LA PLOO BELLE
They had been nearly three weeks on the voyage, three days in port, four
more on cattle trains, and had been marching since morning from the
nearest railway station at Estville-sur-Lesse.
Now, lugging their large leather hold-alls, they started up the main
street of Sainte Lesse, three sunburnt, loud-talking Americans, young,
sturdy, careless of glance and voice and gesture, perfectly
self-satisfied.
Their footsteps echoed loudly on the pavement of this still, old town,
lying so quietly in the shadow of its aged trees and its sixteenth century
belfry, where the great bell, Bayard, had hung for hundreds of years, and,
tier on tier above it, clustered in set ranks the fixed bells of the
ancient carillon.
"Some skyscraper," observed Burley, patronizing the bell-tower with a
glance.
As he spoke, they came to the inn, a very ancient hostelry built into a
remnant of the old town wall, and now a part of it. On the signboard was
painted a white doe; and that was the name of the inn.
So they trooped through the stone-arched tunnel, ushered by a lame
innkeeper; and Burley, chancing to turn his head and glance back through
the shadowy stone passage, caught a glimpse in the outer sunshine of the
girl whose dark eyes had inspired him with jocular eloquence as he rode on
his mule under the bell-tower of Sainte Lesse.
"A peach," he said to Smith. And the sight of her apparently going to his
head, he burst into French: "Tray chick! Tray, tray chick! I’m glad I’ve
got on this uniform and not overalls and one suspender."
"What’s biting you?" inquired Smith.
"Nothing, Stick, nothing. But I believe I’ve seen the prettiest girl in
the world right here in this two-by-four town."
Stick glanced over his shoulder, then shrugged:
"She’s ornamental, only she’s got a sad on."
But Burley trudged on with his leather hold-all, muttering to himself
something about the prettiest girl in the world.
The "prettiest girl in the world" continued her way unconscious of the
encomiums of John Burley and the critique of Sticky Smith. Her way,
however, seemed to be the way of Burley and his two companions, for she
crossed the sunny street and entered the White Doe by the arched door and
tunnel-like passage.
Unlike them, however, she turned to the right in the stone corridor,
opened a low wooden door, crossed the inn parlour, ascended a short
stairway, and entered a bedroom.
Here, standing before a mirror, she unpinned her straw hat, smoothed her
dark hair, resting her eyes pensively for a few moments on her reflected
face. Then she sauntered listlessly about the little room in performance
of those trivial, aimless offices, entirely feminine, such as opening all
the drawers in her clothes-press, smoothing out various frilly objects and
fabrics, investigating a little gilded box and thoughtfully inspecting its
contents, which consisted of hair-pins. Fussing here, lingering there,
loitering by her bird-cage, where a canary cheeped its greeting and hopped
and hopped; bending over a cluster of white phlox in a glass of water to
inhale the old-fashioned perfume, she finally tied on a fresh apron and
walked slowly out to the ancient, vaulted kitchen.
An old peasant woman was cooking, while a young one washed dishes.
"Are the American gentlemen still at table, Julie?" she inquired.
"Mademoiselle Maryette, they are devouring everything in the house!"
exclaimed old Julie, flinging both hands toward heaven. "_Tenez_,
mamzelle, I have heard of eating in ancient days, I have read of
Gargantua, I have been told of banquets, of feasting, of appetites! But
there is one American in there! Mamzelle Maryette, if I should swear to
you that he is on his third chicken and that a row of six pint bottles of
’93 Margaux stand empty on the cloth at his elbow, I should do no penance
for untruthfulness. _Tenez, Mamzelle Maryette, regardez un peu par
l’oubliette_--" And old Julie slid open the wooden shutter on the crack
and Maryette bent forward and surveyed the dining room outside.
They were laughing very loud in there, these three Americans--three
powerful, sun-scorched young men, very much at their ease around the
table, draining the red Bordeaux by goblets, plying knife and fork with
joyous and undiminished vigour.
The tall one with the crisp hair and clear, grayish eyes--he of the three
chickens--was already achieving the third--a crisply browned bird, fresh
from the spit, fragrant and smoking hot. At intervals he buttered great
slices of rye bread, or disposed of an entire young potato, washing it
down with a goblet of red wine, but always he returned to the rich roasted
fowl which he held, still impaled upon its spit, and which he carved as he
ate, wings, legs, breast falling in steaming flakes under his skillful
knife blade.
Sticky Smith finally pushed aside his drained glass and surveyed an empty
plate frankly and regretfully, unable to continue. He said:
"I’m going to bed and I’m going to sleep twenty-four hours. After that I’m
going to eat for twenty-four more hours, and then I’ll be in good shape.
Bong soir."
"Aw, stick around with the push!" remonstrated Kid Glenn thickly, impaling
another potato upon his fork and gesticulating with it.
Smith gazed with surfeited but hopeless envy upon Burley’s magnificent
work with knife and fork, saw him crack a seventh bottle of Bordeaux,
watched him empty the first goblet.
But even Glenn’s eyes began to dull in spite of himself, his head nodded
mechanically at every mouthful achieved.
"I gotta call it off, Jack," he yawned. "Stick and I need the sleep if you
don’t. So here’s where we quit----"
"Let me tell you about that girl," began Burley. "I never saw a
prettier--" But Glenn had appetite neither for food nor romance:
"Say, listen. Have a heart, Jack! We need the sleep!"
Stick had already risen; Glenn shoved back his chair with a gigantic yawn
and shambled to his feet.
"I want to tell you," insisted Burley, "that she’s what the French call
tray, tray chick----"
Stick pointed furiously at the fowl:
"Chick? I’m fed up on chick! Maybe she is some chick, as you say, but it
doesn’t interest me. Goo’bye. Don’t come battering at my door and wake me
up, Jack. Be a sport and lemme alone----"
He turned and shuffled out, and Glenn followed, his Mexican spurs
clanking.
Burley jeered them:
"Mollycoddles! Come on and take in the town with us!"
But they slammed the door behind them, and he heard them stumbling and
clanking up stairs.
So Burley, gazing gravely at his empty plate, presently emptied the last
visible bottle of Bordeaux, then stretching his mighty arms and superb
chest, fished out a cigarette, set fire to it, unhooked the cartridge-belt
and holster from the back of his chair, buckled it on, rose, pulled on his
leather-peaked cap, and drew a deep breath of contentment.
For a moment he stood in the centre of the room, as though in pleasant
meditation, then he slowly strode toward the street door, murmuring to
himself: "Tray, tray chick. The prettiest girl in the world.... La ploo
belle fille du monde ... la ploo belle...."
He strolled as far as the corral down in the meadow by the stream, where
he found the negro muleteers asleep and the mules already watered and fed.
For a while he hobnobbed with the three gendarmes on duty there,
practicing his kind of French on them and managing to understand and be
understood more or less--probably less.
But the young man was persistent; he desired to become that easy master of
the French language that his tongue-tied comrades believed him to be. So
he practiced garrulously upon the polite, suffering gendarmes.
He related to them his experience on shipboard with a thousand mutinous
mules to pacify, feed, water, and otherwise cherish. They had, it
appeared, encountered no submarines, but enjoyed several alarms from
destroyers which eventually proved to be British.
"A cousin of mine," explained Burley, "Ned Winters, of El Paso, went down
on the steamer _John B. Doty_, with eleven hundred mules and six niggers.
The Boches torpedoed the ship and then raked the boats. I’d like to get a
crack at one Boche before I go back to God’s country."
The gendarmes politely but regretfully agreed that it was impracticable
for Burley to get a crack at a Hun; and the American presently took
himself off to the corral, after distributing cigarettes and establishing
cordial relations with the Sainte Lesse Gendarmerie.
He waked up a negro and inspected the mules; that took a long time. Then
he sought out the negro blacksmith, awoke him, and wrote out some
directions.
"The idea is," he explained, "that whenever the French in this sector need
mules they draw on our corral. We are supposed to keep ten or eleven
hundred mules here all the time and look after them. Shipments come every
two weeks, I believe. So after you’ve had another good nap, George, you
wake up your boys and get busy. And there’ll be trouble if things are not
in running order by tomorrow night."
"Yas, suh, Mistuh Burley," nodded the sleepy blacksmith, still blinking in
the afternoon sunshine.
"And if you need an interpreter," added Burley, "always call on me until
you learn French enough to get on. Understand, George?"
"Yas, suh."
"Because," said Burley, walking away, "a thorough knowledge of French
idioms is necessary to prevent mistakes. When in doubt always apply to me,
George, for only a master of the language is competent to deal with these
French people."
It was his one vanity, his one weakness. Perhaps, because he so ardently
desired proficiency, he had already deluded himself with the belief that
he was a master of French.
So, belt and loaded holster sagging, and large silver spurs clicking and
clinking at every step, John Burley sauntered back along the almost
deserted street of Sainte Lesse, thinking sometimes of his mules,
sometimes of the French language, and every now and then of a dark-eyed,
dark-haired girl whose delicately flushed and pensive gaze he had
encountered as he had ridden into Sainte Lesse under the old belfry.
"Stick Smith’s a fool," he thought to himself impatiently. "Tray chick
doesn’t mean ’some chicken.’ It means a pretty girl, in French."
He looked up at the belfry as he passed under it, and at the same moment,
from beneath the high, gilded dragon which crowned its topmost spire, a
sweet bell-note floated, another, others succeeding in crystalline
sweetness, linked in a fragment of some ancient melody. Then they ceased;
then came a brief silence; the great bell he had heard before struck five
times.
"Lord!--that’s pretty," he murmured, moving on and turning into the arched
tunnel which was the entrance to the White Doe Inn.
Wandering at random, he encountered the innkeeper in the parlour, studying
a crumpled newspaper through horn-rimmed spectacles on his nose.
"Tray jolie," said Burley affably, seating himself with an idea of further
practice in French.
"_Plait-il?_"
"The bells--tray beau!"
The old man straightened his bent shoulders a little proudly.
"For thirty years, m’sieu, I have been Carillonneur of Sainte Lesse." He
smiled; then, saddened, he held out both hands toward Burley. The fingers
were stiff and crippled with rheumatism.
"No more," he said slowly; "the carillon is ended for me. The great art is
no more for Jean Courtray, Master of Bells."
"What is a carillon?" inquired John Burley simply.
Blank incredulity was succeeded by a shocked expression on the old man’s
visage. After a silence, in mild and patient protest, he said:
"I am Jean Courtray, Carillonneur of Sainte Lesse.... Have you never heard
of the carillon of Sainte Lesse, or of me?"
"Never," said Burley. "We don’t have anything like that in America."
The old carillonneur, Jean Courtray, began to speak in a low voice of his
art, his profession, and of the great carillon of forty-six bells in the
ancient tower of Sainte Lesse.
A carillon, he explained, is a company of fixed bells tuned according to
the chromatic scale and ranging through several octaves. These bells,
rising tier above tier in a belfry, the smallest highest, the great,
ponderous bells of the bass notes lowest, are not free to swing, but are
fixed to huge beams, and are sounded by clappers connected by a wilderness
of wires to a keyboard which is played upon by the bell-master or
carillonneur.
He explained that the office of bell-master was an ancient one and greatly
honoured; that the bell-master was also a member of the municipal
government; that his salary was a fixed one; that not only did he play
upon the carillon on fête days, market days, and particular occasions, but
he also travelled and gave concerts upon the few existing carillons of
other ancient towns and cities, not alone in France where carillons were
few, but in Belgium and Holland, where they still were comparatively many,
although the German barbarians had destroyed some of the best at Liége,
Arras, Dixmude, Termonde, and Ypres.
"Monsieur," he went on in a voice which began to grow a little unsteady,
"the Huns have destroyed the ancient carillons of Louvain and of Mechlin.
In the superb bell-tower of Saint Rombold I have played for a thousand
people; and the Carillonneur, Monsieur Vincent, and the great bell-master,
Josef Denyn, have come to me to congratulate me with tears in their
eyes--in their eyes----"
There were tears in his own now, and he bent his white head and looked
down at the worn floor under his crippled feet.
"Alas," he said, "for Denyn--and for Saint Rombold’s tower. The Hun has
passed that way."
After a silence:
"Who is it now plays the carillon in Sainte Lesse!" asked Burley.
"My daughter, Maryette. Sainte Lesse has honoured me in my daughter, whom
I myself instructed. My daughter--the little child of my old age,
monsieur--is mistress of the bells of Sainte Lesse.... They call her
Carillonnette in Sainte Lesse----"
The door opened and the girl came in.