SOME ONE KNOCKS AT THE WINDOW

The fourth day was one of the coldest of that winter. From early morning the first comers to the playground kept warm by sliding round the well. They were waiting for the stove to be lit to rush into the classroom.

Behind the front gate several of us waited for the arrival of the boys from the countryside farther off. They came with eyes quite dazed from having crossed hoar-sparkling fields and looked on frozen ponds and coppices from which hares ran.... Their overalls had a smell of hay and stables which made the air of the classrooms heavy, as they crowded round the red-hot stove. And that morning one of them had brought in a basket a frozen squirrel which he had found on the way. He tried, I remember, to hang up the long stiff animal by its claws to a pillar of the playground shelter....

Then the dull class-work of winter began.

A sharp knock on the window made us look up. Upright against the door we saw Admiral Meaulnes shaking off the frost from his overall before he came in, standing there head erect and as if dazzled with rapture!

The two boys of the bench nearest to the door hurried to open it: they had a little confabulation, which we did not hear, just outside, and at last the truant made up his mind to come into the school.

That breath of fresh air coming from the deserted playground, the bits of straw which could be seen clinging to Admiral Meaulnes’ clothing, and above all the look he had of a traveller, tired, hungry, but thrilled by wonders, all gave us a strange feeling of pleasure and curiosity.

M. Seurel had come down the two steps of his desk where he had been giving us a dictation, and Meaulnes walked towards him looking aggressive. I recall how handsome he seemed to me then, that big friend of mine, in spite of his battered look and of his eyes reddened by nights spent, most likely, in the open.

He went up to the master’s desk and said, in the assured voice of a man who brings news: ‘I have come back, sir.’

‘So I see,’ replied M. Seurel, looking at him with curiosity.... ‘Go to your seat.’

The boy turned towards us, his back slightly bent, smiling in a mocking way, as do big unruly fellows when punished, and, catching hold of the end of the table with one hand, he let himself drop on his bench.

‘You are going to take out a book and read as I tell you,’ said the master--all heads were turned then towards Meaulnes--‘while the others finish their dictation.’

And the lesson went on as before. From time to time Admiral Meaulnes turned my way, then looked out of the windows from which the white garden was visible, downy and motionless, and the bare fields on which a crow sometimes descended. In the classroom the heat was heavy around the reddened stove. My friend settled himself to read, holding his head in his hands: twice I saw his eyelids close and I thought he was falling asleep.

‘I’d like to go to bed, sir,’ said he at last, half lifting his arm. ‘I’ve not slept for three nights.’

‘Then go!’ said M. Seurel, anxious above all to avoid a scene.

We sat up, all of us, pens in the air, and sadly watched him go, his overall rumpled at the back and his shoes earthy.

How slow that morning was in passing! Towards midday we heard the traveller, upstairs in the attic, preparing to come down. At dinner time I found him sitting by the fire near our puzzled grandparents, and as the clock struck twelve the boys, big and little, scattered over the snowclad playground, made off like shadows before the dining-room door.

Of that dinner I recall only a great silence and a great distress. Everything was icy; the oilcloth without a tablecloth, the cold wine in the glasses, the red flagstones under our feet. It had been decided to put no questions to the truant so as not to rouse him to revolt. And he availed himself of that truce to say not a word.

At last, dessert ended, and we two were able to make a dash for the playground. A school playground in the afternoon, with the snow trampled away by clogs ... a playground black all round with drips from the roofs of the shelters ... a playground thick with games and screams! Meaulnes and I pelted along by the school buildings. At once two or three fellows from the village left their game and ran up to us with shouts of joy; hands in pockets, scarves unloosed, and mud squirting from under their clogs. But my friend burst into the big classroom, where I followed; he shut the glass door just in time to stop the rush of the fellows in pursuit. There was instant uproar loud and clear; glass panes shaken, clogs stamping on stone; one shove bent the iron bar holding the two leaves of the door; but Meaulnes had already turned the little key in the lock, at the risk of cutting himself on its broken ring.

We used to think it maddening to behave like that. In summer, fellows who were locked out in this way, would tear round at full speed into the garden and managed often to climb in at one of the windows, before you could shut them all. But it was then December and everything was shut up. For a little while the boys kept shoving against the door; they yelled insults at us; then, one by one, they turned tail and went off crest-fallen, doing up their scarves as they went.

Only two boys were in the classroom, which smelt of chestnuts and sour wine, two sweepers who were shifting the tables. I went up to the stove to warm myself lazily till lessons time, while Meaulnes searched the master’s desk and the lockers. He soon found a small atlas which he studied with eagerness as he stood on the platform, his elbows on the desk and his head in his hands.

I was just about to go up to him; I should have placed my hand on his shoulder and, no doubt, we should have followed together, on the map, the route which he had taken, when suddenly the door leading to the infants’ room opened with a crash under a violent push, and Jasmin Delouche, followed by a village boy and three fellows from the neighbouring countryside, emerged with a shout of triumph. One of the windows in the infants’ classroom had probably been half shut; they had pushed it open and jumped through.

Jasmin Delouche, although rather small, was one of the elder boys of the top form. He was very jealous of Admiral Meaulnes, though he pretended to be his friend. Before our boarder’s arrival, Jasmin himself had been cock of the form. He had a pale, rather sallow face, and pomaded hair. He was the only son of widow Delouche, the innkeeper, and he played the man, trotting out with self-conceit what he had heard in the billiard-room and at the bar.

At his entry Meaulnes looked up frowning and called out to the boys, as they scrambled to the stove: ‘So one can’t have a minute’s peace here!’

‘If you don’t like it, you should have stopped where you were,’ said Jasmin Delouche, without looking up.

T think that Augustin was in that state when temper comes and gets you so that you cannot control it.

‘Now then, you!’ he said, a little pale, rising and shutting his book, ‘get out of it!’

The other sneered.

‘Oh!’ he cried, ‘because you ran away for three days, you think you are going to be boss now!’ he went on, dragging in the others. ‘A chap like you can’t turn us out, I tell you that much!’

But Meaulnes was already on him. A scrap began; a wild scrimmage; sleeves of overalls split and tore at the seams. Martin alone--one of the boys of the neighbourhood who had come with Jasmin--interfered.

‘Leave him alone!’ he called out, with quivering nostrils, shaking his head like a ram.

With a violent jerk Meaulnes threw him reeling, arms out, to the middle of the room; then gripping Delouche by the neck with one hand and opening the door with the other, he tried to throw him out. Jasmin clung to the tables and dragged his feet, making his hobnailed shoes grate on the flagstones, while Martin, having regained his balance, came back with measured steps, head forward and furious. Meaulnes let go Delouche to collar this idiot, and would soon have found himself in a fix if the door of the living-room had not partly opened. M. Seurel was seen standing there at the door, his back turned towards us, to finish, before he came in, a conversation he was having with some one....

At once the battle stopped. Some boys collected round the stove, none too proud of themselves, having, right to the end, avoided taking sides. Meaulnes sat down in his place, his sleeves undone and torn at the gathers.

As for Jasmin, purple in the face, during the few minutes before the ruler rapped for form-work to begin, he could be heard calling out: ‘He can’t stand anything now. He puts on side. Does he suppose we do not know where he’s been!’

‘You ass! I don’t know myself,’ replied Meaulnes, in the immediate silence.

Then, shrugging his shoulders and burying his head in his hands, he began to do his work.