Mother Savage
I
I had not returned to Virelogne for fifteen years. I went back there to hunt in the autumn, staying with my friend Serval, who had finally rebuilt his château, which had been destroyed by the Prussians.
I was infinitely fond of that country. There are delicious corners in this world which have a sensual charm for the eyes. One loves them with a physical love. We folk whom nature attracts, keep certain tender recollections, often keen, for certain springs, certain woods, certain ponds, certain hills, which have touched us like happy events. Sometimes even memory returns toward a forest nook, or a bit of a river bank, or a blossoming orchard, seen only once, on some happy day, which has remained in our heart like those pictures of women seen in the street, on a spring morning, with a white, transparent costume, and which leave in our soul and flesh an unappeased, unforgetable desire, the sensation of having just missed happiness.
At Virelogne, I loved the whole region, sowed with little woods, and traversed by brooks which ran through the soil like veins bringing blood to the earth.
We fished in them for crayfish, trout, and eels! Divine happiness! We could bathe in certain places and often found woodcock in the tall grass which grew on the banks of those little narrow streams.
I went, light as a goat, watching my two dogs forage in front of me. Serval, a hundred yards away, on my right, was beating up a field of lucerne. I went around the thickets which formed the boundaries of the Sandres forest, and I perceived a hut in ruins.
Suddenly I recollected that I had seen it for the last time in 1869, neat, vine-clad, with chickens before the door. What is sadder than a dead house with its skeleton standing, dilapidated and sinister?
I recalled also that a woman had given me a glass of wine there, on a day when I was very tired, and that Serval had then told me the story of the inhabitants. The father, an old poacher, had been killed by the gendarmes. The son, whom I had seen before, was a tall, wizened lad who was likewise considered a ferocious killer of game. People called them the Savage family.
Was it a name or a nickname? I hailed Serval. He came with his long stride, as if he were walking on stilts.
I asked him: “What has become of those people?” And he told me this adventure.
II
“When war was declared, the younger Savage, who was then about thirty-three years old, enlisted, leaving his mother alone in the house. People did not pity the old woman very much, because they knew that she had money.
“So she stayed all alone in this isolated house, so far from the village, on the edge of the woods. She was not afraid, however, being of the same race as her men, a strong, tall, thin, old woman, who seldom laughed, and with whom no one joked. The women of the fields do not laugh much, anyway. That is the men’s business! They have a sad and narrow soul, leading a life which is gloomy and without bright spots.
“The peasant learns a little of the noisy gaiety of the pothouse, but his wife remains serious, with a constantly severe expression of countenance. The muscles of her face never learn the motions of laughter.
“Mother Savage continued her usual existence in her hut, which was soon covered with snow. She came to the village once a week to get bread and a little meat: then she returned to her cottage. As people spoke of wolves, she carried a gun on her shoulder, her son’s gun, rusty, with the stock worn by the rubbing of the hand. She was a curious sight, this tall Savage woman, a little bent, walking with slow strides through the snow, the barrel of the weapon extending beyond the black headdress, which imprisoned the white hair that no one had ever seen.
“One day the Prussians arrived. They were distributed among the inhabitants according to the means and resources of each. The old woman, who was known to be rich, had four soldiers billeted upon her.
“They were four big young men with fair flesh, fair beard, and blue eyes, who had remained stout in spite of the fatigues they had endured, and good fellows even if they were in a conquered territory. Alone with this old woman, they showed themselves full of consideration for her, sparing her fatigue and expense as far as they could do so. All four might have been seen making their toilette at the well in the morning, in their shirtsleeves, splashing their pink and white flesh, the flesh of the men of the north, in the water, on cold snowy days, while Mother Savage came and went preparing their soup. Then they might have been observed cleaning the kitchen, polishing the floor, chopping wood, peeling potatoes, washing the clothes, doing all the household duties, like four good sons around their mother.
“But she thought continually of her own son, the old mother, of her tall, thin boy with his crooked nose, brown eyes, and stiff moustache which made a cushion of black hair on his upper lip. She asked each of the soldiers installed at her hearth:
“ ‘Do you know where the French regiment has gone, the Twenty-third Infantry? My boy is in it.’
“They answered: ‘No, we don’t know anything at all about it.’
“And understanding her grief and worry they, who had mothers at home, rendered her a thousand little services.
“She liked them very well, moreover, her four enemies: for peasants seldom have patriotic hatreds: that is the business of the superior classes. The humble, those who pay the most because they are poor, and because every new burden rests upon them, those who are killed in masses, who form the true cannon fodder because they are numerous, those who, in a word, suffer most cruelly the atrocious miseries of the poor, because they are the weakest and the most unresisting, understand little of those bellicose ardours, the excitable points of honour and those pretended political combinations which exhaust two nations in six months, the victorious as well as the vanquished.
“They said in the country, speaking of Mother Savage’s Germans: ‘There are four who have found a snug berth.’
“Now, one morning, as the old woman was alone in the house, she perceived afar off on the plain a man coming toward her home. Soon she recognized him: it was the postman, charged with distributing letters. He handed her a folded paper, and she drew from their case her spectacles which she used for sewing, and read:
“ ‘Madame Savage, this is to give you sad news. Your son Victor was killed by a cannonball yesterday, which virtually cut him in two. I was very near, as we were side by side in the company and he had asked me to tell you the same day if anything happened to him.
“ ‘I took his watch from his pocket to bring it to you when the war is finished.
“The letter was dated three weeks back.
“She did not weep. She stood motionless, so astounded that she did not yet suffer.
“She thought: ‘Victor is killed!’
“Then little by little the tears came to her eyes and grief overwhelmed her heart. Ideas came to her one by one, frightful, torturing ideas. She would never kiss him again, her big boy, never again. The gendarmes had killed the father, the Prussians had killed the son. He had been cut in two by a cannonball. And it seemed to her that she saw the thing, the horrible thing: the head falling, the eyes open, while he gnawed the end of his big moustache, as he did in moments of anger.
“What had they done with his body afterwards? If they had only sent her boy back to her, as they had her husband, with a bullet in his forehead.
“But she heard a sound of voices. It was the Prussians, who were returning from the village. She quickly hid the letter in her pocket, and received them tranquilly, with her ordinary expression on her face, having had time to wipe her eyes.
“They were all four laughing, delighted, for they were bringing back a fine rabbit, stolen no doubt, and they made a sign to the old woman that they were going to have something good to eat.
“She applied herself at once to the duties of preparing the breakfast; but when it came to killing the rabbit, her heart failed her. And yet it was not the first. One of the soldiers killed it with a blow behind the ears.
“Once the animal was dead, she took the red body out of the skin; but the sight of the blood which she touched, which covered her hands, of the warm blood which she felt getting cold and coagulating, made her tremble from head to foot; and she kept seeing her tall boy cut in two and all bleeding, like this still palpitating animal.
“She sat at the table with her Prussians, but she could not eat, not even a mouthful. They devoured the rabbit without troubling about her. She looked at them aside without speaking, nursing an idea, with her countenance so impassive that they perceived nothing.
“Suddenly she said: ‘I don’t even know your names, and it is a month since we have been together.’ They understood, not without difficulty, what she wished and gave her their names. That was not enough, she made them write them for her on a piece of paper, with the address of their families, and resting her spectacles on her large nose she scanned this unknown handwriting, then she folded the sheet and put it in her pocket, with the letter which told of the death of her son.
“When the meal was finished, she said to the men:
“ ‘I am going to work for you.’
“And she began to carry straw to the garret in which they slept.
“They were astonished at this act. She explained to them that they would be less cold; and they assisted her. They piled the bundles of straw up to the roof, and thus they made for themselves a sort of big room with four walls of forage, warm and sweet-smelling, where they would sleep wonderfully.
“At dinner one of them was disturbed to see that Mother Savage did not eat anything. She asserted that she had cramps. Then she lighted a good fire to warm herself, and the four Germans climbed to their lodging by the ladder which they used every evening.
“As soon as the trapdoor was closed, the old woman took away the ladder, then she noiselessly opened the outside door and returned to get more bundles of straw, with which she filled the kitchen. She went out barefooted in the snow, so softly that the men heard nothing. From time to time she listened to the deep and uneven snores of the four sleeping soldiers. When she thought her preparations were sufficient, she threw into the fire one of the bundles of straw, and when it had ignited she piled it on the others, and then went out again and looked.
“A brilliant light illuminated in a few seconds all the interior of the cottage; then it became a frightful brazier, a gigantic, glowing furnace, whose gleams shone through the narrow window and cast a dazzling light upon the snow.
“Then a great cry came from the top of the house; there was a clamour of human shrieks, of heartrending appeals of anguish and terror. Then, the trapdoor having sunk down into the interior, a whirlwind of fire leaped through the attic, pierced the thatched roof, and ascended to the sky like the flame of a great torch; and the whole cottage was burning.
“Nothing more was heard inside but the crackling of the flames, the crumbling of the walls, and the crashing of the beams. The roof suddenly fell in, and the glowing remnant of the house shot up into the air, amid a cloud of smoke, a great fountain of sparks.
“The white field, lighted up by the fire, glistened like a cloth of silver tinted with red.
“A bell in the distance began to ring. The old Savage woman stood erect before her ruined home, armed with a gun, her son’s, for fear one of the men should escape.
“When she saw that her work was finished, she threw the weapon in the fire. A report rang out.
“The people arrived, peasants and Prussians.
“They found the woman sitting on the trunk of a tree, tranquil and satisfied.
“A German officer who could speak French like a Frenchman, asked her:
“ ‘Where are the soldiers?’
“She stretched her thin arm toward the red mass of flames, which were now dying down, and answered in a strong voice:
“ ‘They are in there!’
“All pressed around her. The Prussian asked:
“ ‘How did the fire start?’
“She replied:
“ ‘I set the house on fire.’
“They did not believe her, thinking that the sudden disaster had made her mad. Then, as everybody gathered around and listened, she related the whole thing from beginning to end, the arrival of the letter to the last cry of the men, burning up with the house. She did not forget a single detail of what she had felt nor what she had done.
“When she had finished she drew two papers from her pocket, and, to distinguish them in the last gleams of the fire, she again put on her spectacles. Then she said, showing one of them: ‘This is the death of Victor.’ Showing the other, she added, nodding her head toward the red ruins: ‘And this is the list of their names, so that someone may write the news home about them.’
“She quietly handed the white sheet to the officer, who took her by the shoulders, and she resumed:
“ ‘You will write how it happened, and you will tell their relatives that it was I who did it, Victoire Simon, the Savage; don’t forget.’
“The officer shouted some orders in German, to the soldiers; they seized her, and threw her against the still heated walls of the house. Then a squad of twelve men drew up in a rank opposite her, at a distance of twenty yards. She did not stir. She had understood. She waited.
“An order resounded, which was followed by a long report of muskets. One delayed shot went off all alone, after the others.
“The old woman did not fall. She sank down as if someone had mowed off her legs.
“The Prussian officer approached. She was cut almost in two, and in her shriveled hand she held her letter, bathed in blood.”
My friend Serval added.
“It was by way of reprisal that the Germans destroyed the château of the district, which belonged to me.”
I thought of the mothers of the poor gentle young fellows burned there; and of the atrocious heroism of that other mother, shot against the wall.
And I picked up a little pebble, still blackened by the fire.