In and out of Three Normandy Inns Part 2

[Ill.u.s.tration: ON THE BEACH--VILLERVILLE]

The width of the sky overhanging this s.p.a.ce was immense; not a sc.r.a.p, apparently, was left over to cover, decently, the rest of the earth's surface--of that one was quite certain in looking at this vast inverted cup overflowing with ether. What there was of land was a very sketchy performance. Opposite ran the red line of the Havre headlands.

Following the river, inland, there was a pretence of sh.o.r.e, just sufficiently outlined, like a youth's beard, to give substance to one's belief in its future growth and development. Beneath these windows the water, hemmed in by this edge of sh.o.r.e, panted, like a child at play; its sighs, liquid, lisping, were irresistible; one found oneself listening for the sound of them as if they had issued from a human throat. The humming of the bees in the garden, the cry of a fisherman calling across the water, the shout of the children below on the beach, or, at twilight, the chorusing birds, carolling at full concert pitch; this, at most, was all the sound and fury the sea beach yielded.

The windows opening on the village street let in a noise as tumultuous as the sea was silent. The hubbub of a perpetual babble, all the louder for being compressed within narrow s.p.a.ce, was always to be heard; it ceased only when the village slept. There was an incessant clicking accompaniment to this noisy street life; a music played from early dawn to dusk over the pavement's rough cobbles--the click clack, click clack of the countless wooden sabots.

Part of this clamor in the streets was due to the fact that the village, as a village, appeared to be doing a tremendous business with the sea.

Men and women were perpetually going to and coming from the beach.

Fishermen, sailors, women bearing nets, oars, masts, and sails, children bending beneath the weight of baskets filled with kicking fish; wheelbarrows stocked high with sea-food and warm clothing; all this commerce with the sea made the life in these streets a more animated performance than is commonly seen in French villages.

In time, the provincial mania began to work in our veins.

To watch our neighbors, to keep an eye on this life--this became, after a few days, the chief occupation of our waking hours.

The windows of our rooms fronting on the street were peculiarly well adapted for this unmannerly occupation. By merely opening the blinds, we could keep an eye on the entire village. Not a cat could cross the street without undergoing inspection. Augustine, for example, who, once having turned her back on the inn windows, believed herself entirely cut off from observation, was perilously exposed to our mercy. We knew all the secrets of her thieving habits; we could count, to a second, the time she stole from the Mere, her employer, to squander in smiles and dimples at the corner creamery. There a tall Norman rained admiration upon her through wide blue eyes, as he patted, caressingly, the pots of blond b.u.t.ter, just the color of her hair, before laying them, later, tenderly in her open palm. Soon, as our acquaintance with our neighbors deepened into something like intimacy, we came to know their habits of mind as we did their facial peculiarities; certain of their actions made an event in our day. It became a serious matter of conjecture as to whether Madame de Tours, the social swell of the town, would or would not offer up her prayer to Deity, accompanied by Friponne, her black poodle. If Friponne issued forth from the narrow door, in company with her austere mistress, the s.h.i.+ning black silk gown, we knew, would not decorate the angular frame of this aristocratic provincial; a sober beige was best fitted to resist the dashes made by Friponne's sharply-trimmed nails. It was for this, to don a silk gown in full sight of her neighbors; to set up as companion a dog of the highest fas.h.i.+on, the very purest of _caniches_, that twenty years of patient nursing a paralytic husband--who died all too slowly--had been counted as nothing!

Once we were summoned to our outlook by the vigorous beating of a drum.

Madame Mouchard and Augustine were already at their own post of observation--the open inn door. The rest of the village was in full attendance, for it was not every day in the week that the "tambour,"

the town-crier, had business enough to render his appearance, in his official capacity, necessary; as a mere townsman he was to be seen any hour of the day, as drunk as a lord, at the sign of "L'Ami Fidele." His voice, as it rolled out the words of his cry, was as _staccato_ in pitch as any organ can be whose practice is largely confined to unceasing calls for potations. To the listening crowd, the thick voice was shouting:

"_Madame Tricot--a la messe--dimanche--a--perdu une broche--or et perles--avec cheveux--Madame Merle a perdu--sur la plage--un panier avec--un chat noir--_"

We ourselves, to our astonishment, were drummed the very next morning.

Augustine had made the discovery of a missing shoulder-cape; she had taken it upon herself to call in the drummer. So great was the attendance of villagers, even the abstractors of the lost garment must, we were certain, be among the crowd a.s.sembled to hear our names shouted out on the still air. We were greatly affected by the publicity of the occasion; but the village heard the announcement, both of our names and of our loss, with the phlegm of indifference. "Vingt francs pour avoir tambourine mademoiselle!" This was an item which a week later, in madame's little bill, was not confronted with indifference.

"It gives one the feeling of having had relations with a wandering circus," remarked the young philosopher at my side.

"But it is really a great convenience, that system," she continued; "I'm always mislaying things--and through the drummer there's a whole village as aid to find a lost article. I shall, doubtless, always have that, now, in my bills!" And Charm, with an air of serene confidence in the village, adjusted her restored shoulder-cape.

Down below, in our neighbor's garden--the one adjoining our own and facing the sea--a new and old world of fas.h.i.+on in capes and other garments were a-flutter in the breeze, morning after morning. Who and what was this neighbor, that he should have so curious and eccentric a taste in clothes? No woman was to be seen in the garden-paths; a man, in a butler's ap.r.o.n and a silk skullcap, came and went, his arms piled high with gowns and scarves, and all manner of strange odds and ends.

Each morning some new a.s.sortment of garments met our wondering eyes.

Sometimes it was a collection of Empire embroidered costumes that were hung out on the line; faded fleur-de-lis, sprigs of dainty lilies and roses, gold-embossed Empire coats, strewn thick with seed-pearls on satins softened by time into melting shades. When next we looked the court of Napoleon had vanished, and the Bourbon period was, literally, in full swing. A frou-frou of laces, coats with deep skirts, and beribboned trousers would be fluttering airily in the soft May air.

Once, in fine contrast to these courtly splendors, was a wondrous a.s.sortment of flannel petticoats. They were of every hue--red, yellow, brown, pink, patched, darned, wide-skirted, plaited, ruffled--they appeared to represent the taste and requirement of every climate and country, if one could judge by the thickness of some and the gossamer tissues of others; but even the smartest were obviously, unmistakably, effrontedly, flannel petticoats.

It was a mystery that greatly intrigued us. One morning the mystery was solved. A whiff of tobacco from an upper window came along with a puff of wind. It was a heated whiff, in spite of the cooling breeze. It was from a pipe, a short, black pipe, owned by some one in the Mansard window next door. There was the round disk of a dark-blue beret drooping over the pipe. "Good--" I said to myself--"I shall see now--at last--this maniac with a taste for darned petticoats!"

The pipe smoked peacefully, steadily on. The beret was motionless.

Between the pipe and the cap was a man's profile; it was too much in shadow to be clearly defined.

The next instant the man's face was in full sunlight. The face turned toward me--with the quick instinct of knowing itself watched--and then--

"Pas--possible!"

"You--here!"

"Been here a year--but you, when did you arrive? What luck! What luck!"

It was John Renard, the artist; after the first salutations question followed question.

"Are you alone?--"

"No."

"Is she--young?"

"Yes."

"Pretty?"

"Judge for yourself--that is she--in the garden yonder."

The beret dipped itself perilously out into the sky--to take a full view.

"Hem--I'll come in at once."

It was as a trio that the conversation was continued later, in the garden. But Renard was still chief questioner.

"Have you been out on the mussel-beds?"

"Not yet."

"We'll go this afternoon--Have you been to Honfleur? Not yet?--We'll go to-morrow. The tide will be in to-day about four--I'll call for you--wear heavy boots and old clothes. It's jolly dirty. Where do you breakfast?"

The breakfast was eaten, as a trio, at our inn, an hour later. It was so warm a day, it was served under one of the arbors. Augustine was feeding and caressing the doves as we entered the inn garden. At sight of Renard she dropped a quiet courtesy, smiles and roses struggling for a supremacy on her round peasant face. She let the doves loose at once, saying: "Allez, allez," as if they quite understood that with Monsieur Renard's advent their hour of success was at an end.

Why does a man's presence always seem to communicate such surprising animation to a woman--to any woman? Why does his appearance, for instance, suddenly, miraculously stiffen the sauces, lure from the cellar bottles incrusted with the gray of thick cobwebs, give an added drop of the lemon to the mayonnaise, and make an omelette to swim in a sea of b.u.t.ter? All these added touches to our commonly admirable breakfast were conspicuous that day--it was a breakfast for a prince and a gourmet.

"The Mere can cook--when she gives her mind to it," was Renard's meagre masculine comment, as the last morsel of the golden omelette disappeared behind his mustache.

It was a gay little breakfast, with the circling above of the birds and the doves. There are duller forms of pleasure than to eat a repast in the company of an artist. I know not why it is, but it has always seemed to me that the man who lives only to copy life appears to get far more out of it than those who make a point of seeing nothing in it save themselves.

Renard, meanwhile, was taking pains to a.s.sure us that in less than a month the Villerville beaches would be crowded; only the artists of the brushes were here now; the artists of high life would scarcely be found deserting the Avenue des Acacias before June.

"French people are always coming to the seash.o.r.e, you know--or trying to come. It's a part of their emotional religion to wors.h.i.+p the sea.

'La mer! la mer!' they cry, with eyes all whites; then they go into little swoons of rapture--I can see them now, att.i.tudinizing in salons and at tables-d'hote!" To which comment we could find no more original rejoinder than our laughter.

It was a day when laughter was good; it put one in closer relations with the universal smiling. There are certain days when nature seems to laugh aloud; in this hour of noon the entire universe, all we could see of it, was on a broad grin. Everything moved, or danced, or sang; the leaves were each alive, trembling, quivering, shaking; the insect hum was like a Wagnerian chorus, deafening to the ear; there was a brisk, light breeze stirring--a breeze that moved the higher branches of the trees as if it had been an arm; that rippled the gra.s.s; that tossed the wavelets of the sea into such foam that they seemed over-running with laughter; and such was still its unspent energy that it sent the Seine with a bound up through its sh.o.r.es, its waters clanging like a sheet of mail armor worn by some l.u.s.ty warrior. We were walking in the narrow lane that edged the cliff; it was a lane that was guarded with a sentinel row of osiers, syringas, and laburnums. This was the guard of the cliffs. On the other side was the high garden wall, over which we caught dissolving views of dormer-windows, of gabled roofs, vine-clad walls, and a maze of peach and pear blossoms. This was not precisely the kind of lane through which one hurried. One needed neither to be sixteen nor even in love to find it a delectable path, very agreeable to the eye, very suggestive to the imaginative faculty, exceedingly satisfactory to the most fastidious of all the senses, to that aristocrat of all the five, the sense of smell. Like all entirely perfect experiences in life, the lane ended almost as soon as it began; it ended in a steep pair of steps that dropped, precipitously, on the pebbles of the beach.

For some reason best known to the day and the view, we all, with one accord, proceeded to seat ourselves on the topmost step of this stairway. We were waiting for the tide to fall, to go out to the mussel-bed. Meanwhile the prospect to be seen from this improvised seat was one made to be looked at. There is a certain innate compelling quality in all great beauty. When nature or woman presents a really grandiose appearance, they are singularly reposeful, if you notice; they have the calm which comes with a consciousness of splendor. It is only prettiness which is tormented with the itching for display; and therefore this prospect, which rolled itself out beneath our feet, curling in a half-moon of beach, broadening into meadows that dropped to the river edge, lifting its beauty upward till the hills met the sky. and the river was lost in the clasp of the sh.o.r.e--this aspect of nature, in this moment of beauty, was as untroubled as if Chateaubriand had not found her a lover, and had flattered man by persuading him that,

"La voix de l'univers, c'est mon intelligence."

CHAPTER IV.