"Shoot straight!" he counselled with a smile. Alice gave me her cheek, which I reverently kissed and murmured my apologies for my insistence in her small ear. Then I swung open the door and made for the spiral stairs. At the bottom step I stopped short. I had completely forgotten I should not return until after New Year's, and I rushed back to wish them a Bonne Année in advance, but I closed the door of the stuffy little cabinet particulier quicker than I opened it, for her arms were about the sturdy neck of a good comrade whose self-denial made me feel like the mad infant rushing to the fête.
"Bonne Année, mes enfants!" I called from the corridor, but they did not hear.
Ten minutes later I reached my studio, dumped three hundred cartridges into a worn valise and caught the 12.18 with four minutes to spare.
Enfin! it is winter in earnest!
The northeast gale gave, while it lasted, the best shooting the curé and I have ever had. Then the wind shifted to the southwest with a falling barometer, and the flights ceased. Again, for three days, the Norman coast has been thrashed by squalls of driving snow. The wild geese are honking in V-shaped lines to an inland refuge for the white sea is no longer tenable. Curlews cry hoarsely over the frozen fields. It is tough enough lying hidden in my sand pit on the open beach beyond the dunes, where I crack away at the ricketing flights of fat gray plover and beat myself to keep warm. Fuel is scarce and there is hardly a sou to be earned fishing in such cruel weather as this.
The country back of my house abandoned by the marsh is now stripped to bare actualities—all things are reduced to their proper size. Houses, barns and the skeletons of leafless trees stand out, naked facts in the landscape. The orchards are soggy in mud and the once green feathery lane back of my house abandoned, is now a rough gash of frozen pools and rotten leaves.
Birds twitter in the thin hedges.
I would never have believed my wild garden, once so full of mystery—gay flowers, sunshine and droning bees, to be so modest in size. A few rectangles of bare, frozen ground, and a clinging vine trembling against the old wall, is all that remains, save the scraggly little fruit trees green with moss. Beyond, in a haze of chill sea mist, lie the woodlands, long undulating ribbons of gray twigs crouching under a leaden sky.
In the cavernous cider press whose doors creak open within my courtyard Père Bordier and a boy in eartabs, are busy making cider. If you stop and listen you can hear the cider trickling into the cask and Père Bordier encouraging the patient horse who circles round and round a great stone trough in which revolve two juggernauts of wooden wheels. The place reeks with the ooze and drip of crushed apples. The giant screw of oak, the massive beams, seen dimly in the gloomy light that filters through a small barred window cut through the massive stone wall, gives the old pressoir the appearance of some feudal torture chamber. Blood ran once, and people shrieked in such places—as these.