Human Traces Read Online Free PDF

Then he was in the cold, damp silence of the morning, with the misty rain on his cheeks, and he felt less alone. He walked to the point on the perimeter where he had left his fencing and set to work with his hands, though his mind was elsewhere. Abbe Henri said, "We'll make a scientist of you yet', but Jacques felt too diffident to enquire whether he was being playful or whether he had in mind some actual scheme. The smell from the wood was strong in his nostrils as he worked the rain-washed earth, wet bark, and the suggestion on the slight breeze of something hot-blooded, feral, at its business. The earth fell from his clogged fingernails as he packed it in round the base of a fence post. Some days, at evening, he saw a badger on the other side of the wood, a big, self-conscious beast that rolled off to its sett like a round-bellied alderman after a council dinner. In the middle of the day, he allowed himself time off from his father's business to go and inspect his traps. He found a weasel with dried blood round its gums; he poked it with a small stick, unwilling to put his fingers near the sharp teeth until he was sure it was dead. His stomach was rumbling. It seemed to be a condition of his life that he was hungry, all day, and that no amount of food that he could lay his hands on ever satisfied him. In the afternoon, it began to rain more persistently and he had a long walk to the house of a tenant whose barn roof needed mending. At least he was offered some preserved pork skin and pieces of foot in a clear jelly for his services. By the time he finished, the light was starting to go and he felt tired by his work. The rain had soaked through his clothes to the skin of his chest and shoulders, but he was so used to it that he felt no discomfort. In fact, he found a sort of contentment, he thought, or why else would his step be quickening as he saw the narrow line of smoke rise from the chimney of his father's house in the distance? The light was receding into the frayed, indistinct clouds over Sainte Agnes, draining down into the dunes and low hills beyond the village, reducing the world rapidly to the sound of his feet on wet paths and the consciousness of his body's movement. This is the kind of choice I have, thought Jacques, touching the bark of a dripping tree with his hand as he passed. To look down to my feet, to sense my heart's murmur, my muscles' damp ache or raise my eyes and see the shape of the almost invisible village and to know where it lies in the world. The difference between Tante Mathilde and Abbe Henri is great like that between a wood louse that lives beneath its log and a fox that goes over hills and fields, with eyes to see and to compare. But suppose that there is more to it than that. Just as Abbe Henri, with his God and his Descartes and his medical training, is the fox to poor Tante Mathilde s wood louse could there not be someone who is a man to the Curé's fox? And how would one become such a man? Must we wait to develop as a species, just as we have all moved on from the achievements of our naked forebears, or could it be done now, by force of will and intellect alone? Do we already possess all we need to stop feeling the world as the sound of footsteps and the ache of our backs and to look up to the woods and the hills and the oceans that stretch out in their immensity, just waiting to be seen? In bed that night, Jacques pulled the blankets up round his shoulders. There was no fat on his body, where the first muscles of manhood were packed firm and taken carelessly for granted. As he lay, he knew what Olivier meant by the feeling that came into the body at this age, the sensation of permanent excitement, as though he was continually crouched at the starting line, waiting for a race to begin. He gripped the blanket in both hands and vowed never to give in to compromise and fatigue. However rocky the path, he would not look down at his feet and allow his life to contract within that view: he