II
“You may, perhaps, remember that it was very warm last summer, especially just before midsummer. One day I was going the rounds of my place as usual. I went out along the ditches in the full sunlight, crossed a meadow where my people were cutting hay, and came to the pasture where my cows were grazing. You can’t imagine how handsome they looked between the birch trunks. I scratched them behind the horns and talked to them the way I do, to Primrose and Buttercup and White Girl—she is my bell-cow; she has no horns and is as white as milk—and to Hercules, my bull, who is a combination of strength and mildness. No animal is better tempered than a bull if only one doesn’t irritate him at the start.
“I talked to them all, and they answered me as well as they could, lowing after me when I left. I also talked with an ‘enlightened’ tailor whom I met on the slope, a man who was a pillar of strength among the ‘awakened’ in the parish. I’ve even heard tell that he used to drive out devils. He responded a bit wryly, of course—and then I came down to the lake. There it lay still and shining. It’s a principle with me never to go in swimming before midsummer; but it was only a couple of days till then, and I was perspiring with the heat. I couldn’t resist. In a twinkling my clothes were off, I jumped into the water, and swam out. However, it was colder than I had thought, and I didn’t stay in long.
“But when I came out, what did I see but all the cows coming toward me? I called to them, and they came nearer, but slowly and cautiously. White Girl came first, with Hercules close beside her. When they were ten or fifteen paces away, I suddenly saw by their expression that they didn’t recognize me, that they didn’t even take me for a human being! And in Hercules’ look I thought I saw something I had never seen there before. I confess that all at once I got frightfully scared. If you want to know what panic terror means, picture yourself stark naked in front of a dozen large beasts with sharp horns—I have eleven cows and a bull—with a lake behind you!
“I for my part went half crazy with fear and began to run along the shore. Then some life came into the cows. I heard them behind me at a sharp trot. What was I to do? I caught hold of a bough that was fairly low and swung myself up into a tree. It was high time; the whole herd was upon me, and Hercules snorted at me and butted the tree with his horns. Well, he couldn’t reach me, and luckily it was so warm that I didn’t catch a chill, though ordinarily my stomach is very sensitive. I tried to talk sense to them, but there was no possibility of such a thing. White Girl responded only with contempt, Primrose lowered her head and gave me an ugly look, and Hercules lost his composure for the first time.
“And in their way they were right. How could they conceive that this strange white thing, which took flight at their coming and climbed into a tree, this animal which had neither black clothes, nor spectacles, nor a straw hat with a wide brim, was identical with their master and good friend? This creature must then inevitably be their enemy, or at least a strange, ridiculous, and indecent phenomenon which ought to be combated.