The Lost Estate (6 page)

I was just getting ready to go over to him. I would have put my hand on his shoulder, and we would doubtless have traced the route that he had taken together on the map, but suddenly the communicating door from the junior class burst open with a violent shove and Jasmin Delouche, followed by a lad from the village and three others from the country, charged in with a shout of triumph. Clearly one of the windows in the junior classroom had been badly closed, so they must have pushed it open and climbed through.

Jasmin Delouche, though quite small, was one of the oldest boys in the Upper School. He was very jealous of The Great Meaulnes, while at the same time pretending to be his friend. Before our boarder had arrived, he, Jasmin, had been king of the class. He had a pale, rather uninteresting face and slicked-down hair. The only son of Widow Delouche, an innkeeper, he acted grown-up and boasted vainly about things he had overheard among billiard players and vermouth drinkers.

When he burst in, Meaulnes looked up and frowned, shouting at the boys as they pushed and shoved to get to the stove: ‘Isn’t there any chance of some peace and quiet around here?’

‘If you don’t like it, you should have stayed where you were,’ Jasmin Delouche answered, not looking at Meaulnes and feeling he had the support of his companions.

I think Augustin was in that state of tiredness where anger wells up and suddenly sweeps over you.

‘You, for a start,’ he said, standing upright and closing his book, quite pale. ‘You’re leaving.’

The other boy sniggered.

‘Huh!’ he shouted. ‘Just because you ran away for three days, you think you’re going to be the boss around here now, do you?’

And, bringing the others into the argument, he added, ‘Don’t think you’re going to chuck us out!’

But Meaulnes was already on top of him. First of all, there was a scuffle in which the sleeves of their smocks were ripped and gave way at the seams. Only Martin, one of the country
boys who had come in with Jasmin, intervened: ‘Leave him alone!’ he said, his nostrils flaring, shaking his head like a bull.

Meaulnes gave a brusque shove and threw him staggering back into the middle of the room, with his arms flailing. Then, grasping Delouche by the neck with one hand and opening the door with the other, he tried to throw him out. Jasmin grabbed hold of the tables, and his hobnailed boots grated on the tiles as his feet were dragged across them, while Martin, recovering his balance, strode across the room, head down and furious. Meaulnes let go of Delouche to take care of the other idiot and might have come off the worse for it, when the door to the private part of the house was half opened and Monsieur Seurel appeared, his head turned towards the kitchen because, as he came in, he was finishing a conversation with someone.

The battle stopped at once. Some of the boys clustered around the stove, with lowered heads, having avoided taking one side or the other right to the end. Meaulnes sat down in his place with the tops of his sleeves unpicked and rumpled. As for Jasmin, still very red in the face, he could be heard, in the few seconds before a banging ruler signalled the start of the lesson, proclaiming loudly: ‘He’s getting really touchy. He’s pretending to be so clever. Perhaps he thinks we don’t know where he’s been!’

‘Idiot! I don’t know myself,’ Meaulnes retorted, in what was by now a deep silence.

Then, with a shrug of his shoulders, he put his head in his hands and started to learn his lessons.

VII

THE SILK WAISTCOAT

As I said earlier, our room was a large attic under the roof – half attic and half bedroom. There were windows in the other rooms for assistant teachers, so there was no telling why this one was lit by a skylight. It was impossible to close the door entirely because it jammed on the floor. When we went up to bed at nights, our hands shading our candles from all the draughts assailing them in that large house, we would try every time to close the door and every time had to give up the attempt. So, around us, throughout the night, we could feel the silence of the three attic rooms seeping into ours.

That is where Augustin and I got together on the evening of that same winter’s day.

In no time, I had taken off all my clothes and thrown them in a heap on a chair at the head of my bed, but my friend started to undress slowly and in silence. I was already in my iron bed with its cretonne curtains in a vine-leaf pattern, and from there I watched him.

At times, he would sit down on his low, curtainless bed; at others, he would get up and walk up and down, still taking off his clothes. The candle that he had placed on a small wicker table made by the gypsies cast his gigantic shadow on the wall as he went back and forth.

Unlike me, he was folding and stacking his school clothes carefully, but with an absent-minded, sour look. I can see him laying out his heavy belt on a chair, folding his black smock (which was extraordinarily creased and stained) over the back of the same chair and taking off a kind of short, dark-blue jacket that he wore under this smock, then leaning over with
his back turned towards me as he spread it out on the foot of his bed… But when he stood up and turned towards me I saw that, instead of the little waistcoat with bronze buttons that we were meant to wear under our jackets, he had a strange, silk waistcoast, very open, which fastened at the bottom with a tight row of little mother-of-pearl buttons. It was a delightfully quaint garment, of a kind that might have been worn by the young men who danced with our grandmothers at a ball around 1830.

I can remember the tall, peasant boy as he was then, bare-headed – because he had carefully placed his cap on top of his other clothes – his face – so young, so brave and already so hardened. He resumed his pacing across the room and started to unbutton this mysterious item from a wardrobe that did not belong to him. And it was strange to see him, in his shirtsleeves, with his too short trousers and his muddy shoes, fingering this aristocratic waistcoat.

As soon as he touched it, he was startled out of his daydream and looked round at me anxiously. I felt like laughing. He smiled at the same time as I did, and his face lit up.

‘Do tell me about it,’ I said quietly, encouraged by this. ‘Where did you get it?’

But he immediately stopped smiling. He ran a heavy hand twice over his short hair and suddenly, like someone giving in to an irresistible urge, put his jacket back on and buttoned it down over the elegant waistcoat, then put on his smock. After that, he paused for a moment, looking sideways at me. Finally, he sat down on the edge of his bed, took off his shoes, letting them fall noisily on to the floor and, fully dressed like a soldier on alert, lay back on his bed and blew out the candle.

Some time in the middle of the night, I woke up with a start. Meaulnes was standing in the middle of the room with his cap on, looking for something on the clothes rail – a cape, which he put on… The room was very dark, without even the glimmer of light that you sometimes get with snow. An icy, dark wind was blowing in the dead garden and across the roof.

I sat up and said, softly, ‘Meaulnes! Are you off again?’

He did not answer; so, quite distraught, I went on: ‘Right,
then, I’m coming with you. You must take me.’ And I jumped down from my bed.

He came over, took my arm and, forcing me to sit on the edge of the bed, he told me, ‘I can’t take you, François. If I knew the way properly, you could come with me, but first of all I have to find it myself on the map, or I won’t get there.’

‘So you can’t go either?’

‘That’s right, it’s no use,’ he said, dejectedly. ‘Come on, go back to bed. I promise not to go without you.’

He started to walk up and down the room again. I didn’t dare say anything. He would walk, then stop, then set off again faster, like someone looking for memories or going over them in his head, comparing and contrasting, calculating, then suddenly thinking he has the solution… Then, once more, he loses the thread and starts looking again…

This was not the only night when, woken by the sound of his footsteps, I found him like that, walking up and down the room and the attics at around one o’clock in the morning – like those sailors who cannot get used to not doing the night watch and who, in their houses in Brittany, get up and dress at the appointed hour to go and keep watch over the night on shore.

Two or three times, in this way, in January and the first fortnight of February, I was woken from sleep. The Great Meaulnes was there, upright, fully equipped, his cape over his shoulders, ready to leave; and every time, on the frontier of this mysterious country into which he had already once escaped, he paused, hesitating… Just as he was about to lift the latch of the door to the stairs and slip out through the kitchen door (which he could have opened easily without my hearing), he shrank back once more… Then through the long hours in the middle of the night, he would stride feverishly through the abandoned attics, racking his brains.

Finally, one night, around 15 February, he decided to wake me himself by gently putting a hand on my shoulder.

It had been a day of upsets. Meaulnes, who had entirely abandoned all the games of his former friends, had spent his
time during the last break of the day sitting on a bench, entirely absorbed in drawing up some mysterious little plan by following a route, and making long calculations, on a map of the
département
of Cher. There was constant coming and going between the yard and the classroom. Clogs clattered and boys chased each other around from one table to the next, leaping over the benches and the master’s platform in a single jump… They knew that it was not a good idea to go up to Meaulnes when he was working like that, yet towards the end of the recreation, two or three village lads crept up to him as a dare and looked over his shoulder. One of them was reckless enough to push the others on to Meaulnes. He slammed his atlas shut, hid his sheet of paper and grabbed hold of the last of the three lads while the other two managed to get away.

The unlucky one was the fractious Giraudat, who started to whine, tried to kick and was finally thrown out by The Great Meaulnes, shouting furiously, ‘You big coward! I’m not surprised they’re all against you and want to pick a fight with you!’ And then a shower of insults, to which we responded, without exactly knowing what he had been trying to say. I was the one who shouted loudest, because I had taken Meaulnes’ side; from now on, there was a sort of pact between us. His promise to take me with him, without telling me as everyone else did that ‘I wasn’t up to walking’, had bound me to him for ever. I was constantly thinking about his mysterious journey and had convinced myself that he must have met a girl. Of course, she would be infinitely more beautiful than any in our village, more beautiful than Jeanne, whom we used to see in the convent garden through the keyhole, and more than Madeleine, the baker’s daughter, all pink and blonde. And more than Jenny, the daughter of the lady of the manor, who was splendid, but mad and kept indoors all the time. He was surely thinking about a girl in the night, like the hero of a novel. And I had decided to pluck up my courage and talk to him about it, next time he woke me up.

The evening after this latest battle, from four o’clock onwards, we were both busy bringing the tools in from the garden – spades and picks that had been used for making holes – when
we heard shouting from the road. It was a gang of young lads and kids, marching four abreast, at the double, just like a well-drilled company of soldiers, under the command of Delouche, Daniel, Giraudat and another boy whom we did not know. They had spotted us and were hooting loudly. So the whole village was against us and they were organizing some military game from which we were excluded.

Meaulnes, without a word, put back in the shed the spade and the pick that he was carrying over his shoulder… But, at midnight, I felt his hand on my arm and woke up with a start.

‘Get up,’ he said. ‘We’re going.’

‘Do you know the road now all the way?’

‘I know a good stretch of it. We’ll just have to find the rest!’ he said, through clenched teeth.

‘Listen, Meaulnes,’ I said, sitting upright. ‘Listen to me. There’s only one thing to do and that’s for us both to look for it in daylight and, using your plan, find the missing bit of road.’

‘But that bit is a very long way away.’

‘Well, we can take the trap, this summer, when the days are longer.’

There was a lengthy silence, which meant that he had agreed.

‘Since we are both going to try and find the girl that you love, Meaulnes,’ I said finally, ‘tell me who she is. Talk to me about her.’

He sat down on the foot of my bed. In the darkness, I could see his bent head, his crossed arms and his knees. Then he took a deep breath, like someone who has had a full heart for a long time and who is at last about to share his secret…

VIII

THE ADVENTURE

That night, my friend did not tell me all that had happened to him on the road. And even when he did make up his mind to tell me everything, during some days of unhappiness that I shall describe later, it was to remain the great secret of our adolescent years. But today, now it is all over, now that nothing is left but dust

of so much ill, of so much good,

I can describe his strange adventure.

At half-past one in the afternoon, on the Vierzon road, in that freezing weather, Meaulnes was driving his horse along at a good pace, knowing he was not ahead of time. At first, to amuse himself, he thought only of how surprised we would all be when, at four o’clock, he brought Grandfather and Grandmother Charpentier back in the trap – because, at that moment, this was certainly all he intended.

After a while, as the cold chilled him, he wrapped his legs in a blanket which he had refused at first, but which the people at La Belle-Etoile had insisted on putting into the cart.

At two o’clock, he went through the village of La Motte. He had never before been through a small village like this at school time and was amused to see it so deserted and sleepy. Only a curtain or two, from time to time, lifted to reveal the face of an inquisitive old woman.