Chapter V: La Grand’ Bête

My rupture with Crépin was the preface to a period of my life, the details of which I could never but doubtfully piece together in my mind. During this period I lived, but how I supported existence is a problem that it is beyond my power to solve. I have an indistinct memory of wandering amongst trees--always amongst trees; in light and darkness; in drought and in dew; of scaring and being scared by snakes, that rustled from me over patches of dead leaves; of swallowing, in desperate phases of hunger, berries and forest fruits, of whose properties I was as ignorant as of their names.

And, throughout, the strange thought dwelt with me, warm and insistent, that I was the champion elect of that white Carinne with whom I had never so much as exchanged a word. To me she was the Una of these fathomless green depths--the virgin who had carried her maidenhood and her pride to the Republic of the woods, where security and an equal condition were the right of all.

This fanciful image possessed a singular fascination for me. It glimmered behind trees; it peered through the thick interlace of branches; I heard the paddle of its feet in mossy rills, or the low song of its voice rising from some shadow prostrate in beds of fern. No doubt fatigue and hunger and that sense of a long responsibility repudiated came to work a melodious madness in my brain. For days, loitering aimlessly under its spell, I was happy--happier, I believe, than I had ever been hitherto. I had become a thing apart from mankind--a faun--a reversion to the near soulless type, but with the germ of spirit budding in me.

It was a desire to avoid a certain horror dangling over a track that had at first driven me into the thickets, and so lost me my way. The memory of a blot of shadow, on the sunny grass underneath that same horror, that swayed sluggishly, like the disc of a pendulum, as the body swayed above, got into my waking thoughts and haunted them. I wished to put a world-wide interval between myself and the blot--though I had seen monstrosities enough of late, God knows. But, in the silent woods, under that enchanted fancy of my relapse to primitive conditions, a loathing of the dead man, such as Cain might have felt, sickened all my veins. I was done with violence--astonished that its employment could ever have entered into the systems of such a defenceless race as man.

But also I knew that to me, moving no longer under the ægis of authority, the towns and the resorts of men were become quagmires for my uncertain feet. I was three hundred miles from Paris; all my neighbourhood was dominated by Revolutionary Committees; my chance of escape, did once that black cuttle-fish of the “Terror” touch me with a tentacle, a finger-snap would express. My hitherto immunity was due, indeed, to the offices of certain friends, and a little, perhaps, to my constitutional tendency to allow circumstances to shape my personality as they listed. Resigned to the remotest possibilities, my absence of affectation was in a sense my safeguard.

Here, however, far from the centre of operations, that which, under certain conditions, had proved my protection, would avail me nothing. A sober nonchalance, an easy manner, would be the very thyrsus to whip these coarse provincial hinds to madness. And, finding in my new emancipation--or intellectual decadence--an ecstasy I had not known before, I was very tender of my life, and had no longer that old power of indifference in me to the processes of fatality.

How long this state of exaltation lasted I do not know; but I know it came to me all in a moment that I must eat or die. It was the reflection of my own face, I think, in a little pool of water, that wrought in me this first dull recrudescence of reason. The wild countenance of a maniac stared up at me. Its hollow jaws bristled like the withered husks of a chestnut; its lips were black with the juice of berries; an animal _abandon_ slept in the pupils of its eyes. Ah! it was better that reason should triumph over circumstance than that the soul should subscribe tamely to its own disinheritance.

All in an instant I had set off running through the wood. That privilege of man, to dare and to fail, I would not abrogate for all the green retreats of nature.

For hours, it seemed to me, I hurried onwards. My heart sobbed in my chest; my breath was like a knotted cord under my shirt. At last, quite suddenly, blue sky came at me through the trunks, and I broke from the dense covert into a field of maize, and found myself looking down a half mile of sloping arable land upon a large town of ancient houses, whereof at the gate opposite me the tricolour mounted guard on the height of a sombre tower.

Now, in view of this, my purpose somewhat wavering, I sat me down in the thick of the corn and set to wondering how I could act for the best. I had assignats in my pocket, and a little money, yet there could be no dealings for me in the open market. Thinking of my appearance, I knew that by my own act I had yielded myself to the condition of a hunted creature.

All the afternoon I crouched in patches of the higher stalks, peeping down upon the town that, spreading up a gentle slope in the nearer distance, lay mapped before my eyes. Sometimes desperate in my hunger, I would snatch a head of the standing grain; but to chew and swallow more than would just blunt the edge of my suffering would be, I knew, to invite a worser torture. The sun beat on my head; my throat was caked with drought. At last I could endure it no longer, but retreated once more into the wood and waited for the shadows to lengthen.

It was early evening when I ventured into the field again and looked down. The falling sunlight smote the town with fire from the west, so that its walls and turrets seemed to melt in the glare and run into long pools of shadow. But here and there wan ribbons of streets, or patches of open places, broke up the sombreness--in vivid contrast with it--and seemed to swarm, alone of all the dappled area, with crawling shapes.

Of these blotches of whiteness, one flashed and scintillated at a certain point, from some cause I could not at first fathom. Now white, now red, it stretched across the fields a rayed beam that dazzled my wood-haunted eyes with the witchery of its brightness.

But presently I saw the open patch whence it issued grow dark with a press of figures. It was as if a cloth had been pulled over a dead face; and all in a moment the strange flash fell and rose again--like a hawk that has caught a life in its talons,--and a second time swooped and mounted, clustered with red rays,--and a third time and a fourth; but by then I had interpreted the writing on the wall, and it was the “_Mene, mene_,” written on the bright blade of the guillotine by the finger of the setting sun.

A very strange and quiet pity flowed in my veins as I looked. Here was I resting amidst the tranquillity of a golden harvest, watching that other harvest being gathered in. Could it be possible that any point of my picture expressed other than the glowing serenity that was necessary to the composition? I felt as if, in the intervals of the flashing, each next victim must be stepping forward with a happy consciousness of the part he was to play in the design. Then suddenly I threw myself on my face, and crushed my palms against my mouth that I might not shriek curses on the inexorable beauty of the heavens above me.

I did not look again, or rise from my covert till dark was drooping over the hillside. But, with the first full radiance of moonrise, I got to my feet, feeling dazed and light-headed, and went straight off in an easterly direction. My plan was to circumambulate, at a safe distance, the walls (that could enclose no possibility of help to me in my distress), and seek relief of my hunger in some hamlet (less emancipated) on their farther side. If the town was Libourne, as I believed it to be, then I knew the village of St Émilion to lie but a single league to the south-east of it.

Walking as in a dream, I came out suddenly into the highroad, and saw the moon-drenched whiteness of it flow down to the very closed gates far below me. Its track was a desolate tide on which no life was moving; for nowadays the rural population was mostly drifted or driven into the seething market-places of the Revolution. Now my imagination pictured this cold and silent highway a softly tumultuous stream--a welded torrent of phantoms, mingling and pushing and hurrying, in the midst of noiseless laughter, to beat on the town gates and cry out murmuringly that a “suspect” was fording a channel of its upper reaches.

This fright, this fancy (one would hardly credit it) brought the sweat out under my clothes. But it was to be succeeded by a worse. For, as I looked, the boiling wash of moonlight was a road again, and there came up it footsteps rhythmically clanking and unearthly--and others and yet others, till the whole night was quick with their approach. And, as the footfalls neared me, they ceased abruptly, and there followed the sound of an axe ringing down in wooden grooves; and then I knew that the victims of the evening, ghastly and impalpable, were come to gaze upon the man who had indulged his soul, even for a moment, with the enchantment of a prospect whose accent was their agony.

Now, assuredly, my reason was in a parlous state--when, with a whoop that broke the spell, an owl swept above me and fled eastwards down the sky; and I answered to its call, and crossed the road and plunged into fields again, and ran and stumbled and went blindly on once more until I had to pause for breath.

At last I heard the rumbling wash of water, and paused a stone’s-throw from a river-bank; and here a weight of terror seemed to fall from me to mark how wan and sad the real stream looked, and how human in comparison with that other demon current of my imagining. From its bosom a cluster of yards and masts stood up against the sky; and by that I knew that I was come upon the Dordogne where it opened out into a port for the once busy town of Libourne, and that if ever caution was necessary to me it was necessary now.

I looked to my right. A furlong off the rampart of the walls swept black and menacing; and over them, close at hand now, the silent yoke of the guillotine rose into the moonlight. It must have been perched upon some high ground within; and there it stood motionless, its jaws locked in slumber. Could it be the same monster I had watched flashing, scarlet and furious, from the hillside? Now, the ravening of its gluttony was satisfied; Jacques Bourreau had wiped its slobbered lips clean with a napkin. Sullenly satiate, propped against the sky, straddling its gaunt legs over the empty trough at its feet, it slept with lidless eyes that seemed to gloat upon me in a hideous trance.

Bah! Now all this is not Jean-Louis Sebastien de Crancé, nor even Citizen Thibaut. It is, in truth, the half-conscious delirium of a brain swimming a little with hunger and thirst and fatigue; and I must cut myself adrift from the hysterical retrospection.

I hurried towards the river, running obliquely to the south-east. If I could once win to clean water, I was prepared, in my desperation, to attempt to swim to the opposite bank. Stumbling, and sometimes wallowing, I made my way up a sludgy shore and suddenly came to a little creek or cove where a boat lay moored to a post. Close by, a wooden shanty, set in a small common garden with benches, like the Guinguettes of Paris, rattled to its very walls with boisterous disputation, while the shadows of men tossing wine-cups danced on its one window-blind. I unhitched the painter of the boat, pushed the prow from the bank, and, as the little craft swung out into the channel, scrambled softly on board and felt for the sculls in a panic. When I had once grasped and tilted these into the rowlocks, I breathed a great sigh of relief and pulled hurriedly round the stern of a swinging vessel into the cool-running waters of the Dordogne.

It was not until I had made more than half the passage to the farther side that I would venture to pause a moment to assuage my cruel thirst. Then, resting on my oars, I dipped in my hat and drank again and again, until my whole system seemed to flow with moisture like a rush. At last, clapping my sopped hat on my head, I was preparing to resume my work, when I uttered a low exclamation of astonishment, and sat transfixed. For something moved in the stern-sheets of the boat; and immediately, putting aside a cloak under which it appeared he had lain asleep, a child sat up on the bottom boards.

Now, my heart seemed to tilt like a top-heavy thing. Must this hateful necessity be mine, then--to silence, for my own safety, this baby of six or seven, this little comical _poupon_ with the round cropt head and ridiculous small shirt?

He stared at me, rubbed the sleep from his eyes, and suddenly began to whimper.

“_Heu! heu!_” he cried in the cheeping voice of a duckling, “_la Grand’ Bête!_”

He took me for the mythical monster of the peasants, whose power of assumption of any form is in ratio with the corrective ingenuity of nurses and mothers.

“Yes,” I said, my brain leaping to an idea; “I am _la Grand’ Bête_, and if you make a noise I shall devour you.”

His eyes were like full brown agates; his chin puckered to his lower lip; but he crushed his little fists against his chest to stay the coming outcry. My face relaxed as I looked at him.

“_La Grand’ Bête_ is kind to the little ones that obey him. Can you use these sculls?”

“_Mais, oui_,” he whispered, with a soft sob; “I am the pretty little waterman.”

“Very well. Now, little waterman, I shall land at the bank over there, and then you can take the sculls and pull the boat across to the cove again. But you must be very silent and secret about having gone with _la Grand’ Bête_ over the river, or he will come to your bedside in the night and devour you.”

I had been rowing gently as I talked, and now the nose of the skiff grounded easily under a low bank. I shipped the sculls, reached forward and took the rogue in my arms.

“Oh! but _la Grand’ Bête_ loves the good children. Be a discreet little waterman, and thou shalt find a gold louis under thy pillow this very day month.”

I kissed him, and, turning, caught at the knots of grass and hauled myself up the bank. It was a clumsy disembarkation for a god, perhaps, but my late comrade did not appear to be shaken in his faith. I stopped and looked back at him when I had run a few yards from the river. He was paddling vigorously away, with a professional air, and the moonlight was shattered on his scull-blades into a rain of diamonds. Suddenly a patrol-boat was pulled up the river across his bows, and I half turned to fly, my heart in my mouth.

“Hullo, hullo, Jacksprat!” cried a rough voice. “What dost thou here at this hour?”

“They were noisy in the _auberge_,” answered the childish treble, “and I could not sleep.”

I went on my way with a smile. To have used the boat and cast it adrift would not have prospered me so well as did this accident. Yet I felt a shame of meanness to hear the little thing, taking its lying cue from me, lie to the men, and I wished I had not clinched my purchase of his silence with that promise of a louis-d’or.

Pushing boldly across a wide moon-dappled margin of grass, so thronged with trees as to afford one good cover, I came out suddenly into a field-track running southwards, and along this I sped at a fast pace. But presently, seeing figures mounting towards me from the dip of a flying slope, I dived into a belt of corn that ran on my left between the track and the skirt of a dense wood, and lay close among the stalks waiting for the travellers to pass. This, however, to my chagrin, they did not; but, when they were come right over against me, they stopped, very disputative and voluble in a breathless manner, and lashed one another with knotty thongs of patriotism.

“But who wants virtue or moderation in a Commonwealth?”

“Dost not thou?”

“I?--I want heads--a head for every cobblestone in the Rue St Jacques. I would walk on the brains of self-seekers. This Roland----”

“He wore strings in his shoes to rebuke the vanity of the Veto----”

“And to indulge his own. Head of a cabbage! thou wouldst weep over the orator though he condemned thy belly to starvation. What! shall I satisfy my hunger with a thesis on the beauty of self-denial, because, like a drum, it has a full sound!”

“Be sure I do not defend him; but has he not practised what he taught?”

“Of a certainty, and is double-damned thereby. For know that these austere moralists have found their opportunity to indulge a hobby--not to avenge a people. What do _we_ want with abstinence who have practised it all our lives? What do we want with interminable phrases on the sublimity of duty?”

“But, thou wilt not understand that political economy----”

“Bah! I know it for the economy of words--that delicious _terminer les débats_ of the jury that rolls another lying mouth into the basket and makes a body the less to feed. But I tell thee, with every fall of the axe I feel myself shifting a place nearer the rich joints at the top of the feast.”

“Liberty----”

“That I desire is the free indulgence of my appetites. Now would not Roland and Vergniaud and their crew shave me nicely for that sentiment? Therefore I love to hunt them down.”

_A vieux chat jeune souris._ How indeed could these old grimalkins, grown toothless under tyranny, digest this tough problem of virtue for its own sake? Their food must be minced for them.

I never saw their faces; but I guessed them, by a certain croaking in their speech, to be worn with years and suffering. Presently, to my disgust, they had out their pipes and a flask of cognac and sat themselves down against the edge of the corn for a mild carouse. I waited on and on, listening to their snuffling talk, till I grew sick with the monotony of it and the cramp of my position. They were, I gathered, informers employed by Tallien in his search for those escaped Deputies who were believed to be in hiding in the neighbourhood.

At last I could stand it no longer. Move I must, for all the risk it entailed. I set to work, very cautiously, a foot at a time, wriggling on my belly through the corn. They took no notice, each being voluble to assert his opinions against the other. Presently, making towards the wood, I found the field to dip downwards to its skirt, so that I was enabled to raise myself to a crouching position and increase my pace. The relief was immense; I was running as the tree-trunks came near and opened out to me.

Now, I was so weary that I thought I must sleep awhile before I proceeded. I was pushing through the last few yards of the stalks when a guttural snarl arrested me. Immediately, right in my path, a head was protruded from the corn, and a bristled snout, slavering in the moonlight, was lifted at me. I stood a moment transfixed--a long moment, it appeared to me. The ridiculous fancy occurred to me that the yellow eyes glaring into mine would go on dilating till presently I should find myself embedded in their midst, like a prawn in aspic. Then, with a feeling of indescribable politeness in my heart, I turned aside to make a _détour_ into the wood, stepping on tiptoe as if I were leaving a sick-room. Once amongst the trees, I penetrated the darkness rapidly to the depth of a hundred yards, not venturing to look behind me, and, indeed, only before in search of some reasonable branch or fork where I might rest in safety. Wolves! I had not taken these into my calculations in the glowing solstice of summer, and it gave me something a shock to think what I had possibly escaped during my unguarded nights in the forest.

At length I found the place I sought--a little natural chair of branches high enough to be out of the reach of wild beasts, yet the ascent thereto easy. I climbed to it, notched myself in securely, and, my hunger somewhat comforted by the water I had drunk, fell almost immediately into a delicious stupor.

I awoke quite suddenly, yet with a smooth swift leap to consciousness. The angle of moonlight was now shifted to an oblique one, so that no rays entered direct; and the space beneath me was sunk into profound darkness. For some moments I lay in a happy trance, dully appreciative of the indistinct shapes that encompassed me, of the smell of living green bark near my face, of the stars embroidered into a woof of twigs overhead. But presently, gazing down, a queer little phenomenon of light fixed my attention, indifferently at first, then with an increase of wonder. This spot of pink radiance waxed and waned and waxed and waned, with a steady recurrence, on the butt of a great tree, twenty yards away. At first it was of a strong rosy tint, but little by little it faded till it was a mere phosphorescent blot; and then, while I was flogging my brains to think what it could be, of a sudden it seemed to fly down to the noise of a little grunting explosion, and break into a shower of scarlet sparks.

At that I was betrayed into a squiggle of laughter; for my phenomenon had in the flash resolved itself into nothing more mysterious than the glow from the pipe of a man seated silently smoking, with his head thrown back against the tree-foot.

“Hullo!” he exclaimed in a surprised voice, but with nothing of fear in it; and I congratulated myself at least that the voice struck a different note to that of either of M. Tallien’s informers. Nevertheless, I had been a fool, and I judged it the wise policy to slide from my perch and join my unseen companion. He made me out, I am sure, long before I did him; yet he never moved or showed sign of apprehension.

“Good evening, Jacques,” said I.

“Good morrow, rather, Jacques squirrel,” he answered.

“Is it so?”

“It is so.”

“You prefer the burrow, it seems, and I the branch.”

“No doubt we are not birds of a feather.”

“Why, truly, I seek Deputies,” I said, in a sudden inspiration.

“And I my fortune,” he answered, serenely.

“We travel by the same road, then. Have you a fragment of bread on you, comrade?”

“If I had a loaf thou shouldst go wanting a crumb of it.”

“And why, citizen?”

“I do not love spies.”

I fetched a grimace over my miscarried ruse.

“Then wilt thou never make thy fortune in France,” I said.

He gave a harsh laugh.

“_You_ will prevent me for that word, citizen.”

I curled myself up under the tree.

“I will wait for the dawn and read thee thy fortune,” I said, “and charge thee nothing for it but a kick to help thee on thy way.”

He laughed again at that.

“Thou provest thyself an ass,” said he, and refilled and lit his pipe and smoked on silently.

I lay awake near him, because, churl as he appeared, I felt the advantage of any human companionship in these beast-haunted thickets.

At last the light of dawn penetrated a little to where we rested, and when it was broad enough to distinguish objects by, I rolled upon my elbow and scrutinised my companion closely.

“Good morrow, then, burner of charcoal.”

He turned to me, a leering smile suspended on his lips.

“_Comment?_” said he.

“But I am a palmist, my friend, as you observe.”

He looked at his stunted and blackened fists.

“Ah! _si fait vraiment_. That is to tell my past condition of poverty, not my fortune.”

“The rest shall come. Observe my fitness for my post. You are from the forests of Nontron.”

He started and stared.

“Truly I have no love for spies,” he muttered, dismayed.

It was my turn to laugh. I had hazarded a bold guess. That he was from the woods rather than from the Landes his gift of seeing through the darkness convinced me. Then, if from the woods, why not from that part of the province where they stretched thickest and most meet for his trade?

“Now,” said I, “for what follows. It comes to your ears that Guienne is hatching a fine breed of maggots from the carcasses of dead aristocrats; that there is a feast of rich fragments toward. You will have your share; you will eat of these aristocrats that have so long fed on you. That is a very natural resolve. But in a Republic of maggots, as in all other communities, there is always a proportion of the brood that will fatten unduly at the expense of its fellows. These despots by constitution appropriate the most succulent parts; they wax thick and strong, and, finally, they alone of the swarm hatch out into flies, while the rest perish undeveloped.”

“It is a cursed parable,” he said, sullenly. “I do not comprehend you.”

“I speak of the people, my friend--of whom you are not one that will fatten.”

“And why, and why?”

“You have scruples. You decry at the outset the methods of this select clique of the Republic that has the instinct to prosper. If I congratulate you on the possession of a conscience, I must deplore in anticipation the sacrifice of yet another martyr to that truism which history repeats as often as men forget it.”

“What truism, sayst thou?”

“That swinish Fortune will love the lusty bully that drains her, though the bulk of the litter starve.”

He spat savagely on the ground.

“I do not comprehend,” he muttered again.

“Well,” I said, “at least let us hope there is an especial Paradise reserved for the undeveloped maggots.”

He rose and stood brooding a moment; then looked away from me and cried morosely, “Get up!”

To my astonishment, from a sort of cradle of roots to the farther side of the tree a young girl scrambled to her feet at his call, and stood yawning and eyeing me loweringly.

“Your daughter?” said I.

“Yes,” he answered, “she is my daughter. What then?”

I jumped up in some suppressed excitement.

“I recall my words,” I said. “You have a chance, after all, down there in Bordeaux. And now I see that it is a thief that fears a spy.”

I pointed at the wench. She was dressed, ridiculously, inappropriately, in a silk gown of a past fashion, but rich in quality, and decorated with a collar of point-lace. Out of this her dirty countenance, thatched with a villainous mop of hair, stuck grotesquely; and the skirt of the dress had been roughly caught up to disencumber her bare feet.

The man stamped on the ground.

“I do not fear you!” he cried furiously, “and I am no thief!”

I laughed derisively.

“But it is true!” he shouted. “A young lady we met in the woods of Coutras would exchange it for Nannette’s _jupon_; and why the devil should we deny her?”

My heart gave a sudden swerve.

“What was she like, this lady?” I said.

The fellow glanced sulkily askance at me.

“Does not the spy know?” he said.

“Perhaps he does. Say this demoiselle was slender and of a reasonable height; that she had brown hair, and grey eyes under dark brows; that her face was of a cold, transparent whiteness; that she spoke with a certain soft huskiness in her voice.”

He cried under his breath, with a note of fright, “The devil is in this man!”

I laughed and took off my hat and made the two a bow.

“To your quick advancement in Bordeaux!” I said.

He stared a moment, seemed to hesitate; then, roughly summoning the girl to follow him, strode off through the wood. The moment they were out of sight I sat down again to ponder.

Was it true, then, that these peasants had met Carinne--that they had helped her to a disguise--for what purpose? She must have been in the woods whilst I was there--accursed destiny that kept us apart! At least I must return to them at once and seek her.

I broke into a queer embarrassed fit of laughter.

What self-ordained mission was this? What was my interest in the girl, or how would she not resent, perhaps, the insolence of my interference? She had no claim upon my protection or I upon her favour.

Very well and very well--but I was going to seek her, nevertheless. Such queer little threads of irresponsible adventure pulled me in these days.

But, at first for my hunger. It was a great voice in an empty house. It would not be refused or put off with a feast of sentiment. Eat I must, if it was only of a hunk of sour pease-bread.

Suddenly I thought of that bestial apparition at the wood-skirt. There had been a liquid “yong” in its snarl, as if it could not forbear the action of gluttonous jaws even while they were setting at an intruder. Perhaps the remains of a goat----!

I started running towards the point at which, I believed, I had entered amongst the trees. Very shortly I emerged into the open, and saw the cornfield shimmering violet before me in the dawn. I beat up and down amongst the standing grain, and all in a moment came upon that I sought. A goat it might have been (or a scapegoat bearing the sins of the people) for anything human in its appearance. Yet it was the body of a man--of a great man, too, in his day, I believe--that lay before me in the midst of a trampled crib of stalks, but featureless, half-devoured--a seething abomination.

Now, in the placid aftermath of my fortunes, I can very easily shudder over that thought of the straits to which hunger will drive one. Then, I only know that through all the abhorrence with which I regarded the hideous remains, the sight of an untouched satchel flung upon the ground beside them thrilled me with hope. I stooped, had it in my hands, unbuckled it with shaking fingers. It was full to choking of bread and raisins and a little flask of cognac. Probably the poor wretch had not thought it worth his while to satisfy the needs of an existence he was about to put an end to. For the horn handle of a knife, the blade of which was hidden in the decaying heart of the creature, stood out slackly from a hoop of ribs.

I withdrew into the wood, and without a scruple attacked the provisions. It was a dry and withered feast; yet I had been fastidiously critical of many a _service aux repas_ at Versailles that gave me not a tithe of the pleasure I now enjoyed. And at the last I drank to the white Andromeda whose Perseus I then and there proclaimed myself to be.