A NORMAN HOUSEHOLD.
There were two paths in the village that were well worn. One was that
which led the village up into the fields. The other was the one that
led the tillers of the soil down into the village, to the door step of
the justice of the peace.
A good Norman is no Norman who has not a lawsuit on hand.
Anything will serve as a pretext for a quarrel No sum of money is so
small as not to warrant a breaking of the closest blood ties, if
thereby one's rights may be secured. Those beautiful stripes of rye,
barley, corn, and wheat up yonder in the fields, that melt into one
another like sea-tones--down here on the benches before the _juge de
paix_--what quarrels, what hatreds, what evil passions these few acres
of land have brought their owners, facing each other here like so many
demons, ready to spring at the others' throats! Brothers on these
benches forget they are brothers, and sisters that they have suckled
the same mother. Two more yards of the soil that should have been
Fillette's instead of Jeanne's, and the grave will enclose both before
the clenched fist of either is relaxed, and the last _sous_ in the
stocking will be spent before the war between their respective lawyers
will end.
Many and many were the tales told us of the domestic tragedies, born of
wills mal-administered, of the passions of hate, ambition, and despair
kept at a white heat because half the village owned, up in the fields,
what the other half coveted. Many, also, and fierce were the heated
faces we looked in upon at the justice's door, in the very throes of
the great moment of facing justice, and their adversary.
Our own way, by preference, took us up into the fields. Here, in the
broad open, the farms lay scattered like fortifications over a plain.
Doubtless, in the earlier warlike days they had served as such.
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
shore 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 grasses and
honeysuckle. The shepherdesses, as they followed the sheep inland into
the heart of the pasture land, were busy netting the coarse cages that
trap the finny tribe. Long-limbed, vigorous-faced, these shepherdesses
were Biblical figures. In their coarse 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 grass 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 grasses.
The fat pasture lands rose and sank in undulations as rounded as the
nascent breasts 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 space; 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 coarse, 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 glass of milk?"
The farm-house might have been waiting for us, it was so still. Even
the grasses along its sloping roof nodded, as if in welcome. The house,
as we approached it, together with its out-buildings, assumed 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 glass 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 passion--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 coarse, good-humored face broke into a broad laugh.
"Pardon, mam'selle--_j'n bougeons pas. Not' maitre e encoléré; 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 passion 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.