THE BURDEN

School was to begin again on the Monday. On Saturday evening about five, a woman from the estate appeared in the playground where I was busy sawing wood for the winter. She came to tell me that a little girl was born at the Sand Pit. The confinement had been difficult. At nine in the evening, the midwife from Préveranges had been called. At midnight the horse had been once more harnessed to fetch the Vierzon doctor. He had had to use forceps. The little girl’s head was injured and she screamed much, but appeared likely to live. Yvonne de Galais was at present prostrate, but she had suffered and struggled through with extraordinary courage.

Immediately I left my job, ran in to change my coat, and, content on the whole with the news, followed the good woman as far as the Sand Pit. With great care I climbed up the narrow wooden stairs leading to the first floor, anxious not to wake either of the patients. And there M. de Galais, tired but happy, made me go into the room where the cradle, draped in curtains, had been provisionally installed.

I had never been in a house on the very day a baby had been born. How quaint, mysterious, and good it seemed to me! It was such a beautiful evening--a true summer evening--that M. de Galais had not hesitated to open the window which looked on the yard. He leaned by my side on the window-sill and told me the story of the night in full detail but happily, and as I listened I became vaguely conscious of someone from a strange country now present in the room with us....

Then under the curtains the stranger began to cry, a shrill, prolonged cry.... And M. de Galais said in a soft voice, ‘It’s that wound on the head makes her cry.’

Mechanically he began to rock the bundle of curtains, and you felt he had been doing this ever since morning, acquiring the habit at once.

‘She has already laughed,’ he said, ‘and she takes hold of one’s finger. But you’ve not seen her yet?’

He opened the curtains and I saw a little face, red and puffed, the top of the head was pear-shaped and deformed by the forceps.

‘That’s nothing,’ said M. de Galais; ‘the doctor says it will set itself right.... Give her your finger, she’ll hold on to it.’

I was there, discovering an unknown world. My heart was full of a strange joy I had never felt before.

M. de Galais cautiously peeped in at the young mother’s door. She was not asleep.

‘You can come in,’ he said.

She lay prostrate, her feverish face in the midst of her unloosened fair hair. She held out her hand to me, smiling in a tired way. I congratulated her on her daughter. And in a voice that was a little hoarse and unusually harsh--the harshness of one just back from a fight, ‘Yes, but they have injured her so!’

I had to go soon after, not to tire her.

* * * * *

The next day was a Sunday, and in the afternoon I hurried almost cheerfully to the Sand Pit. On the front door was pinned a notice which stopped my hand on its way to the bell.

_Please do not ring_

I did not guess what it referred to. I knocked quite loud. I heard, inside, muffled steps hastening. Someone I did not know--it was the doctor from Vierzon--opened the door.

‘Well! What’s the matter?’ I said quickly.

‘Hush! Hush!’ he replied in a low voice, and troubled. ‘The little girl nearly died in the night. And the mother’s very ill.’

Completely disconcerted, I followed him on tiptoe up to the first floor. The little girl, asleep in her cradle, was dreadfully pale and white, like a little dead child. The doctor thought he would save her. As for the mother, he could not tell.... He gave me long explanations as to the one friend of the family. He spoke of congestion of the lungs, embolism. He was doubtful, he could not be sure.... M. de Galais came in, frightfully aged in two days, haggard and trembling.

He took me into the bedroom, scarcely knowing what he was doing:

‘She must not be alarmed,’ he said in a low voice; ‘the doctor says we must assure her that all is well.’

Extremely flushed, Yvonne de Galais lay with her head thrown back as on the previous day. Her cheeks and forehead were dark red; at times her eyes became distended as happens to one who is suffocating; she was fighting death with untold courage and sweetness.

She could not speak, but she held out a burning hand with such friendliness that I nearly burst into tears.

‘Well, now! Well, now!’ said M. de Galais loudly, with terrible cheerfulness that resembled madness. ‘You see, she doesn’t look too bad for an invalid!’

And I did not know what to reply, but kept in mine the hand, so terribly hot, of the dying young woman....

She tried to make an effort to say something, to ask me I know not what; she turned her eyes to me, then towards the window as if to make me understand I must go and fetch someone.... But then a dreadful fit of suffocation came upon her. Her beautiful blue eyes, which but a moment before had called me so tragically, distended, her cheeks and forehead darkened, and she struggled gently, endeavouring to the end to restrain her terror and despair. Doctors and women hurried to her help with a flask of oxygen, towels, and bottles, while the old man bending over her was shouting in his rough and shaky voice--shouting as if she was already far away from him: ‘Don’t be frightened Yvonne. It’s nothing. No need to be afraid!’

Then the crisis passed. She managed to breathe a little, yet she continued to be half suffocated, her eyes white, her head thrown back, still struggling, but unable, even for a moment, to look at me or to speak, to emerge from the abyss into which she had already sunk.

... And as I was entirely useless, I made up my mind to go. I could no doubt have stayed a moment longer, and at this thought I feel overwhelmed by terrible remorse. But how could one tell? I still hoped. Still tried to convince myself death could not be so near.

When I reached the edge of the firs, behind the house, that last look of Yvonne de Galais towards the window came back to my mind, and I scanned with the attention of a sentry or a man-hunter the depths of that wood from which Augustin had come in former days and into which he had fled this last winter. Alas, nothing stirred. Not one suspicious shadow; not a branch that moved. But at length, out there, towards the lane coming from Préveranges, I heard the faint sound of a bell; soon a child in a red _calotte_ and black overall appeared at the bend, a priest was following him.... And I walked away fighting back my tears.

* * * * *

School was to start next day. At seven o’clock there were already two or three boys in the playground. I hesitated a long while before coming down, before showing myself. And when I appeared at last, unlocking the door of the mouldy classroom which had been closed for two months, what I most dreaded happened: I saw the biggest of the boys leave a group of youngsters playing under the shelter and advance towards me. He came to tell me that ‘the young lady at the Sand Pit had died at nightfall on the previous evening.’

Everything turns to confusion, everything mingles with this grief. It seems to me now that never again shall I have the courage to start school. Only to cross the playground is an effort which will break me up. Everything is painful, everything is bitter, now that she is dead. The world is empty, holidays ended. Ended the long country drives, ended the mysterious fête.... Life is again the burden it was of old.

I tell the children there will be no school this morning. They go away in small groups to carry the news to others about the countryside. As for me, I take my black hat, a mourning coat I have, and start wretchedly towards the Sand Pit.

I am in front of the house we had sought three years ago! It is in this house that Yvonne de Galais, Augustin Meaulnes’ wife, died yesterday evening. A stranger would take it for a chapel, so great is the silence which has settled since yesterday on this desolate spot.

So this is what this beautiful morning of the new school year, this treacherous autumn sun which glides under the branches, had in store for us. How could I fight against hideous revolt and a blinding flood of tears! We had again found the beautiful girl. We had won her. She was my friend’s wife and I myself loved her with that deep, secret friendship which is never told. I used to look at her and be happy like a little child. I might one day have married another girl, and she would have been the first to whom I should have confided the great secret news....

Yesterday’s notice has been left close to the bell on one side of the door. The coffin has already been brought into the hall downstairs. In the room on the first floor, it is the child’s nurse who greets me, relates to me the end, and gently pushes the door ajar.... She is there. No more fever nor struggle. No more flush nor waiting. Nothing but silence, and, framed in cotton wool, a hard face, unsensitive and white, a dead forehead from which the hair rises thick and stiff.

M. de Galais, crouched in one corner with his back to us, is there in his socks, searching with tragic obstinacy amongst a confusion of drawers he has pulled out of a cupboard. Now and again he takes out of them some old and already faded photographs of his daughter, and sobs shake his shoulders like a burst of laughter.

The funeral is for midday. The doctor fears the rapid decomposition which sometimes follows on an embolism. This is why the face, as well as the whole body, is surrounded by cotton wool soaked in carbolic.

The last toilet has been made--she had been dressed in her beautiful frock of dark blue velvet bespangled with little silver stars, its fine but old-fashioned leg-of-mutton sleeves flattened and folded under; but at the moment of bringing up the coffin it is found that there is not room to turn it in the very narrow corridor. It will have to be hauled up through the window from the outside, by means of a rope, and be lowered again in the same way.... It is then that M. de Galais, still bent over these ancient things amidst which he searches for some lost tokens, suddenly steps in with terrifying impetuosity.

‘Rather than allow such a dreadful thing to be done,’ he says, in a voice broken by tears and anger, ‘I will take her myself in my arms and carry her down....’

And he would do as he says at the risk of fainting halfway and crashing down with her!

Then I offer myself, deciding on the only possible course of action; with the help of a doctor and a nurse, placing one arm under the back of the stretched-out dead woman, the other under her legs, I gather her against my breast. Seated on my left arm, her shoulders resting on the right one, her drooping head uplifted under my chin, she weighs terribly against my heart. I walk down slowly step after step along the stiff flight of stairs, while in the room below all is being prepared.

My arms soon ache with fatigue. At each step, with this load on my breast, I am more out of breath. Clinging to the inert and heavy body, I lower my head towards the head of her I carry. I breathe heavily and her fair hair enters my mouth, dead hair with a taste of the earth. This taste of earth and of death, this weight on my heart, that is all that is left to me of the great adventure and of you, Yvonne de Galais, the woman so long sought--so loved....