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Read Ebook: Miracles avec une introduction de Jacques Rivière by Alain Fournier Rivi Re Jacques Author Of Introduction Etc
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Ebook has 546 lines and 46620 words, and 11 pages
OUR PIRATE HOARD.
My great-great-great-uncle was one of the many sturdy, honest, high-spirited men to whom the early years of the last century gave birth. He was a brave man and a ready fighter, yet was he ever controlled in his actions by so nice a regard for the feelings of others, and through the strong fibre of his hardy nature ran a strain of such almost womanly gentleness and tenderness, that throughout the rather exceptionally wide circle of his acquaintance he was very generally beloved.
My great-great-great-uncle threw himself into his profession in the hearty fashion that was to be expected from a man of his sincere, earnest character. He toiled early and late at sea, and on shore he regulated the affairs of his family so that his expenses should be well within his large though somewhat fluctuating income; and the result of his prudence in affairs was that he saved the greater portion of what he earned. The people of Lewes respected him greatly, and the boys of the town were bidden to emulate his steady business ways and habit of thrift. He was, too, a man of public spirit. At his own cost and charge he renewed the town pump; and he presented the church--he was a very regular churchgoer when on shore--with a large bell of singularly sweet tone that had come into his possession after a casual encounter with a Cuban-bound galleon off the Bahama Banks.
And yet when at last my great-great-great-uncle, in the fulness of his years and virtues, was gathered to his fathers, and the sweet-toned Spanish bell tolled his requiem, everybody was very much surprised to find that of the fine fortune accumulated during his successful business career nothing worth speaking of could be found. The house that he owned in Lewes, the handsome furniture that it contained, and a sea-chest in which were some odds and ends of silverware and some few pieces-of-eight and doubloons, constituted the whole of his visible wealth.
For my great-great-great-aunt, with a family of five sons and seven daughters all under eleven years of age, the outlook was a sorry one. She was puzzled, too, to think what had gone with the great fortune which certainly had existed, and so was everybody else. The explanation that finally was adopted was that my great-great-great-uncle, in accordance with well established pirate usage, had buried his treasure somewhere, and had taken the secret of its burial-place with him to another and a better world. Probability was given to this conjecture by the fact that he had died in something of a hurry. He had been brought ashore by his men after an unexpected encounter with a King's ship off the capes of the Delaware. One of his legs was shot off, and his head was pretty well laid open by a desperate cutlass slash. He already was in a raging fever, and although the best medical advice in Lewes was procured, he died that very night. As he lay dying his talk was wild and incoherent; but at the very last, as my great-great-great-aunt well remembered, he suddenly grew calm, straightened himself in the bed, and said, with great earnestness: "Sheer up the plank midway--"
That was all. He did not live to finish the sentence. At the moment, my great-great-great-aunt believed the words to be nothing more than a delirious use of a professional phrase; and this belief received color from the fact that a little before, in his feverish fancy, he had been capturing a Spanish galleon, and had got about to the part of the affair where the sheering up of a plank midway between the main and mizzen masts, for the accommodation of the Spaniards in leaving their vessel, would be appropriate. Thinking the matter over calmly afterwards, and in the light of subsequent events, she came to the conclusion that he was trying to tell her how and where his treasure was hid. Acting upon this belief, she sheered up all the planks about the house that seemed at all promising. She even had the cellar dug up and the well dragged. But not a scrap of the treasure did she ever find.
And the worst part of it was, that from that time onward our family had no luck at all. Excepting my elderly cousin, Gregory Wilkinson--who inherited a snug little fortune from his mother, and expanded it into a very considerable fortune by building up a large manufacture of carpet-slippers for the export trade--the rule in my family has been a respectable poverty that has just bordered upon actual want. But all the generations since my great-great-great-uncle's time have been cheered, as poverty-stricken people naturally would be cheered, by the knowledge that the pirate hoard was in existence; and by the hope that some day it would be found, and would make them all enormously rich at a jump. From the moment when I first heard of the treasure, as a little boy, I believed in it thoroughly; and I also believed that I was the member of the family destined to discover it.
I was glad to find, when I married Susan, that she believed in my destiny too. After talking the matter over quite seriously, we decided that the best thing for us to do was to go and live either in or near Lewes, so that my opportunities for investigation might be ample. I think, too, that Susan was pleased with the prospect of having a nice little house of our own, with a cow and peach-trees and chickens, where we could be very happy together. Moreover, she had notions about house-keeping, especially about house-keeping in the country, which she wanted to put into practice.
We found a confirmation of my destiny in the ease with which the preliminaries of my search were accomplished. The house that we wanted seemed to be there just waiting for us--a little bit of a house, well out in the country, with a couple of acres of land around it, the peach-trees really growing, and a shed that the man said would hold a cow nicely. What I think pleased Susan most of all was a swallow's nest under the eaves, with the mother swallow sitting upon a brood of dear little swallows, and the father swallow flying around chippering like anything.
"Just think of it!" said the dear child; "it is like living in a feudal castle, and having kestrels building their nests on the battlements."
I did not check her sweet enthusiasm by asking her to name some particular feudal castle with a frieze of kestrels' nests. I kissed her, and said that it was very like indeed.
Then we examined the cow-stable--we thought it better to call it a cow-stable than a shed--and I pulled out my foot-rule and measured it inside. It was a very little cow-stable, but, as Susan suggested, if we could not get a small grown-up cow to fit it, "we might begin with a young cow, and teach her, as she grew larger, to accommodate herself to her quarters by standing cat-a-cornered, like the man who used to carry oxen up a mountain." Susan's allusions are not always very clearly stated, though her meaning, no doubt, always is quite clear in her own mind. I may mention here that eventually we were so fortunate as to obtain a middle-sized cow that got along in the stable very well. We had a tidy colored girl who did the cooking and the rough part of the house-work, and who could milk like a steam-engine.
As soon as we got fairly settled in our little home I began to look for my great-great-great-uncle's buried treasure, but I cannot say that at first I made much progress. I could not even find a trace of my great-great-great-uncle's house in Lewes, and nobody seemed ever to have heard of him. One day, though, I was so fortunate as to encounter a very old man--known generally about Lewes as Old Jacob--who did remember "the old pirate," as he irreverently called him, and who showed me where his house had been. The house had burned down when he was a boy--seventy years back, he thought it was--and across where it once had stood a street had been opened. This put a stop to my search in that direction. As Susan very justly observed, I could not reasonably expect the Lewes people to let me dig up their streets like a gas-piper just on the chance of finding my family fortune.
The day after I had this talk with Old Jacob I was rather surprised by getting a telegram from my cousin Gregory Wilkinson, telling me that he was coming down to pay us a visit, and would be there that afternoon. I was not as much astonished as I would have been if the telegram had come from anybody else, because Gregory Wilkinson had a way of telegraphing that he was going to do things which nobody expected him to do, and I was used to it. Moreover, I had every reason for desiring to maintain very friendly relations with him. He had told me several times that he had made a will by which his large fortune was to be divided between me and a certain Asylum for the Relief and Education of Destitute Red Indian Children that he was very much interested in; and he had more than hinted that the asylum was not the legatee that was the more to be envied. This made me feel quite comfortable about the remote future, but it did not simplify the problem of living comfortably in the immediate present. My cousin was a very tough, wiry little man, barely turned of fifty. There was any quantity of life left in him--his father, who had been just such another, had lived till he was eighty-nine. There was not much of a chance, therefore, that either the asylum or I would receive anything from his estate for ever so long--and I may add I was very glad, for my part, that things were that way. Gregory Wilkinson was a first-rate fellow, for all his queerness and sudden ways, and I should have been sorry enough to have been his chief heir. One reason why I liked him so much was because he was so fond of Susan. When we were married--although he had not seen her then--he sent her forks, and he had lived up to those forks ever since.
Susan was rather flustered when I showed her the telegram; but she went to work with a will, and got the little spare room in order, and stewed some peaches and made some biscuits for supper. Susan's biscuits were something extraordinary. Gregory Wilkinson came all right, and after supper--he said that it was the nicest supper he had eaten in a long while--she did the honors of the Swallow's Nest in the pretty way that is her especial peculiarity. She showed him the cow-stable, with the cow in it, and the colored girl milking away in her usual vigorous fashion, the chickens, the garden, the peach-trees, and the nest under the eaves where the swallows had lived when we first came there. Then, as it grew dark, we sat on the little veranda while we smoked our cigars--that is, Gregory Wilkinson and I smoked: all that Susan did was to try to poke her finger through the rings which I blew towards her--and I told why we had come down there, and what a good start we had made towards finding my great-great-great-uncle's buried money. And when I had got through, Susan told how, as soon as I had found it, we were going to Europe.
We neither of us thought that Gregory Wilkinson manifested as much enthusiasm in the matter as the circumstances of the case demanded; but then, as Susan pointed out to me, in her usual clear-headed way, it was not reasonable to expect a man with a fortune to be as eager to get one as a man without one would be.
"Very likely he'll give us his share for finding it," said Susan; "he don't want it himself, and it would be dreadful to turn the heads of all those destitute red Indian children by leaving it to them."
I should have mentioned earlier that, so far as we knew, my cousin and I were my great-great-great-uncle's only surviving heirs. The family luck had not held out any especially strong temptations in the way of pleasant things to live for, and so the family gradually had died off. Whatever my search should bring to light, therefore, would be divided between us two.
I was sorry to find that the clearer the lay of the land and water became, the more indistinct grew Old Jacob's remembrance of where his father had told him that the schooner used to lie.
"It mought hev ben about here," he said, pointing across to a little bay some way off on our left; "an' agin it mought hev ben about thar," with a wave of his hand towards a low point of land nearly half a mile off on our right; "an' agin it mought hev ben sorter atwixt an' at ween 'em. Here or hereabouts, thet's w'at I say; here or hereabouts, sure."
Now this was perplexing. My plan, based upon Old Jacob's assurance that he could locate the anchorage precisely, was to hunt near the shore for likely-looking places and dig them up, one after another, until we found the treasure. But to dig up all the places where treasure might be buried along a whole mile of coast was not to be thought of. We implored Old Jacob to brush up his memory, to look attentively at the shape of the coast, and to try to fix definitely the spot off which the schooner had lain. But the more that he tried, the more confusing did his statements become. Just as he would settle positively--after much thinking and much looking at the sun and the coast line--on a particular spot, doubts would arise in his mind as to the correctness of his location; and these doubts presently would resolve themselves into the certainty that he was all wrong. Then the process of thinking and looking would begin all over again, only again to come to the same disheartening end. The short and long of the matter was that we spent all that day and a good part of the next in wandering along the bay-side in Old Jacob's wake, while he made and unmade his locations at the rate of about three an hour. At last I looked at Gregory Wilkinson and Gregory Wilkinson looked at me, and we both nodded. Then we told Old Jacob that we guessed we'd better hitch up the horses and drive home. It made us pretty dismal, after all our hopes, to hitch up the horses and drive home that way.
My heart ached when I saw Susan leaning over the front gate watching for us as we drove up the road. The wind was setting down towards us, and I could smell the coffee that she had put on the fire to boil as soon as she caught sight of us--Susan made coffee splendidly--and I knew that she had kept her promise, and had ready the feast that was to celebrate our success; and that made it all the dismaller that we hadn't any success to celebrate.
When I told her how badly the expedition had turned out she came very near crying; but she gave a sort of gulp, and then laughed instead, and did what she could to make things pleasant for us. We had our feast, but notwithstanding Susan's effort to be cheerful, it was about as dreary a feast as I ever had anything to do with. We brought Old Jacob in and let him feast with us; and he, to do him justice, was not dreary at all. He seemed to enjoy it thoroughly. Indeed, the most trying part of that sorrowful supper-party was the way in which Old Jacob recovered his spirits and declared at short intervals that his memory now was all right again. He even went so far as to say that with his eyes blindfolded and in the dark he could lead us to the precise spot off which the schooner used to lie.
Susan was disposed to regard these assertions hopefully; but we, who had been fumbling about with him for two days, well understood their baselessness. It was not Old Jacob's fault, of course, but his defective memory certainly was dreadfully provoking. Here was an enormous fortune slipping through our lingers just because this old man could not remember a little matter about where a schooner had been anchored.
After he had eaten all the supper that he could hold--which was a good deal--and had gone home, we told Susan the whole dismal story of how our expedition had proved to be a total failure. It was best, we thought, not to mince matters with her; and we stated minutely how time after time the anchorage of the schooner had been precisely located, and then in a little while had been unlocated again. She saw, as we did, that as a clew Old Jacob was not much of a success, and also that he was about the only thing in the least like a clew that we possessed. Realizing this latter fact, and knowing that his great age made his death probable at any moment, Susan strongly advised me, in her clear-sighted way, to have him photographed.
Gregory Wilkinson seemed to find himself quite comfortable in our little home, and settled down there into a sort of permanency. We were glad to have him stay with us, for he was a first-rate fellow, and always good company in his pleasant, quiet way, and he told us two or three times that he was enjoying himself. He told me a great many more than two or three times that he considered Susan to be a wonderfully fine woman; indeed, he told me this at least once every day, and sometimes oftener. He was greatly struck--just as everybody is who lives for any length of time in the same house with Susan--by her capable ways, and by her unfailing equanimity and sweetness of temper. Even when the colored girl fell down the well, carrying the rope and the bucket along with her, Susan was not a bit flustered. She told me just where I would find the clothes-line and a big meat-hook; and when, with this hastily-improvised apparatus, we had fished the colored girl up and got her safely on dry land again, she knew exactly what to do to make her all right and comfortable. As Gregory Wilkinson observed to me, after it was all over, from the way that Susan behaved, any one might have thought that hooking colored girls up out of wells was her regular business.
As to making Susan angry, that simply was impossible. When things went desperately wrong with her in any way she would just come right to me and cry a little on my shoulder. Then, when I had comforted her, she would chipper up and be all right again in no time. Gregory Wilkinson happened to come in one day while a performance of this sort was going on, and for fear that he should think it odd Susan explained to him that it was a habit of hers when things very much worried her and she felt like being ugly to people. That evening, while we were sitting on the veranda smoking, and before Susan, who was helping clear the supper-table, had joined us, Gregory Wilkinson said to me, with oven, more emphasis than usual, that Susan was the finest woman he had ever known; and he added that he was very sorry that when he was my ago he had not met and married just such another.
About this time I noticed that Gregory Wilkinson was unusually silent, and seemed to be thinking a great deal about something. At first we were afraid that he was not quite well, and Susan offered him both her prepared mustard plasters and her headache powders. But he said that he was all right, though he was very much obliged to her. Still, he kept on thinking, and he was so silent and preoccupied that Susan and I were very uncomfortable. To have him around that way, and to be always wondering what he could possibly be thinking about, Susan said, made her feel as though she were trying to eavesdrop when nobody was talking.
One afternoon while we were sitting on the veranda--Susan and I trying to keep up some sort of a conversation, and Gregory Wilkinson thinking away as hard as ever he could think--a thin man in a buggy drove down the road and stopped at our hitch-ing-post. When he had hitched his horse he took out from the after-part of the buggy a largo tin vessel standing on light iron legs, and came up to the house with it. He made us all a sort of comprehensive bow, but stopped in front of Susan, set the tin vessel upon its legs, and said:
"Madam, you behold before you the most economical device and the greatest labor-saving invention of this extraordinarily devicious and richly inventive age. This article, madam"--and he placed his hand upon the tin vessel affectionately--"is Stowe's patent combination interchangeable churn and wash-boiler."
Susan did not say anything; she simply shuddered.
"And mark, madam, mark most of all, the economy of this invention. I need not say to you, a housekeeper of knowledge and experience, that churning-day and wash-day stand separate and distinct upon your household calendar. Under no circumstances is it conceivable that the churn and the wash-boiler shall be required for use upon the same day. Clearly the use of the one presupposes and compels the neglect of the other. Then why cumber your house with these two articles, equally large and equally unwieldly, when, by means of the beautiful invention that I have the honor of presenting to your notice, the two in one can be united, and money and house-room alike can be saved? I trust, madam, I believe, that I have said enough to convince you that my article is all that fancy can paint or bright hope inspire; that in every household made glad by its presence it will be regarded always and forever as a heaven-given boon!" Suddenly dropping his rhetorical tone and coming down to the tone of sespoir, qu'elle ?tait mari?e.
Ayant suivi Alain-Fournier depuis son adolescence jusqu'? sa mort, je puis dire que cet ?v?nement si discret fut l'aventure capitale de sa vie et ce qui l'alimenta jusqu'au bout de ferveur, de tristesse et d'extase. Ses autres amours n'effac?rent jamais celui-l?, ni m?me, je crois, n'int?ress?rent jamais les m?mes parties de son ?me. Il voyait toujours la parfaite jeune fille pench?e sur lui; il ne lui demandait pas de se caract?riser ni de se r?v?ler ? lui dans sa diff?rence; il n'avait aucun besoin, dans le fond, de la conna?tre au sens complexe et dangereux du mot; il lui suffisait qu'elle f?t impossible comme la vie; elle non plus, n'?tait <
J'avais quitt? Lakanal au mois de juillet 1905, ayant obtenu une bourse de licence en province. Fournier ?tait all? passer ses vacances en Angleterre, puis ?tait rentr? au lyc?e pour une troisi?me ann?e de <
Mais de cette s?paration naquit une ?norme correspondance, qui me permet aujourd'hui de suivre r?trospectivement le d?veloppement de mon ami pendant cette p?riode.
Ce fut, ? coup s?r, une de celles o? sa pens?e fut le plus active, celle o? son talent se nourrit, se forma. Tout le poids dont l'accablait la <
Il s'assimila Claudel, Gide, Rimbaud, Ibsen, acheva de dig?rer Laforgue et Jammes. En Angleterre, il s'?tait ?pris des Pr?rapha?lites. La peinture l'int?ressait, mais par les c?t?s, il faut bien le dire, o? elle touchait ? la litt?rature. A Paris, il se mit ? visiter les salons: Maurice Denis et Laprade lui donn?rent de grandes ?motions. Il croyait d?couvrir dans leurs toiles les paysages purs et d?sesp?r?s qu'habitait naturellement son ?me, qu'il voulait ? son tour ?voquer.
En toutes ses admirations de cette ?poque, d'ailleurs, et m?me de toujours, on sent un fort coefficient subjectif: il se cherche au travers de ce qui l'enthousiasme; il poursuit surtout des exemples, des permissions.
Lettre du 7 mars 1906.
Lettre du 21 mars 1906.
Il est difficile, tant elles sont nombreuses et riches, de mettre en ordre toutes les d?couvertes que Fournier fit sur lui-m?me, ou plut?t sur son talent et sur les conditions de sa cr?ation, pendant ces deux ou trois ann?es.
Les plus g?n?rales d'abord: il comprend, lui qui vient de s'?panouir, au milieu et par le moyen de la litt?rature la plus ?sot?rique, la plus aristocratique peut-?tre qui ait jamais ?t?,--il comprend que ses sources d'inspiration sont d'ordre populaire, qu'il doit ob?issance ? son h?r?dit? paysanne et que c'est du milieu dont il sort que monteront ? son esprit les vrais th?mes de son oeuvre future. Toutes ses lettres sont pleines de descriptions de son pays, de grands r?cits de promenades, de conversations avec des paysans qu'il me rapporte m?ticuleusement: <
Lettre du 3 septembre 1906.
Cette parent? avec les champs, que j'avais tout de suite sentie en lui, dont Jammes plus tard l'avait aid? ? mieux prendre conscience, il commence ? l'?prouver comme une incitation ? cr?er. Elle prend un sens positif, actif; elle veut se d?velopper et se dire.
Aussi comme il est hostile ? tout ce qui pourrait le s?parer de sa terre et plus g?n?ralement du monde vivant, des ?tres particuliers, de l'immense r?gne du concret! J'ai d?j? not? plus haut sa r?pugnance, sa r?sistance ? tout effort critique et l'esp?ce de mauvaise humeur avec laquelle il repoussait mes tentatives pour emprisonner le r?el dans des formules. Elles vont croissant.
Contre un ami ? qui il s'?tait confi? et qui avait cru lui faire plaisir en reconnaissant et en ?tiquetant chaque trait de lui-m?me qu'il lui r?v?lait, Fournier se r?volte: <
Lettre du 17-19 f?vrier 1906.
Et en effet s'il ?crit: <
M?me lettre. Et ailleurs: <
Lettre du 9 novembre 1906.
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