The Lost Estate (16 page)

As for me, much to my delight, I was given the task of following the eastern edge of the wood, in case any fleeting schoolboys tried to escape on that side.

Now, in the map amended by the gypsy, which I had many times studied with Meaulnes, it seemed that there was a single-lane track, a dirt road, leaving from this edge of the wood and heading towards the Estate. Suppose I should discover it that morning! I had started to convince myself that before midday I should be on the road towards the lost château…

What a wonderful walk. As soon as we had passed the Slope and gone round the Mill, I left my two companions, Monsieur Seurel, who looked as though he were going off to war – I truly think he had put an old pistol in his pocket – and the treacherous Moucheboeuf.

Following a transverse path, I soon reached the edge of the wood – alone in the countryside for the first time in my life, like an army patrol that has lost touch with its corporal.

This, I should think, is something close to that mysterious happiness that Meaulnes apprehended one day. The whole
morning is mine, to explore the outskirts of the wood, the coolest, most hidden place thereabouts, while my big brother is also away on a journey of discovery. It is like a dried-up riverbed. I am walking beneath the low branches of trees that I do not know by name; they must be elms. Just now, I jumped over a stile at the end of the path and here I am, in this broad avenue of green grass flowing beneath the leaves, brushing through the nettles in places and knocking down the tall stalks of valerian.

Sometimes, for a few steps, my feet are resting on a bank of fine sand. And in the silence, I can hear a bird: I think it’s a nightingale, but I must be wrong because they only sing in the evenings… This bird is relentlessly repeating the same phrase: voice of the morning, a recital in the shade, a delicious invitation to a journey between the elms. Invisible and obstinate, it seems to be accompanying me through the leaves.

For the first time, I too am on the road to adventure. No longer am I hunting for shells washed up by the sea under Monsieur Seurel’s guidance, or wild orchids that even the schoolmaster does not recognize, or even, as often happened in Old Martin’s field, the deeply sunk, dried-up spring covered by a grating and buried under so many weeds that every time we would take longer finding it… I am looking for something still more mysterious. I’m looking for the passage that they write about in books, the one with the entrance that the prince, weary with travelling, cannot find. This is the one you find at the remotest hour of morning, long after you have forgotten that eleven o’clock is coming, or midday. And suddenly, as you part the branches in the dense undergrowth, with that hesitant movement of the hands, held unevenly at face height, you see something like a long, dark avenue leading to a tiny circle of light…

But while I am intoxicating myself with these hopes and ideas, I suddenly come out into a kind of clearing which turns out to be nothing more than a field. Without expecting it, I have reached the end of the Bois des Communaux, which I had always imagined to be an infinite distance away. Now on my right, between piles of wood, buzzing in the shade, is the
keeper’s house. Two pairs of stockings are drying on the window ledge. In previous years, when we reached the entrance to the wood, we would always say, pointing to a patch of light far away at the end of the immense dark lane: ‘Down there is the keeper’s house, Baladier’s house.’ But never did we go that far. Sometimes we would hear people say, as if talking about some extraordinary expedition, ‘He went as far as the keeper’s house!’

This time, I’ve gone as far as Baladier’s house – and found nothing…

My tired leg was starting to hurt, and I was suffering from the heat, which I had not felt up to then. I was afraid of undertaking the whole of the return trip by myself when I heard Monsieur Seurel’s bird decoy near by and Moucheboeuf’s voice, then others calling me…

There was a band of six big lads among whom only the treacherous Moucheboeuf seemed triumphant. They were Giraudat, Auberger, Delage and others… Thanks to the birdcall, some had been caught climbing a wild cherry tree in the middle of a clearing and the others as they were robbing a woodpecker’s nest. Giraudat, the simpleton with the puffy eyes and dirty smock, had hidden the little birds on his belly between his shirt and his skin. Two of their friends had fled when Monsieur Seurel came up, probably Delouche and little Coffin. At first, they had laughed in answer to ‘Mouchevache’ (as they called him), and the wood threw their jokes as echoes back to them; while he, foolishly, thinking he had them in the bag, angrily replied: ‘You might as well come down, you know! Monsieur Seurel is here…’

At that, everything suddenly went quiet: they were silently escaping through the woods. And since they knew every inch of the place, there was no sense in trying to catch them. No one knew, either, where The Great Meaulnes had gone. They had not heard his voice and decided to give up the search.

It was after midday when we started back towards Sainte-Agathe, slowly, our heads hanging, tired and grubby. As we came out of the wood and had shaken and rubbed the mud off
our shoes on the dry road, the sun began to shine brightly. It was no longer that fresh, glowing spring morning. Afternoon sounds could be heard. Here and there, a cock crowed – a forlorn cry! – in one of the isolated farms beside the road. Coming down the Slope, we paused for a moment to chat with the farm hands who had resumed their work in the fields after lunch. They were leaning on the gate, and Monsieur Seurel told them, ‘What a bunch of rascals! Why, just look at Giraudat: he put the fledglings in his shirt and they did just what you’d expect. A fine mess!’

I felt as though it was my disaster as well that the farmhands were laughing about, shaking their heads; but they did not entirely blame the boys, whom they knew well. They even told us, confidentially, when Monsieur Seurel had resumed his place at the head of the column: ‘Another one came past, a tall one, you know him… On his way he must have met up with the cart from Les Granges, and they gave him a lift; he got down, covered in mud and his clothes all torn, just here, at the road to Les Granges! We told him we’d seen you go by this morning, but that you weren’t back yet. And off he went, taking his time, towards Sainte-Agathe.’

In fact, The Great Meaulnes was waiting for us, sitting on a promontory of the Pont des Glacis, looking utterly exhausted. When Monsieur Seurel asked him, he said that he had also gone off looking for the truants, and when I questioned him he just whispered back, shaking his head in disappointment, ‘No, nothing! Nothing like it!’

After lunch, in the closed classroom, which was dark and empty in the midst of a sunlit land, he sat down at one of the long tables and, with his head in his hands, he lapsed into a long, heavy and miserable sleep. Around evening, after thinking about it for a long time, as though he had just taken an important decision, he wrote a letter to his mother. And that is all I remember of that dreary end to a great day of disappointments.

X

THE WASHING

We had counted too soon on the arrival of spring.

On Monday evening, we wanted to get our homework done immediately after four o’clock, as in mid-summer, and so that we could see more clearly, we brought two large tables out into the courtyard. But all at once the weather clouded over, a drop of rain fell on an exercise book and we hurried back inside. And then, silently, from the great hall plunged in darkness, we watched through the wide windows as the clouds raced across the grey sky.

At that, Meaulnes, who was watching with us, one hand on a window catch, could not repress the remark (though he seemed annoyed at feeling so much regret inside him): ‘Oh, the clouds were running differently from that when I was on the road in the cart from La Belle Etoile!’

‘On what road?’ Jasmin asked.

Meaulnes did not reply.

In order to change the subject, I said, ‘Now, I’d like to have travelled like that in a cart under the driving rain with an umbrella to shelter me.’

‘And be reading all the way, as though you were indoors,’ said someone else.

‘It wasn’t raining and I didn’t want to read,’ said Meaulnes. ‘All I thought about was watching the countryside go by.’

But when Giraudat again asked what countryside he was talking about, again Meaulnes said nothing. And Jasmin remarked: ‘I know… It’s that famous adventure again!’

He said this in a conciliatory, but self-important, tone of voice, as though he were himself somehow in the secret. He
was wasting his time, though: his approach achieved nothing, and since night was falling, everyone hurried away, heads sheltering under smocks from the cold rain.

Until the following Thursday, the weather remained wet. And that Thursday was more dreary even than the one before. All the countryside was bathed in a kind of icy fog as in the worst days of winter.

Millie, taken in by the bright sunshine of the previous week, had got the washing done, but it was no use thinking of putting it out to dry on the garden hedges or even on lines in the loft, the air was so damp and cold.

Talking about this to Monsieur Seurel, she got the idea of hanging out the washing in the classrooms, since it was Thursday, and working the stove up to full heat. To save on the fires in the kitchen and dining room, we could cook our meals on the stove and spend the whole day in the main classroom.

At first – I was still so young – I thought of this novelty as a festive occasion.

Some festivity! All the heat from the stove was taken up by the washing, and it felt really cold. Outside, in the yard, a winter drizzle fell, weakly and endlessly; and yet it was there that, at nine in the morning, driven mad by boredom, I met The Great Meaulnes. Through the bars of the main gate, against which we were silently resting our heads, we watched a funeral procession arriving from the country to the high point of the town at the crossroads of Les Quatre-Routes. The coffin, which had come in an ox cart, was unloaded and placed on a stone slab at the foot of the great cross where the butcher had recently seen the gypsy sentries. Where was he now, the young captain who had so brilliantly led the attack? The curé and the choir-boys halted in front of the coffin, according to custom, and we could hear the melancholy sound of singing in the distance. We knew that this would be the only event of the day and that otherwise it all would flow past like yellowed water in a gutter…

‘And now,’ Meaulnes said, suddenly, ‘I’m going to do my packing. I’ve got to tell you, Seurel: I wrote to my mother last
Thursday to ask if I could complete my education in Paris. I’m leaving today.’

He went on looking towards the town, with his hands resting on the bars, level with his head. There was no point in asking if his mother, who was rich and granted his every wish, had also granted this one. Nor was there any point in asking why he suddenly wanted to go off to Paris!

But he certainly had some feelings of regret and fear about leaving the dear town of Sainte-Agathe, from which he had set out on his adventure. And I, for my part, felt a huge sense of desolation rise up inside me, unlike any that I had experienced before.

‘Easter’s coming!’ he said, with a sigh, by way of explanation.

‘As soon as you find her there, you’ll write to me, won’t you?’ I asked.

‘Of course, I promise. You’re my friend and my brother, aren’t you?’

And he put a hand on my shoulder.

Gradually, I came to realize that it was really over, since he wanted to finish his schooling in Paris. Never again would I have my tall friend with me.

There was only one hope that we would be reunited, and that was in the house in Paris where he might find the trail of the lost adventure… But what a meagre hope it was for me, when I saw Meaulnes himself so sad!

My parents were informed. Monsieur Seurel appeared quite amazed, but soon accepted Augustin’s reasons. Millie, a real housewife, was chiefly sorry at the thought that his mother would see our house in a state of unaccustomed disarray… The trunk, alas, was quickly packed. We looked for his Sunday shoes in the cupboard under the stairs, some linen in the wardrobe and then his papers and schoolbooks – all that a young man of eighteen possesses in this world.

At midday, Madame Meaulnes arrived in her carriage. She had lunch at the Café Daniel with Augustin and took him away almost without a word as soon as the horse was fed and harnessed. We said goodbye to them at the door… and the
carriage vanished round the corner at the crossroads of Les Quatre-Routes.

Millie scraped her shoes at the door and returned to the cold dining room to put everything back in its place, while I, for the first time for many months, found myself alone facing a long Thursday evening – with the feeling that inside that old carriage my adolescence had just vanished for evermore.

XI

BETRAYAL

What should I do? The weather was clearing a little, and it looked as though the sun might even come out.

A door closed in the school house. Then, again, silence. From time to time my father walked across the yard to fill the coal scuttle which he used to stoke up the stove. I could see the white clothes hanging from their lines and had no desire to go back to this sad place which had been transformed into a drying room, there to find myself confronted by the end-of-year exam, that competition for the Ecole Normale which should from now on be my sole concern.

An odd thing: mixed in with this sense of boredom and desolation, there was almost a feeling of freedom. Now that Meaulnes had gone, now that the whole adventure was over and a failure, I felt at least free of a strange preoccupation, of that mysterious obsession preventing me from behaving like everyone else. Now that Meaulnes had gone, I was no longer his companion in adventure, the brother of that pathfinder. I reverted to being a village boy like the rest. This was easy for me: I had only to follow my most natural impulse.

The youngest of the Roy brothers went past down the muddy street, swinging three conkers tied together on a piece of string, then launching them into the air, to fall into the school yard. So great was my boredom that I enjoyed throwing his conkers back to him two or three times over the wall.