A Humble Drama
by Guy de Maupassant
Translators: Albert M.C. McMaster, A.E. Henderson, Mme. Quesada, & others.
by Guy de Maupassant
Translators: Albert M.C. McMaster, A.E. Henderson, Mme. Quesada, & others.
Meetings that are unexpected constitute the charm of
traveling. Who has not experienced the joy of suddenly coming across a
Parisian, a college friend, or a neighbor, five hundred miles from home? Who
has not passed a night awake in one of those small, rattling country
stagecoaches, in regions where steam is still a thing unknown, beside a strange
young woman, of whom one has caught only a glimpse in the dim light of the
lantern, as she entered the carriage in front of a white house in some small
country town?
And the next morning, when one's head and ears feel
numb with the continuous tinkling of the bells and the loud rattling of the
windows, what a charming sensation it is to see your pretty neighbor open her
eyes, startled, glance around her, arrange her rebellious hair with her slender
fingers, adjust her hat, feel with sure hand whether her corset is still in
place, her waist straight, and her skirt not too wrinkled.
She glances at you coldly and curiously. Then she
leans back and no longer seems interested in anything but the country.
In spite of yourself, you watch her; and in spite of
yourself you keep on thinking of her. Who is she? Whence does she come? Where
is she going? In spite of yourself you spin a little romance around her. She is
pretty; she seems charming! Happy he who . . . Life might be delightful with
her. Who knows? She is perhaps the woman of our dreams, the one suited to our
disposition, the one for whom our heart calls.
And how delicious even the disappointment at seeing
her get out at the gate of a country house! A man stands there, who is awaiting
her, with two children and two maids. He takes her in his arms and kisses as he
lifts her out. Then she stoops over the little ones, who hold up their hands to
her; she kisses them tenderly; and then they all go away together, down a path,
while the maids catch the packages which the driver throws down to them from
the coach.
Adieu! It is all over. You never will see her again!
Adieu to the young woman who has passed the night by your side. You know her no
more, you have not spoken to her; all the same, you feel a little sad to see
her go. Adieu!
I have had many of these souvenirs of travel, some
joyous and some sad.
Once I was in Auvergne, tramping through those
delightful French mountains, that are not too high, not too steep, but friendly
and familiar. I had climbed the Sancy, and entered a little inn, near a
pilgrim's chapel called Notre-Dame de Vassiviere, when I saw a queer,
ridiculous-looking old woman breakfasting alone at the end table.
She was at least seventy years old, tall, skinny, and
angular, and her white hair was puffed around her temples in the old-fashioned
style. She was dressed like a traveling Englishwoman, in awkward, queer
clothing, like a person who is indifferent to dress. She was eating an omelet
and drinking water.
Her face was peculiar, with restless eyes and the
expression of one with whom fate has dealt unkindly. I watched her, in spite of
myself, thinking: "Who is she? What is the life of this woman? Why is she
wandering alone through these mountains?"
She paid and rose to leave, drawing up over her
shoulders an astonishing little shawl, the two ends of which hung over her
arms. From a corner of the room she took an alpenstock, which was covered with
names traced with a hot iron; then she went out, straight, erect, with the long
steps of a letter-carrier who is setting out on his route.
A guide was waiting for her at the door, and both went
away. I watched them go down the valley, along the road marked by a line of
high wooden crosses. She was taller than her companion, and seemed to walk faster
than he.
Two hours later I was climbing the edge of the deep
funnel that incloses Lake Pavin in a marvelous and enormous basin of verdure,
full of trees, bushes, rocks, and flowers. This lake is so round that it seems
as if the outline had been drawn with a pair of compasses, so clear and blue
that one might deem it a flood of azure come down from the sky, so charming
that one would like to live in a but on the wooded slope which dominates this
crater, where the cold, still water is sleeping. The Englishwoman was standing
there like a statue, gazing upon the transparent sheet down in the dead
volcano. She was straining her eyes to penetrate below the surface down to the
unknown depths, where monstrous trout which have devoured all the other fish
are said to live. As I was passing close by her, it seemed to me that two big
tears were brimming her eyes. But she departed at a great pace, to rejoin her
guide, who had stayed behind in an inn at the foot of the path leading to the
lake.
I did not see her again that day.
The next day, at nightfall, I came to the chateau of
Murol. The old fortress, an enormous tower standing on a peak in the midst of a
large valley, where three valleys intersect, rears its brown, uneven, cracked
surface into the sky; it is round, from its large circular base to the
crumbling turrets on its pinnacles.
It astonishes the eye more than any other ruin by its
simple mass, its majesty, its grave and imposing air of antiquity. It stands
there, alone, high as a mountain, a dead queen, but still the queen of the
valleys stretched out beneath it. You go up by a slope planted with firs, then
you enter a narrow gate, and stop at the foot of the walls, in the first
inclosure, in full view of the entire country.
Inside there are ruined halls, crumbling stairways,
unknown cavities, dungeons, walls cut through in the middle, vaulted roofs held
up one knows not how, and a mass of stones and crevices, overgrown with grass,
where animals glide in and out.
I was exploring this ruin alone.
Suddenly I perceived behind a bit of wall a being, a
kind of phantom, like the spirit of this ancient and crumbling habitation.
I was taken aback with surprise, almost with fear,
when I recognized the old lady whom I had seen twice.
She was weeping, with big tears in her eyes, and held
her handkerchief in her hand.
I turned around to go away, when she spoke to me,
apparently ashamed to have been surprised in her grief.
"Yes, monsieur, I am crying. That does not happen
often to me."
"Pardon me, madame, for having disturbed
you," I stammered, confused, not knowing what to say. "Some
misfortune has doubtless come to you."
"Yes. No--I am like a lost dog," she
murmured, and began to sob, with her handkerchief over her eyes.
Moved by these contagious tears, I took her hand, trying
to calm her. Then brusquely she told me her history, as if no longer ably to
bear her grief alone.
"Oh! Oh! Monsieur--if you knew--the sorrow in
which I live--in what sorrow.
"Once I was happy. I have a house down there--a
home. I cannot go back to it any more; I shall never go back to it again, it is
too hard to bear.
"I have a son. It is he! it is he! Children don't
know. Oh, one has such a short time to live! If I should see him now I should
perhaps not recognize him. How I loved him? How I loved him! Even before he was
born, when I felt him move. And after that! How I have kissed and caressed and
cherished him! If you knew how many nights I have passed in watching him sleep,
and how many in thinking of him. I was crazy about him. When he was eight years
old his father sent him to boarding-school. That was the end. He no longer
belonged to me. Oh, heavens! He came to see me every Sunday. That was all!
"He went to college in Paris. Then he came only
four times a year, and every time I was astonished to see how he had changed,
to find him taller without having seen him grow. They stole his childhood from
me, his confidence, and his love which otherwise would not have gone away from
me; they stole my joy in seeing him grow, in seeing him become a little man.
"I saw him four times a year. Think of it! And at
every one of his visits his body, his eye, his movements, his voice his laugh,
were no longer the same, were no longer mine. All these things change so
quickly in a child; and it is so sad if one is not there to see them change;
one no longer recognizes him.
"One year he came with down on his cheek! He! my
son! I was dumfounded --would you believe it? I hardly dared to kiss him. Was
it really he, my little, little curly head of old, my dear; dear child, whom I
had held in his diapers or my knee, and who had nursed at my breast with his
little greedy lips--was it he, this tall, brown boy, who no longer knew how to
kiss me, who seemed to love me as a matter of duty, who called me 'mother' for
the sake of politeness, and who kissed me on the forehead, when I felt like
crushing him in my arms?
"My husband died. Then my parents, and then my
two sisters. When Death enters a house it seems as if he were hurrying to do
his utmost, so as not to have to return for a long time after that. He spares
only one or two to mourn the others.
"I remained alone. My tall son was then studying
law. I was hoping to live and die near him, and I went to him so that we could
live together. But he had fallen into the ways of young men, and he gave me to
understand that I was in his way. So I left. I was wrong in doing so, but I
suffered too much in feeling myself in his way, I, his mother! And I came back
home.
"I hardly ever saw him again.
'He married. What a joy! At last we should be together
for good. I should have grandchildren. His wife was an Englishwoman, who took a
dislike to me. Why? Perhaps she thought that I loved him too much.
"Again I was obliged to go away. And I was alone.
Yes, monsieur.
"Then he went to England, to live with them, with
his wife's parents. Do you understand? They have him--they have my son for
themselves. They have stolen him from me. He writes to me once a month. At
first he came to see me. But now he no longer comes.
"It is now four years since I saw him last. His
face then was wrinkled and his hair white. Was that possible? This man, my son,
almost an old man? My little rosy child of old? No doubt I shall never see him
again.
"And so I travel about all the year. I go east
and west, as you see, with no companion.
"I am like a lost dog. Adieu, monsieur! don't
stay here with me for it hurts me to have told you all this."
I went down the hill, and on turning round to glance
back, I saw the old woman standing on a broken wall, looking out upon the
mountains, the long valley and Lake Chambon in the distance.
And her skirt and the queer little shawl which she
wore around her thin shoulders were fluttering tike a flag in the wind.
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