In and out of Three Normandy Inns Part 22

A DAY AT BAYEUX AND ST. LO.

Caen seated in its plain, wearing its crown of steeples--this was our last glimpse of the beautiful city. Our way to Bayeux was strewn thick with these Normandy jewels; with towns smaller than Caen; with Gothic belfries; with ruined priories, and with castles, stately even when tottering in decay. When the last castle was lost in a thicket, we discovered that our iron horse was stopping in the very middle of a field. If the guard had shouted out the name of any American city, built overnight, on a Western prairie, we should have felt entirely at home in this meadow; we should have known any clearing, with gra.s.s and daisies, was a very finished evidence of civilization at high pressure.

But a lane as the beginning of a cathedral town!

Evidently Bayeux has had a Ruskinian dread of steam-whistles, for this ancient seat of bishops has succeeded in retaining the charms of its old rustic approaches, whatever else it may have sacrificed on the altar of modernness.

An harangue, at the door of the quaint old Normandy omnibus, by the driver of the same, was proof that the lesson of good oratory, administered by generations of bishops, had not been lost on the Bayeux inhabitants. Two rebellious English tourists furnished the text for the driver's sermon; they were showing, with all the naive pride of pedestrians, their intention of footing the distance between the station and the cathedral. This was an independence of spirit no Norman could endure to see. What? these gentlemen proposed to walk, in the sun, through clouds of dust, when here was a carriage, with ladies for companions, at their command? The coach had come down the hill on purpose to conduct _Messieurs les voyageurs;_ how did these gentlemen suppose _a pere de famille_ was to make his living if the fashion of walking came in? And the rusty red vest was thumbed by the gnarled hand of the father, who was also an orator; and a high-peaked hat swept the ground before the hard-hearted gentlemen. All the tragedy of the situation had come about from the fact that the tourists, also, had gotten themselves up in costume. When two fine youths have risen early in the day to put on checked stockings, leggings, russet walking-shoes, and a plaited coat with a belt, such attire is one to be lived up to.

Once in knickerbockers and a man's getting into an omnibus is really too ignominious! With such a road before two sets of such well-shaped calves--a road all shaped and graded--this, indeed, would be flying in the face of a veritable providence of bishop-builders intent on maintaining pastoral effects.

The knickerbockers relentlessly strode onward; the driver had addressed himself to hearts of stone. But he had not yet exhausted his quiver of appeal. Englishmen walk, well! there's no accounting for the taste of Britons who are also still half savages; but even a barbarian must eat.

Half-way up the hill, the rattle of the loose-jointed vehicle came to a dead stop. With great gravity the guard descended from his seat; this latter he lifted to take from the entrails of the old vehicle a handful of hand-bills. He, the horse, the omnibus, and we, all waited for, what do you suppose? To besprinkle the walking Englishmen as they came within range with a shower of circulars announcing that at "_midi, chez Nigaud, il y aura un dejeuner chaud_."

The driver turned to look in at the window--and to nod as he turned--he felt so certain of our sympathy; had he not made sure of them at last?

A group of gossamer caps beneath a row of sad, gray-faced houses was our Bayeux welcome. The faces beneath the caps watched our approach with the same sobriety as did the old houses--they had the antique Norman seriousness of aspect. The noise we made with the clatter and rattle of our broken-down vehicle seemed an impertinence, in the face of such severe countenances. We might have been entering a deserted city, except for the presence of these motionless Normandy figures. The cathedral met us at the threshold of the city: magnificent, majestic, a huge gray mountain of stone, but severe in outline, as if the Norman builders had carved on the vast surface of its facade an imprint of their own grave earnestness.

We were somewhat early for the hot breakfast at Nigaud's. There was, however, the appetizing smell of soup, with a flourishing pervasiveness of onion in the pot, to sustain the vigor of an appet.i.te whetted by a start at dawn. The knickerbockers came in with the omelette. But one is not a Briton on his travels for nothing; one does not leave one's own island to be the dupe of French inn-keepers. The smell of the soup had not departed with our empty plates, and the voice of the walkers was not of the softest when they demanded their rights to be as odorous as we. There is always a curiously agreeable sensation, to an American, in seeing an Englishman angry; to get angry in public is one thing we do badly; and in his cup of wrath our British brother is sublime--he is so superbly unconscious--and so contemptuous--of the fact that the world sometimes finds anger ridiculous.

At the other end of the long and narrow table two other travellers were seated, a man and a woman. But food, to them, it was made manifestly evident, was a matter of the most supreme indifference. They were at that radiant moment of life when eating is altogether too gross a form of indulgence. For these two were at the most interesting period of French courtship--just _after_ the wedding ceremony, when, with the priest's blessing, had come the consent of their world and of tradition to their making the other's acquaintance. This provincial bride and her husband of a day were beginning, as all rustic courting begins, by a furtive holding of hands; this particular couple, in view of our proximity and their own mutual embarra.s.sment, had recourse to the subterfuge of desperate lunges at the other's fingers, beneath the table-cloth. The screen, as a screen, did not work. It deceived no one--as the bride's pale-gray dress and her flowery bonnet also deceived no one--save herself. This latter, in certain ranks of life, is the bride's travelling costume, the world over. And the world over, it is worn by the recently wedded with the profound conviction that in donning it they have discovered the most complete of all disguises.

This bride and groom were obviously in the first rapture of mutual discovery. The honey in their moon was not fresher than their views of the other's tastes and predilections.

"Ah--ah--you like to travel quickly--to see everything, to take it all in a gulp--so do I, and then to digest at one's leisure."

The bride was entirely of this mind. Only, she murmured, there were other things one must not do too quickly--one must go slow in matters of the heart--to make quite sure of all the stages.

But her husband was at her throat, that is, his eyes and lips were, as he answered, so that all the table might partake of his emotion--"No, no, the quicker the heart feels the quicker love comes. _Tiens, voyons, mon amie, toi-meme, tu m'as confie_"--and the rest was lost in the bride's ear.

Apparently we were to have them, these brides, for the rest of our journey, in all stages and of all ages! Thus far none others had appeared as determined as were these two honey-mooners, that all the world should share their bliss. They were cracking filberts with their disengaged fingers, the other two being closely interlocked, in quite scandalous openness, when we left them.

That was the only form of excitement that greeted us in the quiet Bayeux streets. The very street urchins invited repose; the few we saw were seated sedately on the threshold of their own door-steps, frequent sallies abroad into this quiet city having doubtless convinced them of the futility of all sorties. The old houses were their carved facades as old ladies wear rich lace--they had reached the age when the vanity of personal adornment had ceased to inflate. The great cathedral, towering above the tranquil town, wore a more conscious air; its significance was too great a contrast to the quiet city asleep at its feet. In these long, slow centuries the towers had grown to have the air of protectors.

The famous tapestries we went to see later, might easily enough have been worked yesterday, in any one of the old mediaeval houses; Mathilde and her hand-maidens would find no more--not so much--to distract and disturb them now in this still and tranquil town, with its sad gray streets and its moss-grown door-steps, as they must in those earlier bustling centuries of the Conqueror. Even then, when Normandy was only beginning its career of importance among the great French provinces, Bayeux was already old. She was far more Norse then than Norman; she was Scandinavian to the core; even her n.o.bles spoke in harsh Norse syllables; they were as little French as it was possible to be, and yet govern a people.

Mathilde, when she toiled over her frame, like all great writers, was doubtless quite unconscious she was producing a masterpiece. She was, however, in point of fact, the very first among the great French realists. No other French writer has written as graphically as she did with her needle, of the life and customs of their day. That long scroll of tapestry, for truth and a naive perfection of sincerity--where will you find it equalled or even approached? It is a rude Homeric epic; and I am not quite certain that it ought not to rank higher than even some of the more famous epics of the world--since Mathilde had to create the mould of art into which she poured her story. For who had thought before her of making women's st.i.tches write or paint a great historical event, crowded with homely details which now are dubbed archaeological veracities?

Bayeux and its tapestry; its grave company of antique houses; its glorious cathedral dominating the whole--what a lovely old background against which poses the eternal modernness of the young noon sun! The history of Bayeux is commonly given in a paragraph. Our morning's walk had proved to us it was the kind of town that does more to re-create the historic past than all the pages of a Guizot or a Challamel.

The bells that were ringing out the hour of high-noon from the cathedral towers at Bayeux were making the heights of St. Lo, two hours later, as noisy as a village fair. The bells, for rivals, had the clatter of women's tongues. I think I never, before or since, have beheld so lively a company of washerwomen as were beating their clothes in Vire River. The river bends prettily just below the St. Lo heights, as if it had gone out of its way to courtesy to a hill. But even the waters, in their haste to be polite, could not course beneath the great bridge as swiftly as ran those women's tongues. There were a good hundred of them at work beneath the washing-sheds. Now, these sheds, anywhere in France, are really the open-air club room of the French peasant woman; the whole dish of the village gossip is hung out to dry, having previously been well soused and aired, along with the blouses and the coa.r.s.e chemises. The town of St. Lo had evidently furnished these club members of the washing-stones with some fat dish of gossip--the heads were as close as currants on a stem, as they bent in groups over the bright waters. They had told it all to the stream; and the stream rolled the volume of the talk along as it carried along also the gay, sparkling reflections of the life and the toil that bent over it--of the myriad reflections of those moving, bare-armed figures, of the brilliant kerchiefs, of the wet blue and gray jerseys, and of the long prismatic line of the damp, motley-hued clothes that were fluttering in the wind.

The bells' clangor was an a.s.surance that something was happening on top of the hill. Just what happened was as altogether pleasing a spectacle, after a long and arduous climb up a hillside, as it has often been my good fortune to encounter.

The portals of the church of Notre Dame were wide open. Within, as we looked over the shoulders of the townspeople who, like us, had come to see what the bells meant by their ringing, within the church there was a rich and sombre dusk; out of this dusk, indistinctly at first, lit by the tremulous flicker of a myriad of candles, came a line of white-veiled heads; then another of young boys, with faces as pale as the nosegays adorning their brand-new black coats; next the scarlet-robed choristers, singing, and behind them still others swinging incense that thickened the dusk. Suddenly, like a vision, the white veils pa.s.sed out into the sunlight, and we saw that the faces beneath the veils were young and comely. The faces were still alternately lighted by the flare of the burning tapers and the glare of the noon sun. The long procession ended at last in a straggling group of old peasants with fine tremulous mouths, a-tremble with pride and with feeling; for here they were walking in full sight of their town, in their holiday coats, with their knees treacherously unsteady from the thrill of the organ's thunder and the sweetness of the choir-boys'

singing.

Whether it was a pardon, or a _fete_, or a first communion, we never knew. But the town of St. Lo is ever gloriously lighted, for us, with a nimbus of young heads, such as encircled the earlier madonnas.

After such a goodly spectacle, the rest of the town was a tame morsel.

We took a parting sniff of the incense still left in the eastern end of the church's nave; there was a bit of good gla.s.s in a window to reward us. Outside the church, on the west from the Pet.i.te Place, was a wide outlook over the lovely vale of the Vire, with St. Lo itself twisting and turning in graceful postures down the hillside.

On the same prospect two kings have looked, and before the kings a saint. St. Lo or St. Laudus himself, who gave his name to the town, must, in the sixth century, have gazed on virgin forests stretching away from the hill far as the eye could reach. Charlemagne, three hundred years later, in his turn, found the site a goodly one, one to tempt men to worship the Creator of such beauty, for here he founded the great Abbey of St. Croix, long since gone with the monks who peopled it. Louis XI, that mystic wearing the warrior's helmet, set his seal of approval on the hill, by sending the famous gla.s.s yonder in the cathedral, when the hill and the St. Lo people beat the Bretons who had come to capture both.

Like saint, and kings, and monks, and warriors, we in our turn crept down the hill. For we also were done with the town.

CHAPTER XXV.

A DINNER AT COUTANCES.

The way from St. Lo to Coutances is a pleasant way. There is no map of the country that will give you even a hint of its true character, any more than from a photograph you can hope to gain an insight into the moral qualities of a pretty woman.

Here, at last, was the ideal Normandy landscape. It was a country with a savage look--a savage that had been trained to follow the plough.

Even in its color it had retained the true barbarians' instinct for a good primary. Here were no melting-yellow mustard-fields, nor flame-lit poppied meadows, nor blue-bells lifting their baby-blue eyes out of the grain. All the land was green. Fields, meadows, forests, plains--all were green, green, green. The features of the landscape had changed with this change in coloring. The slim, fragile grace of slim trees and fragile cliffs had been replaced by trees of heroic proportions, and by outlines n.o.bly rounded and full--like the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of a mother. The whole country had an astonishing look of vigor--of the vigor which comes with rude strength; and it had that charm which goes with all untamed beauty--the power to sting one into a sense of agitated enjoyment.

Even the farm-houses had been suddenly transformed into fortresses.

Each one of the groups of the farm enclosures had its outer walls, its miniature turrets, and here and there its rounded bastions. Each farm, apparently, in the olden days had been a citadel unto itself. The Breton had been a very troublesome neighbor for many a long century; every ploughman, until a few hundred years ago, was quite likely to turn soldier at a second's notice--every true Norman must look to his own sword to defend his hearth-stone. Such is the story those stone turrets that cap the farm walls tell you--each one of these turrets was an open lid through which the farmer could keep his eye on Brittany.

Meanwhile, along the roads as we rushed swiftly by, a quieter life was pa.s.sing. The farm wagons were jogging peacefully along on a high-road as smooth as a fine lady's palm--and as white. The horses were harnessed one before the other, in interminable length of line.

Sometimes six, sometimes eight, even so many as ten, marched with great gravity, and with that majestic dignity only possible to full-blooded Percherons, one after the other. They each wore a saddle-cloth of blue sheepskin. On their mottled haunches this bit of color made their polished coats to gleam like unto a lizards' skin.

Meanwhile, also, we were nearing Coutances. The farm-houses were fortresses no longer; the thatched roofs were one once more with the green of the high roads; for even in the old days there was a great walled city set up on a hill, to which refuge all the people about for miles could turn for protection.

A city that is set on a hill! That for me is commonly recommendation enough. Such a city, so set, promises at the very least the dual distinction of looking up as well as looking down; it is the nearer heaven, and just so much the farther removed from earth.

Coutances, for a city with its head in the air, was surprisingly friendly. It went out of its way to make us at home. At the very station, down below in the plain, it had sent the most loquacious of coach-drivers to put us in immediate touch with its present interests.

All the city, as the coa.r.s.e blue blouse, flourishing its whip, took pains to explain, was abroad in the fields; the forests, _tiens_, down yonder through the trees, we could see for ourselves how the young people were making the woods as crowded as a ball-room. The city, as a city, was stripping the land and the trees bare--it would be as bald as a new-born babe by the morrow. But then, of a certainty, we also had come for the _fete_--or, and here a puzzled look of doubt beclouded the provincial's eyes--might we, perchance, instead, have come for the trial? _Mais non, pas ca_, these ladies had never come for that, since they did not even know the court was sitting, now, this very instant, at Coutances. And--_sapristi!_ but there was a trial going on--one to make the blood curdle; he himself had not slept, the rustic coachman added, as he shivered beneath his blouse, all the night before--the blood had run so cold in his veins.

The horse and the road were all the while going up the hill. The road was easily one that might have been the path of warriors; the walls, still lofty on the side nearest the town, bristled with a turret or a bastion to remind us Coutances had not been set on a hill for mere purposes of beauty. The ramparts of the old fortifications had been turned into a broad promenade. Even as we jolted past, beneath the great breadth of the trees' verdure we could see how gloriously the prospect widened--the country below reaching out to the horizon like the waters of a sea that end only in indefiniteness.

The city itself seemed to grow out of the walls and the trees. Here and there a few scattered houses grouped themselves as if meaning to start a street; but a maze of foliage made a straight line impossible.

Finally a large group of buildings, with severe stone faces, took a more serious plunge away from the vines; they had shaken themselves free and were soon soberly ranging themselves into the parallel lines of narrow city streets.

It was a pleasant surprise to find that, for once, a Norman blouse had told the truth; for here were the people of Coutances coming up from the fields to prove it. In all these narrow streets a great mult.i.tude of people were pa.s.sing us; some were laden with vines, others with young forest trees, and still others with rude garlands of flowers. The peasant women's faces, as the bent figures staggered beneath a young fir-tree, were purple, but their smiles were as gay as the wild flowers with which the stones were thickly strewn. Their words also were as rough:

"_Diantre--mais c'e lourd!_"

"_E-ben, e toi, tu n' bougeons point, toi!_"

And the nearest fir-tree carrier to our carriage wheels cracked a swift blow over the head of a vine-bearer, who being but an infant of two, could not make time with the swift foot of its mother.

The smell of the flowers was everywhere. Fir-trees perfumed the air.

Every doorstep was a garden. The courtyards were alive with the squat figures of capped maidens, wreathing and twisting greens and garlands.

And in the streets there was such a noise as was never before heard in a city on a hill-top.