In the vine country

by E. Oe. Somerville; Martin Ross

The wood of the great barrel was quite warm, and from within came a low humming, like a swarm of bees high up in a chimney. I went up the second ladder, and looked down into a darkness that had black gleams in it like a coal-cellar, showing where was the surface of the sweltering mass of grapes. My cousin hurried into conversation about it, regardless of the sour, heady smell of the fermentation, until we heard a voice below warning us not to stoop so long over the fumes; and then I felt that it was quite worth the disgusting flavour of moût that still haunted my palate to see her come down the ladder and find the man with the tumbler waiting for her at the foot of it. I could never have believed that she would have been so lost to all sense of politeness and policy as to dodge past his extended hand and bolt through an unknown doorway into a dark room that had apparently nothing in it except a great deal of straw and a musty draught.

It was a very long room, so I saw as I followed, lighted principally by an open door at the far end of it, and over half the floor was strewn a thick litter of straw. The open door framed an oblong of glaring white road, and tendrils of vine with the sun shining through their leaves, and the light struck up on the boarded ceiling, and dealt mercifully with the details of a long table with black bottles on it that was disposed beyond the region of the straw.

‘It is here that the vintagers eat and sleep,’ said the vigneron, taking a loving sip from the tumbler for fear it should overflow. ‘Mais voilà!’—with ecstasy—‘mademoiselle is about to walk upon one of them! He has drunk too much of the moût!’

My cousin was plunging her way through the straw with uncertain strides and without her eyeglasses, so that it must have been a considerable shock to her when a crimson face with a white beard reared itself from the straw at her feet, and stared with a petrified terror at this episode in the dreams induced by moût. It was not only at her, however, that the old man thus gazed transfixed. The monkey had escaped, and was advancing, evidently much exhilarated by the straw, with demoniac leaps and cries, and doubtless the vintager was realising that he must have got ‘them’ very badly this time. Whatever he may have thought, the monkey settled the question for my cousin. She fled back to us, and when in safety took her gulp of moût with a heroism that I well knew to be a refinement of spite.

CHAPTER V.

The sitting-room in our hotel at Pauillac was discovered and annexed by us on the afternoon of our first day in the Médoc. It was a large room and a pleasant, and, so far as we were aware, had never before been trodden by the foot of man; certainly none trod it once we had taken possession. The sandy bootmarks that we distributed about its polished red floor remained there during the whole of our stay at Pauillac undisturbed by a brush, and unmingled with the footprint of the négociant en vins. The two big plaited maize-straw arm-chairs stood at attention by the table just as they were left; and, most wonderful of all, we could open the windows and know they would not be shut the moment our backs were turned. Apparently the other people in the hotel had no time to spend in the sitting-room. The wine merchants went forth in loud companies every morning, but—like the Irish lady who was said to be ‘the most thronging woman ever you seen; sure, she’d go out o’ the house twenty times for the once she’d come in’—they never seemed to return, and, whatever may have happened to them, the salon remained undisturbedly ours.

It was while sitting at tea at the large admirable table belonging to this room, on the afternoon of our first experience in the cuviers, that we became conscious of the eye of the Kodak regarding us from behind our eighteenpenny teapot with a cold reproach. As yet the gardens on the Thames Embankment reigned in lonely beauty in the recesses of the machinery; nothing French had been given to the mysterious custody of the black box, though we had carried it, at considerable inconvenience, to the cuvier of St. Lambert in the morning. The right moment never seemed to come; the sun was where it ought not to be, or we were afraid that the suitable peasant might be offended, and we had besides a latent disbelief in the Kodak’s willingness to deal with southern sunshine and a foreign sky tingling with light.

‘It has the surly English turn in it somewhere,’ my cousin had said, with Galway arrogance. But it was now saying ‘Ici on parle Français’ with all the power of its sunken eye; and as soon as we had thrown the tea-leaves out of the window, and hidden the jug of cold boiled milk behind the stuffed fox on the side-table, we went down and ordered a wagonette for the next morning from a livery stable, and felt that we were going to do our duty seriously by the Kodak.

The weather certainly did its part of the business to perfection. The sun blazed upon our departure, as we emerged from the hotel in the morning, and the heat came through the cool wind in streaks, as the vanille biscuit intersects the aching monotony of the lemon ice. Under the awning outside the coffee-room windows sat Madame, filling out her straw chair in magnificent meditation. Ours had been the last of the petits déjeuners, so that there was no longer any need for her to watch over the expenditure of red embers and café au lait in the kitchen, and she could now exhibit her elegant leisure and her blue cloth slippers to the loungers of Pauillac for an hour or so. We wished, for her sake, that the wagonette was larger and had two horses, and that the Kodak’s resemblance to a box of ‘samples’ had not given us so much the effect of commercial travellers; but she gave us a ‘bonne promenade,’ and a wave of the hand, that showed she had a heart that did not despise the humble.