Ramuntcho | Page 2

the curlews, their rusty-pulley cries, on the rivers beneath. But Ramuntcho was singing one of those plaintive songs of the olden time, which are still transmitted in the depths of the distant lands, and his naive voice went through the mist or the rain, among the wet branches of the oaks, under the grand shroud, more and more sombre, of isolation, of autumn and of night.
He stopped for an instant, pensive, to see a cart drawn by oxen pass at a great distance above him. The cowboy who drove the slow team sang also; through a bad and rocky path, they descended into a ravine bathed in shadows already nocturnal.
And soon they disappeared in a turn of the path, masked suddenly by trees, as if they had vanished in an abyss. Then Ramuntcho felt the grasp of an unexpected melancholy, unexplained like most of his complex impressions, and, with an habitual gesture, while he resumed his less alert march, he brought down like a visor on his gray eyes, very sharp and very soft, the crown of his woolen Basque cap.
Why?--What had to do with him this cart, this singing cowboy whom he did not even know? Evidently nothing--and yet, for having seen them disappear into a lodging, as they did doubtless every night, into some farm isolated in a lowland, a more exact realization had come to him of the humble life of the peasant, attached to the soil and to the native field, of those human lives as destitute of joy as beasts of burden, but with declines more prolonged and more lamentable. And, at the same time, through his mind had passed the intuitive anxiety for other places, for the thousand other things that one may see or do in this world and which one may enjoy; a chaos of troubling half thoughts, of atavic reminiscences and of phantoms had furtively marked themselves in the depths of his savage child's mind--
For Ramuntcho was a mixture of two races very different and of two beings separated, if one may say it, by an abyss of several generations. Created by the sad fantasy of one of the refined personages of our dazzled epoch, he had been inscribed at his birth as the "son of an unknown father" and he bore no other name than that of his mother. So, he did not feel that he was quite similar to his companions in games and healthy fatigues.
Silent for a moment, he walked less quickly toward his house, on the deserted paths winding on the heights. In him, the chaos of other things, of the luminous "other places", of the splendors or of the terrors foreign to his own life, agitated itself confusedly, trying to disentangle itself--But no, all this, being indistinct and incomprehensible, remained formless in the darkness
At last, thinking no more of it, he began to sing his song again. The song told, in monotonous couplets, the complaint of a linen weaver whose lover in a distant war prolonged his absence. It was written in that mysterious Euskarian language, the age of which seems incalculable and the origin of which remains unknown. And little by little, under the influence of the ancient melody, of the wind and of the solitude, Ramuntcho found himself as he was at the beginning of his walk, a simple Basque mountaineer, sixteen or seventeen years old, formed like a man, but retaining the ignorance and the candor of a little boy.
Soon he perceived Etchezar, his parish, its belfry massive as the dungeon of a fortress; near the church, some houses were grouped; others, more numerous, had preferred to be disseminated in the surroundings, among trees, in ravines or on bluffs. The night fell entirely, hastily that evening, because of the sombre veils hooked to the great summits.
Around this village, above or in the valleys, the Basque country appeared, at that moment, like a confusion of gigantic, obscure masses. Long mists disarranged the perspectives; all the distances, all the depths had become inappreciable, the changing mountains seemed to have grown taller in the nebulous phantasmagoria of night. The hour, one knew not why, became strangely solemn, as if the shade of past centuries was to come out of the soil. On the vast lifting-up which is called the Pyrenees, one felt something soaring which was, perhaps, the finishing mind of that race, the fragments of which have been preserved and to which Ramuntcho belonged by his mother--
And the child, composed of two essences so diverse, who was walking alone toward his dwelling, through the night and the rain, began again in the depth of his double being to feel the anxiety of inexplicable reminiscences.
At last he arrived in front of his house,--which was very elevated, in the Basque fashion, with old wooden balconies under narrow