A SPRING DRIVE.
The Trouville beach was as empty as a desert. No other footfall, save
our own, echoed along the broad board walks; this Boulevard des
Italiens of the Normandy coast, under the sun of May was a shining
pavement that boasted only a company of jelly-fishes as loungers.
Down below was a village, a white cluster of little wooden houses; this
was the village of the bath houses. The hotels might have been
monasteries deserted and abandoned, in obedience to a nod from Rome or
from the home government. Not even a fisherman's net was spread
a-drying, to stay the appetite with a sense of past favors done by the
sea to mortals more fortunate than we. The whole face of nature was as
indifferent as a rich relation grown callous to the voice of entreaty.
There was no more hope of man apparently, than of nature, being moved
by our necessity; for man, to be moved, must primarily exist, and he
was as conspicuously absent on this occasion as Genesis proves him to
have been on the fourth day of creation.
Meanwhile we sat still, and took counsel together. The chief of the
council suddenly presented himself. It was a man in miniature. The
masculine shape, as it loomed up in the distance, gradually separating
itself from the background of villa roofs and casino terraces, resolved
itself into a figure stolid and sturdy, very brown of leg, and insolent
of demeanor--swaggering along as if conscious of there being a
full-grown man buttoned up within a boy's ragged coat. The swagger was
accompanied by a whistle, whose neat crispness announced habits of
leisure and a sense of the refined pleasures of life; for an artistic
rendering of an aria from "La Fille de Madame Angot" was cutting the
air with clear, high notes.
The whistle and the brown legs suddenly came to a dead stop. The round
blue eyes had caught sight of us:
"_Ouid-a-a!_" was this young Norman's salutation. There was very little
trouser left, and what there was of it was all pocket, apparently. Into
the pockets the boy's hands were stuffed, along with his amazement; for
his face, round and full though it was, could not hold the full measure
of his surprise.
"We came over by boat--from Havre," we murmured meekly; then, "Is there
a cake-shop near?" irrelevantly concluded Charm with an unmistakable
ring of distress in her tone. There was no need of any further
explanation. These two hearty young appetites understood each other;
for hunger is a universal language, and cake a countersign common among
the youth of all nations.
"Until you came, you see, we couldn't leave the luggage," she went on.
The blue eyes swept the line of our boxes as if the lad had taken his
afternoon stroll with no other purpose than to guard them. "There are
eight, and two umbrellas. _Soyez tranquille, je vous attendrai._"
It was the voice and accent of a man of the world, four feet high--a
pocket edition, so to speak, in shabby binding. The brown legs hung,
the next instant, over the tallest of the trunks. The skilful whistling
was resumed at once; our appearance and the boy's present occupation
were mere interludes, we were made to understand; his real business,
that afternoon, was to do justice to the Lecoq's entire opera, and to
keep his eye on the sea.
Only once did he break down; he left a high _C_ hanging perilously in
mid-air, to shout out "I like madeleines, I do!" We assured him he
should have a dozen.
"_Bien!_" and we saw him settling himself to await our return in
patience.
Up in the town the streets, as we entered them, were as empty as was
the beach. Trouville might have been a buried city of antiquity. Yet,
in spite of the desolation, it was French and foreign; it welcomed us
with an unmistakably friendly, companionable air. Why is it that one is
made to feel the companionable element, by instantaneous process, as it
were, in a Frenchman and in his towns? And by what magic also does a
French village or city, even at its least animated period, convey to
one the fact of its nationality? We made but ten steps progress through
these silent streets, fronting the beach, and yet, such was the subtle
enigma of charm with which these dumb villas and mute shops were
invested, that we walked along as if under the spell of fascination.
Perhaps the charm is a matter of sex, after all: towns are feminine, in
the wise French idiom, that idiom so delicate in discerning qualities
of sex in inanimate objects, as the Greeks before them were clever in
discovering sex distinctions in the moral qualities. Trouville was so
true a woman, that the coquette in her was alive and breathing even in
this her moment of suspended animation. The closed blinds and iron
shutters appeared to be winking at us, slyly, as if warning us not to
believe in this nightmare of desolation; she was only sleeping, she
wished us to understand; the touch of the first Parisian would wake her
into life. The features of her fashionable face, meanwhile, were
arranged with perfect composure; even in slumber she had preserved her
woman's instinct of orderly grace; not a sign was awry, not a
window-blind gave hint of rheumatic hinges, or of shattered vertebrae;
all the machinery was in order; the faintest pressure on the electrical
button, the button that connects this lady of the sea with the Paris
Bourse and the Boulevards, and how gayly, how agilely would this
Trouville of the villas and the beaches spring into life!
The listless glances of the few tailors and cobblers who, with
suspended thread, now looked after us, seemed dazed--as if they could
not believe in the reality of two early tourists. A woman's head, here
and there, leaned over to us from a high window; even these feminine
eyes, however, appeared to be glued with the long winter's lethargy of
dull sleep; they betrayed no edge of surprise or curiosity. The sun
alone, shining with spendthrift glory, flooding the narrow streets and
low houses with a late afternoon stream of color, was the sole
inhabitant who did not blink at us, bovinely, with dulled vision.
Half an hour later we were speeding along the roadway. Half an
hour--and Trouville might have been a thousand miles away. Inland, the
eye plunged over nests of clover, across the tops of the apple and
peach trees, frosted now with blossoms, to some farm interiors. The
familiar Normandy features could be quickly spelled out, one by one.
It was the milking-hour.
The fields were crowded with cattle and women; some of the cows were
standing immovable, and still others were slowly defiling, in
processional dignity, toward their homes. Broad-hipped, lean-busted
figures, in coarse gowns and worsted kerchiefs, toiled through the
fields, carrying full milk-jugs; brass _amphorae_ these latter might
have been, from their classical elegance of shape. Ploughmen appeared
and disappeared, they and their teams rising and sinking with the
varying heights and depressions of the more distant undulations. In the
nearer cottages the voices of children would occasionally fill the air
with a loud clamor of speech; then our steed's bell-collar would
jingle, and for the children's cries, a bird-throat, high above, from
the heights of a tall pine would pour forth, as if in uncontrollable
ecstasy, its rapture into the stillness of this radiant Normandy
garden. The song appeared to be heard by other ears than ours. We were
certain the dull-brained sheep were greatly affected by the strains of
that generous-organed songster--they were so very still under the pink
apple boughs. The cows are always good listeners; and now, relieved of
their milk, they lifted eyes swimming with appreciative content above
the grasses of their pasture. Two old peasants heard the very last of
the crisp trills, before the concert ended; they were leaning forth
from the narrow window-ledges of a straw-roofed cottage; the music gave
to their blinking old eyes the same dreamy look we had read in the
ruminating cattle orbs. For an aeronaut on his way to bed, I should
have felt, had I been in that blackbird's plumed corselet, that I had
had a gratifyingly full house.
Meanwhile, toward the west, a vast marine picture, like a panorama on
wheels, was accompanying us all the way. Sometimes at our feet, beneath
the seamy fissures of a hillside, or far removed by sweep of meadow,
lay the fluctuant mass we call the sea. It was all a glassy yellow
surface now; into the liquid mirror the polychrome sails sent down long
lines of color. The sun had sunk beyond the Havre hills, but the flame
of his mantle still swept the sky. And into this twilight there crept
up from the earth a subtle, delicious scent and smell--the smell and
perfume of spring--of the ardent, vigorous, unspent Normandy spring.
[Illustration: A VILLAGE STREET--VILLERVILLE]
Suddenly a belfry grew out of the grain-fields.
"_Nous voici_--here's Villerville!" cried lustily into the twilight our
coachman's thick peasant voice. With the butt-end of his whip he
pointed toward the hill that the belfry crowned. Below the little
hamlet church lay the village. A high, steep street plunged recklessly
downward toward the cliff; we as recklessly were following it. The
snapping of our driver's whip had brought every inhabitant of the
street upon the narrow sidewalks. A few old women and babies hung forth
from the windows, but the houses were so low, that even this portion of
the population, hampered somewhat by distance and comparative
isolation, had been enabled to join in the chorus of voices that filled
the street. Our progress down the steep, crowded street was marked by a
pomp and circumstance which commonly attend only a royal entrance into
a town; all of the inhabitants, to the last man and infant, apparently,
were assembled to assist at the ceremonial of our entry.
A chorus of comments arose from the shadowy groups filling the low
doorways and the window casements.
"_Tiens_--it begins to arrive--the season!"
"Two ladies--alone--like that!"
"_Dame! Anglaises, Américaines_--they go round the world thus, _à
deux_!"
"And why not, if they are young and can pay?"
"Bah! old or poor, it's all one--they're never still, those English!" A
chorus of croaking laughter rattled down the street along with the
rolling of our carriage-wheels.
Above, the great arch of sky had shrunk, all at once, into a narrow
scallop; with the fields and meadows the glow of twilight had been left
behind. We seemed to be pressing our way against a great curtain, the
curtain made by the rich dusk that filled the narrow thoroughfare.
Through the darkness the sinuous street and rickety houses wavered in
outline, as the bent shapes of the aged totter across dimly-lit
interiors. A fisherman's bare legs, lit by some dimly illumined
interior; a line of nets in the little yards; here and there a white
kerchief or cotton cap, dazzling in whiteness, thrown out against the
black facades, were spots of light here and there. There was a glimpse
of the village at its supper--in low-raftered interiors a group of
blouses and women in fishermen's rig were gathered about narrow tables,
the coarse-featured faces and the seamed foreheads lit up by the feeble
flame of candles that ended in long, thin lines of smoke.
"_Ohé--Mère Mouchard!--des voyageurs!_" cried forth our coachman into
the darkness. He had drawn up before a low, brightly-lit interior. In
response to the call a figure appeared on the threshold of the open
door. The figure stood there for a long instant, rubbing its hands, as
it peered out into the dusk of the night to take a good look at us. The
brown head was cocked on one side thoughtfully; it was an attitude that
expressed, with astonishingly clear emphasis, an unmistakable
professional conception of hospitality. It was the air and manner, in a
word, of one who had long since trimmed the measurement of its
graciousness to the price paid for the article.
"_Ces dames_ wished rooms, they desired lodgings and board--_ces dames_
were alone?" The voice finally asked, with reticent dignity. "From
Havre--from Trouville, _par p'tit bateau!_" called out lustily our
driver, as if to furnish us, _gratis_, with a passport to the
landlady's not too effusive cordiality.
What secret spell of magic may have lain hidden in our friendly
coachman's announcement we never knew. But the "p'tit bateau" worked
magically. The figure of Mère Mouchard materialized at once into such
zeal, such effusion, such a zest of welcome, that we, our bags, and our
coachman were on the instant toiling up a pair of spiral wooden stairs.
There was quite a little crowd to fill the all-too-narrow landing at
the top of the steep steps, a crowd that ended in a long line of
waiters and serving-maids, each grasping a remnant of luggage. Our
hostess, meanwhile, was fumbling at a door-lock--an obstinate door that
refused to be wrenched open.
"Augustine--run--I've taken the wrong key. _Cours, mon enfant_, it is
no farther away than the kitchen."
The long line pressed itself against the low walls. Augustine, a
blond-haired, neatly-garmented shape, sped down the rickety stairs with
the step of youth and a dancer; for only the nimble ankles of one
accomplished in waltzing could have tripped as dexterously downward as
did Augustine.
"How she lags! what an idiot of a child!" fumed Mère Mouchard as she
peered down into the round blackness about which the curving staircase
closed like an embrace. "One must have patience, it appears, with
people made like that. _Ah, tiens,_ here she comes. How could you keep
_ces dames_ waiting like this? It is shameful, shameful!" cried the
woman, as she half shook the panting girl, in anger. "If _ces dames_
will enter,"--her voice changing at once to a caressing falsetto, as
the door flew open, opened by Augustine's trembling fingers--"they will
find their rooms in readiness."
The rooms were as bare as a soldier's barrack, but they were spotlessly
clean. There was the pale flicker of a sickly candle to illumine the
shadowy recesses of the curtained beds and the dark little
dressing-rooms.
A few moments later we wound our way downward, spirally, to find
ourselves seated at a round table in a cosy, compact dining-room.
Directly opposite, across the corridor, was the kitchen, from which
issued a delightful combination of vinous, aromatic odors. The light of
a strong, bright lamp made it as brilliant as a ball-room; it was a
ball-room which for decoration had rows of shining brass and copper
kettles--each as burnished as a jewel--a mass of sunny porcelain, and
for carpet the satin of a wooden floor. There was much bustling to and
fro. Shapes were constantly passing and repassing across the lighted
interior. The Mère's broad-hipped figure was an omniscient presence: it
hovered at one instant over a steaming saucepan, and the next was
lifting a full milk-jug or opening a wine-bottle. Above the clatter of
the dishes and the stirring of spoons arose the thick Normandy voices,
deep alto tones, speaking in strange jargon of speech--a world of
patois removed from our duller comprehension. It was made somewhat too
plain in this country, we reflected, that a man's stomach is of far
more importance than the rest of his body. The kitchen yonder was by
far the most comfortable, the warmest, and altogether the prettiest
room in the whole house.
Augustine crossed the narrow entry just then with a smoking pot of
soup. She was followed, later, by Mère Mouchard, who bore a sole au vin
blanc, a bottle of white Burgundy, and a super-naturally ethereal
soufflé. And an hour after, even the curtainless, carpetless bed
chambers above were powerless to affect the luxurious character of our
dreams.