FullReads

“Write the letter,” said David, “I am sorry you did not speak of this sooner.”

At sunrise the next morning he was on the road to Dreux with the precious roll of poems under his arm. At noon he wiped the dust from his feet at the door of Monsieur Bril. That learned man broke the seal of M. Papineau’s letter, and sucked up its contents through his gleaming spectacles as the sun draws water. He took David inside to his study and sat him down upon a little island beat upon by a sea of books.

Monsieur Bril had a conscience. He flinched not even at a mass of manuscript the thickness of a finger-length and rolled to an incorrigible curve. He broke the back of the roll against his knee and began to read. He slighted nothing; he bored into the lump as a worm into a nut, seeking for a kernel.

Meanwhile, David sat, marooned, trembling in the spray of so much literature. It roared in his ears. He held no chart or compass for voyaging in that sea. Half the world, he thought, must be writing books.

Monsieur Bril bored to the last page of the poems. Then he took off his spectacles, and wiped them with his handkerchief.

“My old friend, Papineau, is well?” he asked.

“In the best of health,” said David.

“How many sheep have you, Monsieur Mignot?”

“Three hundred and nine, when I counted them yesterday. The flock has had ill fortune. To that number it has decreased from eight hundred and fifty.”

“You have a wife and home, and lived in comfort. The sheep brought you plenty. You went into the fields with them and lived in the keen air and ate the sweet bread of contentment. You had but to be vigilant and recline there upon nature’s breast, listening to the whistle of the blackbirds in the grove. Am I right thus far?”

“It was so,” said David.

“I have read all your verses,” continued Monsieur Bril, his eyes wandering about his sea of books as if he conned the horizon for a sail. “Look yonder, through that window, Monsieur Mignot; tell me what you see in that tree.”

“I see a crow,” said David, looking.

“There is a bird,” said Monsieur Bril, “that shall assist me where I am disposed to shirk a duty. You know that bird, Monsieur Mignot; he is the philosopher of the air. He is happy through submission to his lot. None so merry or full-crawed as he with his whimsical eye and rollicking step. The fields yield him what he desires. He never grieves that his plumage is not gay, like the oriole’s. And you have heard, Monsieur Mignot, the notes that nature has given him? Is the nightingale any happier, do you think?”

David rose to his feet. The crow cawed harshly from his tree.

“I thank you, Monsieur Bril,” he said, slowly. “There was not, then, one nightingale among all those croaks?”

“I could not have missed it,” said Monsieur Bril, with a sigh. “I read every word. Live your poetry, man; do not try to write it any more.”

“I thank you,” said David, again. “And now I will be going back to my sheep.”

“If you would dine with me,” said the man of books, “and overlook the smart of it, I will give you reasons at length.”

“No,” said the poet, “I must be back in the fields cawing at my sheep.”

Back along the road to Vernoy he trudged with his poems under his arm. When he reached his village he turned into the shop of one Zeigler, a Jew out of Armenia, who sold anything that came to his hand.

“Friend,” said David, “wolves from the forest harass my sheep on the hills. I must purchase firearms to protect them. What have you?”

“A bad day, this, for me, friend Mignot,” said Zeigler, spreading his hands, “for I perceive that I must sell you a weapon that will not fetch a tenth of its value. Only last I week I bought from a peddlar a wagon full of goods that he procured at a sale by a /commissionaire/ of the crown. The sale was of the /chateau/ and belongings of a great lord–I know not his title–who has been banished for conspiracy against the king. There are some choice firearms in the lot. This pistol–oh, a weapon fit for a prince!–it shall be only forty francs to you, friend Mignot–if I lose ten by the sale. But perhaps an arquebuse–“

“This will do,” said David, throwing the money on the counter. “Is it charged?”

“I will charge it,” said Zeigler. “And, for ten francs more, add a store of powder and ball.”

David laid his pistol under his coat and walked to his cottage. Yvonne was not there. Of late she had taken to gadding much among the neighbours. But a fire was glowing in the kitchen stove. David opened the door of it and thrust his poems in upon the coals. As they blazed up they made a singing, harsh sound in the flue.

“The song of the crow!” said the poet.

He went up to his attic room and closed the door. So quiet was the village that a score of people heard the roar of the great pistol. They flocked thither, and up the stairs where the smoke, issuing, drew their notice.

The men laid the body of the poet upon his bed, awkwardly arranging it to conceal the torn plumage of the poor black crow. The women chattered in a luxury of zealous pity. Some of them ran to tell Yvonne.

M. Papineau, whose nose had brought him there among the first, picked up the weapon and ran his eye over its silver mountings with a mingled air of connoisseurship and grief.

“The arms,” he explained, aside, to the /cure/, “and crest of Monseigneur, the Marquis de Beaupertuys.”