[Illustration: view of house from distance]
Strange how sharp and detailed will some of our very early memories
remain in after life, when even important scenes of our later years are
so easily forgotten! That old farm of Mesnil-le-Roy is still a clear
picture, vignetted, so to speak, upon grey pages of oblivion.... I can
yet see the orchard, strewn with myriad fallen apples—the byres, whereto
at sundown returned the slow-pacing, dreamy, placid-eyed milch cows; the
giant walnut-tree, with one of its main branches blasted by
lightning—blasted on the stormy night, during which “thunder had fallen”
freely ‹as the little boy heard the labourers say, awe-struck, in the
morning; but during which he had slept under the brown-tiled roof
without the slightest disturbance›.... I can see the _Four Banal_, that
co-operative bread-oven, a relic of mediæval institutions, which was
still common enough in those days; where you could have such an
entrancing view of lambent blue flames lined with yellow when the door
stood open to receive the unbaked loaves; and where the air smelt so
divinely of hot wheaten crust when they were removed on completion....
[Illustration: little boy with two adults]
It was, by the way, on that alluring spot—the boy used to find his way
there regularly on the days when _on cuisait_—that he heard a certain
remark, which to his child ears had no special meaning, but which
remained on memory’s tablets to assume later an interesting
significance. The country folk were very kind. The little English boy,
left for the good of his health at the farm of _père Pelletier_, was
known to everybody; was accepted and treated as one of the community.
Rarely did he stroll, as might any roaming puppy dog, into an open door
of the village without being supplied with a generous sup of milk, or a
_tartine de raisiné_; or again, in season, with a _pomme cuite_. The
roasted apple, be it said, browning and lusciously oozing caramel, was a
standing affair in that old-world village. There was, however, on that
day, a benighted wayfarer who obviously could not reconcile with these
rustic surroundings the yellow-haired, barelegged little boy gravely
gazing at the glowing oven.
“_D’ousqui sort, ce gosse-là?_” ‹for which barbarous lingo I take leave
to give as an equivalent: Who’s the kid?› asked the man. And the answer
came: “_Ça?—ca, mais le p’tit godem, donc_.” ‹That—why, that’s the
little “goddam.”›
[Sidenote: THE LITTLE GODEM]
_Le petit godem!..._ Such was the name under which that young innocent
was known at Mesnil-le-Roy, and, be it understood, in all cordiality and
benevolence! Of a certainty not one of those excellent people had the
remotest idea of the meaning of their “godem:” with them it was only the
established equivalent for English.
The term is a noun, not an expletive, which has come down through five
centuries—from the days, in fact, of the English occupation of France.
Among the written records of those stirring times we come across many a
passage in which a Duguesclin, a Maid of Orleans, or a Dunois is heard
to mention hatefully “_les godems_,” or “_les godons d’Angleterre_.”
Now, all that fertile country of the Vexin, the Ile-de-France and the
Beauce, of which the fat farm land of my old _père Pelletier_ was so
fair a sample, was obstinately fought for by the English for the best
part of a century. Mantes-la-Jolie—now mainly famed for its river
terraces, its sweet water grapes and its savoury _matelottes_ or eel
stews—was once a fortified place of note, taken and retaken by French
and English more than once; but finally captured ‹in 1418› by the noble
Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, the Achilles of England, as the French
themselves dubbed him, and firmly held by the “godems” for more than
thirty years. To have heard that mispleasing word used dispassionately,
merely as a substantive, is indeed a link with the past.
Strange paths of the musing thought, winding from Wisteria Sinensis to
the days of our conquering English archer!
* * * * *
I spoke of these childhood memories as of oddly clear pictures emerging
here and there out of grey mists of oblivion. Another now detaches
itself in the same way from the clouds of the very distant past.
It belongs to the following summer. A perfume of Glycine still lingers
about it, no doubt; for there again, upon the stone and through the
curvetting iron-work balconies of the fair Louis XV house overlooking
the park of St. Cloud, pale silvery green leafage, with here and there a
cluster of faint blue, spreads in a well-regulated display—widely
different, though, from the foaming profusion of the Mesnil. But the
impression more specially associated with those happy St. Cloud days is
the incense of the Sweet Briar.
[Sidenote: SWEET EGLANTINE]
[Illustration: outside of window with small balcony]
What has happened—I pause and ask indignantly—to the Sweet-Briar of the
world? Whither has the celestial, the entrancing scent of the true
Eglantine vanished? Our twentieth century Briar is still—there is no
gainsaying it—a delicious being, in its ephemeral exquisiteness of
flower and its pleasant, if but slightly more lasting, leafy odour. But
never, in subsequent life, have I captured again the sudden delight
first brought to my childish nostrils by a puff of breeze that had
passed over some hidden clump of sweet Eglantine. This first impression
is connected with certain grassy alleys piercing deep the grand
old-world park, or rather forest, of St. Cloud, which were my favourite
playgrounds in the early sixties of the last century. ‹There is
something distinctly suitable to the status of Grandpa, albeit merely
“brevet” rank as in my case, in memorising thus about a past century!›
[Illustration: flowers on stem]
I can see the five-year-old arrested short upon the turf, in the midst
of the hot pursuit of a blue butterfly, by his first whiff in life of
Rosa Rubiginosa: so might a setter halt and stiffen, having got the wind
of a grouse.—The source of the fitful stream of fragrance was hidden
among clumps of forbidding brambles. Besides, there was no following the
trail: it seemed ubiquitous. Like some Puck in his most tantalising
mood, it would lead up and down, up and down—luring now to right, now to
left, now straight ahead, anon seemed to whisk past from behind, until,
in a kind of “dwam,” the child would give up the baffled purpose and
pensively trot home by the nurse’s side.
For days the ambrosial fragrance dwelt in his little turned-up nose. It
haunted the sensitive child-mind much as, later, in budding manhood, the
remembrance of some enchanting face seen for an instant and then lost to
sight. He had at last to confide his hopeless passion to his mother. It
smelt ‹he explained› like the _Pomme Reinette_ of the dessert plates,
but oh, so much, so much better! The reference to the well-known and
excellent variety of apple left no doubt about the nature of the plant
which had exhaled the elusive trails of perfume. “Reinette” became the
accepted name of the woodland charmer and the hunt for Reinette bushes
in the more devious paths of the wood a daily occupation.
* * * * *
With these expeditions is associated another first acquaintance that
made a singularly strong impression.
There was, at the end of one of those heavenly grassed alleys, a group
of brushwood greenery from which the unmistakable fragrance flowed
deliciously across the path when the wind blew from a certain
direction—I should say, now, from the west; for the path led to Garches,
a place which, some eight years later, during the siege of Paris, became
notorious as the scene of some very ferocious bayonet fighting.
Undoubtedly there was a wealth of the desirable “Reinette” amid that
underwood. But, to the mild surprise of nurse or mother, or whoever it
might be who escorted the child upon his daily constitutional in the
wood, nothing could induce him to draw that particular cover. He
developed an ingenuity ‹or rather should it be called a
disingenuousness› for pushing investigations or carrying on a game in
paths that gave this spot a wide berth. Whenever possible, even, he
found some specious argument for avoiding the Garches-ward alley
altogether. No one, I believe, ever knew the reason.
[Sidenote: THE BLANCHING, LAUGHING ASPEN]
The fact is that, hard thereby, as if standing sentinel, rose a company
of tall, slender Aspens—trees that, in a small boy’s estimation, did not
behave as mere trees should. He had realised this, with a suddenness
that first made his heart jump, and then rooted him on the spot, one day
when, having caught up his scent, he was rushing with a whoop to the
capture of his bush. The Aspens, up to that instant quite placid, palely
green, grew all at once white with excitement and nodded their heads to
each other; after which came the noise of their leaves; not the honest
rustle of green trees, but derisive laughter; sounds, too, weirdly
human, ringing as though in mockery of the discomfited invader.
Mark you, there is something decidedly uncanny in the deportment of the
Aspen and its gracile, long-stalked trembling leaves, the white
undersides of which any puff of wind exposes simultaneously to
view—turning, on the instant, the whole of the green to foaming silver.
There was no doubt about the matter then. These paling and odd rustling
trees completely overawed Master Louis ‹Louis is Loki’s grandpa’s
baptismal name, now sunk into disuse›, though, in his budding masculine
pride, he kept the secret of his abhorrence very close within his own
little bosom.
[Illustration: child in front of trees]
On one occasion, however, when he had had to make up his mind to walk
past the blanching, murmuring group unless he were prepared ‹which he
was not› to explain the nature of his objection, he asked, with a fair
show of indifference, what manner of tree it was which “made that funny
noise: he-he-he-he.” “One would say,” he added with elaborate airiness,
“that they make a mock of one!”
When informed that “_Tremble_” was the name thereof, he became sunk in
fresh unpleasant musings, and was fain to look back, fascinated, over
his shoulder, each time the chuckling called after him.
The sound of the breeze, as it ruffles through the leaves of “Populus
tremula,” is like nothing else in the woods. I have always retained my
interest in the “Tremble” of my young days; and in the course of time it
became one of delight instead of terror. I would give a good deal to
have one of my own: one living not far from my bedroom window. It would
be good to hear it laughing gently outside, when one first woke, and to
know that it was powdering itself, so to speak, under the rays of the
rising sun. But there are no Aspens in our part of the world. And, as
for planting a council of these in the hope of silvery rustle and light
effects, why, it is perhaps somewhat too late in the day! But I still
seem to hear and see them with the ears and eyes of that dawning spring
of life in the St. Cloud days.
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