• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2097 0

kinds of provisions, concealed under sacks of charcoal. He found out that the good man had two married daughters in France, at Raucourt, and he was going to take these provisions to them, knowing that they had been left quite destitute after the Bavarians had passed through. He had obtained the necessary safe-conduct first thing that morning. At once Prosper was seized with a mad desire to sit on the seat of that cart as well and go back to the place for which he was already dying of homesickness. Nothing simpler, he could get off at Remilly, which the farmer had to go through in any case. It was all fixed up in three minutes, they lent him the trousers and smock he needed so badly, the farmer gave out everywhere that he was his farm-hand, and by about six he got off at the church, after being stopped only two or three times at German posts.

‘No, really, I’d had enough,’ Prosper went on after a pause. ‘I wouldn’t have minded so much if they’d put us to some good use as they did in Africa. But to move left just so as to move back right, to feel you’re absolutely no use, it isn’t any sort of existence at all… And now my poor Zephir is dead and I’d be quite alone, so the only thing I can do is go back to the land. Better than being a prisoner with the Prussians, isn’t it?… You’ve got some horses, Monsieur Fouchard, and you’ll see whether I can love them and look after them!’

The old man’s eyes glittered. He held up his glass once again and concluded the business without undue haste:

‘Oh well, as it will help you I don’t mind if I do… I’ll take you on… But as to any wages, can’t discuss that until the war is over, because I don’t really need anybody and times are too hard!’

Silvine was still sitting there with Chariot on her lap, and she had never taken her eyes off Prosper. When she saw him getting up to go straight off to the stable and get to know the horses, she asked him once again:

‘So you haven’t seen Honoré?’

The question, suddenly hitting him again, made him jump, as though it had shone a sudden ray of light into a dark corner of his memory. He hesitated again and then made up his mind.

‘Look, I didn’t want to upset you just now, but I believe Honoré is still out there.’

‘Still there? What do you mean?’

‘Yes, I think the Prussians have done for him. I saw him lying back over a cannon, with his head held high and a hole under the heart.’

There was a silence. Silvine turned a ghastly white, and old Fouchard looked stunned, then put his glass back on the table, where he had finished off the bottle.

‘Are you sure?’ she gasped.

‘Yes of course I am, as sure as you can be of anything you’ve seen… It was on a little mound, near three trees, and I think I could go there with my eyes shut.’

For her it was the end of the world. This man who had forgiven her, bound himself with a promise, whom she was to marry as soon as he came back from the army after the campaign was over! And they had taken him away from her, he was out there with a hole under the heart! Never had she felt she loved him so much, and now an urge to see him again, to have him to herself in spite of all, even though buried in the ground, lifted her out of her usual passivity.

She put Chariot down roughly and exlaimed:

‘Right, I shan’t believe it until I’ve seen for myself… As you know where the place is you’re going to take me there. And if it’s true and we find him we’ll bring him back home.’

Tears choked her words and she collapsed on the table, shaken with bitter sobs, and the child, outraged at having been roughly handled by his mother, burst into tears as well. She took him back and clasped him to her, uttering disjointed words:

‘Poor child, poor child!’

Old Fouchard was thunderstruck. He really did love his son in his own fashion. Old memories must have come back from long ago when his wife was still alive and Honoré was still going to school, and two big tears formed in his red eyes too and rolled down his brown leathery cheeks. He had not cried for over ten years. He began to mutter oaths, and worked himself up into a rage because his