In and out of Three Normandy Inns

by Anna Bowman Dodd

OUT ON A MUSSEL-BED.

That same afternoon we were out on the mussel bed.

The tide was at its lowest. Before us, for an acre or more, there lay a wide, wet, stretch of brown mud. Near the beach was a strip of yellow sand; here and there it had contracted into narrow ridges, elsewhere it had expanded into scroll-like patterns. The bed of mud and slime ran out from this yellow sand strip—a surface diversified by puddles of muddy water, by pools, clear, ribbed with wavelets, and by little heaps of stones covered with lichens. The surface of the bed, whether pools or puddles, or rock-heaps, or sea-weeds massed, was covered by thousands and thousands of black, lozenge-shaped bivalves. These bivalves were the mussels. Over this bed of shells and slime there moved and toiled a whole villageful of old women. Where the sea met the edges of the mud-flat the throng of women was thickest. The line of the ever-receding shore was marked by the shapes of countless bent figures. The heads of these stooping women were on a level with their feet, not one stood upright. All that the eye could seize for outline was the dome made by the bent hips, and the backs that closed against the knees as a blade is clasped into a knife handle. The oblong masses that were lifted now and then, from the level of the sabots, resolved themselves into the outlines of women's heads and women's faces. These heads were tied up in cotton kerchiefs or in cotton nightcaps; these being white, together with the long, thick, aprons also white, were in startling contrast to the blue of the sky and to the changing sea-tones.

Between these women and the incoming tide, twice daily, was fought a persistent, unrelenting duel. It was a duel, on the part of the fish-wives, against time, against the fate of the tides, against the blind forces of nature. For this combat the women were armed to the teeth, clad as they were in their skeleton muscular leanness; helmeted with their heads of iron; visored in the bronze of their skin and in wrinkles that laughed at the wind. In these sinewy, toughened bodies there was a grim strength that appeared to know neither ache nor fatigue nor satiety.

High, clear, strong, came their voices. The tones were the tones that come from deep chests, and with a prolonged, sustained capacity for enduring the toil of men. But the high-pitched laughter proved them women, as did their loud and unceasing gossip. The battle of the voices rose above the swash of the waves, above, also, another sound, as incessant as the women's chatter and the swish of the water as it hissed along the mud-flat's edges.

[Illustration: A SALE OF MUSSELS—VILLERVILLE]

This was the swift, sharp, saw-like cutting among the stones and the slime, the scrape, scrape of the hundred of knives into the moist earth. This ceaseless scraping, lunging, digging, made a new world of sound—strange, sinister, uncanny. It was neither of the sea nor yet of the land—it was a noise that seemed inseparable from this tongue of mud, that also appeared to be neither of the heavens above nor of the earth, from the bowels out of which it had sprung.

The mussels cling to their slime with extraordinary tenacity; only an expert, who knows the exact point of attachment between the hard shell and its soil, can remove a mussel with dexterity. These women, as they dipped their knives into the thick mud, swept the diminutive black bivalve with a trenchant movement, as a Moor might cleave a human head with one turn of his moon-shaped sword. Into the bronzed, wrinkled old hands the mussels then were slipped as if they had been so many dainty sweets.

New and pungent smells were abroad on this strip of slime. Sea smells, strong and salty; smells of the moist and damp soil, the bitter-sweet of wetted weeds, the aromatic flavor that shell-life yields, and the smells also of rotten and decaying fish—all these were inextricably blended in the air, that was of the keenness of a frost-blight for freshness, and yet was warm with the softness of a June sun.

Meanwhile the voices of the women were nearing. Some of the bent heads were lifted as we approached. Here and there a coif, or cotton cap, nodded, and the slit of a smile would gape between the nose and the meeting chin. A high good humor appeared to reign among the groups; a carnival of merriment laughed itself out in coarse, cracked laughter; loud was the play of the jests, hoarse and guttural the gibes that were abroad on the still air, from old mouths that uttered strong, deep notes.