AFTER FOUR O’CLOCK

Until then I had never loafed about in the streets with the other village boys. An affection of the hip from which I had suffered up to this year 189.. had made me nervous and wretched. I still see myself chasing the nimble schoolboys in the alleys round our home, hopping wretchedly on one leg....

So I was seldom allowed to go out, and I recall that Millie, who was very proud of me, more than once brought me home and boxed my ears for having been caught hopping thus with some village urchins.

The arrival of Augustin Meaulnes, at the very time of my cure, marked the beginning of a new life.

Before his coming, a dreary evening of loneliness began for me when lessons were over at four. Father was in the habit of carrying into the dining-room grate the fire remaining in the classroom stove; and, little by little, the last boys who had lingered behind left the chilled building, thick with clouds of smoke. There were still a few games, some galloping races in the playground, then night came; the two pupils who had swept the classroom fetched their hoods and cloaks, and with their baskets under their arms went away quickly, leaving the big gate open....

Then, as long as there was a ray of light, I stopped in the record-room at the town hall, with its dead flies and posters that flapped in the draught, and I read, sitting on an old weighing-machine, close to a window looking on the garden.

When it was quite dark, and the dogs of the neighbouring farm began to howl and a light was seen at the window of our little kitchen, then I went home. Mother had begun to get supper ready. I climbed three steps of the attic stairs, sat down without a word and, leaning my head on the cold rails of the bannisters, watched Millie light her fire in this narrow kitchen where the flame of one candle flickered....

But some one has come who has taken from me these peaceful, childlike delights. Some one has blown out the candle which lit up for me the gentle motherly face bent over the evening meal. Some one has extinguished the lamp around which, at night, we were a happy family, when Father had fixed the wooden shutters over the glass doors. And he was Augustin Meaulnes, whom the other fellows soon called ‘Admiral Meaulnes.’

As soon as he became a boarder with us, that is, from the early days of December, the school was no longer deserted in the evening after four. Every day then, in the classroom, despite the cold from the swinging door and the shouts and clatter of the cleaners with their pails of water, a score of the big boys, both those from the countryside and the village, gathered round Meaulnes. Long discussions, never-ending arguments followed, into which I was drawn restlessly but with pleasure. Meaulnes never said anything, but it was because of him that repeatedly one chatterbox or another, making of himself the centre of the group, and taking in turn each of his noisily approving friends as witness, would relate some long story of poaching, which the others followed with gaping mouths and inward laughter.

Sitting on a desk and swinging his legs, Meaulnes was thoughtful. At exciting moments he used also to laugh, but softly, as though he reserved his real laughter for some better story known only to himself. Then, as night fell and no more light came from the classroom windows on the throng of boys, Meaulnes used suddenly to get up, and pushing his way through, call out:

‘Come on! Let’s go!’

Then all followed him and until pitch dark one could hear them shouting, towards the heights of the village.

* * * * *

It came about now that I went with them. With Meaulnes, I went at milking-time to barn doors just outside the village. We entered shops, and the weaver, between two clicks of his loom, used to say out of his darkness: ‘Ha! the schoolboys.’

Generally, at dinner-time, we were to be found quite near the Higher Elementary School with Desnoues, the wheelwright, who was also a blacksmith. His shop was an old inn with big double-leaf doors, always kept open. From the street you could hear the squeak of the forge bellows, and you could sometimes make out, by the glow of the forge fire, in this dark and noisy place, country folk who had stopped their cart to have a chat, or a schoolboy like us, his back to a door, a silent onlooker.

And it is there that everything began, about eight days before Christmas.