Читать книгу Journal of Small Things - Helen Mackay - Страница 10

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The beggars came as usual to the château for their Friday morning sous. There were the usual dozen of them; old men, and women with babies, and old women, and Margotte, the girl who was innocente, with her nodding head and hands that would never keep still. They came out of their holes in the marble quarries, and from nobody knew quite where, according to their long custom. All that was just as usual. But they were not as usual.

They were angry because Venus and Olga, the great Danes of the moat bridge, barked at them. Venus and Olga always barked at them, but the beggars never had been angry before. Before, they had been, always, apologetic and conciliatory.

An old woman with wild white hair screamed at the butler who came with the sous, and a young woman with a baby in her arms and two babies hiding in her skirts, shook her fist at the château windows. There was a sound of growling, snarling voices, more ugly than the dogs' barking, in the court of the lime trees.

I went out to talk with the beggars. I was afraid of them, ridiculously and terribly, as one is afraid of things in dreams. That especially terrible fear which belongs to dreams, exaggerated, absurd, seemed to be fallen, suddenly, somehow, upon everything.

I was afraid of the wild white hair of the old woman in the shawl, and of Margotte's twitching, clutching, crazy hands.

I do not want to write about this day. I will always try not to remember it.

After dinner we walked in the garden and along the rampart walls. We went to feed the rabbits. How absurd to be heartbroken because it may be the last time that we ever shall feed cabbage-leaves to the rabbits!

Now, writing in the north-tower room, I feel a strange commotion in the village. How wide-awake the village is, so late! There are footsteps going up and down the streets, up and down, and voices, under the ramparts. The sound of footsteps and voices is strange in the night. Why are the people going up and down like that? Of what are they talking? There is the sound of a drum.

The sound of the drum comes across the moat, past the Dungeon Tower, through the lime trees of the entrance court, along the dim halls and corridors.

The drumming stops.

A man's voice takes up the reading out, very loud, of something, to the hush that has fallen on footsteps and voices.