Why should not a peasant, in blouse and sabots, with a grinning idiot face, have put the picture out? But he did not. He was walking, or rather waddling, toward us, between two green walls that rose to be arched by elms that hid the blue of the sky. This lane was the kind of lane one sees only in Devonshire and in Normandy. There are lanes and lanes, as, to quote our friend the cobbler, there are cures and cures. But only in these above-named countries can one count on walking straight into the heart of an emerald, if one turns from the high-road into a lane. The trees, in these Devonshire and Normandy by-paths, have ways of their own of vaulting into space; the hedges are thicker, sweeter, more vocal with insect and song notes than elsewhere; the roadway itself is softer to the foot, and narrower—only two are expected to walk therein.
It was through such a lane as this that the coarse, animal shape of a peasant was walking toward us. His legs and body were horribly twisted; the dangling arms and crooked limbs appeared as if caricaturing the gnarled and tortured boughs and trunks of the apple-trees. The peasant's blouse was filthy; his sabots were reeking with dirty straw; his feet and ankles, bare, were blacker than the earth over which he was painfully crawling; and on his face there was the vacuous, sensuous deformity of the smile idiocy wears. Again I ask, why did he not disfigure this fair scene, and put out something of the beauty of the day? Is it because the French peasant seems now to be an inseparable adjunct of the Frenchman's landscape? That even deformity has been so handled by the realists as to make us see beauty in ugliness? Or is it that, as moderns, we are all bitten by the rabies of the picturesque; that all things serve and are acceptable so long as we have our necessary note of contrast? Certain it is that it appears to be the peasant's blouse that perpetuates the Salon, and perhaps—who knows?—when over-emigration makes our own American farmer too poor to wear a boiled shirt when he ploughs, we also may develop a school of landscape, with figures.
Meanwhile the walk and the talk had made Charm thirsty. "Why should we not go," she asked, "across the next field, into that farm house yonder, and beg for a glass of milk?"
The farm-house might have been waiting for us, it was so still. Even the grasses along its sloping roof nodded, as if in welcome. The house, as we approached it, together with its out-buildings, assumed a more imposing aspect than it had from the road. Its long, low facade, broken here and there by a miniature window or a narrow doorway, appeared to stretch out into interminable length beneath the towering beeches and the snarl of the peach-tree boughs.
The stillness was ominous—it was so profound.
The only human in sight was a man in a distant field; he was raking the ploughed ground. He was too far away to hear the sound of our voices.
"Perhaps the entire establishment is in the fields," said Charm, as we neared the house.
Just then a succession of blows fell on our ear.
"Someone is beating a mattress within, we shall have our glass after all."
We knocked. But no one answered our knock.