In and out of Three Normandy Inns Part 7

Once out of the narrow Villerville streets, and the pastoral was in full swing.

The sea along this coast was not in the least insistant; it allowed the sh.o.r.e to play its full gamut of power. There were no tortured shapes of trees or plants, or barren wastes, to attest the fierce ways of the sea with the land. Reminders of the sea and of the life that is lived in ships were conspicuous features everywhere, in the pastoral scenes that began as soon as the town ended. Women carrying sails and nets toiled through the green aisles of the roads and lanes. Fishing-tackle hung in company with tattered jerseys outside of huts hidden in gra.s.ses and honeysuckle. The shepherdesses, as they followed the sheep inland into the heart of the pasture land, were busy netting the coa.r.s.e cages that trap the finny tribe. Long-limbed, vigorous-faced, these shepherdesses were Biblical figures. In their coa.r.s.e homespun, with only a skirt and a shirt, with their bare legs, half-open bosoms, and the fine poise of their blond heads, theirs was a beauty that commanded the homage accorded to a rude virginity.

In some of the fields, in one of our many walks, the gra.s.s was being cut. In these fields the groups of men and women were thickest. The long scythes were swung mightily by both; the voices, a gay treble of human speech, rose above the metallic swish of the sharp blades cutting into the succulent gra.s.ses.

The fat pasture lands rose and sank in undulations as rounded as the nascent b.r.e.a.s.t.s of a young Greek maiden. A medley of color played its charming variations over fields, over acres of poppies, over plains of red clover, over the backs of spotted cattle, mixing, mingling, blending a thousand twists and turns into one exquisite, harmonious whole. There was no discordant note, not one harsh contrast; even the hay-ricks seemed to have been modelled rather than pitched into shape; their sloping sides and finely pointed apexes giving them the dignity of structural intent.

Why should not a peasant, in blouse and sabots, with a grinning idiot face, have put the picture out? But he did not. He was walking, or rather waddling, toward us, between two green walls that rose to be arched by elms that hid the blue of the sky. This lane was the kind of lane one sees only in Devonshire and in Normandy. There are lanes and lanes, as, to quote our friend the cobbler, there are cures and cures.

But only in these above-named countries can one count on walking straight into the heart of an emerald, if one turns from the high-road into a lane. The trees, in these Devonshire and Normandy by-paths, have ways of their own of vaulting into s.p.a.ce; the hedges are thicker, sweeter, more vocal with insect and song notes than elsewhere; the roadway itself is softer to the foot, and narrower--only two are expected to walk therein.

It was through such a lane as this that the coa.r.s.e, animal shape of a peasant was walking toward us. His legs and body were horribly twisted; the dangling arms and crooked limbs appeared as if caricaturing the gnarled and tortured boughs and trunks of the apple-trees. The peasant's blouse was filthy; his sabots were reeking with dirty straw; his feet and ankles, bare, were blacker than the earth over which he was painfully crawling; and on his face there was the vacuous, sensuous deformity of the smile idiocy wears. Again I ask, why did he not disfigure this fair scene, and put out something of the beauty of the day? Is it because the French peasant seems now to be an inseparable adjunct of the Frenchman's landscape? That even deformity has been so handled by the realists as to make us see beauty in ugliness? Or is it that, as moderns, we are all bitten by the rabies of the picturesque; that all things serve and are acceptable so long as we have our necessary note of contrast? Certain it is that it appears to be the peasant's blouse that perpetuates the Salon, and perhaps--who knows?--when over-emigration makes our own American farmer too poor to wear a boiled shirt when he ploughs, we also may develop a school of landscape, with figures.

Meanwhile the walk and the talk had made Charm thirsty. "Why should we not go," she asked, "across the next field, into that farm house yonder, and beg for a gla.s.s of milk?"

The farm-house might have been waiting for us, it was so still. Even the gra.s.ses along its sloping roof nodded, as if in welcome. The house, as we approached it, together with its out-buildings, a.s.sumed a more imposing aspect than it had from the road. Its long, low facade, broken here and there by a miniature window or a narrow doorway, appeared to stretch out into interminable length beneath the towering beeches and the snarl of the peach-tree boughs.

The stillness was ominous--it was so profound.

The only human in sight was a man in a distant field; he was raking the ploughed ground. He was too far away to hear the sound of our voices.

"Perhaps the entire establishment is in the fields," said Charm, as we neared the house.

Just then a succession of blows fell on our ear.

"Someone is beating a mattress within, we shall have our gla.s.s after all."

We knocked. But no one answered our knock.

The beating continued; the sound of the blows fell as regularly as if machine-impelled. Then a cry rose up; it was the cry of a young, strong voice, and it was followed by a low wail of anguish.

The door stood half-open, and this is what we saw: A man--tall, strong, powerful, with a face purple with pa.s.sion--bending over the crouching form of a girl, whose slender body was quivering, shrinking, and writhing as the man's hand, armed with a short stick, fell, smiting her defenceless back and limbs.

Her wail went on as each blow fell.

In a corner, crouched in a heap, sitting on her heels, was a woman. She was clapping her hands. Her eyes were starting from her head; she clapped as the blows came, and above the girl's wail her strong, exultant voice arose--calling out:

"_Tue-la! Tue-la!_"

It was the voice of a triumphant fury.

The backs of all these people were turned upon us; they had not seen, much less heard, our entrance.

Someone else had seen us, however. A man with a rake over his shoulder rushed in through the open door; it was the peasant we had seen in the field. He seized Charm by the arm, and then my own hand was grasped as in a grip of iron. Before we had time for resistance he had pushed us out before him into the entry, behind the outer door. This latter he slammed. He put his broad back against it; then he dropped his rake and began to mop his face, violently, with a filthy handkerchief he plucked from beneath his blouse.

"_Que chance! Nom de Dieu, que chance! Je v'avions vue_, I saw you just in time--just in time--"

"But, I must go in--I wish to go back!" But Charm might as well have attempted to move a pillar of stone.

The peasant's coa.r.s.e, good-humored face broke into a broad laugh.

"Pardon, mam'selle--_j'n bougeons pas. Not' maitre e encolere; e' son jour--faut pas l'irriter--aujou'hui."_

Meantime, during the noise of our forced exit and the ensuing dialogue, the scene within had evidently changed in character, for the blows had ceased. Steps could be heard crossing and recrossing the wooden floor.

A creaking sound succeeded to the beating--it was the creaking and groaning of a wooden staircase bending beneath the weight of a human figure. In an upper chamber there came the sound of a quiet, subdued sobbing now. They were the sobs of the girl. She at least had been released.

A face, cruel, pinched, hardened, with flaming agate eyes and an insolent smile, stood looking out at us through the dulled, dusty window-pane. It was the fury.

Meanwhile the peasant was still defending his post. A moment later the tall frame of the farmer suddenly filled the open doorway. The peasant well-nigh fell into his master's arms. The farmer's face was still terrible to look upon, but the purple stain of pa.s.sion was now turned to red. There was a mocking insolence in his tone as he addressed us, that matched with the woman's unconcealed glee.

"Will you not come in, mesdames? Will you not rest a while after your long walk?" On the man's hard face there was still the shadow of a sinister cruelty as he waved his hand toward the room within.

The peasant's good-humored, loutish smile, and his stupid, cow-like eyes, by contrast, were the eyes and smile of a benevolent deity.

The smile told us we were right, as we slunk away toward the open road.

The head kept nodding approval as we vanished presently beneath the shade of the protecting trees.

The fields, as we swept rapidly past them, were as bathed in peace as when we had left them; there was even a more voluptuous content abroad: for the twilight was wrapping about the landscape its poppied dusk of gloom and shadow. Above, the birds were swirling in sweeping circles, raining down the ecstasy of their night-song; still above, far beyond them, across a zenith pure, transparent, ineffably pink, illumined wisps of clouds were trailing their scarf-like shapes. It was a scene of beatific peace. Across the fields came the sound of a distant bell.

It was the _Angelus_. The ploughmen stopped to doff their hats, the women to bend their heads in prayer.

And in our ears, louder than the vibrations of the hamlet bell, louder than the bird-notes and the tumult of the voluptuous insect whirr, there rang the thud, thud of cruel blows falling on quivering human flesh.

The curtain that hid the life of the peasant-farmer had indeed been lifted.

CHAPTER X.

ERNESTINE.

"Ah, mesdames, what will you have? The French peasant is like that.

When he is in a rage nothing stops him--he beats anything, everything; whatever his hand encounters must suffer when he is angry; his wife, his child, his servant, his horse, they are all alike to him when he sees red."

Monsieur Fouchet was tying up his rose-trees; we were watching him from our seat on the green bench. Here in the garden, beneath the blue vault, the roses were drooping from very heaviness of glory; they gave forth a scent that made the head swim. It was a healthy, virile intoxication, however, the salt in the air steadying one's nerves.

Nature, not being mortal and cursed with a conscience, had risen that morning in a mood for carousal; at this hour of noon she had reached the point of ecstatic stupor. No state of trance was ever so exquisite.

The air was swooning, but how delicate its gasps, as if it fell away into calm! How adorably blue the sky in its debauch of sun-lit ether!

The sea, too, although it reeled slightly, unsteadily rising only to fall away, what a radiance of color it maintained! Here in the garden the drowsy air would lift a flower petal, as some dreamer sunk in hasheesh slumber might touch a loved hand, only to let it slip away in nerveless impotence. Never had the charm of this Normandy sea-coast been as compelling; never had the divine softness of this air, this harmonious marriage of earth-scents and sea-smells seemed as perfect; never before had the delicacy of the foliage and color-gradations of the sky as triumphantly proved that nowhere else, save in France, can nature be at once sensuous and poetic.

We looked for something other than pure enjoyment from this golden moment; we hoped its beauty would help us to soften our landlord. This was the moment we had chosen to excite his sympathies, also to gain counsel from him concerning the tragedy we had witnessed the day before. He listened to our tale with evident interest, but there was a disappointing coolness in his eye. As the narrative proceeded, the brutality of the situation failed to sting him to even a mild form of indignation. He went on tying his rose-trees, his ardor expending itself in choice snippings of the stray stalks and rebellious tendrils.

"This Guichon," he said, after a brief moment, in the tone that goes with the pursuance of an occupation that has become a pa.s.sion. "This Guichon--I know him. He is a hard man, but no harder than many others, and he has had his losses, which don't always soften a man. '_Qui terre a guerre a_,' Moliere says, and Guichon has had many lawsuits, losing them all. He has been twice married; that was his daughter by his first wife he was touching up like that. He married only the other day Madame Tier, a rich woman, a neighbor, their lands join. It was a great match for him, and she, the wife, and his daughter don't hit it off, it appears. There was some talk of a marriage for the girl lately; a good match presented itself, but the girl will have none of it; perhaps that accounts for the beating."

A rose, overblown with its fulness of splendor, dropped in a shower at Fouchet's feet just then.

"_Tiens, elle est finie, celle-la_" he cried, with an accent of regret, and he stooped over the fallen petals as if they had been the remains of a friend. Then he sighed as he swept the ma.s.s into his broad palm.

"Come, let us leave him to the funeral of his roses; he hasn't the sensibilities of an insect;" and Charm grasped my arm to lead me over the turf, across the gravel paths, toward the tea-house.