Two Summers in Guyenne: A Chronicle of the Wayside and Waterside

by Edward Harrison Barker

I was charmed by the spectacle as I meditated upon the opposite bank. The more I meditated the better I liked the idea of tarrying in a spot where Arcadian simplicity of life was so unaffectedly cultivated. I resolved that I, too, would take a house at Beynac if there was one to be had, and that I would have what I figuratively termed my 'caravan' brought up here. At the auberge—the only one in the place—I learnt that there was but a single house still vacant, and that it was not a very beautiful one. A young fisherman started off barefoot to fetch the owner from his village, four miles away. The country had to be scoured for him, so that it was long before he showed himself.

While waiting, I went out and amused the fish in the Dordogne by pointing a borrowed rod at them, and tempting them with the fattest house-flies I could find; but as soon as they saw the bait they all turned their tails to it. My angling was a complete failure. And yet there were multitudes of fish swimming on the surface; the water seemed alive with them. I concluded that they were observing a solemn fast.

At length the fisherman returned, looking very hot and dusty, and of course thirsty. He was accompanied by a hard-baked man of about sixty—a peasant, apparently, but one who had put on his best clothes in view of an important bargain that was to be made. He had cunning little eyes, and a mouth that seemed to have acquired from many ancestors, and from the habits of a lifetime, a concentrated expression of rustic chicanery which told me that no business was to be done with him without a fight.

He led the way to his house, which was on the road just above the river. I came to terms with him for a month, after the expected fight; but it was not until he had gone away that I began to realize that I had not distinguished myself by my wisdom in this transaction. Even the villagers, who are not dainty in the matter of lodging, described the house as a baraque. It gave me the same impression when I saw the inside of it; but I closed my eyes to its drawbacks, because I had taken a fancy to Beynac, and this was the only furnished dwelling to be obtained there. I thought all the little drawbacks belonging to it, such as the rustic hearth to cook upon, pots with holes in them, rusty frying-pans, deficiency of crockery, and more than a sufficiency of fleas, would be overcome somehow, as they had been elsewhere during my peregrinations in out-of-the-way districts, where the traveller who nurses his dignity, and has a proper regard for the comforts of life, never thinks of stopping. But things did not settle down this time quite so quickly as I had expected.

After the arrival of the 'caravan' I took to fishing—always with the same rod borrowed of the blacksmith-innkeeper—with a zeal that I had not known since I was a boy. I found that things settled down better when I was out of the way. But there was something that settled down only too rapidly. This was the kitchen floor. There was a bare rock forming the back wall of the house, and down it a runnel of water gently trickled. In the wet season it lost all modesty, made a lake that rose above the boards, and tried to find an exit by the back of the chimney. This explained why the fire needed two days' coaxing and blowing before it would burn, notwithstanding that our servant had been reared in the knowledge of such chimney-places and their humours. It also explained why somebody's foot went through the floor in a fresh place two or three times a day. At the end of the first week one had to stride or jump over half a dozen chasms to get from one side to another. About the same time four or five of the lower stairs gave way from rottenness, so that it needed no little agility to reach the bedrooms. The old man had to come and mend his house, and because he had a guilty conscience he brought a basket of figs with him; but, instead of owning that the wood was rotten, he insinuated that it had been maliciously danced upon.

But the heat was the worst tribulation. The house, with all its windows without persiennes—a detail I had quite overlooked—faced the south, so that during the hottest hours of the day the sun was full upon it, and the heat was over one hundred degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. It was the most scorching August that had been known even in the South of France for years. The recollection of those burning hours in that shanty will be ever green.

Nevertheless, the time spent at Beynac left some pleasant memories. The days were fiery, and, when the south wind blew, almost suffocating; but when the sun went down into the west there usually came a beneficent change. During the few minutes that the golden circle lay seemingly upon the edge of the world, a boat crossing the river appeared to glide over unfathomable depths of splendour; then gradually over the fields of maize and tobacco, and where the yellow stubble of the corn long since reaped had been left, there spread the deep-toned lustre of evening. As the brown dusk filled the valley, and under the sombre walnut-trees the wayside cross became like the spectre of one, shrill voices of old women were heard calling the geese and turkeys that still lingered in the fields.

The geese were often left to come home by themselves, after spending the day along the banks of the river. They belonged to various people, but, being eminently sociable birds, they started off together in flocks of fifty or more. Although there must have been causes of jealousy and rivalry among them, they never seemed to quarrel. They knew when it was time to go home by the failing light, and in the dusk I often met them marching along the road like a regiment of soldiers. As they reached houses to which some of them belonged, detachments would fall out and the others would go on. Every bird would return to the place which had for it the sweet associations of its gosling innocence.

It is now night—the calm summer night without a moon, but spangled with stars. Among those which the Dordogne reflects and holds as if they were its own, is the planet Mars, which gleams readily in the midst of a swarm of lesser yellow lights. The river here is broad and still; there is not ripple enough to make a beam tremble. If the stars in the water flash, it is because the rays are flashed from above. Just below the village there are rapids, and a faint murmur comes up from them, but it is borne under by the shrilling of the crickets that have climbed into the osiers and poplars all along by the water's edge. Now and again there is a great splash in the middle of the stream, which makes one think that a fish large enough to swallow some unsuspecting Jonah of Périgord must be there in a playful mood; but this is merely the effect upon the imagination of a sudden noise breaking in upon the monotonous sounds of the night which are so much like silence.

Lured by the freshness of the air and the serene glory of the starlit sky, I wander off down the valley to a spot where the river, all in turmoil, washes and wears away the flanks of rocks rising sheer from its bed like a wall. Looking back, I can see very distinctly the dark mass of the castle and the church by its side high above me against the sky, and every minute or so the lightning-flash from a storm far away in the west brightens the sombre masonry and the rock beneath.