When the winds brought me back to Brittany again, it was in the last
days of May, when the Breton spring was at its fairest.
Yves had already been six weeks in his little house at Toulven,
arranging my room, and preparing everything for my arrival.
The ship on which I had embarked had left the Mediterranean and was
going north in the Atlantic, bound for the northern ports and Brest
where it was to be laid up.
18_th May, at sea._ Already one feels that Brittany is near. It is fine
still, but the day is one of those fine Breton days which are calm and
melancholy. The smooth sea is of a pale blue, the salt air is fresh and
smells of seaweed; over everything there is a veil of bluish mist, very
transparent and very tenuous.
At eight o'clock in the morning we round the point of Penmarc'h. The
Celtic rocks, the tall sad cliffs become visible little by little and
draw nearer.
Now there are real banks of mist--but very light still, summer
mists--which rest everywhere on the distances of the horizon.
At one o'clock, the channel of the Toulinguets, and then we enter Brest.
19_th May._ Eight days' leave. At midday I am in the train, on my way to
Toulven.
Rain all the way over the Breton countryside. The meadows, the shady
valleys are full of water.
From Bannalec to Toulven is an hour's drive through the woods. With my
eyes fixed in front of me I watch for the granite steeple of the church
in the distance of the green horizon.
And now it appears reflected deep below in the mournful pool. The
weather has cleared and the sky is blue again, a pale blue.
Toulven! . . . The diligence stops. Yves is there waiting for me,
holding little Pierre by the hand.
We look at each other--and our first impulse is to laugh, on account of
our moustaches. Our faces are altered, and we seem odd to each other. We
had not seen each other since permission had been given to sailors to
leave the upper lip unshaved. Yves expressed the opinion that it made us
look much more knowing.
Then we shook hands.
And what a fine little fellow Pierre has become! So tall, so strong! We
set off together, going through Toulven, where the good folk know me and
come to their doors to watch us pass. We make our way through the narrow
grey street, between the ancient houses, between the walls of massive
granite. I recognize the old woman with the owl-like profile who
presided at the birth of my godson; she nods to me from an open window.
The large coifs, the collarettes, the spangles on the bodices, stand
out, in the deep embrasures against the dark backgrounds, and the
impression I receive as I pass by is one peculiar to Brittany, of olden
times, of days remote and dead.
Little Pierre, whose hands we hold, walks now like a man. He had said
nothing at first, a little overcome at seeing me again, but presently he
begins to talk; upturning towards me his round face he looks at me as at
a friend with whom he may share his thoughts, and a sweet small voice
with which I am not yet very familiar pipes out with a strong Breton
accent:
"Godfather, have you brought me my sheep?"
Fortunately I had remembered my promise of a year ago; this sheep on
wheels for little Pierre is in my trunk. And I have brought also some
candlesticks with owls' heads on them (heads of the _parrots of France_)
which I had promised to my other baby--Yves.
And here is the house, gay and white and new, with its Breton window
frames, its green shutters, its attic store-room, and, behind, the
horizon of the woods.
We enter. Below in the open-hearthed kitchen, Marie and little Corentine
are waiting for us.
But, immediately, Yves hurries me away, impatient that I should see
their handsome white room upstairs, with its muslin curtains and its
cherry wood furniture.
And then he opens another door.
"And now, brother, you are in your own room?"
And he looks at me, anxious to see the effect produced, after all the
pains his wife and he have taken to ensure that I should find everything
to my taste.
I enter, touched, moved. It is all white, my room, and filled with a
delicious fragrance. There are flowers everywhere, flowers which they
have gone very far to find for me; in vases on the mantelpiece, bunches
of mignonette and large bouquets of sweetpeas; in the fireplace, a mass
of heather.
But they could not bring themselves to put in my room the old furniture,
the old Breton odds and ends, and they excused themselves saying they
had found nothing that seemed to them nice enough and suitable enough;
and so they had gone to Quimper and bought me a bed like their own, in
cherry wood, a light wood, bright and slightly reddish in colour. The
tables and chairs are of the same wood. The smallest details have been
arranged with tender thought; on the walls, in gilt frames, are drawings
which I had made in earlier days and a large photograph of the tower of
Saint Pol-de-Léon, which I had given Yves at the time when we were
together in the misty waters of the North.
The boards of the floor are as clean as newly-sawn wood.
"You see, brother, everything is as spotless as on board," says Yves,
who himself has taken the greatest pains to make it so, and who removes
his shoes whenever he goes up so that he may not dirty the stairs.
And I must see everything, go everywhere, even into the store-room where
the potatoes are laid by, and the logs of wood for the winter; even into
the little vestibule of the staircase where is suspended, like the
_ex-voto_ of a sailor in a chapel of the Virgin, a miniature ship which
Yves had made during his spare time in the crow's nest of the
_Primauguet_; and finally into the garden where the strawberries and
various green things are beginning to push up their fresh shoots in long
neat rows.
Now we sit down at the table, Yves, Marie, little Corentine, little
Pierre and I, round the spotless white cloth on which the dinner has
been placed. And Yves, my brother Yves, becomes self-conscious and
nervous all at once in his rôle of master of the house. And so it is I
who have to carve, and, as it is the first time in my life, I get a
little confused too.
At this dinner, I eat to please them; but this great happiness which I
feel here near me and of which in some small measure I am the cause,
this deep gratitude which surrounds me, all this moves me very
strangely. To be in the midst of these rare things brings me the
surprise of a new, delightful experience.
"You know," Yves says to me, low as if in confidence, "I go with her to
mass now every Sunday."
And he makes in the direction of his wife a little grimace of childlike
submission, very comical to see in one so serious. But his manner with
Marie has quite changed, and I saw as soon as I entered that love had
come at last to make its home for good and all in the new house. And my
dear friends, therefore, have attained all that is best on earth. As
Yves said "All that was wanted now was that the pendulum of time should
stop so that this great happiness of their fulfilled dreams might never
leave them."
They also are silent in their happiness, as if they feared they might
frighten it away if they spoke too loud or too lightheartedly about it.
Besides we have to speak of the dead, of that little Yvonne who departed
last autumn without waiting for the return of the _Primauguet_ and whom
Yves never saw; of old Corentin, her grandfather, who had found the cold
weather of December too much for him.
It is Marie who speaks:
"He became very difficult towards the end, he who had always been so
considerate. He said we did not know how to look after him, and he asked
continually for his son Yves: 'Oh! if Yves were here he would help me;
he would lift me in his strong arms and turn me over in my bed.' On the
last night he called him without ceasing."
And Yves replied:
"What grieves me most when I think of our father, is that we were a
little angry with each other on the day I went away, in connection with
the settlement, you know. You cannot believe how often the recollection
of that dispute with him comes into my mind."
Dinner is finished. It is evening, the long mild evening of May. We are
walking, Yves and I, towards the church, to pay a visit to a white cross
which stands there on a little flower-decked mound:
_Yvonne Kermadec, thirteen months._
"They say that she was very like me," says Yves.
And this resemblance of the dead infant to him makes him very
thoughtful.
As we look at the cross, the mound and the flowers, we both think of
this mystery: a little baby girl who was of his blood, his issue, who
had his eyes, and . . . probably, too, his nature, and who was given
back so soon to the Breton earth. It is as if something of himself had
already gone from him to mingle with the dust; it was like an
earnest-money which he had already given to eternal nothingness. . . .
In four years, this little cross which may be seen now from the
distance, will exist no longer; Yvonne and her mound and her flowers
will be swept away. Even her little bones will be gathered up and mixed
with the others, the bones of those long dead, under the church, in the
ossuary.
For four years still the cross will remain, and those who pass may read
this name of a little child. . . .
It stands on the edge of the pond. It is reflected in the deep, stagnant
water, by the side of the tall grey steeple. On the mound the blooming
carnations make white tufts, already indistinct in the oncoming
darkness. The pond is like a mirror, pale yellow, of the colour of the
dying daylight, of the sunset sky; and, all round, is the line, already
dark, of the woods.
The flowers of the tombs give out their soft perfumes of the evening. A
mild stillness surrounds us and seems to close in upon us. . . .
In the distance we hear the hooting of the owls, and we cannot
distinguish now little Yvonne's white carnations. . . . The summer night
has come.
Suddenly a loud noise startles us, amid this silence in which we were
thinking of the dead. It is the Angelus sounding, very close, above us,
in the steeple; and the air is filled with the deep vibrations of the
bell.
Yet we had seen no one enter the church which is shut and dark.
"Who is ringing?" asks Yves anxiously. "Who can be ringing? I would not
do it, ever. . . . I would not enter the church at this hour, not even
for all the gold in the world!"
. . . We leave the cemetery; there is too much noise and the Angelus
sounds strange there; it awakens unexpected echoes, in the waters of the
pond, in the enclosure of the dead, in the darkness. Not that we are
afraid of the poor little tomb with the white carnations; but there are
the others, these mounds of turf which are all about us, these graves of
men and women unknown. . . .
_Ten o'clock._ I am going to sleep for the first time under the roof of
my brother Yves.
_Later._ We have already said good night, but he returns and opens my
door.
"The flowers. They may not be good for you; it has just occurred to us.
. . ."
And he takes them all away, the mignonette, the sweetpeas, even the
bunches of heather.