Story of the Month: The Secret of the Locked Mill

You should know, sir, that our country was not always dead as it is today. Yesterday there was a great traffic of milling here, and people came to us with their wheat from villages near and far to have it ground. These hills around us were covered with windmills; whichever way you looked, right or left, you saw their sails turning above the pines and the oaks, and saw the donkeys, heavy with their loads, going up and down the paths. All week long it was a true joy for the eye to light on these sights, and for the ear to hear the cracks of the switches with which the muleteers drove their beasts; and when Sunday came, we all went up to the mills, where the millers served us the delicious old wine. Their daughters were beautiful as kings' daughters, with their embroidered shawls and the gold ornaments at their throats. We would stay until the end of the night, drinking and singing and dancing... Believe me, my friend, those mills were the joy and the wealth of our country.

But what could be done? One day it occurred to a company of people from the capital to set up a steam mill in our country. Everything new has its pull, and people took to sending their wheat to the steam mill, and the poor windmills were left without work. They tried to resist for a while, but in the end steam got the better of wind, and they were forced to shut their doors... The donkeys ceased going up and down the paths, the millers' daughters sold their gold ornaments, and of the delicious old wine nothing was left but the memory. Let the breezes blow as they pleased—the sails of the mills above the pines and oaks stood frozen and would not stir.

Then the municipality ordered these shacks torn down and their timbers broken up, and the planters planted vines and olives in their place... all but one mill, which remained standing amid these ruins in defiance of everyone, and never ceased its turning: the mill of Master Cornille—this very one where we are spending our evening tonight.

★

Master Cornille was an old miller who had lived in flour for sixty years, and he loved his craft to the point of worship. When the steam mill was set up, it struck him on the head and he became like a madman. He spent a week running about the village, stirring people up against it and shouting at them with all his might that those people meant to poison them with the flour of the steam mill. He would say:

"Don't go there. Those thieves use steam to make bread, and steam is the invention of the devil. As for me, I work with the breezes, which are the breath of God!..."

And many other things he said in praise of windmills. But no one listened to him.

Then a despairing fury took hold of him: he shut himself up in his mill and lived alone like a wild beast. He would not even allow his granddaughter Vivette to stay at his side—a girl of fifteen who had no one in the world to turn to but her grandfather, her parents having died when she was small. So the poor thing wandered about the village and the neighborhood, helping with the sowing and the harvesting and the tending of the cows, earning her daily bread by painful toil. And yet Master Cornille loved her dearly; sometimes he would set out after her from village to village, and when he met her he would sit facing her and spend hours looking at her and weeping...

Master Cornille's condition worsened, and he fell from honor into abasement. He walked the roads in worn-out rags, a filthy cap, shoes full of holes. And when

Sunday came, he did not go up to the front benches in church, but stayed near the door with the poor, his head bowed, sorrowful. People looked at him with pity and curiosity at once, and tried to unriddle the enigma he lived in, without success. For months and months the people of the village and the neighborhood had ceased grinding their wheat at his mill, and yet the sails of his mill still turned without pause. Every evening they saw him driving his donkey loaded with huge sacks of flour, and they would stop him:

"Good day, Master Cornille. Business still going at the mill?"

And he would answer:

"Always, my children, God be praised. We complain of everything except lack of work."

And if they asked him where all this work came from, he laid his finger on his lips and said:

"Hush!... I work for export."

No one could get more out of him than that. As for entering his mill, that was not a thing to be thought of. Even Vivette herself had no right to cross the threshold. The passerby saw the door locked by day and by night, the sails in perpetual motion, the decrepit, scrawny donkey cropping the grass in the yard, and a big cat pacing the window sill and casting its wicked eyes at you. All this cast an air of secrets that everyone tried, in vain, to dispel, so as to reach the heart of Master Cornille. But people agreed on one thing: that in the mill there were sacks of gold outnumbering, no doubt, its sacks of wheat.

*

Yet in time the matter came to light. One day there was a wedding in the village, and we all went to offer our congratulations and to drink wine and dance. And there I noticed my eldest son circling around Vivette in a way whose meaning did not escape me. He loved her and she loved him. As for me, that did not displease me, for Master Cornille, in spite of everything, is among the most honorable of men. And then I pictured that little sparrow Vivette hopping and chirping about the house, and I said to myself, let that house be mine; and I feared that if things dragged on between them it might lead to what ought to be reckoned with in its proper season, lest I repent when repentance is of no use. So early the next morning I took myself off to the mill to broach the matter with Master Cornille... And do you know, sir, how he received me? In vain I begged him to open the door. I had to put my mouth to the crack and set out to him the reason for my coming, while that cursed cat never stopped spitting above my head like a devil. He did not let me finish, but gave me to understand that if I was in a hurry to marry off my son, I had only to go to the steam mill, where girls were plentiful! You can imagine how the blood rose to my head at those ugly words. But I kept hold of myself, left the doting old man where he was, and went back to tell the boy and the girl the result of my errand.

The two gentle sweethearts could not believe that anything could stand in the way of their love, and they asked my leave to go together to the mill, saying they would undertake to persuade its owner. I said: it is your affair.

And the fates would have it that Master Cornille had gone out only a few minutes before they arrived. But he had left the ladder outside, and it occurred to them at once to climb in through the window and see what there could possibly be inside this strange mill.

What a wonder! The mill was empty. Not a sack, not a grain of wheat, not a speck of flour dust on the walls. Even that good warm smell that rises from ground wheat and fills the nostrils—of it there was no trace. In one corner, a broken wooden bed; on the window sill, some crusts of dry bread; and then, in another corner, four or five sacks full of holes, from which spilled white sand.

That—that was Master Cornille's secret. Those were the sacks he loaded on his donkey's back and paraded along the village roads every evening, to save the honor of his mill and to make people believe that work there was going on. Poor mill, and poor Master Cornille! The steam mill and its owners had robbed them of their customers long ago; the millstones turned and turned, but on emptiness.

The boy and the girl came back and, weeping, told me what they had seen. My heart nearly broke. I did not waste a minute, but went straightaway to the neighbors and explained the matter to them in two words, and we agreed to carry to Master Cornille's mill, that very hour, all the wheat in our houses. The news spread through the village, and in no time the whole village marched out in a long procession of donkeys loaded with wheat—but this was real wheat.

The door stood open on both its leaves, and Master Cornille was sitting on a stone, his head in his hands, weeping with grief. He had realized that some rogue had taken advantage of his absence and his forgetting the ladder outside, had got into the mill and laid bare his secret. He was crying out and lamenting his lot, saying:

"O my shame! Nothing is left me but to die, after what has befallen my mill!"

And he called the mill by loving names, as though he were speaking to a real person.

At that moment the donkeys reached the yard, and we all began shouting as we used to in the great days of the windmills, and unloading the sacks, while Master Cornille opened his eyes wide and, with his dry, veined hand, took up and gathered a handful here and a handful there, wanting to laugh and weeping instead, and saying:

"Wheat—wheat—by God Almighty, wheat! Let me look my fill at it!"

Then he turned his face to us and said:
"I knew you would come back to me. Those people from the capital are all thieves."

*

From that day on we never left Master Cornille without work. Then, a year and some months later, the old man died, and the sails of our windmills stopped—this time forever. What would you have? We must understand, sir, that everything has an end, and resign ourselves to it: the age of the windmills has gone, never to return, along with all the beautiful things that were of old and have passed away.