It is a season, too, of crisp twilights after brilliant days, so short that my lost village is plunged in darkness as early as seven, and goes to bed to save the candle—the hour when the grocer's light gleaming ahead of me across the slovenly little public square becomes the only beacon in the village; and, guided by it, I pick my way in the dark along the narrow thoroughfare, stumbling over the laziest of the village dogs sprawled here and there in the road outside the doorways of the fishermen.
Across one of these thresholds I catch a glimpse to-night of a tired fisher girl stretched on her bed after her long day at sea. Beside the bed a very old woman in a white cotton cap bends over her bowl of soup by the wavering light of a tallow dip.
"Bonsoir, monsieur!" croaks a hoarse voice from the dark. It is Marianne. She has fished late.
At seven-thirty the toy train rumbles into Pont du Sable, stops for a barefooted passenger, and rumbles out again through the village—crawling lest it send one of the laziest dogs yelping to its home. The headlight on the squat locomotive floods the way ahead, suddenly illumining the figure of a blinking old man laden with nets and three barelegged children who scream, "Bonsoir, monsieur," to the engineer.
What glorious old days are these! The wealth of hedged fields—-the lush green grass, white with hoar frost at daybreak—the groups of mild-eyed cows and taciturn young bulls; in all this brilliant clearness of sea air, sunshine and Norman country spreading its richness down to the very edge of the sea, there comes to the man with the gun a sane exhilaration—he is alive.
On calm nights the air is pungent and warm with the perfume of tons of apples lying heaped in the orchards, ready for the cider-making, nights, when the owls hoot dismally under a silver moon.
When the wind veers to the north it grows cold. On such nights as these "the Essence of Selfishness" seeks my fireside.
She is better fed than many other children in the lost village beyond my wall. And spoiled!—mon Dieu! She is getting to be hopeless.
Ah, you queen of studied cruelty and indifference! You, with your nose of coral pink, your velvet ears that twitch in your dreams, and your blue-white breast! You, who since yesterday morning have gnawed to death two helpless little birds in my hedge which you still think I have not discovered! And yet I still continue to feed you by hand piecemeal since you disdain to dine from my best china, and Suzette takes care of you like a nurse.
Eh bien! Some day, do you hear, I shall sell you to the rabbit-skin man, who has a hook for a hand, and the rest of you will find its way to some cheap table d'hôte, where you will pass as ragout of rabbit Henri IV. under a thick sauce. What would you do, I should like to know, if you were the vagabond cat who lives back in the orchard, and whose four children sleep in the hollow trunk of the tree and are content with what their mother brings them, whether it be plain mole or the best of grasshopper. Eh, mademoiselle? Open those topaz eyes of yours—Suzette is coming to put you to bed.