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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Ramuntcho, by Pierre Loti
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Ramuntcho
+
+Author: Pierre Loti
+
+Translator: Henri Pene du Bois
+
+Release Date: January, 2006 [EBook #9616]
+Posting Date: June 16, 2009
+Last Updated: March 6, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RAMUNTCHO ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Dagny; and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+RAMUNTCHO
+
+By Pierre Loti
+
+
+Translated by Henri Pene du Bois
+
+
+
+
+PART I.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+The sad curlews, annunciators of the autumn, had just appeared in a
+mass in a gray squall, fleeing from the high sea under the threat of
+approaching tempests. At the mouth of the southern rivers, of the Adour,
+of the Nivelle, of the Bidassoa which runs by Spain, they wandered above
+the waters already cold, flying low, skimming, with their wings over the
+mirror-like surfaces. And their cries, at the fall of the October night,
+seemed to ring the annual half-death of the exhausted plants.
+
+On the Pyrenean lands, all bushes and vast woods, the melancholy of the
+rainy nights of declining seasons fell slowly, enveloping like a shroud,
+while Ramuntcho walked on the moss-covered path, without noise, shod
+with rope soles, supple and silent in his mountaineer's tread.
+
+Ramuntcho was coming on foot from a very long distance, ascending the
+regions neighboring the Bay of Biscay, toward his isolated house which
+stood above, in a great deal of shade, near the Spanish frontier.
+
+Around the solitary passer-by, who went up so quickly without trouble
+and whose march in sandals was not heard, distances more and more
+profound deepened on all sides, blended in twilight and mist.
+
+The autumn, the autumn marked itself everywhere. The corn, herb of the
+lowlands, so magnificently green in the Spring, displayed shades of dead
+straw in the depths of the valleys, and, on all the summits, beeches
+and oaks shed their leaves. The air was almost cold; an odorous humidity
+came out of the mossy earth and, at times, there came from above a light
+shower. One felt it near and anguishing, that season of clouds and of
+long rains, which returns every time with the same air of bringing the
+definitive exhaustion of saps and irremediable death,--but which passes
+like all things and which one forgets at the following spring.
+
+Everywhere, in the wet of the leaves strewing the earth, in the wet
+of the herbs long and bent, there was a sadness of death, a dumb
+resignation to fecund decomposition.
+
+But the autumn, when it comes to put an end to the plants, brings only
+a sort of far-off warning to man, a little more durable, who resists
+several winters and lets himself be lured several times by the charm
+of spring. Man, in the rainy nights of October and of November, feels
+especially the instinctive desire to seek shelter at home, to warm
+himself at the hearth, under the roof which so many thousand years
+amassed have taught him progressively to build.--And Ramuntcho felt
+awakening in the depths of his being the old ancestral aspirations for
+the Basque home of the country, the isolated home, unattached to the
+neighboring homes. He hastened his steps the more toward the primitive
+dwelling where his mother was waiting for him.
+
+Here and there, one perceived them in the distance, indistinct in the
+twilight, the Basque houses, very distant from one another, dots white
+or grayish, now in the depth of some gorge steeped in darkness, then on
+some ledge of the mountains with summits lost in the obscure sky. Almost
+inconsequential are these human habitations, in the immense and confused
+entirety of things; inconsequential and even annihilated quite, at
+this hour, before the majesty of the solitude and of the eternal forest
+nature.
+
+Ramuntcho ascended rapidly, lithe, bold and young, still a child, likely
+to play on his road as little mountaineers play, with a rock, a reed, or
+a twig that one whittles while walking. The air was growing sharper,
+the environment harsher, and already he ceased to hear the cries of the
+curlews, their rusty-pulley cries, on the rivers beneath. But Ramuntcho
+was singing one of those plaintive songs of the olden time, which are
+still transmitted in the depths of the distant lands, and his naive
+voice went through the mist or the rain, among the wet branches of the
+oaks, under the grand shroud, more and more sombre, of isolation, of
+autumn and of night.
+
+He stopped for an instant, pensive, to see a cart drawn by oxen pass
+at a great distance above him. The cowboy who drove the slow team sang
+also; through a bad and rocky path, they descended into a ravine bathed
+in shadows already nocturnal.
+
+And soon they disappeared in a turn of the path, masked suddenly by
+trees, as if they had vanished in an abyss. Then Ramuntcho felt the
+grasp of an unexpected melancholy, unexplained like most of his complex
+impressions, and, with an habitual gesture, while he resumed his less
+alert march, he brought down like a visor on his gray eyes, very sharp
+and very soft, the crown of his woolen Basque cap.
+
+Why?--What had to do with him this cart, this singing cowboy whom he
+did not even know? Evidently nothing--and yet, for having seen them
+disappear into a lodging, as they did doubtless every night, into some
+farm isolated in a lowland, a more exact realization had come to him of
+the humble life of the peasant, attached to the soil and to the native
+field, of those human lives as destitute of joy as beasts of burden, but
+with declines more prolonged and more lamentable. And, at the same time,
+through his mind had passed the intuitive anxiety for other places, for
+the thousand other things that one may see or do in this world and
+which one may enjoy; a chaos of troubling half thoughts, of atavic
+reminiscences and of phantoms had furtively marked themselves in the
+depths of his savage child's mind--
+
+For Ramuntcho was a mixture of two races very different and of two
+beings separated, if one may say it, by an abyss of several generations.
+Created by the sad fantasy of one of the refined personages of our
+dazzled epoch, he had been inscribed at his birth as the “son of an
+unknown father” and he bore no other name than that of his mother. So,
+he did not feel that he was quite similar to his companions in games and
+healthy fatigues.
+
+Silent for a moment, he walked less quickly toward his house, on the
+deserted paths winding on the heights. In him, the chaos of other
+things, of the luminous “other places”, of the splendors or of the
+terrors foreign to his own life, agitated itself confusedly, trying
+to disentangle itself--But no, all this, being indistinct and
+incomprehensible, remained formless in the darkness.
+
+At last, thinking no more of it, he began to sing his song again. The
+song told, in monotonous couplets, the complaint of a linen weaver whose
+lover in a distant war prolonged his absence. It was written in that
+mysterious Euskarian language, the age of which seems incalculable and
+the origin of which remains unknown. And little by little, under the
+influence of the ancient melody, of the wind and of the solitude,
+Ramuntcho found himself as he was at the beginning of his walk, a simple
+Basque mountaineer, sixteen or seventeen years old, formed like a man,
+but retaining the ignorance and the candor of a little boy.
+
+Soon he perceived Etchezar, his parish, its belfry massive as the
+dungeon of a fortress; near the church, some houses were grouped;
+others, more numerous, had preferred to be disseminated in the
+surroundings, among trees, in ravines or on bluffs. The night fell
+entirely, hastily that evening, because of the sombre veils hooked to
+the great summits.
+
+Around this village, above or in the valleys, the Basque country
+appeared, at that moment, like a confusion of gigantic, obscure masses.
+Long mists disarranged the perspectives; all the distances, all the
+depths had become inappreciable, the changing mountains seemed to have
+grown taller in the nebulous phantasmagoria of night. The hour, one knew
+not why, became strangely solemn, as if the shade of past centuries
+was to come out of the soil. On the vast lifting-up which is called the
+Pyrenees, one felt something soaring which was, perhaps, the finishing
+mind of that race, the fragments of which have been preserved and to
+which Ramuntcho belonged by his mother--
+
+And the child, composed of two essences so diverse, who was walking
+alone toward his dwelling, through the night and the rain, began again
+in the depth of his double being to feel the anxiety of inexplicable
+reminiscences.
+
+At last he arrived in front of his house,--which was very elevated, in
+the Basque fashion, with old wooden balconies under narrow windows, the
+glass of which threw into the night the light of a lamp. As he came
+near the entrance, the light noise of his walk became feebler in the
+thickness of the dead leaves: the leaves of those plane-trees shaped
+like vaults which, according to the usage of the land, form a sort of
+atrium before each dwelling.
+
+She recognized from afar the steps of her son, the serious Franchita,
+pale and straight in her black clothes,--the one who formerly had loved
+and followed the stranger; then, who, feeling her desertion approaching,
+had returned courageously to the village in order to inhabit alone the
+dilapidated house of her deceased parents. Rather than to live in the
+vast city, and to be troublesome and a solicitor there, she had quickly
+resolved to depart, to renounce everything, to make a simple Basque
+peasant of that little Ramuntcho, who, at his entrance in life, had worn
+gowns embroidered in white silk.
+
+It was fifteen years ago, fifteen years, when she returned,
+clandestinely, at a fall of night similar to this one. In the first days
+of this return, dumb and haughty to her former companions from fear of
+their disdain, she would go out only to go to church, her black cloth
+mantilla lowered on her eyes. Then, at length, when curiosity
+was appeased, she had returned to her habits, so valiantly and so
+irreproachably that all had forgiven her.
+
+To greet and embrace her son she smiled with joy and tenderness, but,
+silent by nature and reserved as both were, they said to each other only
+what it was useful to say.
+
+He sat at his accustomed place to eat the soup and the smoking
+dish which she served to him without speaking. The room, carefully
+kalsomined, was made gay by the sudden light of a flame of branches in
+the tall and wide chimney ornamented with a festoon of white calico.
+In frames, hooked in good order, there were images of Ramuntcho's first
+communion and different figures of saints with Basque legends; then the
+Virgin of Pilar, the Virgin of Anguish, and rosaries, and blessed palms.
+The kitchen utensils shone, in a line on shelves sealed to the walls;
+every shelf ornamented with one of those pink paper frills, cut in
+designs, which are manufactured in Spain and on which are printed,
+invariably, series of personages dancing with castanets, or scenes in
+the lives of the toreadors. In this white interior, before this joyful
+and clear chimney, one felt an impression of home, a tranquil welfare,
+which was augmented by the notion of the vast, wet, surrounding night,
+of the grand darkness of the valleys, of the mountains and of the woods.
+
+Franchita, as every evening, looked long at her son, looked at him
+embellishing and growing, taking more and more an air of decision and
+of force, as his brown mustache was more and more marked above his fresh
+lips.
+
+When he had supped, eaten with his young mountaineer's appetite several
+slices of bread and drunk two glasses of cider, he rose, saying:
+
+“I am going to sleep, for we have to work tonight.”
+
+“Ah!” exclaimed the mother, “and when are you to get up?”
+
+“At one o'clock, as soon as the moon sets. They will whistle under the
+window.”
+
+“What is it?”
+
+“Bundles of silk and bundles of velvet.”
+
+“With whom are you going?”
+
+“The same as usual: Arrochkoa, Florentino and the Iragola brothers. It
+is, as it was the other night, for Itchoua, with whom I have just made
+an engagement. Good-night, mother--Oh, we shall not be out late and,
+sure, I will be back before mass.”
+
+Then, Franchita leaned her head on the solid shoulder of her son, in
+a coaxing humor almost infantile, different suddenly from her habitual
+manner, and, her cheek against his, she remained tenderly leaning, as
+if to say in a confident abandonment of her will: “I am still troubled
+a little by those night undertakings; but, when I reflect, what you wish
+is always well; I am dependent on you, and you are everything--”
+
+On the shoulder of the stranger, formerly, it was her custom to lean and
+to abandon herself thus, in the time when she loved him.
+
+When Ramuntcho had gone to his little room, she stayed thinking for a
+longer time than usual before resuming her needlework. So, it became
+decidedly his trade, this night work in which one risks receiving the
+bullets of Spain's carbineers!--He had begun for amusement, in bravado,
+like most of them, and as his friend Arrochkoa was beginning, in the
+same band as he; then, little by little, he had made a necessity of this
+continual adventure in dark nights; he deserted more and more, for this
+rude trade, the open air workshop of the carpenter where she had placed
+him as an apprentice to carve beams out of oak trunks.
+
+And that was what he would be in life, her little Ramuntcho, so coddled
+formerly in his white gown and for whom she had formed naively so many
+dreams: a smuggler! Smuggler and pelota player,--two things which go
+well together and which are essentially Basque.
+
+She hesitated still, however, to let him follow that unexpected
+vocation. Not in disdain for smugglers, oh, no, for her father had been
+a smuggler; her two brothers also; the elder killed by a Spanish bullet
+in the forehead, one night that he was swimming across the Bidassoa, the
+second a refugee in America to escape the Bayonne prison; both respected
+for their audacity and their strength. No, but he, Ramuntcho, the son of
+the stranger, he, doubtless, might have had pretensions to lead a less
+harsh life than these men if, in a hasty and savage moment, she had
+not separated him from his father and brought him back to the Basque
+mountains. In truth, he was not heartless, Ramuntcho's father; when,
+fatally, he had wearied of her, he had made some efforts not to let her
+see it and never would he have abandoned her with her child if, in her
+pride, she had not quitted him. Perhaps it would be her duty to-day to
+write to him, to ask him to think of his son--
+
+And now the image of Gracieuse presented itself naturally to her mind,
+as it did every time she thought of Ramuntcho's future. She was the
+little betrothed whom she had been wishing for him for ten years. (In
+the sections of country unacquainted with modern fashions, it is usual
+to marry when very young and often to know and select one another for
+husband and wife in the first years of life.) A little girl with hair
+fluffed in a gold mist, daughter of a friend of her childhood, of a
+certain Dolores Detcharry, who had been always conceited--and who had
+remained contemptuous since the epoch of the great fault.
+
+Certainly, the father's intervention in the future of Ramuntcho would
+have a decisive influence in obtaining the hand of that girl--and would
+permit even of asking it of Dolores with haughtiness, after the ancient
+quarrel. But Franchita felt a great uneasiness in her, increasing as the
+thought of addressing herself to that man became more precise. And then,
+she recalled the look, so often sombre, of the stranger, she recalled
+his vague words of infinite lassitude, of incomprehensible despair; he
+had the air of seeing always, beyond her horizon, distant abysses and
+darkness, and, although he was not an insulter of sacred things, never
+would he pray, thus giving to her this excess of remorse, of having
+allied herself to some pagan to whom heaven would be closed forever.
+His friends were similar to him, refined also, faithless, prayerless,
+exchanging among themselves in frivolous words abysmal thoughts.--Oh,
+if Ramuntcho by contact with them were to become similar to them
+all!--desert the churches, fly from the sacraments and the mass!--Then,
+she remembered the letters of her old father,--now decomposed in the
+profound earth, under a slab of granite, near the foundations of his
+parish church--those letters in Euskarian tongue which he wrote to her,
+after the first months of indignation and of silence, in the city where
+she had dragged her fault. “At least, my poor Franchita, my daughter,
+are you in a country where the men are pious and go to church
+regularly?--” Oh! no, they were hardly pious, the men of the great city,
+not more the fashionable ones who were in the society of Ramuntcho's
+father than the humblest laborers in the suburban district where
+she lived hidden; all carried away by the same current far from the
+hereditary dogmas, far from the antique symbols.--And Ramuntcho, in such
+surroundings, how would he resist?--
+
+Other reasons, less important perhaps, retained her also. Her haughty
+dignity, which in that city had maintained her honest and solitary,
+revolted truly at the idea that she would have to reappear as a
+solicitor before her former lover. Then, her superior commonsense, which
+nothing had ever been able to lead astray or to dazzle, told her that it
+was too late now to change anything; that Ramuntcho, until now ignorant
+and free, would not know how to attain the dangerous regions where
+the intelligence of his father had elevated itself, but that he would
+languish at the bottom, like one outclassed. And, in fine, a sentiment
+which she hardly confessed to herself, lingered powerfully in the depths
+of her heart: the fear of losing her son, of guiding him no longer, of
+holding him no longer, of having him no longer.--And so, in that instant
+of decisive reflection, after having hesitated for years, she inclined
+more and more to remain stubborn in her silence with regard to the
+stranger and to let pass humbly near her the life of her Ramuntcho,
+under the protecting looks of the Virgin and the saints.--There remained
+unsolved the question of Gracieuse Detcharry.--Well, she would marry, in
+spite of everything, her son, smuggler and poor though he be! With her
+instinct of a mother somewhat savagely loving, she divined that the
+little girl was enamoured enough not to fall out of love ever; she had
+seen this in her fifteen year old black eyes, obstinate and grave under
+the golden nimbus of her hair. Gracieuse marrying Ramuntcho for his
+charm alone, in spite of and against maternal will!--The rancor and
+vindictiveness that lurked in the mind of Franchita rejoiced suddenly at
+that great triumph over the pride of Dolores.
+
+Around the isolated house where, under the grand silence of midnight,
+she decided alone her son's future, the spirit of the Basque ancestors
+passed, sombre and jealous also, disdainful of the stranger, fearful of
+impiety, of changes, of evolutions of races;--the spirit of the Basque
+ancestors, the old immutable spirit which still maintains that people
+with eyes turned toward the anterior ages; the mysterious antique spirit
+by which the children are led to act as before them their fathers had
+acted, at the side of the same mountains, in the same villages, around
+the same belfries.--
+
+The noise of steps now, in the dark, outside!--Someone walking softly
+in sandals on the thickness of the plane-tree leaves strewing the
+soil.--Then, a whistled appeal.--
+
+What, already!--Already one o'clock in the morning--!
+
+Quite resolved now, she opened the door to the chief smuggler with a
+smile of greeting that the latter had never seen in her:
+
+ “Come in, Itchoua,” she said, “warm yourself--while I go wake up my
+son.”
+
+A tall and large man, that Itchoua, thin, with a thick chest, clean
+shaven like a priest, in accordance with the fashion of the old time
+Basque; under the cap which he never took off, a colorless face,
+inexpressive, cut as with a pruning hook, and recalling the beardless
+personages archaically drawn on the missals of the fifteenth century.
+Above his hollow cheeks, the breadth of the jaws, the jutting out of the
+muscles of the neck gave the idea of his extreme force. He was of the
+Basque type, excessively accentuated; eyes caved-in too much under the
+frontal arcade; eyebrows of rare length, the points of which, lowered
+as on the figures of tearful madonnas, almost touched the hair at the
+temples. Between thirty and fifty years, it was impossible to assign an
+age to him. His name was Jose-Maria Gorosteguy; but, according to the
+custom he was known in the country by the surname of Itchoua (the Blind)
+given to him in jest formerly, because of his piercing sight which
+plunged in the night like that of cats. He was a practising Christian, a
+church warden of his parish and a chorister with a thundering voice. He
+was famous also for his power of resistance to fatigue, being capable of
+climbing the Pyrenean slopes for hours at racing speed with heavy loads
+on his back.
+
+Ramuntcho came down soon, rubbing his eyelids, still heavy from a
+youthful sleep, and, at his aspect, the gloomy visage of Itchoua was
+illuminated by a smile. A continual seeker for energetic and strong boys
+that he might enroll in his band, and knowing how to keep them in spite
+of small wages, by a sort of special point of honor, he was an expert in
+legs and in shoulders as well as in temperaments, and he thought a great
+deal of his new recruit.
+
+Franchita, before she would let them go, leaned her head again on her
+son's neck; then she escorted the two men to the threshold of her door,
+opened on the immense darkness,--and recited piously the Pater for them,
+while they went into the dark night, into the rain, into the chaos of
+the mountains, toward the obscure frontier.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+Several hours later, at the first uncertain flush of dawn, at the
+instant when shepherds and fisherman awake, they were returning
+joyously, the smugglers, having finished their undertaking.
+
+Having started on foot and gone, with infinite precautions to be silent,
+through ravines, through woods, through fords of rivers, they were
+returning, as if they were people who had never anything to conceal from
+anybody, in a bark of Fontarabia, hired under the eyes of Spain's custom
+house officers, through the Bidassoa river.
+
+All the mass of mountains and of clouds, all the sombre chaos of the
+preceding night had disentangled itself almost suddenly, as under the
+touch of a magic wand. The Pyrenees, returned to their real proportions,
+were only average mountains, with slopes bathed in a shadow still
+nocturnal, but with peaks neatly cut in a sky which was already
+clearing. The air had become lukewarm, suave, exquisite, as if the
+climate or the season had suddenly changed,--and it was the southern
+wind which was beginning to blow, the delicious southern wind special to
+the Basque country, which chases before it, the cold, the clouds and
+the mists, which enlivens the shades of all things, makes the sky blue,
+prolongs the horizons infinitely and gives, even in winter, summer
+illusions.
+
+The boatman who was bringing the smugglers back to France pushed the
+bottom of the river with his long pole, and the bark dragged, half
+stranded. At this moment, that Bidassoa by which the two countries are
+separated, seemed drained, and its antique bed, excessively large, had
+the flat extent of a small desert.
+
+The day was decidedly breaking, tranquil and slightly pink. It was the
+first of the month of November; on the Spanish shore, very distant, in
+a monastery, an early morning bell rang clear, announcing the religious
+solemnity of every autumn. And Ramuntcho, comfortably seated in the
+bark, softly cradled and rested after the fatigues of the night,
+breathed the new breeze with well-being in all his senses. With a
+childish joy, he saw the assurance of a radiant weather for that
+All-Saints' Day which was to bring to him all that he knew of this
+world's festivals: the chanted high mass, the game of pelota before
+the assembled village, then, at last, the dance of the evening with
+Gracieuse, the fandango in the moon-light on the church square.
+
+He lost, little by little, the consciousness of his physical life,
+Ramuntcho, after his sleepless night; a sort of torpor, benevolent under
+the breath of the virgin morning, benumbed his youthful body, leaving
+his mind in a dream. He knew well such impressions and sensations, for
+the return at the break of dawn, in the security of a bark where one
+sleeps, is the habitual sequel of a smuggler's expedition.
+
+And all the details of the Bidassoa's estuary were familiar to him,
+all its aspects, which changed with the hour, with the monotonous and
+regular tide.--Twice every day the sea wave comes to this flat bed;
+then, between France and Spain there is a lake, a charming little sea
+with diminutive blue waves--and the barks float, the barks go quickly;
+the boatmen sing their old time songs, which the grinding and the shocks
+of the cadenced oars accompany. But when the waters have withdrawn, as
+at this moment, there remains between the two countries only a sort of
+lowland, uncertain and of changing color, where walk men with bare legs,
+where barks drag themselves, creeping.
+
+They were now in the middle of this lowland, Ramuntcho and his band,
+half dozing under the dawning light. The colors of things began to
+appear, out of the gray of night. They glided, they advanced by slight
+jerks, now through yellow velvet which was sand, then through a brown
+thing, striped regularly and dangerous to walkers, which was slime.
+And thousands of little puddles, left by the tide of the day before,
+reflected the dawn, shone on the soft extent like mother-of-pearl
+shells. On the little yellow and brown desert, their boatman followed
+the course of a thin, silver stream, which represented the Bidassoa at
+low tide. From time to time, some fisherman crossed their path, passed
+near them in silence, without singing as the custom is in rowing, too
+busy poling, standing in his bark and working his pole with beautiful
+plastic gestures.
+
+While they were day-dreaming, they approached the French shore, the
+smugglers. On the other side of the strange zone which they were
+traversing as in a sled, that silhouette of an old city, which fled from
+them slowly, was Fontarabia; those highlands which rose to the sky
+with figures so harsh, were the Spanish Pyrenees. All this was Spain,
+mountainous Spain, eternally standing there in the face of them and
+incessantly preoccupying their minds: a country which one must reach in
+silence, in dark nights, in nights without moonlight, under the rain of
+winter; a country which is the perpetual aim of dangerous expeditions; a
+country which, for the men of Ramuntcho's village, seems always to close
+the southwestern horizon, while it changes in appearance according to
+the clouds and the hours; a country which is the first to be lighted by
+the pale sun of mornings and which masks afterward, like a sombre screen
+the red sun of evenings.--
+
+He adored his Basque land, Ramuntcho,--and this morning was one of the
+times when this adoration penetrated him more profoundly. In his after
+life, during his exile, the reminiscence of these delightful returns at
+dawn, after the nights of smuggling, caused in him an indescribable and
+very anguishing nostalgia. But his love for the hereditary soil was not
+as simple as that of his companions. As in all his sentiments, as in all
+his sensations, there were mingled in it diverse elements. At first the
+instinctive and unanalyzed attachment of his maternal ancestors to the
+native soil, then something more refined coming from his father, an
+unconscious reflection of the artistic admiration which had retained the
+stranger here for several seasons and had given to him the caprice of
+allying himself with a girl of these mountains in order to obtain a
+Basque descendance.--
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+It is eleven o'clock now, and the bells of France and Spain mingle above
+the frontier their religious festival vibrations.
+
+Bathed, rested, and in Sunday dress, Ramuntcho was going with his mother
+to the high mass of All-Saints' Day. On the path, strewn with reddish
+leaves, they descended toward their parish, under a warm sun which gave
+to them the illusion of summer.
+
+He, dressed in a manner almost elegant and like a city denizen, save for
+the traditional Basque cap, which he wore on the side and pulled down
+like a visor over his childish eyes. She, straight and proud, her head
+high, her demeanor distinguished, in a gown of new form; having the air
+of a society woman, except for the mantilla; made of black cloth, which
+covered her hair and her shoulders. In the great city formerly she had
+learned how to dress--and anyway, in the Basque country, where so many
+ancient traditions have been preserved, the women and the girls of the
+least important villages have all taken the habit of dressing in the
+fashion of the day, with an elegance unknown to the peasants of the
+other French provinces.
+
+They separated, as etiquette ordains, in the yard of the church, where
+the immense cypress trees smelled of the south and the Orient. It
+resembled a mosque from the exterior, their parish, with its tall, old,
+ferocious walls, pierced at the top only by diminutive windows, with its
+warm color of antiquity, of dust and of sun.
+
+While Franchita entered by one of the lower doors, Ramuntcho went up
+a venerable stone stairway which led one from the exterior wall to the
+high tribunes reserved for men.
+
+The extremity of the sombre church was of dazzling old gold, with a
+profusion of twisted columns, of complicated entablements, of statues
+with excessive convolutions and with draperies in the style of the
+Spanish Renaissance. And this magnificence of the tabernacle was in
+contrast with the simplicity of the lateral walls, simply kalsomined.
+But an air of extreme old age harmonized these things, which one felt
+were accustomed for centuries to endure in the face of one another.
+
+It was early still, and people were hardly arriving for this high mass.
+Leaning on the railing of his tribune, Ramuntcho looked at the women
+entering, all like black phantoms, their heads and dress concealed under
+the mourning cashmere which it is usual to wear at church. Silent and
+collected, they glided on the funereal pavement of mortuary slabs, where
+one could read still, in spite of the effacing of ages, inscriptions
+in Euskarian tongue, names of extinguished families and dates of past
+centuries.
+
+Gracieuse, whose coming preoccupied Ramuntcho, was late. But, to
+distract his mind for a moment, a “convoy” advanced slowly; a convoy,
+that is a parade of parents and nearest neighbors of one who had died
+during the week, the men still draped in the long cape which is worn at
+funerals, the women under the mantle and the traditional hood of full
+mourning.
+
+Above, in the two immense tribunes superposed along the sides of the
+nave, the men came one by one to take their places, grave and with
+rosaries in their hands: farmers, laborers, cowboys, poachers or
+smugglers, all pious and ready to kneel when the sacred bell rang. Each
+one of them, before taking his seat, hooked behind him, to a nail on the
+wall, his woolen cap, and little by little, on the white background of
+the kalsomine, came into line rows of innumerable Basque headgear.
+
+Below, the little girls of the school entered at last, in good order,
+escorted by the Sisters of Saint Mary of the Rosary. And, among these
+nuns, wrapped in black, Ramuntcho recognized Gracieuse. She, too, had
+her head enveloped with black; her blonde hair, which to-night would be
+flurried in the breeze of the fandango, was hidden for the moment under
+the austere mantilla of the ceremony. Gracieuse had not been a scholar
+for two years, but was none the less the intimate friend of the sisters,
+her teachers, ever in their company for songs, novenas, or decorations
+of white flowers around the statues of the Holy Virgin.--Then, the
+priests, in their most sumptuous costumes, appeared in front of
+the magnificent gold of the tabernacle, on a platform elevated and
+theatrical, and the mass began, celebrated, in this distant village,
+with excessive pomp as in a great city. There were choirs of small
+boys chanting in infantile voices with a savage ardor. Then choruses of
+little girls, whom a sister accompanied at the harmonium and which the
+clear and fresh voice of Gracieuse guided. From time to time a clamor
+came, like a storm, from the tribunes above where the men were,
+a formidable response animated the old vaults, the old sonorous
+wainscoting, which for centuries have vibrated with the same song.--
+
+To do the same things which for numberless ages the ancestors have done
+and to tell blindly the same words of faith, are indications of supreme
+wisdom, are a supreme force. For all the faithful who sang there came
+from this immutable ceremony of the mass a sort of peace, a confused but
+soft resignation to coming destruction. Living of the present hour, they
+lost a little of their ephemeral personality to attach themselves better
+to the dead lying under the slabs and to continue them more exactly, to
+form with them and their future descendants only one of these resisting
+entireties, of almost infinite duration, which is called a race.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+“Ite missa est!” The high mass is finished and the antique church is
+emptying. Outside, in the yard, among the tombs, the assistants scatter.
+And all the joy of a sunny noon greets them, as they come out of the
+sombre nave where each, according to his naive faculties, had caught
+more or less a glimpse of the great mystery and of the inevitable death.
+
+Wearing all the uniform national cap, the men come down the exterior
+stairway; the women, slower to be captivated by the lure of the blue
+sky, retaining still under the mourning veil a little of the dream of
+the church, come out of the lower porticoes in black troops; around a
+grave freshly closed, some stop and weep.
+
+The southern wind, which is the great magician of the Basque country,
+blows softly. The autumn of yesterday has gone and it is forgotten.
+Lukewarm breaths pass through the air, vivifying, healthier than those
+of May, having the odor of hay and the odor of flowers. Two singers of
+the highway are there, leaning on the graveyard wall, and they intone,
+with a tambourine and a guitar, an old seguidilla of Spain, bringing
+here the warm and somewhat Arabic gaieties of the lands beyond the
+frontiers.
+
+And in the midst of all this intoxication of the southern November,
+more delicious in this country than the intoxication of the spring,
+Ramuntcho, having come down one of the first, watches the coming out of
+the sisters in order to greet Gracieuse.
+
+The sandal peddler has come also to this closing of the mass, and
+displays among the roses of the tombs his linen foot coverings
+ornamented with woolen flowers. Young men, attracted by the dazzling
+embroideries, gather around him to select colors.
+
+The bees and the flies buzz as in June; the country has become again,
+for a few hours, for a few days, for as long as this wind will blow,
+luminous and warm. In front of the mountains, which have assumed violent
+brown or sombre green tints, and which seem to have advanced to-day
+until they overhang the church, houses of the village appear in relief,
+very neat, very white under their coat of kalsomine,--old Pyrenean
+houses with their wooden balconies and on their walls intercrossings of
+beams in the fashion of the olden time. In the southwest, the visible
+portion of Spain, the denuded and red peak familiar to smugglers, stands
+straight and near in the beautiful clear sky.
+
+Gracieuse does not appear yet, retarded doubtless by the nuns in
+some altar service. As for Franchita, who never mingles in the Sunday
+festivals, she takes the path to her house, silent and haughty, after a
+smile to her son, whom she will not see again until to-night after the
+dances have come to an end.
+
+A group of young men, among whom is the vicar who has just taken off his
+golden ornaments, forms itself at the threshold of the church, in
+the sun, and seems to be plotting grave projects.--They are the great
+players of the country, the fine flower of the lithe and the strong; it
+is for the pelota game of the afternoon that they are consulting, and
+they make a sign to Ramuntcho who pensively comes to them. Several old
+men come also and surround them, caps crushed on white hair and faces
+clean shaven like those of monks: champions of the olden time, still
+proud of their former successes, and sure that their counsel shall be
+respected in the national game, which the men here attend with pride
+as on a field of honor.--After a courteous discussion, the game is
+arranged; it will be immediately after vespers; they will play the
+“blaid” with the wicker glove, and the six selected champions, divided
+into two camps, shall be the vicar, Ramuntcho and Arrochkoa, Gracieuse's
+brother, against three famous men of the neighboring villages: Joachim
+of Mendiazpi; Florentino of Espelette, and Irrubeta of Hasparren--
+
+Now comes the “convoy”, which comes out of the church and passes by
+them, so black in this feast of light, and so archaic, with the envelope
+of its capes, of its caps and of its veils. They are expressive of the
+Middle Age, these people, while they pass in a file, the Middle Age
+whose shadow the Basque country retains. And they express, above all,
+death, as the large funereal slabs, with which the nave is paved,
+express it, as the cypress trees and the tombs express it, and all the
+things in this place, where the men come to pray, express it: death,
+always death.--But a death very softly neighboring life, under the
+shield of the old consoling symbols--for life is there marked also,
+almost equally sovereign, in the warm rays which light up the cemetery,
+in the eyes of the children who play among the roses of autumn, in
+the smile of those beautiful brown girls who, the mass being finished,
+return with steps indolently supple toward the village; in the muscles
+of all this youthfulness of men, alert and vigorous, who shall soon
+exercise at the ball-game their iron legs and arms.--And of this group
+of old men and of boys at the threshold of a church, of this mingling,
+so peacefully harmonious, of death and of life, comes the benevolent
+lesson, the teaching that one must enjoy in time strength and love;
+then, without obstinacy in enduring, submit to the universal law of
+passing and dying, repeating with confidence, like these simple-minded
+and wise men, the same prayers by which the agonies of the ancestors
+were cradled.--
+
+It is improbably radiant, the sun of noon in this yard of the dead.
+The air is exquisite and one becomes intoxicated by breathing it. The
+Pyrenean horizons have been swept of their clouds, their least
+vapors, and it seems as if the wind of the south had brought here the
+limpidities of Andalusia or of Africa.
+
+The Basque guitar and tambourine accompany the sung seguilla, which the
+beggars of Spain throw, like a slight irony into this lukewarm breeze,
+above the dead. And boys and girls think of the fandango of to-night,
+feel ascending in them the desire and the intoxication of dancing.--
+
+At last here come the sisters, so long expected by Ramuntcho; with
+them advance Gracieuse and her mother, Dolores, who is still in widow's
+weeds, her face invisible under a black cape closed by a crape veil.
+
+What can this Dolores be plotting with the Mother Superior?--Ramuntcho,
+knowing that these two women are enemies, is astonished and disquiet
+to-day to see them walk side by side. Now they even stop to talk aside,
+so important and secret doubtless is what they are saying; their similar
+black caps, overhanging like wagon-hoods, touch each other and they talk
+sheltered under them; a whispering of phantoms, one would say, under
+a sort of little black vault.--And Ramuntcho has the sentiment of
+something hostile plotted against him under these two wicked caps.
+
+When the colloquy comes to an end, he advances, touches his cap for a
+salute, awkward and timid suddenly in presence of this Dolores, whose
+harsh look under the veil he divines. This woman is the only person in
+the world who has the power to chill him, and, never elsewhere than in
+her presence, he feels weighing upon him the blemish of being the child
+of an unknown father, of wearing no other name than that of his mother.
+
+To-day, however, to his great surprise, she is more cordial than usual,
+and she says with a voice almost amiable: “Good-morning, my boy!” Then
+he goes to Gracieuse, to ask her with a brusque anxiety: “To-night, at
+eight o'clock, say if you will be on the square to dance with me?”
+
+For some time, every Sunday had brought to him the same fear of being
+deprived of dancing with her in the evening. In the week he hardly ever
+saw her. Now that he was becoming a man, the only occasion for him to
+have her company was this ball on the green of the square, in the light
+of the stars or of the moon.
+
+They had fallen in love with each other five years ago, Ramuntcho and
+Gracieuse, when they were still children. And such loves, when by chance
+the awakening of the senses confirms instead of destroying them, become
+in young heads something sovereign and exclusive.
+
+They had never thought of saying this to each other, they knew it so
+well; never had they talked together of the future which did not appear
+possible to one without the other. And the isolation of this mountain
+village where they lived, perhaps also the hostility of Dolores to their
+naive, unexpressed projects, brought them more closely together--
+
+“To-night, at eight o'clock, say if you will be on the square to dance
+with me?”
+
+“Yes--” replies the little girl, fixing on her friend eyes of sadness, a
+little frightened, as well as of ardent tenderness.
+
+“Sure?” asked Ramuntcho again, whom these eyes make anxious.
+
+“Yes, sure!”
+
+So, he is quieted again this time, knowing that if Gracieuse has said
+and decided something one may count on it. And at once the weather seems
+to him more beautiful, the Sunday more amusing, life more charming--
+
+The dinner hour calls the Basques now to the houses or to the inns, and,
+under the light, somewhat gloomy, of the noon sun, the village seems
+deserted.
+
+Ramuntcho goes to the cider mill which the smugglers and pelota players
+frequent. There, he sits at a table, his cap still drawn over his eyes,
+with his friends: Arrochkoa, two or three others of the mountains and
+the somber Itchoua, their chief.
+
+A festive meal is prepared for them, with fish of the Nivelle, ham and
+hares. In the foreground of the hall, vast and dilapidated, near the
+windows, are the tables, the oak benches on which they are seated; in
+the background, in a penumbra, are the enormous casks filled with new
+cider.
+
+In this band of Ramuntcho, which is there entire, under the piercing
+eye of its chief, reigns an emulation of audacity and a reciprocal,
+fraternal devotion; during their night expeditions especially, they are
+all one to live or to die.
+
+Leaning heavily, benumbed in the pleasure of resting after the fatigues
+of the night and concentrated in the expectation of satiating their
+robust hunger, they are silent at first, hardly raising their heads to
+look through the window-panes at the passing girls. Two are very young,
+almost children like Ramuntcho: Arrochkoa and Florentino. The others
+have, like Itchoua, hardened faces, eyes in ambuscade under the frontal
+arcade, expressing no certain age; their aspect reveals a past of
+fatigues, in the unreasonable obstinacy to pursue this trade of
+smuggling, which hardly gives bread to the less skilful.
+
+Then, awakened little by little by the smoking dishes, by the sweet
+cider, they talk; soon their words interlace, light, rapid and sonorous,
+with an excessive rolling of the _r_. They talk in their mysterious
+language, the origin of which is unknown and which seems to the men of
+the other countries in Europe more distant than Mongolian or Sanskrit.
+They tell stories of the night and of the frontier, stratagems newly
+invented and astonishing deceptions of Spanish carbineers. Itchoua, the
+chief, listens more than he talks; one hears only at long intervals his
+profound voice of a church singer vibrate. Arrochkoa, the most elegant
+of all, is in striking contrast with his comrades of the mountain. (His
+name was Jean Detcharry, but he was known only by his surname, which the
+elders of his family transmitted from father to son for centuries.) A
+smuggler for his pleasure, he, without any necessity, and possessing
+beautiful lands in the sunlight; the face fresh and pretty, the blonde
+mustache turned up in the fashion of cats, the eye feline also, the
+eye caressing and fleeting; attracted by all that succeeds, by all that
+amuses, by all that shines; liking Ramuntcho for his triumphs in the
+ball-game, and quite disposed to give to him the hand of his sister,
+Gracieuse, even if it were only to oppose his mother, Dolores. And
+Florentino, the other great friend of Ramuntcho is, on the contrary,
+the humblest of the band; an athletic, reddish fellow, with wide and
+low forehead, with good eyes of resignation, soft as those of beasts of
+burden; without father or mother, possessing nothing in the world except
+a threadbare costume and three pink cotton shirts; unique lover of a
+little fifteen year old orphan, as poor as he and as primitive.
+
+At last Itchoua deigns to talk in his turn. He relates, in a tone of
+mystery and of confidence, a certain tale of the time of his youth, in
+a black night, on the Spanish territory, in the gorges of Andarlaza.
+Seized by two carbineers at the turn in a dark path, he had disengaged
+himself by drawing his knife to stab a chest with it: half a second,
+a resisting flesh, then, crack! the blade entering brusquely, a jet of
+warm blood on his hand, the man fallen, and he, fleeing in the obscure
+rocks--
+
+And the voice which says these things with implacable tranquility, is
+the same which for years sings piously every Sunday the liturgy in the
+old sonorous church,--so much so that it seems to retain a religious and
+almost sacred character--!
+
+“When you are caught”--adds the speaker, scrutinizing them all with his
+eyes, become piercing again--“When you are caught--What is the life of a
+man worth in such a case? You would not hesitate, either, I suppose, if
+you were caught--?”
+
+“Sure not,” replied Arrochkoa, in a tone of infantile bravado, “Sure
+not! In such a case to take the life of a carabinero no one would
+hesitate!--”
+
+The debonair Florentino, turned from Itchoua his disapproving eyes.
+Florentino would hesitate; he would not kill. This is divined in the
+expression of his face.
+
+“You would not hesitate,” repeated Itchoua, scrutinizing Ramuntcho this
+time in a special manner; “you would not hesitate, either, I suppose, if
+you were caught, would you?”
+
+“Surely,” replied Ramuntcho, submissively. “Oh, no, surely--”
+
+But his look, like that of Florentino, has turned from Itchoua. A terror
+comes to him of this man, of this imperious and cold influence, so
+completely felt already; an entire soft and refined side of his nature
+is awakened, made disquiet and in revolt.
+
+Silence has followed the tale, and Itchoua, discontented with the effect
+of it, proposes a song in order to change the course of ideas.
+
+The purely material well-being which comes after dinner, the cider which
+has been drunk, the cigarettes which are lighted and the songs that
+begin, bring back quickly confident joy in these children's heads.
+And then, there are in the band the two brothers Iragola, Marcos and
+Joachim, young men of the mountain above Mendiazpi, who are renowned
+extemporary speakers in the surrounding country and it is a pleasure to
+hear them, on any subject, compose and sing verses which are so pretty.
+
+“Let us see,” says Itchoua, “you, Marcos, are a sailor who wishes to
+pass his life on the ocean and seek fortune in America; you, Joachim,
+are a farm hand who prefers not to quit his village and his soil here.
+Each of you will discuss alternately, in couplets of equal length, the
+pleasures of his trade to the tune--to the tune of the 'Iru Damacho'. Go
+on.”
+
+They looked at each other, the two brothers, half turned toward each
+other on the oak bench where they sit; an instant of reflection, during
+which an imperceptible agitation of the eyelids alone betrays the
+working of their minds; then, brusquely Marcos, the elder, begins, and
+they will never stop. With their shaven cheeks, their handsome profiles,
+their chins which advance somewhat imperiously above the powerful
+muscles of the neck, they recall, in their grave immobility, the figures
+engraved on the Roman medals. They sing with a certain effort of the
+throat, like the muezzins in the mosques, in high tones. When one has
+finished his couplet, without a second of hesitation or silence, the
+other begins; more and more their minds are animated and inflamed.
+Around the smugglers' table many other caps have gathered and all listen
+with admiration to the witty or sensible things which the two brothers
+know how to say, ever with the needed cadence and rhyme.
+
+At the twentieth stanza, at last, Itchoua interrupts them to make them
+rest and he orders more cider.
+
+“How have you learned?” asked Ramuntcho of the Iragola brothers. “How
+did the knack come to you?”
+
+“Oh!” replies Marcos, “it is a family trait, as you must know. Our
+father, our grandfather were extemporary composers who were heard with
+pleasure in all the festivals of the Basque country, and our mother also
+was the daughter of a grand improvisator of the village of Lesaca. And
+then, every evening in taking back the oxen or in milking the cows, we
+practice, or at the fireside on winter nights. Yes, every evening, we
+make compositions in this way on subjects which one of us imagines, and
+it is our greatest pleasure--”
+
+But when Florentino's turn to sing comes he, knowing only the old
+refrains of the mountain, intones in an Arabic falsetto voice the
+complaint of the linen weaver; and then Ramuntcho, who had sung it
+the day before in the autumn twilight, sees again the darkened sky of
+yesterday, the clouds full of rain, the cart drawn by oxen going down
+into a sad and closed valley, toward a solitary farm--and suddenly the
+unexplained anguish returns to him, the one which he had before; the
+fear of living and of passing thus always in these same villages, under
+the oppression of these same mountains; the notion and the confused
+desire for other places; the anxiety for unknown distances--His eyes,
+become lifeless and fixed, look inwardly; for several strange minutes
+he feels that he is an exile, from what country he does not know,
+disinherited, of what he does not know, sad in the depths of his soul;
+between him and the men who surround him have come suddenly irreducible,
+hereditary barriers--
+
+Three o'clock. It is the hour when vespers, the last office of the day,
+comes to an end; the hour when leave the church, in a meditation grave
+as that of the morning, all the mantillas of black cloth concealing the
+beautiful hair of the girls and the form of their waists, all the
+woolen caps similarly lowered on the shaven faces of men, on their eyes
+piercing or somber, still plunged in the old time dreams.
+
+It is the hour when the games are to begin, the dances, the pelota and
+the fandango. All this is traditional and immutable.
+
+The light of the day becomes more golden, one feels the approach of
+night. The church, suddenly empty, forgotten, where persists the odor
+of incense, becomes full of silence, and the old gold of the background
+shines mysteriously in the midst of more shade; silence also is
+scattered around on the tranquil enclosure of the dead, where the folks
+this time passed without stopping, in their haste to go elsewhere.
+
+On the square of the ball-game, people are beginning to arrive from
+everywhere, from the village itself and from the neighboring hamlets,
+from the huts of the shepherds or of the smugglers who perch above,
+on the harsh mountains. Hundreds of Basque caps, all similar, are now
+reunited, ready to judge the players, to applaud or to murmur; they
+discuss the chances, comment upon the relative strength of the players
+and make big bets of money. And young girls, young women gather also,
+having nothing of the awkwardness of the peasants in other provinces of
+France, elegant, refined, graceful in costumes of the new fashions;
+some wearing on their hair the silk kerchief, rolled and arranged like
+a small cap; others bareheaded, their hair dressed in the most
+modern manner; most of them pretty, with admirable eyes and very long
+eyebrows--This square, always solemn and ordinarily somewhat sad, is
+filled to-day, Sunday, with a lively and gay crowd.
+
+The most insignificant hamlet in the Basque country has a square for
+the ball-game, large, carefully kept, in general near the church, under
+oaks.
+
+But here, this is a central point and something like the Conservatory of
+French ball-players, of those who become celebrated, in South America
+as well as in the Pyrenees, and who, in the great international games,
+oppose the champions of Spain. So the place is particularly beautiful
+and pompous, surprising in so distant a village. It is paved with large
+stones, between which grass grows expressing its antiquity and giving
+to it an air of being abandoned. On the two sides are extended, for the
+spectators, long benches--made of the red granite of the neighboring
+mountain and, at this moment, all overgrown with autumn scabwort.
+
+And in the back, the old monumental wall rises, against which the balls
+will strike. It has a rounded front which seems to be the silhouette
+of a dome and bears this inscription, half effaced by time: “Blaidka
+haritzea debakatua.” (The blaid game is forbidden.)
+
+Still, the day's game is to be the blaid; but the venerable inscription
+dates from the time of the splendor of the national game, degenerated at
+present, as all things degenerate. It had been placed there to preserve
+the tradition of the “rebot”, a more difficult game, exacting more
+agility and strength, and which has been perpetuated only in the Spanish
+province of Guipuzcoa.
+
+While the graded benches are filling up, the paved square, which the
+grass makes green, and which has seen the lithe and the vigorous men
+of the country run since the days of old, remains empty. The beautiful
+autumn sun, at its decline, warms and lights it. Here and there some
+tall oaks shed their leaves above the seated spectators. Beyond are the
+high church and the cypress trees, the entire sacred corner, from which
+the saints and the dead seem to be looking at a distance, protecting the
+players, interested in this game which is the passion still of an entire
+race and characterises it--
+
+At last they enter the arena, the Pelotaris, the six champions among
+whom is one in a cassock: the vicar of the parish. With him are some
+other personages: the crier, who, in an instant, will sing the points;
+the five judges, selected among the experts of different villages to
+intervene in cases of litigation, and some others carrying extra balls
+and sandals. At the right wrist the players attach with thongs a strange
+wicker thing resembling a large, curved fingernail which lengthens the
+forearm by half. It is with this glove (manufactured in France by a
+unique basket-maker of the village of Ascain) that they will have
+to catch, throw and hurl the pelota,--a small ball of tightened cord
+covered with sheepskin, which is as hard as a wooden ball.
+
+Now they try the balls, selecting the best, limbering, with a few
+points that do not count, their athletic arms. Then, they take off their
+waistcoats and carry them to preferred spectators; Ramuntcho gives
+his to Gracieuse, seated in the first row on the lower bench. And all,
+except the priest, who will play in his black gown, are in battle array,
+their chests at liberty in pink cotton shirts or light thread fleshings.
+
+The assistants know them well, these players; in a moment, they shall be
+excited for or against them and will shout at them, frantically, as it
+happens with the toreadors.
+
+At this moment the village is entirely animated by the spirit of the
+olden time; in its expectation of the pleasure, in its liveliness, in
+its ardor, it is intensely Basque and very old,--under the great shade
+of the Gizune, the overhanging mountain, which throws over it a twilight
+charm.
+
+And the game begins in the melancholy evening. The ball, thrown with
+much strength, flies, strikes the wall in great, quick blows, then
+rebounds, and traverses the air with the rapidity of a bullet.
+
+This wall in the background, rounded like a dome's festoon on the sky,
+has become little by little crowned with heads of children,--little
+Basques, little cats, ball-players of the future, who soon will
+precipitate themselves like a flight of birds, to pick up the ball every
+time when, thrown too high, it will go beyond the square and fall in the
+fields.
+
+The game becomes gradually warmer as arms and legs are limbered, in an
+intoxication of movement and swiftness. Already Ramuntcho is acclaimed.
+And the vicar also shall be one of the fine players of the day, strange
+to look upon with his leaps similar to those of a cat, and his athletic
+gestures, imprisoned in his priest's gown.
+
+This is the rule of the game: when one of the champions of the two
+camps lets the ball fall, it is a point earned by the adverse camp,--and
+ordinarily the limit is sixty points. After each point, the titled crier
+chants with a full voice in his old time tongue: “The but has so much,
+the refil has so much, gentlemen!” (The but is the camp which played
+first, the refil is the camp opposed to the but.) And the crier's long
+clamor drags itself above the noise of the crowd, which approves or
+murmurs.
+
+On the square, the zone gilt and reddened by the sun diminishes, goes,
+devoured by the shade; more and more the great screen of the Gizune
+predominates over everything, seems to enclose in this little corner
+of the world at its feet, the very special life and the ardor of these
+mountaineers--who are the fragments of a people very mysteriously
+unique, without analogy among nations--The shade of night marches
+forward and invades in silence, soon it will be sovereign; in the
+distance only a few summits still lighted above so many darkened
+valleys, are of a violet luminous and pink.
+
+Ramuntcho plays as, in his life, he had never played before; he is
+in one of those instants when one feels tempered by strength, light,
+weighing nothing, and when it is a pure joy to move, to extend one's
+arms, to leap. But Arrochkoa weakens, the vicar is fettered two or three
+times by his black cassock, and the adverse camp, at first distanced,
+little by little catches up, then, in presence of this game so
+valiantly disputed, clamor redoubles and caps fly in the air, thrown by
+enthusiastic hands.
+
+Now the points are equal on both sides; the crier announces thirty for
+each one of the rival camps and he sings the old refrain which is of
+tradition immemorial in such cases: “Let bets come forward! Give drink
+to the judges and to the players.” It is the signal for an instant of
+rest, while wine shall be brought into the arena at the cost of the
+village. The players sit down, and Ramuntcho takes a place beside
+Gracieuse, who throws on his shoulders, wet with perspiration, the
+waistcoat which she was keeping for him, Then he asks of his little
+friend to undo the thongs which hold the glove of wood, wicker and
+leather on his reddened arm. And he rests in the pride of his success,
+seeing only smiles of greeting on the faces of the girls at whom he
+looks. But he sees also, on the side opposed to the players' wall, on
+the side of the approaching darkness, the archaic assemblage of Basque
+houses, the little square of the village with its kalsomined porches and
+its old plane-trees, then the old, massive belfry of the church, and,
+higher than everything, dominating everything, crushing everything, the
+abrupt mass of the Gizune from which comes so much shade, from which
+descends on this distant village so hasty an impression of night--Truly
+it encloses too much, that mountain, it imprisons, it impresses--And
+Ramuntcho, in his juvenile triumph, is troubled by the sentiment of
+this, by this furtive and vague attraction of other places so often
+mingled with his troubles and with his joys--
+
+The game continues and his thoughts are lost in the physical
+intoxication of beginning the struggle again. From instant to instant,
+clack! the snap of the pelotas, their sharp noise against the glove
+which throws them or the wall which receives them, their same noise
+giving the notion of all the strength displayed--Clack! it will snap
+till the hour of twilight, the pelota, animated furiously by arms
+powerful and young. At times the players, with a terrible shock, stop it
+in its flight, with a shock that would break other muscles than theirs.
+Most often, sure of themselves, they let it quietly touch the soil,
+almost die: it seems as if they would never catch it: and clack! it goes
+off, however, caught just in time, thanks to a marvellous precision of
+the eye, and strikes the wall, ever with the rapidity of a bullet--When
+it wanders on the benches, on the mass of woolen caps and of pretty hair
+ornamented with silk kerchiefs, all the heads then, all the bodies,
+are lowered as if moved by the wind of its passage: for it must not be
+touched, it must not be stopped, as long as it is living and may
+still be caught; then, when it is really lost, dead, some one of the
+assistants does himself the honor to pick it up and throw it back to the
+players.
+
+The night falls, falls, the last golden colors scatter with serene
+melancholy over the highest summits of the Basque country. In the
+deserted church, profound silence is established and antique images
+regard one another alone through the invasion of night--Oh! the sadness
+of ends of festivals, in very isolated villages, as soon as the sun
+sets--!
+
+Meanwhile Ramuntcho is more and more the great conqueror. And the
+plaudits, the cries, redouble his happy boldness; each time he makes a
+point the men, standing now on the old, graded, granite benches, acclaim
+him with southern fury.
+
+The last point, the sixtieth--It is Ramuntcho's and he has won the game!
+
+Then there is a sudden crumbling into the arena of all the Basque caps
+which ornamented the stone amphitheatre; they press around the players
+who have made themselves immovable, suddenly, in tired attitudes. And
+Ramuntcho unfastens the thongs of his glove in the middle of a crowd of
+expansive admirers; from all sides, brave and rude hands are stretched
+to grasp his or to strike his shoulder amicably.
+
+“Have you asked Gracieuse to dance with you this evening?” asks
+Arrochkoa, who in this instant would do anything for him.
+
+“Yes, when she came out of the high mass I spoke to her--She has
+promised.”
+
+“Good! I feared that mother--Oh! I would have arranged it, in any case;
+you may believe me.”
+
+A robust old man with square shoulders, with square jaws, with a
+beardless, monkish face, before whom all bowed with respect, comes also:
+it is Haramburu, a player of the olden time who was celebrated half a
+century ago in America for the game of rebot, and who earned a small
+fortune. Ramuntcho blushes with pleasure at the compliment of this old
+man, who is hard to please. And beyond, standing on the reddish benches,
+among the long grasses and the November scabwort, his little friend,
+whom a group of young girls follows, turns back to smile at him, to
+send to him with her hand a gentle adios in the Spanish fashion. He is a
+young god in this moment, Ramuntcho; people are proud to know him, to
+be among his friends, to get his waistcoat for him, to talk to him, to
+touch him.
+
+Now, with the other pelotaris, he goes to the neighboring inn, to a
+room where are placed the clean clothes of all and where careful friends
+accompany them to rub their bodies, wet with perspiration.
+
+And, a moment afterward, elegant in a white shirt, his cap on the side,
+he comes out of the door, under the plane-trees shaped like vaults,
+to enjoy again his success, see the people pass, continue to gather
+compliments and smiles.
+
+The autumnal day has declined, it is evening at present. In the lukewarm
+air, bats glide. The mountaineers of the surrounding villages depart
+one by one; a dozen carriages are harnessed, their lanterns are lighted,
+their bells ring and they disappear in the little shady paths of the
+valleys. In the middle of the limpid penumbra may be distinguished the
+women, the pretty girls seated on benches in front of the houses, under
+the vaults of the plane-trees; they are only clear forms, their Sunday
+costumes make white spots in the twilight, pink spots--and the pale blue
+spot which Ramuntcho looks at is the new gown of Gracieuse.--Above all,
+filling the sky, the gigantic Gizune, confused and sombre, is as if
+it were the centre and the source of the darkness, little by little
+scattered over all things. And at the church, suddenly the pious bells
+ring, recalling to distracted minds the enclosure where the graves are,
+the cypress trees around the belfry, and the entire grand mystery of the
+sky, of prayer, of inevitable death.
+
+Oh! the sadness of ends of festivals in very isolated villages, when the
+sun ceases to illuminate, and when it is autumn--
+
+They know very well, these men who were so ardent a moment ago in
+the humble pleasures of the day, that in the cities there are other
+festivals more brilliant, more beautiful and less quickly ended; but
+this is something separate; it is the festival of the country, of their
+own country, and nothing can replace for them these furtive instants
+whereof they have thought for so many days in advance--Lovers who will
+depart toward the scattered houses flanking the Pyrenees, couples who
+to-morrow will begin over their monotonous and rude life, look at one
+another before separating, look at one another under the falling night,
+with regretful eyes that say: “Then, it is finished already? Then, that
+is all?--”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+Eight o'clock in the evening. They have dined at the cider mill, all
+the players except the vicar, under the patronage of Itchoua; they have
+lounged for a long time afterward, languid in the smoke of smuggled
+cigarettes and listening to the marvellous improvisations of the two
+Iragola brothers, of the Mendiazpi mountain--while outside, on the
+street, the girls in small groups holding one another's arms, looked at
+the windows, found pleasure in observing on the smoky panes the round
+shadows of the heads of the men covered with similar caps--
+
+Now, on the square, the brass band plays the first measures of the
+fandango, and the young men, the young girls, all those of the village
+and several also of the mountain who have remained to dance, arrive in
+impatient groups. There are some dancing already on the road, not to
+lose anything.
+
+And soon the fandango turns, turns, in the light of the new moon the
+horns of which seem to pose, lithe and light, on the enormous and heavy
+mountain. In the couples that dance without ever touching each other,
+there is never a separation; before one another always and at an equal
+distance, the boy and the girl make evolutions with a rhythmic grace, as
+if they were tied together by some invisible magnet.
+
+It has gone into hiding, the crescent of the moon, fallen, one would
+think, in the black mountain; then lanterns are brought and hooked to
+the trunks of the plane-trees and the young men can see better their
+partners who, opposite them swing with an air of fleeing continually,
+but without increasing their distance ever: almost all pretty, their
+hair elegantly dressed, a kerchief on the neck, and wearing with
+ease gowns in the fashion of to-day. The men, somewhat grave always,
+accompany the music with snaps of their fingers in the air: shaven and
+sunburnt faces to which labor in the fields, in smuggling or at sea,
+has given a special thinness, almost ascetic; still, by the ampleness
+of their brown necks, by the width of their shoulders, one divines their
+great strength, the strength of that old, sober and religious race.
+
+The fandango turns and oscillates, to the tune of an ancient waltz. All
+the arms, extended and raised, agitate themselves in the air, rise or
+fall with pretty, cadenced motions following the oscillations of bodies.
+The rope soled sandals make this dance silent and infinitely light;
+one hears only the frou-frou of gowns, and ever the snap of fingers
+imitating the noise of castanets. With a Spanish grace, the girls, whose
+wide sleeves expand like wings, swing their tightened waists above their
+vigorous and supple hips--
+
+Facing one another, Ramuntcho and Gracieuse said nothing at first,
+captivated by the childish joy of moving quickly in cadence, to the
+sound of music. It is very chaste, that manner of dancing without the
+slightest touch of bodies.
+
+But there were also, in the course of the evening, waltzes and
+quadrilles, and even walks arm-in-arm during which the lovers could
+touch each other and talk.
+
+“Then, my Ramuntcho,” said Gracieuse, “it is of that game that you
+expect to make your future, is it not?”
+
+They were walking now arm-in-arm, under the plane-trees shedding their
+leaves in the night of November, lukewarm as a night of May, during an
+interval of silence when the musicians were resting.
+
+“Yes,” replied Ramuntcho, “in our country it is a trade, like any other,
+where one may earn a living, as long as strength lasts--and one may go
+from time to time to South America, you know, as Irun and Gorosteguy
+have done, and bring back twenty, thirty thousand francs for a season,
+earned honestly at Buenos Ayres.”
+
+“Oh, the Americas--” exclaimed Gracieuse in a joyful enthusiasm--“the
+Americas, what happiness! It was always my wish to go across the sea to
+those countries!--And we would look for your uncle Ignacio, then go to
+my cousin, Bidegaina, who has a farm on the Uruguay, in the prairies--”
+
+She ceased talking, the little girl who had never gone out of that
+village which the mountains enclose; she stopped to think of these
+far-off lands which haunted her young head because she had, like most
+Basques, nomadic ancestors--folks who are called here Americans or
+Indians, who pass their adventurous lives on the other side of the ocean
+and return to the cherished village only very late, to die. And, while
+she dreamed, her nose in the air, her eyes in the black of the clouds
+and of the summits, Ramuntcho felt his blood running faster, his
+heart beating quicker in the intense joy of what she had just said so
+spontaneously. And, inclining his head toward her, he asked, as if to
+jest, in a voice infinitely soft and childish:
+
+ “We would go? Is that what you said: we would go, you with me? This
+signifies therefore that you would consent, a little later, when we
+become of age, to marry me?”
+
+He perceived through the darkness the gentle black light of Gracieuse's
+eyes, which rose toward him with an expression of astonishment and of
+reproach.
+
+“Then--you did not know?”
+
+“I wanted to make you say it, you see--You had never said it to me, do
+you know?--”
+
+He held tighter the arm of his little betrothed and their walk became
+slower. It is true that they had never said it, not only because it
+seemed to them that it was not necessary to say, but especially because
+they were stopped at the moment of speaking by a sort of terror--the
+terror of being mistaken about each other's sentiment--and now they
+knew, they were sure. Then they had the consciousness of having passed
+together the grave and solemn threshold of life. And, leaning on one
+another, they faltered, almost, in their slackened promenade, like two
+children intoxicated by youthfulness, joy and hope.
+
+“But do you think your mother will consent?” said Ramuntcho timidly,
+after the long, delightful silence--
+
+“Ah, that is the trouble,” replied the little girl with a sigh of
+anxiety--“Arrochkoa, my brother, will be for us, it is probable. But
+mother?--Will mother consent?--But, it will not happen soon, in any
+case--You have to serve in the army.”
+
+“No, if you do not want me to! No, I need not serve! I am a Guipuzcoan,
+like my mother; I shall be enrolled only if I wish to be--Whatever you
+say, I'll do--”
+
+“My Ramuntcho, I would like better to wait for you longer and that you
+become naturalized, and that you become a soldier like the others. I
+tell you this, since you ask--”
+
+“Truly, is it what you wish? Well, so much the better. Oh, to be a
+Frenchman or a Spaniard is indifferent to me. I shall do as you wish. I
+like as well one as the other: I am a Basque like you, like all of us;
+I care not for the rest! But as for being a soldier somewhere, on this
+side of the frontier or on the other, yes, I prefer it. In the first
+place, one who goes away looks as if he were running away; and then, it
+would please me to be a soldier, frankly.”
+
+“Well, my Ramuntcho, since it is all the same to you, serve as a soldier
+in France, to please me.”
+
+“It is understood, Gatchutcha!--You will see me wearing red trousers.
+I shall call on you in the dress of a soldier, like Bidegarray, like
+Joachim. As soon as I have served my three years, we will marry, if your
+mother consents!”
+
+After a moment of silence Gracieuse said, in a low, solemn voice:
+
+“Listen, my Ramuntcho--I am like you: I am afraid of her--of my
+mother--But listen--if she refuses, we shall do together anything,
+anything that you wish, for this is the only thing in the world in which
+I shall not obey her--”
+
+Then, silence returned between them, now that they were engaged, the
+incomparable silence of young joys, of joys new and not yet tried, which
+need to hush, which need to meditate in order to understand themselves
+better in their profoundness. They walked in short steps and at random
+toward the church, in the soft obscurity which the lanterns troubled no
+longer, intoxicated by their innocent contact and by feeling that they
+were walking together in the path where no one had followed them--
+
+But the noise of the brass instruments suddenly arose anew, in a sort
+of slow waltz, oddly rhythmic. And the two children, at the fandango's
+appeal, without having consulted each other, and as if it was a
+compulsory thing which may not be disputed, ran, not to lose a moment,
+toward the place where the couples were dancing. Quickly, quickly
+placing themselves opposite each other, they began again to swing in
+measure, without talking to each other, with the same pretty gestures
+of their arms, the same supple motions of their hips. From time to
+time, without loss of step or distance, both ran, in a direct line like
+arrows. But this was only an habitual variation of the dance,--and, ever
+in measure, quickly, as if they were gliding, they returned to their
+starting point.
+
+Gracieuse had in dancing the same passionate ardor as in praying at the
+white chapels,--the same ardor which later doubtless, she would have in
+embracing Ramuntcho when caresses between them would not be forbidden.
+And at moments, at every fifth or sixth measure, at the same time as
+her light and strong partner, she turned round completely, the bust bent
+with Spanish grace, the head thrown backward, the lips half open on
+the whiteness of the teeth, a distinguished and proud grace disengaging
+itself from her little personality, still so mysterious, which to
+Ramuntcho only revealed itself a little.
+
+During all this beautiful evening of November, they danced before each
+other, mute and charming, with intervals of promenade in which they
+hardly talked--intoxicated in silence by the delicious thought with
+which their minds were filled.
+
+And, until the curfew rang in the church, this dance under the branches
+of autumn, these little lanterns, this little festival in this corner
+closed to the world, threw a little light and joyful noise into the vast
+night which the mountains, standing everywhere like giants of shadow,
+made more dumb and more black.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+There is to be a grand ball-game next Sunday, for the feast of Saint
+Damasus, in the borough of Hasparitz.
+
+Arrochkoa and Ramuntcho, companions in continual expeditions through the
+surrounding country, travelled for the entire day, in the little wagon
+of the Detcharry family, in order to organize that ball-game, which to
+them is a considerable event.
+
+In the first place, they had to consult Marcos, one of the Iragola
+brothers. Near a wood, in front of his house in the shade, they found
+him seated on a stump of a chestnut tree, always grave and statuesque,
+his eyes inspired and his gesture noble, in the act of making his little
+brother, still in swaddling clothes, eat soup.
+
+“Is he the eleventh?” they have asked, laughing.
+
+“Oh! Go on!” the big eldest brother has replied, “the eleventh
+is running already like a hare in the heather. This is number
+twelve!--little John the Baptist, you know, the latest, who, I think,
+will not be the last.”
+
+And then, lowering their heads not to strike the branches, they had
+traversed the woods, the forests of oaks under which extends infinitely
+the reddish lace of ferns.
+
+And they have traversed several villages also,--Basque villages, all
+grouped around these two things which are the heart of them and which
+symbolize their life: the church and the ball-game. Here and there, they
+have knocked at the doors of isolated houses, tall and large houses,
+carefully whitewashed, with green shades, and wooden balconies where are
+drying in the sun strings of red peppers. At length they have talked,
+in their language so closed to strangers of France, with the famous
+players, the titled champions, the ones whose odd names have been seen
+in all the journals of the southwest, on all the posters of Biarritz
+or of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and who, in ordinary life, are honest country
+inn-keepers, blacksmiths, smugglers, with waistcoat thrown over the
+shoulder and shirt sleeves rolled on bronze arms.
+
+Now that all is settled and that the last words have been exchanged,
+it is too late to return that night to Etchezar; then, following their
+errant habits, they select for the night a village which they like,
+Zitzarry, for example, where they have gone often for their smuggling
+business. At the fall of night, then, they turn toward this place, which
+is near Spain. They go by the same little Pyrenean routes, shady and
+solitary under the old oaks that are shedding their leaves, among slopes
+richly carpeted with moss and rusty ferns. And now there are ravines
+where torrents roar, and then heights from which appear on all sides the
+tall, sombre peaks.
+
+At first it was cold, a real cold, lashing the face and the chest. But
+now gusts begin to pass astonishingly warm and perfumed with the scent
+of plants: the southern wind, rising again, bringing back suddenly the
+illusion of summer. And then, it becomes for them a delicious sensation
+to go through the air, so brusquely changed, to go quickly under
+the lukewarm breaths, in the noise of their horse's bells galloping
+playfully in the mountains.
+
+Zitzarry, a smugglers' village, a distant village skirting the frontier.
+A dilapidated inn where, according to custom, the rooms for the men
+are directly above the stables, the black stalls. They are well-known
+travelers there, Arrochkoa and Ramuntcho, and while men are lighting
+the fire for them they sit near an antique, mullioned window, which
+overlooks the square of the ball-game and the church; they see the
+tranquil, little life of the day ending in this place so separated from
+the world.
+
+On this solemn square, the children practice the national game; grave
+and ardent, already strong, they throw their pelota against the wall,
+while, in a singing voice and with the needful intonation, one of
+them counts and announces the points, in the mysterious tongue of the
+ancestors. Around them, the tall houses, old and white, with warped
+walls, with projecting rafters, contemplate through their green or red
+windows those little players, so lithe, who run in the twilight like
+young cats. And the carts drawn by oxen return from the fields, with
+the noise of bells, bringing loads of wood, loads of gorse or of dead
+ferns--The night falls, falls with its peace and its sad cold. Then,
+the angelus rings--and there is, in the entire village, a tranquil,
+prayerful meditation--
+
+Then Ramuntcho, silent, worries about his destiny, feels as if he were
+a prisoner here, with his same aspirations always, toward something
+unknown, he knows not what, which troubles him at the approach of night.
+And his heart also fills up, because he is alone and without support in
+the world, because Gracieuse is in a situation different from his and
+may never be given to him.
+
+But Arrochkoa, very brotherly this time, in one of his good moments,
+slaps him on the shoulder as if he had understood his reverie, and says
+to him in a tone of light gaiety:
+
+“Well! it seems that you talked together, last night, sister and
+you--she told me about it--and that you are both prettily agreed!--”
+
+Ramuntcho lifts toward him a long look of anxious and grave
+interrogation, which is in contrast with the beginning of their
+conversation:
+
+“And what do you think,” he asks, “of what we have said?”
+
+“Oh, my friend,” replied Arrochkoa, become more serious also, “on my
+word of honor, it suits me very well--And even, as I fear that there
+shall be trouble with mother, I promise to help you if you need help--”
+
+And Ramuntcho's sadness is dispelled as a little dust on which one has
+blown. He finds the supper delicious, the inn gay. He feels himself
+much more engaged to Gracieuse, now, when somebody is in the secret, and
+somebody in the family who does not repulse him. He had a presentiment
+that Arrochkoa would not be hostile to him, but his co-operation, so
+clearly offered, far surpasses Ramuntcho's hope--Poor little abandoned
+fellow, so conscious of the humbleness of his situation, that the
+support of another child, a little better established in life, suffices
+to return to him courage and confidence!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+At the uncertain and somewhat icy dawn, he awoke in his little room
+in the inn, with a persistent impression of his joy on the day before,
+instead of the confused anguish which accompanied so often in him the
+progressive return of his thoughts. Outside, were sounds of bells of
+cattle starting for the pastures, of cows lowing to the rising sun, of
+church bells,--and already, against the wall of the large square, the
+sharp snap of the Basque pelota: all the noises of a Pyrenean village
+beginning again its customary life for another day. And all this seemed
+to Ramuntcho the early music of a day's festival.
+
+At an early hour, they returned, Arrochkoa and he, to their little
+wagon, and, crushing their caps against the wind, started their horse at
+a gallop on the roads, powdered with white frost.
+
+At Etchezar, where they arrived at noon, one would have thought it was
+summer,--so beautiful was the sun.
+
+In the little garden in front of her house, Gracieuse sat on a stone
+bench:
+
+“I have spoken to Arrochkoa!” said Ramuntcho to her, with a happy smile,
+as soon as they were alone--“And he is entirely with us, you know!”
+
+“Oh! that,” replied the little girl, without losing the sadly pensive
+air which she had that morning, “oh, that!--my brother Arrochkoa, I
+suspected it, it was sure! A pelota player like you, you should know,
+was made to please him, in his mind there is nothing superior to that--”
+
+“But your mother, Gatchutcha, for several days has acted much better
+to me, I think--For example, Sunday, you remember, when I asked you to
+dance--”
+
+“Oh! don't trust to that, my Ramuntcho! you mean day before yesterday,
+after the high mass?--It was because she had just talked with the Mother
+Superior, have you not noticed?--And the Mother Superior had insisted
+that I should not dance with you on the square; then, only to be
+contrary, you understand--But, don't rely on that, no--”
+
+“Oh!” replied Ramuntcho, whose joy had already gone, “it is true that
+they are not very friendly--”
+
+“Friendly, mama and the Mother Superior?--Like a dog and a cat,
+yes!--Since there was talk of my going into the convent, do you not
+remember that story?”
+
+He remembered very well, on the contrary, and it frightened him still.
+The smiling and mysterious black nuns had tried once to attract to the
+peace of their houses that little blonde head, exalted and willful,
+possessed by an immense necessity to love and to be loved--
+
+“Gatchutcha! you are always at the sisters', or with them; why so often?
+explain this to me: they are very agreeable to you?”
+
+“The sisters? no, my Ramuntcho, especially those of the present time,
+who are new in the country and whom I hardly know--for they change them
+often, you know--The sisters, no--I will even tell you that I am like
+mama about the Mother Superior. I cannot endure her--”
+
+“Well, then, what?--”
+
+“No, but what will you? I like their songs, their chapels, their houses,
+everything--I cannot explain that to you--Anyway, boys do not understand
+anything--”
+
+The little smile with which she said this was at once extinguished,
+changed into a contemplative expression or an absent expression, which
+Ramuntcho had often seen in her. She looked attentively in front of her,
+although there were on the road only the leafless trees, the brown mass
+of the crushing mountain; but it seemed as if Gracieuse was enraptured
+in melancholy ecstasy by things perceived beyond them, by things which
+the eyes of Ramuntcho could not distinguish--And during their silence
+the angelus of noon began to ring, throwing more peace on the tranquil
+village which was warming itself in the winter sun; then, bending their
+heads, they made naively together their sign of the cross--
+
+Then, when ceased to vibrate the holy bell, which in the Basque villages
+interrupts life as in the Orient the song of the muezzins, Ramuntcho
+decided to say:
+
+“It frightens me, Gatchutcha, to see you in their company always--I
+cannot but ask myself what ideas are in your head--”
+
+Fixing on him the profound blackness of her eyes, she replied, in a tone
+of soft reproach:
+
+“It is you talking to me in that way, after what we have said to each
+other Sunday night!--If I were to lose you, yes then, perhaps--surely,
+even!--But until then, oh! no--oh! you may rest in peace, my
+Ramuntcho--”
+
+He bore for a long time her look, which little by little brought back to
+him entire delicious confidence, and at last he smiled with a childish
+smile:
+
+“Forgive me,” he asked--“I say silly things often, you know!--”
+
+“That, at least, is the truth!”
+
+Then, one heard the sound of their laughter, which in two different
+intonations had the same freshness and the same youthfulness. Ramuntcho,
+with an habitual brusque and graceful gesture, changed his waistcoat
+from one shoulder to the other, pulled his cap on the side, and, with no
+other farewell than a sign of the head, they separated, for Dolores was
+coming from the end of the road.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+Midnight, a winter night, black as Hades, with great wind and whipping
+rain. By the side of the Bidassoa, in the midst of a confused extent of
+ground with treacherous soil that evokes ideas of chaos, in slime that
+their feet penetrate, men are carrying boxes on their shoulders and,
+walking in the water to their knees, come to throw them into a long
+thing, blacker than night, which must be a bark--a suspicious bark
+without a light, tied near the bank.
+
+It is again Itchoua's band, which this time will work by the river. They
+have slept for a few moments, all dressed, in the house of a receiver
+who lives near the water, and, at the needed hour, Itchoua, who never
+closes but one eye, has shaken his men; then, they have gone out with
+hushed tread, into the darkness, under the cold shower propitious to
+smuggling.
+
+On the road now, with the oars, to Spain whose fires may be seen at a
+distance, confused by the rain. The weather is let loose; the shirts of
+the men are already wet, and, under the caps pulled over their eyes, the
+wind slashes the ears. Nevertheless, thanks to the vigor of their
+arms, they were going quickly and well, when suddenly appeared in the
+obscurity something like a monster gliding on the waters. Bad business!
+It is the patrol boat which promenades every night. Spain's customs
+officers. In haste, they must change their direction, use artifice, lose
+precious time, and they are so belated already.
+
+At last they have arrived without obstacle near the Spanish shore, among
+the large fishermen's barks which, on stormy nights, sleep there on
+their chains, in front of the “Marine” of Fontarabia. This is the
+perilous instant. Happily, the rain is faithful to them and falls still
+in torrents. Lowered in their skiff to be less visible, having ceased
+to talk, pushing the bottom with their oars in order to make less noise,
+they approach softly, softly, with pauses as soon as something has
+seemed to budge, in the midst of so much diffuse black, of shadows
+without outlines.
+
+Now they are crouched against one of these large, empty barks and almost
+touching the earth. And this is the place agreed upon, it is there that
+the comrades of the other country should be to receive them and to
+carry their boxes to the receiving house--There is nobody there,
+however!--Where are they?--The first moments are passed in a sort of
+paroxysm of expectation and of watching, which doubles the power of
+hearing and of seeing. With eyes dilated, and ears extended, they watch,
+under the monotonous dripping of the rain--But where are the Spanish
+comrades? Doubtless the hour has passed, because of this accursed custom
+house patrol which has disarranged the voyage, and, believing that the
+undertaking has failed this time, they have gone back--
+
+Several minutes flow, in the same immobility and the same silence. They
+distinguish, around them, the large, inert barks, similar to floating
+bodies of beasts, and then, above the waters, a mass of obscurities
+denser than the obscurities of the sky and which are the houses, the
+mountains of the shore--They wait, without a movement, without a word.
+They seem to be ghosts of boatmen near a dead city.
+
+Little by little the tension of their senses weakens, a lassitude comes
+to them with the need of sleep--and they would sleep there, under this
+winter rain, if the place were not so dangerous.
+
+Itchoua then consults in a low voice, in Basque language, the two
+eldest, and they decide to do a bold thing. Since the others are not
+coming, well! so much the worse, they will go alone, carry to the house
+over there, the smuggled boxes. It is risking terribly, but the idea is
+in their heads and nothing can stop them.
+
+“You,” says Itchoua to Ramuntcho, in his manner which admits of no
+discussion, “you shall be the one to watch the bark, since you have
+never been in the path that we are taking; you shall tie it to the
+bottom, but not too solidly, do you hear? We must be ready to run if the
+carbineers arrive.”
+
+So they go, all the others, their shoulders bent under the heavy loads,
+the rustling, hardly perceptible, of their march is lost at once on the
+quay which is so deserted and so black, in the midst of the monotonous
+dripping of the rain. And Ramuntcho, who has remained alone, crouches
+at the bottom of the skiff to be less visible becomes immovable again,
+under the incessant sprinkling of the rain, which falls now regular and
+tranquil.
+
+They are late, the comrades--and by degrees, in this inactivity and this
+silence, an irresistible numbness comes to him, almost a sleep.
+
+But now a long form, more sombre than all that is sombre, passes by him,
+passes very quickly,--always in this same absolute silence which is the
+characteristic of these nocturnal undertakings: one of the large Spanish
+barks!--Yet, thinks he, since all are at anchor, since this one has no
+sails nor oars--then, what?--It is I, myself, who am passing!--and he
+has understood: his skiff was too lightly tied, and the current, which
+is very rapid here, is dragging him:--and he is very far away, going
+toward the mouth of the Bidassoa, toward the breakers, toward the sea--
+
+An anxiety has taken hold of him, almost an anguish--What will he
+do?--What complicates everything is that he must act without a cry of
+appeal, without a word, for, all along this coast, which seems to be the
+land of emptiness and of darkness, there are carbineers, placed in
+an interminable cordon and watching Spain every night as if it were a
+forbidden land--He tries with one of the long oars to push the bottom
+in order to return backward;--but there is no more bottom; he feels only
+the inconsistency of the fleeting and black water, he is already in the
+profound pass--Then, let him row, in spite of everything, and so much
+for the worse--!
+
+With great trouble, his forehead perspiring, he brings back alone
+against the current the heavy bark, worried, at every stroke of the oar,
+by the small, disclosing grating that a fine ear over there might so
+well perceive. And then, one can see nothing more, through the rain
+grown thicker and which confuses the eyes; it is dark, dark as in the
+bowels of the earth where the devil lives. He recognizes no longer the
+point of departure where the others must be waiting for him, whose ruin
+he has perhaps caused; he hesitates, he waits, the ear extended, the
+arteries beating, and he hooks himself, for a moment's reflection, to
+one of the large barks of Spain--Something approaches then, gliding with
+infinite precaution on the surface of the water, hardly stirred: a human
+shadow, one would think, a silhouette standing:--a smuggler, surely,
+since he makes so little noise! They divine each other, and, thank God!
+it is Arrochkoa; Arrochkoa, who has untied a frail, Spanish skiff to
+meet him--So, their junction is accomplished and they are probably saved
+all, once more!
+
+But Arrochkoa, in meeting him, utters in a wicked voice, in a voice
+tightened by his young, feline teeth, one of those series of insults
+which call for immediate answer and sound like an invitation to fight.
+It is so unexpected that Ramuntcho's stupor at first immobilizes him,
+retards the rush of blood to his head. Is this really what his friend
+has just said and in such a tone of undeniable insult?--
+
+“You said?”
+
+“Well!” replies Arrochkoa, somewhat softened and on his guard, observing
+in the darkness Ramuntcho's attitudes. “Well! you had us almost caught,
+awkward fellow that you are!--”
+
+The silhouettes of the others appear in another bark.
+
+“They are there,” he continues. “Let us go near them!”
+
+And Ramuntcho takes his oarsman's seat with temples heated by anger,
+with trembling hands--no--he is Gracieuse's brother; all would be lost
+if Ramuntcho fought with him; because of her he will bend the head and
+say nothing.
+
+Now their bark runs away by force of oars, carrying them all; the trick
+has been played. It was time; two Spanish voices vibrate on the black
+shore: two carbineers, who were sleeping in their cloaks and whom the
+noise has awakened!--And they begin to hail this flying, beaconless
+bark, not perceived so much as suspected, lost at once in the universal,
+nocturnal confusion.
+
+“Too late, friends,” laughs Itchoua, while rowing to the uttermost.
+“Hail at your ease now and let the devil answer you!”
+
+The current also helps them; they go into the thick obscurity with the
+rapidity of fishes.
+
+There! Now they are in French waters, in safety, not far, doubtless,
+from the slime of the banks.
+
+“Let us stop to breathe a little,” proposes Itchoua.
+
+And they raise their oars, halting, wet with perspiration and with rain.
+They are immovable again under the cold shower, which they do not
+seem to feel. There is heard in the vast silence only the breathing of
+chests, little by little quieted, the little music of drops of water
+falling and their light rippling. But suddenly, from this bark which was
+so quiet, and which had no other importance than that of a shadow hardly
+real in the midst of so much night, a cry rises, superacute, terrifying:
+it fills the emptiness and rents the far-off distances--It has come from
+those elevated notes which belong ordinarily to women only, but with
+something hoarse and powerful that indicates rather the savage male;
+it has the bite of the voice of jackals and it preserves, nevertheless,
+something human which makes one shiver the more; one waits with a sort
+of anguish for its end, and it is long, long, it is oppressive by its
+inexplicable length--It had begun like a stag's bell of agony and now it
+is achieved and it dies in a sort of laughter, sinister and burlesque,
+like the laughter of lunatics--
+
+However, around the man who has just cried thus in the front of the
+bark, none of the others is astonished, none budges. And, after a few
+seconds of silent peace, a new cry, similar to the first, starts from
+the rear, replying to it and passing through the same phases,--which are
+of a tradition infinitely ancient.
+
+And it is simply the “irrintzina”, the great Basque cry which has been
+transmitted with fidelity from the depth of the abyss of ages to the men
+of our day, and which constitutes one of the strange characteristics of
+that race whose origins are enveloped in mystery. It resembles the cry
+of a being of certain tribes of redskins in the forests of America;
+at night, it gives the notion and the unfathomable fright of primitive
+ages, when, in the midst of the solitudes of the old world, men with
+monkey throats howled.
+
+This cry is given at festivals, or for calls of persons at night in the
+mountains, and especially to celebrate some joy, some unexpected good
+fortune, a miraculous hunt or a happy catch of fish in the rivers.
+
+And they are amused, the smugglers, at this game of the ancestors; they
+give their voices to glorify the success of their undertaking, they
+yell, from the physical necessity to be compensated for their silence of
+a moment ago.
+
+But Ramuntcho remains mute and without a smile. This sudden savagery
+chills him, although he has known it for a long time; it plunges him
+into dreams that worry and do not explain themselves.
+
+And then, he has felt to-night once more how uncertain and changing is
+his only support in the world, the support of that Arrochkoa on whom
+he should be able to count as on a brother; audacity and success at the
+ball-game will return that support to him, doubtless, but a moment of
+weakness, nothing, may at any moment make him lose it. Then it seems to
+him that the hope of his life has no longer a basis, that all vanishes
+like an unstable chimera.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+It was New Year's eve.
+
+All the day had endured that sombre sky which is so often the sky of the
+Basque country--and which harmonizes well with the harsh mountains, with
+the roar of the sea, wicked, in the depths of the Bay of Biscay.
+
+In the twilight of this last day of the year, at the hour when the fires
+retain the men around the hearths scattered in the country, at the hour
+when home is desirable and delicious, Ramuntcho and his mother were
+preparing to sit at the supper table, when there was a discreet knock at
+the door.
+
+The man who was coming to them from the night of the exterior, at the
+first aspect seemed unknown to them; only when he told his name (Jose
+Bidegarray, of Hasparitz) they recalled the sailor who had gone several
+years ago to America.
+
+“Here,” he said, after accepting a chair, “here is the message which I
+have been asked to bring to you. Once, at Rosario in Uruguay, as I was
+talking on the docks with several other Basque immigrants there, a man,
+who might have been fifty years old, having heard me speak of Etchezar,
+came to me.
+
+“'Do you come from Etchezar?' he asked.
+
+“'No,' I replied, 'but I come from Hasparitz, which is not far from
+Etchezar.'
+
+“Then he put questions to me about all your family. I said:
+
+“'The old people are dead, the elder brother was killed in smuggling,
+the second has disappeared in America; there remain only Franchita and
+her son, Ramuntcho, a handsome young fellow who must be about eighteen
+years old today.'
+
+“He was thinking deeply while he was listening to me.
+
+“'Well,' he said at last, 'since you are going back there, you will say
+good-day to them for Ignacio.'
+
+“And after offering a drink to me he went away--”
+
+Franchita had risen, trembling and paler than ever. Ignacio, the most
+adventurous in the family, her brother who had disappeared for ten years
+without sending any news--!
+
+How was he? What face? Dressed how?--Did he seem happy, at least, or was
+he poorly dressed?
+
+“Oh!” replied the sailor, “he looked well, in spite of his gray hair; as
+for his costume, he appeared to be a man of means, with a beautiful gold
+chain on his belt.”
+
+And that was all he could say, with this naive and rude good-day of
+which he was the bearer; on the subject of the exile he knew no more
+and perhaps, until she died, Franchita would learn nothing more of that
+brother, almost non-existing, like a phantom.
+
+Then, when he had emptied a glass of cider, he went on his road, the
+strange messenger, who was going to his village. Then, they sat at table
+without speaking, the mother and the son: she, the silent Franchita,
+absent minded, with tears shining in her eyes; he, worried also, but in
+a different manner, by the thought of that uncle living in adventures
+over there.
+
+When he ceased to be a child, when Ramuntcho began to desert from
+school, to wish to follow the smugglers in the mountain, Franchita would
+say to him:
+
+“Anyway, you take after your uncle Ignacio, we shall never make anything
+of you!--”
+
+And it was true that he took after his uncle Ignacio, that he was
+fascinated by all the things that are dangerous, unknown and far-off--
+
+To-night, therefore, if she did not talk to her son of the message
+which had just been transmitted to them, the reason was she divined
+his meditation on America and was afraid of his answers. Besides, among
+country people, the little profound and intimate dramas are played
+without words, with misunderstandings that are never cleared up, with
+phrases only guessed at and with obstinate silence.
+
+But, as they were finishing their meal, they heard a chorus of young and
+gay voices, coming near, accompanied by a drum, the boys of Etchezar,
+coming for Ramuntcho to bring him with them in their parade with music
+around the village, following the custom of New Year's eve, to go into
+every house, drink in it a glass of cider and give a joyous serenade to
+an old time tune.
+
+And Ramuntcho, forgetting Uruguay and the mysterious uncle, became a
+child again, in the pleasure of following them and of singing with them
+along the obscure roads, enraptured especially by the thought that they
+would go to the house of the Detcharry family and that he would see
+again, for an instant, Gracieuse.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+The changeable month of March had arrived, and with it the intoxication
+of spring, joyful for the young, sad for those who are declining.
+
+And Gracieuse had commenced again to sit, in the twilight of the
+lengthened days, on the stone bench in front of her door.
+
+Oh! the old stone benches, around the houses, made, in the past ages,
+for the reveries of the soft evenings and for the eternally similar
+conversations of lovers--!
+
+Gracieuse's house was very ancient, like most houses in that Basque
+country, where, less than elsewhere, the years change the things.--It
+had two stories; a large projecting roof in a steep slope; walls like a
+fortress which were whitewashed every summer; very small windows,
+with settings of cut granite and green blinds. Above the front door, a
+granite lintel bore an inscription in relief; words complicated and long
+which, to French eyes resembled nothing known. It said: “May the Holy
+Virgin bless this home, built in the year 1630 by Peter Detcharry,
+beadle, and his wife Damasa Irribarne, of the village of Istaritz.” A
+small garden two yards wide, surrounded by a low wall so that one could
+see the passers-by, separated the house from the road; there was a
+beautiful rose-laurel, extending its southern foliage above the evening
+bench, and there were yuccas, a palm tree, and enormous bunches of
+those hortensias which are giants here, in this land of shade, in this
+lukewarm climate, so often enveloped by clouds. In the rear was a badly
+closed orchard which rolled down to an abandoned path, favorable to
+escalades of lovers.
+
+What mornings radiant with light there were in that spring, and what
+tranquil, pink evenings!
+
+After a week of full moon which kept the fields till day-light blue with
+rays, and when the band of Itchoua ceased to work,--so clear was their
+habitual domain, so illuminated were the grand, vaporous backgrounds of
+the Pyrenees and of Spain--the frontier fraud was resumed more ardently,
+as soon as the thinned crescent had become discreet and early setting.
+Then, in these beautiful times, smuggling by night was exquisite; a
+trade of solitude and of meditation when the mind of the naive and very
+pardonable defrauders was elevated unconsciously in the contemplation of
+the sky and of the darkness animated by stars--as it happens to the mind
+of the sea folk watching, on the nocturnal march of vessels, and as it
+happened formerly to the mind of the shepherds in antique Chaldea.
+
+It was favorable also and tempting for lovers, that tepid period which
+followed the full moon of March, for it was dark everywhere around the
+houses, dark in all the paths domed with trees,--and very dark, behind
+the Detcharry orchard, on the abandoned path where nobody ever passed.
+
+Gracieuse lived more and more on her bench in front of her door.
+
+It was here that she was seated, as every year, to receive and look at
+the carnival dancers: those groups of young boys and of young girls of
+Spain or of France, who, every spring, organize themselves for several
+days in a wandering band, and, all dressed in the same pink or white
+colors, traverse the frontier village, dancing the fandango in front of
+houses, with castanets--
+
+She stayed later and later in this place which she liked, under the
+shelter of the rose-laurel coming into bloom, and sometimes even, she
+came out noiselessly through the window, like a little, sly fox, to
+breathe there at length, after her mother had gone to bed. Ramuntcho
+knew this and, every night, the thought of that bench troubled his
+sleep.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+One clear April morning, they were walking to the church, Gracieuse and
+Ramuntcho. She, with an air half grave, half mocking, with a particular
+and very odd air, leading him there to make him do a penance which she
+had ordered.
+
+In the holy enclosure, the flowerbeds of the tombs were coming into
+bloom again, as also the rose bushes on the walls. Once more the new
+saps were awakening above the long sleep of the dead. They went in
+together, through the lower door, into the empty church, where the old
+“benoite” in a black mantilla was alone, dusting the altars.
+
+When Gracieuse had given to Ramuntcho the holy water and they had made
+their signs of the cross, she led him through the sonorous nave, paved
+with funereal stones, to a strange image on the wall, in a shady corner,
+under the men's tribunes.
+
+It was a painting, impregnated with ancient mysticism, representing the
+figure of Jesus with eyes closed, forehead bloody, expression lamentable
+and dead; the head seemed to be cut off, separated from the body,
+and placed there on a gray linen cloth. Above, were written the long
+Litanies of the Holy Face, which have been composed, as everybody knows,
+to be recited in penance by repentant blasphemers. The day before,
+Ramuntcho, in anger, had sworn in an ugly manner: a quite unimaginable
+string of words, wherein the sacraments and the most saintly things were
+mingled with the horns of the devil and other villainous things still
+more frightful. That is why the necessity for a penance had impressed
+itself on the mind of Gracieuse.
+
+“Come, my Ramuntcho,” she recommended, as she walked away, “omit nothing
+of what you must say.”
+
+She left him then in front of the Holy Face, beginning to murmur his
+litanies in a low voice, and went to the good woman and helped her to
+change the water of the white Easter daisies in front of the altar of
+the Virgin.
+
+But when the languorous evening returned, and Gracieuse was seated in
+the darkness meditating on her stone bench, a young human form started
+up suddenly near her; someone who had come in sandals, without making
+more noise than the silk owls make in the air, from the rear of the
+garden doubtless, after some scaling, and who stood there, straight, his
+waistcoat thrown over one shoulder: the one to whom were addressed all
+her tender emotions on earth, the one who incarnated the ardent dream of
+her heart and of her senses--
+
+“Ramuntcho!” she said. “Oh! how you frightened me. Where did you come
+from at such an hour? What do you want? Why did you come?”
+
+“Why did I come? In my turn, to order you to do penance,” he replied,
+laughing.
+
+“No, tell the truth, what is the matter, what are you coming to do?”
+
+ “To see you, only! That is what I come to do--What will you have! We
+never see each other!--Your mother keeps me at a distance more and more
+every day. I cannot live in that way.--We are not doing any harm, after
+all, since we are to be married! And you know, I could come every night,
+if you like, without anybody suspecting it--”
+
+“Oh! no!--Oh! do not do that ever, I beg of you--”
+
+They talked for an instant, and so low, so low, with more silence than
+words, as if they were afraid to wake up the birds in their nests.
+They recognized no longer the sound of their voices, so changed and
+so trembling they were, as if they had committed some delicious and
+damnable crime, by doing nothing but staying near each other, in the
+grand, caressing mystery of that night of April, which was hatching
+around them so many ascents of saps, so many germinations and so many
+loves--
+
+He had not even dared to sit at her side; he remained standing, ready to
+run under the branches at the least alarm, like a nocturnal prowler.
+
+However, when he prepared to go, it was she who asked, hesitating, and
+in a manner to be hardly heard:
+
+“And--you will come back to-morrow?”
+
+Then, under his growing mustache, he smiled at this sudden change of
+mind and he replied:
+
+“Yes, surely.--To-morrow and every night.--Every night when we shall not
+have to work in Spain.--I will come--”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+Ramuntcho's lodging place was, in the house of his mother and above the
+stable, a room neatly whitewashed; he had there his bed, always clean
+and white, but where smuggling gave him few hours for sleep. Books of
+travel or cosmography, which the cure of the parish lent to him, posed
+on his table--unexpected in this house. The portraits, framed, of
+different saints, ornamented the walls, and several pelota-players'
+gloves were hanging from the beams of the ceiling, long gloves of wicker
+and of leather which seemed rather implements of hunting or fishing.
+
+Franchita, at her return to her country, had bought back this house,
+which was that of her deceased parents, with a part of the sum given to
+her by the stranger at the birth of her son. She had invested the rest;
+then she worked at making gowns or at ironing linen for the people of
+Etchezar, and rented, to farmers of land near by, two lower rooms, with
+the stable where they placed their cows and their sheep.
+
+Different familiar, musical sounds rocked Ramuntcho in his bed. First,
+the constant roar of a near-by torrent; then, at times, songs of
+nightingales, salutes to the dawn of divers birds. And, in this spring
+especially, the cows, his neighbors, excited doubtless by the smell of
+new-mown hay, moved all night, were agitated in dreams, making their
+bells tintillate continually.
+
+Often, after the long expeditions at night, he regained his sleep in the
+afternoon, extended in the shade in some corner of moss and grass. Like
+the other smugglers, he was not an early riser for a village boy, and
+he woke up sometimes long after daybreak, when already, between the
+disjointed planks of his flooring, rays of a vivid and gay light came
+from the stable below, the door of which remained open always to the
+rising sun after the departure of the cattle to their pastures. Then, he
+went to his window, pushed open the little, old blinds made of massive
+chestnut wood painted in olive, and leaned on his elbows, placed on the
+sill of the thick wall, to look at the clouds or at the sun of the new
+morning.
+
+What he saw, around his house, was green, green, magnificently green, as
+are in the spring all the corners of that land of shade and of rain.
+The ferns which, in the autumn, have so warm a rusty color, were now,
+in this April, in the glory of their greenest freshness and covered the
+slopes of the mountains as with an immense carpet of curly wool, where
+foxglove flowers made pink spots. In a ravine, the torrent roared under
+branches. Above, groups of oaks and of beeches clung to the slopes,
+alternating with prairies; then, above this tranquil Eden, toward the
+sky, ascended the grand, denuded peak of the Gizune, sovereign hill of
+the region of the clouds. And one perceived also, in the background, the
+church and the houses--that village of Etchezar, solitary and perched
+high on one of the Pyrenean cliffs, far from everything, far from
+the lines of communication which have revolutionized and spoiled the
+lowlands of the shores; sheltered from curiosity, from the profanation
+of strangers, and living still its Basque life of other days.
+
+Ramuntcho's awakenings were impregnated, at this window, with peace and
+humble serenity. They were full of joy, his awakenings of a man engaged,
+since he had the assurance of meeting Gracieuse at night at the promised
+place. The vague anxieties, the undefined sadness, which accompanied
+in him formerly the daily return of his thoughts, had fled for a time,
+dispelled by the reminiscence and the expectation of these meetings;
+his life was all changed; as soon as his eyes were opened he had the
+impression of a mystery and of an immense enchantment, enveloping him in
+the midst of this verdure and of these April flowers. And this peace of
+spring, thus seen every morning, seemed to him every time a new thing,
+very different from what it had been in the previous years, infinitely
+sweet to his heart and voluptuous to his flesh, having unfathomable and
+ravishing depths.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+It is Easter night, after the village bells have ceased to mingle in the
+air so many holy vibrations that came from Spain and from France.
+
+Seated on the bank of the Bidassoa, Ramuntcho and Florentino watch the
+arrival of a bark. A great silence now, and the bells sleep. The tepid
+twilight has been prolonged and, in breathing, one feels the approach of
+summer.
+
+As soon as the night falls, it must appear from the coast of Spain, the
+smuggling bark, bringing the very prohibited phosphorus. And, without
+its touching the shore, they must go to get that merchandise, by
+advancing on foot in the bed of the river, with long, pointed sticks in
+their hands, in order to assume, if perchance they were caught, airs of
+people fishing innocently for “platuches.”
+
+The water of the Bidassoa is to-night an immovable and clear mirror, a
+little more luminous than the sky, and in this mirror, are reproduced,
+upside down, all the constellations, the entire Spanish mountain, carved
+in so sombre a silhouette in the tranquil atmosphere. Summer, summer,
+one has more and more the consciousness of its approach, so limpid and
+soft are the first signs of night, so much lukewarm langour is scattered
+over this corner of the world, where the smugglers silently manoeuvre.
+
+But this estuary, which separates the two countries, seems in this
+moment to Ramuntcho more melancholy than usual, more closed and more
+walled-in in front of him by these black mountains, at the feet of which
+hardly shine, here and there, two or three uncertain lights. Then, he
+is seized again by his desire to know what there is beyond, and further
+still.--Oh! to go elsewhere!--To escape, at least for a time, from the
+oppressiveness of that land--so loved, however!--Before death, to escape
+the oppressiveness of this existence, ever similar and without egress.
+To try something else, to get out of here, to travel, to know things--!
+
+Then, while watching the far-off, terrestrial distances where the bark
+will appear, he raises his eyes from time to time toward what happens
+above, in the infinite, looks at the new moon, the crescent of which, as
+thin as a line, lowers and will disappear soon; looks at the stars,
+the slow and regulated march of which he has observed, as have all the
+people of his trade, during so many nocturnal hours; is troubled in the
+depth of his mind by the proportions and the inconceivable distances of
+these things.--
+
+In his village of Etchezar, the old priest who had taught him the
+catechism, interested by his young, lively intelligence, has lent books
+to him, has continued with him conversations on a thousand subjects,
+and, on the subject of the planets, has given to him the notion of
+movements and of immensities, has half opened before his eyes the grand
+abyss of space and duration. Then, in his mind, innate doubts, frights
+and despairs that slumbered, all that his father had bequeathed to him
+as a sombre inheritance, all these things have taken a black form which
+stands before him. Under the great sky of night, his Basque faith has
+commenced to weaken. His mind is no longer simple enough to accept
+blindly dogmas and observances, and, as all becomes incoherence and
+disorder in his young head, so strangely prepared, the course of which
+nobody is leading, he does not know that it is wise to submit, with
+confidence in spite of everything, to the venerable and consecrated
+formulas, behind which is hidden perhaps all that we may ever see of the
+unknowable truths.
+
+Therefore, these bells of Easter which the year before had filled him
+with a religious and soft sentiment, this time had seemed to him to be
+a music sad and almost vain. And now that they have just hushed, he
+listens with undefined sadness to the powerful noise, almost incessant
+since the creation, that the breakers of the Bay of Biscay make and
+which, in the peaceful nights, may be heard in the distance behind the
+mountains.
+
+But his floating dream changes again.--Now the estuary, which has
+become quite dark and where one may no longer see the mass of human
+habitations, seems to him, little by little, to become different; then,
+strange suddenly, as if some mystery were to be accomplished in it; he
+perceives only the great, abrupt lines of it, which are almost eternal,
+and he is surprised to think confusedly of times more ancient, of an
+unprecise and obscure antiquity.--The Spirit of the old ages, which
+comes out of the soil at times in the calm nights, in the hours when
+sleep the beings that trouble us in the day-time, the Spirit of the old
+ages is beginning, doubtless, to soar in the air around him; Ramuntcho
+does not define this well, for his sense of an artist and of a seer,
+that no education has refined, has remained rudimentary; but he has the
+notion and the worry of it.--In his head, there is still and always
+a chaos, which seeks perpetually to disentangle itself and never
+succeeds.--However, when the two enlarged and reddened horns of the
+moon fall slowly behind the mountain, always black, the aspect of things
+takes, for an inappreciable instant, one knows not what ferocious and
+primitive airs; then, a dying impression of original epochs which had
+remained, one knows not where in space, takes for Ramuntcho a precise
+form in a sudden manner, and troubles him until he shivers. He dreams,
+even without wishing it, of those men of the forests who lived here in
+the ages, in the uncalculated and dark ages, because, suddenly, from a
+point distant from the shore, a long Basque cry rises from the darkness
+in a lugubrious falsetto, an “irrintzina,” the only thing in this
+country with which he never could become entirely familiar. But a great
+mocking noise occurs in the distance, the crash of iron, whistles: a
+train from Paris to Madrid, which is passing over there, behind them, in
+the black of the French shore. And the Spirit of the old ages folds its
+wings made of shade and vanishes. Silence returns: but after the passage
+of this stupid and rapid thing, the Spirit which has fled reappears no
+more--
+
+At last, the bark which Ramuntcho awaited with Florentino appears,
+hardly perceptible for other eyes than theirs, a little, gray form which
+leaves behind it slight ripples on this mirror which is of the color of
+the sky at night and wherein stars are reflected upside down. It is the
+well-selected hour, the hour when the customs officers watch badly; the
+hour also when the view is dimmer, when the last reflections of the sun
+and those of the crescent of the moon have gone out, and the eyes of men
+are not yet accustomed to darkness.
+
+Then to get the prohibited phosphorus, they take their long fishing
+sticks, and go into the water silently.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+There was a grand ball-game arranged for the following Sunday at
+Erribiague, a far-distant village, near the tall mountains. Ramuntcho,
+Arrochkoa and Florentino were to play against three celebrated ones
+of Spain; they were to practice that evening, limber their arms on the
+square of Etchezar, and Gracieuse, with other little girls of her age,
+had taken seats on the granite benches to look at them. The girls, all
+pretty; with elegant airs in their pale colored waists cut in accordance
+with the most recent vagary of the season. And they were laughing, these
+little girls, they were laughing! They were laughing because they had
+begun laughing, without knowing why. Nothing, a word of their old Basque
+tongue, without any appropriateness, by one of them, and there they were
+all in spasms of laughter.--This country is truly one of the corners of
+the world where the laughter of girls breaks out most easily, ringing
+like clear crystal, ringing youthfulness and fresh throats.
+
+Arrochkoa had been there for a long time, with the wicker glove at his
+arm, throwing alone the pelota which, from time to time, children picked
+up for him. But Ramuntcho, Florentino, what were they thinking of?
+How late they were! They came at last, their foreheads wet with
+perspiration, their walk heavy and embarrassed. And, while the little,
+laughing girls questioned them, in that mocking tone which girls, when
+they are in a troupe, assume ordinarily to interpellate boys,
+these smiled, and each one struck his chest which gave a metallic
+sound.--Through paths of the Gizune, they had returned on foot from
+Spain, heavy with copper coin bearing the effigy of the gentle, little
+King Alfonso XIII. A new trick of the smugglers: for Itchoua's account,
+they had exchanged over there with profit, a big sum of money for this
+debased coin, destined to be circulated at par at the coming fairs, in
+different villages of the Landes where Spanish cents are current. They
+were bringing, in their pockets, in their shirts, some forty kilos of
+copper. They made all this fall like rain on the antique granite of the
+benches, at the feet of the amused girls, asking them to keep and count
+it for them; then, after wiping their foreheads and puffing a little,
+they began to play and to jump, being light now and lighter than
+ordinarily, their overload being disposed of.
+
+Except three or four children of the school who ran like young cats
+after the lost pelotas, there were only the girls, seated in a group on
+the lowest one of these deserted steps, the old, reddish stones of
+which bore at this moment their herbs and their flowers of April. Calico
+gowns, clear white or pink waists, they were all the gaiety of this
+solemnly sad place. Beside Gracieuse was Pantchika Dargaignaratz,
+another fifteen year old blonde, who was engaged to Arrochkoa and would
+soon marry him, for he, being the son of a widow, had not to serve in
+the army. And, criticizing the players, placing in lines on the granite
+rows of piled-up copper cents, they laughed, they whispered, in their
+chanted accent, with ends of syllables in “rra” or in “rrik,” making the
+“r's” roll so sharply that one would have thought every instant sparrows
+were beating their wings in their mouths.
+
+They also, the boys, were laughing, and they came frequently, under
+the pretext of resting, to sit among the girls. These troubled and
+intimidated them three times more than the public, because they mocked
+so!
+
+Ramuntcho learned from his little betrothed something which he would not
+have dared to hope for: she had obtained her mother's permission to
+go to that festival of Erribiague, see the ball-game and visit that
+country, which she did not know. It was agreed that she should go in a
+carriage, with Pantchika and Madame Dargaignaratz; and they would meet
+over there; perhaps it would be possible to return all together.
+
+During the two weeks since their evening meetings had begun, this was
+the first time when he had had the opportunity to talk to her thus in
+the day-time and before the others--and their manner was different, more
+ceremonious apparently, with, beneath it, a very suave mystery. It was
+a long time, also, since he had seen her so well and so near in the
+daylight: she was growing more beautiful that spring; she was pretty,
+pretty!--Her bust had become rounder and her waist thinner; her manner
+gained, day by day, an elegant suppleness. She resembled her brother
+still, she had the same regular features, the same perfect oval of the
+face; but the difference in their eyes went on increasing: while those
+of Arrochkoa, of a blue green shade which seemed fleeting, avoided
+the glances of others, hers, on the contrary, black pupils and lashes,
+dilated themselves to look at you fixedly. Ramuntcho had seen eyes like
+these in no other person; he adored the frank tenderness of them and
+also their anxious and profound questioning. Long before he had become a
+man and accessible to the trickery of the senses, those eyes had caught,
+of his little, childish mind, all that was best and purest in it.--And
+now around such eyes, the grand Transformer, enigmatic and sovereign,
+had placed a beauty of flesh which irresistibly called his flesh to a
+supreme communion.--
+
+They were made very inattentive to their game, the players, by the group
+of little girls, of white and pink waists, and they laughed themselves
+at not playing so well as usual. Above them, occupying only a small
+corner of the old, granite amphitheatre, ascended rows of empty benches
+in ruins; then, the houses of Etchezar, so peacefully isolated from the
+rest of the world; then, in fine, the obscure, encumbering mass of the
+Gizune, filling up the sky and mingling with thick clouds asleep on
+its sides. Clouds immovable, inoffensive and without a threat of rain;
+clouds of spring, which were of a turtle-dove color and which seemed
+tepid, like the air of that evening. And, in a rent, much less elevated
+than the summit predominating over this entire site, a round moon began
+to silver as the day declined.
+
+They played, in the beautiful twilight, until the hour when the first
+bats appeared, until the hour when the flying pelota could hardly be
+seen in the air. Perhaps they felt, unconsciously, that the moment was
+rare and might not be regained: then, as much as possible, they should
+prolong it--
+
+And at last, they went together to take to Itchoua his Spanish coins. In
+two lots, they had been placed in two thick, reddish towels which a boy
+and a girl held at each end, and they walked in cadence, singing the
+tune of “The Linen Weaver.”
+
+How long, clear and soft was that twilight of April!--There were roses
+and all sorts of flowers in front of the walls of the venerable, white
+houses with brown or green blinds. Jessamine, honeysuckle and linden
+filled the air with fragrance. For Gracieuse and Ramuntcho, it was
+one of those exquisite hours which later, in the anguishing sadness
+of awakenings, one recalls with a regret at once heart-breaking and
+charming.
+
+Oh! who shall say why there are on earth evenings of spring, and eyes
+so pretty to look at, and smiles of young girls, and breaths of perfumes
+which gardens exhale when the nights of April fall, and all this
+delicious cajoling of life, since it is all to end ironically in
+separation, in decrepitude and in death--
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+The next day, Friday, was organized the departure for this village where
+the festival was to take place on the following Sunday. It is situated
+very far, in a shady region, at the turn of a deep gorge, at the foot of
+very high summits. Arrochkoa was born there and he had spent there the
+first months of his life, in the time when his father lived there as
+a brigadier of the French customs; but he had left too early to have
+retained the least memory of it.
+
+In the little Detcharry carriage, Gracieuse, Pantchita and, with a long
+whip in her hand, Madame Dargaignaratz, her mother, who is to drive,
+leave together at the noon angelus to go over there directly by the
+mountain route.
+
+Ramuntcho, Arrochkoa and Florentino, who have to settle smuggling
+affairs at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, go by a roundabout way which will bring
+them to Erribiague at night, on the train which goes from Bayonne to
+Burguetta. To-day, all three are heedless and happy; Basque caps never
+appeared above more joyful faces.
+
+The night is falling when they penetrate, by this little train of
+Burguetta, into the quiet, interior country. The carriages are full of
+a gay crowd, a spring evening crowd, returning from some festival, young
+girls with silk kerchiefs around their necks, young men wearing woolen
+caps; all are singing, laughing and kissing. In spite of the invading
+obscurity one may still distinguish the hedges, white with hawthorn, the
+woods white with acacia flowers; into the open carriages penetrates a
+fragrance at once violent and suave, which the country exhales. And on
+all this white bloom of April, which the night little by little effaces,
+the train throws in passing a furrow of joy, the refrain of some old
+song of Navarre, sung and resung infinitely by these girls and these
+boys, in the noise of the wheels and of the steam--
+
+Erribiague! At the doors, this name, which makes all three start, is
+cried. The singing band had already stepped out, leaving them almost
+alone in the train, which had become silent. High mountains had made the
+night very thick--and the three were almost sleeping.
+
+Astounded, they jump down, in the midst of an obscurity which even their
+smugglers' eyes cannot pierce. Stars above hardly shine, so encumbered
+is the sky by the overhanging summits.
+
+“Where is the village?” they ask of a man who is there alone to receive
+them.
+
+“Three miles from here on the right.”
+
+They begin to distinguish the gray trail of a road, suddenly lost in the
+heart of the shade. And in the grand silence, in the humid coolness of
+these valleys full of darkness, they walk without talking, their gaiety
+somewhat darkened by the black majesty of the peaks that guard the
+frontier here.
+
+They come, at last, to an old, curved bridge over a torrent; then, to
+the sleeping village which no light indicates. And the inn, where shines
+a lamp, is near by, leaning on the mountain, its base in the roaring
+water.
+
+The young men are led into their little rooms which have an air of
+cleanliness in spite of their extreme oldness: very low, crushed by
+their enormous beams, and bearing on their whitewashed walls images of
+the Christ, the Virgin and the saints.
+
+Then, they go down to the supper tables, where are seated two or three
+old men in old time costume: white belt, black blouse, very short, with
+a thousand pleats. And Arrochkoa, vain of his parentage, hastens to ask
+them if they have not known Detcharry, who was here a brigadier of the
+customs eighteen years ago.
+
+One of the old men scans his face:
+
+“Ah! you are his son, I would bet! You look like him! Detcharry, do
+I remember Detcharry!--He took from me two hundred lots of
+merchandise!--That does not matter, here is my hand, even if you are his
+son!”
+
+And the old defrauder, who was the chief of a great band, without
+rancor, with effusion, presses Arrochkoa's two hands.
+
+Detcharry has remained famous at Erribiague for his stratagems, his
+ambuscades, his captures of contraband goods, out of which came, later,
+his income that Dolores and her children enjoy.
+
+And Arrochkoa assumes a proud air, while Ramuntcho lowers his head,
+feeling that he is of a lower condition, having no father.
+
+“Are you not in the customhouse, as your deceased father was?” continued
+the old man in a bantering tone.
+
+“Oh, no, not exactly.--Quite the reverse, even--”
+
+“Oh, well! I understand!--Then, shake once more--and it's a sort
+of revenge on Detcharry for me, to know that his son has gone into
+smuggling like us!--”
+
+They send for cider and they drink together, while the old men tell
+again the exploits and the tricks of former times, all the ancient tales
+of nights in the mountains; they speak a variety of Basque different
+from that of Etchezar, the village where the language is preserved more
+clearly articulated, more incisive, more pure, perhaps. Ramuntcho and
+Arrochkoa are surprised by this accent of the high land, which softens
+the words and which chants them; those white-haired story tellers seem
+to them almost strangers, whose talk is a series of monotonous stanzas,
+repeated infinitely as in the antique songs expressive of sorrow. And,
+as soon as they cease talking, the slight sounds in the sleep of the
+country come from peaceful and fresh darkness. The crickets chirp;
+one hears the torrent bubbling at the base of the inn; one hears the
+dripping of springs from the terrible, overhanging summits, carpeted
+with thick foliage.--It sleeps, the very small village, crouched and
+hidden in the hollow of a ravine, and one has the impression that the
+night here is a night blacker than elsewhere and more mysterious.
+
+“In truth,” concludes the old chief, “the customhouse and smuggling, at
+bottom, resemble each other; it is a game where the smartest wins, is
+it not? I will even say that, in my own opinion, an officer of customs,
+clever and bold, a customs officer like your father, for example, is as
+worthy as any of us!”
+
+After this, the hostess having come to say that it was time to put out
+the lamp--the last lamp still lit in the village--they go away, the old
+defrauders. Ramuntcho and Arrochkoa go up to their rooms, lie down and
+sleep, always in the chirp of the crickets, always in the sound of
+fresh waters that run or that fall. And Ramuntcho, as in his house at
+Etchezar, hears vaguely during his sleep the tinkling of bells, attached
+to the necks of cows moving in a dream, under him, in the stable.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+Now they open, to the beautiful April morning, the shutters of their
+narrow windows, pierced like portholes in the thickness of the very old
+wall.
+
+And suddenly, it is a flood of light that dazzles their eyes. Outside,
+the spring is resplendent. Never had they seen, before this, summits
+so high and so near. But along the slopes full of leaves, along the
+mountains decked with trees, the sun descends to radiate in this valley
+on the whiteness of the village, on the kalsomine of the ancient houses
+with green shutters.
+
+Both awakened with veins full of youth and hearts full of joy. They have
+formed the project this morning to go into the country, to the house of
+Madame Dargaignaratz's cousins, and see the two little girls, who
+must have arrived the night before in the carriage, Gracieuse and
+Pantchika.--After a glance at the ball-game square, where they shall
+return to practice in the afternoon, they go on their way through
+small paths, magnificently green, hidden in the depths of the valleys,
+skirting the cool torrents. The foxglove flowers start everywhere like
+long, pink rockets above the light and infinite mass of ferns.
+
+It is at a long distance, it seems, that house of the Olhagarray
+cousins, and they stop from time to time to ask the way from shepherds,
+or they knock at the doors of solitary houses, here and there, under
+the cover of branches. They had never seen Basque houses so old nor so
+primitive, under the shade of chestnut trees so tall.
+
+The ravines through which they advance are strangely enclosed. Higher
+than all these woods of oaks and of beeches, which seem as if suspended
+above, appear ferocious, denuded summits, a zone abrupt and bald,
+sombre brown, making points in the violent blue of the sky. But here,
+underneath, is the sheltered and mossy region, green and deep, which the
+sun never burns and where April has hidden its luxury, freshly superb.
+
+And they also, the two who are passing through these paths of foxglove
+and of fern, participate in this splendor of spring.
+
+Little by little, in their enjoyment at being there, and under the
+influence of this ageless place, the old instincts to hunt and to
+destroy are lighted in the depths of their minds. Arrochkoa, excited,
+leaps from right to left, from left to right, breaks, uproots grasses
+and flowers; troubles about everything that moves in the green foliage,
+about the lizards that might be caught, about the birds that might be
+taken out of their nests, and about the beautiful trout swimming in the
+water; he jumps, he leaps; he wishes he had fishing lines, sticks,
+guns; truly he reveals his savagery in the bloom of his robust eighteen
+years.--Ramuntcho calms himself quickly; after breaking a few branches,
+plucking a few flowers, he begins to meditate; and he thinks--
+
+Here they are stopped now at a cross-road where no human habitation is
+visible. Around them are gorges full of shade wherein grand oaks grow
+thickly, and above, everywhere, a piling up of mountains, of a reddish
+color burned by the sun. There is nowhere an indication of the new
+times; there is an absolute silence, something like the peace of the
+primitive epochs. Lifting their heads toward the brown peaks, they
+perceive at a long distance persons walking on invisible paths,
+pushing before them donkeys of smugglers: as small as insects at such
+a distance, are these silent passers-by on the flank of the gigantic
+mountain; Basques of other times, almost confused, as one looks at them
+from this place, with this reddish earth from which they came--and where
+they are to return, after having lived like their ancestors without a
+suspicion of the things of our times, of the events of other places--
+
+They take off their caps, Arrochkoa and Ramuntcho, to wipe their
+foreheads; it is so warm in these gorges and they have run so much,
+jumped so much, that their entire bodies are in a perspiration. They are
+enjoying themselves, but they would like to come, nevertheless, near
+the two little, blonde girls who are waiting for them. But of whom shall
+they ask their way now, since there is no one?
+
+“Ave Maria,” cries at them from the thickness of the branches an old,
+rough voice.
+
+And the salutation is prolonged by a string of words spoken in a rapid
+decrescendo, quick; quick; a Basque prayer rattled breathlessly, begun
+very loudly, then dying at the finish. And an old beggar comes out of
+the fern, all earthy, all hairy, all gray, bent on his stick like a man
+of the woods.
+
+“Yes,” says Arrochkoa, putting his hand in his pocket, “but you must
+take us to the Olhagarray house.”
+
+“The Olhagarray house,” replies the old man. “I have come from it, my
+children, and you are near it.”
+
+In truth, how had they failed to see, at a hundred steps further, that
+black gable among branches of chestnut trees?
+
+At a point where sluices rustle, it is bathed by a torrent, that
+Olhagarray house, antique and large, among antique chestnut trees.
+Around, the red soil is denuded and furrowed by the waters of the
+mountain; enormous roots are interlaced in it like monstrous gray
+serpents; and the entire place, overhung on all sides by the Pyrenean
+masses, is rude and tragic.
+
+But two young girls are there, seated in the shade; with blonde hair and
+elegant little pink waists; astonishing little fairies, very modern in
+the midst of the ferocious and old scenes.--They rise, with cries of
+joy, to meet the visitors.
+
+It would have been better, evidently, to enter the house and salute the
+old people. But the boys say to themselves that they have not been seen
+coming, and they prefer to sit near their sweethearts, by the side of
+the brook, on the gigantic roots. And, as if by chance, the two couples
+manage not to bother one another, to remain hidden from one another by
+rocks, by branches.
+
+There then, they talk at length in a low voice, Arrochkoa with
+Pantchika, Ramuntcho with Gracieuse. What can they be saying, talking so
+much and so quickly?
+
+Although their accent is less chanted than that of the highland, which
+astonished them yesterday, one would think they were speaking scanned
+stanzas, in a sort of music, infinitely soft, where the voices of the
+boys seem voices of children.
+
+What are they saying to one another, talking so much and so quickly,
+beside this torrent, in this harsh ravine, under the heavy sun of noon?
+What they are saying has not much sense; it is a sort of murmur special
+to lovers, something like the special song of the swallows at nesting
+time. It is childish, a tissue of incoherences and repetitions. No, what
+they are saying has not much sense--unless it be what is most sublime in
+the world, the most profound and truest things which may be expressed
+by terrestrial words.--It means nothing, unless it be the eternal and
+marvellous hymn for which alone has been created the language of men and
+beasts, and in comparison with which all is empty, miserable and vain.
+
+The heat is stifling in the depth of that gorge, so shut in from all
+sides; in spite of the shade of the chestnut trees, the rays, that the
+leaves sift, burn still. And this bare earth, of a reddish color, the
+extreme oldness of this nearby house, the antiquity of these trees, give
+to the surroundings, while the lovers talk, aspects somewhat harsh and
+hostile.
+
+Ramuntcho has never seen his little friend made so pink by the sun: on
+her cheeks, there is the beautiful, red blood which flushes the skin,
+the fine and transparent skin; she is pink as the foxglove flowers.
+
+Flies, mosquitoes buzz in their ears. Now Gracieuse has been bitten on
+the chin, almost on the mouth, and she tries to touch it with the end of
+her tongue, to bite the place with the upper teeth. And Ramuntcho, who
+looks at this too closely, feels suddenly a langour, to divert himself
+from which he stretches himself like one trying to awake.
+
+She begins again, the little girl, her lip still itching--and he again
+stretches his arms, throwing his chest backward.
+
+“What is the matter, Ramuntcho, and why do you stretch yourself like a
+cat?--”
+
+But when, for the third time, Gracieuse bites the same place, and shows
+again the little tip of her tongue, he bends over, vanquished by the
+irresistible giddiness, and bites also, takes in his mouth, like a
+beautiful red fruit which one fears to crush, the fresh lip which the
+mosquito has bitten--
+
+A silence of fright and of delight, during which both shiver, she as
+much as he; she trembling also, in all her limbs, for having felt the
+contact of the growing black mustache.
+
+“You are not angry, tell me?”
+
+ “No, my Ramuntcho.--Oh, I am not angry, no--”
+
+Then he begins again, quite frantic, and in this languid and warm air,
+they exchange for the first time in their lives, the long kisses of
+lovers--
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+The next day, Sunday, they went together religiously to hear one of the
+masses of the clear morning, in order to return to Etchezar the same
+day, immediately after the grand ball-game. It was this return, much
+more than the game, that interested Gracieuse and Ramuntcho, for it
+was their hope that Pantchika and her mother would remain at Erribiague
+while they would go, pressed against each other, in the very small
+carriage of the Detcharry family, under the indulgent and slight
+watchfulness of Arrochkoa, five or six hours of travel, all three
+alone, on the spring roads, under the new foliage, with amusing halts in
+unknown villages--
+
+At eleven o'clock in the morning, on that beautiful Sunday, the square
+was encumbered by mountaineers come from all the summits, from all
+the savage, surrounding hamlets. It was an international match,
+three players of France against three of Spain, and, in the crowd of
+lookers-on, the Spanish Basques were more numerous; there were large
+sombreros, waistcoats and gaiters of the olden time.
+
+The judges of the two nations, designated by chance, saluted each
+other with a superannuated politeness, and the match began, in profound
+silence, under an oppressive sun which annoyed the players, in spite of
+their caps, pulled down over their eyes.
+
+Ramuntcho soon, and after him Arrochkoa, were acclaimed as victors. And
+people looked at the two little strangers, so attentive, in the first
+row, so pretty also with their elegant pink waists, and people said:
+“They are the sweethearts of the two good players.” Then Gracieuse, who
+heard everything, felt proud of Ramuntcho.
+
+Noon. They had been playing for almost an hour. The old wall, with its
+summit curved like a cupola, was cracking from dryness and from heat,
+under its paint of yellow ochre. The grand Pyrenean masses, nearer here
+than at Etchezar, more crushing and more high, dominated from everywhere
+these little, human groups, moving in a deep fold of their sides. And
+the sun fell straight on the heavy caps of the men, on the bare heads
+of the women, heating the brains, increasing enthusiasm. The passionate
+crowd yelled, and the pelotas were flying, when, softly, the angelus
+began to ring. Then an old man, all wrinkled, all burned, who was
+waiting for this signal, put his mouth to the clarion--his old clarion
+of a Zouave in Africa--and rang the call to rest. And all, the women who
+were seated rose; all the caps fell, uncovering hair black, blonde
+or white, and the entire people made the sign of the cross, while the
+players, with chests and foreheads streaming with perspiration, stopped
+in the heat of the game and stood in meditation with heads bent--
+
+At two o'clock, the game having come to an end gloriously for the
+French, Arrochkoa and Ramuntcho went in their little wagon, accompanied
+and acclaimed by all the young men of Erribiague; then Gracieuse sat
+between the two, and they started for their long, charming trip, their
+pockets full of the gold which they had earned, intoxicated by their
+joy, by the noise and by the sunlight.
+
+And Ramuntcho, who retained the taste of yesterday's kiss, felt like
+shouting to them: “This little girl who is so pretty, as you see, is
+mine! Her lips are mine, I had them yesterday and will take them again
+to-night!”
+
+They started and at once found silence again, in the shaded valleys
+bordered by foxglove and ferns--
+
+To roll for hours on the small Pyrenean roads, to change places almost
+every day, to traverse the Basque country, to go from one village
+to another, called here by a festival, there by an adventure on the
+frontier--this was now Ramuntcho's life, the errant life which the
+ball-game made for him in the day-time and smuggling in the night-time.
+
+Ascents, descents, in the midst of a monotonous display of verdure.
+Woods of oaks and of beeches, almost inviolate, and remaining as they
+were in the quiet centuries.--When he passed by some antique house,
+hidden in these solitudes of trees, he stopped to enjoy reading, above
+the door, the traditional legend inscribed in the granite: “Ave Maria!
+in the year 1600, or in the year 1500, such a one, from such a village,
+has built this house, to live in it with such a one, his wife.”
+
+Very far from all human habitation, in a corner of a ravine, where
+it was warmer than elsewhere, sheltered from all breezes, they met a
+peddler of holy images, who was wiping his forehead. He had set down
+his basket, full of those colored prints with gilt frames that represent
+saints with Euskarian legends, and with which the Basques like to adorn
+their old rooms with white walls. And he was there, exhausted from
+fatigue and heat, as if wrecked in the ferns, at a turn of those little,
+mountain routes which run solitary under oaks.
+
+Gracieuse came down and bought a Holy Virgin.
+
+“Later,” she said to Ramuntcho, “we shall put it in our house as a
+souvenir--”
+
+And the image, dazzling in its gold frame, went with them under the
+long, green vaults--
+
+They went out of their path, for they wished to pass by a certain valley
+of the Cherry-trees, not in the hope of finding cherries in it, in
+April, but to show to Gracieuse the place, which is renowned in the
+entire Basque country.
+
+It was almost five o'clock, the sun was already low, when they reached
+there. It was a shaded and calm region, where the spring twilight
+descended like a caress on the magnificence of the April foliage. The
+air was cool and suave, fragrant with hay, with acacia. Mountains--very
+high, especially toward the north, to make the climate there softer,
+surrounded it on all sides, investing it with a melancholy mystery of
+closed Edens.
+
+And, when the cherry-trees appeared, they were a gay surprise, they were
+already red.
+
+There was nobody on these paths, above which the grand cherry-trees
+extended like a roof, their branches dripping with coral.
+
+Here and there were some summer houses, still uninhabited, some deserted
+gardens, invaded by the tall grass and the rose bushes.
+
+Then, they made their horse walk; then, each one in his turn,
+transferring the reins and standing in the wagon, amused himself by
+eating these cherries from the trees while passing by them and without
+stopping. Afterward, they placed bouquets of them in their buttonholes,
+they culled branches of them to deck the horse's head, the harness and
+the lantern. The equipage seemed ornamented for some festival of youth
+and of joy--
+
+“Now let us hurry,” said Gracieuse. “If only it be light enough, at
+least, when we reach Etchezar, for people to see us pass, ornamented as
+we are!”
+
+As for Ramuntcho, he thought of the meeting place in the evening, of the
+kiss which he would dare to repeat, similar to that of yesterday, taking
+Gracieuse's lip between his lips like a cherry--
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+May! The grass ascends, ascends from everywhere like a sumptuous carpet,
+like silky velvet, emanating spontaneously from the earth.
+
+In order to sprinkle this region of the Basques, which remains humid and
+green all summer like a sort of warmer Brittany, the errant vapors
+on the Bay of Biscay assemble all in this depth of gulf, stop at the
+Pyrenean summits and melt into rain. Long showers fall, which are
+somewhat deceptive, but after which the soil smells of new flowers and
+hay.
+
+In the fields, along the roads, the grasses quickly thicken; all the
+ledges of the paths are as if padded by the magnificent thickness of
+the bent grass; everywhere is a profusion of gigantic Easter daisies, of
+buttercups with tall stems, and of very large, pink mallows like those
+of Algeria.
+
+And, in the long, tepid twilights, pale iris or blue ashes in color,
+every night the bells of the month of Mary resound for a long time
+in the air, under the mass of the clouds hooked to the flanks of the
+mountains.
+
+During the month of May, with the little group of black nuns, with
+discreet babble, with puerile and lifeless laughter, Gracieuse, at all
+hours, went to church. Hastening their steps under the frequent showers,
+they went together through the graveyard, full of roses; together,
+always together, the little clandestine betrothed, in light colored
+gowns, and the nuns, with long, mourning veils; during the day they
+brought bouquets of white flowers, daisies and sheafs of tall lilies;
+at night they came to sing, in the nave still more sonorous than in the
+day-time, the softly joyful canticles of the Virgin Mary:
+
+“Ave, Queen of the Angels! Star of the Sea, ave!--”
+
+Oh, the whiteness of the lilies lighted by the tapers, their white
+petals and their yellow pollen in gold dust! Oh, their fragrance in the
+gardens or in the church, during the twilights of spring!
+
+And as soon as Gracieuse entered there, at night, in the dying ring of
+the bells--leaving the pale half-light of the graveyard full of roses
+for the starry night of the wax tapers which reigned already in the
+church, quitting the odor of hay and of roses for that of incense and of
+the tall, cut lilies, passing from the lukewarm and living air
+outside to that heavy and sepulchral cold that centuries amass in old
+sanctuaries--a particular calm came at once to her mind, a pacifying of
+all her desires, a renunciation of all her terrestrial joys. Then, when
+she had knelt, when the first canticles had taken their flight under the
+vault, infinitely sonorous, little by little she fell into an ecstasy,
+a state of dreaming, a visionary state which confused, white apparitions
+traversed: whiteness, whiteness everywhere; lilies, thousands of sheafs
+of lilies, and white wings, shivers of white wings of angels--
+
+Oh! to remain for a long time in that state, to forget all things, and
+to feel herself pure, sanctified and immaculate, under that glance,
+ineffably fascinating and soft, under that glance, irresistibly
+appealing, which the Holy Virgin, in long white vestments, let fall from
+the height of the tabernacle--!
+
+But, when she went outside, when the night of spring re-enveloped her
+with tepid breezes of life, the memory of the meeting which she had
+promised the day before, the day before as well as every day, chased
+like the wind of a storm the visions of the church. In the expectation
+of Ramuntcho, in the expectation of the odor of his hair, of the touch
+of his mustache, of the taste of his lips, she felt near faltering, like
+one wounded, among the strange companions who accompanied her, among the
+peaceful and spectral black nuns.
+
+And when the hour had come, in spite of all her resolutions she was
+there, anxious and ardent, listening to the least noise, her heart
+beating if a branch of the garden moved in the night--tortured by the
+least tardiness of the beloved one.
+
+He came always with his same silent step of a rover at night, his
+waistcoat on his shoulder, with as much precaution and artifice as for
+the most dangerous act of smuggling.
+
+In the rainy nights, so frequent in the Basque spring-time, she remained
+in her room on the first floor, and he sat on the sill of the open
+window, not trying to go in, not having the permission to do so. And
+they stayed there, she inside, he outside, their arms laced, their heads
+touching each other, the cheek of one resting on the cheek of the other.
+
+When the weather was beautiful, she jumped over this low window-sill
+to wait for him outside, and their long meetings, almost without words,
+occurred on the garden bench. Between them there were not even those
+continual whisperings familiar to lovers; no, there were rather
+silences. At first they did not dare to talk, for fear of being
+discovered, for the least murmurs of voices at night are heard. And
+then, as nothing new threatened their lives, what need had they to talk?
+What could they have said which would have been better than the long
+contact of their joined hands and of their heads resting against each
+other?
+
+The possibility of being surprised kept them often on the alert, in an
+anxiety which made more delicious afterward the moments when they forgot
+themselves more, their confidence having returned.--Nobody frightened
+them as much as Arrochkoa, a smart, nocturnal prowler himself, and
+always so well-informed about the goings and comings of Ramuntcho--In
+spite of his indulgence, what would he do, if he discovered them?--
+
+Oh, the old stone benches, under branches, in front of the doors of
+isolated houses, when fall the lukewarm nights of spring!--Theirs was a
+real lovers' hiding place, and there was for them, every night, a
+music, for, in all the stones of the neighbors' wall lived those singing
+tree-toads, beasts of the south, which, as soon as night fell, gave from
+moment to moment a little, brief note, discreet, odd, having the tone
+of a crystal bell and of a child's throat. Something similar might be
+produced by touching here and there, without ever resting on them,
+the scales of an organ with a celestial voice. There were tree-toads
+everywhere, responding to one another in different tones; even those
+which were under their bench, close by them, reassured by their
+immobility, sang also from time to time; then that little sound,
+brusque and soft, so near, made them start and smile. All the exquisite,
+surrounding obscurity was animated by that music, which continued in the
+distance, in the mystery of the leaves and of the stones, in the depths
+of all the small, black holes of rocks or walls; it seemed like chivies
+in miniature, or rather, a sort of frail concert somewhat mocking--oh!
+not very mocking, and without any maliciousness--led timidly by
+inoffensive gnomes. And this made the night more living and more
+loving--
+
+After the intoxicated audacities of the first nights, fright took a
+stronger hold of them, and, when one of them had something special to
+say, one led the other by the hand without talking; this meant that they
+had to walk softly, softly, like marauding cats, to an alley behind the
+house where they could talk without fear.
+
+“Where shall we live, Gracieuse?” asked Ramuntcho one night.
+
+“At your house, I had thought.”
+
+“Ah! yes, so thought I--only I thought it would make you sad to be so
+far from the parish, from the church and the square--”
+
+“Oh--with you, I could find anything sad?--”
+
+“Then, we would send away those who live on the first floor and take the
+large room which opens on the road to Hasparitz--”
+
+It was an increased joy for him to know that Gracieuse would accept his
+house, to be sure that she would bring the radiance of her presence into
+that old, beloved home, and that they would make their nest there for
+life--
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+Here come the long, pale twilights of June, somewhat veiled like those
+of May, less uncertain, however, and more tepid still. In the gardens,
+the rose-laurel which is beginning to bloom in profusion is becoming
+already magnificently pink. At the end of each work day, the good folks
+sit outside, in front of their doors, to look at the night falling--the
+night which soon confuses, under the vaults of the plane-trees, their
+groups assembled for benevolent rest. And a tranquil melancholy descends
+over villages, in those interminable evenings--
+
+For Ramuntcho, this is the epoch when smuggling becomes a trade almost
+without trouble, with charming hours, marching toward summits through
+spring clouds; crossing ravines, wandering in lands of springs and of
+wild fig-trees; sleeping, waiting for the agreed hour, with carbineers
+who are accomplices, on carpets of mint and pinks.--The good odor of
+plants impregnated his clothes, his waistcoat which he never wore, but
+used as a pillow or a blanket--and Gracieuse would say to him at night:
+“I know where you went last night, for you smell of mint of the mountain
+above Mendizpi”--or: “You smell of absinthe of the Subernoa morass.”
+
+Gracieuse regretted the month of Mary, the offices of the Virgin in the
+nave, decked with white flowers. In the twilights without rain, with the
+sisters and some older pupils of their class, she sat under the porch
+of the church, against the low wall of the graveyard from which the
+view plunges into the valleys beneath. There they talked, or played the
+childish games in which nuns indulge.
+
+There were also long and strange meditations, meditations to which the
+fall of day, the proximity of the church, of the tombs and of their
+flowers, gave soon a serenity detached from material things and as if
+free from all alliance with the senses. In her first mystic dreams as a
+little girl,--inspired especially by the pompous rites of the cult, by
+the voice of the organ, the white bouquets, the thousand flames of the
+wax tapers--only images appeared to her--very radiant images, it is
+true: altars resting on mists, golden tabernacles where music vibrated
+and where fell grand flights of angels. But those visions gave place
+now to ideas: she caught a glimpse of that peace and that supreme
+renunciation which the certainty of an endless celestial life gives; she
+conceived, in a manner more elevated than formerly, the melancholy joy
+of abandoning everything in order to become an impersonal part of that
+entirety of nuns, white, or blue, or black, who, from the innumerable
+convents of earth, make ascend toward heaven an immense and perpetual
+intercession for the sins of the world--
+
+However, as soon as night had fallen quite, the course of her thoughts
+came down every evening fatally toward intoxicating and mortal things.
+Her wait, her feverish wait, began, more impatient from moment to
+moment. She felt anxious that her cold companions with black veils
+should return into the sepulchre of their convent and that she should
+be alone in her room, free at last, in the house fallen asleep, ready to
+open her window and listen to the slight noise of Ramuntcho's footsteps.
+
+The kiss of lovers, the kiss on the lips, was now a thing possessed
+and of which they had not the strength to deprive themselves. And they
+prolonged it a great deal, not wishing, through charming scruples, to
+accord more to each other.
+
+Anyway, if the intoxication which they gave to each other thus was a
+little too carnal, there was between them that absolute tenderness,
+infinite, unique, by which all things are elevated and purified.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+Ramuntcho, that evening, had come to the meeting place earlier than
+usual--with more hesitation also in his walk, for one risks, on these
+June evenings, to find girls belated along the paths, or boys behind the
+hedges on love expeditions.
+
+And by chance she was already alone, looking outside, without waiting
+for him, however.
+
+At once she noticed his agitated demeanor and guessed that something new
+had happened. Not daring to come too near, he made a sign to her to come
+quickly, jump over the window-sill, and meet him in the obscure alley
+where they talked without fear. Then, as soon as she was near him, in
+the nocturnal shade of the trees, he put his arm around her waist and
+announced to her, brusquely, the great piece of news which, since the
+morning, troubled his young head and that of Franchita, his mother.
+
+“Uncle Ignacio has written.”
+
+“True? Uncle Ignacio!”
+
+She knew that that adventurous uncle, that American uncle, who had
+disappeared for so many years, had never thought until now of sending
+more than a strange good-day by a passing sailor.
+
+“Yes! And he says that he has property there, which requires attention,
+large prairies, herds of horses; that he has no children, that if I wish
+to go and live near him with a gentle Basque girl married to me here,
+he would be glad to adopt both of us.--Oh! I think mother will come
+also.--So, if you wish.--We could marry now.--You know they marry people
+as young as we, it is allowed.--Now that I am to be adopted by my uncle
+and I shall have a real situation in life, your mother will consent, I
+think.--And as for military service, we shall not care for that, shall
+we?--”
+
+They sat on the mossy rocks, their heads somewhat dizzy, troubled by the
+approach and the unforeseen temptation of happiness. So, it would not be
+in an uncertain future, after his term as a soldier, it would be almost
+at once; in two months, in one month, perhaps, that communion of their
+minds and of their flesh, so ardently desired and now so forbidden,
+might be accomplished without sin, honestly in the eyes of all,
+permitted and blessed.--Oh! they had never looked at this so
+closely.--And they pressed against each other their foreheads, made
+heavy by too many thoughts, fatigued suddenly by a sort of too delicious
+delirium.--Around them, the odor of the flowers of June ascended from
+the earth, filling the night with an immense suavity. And, as if there
+were not enough scattered fragrance, the jessamine, the honeysuckle
+on the walls exhaled from moment to moment, in intermittent puffs, the
+excess of their perfume; one would have thought that hands swung in
+silence censers in the darkness, for some hidden festival, for some
+enchantment magnificent and secret.
+
+There are often and everywhere very mysterious enchantments like this,
+emanating from nature itself, commanded by one knows not what sovereign
+will with unfathomable designs, to deceive us all, on the road to
+death--
+
+“You do not reply, Gracieuse, you say nothing to me--”
+
+He could see that she was intoxicated also, like him, and yet he divined
+by her manner of remaining mute so long, that shadows were amassing over
+his charming and beautiful dream.
+
+“But,” she asked at last, “your naturalization papers. You have received
+them, have you not?”
+
+“Yes, they arrived last week, you know very well, and it was you who
+said that I should apply for them--”
+
+“Then you are a Frenchman to-day.--Then, if you do not do your military
+service you are a deserter.”
+
+“Yes.--A deserter, no; but refractory, I think it is called.--It isn't
+better, since one cannot come back.--I was not thinking of that--”
+
+How she was tortured now to have caused this thought, to have impelled
+him herself to this act which made soar over his hardly seen joy a
+threat so black! Oh, a deserter, he, her Ramuntcho! That is, banished
+forever from the dear, Basque country!--And this departure for America
+becomes suddenly frightfully grave, solemn, similar to a death, since he
+could not possibly return!--Then, what was there to be done?--
+
+Now they were anxious and mute, each one preferring to submit to the
+will of the other, and waiting, with equal fright, for the decision
+which should be taken, to go or to remain. From the depths of their two
+young hearts ascended, little by little, a similar distress, poisoning
+the happiness offered over there, in that America from which they
+would never return.--And the little, nocturnal censers of jessamine, of
+honeysuckle, of linden, continued to throw into the air exquisite puffs
+to intoxicate them; the darkness that enveloped them seemed more and
+more caressing and soft; in the silence of the village and of the
+country, the tree-toads gave, from moment to moment, their little
+flute-note, which seemed a very discreet love call, under the velvet of
+the moss; and, through the black lace of the foliage, in the serenity of
+a June sky which one thought forever unalterable, they saw scintillate,
+like a simple and gentle dust of phosphorus, the terrifying multitude of
+the worlds.
+
+The curfew began to ring, however, at the church. The sound of that
+bell, at night especially, was for them something unique on earth.
+At this moment, it was something like a voice bringing, in their
+indecision, its advice, its counsel, decisive and tender. Mute still,
+they listened to it with an increasing emotion, of an intensity till
+then unknown, the brown head of the one leaning on the brown head of the
+other. It said, the advising voice, the dear, protecting voice: “No, do
+not go forever; the far-off lands are made for the time of youth; but
+you must be able to return to Etchezar: it is here that you must grow
+old and die; nowhere in the world could you sleep as in this graveyard
+around the church, where one may, even when lying under the earth, hear
+me ring again--” They yielded more and more to the voice of the bell,
+the two children whose minds were religious and primitive. And Ramuntcho
+felt on his cheek a tear of Gracieuse:
+
+“No,” he said at last, “I will not desert; I think that I would not have
+the courage to do it--”
+
+“I thought the same thing as you, my Ramuntcho,” she said. “No, let us
+not do that. I was waiting for you to say it--”
+
+Then he realized that he also was crying, like her--
+
+The die was cast, they would permit to pass by happiness which was
+within their reach, almost under their hands; they would postpone
+everything to a future uncertain and so far off--!
+
+And now, in the sadness, in the meditation of the great decision which
+they had taken, they communicated to each other what seemed best for
+them to do:
+
+“We might,” she said, “write a pretty letter to your uncle Ignacio;
+write to him that you accept, that you will come with a great deal of
+pleasure immediately after your military service; you might even add,
+if you wish, that the one who is engaged to you thanks him and will be
+ready to follow you; but that decidedly you cannot desert.”
+
+“And why should you not talk to your mother now, Gatchutcha, only to
+know what she would think?--Because now, you understand, I am not as I
+was, an abandoned child--” Slight steps behind them, in the path--and
+above the wall, the silhouette of a young man who had come on the tips
+of his sandals, as if to spy upon them!
+
+“Go, escape, my Ramuntcho, we will meet to-morrow evening!--”
+
+In half a second, there was nobody: he was hidden in a bush, she had
+fled into her room.
+
+Ended was their grave interview! Ended until when? Until to-morrow or
+until always?--On their farewells, abrupt or prolonged, frightened or
+peaceful, every time, every night, weighed the same uncertainty of their
+meeting again--
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+The bell of Etchezar, the same dear, old bell, that of the tranquil
+curfew, that of the festivals and that of the agonies, rang joyously in
+the beautiful sun of June. The village was decorated with white cloths,
+white embroideries, and the procession of the Fete-Dieu passed slowly,
+on a green strewing of fennel seed and of reeds cut from the marshes.
+
+The mountains seemed near and sombre, somewhat ferocious in their brown
+tones, above this white parade of little girls marching on a carpet of
+cut leaves and grass.
+
+All the old banners of the church were there, illuminated by that sun
+which they had known for centuries but which they see only once or twice
+a year, on the consecrated days.
+
+The large one, that of the Virgin, in white silk embroidered with pale
+gold, was borne by Gracieuse, who walked in white dress, her eyes lost
+in a mystic dream. Behind the young girls, came the women, all the women
+of the village, wearing black veils, including Dolores and Franchita,
+the two enemies. Men, numerous enough, closed this cortege, tapers in
+their hands, heads uncovered--but there were especially gray hairs,
+faces with expressions vanquished and resigned, heads of old men.
+
+Gracieuse, holding high the banner of the Virgin, became at this hour
+one of the Illuminati; she felt as if she were marching, as after
+death, toward the celestial tabernacles. And when, at instants, the
+reminiscence of Ramuntcho's lips traversed her dream, she had the
+impression, in the midst of all this white, of a sharp stain, delicious
+still. Truly, as her thoughts became more elevated from day to day, what
+brought her back to him was less her senses, capable in her of being
+tamed, than true, profound tenderness, the one which resists time and
+deceptions of the flesh. And this tenderness was augmented by the fact
+that Ramuntcho was less fortunate than she and more abandoned in life,
+having had no father--
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+“Well, Gatchutcha, you have at last spoken to your mother of Uncle
+Ignacio?” asked Ramuntcho, very late, the same night, in the alley of
+the garden, under rays of the moon.
+
+“Not yet, I have not dared.--How could I explain that I know all these
+things, since I am supposed not to talk with you ever, and she has
+forbidden me to do so?--Think, if I were to make her suspicious!--There
+would be an end to everything, we could not see each other again! I
+would like better to wait until you left the country, then all would be
+indifferent to me--”
+
+“It is true!--let us wait, since I am to go.”
+
+He was going away, and already they could count the evenings which would
+be left to them.
+
+Now that they had permitted their immediate happiness to escape,
+the happiness offered to them in the prairies of America, it seemed
+preferable to them to hasten the departure of Ramuntcho for the army,
+in order that he might return sooner. So they had decided that he would
+enlist in the naval infantry, the only part of the service where one may
+elect to serve for a period as short as three years. And as they needed,
+in order to be certain not to be lacking in courage, a precise epoch,
+considered for a long time in advance, they had fixed the end of
+September, after the grand series of ball-games.
+
+They contemplated this separation of three years duration with an
+absolute confidence in the future, so sure they thought they were of
+each other, and of themselves, and of their imperishable love. But
+it was, however, an expectation which already filled their hearts
+strangely; it threw an unforeseen melancholy over things which were
+ordinarily the most indifferent, on the flight of days, on the least
+indications of the next season, on the coming into life of certain
+plants, on the coming into bloom of certain species of flowers, on all
+that presaged the arrival and the rapid march of their last summer.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+Already the fires of St. John have flamed, joyful and red in a clear,
+blue night, and the Spanish mountain seemed to burn, that night, like a
+sheaf of straw, so many were the bonfires lighted on its sides. It has
+begun, the season of light, of heat and of storms, at the end of which
+Ramuntcho must depart.
+
+And the saps, which in the spring went up so quickly, become languid
+already in the complete development of the verdure, in the wide bloom of
+the flowers. And the sun, more and more burning, overheats all the heads
+covered with Basque caps, excites ardor and passion, causes to rise
+everywhere, in those Basque villages, ferments of noisy agitation and of
+pleasure. While, in Spain, begin the grand bull-fights, this is here
+the epoch of so many ball-games, of so many fandangoes danced in the
+evening, of so much pining of lovers in the tepid voluptuousness of
+nights--!
+
+Soon will come the warm splendor of the southern July. The Bay of Biscay
+has become very blue and the Cantabric coast has for a time put on its
+fallow colors of Morocco or of Algeria.
+
+With the heavy rains alternates the marvellously beautiful weather which
+gives to the air absolute limpidities. And there are days also when
+somewhat distant things are as if eaten by light, powdered with sun
+dust; then, above the woods and the village of Etchezar, the Gizune,
+very pointed, becomes more vaporous and more high, and, on the sky,
+float, to make it appear bluer, very small clouds of a gilded white with
+a little mother-of-pearl gray in their shades.
+
+And the springs run thinner and rarer under the thickness of the ferns,
+and, along the routes, go more slowly, driven by half nude men, the
+ox-carts which a swarm of flies surrounds.
+
+At this season, Ramuntcho, in the day-time, lived his agitated life of
+a pelotari, running with Arrochkoa from village to village, to organize
+ball-games and play them.
+
+But, in his eyes, evenings alone existed.
+
+Evenings!--In the odorous and warm darkness of the garden, to be seated
+very near Gracieuse; to put his arm around her, little by little to draw
+her to him and hold her against his breast, and remain thus for a long
+time without saying anything, his chin resting on her hair, breathing
+the young and healthy scent of her body.
+
+He enervated himself dangerously, Ramuntcho, in these prolonged contacts
+which she did not prohibit. Anyway, he divined her surrendered enough to
+him now, and confident enough, to permit everything; but he did not wish
+to attempt supreme communion, through childish reserve, through respect
+for his betrothed, through excess and profoundness of love. And it
+happened to him at times to rise abruptly, to stretch himself--in the
+manner of a cat, she said, as formerly at Erribiague--when he felt a
+dangerous thrill and a more imperious temptation to leave life with her
+in a moment of ineffable death--
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+Franchita, however, was astonished by the unexplained attitude of her
+son, who, apparently, never saw Gracieuse and yet never talked of her.
+Then, while was amassing in her the sadness of his coming departure
+for military service, she observed him, with her peasant's patience and
+muteness.
+
+One evening, one of the last evenings, as he was going away, mysterious
+and in haste, long before the hour of the nocturnal contraband, she
+straightened before him, her eyes fixed on his:
+
+“Where are you going, my son?”
+
+And seeing him turn his head, blushing and embarrassed, she acquired a
+sudden certainty:
+
+“It is well, now I know.--Oh! I know!--”
+
+She was moved even more than he, at her discovery of this great
+secret.--The idea had not even come to her that it was not Gracieuse,
+that it might be another girl. She was too far-seeing. And her scruples
+as a Christian were awakened, her conscience was frightened at the
+evil that they might have done, as rose from the depth of her heart
+a sentiment of which she was ashamed as if it were a crime, a sort of
+savage joy.--For, in fine--if their carnal union was accomplished, the
+future of her son was assured.--She knew her Ramuntcho well enough to
+know that he would not change his mind and that Gracieuse would never be
+abandoned by him.
+
+The silence between them was prolonged, she standing before him, barring
+the way:
+
+“And what have you done together?” she decided to ask. “Tell me the
+truth, Ramuntcho, what wrong have you done?--”
+
+“What wrong?--Oh! nothing, mother, nothing wrong, I swear to you--”
+
+He replied this without irritation at being questioned, and bearing the
+look of his mother with eyes of frankness. It was true, and she believed
+him.
+
+But, as she stayed in front of him, her hand on the door-latch, he said,
+with dumb violence:
+
+“You are not going to prevent me from going to her, since I shall leave
+in three days!”
+
+Then, in presence of this young will in revolt, the mother, enclosing in
+herself the tumult of her contradictory thoughts, lowered her head and,
+without a word, stood aside to let him pass.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV.
+
+It was their last evening, for, the day before yesterday, at the Mayor's
+office of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, he had, with a hand trembling a little,
+signed his engagement for three years in the Second naval infantry,
+whose garrison was a military port of the North.
+
+It was their last evening,--and they had said that they would make it
+longer than usual,--it would last till midnight, Gracieuse had decided:
+midnight, which in the villages is an unseasonable and black hour,
+an hour after which, she did not know why, all seemed to the little
+betrothed graver and guiltier.
+
+In spite of the ardent desire of their senses, the idea had not come
+to one nor to the other that, during this last meeting, under the
+oppression of parting, something more might be attempted.
+
+On the contrary, at the instant so full of concentration of their
+farewell, they felt more chaste still, so eternal was their love.
+
+Less prudent, however, since they had not to care for the morrow, they
+dared to talk there, on their lovers' bench, as they had never done
+before. They talked of the future, of a future which was for them very
+distant, because, at their age, three years seem infinite.
+
+In three years, at his return, she would be twenty; then, if her mother
+persisted to refuse in an absolute manner, at the end of a year she
+would use her right of majority, it was between them an agreed and a
+sworn thing.
+
+The means of correspondence, during the long absence of Ramuntcho,
+preoccupied them a great deal: between them, everything was so
+complicated by obstacles and secrets!--Arrochkoa, their only possible
+intermediary, had promised his help; but he was so changeable, so
+uncertain!--Oh, if he were to fail!--And then, would he consent to send
+sealed letters?--If he did not consent there would be no pleasure in
+writing.--In our time, when communications are easy and constant, there
+are no more of these complete separations similar to the one which
+theirs would be; they were to say to each other a very solemn farewell,
+like the one which the lovers of other days said, the lovers of the
+days when there were lands without post-offices, and distances that
+frightened one. The fortunate time when they should see each other again
+appeared to them situated far off, far off, in the depths of duration;
+yet, because of the faith which they had in each other, they expected
+this with a tranquil assurance, as the faithful expect celestial life.
+
+But the least things of their last evening acquired in their minds
+a singular importance; as this farewell came near, all grew and was
+exaggerated for them, as happens in the expectation of death. The slight
+sounds and the aspects of the night seemed to them particular and, in
+spite of them, were engraving themselves forever in their memory. The
+song of the crickets had a characteristic which it seemed to them they
+had never heard before. In the nocturnal sonority, the barking of
+a watch-dog, coming from some distant farm, made them shiver with a
+melancholy fright. And Ramuntcho was to carry with him in his exile,
+to preserve later with a desolate attachment, a certain stem of grass
+plucked from the garden negligently and with which he had played
+unconsciously the whole evening.
+
+A phase of their life finished with that day: a lapse of time had
+occurred, their childhood had passed--
+
+Of recommendations, they had none very long to exchange, so intensely
+was each one sure of what the other might do during the separation. They
+had less to say to each other than other engaged people have, because
+they knew mutually their most intimate thoughts. After the first hour
+of conversation, they remained hand in hand in grave silence, while were
+consumed the inexorable minutes of the end.
+
+At midnight, she wished him to go, as she had decided in advance, in her
+little thoughtful and obstinate head. Therefore, after having embraced
+each other for a long time, they quitted each other, as if the
+separation were, at this precise minute, an ineluctable thing which it
+was impossible to retard. And while she returned to her room with
+sobs that he heard, he scaled over the wall and, in coming out of the
+darkness of the foliage, found himself on the deserted road, white with
+lunar rays. At this first separation, he suffered less than she, because
+he was going, because it was he that the morrow, full of uncertainty,
+awaited. While he walked on the road, powdered and clear, the powerful
+charm of change, of travel, dulled his sensitiveness; almost without any
+precise thought, he looked at his shadow, which the moon made clear
+and harsh, marching in front of him. And the great Gizune dominated
+impassibly everything, with its cold and spectral air, in all this white
+radiance of midnight.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI.
+
+The parting day, good-byes to friends here and there; joyful wishes of
+former soldiers returned from the regiment. Since the morning, a sort of
+intoxication or of fever, and, in front of him, everything unthought-of
+in life.
+
+Arrochkoa, very amiable on that last day, had offered to drive him in a
+wagon to Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and had arranged to go at sunset, in order
+to arrive there just in time for the night train.
+
+The night having come, inexorably, Franchita wished to accompany her son
+to the square, where the Detcharry wagon was waiting for him, and here
+her face, despite her will, was drawn by sorrow, while he straightened
+himself, in order to preserve the swagger which becomes recruits going
+to their regiment:
+
+“Make a little place for me, Arrochkoa,” she said abruptly. “I will sit
+between you to the chapel of Saint-Bitchentcho; I will return on foot--”
+
+And they started at the setting sun, which, on them as on all things,
+scattered the magnificence of its gold and of its red copper.
+
+After a wood of oaks, the chapel of Saint-Bitchentcho passed, and the
+mother wished to remain. From one turn to another, postponing every time
+the great separation, she asked to be driven still farther.
+
+“Mother, when we reach the top of the Issaritz slope you must go down!”
+ he said tenderly. “You hear, Arrochkoa, you will stop where I say; I do
+not want mother to go further--”
+
+At this Issaritz slope the horse had himself slackened his pace. The
+mother and the son, their eyes burned with suppressed tears, held each
+other's hands, and they were going slowly, slowly, in absolute silence,
+as if it were a solemn ascent toward some Calvary.
+
+At last, at the top of the slope, Arrochkoa, who seemed mute also,
+pulled the reins slightly, with a simple little: “Ho!--” discreet as
+a lugubrious signal which one hesitates to give--and the carriage was
+stopped.
+
+Then, without a word, Ramuntcho jumped to the road, helped his mother to
+descend, gave a long kiss to her, then remounted briskly to his seat:
+
+“Go, Arrochkoa, quickly, race, let us go!”
+
+And in two seconds, in the rapid descent, he lost sight of the one whose
+face at last was covered with tears.
+
+Now they were going away from one another, Franchita and her son. In
+different directions, they were walking on that Etchezar road,--in the
+splendor of the setting sun, in a region of pink heather and of yellow
+fern. She was going up slowly toward her home, meeting isolated groups
+of farmers, flocks led through the golden evening by little shepherds
+in Basque caps. And he was going down quickly, through valleys soon
+darkened, toward the lowland where the railway train passes--
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII.
+
+At twilight, Franchita was returning from escorting her son and was
+trying to regain her habitual face, her air of haughty indifference, to
+pass through the village.
+
+But, when she arrived in front of the Detcharry house, she saw Dolores
+who, instead of going in, as she intended, turned round and stood at the
+door to see her pass. Something new, some sudden revelation must
+have impelled her to take this attitude of aggressive defiance, this
+expression of provoking irony,--and Franchita then stopped, she also,
+while this phrase, almost involuntary, came through her set teeth:
+
+“What is the matter with that woman? Why does she look at me so--”
+
+“He will not come to-night, the lover, will he?” responded the enemy.
+
+“Then you knew that he came here to see your daughter?”
+
+In truth, Dolores knew this since the morning: Gracieuse had told her,
+since no care needed to be taken of the morrow; Gracieuse had told
+it wearily, after talking uselessly of Uncle Ignacio, of Ramuntcho's
+future, of all that would serve their cause--
+
+“Then you knew that he came here to see your daughter?”
+
+By a reminiscence of other times, they regained instinctively their
+theeing and thouing of the sisters' school, those two women who for
+nearly twenty years had not addressed a word to each other. Why they
+detested each other, they hardly knew; so many times, it begins thus,
+with nothings, with jealousies, with childish rivalries, and then, at
+length, by dint of seeing each other every day without talking to each
+other, by dint of casting at each other evil looks, it ferments till it
+becomes implacable hatred.--Here they were, facing each other, and their
+two voices trembled with rancor, with evil emotion:
+
+“Well,” replied the other, “you knew it before I did, I suppose, you who
+are without shame and sent him to our house!--Anyway, one can understand
+your easiness about means, after what you have done in the past--”
+
+And, while Franchita, naturally much more dignified, remained mute,
+terrified now by this unexpected dispute on the street, Dolores
+continued:
+
+“No. My daughter marrying that penniless bastard, think of it!--”
+
+“Well, I have the idea that she will marry him, in spite of
+everything!--Try to propose to her a man of your choice and see--”
+
+Then, as if she disdained to continue, she went on her way, hearing
+behind her the voice and the insults of the other pursuing her. All her
+limbs trembled and she faltered at every step on her weakened legs.
+
+At the house, now empty, what sadness she found!
+
+The reality of this separation, which would last for three years,
+appeared to her under an aspect frightfully new, as if she had hardly
+been prepared for it--even as, on one's return from a graveyard, one
+feels for the first time, in its frightful integrity, the absence of the
+cherished dead--
+
+And then, those words of insult in the street, those words the more
+crushing because she was cruelly conscious of her sin with the stranger!
+Instead of passing by, as she should have done, how had she found the
+courage to stop before her enemy and, by a phrase murmured between her
+teeth, provoke this odious dispute? How could she have descended to such
+a thing, forgotten herself thus, she who, for fifteen years, had imposed
+herself, little by little, on the respect of all by her demeanor, so
+perfectly dignified. Oh, to have attracted and to have suffered the
+insult of that Dolores,--whose past was irreproachable and who had, in
+effect, the right to treat her with contempt! When she reflected, she
+became frightened more and more by that sort of defiance of the future
+which she had had the imprudence to hurl; it seemed to her that she
+had compromised the cherished hope of her son in exasperating thus the
+hatred of that woman.
+
+Her son!--her Ramuntcho, whom a wagon was carrying away from her at this
+hour in the summer night, was carrying away from her to a long distance,
+to danger, to war!--She had assumed very heavy responsibilities in
+directing his life with ideas of her own, with stubbornness, with pride,
+with selfishness.--And now, this evening, she had, perhaps, attracted
+misfortune to him, while he was going away so confident in the joy of
+his return!--This would be doubtless for her the supreme chastisement;
+she seemed to hear, in the air of the empty house, something like a
+threat of this expiation, she felt its slow and sure approach.
+
+Then, she said for him her prayers, from a heart harshly revolted,
+because religion, as she understood it, remained without sweetness,
+without consolation, without anything confidential and tender. Her
+distress and her remorse were, at this moment, of so sombre a nature
+that tears, benevolent tears, came no longer to her--
+
+And he, at this same instant of the night, continued to descend, through
+darker valleys, toward the lowland where the trains pass--carrying away
+men to a long distance, changing and upsetting all things. For about an
+hour he would continue to be on Basque soil; then, it would end. Along
+his route, he met some oxcarts, of indolent demeanor, recalling the
+tranquillities of the olden time; or vague human silhouettes, hailing
+him with the traditional goodnight, the antique “Gaou-one,” which
+to-morrow he would cease to hear. And beyond, at his left, in the depth
+of a sort of black abyss, was the profile of Spain, Spain which, for a
+very long time doubtless, would trouble his nights no longer--
+
+
+
+
+
+PART II.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+Three years have passed, rapidly.
+
+Franchita is alone at home, ill and in bed, at the end of a November
+day.--And it is the third autumn since her son's departure.
+
+In her hands, burning with fever, she holds a letter from him, a letter
+which should have brought only joy without a cloud, since it announces
+his return, but which causes in her, on the contrary, tormented
+sentiments, for the happiness of seeing him again is poisoned now by
+sadness, by worry especially, by frightful worry--
+
+Oh, she had an exact presentiment of the sombre future, that night when,
+returning from escorting him on the road to departure, she returned to
+her house with so much anguish, after that sort of defiance hurled at
+Dolores on the street: it was cruelly true that she had broken then
+forever her son's life--!
+
+Months of waiting and of apparent calm had followed that scene, while
+Ramuntcho, far from his native land, was beginning his military service.
+Then, one day, a wealthy suitor had presented himself for Gracieuse and
+she, to the entire village's knowledge, had rejected him obstinately in
+spite of Dolores's will. Then, they had suddenly gone away, the mother
+and the daughter, pretexting a visit to relatives in the highland; but
+the voyage had been prolonged; a mystery more and more singular had
+enveloped this absence,--and suddenly the rumor had come that Gracieuse
+was a novice among the sisters of Saint Mary of the Rosary, in a
+convent of Gascony where the former Mother Superior of Etchezar was the
+abbess--!
+
+Dolores had reappeared alone in her home, mute, with a desolate and evil
+air. None knew what influence had been exercised over the little girl
+with the golden hair, nor how the luminous doors of life had been closed
+before her, how she had permitted herself to be walled in that tomb;
+but, as soon as the period of novitiate had been accomplished, without
+seeing even her brother, she had taken her vows there, while Ramuntcho,
+in a far-off colonial war, ever distant from the post-offices of France,
+among the forests of a Southern island, won the stripes of a sergeant
+and a military medal.
+
+Franchita had been almost afraid that he would never return, her
+son.--But at last, he was coming back. Between her fingers, thin and
+warm, she held the letter which said: “I start day after to-morrow and
+I will be with you Saturday night.” But what would he do, at his return,
+what would he make of his life, so sadly changed? In his letters, he had
+obstinately refrained from writing of this.
+
+Anyway, everything had turned against her. The farmers, her tenants,
+had left Etchezar, leaving the barn empty, the house more lonely,
+and naturally her modest income was much diminished. Moreover, in
+an imprudent investment, she had lost a part of the money which the
+stranger had given for her son. Truly, she was too unskilful a mother,
+compromising in every way the happiness of her beloved Ramuntcho,--or
+rather, she was a mother upon whom justice from above fell heavily
+to-day, because of her past error.--And all this had vanquished her, all
+this had hastened and aggravated the malady which the physician, called
+too late, did not succeed in checking.
+
+Now, therefore, waiting for the return of her son, she was stretched on
+her bed, burning with fever.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+He was returning, Ramuntcho, after his three years of absence,
+discharged from the army in that city of the North where his regiment
+was in garrison. He was returning with his heart in disarray, with his
+heart in a tumult and in distress.
+
+His twenty-two year old face had darkened under the ardent sun; his
+mustache, now very long, gave him an air of proud nobility. And, on
+the lapel of the civilian coat which he had just bought, appeared the
+glorious ribbon of his medal.
+
+At Bordeaux, where he had arrived after a night of travel, he had taken
+a place, with some emotion, in that train of Irun which descends in a
+direct line toward the South, through the monotony of the interminable
+moors. Near the right door he had installed himself in order to
+see sooner the Bay of Biscay open and the highlands of Spain sketch
+themselves.
+
+Then, near Bayonne, he had been startled at the sight of the first
+Basque caps, at the tall gates, the first Basque houses among the pines
+and the oaks.
+
+And at Saint-Jean-de-Luz at last, when he set foot on the soil, he
+had felt like one drunk--After the mist and the cold already begun
+in Northern France, he felt the sudden and voluptuous impression of
+a warmer climate, the sensation of going into a hothouse. There was a
+festival of sunlight that day; the southern wind, the exquisite southern
+wind, blew, and the Pyrenees had magnificent tints on the grand, free
+sky. Moreover, girls passed, whose laughter rang of the South and of
+Spain, who had the elegance and the grace of the Basques--and who,
+after the heavy blondes of the North, troubled him more than all these
+illusions of summer.--But promptly he returned to himself: what was he
+thinking of, since that regained land was to him an empty land forever?
+How could his infinite despair be changed by that tempting gracefulness
+of the girls, by that ironical gaiety of the sky, the human beings and
+the things?--No! He would go home, embrace his mother--!
+
+As he had expected, the stage-coach to Etchezar had left two hours
+ago. But, without trouble, he would traverse on foot this long road so
+familiar to him and arrive in the evening, before night.
+
+So he went to buy sandals, the foot-gear of his former runs. And, with
+the mountaineer's quick step, in long, nervous strides, he plunged at
+once into the heart of the silent country, through paths which were for
+him full of memories.
+
+November was coming to an end in the tepid radiance of that sun which
+lingers always here for a long time, on the Pyrenean slopes. For days,
+in the Basque land, had lasted this same luminous and pure sky, above
+woods half despoiled of their leaves, above mountains reddened by the
+ardent tint of the ferns. From the borders of the paths ascended tall
+grasses, as in the month of May, and large, umbellated flowers, mistaken
+about the season; in the hedges, privets and briars had come into bloom
+again, in the buzz of the last bees; and one could see flying persistent
+butterflies, to whom death had given several weeks of grace.
+
+The Basque houses appeared here and there among the trees,--very
+elevated, the roof protruding, white in their extreme oldness, with
+their shutters brown or green, of a green ancient and faded. And
+everywhere, on their wooden balconies were drying the yellow gold
+pumpkins, the sheafs of pink peas; everywhere, on their walls, like
+beautiful beads of coral, were garlands of red peppers: all the things
+of the soil still fecund, all the things of the old, nursing soil,
+amassed thus in accordance with old time usage, in provision for the
+darkened months when the heat departs.
+
+And, after the mists of the Northern autumn, that limpidity of the
+air, that southern sunlight, every detail of the land, awakened in the
+complex mind of Ramuntcho infinite vibrations, painfully sweet.
+
+It was the tardy season when are cut the ferns that form the fleece
+of the reddish hills. And, large ox-carts filled with them rolled
+tranquilly, in the beautiful, melancholy sun, toward the isolated farms,
+leaving on their passage the trail of their fragrance. Very slowly,
+through the mountain paths, went these enormous loads of ferns; very
+slowly, with sounds of cow-bells. The harnessed oxen, indolent and
+strong,--all wearing the traditional head-gear of sheepskin, fallow
+colored, which gives to them the air of bisons or of aurochs, pulled
+those heavy carts, the wheels of which are solid disks, like those of
+antique chariots. The cowboys, holding the long stick in their hands,
+marched in front, always noiselessly, in sandals, the pink cotton shirt
+revealing the chest, the waistcoat thrown over the left shoulder--and
+the woolen cap drawn over a face shaven, thin, grave, to which the
+width of the jaws and of the muscles of the neck gives an expression of
+massive solidity.
+
+Then, there were intervals of solitude when one heard, in these paths,
+only the buzz of flies, in the yellowed and finishing shade of the
+trees.
+
+Ramuntcho looked at them, at these rare passers-by who crossed his road,
+surprised at not meeting somebody he knew who would stop before him.
+But there were no familiar faces. And the friends whom he met were
+not effusive, there were only vague good-days exchanged with folks who
+turned round a little, with an impression of having seen him sometime,
+but not recalling when, and fell back into the humble dream of the
+fields.--And he felt more emphasized than ever the primary differences
+between him and those farm laborers.
+
+Over there, however, comes one of those carts whose sheaf is so big that
+branches of oaks in its passage catch it. In front, walks the driver,
+with a look of soft resignation, a big, peaceful boy, red as the ferns,
+red as the autumn, with a reddish fur in a bush on his bare chest; he
+walks with a supple and nonchalant manner, his arms extended like those
+of a cross on his goad, placed across his shoulders. Thus, doubtless, on
+these same mountains, marched his ancestors, farm laborers and cowboys
+like him since numberless centuries.
+
+And this one, at Ramuntcho's aspect, touches the forehead of his oxen,
+stops them with a gesture and a cry of command, then comes to the
+traveller, extending to him his brave hands.--Florentino! A Florentino
+much changed, having squarer shoulders, quite a man now, with an assured
+and fixed demeanor.
+
+The two friends embrace each other. Then, they scan each other's faces
+in silence, troubled suddenly by the wave of reminiscences which come
+from the depth of their minds and which neither the one nor the other
+knows how to express; Ramuntcho, not better than Florentino, for, if his
+language be infinitely better formed, the profoundness and the mystery
+of his thoughts are also much more unfathomable.
+
+And it oppresses them to conceive things which they are powerless to
+tell; then their embarrassed looks return absent-mindedly to the two
+beautiful, big oxen:
+
+“They are mine, you know,” says Florentino. “I was married two
+years ago.--My wife works. And, by working--we are beginning to get
+along.--Oh!” he adds, with naive pride, “I have another pair of oxen
+like these at the house.”
+
+Then he ceases to talk, flushing suddenly under his sunburn, for he has
+the tact which comes from the heart, which the humblest possess often by
+nature, but which education never gives, even to the most refined people
+in the world: considering the desolate return of Ramuntcho, his broken
+destiny, his betrothed buried over there among the black nuns, his
+mother dying, Florentino is afraid to have been already too cruel in
+displaying too much his own happiness.
+
+Then the silence returned; they looked at each other for an instant
+with kind smiles, finding no words. Besides, between them, the abyss
+of different conceptions has grown deeper in these three years. And
+Florentino, touching anew the foreheads of his oxen, makes them march
+again with a call of his tongue, and presses tighter the hand of his
+friend:
+
+“We shall see each other again, shall we not?”
+
+And the noise of the cow-bells is soon lost in the calm of the road more
+shady, where begins to diminish the heat of the day--
+
+“Well, he has succeeded in life, that one!” thinks Ramuntcho
+lugubriously, continuing his walk under the autumn branches--
+
+The road which he follows ascends, hollowed here and there by springs
+and sometimes crossed by big roots of oaks.
+
+Soon Etchezar will appear to him and, before seeing it, the image of
+it becomes more and more precise in him, recalled and enlivened in his
+memory by the aspect of the surroundings.
+
+Empty now, all this land, where Gracieuse is no more, empty and sad as
+a beloved home where the great Reaper has passed!--And yet Ramuntcho, in
+the depths of his being, dares to think that, in some small convent over
+there, under the veil of a nun, the cherished black eyes still exist and
+that he will be able at least to see them; that taking the veil is not
+quite like dying, and that perhaps the last word of his destiny has not
+been said irrevocably.--For, when he reflects, what can have changed
+thus the soul of Gracieuse, formerly so uniquely devoted to him?--Oh,
+terrible, foreign pressure, surely--And then, when they come face to
+face again, who knows?--When they talk, with his eyes in her eyes?--But
+what can he expect that is reasonable and possible?--In his native land
+has a nun ever broken her eternal vows to follow one to whom she was
+engaged? And besides, where would they go to live together afterward,
+when folks would get out of their way, would fly from them as
+renegades?--To America perhaps, and even there!--And how could he
+take her from these white houses of the dead where the sisters live,
+eternally watched?--Oh, no, all this is a chimera which may not be
+realized--All is at an end, all is finished hopelessly--!
+
+Then, the sadness which comes to him from Gracieuse is forgotten for a
+moment, and he feels nothing except an outburst of his heart toward his
+mother, toward his mother who remains to him, who is there, very near, a
+little upset, doubtless, by the joyful trouble of waiting for him.
+
+And now, on the left of his route, is a humble hamlet, half hidden in
+the beeches and the oaks, with its ancient chapel,--and with its wall
+for the pelota game, under very old trees, at the crossing of two paths.
+At once, in Ramuntcho's youthful head, the course of thoughts changes
+again: that little wall with rounded top, covered with wash of kalsomine
+and ochre, awakens tumultuously in him thoughts of life, of force and of
+joy; with a childish ardor he says to himself that to-morrow he will be
+able to return to that game of the Basques, which is an intoxication of
+movement and of rapid skill; he thinks of the grand matches on Sundays
+after vespers, of the glory of the fine struggles with the champions of
+Spain, of all this deprivation of his years of exile. But it is a very
+short instant, and mortal despair comes back to him: his triumphs on the
+squares, Gracieuse shall not see them; then, what is the use!--Without
+her, all things, even these, fall back discolored, useless and vain, do
+not even exist--
+
+Etchezar!--Etchezar, is revealed suddenly at a turn of the road!--It
+is in a red light, something like a fantasmagoria image, illuminated
+purposely in a special manner in the midst of grand backgrounds of shade
+and of night. It is the hour of the setting sun. Around the isolated
+village, which the old, heavy belfry, surmounts, a last sheaf of rays
+traces a halo of the color of copper and gold, while clouds--and a
+gigantic obscurity emanating from the Gizune--darken the lands piled up
+above and under, the mass of brown hills, colored by the death of the
+ferns--
+
+Oh! the melancholy apparition of the native land, to the soldier who
+returns and will not find his sweetheart--!
+
+Three years have passed since he left here.--Well, three years, at his
+age, are an abyss of time, a period which changes all things. And,
+after that lone exile, how this village, which he adores, appears to
+him diminished, small, walled in the mountains, sad and hidden!--In the
+depth of his mind of a tall, uncultured boy, commences again, to make
+him suffer more, the struggle of those two sentiments of a too refined
+man, which are an inheritance of his unknown father: an attachment
+almost maladive to the home, to the land of childhood, and a fear of
+returning to be enclosed in it, when there exist in the world other
+places so vast and so free. --After the warm afternoon, the autumn is
+indicated now by the hasty fall of the day, with a coolness ascending
+suddenly from the valleys underneath, a scent of dying leaves and of
+moss. And then the thousand details of preceding autumns in the Basque
+country, of the former Novembers, come to him very precisely; the cold
+fall of night succeeding the beautiful, sunlit day; the sad clouds
+appearing with the night; the Pyrenees confounded in vapors inky gray,
+or, in places, cut in black silhouettes on a pale, golden sky; around
+the houses, the belated flowers of the gardens, which the frost spares
+for a long time here, and, in front of all the doors, the strewn leaves
+of the plane-trees, the yellow strewn leaves cracking under the steps of
+the man returning in sandals to his home for supper.--Oh, the heedless
+joy of these returns to the home, in the nights of other times, after
+days of marching on the rude mountain! Oh, the gaiety, in that time,
+of the first winter fires--in the tall, smoky hearth ornamented with a
+drapery of white calico and with a strip of pink paper. No, in the
+city, with its rows of houses one does not have the real impression of
+returning home, of earthing up like plants at night in the primitive
+manner, as one has it here, under those Basque roofs, solitary in the
+midst of the country, with the grand, surrounding black, the grand,
+shivering black of the foliage, the grand, changing black of the clouds
+and the summits.--But to-day, his travels, his new conceptions, have
+diminished and spoiled his mountaineer's home; he will doubtless find it
+almost desolate, especially in the thought that his mother shall not be
+there always--and that Gracieuse shall never be there again.
+
+His pace quickens in his haste to embrace his mother; he turns around
+his village instead of going into it, in order to reach his house
+through a path which overlooks the square and church; passing quickly,
+he looks at everything with inexpressible pain. Peace, silence soar
+over this little parish of Etchezar, heart of the French Basque land and
+country of all the famous pelotaris of the past who have become heavy
+grandfathers, or are dead now. The immutable church, where have remained
+buried his dreams of faith, is surrounded by the same dark cypresses,
+like a mosque. The ball-game square, while he walks quickly above it,
+is still lighted by the sun with a finishing ray, oblique, toward the
+background, toward the wall which the ancient inscription surmounts,--as
+on the evening of his first great success, four years ago, when, in the
+joyous crowd, Gracieuse stood in a blue gown, she who has become a black
+nun to-day.--On the deserted benches, on the granite steps where the
+grass grows, three or four old men are seated, who were formerly
+the heroes of the place and whom their reminiscences bring back here
+incessantly, to talk at the end of the days, when the twilight descends
+from the summits, invades the earth, seems to emanate and to fall from
+the brown Pyrenees.--Oh, the folks who live here, whose lives run here;
+oh, the little cider inns, the little, simple shops and the old, little
+things--brought from the cities, from the other places--sold to the
+mountaineers of the surrounding country!--How all this seems to him
+now strange, separated from him, or set far in the background of the
+primitive past!--Is he truly not a man of Etchezar to-day, is he no
+longer the Ramuntcho of former times?--What particular thing resides
+in his mind to prevent him from feeling comfortable here, as the others
+feel? Why is it prohibited to him, to him alone, to accomplish here the
+tranquil destiny of his dreams, since all his friends have accomplished
+theirs?--
+
+At last here is his house, there, before his eyes. It is as he expected
+to find it. As he expected, he recognizes along the wall all the
+persistent flowers cultivated by his mother, the same flowers which
+the frost has destroyed weeks ago in the North from which he comes:
+heliotropes, geraniums, tall dahlias and roses with climbing branches.
+And the cherished, strewn leaves, which fall every autumn from the
+vault-shaped plane-trees, are there also, and are crushed with a noise
+so familiar under his steps--!
+
+In the lower hall, when he enters, there is already grayish indecision,
+already night. The high chimney, where his glance rests at first by an
+instinctive reminiscence of the fires of ancient evenings, stands the
+same with its white drapery; but cold, filled with shade, smelling of
+absence or death.
+
+He runs up to his mother's room. She, from her bed having recognized her
+son's step, has straightened up, all stiff, all white in the twilight:
+
+“Ramuntcho,” she says, in a veiled and aged voice.
+
+She extends her arms to him and as soon as she holds him, enlaces and
+embraces him:
+
+“Ramuntcho!--”
+
+Then, having uttered this name without adding anything, she leans her
+head against his cheek, in the habitual movement of surrender, in
+the movement of the grand, tender feelings of other times.--He, then,
+perceives that his mother's face is burning against his. Through her
+shirt he feels the arms that surround him thin, feverish and hot. And
+for the first time, he is frightened; the notion that she is doubtless
+very ill comes to his mind, the possibility and the sudden terror that
+she might die--
+
+“Oh, you are alone, mother! But who takes care of you? Who watches over
+you?”
+
+“Who watches over me?--” she replies with her abrupt brusqueness, her
+ideas of a peasant suddenly returned. “Spending money to nurse me, why
+should I do it?--The church woman or the old Doyamburu comes in
+the day-time to give me the things that I need, the things that the
+physician orders.--But--medicine!--Well! Light a lamp, my Ramuntcho!--I
+want to see you--and I cannot see you--”
+
+And, when the clearness has come from a Spanish, smuggled match, she
+says in a tone of caress infinitely sweet, as one talks to a very little
+child whom one adores:
+
+“Oh, your mustache! The long mustache which has come to you, my son!--I
+do not recognize my Ramuntcho!--Bring your lamp here, bring it here so
+that I can look at you!--”
+
+He also sees her better now, under the new light of that lamp, while
+she admires him lovingly. And he is more frightened still, because the
+cheeks of his mother are so hollow, her hair is so whitened; even the
+expression of her eyes is changed and almost extinguished; on her face
+appears the sinister and irremediable labor of time, of suffering and of
+death--
+
+And, now, two tears, rapid and heavy, fall from the eyes of Franchita,
+which widen, become living again, made young by desperate revolt and
+hatred.
+
+“Oh, that woman,” she says suddenly. “Oh, that Dolores!”
+
+And her cry expresses and summarizes all her jealousy of thirty years'
+standing, all her merciless rancor against that enemy of her childhood
+who has succeeded at last in breaking the life of her son.
+
+A silence between them. He is seated, with head bent, near the bed,
+holding the poor, feverish hand which his mother has extended to him.
+She, breathing more quickly, seems for a long while under the oppression
+of something which she hesitates to express:
+
+“Tell me, my Ramuntcho!--I would like to ask you.--What do you intend to
+do, my son? What are your projects for the future?--”
+
+“I do not know, mother.--I will think, I will see.--You ask--all
+at once.--We have time to talk of this, have we not?--To America,
+perhaps--”
+
+“Oh, yes,” she says slowly, with the fear that was in her for days, “to
+America--I suspected it. Oh, that is what you will do.--I knew it, I
+knew it--”
+
+Her phrase ends in a groan and she joins her hands to try to pray--
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+Ramuntcho, the next morning, was wandering in the village, under a sun
+which had pierced the clouds of the night, a sun as radiant as that of
+yesterday. Careful in his dress, the ends of his mustache turned up,
+proud in his demeanor, elegant, grave and handsome, he went at
+random, to see and to be seen, a little childishness mingling with his
+seriousness, a little pleasure with his distress. His mother had said to
+him:
+
+“I am better, I assure you. To-day is Sunday; go, walk about I pray
+you--”
+
+And passers-by turned their heads to look at him, whispered the news:
+“Franchita's son has returned home; he looks very well!”
+
+A summer illusion persisted everywhere, with, however, the unfathomable
+melancholy of things tranquilly finishing. Under that impassible
+radiance of sunlight, the Pyrenean fields seemed dull, all their plants,
+all their grasses were as if collected in one knows not what resignation
+weary of living, what expectation of death.
+
+The turns of the path, the houses, the least trees, all recalled hours
+of other times to Ramuntcho, hours wherein Gracieuse was mingled. And
+then, at each reminiscence, at each step, engraved itself and hammered
+itself in his mind, under a new form, this verdict without recourse: “It
+is finished, you are alone forever, Gracieuse has been taken away from
+you and is in prison--” The rents in his heart, every accident in the
+path renewed and changed them. And, in the depth of his being, as a
+constant basis for his reflections, this other anxiety endured: his
+mother, his mother very ill, in mortal danger, perhaps--!
+
+He met people who stopped him, with a kind and welcoming air, who talked
+to him in the dear Basque tongue--ever alert and sonorous despite its
+incalculable antiquity; old Basque caps, old white heads, liked to talk
+of the ball-game to this fine player returned to his cradle. And then,
+at once, after the first words of greeting, smiles went out, in spite of
+this clear sun in this blue sky, and all were disturbed by the thought
+of Gracieuse in a veil and of Franchita dying.
+
+A violent flush of blood went up to his face when he caught sight of
+Dolores, at a distance, going into her home. Very decrepit, that one,
+and wearing a prostrate air! She had recognized him, for she turned
+quickly her obstinate and hard head, covered by a mourning mantilla.
+With a sentiment of pity at seeing her so undone, he reflected that she
+had struck herself with the same blow, and that she would be alone now
+in her old age and at her death--
+
+On the square, he met Marcos Iragola who informed him that he was
+married, like Florentino--and with the little friend of his childhood,
+he also.
+
+“I did not have to serve in the army,” Iragola explained, “because we
+are Guipuzcoans, immigrants in France; so I could marry her earlier!”
+
+He, twenty-one years old; she eighteen; without lands and without a
+penny, Marcos and Pilar, but joyfully associated all the same, like
+two sparrows building their nest. And the very young husband added
+laughingly:
+
+“What would you? Father said: 'As long as you do not marry I warn you
+that I shall give you a little brother every year.' And he would have
+done it! There are already fourteen of us, all living--”
+
+Oh, how simple and natural they are! How wise and humbly
+happy!--Ramuntcho quitted him with some haste, with a heart more bruised
+for having spoken to him, but wishing very sincerely that he should be
+happy in his improvident, birdlike, little home.
+
+Here and there, folks were seated in front of their doors, in that sort
+of atrium of branches which precedes all the houses of this country.
+And their vaults of plane-trees, cut in the Basque fashion, which in the
+summer are so impenetrable all open worked in this season, let fall
+on them sheafs of light. The sun flamed, somewhat destructive and sad,
+above those yellow leaves which were drying up--
+
+And Ramuntcho, in his slow promenade, felt more and more what intimate
+ties, singularly persistent, would attach him always to this region of
+the earth, harsh and enclosed, even if he were there alone, abandoned,
+without friends, without a wife and without a mother--
+
+Now, the high mass rings! And the vibrations of that bell impress him
+with a strange emotion that he did not expect. Formerly, its familiar
+appeal was an appeal to joy and to pleasure--
+
+He stops, he hesitates, in spite of his actual religious unbelief and
+in spite of his grudge against that church which has taken his betrothed
+away from him. The bell seems to invite him to-day in so special
+a manner, with so peaceful and caressing a voice: “Come, come; let
+yourself be rocked as your ancestors were; come, poor, desolate being,
+let yourself be caught by the lure which will make your tears fall
+without bitterness, and will help you to die--”
+
+Undecided, resisting still, he walks, however, toward the church--when
+Arrochkoa appears!
+
+Arrochkoa, whose catlike mustache has lengthened a great deal and whose
+feline expression is accentuated, runs to him with extended hands, with
+an effusion that he did not expect, in an enthusiasm, perhaps sincere,
+for that ex-sergeant who has such a grand air, who wears the ribbon of a
+medal and whose adventures have made a stir in the land:
+
+“Ah, my Ramuntcho, when did you arrive?--Oh, if I could have
+prevented--What do you think of my old, hardened mother and of all those
+church bigots?--Oh, I did not tell you: I have a son, since two months;
+a fine little fellow! We have so many things to say, my poor friend, so
+many things!--”
+
+The bell rings, rings, fills the air more and more with its soft appeal,
+very grave and somewhat imposing also.
+
+“You are not going there, I suppose?” asks Arrochkoa, pointing to the
+church.
+
+“No, oh, no,” replies Ramuntcho, sombrely decided.
+
+“Well come then, let us go in here and taste the new cider of your
+country!--”
+
+To the smugglers' cider mill, he brings him; both, near the open window,
+sit as formerly, looking outside;--and this place also, these old
+benches, these casks in a line in the back, these same images on the
+wall, are there to recall to Ramuntcho the delicious times of the past,
+the times that are finished.
+
+The weather is adorably beautiful; the sky retains a rare limpidity;
+through the air passes that special scent of falling seasons, scent of
+woods despoiled, of dead leaves that the sun overheats on the soil. Now,
+after the absolute calm of the morning, rises a wind of autumn, a chill
+of November, announcing clearly, but with a melancholy almost charming,
+that the winter is near--a southern winter, it is true, a softened
+winter, hardly interrupting the life of the country. The gardens and all
+the old walls are still ornamented with roses--!
+
+At first they talk of indifferent things while drinking their cider, of
+Ramuntcho's travels, of what happened in the country during his absence,
+of the marriages which occurred or were broken. And, to those two rebels
+who have fled from the church, all the sounds of the mass come during
+their talk, the sounds of the small bells and the sounds of the organ,
+the ancient songs that fill the high, sonorous nave--
+
+At last, Arrochkoa returns to the burning subject:
+
+“Oh, if you had been here it would not have occurred!--And even now, if
+she saw you--”
+
+Ramuntcho looks at him then, trembling at what he imagines he
+understands:
+
+“Even now?--What do you mean?”
+
+“Oh, women--with them, does one ever know?--She cared a great deal for
+you and it was hard for her.--In these days there is no law to keep her
+there!--How little would I care if she broke her vows--”
+
+Ramuntcho turns his head, lowers his eyes, says nothing, strikes the
+soil with his foot. And, in the silence, the impious thing which he had
+hardly dared to formulate to himself, seems to him little by little less
+chimerical, attainable, almost easy.--No, it is not impossible to regain
+her. And, if need be, doubtless, Arrochkoa, her own brother, would lend
+a hand. Oh, what a temptation and what a new disturbance in his mind--!
+
+Drily he asks, “Where is she?--Far from here?”
+
+“Far enough, yes. Over there, toward Navarre, five or six hours of
+a carriage drive. They have changed her convent twice. She lives at
+Amezqueta now, beyond the oak forests of Oyanzabal; the road is through
+Mendichoco; you know, we must have gone through it together one night
+with Itchoua.”
+
+The high mass is ended.--Groups pass: women, pretty girls, elegant in
+demeanor, among whom Gracieuse is no more: many Basque caps lowered on
+sunburnt foreheads. And all these faces turn to look at the two cider
+drinkers at their window. The wind, that blows stronger, makes dance
+around their glasses large, dead, plane-tree leaves.
+
+A woman, already old, casts at them, from under her black cloth
+mantilla, a sad and evil glance:
+
+“Ah,” says Arrochkoa, “here is mother! And she looks at us
+crosswise.--She may flatter herself for her work!--She punished herself
+for she will end in solitude now.--Catherine--who is at Elsagarray's,
+you know--works by the day for her; otherwise, she would have nobody to
+talk to in the evening--”
+
+A bass voice, behind them, interrupts them, with a Basque greeting,
+hollow like a sound in a cavern, while a large and heavy hand rests on
+Ramuntcho's shoulder as if to take possession of him: Itchoua, Itchoua
+who has just finished chanting his liturgy!--Not changed at all, this
+one; he has always his same ageless face, always his colorless mask
+which is at once that of a monk and that of a highwayman, and his same
+eyes, set in, hidden, absent. His mind also must have remained similar,
+his mind capable of impassible murder at the same time as devout
+fetichism.
+
+“Ah,” he says, in a tone which wishes to be that of a good fellow, “you
+have returned to us, my Ramuntcho! Then we are going to work together,
+eh? Business is brisk with Spain now, you know, and arms are needed at
+the frontier. You are one of us, are you not?”
+
+“Perhaps,” replies Ramuntcho. “We may talk of it--”
+
+For several moments his departure for America has become a faint idea in
+his mind.--No!--He would rather stay in his native land, begin again
+his former life, reflect and wait obstinately. Anyway, now that he knows
+where she is, that village of Amezqueta, at a distance of five or six
+hours from here, haunts him in a dangerous way, and he hugs all sorts
+of sacrilegious projects which, until to-day, he would never have dared
+hardly to conceive.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+At noon, he returned to his isolated house to see his mother.
+
+The febrile and somewhat artificial improvement of the morning had
+continued. Nursed by the old Doyanburu, Franchita said that she felt
+better, and, in the fear that Ramuntcho might become dreamy, she made
+him return to the square to attend the Sunday ball-game.
+
+The breath of the wind became warm again, blew from the south; none of
+the shivers of a moment ago remained; on the contrary, a summer sun
+and atmosphere, on the reddened woods, on the rusty ferns, on the roads
+where continued to fall the sad leaves. But the sky was gathering thick
+clouds, which suddenly came out from the rear of the mountains as if
+they had stayed there in ambush to appear all at the same signal.
+
+The ball-game had not yet been arranged and groups were disputing
+violently when he reached the square. Quickly, he was surrounded, he was
+welcomed, designated by acclamation to go into the game and sustain the
+honor of his county. He did not dare, not having played for three years
+and distrusting his unaccustomed arm. At last, he yielded and began
+to undress--but to whom would he trust his waistcoat now?--The image
+reappeared to him, suddenly, of Gracieuse, seated on the nearest steps
+and extending her hands to receive it. To whom would he throw his
+waistcoat to-day? It is intrusted ordinarily to some friend, as the
+toreadors do with their gilt silk mantles.--He threw it at random, this
+time, anywhere, on the granite of the old benches flowered with belated
+scabwort--
+
+The match began. Out of practice at first, uncertain, he missed several
+times the little bounding thing which is to be caught in the air.
+
+Then, he went to his work with a rage, regained his former ease and
+became himself again superbly. His muscles had gained in strength what
+they had perhaps lost in skill; again he was applauded, he knew the
+physical intoxication of moving, of leaping, of feeling his muscles play
+like supple and violent springs, of hearing around him the ardent murmur
+of the crowd.
+
+But then came the instant of rest which interrupts ordinarily the
+long disputed games; the moment when one sits halting, the blood in
+ebulition, the hands reddened, trembling,--and when one regains the
+course of ideas which the game suppresses.
+
+Then, he realized the distress of being alone.
+
+Above the assembled heads, above the woolen caps and the hair ornamented
+with kerchiefs, was accentuated that stormy sky which the southern
+winds, when they are about to finish, bring always. The air had assumed
+an absolute limpidity, as if it had become rarified, rarified unto
+emptiness. The mountains seemed to have advanced extraordinarily; the
+Pyrenees were crushing the village; the Spanish summits or the French
+summits were there, all equally near, as if pasted on one another,
+exaggerating their burned, brown colors, their intense and sombre,
+violet tints. Large clouds, which seemed as solid as terrestrial
+things, were displayed in the form of bows, veiling the sun, casting an
+obscurity which was like an eclipse. And here and there, through some
+rent, bordered with dazzling silver, one could see the profound blue
+green of a sky almost African. All this country, the unstable climate of
+which changes between a morning and an evening, became for several hours
+strangely southern in aspect, in temperature and in light.
+
+Ramuntcho breathed that dry and suave air, come from the South in order
+to vivify the lungs. It was the true weather of his native land. It was
+even the characteristic weather of that land of the Bay of Biscay, the
+weather which he liked best formerly, and which to-day filled him with
+physical comfort--as much as with disturbance of mind, for all that was
+preparing, all that was amassing above, with airs of ferocious menace,
+impressed him with the sentiment of a heaven deaf to prayers, without
+thoughts as without master, a simple focus of storms, of blind forces
+creating, recreating and destroying. And, during these minutes of
+halting meditation, where men in Basque caps of a temperament other than
+his, surrounded him to congratulate him, he made no reply, he did not
+listen, he felt only the ephemeral plenitude of his own vigor, of his
+youth, of his will, and he said to himself that he wished to use harshly
+and desperately all things, to try anything, without the obstacle of
+vain fears, of vain church scruples, in order to take back the young
+girl whom his soul and his flesh desired, who was the unique one and the
+betrothed--
+
+When the game had ended gloriously for him, he returned alone, sad and
+resolute,--proud of having won, of having known how to preserve his
+agile skilfulness, and realizing that it was a means in life, a source
+of money and of strength, to have remained one of the chief ball-players
+of the Basque country.
+
+Under the black sky, there were still the same tints exaggerated by
+everything, the same sombre horizon. And still the same breaths from the
+south, dry and warm, agitors of muscles and of thought.
+
+However, the clouds had descended, descended, and soon this weather,
+these appearances would change and finish. He knew it, as do all the
+countrymen accustomed to look at the sky: it was only the announcement
+of an autumn squall to close the series of lukewarm winds,--of a
+decisive shake-up to finish despoiling the woods of their leaves.
+Immediately after would come the long showers, chilling everything, the
+mists making the mountains confused and distant. And it would be the
+dull rain of winter, stopping the saps, making temporary projects
+languid, extinguishing ardor and revolt--
+
+Now the first drops of water were beginning to fall on the road,
+separate and heavy on the strewn leaves.
+
+As the day before, when he returned home, at twilight, his mother was
+alone.
+
+He found her asleep, in a bad sleep, agitated, burning.
+
+Rambling in his house he tried, in order to make it less sinister, to
+light in the large, lower chimney a fire of branches, but it went out
+smoking. Outside, torrents of rain fell. Through the windows, as through
+gray shrouds, the village hardly appeared, effaced under a winter
+squall. The wind and the rain whipped the walls of the isolated house,
+around which, once more, would thicken the grand blackness of the
+country in rainy nights--that grand blackness, that grand silence, to
+which he had long been unaccustomed. And in his childish heart, came
+little by little, a cold of solitude and of abandonment; he lost even
+his energy, the consciousness of his love, of his strength and of his
+youth; he felt vanishing, before the misty evening, all his projects of
+struggle and of resistance. The future which he had formed a moment
+ago became miserable or chimerical in his eyes, that future of a pelota
+player, of a poor amuser of the crowds, at the mercy of a malady or of
+a moment of weakness--His hopes of the day-time were going out, based,
+doubtless, on unstable things, fleeing now in the night--
+
+Then he felt transported, as in his childhood, toward that soft refuge
+which was his mother; he went up, on tiptoe, to see her, even asleep,
+and to remain there, near her bed, while she slept.
+
+And, when he had lighted in the room, far from her, a discreet lamp,
+she appeared to him more changed than she had been by the fever of
+yesterday; the possibility presented itself, more frightful to his mind,
+of losing her, of being alone, of never feeling again on his cheek the
+caress of her head.--Moreover, for the first time, she seemed old to
+him, and, in the memory of all the deceptions which she had suffered
+because of him, he felt a pity for her, a tender and infinite pity,
+at sight of her wrinkles which he had not before observed, of her hair
+recently whitened at the temples. Oh, a desolate pity and hopeless, with
+the conviction that it was too late now to arrange life better.--And
+something painful, against which there was no possible resistance, shook
+his chest, contracted his young face; objects became confused to his
+view, and, in the need of imploring, of asking for mercy, he let himself
+fall on his knees, his forehead on his mother's bed, weeping at last,
+weeping hot tears--
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+“And whom did you see in the village, my son?” she asked, the next
+morning during the improvement which returned every time, in the first
+hours of the day, after the fever had subsided.
+
+“And whom did you see in the village, my son?--” In talking, she tried
+to retain an air of gaiety, of saying indifferent things, in the fear of
+attacking grave subjects and of provoking disquieting replies.
+
+“I saw Arrochkoa, mother,” he replied, in a tone which brought back
+suddenly the burning questions.
+
+“Arrochkoa!--And how did he behave with you?”
+
+“Oh, he talked to me as if I had been his brother.”
+
+“Yes, I know, I know.--Oh, it was not he who made her do it--”
+
+“He said even--”
+
+He did not dare to continue now, and he lowered his head.
+
+“He said what, my son?”
+
+“Well, that--that it was hard to put her in prison there--that
+perhaps--that, even now, if she saw me, he was not far from thinking--”
+
+She straightened under the shock of what she had just suspected; with
+her thin hands she parted her hair, newly whitened, and her eyes became
+again young and sharp, in an expression almost wicked from joy, from
+avenged pride:
+
+“He said that, he!--”
+
+“Would you forgive me, mother--if I tried?”
+
+She took his two hands and they remained silent, not daring, with
+their scruples as Catholics, to utter the sacrilegious thing which was
+fomenting in their heads. In the depth of her eyes, the evil spark went
+out.
+
+“Forgive you?” she said in a low voice, “Oh, I--you know very well that
+I would.--But do not do this, my son, I pray you, do not do it; it would
+bring misfortune to both of you!--Do not think of it, my Ramuntcho,
+never think of it--”
+
+Then, they hushed, hearing the steps of the physician who was coming
+up for his daily visit. And it was the only time, the supreme time when
+they were to talk of it in life.
+
+But Ramuntcho knew now that, even after death, she would not condemn him
+for having attempted, or for having committed it: and this pardon was
+sufficient for him, and, now that he felt sure of obtaining it, the
+greatest barrier, between his sweetheart and him, had now suddenly
+fallen.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+In the evening, when the fever returned, she seemed already much more
+dangerously affected.
+
+On her robust body, the malady had violently taken hold,--the
+malady recognized too late, and insufficiently nursed because of her
+stubbornness as a peasant, because of her incredulous disdain for
+physicians and medicine.
+
+And little by little, in Ramuntcho, the frightful thought of losing her
+installed itself in a dominant place; during the hours of watchfulness
+spent near her bed, silent and alone, he was beginning to face the
+reality of that separation, the horror of that death and of that
+burial,--even all the lugubrious morrows, all the aspects of his future
+life: the house which he would have to sell before quitting the country;
+then, perhaps, the desperate attempt at the convent of Amezqueta; then
+the departure, probably solitary and without desire to return, for
+unknown America--
+
+The idea also of the great secret which she would carry with her
+forever,--of the secret of his birth,--tormented him more from hour to
+hour.
+
+Then, bending over her, and, trembling, as if he were about to commit an
+impious thing in a church, he dared to say:
+
+“Mother!--Mother, tell me now who my father is!”
+
+She shuddered at first under the supreme question, realizing well, that
+if he dared to question her thus, it was because she was lost. Then,
+she hesitated for a moment: in her head, boiling from fever, there was a
+battle; her duty, she discerned well no longer; her obstinacy which had
+lasted for so many years faltered almost at this hour, in presence of
+the sudden apparition of death--
+
+But, resolved at last forever, she replied at once, in the brusque tone
+of her bad days:
+
+“Your father!--And what is the use, my son?--What do you want of your
+father who for twenty years has never thought of you?--”
+
+No, it was decided, ended, she would not tell. Anyway, it was too
+late now; at the moment when she would disappear, enter into the inert
+powerlessness of the dead, how could she risk changing so completely
+the life of that son over whom she would no longer watch, how could she
+surrender him to his father, who perhaps would make of him a disbeliever
+and a disenchanted man like himself! What a responsibility and what an
+immense terror--!
+
+Her decision having been taken irrevocably, she thought of herself,
+feeling for the first time that life was closing behind her, and joined
+her hands for a sombre prayer.
+
+As for Ramuntcho, after this attempt to learn, after this great effort
+which had almost seemed a profanation to him, he bent his head before
+his mother's will and questioned no longer.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+It went very quickly now, with the drying fevers that made her
+cheeks red, her nostrils pinched, or with the exhaustion of baths of
+perspiration, her pulse hardly beating.
+
+And Ramuntcho had no other thought than his mother; the image of
+Gracieuse ceased to visit him during these funereal days.
+
+She was going, Franchita; she was going, mute and as if indifferent,
+asking for nothing, never complaining--
+
+Once, however, as he was watching, she called him suddenly with a poor
+voice of anguish, to throw her arms around him, to draw him to her, lean
+her head on his cheek. And, in that minute, Ramuntcho saw pass in
+her eyes the great Terror--that of the flesh which feels that it is
+finishing, that of the men and that of the beasts, the horrible and the
+same for all.--A believer, she was that a little; practising rather,
+like so many other women around her; timid in the face of dogmas, of
+observances, of services, but without a clear conception of the world
+beyond, without a luminous hope.--Heaven, all the beautiful things
+promised after life.--Yes, perhaps.--But still, the black hole was
+there, near and certain, where she would have to turn into dust.--What
+was sure, what was inexorable, was the fact that never, never more would
+her destroyed visage lean in a real manner on that of Ramuntcho; then,
+in the doubt of having a mind which would fly, in the horror and the
+misery of annihilation, of becoming powder and nothing, she wanted again
+kisses from that son, and she clutched at him as clutch the wrecked who
+fall into the black and deep waters--
+
+He understood all this, which the poor, fading eyes said so well. And
+the pity so tender, which he had already felt at seeing the wrinkles
+and the white hairs of his mother, overflowed like a flood from his very
+young heart; he responded to this appeal with all that one may give of
+desolate clasps and embraces.
+
+But it did not last long. She had never been one of those who are
+enervated for long, or at least, let it appear. Her arms unclasped,
+her head fallen back, she closed her eyes again, unconscious now,--or
+stoical--
+
+And Ramuntcho, standing, not daring to touch her, wept heavy tears,
+without noise, turning his head,--while, in the distance, the parish
+bell began to ring the curfew, sang the tranquil peace of the village,
+filled the air with vibrations soft, protective, advising sound sleep to
+those who have morrows--
+
+The following morning, after having confessed, she passed out of
+life, silent and haughty, having felt a sort of shame for her
+suffering,--while the same bell rang slowly her agony.
+
+And at night, Ramuntcho found himself alone, beside that thing in bed
+and cold, which is preserved and looked at for several hours, but which
+one must make haste to bury in the earth--
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+Eight days after.
+
+At the fall of night, while a bad mountain squall twisted the branches
+of the trees, Ramuntcho entered his deserted house where the gray of
+death seemed scattered everywhere. A little of winter had passed over
+the Basque land, a little frost, burning the annual flowers, ending
+the illusory summer of December. In front of Franchita's door, the
+geraniums, the dahlias had just died, and the path which led to the
+house, which no one cared for, disappeared under the mass of yellow
+leaves.
+
+For Ramuntcho, this first week of mourning had been occupied by the
+thousand details that rock sorrow. Proud also, he had desired that all
+should be done in a luxurious manner, according to the old usages of
+the parish. His mother had been buried in a coffin of black velvet
+ornamented with silver nails. Then, there had been mortuary masses,
+attended by the neighbors in long capes, the women enveloped and hooded
+with black. And all this represented a great deal of expense for him,
+who was poor.
+
+Of the sum given formerly, at the time of his birth, by his unknown
+father, little remained, the greater part having been lost through
+unfaithful bankers. And now, he would have to quit the house, sell the
+dear familiar furniture, realize the most money possible for the flight
+to America--
+
+This time, he returned home peculiarly disturbed, because he was to do a
+thing, postponed from day to day, about which his conscience was not
+at rest. He had already examined, picked out, all that belonged to his
+mother; but the box containing her papers and her letters was still
+intact--and to-night he would open it, perhaps.
+
+He was not sure that death, as many persons think, gives the right to
+those who remain to read letters, to penetrate the secrets of those who
+have just gone. To burn without looking seemed to him more respectful,
+more honest. But it was also to destroy forever the means of discovering
+the one whose abandoned son he was.--Then what should he do?--And from
+whom could he take advice, since he had no one in the world?
+
+In the large chimney he lit the evening fire: then he got from an upper
+room the disquieting box, placed it on a table near the fire, beside his
+lamp, and sat down to reflect again. In the face of these papers, almost
+sacred, almost prohibited, which he would touch and which death alone
+could have placed in his hands, he had in this moment the consciousness,
+in a more heartbreaking manner, of the irrevocable departure of his
+mother; tears returned to him and he wept there, alone, in the silence--
+
+At last he opened the box--
+
+His arteries beat heavily. Under the surrounding trees, in the obscure
+solitude, he felt that forms were moving, to look at him through the
+window-panes. He felt breaths strange to his own chest, as if some one
+was breathing behind him. Shades assembled, interested in what he was
+about to do.--The house was crowded with phantoms--
+
+They were letters, preserved there for more than twenty years, all in
+the same handwriting,--one of those handwritings, at once negligent and
+easy, which men of the world have and which, in the eyes of the simple
+minded, are an indication of great social difference. And at first,
+a vague dream of protection, of elevation and of wealth diverted the
+course of his thoughts.--He had no doubt about the hand which had
+written them, those letters, and he held them tremblingly, not daring to
+read them, nor even to look at the name with which they were signed.
+
+One only had retained its envelope; then he read the address: “To Madame
+Franchita Duval.”--Oh! yes, he remembered having heard that his mother,
+at the time of her disappearance from the Basque country, had taken
+that name for a while.--Following this, was an indication of street and
+number, which it pained him to read without his being able to understand
+why, which made the blood come to his cheeks; then the name of that
+large city, wherein he was born.--With fixed eyes, he stayed there,
+looking no longer.--And suddenly, he had the horrible vision of that
+clandestine establishment: in a suburban apartment, his mother, young,
+elegant, mistress of some rich idler, or of some officer perhaps!--In
+the regiment he had known some of these establishments, which doubtless
+are all alike, and he had found in them for himself unexpected
+adventures.--A dizziness seized him, to catch a glimpse thus under a new
+aspect of the one whom he had venerated so much; the dear past faltered
+behind him, as if to fall into a desolating abyss. And his despair
+turned into a sudden execration for the one who had given life to him
+through a caprice--
+
+Oh! to burn them, to burn them as quickly as possible, these letters of
+misfortune!--And he began to throw them one by one into the fire, where
+they were consumed by sudden flames.
+
+A photograph, however, came out of them, fell on the floor; then he
+could not refrain from taking it to the lamp to see it.
+
+And his impression was heart-rending, during the few seconds when his
+eyes met the half effaced ones of the yellowed image!--It resembled
+him!--He found, with profound fear, something of himself in the unknown.
+And instinctively he turned round, asking himself if the spectres in the
+obscure corners had not come near behind him to look also.
+
+It had hardly an appreciable duration, that silent interview, unique and
+supreme, with his father. To the fire also, the image! He threw it, with
+a gesture of anger and of terror, among the ashes of the last letters,
+and all left soon only a little mass of black dust, extinguishing the
+clear flames of the branches.
+
+Finished! The box was empty. He threw on the floor his cap which gave
+him a headache, and straightened himself, with perspiration on his
+forehead and a buzzing at the temples.
+
+Finished! Annihilated, all these memories of sin and of shame. And now
+the things of life appeared to him to regain their former balance; he
+regained his soft veneration for his mother, whose memory it seemed
+to him he had purified, avenged also a little, by this disdainful
+execution.
+
+Therefore, his destiny had been fixed to-night forever. He would remain
+the Ramuntcho of other times, the “son of Franchita,” player of pelota
+and smuggler, free, freed from everything, owing nothing to and asking
+nothing from anybody. And he felt serene, without remorse, without
+fright, either, in this mortuary house, from which the shades had just
+disappeared, peaceful now and friendly--
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+At the frontier, in a mountain hamlet. A black night, about one o'clock
+in the morning; a winter night inundated by cold and heavy rain. At the
+front of a sinister house which casts no light outside, Ramuntcho loads
+his shoulders with a heavy smuggled box, under the rippling rain, in the
+midst of a tomb-like obscurity. Itchoua's voice commands secretly,--as
+if one hardly touched with a bow the last strings of a bass viol,--and
+around him, in the absolute darkness, one divines the presence of other
+smugglers similarly loaded, ready to start on an adventure.
+
+It is now more than ever Ramuntcho's life, to run almost every night,
+especially on the cloudless and moonless nights when one sees nothing,
+when the Pyrenees are an immense chaos of shade. Amassing as much money
+as he can for his flight, he is in all the smuggling expeditions, as
+well in those that bring a suitable remuneration as in those where one
+risks death for a hundred cents. And ordinarily, Arrochkoa accompanies
+him, without necessity, in sport and for a whim.
+
+They have become inseparable, Arrochkoa, Ramuntcho,--and they talk
+freely of their projects about Gracieuse, Arrochkoa seduced especially
+by the attraction of some fine prowess, by the joy of taking a nun away
+from the church, of undoing the plans of his old, hardened mother,--and
+Ramuntcho, in spite of his Christian scruples which affect him still,
+making of this dangerous project his only hope, his only reason for
+being and for acting. For a month, almost, the attempt has been decided
+upon in theory and, in their long talks in the December nights, on the
+roads where they walk, or in the corners of the village cider mills
+where they sit apart, the means of execution are discussed by them, as
+if the question was a simple frontier undertaking. They must act very
+quickly, concludes Arrochkoa always, they must act in the surprise of
+a first interview which shall be for Gracieuse a very disturbing thing;
+they must act without giving her time to think or to recant, they must
+try something like kidnapping--
+
+“If you knew,” he says, “what is that little convent of Amezqueta where
+they have placed her: four old, good sisters with her, in an isolated
+house!--I have my horse, you know, who gallops so quickly; once the nun
+is in a carriage with you, who can catch her?--”
+
+And to-night they have resolved to take into their confidence Itchoua
+himself, a man accustomed to suspicious adventures, valuable in assaults
+at night, and who, for money, is capable of everything.
+
+The place from which they start this time for the habitual smuggling
+expedition is named Landachkoa, and it is situated in France at ten
+minutes' distance from Spain. The inn, solitary and old, assumes as soon
+as the night falls, the air of a den of thieves; at this moment while
+the smugglers come out of one door, it is full of Spanish carbineers who
+have familiarly crossed the frontier to divert themselves here and who
+drink while singing. And the hostess, accustomed to these nocturnal
+affairs, has said joyfully, a moment ago, in Basque tongue to Itchoua's
+folks:
+
+“It is all right! They are all drunk, you can go out!”
+
+Go out! It is easier to advise than to do! You are drenched at the first
+steps and your feet slip on the mud, despite the aid of your sticks,
+on the stiff slopes of the paths. They do not see one another; they see
+nothing, neither the walls of the hamlet along which they pass nor the
+trees afterward, nor the rocks; they are like blind men, groping and
+slipping under a deluge, with the music of rain in their ears which
+makes them deaf.
+
+And Ramuntcho, who makes this trip for the first time, has no idea of
+the passages which they are to go through, strikes here and there his
+load against black things which are branches of beeches, or slips with
+his two feet, falters, straightens up, catches himself by planting at
+random his iron-pointed stick in the soil. They are the last on the
+march, Arrochkoa and Ramuntcho, following the band by ear;--and those
+who precede them make no more noise with their sandals than wolves in a
+forest.
+
+In all, fifteen smugglers on a distance of fifty metres, in the thick
+black of the mountain, under the incessant sprinkling of the shower;
+they carry boxes full of jewels, of watches, of chains, of rosaries,
+or bundles of Lyons silk, wrapped in oilcloth; in front, loaded with
+merchandise less valuable, walk two men who are the skirmishers, those
+who will attract, if necessary, the guns of the Spaniards and will then
+take flight, throwing away everything. All talk in a low voice, despite
+the drumming of the rain which already stifles sounds--
+
+The one who precedes Ramuntcho turns round to warn him:
+
+“Here is a torrent in front of us--” (Its presence would have been
+guessed by its noise louder than that of the rain--) “We must cross it!”
+
+“Ah!--Cross it how? Wade in the water?--”
+
+“No, the water is too deep. Follow us. There is a tree trunk over it.”
+
+Groping, Ramuntcho finds that tree trunk, wet, slippery and round. He
+stands, advancing on this monkey's bridge in a forest, carrying his
+heavy load, while under him the invisible torrent roars. And he crosses,
+none knows how, in the midst of this intensity of black and of this
+noise of water.
+
+On the other shore they have to increase precaution and silence. There
+are no more mountain paths, frightful descents, under the night, more
+oppressing, of the woods. They have reached a sort of plain wherein the
+feet penetrate; the sandals attached to nervous legs cause a noise of
+beaten water. The eyes of the smugglers, their cat-like eyes, more and
+more dilated by the obscurity, perceive confusedly that there is free
+space around, that there is no longer the closing in of branches. They
+breathe better also and walk with a more regular pace that rests them--
+
+But the bark of dogs immobilizes them all in a sudden manner, as if
+petrified under the shower. For a quarter of an hour they wait, without
+talking or moving; on their chests, the perspiration runs, mingled with
+the rain that enters by their shirt collars and falls to their belts.
+
+By dint of listening, they hear the buzz of their ears, the beat of
+their own arteries.
+
+And this tension of their senses is, in their trade, what they all like;
+it gives to them a sort of joy almost animal, it doubles the life of the
+muscles in them, who are beings of the past; it is a recall of the most
+primitive human impressions in the forests or the jungles of original
+epochs.--Centuries of civilization will be necessary to abolish this
+taste for dangerous surprises which impels certain children to play
+hide and seek, certain men to lie in ambush, to skirmish in wars, or to
+smuggle--
+
+They have hushed, the watch-dogs, quieted or distracted, their attentive
+scent preoccupied by something else. The vast silence has returned, less
+reassuring, ready to break, perhaps, because beasts are watching. And,
+at a low command from Itchoua, the men begin again their march, slower
+and more hesitating, in the night of the plain, a little bent, a little
+lowered on their legs, like wild animals on the alert.
+
+Before them is the Nivelle; they do not see it, since they see nothing,
+but they hear it run, and now long, flexible things are in the way of
+their steps, are crushed by their bodies: the reeds on the shores.
+The Nivelle is the frontier; they will have to cross it on a series of
+slippery rocks, leaping from stone to stone, despite the loads that make
+the legs heavy.
+
+But before doing this they halt on the shore to collect themselves and
+rest a little. And first, they call the roll in a low voice: all are
+there. The boxes have been placed in the grass; they seem clearer
+spots, almost perceptible to trained eyes, while, on the darkness in the
+background, the men, standing, make long, straight marks, blacker than
+the emptiness of the plain. Passing by Ramuntcho, Itchoua has whispered
+in his ear:
+
+“When will you tell me about your plan?”
+
+“In a moment, at our return!--Oh, do not fear, Itchoua, I will tell
+you!”
+
+At this moment when his chest is heaving and his muscles are in action,
+all his faculties doubled and exasperated by his trade, he does not
+hesitate, Ramuntcho; in the present exaltation of his strength and of
+his combativeness he knows no moral obstacles nor scruples. The idea
+which came to his accomplice to associate himself with Itchoua frightens
+him no longer. So much the worse! He will surrender to the advice of
+that man of stratagem and of violence, even if he must go to the extreme
+of kidnapping and housebreaking. He is, to-night, the rebel from whom
+has been taken the companion of his life, the adored one, the one who
+may not be replaced; he wants her, at the risk of everything.--And while
+he thinks of her, in the progressive languor of that halt, he desires
+her suddenly with his senses, in a young, savage outbreak, in a manner
+unexpected and sovereign--
+
+The immobility is prolonged, the respirations are calmer. And, while the
+men shake their dripping caps, pass their hands on their foreheads to
+wipe out drops of rain and perspiration that veil the eyes, the first
+sensation of cold comes to them, of a damp and profound cold; their wet
+clothes chill them, their thoughts weaken; little by little a sort of
+torpor benumbs them in the thick darkness, under the incessant winter
+rain.
+
+They are accustomed to this, trained to cold and to dampness, they are
+hardened prowlers who go to places where, and at hours when, other men
+never appear, they are inaccessible to vague frights of the darkness,
+they are capable of sleeping without shelter anywhere in the blackest of
+rainy nights, in dangerous marshes or hidden ravines--
+
+Now the rest has lasted long enough. This is the decisive instant when
+the frontier is to be crossed. All muscles stiffen, ears stretch, eyes
+dilate.
+
+First, the skirmishers; then, one after another, the bundle carriers,
+the box carriers, each one loaded with a weight of forty kilos, on the
+shoulders or on the head. Slipping here and there among the round rocks,
+stumbling in the water, everybody crosses, lands on the other shore.
+Here they are on the soil of Spain! They have to cross, without gunshots
+or bad meetings, a distance of two hundred metres to reach an isolated
+farm which is the receiving shop of the chief of the Spanish smugglers,
+and once more the game will have been played!
+
+Naturally, it is without light, obscure and sinister, that farm.
+Noiselessly and groping they enter in a file; then, on the last who
+enter, enormous locks of the door are drawn. At last! Barricaded and
+rescued, all! And the treasury of the Queen Regent has been frustrated,
+again tonight, of a thousand francs--!
+
+Then, fagots are lighted in the chimney, a candle on the table; they
+see one another, they recognize one another, smiling at the success. The
+security, the truce of rain over their heads, the flame that dances and
+warms, the cider and the whiskey that fill the glasses, bring back to
+these men noisy joy after compelled silence. They talk gaily, and the
+tall, white-haired, old chief who receives them all at this undue hour,
+announces that he will give to his village a beautiful square for the
+pelota game, the plans of which have been drawn and the cost of which
+will be ten thousand francs.
+
+“Now, tell me your affair,” insists Itchoua, in Ramuntcho's ear. “Oh, I
+suspect what it is! Gracieuse, eh?--That is it, is it not?--It is
+hard you know.--I do not like to do things against my religion, you
+know.--Then, I have my place as a chorister, which I might lose in such
+a game.--Let us see, how much money will you give me if I succeed?--”
+
+He had foreseen, Ramuntcho, that this sombre aid would cost him a great
+deal, Itchoua being, in truth, a churchman, whose conscience would have
+to be bought; and, much disturbed, with a flush on his cheeks, Ramuntcho
+grants, after a discussion, a thousand francs. Anyway, if he is piling
+up money, it is only to get Gracieuse, and if enough remains for him to
+go to America with her, what matters it?--
+
+And now that his secret is known to Itchoua, now that his cherished
+project is being elaborated in that obstinate and sharp brain, it seems
+to Ramuntcho that he has made a decisive step toward the execution of
+his plan, that all has suddenly become real and approaching. Then, in
+the midst of the lugubrious decay of the place, among these men who are
+less than ever similar to him, he isolates himself in an immense hope of
+love.
+
+They drink for a last time together, all around, clinking their
+glasses loudly; then they start again, in the thick night and under the
+incessant rain, but this time on the highway, in a band and singing.
+Nothing in the hands, nothing in the pockets: they are now ordinary
+people, returning from a natural promenade.
+
+In the rear guard, at a distance from the singers, Itchoua on his long
+legs walks with his hands resting on Ramuntcho's shoulder. Interested
+and ardent for success, since the sum has been agreed upon, Itchoua
+whispers in Ramuntcho's ear imperious advices. Like Arrochkoa, he wishes
+to act with stunning abruptness, in the surprise of a first interview
+which will occur in the evening, as late as the rule of a convent will
+permit, at an uncertain and twilight hour, when the village shall have
+begun to sleep.
+
+“Above all,” he says, “do not show yourself beforehand. She must not
+have seen you, she must not even know that you have returned home! You
+must not lose the advantage of surprise--”
+
+While Ramuntcho listens and meditates in silence, the others, who lead
+the march, sing always the same old song that times their steps. And
+thus they re-enter Landachkoa, village of France, crossing the bridge of
+the Nivelle, under the beards of the Spanish carbineers.
+
+They have no sort of illusion, the watching carbineers, about what these
+men, so wet, have been doing at an hour so black.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+The winter, the real winter, extended itself by degrees over the Basque
+land, after the few days of frost that had come to annihilate the annual
+plants, to change the deceptive aspect of the fields, to prepare the
+following spring.
+
+And Ramuntcho acquired slowly his habits of one left alone; in his
+house, wherein he lived still, without anybody to serve him, he took
+care of himself, as in the colonies or in the barracks, knowing the
+thousand little details of housekeeping which careful soldiers practice.
+He preserved the pride of dress, dressed himself well, wore the ribbon
+of the brave at his buttonhole and a wide crape around his sleeve.
+
+At first he was not assiduous at the village cider mill, where the
+men assembled in the cold evenings. In his three years of travel,
+of reading, of talking with different people, too many new ideas had
+penetrated his already open mind; among his former companions he felt
+more outcast than before, more detached from the thousand little things
+which composed their life.
+
+Little by little, however, by dint of being alone, by dint of passing
+by the halls where the men drank,--on the window-panes of which a lamp
+always sketches the shadows of Basque caps,--he had made it a custom to
+go in and to sit at a table.
+
+It was the season when the Pyrenean villages, freed from the visitors
+which the summers bring, imprisoned by the clouds, the mist, or the
+snow, are more intensely as they were in ancient times. In these cider
+mills--sole, little, illuminated points, living, in the midst of the
+immense, empty darkness of the fields--something of the spirit of former
+times is reanimated in winter evenings. In front of the large casks of
+cider arranged in lines in the background where it is dark, the lamp,
+hanging from the beams, throws its light on the images of saints that
+decorate the walls, on the groups of mountaineers who talk and who
+smoke. At times someone sings a plaintive song which came from the night
+of centuries; the beating of a tambourine recalls to life old, forgotten
+rhythms; a guitar reawakens a sadness of the epoch of the Moors.--Or, in
+the face of each other, two men, with castanets in their hands, suddenly
+dance the fandango, swinging themselves with an antique grace.
+
+And, from these innocent, little inns, they retire early--especially
+in these bad, rainy nights--the darkness of which is so peculiarly
+propitious to smuggling, every one here having to do some clandestine
+thing on the Spanish side.
+
+In such places, in the company of Arrochkoa, Ramuntcho talked over and
+commented upon his cherished, sacrilegious project; or,--during the
+beautiful moon-light nights which do not permit of undertakings on the
+frontier--they talked on the roads for a long time.
+
+Persistent religions scruples made him hesitate a great deal, although
+he hardly realized it. They were inexplicable scruples, since he had
+ceased to be a believer. But all his will, all his audacity, all his
+life, were concentrated and directed, more and more, toward this unique
+end.
+
+And the prohibition, ordered by Itchoua, from seeing Gracieuse before
+the great attempt, exasperated his impatient dream.
+
+The winter, capricious as it is always in this country, pursued its
+unequal march, with, from time to time, surprises of sunlight and of
+heat. There were rains of a deluge, grand, healthy squalls which went
+up from the Bay of Biscay, plunged into the valleys, bending the trees
+furiously. And then, repetitions of the wind of the south, breaths as
+warm as in summer, breezes smelling of Africa, under a sky at once high
+and sombre, among mountains of an intense brown color. And also, glacial
+mornings, wherein one saw, at awakening, summits become snowy and white.
+
+The desire often seized him to finish everything.--But he had the
+frightful idea that he might not succeed and might fall again, alone
+forever, without a hope in life.
+
+Anyway, reasonable pretexts to wait were not lacking. He had to settle
+with men of affairs, he had to sell the house and realize, for his
+flight, all the money that he could obtain. He had also to wait for the
+answer of Uncle Ignacio, to whom he had announced his emigration and at
+whose house he expected to find an asylum.
+
+Thus the days went by, and soon the hasty spring was to ferment. Already
+the yellow primrose and the blue gentian, in advance here by several
+weeks, were in bloom in the woods and along the paths, in the last suns
+of January--
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+They are this time in the cider mill of the hamlet of Gastelugain, near
+the frontier, waiting for the moment to go out with boxes of jewelry and
+weapons.
+
+And it is Itchoua who is talking:
+
+“If she hesitates--and she will not hesitate, be sure of it--but if she
+hesitates, well! we will kidnap her.--Let me arrange this, my plan is
+all made. It will be in the evening, you understand?--We will bring her
+anywhere and imprison her in a room with you.--If it turns out badly--if
+I am forced to quit the country after having done this thing to please
+you; then, you will have to give me more money than the amount agreed
+upon, you understand?--Enough, at least, to let me seek for my bread in
+Spain--”
+
+“In Spain!--What? What are you going to do, Itchoua? I hope you have not
+in your head the idea to do things that are too grave.”
+
+“Oh, do not be afraid, my friend. I have no desire to assassinate
+anybody.”
+
+“Well! You talk of running away--”
+
+“I said this as I would have said anything else, you know. For some
+time, business has been bad. And then, suppose the thing turns out badly
+and the police make an inquiry. Well, I would prefer to go, that is
+sure.--For whenever these men of justice put their noses into anything,
+they seek for things that happened long ago, and the inquiry never
+ends--”
+
+In his eyes, suddenly expressive, appeared crime and fear. And Ramuntcho
+looked with an increase of anxiety at this man, who was believed to be
+solidly established in the country with lands in the sunlight, and who
+accepted so easily the idea of running away. What sort of a bandit is he
+then, to be so much afraid of justice?--And what could be these things
+that happened long ago?--After a silence between them, Ramuntcho said in
+a lower voice, with extreme distrust:
+
+“Imprison her--you say this seriously, Itchoua?--And where imprison her,
+if you please? I have no castle to hide her in--”
+
+Then Itchoua, with the smile of a faun which no one had seen before,
+tapped his shoulder:
+
+“Oh, imprison her--for one night only, my son!--It will be enough, you
+may believe me.--They are all alike, you see: the first step costs; but
+the second one, they make it all alone, and quicker than you may think.
+Do you imagine that she would wish to return to the good sisters,
+afterward?--”
+
+The desire to slap that dull face passed like an electric shock through
+the arm and the hand of Ramuntcho. He constrained himself, however,
+through a long habit of respectfulness for the old singer of the
+liturgies, and remained silent, with a flush on his cheeks, and his
+look turned aside. It revolted him to hear one talk thus of her--and
+surprised him that the one who spoke thus was that Itchoua whom he had
+always known as the quiet husband of an ugly and old woman. But the
+blow struck by the impertinent phrase followed nevertheless, in his
+imagination, a dangerous and unforeseen path.--Gracieuse, “imprisoned
+a room with him!” The immediate possibility of such a thing, so clearly
+presented with a rough and coarse word, made his head swim like a very
+violent liquor.
+
+He loved her with too elevated a tenderness, his betrothed, to find
+pleasure in brutal hopes. Ordinarily, he expelled from his mind those
+images; but now that man had just placed them under his eye, with a
+diabolical crudity, and he felt shivers in his flesh, he trembled as if
+the weather were cold--
+
+Oh, whether the adventure fell or not under the blow of justice,
+well, so much the worse, after all! He had nothing to lose, all was
+indifferent to him! And from that evening, in the fever of a new desire,
+he felt more boldly decided to brave the rules, the laws, the obstacles
+of this world. Saps ascended everywhere around him, on the sides of the
+brown Pyrenees; there were longer and more tepid nights; the paths were
+bordered with violets and periwinkles.--But religious scruples held him
+still. They remained, inexplicably in the depth of his disordered mind:
+instinctive horror of profanation; belief, in spite of everything,
+in something supernatural enveloping, to defend them, churches and
+cloisters--
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+The winter had just come to an end.
+
+Ramuntcho,--who had slept for a few hours, in a bad, tired sleep, in
+a small room of the new house of his friend Florentino, at
+Ururbil,--awakened as the day dawned.
+
+The night,--a night of tempest everywhere, a black and troubled
+night,--had been disastrous for the smugglers. Near Cape Figuier, in the
+rocks where they had just landed from the sea with silk bundles, they
+had been pursued with gunshots, compelled to throw away their loads,
+losing everything, some fleeing to the mountain, others escaping by
+swimming among the breakers, in order to reach the French shore, in
+terror of the prisons of San Sebastian.
+
+At two o'clock in the morning, exhausted, drenched and half drowned,
+he had knocked at the door of that isolated house, to ask from the good
+Florentino his aid and an asylum.
+
+And on awakening, after all the nocturnal noise of the equinoctial
+storm, of the rain, of the groaning branches, twisted and broken, he
+perceived that a grand silence had come. Straining his ear, he could
+hear no longer the immense breath of the western wind, no longer the
+motion of all those things tormented in the darkness. No, nothing except
+a far-off noise, regular, powerful, continued and formidable; the roll
+of the waters in the depth of that Bay of Biscay--which, since the
+beginning, is without truce and troubled; a rhythmic groan, as might be
+the monstrous respiration of the sea in its sleep; a series of profound
+blows which seemed the blows of a battering ram on a wall, continued
+every time by a music of surf on the beaches.--But the air, the trees
+and the surrounding things were immovable; the tempest had finished,
+without reasonable cause, as it had begun, and the sea alone prolonged
+the complaint of it.
+
+To look at that land, that Spanish coast which he would perhaps never
+see again, since his departure was so near, he opened his window on the
+emptiness, still pale, on the virginity of the desolate dawn.
+
+A gray light emanating from a gray sky; everywhere the same immobility,
+tired and frozen, with uncertainties of aspect derived from the night
+and from dreams. An opaque sky, which had a solid air and was made
+of accumulated, small, horizontal layers, as if one had painted it by
+superposing pastes of dead colors.
+
+And underneath, mountains black brown; then Fontarabia in a morose
+silhouette, its old belfry appearing blacker and more worn by the years.
+At that hour, so early and so freshly mysterious, when the ears of most
+men are not yet open, it seemed as if one surprised things in their
+heartbreaking colloquy of lassitude and of death, relating to one
+another, at the first flush of dawn, all that they do not say when the
+day has risen.--What was the use of resisting the storm of last night?
+said the old belfry, sad and weary, standing in the background in the
+distance; what was the use, since other storms will come, eternally
+others, other storms and other tempests, and since I will pass away,
+I whom men have elevated as a signal of prayer to remain here for
+incalculable years?--I am already only a spectre, come from some other
+time; I continue to ring ceremonies and illusory festivals; but men will
+soon cease to be lured by them; I ring also knells, I have rung so many
+knells for thousands of dead persons whom nobody remembers! And I remain
+here, useless, under the effort, almost eternal, of all those western
+winds which blow from the sea--
+
+At the foot of the belfry, the church, drawn in gray tints, with an air
+of age and abandonment, confessed also that it was empty, that it was
+vain, peopled only by poor images made of wood or of stone, by myths
+without comprehension, without power and without pity. And all the
+houses, piously grouped for centuries around it, avowed that its
+protection was not efficacious against death, that it was deceptive and
+untruthful--
+
+And especially the clouds, the clouds and the mountains, covered with
+their immense, mute attestation what the old city murmured beneath
+them; they confirmed in silence the sombre truths: heaven empty as the
+churches are, serving for accidental phantasmagoria, and uninterrupted
+times rolling their flood, wherein thousands of lives, like
+insignificant nothings, are, one after another, dragged and drowned.--A
+knell began to ring in that distance which Ramuntcho saw whitening; very
+slowly, the old belfry gave its voice, once more, for the end of a life;
+someone was in the throes of death on the other side of the frontier,
+some Spanish soul over there was going out, in the pale morning, under
+the thickness of those imprisoning clouds--and he had almost the precise
+notion that this soul would very simply follow its body in the earth
+which decomposes--
+
+And Ramuntcho contemplated and listened. At the little window of
+that Basque house, which before him had sheltered only generations of
+simple-minded and confident people, leaning on the wide sill which the
+rubbing of elbows had worn, pushing the old shutter painted green, he
+rested his eyes on the dull display of that corner of the world which
+had been his and which he was to quit forever. Those revelations which
+things made, his uncultured mind heard them for the first time and he
+lent to them a frightened attention. An entire new labor of unbelief
+was going on suddenly in his mind, prepared by heredity to doubts and to
+worry. An entire vision came to him, sudden and seemingly definitive, of
+the nothingness of religions, of the nonexistence of the divinities whom
+men supplicate.
+
+And then--since there was nothing, how simple it was to tremble still
+before the white Virgin, chimerical protector of those convents where
+girls are imprisoned--!
+
+The poor agony bell, which exhausted itself in ringing over there so
+puerilely to call for useless prayers, stopped at last, and, under the
+closed sky, the respiration of the grand waters alone was heard in the
+distance, in the universal silence. But the things continued, in the
+uncertain dawn, their dialogue without words: nothing anywhere; nothing
+in the old churches venerated for so long a time; nothing in the sky
+where clouds and mists amass; but always, in the flight of times, the
+eternal and exhausting renewal of beings; and always and at once, old
+age, death, ashes--
+
+That is what they were saying, in the pale half light, the things so
+dull and so tired. And Ramuntcho, who had heard, pitied himself for
+having hesitated so long for imaginary reasons. To himself he swore,
+with a harsher despair, that this morning he was decided; that he would
+do it, at the risk of everything; that nothing would make him hesitate
+longer.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+Weeks have elapsed, in preparations, in anxious uncertainties on the
+manner of acting, in abrupt changes of plans and ideas.
+
+Between times, the reply of Uncle Ignacio has reached Etchezar. If his
+nephew had spoken sooner, Ignacio has written, he would have been glad
+to receive him at his house; but, seeing how he hesitated, Ignacio had
+decided to take a wife, although he is already an old man, and now he
+has a child two months old. Therefore, there is no protection to be
+expected from that side; the exile, when he arrives there, may not find
+even a home--
+
+The family house has been sold, at the notary's money questions have
+been settled; all the goods of Ramuntcho have been transformed into gold
+pieces which are in his hand--
+
+And now is the day of the supreme attempt, the great day,--and already
+the thick foliage has returned to the trees, the clothing of the tall
+grass covers anew the prairies; it is May.
+
+In the little wagon, which the famous fast horse drags, they roll on the
+shady mountain paths, Arrochkoa and Ramuntcho, toward that village of
+Amezqueta. They roll quickly; they plunge into the heart of an infinite
+region of trees. And, as the hour goes by, all becomes more peaceful
+around them, and more savage; more primitive, the hamlets; more
+solitary, the Basque land.
+
+In the shade of the branches, on the borders of the paths, there are
+pink foxgloves, silences, ferns, almost the same flora as in Brittany;
+these two countries, the Basque and the Breton, resemble each other
+by the granite which is everywhere and by the habitual rain; by the
+immobility also, and by the continuity of the same religious dream.
+
+Above the two young men who have started for the adventure, thicken
+the big, customary clouds, the sombre and low sky. The route which they
+follow, in these mountains ever and ever higher, is deliciously green,
+dug in the shade, between walls of ferns.
+
+Immobility of several centuries, immobility in beings and in
+things,--one has more and more the consciousness of it as one penetrates
+farther into this country of forests and of silence. Under this obscure
+veil of the sky, where are lost the summits of the grand Pyrenees,
+appear and run by, isolated houses, centenary farms, hamlets more and
+more rare,--and they go always under the same vault of oaks, of ageless
+chestnut trees, which twist even at the side of the path their roots
+like mossy serpents. They resemble one another, those hamlets separated
+from one another by so much forest, by so many branches, and inhabited
+by an antique race, disdainful of all that disturbs, of all that
+changes: the humble church, most often without a belfry, with a simple
+campanila on its gray facade, and the square, with its wall painted for
+that traditional ball-game wherein, from father to son, the men exercise
+their hard muscles. Everywhere reigned the healthy peace of rustic
+life, the traditions of which in the Basque land are more immutable than
+elsewhere.
+
+The few woolen caps which the two bold young men meet on their rapid
+passage, incline all in a bow, from general politeness first, and from
+acquaintance above all, for they are, Arrochkoa and Ramuntcho, the two
+celebrated pelota players of the country;--Ramuntcho, it is true, had
+been forgotten by many people, but Arrochkoa, everybody, from Bayonne to
+San Sebastian, knows his face with healthy colors and the turned up ends
+of his catlike mustache.
+
+Dividing the journey into two stages, they have slept last night at
+Mendichoco. And at present they are rolling quickly, the two young men,
+so preoccupied doubtless that they hardly care to regulate the pace of
+their vigorous beast.
+
+Itchoua, however, is not with them. At the last moment, a fear has
+come to Ramuntcho of this accomplice, whom he felt to be capable of
+everything, even of murder; in a sudden terror, he has refused the aid
+of that man, who clutched the bridle of the horse to prevent it from
+starting; and feverishly, Ramuntcho has thrown gold into his hands, to
+pay for his advice, to buy the liberty to act alone, the assurance,
+at least, of not committing a crime: piece by piece, to break his
+engagement, he has given to Itchoua a half of the agreed price. Then,
+when the horse is driven at a gallop, when the implacable figure has
+vanished behind a group of trees, Ramuntcho has felt his conscience
+lighter--
+
+ “You will leave my carriage at Aranotz, at Burugoity, the inn-keeper's,
+who understands,” said Arrochkoa, “for, you understand, as soon as you
+have accomplished your end I will leave you.--We have business with the
+people of Buruzabal, horses to lead into Spain to-night, not far from
+Amezqueta, and I promised to be there before ten o'clock--”
+
+What will they do? They do not know, the two allied friends; this will
+depend on the turn that things take; they have different projects, all
+bold and skilful, according to the cases which might present themselves.
+Two places have been reserved, one for Ramuntcho and the other for her,
+on board a big emigrant vessel on which the baggage is embarked and
+which will start tomorrow night from Bordeaux carrying hundreds of
+Basques to America. At this small station of Aranotz, where the carriage
+will leave both of them, Ramuntcho and Gracieuse, they will take the
+train for Bayonne, at three o'clock in the morning, and, at Bayonne
+afterward, the Irun express to Bordeaux. It will be a hasty flight,
+which will not give to the little fugitive the time to think, to
+regain her senses in her terror,--doubtless also in her intoxication
+deliciously mortal--
+
+A gown, a mantilla of Gracieuse are all ready, at the bottom of the
+carriage, to replace the veil and the black uniform: things which
+she wore formerly, before her vows, and which Arrochkoa found in his
+mother's closets. And Ramuntcho thinks that it will be perhaps real,
+in a moment, that she will be perhaps there, at his side, very near,
+on that narrow seat, enveloped with him in the same travelling
+blanket, flying in the midst of night, to belong to him, at once and
+forever;--and in thinking of this too much, he feels again a shudder and
+a dizziness--
+
+“I tell you that she will follow you,” repeats his friend, striking
+him rudely on the leg in protective encouragement, as soon as he sees
+Ramuntcho sombre and lost in a dream. “I tell you that she will follow
+you, I am sure! If she hesitates, well, leave the rest to me!”
+
+If she hesitates, then they will be violent, they are resolved, oh, not
+very violent, only enough to unlace the hands of the old nuns retaining
+her.--And then, they will carry her into the small wagon, where
+infallibly the enlacing contact and the tenderness of her former friend
+will soon turn her young head.
+
+How will it all happen? They do not yet know, relying a great deal on
+their spirit of decision which has already dragged them out of dangerous
+passes. But what they know is that they will not weaken. And they go
+ahead, exciting each other; one would say that they are united now unto
+death, firm and decided like two bandits at the hour when the capital
+game is to be played.
+
+The land of thick branches which they traverse, under the oppression of
+very high mountains which they do not see, is all in ravines, profound
+and torn up, in precipices, where torrents roar under the green night of
+the foliage. The oaks, the beeches, the chestnut trees become more
+and more enormous, living through centuries off a sap ever fresh and
+magnificent. A powerful verdure is strewn over that disturbed geology;
+for ages it covers and classifies it under the freshness of its
+immovable mantle. And this nebulous sky, almost obscure, which is
+familiar to the Basque country, adds to the impression which they have
+of a sort of universal meditation wherein the things are plunged; a
+strange penumbra descends from everywhere, descends from the trees at
+first, descends from the thick, gray veils above the branches, descends
+from the great Pyrenees hidden behind the clouds.
+
+And, in the midst of this immense peace and of this green night, they
+pass, Ramuntcho and Arrochkoa, like two young disturbers going to break
+charms in the depths of forests. At all cross roads old, granite
+crosses rise, like alarm signals to warn them; old crosses with this
+inscription, sublimely simple, which is here something like the device
+of an entire race: “O crux, ave, spes unica!”
+
+Soon the night will come. Now they are silent, because the hour is
+going, because the moment approaches, because all these crosses on the
+road are beginning to intimidate them--
+
+And the day falls, under that sad veil which covers the sky. The valleys
+become more savage, the country more deserted. And, at the corners of
+roads, the old crosses appear, ever with their similar inscriptions: “O
+crux, ave, spes unica!”
+
+Amezqueta, at the last twilight. They stop their carriage at an outskirt
+of the village, before the cider mill. Arrochkoa is impatient to go into
+the house of the sisters, vexed at arriving so late; he fears that the
+door may not be opened to them. Ramuntcho, silent, lets him act.
+
+It is above, on the hill; it is that isolated house which a cross
+surmounts and which one sees in relief in white on the darker mass of
+the mountain. They recommend that as soon as the horse is rested the
+wagon be brought to them, at a turn, to wait for them. Then, both go
+into the avenue of trees which leads to that convent and where the
+thickness of the May foliage makes the obscurity almost nocturnal.
+Without saying anything to each other, without making a noise with
+their sandals, they ascend in a supple and easy manner; around them the
+profound fields are impregnated by the immense melancholy of the night.
+
+Arrochkoa knocks with his finger on the door of the peaceful house:
+
+“I would like to see my sister, if you please,” he says to an old nun
+who opens the door, astonished--
+
+Before he has finished talking, a cry of joy comes from the dark
+corridor, and a nun, whom one divines is young in spite of the
+envelopment of her dissembling costume, comes and takes his hand. She
+has recognized him by his voice,--but has she divined the other who
+stays behind and does not talk?--
+
+The Mother Superior has come also, and, in the darkness of the stairway,
+she makes them go up to the parlor of the little country convent; then
+she brings the cane-seat chairs and everyone sits down, Arrochkoa near
+his sister, Ramuntcho opposite,--and they face each other at last, the
+two lovers, and a silence, full of the beating of arteries, full of
+leaps of hearts, full of fever, descends upon them--
+
+Truly, in this place, one knows not what peace almost sweet, and a
+little sepulchral also, envelopes the terrible interview; in the depth
+of the chests, the hearts beat with great blows, but the words of love
+or of violence, the words die before passing the lips.--And this peace,
+more and more establishes itself; it seems as if a white shroud little
+by little is covering everything, in order to calm and to extinguish.
+
+There is nothing very peculiar, however, in this humble parlor: four
+walls absolutely bare under a coat of whitewash; a wooden ceiling; a
+floor where one slips, so carefully waxed it is; on a table, a plaster
+Virgin, already indistinct, among all the similar white things of the
+background where the twilight of May is dying. And a window without
+curtains, open on the grand Pyrenean horizons invaded by night.--But,
+from this voluntary poverty, from this white simplicity, is exhaled a
+notion of definitive impersonality, of renunciation forever; and the
+irremediability of accomplished things begins to manifest itself to the
+mind of Ramuntcho, while bringing to him a sort of peace, of sudden and
+involuntary resignation.
+
+The two smugglers, immovable on their chairs, appear as silhouettes,
+of wide shoulders on all this white of the walls, and of their lost
+features one hardly sees the black more intense of the mustache and the
+eyes. The two nuns, whose outlines are unified by the veil, seem already
+to be two spectres all black--
+
+“Wait, Sister Mary Angelique,” says the Mother Superior to the
+transformed young girl who was formerly named Gracieuse, “wait sister
+till I light the lamp in order that you may at least see your brother's
+face!”
+
+She goes out, leaving them together, and, again, silence falls on
+this rare instant, perhaps unique, impossible to regain, when they are
+alone--
+
+She comes back with a little lamp which makes the eyes of the smugglers
+shine,--and with a gay voice, a kind air, asks, looking at Ramuntcho:
+
+“And this one? A second brother, I suppose?--”
+
+“Oh, no,” says Arrochkoa in a singular tone. “He is only my friend.”
+
+In truth, he is not their brother, that Ramuntcho who stays there,
+ferocious and mute.--And how he would frighten the quiet nuns if they
+knew what storm brings him here--!
+
+The same silence returns, heavy and disquieting, on these beings who, it
+seems, should talk simply of simple things; and the old Mother Superior
+remarks it, is astonished by it.--But the quick eyes of Ramuntcho become
+immovable, veil themselves as if they are fascinated by some invisible
+tamer. Under the harsh envelope, still beating, of his chest, the
+calmness, the imposed calmness continues to penetrate and to extend. On
+him, doubtless, are acting the mysterious, white powers which are here
+in the air; religious heredities which were asleep in the depths of
+his being fill him now with unexpected respect and submissiveness; the
+antique symbols dominate him: the crosses met in the evening along the
+road and that plaster Virgin of the color of snow, immaculate on the
+spotless white of the wall--
+
+“Well, my children, talk of the things of Etchezar,” says the Mother
+Superior to Gracieuse and to her brother. “We shall leave you alone, if
+you wish,” she adds with a sign to Ramuntcho to follow her.
+
+“Oh, no,” protests Arrochkoa, “Let him stay.--No, he is not the one--who
+prevents us--”
+
+And the little nun, veiled in the fashion of the Middle Age, lowers her
+head, to maintain her eyes hidden in the shade of her austere headdress.
+
+The door remains open, the window remains open; the house, the things
+retain their air of absolute confidence, of absolute security, against
+violations and sacrilege. Now two other sisters, who are very old, set
+a small table, put two covers, bring to Arrochkoa and to his friend a
+little supper, a loaf of bread, cheese, cake, grapes from the arbor.
+In arranging these things they have a youthful gaiety, a babble almost
+childish--and all this is strangely opposed to the ardent violence which
+is here, hushed, thrown back into the depth of minds, as under the blows
+of some mace covered with white--
+
+And, in spite of themselves, they are seated at the table, the two
+smugglers, opposite each other, yielding to insistence and eating
+absent-mindedly the frugal things, on a cloth as white as the walls.
+Their broad shoulders, accustomed to loads, lean on the backs of the
+little chairs and make their frail wood crack. Around them come and
+go the Sisters, ever with their discreet talk and their puerile laugh,
+which escape, somewhat softened, from under their veils. Alone, she
+remains mute and motionless, Sister Mary Angelique: standing near her
+brother who is seated, she places her hand on his powerful shoulder;
+so lithe beside him that she looks like a saint of a primitive church
+picture. Ramuntcho, sombre, observes them both; he had not been able to
+see yet the face of Gracieuse, so severely her headdress framed it. They
+resemble each other still, the brother and the sister; in their very
+long eyes, which have acquired expressions more than ever different
+remains something inexplicably similar, persists the same flame, that
+flame which impelled one toward adventures and the life of the muscles,
+the other toward mystic dreams, toward mortification and annihilation of
+flesh. But she has become as frail as he is robust; her breast doubtless
+is no more, nor her hips; the black vestment wherein her body remains
+hidden falls straight like a furrow enclosing nothing carnal.
+
+And now, for the first time, they are face to face, Gracieuse and
+Ramuntcho; their eyes have met and gazed on one another. She does not
+lower her head before him; but it is as from an infinite distance that
+she looks at him, it is as from behind white mists that none may scale,
+as from the other side of an abyss, as from the other side of death;
+very soft, nevertheless, her glance indicates that she is as if she
+were absent, gone to tranquil and inaccessible other places.--And it is
+Ramuntcho at last who, still more tamed, lowers his ardent eyes before
+her virgin eyes.
+
+They continue to babble, the Sisters; they would like to retain them
+both at Amezqueta for the night: the weather, they say, is so black,
+and a storm threatens.--M. the Cure, who went out to take communion to
+a patient in the mountain, will come back; he has known Arrochkoa at
+Etchezar when a vicar there; he would be glad to give him a room in the
+parish house--and one to his friend also, of course--
+
+But no, Arrochkoa refuses, after a questioning glance at Ramuntcho.
+It is impossible to stay in the village; they will even go at once,
+or after a few moments of conversation, for they are expected on the
+Spanish frontier.--Gracieuse who, at first, in her mortal disturbance
+of mind, had not dared to talk, begins to question her brother. Now in
+Basque, then in French, she asks for news of those whom she has forever
+abandoned:
+
+“And mother? All alone now in the house, even at night?”
+
+“Oh, no,” says Arrochkoa, “Catherine watches over her and sleeps at the
+house.”
+
+“And how is your child, Arrochkoa, has he been christened? What is his
+name? Lawrence, doubtless, like his grandfather.”
+
+Etchezar, their village, is separated from Amezqueta by some sixty
+kilometres, in a land without more means of communication than in the
+past centuries:
+
+“Oh, in spite of the distance,” says the little nun, “I get news of
+you sometimes. Last month, people here had met on the market place of
+Hasparren, women of our village; that is how I learned--many things.--At
+Easter I had hoped to see you; I was told that there would be a
+ball-game at Erricalde and that you would come to play there; then I
+said to myself that perhaps you would come here--and, while the festival
+lasted, I looked often at the road through this window, to see if you
+were coming--”
+
+And she shows the window, open on the blackness of the savage
+country--from which ascends an immense silence, with, from time to
+time, the noise of spring, intermittent musical notes of crickets and
+tree-toads.
+
+Hearing her talk so quietly, Ramuntcho feels confounded by this
+renunciation of all things; she appears to him still more irrevocably
+changed, far-off--poor little nun!--Her name was Gracieuse; now her name
+is Sister Mary Angelique, and she has no relatives; impersonal here, in
+this little house with white walls, without terrestrial hope and without
+desire, perhaps--one might as well say that she has departed for the
+regions of the grand oblivion of death. And yet, she smiles, quite
+serene now and apparently not even suffering.
+
+Arrochkoa looks at Ramuntcho, questions him with a piercing eye
+accustomed to fathom the black depths--and, tamed himself by all this
+unexpected peace, he understands very well that his bold comrade dares
+no longer, that all the projects have fallen, that all is useless
+and inert in presence of the invisible wall with which his sister is
+surrounded. At moments, pressed to end all in one way or in another, in
+a haste to break this charm or to submit to it and to fly before it, he
+pulls his watch, says that it is time to go, because of the friends who
+are waiting for them.--The Sisters know well who these friends are
+and why they are waiting but they are not affected by this: Basques
+themselves, daughters and granddaughters of Basques, they have the blood
+of smugglers in their veins and consider such things indulgently--
+
+At last, for the first time, Gracieuse titters the name of Ramuntcho;
+not daring, however, to address him directly, she asks her brother, with
+a calm smile:
+
+“Then he is with you, Ramuntcho, now? You work together?”
+
+A silence follows, and Arrochkoa looks at Ramuntcho.
+
+“No,” says the latter, in a slow and sombre voice, “no--I, I go
+to-morrow to America--”
+
+Every word of this reply, harshly scanned, is like a sound of trouble
+and of defiance in the midst of that strange serenity. She leans more
+heavily on her brother's shoulder, the little nun, and Ramuntcho,
+conscious of the profound blow which he has struck, looks at her and
+envelopes her with his tempting eyes, having regained his audacity,
+attractive and dangerous in the last effort of his heart full of love,
+of his entire being of youth and of flame made for tenderness.--Then,
+for an uncertain minute, it seems as if the little convent had trembled;
+it seems as if the white powers of the air recoiled, went out like
+sad, unreal mists before this young dominator, come here to hurl the
+triumphant appeal of life. And the silence which follows is the heaviest
+of all the silent moments which have interrupted already that species of
+drama played almost without words--
+
+At last, Sister Mary Angelique talks, and talks to Ramuntcho himself.
+Really it does not seem as if her heart had just been torn supremely
+by the announcement of that departure, nor as if she had just shuddered
+under that lover's look.--With a voice which little by little becomes
+firmer in softness, she says very simple things, as to any friend.
+
+“Oh, yes--Uncle Ignacio?--I had always thought that you would go to
+rejoin him there.--We shall all pray the Holy Virgin to accompany you in
+your voyage--”
+
+And it is the smuggler who lowers the head, realizing that all is ended,
+that she is lost forever, the little companion of his childhood; that
+she has been buried in an inviolable shroud.--The words of love and of
+temptation which he had thought of saying, the projects which he
+had revolved in his mind for months, all these seemed insensate,
+sacrilegious, impossible things, childish bravadoes.--Arrochkoa, who
+looks at him attentively, is under the same irresistible and light
+charm; they understand each other and, to one another, without words,
+they confess that there is nothing to do, that they will never dare--
+
+Nevertheless an anguish still human appears in the eyes of Sister Mary
+Angelique when Arrochkoa rises for the definite departure: she prays,
+in a changed voice, for them to stay a moment longer. And Ramuntcho
+suddenly feels like throwing himself on his knees in front of her; his
+head on the hem of her veil, sobbing all the tears that stifle him; like
+begging for mercy, like begging for mercy also of that Mother Superior
+who has so soft an air; like telling both of them that this sweetheart
+of his childhood was his hope, his courage, his life, and that people
+must have a little pity, people must give her back to him, because,
+without her, there is no longer anything.--All that his heart contains
+that is infinitely good is exalted at present into an immense necessity
+to implore, into an outbreak of supplicating prayer and also into a
+confidence in the kindness, in the pity of others--
+
+And who knows, if he had dared formulate that great prayer of pure
+tenderness, who knows what he might have awakened of kindness also, and
+of tenderness and of humanity in the poor, black-veiled girl?--Perhaps
+this old Mother Superior herself, this old, dried-up girl with childish
+smile and grave, pure eyes, would have opened her arms to him, as to a
+son, understanding everything, forgiving everything, despite the rules
+and despite the vows? And perhaps Gracieuse might have been returned
+to him, without kidnapping, without deception, almost excused by her
+companions of the cloister. Or at last, if that was impossible, she
+would have bade him a long farewell, consoling, softened by a kiss of
+immaterial love--
+
+But no, he stays there mute on his chair. Even that prayer he cannot
+make. And it is the hour to go, decidedly. Arrochkoa is up, agitated,
+calling him with an imperious sign of the head. Then he straightens up
+also his proud bust and takes his cap to follow Arrochkoa. They express
+their thanks for the little supper which was given to them and they
+say good-night, timidly. During their entire visit they were very
+respectful, almost timid, the two superb smugglers. And, as if hope had
+not just been undone, as if one of them was not leaving behind him his
+life, they descend quietly the neat stairway, between the white walls,
+while the good Sisters light the way with their little lamp.
+
+“Come, Sister Mary Angelique,” gaily proposes the Mother Superior, in
+her frail, infantile voice, “we shall escort them to the end of our
+avenue, you know, near the village.”
+
+Is she an old fairy, sure of her power, or a simple and unconscious
+woman, playing without knowing it, with a great, devouring fire?--It was
+all finished; the parting had been accomplished; the farewell accepted;
+the struggle stifled under white wadding,--and now the two who adored
+each other are walking side by side, outside, in the tepid night of
+spring!--in the amorous, enveloping night, under the cover of the new
+leaves and on the tall grass, among all the saps that ascend in the
+midst of the sovereign growth of universal life.
+
+They walk with short steps, through this exquisite obscurity, as in
+silent accord, to make the shaded path last longer, both mute, in the
+ardent desire and the intense fear of contact of their clothes, of a
+touch of their hands. Arrochkoa and the Mother Superior follow them
+closely, on their heels; without talking, nuns with their sandals,
+smugglers with their rope soles, they go through these soft, dark spots
+without making more noise than phantoms, and their little cortege, slow
+and strange, descends toward the wagon in a funereal silence. Silence
+also around them, everywhere in the grand, ambient black, in the depth
+of the mountains and the woods. And, in the sky without stars, sleep the
+big clouds, heavy with all the water that the soil awaits and which
+will fall to-morrow to make the woods still more leafy, the grass still
+higher; the big clouds above their heads cover all the splendor of
+the southern summer which so often, in their childhood, charmed them
+together, disturbed them together, but which Ramuntcho will doubtless
+never see again and which in the future Gracieuse will have to look at
+with eyes of one dead, without understanding nor recognizing it--
+
+There is no one around them, in the little obscure alley, and the
+village seems asleep already. The night has fallen quite; its grand
+mystery is scattered everywhere, on the mountains and the savage
+valleys.--And, how easy it would be to execute what these two young men
+have resolved, in that solitude, with that wagon which is ready and that
+fast horse--!
+
+However, without having talked, without having touched each other, they
+come, the lovers, to that turn of the path where they must bid each
+other an eternal farewell. The wagon is there, held by a boy; the
+lantern is lighted and the horse impatient. The Mother Superior stops:
+it is, apparently, the last point of the last walk which they will
+take together in this world,--and she feels the power, that old nun, to
+decide that it will be thus, without appeal. With the same little, thin
+voice, almost gay, she says:
+
+“Come, Sister, say good-bye.”
+
+And she says that with the assurance of a Fate whose decrees of death
+are not disputable.
+
+In truth, nobody attempts to resist her order, impassibly given. He
+is vanquished, the rebellious Ramuntcho, oh, quite vanquished by the
+tranquil, white powers; trembling still from the battle which has just
+come to an end in him, he lowers his head, without will now, and almost
+without thought, as under the influence of some sleeping potion--
+
+“Come, Sister, say good-bye,” the old, tranquil Fate has said. Then,
+seeing that Gracieuse has only taken Arrochkoa's hand, she adds:
+
+“Well, you do not kiss your brother?--”
+
+Doubtless, the little Sister Mary Angelique asks for nothing better,
+to kiss him with all her heart, with all her soul; to clasp him, her
+brother, to lean on his shoulder and to seek his protection, at that
+hour of superhuman sacrifice when she must let the cherished one
+leave her without even a word of love.--And still, her kiss has in it
+something frightened, at once drawn back; the kiss of a nun, somewhat
+similar to the kiss of one dead.--When will she ever see him again, that
+brother, who is not to leave the Basque country, however? When will
+she have news of her mother, of the house, of the village, from some
+passer-by who will stop here, coming from Etchezar?--
+
+“We will pray,” she says again, “to the Holy Virgin to protect you
+in your long voyage--” And how they go; slowly they turn back, like
+silent shades, toward the humble convent which the cross protects, and
+the two tamed smugglers, immovable on the road, look at their veils,
+darker than the night of the trees, disappearing in the obscure avenue.
+
+Oh! she is wrecked also, the one who will disappear in the darkness
+of the little, shady hill.--But she is nevertheless soothed by white,
+peaceful vapors, and all that she suffers will soon be quieted under a
+sort of sleep. To-morrow she will take again, until death, the course of
+her strangely simple existence; impersonal, devoted to a series of daily
+duties which never change, absorbed in a reunion of creatures almost
+neutral, who have abdicated everything, she will be able to walk with
+eyes lifted ever toward the soft, celestial mirage--
+
+O crux, ave, spes unica--!
+
+To live, without variety or truce to the end, between the white walls of
+a cell always the same, now here, then elsewhere, at the pleasure of a
+strange will, in one of those humble village convents to which one
+has not even the leisure to become attached. On this earth, to possess
+nothing and to desire nothing, to wait for nothing, to hope for nothing.
+To accept as empty and transitory the fugitive hours of this world, and
+to feel freed from everything, even from love, as much as by death.--The
+mystery of such lives remains forever unintelligible to those young men
+who are there, made for the daily battle, beautiful beings of instinct
+and of strength, a prey to all the desires; created to enjoy life and to
+suffer from it, to love it and to continue it--
+
+O crux, ave, spes unica!--One sees them no longer, they have re-entered
+their little, solitary convent.
+
+The two men have not exchanged even a word on their abandoned
+undertaking, on the ill-defined cause which for the first time has
+undone their courage; they feel, toward one another, almost a sense of
+shame of their sudden and insurmountable timidity.
+
+For an instant their proud heads were turned toward the nuns slowly
+fleeing; now they look at each other through the night.
+
+They are going to part, and probably forever: Arrochkoa puts into his
+friends hands the reins of the little wagon which, according to his
+promise, he lends to him:
+
+“Well, my poor Ramuntcho!” he says, in a tone of commiseration hardly
+affectionate.
+
+And the unexpressed end of the phrase signifies clearly:
+
+“Go, since you have failed; and I have to go and meet my friends--”
+
+Ramuntcho would have kissed him with all his heart for the last
+farewell,--and in this embrace of the brother of the beloved one, he
+would have shed doubtless good, hot tears which, for a moment at least,
+would have cured him a little.
+
+But no, Arrochkoa has become again the Arrochkoa of the bad days, the
+gambler without soul, that only bold things interest. Absentmindedly, he
+touches Ramuntcho's hand:
+
+“Well, good-bye!--Good luck--”
+
+And, with silent steps, he goes toward the smugglers, toward the
+frontier, toward the propitious darkness.
+
+Then Ramuntcho, alone in the world now, whips the little, mountain horse
+who gallops with his light tinkling of bells.--That train which will
+pass by Aranotz, that vessel which will start from Bordeaux--an instinct
+impels Ramuntcho not to miss them. Mechanically he hastens, no longer
+knowing why, like a body without a mind which continues to obey an
+ancient impulsion, and, very quickly, he who has no aim and no hope in
+the world, plunges into the savage country, into the thickness of the
+woods, in all that profound blackness of the night of May, which the
+nuns, from their elevated window, see around them--
+
+For him the native land is closed, closed forever; finished are the
+delicious dreams of his first years. He is a plant uprooted from the
+dear, Basque soil and which a breath of adventure blows elsewhere.
+
+At the horse's neck, gaily the bells tinkle, in the silence of the
+sleeping woods; the light of the lantern, which runs hastily, shows to
+the sad fugitive the under side of branches, fresh verdure of oaks; by
+the wayside, flowers of France; from distance to distance, the walls of
+a familiar hamlet, of an old church,--all the things which he will never
+see again, unless it be, perhaps, in a doubtful and very distant old
+age--
+
+In front of his route, there is America, exile without probable return,
+an immense new world, full of surprises and approached now without
+courage: an entire life, very long, doubtless, during which his mind
+plucked from here will have to suffer and to harden over there; his
+vigor spend and exhaust itself none knows where, in unknown labors and
+struggles--
+
+Above, in their little convent, in their sepulchre with walls so white,
+the tranquil nuns recite their evening prayers--
+
+O crux, ave, spes unica--!
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Ramuntcho, by Pierre Loti
+
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