The Town Below. Roger Lemelin
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from all three mouths: “And they never catch us!” They said nothing of Boucher. Lise’s astonishment caused them to puff out their chests.
How charming was this ragamuffin bravado! The spontaneous homage of the three marauders reminded her of Maid Marian and Robin Hood’s men. The hesitant breeze of her thoughts was lost in a vague, romantic reverie that had to do with things past even as her gaze rested unseeingly on the objects about her. For her, the present served merely as an echo of the past, and since the tendency of schoolgirl dreams is toward the ideal and the unreal, Lise found herself tossing in time and space like a bit of driftwood that is always on the point of settling somewhere but never does. The light-skimming, wavering glance with which she regarded the lads in front of her reflected this inner vagueness; and then, suddenly, a startled look came into her eyes as she stared at Jean’s leg. Bending over, he perceived the hole in his trousers through which his knee was visible.
“They are my everyday ones,” he stammered. He would have liked very much to show her his fine brown suit with the stripes.
The girl was becoming conscious of her surroundings once more: the clothesline strung with underwear, handkerchiefs, diapers, towels — nearly white, all of them, and flapping in the wind like the multitudinous symbols of people without a flag. Upon the neighbouring shed a tomcat was stoically sampling the unsavoury remains of a rat as Bédarovitch the ragman went down the rue Colomb crying in his hoarse, singsong voice: “Ra-a-a-ags — Ra-a-a-ags —” Abruptly confronted with this disturbing reality, Lise dropped her armful of fruit.
“You mustn’t throw it away!” said Jean, as he bounded forward to recover the apple he had given her. “It’s the best of the lot.”
“Aren’t you coming back, Lise?” Madame Lévesque’s heavy voice was audible a short distance away.
Frightened at this, her daughter now pushed the marauders out, whispering to Jean, who was the last to leave: “Whatever you do, don’t tell anybody.”
He gave her an understanding smile. “My name,” he said, with a strange tightening of the throat, “is Jean Colin. I’ll bring you some plums tomorrow.” He came near stumbling over the threshold as he backed out.
Lise’s face was red; for the Abbé Charton was standing there, watching the youths in amazement as they emerged from the garden. Coming up to the convent miss, the amiably smiling priest studied her closely.
“I’ve brought you my arrangement of Parce Domine for three voices. Here it is.”
Glancing back, the lads laughingly whispered to one another that the Abbé Charton was making up to the family because Zépherin Lévesque had just bought an automobile. Jean Colin smiled up at the telephone poles. So the pretty stranger was going to sing that evening!
Denis Boucher kept an eye on the Mulots by way of making sure that they did not turn him in. It gave him satisfaction to see the small lads deflating the tires of the police car as the older ones dispersed. “They’re afraid!” he muttered to himself. He laughed at the sight of the gendarmes coming back empty-handed from the chase. His friends were safe. Ah! How proud he was of being the pet aversion of those Mulots! How he loved to see them tremble like rats in front of his eyes! And the same went for the Soyeux who made so much of their wealth and intellectual pretensions. Intellectuals! He had it in him to flatten them like the leaves of those books they were always talking about. As for the women! He would never love any of them but would drag them after him like logs all his life long. Only they would not be the girls of Saint-Sauveur, for they had known him when he was small and his mother used to beat him for starting fires or throwing stones at passers-by. The conquest of the world would begin at the frontiers of this “Sewer Town” (so called because of the water from the Upper Town with which it was flooded in the rainy season), of which he called himself the king. His reflections were interrupted by the Abbé Bongrain.
“Was the harvest a good one?” the priest called to him jovially. He was bringing wood to Méo Nolin, who had injured his fingers and who received donations from the Saint-Vincent de Paul Society. The Abbé Bongrain took a sort of stern pleasure in manual labour and was not in the least mindful of the twigs and bits of bark that clung to his cassock. Boucher gave him a friendly look.
“It was all right,” he said, “but there was a little rumpus. Here, catch it!”
The priest so beloved by the Mulots (he was like an almoner to them) caught the apple which Denis tossed him and, mopping the sweat from his forehead, took a hearty bite.
With a nervous laugh, the young man leaped the fence, landing in the middle of his brother Gaston’s poultry yard. The frightened hens found refuge by huddling against the weird-looking bosoms of the roosters which now began scolding because the intruder’s feet were a threat to the chickens pecking the rich soil.
A hoarse anxious cry rang out: “Careful, Denis — Crazy — my chickens!”
Gaston came running up as fast as he could, his hips swaying with his uneven gait. He had a man’s face on a child’s body, a body that looked as if someone had started to demolish it with a sledge hammer. His brow was lined with wrinkles, and he seemed to be forever engaged in solving some problem. There was a crease at the corners of his mouth that conveyed an impression of disillusionment and, at the same time of naiveté. It gave him the abnormal appearance of those who have suffered before they have lived. Rickety and useless, his long arms swung by the side of his slanting body like tropical creepers. Three years the elder, he looked up to Denis as a sort of god, bloody to avenge some mocking insult that had been offered to the invalid. When Gaston spoke of his brother, he always said “Denis” in a piping voice in which all too much pride was revealed.
Misfortune for him had been a kind of vocation. Having suffered an attack of pleurisy accompanied by a pus infection at the age of four, he had later had a severe case of the measles, which, as his mother put it, “had gone to his ears.” Becoming deaf, he had afterwards developed a falsetto voice. Later still, in the days when a thoracoplasty was regarded as a daring operation, he had undergone a rib-section. He had recovered, but from year to year they noticed that he bent over more and more, for an alarming spinal curvature had set in. His right shoulder, lacking ribs to support it, had sagged to such an extent that, the heart being imprisoned in too narrow a space, a cardiac affection had resulted. Today, the invalid found himself a prey to the slightest emotion; and here he was now, confronting his big brother and breathing hard.
Denis surveyed him thoughtfully for a moment, then offered him a couple of apples.
Gaston shook his head: “Don’t want them, not ripe.” Then he changed his mind and took them. “Still stealing? The police will get you.”
“The cops? To the devil with them, old man.” And Denis ran his hand through Gaston’s hair, rumpling it until it stood up in rigid tufts around the oversized head. The sick lad grumbled and bit his brother’s wrists.
Denis now proceeded to clear the yard of the brats who infested it, whose hands, stretched out toward his shirt front, were threatening to undress him. Laughing as he did so, he suddenly stopped short: his mother was talking to that gendarme again! Motionless, a mist in front of his eyes, the young man wet his lips. He remembered the feeling of despair that had come over him when they told him that this guardian of deserted streets had been his mother’s lover for the last four years. What had become of that beautiful legend about the love that existed between his parents, who, he had believed, cared for no one but each other? Aware of her son’s presence, Flora Boucher turned pale and took a step or two backward from the wall over which she had been leaning.
“That’s my lad, Noré. Do you think he’s big enough to get on the force?”
Denis stared at them without saying a word and began juggling his apples. By way of ridding himself of his embarrassment, Noré started speaking of Gaston’s hens, which the boy was in the habit of raffling off at ten cents a ticket when they had reached their full growth, and Flora took advantage of that situation to sell him three chances. A look of avarice distorted the invalid’s queer face as he snatched the silver coins. They would go to swell his savings toward the purchase of an automobile.