Читать книгу Brigadier Frederick, The Dean's Watch - Erckmann-Chatrian - Страница 3

When I was brigadier forester at Steinbach, said Father Frederick to me, and when I was the inspector of the most beautiful forest district in all the department of Saverne, I had a pretty cottage, shaded by trees, the garden and orchard behind filled with apple trees, plum trees, and pear trees, covered with fruit in the autumn; with that four acres of meadow land along the bank of the river; when the grandmother, Anne, in spite of her eighty years, still spun behind the stove, and was able to help about the house; when my wife and daughter kept house and superintended the stables and the cultivation of our land, and when weeks, months, and years passed in their tranquility like a single day. If at that time any one had said to me, "See here, Brigadier Frederick, look at this great valley of Alsace, that extends to the banks of the Rhine; its hundreds of villages, surrounded by harvests of all kinds: tobacco, hops, madder, hemp, flax, wheat, barley and oats, over which rushes the wind as over the sea; those high factory chimneys, vomiting clouds of smoke into the air; those wind-mills and sawmills; those hills, covered with vines; those great forests of beech and fir trees, the best in France for ship-building; those old castles, in ruins for centuries past, on the summits of the mountains; those fortresses of Neuf-Brisach, Schlestadt, Phalsbourg, Bitche, that defend the passes of the Vosges. Look, brigadier, as far as a man's eye can reach from the line of Wissembourg to Belfort. Well, in a few years all that will belong to the Prussians; they will be the masters of all; they will have garrisons everywhere; they will levy taxes; they will send preceptors, censors, foresters, and schoolmasters into all the villages, and the inhabitants will bend their backs; they will go through the military drill in the German ranks, commanded by the feldwebel1 of the Emperor William." If any one had told me that, I would have thought the man was mad, and, even in my indignation, I should have been very likely to have given him a backhander across the face.

He would only have told the truth, however, and he would not even have said enough, for we have seen many other things; and the most terrible thing of all for me, who had never quitted the mountain, is to see myself, at my old age, in this garret, from which I can see only the tiles and chimney-pots; alone, abandoned by Heaven and earth, and thinking day and night of that frightful story.

Yes, George, the most terrible thing is to think! Foxes and wolves that are wounded lick themselves and get well. Kids and hares that are hurt either die at once, or else hide in a thicket and end by recovering. When a dog's puppies are taken away, the poor beast pines for a few days; then she forgets, and all is forgotten. But we men cannot forget, and as time goes on we realize our misery more and more, and we see many sad things that we had not felt at first. Injustice, bad faith, selfishness, all grow up before our eyes like thorns and briers.

However, since you desire to know how I happened to get into this hovel in the heart of La Villette, and the way in which I have passed my life up to the present time, I will not refuse to answer you. You can question many other people beside myself; persons of different occupations – workmen, peasants emigrated from down yonder; all the tumble-down houses of La Villette and La Chapelle are filled with them. I have heard that more than two hundred thousand have left. It is possible. When I quitted the country the roads were already overcrowded.

But you know all about these things as well as I do; so I will tell about what concerns me alone, beginning at the beginning. That will be the simplest way.

When your grandfather, M. Münsch, the President of the Tribunal, obtained promotion, in 1865, and left for Brittany, I was very glad of it, in one way, for he deserved to be promoted; I have never seen a better or more learned man. Saverne was not the place for him. But, on the other hand, I was very sorry for it. My father, the former forester of Dôsenheim, had never spoken to me of President Münsch but with the greatest respect, repeating to me, over and over again, that he was our benefactor, that he had always liked our family. I myself owed to him my good post at Steinbach, and it was also on his recommendation that I got my wife, Catherine Burat, the only daughter of the former brigadier, Martin Burat.

After that, you can readily believe that, in going to make my report at Saverne, it was always with emotion that I gazed upon that good house, where, for twenty years, I had been so kindly received, and I regretted that noble man; it made my heart very sad. And, naturally, we missed very much, no longer having you to spend the vacations with us. We were so used to having you, that, long in advance, we would say: "The month of September is coming round; little George will soon be here."

My wife arranged the bed upstairs; she put lavender in the well-bleached sheets, and she washed the floor and window-panes. I prepared snares for the thrushes and bait of all kinds for the trout; I repaired the tomtits' hut under the rocks; I tried the whistles for the bird-calls, and made new ones with lead and geese bones; I arranged everything in order in our boxes – the hooks, the lines, the flies, made of cock feathers; laughing beforehand at the pleasure of seeing you rummage among them, and of hearing you say: "See here, Father Frederick, you must wake me up to-morrow morning at two o'clock, without fail; we will start long before day!"

I knew very well that you would sleep like a top till I should come to shake you and to scold you for your laziness; but at night, before going to bed, you always wanted to be up at two o'clock, or even at midnight; that amused me greatly.

And then I saw you in the hut, keeping so still while I whistled on the bird-call that you scarcely dared to breathe; I heard you trembling on the moss when the jackdaws and thrushes arrived, wheeling under the trees to see; I heard you whisper, softly: "There they are, there they are!"

You were almost beside yourself when there came a great cloud of tomtits, which usually happened just at daybreak.

Yes, George, all these things rejoiced my heart, and I looked forward to the vacations with as much impatience perhaps as you did. Our little Marie-Rose also rejoiced in the thought of soon seeing you again; she hastened to plait new snares and to repair the meshes of the nets which had got broken the year before. But then all was over; you were never to return, and we knew it well.

Two or three times that poor idiot Calas, who looked after our cows in the field, seeing afar off on the other slope of the valley some persons who were on their way to Dôsenheim, came running in, crying, with his mouth open as far as his ears, "Here he is, here he is! It is he; I recognise him; he has his bundle under his arm!"

And Ragot barked at the heels of that idiot. I should have liked to have knocked them both over, for we had learned of your arrival at Rennes, and the President himself had written that you regretted Steinbach every day. I was in a bad enough humour, without listening to such cries.

Often, too, my wife and Marie-Rose, while arranging the fruit on the garret floor, would say: "What fine melting pears, what good gray rennets! Ah! if George returned, he would roll them round from morning till night. He would do nothing but run up and down stairs." And then they would smile, with tears in their eyes.

And how often I myself, returning from the bird-catching, and throwing on the table my bunches of tomtits, have I not cried: "Look! there are ten or twelve dozen of them. What is the good of them now the boy is no longer here? Might as well give them to the cat; for my part, I despise them."

That was true, George; I never had a taste for tomtits, or even for thrushes. I always liked better a good quarter of beef, with now and then only a little bit of game, by way of change.

Well, it is thus that the time passed just after your departure. That lasted for some months, and finally our ideas took another course, and that the more because, in the month of January, 1867, a great misfortune happened to us.