The Man Who Laughs Read online

  Under the bowsprit the cut-water, long, curved, and sharp, came out in front like the horn of a crescent. At the top of the cut-water, and at the feet of the Virgin, a kneeling angel, with folded wings, leaned her back against the stem, and looked through a spyglass at the horizon. The angel was gilded like Our Lady. In the cut-water were holes and openings to let the waves pass through, which afforded an opportunity for gilding and arabesques.

  Under the figure of the Virgin was written in gilt capitals, the word Matutina--the name of the vessel, not to be read just now on account of the darkness.

  Amid the confusion of departure there were thrown down in disorder, at the foot of the cliff, the goods which the voyagers were to take with them, and which, by means of a plank serving as a bridge across, were being passed rapidly from the shore to the boat. Bags of biscuit, a cask of stock-fish, a case of portable soup, three barrels--one of fresh water, one of malt, one of tar--four or five bottles of ale, an old portmanteau buckled up by straps, trunks, boxes, a ball of tow for torches and signals. Such was the lading. These ragged people had valises, which seemed to indicate a roving life. Wandering rascals are obliged to own something; at times they would prefer to fly away like birds, but they can not do so without abandoning the means of earning a livelihood. They of necessity possess boxes of tools and instruments of labour, whatever their errant trade may be. Those of whom we speak were dragging their baggage with them, often an encumbrance.

  It could not have been easy to bring these movables to the bottom of the cliff. This, however, revealed the intention of a definite departure.

  No time was lost; there was one continued passing to and fro from the shore to the vessel, and from the vessel to the shore; each one took his share of the work; one carried a bag, another a chest. Those amid the promiscuous company, who were possibly or probably women, worked like the rest. They overloaded the child.

  It was doubtful if the child's father or mother were in the group; no sign of life was vouchsafed him. They made him work, nothing more. He appeared not a child in a family, but a slave in a tribe. He waited on every one, and no one spoke to him.

  However, he made haste, and, like the others of this mysterious troop, he seemed to have but one thought-to embark as quickly as possible. Did he know why? probably not, he hurried mechanically because he saw the others hurry.

  The hooker was decked. The stowing of the lading in the hold was quickly finished, and the moment to pill ok arrived. The last case had been carried over the gang-way, and nothing was left to embark but the men. The two objects among the group who seemed women were already on board; six, the child among them, were still on the low platform of the cliff. A movement of departure was made in the vessel, the captain seized the helm, a sailor took up an axe to cut the hawser; to cut is an evidence of haste; when there is time it is unknotted.

  "Andamos," said, in a low voice, he who appeared chief of the six, and who had the spangles on his tatters. The child rushed toward the plank in order to be the first to pass. As he placed his foot on it, two of the men hurried by, at the risk of throwing him into the water, got in before him, and passed on; the fourth drove him back with his fist and followed the third; the fifth, who was the chief, bounded into rather than entered the vessel, and, as he jumped in, kicked back the plank, which fell into the sea, a stroke of the hatchet cut the moorings, the helm was put up, the vessel left the shore, and the child remained on land.

  * * *

  III

  ALONE

  THE CHILD remained motionless on the rock, with his eyes fixed; no calling out; no appeal. Though this was unexpected by him, he spoke not a word. The same silence reigned in the vessel. No cry from the child to the men--no farewell from the men to the child. There was on both sides a mute acceptance of the widening distance between them. It was like a separation of ghosts on the banks of the Styx. The child, as if nailed to the rock, which the high tide was beginning to bathe, watched the departing bark. It seemed as if he realised his position. What did he realise?--Darkness.

  A moment later, the hooker gained the neck of the creek and entered it. Against the clear sky the mast-head was visible, rising above the split blocks between which the strait wound as between two walls. The truck wandered to the summit of the rocks and appeared to run into them. Then it was seen no more--all was over--the bark had gained the sea.

  The child watched its disappearance--he was astounded but dreamy.

  His stupefaction was complicated by a sense of the dark reality of existence. It seemed as if there were experience in this dawning being. Did he, perchance, already exercise judgment? Experience coming too early constructs, sometimes, in the obscure depths of a child's mind, some dangerous balance--we know not what--in which the poor little soul weighs God.

  Feeling himself innocent, he yielded. There was no complaint--the irreproachable does not reproach.

  His rough expulsion drew from him no sign--he suffered a sort of internal stiffening. The child did not bow under this sudden blow of fate, which seemed to put an end to his existence ere it had well begun; he received the thunderstroke standing.

  It would have been evident to any one who could have seen his astonishment unmixed with dejection, that, in the group which abandoned him, there was nothing which loved him, nothing which he loved.

  Brooding, he forgot the cold. Suddenly the wave wetted his feet--the tide was flowing; a gust passed through his hair--the north wind was rising. He shivered. There came over him, from head to foot, the shudder of awakening.

  He cast his eyes about him.

  He was alone.

  Up to this day there had never existed for him any other men than those who were now in the hooker. Those men had just stolen away.

  Let us add what seems a strange thing to state. Those men, the only ones he knew, were unknown to him.

  He could not have said who they were. His childhood had been passed among them, without his having the consciousness of being of them. He was in juxtaposition to them, nothing more.

  He had just been--forgotten--by them.

  He had no money about him, no shoes to his feet, scarcely a garment to his body, not even a piece of bread in his pocket.

  It was winter--it was night. It would be necessary to walk several leagues before a human habitation could be reached.

  He did not know where he was.

  He knew nothing, unless it was that those who had come with him to the brink of the sea had gone away without him.

  He felt himself put outside the pale of life.

  He felt that man failed him.

  He was ten years old.

  The child was in a desert, between depths where he saw the night rising and depths were he heard the waves murmur.

  He stretched his little thin arms and yawned.

  Then, suddenly, as one who makes up his mind, bold, and throwing off his numbness--with the agility of a squirrel--or perhaps of an acrobat--he turned his back on the creek, and set himself to climb up the cliff. He escaladed the path, left it, returned to it, quick and venturous. He was hurrying landward, just as though he had a destination marked out; nevertheless he was going nowhere.

  He hastened without an object--a fugitive before Fate.

  To climb is the function of a man; to clamber is that of an animal--he did both. As the slopes of Portland face southward, there was scarcely any snow on the path the intensity of cold had, however, frozen that snow into dust very troublesome to the walker. The child freed himself of it. His man's jacket, which was too big for him, complicated matters, and got in his way. Now and then on an overhanging crag or in a declivity he came upon a little ice, which caused him to slip down. Then, after hanging some moments over the precipice, he would catch hold of a dry branch or projecting stone. Once he came on a vein of slate, which suddenly gave way under him, letting him down with it. Crumbling slate is treacherous. For some seconds the child slid like a tile on a roof; he rolled to the extreme edge of the decline; a tuft of grass which he
clutched at the right moment saved him. He was as mute in sight of the abyss as he had been in sight of the men; he gathered himself up and reascended silently. The slope was steep; so he had to tack in ascending. The precipice grew in the darkness; the vertical rock had no ending.

  It receded before the child in the distance of its height. As the child ascended, so seemed the summit to ascend. While he clambered he looked up at the dark entablature, placed like a barrier, between heaven and him. At last he reached the top.

  He jumped on the level ground, or rather landed, for he rose from the precipice.

  Scarcely was he on the cliff when he began to shiver. He felt in his face that bite of the night, the north wind. The bitter northwester was blowing; he tightened his rough sailor's jacket about his chest.

  It was a good coat, called in ship language a sou'wester, because that sort of stuff allows little of the southwesterly rain to penetrate.

  The child, having gained the tableland, stopped, placed his feet firmly on the frozen ground and looked about him.

  Behind him was the sea; in front the land; above, the sky--but a sky without stars; an opaque mist masked the zenith.

  On reaching the summit of the rocky wall he found himself turned toward the land, and looked at it attentively. It lay before him as far as the sky-line, flat, frozen, and covered with snow. Some tufts of heather shivered in the wind. No roads were visible. Nothing, not even a shepherd's cot. Here and there, pale, spiral vortices might be seen, which were whirls of fine snow, snatched from the ground by the wind and blown away. Successive undulations of ground become suddenly misty rolled themselves into the horizon. The great dull plains were lost under the white fog. Deep silence. It spread like infinity, and was hush as the tomb.

  The child turned again toward the sea.

  The sea, like the land, was white, the one with snow, the other with foam. There is nothing so melancholy as the light produced by this double whiteness.

  Certain lights of night are very clearly cut in their hardness; the sea was like steel, the cliff like ebony. From the height where the child was, the bay of Portland appeared almost like a geographical map, pale, in a semi-circle of hills. There was something dreamlike in that nocturnal landscape--a wan disk belted by a dark crescent. The moon sometimes has a similar appearance. From cape to cape, along the whole coast, not a single spark indicating a hearth with a fire, not a lighted window, not an inhabited house, was to be seen. As in heaven so on earth, no light. Not a lamp below, not a star above. Here and there came sudden risings in the great expanse of waters in the gulf as the wind disarranged and wrinkled the vast sheet. The hooker was still visible in the bay as she fled.

  It was a black triangle gliding over the livid waters.

  Far away the waste of waters stirred confusedly in the ominous chiaroscuro of immensity. The Matutina was making quick way. She seemed to grow smaller every minute. Nothing appears so rapid as the flight of a vessel melting into the distance of ocean.

  Suddenly she lit the lantern at her prow. Probably the darkness falling round her made those on board Unix easy, and the pilot thought it necessary to throw light on the waves. This luminous point, a spark seen from afar, clung like a corpse light to the high and long black form. You would have said it was a shroud raised up and moving in the middle of the sea, under which some one wandered with a star in his hand.

  A storm threatened in the air: the child took no account of it, but a sailor would have trembled. It was that moment of preliminary anxiety when it seems as though the elements are changing into persons, and one is about to witness the mysterious transfiguration of the wind into the wind-god. The sea becomes Ocean: its power reveals itself as Will: that which one takes for a thing, is a soul. It will become visible. Hence the terror. The soul of man fears to be thus confronted with the soul of nature.

  Chaos was about to appear. The wind rolling back the fog, and making a stage of the clouds behind, set the scene for that fearful drama of wave and winter, which is called a Snowstorm. Vessels putting back hove in sight. For some minutes past the roads had no longer been deserted. Every instant troubled barks hastening toward an anchorage appeared from behind the capes; some were doubling Portland Pill, the others St. Albans head. From afar ships were running in. It was a race for refuge. Southward the darkness thickened, and clouds, full of night, bordered on the sea. The weight of the tempest hanging overhead made a dreary lull on the waves. It certainly was no time to sail. Yet the hooker had sailed.

  She had made the south of the cape. She was already out of the gulf and in the open sea. Suddenly there came a gust of wind. The Matutina, which was still clearly in sight, made all sail, as if resolved to profit by the hurricane. It was the nor'wester, a wind sullen and angry. Its weight was felt instantly. The hooker, caught broadside on, staggered, but recovering held her course to sea. This indicated a flight rather than a voyage, less fear of sea than of land, and greater heed of pursuit from man than from wind.

  The hooker, passing through every degree of diminution, sank into the horizon. The little star which she carried into shadow paled. More and more the hooker became amalgamated with the night, then disappeared.

  This time for good and all.

  At least the child seemed to understand it so; he ceased to look at the sea. His eyes turned hack upon the plains, the wastes, the hills, toward the space where it might not be impossible to meet something living. Into this unknown he set out.

  * * *

  IV

  QUESTIONS

  WHAT KIND of band was it which had left the child behind in its flight?

  Were those fugitives Comprachicos?

  We have already seen the account of the measures taken by William III, and passed by Parliament against the malefactors, male and female, called Comprachicos, otherwise Comprapequeños, otherwise Cheylas.

  There are laws which disperse. The law acting against the Comprachicos determined, not only the Comprachicos, but vagabonds of all sorts, on a general flight.

  It was the devil take the hindmost. The greater number of the Comprachicos returned to Spain; many of them, as we have said, being Basques.

  The law for the protection of children had at first this strange result: it caused many children to be abandoned.

  The immediate effect of the penal statute was to produce a crowd of children, found, or rather lost. Nothing is easier to understand. Every wandering gang containing a child was liable to suspicion. The mere fact of the child's presence was in itself a denunciation.

  "They are very likely Comprachicos." Such was the first idea of the sheriff, of the bailiff, of the constable, hence arrest and inquiry. People simply unfortunate, reduced to wander and to beg, were seized with a terror of being taken for Comprachicos, although they were nothing of the kind. But the weak have grave misgivings of possible errors in Justice. Besides, these vagabond families are very easily scared. The accusation against the Comprachicos was that they traded in other people's children. But the promiscuousness caused by poverty and indigence is such that at times it might have been difficult for a father and mother to prove a child their own.

  How came you by this child? how were they to prove that they held it from God? The child became a peril--they got rid of it. To fly unencumbered was easier; the parents resolved to lose it--now in a wood, now on a strand, now down a well.

  Children were found drowned in cisterns.

  Let us add that, in imitation of England, all Europe henceforth hunted down the Comprachicos. The impulse of pursuit was given. There is nothing like belling the cat. From this time forward the desire to seize them made rivalry and emulation among the police of all countries, and the alguazil was not less keenly watchful than the constable.

  One could still read, twenty-three years ago, on a stone of the gate of Otero, an untranslatable inscription--the words of the code, outraging property. In it, however, the shade of difference which existed between the buyers and the stealers of children is very strongly marked. Here is
part of the inscription in somewhat rough Castilian: Aqui quedan las orejas de los Comprachicos, y las bolsas de los robaniños, mientras que se van ellos al trabajo de mar. You seethe confiscation of ears, etc., did not prevent the owners going to the galleys. Whence followed a general rout among all vagabonds. They started frightened; they arrived trembling. On every shore in Europe their furtive advent was watched. Impossible for such a band to embark with a child, since to embark with one was dangerous.

  To lose the child was much simpler of accomplishment.

  And this child, of whom we have caught a glimpse in the shadow of the solitudes of Portland, by whom had he been cast away?

  To all appearance by Comprachicos.

  * * *

  V

  THE TREE OF HUMAN INVENTION

  IT MIGHT BE about seven o'clock in the evening. The wind was now diminishing, a sign, however, of a violent recurrence impending. The child was on the table-land at the extreme south point of Portland. Portland is a peninsula; but the child did not know what a peninsula was, and was ignorant even of the name of Portland. He knew but one thing, which is, that one can walk until one drops down. An idea is a guide; he had no idea. They had brought him there, and left him there. They and there. These two enigmas represented his doom. They were humankind. There was the universe. For him in all creation there was absolutely no other basis to rest on but the little piece of ground where he placed his heel, ground hard and cold to his naked feet. In the great twilight world, open on all sides, what was there for the child? Nothing.

  He walked toward this Nothing. Around him was the vastness of human desertion.