The Town Below. Roger Lemelin

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СКАЧАТЬ who launched the attack, the police bracing themselves to meet it. In three jumps Denis was upon the first officer, who made an attempt to seize him. The gendarme, however, had not reckoned with the strength of this sinewy youth of eighteen. With a sudden squirm Boucher bowled him over and continued on his headlong flight, bearing down upon the other two, a few yards farther on, who with the automobile constituted a sort of rampart. As they saw him coming they spread out a little that they might have a better chance of grabbing him; but just as he was within arm’s reach he quickly ducked and slipped through their hands like an eel. The automobile still barred his way and he did not have time to run around the end of it. In a couple of leaps he was over the hood, coming down on the pavement of the rue Franklin on the other side. Apples spilled from his shirt and the little Mulots fought with one another for possession of them. All of which happened so rapidly that the policeman who had been knocked down had not yet been able to pick himself up.

      “Hurrah!” shouted the urchins enthusiastically. They were punished for this by knee thrusts in the small of their backs; for the older lads were jealous of the fascination that Boucher exercised over the younger ones. His mocking laugh could be heard in the distance; he was proud of this successful manoeuvre. In the meantime, the Langevin twins and Jean Colin had likewise managed to slip past the flurried gendarmes, whose turn it was to hesitate now. Not knowing what to do but obeying a natural impulse under the circumstances, they gave up the chase after Boucher and set out in pursuit of the other three, their handsome blue uniforms crackling while their white bell-shaped helmets danced above their foreheads, which were bathed in sweat from the unaccustomed exertion, and took on the hilarious appearance of carnival masks.

      Denis had continued down the rue Montmagny. Germaine Colin offered him a refuge in her house, but he ran jauntily on past her. The two Langevins and Jean Colin, with the police close on their heels, whirled at the corner of the rue Chateauguay and dashed down that street. They had not gone far when, after pausing for a few seconds, they suddenly turned to the left. Paying no attention to the dog that yelped in summer and in winter ran in the dog-sled derby, they briskly clambered over a fence, made their way over the roofs of four sheds, dropped down into a yard, and then climbed some more fences. Unexpectedly, they found themselves in the garden belonging to the churchwarden Zépherin Lévesque, which was the envy of the parish. It was separated from the adjoining property by a veritable palisade. Anxiously, they ran over to the gate, but it was locked. As they huddled in the entryway they heard women’s voices.

      “My Lise back from the convent! It’s too good to be true, my dear. What a charming life we are going to arrange for ourselves. With your education you are sure to be made president of the Daughters of Mary. I must say I’ve had my fill of that Eugénie Clichoteux who is always the centre of everything, at entertainments and in church.”

      The pleasant but sulky voice of a young girl, a voice modulated by long recital of lessons, broke in upon this flow of words.

      “I love you a great deal, Mama, but I cannot understand your ambitions. I’m afraid it’s going to be dreadfully boring here. The boys fighting and screaming, the women wrangling from their balconies — it seems to me that was not the way I imagined my life in the outside world would be. My girlfriends —”

      “Conceited young thing!” Robert Langevin, ordinarily timid enough, was indignant.

      The youths in their anxiety listened distractedly to this strange talk. Their hearts were thumping, the sweat glistening on their foreheads. They pictured to themselves a prudish young miss in glasses, with her braids under her chin, a rickety neck, and a small head that came up to a point and only needed an old lady’s bonnet to fit her out for attending a wake in some wealthy home.

      “You are a woman now, my daughter, and you must learn to care for such things.” Madame Lévesque spoke in an offhand manner, inflating her voice as she uttered the most sonorous words in her vocabulary. She had been saving them up for ten years for this brilliant offspring of hers who had been graduated from a fashionable convent school. “Your girlfriends, my daughter,” she went on, “must be left to lead their own lives. If you only realized how different things are from your dreams.”

      “But really, Mama, this place —?”

      “You’ll come to love it, you’ll see. You will be queen here! Take your father’s case. When I first knew him he had his little aristocratic tastes. But he was a businessman. And with a few dollars, he is the leading citizen here, while at Saint-Dominique —”

      “Darling Papa! I love him. Does he absolutely insist on my singing tonight?”

      “Indeed he does! Monsieur le Député will be there, and Eugénie will be eaten up with jealousy. What a triumph for you. Don’t refuse, Lise.”

      “Let’s do something!” said Colin, who was worried at not being able to find a hiding place.

      “Break down the door!” suggested Jacques Langevin.

      They hurled themselves against the solid wooden panel, but only succeeded in making a lot of noise. The sweat on their foreheads was cold, for the police were already in the garden next door.

      “That must be the milkman, who wants to get into the yard,” said Madame Lévesque. “Go open the gate for him, will you, Lise?”

      As the girl came out of the house she was still immersed in thinking of her new life, of the roseate dreams that she had cherished for so long and that now were clouded over with a dark uncertainty. It was, accordingly, with something of a shock that she encountered the defiant group on the other side of the gate. She was surprised at finding herself face to face with the Langevin twins, each of whom was short and ruddy with a mop of red hair. She let her eyes roam over Jean, a strapping youth with blue eyes, a nut-brown complexion, and a burnished forehead fringed with unruly curls. The habits of the convent were strong within her, and at the sight of strangers of the opposite sex she had for a moment the illusory impression of chaste precincts being violated. Blushing deeply, she dropped her gaze, too frightened for words.

      “The police are after us,” Robert explained. He was flustered by Lise’s beauty.

      She glanced up at them timidly. Jean Colin appeared to be paralyzed by her presence. All he could see was that mouth of hers; the future hung on what she was about to say. When she spoke, it was as if in a dream.

      “Ah! So the police are after you?” She thought of the nobility of Old France, of those atrocious sans-culottes who had pursued the holy priests and the good bourgeois, so pale and haggard-looking. As a result of her reading she had some while since come to conceive of life as a possible repetition of all those chivalrous events with which the romances were so filled.

      “Quick!” she murmured mysteriously, as she opened the gate leading into the rue Colomb. She put them into the garage, and they were no sooner hidden than the breathless, impatient voices of their pursuers were heard.

      “You haven’t seen any young hoodlums down this way, have you, Mademoiselle?”

      The marauders held their breath, Jean Colin being unaware that his right hand was resting in a puddle of oil upon the workbench.

      In reply the girl mechanically stammered out a sentence or two that she had not had time to master. “Why, yes, I have! They ran through the gate there. I was afraid, so I locked it!”

      “Damn it!” bellowed one of the gendarmes. “We’ve let them get away again!”

      “They’re going,” whispered Jean. Nervously he ran his oil-stained hand over his damp brow; it left dark streaks behind it. There was a silence, and then the door opened part way.

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