# The Man Who Laughs (Estes and Lauriat 1869)/Chapter 68

CHAPTER II.
FROM GAY TO GRAVE.
HOW simple a miracle is, after all! It was the breakfast hour in the Green Box, and Dea had merely come to see why Gwynplaine had not joined them at table.
"It is you:" exclaimed Gwynplaine; and in that he had said everything. There was no other horizon, no vision for him now but the heaven where Dea was. His agitation was calmed,—calmed in such a manner as he alone can understand who has seen the smile spread swiftly over the ocean when the hurricane has passed away. There is nothing that becomes tranquil more quickly than the waves. This results from their power of absorption. And so it is with the human heart. Not always, however. Dea had but to show herself, and behind the dazzled Gwynplaine there was but a flight of phantoms. What a peace-maker is adoration!
A few minutes afterwards they were sitting opposite each other, Ursus between them, Homo at their feet. The teapot, hung over a little lamp, was on the table. Fibi and Vinos were outside, waiting. They breakfasted as they supped, in the centre compartment. From the position in which the narrow table was placed, Dea's back was turned towards the aperture in the partition which was opposite the entrance door of the Green Box. Their knees were touching. Gwynplaine was pouring out tea for Dea. Suddenly she sneezed. Just at that ​moment a thin smoke rose above the flame of the lamp, and something like a piece of paper fell into ashes. It was the smoke which had caused Dea to sneeze.
"What was that?" she asked.
"Nothing," replied Gwynplaine.
And he smiled. He had just burned the duchess's letter. The conscience of the man who loves is the guardian angel of the woman whom he loves. Unburdened of the letter, his relief was wondrous, and Gwynplaine exulted in his integrity as an eagle exults in his wings. It seemed to him as if his temptation had vanished with the smoke, and as if the duchess had crumbled into ashes with the paper.
Taking up their cups at random, and drinking one after the other from the same one, they talked,—a babble of lovers, a chattering of sparrows! Nonsense, worthy of Mother Goose or of Homer! With two loving hearts, seek no further for poetry; with two kisses for dialogue, go no further for music.
"Gwynplaine, I dreamed that we were animals, and had wings."
"Wings; that means birds," murmured Gwynplaine.
"Fools! it means angels," growled Ursus.
And their talk went on.
"If you did not exist, Gwynplaine!—"
"What then?"
"It could only be because there was no God."
"The tea is too hot; you will burn yourself, Dea."
"Blow on my cup."
"How beautiful you are this morning!"
"Do you know that I have a great many things to say to you?"
"Say them."
"I love you!"
"I adore you!"
​And Ursus said aside, "By heaven, they are plain-spoken people!"
How blissful to lovers are their moments of silence! In them they gather, as it were, masses of love, which afterwards explode into sweet fragments.
Then came a pause, and afterwards Dea cried,—
"Do you know, in the evening, when we are playing our parts, at the moment when my hand touches your forehead,—oh, what a noble head yours is, Gwynplaine!—at the moment when I feel your hair beneath my fingers, I shiver; a heavenly joy comes over me, and I say to myself, 'In all this world of darkness which encompasses me, in this universe of solitude, in this great obscurity in which I live, in this quaking fear of myself and of everything, I have one prop; and he is here. It is he.' It is you."
"Oh, you love me!" said Gwynplaine. "I, too, have no one but you on earth. You are everything to me. Dea, what would you have me do? What do you desire? What do you want?"
Dea answered, "I do not know. I am happy."
"Yes," replied Gwynplaine, "we are happy indeed!"
Ursus raised his voice severely: "So you are happy. are you? That's a crime. I have warned you before. You are happy! Then take care you are not seen. Take up as little room as you can. Happiness ought to hide itself in a hole. Make yourselves still less than you are, if that be possible. God measures the greatness of happiness by the insignificance of the happy. The happy should conceal themselves like malefactors. Shine out like the wretched glow-worms that you are, and you'll be trodden on; and serve you right too! What do you mean by all that love-making nonsense? I'm no duenna, whose business it is to watch lovers billing and cooing. I'm tired of it all, I tell you; and you may both go to the devil."
​And feeling that his harsh tones were melting into tenderness, he drowned his emotion in a loud grumble.
"Father," said Dea, "how roughly you talk."
"That is because I don't like to see people too happy."
Here Homo re-echoed Ursus. His growl was heard from beneath the lovers' feet.
Ursus stooped down, and placed his hand on Homo's head: "That's right; you're in bad humour, too. You growl. The bristles are all on end on your pate. You don't like all this love-making. That 's because you are wise. Hold your tongue all the same. You have had your say, and given your opinion; so be it. Now be silent."
The wolf growled again. Ursus looked under the table at him:—
"Be still. Homo! Come, don't dwell on it, you philosopher!"
But the wolf sat up, and looked towards the door, showing his teeth.
"What 's wrong with you now?" said Ursus. And he caught hold of Homo by the skin of the neck.
Heedless of the wolf's growls, and wholly wrapt up in her own thoughts, and in the sound of Gwynplaine's voice, Dea sat silent, absorbed in that kind of ecstasy peculiar to the blind, which seems at times to give them a song to listen to in their hearts, and to make up to them for the vision which they lack by some strain of ideal music. Blindness is a cavern through which celestial harmonies are ever floating.
While Ursus was looking down, talking to Homo, Gwynplaine raised his eyes. He was about to drink a cup of tea. He did not drink it however, but slowly replaced it on the table. His fingers remained open, his eyes fixed. He scarcely breathed.
A man was standing in the doorway, behind Dea. ​He was clad in black, with a hood. He wore a wig down to his eyebrows, and held in his hand an iron baton with a crown at each end. This baton was short and massive. Imagine a Medusa thrusting her head between two blossoming branches in paradise.
Ursus, who had heard some one enter, and who had raised his head without loosing his hold of Homo, recognized the terrible personage. He shook from head to foot, and whispered to Gwynplaine: "It's the wapentake."
Gwynplaine recollected. An exclamation of surprise was about to escape him, but he restrained it. The iron staff, with the crown at each end, was called the iron weapon. It was from this iron weapon, upon which the city officers of justice took the oath when they entered upon their duties, that the old wapentakes of the English police derived their name.
Behind the man in the wig, the frightened landlord could be dimly discerned in the shadow. Without saying a word—a personification of the muta Themis of the old charters—the man stretched his right arm over the radiant Dea, and touched Gwynplaine on the shoulder with the iron staff, at the same time pointing with his left thumb to the door of the Green Box behind him. These gestures, all the more imperious for the intruder's silence, meant, Follow me. "Pro signo exeundi, sursum trahe," says the old Norman record. He who was touched by the iron weapon had no right but the right of obedience. To that mute order there was no reply. The harsh penalties of the English law threatened the refractory.
Gwynplaine felt a shock under the rigid touch of the law; then he sat as though petrified. If, instead of having been merely grazed on the shoulder, he had been struck a violent blow on the head with the iron staff, he ​could not have been worse stunned. He knew that the police officer summoned him to follow; but why? That he could not understand.
Ursus, too, was thrown into the most painful agitation, but he saw through matters pretty clearly. His thoughts flew to the jugglers and preachers,—his competitors,—to complaints made against the Green Box, against that delinquent the wolf, to his own affair with the three Bishopsgate commissioners; and who knows, perhaps—but that would be too dreadful—Gwynplaine's unbecoming and factious speeches touching the royal authority. He trembled violently. Dea was smiling.
Neither Gwynplaine nor Ursus uttered a word. They both had the same thought,—not to frighten Dea. It may have struck the wolf as well, for he ceased growling. True, Ursus did not loose him. Homo, however, was a prudent wolf when occasion required. Who is there who has not remarked this kind of intelligence in animals? It may be that to the extent to which a wolf can understand mankind he felt that he was an outlaw.
Gwynplaine rose. Resistance was useless, as he knew, for he remembered Ursus' words. He remained standing in front of the wapentake. The latter raised the iron staff from Gwynplaine's shoulder, and drawing it back, held it out straight in an attitude of command,—a constable's attitude which was well understood in those days by the people, and which expressed the following order: "Let this man, and no other, follow me. The rest remain where they are. Silence!" No curious followers were allowed. In all ages the police have had a taste for arrests of the kind. This description of seizure was termed sequestration of the person.
The wapentake turned round in one motion, like a piece of mechanism revolving on its own pivot, and ​with grave and magisterial step proceeded towards the door of the Green Box.
Gwynplaine looked at Ursus. The latter went through a pantomime composed as follows: he shrugged his shoulders, placed both elbows close to his hips, with his hands out, and knitted his brows into chevrons, all intended to signify: "We must submit to the inevitable."
Gwynplaine looked at Dea. She was still in a dream. She was still smiling. He put the tips of his fingers to his lips, and waved her an unutterable kiss.
Ursus, who had partially recovered from his terror now that the wapentake's back was turned, seized this opportunity to whisper in Gwynplaine's ear: "On your life, do not speak until you are questioned."
Gwynplaine, with the same care to avoid noise that he would have taken in a sick room, took his hat and cloak from the hook on the partition, wrapped himself up to the eyes in the cloak, and pulled his hat down over his forehead. Not having been to bed, he had his working clothes still on, and his leather collar round his neck. Once more he looked at Dea. Having reached the door, the wapentake raised his staff and began to descend the steps, Gwynplaine following as if the man was dragging him by an invisible chain. Ursus watched Gwynplaine leave the Green Box. At that moment the wolf gave a low growl, but Ursus quieted him by whispering, "He is coming back."
In the yard. Master Nicless was trying to silence with imperious gestures the cries of terror raised by Vinos and Fibi, as they watched Gwynplaine led away by this formidable-looking official. The two girls were like petrifactions; they had the appearance of stalactites. Govicum, stunned, was gazing open-mouthed out of a window.
The wapentake preceded Gwynplaine by a few steps, ​never once turning round or looking at him, with that cold tranquillity which the knowledge that one is the law imparts. In death-like silence they both crossed the yard, passed through the dark tap-room, and reached the street. A few passers-by had collected about the inn door, and the justice of the quorum was there at the head of a squad of police. The idlers, stupefied, and without uttering a word, opened out and stood aside, with true English discipline, at the sight of the constable's staff. The wapentake moved off in the direction of the narrow street then called the Little Strand, skirting the Thames; and Gwynplaine, with the justice of the quorum's men in line on each side of him like a double hedge, wrapped in his cloak as in a shroud, left the inn farther and farther behind him as he followed the silent man, like a statue following a spectre.