The children did not hear these voices, but the clarion and the horn echoed louder and more distinctly, and at the first sound Georgette craned her neck and ceased eating; she had dropped her spoon into the porringer, and at the second blast from the clarion she lifted the tiny forefinger of her right hand, and alternately raising and letting it fall, she marked the time of the trumpet, that was prolonged by the second call of the horn; when the horn and the clarion were silent, with her finger still uplifted, she paused dreamily, and then murmured to herself, "Muthic."
She probably meant "music,"
The two older ones, René-Jean and Gros-Alain, had paid no attention to the horn and the clarion; they were absorbed by another object. Gros-Alain, who had spied a woodlouse in the act of crawling across the library floor, exclaimed,—
"A creature!"
René-Jean ran up to him.
"It pricks," continued Gros-Alain.
"Don't hurt it," said René-Jean.
And both the children set themselves to watch the traveller.
Meanwhile Georgette, having finished her soup, was looking about for her brothers, who, crouching in the embrasure of a window, hung gravely over the woodlouse, their heads so close together that their hair intermingled; holding their breath, they gazed in astonishment at the creature, which, far from appreciating so much admiration, had stopped crawling, and no longer attempted to move.
Georgette, seeing that her brothers were watching something, desired to know what it might be. It was no easy matter to reach them, but she undertook it nevertheless. The journey fairly bristled with difficulties; all sorts of things were scattered over the floor,—stools turned upside down, bundles of papers, packing-cases which had been opened and left empty, trunks, all sorts of rubbish,—around which she had to make her way: a very archipelago of reefs; but Georgette took the risk. Her first achievement was to crawl out of the crib; then she plunged among the reefs. Winding her way through the straits, and pushing aside a footstool, she crawled between two boxes and over a bundle of papers, climbing up on one side, rolling down on the other, innocently exposing her poor little naked body, and finally reached what a sailor would call the open sea,—that is to say, quite an expanse of floor unencumbered by rubbish and free from perils. Here she made a rush, and with the agility of a cat she crept across the room on all fours as far as the window, where she encountered a formidable obstacle in the shape of the long ladder, which lying against the wall ended at this window, reaching a little beyond the corner of the embrasure, thus forming a sort of promontory between Georgette and her brothers. She paused, and seemed to consider the subject; and when she had solved the problem to her satisfaction, she resolutely clasped her rosy fingers about one of the rungs, which, as the ladder rested on its side, were not horizontal but vertical, and tried to pull herself up on to her feet; and when, after two unsuccessful attempts, she at last succeeded, she walked the entire length of the ladder, catching one rung after the other. On reaching the end her support failed, she stumbled and fell; but, nothing daunted, she caught at the end of one of its enormous poles with her tiny hands, pulled herself up, doubled the promontory, looked at René-Jean and Gros-Alain, and burst out laughing.