Birds and Beasts 8

Birds and Beasts 8

The cat!

 

Jannot never stopped till he reached the woods, after darting across the

garden, leaping a brook, scurrying over the fields, breathless and

exhausted. Vague shadows loomed around him; flying footsteps sounded

about his path; suddenly, by the startled cry that escaped a little

creature which halted right before his nose, he knew he was in presence

of another rabbit.

 

“I am Jannot,” he said, in a low voice; “perhaps we are relations.”

 

From the first moment the rabbit saw him, he loaded him with polite

attentions, declared he loved him already, and offered him the

hospitality of his house; so the two of them jogged off in company. But

after a moment or two Goodman Rabbit stopped dead, saying—

 

“You’d best go by the clearing, and I through the scrub; it will never

do to let the polecat see us. We will meet at the foot of a great oak

you can’t help seeing.”

 

Jannot followed his companion’s advice; but no sooner were they together

again than the rabbit, after fifty yards or so, cried out once more—

 

“The place we’re in now is just as dangerous as the other. A wild-cat

lurks hereabouts, and slaughters whatever comes under his claws. You go

that way; I’ll go this. A rock you will see will serve as rendezvous.”

 

They reached the rock at the same moment, and then trotted off again.

They were just coming to a coppice of young trees with narrow winding

paths through it when his experienced friend called a halt for the third

time, crying—

 

“Well, we did well not to travel side by side. My advice is that we go

each his own way again, without bothering about one another, till we

come to the crossroads you’ll find down yonder. Ah! d’ye see those

snares? Mind you don’t get into them, for if the polecat and the

wild-cat are lords of the lands we have just been through, the poacher

rules here as monarch paramount.”

 

The advice was good, but its giver had no time to finish it; he was

caught by the foot in one of the gins, and the more he struggled to get

free, the tighter the dreadful noose was drawn.

 

“Help! help!” he clamoured.

 

But already Jannot was off and away, panic-stricken; he ran on and on,

never once stopping till he won back as quick as ever he could to the

edge of the woodland where he and Master Rabbit had first met.

 

“If the world is so strewn with dangers,” he thought to himself, “better

to live in peace and quietness in a hutch. What use in roaming the

woods, when death is at the journey’s end?”

 

Then in his mind’s eye he saw his mother again and his brothers; and the

safe shelter where they awaited his return seemed a far-off, happy

refuge he could hardly hope to reach.

 

Field-mice and weasels and martens were stirring in the dark underwood

and shaking the leaves. Suddenly a new terror, more appalling than all

the rest, gripped him; he thought he was being pursued. Then he dashed

out into the plain that lay clear in the moonlight, and, with ears

pricked, thinking all the while he could hear at his heels the

unwearying, unflagging trot, trot of the fell creatures that were on his

track, he pushed through hedges, leapt ditches, climbed banks.

 

He had his back to the moon, and two black shadows, the same he had seen

at the outset of his escapade, stretched out before him; this time they

went in front, never leaving him, and sometimes lengthening out to

portentous proportions.

 

No doubt about it, a whole host of enemies was after him!

 

At last his breath failed him and he sank down in despair, waiting for

death; but as it was a long time coming, he began to recover a little

courage, and, turning round, stared hard into the night.

 

Not a thing was visible amid the loneliness of the fields, and the moon

seemed to be grinning down at him from the sky.

 

Then he discovered that the two shadows that had terrified him so were

only the shadows of his own two ears. This was mortifying!

 

Day dawned by slow degrees; and presently he found himself back by the

brook, the ducks, the cow-shed and the kitchen-garden.

 

“Mind this,” his mother told him, “there’s no adventures so fine as to

match the pleasure of being safe at home, among the folks who love you.”

 

 

 

 

“Monsieur Friquet”

 

 

Nature had not been generous to the poor thing; Claire was born a

hunchback, and a hunchback she had grown up—if indeed she can be said

ever to have grown up—an undersized, sickly, suffering creature, who at

thirty was not as high, from head to heels, as a little girl of nine.

 

She had been left an orphan when quite a child; first her mother died,

and her father had not survived her long. So Claire had had to face the

world alone, with her own ten fingers for all her fortune. Her parents

had never spoilt her with overmuch indulgence. They were poor,

hardworking folks, who hardly knew what it was to smile. Even when they

were alive, she had led a lonely enough existence. Still, after their

death, she missed the life lived in common, the destitution shared with

others, the bustle of the hugger-mugger household, where scolding and

grumbling were by no means unknown. Her parents were her parents after

all; with them life had its happy moments, now and then.

 

[Illustration: “MONSIEUR FRIQUET”]

 

They were hard times now for Claire. Shut up all day long in the

unhealthy air of workrooms, she seemed to grow more and more emaciated,

and smaller and smaller every day. Nobody ever thought of pitying the

poor, uncouth being who sat sewing apart from the rest, who, with a

gentle humility, always sought the shade, where her deformity was less

noticeable; nobody ever dreamed of asking if there was a soul within

that misshapen body, and her great eyes—light blue, sickly-looking eyes,

which she would raise slowly and languidly, as if afraid of the

light—encountered only mockery and indifference from all about her.

 

The tall, handsome girls who sat round the sewing-table had nothing but

hard words for her; scarcely knowing why, yielding to a cruel impulse

which a little thought, if nothing better, would have checked, they

treated her vilely.

 

Little by little she had become the general butt of the workroom; one

dismal day in December a last outrage was added to all the rest.

 

An ill-conditioned cripple, a girl who had borne Claire a grudge from

the first day of her coming, because of their sisterhood in misfortune,

which caused twice as many gibes to be levelled at her own club-foot,

contrived to secrete a piece of silk, in order to accuse Claire of the

theft. She declared stoutly she had taken the piece and hidden it inside

her dress. In vain the poor girl, bursting into tears, swore she was

innocent. The head of the shop ordered her to strip. She begged

piteously for mercy, clasping her hands in supplication; but the cripple

moved heaven and earth to set the others against her. Rough hands were

laid on her; she was bruised and shaken and hurt; all she could do was

to stammer out appeals to their compassion; she was nearly fainting, and

the tears were streaming down her cheeks. No use; the poor back was

bared, and while the mistress was searching her, the pretty,

rosy-cheeked workgirls were feeling the deformity curiously, examining

what like a hump exactly was.

 

Claire had buried her face in her hands; her hair had fallen about her

ears, and there she stood, quite still and helpless, terrified at the

angry faces about her; her throat was dry and her whole body quivering

with overmastering agitation. She wished she was dead.

 

The mistress’s hard voice dismissing her roused her at last; she got to

her feet amidst the jeers of the workroom, buttoned her frock, collected

her needles and scissors, and, shuddering and shaking, catching her feet

in her skirts, she hurried to the door; there was a loud buzzing in her

ears, and she seemed to see everything through a sort of mist.

 

She dashed downstairs two steps at a time and reached the riverside

quays, looking in her despair for an unfrequented bridge from which an

unhappy hunchback might throw herself into the water and not be noticed.

But everywhere she seemed to see mocking eyes pursuing her.

 

By degrees she began to think of the dreadful publicity of such a death;

she saw herself dragged from the river, laid on the crowded bank, under

the eyes of a throng of curious onlookers, in the glaring light of day.

 

No, what she craved was a quiet death in some dark corner, where she

would be sheltered from prying looks.

 

She retraced her steps, bought a supply of charcoal, which she hid in a

fold of her gown, and made her way home. Her poor worn hands had helped

her—how hardly!—to live, now they should help her to die.

 

Possessed by these ideas, she pushed open the door of the room—and

suddenly stopped....

 

How, when, by what way had he got in, the little sparrow she saw beating

his wings against the walls, looking so scared and frightened, trying in

vain to find a way out of the garret he had invaded so impudently, like

the little good-for-nothing scamp he was?

 

Yes, she remembered; that morning, before leaving, she had left the

window ajar; but no doubt the wind had blown it to, and after coming in

unhindered, like a conquering hero taking possession of a new kingdom,

the bird was now a prisoner.

 

A prisoner? But why a prisoner? What had she and he in common? He only

asked to live, to fly, to soar in the free air, while she, she was fain

to die. Begone, little madcap! you shall have your freedom again.