Bébée; Or, Two Little Wooden Shoes

There was a derisive laughter; some one bade her with an oath begone; rough shoulders jostled her away. She stretched her arms out piteously.

"Take me—oh, pray take me! I will go with the sheep, with the cattle—only, only take me!"

But in the rush and roar none heeded her; some thief snatched the silver buckles from her hand, and made off with them and was lost in the throng; a great iron beast rushed by her, snorting flame and bellowing smoke; there was a roll like thunder, and all was dark; the night express had passed on its way to Paris.

Bébée stood still, crushed for a moment with the noise and the cruelty and the sense of absolute desolation; she scarcely noticed that the buckles had been stolen; she had only one thought—to get to Paris.

"Can I never go without money?" she asked at the wicket; the man there glanced a moment, with a touch of pity, at the little wistful face.

"The least is twenty francs—surely you must know that?" he said, and shut his grating with a clang.

Bébée turned away and went out of the great cruel, tumultuous place; her heart ached and her brain was giddy, but the sturdy courage of her nature rose to need.

"There is no way at all to go without money to Paris, I suppose?" she asked of an old woman whom she knew a little, who sold nuts and little pictures of saints and wooden playthings under the trees, in the avenue hard by.

The old woman shook her head.

"Eh?—no, dear. There is nothing to be done anywhere in the world without money. Look, I cannot get a litre of nuts to sell unless I pay beforehand."

"Would it be far to walk?"

"Far! Holy Jesus! It is right away in the heart of France—over two hundred miles, they say; straight out through the forest. Not but what my son did walk it once;—and he a shoemaker, who knows what walking costs; and he is well-to-do there now—not that he ever writes. When they want nothing people never write."

"And he walked into Paris?"

"Yes, ten years ago. He had nothing but a few sous and an ash stick, and he had a fancy to try his luck there. And after all our feet were given us to travel with. If you go there and you see him, tell him to send me something—I am tired of selling nuts."

Bébée said nothing, but went on her road; since there was no other way but to walk, she would take that way; the distance and the hardship did not appall two little feet that were used to traverse so many miles of sun-baked summer dust and of frozen winter mud unblenchingly year after year.

The time it would take made her heart sink indeed. He was ill. God knew what might happen. But neither the length of leagues nor the fatigue of body daunted her. She only saw his eyes dim with pain and his lips burned with fever.

She would walk twenty miles a day, and then, perhaps, she might get lifts here and there on hay wagons or in pedlers' carts; people had always used to be kind to her. Anyhow she counted she might reach Paris well in fifteen days.

She sat under a shrine in a by street a moment, and counted the copper pieces she had on her; they were few, and the poor pretty buckles that she might have sold to get money were stolen.

She had some twenty sous and a dozen eggs; she thought she might live on that; she had wanted to take the eggs to him, but after all, to keep life in her until she could reach Paris was the one great thing.

"What a blessing it is to have been born poor; and to have lived hardly—one wants so little!" she thought to herself.

Then she put up the sous in the linen bosom of her gown, and trimmed her little lantern and knelt down in the quiet darkness and prayed a moment, with the hot agonized tears rolling down her face, and then rose and stepped out bravely in the cool of the night, on the great southwest road towards Paris.

The thought never once crossed her to turn back, and go again into the shelter of her own little hut among the flowers. He was sick there, dying, for anything she knew; that was the only thing she remembered.

It was a clear, starlit night, and everywhere the fragrance of the spring was borne in from the wide green plains, and the streams where the rushes were blowing.

She walked ten miles easily, the beautiful gray shadow all about her. She had never been so far from home in all her life, except to that one Kermesse at Mechlin. But she was not afraid.

With the movement, and the air, and the sense that she was going to him, which made her happy even in her misery, something of the old, sweet, lost fancies came to her.

She smiled at the stars through her tears, and as the poplars swayed and murmured in the wind, they looked to her like the wings and the swords of a host of angels.

Her way lay out through the forest, and in that sweet green woodland she was not afraid—no more afraid than the fawns were.

At Boitsfort she shrank a little, indeed. Here there were the open-air restaurants, and the café gardens all alight for the pleasure-seekers from the city; here there were music and laughter, and horses with brass bells, and bright colors on high in the wooden balconies, and below among the blossoming hawthorn hedges. She had to go through it all, and she shuddered a little as she ran, thinking of that one priceless, deathless forest day when he had kissed her first.

But the pleasure-people were all busied with their mirth and mischief, and took no notice of the little gray figure in the starry night. She went on along the grassy roads, under the high arching trees, with the hoot of the owls and the cry of the rabbits on the stillness.

At Groenendael, in the heart of the forest midnight was striking as she entered the village. Every one was asleep. The lights were all out The old ruined priory frowned dark under the clouds.

She shivered a little again, and began to feel chill and tired, yet did not dare to knock at any one of the closed house doors—she had no money.

So she walked on her first ten unknown miles, meeting a few people only, and being altogether unmolested—a small gray figure, trotting in two little wooden shoes.

They thought her a peasant going to a fair or a lace mill, and no one did her more harm than to wish her good night in rough Flemish.

When the dawn began to whiten above the plains of the east, she saw an empty cow-shed filled with hay; she was a little tired, and lay down and rested an hour or two, as a young lamb might have lain on the dried clover, for she knew that she must keep her strength and husband her power, or never reach across the dreary length of the foreign land to Paris.

But by full sunrise she was on her way again, bathing her face in a brook and buying a sou's worth of bread and flet-milk at the first cottage that she passed in bright, leaf-bowered Hoey-laert.

The forest was still all around her, with its exquisite life of bough and blossom, and murmur of insect and of bird. She told her beads, praying as she went, and was almost happy.

God would not let him die. Oh, no, not till she had kissed him once more, and could die with him.

The hares ran across the path, and the blue butterflies flew above-head. There was purple gloom of pine wood, and sparkling verdure of aspen and elm. There were distant church carillons ringing, and straight golden shafts of sunshine streaming.

She was quite sure God would not let him die.

She hoped that he might be very poor. At times he had talked as if he were, and then she might be of so much use. She knew how to deal with fever and suffering. She had sat up many a night with the children of the village. The gray sisters had taught her many of their ways of battling with disease; and she could make fresh cool drinks, and she could brew beautiful remedies from simple herbs. There was so much that she might do; her fancy played with it almost happily. And then, only to touch his hand, only to hear his voice; her heart rose at the thought, as a lark to its morning song.

At Rixensart, buried in its greenery, as she went through it in morning light, some peasants greeted her cheerily, and called to her to rest in a house porch, and gave her honey and bread. She could not eat much; her tongue was parched and her throat was dry, but the kindness was precious to her, and she went on her road the stronger for it.

"It is a long way to walk to Paris," said the woman, with some curious wonder. Bébée smiled, though her eyes grew wet.

"She has the look of the little Gesù," said the Rixensart people; and they watched her away with a vague timid pity.

So she went on through Ottignies and La Roche to Villers, and left the great woods and the city chimes behind her, and came through the green abbey valleys through Tilly and Ligny, and Fleurus, and so into the coal and iron fields that lie round Charleroi.

Here her heart grew sick, and her courage sank under the noise and the haste, before the blackness and the hideousness. She had never seen anything like it. She thought it was hell, with the naked, swearing, fighting people, and the red fires leaping night and day. Nevertheless, if hell it were, since it lay betwixt her and him, she found force to brave and cross it.

The miners and glass-blowers and nail-makers, rough and fierce and hard, frightened her. The women did not look like women, and the children ran and yelled at her, and set their dogs upon her. The soil was thick with dust like soot, and the trees were seared and brown. There was no peace in the place, and no loveliness. Eighty thousand folks toiled together in the hopeless Tophet, and swarmed, and struggled, and labored, and multiplied, in joyless and endless wrestling against hunger and death.

She got through it somehow, hiding often from the ferocious youngsters, and going sleepless rather than lie in those dens of filth; but she seemed so many, many years older when Charleroi lay at last behind her,—so many, many years older than when she had sat and spun in the garden at home.

When she was once in the valley of the Sambre she was more herself again, only she felt weaker than she had ever done, because she only dared to spend one of her sous each day, and one sou got so little food.

In the woods and fields about Alne she began to breathe again, like a bird loosed to the air after being shut in a wooden trap. Green corn, green boughs, green turf, mellow chimes of church bells, humming of golden bees, cradle songs of women spinning, homely odors of little herb gardens and of orchard trees under cottage walls,—these had been around her all her life; she only breathed freely among them.

She often felt tired, and her wooden shoes were wearing so thin that the hot dust of the road at noonday burnt her feet through them. Sometimes, too, she felt a curious brief faintness, such as she had never known, for the lack of food and the long fatigue began to tell even on her hardy little body.