For a few minutes he stood before it in silence, then he laughed aloud in sheer enjoyment. All the other crèches he had seen boasted figures of plaster or china; here, apparently, the expense had been too great, and the characters were represented by dolls, ordinary wooden dolls with shiny, painted, black hair and stuff clothes. The Mother herself was dressed in stiff, spangled muslin, with a veil like a première communiante, and a wreath of orange blossom—a confusion of ideas that had its humour. St. Joseph, in good broadcloth coat and the tightest of trousers, held the other post of honour, and nearer the spectators, though facing away from them to the little Christ-Child, were ranged the shepherds, with—surely an innovation—their wives. The shepherds themselves supplied the crowning touch, for they wore real knitted stockings of worsted, and shoes with stitched leather soles, a fact admirably displayed by the kneeling position of their wearers. The wives held little baskets full of beads, meant to represent eggs; and woolly lambs with red-cotton tongues stood about at regular intervals. All the dolls looked old, and as though they had seen a less gentle service, and Bernardy wondered what child in that remote place was of sufficient wealth to own dolls. He was charmed into mirth, and as he thought how tenderly and kindly the real personages represented must laugh as they looked down at the little set-piece, he tried to trace, in some trick of light and shadow, a fleeting smile on the doll-faces. Without warning, his horror closed on him again, and turning he went heavily down the church.
As he neared the door the two old women of the market square came in; still laughing and chattering, they went past him, slowly and stiffly, with the uneven clumping of old feet. Some curious premonition—a feeling that something was about to happen—made Bernardy watch them.
Suddenly the old woman in the hat caught sight of the crèche, and with the swift transition of the South, she stopped short in her chatter and clutched her companion's arm:
"Ah!" she said, "c'est le bon Jésus, qui donne courage!"
Every note of her harsh old voice thrilled Bernardy's nerves like a sudden clarion. It seemed to him the most luminous moment of his life. There are brief seconds when a rent in the outer film of this world comes against a rent in what we are pleased to call the "next," though it is really co-existent with our own. Then it is that we can catch a glimpse of something that is at another angle, a differently tilted spiritual plane, so to speak, from our own, and for which our minds would, ordinarily, need a different focus. The old woman had torn a peephole for Edmond—perhaps, for all he knew, in that moment of sympathetic concentration in the Square, their personalities had mingled, and so made him sensitive to the premonition that gripped him as she passed. He only knew that her phrase—and being a phrase-monger himself he had a passion for them—struck him as magnificent. He would have thought less of it had she said it of the Christ on the Cross, but she spoke of the Christ-Child. Or if she had spoken of peace, but her words were "qui donne courage."
"C'est le bon Jésus, qui donne courage!"
Bernardy stood quite still, wondering what her life had been that "courage" should be the word that instinctively sprang to her lips. The two women were still peering in at the crèche, but while White Cap was recognizing all her acquaintances, so to speak, and hailing them by name, the other old woman stared straight in front of her, repeating her phrase very fast, over and over again. Suddenly she turned, and coming down the church to where Bernardy stood, peered up into his face. For the last time she repeated it, but with a slight difference, her hand on his wrist:
"Tu sais, mon brave," she said, "tu sais, c'est l'Enfant qui donne courage!"
Bernardy went out into the sunlight feeling at once calmed and exhilarated, yet still with that odd sense of waiting, as of something holding its breath. All the afternoon he haunted the little wind-swept town, and towards evening he leant upon the parapet that hung over the sheer mountain-side. Hundreds of feet below him the valley was lapped in darkness and he watched the shadow thrown by the opposite range creep up towards him, the edge of it in deeply curved waves, like a purple tide. The chill of sunset was in the air when he made his way to the inn, and he noted that, although the sight of a stranger must be of the utmost rarity, he excited no comment. Could it be, he wondered, that they instinctively knew him for one of themselves, these people of his dream-city, or were they dreams too? In how leisurely a manner they passed along the streets—the Faun-like youths, brown-necked and bold-eyed; the firm-set women with their black hair so sleekly and heavily massed about their heads that it seemed carved out of ebony, and the quiet-eyed old people with indrawn mouths!
When he reached the inn, a grey pile of round-flanked towers that was built on the eastern edge, his memories awoke again, and in the courtyard they surged over him—memories of sitting enthroned in just such a castle as this. He remembered, too, that there had always been something he was not allowed to know—was it a door that had been kept locked, or a forbidden book, or some hidden person whom he had perpetually tried to meet and never succeeded? Whatever it was, he felt he would soon discover it.