In and out of Three Normandy Inns

by Anna Bowman Dodd

"Horrors!"

"Exactly. That's the way it's done—over here. Will you join me—over there?" Renard blushed a little. "I mean I wish to follow that girl—she's going to dig out yonder. Will you come?"

Meanwhile the light was changing, and so was the tide. The women were coming inward, washed up to the shore along with the grasses and seaweeds. A band of diggers suddenly started, with full basket loads, toward a fishing boat that had dropped anchor close in to the shore; it was a Honfleur craft, come to buy mussels for the Paris market. The women trudged through the water, up to their waists; they clustered about the boats like so many laden beasts. But their shrill bargaining proved them women.

Meanwhile that gentle hissing along the level stretch of brown mud was the tide. It was pushing the women upward, as if it had been a hand—the hand of a relentless fate—instead of a little, liquid kiss.

The sun, as it dipped, made a glory of splendor out of this commonplace bank. It soaked the mud in gold; it was in a royal mood, throwing its largess with reckless abundance to this poor of earth—to the slime and the mud. The long, yellow, lichen leaves massed on the rocks were dyed as if lying in a yellow bath. The sands were richly colored; the ridges were brown in the shadows and burnished at the tops. In the distance the sea weeds were black, sable furs, covering the velvet robes of earth. The sea out beyond was as rosy as a babe, and the sails were dazzlingly white as they floated past, between the sky and the distant purple line of the horizon.

Meanwhile the tide is coming in.

The procession of the women toward the carts grows in numbers. The thick sabots plunge into the mud, the water squirts out of the wooden shoes as the strong heels press into them. The straw, the universal stocking of these women-diggers, is reeking with dirt. Volumes of slush are splashed on the bared skinny ankles, on the wet skirts, wet to the waists, and on the coarse sail-cloth aprons tied beneath the hanging bosoms. The women are all drenched now in a bath of filth. The baskets are reeking with filth also, they rain showers of dirt along the bent backs. A long line of the bent figures has formed on their way to the carts. There is, however, a thick fringe of diggers left who still dispute their rights with the sea.

But the tide is pushing them inward, upward. And all the while the light is getting more and more golden, shimmery, radiant. Under this light, beneath this golden mantel of color, these creatures appear still more terrible. As they bend over, their faces tirelessly held downward on a level with their hands, they seem but gnomes; surely they are huge, undeveloped embryos of women, with neither head nor trunk. For this light is pitiless. It makes them even more a part of this earth, out of which they seem to have sprung, a strange amorphous growth. The bronzed skins are dyed in the gold as if to match with the hue of the mud; the wet skirts are shreds, gray and brown tatters, not so good in texture as the lichens, and the ragged jerseys seem only bits of the more distant weeds woven into tissues to hide mercifully the lean, sinewy backs.

The tide is almost in.

In the shallows the sunset is fading. Here and there are brilliant little pools, each pool a mirror, and each mirror reflects a different picture. Here is a second sky—faintly blue, with a trailing saffron scarf of cloud; there, the inverted silhouettes of two fish-wives are conical shapes, their coifs and wet skirts startlingly distinct in tones; beyond, sails a fantastic fleet, with polychrome sails, each spar, masthead, and wrinkled sail as sharply outlined as if chiselled in relief. Presently these miniature pictures fade as the light fades. Blacker grows the mud, and there is less and less of it; the silhouetted shapes of the diggers are seen no more; they are following the carts up the steep cliffs; even the sky loses its color and fades also. And the little pools that have been a burning orange, then a darkening violet, gay with pictured worlds, in turn pale to gray, and die into the universal blackness.