The Path of Life Part 12

"Lad, you're coming along to the farm to-day, to bind corn."

Play was over, the free play of the country! They were pressed into labour, were saddled with the labourer's heavy burden. Since then, it had been an endless roving after work, from one farm to another, with his bundle under his arm.

Stafke had remained serving at Willems', with father, and he, on Sunday afternoons, had not so far to go, under the burning sun, in order to get home.

The way was long for an unthinking lad; and they seemed endless, those never-changing rows of tree-trunks, those uncounted yellow, blinking cornfields ... and never a creature on the road. It was something very much out of the way when a pigeon flew through the azure sky; the lad stood still and, turning round, followed the great ring which it made until it dropped far away, yonder among the houses of the village. Then he went on, pondering, as he went, that there was nothing, absolutely nothing lovelier than a milk-white pigeon in a pale-blue sky; and he whispered:

"Perhaps it's Stafke's pigeon."

On reaching home, he laid down his bundle; his baby sister came running up to him, with her little arms wide open, and held him by his legs; and he lifted her twice, three times above his head. He handed mother his earnings; and then, out of the door, to Stafke's!

"Roz'lie, is he in?"

"Oh, yes, he's up in the loft, with the pigeons."

He climbed up the ladder, in three steps and as carefully as he could, to the dovecote. Behind a swarm of half-stretched and loose-hanging clouts and canvas things, a lad sat on an overturned tub, his fair-haired curly head in his hands, his elbows on his knees, peering through a sort of lattice-work. Jaak sat down at the other side, on a bundle of maize, in just the same att.i.tude, and looked too....

There were white, snow-white, mottled, blue, slate-blue, russet, speckled, grey, black-flecked, striped and spotted pigeons, doves, pouters--some c.o.c.ks, the rest hens--a motley crowd all mixed up together.

There were some that sat murmuring one to the other, softly--oh, so softly--and nodding their heads for sheer kindliness. Others cooed loudly, angrily or indifferently and tripped round one another. Others sat huddled, meditating, lonely and forlorn, blinking their bright little glittering eyes.

Through the holes, from the resting-board, new ones came walking in with shy feet and sought a little place for themselves; others pa.s.sed out through the narrow opening and, flapping their wings, rose into the sky.

'Twas a humming and muttering without end, a murmuring and whispering loud and soft and a restless stir and movement: a little world full of neatly-dressed damsels, who were all so lightly, so prettily decked out and who knew how to manage their trains and their fine clothes so demurely and so comically. They carefully combed and cleaned their black velvet ruffs, smoothed their sharp-striped feathers one by one, fondled and rubbed their downy b.r.e.a.s.t.s till they shone like new-blown roses....

And Jaak and Stafke sat watching this, sat watching this, like two steel statues, sweating in that warm loft. They did not stir nor speak a single word.

And that lasted and went on....

It grew dusk. From every side the pigeons came flying in, whole troops of them, and sought their well-known roosts. They stood two and two, closely crowded together on the perches or huddled in the holes. They drew their heads into their feathered throats and slept. The rumour diminished to just a soft mumbling; and then nothing more. The pigeon that sat over there, squatting low on her eggs, faded from sight in her dark corner; and the whole upper row vanished in the dusk of the rafters.

The boys still sat on.

The dovecote became a pale-grey twilight thing, with drab and black patches here and there. The soft humming pa.s.sed into a faint buzz that died away quite; and all was silence.

They both together stood up straight, gave a long-drawn sigh and went below.

"It's getting dark," said Jaak, wiping the sweat from his face. "The cows will be waiting."

"Yes," said Stafke. "It gets evening all at once. Well, Jaak, till Sunday."

And Jaak went away, through the now moonlit drove, with a new bundle under his arm and thinking of the farm, of his twenty-nine cow-beasts and of Sunday and of Stafke's pigeons....

_Il y a des malheurs qui arrivent d'un pas si lent et si sur qu'ils paraissent faire partie de la vie journaliere._

MONTALEMBERT.

IX. AN ACCIDENT

He had been half awake several times already, but each time he had slipped back into an uneasy doze, a restless, wearisome sojourn in a strange, drowsy world, in which he struggled with stupid, silly dream-spectres, all jumbled together in a huddled ma.s.s of incoherent, impossible thoughts and actions; a blank world in which all his workaday doings were forgotten; an after-life of tiring sleep following on the carouse of yesterday. He lay half-suffocated in the stifling heat of that tiled garret, lay tossing on a straw mattress. And suddenly, with a jolt that jerked him sleeping like a beast of burden. And now why couldn't he take life as it came, like his mates, who just went through it anyhow, without any calculating, callously and cheerfully, something like a machine which, when the sun comes out and it is daylight, begins to move arms and legs, to twist and turn the whole day long and, when it is evening again and dark, falls down and remains lying dead, for a few hours, with all the other things?

He drew himself up, thrust his thin legs into his trousers, his arms into a dirty jacket and let his weary limbs carry him below. His mother had b.u.t.toned up the linen satchel with his two slices of bread-and-b.u.t.ter and had ladled out his porridge. He went out followed by a "G.o.d guard you, lad!" and the little woman looked after her boy till he had vanished out of the alley. She was so fond of him, he knew it; yes, he knew all about that tender love, which he so often rejected in a moment of churlish impatience; but still he was sorry afterwards, even though he never showed it. That prim, old-fashioned little woman, with her cramped ways, was his mother; his father had been a drunkard and had been killed at his work: that was his parentage; it was their fault that he led this poverty-stricken existence.

He walked on, without looking up at all the swarming life around him, went step by step over the slippery cobbles, straight to his work. His work: why must he work, always that everlasting toiling, while others lived and enjoyed their lives without doing anything? He too had once thought--but it was only a dream--of becoming something; he had felt something stirring just there, inside him, and that seed would have sprouted and blossomed if they had only tended it; but they had ruthlessly repelled him, had refused to take him up with them on the heights; and he had remained in the mud, alone, all alone.

There it rose before him: a mighty edifice in building, with behind it a radiant summer sun that blazed forth high above the framework of the roof in the morning sky and made that giant structure stand black in its own shadow.

That was his work. All that ma.s.s of bricks he had seen grow into the mighty whole; and there it stood now, a huge block, with heavy, ma.s.sive outlines, contained--held upright, it seemed--by a jumble of dirty-white stakes and posts, crossed and criss-crossed with planks. Out of a dirty hodge-podge of crazy houses, walls black with smoke, little inner rooms which for the first time saw the white light of day, with ragged strips of wall-paper and whitewash among rotten beams and rafters straight and askew, all of which his stubborn labour had made to fall and disappear, and out of those deep-dug foundations, out of that drudging in the dirty ground, those stout walls had grown stone by stone, had risen high into the sky--oh, the hard work of it!--and, tapering by degrees, had shot up to form that mighty building. Wall by wall, wrought at and toiled at, held together by pillars running beside narrow pointed windows to those peaked gable-steps, running into a forest of masts, of slanting beams that had to bear the roof, the whole of that sprawling monster had gradually acquired a sense and a meaning and become the splendid masterpiece that now stood there, solidly fixed against the blue sky like a magic crystallized phrase.

That beginning all over again, day after day, at the same work; all that busy stir of men and stones, now high in the air, now deep below; that incessant climbing up and down those swaying ladders: all this had made such a deep impression on him, had implanted itself into him so firmly that at the first sight of it he felt smitten with impotence, with a mechanical discouragement that gripped his whole being and made him work throughout the day as though urged by an all-ruling deity set there in the symbolic shape of that giant colossus at which he toiled. It seemed to him that he was an indispensable little part of that great building, a small moving thing with but a tiny atom of intelligence--sometimes--and fatally dragged along in that whirling circle, under the behest of the masters, who knew their way through every stroke and line of the great plan, who had all that great work in their heads and on paper and who possessed the power to bring all that complicated machine into operation.

And he just went to work like a dog, set going by the mournful knocking of the stone-chopper, the shrill screech of the toothless iron marble-saw and all the banging and knocking and hewing up yonder at the top of things. He took his wooden hod, filled it with bricks and slowly climbed the ladder. He was once more the dismal noodle of last week, the hypnotized bag-o'-nerves that let himself be swept along in the whirlwind of habit and vexation, dazed by that awful hugeness which he was helping to complete and driven on by the ever-pursuing pair of eyes of his strict foreman. And his head ached so; and he felt so sick; and his legs bent under the load.

On he had to go and on. His head no longer took part in the work; his legs kept on going up and down the rungs with those bricks, those everlasting bricks: he did not know how many, just hauled them up, without stopping.

It seemed to him sometimes that the whole ma.s.s of walls and scaffolding, labourers and foremen made but a single being: a sort of fearsome deity, something like an unwieldy monster with inhuman, cruel feelings, something which had to be fed with all that workmen's sweat; and all this feverish activity seemed to him the whirling along of a crowd of unfortunates who had stepped into the fatal circle marked out for them, never to leave it again. Everything seemed so unsteady to-day: those walls on which he had to walk tottered; and he took such a pleasure in looking, in looking for a long time down below, yonder where the men and women were like ants and the great blocks of freestone became little bricks. It gave him such a delicious wriggling in the bowels, a tickling in his blood; and he felt his hair tingling on his head. Was not this the way to obtain release from that hard labour, to get out of that brain-racking circle?

Then he held on to a post until he recovered his senses; and he went down again for more bricks. It came from all that beer.

Yesterday had been a holiday. The wooden framework of the roof was finished; and they had nailed the May-bough to the top, the joyous emblem of difficulties vanquished. It showed up grandly there, with its bright green leaves so high in the air. The masters had granted the men a day off and given them plenty of beer. All that warm day they had made merry, drinking and singing and loafing about the streets like happy savages. He too had revelled with the rest, had been overcome by the drink and joined in everything, from the horseplay in the open air to the b.e.s.t.i.a.l amus.e.m.e.nts in those dark holes where the populace seeks its pleasure, that stimulant for the work of the morrow. Then that brutal drunkenness had come, with the loss of all his senses, till he found himself, dog-tired, sick and feverish, up in his garret under the tiles.

To-day the work was twice as irksome. That rising warmth which, in the morning, while it is still cool, forebodes the stifling, paralysing heat of the scorching noon-day, tortured his throat and his bowels; he couldn't go on.

"Slacker!" was the first word flung at his head. He stood on the high gable-steps and set down his load of bricks. That "Slacker!" played about in his head like the smarting pain of a lash. He stood looking aimlessly into s.p.a.ce, indifferent to all that moved and lived around him. A shudder ran through his body. The wall tottered ... and he was so high up, all alone, seen by n.o.body: such a small creature in that blue sky, in that endless s.p.a.ce. In a clear vision he saw his own figure in all its lean wretchedness, cut out like a paper silhouette, standing out sharply against the sky, such a miserable little object: two thin legs, like laths, a little stomach, two little sticks of arms and that small, everyday, vulgar head. Was that he, that tiny atom of this mighty, colossal building, that ant on the back of this behemoth ... which had only to move to shake him off, ever so low down!

Ah, here's that delicious wriggling in the bowels again! He has looked down. Once more. That's capital: something like a feeling of wanting to jump down, such an airy, irresponsible joy, like flying in a dense, blue sky, falling very gently and slowly--oh, what fun!--and then being rid of all one's troubles!... And yet there was a certain fear about it. He mustn't look any more. Or just this once ... that was grand! Once more that awful depth, with all those tiny figures, yawned below him; and it was the little wall that kept him up there so high, only that little wall.... One movement, the least little yielding, the least bending over: oh, what bliss ... and how frightful!... He became drunk with delight, filled with the pleasure of it; he gasped, his eyes became unseeing; it was like being wafted along, a gentle flight through the air and ... he fell.

b.u.mping against a scaffold, clutching with hands and feet; a breaking plank, a ghastly yell ... and then a body with arms and legs outspread in s.p.a.ce, a thunderbolt ... a thud as of a bag of earth ... and there he lay, stretched at full length, like a man asleep. That scream of distress, that terrible shriek, that farewell cry of one who is going away for good had sent something like an electric shock through all around; work ceased and they scrambled down and stood in a great circle around that body ... looking. And a great silence followed, that silence which is so heavy and oppressive after the sudden stop of so much activity. People came rushing up, pushing to get closer ... and to see.

They tore the poor devil's clothes open to find out where he was hurt, others ran for help, while fresh swarms of folk came crowding up and the silence died in an uproar of questions and tramping and the wailing of women. He lay there, with his peaceful face turned to one side, lay on his back, seemingly uninjured; a few drops of blood trickled from his mouth. His eyes were closed like those of a man asleep.

"Such a height to fall!... So young, only a boy!"

Others stood chattering loudly, indifferently, as though about an everyday occurrence, or looked up at the wall and showed one another from where he had tumbled down.

There was a sudden movement in the crowd; people jostled one another.

"His mother's coming!" somebody whispered.

They pressed closer and closer to watch the effect upon her, the women with an anguished consciousness of what she must be suffering, that mother-pain which they understood so well. The men pushed to see what happened, because everybody was looking. All eyes were fixed on the little woman who came running along, with those elderly little hurried steps, those two anxious eyes which showed all the dread of the tragedy they suspected. The people made way respectfully, as before one who is privileged to approach and look upon what is hers. Those who could not move back she dragged away mercilessly, gripping them with her hooked fingers, which she thrust out at every side in order to see closer. It was her ... her ... her son lying there, her own son; and she must get to him.

She saw him. He lay there and he was dead, the son, the child whom she had seen leaving that morning alive and well. She stood aghast, out of breath after the great effort of hurrying, her throat pinched with distress and sorrow and shock, her soul filled with all the pent-up tempest that was seeking an outlet. Her flat chest heaved and all her thin, frail little body quivered; her legs shook beneath her. Slowly and painfully the sobs came welling up.

The people waited in silence, more or less disappointed, saddened by all that silent grief. Her eyes, the eyes of a mother, stared at the dead body; and he did not look at her and he slept on and ... and he was asleep for ever, gone for ever: he would never see her again! This last cut into her soul; a shrill scream came from her throat, she flung her lean brown hands together high above her head, wrung the crooked, gnarled fingers convulsively and then, with her fists clenched in her lap, sank impotently to her knees, with her head against his.

"Oh, it's such a pity, oh, it's such a pity!" she moaned; and the words contained all the awful depth of her woe, all the concentrated sorrow.

"Oh, it's such a pity, such a pity!" she kept on repeating, finding no other words to express her grief and lending them power by force of repet.i.tion.