Old lamps for new

by E. V. Lucas

As to the loss of the miller, that is a matter that does not bear thinking about. That the elimination of this character, historically so shrewd and so genial, from the countryside should be borne with such equanimity proves the carelessness and apathy of England more almost than the rise of the dust-evolving, road-devouring car. And what chance has the English ballad poetry of the future with no millers to celebrate? But perhaps the bread boom will really bring him back. Devoutly do I hope so, for the only thing more beautiful in a landscape than a mill that is still is a mill that is active.

A Glimpse of Civilization

The sign of this inn, like that of so many in the fair land of France, was “Les Quatre Fils d’Aymon”; and who Aymon was, and what his four sons did, I wonder how many English people know. Aymon was the Duke of Dordogne, and his sons were Renaud, Guiscard, Alard, and Richard, and you may read of them in a twelfth-century French romance and in Victor Hugo’s Légende des Siècles. So much I can state, but no more. There are certain things that one’s memory will not retain, and the story of Aymon and his four sons is one of them. I have equal difficulty in remembering for certain whether the pen is mightier than the sword or the sword mightier than the pen.

But Aymon and his quartette matter nothing. What does matter is that in a French inn you may be as witty as you can, as intelligent as you can, but some one there will be more intelligent, more witty. We came to this inn, which is some three leagues distant from Paris, about five in the afternoon on a bitter, snowy day. We made the journey in a motor-car through the bleakest country I ever saw, chiefly over pavé, right from the heart of Paris, and the sign of Aymon and his family was the first to greet our eyes, strain them as we might. Hence, since there are few pleasures to compare with that of entering a warm inn while one is on a cold journey, we were very happy when the door closed behind us, and the rays of the circular stove in the middle of the room drew us to it like tentacles.

Where was the patron? (We had heard of the patron as a character.) The patron, being also the chef, was in the kitchen—a vast, clean kitchen, with a glowing fire, and myriad copper pots on the walls; but he very willingly called in a lieutenant, and then brought certain hot cordials and himself to our table. Consider an English innkeeper being found at five in the afternoon in a spotless kitchen, himself in spotless white, and leaving it to discuss the world at large with two guests of a few minutes! For that is what we did—we discussed affairs. He had the “Petit Journal” before him, and we went through the pictures, and he dismissed men and matters with grunts and chuckles. He knew the world. He had lived and he knew. Napoleon III had once dined in this very inn, and a copper pipkin was still preserved on the kitchen wall in which part of the Imperial meal had been cooked; but it was nothing to our little host. President Fallières lunched there only a few months ago—in that very chair—but that also was nothing to him. Life is an individual business; life comes first; and an innkeeper has as much life to live as any one else, be it Emperor or President.

He is a short man, between fifty and sixty, with close-cropped, grizzled hair, a grizzled imperial, and a fierce, grizzled moustache in perpetual danger of being burned by his cigarette. As a young man he was cook to his officers’ mess, chiefly in Algiers, where he had a touch of sun, which accounts for a certain excitability and nervousness. (At a performance of “Biribi” at Antoine’s Theatre he had to be led out, it was so true and he so overwrought.) He would certainly have written poetry had his parents been rich. Trouble also he would as assuredly have plunged into; and indeed his life is not too smooth as it is, for he is terribly susceptible (those African sunstrokes!) and Madame had to keep both eyes very wide open before she ceased to care.

In his youth, before his Army period, he had been a valet in London, in Half-Moon Street, and though it was only for a few weeks and he speaks no English, it brings him into touch with English people a little quicker; and after a glass or two, if he likes you and Madame is absent, he will tell you of how the only woman he ever really loved was the English girl that he met in London. But this vein is not to be encouraged, since it ends in tears. For the most part he is a mocker—laughing and cynical—appraising everything and everybody in modern life with a French shrug or a French gesture, never wholly serious and never wholly thoughtless, living in that busy, materialistic French way that makes such contented citizens and such an efficient nation and is yet the despair of every moralist in Tunbridge Wells.

After a while the door opened, letting in an icy blast and a little woman in a plaid shawl. Her head was bare, her light brown hair being pulled back from the forehead in the French way. She had large diamond earrings, a pair of cold blue eyes capable of much surface mirth, and a shrewd calculating face. It was Madame. She sat down at once and began to talk, and talked on, cleverly, commandingly, till we left—cynical as her husband, but more alert. Her readiness was amazing. She took every point and added to it points of her own; while with every new customer that entered for a glass of coffee or cognac or an apéritif she had a sentence or two of greeting and jest, flung across to their tables—for in this land of France, where people talk little of the conduct of life, but live it industriously, every man who wants refreshment may have a seat for his comfort and a table on which to stand his glass, and may sit there as long as he wishes.

How far (I thought as I sat there, while the landlord and the landlady and my friend exchanged their badinage) is this removed from the “Red Lions” and “King’s Heads” and “White Horses” of my native land, where landlords are plethoric and vinous, and landladies testy and not too clean, and barmaids vacuous and pert, and bars are crowded by horse-laughing loafers who know not when to stop! How different! And to what class of society in England would one have to go (I asked myself) for a similarly vivid banter and shrewd criticism of life? Certainly not to licensed victuallers, was the nearest reply I could frame.