The Bark Tree Read Online Free PDF Page B

alas, nothing serious had happened: a person had been slightly grazed by a car, but he seemed to be all right, though a bit shaken; he was dusting himself off and explaining how it had happened. He was stammering a bit as he explained. It was nothing. No, really, he felt perfectly all right, he was surrounded by people. Some took the driver’s side, others his, even though he didn’t have one, himself. He expressed the wish to forget about it, because he was going to miss his train. The taxi fare apologized to him; in a way it was his fault, he’d told the driver to hurry, he too was afraid of missing his train. He was going to Obonne; so was the other. So they went to the station. The crowd gradually dispersed. Mme. Cloche shuffled off, furious at not even having seen the taxi butting the idiot in the back. All the fault of that waiter. But she’d never go back and sit on that caf é terrace, no, she’d never go back there, she swore she wouldn’t, their camomile tea was too rotten, they didn’t even give you any sugar, and, even though the next day, when she went to see her brother at Blagny, she had to take a train from that station, well, she wouldn’t stop and have a drink in that café. No, that she wouldn’t.
     
     
    —oooooo—oooooo—
    The two men got into the same compartment. The being of lesser consistency had skillfully managed to get his usual seat. The manille -playing quartet had disintegrated. The young lady must have found a better place. The wine salesman was sitting in a corner looking important, waving a newspaper like a flag; opposite him, the reader of the Cross was trying his hand at doing an addition problem on the back of an envelope; every so often, he scratched his head with his pencil. Two female railroad employees occupied the other two corners: they were sewing (or embroidering, or lace-making. Pierre didn’t make up his mind which of these occupations it was). Next to them, face to face, silent and hostile, an old man and an old woman of the silver wedding type.
    At the moment when the little trumpets of the people authorized to play them were making their pretty symphony heard, a young man, out of breath, penetrated into the compartment which was already as full as an egg; he remained standing, and his head was lost in the luggage racks. Opposite his jacket pockets, to the right and left, Pierre and his victim were sitting.
    Up to Blagny, nothing happened (nor after, so far as anyone could tell). The train was nonstop as far as that station; everyone was occupying himself according to his particular tastes; two women were sewing, two men were reading, two old people were dozing; the latecomer was yawning, and from time to time lowering his eyes to the seated humanity. As this individual’s father was not a glass-maker, Pierre couldn’t see the modifications in the consistency of the employee of the Audit Bank, the one who had registered on him among thousands of others.
    This second journey to the suburbs, in such conditions, he found only moderately enchanting; he remembered with horror the night he had spent at Hippolyte’s; the sheets so filthy that he had preferred to sleep fully dressed, the smell of mildew that came from a bedside table of a most uncommon style; the layer of thick dust floating on the water intended for his washstand; the sickly, yellowish light that had pretensions to illuminating the whole, and, above all, the feeling of abandonment he had experienced when the innkeeper, having taken him up to his room, had closed the door behind him. Even the first day when, in a barracks in the east of France, he had found himself dressed in the uniform of a French soldier, and realized that the next eighteen months he would have to salute innumerable N.C.O.’s and make his bed in the approved fashion, even that day, he hadn’t felt as lost, as hopeless. He didn’t sleep that night; from time to time he went to the window and contemplated the building sites of