Mordiane had risen up with a longing to escape, to
run off, which made his legs tremble. This “dada”
had hit him like a bullet. It was to him
that it was addressed, it was intended for him, this
“dada,” smelling of garlic—this
“dada” of the South.
Oh! how sweet had been the perfume exhaled by her,
his sweetheart of bygone days!
Duchoux saw him to the door.
“This house is your own?” said the baron.
“Yes, monsieur; I bought it recently. And
I am proud of it. I am a child of accident, monsieur,
and I don’t want to hide it; I am proud of it.
I owe nothing to anyone; I am the son of my own efforts;
I owe everything to myself.”
The little boy, who remained on the threshold, kept
still exclaiming, though at some distance away from
them:
“Dada!”
Mordiane, shaking with a shivering fit, seized with
panic, fled as one flies away from a great danger.
“He is going to guess who I am, to recognize
me,” he thought. “He is going to
take me in his arms, and to call out to me, ‘Dada,’
while giving me a kiss perfumed with garlic.”
“To-morrow, monsieur.”
“To-morrow, at one o’clock.”
The landau rolled over the white road.
“Coachman! to the railway-station!”
And he heard two voices, one far away and sweet, the
faint, sad voice of the dead, saying: “My
darling,” and the other sonorous, sing-song,
frightful, bawling out, “Dada,” just as
people bawl out, “Stop him!” when a thief
is flying through the street.
Next evening, as he entered the club, the Count d’Etreillis
said to him:
“We have not seen you for the last three days.
Have you been ill?”
“Yes, a little unwell. I get headaches
from time to time.”
The humid, gray sky seemed to weigh down on the vast
brown plain. The odor of Autumn, the sad odor
of bare, moist lands, of fallen leaves, of dead grass,
made the stagnant evening air more thick and heavy.
The peasants were still at work, scattered through
the fields, waiting for the stroke of the Angelus
to call them back to the farm-houses, whose thatched
roofs were visible here and there through the branches
of the leafless trees which protected the apple-gardens
against the wind.
At the side of the road, on a heap of clothes, a very
small male child seated with its legs apart, was playing
with a potato, which he now and then let fall on his
dress, while five women bent down with their rumps
in the air, were picking sprigs of colza in the adjoining
plain. With a slow continuous movement, all along
the great cushions of earth which the plow had just
turned up, they drove in sharp wooden stakes, and then
cast at once into the hole so formed the plant, already
a little withered, which sank on the side; then they
covered over the root, and went on with their work.
