XVIII
FLOWER O' THE WHEAT
Flower o' the Wheat was the prettiest girl in my village. Tall, well set up, stepping along with a fine self-confidence, she brightened by her clear laughter the fields, the woods, the deep road cuts of the Vendée. With the first warm days of spring the milky whiteness of her skin would be dotted over with a constellation of freckles.
The peasants used to say: "The good Lord threw a handful of bran in her face."
Bran and flour, it would seem, for her face under the sun's rays remained as white as if dusted over with the powder of bolted wheat. Hence, perhaps, her surname, or possibly she owed it to her red hair, matched rather unusually by tawny eyes. She gave one the impression of being all of the beautiful gold-brown tone of ripe wheat. Flower o' the Wheat was beautiful, and knew it because she was told so all day long.
The man of the fields is not by a long way insensible to beauty. His esthetic sense is not the same as ours. He is not moved by a line, a contour, the grace of a moving form, but he is powerfully affected by colour, as are all whom civilization has not overrefined. Flower o' the Wheat being a creature of living colour, had, therefore, the pleasure of hearing herself proclaimed fair, and of having to fend off the playfulness, and occasionally the somewhat robust caresses, of manly youth all the way from Sainte Hermine to Chantonnay. Plant a flower wherever you will, there the bees will congregate. Wherever you meet beauty, you will see men coming to forage, with eyes and hands and lips. Between city and country there is only a difference of setting.
As her fame spread beyond the borders of the canton, Flower o' the Wheat had a throng of admirers such as had not been seen for many a day in our neighbourhood. The pride of it shone in her eyes, dazzled by their own attractiveness, and if she had been told of Cleopatra on whom was centred the gaze of the world, it is not certain that she would have thought the Egyptian queen had an advantage over the country maid. For which I praise her, for enumerating a multitude of adorers is a foolish pastime. Moreover, the queen was dead and the peasant girl alive: the best argument of all.
The delightful part of the story is that Flower o' the Wheat, while permitting herself to be admired by every man, and envied by every woman, kept her heart faithful to the friend who had known how to win it, in which she differed notably from Cleopatra. Now, that friend, for I must finally come to my confession, was none other than your humble servant. I may be pardoned the pride of that avowal: I loved Flower o' the Wheat, and Flower o' the Wheat entertained sentiments for me which she was not in the least loth to exhibit. I used to follow her about the fields with her dog, "Red Socks," so called because of his four tawny paws, and while the flock browsed very improperly beyond the limit set by the rural guard, I told her all about Nantes, where I had spent the winter. I amazed her with tales from my books, or else she talked to me about animals, what they did, what they thought; she told me extraordinary stories. Our souls were very near to each other, I will not say the same of our hearts, for the sad part of our love was, alas, that she was twenty and I was six—or seven, if I stood on tiptoe. This did not make it difficult for either of us, however, to hug the other. It was only later that I realized my misfortune.
Our best days were at harvest time. The abominable smoke of the threshing machine had not yet invaded the countryside. The flail was still in use. At dawn, men and women divided into groups would begin the round of the threshing floor, their motions accompanied by the rhythmic thud of the wooden flail, muffled by the straw on the ground; one half of the quadrille would slowly retreat, while the other half gradually advanced. The necessity for attention, and the sustained effort, obliged them to be silent. But what a reaction of laughter and song when the wooden pitch forks came into play, stacking the straw! Noonday would see the ground strewn with harvesters taking their rest in the full glare of the sun, for the peasant fears the treacherous shade. Upon the stroke of a bell, the noisy concert of the flails would again fill the air on every side.