In and out of Three Normandy Inns Part 28

The geese on the green downs, just below the village, had clearly never even heard of Calvin; they were luxuriating in a series of plunges into the deep pools in a way to prove complete ignorance of nice sabbatarian laws.

With our first toss upon the downs, a world of new and fresh experiences began. Genets was quite right; the Mont over yonder was another country; even at the very beginning of the journey we learned so much. This breeze blowing in from the sea, that had swept the ramparts of the famous rock, was a double extract of the sea essence; it had all the salt of the sea and the aroma of firs and wild flowers; its lips had not kissed a garden in high air without the perfume lingering, if only to betray them. Even this strip of meadow marsh had a character peculiar to itself; half of it belonged to earth and half to the sea. You might have thought it an inland pasture, with its herds of cattle, its flocks of sheep, and its colonies of geese--patrolled by ragged urchins. But behold, somewhere out yonder the pasture was lost in high sea-waves; ships with bulging sails replaced the curve of the cattle's sides, and instead of bending necks of sheep, there were seagulls swooping down upon the foamy waves.

As the incarnation of this dual life of sea and land, the rock stands.

It also is both of the sea and the land. Its feet are of the waters--rocks and stones the sea-waves have used as playthings these millions of years. But earth regains possession as the rocks pile themselves into a mountain. Even from this distance, one can see the moving arms of great trees, the ma.s.ses of yellow flower-tips that dye the sides of the stony hill, and the strips of green gra.s.s here and there. So much has nature done for this wonderful pyramid in the sea.

Then man came and fashioned it to his liking. He piled the stones at its base into t.i.tanic walls; he carved about its sides the rounded b.r.e.a.s.t.s of bastions; he piled higher and higher up the dizzy heights a medley of palaces, convents, abbeys, cloisters, to lay at the very top the fitting crown of all, a jewelled Norman-Gothic cathedral.

Earth and man have thrown their gauntlet down to the sea--this rock is theirs, they cry to the waves and the might of oceans. And the sea laughs--as strong men laugh when boys are angry or insistent. She has let them build and toil, and pray and fight; it is all one to her what is done on the rock--whether men carve its stones into lace, or rot and die in its dungeons; it is all the same to her whether each spring the daffodils creep up within the crevices and the irises nod to them from the gardens.

It is all one to her. For twice a day she recaptures the Mont. She encircles it with the strong arm of her tides; with the might of her waters she makes it once more a thing of the sea.

The tide was rising now.

The fringe of the downs had dabbled in the shoals till they had become one. We had left behind the last of the shepherd lads, come out to the edge of the land to search for a wandering kid. We were all at once plunging into high water. Our road was sunk out of sight; we were driving through waves as high as our cart-wheels. Fend l'Air was shivering; he was as a-tremble as a woman. The height of the rivers was not to his liking.

"_Sacre faineant!_" yelled his owner, treating the tremor to a mighty crack of the whip.

"Is he afraid?"

"Yes--when the water is as high as that, he is always afraid. Ah, there he is--_diantre_, but he took his time!" he growled, but the growl was set in the key of relief. He was pointing toward a figure that was leaping toward us through the water. "It is the guide!" he added, in explanation.

The guide was at Fend l'Air's shoulder. Very little of him was above water, but that little was as brown as an Egyptian. He was puffing and blowing like unto a porpoise. In one hand he held a huge pitchfork--the trident of this watery Mercury.

"Shall I conduct you?" he asked, dipping the trident as if in salute, into the water, as he still puffed and gasped.

"If you please," as gravely responded our driver. For though up to our cart-wheels and b.r.e.a.s.t.s in deep water, the formalities were not to be dispensed with, you understand. The guide placed himself at once in front of Fend l'Air, whose shivers as quickly disappeared.

"You see, mesdames--the guide gives him courage--and he now knows no fear," cried out with pride our whip on the outer bench. "And what news, Victor--is there any?" It was of the Mont he was asking. And the guide replied, taking an extra plunge into deep water:

"Oh, not much. There's to be a wedding tomorrow and a pilgrimage the next day. Madame Poulard has only a handful as yet. _Ces dames_ descend doubtless at Madame Poulard's--_celle qui fait les omelettes?_" The ladies were ignorant as yet of the accomplishments of the said landlady; they had only heard of her beauty.

"_C'est elle_," gravely chorussed the guide and the driver, both nodding their heads as their eyes met. "_Fameuse, sa beaute, comme son omelette_," as gravely added our driver.

The beauty of this lady and the fame of her omelette were very sobering, apparently, in their effects on the mind; for neither guide nor driver had another word to say.

Still the guide plunged into the rivers, and Fend l'Air followed him.

Our cart still pitched and tossed--we were still rocked about in our rough cradle. But the sun, now freed from the banks of clouds, was lighting our way with a great and sudden glory. And for the rest of our watery journey we were conscious only of that lighting. Behind the Mont, lay a vast sea of saffron. But it was in the sky; against it the great rock was as black as if the night were upon it. Here and there, through the curve of a flying b.u.t.tress, or the apertures of a pierced parapet, gay bits of this yellow world were caught and framed. The sea lay beneath like a quiet carpet; and over this carpet ships and sloops swam with easy gliding motion, with sails and cordage dipped in gold.

The smaller craft, moored close to sh.o.r.e, seemed transfigured as in a fog of gold. And nearer still were the brown walls of the Mont making a great shadow, and in the shadow the waters were as black as the skin of an African. In the shoals there were lovely ma.s.ses of turquoise and palest green; for here and there a cloudlet pa.s.sed, to mirror their complexions in the translucent pools.

But Fend l'Air's hoofs had struck a familiar note. His iron shoes were clicking along the macadam of the dike. There was a rapid dashing beneath the great walls; a sudden night of darkness as we plunged through an open archway into a narrow village street; a confused impression of houses built into side-walls; of machicolated gateways; of rocks and roof-tops tumbling about our ears; and within the street was sounding the babel of a shrieking troop of men and women. Porters, peasants, lads, and children were clamoring about our cart-wheels like unto so many jackals. The bedlam did not cease as we stopped before a wide, brightly-lit open doorway.

Then through the doorway there came a tall, finely-featured brunette.

She made her way through the yelling crowd as a d.u.c.h.ess might cleave a path through a rabble. She was at the side of the cart in an instant.

She gave us a bow and smile that were both a welcome and an act of appropriation. She held out a firm, soft, brown hand. When it closed on our own, we knew it to be the grasp of a friend, and the clasp of one who knew how to hold her world. But when she spoke the words were all of velvet, and her voice had the cadence of a caress.

"I have been watching you, _cheres dames_--crossing the _greve_--but how wet and weary you must be! Come in by the fire, it is ablaze now--I have been feeding it for you!" And once more the beautifully curved lips parted over the fine teeth, and the exceeding brightness of the dark eyes smiled and glittered in our own. The caressing voice still led us forward, into the great gay kitchen; the touch of skilful, discreet fingers undid wet cloaks and wraps; the soft charm of a lovely and gracious woman made even the penetrating warmth of the huge fire-logs a secondary feature of our welcome. To those who have never crossed a _greve_; who have had no jolting in a Normandy _char-a-banc_; who, for hours, have not known the mixed pleasures and discomfort of being a part of sea-rivers; and who have not been met at the threshold of an Inn on a Rock by the smiling welcome of Madame Poulard--all such have yet a pleasant page to read in the book of travelled experience.

Meanwhile somewhere, in an inner room, things sweet to the nostrils were cooking. Maids were tripping up and down stairs with covered dishes; there was the pleasant clicking in the ear of the lids of things; dishes or pans or jars were being lifted. And more delicious to the ear than even the promise to starving mouths of food, and of red wine to the lip, was the continuing music of madame's voice, as she stood over us purring with content at seeing her travellers drying and being thoroughly warmed. "The dinner-bell must soon be rung, dear ladies; I delayed it as long as I dared--I gauged your progress across from the terrace--I have kept all my people waiting; for your first dinner here must be hot! But now it rings! Shall I conduct you to your rooms?"

I have no doubt that, even without this brunette beauty, with her olive cheek and her comely figure as guides, we should have gone the way she took us in a sort of daze. One cannot pa.s.s under machicolated gateways; rustle between the walls of fourteenth century fortifications; climb a stone stairway that begins in a watch-tower and ends in a rampart, with a great sea view, and with the breadth of all the land sh.o.r.eward; walk calmly over the top of a king's gate, with the arms of a bishop and the shrine of the Virgin beneath one's feet; and then, presently, begin to climb the side of a rock in which rude stone steps have been cut, till one lands on a miniature terrace, to find a preposterously st.u.r.dy-looking house affixed to a ridiculous ledge of rock that has the presumption to give shelter to a hundred or more travellers--ground enough, also, for rows of plane-trees, for honeysuckles, and rose-vine, with a full coquettish equipment of little tables and iron chairs--no such journey as that up a rock was ever taken with entirely sober eyes.

Although her people were waiting below, and the dinner was on its way to the cloth, Madame Poulard had plenty of time to give to the beauty about her. How fine was the outlook from the top of the ramparts! What a fresh sensation, this, of standing on a terrace in mid-air and looking down on the sea, and across to the level sh.o.r.es! The rose-vines--we found them sweet--_tiens_--one of the branches had fallen--she had full time to re-adjust the loosened support. And "Marianne, give these ladies their hot water, and see to their bags--"

even this order was given with courtesy. It was only when the supple, agile figure had left us to fly down the steep rock-cut steps; when it shot over the top of the gateway and slid with the grace of a lizard into the street far below us, that we were made sensible of there having been any especial need of madame's being in haste.

That night, some three hours later, a picturesque group was a.s.sembled about this same supple figure. A pretty, and unlooked-for ceremony was about to take place.

It was the ceremony of the lighting of the lanterns.

In the great kitchen, in the dance of the firelight and the glow of the lamps, some seven or eight of us were being equipped with Chinese lanterns. This of itself was an engaging sight. Madame Poulard was always gay at this performance--for it meant much innocent merriment among her guests, and with the lighting of the last lantern, her own day was done. So the brilliant eyes flashed with a fresh fire, and the olive cheek glowed anew. All the men and women laughed as children sputter laughter, when they are both pleased and yet a little ashamed to show their pleasure. It was so very ridiculous, this journey up a rock with a Chinese lantern! But just because it was ridiculous, it was also delightful. One--two--three--seven--eight--they were all lit. The last male guest had touched his cap to madame, exchanging the "_bonne nuit_" a man only gives to a pretty woman, and that which a woman returns who feels that her beauty has received its just meed of homage; madame's figure stood, still smiling, a radiant benedictory presence, in the doorway, with the great glow of the firelight behind her; the last laugh echoed down the street--and behold, darkness was upon us!

The street was as black as a cavern. The strip of sky and the stars above seemed almost day, by contrast. The great arch of the Porte du Roi engulphed us, and then, slowly groping our way, we toiled up the steps to the open ramparts. Here the keen night air swept rudely through our cloaks and garments; the sea tossed beneath the bastions like some restless tethered creature, that showed now a gray and now a purple coat, and the stars were gold b.a.l.l.s that might drop at any instant, so near they were. The men shivered and b.u.t.toned their coats, and the women laughed, a trifle shrilly, as they grasped the floating burnous closer about their faces and shoulders.

And the lanterns' beams danced a strange dance on the stone flagging.

Once more we were lost in darkness. We were pa.s.sing through the old guard-house. And then slowly, more slowly than ever, the lanterns were climbing the steps cut in the rock. Hands groped in the blackness to catch hold of the iron railing; the laughter had turned into little shouts and gasps for help. And then one of the lanterns played a treacherous trick; it showed the backs of two figures groping upward together--about one of the girlish figures a man's arm was flung. As suddenly the noise of the cries was stilled.

The lanterns played their fitful light on still other objects. They illumined now a vivid yellow shrub; they danced upon a roof-top; they flooded, with a sudden circlet of brilliance, the awful depths below of the swirling waters and of rocks that were black as a bottomless pit.

Then the terrace was reached. And the lanterns danced a last gay little dance among the roses and the vines before, Pouffe! Pouffe! and behold!

they were all blown out.

Thus it was we went to bed on the Mont.

CHAPTER x.x.x.

AN HISTORICAL OMELETTE--THE PILGRIMS AND THE SHRINE.

To awake on a hill-top at sea. This was what morning brought.

Crowd this hill with houses plastered to the sides of rocks, with great walls girdling it, with tiny gardens lodged in crevices, and with a forest tumbling seaward. Let this hill yield you a town in which to walk, with a street of many-storied houses; with other promenades along ramparts as broad as church aisles; with dungeons, cloisters, halls, guard-rooms, abbatial gateways, and a cathedral whose flying b.u.t.tresses seemed to spring from mid-air and to end in a cloud--such was the world into which we awoke on the heights of Mont St. Michel.

The verdict of the sh.o.r.e on the hill had been a just one; this world on a rock was a world apart. This hill in the sea had a detached air--as if, though French, at heart a true Gaul, it had had from the beginning of things a life of adventure peculiar to itself. The sh.o.r.e, at best, had been only a foster-mother; the hill was the true child of the sea.

Since its birth it has had a more or less enforced separateness, in experience, from the country to which it belonged. Whether temple or fortress, whether forest-clad in virginal fierceness of aspect, or subdued into beauty by the touch of man's chisel, its destiny has ever been the same--to suffice unto itself--to be, in a word, a world in miniature.

The Mont proved by its appearance its history in adventure; it had the grim, grave, battered look that comes only to features, whether of rock or of more plastic human mould--that have been carved by the rough handling of experience.

It is the common habit of hills and mountains, as we all know, to turn disdainful as they grow skyward; they only too eagerly drop, one by one, the things by which man has marked the earth for his own. To stand on a mountain top and to go down to your grave are alike, at least in this--that you have left everything, except yourself, behind you. But it is both the charm and the triumph of Mont St. Michel, that it carries so much of man's handiwork up into the blue fields of air; this achievement alone would mark it as unique among hills. It appears as if for once man and nature had agreed to work in concert to produce a masterpiece in stone. The hill and the architectural beauties it carries aloft, are like a taunt flung out to sea and to the upper heights of air; for centuries they appear to have been crying aloud, "See what we can do, against your tempests and your futile tides--when we try."

On that particular morning, the taunt seemed more like an epithalamium--such marriage-lines did sea and sky appear to be reading over the glistening face of the rock. June had pitched its tent of blue across the seas; all the world was blue, except where the sun smote it into gold. To eyes in love with beauty, what a world at one's feet!

Beneath that azure roof, toward the west, was the world of water, curling, dimpling, like some human thing charged with the conscious joy of dancing in the sun. Sh.o.r.eward, the more stable earth was in the Moslem's ideal posture--that of perpetual prostration. The Brittany coast was a long, flat, green band; the rocks of Cancale were brown, but scarcely higher in point of elevation than the sand-hills; the Normandy forests and orchards were rippling lines that focussed into the spiral of the Avranches cathedral spires: floating between the two blues, hung the aerial shapes of the Chaunsey and the Channel Islands; and nearer, along the coast-line, were the fringing edges of the sh.o.r.e, broken with shoals and shallows--earth's fingers, as it were, touching the sea--playing, as Coleridge's Abyssinian maid fingered the dulcimer, that music that haunts the poet's ear.

We were seated at the little iron tables, on the terrace. We were sipping our morning coffee, beneath the plane-trees. The terrace, a foot beyond our coffee-cups, instantly began its true career as a precipice. We, ourselves, seemed to have begun as suddenly our own flight heavenward--on such astonishing terms of intimacy were we with the sky. The clapping close to our ears of large-winged birds; the swirling of the circling sea-gulls; the amazing nearness of the cloud drapery--all this gave us the sense of being in a new world, and of its being a strangely pleasant one.

Suddenly a c.o.c.k's crow, shrill and clear, made us start from the luxurious languor of our contentment; for we had scarcely looked to find poultry on this Hill of Surprises. Turning in the direction of the homely, familiar note, we beheld a garden. In this garden walked the c.o.c.k--a two-legged gentleman of gorgeous plumage. If abroad for purely const.i.tutional purposes, the crowing chanticleer must be forced to pa.s.s the same objects many times in review. Of all infinitesimal, microscopic gardens, this one, surely, was a model in minuteness. Yet it was an entirely self-respecting little garden. It was not much larger than a generous-sized pocket handkerchief; yet how much talent--for growing--may be hidden in a yard of soil--if the soil have the right virtue in it. Here were two rocks forming, with a fringe of cliff, a triangle; in that tri-cornered bit of earth a lively crop of growing vegetables was offering flattering signs of promise to the owner's eye. Where all land runs aslant, as all land does on this Mont, not an inch was to be wasted; up the rocks peach and pear-split trees were made to climb--and why should they not, since everything else--since man himself must climb from the moment he touches the base of the hill?

Following the c.o.c.k's call, came the droning sweetness of bees; the rose and the honeysuckle vines were loading the morning air with the perfume of their invitations. Then a human voice drowned the bees' whirring, and a face as fresh and as smiling as the day stood beside us. It was the voice and the face of Madame Poulard, on the round of her morning inspections. Our table and the radiant world at her feet were included in this, her line of observations.