In a Railway Carriage
The sun was vanishing behind the vast chains of hills whose loftiest peak is the Puy de Dôme, and the shadow of the crests filled the deep valley of Royat.
Several people were strolling in the park, round the bandstand. Others were still sitting together in groups, in spite of the sharp evening air.
In one of these groups an animated discussion was in progress, for a grave problem had arisen, and one which seriously perturbed Mesdames de Sarcagnes, de Vaulacelles, and de Bridoie. In a few days the holidays would begin, and the discussion centred round the means of bringing home their sons, now at Jesuit and Dominican colleges.
Now, these ladies had not the least desire to undertake a journey to bring back their offspring, and they did not know exactly who could be entrusted with this delicate task. The last days of July were already on them. Paris was empty. They tried in vain to recall any name which offered the necessary guarantees.
Their concern was the greater because an unsavoury episode had occurred in a railway carriage some few days before. And these ladies were firmly convinced that all the women of the town spent their whole time in the express trains between Auvergne and the Gare de Lyon in Paris. According to Madame de Bridoie, the columns of personal gossip in Gil Blas, moreover, announced the presence at Vichy, at Mont Dore, and La Bourboule of every known and unknown pretty lady. The fact that they were there, was proof that they must have come in a railway carriage; and they would assuredly return in a railway carriage; they must indeed be compelled to go on returning in order to come back again every day. It was a continual coming and going of damaged goods on this abominable line. The ladies lamented that access to the stations was not forbidden to disreputable women.
Besides, Roger de Sarcagnes was fifteen years old, Gontran de Vaulacelles thirteen, and Roland de Bridoie eleven years. What was to be done? They could not, under any circumstances, expose their darlings to the risk of meeting such creatures. What might they hear, what might they see, and what might they find out if they were to spend a whole day, or a night, in a compartment which held also one or two of these vicious women with one or two of their companions!
There seemed no way out of the difficulty, and then Madame de Martinsec happened to come past. She stopped to greet her friends, who poured their woes into her ears.
“But what could be easier?” she cried. “I’ll lend you the abbé. I can quite well spare him for forty-eight hours. Rodolphe’s education will not suffer during that short time. He will go for your children and bring them home.”
So it was arranged that Father Lecuir, a young and cultured priest, and Rodolphe de Martinsec’s tutor, should go to Paris the following week to take charge of the young people.
So the priest set out on Friday; and on Sunday morning he was at the Gare de Lyon, ready, with his three youngsters, to take the eight o’clock express, the new through express which had started to run only a few days before, in response to the unanimous demands of all the people taking the waters in Auvergne.
He walked down the platform, followed by his schoolboys, like a hen and her chicks, in search of a compartment either empty or occupied by people whose appearance was quite irreproachable, for his mind retained a lively sense of all the meticulous commands laid upon him by Mesdames de Sarcagnes, de Vaulacelles, and de Bridoie.
Suddenly he saw, standing outside the door of one compartment, an old gentleman and an old white-haired lady talking to another lady seated inside the carriage. The old gentleman was an officer of the Legion of Honour, and they were all unmistakably gentlefolk. “This is the place for me,” thought the abbé. He helped his three pupils in and followed them.
The old lady was saying:
“Be sure to take the greatest care of yourself, my child.”
The younger lady answered:
“Oh, yes, mamma, don’t be anxious.”
“Call in the doctor as soon as ever you feel yourself in pain.”
“Yes, yes, mamma.”
“Then goodbye, my daughter.”
“Goodbye, mamma.”
They embraced each other warmly, then a porter shut the door and the train began to move.
They were alone. The abbé, in high delight, congratulated himself on his clever management, and began to talk to the young people entrusted to his care. The day he left, it had been arranged that Madame de Martinsec should allow him to give the three boys lessons during the whole of the holidays, and he was anxious to test the abilities and dispositions of his new pupils.
The eldest, Roger de Sarcagnes, was one of those tall schoolboys who have shot up too rapidly, thin and pale, with joints that seemed to fit badly. He spoke slowly, with an air of simplicity.
Gontran de Vaulacelles, on the contrary, had remained short in stature, and squat; he was spiteful, sly, mischievous, and queer-tempered. He made fun of everyone, talked like a grown man, making equivocal answers that caused his parents some uneasiness.
The youngest, Roland de Bridoie, did not seem to have any aptitude for anything at all. He was a jolly little animal and resembled his father.
The abbé had warned them that they would be under his orders during the two summer months, and he read them a carefully worded lecture on their duty to him, on the way in which he intended to order their ways, and on the manner that he would adopt towards them.
He was an upright and simple-minded priest somewhat sententious and full of theories.
His conversation was interrupted by a loud sigh uttered by their fair neighbour. He turned his head towards her. She was sitting still in her corner, her eyes staring in front of her, her cheeks slightly pale. The abbé turned back to his disciples.
The train rushed on at full speed, running through plains and woods, passing under bridges and over bridges, and in its shuddering onrush shaking violently the long chain of travellers shut up in the carriages.
Meanwhile Gontran de Vaulacelles was questioning Father Lecuir about Royat and the amusements the place had to offer. Was there a river? Could you fish in it? Would he have a horse, as he had last year? And so on.
Abruptly, the young woman uttered something like a cry, an “Oh” of pain, quickly smothered. Uneasy, the priest asked her:
“You are feeling unwell, Madame?”
She answered:
“No, no, Father, it is nothing, a passing indisposition, nothing at all. I have been ailing for some time, and the motion of the train wearies me.”
Her face had indeed become livid.
He insisted:
“Is there anything I can do for you, Madame?”
“Oh, no, nothing at all, Father. Thank you so much.”
The priest returned to his conversation with his pupils, accustoming them to his methods of teaching and discipline.
The hours went by. Now and then the train stopped and went on once more. The young woman seemed to be sleeping now, and she never moved, ensconced in her corner. Although the day was more than half gone, she had not yet eaten anything. The abbé thought: “This young lady must be very ill indeed.”
The train was only two hours away from Clermont-Ferrand, when all at once the fair traveller began to moan. She looked as if she might fall from her seat, and, supporting herself on her hands, with wild eyes and distorted face, she repeated: “Oh, my God, oh, my God!”
The abbé rushed to her.
“Madame … Madame … Madame, what is the matter?”
She stammered:
“I … I … think that … that … that my baby is going to be born.” And thereupon she began to cry out in the most terrifying fashion. From her lips issued a long-drawn and frantic sound which seemed to tear its way through her throat, a shrill frightful sound, with an ominous note in it that told her agony of mind and bodily torture.
The unfortunate priest, dazed, stood in front of her, and did not know what to do or what to say or what effort to make; he murmured: “My God, if I had only known! … my God, if I had only known!” He had crimsoned to the very whites of his eyes; and his three pupils stared in utter bewilderment at this outstretched moaning woman.
Suddenly, she writhed, lifting her arms over her head, and a strange shuddering seized her limbs, a convulsion that shook her from head to foot.
The abbé thought that she was going to die, to die there before him, deprived of help and care by his incompetence. So he said in a resolute voice:
“I will help you, Madame. I don’t know what to do … but I will help you as best I can. I owe aid to all suffering creatures.”
Then, swinging round on the three youngsters, he cried:
“As for you, you are going to put your heads out of the windows, and if one of you turns round, he will copy out for me a thousand lines of Virgil.”
He lowered the three windows himself, pushed the three heads into their places, drew the blue curtains round their necks, and repeated:
“If you stir as much as once, you shall not be allowed a single outing during the whole of the holidays. And don’t forget that I never change my mind.”
And he turned back to the young woman, rolling up the sleeves of his cassock.
Her moans came ceaselessly, with now and then a scream. The abbé, his face crimson, helped her, exhorted her, spoke words of comfort to her, and lifted his eyes every minute towards the three youngsters, who kept turning swift glances, quickly averted, towards the mysterious task performed by their new tutor.
“Monsieur de Vaulacelles, you will copy out for me the verb ‘to disobey’ twenty times!” he cried.
“Monsieur de Bridoie, you shall have no sweets for a month!”
Suddenly the young woman ceased her monotonous wailing, and almost in the same instant a strange thin cry, like a yelp or a meow, brought the three schoolboys round in one wild rush, sure that they had just heard a newly born puppy.
In his hands the abbé was holding a little naked babe. He regarded it with startled eyes; he seemed at once satisfied and abashed, near laughter and near tears; he looked like a madman, so expressively distorted was his face by the rapid movement of his eyes, his lips, and his cheeks.
He observed, as if he were announcing an amazing piece of news to his pupils:
“It’s a boy.”
Then he added immediately:
“Monsieur de Sarcagnes, pass me the bottle of water in the rack. That’s right. Take out the stopper. That’s quite right. Pour me out a few drops in my hand, only a few drops. … That’s enough.”
And he scattered the water on the bald forehead of the little creature he was holding, and announced:
“I baptise thee in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”
The train drew into the station of Clermont. The face of Madame de Bridoie appeared in the doorway. Then the abbé, quite losing his head, presented her with the tiny human animal that he had just acquired, and murmured:
“This lady has had a slight accident on the journey.”
He conveyed the impression that he had picked the child up in a gutter; and, his hair wet with sweat, his bands round on his shoulder, his gown soiled, he repeated:
“They saw nothing … nothing at all—I’ll answer for that. … All three of them looked out of the window. … I’ll answer for that … they saw nothing.”
And he descended from the compartment with four boys instead of the three he had gone to fetch, while Mesdames de Bridoie, de Vaulacelles, and de Sarcagnes, very pale, exchanged stupefied glances and found not a word to utter.
That evening, the three families dined together to celebrate the homecoming of the schoolboys. But no one had anything much to say; fathers, mothers, and children alike seemed preoccupied.
Suddenly the youngest, Roland de Bridoie, asked: “Tell me, mamma, where did the abbé find that little boy?”
His mother evaded a direct answer:
“Come, get on with your dinner, and let us alone with your questions.”
He was silent for some minutes, and then went on:
“There was no one there except the lady who had stomachache. The abbé must be a conjurer, like Robert Houdin who made a bowl full of fishes come under a cloth.”
“Be quiet now. It was God who sent him.”
“But where did God put him? I didn’t see anything. Did he come in by the door? Tell me.”
Madame de Bridoie, losing patience, replied:
“Come now, that’s enough, be quiet. He came from under a cabbage, like all little babies. You know that quite well.”
“But there wasn’t a cabbage in the carriage.”
Then Gontran de Vaulacelles, who was listening with a sly look on his face, smiled and said:
“Yes, there was a cabbage. But no one saw it except the abbé.”