The Lost Estate (8 page)

XI

THE MYSTERIOUS ESTATE

As soon as it was light, he set out again. But his swollen knee hurt, so he had to stop and sit down constantly because the pain was so bad. As it happened, this was the most desolate region of the Sologne, and throughout the morning the only person he saw was a shepherdess in the distance bringing home her flock. Even though he called out to her and tried to run, she vanished before he could make her hear.

Despite that, he went on walking in her direction, but with painful slowness. Not a house nor a soul was to be seen. There was not even the cry of a curlew in the marshes. The December sun shone down on this perfect wilderness, clear and cold.

It was around three o’clock in the afternoon when he finally observed the spire of a grey turret rising above some fir trees.

‘An old, abandoned manor house,’ he thought. ‘Or some deserted pigeon loft.’ And he continued on his way, without quickening his pace.

Between two white posts, at the corner of the wood, Meaulnes found the entrance to an avenue and started down it. After a few steps, he paused, astonished, overcome by a feeling that he could not explain. Though he had been walking with the same tired legs and the icy wind was freezing his lips, at times taking his breath away, none the less an extraordinary feeling of contentment raised his spirits, a feeling of perfect, almost intoxicating tranquillity: the certainty that he had reached his goal and that henceforth only happiness awaited him. This was how, in earlier times, he had felt on the eve of the great summer festivals, when at nightfall fir trees were being
set up in the village streets and the window of his bedroom was obscured by their branches.

‘Such happiness,’ he thought, ‘because I am coming to this old dovecot, home to owls and draughts!’

He stopped, irritated with himself, wondering if it would not be better to turn back and carry on to the next village. He had been thinking of this for a moment, hanging his head, when he suddenly noticed that the avenue had been swept in wide, regular circles, as they used to do at home for great occasions: the way beneath his feet was like the main street of La Ferté on Assumption Day morning! He could not have been more surprised if he had turned a corner of the avenue to see a crowd of people celebrating and raising the dust in the month of June.

‘Can there be some festivity taking place in this wilderness?’ he wondered.

He went forward to the first corner and heard voices coming towards him. He hurried off to one side, into the bushy young trees, crouching down and holding his breath. They were children’s voices. A group of children came by, quite close to him. One of them, probably a little girl, was talking in such measured and sensible tones that Meaulnes could not help smiling, even though he hardly understood the meaning of her words.

‘Only one thing bothers me,’ she was saying, ‘and that is the matter of the horses. You see, we’ll never stop Daniel from riding the big yellowish-grey pony!’

‘You’ll never stop me,’ a boy said, in a jeering tone of voice. ‘Aren’t we allowed to do just as we like? Even if it means hurting ourselves, if that’s what we want.’

And the voices faded into the distance, just as another group of children was approaching.

‘Tomorrow morning, if the ice has melted,’ a girl was saying, ‘we can go out in the boat.’

‘But will they let us?’ asked another.

‘You know we’re allowed to organize the festivities just as we want.’

‘Suppose Frantz were to come back this evening, with his fiancée?’

‘Well, he’ll do as we tell him!’

‘It must be a wedding,’ Augustin thought. ‘But are the children in charge here? What a peculiar place!’

He thought he would come out of his hiding-place and ask them where he could find something to eat and drink. He stood up and saw the last group going away. They were three little girls with straight dresses down to their knees. They had pretty hats with ribbons, and each of them had a white feather hanging down behind. One, who had half turned round, was leaning over and listening to her friend as she explained something solemnly with her finger raised.

‘I’ll only scare them,’ Meaulnes thought, looking at his torn peasant’s smock and the ill-matching Sainte-Agathe pupil’s belt he had round it.

Fearing that the children might meet him as they came back down the avenue, he went on through the trees towards the ‘pigeon loft’, though without much idea of what he could ask for when he got there. He was soon halted at the edge of the wood by a low, mossy wall. Beyond it, between the wall and the outhouses, there was a long, narrow courtyard full of carriages, like an inn yard on market day. There were vehicles of every kind and shape: slim little four-seaters, with their shafts in the air; charabancs; old-fashioned bourbonnaises with ornamented sides and even old berlins with their windows up.

Meaulnes, hiding behind the firs, so that no one could see him, was looking at this clutter when he noticed, on the other side of the yard, just above the seat in a tall charabanc, a half-open window in one of the outbuildings. Two iron bars of the sort that you find behind stable buildings with their ever-closed shutters had once sealed this opening, but with time they had loosened.

‘I’ll go in there,’ the boy thought. ‘And sleep in the hay. Then I’ll set off at dawn, without scaring those pretty little girls.’

He climbed over the wall, with difficulty because of his wounded knee, and slipping from one carriage to the next and from the seat of a charabanc to the roof of a berlin, he came level with the window and pushed it open silently, like a door.

He found himself not in a hayloft, but in a huge room with
a low ceiling which must have been a bedroom. In the half-dark of the winter evening, you could see that the table, the mantel-piece and even the armchairs were laden with large vases, valuables and old swords. At the far end of the room were curtains, no doubt concealing an alcove.

Meaulnes had closed the window, as much because of the cold as because he was afraid of being seen from outside. He walked across to the curtain, raised it and discovered a large, low bed, covered in old books with bindings trimmed in gold, lutes with broken strings and candlesticks, all left in a jumble. He pushed them to the back of the alcove and lay down on the bed to rest and to think over the strange adventure in which he was caught up.

There was a deep silence over the place. Only occasionally could one hear the high wind of December blowing.

Lying there, Meaulnes even began to wonder if in spite of his strange encounters, in spite of the voices of the children in the avenue, in spite of the carriages piled up against one another, this was not, as he had first thought, merely an old estate abandoned to the loneliness of winter.

Soon after that, he thought that the wind was carrying the sound of some distant music. It was like a memory, full of charm and nostalgia. He recalled how his mother, when young, would sit down at the piano in the afternoon, in their drawing room, and he, saying nothing, behind the door opening into the garden, would listen to her until night fell…

‘Doesn’t that sound as though someone is playing the piano somewhere?’ he thought.

But he left the question unanswered: overcome by tiredness, he soon fell asleep.

XII

WELLINGTON’S ROOM

It was dark when he woke up. Chilled through, he turned over and over on the bed, creasing and rolling his black smock under him. A dim light shone on the curtains across the alcove.

Sitting up on the bed, he poked his head out through the curtains. Someone had opened the window, and two green Venetian lanterns had been hung up from the frame.

But no sooner had Meaulnes managed to glance at this than he heard the sound of muffled footsteps on the landing and voices speaking quietly outside. He sprang back into the alcove, and his hobnailed boots clanged against one of the bronze pieces that he had pushed back against the wall. For a moment, he anxiously held his breath. The footsteps drew nearer, and two figures slipped into the room.

‘Don’t make a noise,’ said one of them.

‘Why not?’ the other replied. ‘It’s about time he woke up.’

‘Have you decked out his room?’

‘Yes, like the others’.’

The wind shook the open window.

‘Look,’ the first voice said. ‘You didn’t even close the window. The wind has already blown out one of the lanterns. We’ll have to relight it.’

‘Huh!’ said the other, suddenly overcome with idleness and a sense of futility. ‘What’s the point of all these lights facing out into the country, that is, looking at nothing? There’s no one to see them.’

‘No one? But people will be coming at times in the night. Over there, on the road, in their carriages they will be very glad to see our lights!’

Meaulnes heard a match strike. The last one to speak, who seemed to be the leader, carried on in a drawling voice, like a Shakespearean gravedigger: ‘You’re putting green lanterns in Wellington’s room. Why not red ones, then? You don’t know any more about it than I do!’

Silence.

‘Was Wellington American? So, is green an American colour? You’re the actor, the one who’s travelled; you ought to know.’

‘Oh, dearie me!’ the ‘actor’ replied. ‘Travelled? Yes I’ve travelled all right. But I didn’t see anything! What can you see from a caravan?’

Meaulnes peered carefully through the curtains.

The one in charge was a fat, bare-headed man, wrapped in a vast overcoat. He was holding a long rod hung with many-coloured lanterns and he was calmly sitting with one leg crossed over the other, watching his friend work.

As for the actor, he cut the most pathetic figure you could imagine. Tall, lean, shivering, with dull, shifty eyes and a moustache hanging over his gap-toothed mouth, suggesting the face of a drowned man dripping on a slab. He was in shirtsleeves, his teeth chattering. Both his words and his gestures indicated the most utter contempt for himself.

After a moment’s reflection that was at once sour and comic, he went over to his friend and, spreading both arms wide, addressed him confidentially: ‘Do you know what? I don’t know why they had to bring in filth like us to wait on people in a fête of this kind! That’s what I think…’

But without taking any notice of this heartfelt declaration, the fat man went on looking at his work, with his legs crossed, yawned, sniffed quietly, and then, turning his back on the other, went away, with his rod over his shoulder, saying, ‘Come on, off we go! It’s time to get dressed for dinner.’

The gypsy followed, but as he went past the alcove, he said, bowing and in a sarcastic tone of voice, ‘Mr Lie-abed, it’s about time you woke up and got dressed as a marquis, even though you’re just a skivvy like me. And you will go down to the fancy-dress ball, since that is what these little gentlemen and ladies desire.’

And, with a final bow, he added, in the voice of a hawker at a fairground, ‘Our friend Maloyau, member of the kitchen staff, will appear in the role of Harlequin and your humble servant in that of the great Pierrot.’

XIII

THE STRANGE FETE

As soon as they had gone, the boy left his hiding place. His feet were frozen and his joints stiff, but he was rested and his knee appeared to have healed.

‘Go down to dinner?’ he thought. ‘I’ll certainly do that. I shall just be a guest whose name everyone has forgotten. In any case, I’m not an intruder here: it’s quite clear that M. Maloyau and his friend were expecting me…’

Coming out of the total darkness of the alcove, he could see quite clearly in the room, lit as it was by the green lanterns.

The gypsy had ‘decked it out’. Coats were hanging from the clothes pegs. On a heavy dressing table with a cracked marble top, they had laid out everything needed to transform into a dandy some lad or other who had spent the previous night in an abandoned sheepfold. On the mantelpiece were matches beside a large torch. But they had forgotten to wax the floor, and Meaulnes could feel sand and grit rolling and grating under his shoes. Once again he had the impression that he was in a long-since abandoned house. Going to the mantelpiece, he almost bumped into a heap of large cartons and small boxes. He reached out his hand, lit the candle, then lifted the lids and leant over to look inside.

There were young men’s clothes from long ago: frock coats with high velvet collars, stylish low-cut waistcoats, innumerable white ties and patent leather shoes from the start of the century. He did not dare lay a finger on anything, but after cleaning himself up and shivering as he did so, he put one of the large coats over his schoolboy’s smock, turning up the pleated collar, and replaced his hobnailed boots with slender,
highly polished pumps. Then, bare-headed, he got ready to go down.

He reached the bottom of a wooden staircase, in a dark corner of the yard, without meeting anyone. The icy breath of night blew on his face and lifted one corner of his coat.

He took a few steps and, thanks to the faint light in the sky, he managed at once to grasp the layout of the place. He was in a little courtyard enclosed by the outbuildings of the main house. Everything here seemed old and in ruins. The openings at the foot of the stairways were gaping, because their doors had long since been removed. Nor had anyone replaced the glass in some windows, which were just black holes in the walls. Yet all the buildings had a mysteriously festive air. A sort of coloured glow shone from the low-ceilinged rooms where lanterns must also have been lit at the windows opposite the yard. The ground had been swept and grass pulled up where it had invaded the cobbles. Finally, if he listened carefully, Meaulnes thought he could hear some kind of singing, like children’s and girls’ voices, some way off in the jumble of buildings where the wind was shaking the branches across the pink, green and blue openings of the windows.

He was standing there in his big overcoat, like a hunter, leaning forward and straining his ears, when an extraordinarily small young man came out of the nearby building, which had looked empty.

He had a close-fitting top hat which shone in the dark as though it had been made of silver, a coat with its collar high into his hair, a very low-cut waistcoat and trousers with stirrups… This dandy, who was perhaps fifteen years old, was walking on tiptoe as though lifted up by the elastic under his feet, but with astonishing rapidity. He greeted Meaulnes as he went past, without stopping, bowing deeply, automatically, then vanished into the dark towards the main building – the farm, château or abbey – the turret of which had guided the boy since early that afternoon.