FRANTZ’S HOUSE

I had to remain shut up in the school during the whole of the following day, a prey to dull anxiety, feeling but little reassured by the happy ending to yesterday’s scene. Immediately after the hour of ‘private study’ which follows afternoon school, I made my way to the Sand Pit. Night was falling when I reached the avenue of firs leading to the house. The shutters were already closed. I feared to intrude by coming at so late an hour the day after a wedding. So I prowled about close to the edge of the garden and in the neighbouring fields for a long while, hoping all the time to see some one come out of the closed house.... But my hopes were in vain. Nothing stirred, not even in the adjoining farm. And I had to go home, haunted by the gloomiest forebodings.

This uncertainty lasted on next day, a Saturday. In the evening I made haste to get my cape, my stick, a piece of bread to eat on the way, and reached the Sand Pit to find everything closed up there just as the day before.... A little light on the first floor; but no noise, not a movement.... At the farmhouse, however, I now noticed, from the yard, the front door left open, the fire burning in the great kitchen, and I heard a noise of voices and footsteps as is usual at supper time. This reassured me without telling me much. I could not say anything to these people nor ask them anything. And I went back to resume my watch, to wait in vain, thinking at any moment to see the door open and the tall form of Meaulnes emerge.

It was only on Sunday, during the afternoon, that I resolved to pull the bell at the Sand Pit. While I was making my way up the bare hills, I heard in the distance the church bells ringing for vespers on that winter Sunday. I felt lonely and distressed. I do not know what sad foreboding overwhelmed me. And I was only partly surprised when, in answer to my ring, M. de Galais appeared alone and spoke to me almost in whispers: Yvonne de Galais was in bed with a high fever; Meaulnes had been obliged to leave on Friday morning to go on a long journey; no one knew when he would come back....

And as the old man, very embarrassed, very sad, did not ask me to come in, I at once said good-bye to him. The door shut and I remained on the doorstep for a moment, my heart torn, my mind in chaos, watching without knowing why a branch of dead wistaria which the wind swayed in a beam of sunshine.

Thus the secret remorse, which Meaulnes had carried within him since his stay in Paris, had ended by proving too strong. My big friend had been forced in the end to let go of the happiness to which he had clung so obstinately.

Every Thursday and Sunday I came to ask news of Yvonne de Galais until the evening when at last, being convalescent, she sent word for me to come in. I found her sitting by the fire in the drawing-room with its low wide window looking on the grounds and the woods. She was not pale as I had imagined she would be, but on the contrary feverish, with bright red patches under the eyes and in a state of extreme agitation. Though she still seemed very weak, she was fully dressed. She hardly spoke, but said each sentence with extraordinary animation as though she were longing to convince herself that happiness had not yet vanished.... I have no memory of what we said. I remember only that, with some hesitation, I came to ask when Meaulnes would be back.

‘I don’t know when he will come back,’ she replied quickly.

There was entreaty in her eyes and I refrained from asking more.

I often went to see her. I often talked to her by the fire in that low drawing-room where night came quicker than anywhere else. She never spoke about herself or her hidden grief. But she never tired of making me relate in all its details our schoolboy life at Sainte-Agathe.

She listened to the tale of our youthful troubles with a grave, tender interest, almost maternal. She showed no surprise at anything, not even at our most daring, most dangerous childish pranks. This thoughtful tenderness which she had inherited from M. de Galais, had not been exhausted by her brother’s deplorable adventures. The only lament to which the past prompted her was, I think, at not having been enough her brother’s true friend, for on the day of his great disaster he had not dared to tell her more than any one else, and he had thought himself for ever lost. And, after all, it was indeed a heavy task the young woman had assumed--a perilous task that of seconding a mind as madly fantastic as was her brother’s; an overwhelming task when it was a matter of joining one’s lot with so adventurous a spirit as my friend Admiral Meaulnes.

* * * * *

One day she gave me the most touching, I could almost say the most mysterious proof of this faith she kept in her brother’s childish dreams, and the care she took to preserve at least some fragments of the dream in which he had lived up to his twentieth year.

It was during a desolate evening of April, very much like autumn. For nearly a month we had enjoyed a softly premature spring and, accompanied by M. de Galais, the dear woman had again resumed the long walks she was fond of. But that day, the old man being tired and myself free, she asked me to go with her in spite of the threatening weather. The storm--rain and hail--caught us more than two kilometres away from the Sand Pit as we walked by the lake. Under the shed where we sought shelter from the never-ending shower, the wind was icy cold, and we stood close to one another, lost in thought in front of the darkened landscape. I still picture her, wearing a soft neat dress and looking pale and worried.

‘We must go back,’ she kept saying. ‘We’ve been gone so long. What might not have happened?’

But to my surprise, when at last it became possible to leave our shelter, the young woman, instead of turning back towards the Sand Pit, went on her way and asked me to follow her. After a long walk we reached a house I did not know, standing by itself at the side of a rutted lane which must have led towards Préveranges. It was a small private house with a slate roof, only marked out from the type usual in the district by its isolation and remoteness.

Any one watching Yvonne de Galais would have believed the house belonged to us and that we had left it during a long journey. She stooped to open the small iron gate, and she made haste to inspect anxiously the lonely spot. A big yard, overgrown by weeds where children seemed to have come to play during the long dragging evenings at the end of winter, was hollowed out by the rain. A hoop was soaking in a puddle. The heavy shower had left only trails of white gravel in the small gardens which the children had bestrewed with flowers and peas. And we at last discovered, huddled together against the step of one of the damp doors, a whole brood of chickens quite drenched. Most of them were dead under the stiffened wings and the crumpled feathers of the mother.

The dear woman, fronted by so pitiful a sight, gave a stifled cry. She bent down, disregarding water and mud, pulled out the live chickens from the dead, and wrapped them in a fold of her cloak. Then we went into the house, of which she had the key. Four doors opened out of a narrow passage into which swept a gust of wind. Yvonne de Galais opened the first door on our right and made me go into a dark room, where, after a moment of uncertainty, I made out a tall looking-glass and a small bed covered with a red silk eiderdown, in peasant fashion. As for her, having for a moment searched in other parts of the dwelling, she came back with a flat basket filled with down, which she delicately slipped under the eiderdown. And while a languid ray of sunshine, the first and last of the day, made both our faces paler and the dusk more gloomy, we stood there, frozen and worried, in this strange house!

From time to time she would look inside the feverish nest, taking away another dead chicken to prevent it causing the death of the others. And each time it seemed to us that something, perhaps a gust of wind through the broken panes of the attic, perhaps the mysterious sorrow of unknown children, was silently lamenting.

‘This was Frantz’s house when he was little,’ my companion at last said to me. ‘He’d wanted a house all his own, far from every one, in which he could go to play, enjoy himself and live just as he pleased. Father had found this fancy so extraordinary, so funny, that he hadn’t refused. And whenever it pleased him, on a Thursday or Sunday, no matter when, Frantz would go and live at his house like a man. Children of the neighbouring farms used to come to play with him, help him with housekeeping, work in the garden. It was a wonderful game! And at night time he was not afraid of sleeping alone. As for us, we admired him so much, we never once thought of being anxious.

‘Now, the house is empty,’ she went on with a sigh; ‘it has been so for a long time. M. de Galais, altered by age and grief, has never done anything to trace my brother or call him back. And what could he have done? But I often pass this way. Little peasant children, from hereabout, come to play in the yard as in the old days. It pleases me to pretend they are Frantz’s old friends; that he himself is still but a child and that he will soon come back with the fiancée of his choice. These children know me so well. I play with them. That brood of chicks was ours....’

It had needed this shower and this childlike dismay to induce her to confide to me the great grief of which she had never spoken, her deep regret at having lost a brother so mad, so charming, so much admired.

And I listened to her, not knowing what to reply, my heart heavy with suppressed sobs....

Then, having closed the doors and the gate and replaced the chickens in their wooden hutch at the back of the house, she sadly took my arm and I led her home.

* * * * *

Weeks and months went by. Days now of the past! Lost happiness! This girl who had been the fairy, the princess, the mysterious love dream of our youth, it was now my lot to take by the arm, finding the necessary words to soften her grief, while my friend had run away. What can I now say of these days, of these evening talks after school-hours on the hill of Saint-Benoist-des-Champs, of these walks during which the one thing we ought to have discussed was the only one concerning which we were resolved to keep silent? The only memory I have preserved, though already dimmed, is that of a beautiful face grown thinner, of two eyes whose lids slowly lower when they look at me, as if already they contemplate only an inner world.

And I remained her faithful companion--in this long wait we never spoke of--during a whole spring and a whole summer such as will never be again. Many a time we went back to Frantz’s house during an afternoon. She would open the doors to air the rooms, so that nothing should be mouldy on the young couple’s return. She tended the partly wild fowls which had their home in the poultry-yard. And on Thursdays and Sundays we helped to keep going the games of the neighbouring village children, whose laughter and shouts in this lonely spot made the small forsaken house appear more empty, more deserted than ever.