The Horseman on the Roof (34 page)

“I think so, but I'll find out.”

“Better still,” said Angelo, “I'll go first. I'll leave you twenty louis so that you yourself can buy Lavinia's horse and your own. We mustn't attract attention, and if I bought three horses the birds would be singing my name and description.”

“We ought,” said Giuseppe, “to have an extra horse too; then we could take provisions.”

“And I'll go and wait for you a bit farther on.”

“We'll start three or four days after you,” said Giuseppe, “long enough for me to answer any questions about you, if there are any, and to put some rice, beans, flour, and bacon in a sack. But where shall we go?”

“Let's get nearer to Italy,” said Angelo. “Is the plague there too? We have no idea. Anyhow, let's get up into the mountains.”

“Listen,” Giuseppe now said; “I've been turning all this over in my mind for a long time. The shortest route goes up the Durance Valley, but it's certainly patrolled and blocked at every village by barriers where one has to show a pass. What you've told me about your adventures in getting here proves it, if proof were needed. Naturally I'll make out all the passes you and I could want. I took the rubber stamp from the mayor's office. But even with the best of luck we'll get bundled into prison fifty times—if we survive the first forty-nine. And when I say prison I mean quarantine. You've already made my teeth chatter with them. But there's another route that has tremendous advantages. We go deep into Vaucluse if we start westward from here. And from there we go on to the Drôme. That's as wild a country as one could wish. And in it there's a valley that's even wilder, which goes up into the mountains. I'll show you.”

He made a map on a piece of paper. He knew the main roads and even the small tracks.

“Put that in your pocket,” he said. “And wait for us at this spot where I'm putting a cross. I know the way you ride! Even if they sell you an old nag, it's only three days from here. It's neither a town, nor a village, nor even a crossroads. It's a roadside chapel in a spot that gives you the creeps. It's called Lower Sainte-Colombe. Upper Sainte-Colombe is a mountain all made of green rocks, overhanging, enough to make your teeth chatter.”

Angelo found a horse at a farm a league away. The people had no business sense. There was only an old granny left and a woman of about fifty, presumably her daughter-in-law. But the well-polished gold pieces produced by Angelo delighted them.

“You're not counting it,” said Giuseppe when Angelo gave him some money. “Do you even know how much there is in the little bag your mother sent?”

“No.”

“Don't be so casual about it. There's enough to keep a family for three years. Minus ten very pretty gold pieces. They're the ones I pinched for the cause; the ones ostentatiously delivered by post to the good Michu, who made you so welcome when you arrived here. You had paid to get yourself hanged.”

“Now I understand why the police had seen the louis.”

“You won't understand altogether till you realize that they had been most opportunely advised of this delivery by an anonymous letter, beautifully written, without a single spelling mistake and including two or three of those adverbs that come automatically to the pen of an old town-councillor, even when his boss makes him work under cover.”

“You've learned traitors' ways?”

“There's a bourgeois expression for you,” said Giuseppe. “I love liberty. I love the idea. I'll throw myself in the fire for it, and even get myself killed. In love, who considers a friend? And anyway, they're Frenchmen.”

Angelo went to spend the night at the farm, to be near his horse. He distrusted the farmer's wife and her taste for pretty gold pieces. Giuseppe carried the bundle in which the velvet jacket and the winter cloak were rolled up.

“We're at the end of September,” he said; “you'll soon be needing it. As for me, I'll take some cloth, and Lavinia will sew me something in her spare time. I don't need a well-cut coat like you, but take a peep at what I've put in the bundle.”

It was a fine little Garde Nationale saber, so placed that by sliding a hand under the cloak's facings you found its hilt; one pull, and you had a naked weapon ready.

“Of course, I've loaded your pistols, but I know you prefer cold steel, especially the kind you can flourish. Well, there you are. You never know what to expect on the roads, especially in these times.”

Angelo was very grateful to him for the saber. More so than for the good half-hour he spent on his knees examining his boots by the light of his tinder.

“They're all correct and would pass a royal inspection, but two looks are better than one. Anyhow, in ten days at the outside we shall see each other and be together again.”

Once more they brought out the map on which was drawn the route and their meeting-place. Giuseppe explained everything afresh, gave supplementary details, exacted promises, and wept.

“Above all don't go near these two little towns I've marked here. Cut across the fields. If I lose you now I shall blow my brains out.”

“I promise nothing,” said Angelo: “I even think I shall make straight for the first one and go right in if there's anyone left there. I've a terrible longing for some of these little cigars, and I've only three left. But directly I've bought a hundred, then, I swear to you, I'll take to the fields.”

They kissed each other, shivering. Angelo trembled with joy as he hugged his friend, his brother, in his arms, and he felt that he too was going to cry.

“There, run along,” he said, “you've still a few days to spend in your kingdom, and as you say, they're French; tell them they must love one another; what can that cost you?”

For a half-louis Angelo procured a peasant saddle worth a good three francs, to which he strapped his baggage. The pistols were in his pockets. The saber fitted nicely inside the cloak.

It was a fine morning with a north wind. He entered the blue forest. For a good half-league he wandered in the most angelic rapture, listening to the wind in the beeches and rejoicing in the incomparable conflict of golden lances with which the sun pierced the wood. His horse was not too cloddish, and it too took great pleasure in the smells and the play of light.

They reached an old track all covered with centaury and enormous burdocks. Before them the valley descended beneath the darkness of the trees. They had been walking down it for half an hour, stiffened a little by the shade and the silence, when Angelo saw, lying across the path, a red-striped petticoat which he at once recognized as that of the woman who had been the first to be driven out of the high ravine. There indeed she was, already devoured by animals and covered with huge slugs finishing off what was left.

At the end of the woods, the farmlands spread hawk's wings on either side of a stream that had flooded the fields after the recent rains. Here, as elsewhere, neither hay nor grain had been scythed. The crops, left standing, flattened by storms, choked with corn-flowers, thistles, and brambles, were ravaged by clouds of birds. The entire horizon was shut in by hills, above which appeared the violet or even purple spurs of mountains, no doubt covered with box.

In spite of the sun the wind was cold. Angelo decided to put on the famous velvet jacket and make himself respectable: to shave, for one thing. In spite of the keen air he would gladly have bathed in the stream whose overflowing sent clear water with silver reflections trundling over a thick bed of grass. But he had to be careful. Who could tell what it might be infested with upstream? The villages thought nothing of throwing bandages, excrement, carrion, and even corpses into the watercourses. At a fair distance from the stream he found a large pool of rainwater that seemed healthy.

Lavinia had thought of everything, even of a little box of violet-scented brilliantine with which Angelo now smoothed his mustache. The bundle also contained a clean shirt and three very neatly darned handkerchiefs. Giuseppe, for his part, had thought of thirty rounds for the pistols. The saber, though homely in style and rather snub-nosed, had good balance and weight. It was a householder's saber, but could be highly dangerous if used in anger.

The jacket was damned well made. Angelo gradually used more refined language to himself as the velvet brought warmth into his arms. He recalled the workman who had taken his measurements. This man had certainly been a perfect representative of the barricades, with his sickle mustaches and his impersonal stare, standing at ease and guarding something or other of ineffable importance on the hillside. At Giuseppe's request he had immediately leaned his gun against the trunk of an almond tree, hitched up his blouse, and taken a tape-measure out of his breast pocket: “With pleasure! If Monsieur would kindly write down his measurements himself in pencil. Monsieur has a handsome pair of shoulders. Forty-eight. If Monsieur would be so good as to bend his arm. Thank you very much. At your service.” He had then picked up his gun, corrected the sights, and resumed his impersonal military stare.

“People, I love you!” said Angelo out loud. But immediately he felt a twinge of conscience and wondered if in reality he did not love the people as one loves chicken.

The day was bent on gaiety. The wind kept the clouds scudding. Angelo was like the sky: sun chasing shadows, shadows chasing sun.

He had no trouble buying cigars in the village, which was a good way further on. They had not suffered many deaths.

“So far as I know,” said the tobacconist, who was very old, had piled her bedding in the shop, and was doing her cooking on a small charcoal stove set on the marble counter.

The street, however, was deserted. No cackling of hens or stable noises to be heard: on the other hand, clearly audible, the creaking of the weather vane on the belfry and the trampling of the wind on the tiles.

Angelo bought five boxes of cigars, three yards of tinder-wick, a bag of flints. The old woman wanted to sell him the whole shop.

“People aren't smoking much nowadays in these parts,” she said.

There was really nothing but the sound of the wind. And in a half-open door, a shoe and half a man's leg that seemed to belong to a sleeper.

Angelo stuck a cigar in the corner of his mouth and allowed himself a stretch of galloping.

He covered more than two leagues without thinking of anything but the tobacco, the delicious coldness of the wind, and this personal liberty of his.

He was coming out of a narrow valley that had been caressing him with pungent-smelling mint, when he saw ahead of him a main road full of all sorts of halted vehicles. There were also other vehicles, carts, saddled horses tethered to trees in the fields off the road. Farther on, a considerable group of people on foot was piling up against a barricade and some kepis, whose red tassels were distinctly visible.

“Now the fun begins,” he said to himself.

He cut across through a pine wood to the left. He reached a knoll from which he could take in a fairly wide stretch of country. It looked as if a frontier had been set up. On every road and even each tiny path a knot of kepis and barricades was holding back a small dark clot of carts, vehicles, and people.

“The game is to saunter along,” he told himself. “Let's go down there like an amateur. I only need a gap a yard and a half wide to get by. It's really the devil if I can't find a yard and a half.”

But as he approached at a trot a way that seemed to him to be clear, a soldier—a regular—sitting in the long grass stood up and shouted:

“Down you get, peasant! You've been told again and again not to come up mounted. If you want to argue, go along to the road and you'll find an officer.
I
shoot.”

And he worked the breech of his musket. Ten yards away from him another soldier got up and also worked the breech of his musket.

Angelo saluted them and quietly turned his horse's head.

“If the panic is armed and determined,” he said to himself, “the tune is going to change. These aren't those little guards I saw at Peyruis. He called me a peasant. The next trick is to make him believe I really am one. What would a peasant do in my place? He'd go and talk things over with the others. Let's do that.”

And he approached the group clustered together on the road.

It consisted of about twenty people, including some haughty and highly disconcerted ladies and gentlemen. They all had papers in their hands.

“I don't give a damn for your passes,” the officer was saying. “I know all about stunts like that. You don't have to teach an old monkey how to pull faces. My orders are: ‘Halt them and keep them out!' and I'll halt you and keep you out till doomsday. Baron or no baron. I'm like cholera, no respecter of persons. All in the same boat. If it's really so wonderful where you come from, go back there. Unless there's a fly in the ointment. Well, it's just that fly we don't want. About turn.”

He was a thin, colorless fellow like a parsnip, but with boot-polish eyes. He gave Angelo a sharp look.

The peasants, men and women, took the rebuke very well. Brief, knowing looks passed between them. But the barons and baronesses were really vexed. All they could think of was to hold their passes in their hands.

“Things must be getting hot where they came from!” thought Angelo. “Here they are, swallowing insults right in front of everybody, and they're not shocked by this at all. Conclusion: ‘Long live the cholera!'”

Among these smartly dressed ladies who had not put on any powder for twenty-four hours and were beginning to study the toes of their shoes, Angelo noticed a green skirt, short and even, above boots against which a whip was tapping. The hand holding the whip was certainly not subdued. All this belonged to a small, Louis XI-style, sulphur-yellow felt hat and a very white neck. It was a young woman, who turned her back resolutely on the discussion and walked toward a horse tethered to a tree. Angelo saw a small pointed face, framed in heavy dark hair.