The "pendulum of time" has continued its swing. It even seems that it
has moved more quickly than usual, for the week's leave which had been
given me is almost over.
Every day we spend in the woods. The weather is splendid. The heather,
the foxgloves, the red silenes, all are in flower.
There had been a great "pardon" on Sunday, one of the most famous of
this region of Brittany: it was held near the chapel of _Our Lady of
Good Tidings_--which stands alone in the heart of the woods as if it had
been sleeping there, forgotten, since the middle ages.
It happened that the day before, the Saturday, we had sat down in the
shade, Yves, little Pierre and I, near the church, in the hour of the
great calm of noon. A very silent spot, above which the ancient oaks and
beeches linked, as if they had been arms, their great moss-grown
branches.
Two women had come, one young, the other old and decrepit; they wore the
costume of Rosporden and seemed to have travelled far. They carried
large keys.
And they opened the old sanctuary, which remains closed throughout the
year, and began to prepare the altar for the feast of the following day.
In the green half-light of the windows and the trees, we saw them
busying themselves about the statues of the old saints, dusting them,
wiping them; and then sweeping the flagstones covered with dust and
saltpetre.
At the foot of Our Lady someone, out of piety, had placed a skull,
found, no doubt, in the earth of the wood. Greenish-looking, the cranium
staved in, it gazed at us from the bottom of the chapel, with its two
black eye sockets.
"Tell me, godfather, what is that? . . . Did someone find that face in
the earth? . . ."
Little Pierre is vaguely disturbed by this thing, the like of which he
had never seen; as if it was for him the first revelation of an order of
sinister objects dwelling under the earth. . . .
The weather, for this day of pardon, was a little dull, but delightful
nevertheless.
For ten hours, the bagpipes played in front of the chapel, under the
great oaks, and gavottes were danced on the mossy turf.
That indescribable quality of Breton summers, which is somehow
melancholy, is, if one may so express it, a compound of many things: the
charm of the long, warm days, rarer here than elsewhere and sooner over;
the tall-growing herbage fresh and green, with the extreme profusion of
red flowers; and then the sentiment of olden times, which seems to
slumber here, to permeate everything.
Old land of Toulven, great woods where the black fir trees, trees of the
north, mingle already with the oaks and beeches; Breton countrysides,
which seem to be wrapt still in the past. . . .
Great rocks covered with grey lichen, as fine as an old man's beard;
plains in which the granite crops out of the ancient soil, plains of
purple heather. . . .
They are impressions of tranquillity, of appeasement, which this country
brings me; and also an aspiration towards a more complete repose under
the mossy turf, at the foot of the chapels which are in the woods. And,
with Yves, all this is vaguer, more inexpressible, but more intense
also, as with me when I was a child.
To see us sitting together in the woods in the calm of these fine summer
days, one would never imagine what our youth had been, what life we had
lived, nor what terrible scenes there had been between us formerly, when
first our two natures, very different and very alike, had come in
conflict one with the other.
Every evening before we go to bed, we play with little Pierre a Toulven
game, amusing enough, which consists in holding one another by the chin
and reciting, without laughing, a long rigmarole: "By the beard of
Minette I hold you. The first of us two who shall laugh . . . etc." At
this game little Pierre is always caught.
After that come the gymnastics. Yves goes through the performance with
his son, turning him over, making him "go about," head down, legs in the
air, at arm's length, then raising him very high. "Tell me, little
Pierre, when will you have arms like mine? Tell me! Oh, never; never
arms like yours, father; I shall not suffer hardship enough for that, I
am sure."
And when Yves, dishevelled, tired from having romped so much, says, as
he readjusts his clothes, in his most serious way: "Now then, little
Pierre has finished his gymnastics for the present," little Pierre comes
to me with that smile which always gets for him what he wants: "It is
your turn, godfather; come!" And the gymnastics begin again.