Marie Claire

by Marguerite Audoux

At last I came to a clearing. It was lit up by a pale moon and the tearing wind whirled heaps of leaves up and threw them down again, then rolled them about and about, and turned them over in all directions.

I wanted to stop to get my breath, but the big trees were swinging backwards and forwards with a deafening noise. Their shadows, which looked like great black animals, threw themselves flat along the road and then slipped away and hid behind the trees. Some of these shadows had shapes which I recognized. But most of them hovered and jumped about in front of me as though they wanted to prevent me from passing. Some of them frightened me so that I took a little run, and jumped over them. I was dreadfully afraid that they would catch at my feet.

The wind went down a little, and rain began to fall in large drops. I had got to the other side of the clearing, and when I came to a little path which disappeared into the wood again, I saw a white wall at the end of it. I went a little way along the path, and saw that it was a house. Without thinking at all I knocked at the door. I wanted to ask the people to shelter me until the wind stopped. I knocked a second time, and heard somebody moving. I thought the door was going to be opened, but a window was opened on the first floor. A man in a night-cap called out, "Who is there?" I answered, "A little girl." He seemed surprised. "A little girl?" he said, and asked me where I came from, where I was going, and what I wanted. I had not expected all these questions, and I said that I had come from the farm, but then told a lie, and said that I was going to see my mother who was ill. I asked him to let me into the house until the rain stopped. He told me to wait, and I heard him talking to somebody else. Then he came back to the window, and asked me if there was anybody with me. He asked me how old I was; and when I said I was thirteen, he said I must be a brave girl to come through the wood alone at night. He remained leaning out of the window a moment, trying to see my face, which was looking up towards him. Then he turned his head to right and left trying to look into the darkness of the wood, and advised me to go on a little further. There was a village at the other side of the wood, he said, and I should find houses there where I could dry my clothes.

I went on into the night. The moon had hidden itself altogether, and a drizzling rain was falling. I had to walk a long time before I got to the village. All the houses were shut up, and I could hardly see them in the dark. A blacksmith was the only person up. When I got to his house I went up the two steps, meaning to rest there. He was busy with a great iron bar, which he was heating in a fire of red coal, and when his arm went up with the bellows he looked like a giant. Every time the bellows came down the coal flew up and crackled. That made a glimmering light which lit up the walls, on which scythes, saws, and all kinds of knives were hanging. The man's forehead was wrinkled, and he was staring at the fire. I dared not talk to him, and I went away without making any noise.

When it became quite light I saw that I was not very far from the town. I began to recognize the places where Sister Marie-Aimée used to take us when we went for our walks. I was walking very slowly now, and dragged my feet after me because they hurt me. I was so tired that it was all I could do not to sit down on one of the heaps of stone which were on each side of the road.

The sound of a horse and cart rattling along the road as fast as they could go made me turn round, and I remained standing quite still with my heart beating fast. I had recognized the bay mare and the farmer's black beard. He stopped the mare quite close to me, leaned out of the cart, and lifted me up into it by the belt of my dress. He sat me down next to him on the seat, turned the horse round and drove off again at full speed. When we got to the wood Master Silvain made the horse slow down. He turned to me, looked at me, and said, "It is lucky for you that I caught you up. Otherwise you would have been brought back to the farm between two gensdarmes." As I didn't answer, he said again, "Perhaps you don't know that there are gensdarmes who bring little girls back, when they run away." I said, "I want to go and see Sister Marie-Aimée." "Are you unhappy with us?" he asked. I said again, "I want to go and see Sister Marie-Aimée." He looked as though he didn't understand, and went on asking me questions, going over the names of everybody on the farm, and asking me if they were kind to me. I made the same answer every time. At last he lost patience with me, sat straight up, and said, "What an obstinate child." I looked up at him and said that I should run away again if he would not take me to Sister Marie-Aimée. I went on looking at him, waiting for an answer, and I could see quite well that he didn't know what to say. He kept still, and thought for several minutes. Then he put his hand on my knee and said, "Listen to me, child, and try and understand what I am going to tell you." And when he had finished speaking I understood that he had promised to keep me until I was eighteen without ever letting me go to the town. I understood, too, that the Mother Superior could do what she liked with me, and that if I ran away again she would have me locked up, because I ran about the woods during the night. Then the farmer said that he hoped I should forget the convent and that I should grow fond of him, and of his wife, because they wished me to be happy with them. I was very miserable, and it was all I could do not to cry. "Come," said the farmer holding out his hand. "Let us be good friends, shall we?" I put my hand into his, and he held it rather tight. I said I should like to be friends. He cracked his whip, and we soon got through the wood. Rain was still falling in a fine shower like a fog, and the ploughed fields looked drearier than ever. In a field by the road a man came towards us waving his arms. I thought he was threatening me at first, but when he was quite close to us I saw that he was holding something in his left arm, and that his right arm was moving up and down as though he were working a scythe. I was so puzzled that I looked at Master Silvain. As though he were answering a question, he said, "It is Gaboret, sowing." A few minutes afterwards we got to the farm. The farmer's wife was waiting for us in the doorway. When she saw me she opened her mouth wide as though she had been a long time without breathing, and her serious face looked a little less anxious for a moment. I ran past her, went into the room to fetch my cloak, and went straight out to the pens. The sheep rushed out, tumbling over one another. They ought to have been in the fields a long time before.

All day long I thought over what the farmer had said to me. I could not understand why the Mother Superior wanted to prevent me from seeing Sister Marie-Aimée. I understood that Sister Marie-Aimée could do nothing though, and I made my mind up to wait, thinking that a day would come when nobody could prevent me from seeing her again. At bedtime the farmer's wife went up with me to put an extra blanket on my bed, and when she had said "good night," she told me not to call her "madame" any more. She wanted me to call her Pauline. Then she went away, after telling me that both she and her husband looked upon me as a child of the house, and that she would do all she could to make me happy at the farm.

Next day Master Silvain made me sit next to his brother at table. He told him with a laugh that he was not to let me want for anything, because he wanted me to grow. The farmer's brother was called Eugène. He spoke very little, but he always looked at each person who spoke, and his little eyes often seemed to be laughing at them. He was thirty years old, but he did not look more than twenty. He always had an answer to any question he was asked, and I felt no awkwardness at sitting next to him. He squeezed himself against the wall so as to give me more room at the table, and when the farmer told him to look after me, all he said was, "You need not worry."

Now, after all the fields had been ploughed Martine took her sheep a long way off to some pasture land called the common. The cowherd and I took our flock down the meadows and into the woods where there was fern. I suffered from the cold although I had a big woollen cloak which covered me down to my feet. The cowherd often had to light a fire. He would bake potatoes and chestnuts in the ashes and share them with me. He taught me how to know from which side the wind was coming, so as to make use of the least shelter against the cold. And as we sat over the fire and tried to keep ourselves warm he would sing me a song about "Water and Wine." It was a song which had about twenty verses in it. Water and Wine accused one another of ruining the human race, and at the same time praised themselves tremendously. As far as I could see Water was right, but the cowherd said that Wine was not wrong. We used to sit and talk together for hours. He would tell me of his own home, which was a long way off from Sologne. He told me that he had always been a cowherd, and that when he was a child a bull had knocked him down and hurt him. He had been ill a long time after that, and the pains in his limbs had made him scream. Then the pains had gone away, but he had become all twisted up as I saw him now. He remembered the names of all the farms where he had been cowherd. Some of the farmers were kind, and some were not, but he had never come across such kind masters as at Villevieille. He said, too, that Master Silvain's cows were not a bit like those of his own country, which were small, and had horns like pointed spindles. The Villevieille cows were big, strong animals with rough crumpled horns. He was very fond of them and used to call each one by name when he talked to them. The one he liked best was a beautiful white cow which Master Silvain had bought in the spring. She was always lifting her head and looking into the distance, and then all of a sudden she would start off at a run. The cowherd used to call out, "Stop where you are, Blanche! Stop!" She usually obeyed him, but sometimes he had to send the dog after her. Sometimes, too, she used to try and run even when the dog stopped her, and would only come back to the herd when the dog bit her muzzle. The cowherd used to pity her because, he said, he couldn't say what or whom she was regretting.