A Prince of the Captivity (Unabridged). Buchan John

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СКАЧАТЬ supported his aunt’s commendation. He seemed wiry and strong, though he slouched heavily. He had a wispish blond beard which looked as if it had never been shaved, and sandy hair which was cut at long intervals by the blacksmith in Villers l’Evêque. His clothes were odd, for he wore corduroy trousers, much too small for him, which had once belonged to the deceased Raus, and though the first months of the year were chilly he was generally coatless. His face was always dirty, which, said the neighbours, was a disgrace to the Widow; but on Sundays he was smartened up, and appeared at mass in a celluloid collar and a queer old jacket with metal buttons. From long before the first light he was busy about the farm, and could be heard after dark had fallen whistling lugubriously as he fed the cattle.

      The steading was an ill-tended place—a vast midden surrounded by wooden pens and byres, with at one end a great brick barn, and at the other the single-storeyed dwelling-house. There was not much grown in the way of crops, only a few roots and a patch of barley, but the grass-lands along the brook were rich, and the Widow pastured no less than six cows. She had a special permit for this, which was ill-regarded in the neighbourhood, for she was a famous cheese-maker, and sold her cheese (at a starvation price) to the nearest German base-camp. Jules had a hard life of it, for he was cow-herd, milker, and man of all work; but he bore it with a simpleton’s apathy, clumping about the dirty yard in his wooden clogs, his shoulders bowed and his head on his chest. Now and then he was observed to straighten his back and listen, when the wind brought from the west the low grumble of distant guns. Then he would smile idiotically to himself, as if it was some play got up for his entertainment.

      Clearly a natural, all agreed. Marie’s husband was remembered as having been a little weak in his wits, and the son plainly took after him. Jules had large vacant blue eyes, and when he was spoken to his face took on a vacant simper. His habits were odd, for he would work hard for a week and then go off wandering, leaving his aunt to make the rafters ring with maledictions. On such occasions she would reveal shamelessly the family skeleton. “He is Jean Broecker’s own son,” she would declare, “feckless, witless, shiftless! But what would you have? An old woman cannot control an able-bodied idiot. Would that Raus were alive to lay a dog-whip on the scamp’s shoulders!” But the Widow’s wrath was short-lived, and when Jules returned he was not given a dog-whip but a special supper, and she would even bathe his inflamed feet. For it appeared that he was a mighty walker, and in his wanderings travelled far up and down the Meuse valley to places which no one in Villers l’Evêque had ever visited. He would tell foolish empty tales of his travels, and giggle over them. Beyond doubt, a natural!

      But a harmless one. Jules was not unpopular. For one thing he was socially inclined, and when he was idle would gossip with anyone in his queer high voice and clipped town accent. Sometimes he would talk about his life in Brussels, but his stories never reached any point—he would break off with a guffaw before the end. But he seemed to have picked up some good ideas about farming, and in the Three Parrots estaminet, which was the farmers’ house of call, he was sometimes listened to. He liked of an evening, if his work was finished in time, to go down to the village, and he patronised all three of the alehouses. He never stood treat, for he was not entrusted with money, and he never drank himself—did not like the smell of beer and brandy, he said, and made faces of disgust. His one vice was smoking, but unlike the other countryfolk he did not use a pipe—only cigarettes, which he was clever at rolling when anyone gave him tobacco. Now and then he was presented with a packet of cheap caporals which lasted him a long time, and he had generally a cigarette stuck behind his left ear as a sort of iron ration. People tolerated him because he was quiet and simple, and many even came to like him, for so far as his scattered wits allowed he was neighbourly. Also he provided the village with perpetual surprises. He seemed to be oblivious of the severe regime of the military occupation, and many prophesied early disaster.

      But no disaster came to this chartered libertine. Villers l’Evêque was a key-point, for it stood at the crossing of two great high roads and not three miles from the junction of two main railways. Therefore the discipline for its dwellers was strict. There were always second-line troops stationed near, and the beer-shops were usually full of Landsturm. At first Jules was made a butt of by the German soldiers, raw young peasants like himself for the most part, with a sprinkling of more elderly tradesmen. They played tricks on him, pulled a chair from beneath him, slipped lighted matches down his neck, and once gave him an explosive cigarette which badly burned his lips. But he was so good-humoured under this persecution that it presently ceased, and he was treated more like a pet dog or a mascot. They taught him their songs, which he sang in an absurd falsetto that became a recognised evening’s entertainment. Also they talked freely to him, for they could not regard anything so feckless as an enemy. Homesick boys who had picked up a little French would tell him of their recent doings—he was a good listener and quick at helping them out when they were at a loss for a word and relapsed into German. His pale eyes had sympathy in them, if little intelligence.

      Word of this village natural came to headquarters, and every now and then he had to appear before the local Commandant. These officers were frequently changed, but for the most part they were of the same type—elderly dug-outs who asked only for a quiet life. At such interviews Jules produced his papers, and told in a wailing recitative the simple story of his life. The worst that happened was usually a warning to stay at home and not tramp the country, lest he should find himself one fine day against a wall looking at a firing squad—at which he would grin sheepishly and nod his head. But one day he had a terrifying experience. There was a new Commandant, a Bavarian captain who had been temporarily invalided from the front line, a young man with an eye like an angry bird’s, and no bowels of compassion for simple folk. For two hours he kept Jules under the fire of his questions, which he delivered with a lowering brow and a menacing voice. “That animal may be dangerous,” he told his lieutenant. “He is witless, and so can be used as a tool by clever men. A telephone wire, you understand—a senseless thing over which news passes. He must be sent farther east.” But this Commandant was moved elsewhere in a week, and nothing more was heard of his threat. A more dangerous man, if Jules had had the sense to realise it, was a friendly, fatherly personage, who tried to draw him into confidences, and would suddenly ask questions in German and English. But Jules only stared dully at such experiments, until his inquisitor shrugged his shoulders and gave them up.

      Had anyone from Villers l’Evêque met Jules on the road on one of his tramps he would have seen only a shaggy young peasant—rather better shod than most peasants, since he had got the cobbler to make him a stout pair of marching boots—who seemed in high spirits, for he cried a greeting to every passer-by and would sing silly child’s songs in his high falsetto. But much of Jules’s travelling was done off the roads, where no one saw him, and in the dark of moonless nights. Then he was a different being. His clumsy gait and slouching carriage disappeared, and he would cover country at a pace which no peasant could have matched. Into queer places his road often took him. He would lie for long in a marshy meadow till a snipe’s bleat made him raise his head, and then another man would crawl through the reeds and the two would talk. Once he spent two days in the undergrowth of a wood close to a road where German columns passed without end. He seemed to have many friends. There was an old wood-cutter in the hills between the Meuse and the Ourthe who several times gave him shelter, and foresters in the Ardennes, and a blind woman who kept an inn outside Namur on the Seilles road. Indeed, there was a host of people who had something to say to him in whispers, and when he listened to them his face would lose its vacancy. They seemed to respect him too, and when they spoke to him their tone had not the condescension of the Villers folk…

      Sometimes he did strange things. In a lonely place at night he would hide himself for many hours, his head raised like that of a horse at covert-side who waits for the first music of the hounds. Often he waited till dawn and nothing came, but sometimes there would be a beat of wings far up in the air which was not the beat of a Fokker, and the noise would follow of a heavy body crushing the herbage. He would grope his way in the direction of the sound, and a man would appear from the machine with whom he spoke—and that speech was not French or Flemish. By and by the aeroplane would vanish again into the night sky, and Jules would look after it wistfully for a little, before by devious paths he took his road СКАЧАТЬ