Romance of the Rabbit | Page 4

olive-branch, the sign that the great wave was subsiding? Or had he been created, such as he is, with his short tail, his stubbly hide, his cleft lip, his floppy ear, and his trodden-down heel? Did God, the Eternal, set him all ready-made beneath the laurels of Paradise?
Lying crouched beneath a rosebush he had, perhaps, seen Eve, and watched her when she had wandered amid the irises, displaying the grace of her brown legs like a prancing young horse, and extending her golden breasts before the mystic pomegranates. Or was he at first nothing but an incandescent mist? Had he already lived in the heart of the porphyries? Had he, incombustible, escaped from their boiling lava, in order to inhabit each in turn the cell of granite and of the alga before he dared show his nose to the world? Did he owe his pitch-black eyes to the molten jet, his fur to the clayey ooze, his soft ears to the sea-wrack, his ardent blood to the liquid fire?
...His origins mattered little to him at this moment; he was resting peacefully in his marl-pit. It was in a sultry August toward the end of a heavy afternoon. The sky was of the deep-blue color of a plum, puffed out here and there, as if ready to burst upon the plain.
Soon the rain began to patter on the leaves of the brake. Faster and faster came the drumming of the long rods of rain. But Rabbit was not afraid, because the rain fell in accordance with a rhythm which was very familiar to him. And besides the rain did not strike him for it had not yet been able to pierce the thick vault of green above him. A single drop only fell to the bottom of the marl-pit, and splashed and always fell again at the same place.
So there was nothing in this concert to trouble the heart of Rabbit. He was quite familiar with the song in which the tears of the rain form the strophes, and he knew that neither dog, nor man, nor fox, nor hawk had any part in it. The sky was like a harp on which the silver strings of the streaming rain were strung from above down to the earth. And down here below every single thing made this harp resound in its own peculiar fashion, and in turn it again took up its own melody. Under the green fingers of the leaves the crystal strings sounded faint and hollow. It was as though it were the voice of the soul of the mists.
The clay under their touch sobbed like an adolescent girl into whom the south wind has long blown inquietude. There where the clay was thirstiest and driest was heard a continual sound as of drinking, the panting of burning lips which yielded to the fullness of the storm.
The night which followed the storm was serene. The downfall of rain had almost evaporated. On the green meadow where Rabbit was in the habit of meeting his beloved, nothing was left of the storm, except ball-like masses of mist. It looked as though they were paradisiacal cotton-plants whose downy whiteness was bursting beneath the flood of moonlight. Along the steep banks of the river the thickets, heavy with rain, stood in rows like pilgrims bowed down under the weight of their wallets and leather-bottles. Peace reigned. It was as though an angel had rested his forehead in a hand. Dawn shivering with cold was awaiting her sister the day, and the bowed-down leaves of grass prayed to the dawn.
And suddenly Rabbit crouching in the midst of his meadow saw a man approaching, and he wasn't in the least afraid of him. For the first time since the beginning of things, since man had set traps and snares the instinct of flight became extinguished in the timid soul of Rabbit.
The man, who approached, was dressed like the trunk of a tree in winter when it is clothed in the rough fustian of moss. He wore a cowl on his head and sandals on his feet. He carried no stick. His hands were clasped inside the sleeves of his robe, and a cord served as girdle. He kept his bony face turned toward the moon, and the moon was less pale than it. One could clearly distinguish his eagle's nose and his deep eyes, which were like those of asses, and his black beard on which tufts of lamb's wool had been left by the thickets.
Two doves accompanied him. They flitted from branch to branch in the sweetness of the night. The tender beat of their wings was like the fallen petals of a flower, and as if these were striving to re-unite again and expand once more into a blossom.
Three poor dogs that