The Town Below. Roger Lemelin
a refuge in her house, but he ran jauntily on past her. The two Langevins and Jean Colin, with the police close on their heels, whirled at the corner of the rue Chateauguay and dashed down that street. They had not gone far when, after pausing for a few seconds, they suddenly turned to the left. Paying no attention to the dog that yelped in summer and in winter ran in the dog-sled derby, they briskly clambered over a fence, made their way over the roofs of four sheds, dropped down into a yard, and then climbed some more fences. Unexpectedly, they found themselves in the garden belonging to the churchwarden Zépherin Lévesque, which was the envy of the parish. It was separated from the adjoining property by a veritable palisade. Anxiously, they ran over to the gate, but it was locked. As they huddled in the entryway they heard women’s voices.
“My Lise back from the convent! It’s too good to be true, my dear. What a charming life we are going to arrange for ourselves. With your education you are sure to be made president of the Daughters of Mary. I must say I’ve had my fill of that Eugénie Clichoteux who is always the centre of everything, at entertainments and in church.”
The pleasant but sulky voice of a young girl, a voice modulated by long recital of lessons, broke in upon this flow of words.
“I love you a great deal, Mama, but I cannot understand your ambitions. I’m afraid it’s going to be dreadfully boring here. The boys fighting and screaming, the women wrangling from their balconies — it seems to me that was not the way I imagined my life in the outside world would be. My girlfriends —”
“Conceited young thing!” Robert Langevin, ordinarily timid enough, was indignant.
The youths in their anxiety listened distractedly to this strange talk. Their hearts were thumping, the sweat glistening on their foreheads. They pictured to themselves a prudish young miss in glasses, with her braids under her chin, a rickety neck, and a small head that came up to a point and only needed an old lady’s bonnet to fit her out for attending a wake in some wealthy home.
“You are a woman now, my daughter, and you must learn to care for such things.” Madame Lévesque spoke in an offhand manner, inflating her voice as she uttered the most sonorous words in her vocabulary. She had been saving them up for ten years for this brilliant offspring of hers who had been graduated from a fashionable convent school. “Your girlfriends, my daughter,” she went on, “must be left to lead their own lives. If you only realized how different things are from your dreams.”
“But really, Mama, this place —?”
“You’ll come to love it, you’ll see. You will be queen here! Take your father’s case. When I first knew him he had his little aristocratic tastes. But he was a businessman. And with a few dollars, he is the leading citizen here, while at Saint-Dominique —”
“Darling Papa! I love him. Does he absolutely insist on my singing tonight?”
“Indeed he does! Monsieur le Député will be there, and Eugénie will be eaten up with jealousy. What a triumph for you. Don’t refuse, Lise.”
“Let’s do something!” said Colin, who was worried at not being able to find a hiding place.
“Break down the door!” suggested Jacques Langevin.
They hurled themselves against the solid wooden panel, but only succeeded in making a lot of noise. The sweat on their foreheads was cold, for the police were already in the garden next door.
“That must be the milkman, who wants to get into the yard,” said Madame Lévesque. “Go open the gate for him, will you, Lise?”
As the girl came out of the house she was still immersed in thinking of her new life, of the roseate dreams that she had cherished for so long and that now were clouded over with a dark uncertainty. It was, accordingly, with something of a shock that she encountered the defiant group on the other side of the gate. She was surprised at finding herself face to face with the Langevin twins, each of whom was short and ruddy with a mop of red hair. She let her eyes roam over Jean, a strapping youth with blue eyes, a nut-brown complexion, and a burnished forehead fringed with unruly curls. The habits of the convent were strong within her, and at the sight of strangers of the opposite sex she had for a moment the illusory impression of chaste precincts being violated. Blushing deeply, she dropped her gaze, too frightened for words.
“The police are after us,” Robert explained. He was flustered by Lise’s beauty.
She glanced up at them timidly. Jean Colin appeared to be paralyzed by her presence. All he could see was that mouth of hers; the future hung on what she was about to say. When she spoke, it was as if in a dream.
“Ah! So the police are after you?” She thought of the nobility of Old France, of those atrocious sans-culottes who had pursued the holy priests and the good bourgeois, so pale and haggard-looking. As a result of her reading she had some while since come to conceive of life as a possible repetition of all those chivalrous events with which the romances were so filled.
“Quick!” she murmured mysteriously, as she opened the gate leading into the rue Colomb. She put them into the garage, and they were no sooner hidden than the breathless, impatient voices of their pursuers were heard.
“You haven’t seen any young hoodlums down this way, have you, Mademoiselle?”
The marauders held their breath, Jean Colin being unaware that his right hand was resting in a puddle of oil upon the workbench.
In reply the girl mechanically stammered out a sentence or two that she had not had time to master. “Why, yes, I have! They ran through the gate there. I was afraid, so I locked it!”
“Damn it!” bellowed one of the gendarmes. “We’ve let them get away again!”
“They’re going,” whispered Jean. Nervously he ran his oil-stained hand over his damp brow; it left dark streaks behind it. There was a silence, and then the door opened part way.
“They have gone,” panted Lise. She was pale but enthusiastic.
The twins came out, lowering their heads as if to hide them. Jean was the last to appear. Lise had a smile as she caught sight of his grimy forehead, and he blushed, delighted to see that he was not wholly displeasing to her.
She wore a simple, green-dotted white dress, slightly open at the neck, which seemed to set off her youthfulness and enhance the charm of a convent-bred modesty that was at once hesitant and eager in the presence of unlooked-for discoveries. The airy brightness of her new gown was in unforgettable and joyous contrast to her black schoolgirl uniform, solemn as a cemetery, as unrelieved and unexciting as a desert; and if she so frequently dropped her long lashes, as if to imitate Lamartine’s heroines or Louis Veuillot’s young ladies, it was rather to cast a stolen glance at the folds of her dress or the crescent-shaped fastening of her bodice. Like a youth from a poor family who is sporting a new necktie, she was conscious of her graceful, supple throat. In the convent she had kept it as jealously hidden as one would a love letter, but now she was both pleased and astonished to find it thus freely-exposed to the sun. In the presence of Jean, Lise was no longer laughing. Her lips, unskilled at feigning indifference, appeared to be pouting. Was it because she had furnished shelter to outlaws, or was she thinking merely of the brown curl with which she caressed her chin?
“How nice you look!” Jean’s smile was an embarrassed one. When she did not answer, he went on in a timid voice, his head held awkwardly to one side. “We’re not really thieves, you know.” At this point a lump ran down the leg of his trousers and a big apple, barely ripe, rolled over his toes and across the courtyard pavement. He dared not pick it up for fear of seeming too concerned.
“Just see what fine ones they are! It’s the season. If the police would only leave us alone. Will you have some?” Thrusting a nervous hand into the opening of his white shirt on which mud had formed little splotches and arabesques, he selected the choicest specimen and looked about for some place to wipe it but found none. “Go ahead and eat it.”
The Langevin brothers, a bewildered look on their faces, had come back, and now made the same offer with trembling hands. Smiling, she took the fruit,