GREAT NEWS

Next morning, when I reached the High Street, it was such fine holiday weather, it was so still, and so many peaceful and familiar sounds rose from all over the village, that the happy confidence of a bearer of good news came back to me.

Augustin and his mother lived in the old schoolhouse. On the death of his father--retired long before this and enriched by a legacy--Meaulnes had pressed his mother to buy the school in which the old schoolmaster had taught for twenty years and where he himself had learned to read. Not that it was a pleasant house to look at: it was a big square building like a little town hall, which indeed it had once been; the ground-floor windows opened on the street and were so high that no one ever looked in through them; and the yard at the back, where no tree grew and a high shelter blocked any view of the countryside, was certainly the most denuded and the most forlorn of all the forsaken playgrounds I have ever seen.

In the odd-shaped hall on which four doors opened, I found Meaulnes’ mother bringing back from the garden a huge bundle of clothes which she must have put to dry at a very early hour of this long holiday morning. Her grey hair was carelessly twisted up; wisps of it fell across her face; her regular features, under her old-fashioned cap, looked tired and her eyes heavy, as if after a sleepless night, and she kept her head lowered sadly in a dreamy way.

But suddenly she saw me, and recognising me she smiled.

‘You come just in time,’ she said. ‘Look! I was bringing in the clothes I’d put out to dry for Augustin’s journey. I’ve spent the night looking over his accounts and getting his things together. The train leaves at five, but we shall manage to get everything ready.’

You would have said--for she showed such assurance--that she had herself taken this decision. Yet it is likely she did not even know where Meaulnes intended to go.

‘Upstairs,’ she said, ‘you will find him busy writing in the town hall.’

I climbed up the stairs, opened the door on the right, over which the words ‘Town Hall’ still remained on a board, and found myself in a big room with four windows--two opening on the village, two on the country; the walls were decorated with faded portraits of the Presidents Grévy and Carnot. The chairs of the town councillors still stood in front of a table with a green baize cover, on a long platform which filled the back of the room. And there, seated in the centre of the room in the mayor’s old armchair, was Meaulnes, busy writing, dipping his pen in an old-fashioned ink-stand shaped like a heart. This place, which seemed meant for some well-to-do villager, was the room where Meaulnes liked to retire during the holidays, whenever he was not roaming about the country....

As soon as he had recognised me, he got up, but not with the eagerness I had pictured in my mind.

‘Seurel!’ he merely said in astonishment.

He was still the same tall youth, with marked bony features and closely cropped hair. An untrimmed moustache was beginning to droop over his lips. Always the same loyal look.... But something like a veil of mist covered the ardour of the past, though every now and then his old passion dispelled it.

He appeared very upset to see me. At one bound I was on the platform. But, strange to say, he did not even think of holding out his hand. He turned towards me, both hands behind his back, and seeming very ill at ease. And already, looking at me without seeing me, he was absorbed in what he was going to say to me. Slow to break into speech, then and always, like men who live alone--hunters and adventurers--he had come to a decision without bothering about the words required to explain it. And only now that I was in front of him did he begin painfully to seek the necessary words.

However, I gaily related to him how I had come, where I had spent the night, and that I was very surprised to see Madame Meaulnes preparing for her son’s departure.

‘Ah! so she’s told you? ...’ he asked.

‘Yes. You’re not going far, I hope?’

‘Yes, very far.’

Out of countenance for a moment, I no longer dared to say anything and did not know where to begin with my message, for I felt that presently, by a mere word, I was going to wipe out this decision which I did not understand.

But he himself spoke at last like some one who wishes to justify himself.

‘Seurel,’ he said, ‘you know what the strange adventure of Sainte-Agathe meant to me. It was all I lived and hoped for. With that hope lost, what was to become of me?... How could I live like other people?

‘Well, I tried to live out there in Paris, when I saw that all was finished and that it was scarcely worth while even looking for the Lost Land.... But how could a man, who had once leapt at one bound into Paradise, get used to living like everybody else? What means happiness for others appeared to me absurd. And the day when I sincerely and deliberately decided to behave as others do, I piled up remorse for a long time to come....’

I sat on one of the platform chairs with my eyes on the ground and listened without looking at him; I could not tell what to think of these obscure explanations.

‘Come on, Meaulnes,’ I said, ‘explain yourself more clearly! Why this long journey? Have you made a mistake you must make amends for? a promise you must keep?’

‘That’s just it,’ he replied. ‘You remember that promise I made to Frantz?...’

‘Ah!’ I said relieved, ‘is that all?’

‘That’s all. But perhaps also a fault to make good. Both things at once....’

There followed a moment of silence during which I decided to begin speaking and prepared my words....

‘There’s only one explanation, so I’ve come to believe,’ he said again. ‘Of course, I would have liked, once more, to see Mademoiselle de Galais, simply to see her once more.... But I am convinced, now, that when I discovered the nameless manor, I was at the height of what stands for perfection and pure motive in any one’s heart, a height I shall never reach again. In death alone, as I once wrote to you, I may hope to find again the beauty of that day....’

He changed his tone only to begin again with strange animation, while he came nearer to me.

‘But listen, Seurel! This new intrigue and this long journey, this mistake I made and must make amends for, it is all, in a way, my old adventure still going on....’

A pause, during which he painfully tried to grasp once more the events of the past. I had missed the previous opportunity. For nothing on earth would I let this chance slip; and this time I spoke--too hastily, for later I bitterly regretted not having waited for his confession.

So I uttered the sentence which I had prepared for the previous occasion, and which no longer seemed to work. I said, without a gesture, and scarcely raising my head: ‘But what if I came to tell you that all hope is not lost?’

He looked at me; then, suddenly taking his eyes away, blushed as I have never seen any one blush: a rush of blood which must have beat hard against his temples....

‘What do you mean?’ he asked at last, indistinctly.

Then, in one gush, I related what I knew, what I had done, and how, the appearance of things having altered, it seemed almost as if it were Yvonne de Galais who had sent me to him.

He was now dreadfully pale.

During all this narrative--which he listened to in silence, with head sunk between his shoulders in the attitude of one who is taken by surprise and cannot tell how to defend himself, whether to hide or run away--I remember that he interrupted me only once. I was telling him, amongst other things, that all the Sand Pit had been pulled down and that the old manor no longer existed.

‘Ah!’ he said, ‘there you are’ (as if he had watched for a chance of justifying his behaviour and the despair into which he had sunk). ‘There you are: there is nothing left....’

To end my tale, as I felt convinced that the assurance of such an easy course would sweep away what remained of his grief, I told him that a country outing had been arranged by my Uncle Florentin, that Mademoiselle de Galais was coming to it on horseback, and that he himself was invited.... But he appeared completely put out and continued silent.

‘You must at once cancel your journey,’ I said with impatience. ‘Let’s go and tell your mother.’

And, as we were going downstairs together: ‘That country outing? ...’ he asked with some hesitation. ‘Must I really come?...’

‘My dear good chap,’ I replied, ‘what a question to ask!’

He looked like a man who is pushed forward against his will.

Downstairs, Augustin gave Madame Meaulnes to understand that I would stay for lunch, dinner, and the night, and that he himself would hire a bicycle next day and go with me to Vieux-Nançay.

‘Oh! very well,’ she said with a nod, as if this news confirmed all she thought.

I sat down in the little dining-room under the illustrated calendars, the chiselled daggers, and the leather bottles from the Sudan which a brother of M. Meaulnes, who had been in the marines, had brought home from his distant travels....

Augustin left me there alone for a moment before the meal, and in the next room, where his mother had prepared his luggage, I heard him tell her, in a slightly lowered voice, not to unpack his trunk--as his journey was perhaps only delayed....