The Surprises Of Life Part 8

"And this time you were satisfied?"

"No more than before. While I am writing, I am, in spite of myself, possessed by the absolute. I take too vaulting a leap toward truth. Then I realize that men will shrug their shoulders and call me mad, and I question whether it is not in fact madness to try to bring to intelligences of to-day knowledge which belongs to the far future.

Furthermore, no matter how strongly I have felt myself fortified on all sides by evidence, a fury of criticism has hurled me to the attack of my fortress of truth. It took two years to reduce my five-hundred-page book to two hundred pages. Four more years of work--and a notebook of perhaps fifty pages is all that is left--the bone and marrow of the whole matter, for my aim has been to eliminate, one by one, every element of possible uncertainty."

"And now there remains no doubt, I suppose?"

"Nay, doubt remains. Is it strength or weakness of mind? I cannot say.

If I have time to go on working, nothing will be left of my work, and I shall have made the great journey, from reason that seeks to folly that finds, and from folly that knows to reason which, very wisely, still doubts."

The Abbe died six months later, leaving all he had to the poor. Besides his will, not a single page of writing was found among his belongings.

The village priest came to see him in his last hour. He spoke to him of G.o.d--bade him believe, alleging that science led to doubt--whereas faith----

"Then you yourself are sure, are you?" asked the dying man.

"Certainly--I know with absolute certainty."

"Reverend sir, I once spoke as you are speaking. Only ignorance is capable of such proud utterances. Grant to a dying man the privilege of delivering this lesson. I who have aspired to know, know that you know no more than I--even less--I dare affirm it. It is really not enough to justify taking up so much room in the suns.h.i.+ne!"

X

BETTER THAN STEALING

The man from Paris is a natural object of hatred to the poacher. I refer to the hunting man from Paris, who raises game for his own sport in carefully preserved enclosures. This ostentatious personage, who comes and fills the countryside with special guards to keep the aggrieved pedestrian out of glades and plains and bypaths, seems to the rustics a pernicious intruder, in a state of legal warfare against the countryman, who feels himself the friend and legitimate owner of the animals, furry or feathered, with whom his labour in the fields has made him well acquainted. All is fair play against this "maker of trouble." The only thing is not to get "pinched."

Then begins a warfare of ambushes and ruses with the band of gamekeepers, who, having the law on their side, always end by getting the better of those whose only argument of defence is the "natural right" of a man to destroy wild life.

During the season there are almost daily exchanges of shot. Often a man is killed, which means jail, penitentiary, scaffold. All for a miserable rabbit! Remnants of the feudalism of birth which the effort of revolutions has merely replaced by the feudalism of money.

The worst of it is that gamekeepers and poachers, mutually exasperated, cling to their quarrel, and that a taste for brigandage develops in men diverted from the unremunerative tilling of the soil by the daily temptation of booty. Deal as harshly as you may with the poacher, you will not succeed in discouraging him. Has anything ever cured a devotee of roulette? And to the excitement of gambling, in this case, is added the attraction of danger. There is no cure for it. The question of increasing the penalty for poaching often comes up. There will be long discussion before anything is ever done. The discrepancy would be too great between the misdeed and the punishment. And the matter of elections enters into it. No one is anxious to make too violent enemies among the citizen electors.

Entirely different is the question of poaching in the happy regions--there are not many left in France--where preserved hunting is still at the rhetorical stage. There the poacher is merely a hunter without a permit, and as no such thing exists as a peasant whom a hare has never tempted to use his gun, and as a natural understanding unites all those who are compelled to pay taxes against the State which represents taxation and statute labour, never will you find a field labourer ready to admit that a shot, in order to be lawful, needs the seal of a tax gatherer.

The poacher on free territory, therefore, does not hide as does the poacher on preserved lands. He plays a sort of tag with the rural guard, who is by no means eager to meet him, and with the occasional _gendarmes_, whose c.o.c.ked hats and baldricks make them conspicuous from afar. Following along hedges, looking for burrows, keeping his eyes steadfastly on the ground, he scents out the wild creatures and knows the art of capturing them.

How often, in the days of my youth, have I accompanied the redoubtable Janiere on his Sunday expeditions, when he would ostensibly leave the village by the highroad, his hands in his pockets, then dash into the fields, and miraculously find his gun hidden in a bush, a few feet from a rabbit hole. Nor man nor beast was ever known to get the better of him. He was an old Chouan of 1815 who, having been a poacher all his days, and a marauder now and then, died without ever having had a writ served on him. The entire district took pride in Janiere. When he left us for a better world: "He never once went to prison," said the peasants by way of funeral oration. What that man could deduce from a blade of gra.s.s lying over on one side or the other at the edge of a thicket really approached the miraculous. He would consult the wind, the sun, and would construct for me the train of reasoning which must have brought the hare to the precise spot where we invariably found him. His accommodating gun made no more noise than the cracking of a whip. The victim, hidden in the hollow of a pollard, would at nightfall find its way under Janiere's blouse.

But whither have I let myself wander? It was of the water poacher that I meant to speak. He, one might say, is the enemy of no man on earth.

Fish, of dubious morals we are a.s.sured, find no such personal sympathy among us as do the furry and feathered folk. A carp, gasping on the gra.s.s, does not bring tears to our eyes, he seems to belong to a different world, and the police officer at war against illicit fis.h.i.+ng, backed up by more or less convincing arguments relating to the restocking of rivers, has no one on his side. For this reason, my compatriot Simon Grelu counted as many friends as there were inhabitants in the canton. The killing of a hare in his lair rouses enmity among the poachers who alike had their eye on him. No quarrel results from a tench landed. Simon Grelu, besides fis.h.i.+ng at once for profit and the love of it, gave freely of his catch, whence came the universal good-will accompanying him on his nightly or daily expeditions.

Our river in the Vendee, the Lay, wends its leisurely way amid reeds and waterlilies, sometimes narrowing between rocks covered with broom and furze and oak trees, sometimes widening under overarching alders, onward to the meadows, where it attracts the flocks. Everywhere are mills with their gates. It is a populous river, and no one could be said to "populate" it more than Simon Grelu, nominally a miller's a.s.sistant, living in the ruin of what was thought to have been a mill at the time of the wars between the Blues and the Whites.

Simon Grelu is a great tall fellow, all legs and arms and joints, with a long neck leading up to a long nose, which gives him the look of a heron. From the Marshland to the Woodland there is no more noted spoiler of rivers; he is celebrated for the constancy of his relations with the police. Hampered by his lengthy appendages, he is perpetually letting himself be caught, and disdaining what will be thought of it. Every angle of every rock, every stump by the water's edge, is so familiar and homelike to him that he cannot bear to leave his river, and rather than make good his escape on land, prefers to have a warrant served on him, secure in the fact that he has nothing wherewith to pay a fine.

When the police sergeant rebukes his men for their laziness, they cry with one accord:

"Let us go and look up Grelu!"

They go, and find him without the least trouble.

That was what happened last week, and owing to it I had the pleasure of witnessing the interview I am about to relate. I was taking a walk with the Mayor, when Simon Grelu suddenly stood before us. More elongated than ever, with his bony, sallow face, his pointed skull topped by a little tuft of white hair, his mouth open in a smile truly formidable from the threat of a single great black tooth which the slightest cough would inevitably have flung in one's face, the heron-man stood before us, motionless in his wooden shoes.

"I have come for my certificate, _monsieur le maire_," said he with a sort of clucking which might express either mirth or despair.

"What certificate?"

"Why, my certificate of mendicancy, as usual, when I am caught."

"What! Again? Is there no end to it?"

"It is better than stealing, isn't it, _monsieur le maire_?"

"But you have not the choice between poaching and stealing only, Simon.

You could work."

"And do you suppose I don't work? Many thanks! Who drudges more than I do? The whole night in the water! Those accursed policemen played a trick on me!"

"They caught you?"

"That's nothing. They made a fool of me, _monsieur le maire_. No, it can't be called anything else. I shall never forgive myself for being made a fool of----"

"What happened?"

"What happened is that those policemen laughed at me all the way up and down the river. They were half a mile away, and I could still hear them roaring with laughter. No, I never knew I was such a dunderhead."

"But, come to the point, what did they do to you?"

"Ah--the villains! Imagine, _monsieur le maire_, it was just before daylight, and I was quietly fis.h.i.+ng below the mill of La Rochette. The idea, anyway, of forbidding fis.h.i.+ng before sunrise! Is it my fault if fishes come out to play at night?"

"Well--what happened?"

"I was in my boat----"

"You have a boat, then?"

"No, _monsieur le maire_, I may as well tell you, for you'll know it to-morrow, anyway, that it was your boat, which I had taken from your dike by the big pasture."

"And where did you get the key?"

"Ah--you know--with a nail--and there is no chain----But I shut everything up again without damaging the lock. I should not like to give you any trouble. I washed the boat, too, where the fish had left it muddy."

"You had caught a great deal of fish?"

"No. Ten pounds, perhaps. I had only just begun."