Fancies and Goodnights

WITCHS MONEY

Foiral had taken a load of cork up to the high road, where he met the motor truck from Perpignan. He was on his way back to the village, walking harmlessly beside his mule, and thinking of nothing at all, when he was passed by a striding madman, half naked, and of a type never seen before in this district of the Pyrénées-Orientales.

He was not of the idiot sort, with the big head, like two or three of them down in the village. Nor was he a lean, raving creature, like Barilles' old father after the house burned down. Nor had he a little, tiny, shrunken-up, chattering head, like the younger Lloubes. He was a new sort altogether.

Foiral decided he was a kind of bursting madman, all blare and racket, as bad as the sun. His red flesh burst out of his little bits of coloured clothes; red arms, red knees, red neck, and a great round red face bursting with smiles, words, laughter.

Foiral overtook him at the top of the ridge. He was staring down into the valley like a man thunderstruck.

«My God!» he said to Foiral. «Just look at it!» Foiral looked at it. There was nothing wrong.

«Here have I,» said the mad Jack, «been walking up and down these goddam Pyrénées for weeks — meadows, birch trees, pine trees, waterfalls — green as a dish of haricots verts! And here's what I've been looking for all the time. Why did no one tell me?»

There's a damned question to answer! However, madmen answer themselves. Foiral thumped his mule and started off down the track, but the mad fellow fell in step beside him.

«What is it, for God's sake?» said he. «A bit of Spain strayed over the frontier, or what? Might be a crater in the moon. No water, I suppose? God, look at that ring of red hills! Look at that pink and yellow land! Are those villages down there? Or the bones of some creatures that have died?»

«I like it,» he said. «I like the way the fig trees burst out of the rock. I like the way the seeds are bursting out of the figs. Ever heard of surrealism? This is surrealism come to life. What are those? Cork forests? They look like petrified ogres. Excellent ogres, who bleed when these impudent mortals flay you, with my little brush, on my little piece of canvas, I shall restore to you an important part of your life!»

Foiral, by no means devout, took the sensible precaution of crossing himself. The fellow went on and on, all the way down, two or three kilometres, Foiral answering with a «yes,» a «no,» and a grunt. «This is my country!» cried the lunatic. «It's made for me. Glad I didn't go to Morocco! Is this your village? Wonderful! Look at those houses — three, four stories. Why do they look as if they'd been piled up by cave-dwellers, cave-dwellers who couldn't find a cliff? Or are they caves from which the cliff has crumbled away, leaving them uneasy in the sunlight, huddling together? Why don't you have any windows? I like that yellow belfry. Sort of Spanish. I like the way the bell hangs in that iron cage. Black as your hat. Dead. Maybe that's why it's so quiet here. Dead noise, gibbeted against the blue! Ha! Ha! You're not amused, eh? You don't care for surrealism? So much the worse, my friend, because you're the stuff that sort of dream is made of. I like the black clothes all you people wear. Spanish touch again, I suppose? It makes you look like holes in the light.»

«Goodbye,» said Foiral.

«Wait a minute,» said the stranger. «Where can I put up in this village? Is there an inn?»

«No,» said Foiral, turning into his yard.

«Hell!» said the stranger. «I suppose someone has a room I can sleep in?»

«No,» said Foiral.

That set the fellow back a bit. «Well,» said he at last, «I'll have to look around, anyway.»

So he went up the street. Foiral saw him talking to Madame Arago, and she was shaking her head. Then he saw him trying it on at the baker's, and the baker shook his head as well. However, he bought a loaf there, and some cheese and wine from Barilles. He sat down on the bench outside and ate it; then he went pottering off up the slope.

Foiral thought he'd keep an eye on him, so he followed to the top of the village, where he could see all over the hillside. The fellow was just mooning about; he picked up nothing, he did nothing. Then he began to drift over to the little farm-house, where the well is, a few hundred yards above the rest of the houses.

This happened to be Foiral's property, through his wife: a good place, if they'd had a son to live in it. Seeing the stranger edging that way, Foiral followed, not too fast, you understand, and not too slow either. Sure enough, when he got there, there was the fellow peering through the chinks in the shutters, even trying the door. He might have been up to anything.

He looked round as Foiral came up. «Nobody lives here?» he said.

«No,» said Foiral.

«Who does it belong to?» said the stranger.

Foiral hardly knew what to say. In the end he had to admit it was his.

«Will you rent it to me?» said the stranger.

«What's that?» said Foiral.

«I want the house for six months,» said the stranger.

«What for?» said Foiral.

«Damn it!» said the stranger. «To live in.»

«Why?» said Foiral.

The stranger holds up his hand. He picks hold of the thumb. He says, very slowly, «I am an artist, a painter.»

«Yes,» says Foiral.

Then the stranger lays hold of his forefinger. «I can work here. I like it. I like the view. I like those two ilex trees.»

«Very good,» says Foiral.

Then the stranger takes hold of his middle finger. «I want to stay here six months.»

«Yes,» says Foiral.

Then the stranger takes hold of his third finger. «In this house. Which, I may say, on this yellow ground, looks interestingly like a die on a desert. Or does it look like a skull?»

«Ah!» says Foiral.

Then the stranger takes hold of his little finger, and he says, «How much — do you want — to let me — live and work — in this house — for six months?»

«Why?» says Foiral.

At this the stranger began to stamp up and down. They had quite an argument. Foiral clinched the matter by saying that people didn't rent houses in that part of the world; everyone had his own.

«It is necessary,» said the stranger, grinding his teeth, «for me to paint pictures here.»

«So much the worse,» said Foiral.

The stranger uttered a number of cries in some foreign gibberish, possibly that of hell itself. «I see your soul,» said he, «as a small and exceedingly sterile black marble, on a waste of burning white alkali.»

Foiral, holding his two middle fingers under his thumb, extended the first and fourth in the direction of the stranger, careless of whether he gave offence.

«What will you take for the shack?» said the stranger. «Maybe I'll buy it.»

It was quite a relief to Foiral to find that after all he was just a plain, simple, ordinary lunatic. Without a proper pair of pants to his backside, he was offering to buy this excellent sound house, for which Foiral would have asked twenty thousand francs, had there been anyone of whom to ask it.

«Come on,» said the stranger. «How much?»

Foiral, thinking he had wasted enough time, and not objecting to an agreeable sensation, said, «Forty thousand.»

Said the stranger, «I'll give you thirty-five.»

Foiral laughed heartily.

«That's a good laugh,» said the stranger. «I should like to paint a laugh like that. I should express it by a mélange of the roots of recently extracted teeth. Well, what about it? Thirty-five? I can pay you a deposit right now.» And, pulling out a wallet, this Croesus among madmen rustled one, two, three, four, five thousand-franc notes under Foiral's nose.

«It'll leave me dead broke,» he said. «Still, I expect I can sell it again?»

«If God wills, »said Foiral.

«Anyway, I could come here now and then,» said the other. «My God! I can paint a showful of pictures here in six months. New York'll go crazy. Then I'll come back here and paint another show.»

Foiral, ravished with joy, ceased attempting to understand. He began to praise his house furiously: he dragged the man inside, showed him the oven, banged the walls, made him look up the chimney, into the shed, down the well —«All right. All right,» said the stranger. «That's grand. Everything's grand. Whitewash the walls. Find me some woman to come and clean and cook. I'll go back to Perpignan and turn up in a week with my things. Listen, I want that table chucked in, two or three of the chairs, and the bedstead. I'll get the rest. Here's your deposit.»

«No, no,» said Foiral. «Everything must be done properly, before witnesses. Then, when the lawyer comes, he can make out the papers. Come back with me. I'll call Arago, he's a very honest man. Guis, very honest. Vigné, honest as the good earth. And a bottle of old wine. I have it. It shall cost nothing.»

«Fine!» said the blessed madman, sent by God.

Back they went. In came Arago, Guis, Vigné, all as honest as the day. The deposit was paid, the wine was opened, the stranger called for more, others crowded in; those who were not allowed in stood outside to listen to the laughter. You'd have thought there was a wedding going on, or some wickedness in the house. In fact, Foiral's old woman went and stood in the doorway every now and then, just to let people see her.

There was no doubt about it, there was something very magnificent about this madman. Next day, after he had gone, they talked him over thoroughly. «To listen,» said little Guis, «is to be drunk without spending a penny. You think you understand; you seem to fly through the air; you have to burst out laughing.»

«I somehow had the delectable impression that I was rich,» said Arago. «Not, I mean, with something in the chimney, but as if I — well, as if I were to spend it. And more.»

«I like him,» said little Guis. «He is my friend.»

«Now you speak like a fool,» said Foiral. «He is mad. And it is I who deal with him.»

«I thought maybe he was not so mad when he said the house was like an old skull looking out of the ground,» said Guis, looking sideways, as well he might.

«Nor a liar, perhaps?» said Foiral. «Let me tell you, he said also it was like a die on a desert. Can it be both?»

«He said in one breath,» said Arago, «that he came from Paris. In the next, that he was an American.»

«Oh, yes. Unquestionably a great liar,» said Ques. «Perhaps one of the biggest rogues in the whole world, going up and down. But, fortunately, mad as well.»

«So he buys a house,» said Lafago. «If he had his wits about him, a liar of that size, he'd take it — like that. As it is, he buys it. Thirty-five thousand francs!»

«Madness turns a great man inside out, like a sack,» said Arago. «And if he is rich as well —»

« — money flies in all directions,» said Guis.

Nothing could be more satisfactory. They waited impatiently for the stranger's return. Foiral whitewashed the house, cleaned the chimneys, put everything to rights. You may be sure he had a good search for anything that his wife's old man might have left hidden there years ago, and which this fellow might have heard of. They say they're up to anything in Paris.

The stranger came back, and they were all day with the mules getting his stuff from where the motor truck had left it. By the evening they were in the house, witnesses, helpers, and all — there was just the little matter of paying up the money.

Foiral indicated this with the greatest delicacy in the world. The stranger, all smiles and readiness, went into the room where his bags were piled up, and soon emerged with a sort of book in his hand, full of little billets, like those they try to sell for the lottery in Perpignan. He tore off the top one. «Here you are,» he said to Foiral, holding it out. «Thirty thousand francs.»

«No,»said Foiral.

«What the hell now?» asked the stranger.

«I've seen that sort of thing,» said Foiral. «And not for thirty thousand francs, my friend, but for three million. And afterwards — they tell you it hasn't won. I should prefer the money.»

«This is the money,» said the stranger. «It's as good as money anyway. Present this, and you'll get thirty thousand-franc notes, just like those I gave you.»

Foiral was rather at a loss. It's quite usual in these parts to settle a sale at the end of a month. Certainly he wanted to run no risk of crabbing the deal. So he pocketed the piece of paper, gave the fellow good-day, and went off with the rest of them to the village.

The stranger settled in. Soon he got to know everybody. Foiral, a little uneasy, cross-examined him whenever they talked. It appeared, after all, that he did come from Paris, having lived there, and he was an American, having been born there. «Then you have no relations in this part of the world?» said Foiral.

«No relations at all.»

Well! Well! Well! Foiral hoped the money was all right. Yet there was more in it than that. No relations! It was quite a thought. Foiral put it away at the back of his mind: he meant to extract the juice from it some night when he couldn't sleep.

At the end of the month, he took out his piece of paper, and marched up to the house again. There was the fellow, three parts naked, sitting under one of the ilex trees, painting away on a bit of canvas. And what do you think he had chosen to paint? Roustand's mangy olives, that haven't borne a crop in living memory!

«What is it?» said the mad fellow. «I'm busy.»

«This,» said Foiral, holding out the bit of paper. «I need the money.»

«Then why, in the name of the devil,» said the other, «don't you go and get the money, instead of coming here bothering me?»

Foiral had never seen him in this sort of mood before. But a lot of these laughers stop laughing when it comes to hard cash. «Look here,» said Foiral. «This is a very serious matter.»

«Look here,» said the stranger. «That's what's called a cheque. I give it to you. You take it to a bank. The bank gives you the money.»

«Which bank?» said Foiral.

«Your bank. Any bank. The bank in Perpignan,» said the stranger. «You go there. They'll do it for you.»

Foiral, still hankering after the cash, pointed out that he was a very poor man, and it took a whole day to get to Perpignan, a considerable thing to such an extremely poor man as he was.

«Listen,» said the stranger. «You know goddamn well you've made a good thing out of this sale. Let me get on with my work. Take the cheque to Perpignan. It's worth the trouble. I've paid you plenty.»

Foiral knew then that Guis had been talking about the price of the house. «All right, my little Guis, I'll think that over some long evening when the rains begin.» However, there was nothing for it, he had to put on his best black, take the mule to Estagel, and there get the bus, and the bus took him to Perpignan.

In Perpignan they are like so many monkeys. They push you, look you up and down, snigger in your face. If a man has business — with a bank, let us say — and he stands on the pavement opposite to have a good look at it, he gets elbowed into the roadway half a dozen times in five minutes, and he's lucky if he escapes with his life.

Nevertheless, Foiral got into the bank at last. As a spectacle it was tremendous. Brass rails, polished wood, a clock big enough for a church, little cotton-backs sitting among heaps of money like mice in a cheese.

He stood at the back for about half an hour, waiting, and no one took any notice of him at all. In the end one of the little cotton-backs beckoned him up to the brass railing. Foiral delved in his pocket, and produced the cheque. The cotton-back looked at it as if it were a mere nothing. «Holy Virgin!» thought Foiral.

«I want the money for it,» said he.

«Are you a client of the bank?»

«No.»

«Do you wish to be?»

«Shall I get the money?»

«But naturally. Sign this. Sign this. Sign on the back of the cheque. Take this. Sign this. Thank you. Good-day.»

«But the thirty thousand francs?» cried Foiral.

«For that, my dear sir, we must wait till the cheque is cleared. Come back in about a week.»

Foiral, half dazed, went home. It was a bad week. By day he felt reasonably sure of the cash, but at night, as soon as he closed his eyes, he could see himself going into that bank, and all the cotton-backs swearing they'd never seen him before. Still, he got through it, and as soon as the time was up, presented himself at the bank again.

«Do you want a cheque-book?»

«No. Just the money. The money.»

«All of it? You want to close the account? Well! Well! Sign here. Sign here.»

Foiral signed.

«There you are. Twenty-nine thousand eight hundred and ninety.»

«But, sir, it was thirty thousand.»

«But, my dear sir, the charges.»

Foiral found it was no good arguing. He went off with his money. That was good. But the other hundred and ten! That sticks in a man's throat.

As soon as he got home, Foiral interviewed the stranger. «I am a poor man,» said he.

«So am I,» said the stranger. «A damned sight too poor to pay you extra because you can't get a cheque cashed in a civilized way.»

This was a peculiarly villainous lie. Foiral had, with his own eyes, seen a whole block of these extraordinary thirty-thousand-franc billets in the little book from which the stranger had torn this one. But once more there was nothing to be done about it; a plain honest man is always being baffled and defeated. Foiral went home, and put his crippled twenty-nine thousand-odd into the little box behind the stone chimney. How different, if it had been a round thirty thousand! What barbarous injustice!

Here was something to think about in the evenings. Foiral thought about it a lot. In the end he decided it was impossible to act alone, and called in Arago, Quès, Lafago, Vigné, Barilles. Not Guis. It was Guis who had told the fellow he had paid too much for the house, and put his back up. Let Guis stay out of it.

To the rest he explained everything very forcefully. «Not a relation in the whole countryside. And in that book, my dear friends — you have seen it yourselves — ten, twelve, fifteen, maybe twenty of these extraordinary little billets.»

«And if somebody comes after him? Somebody from America?»

«He has gone off, walking, mad, just as he came here. Anything can happen to a madman, walking about, scattering money.»

«It's true. Anything can happen.»

«But it should happen before the lawyer comes.»

«That's true. So far even the cure hasn't seen him.»

«There must be justice, my good friends, society cannot exist without it. A man, an honest man, is not to be robbed of a hundred and ten francs.»

«No, that is intolerable.»

The next night, these very honest men left their houses, those houses whose tall uprights of white plaster and black shadow appear, in moonlight even more than in sunlight, like a heap of bleached ribs lying in the desert. Without much conversation they made their way up the hill and knocked upon the stranger's door.

After a brief interval they returned, still without much conversation, and slipped one by one into their extremely dark doorways, and that was all.

For a whole week there was no perceptible change in the village. If anything, its darks and silences, those holes in the fierce light, were deeper. In every black interior sat a man who had two of these excellent billets, each of which commanded thirty thousand francs. Such a possession brightens the eyes, and enhances the savour of solitude, enabling a man, as the artist would have said, to partake of the nature of Fabre's tarantula, motionless at the angle of her tunnel. But they found it no longer easy to remember the artist. His jabbering, his laughter, even his final yelp, left no echo at all. It was all gone, like the rattle and flash of yesterday's thunderstorm.

So apart from the tasks of the morning and the evening, performing which they were camouflaged by habit, they sat in their houses alone. Their wives scarcely dared to speak to them, and they were too rich to speak to each other. Guis found it out, for it was no secret except to the world outside, and Guis was furious. But his wife rated him from morning till night, and left him no energy for reproaching his neighbours.

At the end of the week, Barilles sprang into existence in the doorway of his house. His thumbs were stuck in his belt, his face was flushed from lead colour to plum colour, his bearing expressed an irritable resolution.

He crossed to Arago's, knocked, leaned against a doorpost. Arago, emerging, leaned against the other. They talked for some little time of nothing at all. Then Barilles, throwing away the stump of his cigarette, made an oblique and sympathetic reference to a certain small enclosure belonging to Arago, on which there was a shed, a few vines, a considerable grove of olives. «It is the very devil,» said Barilles, «how the worm gets into the olive in these days. Such a grove as that, at one time, might have been worth something.»

«It is worse than the devil,» said Arago. «Believe me or not, my dear friend, in some years I get no more than three thousand francs from that grove.»

Barilles burst into what passes for laughter in this part of the world. «Forgive me!» he said. «I thought you said three thousand. Three hundred — yes. I suppose in a good year you might make that very easily.»

This conversation continued through phases of civility, sarcasm, rage, fury and desperation until it ended with a cordial handshake, and a sale of the enclosure to Barilles for twenty-five thousand francs. The witnesses were called in; Barilles handed over one of his billets, and received five thousand in cash from the box Arago kept in his chimney. Everyone was delighted by the sale: it was felt that things were beginning to move in the village.

They were. Before the company separated, pourparlers were already started for the sale of Vigné's mules to Quès for eight thousand, the transfer of Lloubes' cork concession to Foiral for fifteen thousand, the marriage of Roustand's daughter to Vine's brother with a dowry of twenty thousand, and the sale of a miscellaneous collection of brass objects belonging to Madame Arago for sixty-five francs, after some very keen bargaining.

Only Guis was left out in the cold, but on the way home, Lloubes, with his skin full of wine, ventured to step inside the outcast's doorway, and looked his wife Filomena up and down, from top to toe, three times. A mild interest, imperfectly concealed, softened the bitter and sullen expression upon the face of Guis.

This was a mere beginning. Soon properties began to change hands at a bewildering rate and at increasing prices. It was a positive boom. Change was constantly being dug out from under flagstones, from the strawy interiors of mattresses, from hollows in beams, and holes in walls. With the release of these frozen credits the village blossomed like an orchid sprung from a dry stick. Wine flowed with every bargain. Old enemies shook hands. Elderly spinsters embraced young suitors. Wealthy widowers married young brides. Several of the weaker sort wore their best black every day. One of these was Lloubes, who spent his evenings in the house of Guis. Guis in the evenings would wander round the village, no longer sullen, and was seen cheapening a set of harness at Lafago's, a first-rate gun at Roustand's. There was talk of something very special by way of fiesta after the grape harvest, but this was only whispered, lest the curé should hear of it on one of his visits.

Foiral, keeping up his reputation as leader, made a staggering proposal. It was nothing less than to improve the mule track all the way from the metalled road on the rim of the hills, so that motor trucks could visit the village. It was objected that the wage bill would be enormous. «Yes,» said Foiral, «but we shall draw the wages ourselves. We shall get half as much again for our produce.»

The proposal was adopted. The mere boys of the village now shared the prosperity. Barilles now called his little shop «Grand Café Glacier de l'Univers et des Pyrénées.» The widow Loyau offered room, board, and clothing to certain unattached young women, and gave select parties in the evenings.

Barilles went to Perpignan and returned with a sprayer that would double the yield of his new olive grove. Lloubes went and returned with a positive bale of ladies' underclothing, designed, you would say, by the very devil himself. Two or three keen card players went and returned with new packs of cards, so lustrous that your hand seemed to be all aces and kings. Vigné went, and returned with a long face.

The bargaining, increasing all the time, called for more and more ready money. Foiral made a new proposal. «We will all go to Perpignan, the whole damned lot of us, march to the bank, thump down our billets, and show the little cotton-backs whom the money belongs to. Boys, we'll leave them without a franc.»

«They will have the hundred and ten,» said Quès.

«To hell with the hundred and ten!» said Foiral. «And, boys, after that — well — ha! ha! all men sin once. They say the smell alone of one of those creatures is worth fifty francs. Intoxicating! Stair carpets, red hair, every sort of wickedness! Tomorrow!»

«Tomorrow!» they all cried, and on the morrow they went off, in their stiffest clothes, their faces shining. Every man was smoking like a chimney, and every man had washed his feet.

The journey was tremendous. They stopped the bus at every café on the road, and saw nothing they didn't ask the price of. In Perpignan they kept together in a close phalanx; if the townspeople stared, our friends stared back twice as hard. As they crossed over to the bank, «Where is Guis?» said Foiral, affecting to look for him among their number. «Has he nothing due to him?» That set them all laughing. Try as they might, they couldn't hold their faces straight. They were all choking with laughter when the swing doors closed behind them.