THE SILK WAISTCOAT

Our room was, as I have said, a big attic--half attic, half room. The other rooms, meant for assistant masters, had windows; no one knows why ours was lighted only by a skylight. It was impossible to shut the door fast, as it scraped the floor. When we went up in the evening, sheltering with one hand the candle which the draughts of the big house threatened to blow out, every time we tried to shut this door and every time we had to give it up. And the whole night long we felt all round the silence of the three lumber-rooms penetrating our bedroom.

There we met again, Augustin and I, on the evening of that same winter day.

I swiftly took off all my clothes and threw them in a heap on a chair at the foot of my bed, but my companion, without saying a word, began to undress slowly. I watched him undress from the iron bed in which I already lay--looking through cretonne hangings adorned with a wine-stalk pattern. One moment he sat down on his low curtainless bed; the next he got up and paced to and fro as he undressed. The candle, which he had placed on a wicker table, the work of gipsies, threw his moving and gigantic shadow upon the wall.

Quite unlike me he was folding and arranging his school clothes in a bitter and distracted way, but with much care. I still see him drop his heavy belt on a chair, over the back of which he folded his black overall extremely creased and soiled, then take off a kind of dark blue tunic which he wore under his overall, and stooping with his back to me, spread the garment at the foot of his bed.... But when he stood up again and turned to face me, I saw that in place of the brass button uniform waistcoat that should be under the tunic, he was wearing a queer silk waistcoat, cut very open and fastened by a row of small and closely set mother-of-pearl buttons.

It was a garment of fantastic charm, such as must have been worn by the young men who used to dance with our grandmothers, in the days of the dandies.

I distinctly recall, at that moment, the tall peasant boy, bareheaded--for he had carefully placed his cap on his other clothes--his face so young, so gallant, and already so firmly set. He was once more pacing the room when he began to unbutton this mysterious article of a costume which was not his. And it was strange to see him, in shirt-sleeves, with short trousers and muddy shoes, handling this waistcoat of a marquis.

He had no sooner touched it than, starting from his reverie, he turned his face towards me with a look of anxiety. I rather wanted to laugh. He smiled with me and his face brightened.

‘What’s that? Do tell me,’ I said in a low voice, emboldened. ‘Where did you get it?’

But his smile vanished at once. Twice, with his heavy hand, he brushed back his closely cropped hair, and suddenly, like a man unable to resist desire, slipped his tunic back over a dainty jabot, buttoned it up tightly, and slipped on his rumpled overall; then he hesitated a moment, looking at me sideways.... Finally he sat on the edge of his bed, took off his shoes, which fell noisily onto the floor, stretched himself on the bed, fully dressed like a soldier ready for the fray, and blew out the candle.

About midnight I woke up suddenly. Meaulnes was standing in the middle of the room, his cap on his head, and was looking for something on one of the pegs--a cloak which he threw on his back.... The room was very dark. Not even that gleam of light which snow sometimes gives. A black and icy wind was blowing in the garden and over the roof.

I raised myself a little and called to him softly: ‘Meaulnes! Are you going away again?’ He did not reply. Then, quite beside myself, I said: ‘Very well, I shall go with you. You must take me.’ And I jumped out of bed.

He came close to me, took hold of my arm, forcing me to sit on the edge of the bed, and said to me: ‘I can’t take you, François. If I knew my way well, you should come with me. But I must first of all find it on the map, and I can’t.’

‘Then you can’t go either!’

‘That’s true. It’s utterly useless,’ he said, discouraged. ‘Well, go back to bed. I promise not to go without you.’

And he again began to pace to and fro in the room. I dared say nothing more. He kept walking, stopping and then setting off again more quickly like a man in search of memories which he sorts out, challenges and compares, ponders on, thinks he has discovered, and then the thread breaking the search begins once more....

That was not the only night on which, awakened by the sound of his steps, I found him thus, about one in the morning, treading the attic and lumber-rooms, as do sailors who cannot lose the habit of pacing the deck on night watch and who, in the quiet of their Breton holding, get up and dress of a night, at the regulation hour, to keep a land watch.

Two or three times, during the month of January and the first fortnight of February, I was roused out of my sleep in that way. Admiral Meaulnes was there, on foot, all equipped, his cloak on his back, ready to start, and every time, on the edge of that mysterious country into which he once already had ventured, he stopped, he hesitated. At the moment of lifting the latch of the door to the stairs and of slipping off by the kitchen door, which he could easily have opened without being heard, he would shrink back once more.... Then, during the long midnight hours he paced feverishly the disused lumber-rooms, lost in thought.

* * * * *

At last one night, towards the fifteenth of February, he woke me up by gently placing his hand on my shoulder.

The day had been very disturbed. Meaulnes, who had now entirely dropped out of all the games of his former comrades, had remained seated at his bench during the last recreation of the evening, busily sketching out a mysterious plan, following it with his finger and elaborately measuring it out on the atlas of the Cher. There was an incessant going and coming between the playground and the classroom. Clogs kept clattering. Boys chased one another from table to table, taking benches and platform at a jump.... Every one knew that it was not wise to come near Meaulnes when he was working thus; yet, as recreation continued past regulation time, two or three boys from the village advanced towards him for a joke, without any noise, and looked over his shoulder. One of them was bold enough to push the others on top of Meaulnes.... The latter hastily closed his atlas, hid his sheet of paper, and caught hold of the last of the three boys while the other two managed to escape.

It was that surly Giraudat, who began to whine, tried to kick, and at last was pushed out of doors by Admiral Meaulnes, to whom he shouted in a rage: ‘You great coward! No wonder they are all against you and want to make war on you!...’ and a lot of insults, to which we replied without having quite understood what he meant. I was the one to shout the loudest, because I had sided with Admiral Meaulnes.

There was now a kind of pact between us. The promise which he had given to take me with him, instead of saying, like everybody else, that I should not be able to stand the walking, had bound me to him forever. And I never ceased thinking of his mysterious journey. I had become convinced that he must have met a girl. She, no doubt, was infinitely more beautiful than Jeanne, who could be seen in the nuns’ garden by looking through the keyhole; or Madeleine, the baker’s daughter, so pink and so fair; or Jenny, the daughter of the lady of the manor, so handsome, but insane and living in seclusion. It was certainly of a young girl he was thinking at night, like the hero of a novel. And I bravely decided to speak to him about it the first time he wakened me....

After four o’clock, on the evening of that new fight, we were both busy putting away garden tools, pickaxes, and spades which had been used to dig trenches, when we heard shouts on the road. It was a troop of young boys and urchins, formed in fours, marching quickly like a well-drilled squad, led by Delouche, Daniel, Giraudat, and another whom we did not know. They had spotted us and hooted like anything. So all the village was against us, and some fresh soldier stunt, from which we were excluded, was being planned.

Meaulnes, without saying anything, put away in the shed the pickaxe and the spade which he had on his shoulder. But at midnight I felt his hand on my arm, and I woke up with a start.

‘Get up,’ he said, ‘we are going.’

‘Do you know the right way to the very end?’

‘I know a good part of it. And we shall have to find the rest,’ he replied, with clenched teeth.

‘Listen, Meaulnes,’ I said, sitting up, ‘listen to me; there’s only one thing to be done!--and that is to look for the bit of the way we don’t know in full daylight with the help of your map.’

‘But that bit is far away from here.’

‘All right, we’ll drive there this summer, when the days are longer.’

There was a prolonged silence, which meant that he agreed.

‘As we shall try together to find again the girl you love, Meaulnes,’ I said at last, ‘tell me who she is, talk to me about her.’

He sat down at the foot of my bed. I could see in the darkness his lowered head, his folded arms and his knees. Then he took a deep breath, as some one who has had a weight upon his heart for a long time and who is, at last, going to tell his secret....