It was from Valdana, to say that, as she would not come, he was setting forth alone in excellent health to start life anew in Canada.
Part III
France
CHAPTER XIII
THE WAYS OF A LOVER
"For life is not the thing we thought, and not the thing we plan."--ROBERT SERVICE.
March was in like a lamb, and on a fair morning all the windows of Villa Duval stood open, letting in floods of sunlight, gusts of warm sea-scented wind, and the sound of waves crushing and swinging up and down the sandy beaches of Normandy. Perhaps it was because père Duval who built it was an old sailor and lighthouse-keeper that the rooms of the Villa were curiously like ship-cabins with their wooden walls and bare deck-like floors. Looking out through the porthole windows at the view of blue waves rippling from the bay up the river it would not have seemed unnatural to find the Villa gently rocking with the incoming tide. Down in the garden père Duval hoeing weeds fostered the illusion by croaking the ghost of an old sea song that he had lilted bravely enough forty years before from his fishing boat or when he kept the lighthouse at Les Sept Isles. He had built the Villa with his own hands after the sea and he had done with each other; but not for his own habitation. With its pink and blue tables and chairs made and lovingly painted by himself, beds from the Paris Bon Marché, stout bed-linen that had been part of mère Duval's marriage portion, marvellous mirrors and decorated crockery bought with trading coupons that represented many pounds of coffee from the Café Debray Company, it was considered far too wonderful and shining to be the habitation of a mere Normandy peasant. So the old man and his granddaughter Hortense lived in a couple of rooms beneath the wonder house, which was perched high and reached only by a flight of steps to the front door. The Villa lay nearer to the beach than any other in Mascaret, and for this reason was always one of the first to be taken by summer visitors. But at the end of the previous summer père Duval had achieved an extraordinary piece of luck in letting it for the whole autumn and winter to some mad Americans, who were now fixtures for the coming summer also.
The mad Americans had received this title by reason of their eccentric habits and customs, to say nothing of their clothes. They never wore anything, week-day or Sunday, but red woollen sweaters and short skirts, and the girl most shamelessly showed her legs bare to the knee. Also the whole band of three bathed in the sea on the coldest of winter days. Evidently their mental condition was known elsewhere than in Mascaret, for more than once when they were staying at Les Fusains, the villa they had first taken, letters came from America addressed to Les Insains, and the occupants of Les Fusains had received these bland and unblinking from the hands of Jean Baptiste the postman. The postmaster, who understood a little English, had explained the jest to his village cronies, adding that the writing of the eldest mad one so much resembled the writing of a hen, that it was small wonder that mistakes were made over her address. That they were Americans was certain, for every three months American Express money orders came for them, and the eldest Insain promptly changed these for French money mandats and forwarded them to the Credit Lyonnais in Paris. These fantastiques doings deeply impressed the villagers, and had provided them with many an interesting hour of gossip over their black coffee and cider.
And the "Insane ones" never knew a thing about it. On this mild March morning they were variously engaged in simple and peaceful occupations not unsuitable to those of feeble mind. Upstairs, one of them, a girl of sixteen with bare feet and hair swinging in long brown braids, was swishing the sheets from the beds and flicking all stray garments into corners. She considered that she was being certainly very noble and useful. Her face bore the expression of complacent beneficence assumed by those who are aware that they are doing the work of another person, and doing it ten times better than that other person. She wore a bathing dress that was slightly small for her, made combination-fashion, of twill whose pristine scarlet had long since been bleached by sea salt to a faint shell-pink. It was embroidered by black and white darns of a primitive, not to say aboriginal description. Her bare arms were decorated with some beaten copper bracelets of the New Art school, but her slim legs, brown and very long from the knee down, were innocent of stockings. She was tanned all over with the faint, transparent, sherry-coloured tan of a woodland nymph, and her delicately curved cheek wore the tint of woodland berries, wine-brown eyes full of sunshine and shadows, long, flickering, silky hair, a red, sulky mouth.
Haidee had grown into a beauty.