I COULD write a whole book about the summer that followed this spring
day, when I first met Yvon de Ste. Valerie. Yes, and the book would be
so long that no mortal man would have time to read it; but I must hurry
on with my story; for truth to tell, my eyes are beginning to be not
quite what they have been,--they'll serve my time, I hope, but my
writing was always small and crabbed,--and I must say what I have to
say, shorter than I have begun, I perceive. After the first week, then,
which he spent with Father L'Homme-Dieu, Yvon came over to our village
and boarded with Abby Rock. The Father was pleased to have him come; he
knew it would be a great thing for me, and he thought it would not hurt
the young gentleman to live for a time with plain folks. But if he
thought Yvon would look down on our village people, or hold himself
better than they, he was mistaken. In a week the young Frenchman was the
son and brother of the whole village. Our people were dear, good people,
Melody; but I sometimes thought them a little dull; that was after my
mother's death. I suppose I had enough of another nature in me to be
troubled by this, but not enough to know how to help it; later I
learned a little more; but indeed, I should justly say that my lessons
were begun by Yvon de Ste. Valerie. It was from him I learned, my dear,
that nothing in this world of God's is dull or common, unless we bring
dull hearts and dim eyes to look at it. It is the vision, the vision,
that makes the life; that vision which you, my child, with your
sightless eyes, have more clearly than almost any one I have known.
He was delighted with everything. He wanted to know about everything. He
declared that he should write a book, when he returned to France, all
about our village, which he called Paradise. It is a pretty place, or
was as I remember it. He must see how bread was made, how wool was spun,
how rugs were braided. Many's the time I have found him sitting in some
kitchen, winding the great balls of rags neatly cut and stitched
together, listening like a child while the woman told him of how many
rugs she had made, and how many quilts she had pieced; and she more
pleased than he, and thinking him one wonder and herself another.
He was in love with all the girls; so he said, and they had nothing to
say against it. But yet there was no girl could carry a sore heart, for
he treated them all alike. In this I have thought that he showed a sense
and kindness beyond his years or his seeming giddiness; for some of them
might well enough have had their heads turned by a gentleman, and one so
handsome, and with a tongue that liked better to say "Angel!" to a
woman than anything more suited to the average of the sex. But no girl
in the village could think herself for a moment the favoured maiden; for
if one had the loveliest eyes in the world, the next had a cheek of
roses and velvet, and the third walked like a goddess, and the fourth
charmed his soul out of his body every time she opened her lips. And so
it went on, till all understood it for play, and the pleasantest play
they ever saw. But he vowed from the first that he would marry Abby
Rock, and no other living woman. Abby always said yes, she would marry
him the first Sunday that came in the middle of the week; and then she
would try to make him eat more, though he took quite as much as was good
for him, not being used to our hearty ways, especially in the mornings.
Abby was as pleased with him as a child with a kitten, and it was pretty
to see them together.
"Light of my life!" Yvon would cry. "You are exquisite this morning!
Your eyes are like stars on the sea. Come, then, angelic Rock, _Rocher
des Anges_, and waltz with your Ste. Valerie!" And he would take Abby by
the waist, and try to waltz with her, till she reached for the
broomstick. I have told you, Melody, that Abby was the homeliest woman
the Lord ever made. Not that I ever noticed it, for the kindness in her
face was so bright I never saw anything but that; but strangers would
speak of it, and Yvon himself, before he heard her speak, made a little
face, I remember, that only I could see, and whispered, had I brought
him to lodge with Medusa? Medusa, indeed! I think Abby's smile would
soften any stone that had ever had a human heart beating in it, instead
of the other way.
But the place in the village that Yvon loved best was Ham Belfort's
grist-mill; and when he comes to my mind, in these days, when sadder
visions are softened and partly dim to me, it is mostly there that I
seem to see my friend.
It was, as I have said, one of the pleasantest places in the world. To
begin with, the colour and softness of it all! The window-glass was
powdered white, and the light came through white and dim, and lay about
in long powdery shafts, and these were white, too, instead of yellow. So
was the very dust white; or rather, it was good oatmeal and wheat flour
that lay thick and crumbling on the rafters above, and the wheels and
pulleys and other gear. As for Ham, the first time Yvon saw him in the
mill, he cried out "Mont Blanc!" and would not call him anything else
for some time. For Ham was whiter than all the rest, in his
working-dress, cap and jacket and breeches, white to begin with, and
powdered soft and furry, like his face and eyebrows, with the flying
meal. Down-stairs there was plenty of noise; oats and corn and wheat
pouring into the hoppers, and the great stones going round and round,
and wheels creaking and buzzing, and belts droning overhead. Yvon could
not talk at all here, and I not too much; only Ham's great voice and his
father's (old Mr. Belfort was Ham over again, gray under the powder,
instead of pink and brown) could roar on quietly, if I may so express
it, rising high above the rattle and clack of the machinery, and yet
peaceful as the stream outside that turned the great wheels and set the
whole thing flying. So, as he could not live long without talking, Yvon
loved best the loft above, where the corn was stored, both in bags and
unground, and where the big blowers were, and the old green fire-engine,
and many other curious things. I had known them all my life, but they
were strange to him, and he never tired, any more than if he had been a
boy of ten. Sometimes I wondered if he could be twenty-two, as he said;
sometimes when he would swing himself on to the slide, where the bags of
meal and flour were loaded on to the wagons. Well, Melody, it was a
thing to charm a boy's heart; it makes mine beat a little quicker to
think of it, even now; perhaps I was not much wiser than my friend,
after all. This was a slide some three feet wide, and say seven or eight
feet long, sloping just enough to make it pleasant, and polished till it
shone, from the bags that rubbed along it day after day, loading the
wagons as they backed up under it. Nothing would do but we must slide
down this, as if, I say, we were children of ten years old, coming down
astride of the meal-sacks, and sending a plump of flour into the air as
we struck the wagon. Father Belfort thought Yvon was touched in the
brain; but he was all the more gentle on this account. Boys were not
allowed on the slide, unless it were a holiday, or some boy had had a
hard time with sickness or what not; it was a treat rarely given, and
the more prized for that. But Yvon and I might slide as much as we
pleased. "Keep him cheerful, Jakey!" the dear old man would say. "Let
him kibobble all he's a mind to! I had a brother once was looney, and we
kep' him happy all his life long, jest lettin' him stay a child, as the
Lord intended. Six foot eight he stood, and weighed four hundred
pounds."
And when the boy was tired of playing we would sit down together, and
call to Ham to come up and talk; for even better than sliding, Yvon
loved to hear his cousin talk. You can take the picture into your mind,
Melody, my dear. The light dim and white, as I have told you, and very
soft, falling upon rows and rows of full sacks, ranged like soldiers;
the great white miller sitting with his back against one of these, and
his legs reaching anywhere,--one would not limit the distance; and
running all about him, without fear, or often indeed marking him in any
way, a multitude of little birds, sparrows they were, who spent most of
their life here among the meal-sacks. Sometimes they hopped on his
shoulder, or ran over his head, but they never minded his talking, and
he sat still, not liking to disturb them. It was a pretty sight of
extremes in bulk, and in nature too; for while Ham was afraid to move,
for fear of troubling them, they would bustle up to him and cock their
heads, and look him in the eye as if they said, "Come on, and show me
which is the biggest!"
There you see him, my dear; and opposite to him you might see a great
mound or heap of corn that shone yellow as gold. "_Le Mont d'Or_," Yvon
called it; and nothing would do but he must sit on this, lifted high
above us, yet sliding down every now and then, and climbing up again,
with the yellow grains slipping away under him, smooth and bright as
pebbles on the shore. And for myself, I was now here and now there, as I
found it more comfortable, being at home in every part of the friendly
place.
How we talked! Ham was mostly a silent fellow; but he grew to love the
lad so that the strings of his tongue were loosened as they had never
been before. His woman, too (as we say in those parts, Melody; wife is
the more genteel expression, but I never heard Ham use it. My father, on
the other hand, never said anything else; a difference in the fineness
of ear, my dear, I have always supposed),--his woman, I say, or wife,
had not "turned up her toes," but recovered, and as he was a faithful
and affectionate man, his heart was enlarged by this also. However it
was, he talked more in those weeks, I suppose, than in the rest of his
life put together. Bits of his talk, homely and yet wise, come back to
me across the sixty years. One day, I remember, we talked of life, as
young men love to talk. We said nothing that had not been said by young
men since Abel's time, I do suppose, but it was all new to us; and
indeed, my two companions had fresh ways of putting things that seemed
to make them their own in a manner. Yvon maintained that gaiety was the
best that life had to give; that the butterfly being the type of the
human soul, the nearer man could come to his prototype, the better for
him and for all. Sorrow and suffering, he cried, were a blot on the
scheme, a mistake, a concession to the devil; if all would but spread
their wings and fly away from it, houp! it would no longer exist. "_Et
voila!_"
We laughed, but shook our heads. Ham meditated awhile, and then began in
his strong, quiet voice, a little husky, which I always supposed was
from his swallowing so much raw meal and flour.
"That's one way of lookin' at it, Eavan; I expect that's your French
view, likely; looks different, you see, to folks livin' where there's
cold, and sim'lar things, as butterflies couldn't find not to say
comfortable. Way I look at it, it always seemed to me that grain come as
near it as anything, go to compare things. Livin' in a grist-mill, I
presume, I git into a grainy way of lookin' at the world. Now, take
wheat! It comes up pooty enough, don't it, in the fields? Show me a
field o' wheat, and I'll show you as handsome a thing as is made this
side of Jordan. Wal, that might be a little child, we'll say; if there's
a thing handsomer than a field o' wheat, it's a little child. But bimeby
comes reapin' and all, and then the trouble begins. First, it's all in
the rough, ain't it, chaff and all, mixed together; and has to go
through the thresher? Well, maybe that's the lickin's a boy's father
gives him. He don't like 'em,--I can feel Father Belfort's lickin's
yet,--but they git red of a sight o' chaff, nonsense, airs, and what
not, for him. Then it comes here to the grist-mill. Well, I may be
gittin' a little mixed, boys, but you can foller if you try, I expect.
Say that's startin' out in life, leavin' home, or bindin' to a trade, or
whatever. Well, it goes into the duster, and there it gets more chaff
blowed off'n it. And from the duster it goes into the hopper, and down
in betwixt the stones; and them stones grind, grind, grind, till you'd
think the life was ground clear'n out of it. But 'tain't so; contrary!
That's affliction; the upper and nether millstone--Scriptur! Maybe
sickness, maybe losin' your folks, maybe business troubles,--whichever
comes is the wust, and more than any mortal man ever had to bear before.
Well, now, see! That stuff goes in there, grain; it comes out wheat
flour! Then you take and wet it down and put your 'east in,--that's
thought, I expect, or brains,--or might be a woman,--and you bake it in
the oven,--call that--well, 'git-up-and-git' is all I can think of, but
I should aim for a better word, talkin' to a foreigner."
"Purpose," I suggested.
"That's it! purpose! bake it in that oven, and you have a loaf of wheat
bread, riz bread; and that's the best eatin' that's ben invented yet.
That's food for the hungry,--which raw wheat ain't, except it's cattle.
But now you hear me, boys! To git wheat bread, riz bread, you've got to
have wheat to begin with. You've got to have good stuff to start with.
You can't make good riz bread out o' field corn. But take good stuff and
grind it in the Lord's mill, and you've got the best this world can
give. That's my philos'phy!"
He nodded his head to the last words, which fell slowly and weightily;
and as he did so, the sparrow that had been perched on his head ran down
his nose and fluttered in his face, seeming to ask how he dared make
such a disturbance. "I beg your pardon, I'm sure!" said Ham. "I'd no
notion I was interferin' with you. Why didn't you hit one of your
size?"