Part 9 (1/2)
”I never caught that much fish in my life. How do you do it?”
”Oh--they know me. As I was telling you, I was in my--in your boat, when I heard those d----policemen calling me. 'Hey! Grelu, come ash.o.r.e! We are serving your warrant on you!' Well, I landed, of course. I am used to it. We chatted like friends. They carried away my fish to fry for themselves. You won't tell me there is any justice in that, will you, _monsieur le maire_?”
”Is that the trick they played on you?”
”Oh, no! When the police had gone, I said to myself: 'Now I'm fined, I may as well go on fis.h.i.+ng. I shan't be able to pay the fine, whether I do or not. So I'll stay.' I fished and I fished. I was doing first rate.
I was happy. When, suddenly, I hear voices. The police again! Two warrants in one night! I couldn't have that! The boat was giving me away. But they might think I had left it there. So I hide in the water, with nothing out but my head, and I wait. What do you think they do?
They stretch out on the gra.s.s, they light their pipes, and they begin to talk. They had got lost, the idiots! And finding themselves back at the mill, were looking for me to ask their way.
”As for me, I was none too comfortable in the mud. Those loafers wouldn't go away. When one pipe went out, they lighted another. I saw there was going to be nothing for it but to get caught again. Suddenly one of the men says: 'Father Grelu,' says he, 'you must be cold in there. Come and warm yourself at my pipe.' I come out, all covered with mud, and I shake my fist at him. 'If you serve another warrant on me----!' says I to him. 'A second warrant?' says he. 'No danger of that.
The law prevents it. We can only serve one warrant in twenty-four hours on the same person for the same offence. What! You didn't know that, Grelu? And that is why you stayed in the water? We were just saying: ”I wonder why he does that?” Ah, Father Grelu, we are sorry! We thought you knew better.' And they laughed. And they laughed. I was in no mood for laughing. Did you know that, _monsieur le maire_, that two warrants could not be served at once?”
”No.”
”Well, I know it for another time, you may be sure. And now, may I have my certificate of mendicancy, which releases me from liability to fine?”
”Very well. Your bath might have given you pneumonia. How old are you?”
”Over seventy. No harm will ever come to me from water.”
”Nor from wine, eh? It is funny, all the same, to be giving you a certificate of dest.i.tution when I see you so often at the tavern.”
”They give me credit, _monsieur le maire_. I pay them in fish. It is better than stealing, anyway.”
XI
THE GRAY FOX
After the poacher the vagabond has the place of honour in the disfavour of the licensed citizen. A man without an abode inscribed in the tax collector's book comes near to being a man without a country, in the eyes of the bourgeois, inclined to regard the land of his fathers as exclusively what one of them has frankly called it, ”the native land of the landed proprietor.”
It is easy to p.r.o.nounce against the unfortunate nomad the withering sentence: ”He pays no taxes.” No taxes, the barefoot tramp who halts on the edge of a ditch to eat his succinct meal? I defy him to spend the penny just tossed him, without the State stepping in between him and his poor bite and taking a portion of it away. How can he be fed, clothed, and warmed without the State making its existence felt by the exaction of a t.i.the? Merely t.i.thes levied upon beggars would amount to a considerable revenue. The beggar takes no pride in this fact, being carelessly ungrudging of the sacrifices demanded by public duty, and this very modesty does him wrong, for under the pretext that he is of no social utility, householders, under-prefects, army corps commanders, and directors of the Bank of France, all unite in imputing to him most of the evils from which they are supposed to protect us.
In country places, the blame for whatever happens falls on the vagabonds. Theft, arson, trespa.s.sing, who could be guilty of these offences, if not the homeless wanderers going over the roads afoot, when all self-respecting men have at least the use of an automobile? What trade can they ply but taking other people's belongings, seeing that they have nothing of their own? Hence the execration of those who have belongings. I once knew an old philosopher who maintained that it was better to throw bread than stones at them. Ordinarily stones are readier to hand. When there are enough of them, the tramp gathers them into a pile at the roadside and breaks them for honest wages. Never for a moment believe that any one, from the President of the Republic down to the road mender, will express the slightest grat.i.tude to him. Like Timon of Athens, he expects nothing from human kind.
And yet, his defence, should he take the trouble to make one, would not be lacking in interest. Lost sentinel of the army of labour, he might relate strange adventures in the industrial warfare, no less cruel than the other warfare. He might find it difficult to deny a share of shortcomings on his side--but what of the consciences of ”the righteous,” oftentimes, if one could see them in nakedness?
Humanity means weakness. If the vagabond can own as much for himself, he can bear witness to the same in the case of others. Oftener, perhaps, than is generally believed, for peasants, like city people, are tempted by their neighbours' property, and as the caught thief always accuses some unknown personage of the crime attributed to him, the vagabond is in all countries the easy expiatory victim of ”the respectable.”
Something of the kind happened in the affair of the ”Gray Fox,” which once upon a time set my village in uproar. At that distant date one of the notables of the hamlet, a locksmith by trade, who had ”inherited property,” was Claude Guillorit. Without vanity in his Roman Emperor's name, he carried it with the quiet dignity of a man whose future is a.s.sured. He was a ”scholar,” incredibly learned in the acc.u.mulation of miscellaneous facts which almanacs spread even in the remotest districts. He quoted proverbs, was full of strange saws, foretold the future--approximately. He was to be met with by night, carrying a large basket, in search of simples, which have special virtues when gathered after sun-down. He brewed philters for the benefit of man and beast, and cured fevers, I must admit, more easily than he did locks.
For, in spite of his explicit locksmith's sign, locks were wrapped in mystery for Claudit--so called ”for short.” Village housewives, whose furniture knows not intricate locks, are at the end of their resources when they have cleaned the rust off their keys, or smeared a creaky lock with oil. If the evil persisted, in those days, the cry of supreme distress used to be: ”Go and get Claudit,” even as Napoleon's cry was: ”Send forward the guard!” when he was at the end of his genius.
Accompanied by a formidable clatter of ironware, a little slim, spare, sharp man would approach, with long gray locks swinging about his face, after straggling from under a black round of which no one could have declared with any certainty whether it had been a hat or a cap at the time of the Revolution. But it was not his headgear that held the eye.
What struck one, what fixed the attention, what filled even a person unacquainted with him with a sort of superst.i.tious uneasiness, was the black dart of two small, l.u.s.treless eyes, which entered one's very soul and stuck there. When the shaft of Claudit's glance had pierced one, it was not to be plucked from the memory. The man, however, did not concern himself with the impression he produced; he never broke the silence except from necessity, and then spoke only of things pertaining to lock mending.
When he had arrived before the recalcitrant lock, he would throw on the ground--together with the great basket from which he was never separated, and which no one ever saw open except on one memorable occasion--an iron hoop, whence hung an extraordinary number of queerly wrought and bent hooks; then he would kneel down as if in prayer, and apply his eye to the keyhole. After a moment of scientific examination: