III
Jean-Irénée, our gardener at the lodge, does little work for us save plant and tend the kitchen-garden, whose produce he shares, and mow the lawns and orchard—when he deems the grass long enough to feed his cows. He labours for us until noon; after midday he is on his own account a busy man, and a small farmer in his way, with four cows, a cart, and four tiny fields of his own well chosen, scattered in different folds and hollows of the mountain. We give him his house, an acre of grass or two, his garden, and stabling for his cows and pigs; in addition, he has something less than £20 of wages and étrennes, so that he is well off, for Olmet, where even a bouvier-grand, that important person and mainstay of a farm, the head-cowboy, earns barely £17 a year. His cows are tended (for here the cows are always watched and tended) by his stepdaughter Florentine, a child of eight years old. Florentine’s childhood has been sad enough. Her father died before her birth, and, after her mother’s second marriage, the successive birth of two little sisters soon left her out in the cold. She is happier now that she is some one in the household, with a place of her own, and worth her salt. There is nothing unusual in her position. Here the flocks and herds are always minded by tiny shepherds of from five to eleven, who herd the bull past frightened ladies with much air and grace. Alone on the mountain all day long with their charges, they gain an incomparable knowledge of animal nature, of the virtues of herbs and plants, the changes in the skies and winds, and such unwritten lore. The other day, a farmer’s son, the head of a large dairy farm at Badailhac, told me that he had learned half he knew as he tended the cows on the hillside in his childhood. “A gentleman,” he said, “a monsieur, could never understand them. No, a dairyman must be taken young.” But, during their unconscious education, the poor mites sometimes find time hang heavy on their hands. I know a little shepherd girl at Aris, demurely dressed in black; whenever I pass her she is seated beneath a tree, telling her beads, or reading in a book. But Florentine is barely eight. Her coal-black eyes and laughing gipsy face bespeak her of a more adventurous cast. She is even now in disgrace because, the other day, when Jean-Irénée went up the hill, he found her in a field with little Guiralou, the farmer’s herd-boy, roasting, in the ashes of a mighty bonfire, a score of potatoes freshly torn from the field. Fortunately, the cows, compassionate to their little guardian, had continued to conduct themselves with propriety, despite her absence.
A greater calamity—a real one—happened last autumn, and then I thought that Florentine—such an anxious, sobered Florentine!—would never play the truant any more. She was not at fault, or I tremble to think of her punishment. Happily the day was a Sunday; Jean-Irénée himself was seated in the field beside the child, when suddenly the cow stepped on a rolling stone, fell down a precipitous bank, and broke her leg. It was a fine beast, in full milk, having weaned its first calf. Even at Olmet, such a beast is worth from twelve to fifteen pounds. I shall not forget the consternation of the man, the white despair of the child, as they came back that afternoon supporting the patient animal, whose russet foreankle dropped pending. The poor beastie munched cheerfully a handful of clover and a crust, and lay in the stable, in no great pain apparently, not ill-content.
But at Olmet we have not learned how to set a cow’s leg. To make butcher’s meat of poor Corrado, before any fever set in, was her master’s only thought, and indeed his duty. In vain he visited Vic and Polminhac, Thiézac and Carlat. At last an army butcher, from Aurillac, consented to buy the cow for a matter of sixty francs. The loss was heavy, and for many a day Jean-Irénée saw the sunshine black. It is to avert such dangers that, on our rocky hillsides, a tiny guardian is always sent with the cows. One of these little shepherds became (as we all know) so great a man of science that his contemporaries deemed him a sorcerer; he invented the pendulum (I think) in clockwork, and finally ascended the throne of St. Peter as Pope Sylvester II. Having shepherded lambs, the little pâtre of Aurillac knew how to shepherd nations. I know not that any other of our Cantal shepherds has shown the genius of a Gerbert (such was Sylvester’s name), of a Giotto, a Burns, a Joan of Arc. But such a life, one would imagine, must predispose a thoughtful mind to reflection and observation.
Sometimes, as we come home at nightfall from our walk, I hear, high up in the bracken and the broom, a small keen voice singing shrilly, some large and doleful verse maybe of lou Grondo (la Grande), the endless patois chant our peasants sing; or perhaps a stanza of the Marseillaise. Some poor child up there is growing frightened in the dusk! Ours is a Celtic country, full of phantoms, elves, and fairies. Who knows but the huntsman with his spectral rout may dash out of yonder hollow? There is also, and especially, the Drac, a subtle spirit whose dear delight it is to play pranks at twilight on the little herds—a Proteus imp who can change into any shape, who plaits the cattle’s tails and manes into inextricable mats, who pulled Touéno’s ears only last November, one evening as he sat upon the hill, leaving the child half-dead with fear. Who but the Drac misleads the baby cowherds when they and their cattle take a wrong turning, when nights are dark? ’Twas he, most likely, who placed the stone on which our Corrado slipped and broke her leg. It is scant comfort, so far afield and quite alone, to remember that he is no respecter of persons; or how, one chilly winter’s night, he pulled the farmer’s wife herself right out of bed. Nothing is sacred to the Drac! More cause for fear! Sing louder, little shepherd, and I’ll join in, down here in the lane, to hearten up your courage!