The Lost Estate Read Online Free PDF Page B

clogs on the flagstones gives way to the dull sound of their footsteps hurrying across the sand in the yard and skidding around the corner at the little gateway opening on to the road. All the rest of the class is crowding around the garden windows, and some have climbed on the tables to get a better view.
    Too late: Meaulnes is gone.
    ‘Go to the station with Moucheboeuf even so,’ Monsieur Seurel tells me. ‘Meaulnes doesn’t know the way to Vierzon. He will get lost at the crossroads and never meet the three o’clock train.’
    Millie puts her head round the door of the little classroom to ask, ‘What on earth’s going on?’
    In the village street, people have started to gather. The farmworker is still there, stubbornly, not moving, with his hat in his hand, like someone asking for justice.

V
    THE CARRIAGE RETURNS
    When I had brought my grandparents back from the station and after dinner, seated around the tall fireplace, they were starting to give a detailed account of everything that had happened to them since the last holidays, I soon realized that I was not listening to what they were saying.
    The little gate into the courtyard was close to the dining-room door. It would squeak as you opened it. Normally, at nightfall, on our country evenings, I would secretly wait for that squeaking of the gate. It would be followed by the sound of clogs tapping or being wiped on the threshold, and sometimes by whispering, like that of people conferring before they came in. Then a knock. It was a neighbour, or the women teachers, or in any case someone to amuse us in the long evening.
    Now, that evening, I was not expecting anything from outside, because all my loved ones were inside the house, yet I was constantly straining my ears for all the sounds of the night and expecting someone to open our door.
    My old grandfather, with his shaggy appearance, like a large Gascon shepherd, his two feet fairly and squarely in front of him and his stick between his legs, was there, leaning over to knock out his pipe against his shoe. His kindly, moist eyes agreed with what my grandmother was saying about the journey and her hens and their neighbours and the peasants who had not yet paid the rent for their farms. But I was no longer listening.
    I was thinking about the sound of a carriage suddenly stopping in front of the door. Meaulnes would leap down and comein as though nothing had happened. Or he might perhaps go first of all to take the mare back to La Belle-Etoile, and I would shortly hear his footsteps on the road and the opening of the metal gate.
    But nothing happened. Grandfather was staring ahead, and his eyelids began to droop as though sleep was coming. Grandmother, a little annoyed, repeated her last remark, which no one had heard.
    ‘Are you worried about that boy?’ she asked eventually.
    In fact, I had questioned her at the station, but in vain. She had not seen anyone at the Vierzon stop who was like The Great Meaulnes. My friend must have taken a long time on the journey. He had failed. Coming home in the trap. I thought over my disappointment, while my grandmother talked to Moucheboeuf. The little birds were fluttering around the hooves of the donkey as it trotted along the white, frosty road. From time to time, breaking the deep peace of a wintry afternoon, came the distant shout of a shepherdess or a boy calling his friend from one copse to another. And every time, these long cries over the empty downs made me shudder, as though I had heard the voice of Meaulnes in the distance inviting me to follow him.
    While I was going over all this in my head, bedtime arrived. Grandfather had already gone to the red room, the bed-sitting room, which was damp and cold after being shut up since the previous winter. To make room for him, the lace antimacassars had been removed from the armchairs, the rugs had been taken up and any fragile objects put to one side. He had put his stick on one chair and his boots under another, and