The Scapegoat Read Free Page A

who sought bargains among the nailed boots hanging upon strings, the aprons spotted black and white, the plaited slippers, the saucepans and umbrellas. Young girls laughing with linked arms, their hair newly frizzed from the coiffeur; old women pausing, reckoning, shaking their heads at the price of checked tablecloths, moving on, not buying; youths with blue-grey chins and purple suits, eyeing the girls, nudging one another, the inevitable cigarette dangling from their lips: all of them, when the day was done, would return to some familiar plot they knew as home. The silent fields were theirs, and the lowing of cattle, the mist rising from the sodden ground, a fly-blown kitchen, a cat lapping milk beside a cradle, while the scolding voice of the old grandmother went on and on and her son clumped out into the muddy yard swinging a pail.
    Meanwhile I, time no object, would check in at yet another strange hotel, and be accepted as one of them until I produced my British passport; then the bow, the smile, the genuine show of politeness, and the little shrug of regret. ‘We have very few people at the moment. The season is over. Monsieur has the place to himself,’ the implication being that surely I must want to plunge into a bunch of hearty compatriots, carrying Kodaks, exchanging snapshots, lending Penguins, borrowing each other’s
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. Nor would they ever know, these people of the hotel where I passed a night, any more than those whom I now jostled in the street, that I wanted neither my compatriots nor my own company, but instead the happiness, which could never be mine, of feeling myself one of them, bred and schooled amongst them, bound by some tie of family and blood that they would recognize and understand; so that, living with them, I might share their laughter, fathom their sorrow,eat their bread, no longer stranger’s bread but mine and theirs.
    I went on walking and the rain came spattering down again, sending the crowd to huddle in the shops, or to seek the shelter of cars and lorries. For no one promenades in the rain unless he is on business bent, like the serious men in broad-brimmed trilby hats who hurried into the Préfecture with brief-cases under their arms, while I stood uncertainly on the corner of the Place Aristide Briand. I went into Notre-Dame-de-la-Couture beside the Préfecture. It was empty, save for an old woman praying, tears like pearls in each corner of her wide staring eyes, and later a girl with high pattering heels came briskly up the hollow aisle to burn a candle before a blue-washed statue. Then, like a gulf of darkness swamping reason, I knew that later on I must get drunk, or die. How much did failure matter? Not, perhaps, to my small outside world, not to the few friends who thought they knew me well, not to the persons who employed me nor the students who listened to my lectures, not to the officials at the British Museum, who, benign and courteous, gave me good morning or good afternoon, not to the smooth, dull, kindly London shadows amongst whom I lived and breathed and had my being as a law-abiding, quiet, donnish individual of thirty-eight. But to the self who clamoured for release, the man within? How did my poor record seem to him?
    Who he was and whence he sprang, what urges and what longings he might possess, I could not tell. I was so used to denying him expression that his ways were unknown to me; but he might have had a mocking laugh, a casual heart, a swift-roused temper, and a ribald tongue. He did not inhabit a solitary book-lined apartment; he did not wake every morning to the certain knowledge of no family, no ties, no entanglements, no friends or interests infinitely precious to him, nothing to serve as goal and anchor save a preoccupation with French history and the French language which somehow, by good fortune, enabled him to earn his daily bread.
    Perhaps, if I had not kept him locked within me, he mighthave laughed, roistered, fought and lied. Perhaps he