The Horseman on the Roof (12 page)

He took his bottle and glass to the end of the room, to a small isolated table.

The old gentleman with the elegant little white goatee had approached the company. Though still very decorous, he had put up his lorgnette and was fatuously, and with a dazzling smile, examining a dark, milky young woman displaying plenty of bosom. She was undergoing a spirited assault from two men with waxed mustaches, typical commercial travelers; her defense was a coquettish compromise with semi-defeat.

To calm his fidgety hands, Angelo fiddled with the latch of a small door behind his bench. Finally the door opened. It led into a stable. There were at least three or four horses at the feed boxes, and several of those light traps used by traveling salesmen.

“The hell with that rabble,” thought Angelo. He called to the man who was bringing a fresh supply of bottles. “Like to earn three louis?” he said.

“We're counting by fives from now on,” replied the other, who was used to commercial appeals and needed more than a familiar approach to turn his head. And as Angelo tried to take a lofty tone: “Your Highness,” he said, “it's no use trying to diddle old Guillaume. I've seen enough in my life to know that you're not going to give me five louis, maybe even six, for a day's good deed. If I name my price, the rest is up to you. Come off it, and talk like the rest of us.”

Ignoring the insolence with which this was said, Angelo explained at great length that his young wife and two children were being detained in the barn used for quarantine at the village. “Couldn't I borrow the horse and trap of one of these men or women?” he said, fiercely.

“It's purely and simply a question of money,” said the man.

He added, after scratching his head, stroking his chin, and looking his interlocutor up and down: “Provided that … Where are you going afterward?”

“To Avignon.”

“Then come in here.”

He pulled Angelo into the stable and shut the door behind them. The smell of the horses went to Angelo's head.

“This is the way I see it,” said the man. “We can't leave the little lady and the children in that mess. People are dying like flies, you know. Fork out ten louis down and here's what I'll do. You saw the blonde who's losing her stockings back there? Well, she's well known. And when I say well known, I mean well known. She's fixing it up for sure with the fat old boy in the Souvaroff boots. He's a cattle merchant from around here, and he's got horses and carriages the way others have fleas. They're fixing it up between them right now. Myself, I'm a family man. I'll sell you the lady's trap outright; it's that one there.
And
the nice little chestnut. It'll get you to Avignon if that's your idea. I can't do better than that. Ten louis outright. I'll fix things up with the young lady's family, as they say.”

Angelo ardently tried to beat him down to seven, not so much to save money as for the sort of victory he always wanted to gain. But the man said gently, in a fatherly tone: “One doesn't haggle over the life of one's wife and children.”

“The blonde can go hang,” thought Angelo while the man was harnessing up. “But this'll teach that young lady, so proud and so confident in the gendarmes, once and for all, that clothes don't make the man.” He was thinking also of the handsome little boy (he remembered that he had a nice well-starched English collar) and of the little girl whom, the day before, he had several times caught staring at him.

At the moment of leaving, and as Angelo was already shaking the reins, the man said to him: “I like you; you're a good-looking fellow. You'll surely get lost among the crossroads. I'll give you my son; he'll guide you. Afterward you can just leave him on the road.”

He came back with a boy of about fifteen, whom he was instructing in a low voice.

“And be polite to the gentleman,” he added, with an odd expression.

After more than an hour's gallivanting along earth roads among plushy trees, which must have been willows and which kept brushing against the leather hood, they arrived at the famous barn that was used for quarantine. The creak of the springs over the hard ruts had roused all the owls, and they were calling desperately to each other through the echoes of an immense silence.

Angelo pulled up the trap in a thicket. He gave the reins to the boy.

“Wait for me here,” he said. “And keep the horse quiet.”

It was still hot, and there was a sort of smell, which, though faint, made the horse obstinately shake its head and clink its bit.

The silence was complete except for the mournful wailing of the owls.

“Everybody's asleep,” thought Angelo. “I must be very quiet myself and take pains not to wake anyone except the little governess and the two children, to avoid any fuss. The sentry might be less amenable than the one this afternoon. I'll blow on my tinder-wick and I hope they'll have enough presence of mind to recognize me at once and not cry out at seeing my face lit up all of a sudden in the dark. First I'll wake the little boy; he seems very plucky.”

At the same time he strove to make out in the extreme blackness of the night the place where the sentry must be standing. He had stopped some ten paces from the gloomy bulk of the walls, blacker than the night, and listened for the sounds, however light, that a man on watch never fails to make. After a moment, hearing nothing but the owls calling, he said to himself: “The sentry must be asleep too,” and drew nearer, carefully muffling his steps on the grass.

He soon found himself at the barn door. It was wide open. There was no trace of any sentry. The silence of the barn was also somewhat surprising. He expected to hear the sounds of breathing and the crackle of straw under restless bodies, but the walls, having shut off the cry of the owls, held only a silence more compact than the night.

“Could we have made some mistake?” he wondered.

He groped his way forward. His foot met an obstacle. He bent over and touched skirts. He knelt down and struck a light. He blew upon the embers of his tinder-wick and, as it flared, he recognized, distorted in an appalling grimace, the face of the peasant woman who had refused to leave without her trunk. She was dead. He blew on the embers as hard as he could and looked around him, but the red glow gave him only a very small range of vision. He stepped over the peasant woman and advanced several paces to look some more. He found another body, a man's, and some abandoned luggage. At last he thought he recognized some frills of Irish lace over pretty little buckled shoes below linen pantaloons. It was the little girl. Her eyes were opened wide in terrible amazement. She must have died very rapidly, and without being cared for; her dress wasn't even disarranged. The little boy was a little further on, huddling into the young governess, who was all convulsed, her lips drawn back over cruel teeth like a mad dog about to bite.

Angelo kept blowing on his wick and thought of absolutely nothing. Later he walked at random in the dark and stumbled over two or three more bodies; or they may have been the same ones, for unexpectedly he found himself outside again with the owls.

He called. He searched for the thicket where he had left the trap. He fell into an irrigation ditch full of water. He shouted again. He felt the hard ruts of the track under his feet. He found the thicket and called at the top of his voice as he walked with his arms held out in front of him. The trap was no longer there. He heard, a long way off, the galloping of a horse and the rumbling of a vehicle on the highroad.

He was in such a fury that he kept hissing like a wood-fire and could not even manage to swear. He began to run straight ahead, and it was not until he had tumbled two or three times more into the irrigation ditch that he finally had the sense to sit down in the rushes.

He was staggered by the double-dealing of the boy who had deserted him, who had, no doubt, been carefully instructed. He was upset more by this than by the dead people.

The faint smell that had made the horse toss his head became somewhat more definite when a hot little wind began to blow fitfully from the direction of the village. Only fifty paces away, the barn had its own supply of corpses. Angelo pictured the livid and heavy sun that would be rising in a few hours' time.

His imperious need to be generous, especially at this moment when he was floundering in what seemed to be a hideous general misunderstanding, made him consider seriously the idea of staying where he was till daybreak and then going to the village to offer his help in burying the dead. But he remembered the indifference of the sentry and said to himself:

“Those peasants will hate you because you have your own ideas about courage; or simply because you know more about it than they do; especially if you talk to them of quicklime. It would take no time to pitch you into the trench with a knock over the head from a spade. That would be silly.” This last word convinced him.

He got back on to the path. At all events, he would allow himself to pay the innkeeper back. He felt greatly consoled by the thought that that sturdy thickset man would probably be backed up by his son, who must have returned with the trap. “It'll be a fine party, and they won't forget me.” He hated being made a dupe!

He reached the inn as day was about to break. The glow of the lamps was still visible in the threadbare night. But there, too, things had moved fast. The big room was cold and empty. A man lay stretched flat on his belly in the middle. It was one of the two with waxed mustaches. A woman sprawling over the table appeared to be asleep. Angelo called to her gently. He laid his hand on the woman's forehead. It was burning. He called to her again, saying: “Madame,” with great gentleness. He lifted up her face. She was plainly dead. The two open eyes were white as marble. And it was only physical weight that caused the sudden drop of her lower jaw, opening the mouth and letting slowly flow from it a thick flood of that white matter resembling rice pudding, but extraordinarily evil-smelling.

Angelo went all around the room. There was another dead man, crouched behind some chairs in a corner. He passed him, then went back. He had just thought of the little Frenchman. He pushed the chairs aside, but when he laid his hand on the folded arms in which the face was buried, he felt such a stiffness in the clenched limbs that he realized there was no hope for this one either.

After visiting the kitchen, where the fire was still burning in the stove under pans smelling richly of beef stew, and the stable, where there were neither horses nor vehicles left, he went up the stairs to the bedrooms. There were about ten on each side of a long central passage. He opened them all, one after another, and was even scrupulous enough, in the case of some that were dark, to open the shutters. All the rooms were empty: beds untouched. Except for the last one, where he found an enormous granary rat, plump and shiny. It must have just come out of its hole, and it stared at him with its red eyes, one paw in the air. Angelo shut the door.

He went down, crossed the room, in which the three characters from
The Sleeping Beauty
had not stirred, and went out. It was as he went out that he realized that the dead woman was dark; she must be the one who had been laughing a few hours before!

He took the road leading south. Day was breaking. The sun was still well below the hills; the sky was half dark; there was only a pale fringe underlining the shadow in the east, and the heat was already stifling.

Angelo walked for over an hour before realizing that the silence was quite extraordinary. He was passing through woods of small pines and oaks. The trees were perfectly motionless, without the slightest tremor. There were no birds. The road overlooked the bed of the Durance, here about half a league wide. It was entirely filled with salt-white pebbles. There was no water. Here and there by the roadside he saw clearings in the woods around four or five olive trees, which stayed absolutely still. Daylight was spreading without color. The sky was like the riverbed, entirely covered with pebbles of salt. Above the woods the crest of the hill bore a village the color of bones. There was no smoke.

“She was quite right,” he said to himself.

He was seeing again the dark woman laughing, with her foot up on the bar of a chair, showing her legs in a froth of white petticoats.

Gradually the sun rose above the eastern horizon. It had neither shape nor color. It was made of dazzling chalk. For the space of a shudder, there occurred a faint rustling, like the rapid passage of invisible beings burrowing still deeper beneath the leaves and motionless grass.

At length Angelo heard a horse approaching at a trot. He put his hand in his pocket and drew one of his pistols.

Soon he could see the approaching horseman. He was a fat man, bumping up and down in his saddle. When he was three paces away, Angelo leaped at the bridle, stopped the horse, and leveled his pistol.

“Get down,” he said.

The fat man showed every sign of the most abject terror. His lips quivered; he made the sound of an ill-bred man sucking up his soup. As he set foot on the ground he fell to his knees.

Angelo unbuckled the saddlebag.

“Only the horse,” he said.

He took plenty of time tightening the girths and shortening the stirrups. He had put the pistol in his pocket. He felt a strong liking for the fat man, now brushing his knees and watching him with a furtive, frightened look.

“Get into the shade,” said Angelo kindly as he jumped into the saddle.

He wheeled round and started off with a spell of galloping. The horse, which immediately recognized new knees, responded perfectly. In spite of the heat, which quietly burned the skin and fired the air, Angelo felt a sort of pleasure steal over him. It occurred to him that it was a long time since he had had a smoke. He lit one of his little cigars.

On both sides of the road the fields and orchards were abandoned. Several fields of unharvested corn had collapsed under the weight of the ears. The motionless olive groves had the glint of tin. There was no distance anywhere; the hills were drowned in almond sirup. Huge apricot trees smelled, as he passed, of rotten fruit.