OUT ON A MUSSEL-BED.
That same afternoon we were out on the mussel bed.
The tide was at its lowest. Before us, for an acre or more, there lay a
wide, wet, stretch of brown mud. Near the beach was a strip of yellow
sand; here and there it had contracted into narrow ridges, elsewhere it
had expanded into scroll-like patterns. The bed of mud and slime ran
out from this yellow sand strip--a surface diversified by puddles of
muddy water, by pools, clear, ribbed with wavelets, and by little heaps
of stones covered with lichens. The surface of the bed, whether pools
or puddles, or rock-heaps, or sea-weeds massed, was covered by
thousands and thousands of black, lozenge-shaped bivalves. These
bivalves were the mussels. Over this bed of shells and slime there
moved and toiled a whole villageful of old women. Where the sea met the
edges of the mud-flat the throng of women was thickest. The line of the
ever-receding shore was marked by the shapes of countless bent figures.
The heads of these stooping women were on a level with their feet, not
one stood upright. All that the eye could seize for outline was the
dome made by the bent hips, and the backs that closed against the knees
as a blade is clasped into a knife handle. The oblong masses that were
lifted now and then, from the level of the sabots, resolved themselves
into the outlines of women's heads and women's faces. These heads were
tied up in cotton kerchiefs or in cotton nightcaps; these being white,
together with the long, thick, aprons also white, were in startling
contrast to the blue of the sky and to the changing sea-tones.
Between these women and the incoming tide, twice daily, was fought a
persistent, unrelenting duel. It was a duel, on the part of the
fish-wives, against time, against the fate of the tides, against the
blind forces of nature. For this combat the women were armed to the
teeth, clad as they were in their skeleton muscular leanness; helmeted
with their heads of iron; visored in the bronze of their skin and in
wrinkles that laughed at the wind. In these sinewy, toughened bodies
there was a grim strength that appeared to know neither ache nor
fatigue nor satiety.
High, clear, strong, came their voices. The tones were the tones that
come from deep chests, and with a prolonged, sustained capacity for
enduring the toil of men. But the high-pitched laughter proved them
women, as did their loud and unceasing gossip. The battle of the voices
rose above the swash of the waves, above, also, another sound, as
incessant as the women's chatter and the swish of the water as it
hissed along the mud-flat's edges.
[Illustration: A SALE OF MUSSELS--VILLERVILLE]
This was the swift, sharp, saw-like cutting among the stones and the
slime, the scrape, scrape of the hundred of knives into the moist
earth. This ceaseless scraping, lunging, digging, made a new world of
sound--strange, sinister, uncanny. It was neither of the sea nor yet of
the land--it was a noise that seemed inseparable from this tongue of
mud, that also appeared to be neither of the heavens above nor of the
earth, from the bowels out of which it had sprung.
The mussels cling to their slime with extraordinary tenacity; only an
expert, who knows the exact point of attachment between the hard shell
and its soil, can remove a mussel with dexterity. These women, as they
dipped their knives into the thick mud, swept the diminutive black
bivalve with a trenchant movement, as a Moor might cleave a human head
with one turn of his moon-shaped sword. Into the bronzed, wrinkled old
hands the mussels then were slipped as if they had been so many dainty
sweets.
New and pungent smells were abroad on this strip of slime. Sea smells,
strong and salty; smells of the moist and damp soil, the bitter-sweet
of wetted weeds, the aromatic flavor that shell-life yields, and the
smells also of rotten and decaying fish--all these were inextricably
blended in the air, that was of the keenness of a frost-blight for
freshness, and yet was warm with the softness of a June sun.
Meanwhile the voices of the women were nearing. Some of the bent heads
were lifted as we approached. Here and there a coif, or cotton cap,
nodded, and the slit of a smile would gape between the nose and the
meeting chin. A high good humor appeared to reign among the groups; a
carnival of merriment laughed itself out in coarse, cracked laughter;
loud was the play of the jests, hoarse and guttural the gibes that were
abroad on the still air, from old mouths that uttered strong, deep
notes.
"Why should they all be old?" we queried. We were near enough to see
the women face to face now, since we were far out along the outer edges
of the bed; we were so near the sea that the tide was beginning to wash
us back, along with the fringe of the diggers.
"They're not--they only look old," replied Renard, stopping a moment to
sketch in a group directly in front. "This life makes old women of them
in no time. How old, for instance, should you think that girl was, over
there?"
The girl whom he designated was the only figure of youth we had seen on
the bed. She was working alone and remote from the others. She wore no
coif. Her masses of red, wavy hair shaded a face already deeply seamed
with lines of premature age. A moment later she passed close to us. She
was bent almost double beneath a huge, reeking basket, heaped with its
pile of wet mussels. She was carrying it to a distant pool. Once beside
the pool, with swift, dexterous movement the heavy basket was slipped
from the bent back, the load of mussels falling in a shower into the
miniature lake. The next instant she was stamping on the heap, to
plunge them with her sabot still further into the pool. She was washing
her load. Soon she shouldered the basket again, filling it with the
cleansed mussels. A moment later she joined the long, toiling line of
women that were perpetually forming and reforming on their way to the
carts. These latter were drawn up near the beach, their contents
guarded by boys and old men, who received the loads the women had dug,
dragging the whole, later, up the hill.
"She has the Venus de Milo lines, that girl," Renard continued,
critically, with his eyes on her, as she now repassed us. The figure
was drawn up at its full height. It had in truth a noble dignity of
outline. There was a Spartan vigor and severity in the lean, uncorseted
shape, with the bust thrown out against the sky--the bust of a young
warrior rather than a woman. There was a hardy, masculine freedom in
the pliable motion of her straight back, a ripple with muscles that
played easily beneath the close bodice, in her arms, and her finely
turned ankles and legs, that were bared below the knee. The very
simplicity of her costume helped to mark the Greek severity of her
figure. She wore a short skirt of some coarse hempen stuff, covered
with a thick apron made of sail-cloth, her feet thrust into black
sabots, while the upper part of her body was covered with an unbleached
chemise, widely open at the throat.
She had the Phidian breadth and the modern charm--that charm which
troubles and disturbs, haunting the mind with vague, unsatisfied
suggestions of something finer than is seen, something nobler than the
gross physical envelope reveals.
"I must have her--for my Salon picture," calmly remarked Renard, after
a long moment of scrutiny, his eyes following the lean, stately figure
in its grave walk across the weeds and slime. "Yes, I must have her."
"Won't she be hard to get? How can she be made to sit, a stiffened
image of clay, after this life of freedom, this athletic struggle out
here--with these winds and tides?"
One of us, at least, was stirred at Renard's calm assumption--the
assumption so common to artists, who, when they see a good thing at
once count on its possessorship, as if the whole world, indeed, were
eternally sitting, agape with impatience, awaiting the advent of some
painter to sketch in its portrait.
"Oh, it'll be easy enough. She makes two francs a day with her six
basketfuls. I'll offer her three, and she'll drop like a shot."
"I'll make it a red picture," he continued, dipping his brushes into a
little case of paints he held on his thumb; "the mussel-bed a reddish
violet, the sky red in the horizon, and the girl in the foreground,
with that torrent of hair as the high light. I've been hunting for that
hair all over Europe." And he began sketching her in at once.
"_Bonjour, mère_, how goes it?" He nodded as he sketched at a wrinkled,
bent figure, who was smiling out at him from beneath her load of
mussels.
"_Pas mal--e' vous, M'sieur Renard?_"
"All right--and the mortgage, how goes that?"
"Pas si mal--it'll be paid off next year."
"Who is she? One of your models?"
"Yes, last year's: she was my belle--the belle of the mussel-bed for
me, a year ago. Now there's a lesson in patience for you. She's
sixty-five, if she's a minute; she's been working here, on this
mussel-bed, for five years, to pay the mortgage off her farm; when that
is done, her daughter Augustine can marry; Augustine's _dot_ is the
farm."
"Augustine--at our inn?"
"The very same."
"And the blonde--the handsome man at the creamery, he is the future--?"
"I'm sorry to hear such things of Augustine," smiled Renard, as he
worked; "she must be indulging in an entr'acte. No, the gentleman of
Augustine's--well, perhaps not of her affections, but of her mother's
choice, is a peasant who works the farm; the creamery is only an
incidental diversion. Again, I'm sorry to hear such sad things of
Augustine--"
"Horrors!"
"Exactly. That's the way it's done--over here. Will you join me--over
there?" Renard blushed a little. "I mean I wish to follow that
girl--she's going to dig out yonder. Will you come?"
Meanwhile the light was changing, and so was the tide. The women were
coming inward, washed up to the shore along with the grasses and
seaweeds. A band of diggers suddenly started, with full basket loads,
toward a fishing boat that had dropped anchor close in to the shore; it
was a Honfleur craft, come to buy mussels for the Paris market. The
women trudged through the water, up to their waists; they clustered
about the boats like so many laden beasts. But their shrill bargaining
proved them women.
Meanwhile that gentle hissing along the level stretch of brown mud was
the tide. It was pushing the women upward, as if it had been a
hand--the hand of a relentless fate--instead of a little, liquid kiss.
The sun, as it dipped, made a glory of splendor out of this commonplace
bank. It soaked the mud in gold; it was in a royal mood, throwing its
largess with reckless abundance to this poor of earth--to the slime and
the mud. The long, yellow, lichen leaves massed on the rocks were dyed
as if lying in a yellow bath. The sands were richly colored; the ridges
were brown in the shadows and burnished at the tops. In the distance
the sea weeds were black, sable furs, covering the velvet robes of
earth. The sea out beyond was as rosy as a babe, and the sails were
dazzlingly white as they floated past, between the sky and the distant
purple line of the horizon.
Meanwhile the tide is coming in.
The procession of the women toward the carts grows in numbers. The
thick sabots plunge into the mud, the water squirts out of the wooden
shoes as the strong heels press into them. The straw, the universal
stocking of these women-diggers, is reeking with dirt. Volumes of slush
are splashed on the bared skinny ankles, on the wet skirts, wet to the
waists, and on the coarse sail-cloth aprons tied beneath the hanging
bosoms. The women are all drenched now in a bath of filth. The baskets
are reeking with filth also, they rain showers of dirt along the bent
backs. A long line of the bent figures has formed on their way to the
carts. There is, however, a thick fringe of diggers left who still
dispute their rights with the sea.
But the tide is pushing them inward, upward. And all the while the
light is getting more and more golden, shimmery, radiant. Under this
light, beneath this golden mantel of color, these creatures appear
still more terrible. As they bend over, their faces tirelessly held
downward on a level with their hands, they seem but gnomes; surely they
are huge, undeveloped embryos of women, with neither head nor trunk.
For this light is pitiless. It makes them even more a part of this
earth, out of which they seem to have sprung, a strange amorphous
growth. The bronzed skins are dyed in the gold as if to match with the
hue of the mud; the wet skirts are shreds, gray and brown tatters, not
so good in texture as the lichens, and the ragged jerseys seem only
bits of the more distant weeds woven into tissues to hide mercifully
the lean, sinewy backs.
The tide is almost in.
In the shallows the sunset is fading. Here and there are brilliant
little pools, each pool a mirror, and each mirror reflects a different
picture. Here is a second sky--faintly blue, with a trailing saffron
scarf of cloud; there, the inverted silhouettes of two fish-wives are
conical shapes, their coifs and wet skirts startlingly distinct in
tones; beyond, sails a fantastic fleet, with polychrome sails, each
spar, masthead, and wrinkled sail as sharply outlined as if chiselled
in relief. Presently these miniature pictures fade as the light fades.
Blacker grows the mud, and there is less and less of it; the
silhouetted shapes of the diggers are seen no more; they are following
the carts up the steep cliffs; even the sky loses its color and fades
also. And the little pools that have been a burning orange, then a
darkening violet, gay with pictured worlds, in turn pale to gray, and
die into the universal blackness.
The tide is in.
It is flowing, rich and full, crested with foam beneath the osier
hedges. We hear it break with a sudden dash and splutter against the
cliff parapets. And the mud-bank is no more.
Half an hour later, from our chamber windows we looked forth through
the dusk across at the mussel bed. The great mud-bank, all that black
acreage of slime and sea-weed, the eager, struggling band of toiling
fish wives, all was gone; it was all as if it had not been--would never
be again. The water hissed along the beach; it broke in rhythmic,
sonorous measure against the parapet. Surely there had never been any
beds, or any mussels, or any toiling fish-wives; or if there had, it
was all a world that the sea had washed up, and then as quietly, as
heedlessly, as pitilessly had obliterated.
It was the very epitome of life itself.