The Tramp
He had known better days, in spite of his poverty and his infirmity.
At the age of fifteen both his legs had been crushed by a carriage on the Varville high road. Ever since then he had been a beggar, dragging himself along the roads and across the farmyards, balanced on his crutches, which had forced his shoulders to the level of his ears. His head appeared buried between two hills.
As a child he had been found in a ditch by the rector of Billettes, on the eve of All Souls’ Day, and for that reason had been christened Nicolas Toussaint (All Saints). He was brought up by charity, and remained a stranger to any form of education. It was after drinking some brandy given him by the village baker that he was lamed, which was considered an excellent joke; since then he had been a vagabond, not knowing how to do anything except hold out his hand for alms.
In earlier days the Baroness d’Avary had given him a sort of kennel filled with straw to sleep in, next to the chicken-house on the farm belonging to her country-house; and in the times of famine he was always certain of finding a piece of bread and a glass of cider in the kitchen. Often he received there a few coppers as well, thrown down by the old lady from the top of the terrace steps or from the windows of her room. Now she was dead.
In the village he was given scarcely anything; he was too well known; people were tired of him after forty years of seeing him drag his deformed and ragged body round from hovel to hovel on his two wooden paws. Yet he would not leave the neighbourhood, for he knew no other thing on earth but this corner of the country, these three or four hamlets in which he had dragged out his miserable life. He had set boundaries to his begging, and would never have passed over the frontiers within which he was used to keep himself.
He did not know if the world extended far beyond the trees which had always bounded his view. He had no curiosity in the matter. And when rustics, weary of meeting him continually at the edges of their fields or beside their ditches, shouted to him: “Why do you never go to the other villages, instead of always hobbling round these parts?” he would not answer and would go away, seized with a vague fear of the unknown, the fear of a poor man in confused terror of a thousand things, new faces, rough treatment, the suspicious looks of people who did not know him, and the policemen who went two by two along the roads, and sent him ducking instinctively into the bushes or behind the heaps of stones.
When he saw them in the distance, glittering in the sun, he acquired suddenly a strange, monster-like agility in getting himself into some hiding-place. He tumbled off his crutches, letting himself fall like a rag, and rolled up into a ball, becoming quite small, invisible, flattened like a hare in its form, blending his brown rags with the brown earth.
As a matter of fact he had never had anything to do with them. But he carried it in his blood, as though he had received this terror from the parents he had never seen.
He had no refuge, no roof, no hut, no shelter. He slept anywhere in the summer, and in the winter he slipped under barns or into cowsheds with remarkable adroitness. He always decamped before his presence was discovered. He knew the holes by which buildings might be entered; and the handling of his crutches had given surprising strength to his arms; by the strength of his wrists alone he would climb up into haylofts, where he sometimes stayed for four or five days without stirring out, when he had collected sufficient provisions during his rounds.
He lived like the beasts of the woods, surrounded by men, knowing no one, loving no one, arousing in the peasants no emotion but a sort of indifferent contempt and resigned hostility. He had been nicknamed “Bell,” because he swung between his two props like a bell between its two hammers.
For the past two days he had had nothing to eat. No one gave him anything now. People were at last quite tired of him. The peasant women at their doors shouted at him from the distance when they saw him coming:
“Be off with you, you clod! Why, I gave you a bit of bread only three days ago!”
And he swivelled round on his props and went off to the next house, where he was welcomed in the same fashion.
The women declared to their next-door neighbours:
“After all, we can’t feed the lazybones all the year round.”
The lazybones, however, needed food every day.
He had roamed all over Saint Hilaire, Varville, and Les Billettes without harvesting a solitary centime or an old crust. No hope remained, except at Tournolles; but that required of him a journey two leagues on the high road, and he felt too weary to drag himself along, with his belly as empty as his pocket.
But he set off.
It was December; a cold wind ran over the fields and whistled in the bare branches and the clouds galoped across the low, dark sky, hastening to an unknown goal. The cripple went slowly on, painfully moving his crutches one after the other, steadying himself on the one twisted leg that remained to him, terminated by a clubfoot swathed in a rag.
From time to time he sat down at the roadside and rested for a few minutes. Hunger was overwhelming his confused and stupid wits with utter misery. He had only one idea, to eat, but he did not know how it was to be brought about.
For three hours he struggled along the long road; then, when the trees of the village came into sight, he hastened his movements.
The first peasant whom he met, and of whom he asked alms, replied:
“Here you are back again at your old trade! Shall we never be rid of you?”
And “Bell” departed. At every door he was roughly treated and sent away without being given anything. But he continued his round, patient and obstinate. He did not garner a halfpenny.
Then he visited the farms, dragging himself across fields soft with rain, so exhausted that he could not lift his sticks. Everywhere he was driven away. It was one of those cold, melancholy days on which hearts are hardened, and tempers hasty, on which the soul is dark, and the hands open neither to give nor to succour.
When he had visited every house with which he was acquainted, he went and lay down in the corner of a ditch which ran alongside Maître Chiquet’s farmyard. He unhooked himself, this being the best way of expressing the manner in which he let himself fall down between the high crutches that he slipped under his arms. For a long time he remained motionless, tortured by hunger, but too much of an animal fully to comprehend his fathomless misery.
He waited for he knew not what, in that vague state of expectation which lives on, deathless, in all of us. There in the corner of the yard, in the icy wind, he awaited the mysterious aid from heaven or mankind which a wretched victim will always hope for, without wondering how, or why, or by whose agency it can possibly arrive. A flock of black hens was passing, seeking their sustenance in the earth, which gives food to all creatures. At every moment their sharp beaks found a bit of grain or an invisible insect, after which the birds would continue their slow, sure search.
“Bell” watched them, thinking of nothing; then there came to him, into his belly if not into his head, the feeling, rather than the thought, that one of those birds would make excellent eating, grilled over a fire of dead wood.
The idea that he was about to commit a theft never touched him. Taking up a stone which lay within his reach, he threw it at the nearest hen, and, being an expert shot, killed it outright. The bird fell on its side, beating its wings. The rest fled, swaying from side to side on their thin legs, and “Bell,” clambering once more into his crutches, started off to retrieve his booty, his movements resembling those of the hens.
As he arrived beside the little black corpse stained on the head with blood, he was given a violent blow in the back which made him loose hold of his sticks and sent him rolling for ten paces in front of him. Maître Chiquet, exasperated, rushed upon the marauder and showered blows upon him, beating him furiously, with the fury of a peasant who has been robbed, belabouring with fist and knee the entire body of the cripple, who could not defend himself.
The farmhands came up in their turn, and joined their master in battering the beggar. When they were weary of beating him, they picked him up, carried him off, and shut him up in the woodshed while someone went to fetch the police.
“Bell,” half dead, bleeding, and fainting with hunger, remained lying on the ground. Evening came, the night, then dawn. He had still had nothing to eat.
About midday the police appeared and opened the door with great care, expecting to meet with some resistance, for Maître Chiquet had given them to understand that he had been attacked by the beggar and had defended himself with great difficulty.
“Come on! Up you get!” shouted the sergeant.
But “Bell” could not move. He tried hard to hoist himself on to his sticks, but did not succeed. They thought he was shamming, trying to trick them, acting with the obstinate ill will common to malefactors, and the two armed men laid rough hands on him and set him on his crutches by main force.
Terror had gripped him, his instinctive terror of all wearers of the yellow shoulder-belt, the terror of the hunted before the hunter, of the mouse before the cat. With a superhuman effort he managed to remain upright.
“Off we go!” said the sergeant. He walked. All the farmhands watched him go. The women shook their fists at him; the men sniggered and abused him: he was caught at last! Good riddance!
He went off between his two guards. He succeeded in finding the desperate energy necessary to keep going until evening, stupefied, no longer even realising what was happening to him, too frightened to understand anything.
The people they met on the way stopped to watch him go by, and the peasants murmured:
“It’s some thief or other.”
Towards nightfall they reached the capital of the canton. He had never been so far as this. He hardly realised at all what was going on, nor what might happen to him afterwards. All these terrible, unforeseen events, these faces and strange houses, bewildered him.
He did not utter a word, having nothing to say, for he no longer understood anything. And besides, it was so many years since he had spoken to anyone that he had very nearly lost the use of his tongue; moreover, his thoughts were too confused to find expression in words.
He was locked up in the town jail. The policemen never imagined that he might need something to eat, and he was left until next day.
But when they came down to question him, they found him lying dead upon the floor. What a surprise!