THE SHEEPFOLD

To find where he was he climbed on the bank from which he had jumped.

Slowly and with difficulty, as when he came, he made his way between swamps, through willow hedges, and went to fetch his cart at the farther end of the field where he had left it. The cart was no longer there. Standing still, with throbbing temples, he strained hard to catch all the sounds of the night, sure that he heard, each moment, the jingle of the horse’s collar close at hand. Nothing.... He went all round the meadow; the gate was partly open, partly dilapidated as if a cart wheel had passed over it. The mare must have escaped that way, alone.

Turning back, he walked a little way and caught his feet in the rug which no doubt had slipped from the mare onto the ground. This decided him that the beast had gone off in that direction. He started to run.

Obsessed by the obstinate and insane resolve lo overtake the cart, his face on fire, a prey to this panic wish, which resembled fear, he went on running.... Sometimes he stumbled in a rut. In the utter darkness he ran into hedges when the lane turned, and too tired to stop in time he crashed into brambles, his arms stretched out, his hands torn in the effort to protect his face. Sometimes he stopped and listened and went on again. Once he thought he heard a cart, but it was only a jolting wagon going along a road, in the far distance on the left....

Came a time when the knee which he had grazed against the step of the cart hurt so much that he had to stop, his leg quite stiff. Then he realised that unless the mare had run off at a quick gallop, he would long ago have caught her up. He told himself, too, that a cart could not get lost in that way, and that some one would surely find it. At last he retraced his steps, worn out, scarcely able to drag himself along.

After a while he believed that he was again in the neighbourhood of the place he had left, and soon he noticed the light of the house he was looking for. A path opened in the hedge.

‘That’s the path the old man spoke of,’ thought Augustin.

And he entered this passage, glad to have no more hedges and banks to get over. Next moment, the path turning to the left, the light appeared to slip to the right, and Meaulnes reaching a cross-road, in his hurry to regain the poor lodging, without thinking took a path which seemed to lead straight there. But he had hardly walked ten steps along it when the light disappeared, either because the hedge was hiding it, or else because the peasants were tired of waiting and had closed their shutters. Bravely the schoolboy took to the fields and made for the place where the light had just been shining. Then, leaping once more over a hedge, he landed on a new path....

Thus, little by little, Admiral Meaulnes’ trail was tangled and the thread broke which was connecting him with those he had left.

Discouraged, almost exhausted, in despair he resolved to follow this path right to the end. A hundred yards farther he emerged into a vast grey meadow, where here and there he could distinguish shadows appearing to be juniper trees and a dark shed in a fold of the ground. Meaulnes drew near. It was only a kind of large cattle-pen or forsaken sheepfold. The door yielded with a groan. The light of the moon came through chinks in the woodwork, when the high wind chased the clouds.

Without searching farther, Meaulnes stretched himself on the damp straw, one elbow on the ground, his head on his hand. Having removed his belt he curled up, knees bent in his overall. He then thought of the mare’s rug which he had left in the lane and felt so wretched and so cross with himself that he had a strong desire to cry....

So he forced himself to think of something else. Frozen to the bone, he recalled a dream--or rather a vision which he had had when quite a child and of which he had never spoken to any one; one morning, instead of waking up in his room where his trousers and coats were hanging, he had found himself in a long green room with walls like foliage. The light streaming into this place was so sweet that you could simply taste it. Close to the first window a young girl was sewing with her back to him; she seemed to be waiting for him to wake. He had not had strength to creep out of bed into this enchanted dwelling. He had fallen asleep again.... But next time he swore he would get up. To-morrow morning, perhaps!...