The Cripple
This adventure happened to me about 1882.
I had just settled myself in the corner of an empty carriage, and I had shut the door, in the hope of being left undisturbed, when it was abruptly reopened and I heard a voice say:
“Take care, sir, we are just at the crossing of the lines: the footboard is very high.”
Another voice answered:
“Don’t worry, Laurent, I’ll hold fast.”
Then a head appeared, covered with a round cap, and two hands, clinging to the leather straps that hung from both sides of the carriage door, slowly hoisted up a fat body whose feet on the footboard produced the sound of a stick striking the ground.
But when the man had got the upper part of his body into the compartment, I saw the black-painted end of a wooden leg appearing in the limp-hanging leg of his trousers, followed shortly by a similar stump.
A head came into view behind this traveller, and asked:
“Are you all right, sir?”
“Yes, my boy.”
“Then here are your parcels and your crutches.”
And a manservant, who had the appearance of an old soldier, climbed up too, carrying in his arms a quantity of things wrapped in black and yellow papers, carefully tied with strings, and placed them one after another on the rack above his master’s head. Then he said:
“There you are, sir, that’s the lot. There are five of them: the sweets, the doll, the drum, the gun, and the pâté de foie gras.
“That’s right, my boy.”
“I hope you’ll have a comfortable journey, sir.”
“Thanks, Laurent; keep yourself fit.”
The man went away, reclosing the door, and I looked at my neighbour.
He must have been about thirty-five years old, although his hair was almost white; he wore various decorations, he was moustached, and very stout, a victim to the short-winded obesity that falls on strong active men whom some infirmity deprives of exercise.
He mopped his forehead, panted, and giving me a direct glance, said:
“Does the smoke annoy you, sir?”
“No, sir.”
That eye, that voice, that face, I knew them well. But where, where did I get my knowledge? I had certainly met the fellow, I had talked to him, I had shaken his hand. It went a long way back, a very long way, it was lost in those mists where the mind seems to grope after memories and pursue them, like flying phantoms, without grasping them.
He too was now scrutinising my face in the fixed and tenacious manner of a man who has some dim remembrance but cannot quite place it.
Our eyes, embarrassed by this unwinking exchange of glances, turned away; then, a few minutes later, drawn back once more by the secret obstinate will of the labouring memory, they met again, and I said:
“God bless my soul, sir, instead of looking at one another out of the corner of our eyes for an hour, wouldn’t it be more sensible to join forces in discovering where we knew each other?”
My neighbour answered pleasantly:
“You’re quite right, sir.”
I told him my name.
“My name is Henry Bouclair. I’m a magistrate.”
He hesitated a moment; then with that uncertainty of glance and voice produced by severe mental tension, he said:
“Oh, just so. I met you at the Poincels, a long time ago, before the war, it must be twelve years since.”
“Yes, sir … ah … you’re Lieutenant Revalière?”
“Yes, I was even Captain Revalière until the day when I lost my feet, both at one stroke, from a passing ball.”
And we looked at one another again, now that we knew each other.
I recalled perfectly having seen this handsome, slender youth who led cotillions with an agile, graceful energy, and who had been nicknamed, I believe, “La Trombe.”31 But behind this vision, sharply evoked, hovered yet another one I could not grasp, some story that I had known and forgotten, one of those stories to which one lends a friendly and short-lived interest, and which leave in one’s mind only an almost imperceptible trace.
There had been a love affair in those days. I recaptured just that particular emotional impression in the depths of my memory, but nothing more, an emotional impression comparable to the scent which—to a dog’s nose—the foot of an animal deposits on the ground.
Little by little, however, the shadows lifted and the face of a young girl rose before my eyes. Then her name burst in my head like an exploding cracker: Mlle. de Mandal. I recalled the whole affair now. It was indeed a love story, but a commonplace one. That young girl loved that young man, when I met him, and people talked of their approaching marriage. He himself seemed very much in love, very happy.
I lifted my eyes towards the rack where all the parcels carried by my neighbour’s servant were shaking with the jolts of the train, and the man’s voice sounded again in my ears as if he had hardly finished speaking.
He had said:
“There you are, sir, that’s the lot. There are five of them: the sweets, the doll, the drum, the gun, and the pâté de foie gras.”
Thereupon, in a flash, a romance developed and unfolded itself in my head. It was, moreover, exactly like all the romances I had read, in which sometimes the young man, sometimes the young girl, marries his or her betrothed after the catastrophe, bodily or financial. So this officer who had been maimed in the war, had after the campaign come back to find the girl who had promised to marry him, and she had kept her word and given herself to him.
I considered it very beautiful but quite simple, as one considers simple all the self-sacrifices and all the dénouements of books and plays. It always seems to us, as we read or as we listen, in these schools of magnanimity, that we should have sacrificed ourselves with enthusiastic pleasure, with superb impulsiveness. But we are put sorely out of temper, next day, when some luckless friend comes to borrow a little money from us.
Then, suddenly, another supposition, less romantic and more realistic, took the place of the first. Perhaps he had married before the war, before the frightful accident when his legs were shot away, and she, desolate and resigned, had been forced to take back, care for, console and sustain this husband, who had left her strong and handsome, and returned with feet mowed off, a dreadful wreckage condemned to immobility, to impotent rages and an inevitable obesity.
Was he happy or in torment? A desire, at first vague, then increasing, at last irresistible, came upon me, to learn his story, to know at least the principal points of it, which would allow me to guess what he could not or would not say.
I talked to him, my thoughts busy all the time. We had exchanged a few commonplace words; and, my eye turned towards the rack, I kept thinking: “So he has three children. The sweets are for his wife, the doll for his little girl, the drum and the gun for his boys, the pâté de foie gras for himself.”
I asked him abruptly:
“You are a father, sir?”
He answered: “No, sir.”
I felt suddenly confused, as if I had committed a gross breach of taste, and I added:
“I beg your pardon. I had imagined that you were, from hearing your man speak of the toys. One hears things without listening, and draws conclusions in spite of oneself.”
He smiled, then murmured:
“No, I am not even married. I never got any farther than the preliminaries.”
I had the air of suddenly remembering.
“Oh … that’s so, you were engaged when I knew you, engaged to Mlle. de Mandal, I think.”
“Yes, sir, you have an excellent memory.”
I became outrageously audacious, and added:
“Yes, I think I remember also having heard that Mlle. de Mandal had married Monsieur … Monsieur …”
He uttered the name placidly:
“M. de Fleurel.”
“Yes, that’s it. Yes … I even remember having heard your wound spoken of in this connection.”
I looked him full in the face; and he blushed. His full, swollen face, which the constant accession of blood had already made purple, took on a still deeper hue.
He replied eagerly, with the abrupt earnestness of a man who is pleading a cause lost beforehand, lost in his mind and in his heart, but which he wishes to carry in the eyes of the world.
“People are wrong, sir, to couple my name with Mme. de Fleurel’s. When I returned from the war, without my feet, alas, I would never, never have allowed her to become my wife. Was such a thing possible? One does not marry to make a parade of generosity, sir: one marries to live every day, every hour, every minute, every second with one man; and if this man is deformed, as I am, to marry him is to be condemned to a suffering which will last until death. Oh, I understand, I admire all sacrifices, all devotions when they have a limit, but I do not countenance a woman’s renunciation of the whole of a life in which she hopes for happiness, of all joys, of all dreams, just to satisfy the admiration of the gallery. When I hear, on the floor of my room, the clatter of my stumps and my crutches, the noise like a mill-wheel that I make with every step I take, I feel exasperated to the verge of strangling my servant. Do you think one could allow a woman to bear what one cannot endure oneself? And then, do you suppose they’re pretty, my stumps of legs? …”
He was silent. What could I say to him? I felt that he was right. Could I blame her, despise her, even give judgment against him, or against her? No. And yet? This dénouement, conforming as it did to convention, the golden mien, truth and appearances, did not satisfy my appetite for romance. Those heroic stumps called for a splendid sacrifice of which I had been deprived, and I felt cheated thereby.
I asked him abruptly:
“Mme. de Fleurel has children?”
“Yes, a girl and two boys. I am taking these toys to them. Her husband and she have been very good to me.”
The train was climbing the hill of Saint-Germain. It ran through the tunnels, entered the station, came to a standstill.
I was going to offer my arm to help the mutilated officer to descend when two hands were stretched out to him through the open door.
“How do you do, my dear Revalière?”
“Ah, how do you do, Fleurel?”
Behind the man, his wife stood smiling, radiant, still pretty, waving greetings with her gloved fingers. Beside her, a little girl was jumping for joy, and two small boys were staring with greedy eyes at the drum and the gun emerging from the carriage rack in their father’s hands.
When the cripple reached the platform, all the children embraced him. Then they set off, and the small girl lovingly held the polished crossbar of one crutch in her tiny hand, as she would have been able to hold her big friend’s thumb when she walked beside him.