And then she added, probably in answer to her own thoughts: "Life,
after all, is not as good or as bad as we believe it to be."
[A VAGABOND]
He was a journeyman carpenter, a good workman and a steady fellow,
twenty-seven years old, but, although the eldest son, Jacques Randel
had been forced to live on his family for two months, owing to the
general lack of work. He had walked about seeking work for over a
month and had left his native town, Ville-Avary, in La Manche, because
he could find nothing to do and would no longer deprive his family of
the bread they needed themselves, when he was the strongest of them
all. His two sisters earned but little as charwomen. He went and
inquired at the town hall, and the mayor's secretary told him that he
would find work at the Labor Agency, and so he started, well provided
with papers and certificates, and carrying another pair of shoes, a
pair of trousers and a shirt in a blue handkerchief at the end of his
stick.
And he had walked almost without stopping, day and night, along
interminable roads, in sun and rain, without ever reaching that
mysterious country where workmen find work. At first he had the fixed
idea that he must only work as a carpenter, but at every carpenter's
shop where he applied he was told that they had just dismissed men on
account of work being so slack, and, finding himself at the end of his
resources, he made up his mind to undertake any job that he might come
across on the road. And so by turns he was a navvy, stableman,
stonecutter; he split wood, lopped the branches of trees, dug wells,
mixed mortar, tied up fagots, tended goats on a mountain, and all for
a few pence, for he only obtained two or three days' work occasionally
by offering himself at a shamefully low price, in order to tempt the
avarice of employers and peasants.
And now for a week he had found nothing, and had no money left, and
nothing to eat but a piece of bread, thanks to the charity of some
women from whom he had begged at house doors on the road. It was
getting dark, and Jacques Randel, jaded, his legs failing him, his
stomach empty, and with despair in his heart, was walking barefoot on
the grass by the side of the road, for he was taking care of his last
pair of shoes, as the other pair had already ceased to exist for a
long time. It was a Saturday, toward the end of autumn. The heavy gray
clouds were being driven rapidly through the sky by the gusts of wind
which whistled among the trees, and one felt that it would rain soon.
The country was deserted at that hour on the eve of Sunday. Here and
there in the fields there rose up stacks of wheat straw, like huge
yellow mushrooms, and the fields looked bare, as they had already been
sown for the next year.
Randel was hungry, with the hunger of some wild animal, such a hunger
as drives wolves to attack men. Worn out and weakened with fatigue, he
took longer strides, so as not to take so many steps, and with heavy
head, the blood throbbing in his temples, with red eyes and dry mouth,
he grasped his stick tightly in his hand, with a longing to strike the
first passerby who might be going home to supper.
He looked at the sides of the road, imagining he saw potatoes dug up
and lying on the ground before his eyes; if he had found any he would
have gathered some dead wood, made a fire in the ditch and have had a
capital supper off the warm, round vegetables with which he would
first of all have warmed his cold hands. But it was too late in the
year, and he would have to gnaw a raw beetroot which he might pick up
in a field as he had done the day before.
For the last two days he had talked to himself as he quickened his
steps under the influence of his thoughts. He had never thought much
hitherto, as he had given all his mind, all his simple faculties to
his mechanical work. But now fatigue and this desperate search for
work which he could not get, refusals and rebuffs, nights spent in the
open air lying on the grass, long fasting, the contempt which he knew
people with a settled abode felt for a vagabond, and that question
which he was continually asked, "Why do you not remain at home?"
distress at not being able to use his strong arms which he felt so
full of vigor, the recollection of the relations he had left at home
and who also had not a penny, filled him by degrees with rage, which
had been accumulating every day, every hour, every minute, and which
now escaped his lips in spite of himself in short, growling sentences.
As he stumbled over the stones which tripped his bare feet, he
grumbled: "How wretched! how miserable! A set of hogs--to let a man
die of hunger--a carpenter--a set of hogs--not two sous--not two
sous--and now it is raining--a set of hogs!"