Although he was poor and crippled, he had a decent few days at the beginning.
At the age of fifteen, on the main road to Valville, he broke his legs by a car and has been begging ever since. He walked on crutches and dragged himself along the side of the road from farm to yard, from yard to yard, staggering and struggling. As a result of the long frame, his shoulders were raised upwards, so high that they were so high that it looked as if his head was stuck in the middle of two peaks.
He was an abandoned baby picked up by The parish priest of Biyette from a ditch the day before All Souls' Day, hence the name Nikolai Tucson, who grew up with charity and never had any education. One day, the owner of the village bakery gave him a few glasses of shochu to have fun, leaving him crippled. Since then, he has become a tramp who can do nothing but reach out and beg.
Formerly Baroness de Avarry let him live on a farm next to the mansion. Next to the farm chicken coop there was a place full of hay like a kennel, where he slept. On days when he could not beg for anything, when he was too hungry to pass, he walked to the kitchen of the mansion and always got a loaf of bread and a glass of cider. The old lady would often throw him a few coppers from the high steps or the bedroom window. Now the old lady is dead.
In the nearby villages, people rarely gave him money or food because they knew him so well. For forty years, I had been watching this tattered, deformed and ugly body resting on two wooden legs, and from this that grass hut to that grass hut, I was tired of seeing it. But he did not want to go anywhere else, because he knew nothing about the outside world except the corner where he had grown up and the three or four small villages nearby that had allowed him to survive. He set some boundaries for himself to beg, and he never crossed those lines, and it had become customary.
He didn't know how big the world was behind the trees that had been blocking his view, and he never thought much about it. The local farmers, who always met him by their ditches, were tired of him and often shouted at him:
"Why don't you go to other villages and always go around here?"
He walked away without answering anything, feeling only a vague fear of the strange world. It was a kind of poor man's fear, and he was afraid of everything: strange faces, flying insults, suspicious eyes of strangers, and gendarmes walking in pairs on the main road. As soon as he saw the gendarmes, he instinctively burrowed into the bushes or hid behind a pile of rocks.
As soon as he spotted the figure of a gendarme shining in the sunlight at a distance, he immediately became aggrieved; in order to find a place to hide, he was as sensitive as a mythical monster. He rolled down from the wooden crutch, allowing himself to fall to the ground like a pile of tatters, his body shrunken into a clump, becoming very small and small, flush with the ground like a hare hiding in a nest; his brown tattered clothes were mixed with the color of the dirt, and it was really invisible. In fact, he had never had any entanglement with the gendarmes, but he was naturally afraid of the gendarmes, as if it were a gift handed down from his parents, whom he had never met, and he was born with this fear and this cleverness in his blood.
He had no tiles on it, no place to stand under it, no place to live, not even a place to hide from the wind and rain. In the summer he slept everywhere, and in the winter he slipped into people's barns or cattle and sheep pens with great skill, and the next day he always slipped away without waiting for others to find out. He knew exactly from which caves he could enter the houses; his arms were surprisingly powerful thanks to his use of double crutches, and he could climb to the top floor where the hay was stacked with the force of his wrists alone. Sometimes when the food he had begged for was enough to eat, he could hide on it for four or five days in a row.
Although he lived in the middle of the crowd, he was like an animal in the woods, neither associating with nor loving anyone. This attitude can only arouse a contempt and hostility among the peasants, who are even more indifferent to him and who ignore him. They gave him a nickname called "Hanging Bell" because he swung between two wooden crutches, like a bell hanging on a support. He hadn't eaten for two days, no one would give him anything, everyone was so tired of him that finally no one cared about him. The peasant women stood at the door of the house, and when they saw him coming, they called out to him from afar:
"You're not fast enough to walk away, don't grow something!" Didn't I give you a loaf of bread three days ago?"
He turned around on crutches and walked to the next house, but was treated exactly the same.
The women stood at their respective doors and expressed their opinions: "You can't always raise this person who doesn't do anything all year round!" ”
Yet this man who does nothing needs to eat every day. He had traveled to all the homes of Saint-Hilaire, Valville, and Biyette; he had not asked for a single penny or a leftover crumb. The only hope was that Turnor was one place, but he had to walk two more miles down the main road, and he was too tired to drag himself because his stomach was as flat as his pockets.
But he still struggled to walk forward.
It was December, and there was a bitter wind in the fields. The wind howled among the bare branches, and clouds hurried past the low, dark sky, not knowing where to fly. The crippled man walked slowly, moving his two crutches hard and hard again, while stabilizing his body with the bent leg that remained. At the tip of the stump remained a deformed foot wrapped in a rag.
Every moment he walked he sat down by the ditch to rest for a few minutes, his already chaotic and heavy mind more afflicted by hunger, and now there was only one thought in his mind: "Eat." But he didn't know what method to use to get food.
For three hours in a row, he trekked the road; when he finally saw the trees on the edge of the village, he quickened his movements.
When he met the first peasant, he begged him, and the countryman replied, "Old patron, you are here again!" We'll never be able to get rid of you? ”
The "hanging bell" had to turn around and walk away. Every family was rude to him and scolded him for not giving him anything. However, he still insisted on begging one household after another in a low voice, and as a result, he still did not get any money. So he went to the farms outside the village and walked around on the soft ground of the rain, exhausted that he could not even lift the wooden crutches. But wherever he went, people beat him up. The weather is so bad, cold and cold, in this kind of weather, people's mood is always bad, gloomy and easy to get angry, lazy! You have to reach out and give, and you don't bother to reach out to help others.
He went door to door through all the homes he knew, and lay down on a ditch outside Uncle Xikai's yard. He took off the hook—a phrase described by others as how he slid down two tall wooden crutches, tucked them under his armpits, and remained motionless for a long time, suffering from hunger. He was too cloudy to see clearly the unfathomable misfortune of his black hole hole.
He was obsessively there waiting, and even he didn't know what he was waiting for. We usually have this vague expectation. In this biting cold wind, he stayed in the corner of the courtyard, waiting for miraculous help from heaven or mankind, and did not want to think about why this help came, how it came, and through whom. A flock of black hens walked over, searching for something to feed in the land that fed all life, and they kept pecking at a grain or a worm that was invisible to the human eye, and then continued their patient and sure search.
The "hanging bell" looked at the hens and thought nothing; then suddenly came the idea that it was not so much a thought in the mind as it was felt in the stomach, that is, to catch one of these hens and roast it with a dead branch, which must be delicious.
He had no idea that he was about to commit the crime of theft. He picked up a stone and threw it at the nearest hen; because of his dexterity, he smashed the hen to death in one fell swoop. It flapped its wings and fell sideways. The others fled with their thin claws trembling. The "hanging bell" re-erected the wooden crutch, and like these hens, trembled and stepped forward to pick up his prey. Just as he walked over to the small black body with blood spots on its head, he was shoved on his back, so heavy that both of his crutches flew out of his armpits and rolled to a distance of about ten paces.
The angry Uncle Xi Kai suddenly pounced on the thief and beat him like crazy. A countryman who caught someone who stole something from him always beat him so fiercely. He punched and kicked this crippled man, headless and faceless, and the beaten man did not have the slightest ability to fight.
The hired workers of the farm also came and helped their proprietor beat up the beggar; when they were tired, they dragged him up and carried him to the firewood room and locked him up, and at the same time called for a look for the gendarmes.
The "hanging bell" had been beaten half to death, lying on the ground bleeding, dying of hunger. Dusk came, then night, and then dawn, and he hadn't had anything to do with it.
Near noon, the gendarmes arrived. Since Uncle Hikai claimed that he had been attacked by this beggar
After striking, it took a while to protect themselves, and the two gendarmes, thinking they were going to be resisted, carefully opened the door.
The squad leader shouted, "Hey, stand up! ”
But the "hanging bell" could not move, and he struggled to support himself with wooden crutches, but he could not do it. They thought that the man of the adulterous department was pretending to be a fake and deliberately refused to stand up, and two heavily armed gendarmes reprimanded him while rudely dragging him up and forcing him onto a wooden crutch.
He was terrified. It was an innate fear of the yellow armor belt, the fear of prey against hunters, the fear of mice encountering cats. He managed to stand up with extraordinary effort.
"Go!" The squad leader said. He did walk. All the people on the farm watched him walk around. The women waved their fists at him, and the men laughed and cursed him. Finally catch him, this son can always get rid of him!
He walked between two gendarmes. An extraordinary power arose in him, one
A desperate, desperate force. With this strength, he was able to support himself until the evening. His consciousness was so confused that he couldn't even understand what was happening in front of him, and he was completely frightened.
The people they met on the road all stood down and watched him walk past, and the countrymen muttered, "Probably always a thief's bone!" ”
When it was almost dark, he arrived at the seat of the district government. He had never been so far away; he could hardly imagine what was going on, and what was going to happen suddenly. All these terrible and unexpected things, these strange faces and houses he had never seen before, terrified him.
He didn't say a word, he didn't have anything to say, because he couldn't figure out anything, and since he hadn't spoken to anyone for so many years, his tongue had almost completely lost its function; moreover, his thoughts were too disordered to be expressed in words.
He was held in the town's detention center. The gendarmes had no idea that he still needed to eat, so they left him inside until the next day.
However, when I came to question him the next morning, I found that he was dead on the ground. This is really unexpected!