She did not answer, and I left her to her momentary mood, whatever that might betoken. The needle of a woman’s mind is an unsafe compass to steer by. It may point warm west, and lead you, if you follow it, crash on an arctic iceberg.
Deeper and deeper into that land of loneliness we ran on, until the vine-strewn levels, rosy and flaming, which at first had accompanied our flight, were all faded, as a sunset fades, into league-wide wastes of melancholy grey. Harsh bents of grass and lifeless sand came all about us, with pools of motionless water, from whose reeds great birds flapped slowly upwards, sailing away to meet a low horizon. And then at last, at near two hours from our starting, we saw, at the lean land’s end, the pictured shadow of our goal; and there was the grim old fortress town, its feet in the stagnant lagoons, its long ramparts extending as massive and unbroken as when, at Philip the Bold’s bidding, they first rose from the marshes.
Impregnable; unapproachable: but who would want to approach it? That was the thought which occurred to Fifine, when first contemplating that desolate outpost of the ages.
“I suppose nobody could get in, and I suppose nobody could get out,” she said. “I hope that satisfied them. I should have thought the best thing their enemies could have done would be to leave them stuck there, and go round another way.”
“You have an excellent reasoning power in you, gossip,” said I. “But you are no philosopher, or you would know that man is the one organism congenitally incapable of leaving well alone. To let him escape a wild beast by the skin of his teeth is merely to have him provoked to borrow the first inadequate weapon, and go back to try conclusions with his enemy. If you were to throw an empty biscuit tin into the middle of the great Bog of Allen, and loudly proclaim that any man who attempted to redeem it would do so at peril of your deadly wrath, a hundred fools would be ready at once to risk their lives in the reclaiming of that piece of lumber. And, after all, I shouldn’t be prepared to blame the fools. I don’t know why; except that there is something very inflaming to one’s obstinacy in overbearance.”
“If you have finished,” said Fifine, “we may as well go on.”
We went on, and, traversing the stretch of ground which curves between the station and the walls, discovered, a little to our consternation, that it was fair-day in Aigues-Mortes. Booths and caravans lined the approach to the great entrance gate, called la Gardette, and all about them, and thronging the entrance, were swarms of holiday folk, motley and garish in their Sunday best.
Well, there was no help for it, and our only resource was to accept the thing mediævally. The barbaric colour even assisted to that frame of mind; for indeed the workaday trappings of modern France are much of a dingy sameness everywhere, and it is only sparely, as in the case of the cattle-drovers of the Camargue, that one encounters a local survival of the ancient costumes. Dressed almost without exception as our own men, even to the ugly cloth cap, are the labouring and mechanic classes; in places, too, as remote as Aigues-Mortes; while the women have been as ready on the whole to exchange for drab and fustian the livelier raiment of past times. Wherefore this festive frippery, though florid and vulgar in itself, had here its seeming place in the context of stone walls and frowning battlements.
At any rate we tried to think so, as we passed under the archway into that intricacy of narrow streets, and made our way with some difficulty over the filthy pavements.
They were filthy, those pavements. When I had visited the town earlier, it had been in spring, before the grapes were thought of, or the wine-presses disinterred from their winter quarters. Now everywhere the place was littered with the discarded refuse of the harvest, great heaps of decomposing filth, thrown out to await the scavengers, but whether human or elemental who might say. Only their stench was a certain thing—horrible, indescribable, the Genie in expansion of that rank acidity which in its condensed form inhabited the bottled article. It rose from the gutters; from the mounds of fœtid grape-skins piled about the inner walls; from a belated wine-press still in use in the open streets, and revealing itself crusted with the black scum its champings had rejected. Only here and there, in the wider thoroughfares, or in the open Place, could one escape the pursuing poison. Still we religiously did our Aigues-Mortes, though, I confess, with some failing confidence on my part. And at last I stopped.