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The Path of Life

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THE PATH OF LIFE

by

STIJN STREUVELS


Translated From The West-Flemish By

ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS

* * * * *

TRANSLATOR's NOTE

In introducing this new writer to the English-speaking public, I may be
permitted to give a few particulars of himself and his life. Stijn
Streuvels is accepted not only in Belgium, but also in Holland as the
most distinguished Low-Dutch author of our time: his vogue, in fact, is
even greater in the North Netherlands than in the southern kingdom. And I
will go further and say that I know no greater living writer of
imaginative prose in any land or any language. His medium is the
West-Flemish dialect, which is spoken by perhaps a million people
inhabiting the stretch of country that forms the province of West
Flanders and is comprised within the irregular triangle outlined by the
North Sea on the west, the French frontier of Flanders on the south and a
line drawn at one-third of the distance between Bruges and Ghent on the
east. In addition to Bruges and Ostend, this province of West Flanders
includes such towns as Poperinghe, Ypres and Courtrai; and so subtly
subdivided is the West-Flemish dialect that there are words which a man
of Bruges will use to a man of Poperinghe and not be understood.

It is one of the most interesting dialects known to me, containing
numbers of mighty mediaeval words which survive in daily use; and it is
one of the richest: rich especially--and this is not usual in
dialects--in words expressive of human characteristics and of physical
sensations.

Thus there is a word to describe a man who is not so much a poor wretch,
_un misérable_, as what Tom Hood loved to call "a hapless wight:" one who
is poor and wretched and outcast and out of work, not through any fault
of his own, through idleness or fecklessness, but through sheer ill-luck.
There is a word to describe what we feel when we hear the tearing of silk
or the ripping of calico, a word expressing that sense of angry
irritation which gives a man a gnawing in the muscles of the arms, a word
that tells what we really feel in our hair when we pretend that it
"stands on end." It is a sturdy, manly dialect, moreover, spoken by a
fine, upstanding race of "chaps," "fellows," "mates," "wives," and
"women-persons," for your Fleming rarely talks of "men" or "women." It is
also a very beautiful dialect, having many words that possess a charm all
their own. Thus _monkelen_, the West-Flemish for the verb "to smile," is
prettier and has an archer sound than its Dutch equivalent, _glimlachen_.
And it is a dialect of sufficient importance to boast a special
dictionary (_Westvlaamsch Idiotikon_, by the Rev. L. L. De Bo: Bruges,
1873) of 1,488 small-quarto pages, set in double column.

In translating Streuvels' sketches, I have given a close rendering: to
use a homely phrase, their flavour is very near the knuckle; and I have
been anxious to lose no more of it than must inevitably be lost through
the mere act of translation. I hope that I may be forgiven for one or two
phrases, which, though not existing, so far as I am aware, in any country
or district where the English tongue is spoken, are not entirely foreign
to the genius of that tongue. Here and there, but only where necessary, I
have added an explanatory foot-note.

For those interested in such matters, I may say that Stijn Streuvels'
real name is Frank Lateur. He is a nephew of Guido Gezelle, the
poet-priest, whose statue graces the public square at Courtrai, unless
indeed by this time those shining apostles of civilization, the Germans,
have destroyed it. Until ten years ago, when he began to come into his
own, he lived at Avelghem, in the south-east corner of West Flanders,
hard by Courtrai and the River Lys, and there baked bread for the
peasant-fellows and peasant-wives. For you must know that this foremost
writer of the Netherlands was once a baker and stood daily at sunrise,
bare-chested, before his glowing oven, drawing bread for the folk of his
village. The stories and sketches in the present volume all belong to
that period.

Of their number, _Christmas Night_, _A Pipe or no Pipe_, _On Sundays_ and
_The End_ have appeared in the _Fortnightly Review_, which was the first
to give Stijn Streuvels the hospitality of its pages; _In Early Winter_
and _White Life_ in the _English Review_; _The White Sand-path_ in the
_Illustrated London News_; _An Accident in Everyman_; and _Loafing_ in
the _Lady's Realm_. The remainder are now printed in English for the
first time.

ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS.

Chelsea, _April_, 1915.

* * * * *

CONTENTS


TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

I. THE WHITE SAND-PATH

II. IN EARLY WINTER.

III. CHRISTMAS NIGHT.

IV. LOAFING

V. SPRING

VI. IN THE SQUALL

VII. A PIPE OR NO PIPE

VIII. ON SUNDAYS

IX. AN ACCIDENT

X. WHITE LIFE

XI. THE END.

* * * * *

THE WHITE SAND-PATH

* * * * *

I

THE WHITE SAND-PATH

I was a devil of a scapegrace in my time. No tree was too high for me, no
water too deep; and, when there was mischief going, I was the ring-leader
of the band. Father racked his head for days together to find a
punishment that I should remember; but it was all no good: he wore out
three or four birch-rods on my back; his hands pained him merely from
hitting my hard head; and bread and water was a welcome change to me from
the everyday monotony of potatoes and bread-and-butter. After a sound
drubbing followed by half a day's fasting, I felt more like laughing than
like crying; and, in half a while, all was forgotten and my wickedness
began afresh and worse than ever.

One summer's evening, I came home in fine fettle. I and ten of my
school-fellows had played truant: we had gone to pick apples in the
priest's orchard; and we had pulled the burgomaster's calf into the brook
to teach it to swim, but the banks were too high and the beast was
drowned. Father, who had heard of these happenings, laid hold of me in a
rage and gave me a furious trouncing with a poker, after which, instead
of turning me into the road, as his custom was, he caught me up fair and
square, carried me to the loft, flung me down on the floor and bolted the
trap-door behind him.

In the loft! Heavenly goodness, in the loft!

Of an evening I never dared think of the place; and in bright sunshine I
went there but seldom and then always in fear.

I lay as dead, pinched my eyes to and pondered on my wretched plight.
'Twas silent all around; I heard nothing, nothing. That lasted pretty
long, till I began to feel that the boards were so hard and that my body,
which had been thrashed black and blue, was hurting me. My back was stiff
and my arms and legs grew cold. And yet I nor wished nor meant to stir:
that was settled in my head. In the end, it became unbearable: I drew in
my right leg, shifted my arm and carefully opened my eyes. 'Twas so
ghastly, oh, so frightfully dark and warm: I could see the warm darkness;
so funny, that steep, slanting tiled roof, crossed by black rafters,
beams and laths, and all that space beyond, which disappeared in the dark
ridgework: 'twas like a deserted, haunted booth at a fair, during the
night. Over my head, like threatening blunderbusses, old trousers and
jackets hung swinging, with empty arms and legs: they looked just like
fellows that had been hanged! And it grew darker, steadily darker.

My eyes stood fixed and I heard my breath come and go. I pondered how
'twould end here. That lasting silence affrighted me; the anxious waiting
for that coming night: to have to spend a long, long night here alone! My
hair itched and pricked on my head. And the rats! I gave a great loud
scream. It rang in anguish through the sloping vault of the loft. I
listened as it died away ... and nothing followed. I screamed again and
again and went on, till my throat was torn.

The gruesome thought of those rats and of that long night drove me mad
with fear. I rolled about on the floor, I struck out with my arms and
legs, like one possessed, in violent, childish fury. Then, worn out, I
let my arms and legs rest; at last, tired, swallowed up in my
helplessness, left without will or feeling, I waited for what was to
come. I had terribly wicked thoughts: of escaping from the house, of
setting fire to the house, of _murder_! I was an outcast, I was being
tortured. I should have liked to show them what I could do, who I was; to
see them hunting for me and crying; and then to run away, always farther
away, and never come back again.

Downstairs, the plates and forks were clattering for supper. I was not
hungry; I did not wish nor mean to eat. I heard soft, quiet voices
talking: that made me desperate; they were not speaking of me! They had
no thought nor care for the miscreant; they would liefst have him dead,
out of the way. And I was in the loft!

Later, very much later, I heard my little brother's voice saying evening
prayers--I would not pray--and then I heard nothing more, nothing; and I
lay there, upstairs, lonely and forlorn....

I walked all alone in the forest, through the brushwood. 'Twas half-dark
below; but, above the bushes, the sun was playing as through a green
curtain. I went on and on. The bushes here grew thick now and the tiny
path was lost. After long creeping and stumbling, I leapt across a ditch
and entered the wide drove. It did not seem strange to me that 'twas even
darker here and that the light, instead of from above, came streaming low
down from between the trunks of the trees. The vault was closed
leaf-tight and the trunks hung down from out of it like pillars. 'Twas
silent all around. I went, as I thought that I must see the sun, round
behind the trunks, half anxious at last to get out of that magic forest;
but new trees kept coming up, as though out of the ground, and hid the
sun. I would have liked to run, but felt I know not what in my legs that
made me drag myself on.

Far beyond, on the road-side grass, sat two boys. It was ... but no, they
were sitting there too glumly! I went up to them and, after all, knew
them for Sarelke and Lowietje, the village-constable's children. They sat
with their legs in the ditch, their elbows on their knees, earnestly
chatting. I sat down beside them, but they did not even look up, did not
notice me. Those two boys, my schoolmates, the worst two scamps in the
village, sat there like two worn-out old fogies: they did not know me.
This ought to have surprised me, and yet I thought that it must be right
and that it had always been so. They chatted most calmly of the price of
marbles, of the way to tell the best hoops, of buying a new box of tin
soldiers; and they mumbled their words as slowly as the priest in his
pulpit. I became uncomfortable, felt ill at ease in that stifling air,
under that half-dusk of the twilight, where everything was happening so
earnestly, so very slowly and so heavily. I, who was all for sport and
child's-play, now found my own chums so altered; and they no longer knew
me. I would have liked to shout, to grip them hard by the shoulder and
call out that it was I: I, I, I! But I durst not, or could not.

"There--comes--the--keeper," droned Sarelke.

Lowietje looked down the drove with his great glassy eyes. The two boys
stood up and, without speaking, shuffled away. I saw them get smaller and
smaller, till they became two black, hovering little specks that vanished
round the bend.

I was alone again! Alone, with all those trees, in that frightful silence
all around me. And the keeper, where was he? He would come, I knew it;
and I felt afraid of the awful fellow. I must get away from this, I must
hide myself. I lay down, very slowly, deep in the ditch. I now felt that
I had been long, long dead and that I was lying here alone, waiting for I
forget what. That keeper: was there such a person? He now seemed to me an
awesome clod of earth, which came rolling down, slowly but steadily, and
which would fall heavily upon me. Then he turned into a lovely white
ashplant, which stood there waving its boughs in a stately manner. I
would let him go past and then would go away. People were waiting for me,
I had to be somewhere: I tried mightily to remember where, but could not.

The keeper did not come.

The ditch was cold, the bottom was of smooth, worn stone and very hard. I
lay there with gleaming eyes: above my head stood the giant oaks,
silently, and their knotted branches ran up and were lost in the dark
sky.

The keeper came, I heard his coming; and the wind blew fearfully through
the trees. I shivered....

I woke with fright and I was still lying in my loft. The hard bottom of
the ditch was the boarded floor and the tree-trunks were the legs of
father's trousers and the branches ran up and were lost in the darksome
roofwork. Two sharp rays of light beamed through the shut dormer-window.
It must be day then! And this awful night was past! All my dismay was
gone and a bold feeling came over me, something like the feeling of
gladness that follows on a solved problem. I would make Lowietje and
Sarelke and all the boys at school hark to my tale, that I would! I had
slept a whole night alone in the loft! And the rats! And the ghosts! Ooh!
And not a whit afraid!

I got up, but that was such a slow business. I still felt that dream and
that slackness in my limbs. I was so stiff; that heavy gloom, that slow
passing of time still lingered--just as in my dream--in my slow
breathing. I still saw that forest and, shut up as I was, with not a
single touchstone for my thoughts, I began to doubt if my dream was done
and I had to feel the trouser-legs to make sure that they were not really
trees.

Time stood still and there was no getting out of my mind the strange
things seen in that dream-forest, with those earnest, sluggish, elderly
children and that queer keeper. 'Twas as though some one were holding my
arms and legs tight to make them move heavily, deadly heavily; and I felt
myself, within my head, grown quite thirty years older, become suddenly
an old man. I walked about the loft; I wanted to make myself heard, but
my footsteps gave no sound.

I grew awfully hungry. Near the ladder-door, I found my prison fare. I
nibbled greedily at my crust of bread and took a good drink of water.

I now felt better, but this doing nothing wearied me; I became sad and
felt sorry to be sitting alone. If things had gone their usual gait, I
should now be with my mates at school or playing somewhere under the open
sky; and that open sky now first revealed all its delightfulness. The
usual gait, when all was said, was by far the best.... All alone like
this, up here.... Should I go down and beg father's pardon? Then 'twould
all be over and done with....

"No!" said something inside me, "I stay here!"

And I stayed.

I shoved a box under the dormer-window, I pushed open the wooden
shutter ... and there! Before me lay the wide stretch in the blazing
sunlight! My eyes were quite blind with it.

'Twas good up here and funny to see everything from so high up, so
endlessly far! And the people were no bigger than tiny tadpoles!

Just under my dormer-window came a path, a white sand-path winding from
behind the house and then running forwards to the horizon in a line
straight as an arrow. It looked like a naked strip of ground, powdered
white and showing up sharply, like a flat snake, in the middle of the
green fields which, broken into their many-coloured squares, lay blinking
in the sun.

This path was deserted, lonely, as though nor man nor beast had ever
trodden it. It lay very near the house and I did not know it from up
here; it looked now like a long strip of drab linen, which lay bleaching
in a boundless meadow. And that again suited my loneliness so well! At
last, I looked and saw nothing more. And that path!...

Slowly, overcome by that silent, restful idleness, I fell a-dreaming; and
that path, that long, white path seemed to me to have become a part of my
own being, something like a life that began over there, far away yonder
in the clear blue, to end in the unknown, here, behind the gable-end, cut
off at that fatal bend.

After long looking, I saw something, very far off; it came so slowly, so
softly, like a thing that grows, and those two little black patches grew
into two romping schoolboys, who, rolling and leaping along, came running
down the white sand-path and, at last, disappeared in the bend behind the
gable-end.

Then, for another long while, nothing more, nothing but sand, green and
sunshine.

Later, 'twas three labourers, who came stepping up briskly, with their
gear over their shoulders. Half-way up the path, they jumped across the
ditch and went to work in the field. They toiled on, without looking up
or round, toiled on till I got tired of watching and tired of those three
stooping men and of seeing that gleaming steel flicker in the sun and go
in and out of the earth.

When now 'twas mid-day and fiercely hot in my loft, my three labourers
sat down behind a tree and ate their noonday meal.

I went to the loft-door and devoured my second crust of bread and took a
fresh gulp of water.

Very calmly, without thinking, lame with the heat and with that old-man's
feeling still inside me, I went and sat at the window.

The three men worked on, always, without stopping.

And that went on, went on, until the evening! When 'twas nearly dark,
they gathered up their tools, jumped over the ditch, walked down the path
the way they had come and disappeared behind the gable-end.

Now it became deadly.

In the distance appeared a great black patch, which came slowly nearer
and nearer. The patch turned into a lazy, slow-stepping ox, with a
jolting, creaking waggon, in which sat a little old man who gazed
stupidly in front of him into the dark distance. The cart dragged along
wearily, creeping through the sand, and first the ox, then the little
fellow, then the waggon disappeared behind the gable-end.

Now I felt something like fear and I shivered: the evening was coming so
slowly, so sadly; and I dared not think of the night that was to follow.
'Twas the first time in my life that I fell earnestly a-thinking. So that
path there became a life, a long-drawn-out, earnest life.... That was
quite plain in my head; and those boys had rolled and tumbled along that
path; next, those big men had burdensomely, most burdensomely turned over
their bit of earth; and the ox and the little old fellow had joggled
along it so piteously.... That life was so earnest and I had seen it all
from so far, from the outside of it: I did nothing, I took no part in it
and yet I lived ... and must also one day go along that path!

And how?

Getting up in the morning, eating, playing, going to school, misbehaving,
playing, eating, sleeping....

The mist rose out of the fields and I saw nothing more.

I jumped off my box, begged father's pardon and crept into bed.

Never again was I shut up in the loft.

* * * * *

IN EARLY WINTER

* * * * *

II

IN EARLY WINTER

First the leaves had become pale, deathly pale; later they turned
yellow-brown; and then they went fluttering and flickering, so wearily,
so slackly, like the wings of dying birds; and, one after the other, they
began to fall, dancing gently downwards, in eddies. They whirled in the
air, were carried on by the wind and at last fell dead and settled
somewhere in the mud.

Not a living thing was to be seen and the cottages that sat huddled close
to the ground remained fast shut; the smoke from the chimneys alone still
gave a sign of life.

The green drove now stood bare and bleak: two rows of straight trunks
which grew less and faded away in the blue mist.

Yonder comes something creeping up: a shapeless thing, like two little
black stripes, with something else; and it approaches....

At last and at length, out of those little stripes, appear a man and a
wife; and, out of the other thing, a barrel-organ on a cart, with a dog
between the wheels.

It all looked the worse for wear. The little fellow went bent between the
shafts and tugged; the little old woman's lean arms pushed against the
organ-case; and the wheeled thing jolted on like that over the cart-ruts,
along the drove and through the wide gate of an honest homestead.

A flight of black crows sailed across the sky. The wind soughed through
the naked tree-tops; the mist rose and the world thinned away in a bluey
haze; this all vanished and slowly it became dark black night.

Man, woman and dog, they crept, all three, high into the loft and deep
into the hay; and they dozed away, like all else outside them and around.
Warm they lay there! And dream they did, of the cold, of the dark and of
the sad moaning wind!

At early morning, before it was bright day, they were on the tramp, over
the fallow fields, and drowned in a huge sea of thick blue mist. They
pulled for all they could: the little fellow in the shafts, the little
old woman behind the cart and the dog, with his head to the ground, for
the road's sake.

A red glow broke in the east and a new day brightened. 'Twas all white,
snow-white, as if the blue mist had bleached, melted and stuck fast on
the black fields, on the half-withered autumn fruits and on the dark
fretwork of the trees. Great drops dripped from the boughs.

From under the peak of his cap, the fellow peered into the distance with
his one eye, and he saw a church and houses. They went that way.

'Twas low-roofed cottages they saw, all covered with hoar-frost; here and
there stood one alone and then a whole little row, crowded close
together: a street.

They were in the village.

It was lone and still, like a cloister, with here a little woman who,
tucked into her hooded cloak, crept along the houses to the church; there
a smith who hammered ... and the little church-bell, which tinkled over
the house-tops.

They stopped. The dog sat down to look. The little fellow threw off his
shoulder-strap, pulled his cap down lower and felt under the red-brown
organ-cloth for the handle. He gave a look at the houses that stood
before him, pinched his sunken mouth, wiped the seam of his sleeve over
his face and started grinding. Half-numbed sounds came trickling into the
chill street from under the organ-cloth: a sad--once, perhaps,
dance-provoking--tune, which now, false, dragging and twisted out of
shape, was like a muddled crawling of sounds all jumbled up together;
some came too soon, the others too late, as in a weariful dream; and, in
between, a sighing and creaking which came from very deep down, at each
third or fourth turn, and was deadened again at once in those
ever-recurring rough organ-sounds or dragged on and deafened in a mad
dance. 'Twas like a poor little huddled soul uttering its plaint amid the
hullabaloo of rude men shouting aloud in the street.

The dog also had begun to howl when the tune started.

The little wife had settled her kerchief above her sharp-featured
old-wife's face; and, with one hand in her apron-pocket and the other
holding a little tin can, she now went from door to door:

"For the poor blind man.... God reward you."

And this through the whole street and farther, to the farmhouses, from
the one to the other, all day long, till evening fell again and that same
thick mist came to wrap everything in its grey, dark breath.

And again they wandered, through a drove, to a homestead and into the
hay.

"The dog has pupped," said the little old woman; and she shook her man.

"Pupped?..."

And he turned in the nest which he had made for himself, pushed his head
deeper in the hay and drowsed on. He dreamt of dogs and of pups and of
organs and of ear-splitting yelps and howls.

The dog lay in a fine, round little nest of his own, rolled into a ball
and moaning. And he[1] looked so sadly and kindly into the little old
woman's eyes; and he licked, never stopped licking his puppies. They were
like three red-brown moles, each with a fat head; they wriggled their
thick little bodies together and sought about and squeaked.

[1] The West-Fleming talks of dogs of either sex invariably as "he."

When the tramps had swallowed their slice of rye-bread and their dish of
porridge, they went on, elsewhither. The little fellow tugged, the little
old woman pushed and the dogs hung swinging between the wheels, in a
fig-basket. So they went begging, from hamlet to hamlet, the wide world
through: an old man and woman, with their organ; and a dog with his three
young pups.

* * * * *

Much later....

The thick mist had changed into bright, glittering dewdrops and the sun
shone high in the heaven. Now four dogs lay harnessed to the cart, four
red-brown dogs. And, when the handle turned and the organ played, all
those four dogs lifted their noses on high and howled uglily.

Inside, deep-hidden under the organ-cloth, sat the little soul, the
mysterious, shabby little organ-soul, grown quite hoarse now and almost
dumb.

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