THE VILLAGE.
Our visit to the mussel-bed, as we soon found, had been our formal
introduction to the village. Henceforth every door step held a friend;
not a coif or a blouse passed without a greeting. The village, as a
village, lived in the open street. Villerville had the true French
genius for society; the very houses were neighborly, crowding close
upon the narrow sidewalk. Conversation, to be carried on from a
dormer-window or from opposite sides of the street, had evidently been
the first architectural consideration in the mind of the builders;
doors and windows must be as open and accessible as the lives of the
inhabitants. The houses themselves appeared to be regarded in the light
of pockets, into which the old women and fishermen plunged to drag
forth a net or a knife; also as convenient, if rude, little caverns
into which the village crawled at night, to take its heavy slumber.
The door-step was the drawing-room, and the open street was the club of
this Villerville world.
The door-way, the yard, or the bit of garden tucked in between two high
walls--it was here, under the tent of sky rather than beneath the
stuffy roofs, that the village lived, talked, quarrelled, bargained,
worked, and more or less openly made love.
To the door-step everything was brought that was portable. There was
nothing, from the small boy to the brass kettle, that could not be more
satisfactorily polished off, in full view of one's world, than by one's
self, in seclusion and solitude. Justice, at least, appeared to gain by
this passion for open-air ministration, if one were to judge by the
frequency with which the Villerville boy was laid across the parental
knee. We were repeatedly called upon to coincide, at the very instant
of flagellation, with the verdict pronounced against the youthful
offender.
"_S'il est assez méchant, lui?_ Ah, mesdames, what do you think of one
who goes forth dry, with clean sabots, that I, myself, have washed, and
behold him returned, _après un tout p'tit quart d'heure_, stinking with
filth? Bah! it's he that will catch it when his father comes home!" And
meanwhile the mother's hand descends, lest justice should cool ere
night.
[Illustration: A VILLERVILLE FISH-WIFE]
There were other groups that crowded the doorsteps; there were young
mothers that sat there, with their babes clasped to the full breasts,
in whose eyes was to be read the satisfied passion of recent
motherhood; there were gay clusters of young Norman maidens, whose
glances, brilliant and restless, were pregnant with all the meaning of
unspent youth. The figures of the fishermen, toiling up the street with
bared legs and hairy breast, bending beneath their baskets alive with
fish, stopped to have a word or two, seasoned with a laugh, with these
latter groups. There were also knots of patient old men, wrecks that
the sea had tossed back to earth, to rot and die there, that came out
of the black little houses to rest their bones in the sun. And
everywhere there were groups of old women, or of women still young, to
whom the look of age had come long before its due time.
The village seemed peopled with women, sexless creatures for the most
part, whom toil and the life on the mussel-bed or in the field had
dried and hardened into mummy shapes. Only these, the old and the
useless, were left at home to rear the younger generation and to train
them to take up the same heavy burden of life. The coifs of these old
hags made dazzling spots of brightness against the gray of the walls
and the stuccoed houses; clustered together, the high caps that nodded
in unison to the chatter were in startling contrast to the bronzed
faces bending over the fish-nets, and to the blue-veined, leathery
hands that flew in and out of the coarse meshes with the fluent ease of
long practice.
With one of these old women we became friends. We had made her
acquaintance at a poetic moment, under romantic circumstances. We were
all three watching a sunset, under a pink sky; we were sitting far out
on the grasses of the cliff. Her house was in the midst of the grasses,
some little distance from the village, attached to it only as a ragged
fringe might edge a garment. It was a thatched hut; yet there were
circumstances in the life of the owner which had transformed the
interior into a luxurious apartment. The owner of the hut was herself
hanging on the edge of life; she was a toothless, bent, and withered
old remnant; but her vigor and vivacity were those of a witch. Her
hands and eyes were ceaselessly active; she was forever busy, fingering
a fish-net, or polishing her Normandy brasses, or stirring some dark
liquid in an iron pot over the dim fire.
At our first meeting, conversation had immediately engaged itself; it
had ended, as all right talk should, in friendship. On this morning of
our visit, many a gay one having preceded it, we found our friend
arrayed as if for an outing. She had mounted her best coif, and tied
across her shrivelled old breast was a vivid purple silk kerchief.
"_Tiens, mes enfants, soyez les bienvenues_," was her gay greeting,
seasoned with a high cackling laugh, as she waved us to two rickety
chairs. "No, I'm not going out, not yet; there is plenty of time,
plenty of time. It is you who are good, _si aimables_, to come out here
to see me. And tired, too, _hein_, with the long walk? _Tiens_, I had
nearly forgotten; there's a bottle of wine open below--you must take a
glass."
She never forgot. The bottle of wine had always just been opened; the
cork was always also miraculously rebellious for a cork that had been
previously pulled. Although our ancient friend was a peasant, her
cellar was the cellar of a gourmet. Wonderful old wines were hers!
Port, Bordeaux, white wines, of vintages to make the heart warm; each
was produced in turn, a different vintage and wine on each one of our
visits, but no champagne. This was no wine for women--for the right
women. Champagne was a bad, fast wine, for fast, disreputable people.
"_C'est un vrai poison, qui vous infecte_," she had declared again and
again, and when she saw her daughter drinking it, it made her shudder;
she confessed to having a moment of doubt; had Paris, indeed, really
brought her child no harm? Then the old mere would shrug her bent
shoulders and rub her hands, and for a moment she would be lost in
thought. Presently the cracked old laugh would peal forth again, and,
as she threw back her head, she would shake it as if to dispel some
dark vision.
To-day she had dropped, almost as soon as we entered, into a narrow
trap-door, descending a flight of stone steps. We could hear a clicking
of bottles and a rustling of straw; and then, behold, a veritable fairy
issuing from the bowels of the earth, with flushes of red suffusing the
ribbed, bewrinkled face, as the old figure straightens its crookedness
to carry the dusty bottle securely, steadily, lest the cloudy settling
at the bottom should be disturbed. What a merry little feast then
began! We had learned where the glasses were kept; we had been busily
scouring them while our hostess was below. Then wine and glasses, along
with three chairs, were quickly placed on the pine table at the door of
the old house. Here, on the grass of the cliffs, we sat, sipping our
wine, enjoying the sea that lay at our feet, and above, the sunlit sky.
To our friend both sky and sea were familiar companions; but the fichu
was a new friend.
"Yes, it is very beautiful, as you say," she said, in answer to our
admiring comments. "It came from Paris, from my daughter. She sent it
to me; she is always making me gifts; she is one who remembers her old
mother! Figure to yourselves that last year, in midwinter, she sent me
no less than three gowns, all wool! What can I do with them? _C'est
pour me flatter, c'est sa manière de me dire qu'il faut vivre pour
longtemps! Ah, la chère folle!_ But she spoils me, the darling!"
This daughter had become the most mysterious of all our Villerville
discoveries. Our old friend was a peasant, the child of peasant
farmers. She would always remain a peasant; and yet her daughter was a
Parisian, and lived in a _bonbonnière_. She was also married; but that
only served to thicken the web of mystery enshrouding her. How could a
daughter of a peasant, brought up as a peasant, who had lived here, a
tiller of the fields till her nineteenth year, suddenly be transformed
into a woman of the Parisian world, gain the position of a banker's
wife, and be dancing, as the old mere kept telling us, at balls at the
Elysée? Her mother never answered this riddle for us; and, more amazing
still, neither could the village. The village would shrug its
shoulders, when we questioned it, with discretion, concerning this
enigma. "Ah, dame! It was she--the old mere--who had had chances in
life, to marry her daughter like that! Victorine was pretty--yes, there
was no gainsaying she was pretty--but not so beautiful as all that, to
entrap a banker, _un homme sérieux, qui vit de ses rentes!_ and who was
generous, too, for the old mere needn't work now, since she was always
receiving money." Gifts were perpetually pouring into the low
rooms--wines, and Parisian delicacies, and thick garments.
The tie between the two, between the mother and daughter, appeared to
be as strong and their relations as complete, as if one were not clad
in homespun and the other in Worth gowns. There was no shame, that was
easily seen, on either side; each apparently was full of pride in the
other; their living apart was entirely due to the old mère's preference
for a life on the cliffs, alone in the midst of all her old peasant
belongings.
"_C'est plus chez-soi, ici!_ Victorine feels that, too. She loves the
smell of the old wood, and of the peat burning there in the fireplace.
When she comes down to see me, I must shut fast all the doors and
windows; she wants the whole of the smell, _pour faire le vrai
bouquet_, as she says. If she had had children--ah!--I don't say but
what I might have consented; but as it is, I love my old fire, and my
view out there, and the village, best!"
At this point in the conversation, the old eyes, bright as they were,
turned dim and cloudy; the inward eye was doubtless seeing something
other than the view; it was resting on a youthful figure, clad in
Parisian draperies, and on a face rising above the draperies, that bent
lovingly over the deep-throated fireplace, basking in its warmth, and
revelling in its homely perfume. We were silent also, as the picture of
that transfigured daughter of the house flitted across our own mental
vision.
"The village?" suddenly broke in the old mère. "_Dieu de Dieu!_ that
reminds me. I must go, my children, I must go. Loisette is waiting; _la
pauvre enfant_--perhaps suffering too--how do I know? And here am I,
playing, like a lazy clout! Did you know she had had un _nini_ this
morning? The little angel came at dawn. That's a good sign! And what
news for Auguste! He was out last night--fishing; she was at her
washing when he left her. _Tiens_, there they are, looking for him!
They've brought the spy-glass."
The old mère shaded her eyes, as she looked out into the dazzling
sunlight. We followed her finger, that pointed to a projection on the
cliffs. Among the grasses, grouped on top of the highest rock, was a
family party. An old fish-wife was standing far out against the sky;
she also was shading her eyes. A child's round head, crowded into a
white knit cap, was etched against the wide blue; and, kneeling,
holding in both hands a seaman's long glass, was a girl, sweeping the
horizon with swift, skilful stretches of arm and hand. The sun
descended in a shower of light on the old grandam's seamy face, on the
red, bulging cheeks of the chubby child, and on the bent figure of the
girl, whose knees were firmly implanted in the deep, tall grasses.
Beyond the group there was nothing but sea and sky.
"Yes," the mere went on, garrulously, as she recorked the bottle of old
port, carrying table and glasses within doors. "Yes, they're looking
for him. It ought to be time, now; he's due about now. There's a man
for you--good--_bon comme le bon Dieu_. Sober, saving too--good
father--in love with Loisette as on the wedding night--_ah, mes
enfants!_--there are few like him, or this village would be a paradise!"
She shut the door of the little cabin. And then she gave us a broad
wink. The wink was entirely by way of explanation; it was to enlighten
us as to why a certain rare bottle of port--a fresh one--was being
secreted beneath her fichu. It was a wink that conveyed to us a really
valuable number of facts; chief among them being the very obvious fact
that the French Government was an idiot, and a tyrant into the bargain,
since it imposed stupid laws no one meant to carry out; least of all a
good Norman. What? pay two _sous octroi_ on a bottle of one's own wine,
that one had had in one's cellar for half a lifetime? To cheat the town
out of those twopence becomes, of course, the true Norman's chief
pleasure in life. What is his reputation worth, as a shrewd, sharp man
of business, if a little thing like cheating stops him? It is even
better fun than bargaining, to cheat thus one's own town, since nothing
is to be risked, and one is so certain of success.
The mere nodded to us gayly, in farewell, as we all three re-entered
the town. She disappeared all at once into a narrow door way, her arms
still clasping her old port, that lay in the folds of her shawl. On her
shrewd kindly old face came a light that touched it all at once with a
glow of divinity; the mother in her had sprung into life with sharp,
sweet suddenness; she had caught the wail of the new-born babe through
the open door.
The village itself seemed to have caught something of the same glow. It
was not only the splendor of the noon sun that made the faces of the
worn fish-wives and the younger women softer and kindlier than common;
the groups, as we passed them, were all talking of but one thing--of
this babe that had come in the night, of Auguste's absence, and of
Loisette's sharp pains and her cries, that had filled the street, so
that none could sleep.