Close into the edge of the forest, so close that the trees of the
_bornage_ stand pleasantly about the last houses, sits a certain small
and very quiet village. There is but one street, and that, not long ago,
was a green lane, where the cattle browsed between the doorsteps. As you
go up this street, drawing ever nearer the beginning of the wood, you
will arrive at last before an inn where artists lodge. To the door (for
I imagine it to be six o’clock on some fine summer’s even), half a dozen,
or maybe half a score, of people have brought out chairs, and now sit
sunning themselves, and waiting the omnibus from Melun. If you go on
into the court you will find as many more, some in billiard-room over
absinthe and a match of corks some without over a last cigar and a
vermouth. The doves coo and flutter from the dovecot; Hortense is
drawing water from the well; and as all the rooms open into the court,
you can see the white-capped cook over the furnace in the kitchen, and
some idle painter, who has stored his canvases and washed his brushes,
jangling a waltz on the crazy, tongue-tied piano in the salle-à-manger.
‘_Edmond_, _encore un vermouth_,’ cries a man in velveteen, adding in a
tone of apologetic afterthought, ‘_un double_, _s’il vous plaît_.’
‘Where are you working?’ asks one in pure white linen from top to toe.
‘At the Carrefour de l’Épine,’ returns the other in corduroy (they are
all gaitered, by the way). ‘I couldn’t do a thing to it. I ran out of
white. Where were you?’ ‘I wasn’t working. I was looking for motives.’
Here is an outbreak of jubilation, and a lot of men clustering together
about some new-comer with outstretched hands; perhaps the
‘correspondence’ has come in and brought So-and-so from Paris, or perhaps
it is only So-and-so who has walked over from Chailly to dinner.
‘_À table_, _Messieurs_!’ cries M. Siron, bearing through the court the
first tureen of soup. And immediately the company begins to settle down
about the long tables in the dining-room, framed all round with sketches
of all degrees of merit and demerit. There’s the big picture of the
huntsman winding a horn with a dead boar between his legs, and his
legs—well, his legs in stockings. And here is the little picture of a
raw mutton-chop, in which Such-a-one knocked a hole last summer with no
worse a missile than a plum from the dessert. And under all these works
of art so much eating goes forward, so much drinking, so much jabbering
in French and English, that it would do your heart good merely to peep
and listen at the door. One man is telling how they all went last year
to the fête at Fleury, and another how well so-and-so would sing of an
evening: and here are a third and fourth making plans for the whole
future of their lives; and there is a fifth imitating a conjurer and
making faces on his clenched fist, surely of all arts the most difficult
and admirable! A sixth has eaten his fill, lights a cigarette, and
resigns himself to digestion. A seventh has just dropped in, and calls
for soup. Number eight, meanwhile, has left the table, and is once more
trampling the poor piano under powerful and uncertain fingers.
Dinner over, people drop outside to smoke and chat. Perhaps we go along
to visit our friends at the other end of the village, where there is
always a good welcome and a good talk, and perhaps some pickled oysters
and white wine to close the evening. Or a dance is organised in the
dining-room, and the piano exhibits all its paces under manful jockeying,
to the light of three or four candles and a lamp or two, while the
waltzers move to and fro upon the wooden floor, and sober men, who are
not given to such light pleasures, get up on the table or the sideboard,
and sit there looking on approvingly over a pipe and a tumbler of wine.
Or sometimes—suppose my lady moon looks forth, and the court from out the
half-lit dining-room seems nearly as bright as by day, and the light
picks out the window-panes, and makes a clear shadow under every
vine-leaf on the wall—sometimes a picnic is proposed, and a basket made
ready, and a good procession formed in front of the hotel. The two
trumpeters in honour go before; and as we file down the long alley, and
up through devious footpaths among rocks and pine-trees, with every here
and there a dark passage of shadow, and every here and there a spacious
outlook over moonlit woods, these two precede us and sound many a jolly
flourish as they walk. We gather ferns and dry boughs into the cavern,
and soon a good blaze flutters the shadows of the old bandits’ haunt, and
shows shapely beards and comely faces and toilettes ranged about the
wall. The bowl is lit, and the punch is burnt and sent round in scalding
thimblefuls. So a good hour or two may pass with song and jest. And
then we go home in the moonlit morning, straggling a good deal among the
birch tufts and the boulders, but ever called together again, as one of
our leaders winds his horn. Perhaps some one of the party will not heed
the summons, but chooses out some by-way of his own. As he follows the
winding sandy road, he hears the flourishes grow fainter and fainter in
the distance, and die finally out, and still walks on in the strange
coolness and silence and between the crisp lights and shadows of the
moonlit woods, until suddenly the bell rings out the hour from far-away
Chailly, and he starts to find himself alone. No surf-bell on forlorn
and perilous shores, no passing knell over the busy market-place, can
speak with a more heavy and disconsolate tongue to human ears. Each
stroke calls up a host of ghostly reverberations in his mind. And as he
stands rooted, it has grown once more so utterly silent that it seems to
him he might hear the church bells ring the hour out all the world over,
not at Chailly only, but in Paris, and away in outlandish cities, and in
the village on the river, where his childhood passed between the sun and
flowers.