CHAPTER XXVIII.
BY LAND TO MONT ST. MICHEL.
Two hours later the usual collection of forces was assembled in our inn courtyard; for a question of importance was to be decided. Madame was there—chief of the council; her husband was also present, because he might be useful in case any dispute as to madame's word came up; Auguste, the one inn waiter, was an important figure of the group; for he, of them all, was the really travelled one; he had seen the world—he was to be counted on as to distances and routes; and above, from the upper windows, the two ladies of the bed-chamber looked down, to act as chorus to the brisk dialogue going on between madame and the owner of a certain victoria for which we were in treaty.
"Ces dames," madame said, with a shrug which was meant for the coachman, and a smile which was her gift to us—"these ladies wish to go to Mont St. Michel, to drive there. Have you your little victoria and Poulette?"
Now, by the shrug madame had conveyed to the man and the assembled household generally, her own great scorn of us, and of our plans. What a whim this, of driving, forsooth, to the Mont! Dieu sait—French people were not given to any such follies; they were serious-minded, always, in matters of travel. To travel at all, was no light thing; one made one's will and took an honest and tearful farewell of one's family, when one went on a journey. But these English, these Americans, there's no foretelling to what point their folly will make them tempt fate! However, madame was one who knew on which side her bread was buttered, if ever a woman did, and the continuance of these mad follies helped to butter her own French roll. And so her shrug and wink conveyed to the tall Norman just how much these particular lunatics before them would be willing to pay for this their whim.
"Have you Poulette?"
"Yes—yes—Poulette is at home. I have made her repose herself all day—hearing these ladies had spoken of driving to the Mont—"
Chorus from the upper window-sills. "The poor beast! it is joliment longue—la distance."
"As these ladies observe," continued the owner of the doomed animal, not raising his head, but quickly acting on the hint, "it is long, the distance—one does not go for nothing." And though the man kept his mouth from betraying him, his keen eyes glittered with avarice.
"And then—ces dames must descend at Genets, to cross the grève, tu sais" interpolated the waiter, excitedly changing his napkin, his wand of office, from one armpit to the other. The thought of travel stirred his blood. It was fine—to start off thus, without having to make the necessary arrangements for a winter's service or a summer's season. And to drive, that would be new—yes that would be a change indeed from the stuffy third-class compartments. For Auguste, you see, approved of us and of the foolishness of our plans. His sympathy being gratis, was allied to the protective instinct—he would see the cheating was at least as honestly done as was compatible with French methods.
"Another carriage—and why?" we meekly queried, warned by this friendly hint. A chorus now arose from the entire audience.
"Mais, madame!—it is as much as five or six kilos over the sands to the Mont from Genets!" was cried out in a tone of universal reproach.
"Through rivers, madame, through rivers as high as that!" and Auguste, striking in after the chorus, measured himself off at the breast.
"Yes—the water comes to there, on the horse," added the driver, sweeping an imaginary horse's head, with a fine gesture, in the air.
"Dame, that must be fine to see," cried down Léontine and Marie, gasping with little sighs of envy.
"And so it is!" cried back Auguste, nodding upward with dramatic gesture. "One can get as wet as a duck splashing through those rivers. Dieu! que c'est beau!" And he clasped his hands as his eye, rolling heavenward, caught the blue and the velvet of the four feminine orbs on its upward way. Seeing which ecstasy, the courtyard visibly relented; Auguste's rapture and his envy had worked the common human miracle of turning contempt for a folly into belief in it.
This quick firing of French people to a pleasurable elation in others' adventure is, I think we must all agree, one of the great charms of this excitable race: anything will serve as a pretext for setting this sympathetic vibration in motion. What they all crave as a nation is a daily, hourly diet of the unusual, the unforeseen.
It is this passion for incident which makes a Frenchman's life not unlike his soups, since in the case of both, how often does he make something out of nothing!
An hour later we were picking our way through the city's streets.
Sweeter than the crushed flowers was the free air of the valley.
There is no way of looking back so agreeable, on the whole, I think, as to look back upon a city.
From the near distance of the first turn in the road, Coutances and its cathedral were at their very best. The hill on which both stood was only one of the many hills we now saw growing out of the green valley; among the dozen hill tops, this one we were leaving was only more crowded than the others, and more gloriously crowned. In giant height uprose, above the city's roofs and the lesser towers, the spires and the lovely lantern tower. This vast mass of stone, pricked into lacy apertures and with its mighty lines of grace-for how many a long century has it been in the eye of the valley? Tancrède de Hauteville saw it before William was born—before he, the Conqueror, rode in his turn through the green lanes to consecrate the church to One greater than he. From Tancrède to Boileau, what a succession of bishops, each in their turn, have had their eye on the great cathedral. There was a sort of viking bishop, one Geoffrey de Montbray, of the Conqueror's day, who, having a greater taste for men's blood than their purification, found Coutances a dull city; there was more war of the kind his stout arm rejoiced in across the Channel; and so he travelled a bit to do a little pleasant killing. From Geoffrey to Boileau and the latter's lacy ruffles—how many a rude Norman epic was acted out, here in the valley, beneath the soaring spires, before the Homeric combat was turned into the verse of a chanso de geste, a Roman de Rou, or a Latrin!
As Poulette rolled the wheels along, instead of visored bishop, or mail rustling on strong breasts, there was the open face of the landscape, and the tremble of the grasses beneath the touch of the wind. Coming down the hill was a very peaceable company; doubtless, between wars in those hot fighting centuries, just such travellers went up and down the hill-road as unconcernedly as did these peasants. There was quite a variety among the present groups: some were strictly family parties; these talked little, giving their mind to stiff walking—the smell of the soup in the farmyard kitchen was in their nostrils. The women's ages were more legibly read in their caps than in their faces—the older the women the prettier the caps. Among these groups, queens of the party, were some first communicants. Their white kid slippers were brown now, from the long walk in the city streets and the dust of the highway. They held their veils with a maiden's awkwardness; with bent heads they leaned gravely on their fathers' arms. In this, their first supreme experience of self-consciousness, they had the self-absorption of young brides. The trail of their muslin gowns and the light cloud of their veils made dazzling spots of brightness in the delicate frame of the June landscape. Each of these white-clad figures was followed by a long train of friends and relatives. "C'est joli à voir—it's a pretty sight, hein, my ladies? these young girls are beautiful like that!" Our coachman took his eye off Poulette to turn in his seat, looking backward at the groups as they followed in our wake. "Ah—it was hard to leave my own—I had two like that, myself, in the procession to-day." And the full Norman eye filled with a sudden moisture. This was a more attractive glitter than the avarice of a moment before.
"You see, mesdames," he went on, as if wishing to excuse the moistened eyelids, "you see—it's a great day in the family when our children take their first communion. It is the day the child dies and the man, the woman is born. When our children kneel at our feet, before the priest, before their comrades, and beg us to forgive them all the sin they have done since they were born—it is too much—the heart grows so big it is near to bursting. Ah—it is then we all weep!"
Charm settled herself in her seat with a satisfied smile. "We are in luck—an emotional coachman who weeps and talks! The five hours will fly," she murmured. Then aloud, to Jacques—as we learned the now sniffling father was called—she presently asked, with the oil of encouragement in her tone:
"You say your two were in the procession?"
"Two! there were five in all. Even the babies walked. Did you see Jésu and the Magdalen? They were mine—C'était à moi, çà! For the priests will have them—as many as they can get."
"They are right. If the children didn't walk, how could the procession be so fine?" "Fine—beau—ca?" And there was a deep scorn in Jacques's voice. "You should have seen the fête twenty years ago! Now, its glory is as nothing. It's the priests themselves who are to blame. They've spoiled it all. Years ago, the whole town walked. Dieu—what a spectacle! The mayor, the mairie, all the firemen, municipal officers—yes, even the soldiers walked. And as for the singing—dame, all the young men were choristers then—we were trained for months. When we walked and sang in the open streets the singing filled all the town. It was like a great thunder."
"And the change—why has it come?" persisted Charm.
"Oh," Jacques replied, caressing Poulette's haunches with his whip-lash. "It's the priests; they were too grasping. They are avaricious, that's what they are. They want everything for themselves. And a fête—ça coule, vous savez. Besides, the spirit of the times has changed. People aren't so devout now. Libres penseurs—that's the fashion now. Holà, Poulette!"
Poulette responded. She dashed into the valley, below us now, as if this rolling along of a heavy victoria, a lot of luggage, and three travellers, was an agreeable episode in her career of toil. But on the mind of her owner, the spectre of the free-thinkers was still hovering like an evil spirit. During the next hour he gave us a long and exhaustive exposition of the changes wrought by ces messieurs qui nient le bon Dieu. Among their crimes was to be numbered that of having disintegrated the morale of the peasantry. They—the peasants—no longer believed in miracles, and as for sorcery, for the good old superstitions, bah: they were looked upon as old wives' tales. Even here, in the heart of this rural country, you would have to walk far before you could find vne vraie sorcière, one who, by looking into a glass of water, for instance, could read the future as in a book, or one who, if your cow dried up, could name the evil spirit, the demon, who, among the peasants was exercising the curse. All this science was lost. A peasant would now be ashamed to bring his cow to a fortune-teller; all the village would laugh. Even the shepherds had lost the power of communing with the planets at night; and all the valley read the Petit Journal instead of consulting the vieilles mères. One must go as far as Brittany to see a real peasant with the superstitions of a peasant. As for Normandy, it went in step with the rest of the world, que diable! And again the whip lash descended. Poulette must suffer for Jacques's disgust.
If the Norman peasant was a modern, his country, at least, had retained the charm of its ancient beauty. The road was as Norman a highway as one could wish to see. It had the most capricious of natures, turning and perversely twisting among the farms and uplands. The land was ribboned with growing grain, and the June grass was being cut. The farms stood close upon the roadway, as if longing for its companionship; and then, having done so much toward the establishment of neighborly gossip, promptly turned their backs upon it—true Normans, all of them, with this their appearance of frankness and their real reserves of secrecy.
For a last time we caught a distant glimpse of the great cathedral. As we looked back across the bright-roofed villages, we saw the stately pile, gray, glorious, superb, dominating the scene, the hills, river, and fields, as in the old days the great city walls and the cathedral towers had dominated all the human life that played helplessly about them.
We were out once more among the green and yellow broadlands; between our carriage-wheels and the horizon there was now spread a wide amphitheatre of wooded hills. The windings of the poplar-lined road serpentined in sinuous grace in and out of forests, meadows, hills, and islands. The afternoon lights were deepening; the shadows on the grain-fields cast by the oaks and beeches were a part of our company. The blue bloom of the distant hills was strengthening into purple. As the light was intensifying in color, the human life in the fields was relaxing its tension; the bent backs were straightening, the ploughmen were whipping their steeds toward the open road; for although it was Sunday, and a fête day, the farmer must work. The women were gathering up some of the grasses, tying them into bundles, and tossing them on their heads as they moved slowly across the blackening earth.
One field near us was peopled with a group of girls resting on their scythes. One or two among them were mopping their faces with their coarse blue aprons; the faces of all were aflame with the red of rude health. As we came upon them, some had flung away their scythes, the tallest among the group grasping a near companion, playfully, in the pose of a wrestler. In an instant the company was turned into a group of wrestlers. There was a great shout of laughter, as maiden after maiden was tumbled over on her back or face amid the grasses. Sabots, short skirts, kerchiefs, scarlet arms rose and fell to earth in the mad whirl of their gayety.
"Stop, Jacques, I must see the end," cried Charm. "Will they fight or dance, I wonder!"
"Oh, it is a pure Georgic—they'll dance." They were dancing already. The line, with dishevelled hair, aprons and kerchiefs askew, had formed into the square of a quadrille. A rude measure was tripped; a snatch of song, shouted amid the laughter, gave rhythm to the measure, and then the whole band, singing in chorus, linked arms and swept with a furious dash beneath the thatched roof of a low farm-house.
"As you see, my ladies, sometimes the fields are gay—even now," was Jacques's comment. "But they should be getting their grasses in—for it'll rain before night. It's time to sing when the scythe sleeps—as we say here."
To our eyes there were no signs of rain. The clouds rolling in the blue sea above us were only gloriously lighted. But the birds and the peasants knew their sky; there was a great fluttering of wings among the branches; and the peasants, as we rattled in and out of the hamlets, were pulling the reposoirs to pieces in the haste that predicts bad weather. They had been "celebrating" all along the road; and besides the piety, the Norman thrift was abroad upon the highway. Women were tearing sheets off the house facades; the lads and girls were bearing crosses, china vases, and highly-colored Virgins from the wooden altars into the low houses.
Presently the great drops fell; they beat upon the smooth roadway like so many hard bits of coin. In less than two ticks of the clock, the world was a wet world; there were masses of soft gray clouds that were like so much cotton, dripping with moisture. The earth was as drenched as if, half an hour ago, it had not been a jewel gleaming in the sun; and the very farm-houses had quickly assumed an air of having been caught out in the rain without an umbrella. The farm gardens alone seemed to rejoice in the suddenness of the shower. Flowers have a way of shining, when it rains, that proves flower-petals have a woman's love of solitaires.
There were other dashes of color that made the gray landscape astonishingly brilliant. Some of the peasants on their way to the village fêtes were also caught in the passing shower. They had opened their wide blue and purple umbrellas; these latter made huge disks of color reflected in the glass of the wet macadam. The women had turned their black alpaca and cashmere skirts inside out, tucking the edges about their stout hips; beneath the wide vivid circles of the dripping umbrellas these brilliantly colored under-petticoats showed a liberal revelation of scarlet hose and thick ankles sunk in the freshly polished black sabots. The men's cobalt-blue blouses and their peaked felt hats spotted the landscape with contrasting notes and outlines.
After the last peaked hat had disappeared into the farm enclosures, we and the wet landscape had the rain to ourselves. The trees now were spectral shapes; they could not be relied on as companions. Even the gardens and grain lands were mysteriously veiled, so close rolled the mists to our carriage-wheels. Beyond, at the farthest end of the road, these mists had formed themselves into a solid, compact mass.
The clouds out yonder, far ahead, seemed to be enwrapping some part of earth that had lanced itself into the sky.
After a little the eyes unconsciously watched those distant woolly masses. There was a something beyond, faint, vague, impalpable as yet, which the rolling mists begirt as sometimes they cincture an Alpine needle. Even as the thought came, a sudden lifting—of the gray mass showed the point of a high uplifted pinnacle. The point thereof pricked the sky. Then the wind, like a strong hand, swept the clouds into a mantle, and we saw the strange spectacle no more.
For several miles our way led us through a dim, phantasmal landscape. All the outlines were blurred. Even the rain was a veil; it fell between us and the nearest hedgerows as if it had been a curtain. The jingling of Poulette's bell-collar and the gurgle of the water rushing in the gulleys—these were the only sounds that fell upon the ear.
Still the clouds about that distant mass curled and rolled; they were now breaking, now re-forming—as if some strange and wondrous thing were hanging there—between heaven and earth.
It was still far out, the mass; even the lower mists were not resting on any plain of earth. They also were moved by something that moved beneath them, as a thick cloak takes the shape and motion of the body it covers. Still we advanced, and still the great mountain of cloud grew and grew. And then there came a little lisping, hissing sound. It was the kiss of the sea as it met some unseen shore. And on our cheeks the sea-wind blew, soft and salty to the lips.
The mass was taking shape and outline. The mists rolled along some wide, broad base that rested beneath the sea, and skyward they clasped the apexal point of a pyramid.
This pyramid in the sky was Mont St. Michel.
With its feet in the sea, and its head vanishing into infinity—here, at last, was this rock of rocks, caught, phantom-like, up into the very heavens above.
It loomed out of the spectral landscape—itself the superlative spectre; it took its flight upward as might some genius of beauty enrobed in a shroud of mystery.
Such has it been to generations of men. Beautiful, remote, mysterious! With its altars and its shrines, its miracle of stone carved by man on those other stones hewn by the wind and the tempest, Mont St. Michel has ever been far more a part of heaven than a thing of earth.
Then, for us, the clouds suddenly lifted, as, for modern generations of men, the mists of superstition have also rolled themselves away.