II
The sailor who was with the priest felt the usual southern longing for a chat, but dared not begin, for the Abbé exercised great authority over his flock. At last he ventured:
“So you are comfortable in your little house, your Reverence?”
The bastide was one of those tiny houses frequented in summer by the Provençals of town and country in search of fresh air. The Abbé had rented this retreat in the middle of a field, five minutes’ walk from the presbytery, which was too small and enclosed in the centre of the parish, right up against the church.
Even in summer he did not live regularly at the cottage: he only went there occasionally for a few days to be amongst the fields and trees and to do some pistol-practice.
“Yes, my friend,” said the priest. “I am very comfortable there.”
The low dwelling, looking as if it had grown like a Provençal mushroom, appeared among the trees. It was painted pink, its surface being speckled over with stripes and spots, split up into little bits by the olive leaves and branches from the trees in the open field.
At the same moment they saw a tall woman moving about in front of the door, getting the little dinner-table ready as she went backwards and forwards, with methodical leisureliness setting the cloth for one, a plate, table-napkin, piece of bread, and glass. She had on the little cap worn by the women of Arles: a pointed cone of black silk or velvet from which grows a white starched mushroom.
When the Abbé was within hearing distance, he called out:
“Eh, Marguerite?”
She stopped to look round and, recognising her master, said:
“Oh, it’s you, your Reverence?”
“Yes, I am bringing a good haul, you must grill me a catfish at once, cooked in butter, only butter, you hear?”
The servant, who had come to meet the two men, examined the fish the sailor was carrying, with an expert eye.
“But we have already got a chicken cooked with rice.”
“Never mind that, tomorrow’s fish is not as good as fish fresh from the sea. I am going to have a really choice meal, it does not often happen; moreover, it is not a great sin.”
The servant picked out the fish and, as she was carrying it away, turned round:
“A man has been here three times to see you, your Reverence.”
Showing no interest, he asked:
“A man! What kind of man?”
“Well, the kind of man whose looks do not recommend him.”
“What! a beggar?”
“Perhaps, I don’t know. I rather think he is a maoufatan.”
Abbé Vilbois laughed at the Provençal word meaning a bad lot, a tramp, for he knew how frightened Marguerite was, and that when she was at the cottage she was always thinking they were going to be murdered.
He gave the sailor a few pence, and was preparing to wash his face and hands (having kept his old habits of neatness and cleanliness), when Marguerite called out from the kitchen, where she was scraping the blood-flecked scales that came away from the fish like tiny pieces of silver:
“There he is!”
The Abbé turned towards the road and saw a man, who seemed in the distance to be very badly dressed, walking towards the house with very small steps. He awaited him, still smiling at his servant’s fright, thinking: “Upon my word, she must be right, he certainly looks a bad lot.”
Without hurrying, the unknown individual drew near, hands in his pockets, and his eyes fixed upon the priest. He was young, with a fair, curly beard, and hair that fell in curls beneath his soft felt hat, a hat so dirty and crushed that no one could have guessed its original colour and shape. He wore a brown overcoat, trousers that hung in a fringe over his ankles, and string-sandals that gave him a slack, silent, disquieting walk—the hardly perceptible slouch of the tramp.
When a few steps away from the priest, he took off the ragged cap that covered his head with a flourish, exposing a withered, dissolute, but well-shaped head, bald on the top—a sign of fatigue or of early debauchery, for the man was certainly not over twenty-five.
The priest immediately took off his hat too, for he felt that this was no ordinary vagabond, or unemployed, neither was he the habitual jailbird wandering about between two prisons who had forgotten all speech except the mysterious language of the convict.
“Good day, your Reverence,” said the man. The priest replied simply: “Good day,” not wishing to call this doubtful, ragged passerby “sir.” They stared at each other; the fixed steady look of the tramp made Abbé Vilbois feel uncomfortable, distressed as one feels when facing an unknown enemy, and overpowered by one of those strange feelings of uneasiness that send shivers through body and blood. At last the vagabond said:
“Well! do you recognise me?”
The priest replied, very astonished:
“Me? Not at all, I don’t know you.”
“Ah! You don’t know me. Look at me again.”
“What is the good of looking at you? I have never seen you before.”
“That is true enough,” said the other ironically, “but I will show you someone you do know.”
He put on his hat and unbuttoned his coat, under which his chest was bare. A red sash wound round his thin waist held his trousers up over his hips.
He took an envelope from his pocket—an envelope marked with every possible kind of stain, the sort of envelope that tramps keep tucked away in the lining of their clothes, and in which they put all kinds of identification papers, which may be genuine, faked, stolen, or legally correct, and which are the highly valued defences of their individual liberty in case of any meeting with the police. From the envelope he drew a photograph about the size of a letter (such as were formerly used). It was yellowish and crumpled with much handling, faded by the heat of the body against which it had been kept.
Holding it up to the Abbé, he asked:
“And this, do you know it?”
The Abbé took two steps forward to see better, then stopped; he turned pale, profoundly distressed, for this was a photograph of him taken for her in the bygone days of his love.
Still he did not understand and made no reply.
The vagabond repeated:
“Do you recognise this?”
The priest stammered:
“Well, yes.”
“Who is it?”
“Me.”
“It is really you?”
“Certainly.”
“Right; now look at your photograph, then look at me.”
The miserable priest had already seen that the two—the man in the photograph and the man standing at his side laughing, were as alike as two brothers, but still he did not understand and stammered:
“What do you want me to do?”
With a note of spite in his voice the beggar said:
“What do I want? Well, first of all I want you to recognise me.”
“But who are you?”
“What am I? Ask the first comer on the road, ask the servant; if you like, let us go and ask the mayor of the village and show him the photograph; he will laugh about it, I can tell you that. Ah! you refuse to recognise me as your son, Papa curé?”
The old man, lifting his arms with a biblical and despairing gesture, moaned:
“It can’t be true.”
The young man drew nearer and, facing him, said:
“Ah! It can’t be true. Ah! you priest, you must stop telling lies, do you hear?”
The expression on his face was threatening, his fists were doubled up, he spoke with so much violence that the Abbé, moving further away, asked himself which of the two was making a mistake.
However, he insisted again:
“I have never had a child.”
The other retorted:
“And you never had a mistress either?”
The old man with great determination uttered one word: making a dignified assent:
“Yes.”
“And this mistress was not with child when you turned her out?”
The old feeling of resentment, stifled twenty-five years ago—not really stifled but confined deep down in the lover’s heart—suddenly burst asunder the whole fabric of his religious belief, of his resigned devotion to his God, as well as his complete renunciation of worldly things: all that he had built up round it with so much care; and beside himself with rage, he shouted:
“I turned her out because she had deceived me and was with child by another, otherwise I would have killed her, sir, and you too.”
The young man hesitated, surprised at the sincerity of the curé’s outburst; he said in a gentler tone:
“And who told you the child was another’s?”
“She did, she herself, while defying me.”
Without questioning this statement, the vagabond said with the casual manner of a street-boy pronouncing judgment:
“Just so! Then Mamma made a mistake when she defied you, that is all there is to be said.”
Quickly regaining self-control after his sudden outburst, the Abbé began to question the boy:
“And who told you that you were my son?”
“She did when she was dying, your Reverence. … Besides, what about this!”
And he held the little photograph up to the priest.
The old man took it, and with anguish in his heart he spent some time comparing the unknown passerby with his old photograph—there could be no further doubt that the youth was indeed his son.
He was seized with a feeling of distress, an intensely painful, indefinable feeling like remorse for some old crime. He understood a little of what had happened, and guessed the rest, and again he saw the brutal scene of their parting. To save the life threatened by the man she had wronged, the woman—the deceitful, faithless female—had thrust this lie at him. … And the lie had succeeded. A son of his had been born, grown up, and turned into this sordid road tramp stinking of vice as a he-goat stinks of the beast.
He said in a low voice:
“Will you go for a short stroll with me so that we may clear the matter up?”
The other sneered:
“Will I? That is what I came for.”
They went off together, side by side, through the orchard. The sun had gone down and the keen freshness of the Southern twilight spread its invisible cooling cloak over the countryside. The Abbé shivered; raising his eyes to Heaven in the usual orthodox way, he saw all around him, trembling against the sky, the small grey leaves of the holy tree which had sheltered under its frail shadow the greatest of all suffering—the one and only moment of Christ’s weakness. A short prayer of desperation burst from him, spoken with that inner voice that never passes the lips, with which believers call upon the Saviour: “O God, help me.”
Then, turning towards his son:
“So then, your mother is dead?”
As he said the words: “Your mother is dead,” a new wave of grief swept through him, making his heart sink, a curious torment of the flesh unable to forget a cruel echo of the torture he had suffered; as she was dead, the most painful feeling of all seemed to be the faint stirring within him of that delirious, short-lived happiness which had left nothing behind it but the scar of remembrance.
The young man replied:
“Yes, your Reverence, my mother is dead.”
“Long ago?”
“Three years ago.”
Another doubt troubled the priest.
“Why did you not come sooner and look for me?”
The other hesitated.
“I could not. I was prevented. … But excuse me for interrupting the secrets which shall be revealed later on, with as many details as you please, to say that I have had nothing to eat since yesterday morning.”
The old man was filled with pity, and quickly holding out his hands, he said: “Oh, my poor child.”
The young man took the outstretched hands, which closed over his thin, moist, feverish fingers, and replied with his habitual flippancy:
“Good! Really, I begin to think we shall get on together in spite of what has happened.”
The curé started walking again.
“Let us go and dine,” he said.
Suddenly he remembered with a vague feeling of pleasure that was odd and confused, the beautiful fish he had caught, which with the chicken and rice would make a good meal for the wretched youngster.
The Arlesian, anxious and beginning to grumble, was waiting for them at the door.
“Marguerite,” cried the Abbé, “take away the table and carry it into the room, quickly, quickly, and set the cloth for two, but quickly.”
The servant did not move, scared at the thought that her master was going to dine with the criminal.
Then, Abbé Vilbois himself began to take the things away and remove what had been set for him into the only room on the ground floor.
Five minutes later he was seated opposite the vagabond before a tureen full of cabbage soup that sent up a faint cloud of boiling steam between their faces.