The Lost Estate (5 page)

Shortly after that, everything disappears behind the hedge. Two men who have remained standing at the gate of La Belle-Etoile, watching the cart leave, are now involved in an increasingly animated discussion. One of them finally puts his hands to his mouth, like a megaphone, and calls out to Meaulnes, then runs a little way towards him along the track. But at that moment, as the little cart slowly reaches the station road and must now be invisible from the little farm track, Meaulnes suddenly changes position. Rising up like a Roman charioteer, with one foot resting on the footplate and shaking the reins with both hands, he urges the animal on at full speed, and in a second has vanished over the brow of the hill. The man on the farm track who was shouting at him starts running again, while the other has set off at full speed over the fields and appears to be coming towards us.

In a short while, at the very moment when Monsieur Seurel has left the board and is rubbing the chalk off his hands, at the very moment when two or three voices are calling from the back of the class: ‘Monsieur! Meaulnes has gone!’, the man in the blue smock has reached the door, which he suddenly throws open and, from the doorway, raising his hat, asks, ‘Excuse me, Monsieur, but did you authorize that boy to request the trap to go to Vierzon and fetch your parents? Because we were starting to wonder…’

‘Certainly not!’ Monsieur Seurel replies.

And instantly there is the most frightful commotion in the room. The first three boys next to the entrance, whose usual
task is to chase away the pigs and goats by throwing stones at them when they come into the school yard to munch the alyssum leaves, rush through the door. Outside, the loud crashing of their hobnailed clogs on the flagstones gives way to the dull sound of their footsteps hurrying across the sand in the yard and skidding around the corner at the little gateway opening on to the road. All the rest of the class is crowding around the garden windows, and some have climbed on the tables to get a better view.

Too late: Meaulnes is gone.

‘Go to the station with Moucheboeuf even so,’ Monsieur Seurel tells me. ‘Meaulnes doesn’t know the way to Vierzon. He will get lost at the crossroads and never meet the three o’clock train.’

Millie puts her head round the door of the little classroom to ask, ‘What on earth’s going on?’

In the village street, people have started to gather. The farmworker is still there, stubbornly, not moving, with his hat in his hand, like someone asking for justice.

V

THE CARRIAGE RETURNS

When I had brought my grandparents back from the station and after dinner, seated around the tall fireplace, they were starting to give a detailed account of everything that had happened to them since the last holidays, I soon realized that I was not listening to what they were saying.

The little gate into the courtyard was close to the dining-room door. It would squeak as you opened it. Normally, at nightfall, on our country evenings, I would secretly wait for that squeaking of the gate. It would be followed by the sound of clogs tapping or being wiped on the threshold, and sometimes by whispering, like that of people conferring before they came in. Then a knock. It was a neighbour, or the women teachers, or in any case someone to amuse us in the long evening.

Now, that evening, I was not expecting anything from outside, because all my loved ones were inside the house, yet I was constantly straining my ears for all the sounds of the night and expecting someone to open our door.

My old grandfather, with his shaggy appearance, like a large Gascon shepherd, his two feet fairly and squarely in front of him and his stick between his legs, was there, leaning over to knock out his pipe against his shoe. His kindly, moist eyes agreed with what my grandmother was saying about the journey and her hens and their neighbours and the peasants who had not yet paid the rent for their farms. But I was no longer listening.

I was thinking about the sound of a carriage suddenly stopping in front of the door. Meaulnes would leap down and come
in as though nothing had happened. Or he might perhaps go first of all to take the mare back to La Belle-Etoile, and I would shortly hear his footsteps on the road and the opening of the metal gate.

But nothing happened. Grandfather was staring ahead, and his eyelids began to droop as though sleep was coming. Grandmother, a little annoyed, repeated her last remark, which no one had heard.

‘Are you worried about that boy?’ she asked eventually.

In fact, I had questioned her at the station, but in vain. She had not seen anyone at the Vierzon stop who was like The Great Meaulnes. My friend must have taken a long time on the journey. He had failed. Coming home in the trap. I thought over my disappointment, while my grandmother talked to Moucheboeuf. The little birds were fluttering around the hooves of the donkey as it trotted along the white, frosty road. From time to time, breaking the deep peace of a wintry afternoon, came the distant shout of a shepherdess or a boy calling his friend from one copse to another. And every time, these long cries over the empty downs made me shudder, as though I had heard the voice of Meaulnes in the distance inviting me to follow him.

While I was going over all this in my head, bedtime arrived. Grandfather had already gone to the red room, the bed-sitting room, which was damp and cold after being shut up since the previous winter. To make room for him, the lace antimacassars had been removed from the armchairs, the rugs had been taken up and any fragile objects put to one side. He had put his stick on one chair and his boots under another, and just blown out his candle; we were standing saying goodnight and getting ready to go off to our beds when we were silenced by the sound of someone driving into the yard.

It sounded like two vehicles, one following the other, at a slow trot. They slowed still further and finally came to a halt under the dining-room window, which overlooked the road, but couldn’t be opened.

My father had got the lamp and, without waiting for a knock,
he opened the door, which had already been locked. Then, pushing the metal gate and going up the steps, he held the light above his head to see what was going on.

There were, indeed, two carts which had stopped, the horse of one harnessed to the back of the other. A man jumped down and stood there, hesitating…

‘Is this the town hall?’ he asked, coming over. ‘Could you point me to Monsieur Fromentin, the farmer at La Belle-Etoile? I’ve found his trap and his mare going along without a driver, near the road to Saint-Loup-des-Bois. My lantern showed me his name and address on the metal plate, and, as it was on my way, I brought the trap back here to avoid accidents. But I may tell you it’s made me very late.’

We stood there in amazement. My father came across and shone his lamp on the carriage.

‘There’s no sign of a passenger,’ said the man. ‘Not even a blanket. The animal’s tired, and she’s limping a bit.’

I had gone over with the others and was looking at this lost carriage that had come home to us like a wreck from the sea: the first and last wreck, perhaps, of Meaulnes’ adventure.

‘If it’s too far to Fromentin’s,’ the man said, ‘I’ll leave the cart with you. I’m already very late, and they must be getting worried at home.’ My father agreed; in that way, we could take the carriage back to La Belle-Etoile that same evening without having to explain what had happened. Afterwards we could decide what to tell the people in the village and what to write to Meaulnes’ mother… And the man whipped up his horse, refusing the glass of wine that we offered him.

From the bedroom where he had relit the candle, my grandfather called out, as we were coming back inside, in silence, while my father took the trap back to the farm: ‘So what? Has the wanderer returned?’

The women exchanged a brief look, then said: ‘Yes, yes, he went to his mother’s. Go to sleep and don’t worry.’

‘That’s good. Just as I thought,’ Grandfather said, in a gratified voice, before putting out his light and turning over to sleep.

We gave the same explanation to the village people. As for the fugitive’s mother, we decided to wait before writing. And
we kept our anxiety to ourselves, for three whole days. I can still see my father coming back from the farm at eleven o’clock, his moustache damp from the night air, and talking in a low whisper to Millie, in a voice full of unease and anger.

VI

A KNOCK ON THE WINDOW PANE

The fourth day was one of the coldest that winter. Early that morning, the first boys to arrive warmed up by making a slide on the ice around the well. They were waiting for the stove to be lit in the school so that they could rush to it.

Inside, there were several of us waiting and watching for the country boys to come. They would arrive still dazzled after marching through landscapes of frost, from seeing frozen ponds and the copses where the hares scamper. There was a smell of hayloft and stable on their smocks that thickened the air of the classroom when they clustered around the glowing stove. And that morning one of them had brought a frozen squirrel in a basket, having found it on his way. I remember how he tried to hang the long, stiff carcass of the creature by its claws from a beam in the playground shelter.

Then the sluggish winter lessons began…

Suddenly, a knock on the glass made us look up. Standing behind the door, we saw The Great Meaulnes, shaking the frost off his smock before he came in, holding his head high and with a look of wonderment!

The two pupils on the bench closest to the door rushed to open it. There was a sort of conclave in the doorway which we could not hear, and the fugitive at last made up his mind to come inside.

The rush of cold air from the deserted courtyard, the wisps of straw clinging to Meaulnes’ clothes and above all his appearance – like a weary, hungry but marvelling traveller – all of these gave us a strange feeling of pleasure and curiosity.

Monsieur Seurel had stepped down from the little lectern on
its platform, at which he was in the middle of giving us dictation, and Meaulnes walked towards him with an aggressive look. I still remember how fine my older friend looked at that moment, despite his air of exhaustion and his bloodshot eyes, the result no doubt of nights spent in the open.

He walked over to the teacher’s desk and said, in the confident tones of someone with a piece of information to impart, ‘I’m back, Monsieur.’

‘So I see,’ Monsieur Seurel replied, examining him curiously. ‘Go and sit down in your place.’

The boy turned round towards us, his back a little bent, smiling ironically, as unruly older children do when they are being punished; and, taking a corner of the table in one hand, he slid on to his bench.

‘I’ll give you a book,’ the teacher said – all heads were by now turned in Meaulnes’ direction. ‘You can read it while your comrades are finishing their dictation.’

So the lesson resumed. From time to time, The Great Meaulnes would turn towards me, then look out of the windows through which you could see the still, fluffy, white garden and the fields empty except for the occasional crow. The atmosphere in the classroom was heavy, next to the glowing stove. My friend, with his head in his hands, was leaning on one elbow to read. Twice I saw his eyelids closing and I thought he was about to fall asleep.

‘I’d like to go and lie down, Monsieur,’ he said at length, half raising his hand. ‘I have not slept for the past three nights.’

‘Go on, then!’ said Monsieur Seurel, anxious above all to avoid a scene.

All of us were looking up with our pens poised, regretfully watching him go, with his smock crumpled at the back and his muddy shoes.

How slowly the morning passed! At around midday we heard the traveller upstairs in the attic getting ready to come down. At lunchtime, I found him sitting in front of the fire, near my grandparents, who were quite speechless, when the clock was striking twelve and the big boys and little ones who
had scattered across the snow-bound school yard started filing past the dining-room door.

All I can remember of that lunch was deep silence and deep embarrassment. Everything was icy: the waxed tablecloth with no linen one covering it, the wine cold in the glasses, the red tiles beneath our feet. It had been decided that, to avoid driving the fugitive to open rebellion, no questions would be asked – and he was taking advantage of this truce to give nothing away.

When at last the dessert was over, we could both go and play around in the yard: a school yard, in the afternoon, with snow trampled away by clogs, a blackened yard where the thawing snow was streaming from the shelter roofs, a yard full of games and loud shouts! Meaulnes and I ran along beside the wall. Already, two or three of our friends from the village had left their games and were running after us, shouting with joy, the slush spurting out under their clogs, hands in their pockets and scarves flying loose. But my friend dashed into the main classroom, where I followed him, and we closed the glazed door just in time to fend off the attack from the boys behind us. There was a sharp, violent din of rattling windows, clogs thumping on the doorstep, and a shove that bent the iron bar across the double doors; but already Meaulnes, risking injury on its broken ring, was turning the little key in the lock.

We used to consider such behaviour very annoying. In summer, those who were left at the door in this way would run round by the garden and often succeed in climbing through one of the windows before they could all be closed. But it was December and everything was already shut tight. For a short time, they pushed at the door and shouted insults at us; then, one by one, they turned around and left, heads hanging, wrapping their scarves around them.

In the classroom, now smelling of chestnuts and coarse wine, there was no one except two cleaners moving the desks. I went over to the stove to get warm and wait at my leisure for the pupils to come back while Augustin Meaulnes was looking through the desks and the drawers in the master’s table. It was not long before he found a little atlas and began to peruse it
eagerly, standing on the dais with his elbows on the lectern and his head between his hands.