IIITHE DISCOVERY OF THE EARTH
THAT period of my life is quite luminous in my memory: only later it seems as if the sun must have been a little dimmed. I walked out with grandfather morning and evening, I came into closer relations with nature, and I had a new suit of clothes. It was the first. Up to that time I had worn those of my elder brothers cut down to fit me. A seamstress used to come to the house to alter and mend the garments destined for me. She was as homely as heart could wish, and had been recommended by Mlle Tapinois, who flattered herself that she had formed her in her work-rooms.
I had grown rapidly during my illness. What was then my surprise when I was informed that a tailor, a real tailor, was coming to take my measures, mine, not Bernard’s nor Stephen’s! The tailor’s name was Plumeau. Tall and thin as a lath, he floated in an immense frock coat. Did he propose, like God when he created man, to make me in his own image and after his likeness? He fabricated for me a full suit of olive green which emphasised my leanness, to which end he had neglected nothing. The coat, rivalling an overcoat, reached to my knees: thecloth was of a solidity calculated to defy time. It was very evident that I had a suit that would last till I took my baccalaureate. I somehow had the impression that it favoured me too much, and my vanity rebelled. The whole family had been summoned to see me in my new suit, and ratify its acceptance. I was constrained to turn round and round like a horse in the market, and my rebellious face became almost as long as my coat.
“It will do,” father finally pronounced.
It would do? Yes, in two or three years, when I had grown a great deal more. Mother was cautious about speaking too approvingly. My brothers kept silence, but I perceived that they were smothering their laughter, a self-denial which Louise by no means exercised. Aunt Deen saved the situation which was becoming painful. She arrived late upon the scene, for she had been putting to rights in the tower chamber when notified of the arrival of M. Plumeau. We heard her on the stairs before we saw her. Hope at once revived. Her coming was like the arrival of fresh troops upon the field of battle—she decided the fortunes of the day.
Hardly had she perceived me, lost in my new suit, when she cried:
“It’s admirable, Francis; I won’t keep it from you; never have I seen any one so becomingly dressed.”
Every one drew a long breath and I was comforted; so greatly, indeed, that, unwilling to part with my fine garments, I put them on forour next walk. Grandfather did not notice. But at the gate Aunt Deen overtook us all out of breath.
“Naughty boy!” she exclaimed, “putting on your best clothes for a walk!”
She almost undressed me with her own hands in the street; I must needs go back to the house under her escort, to exchange my costume for less distinguished raiment, and the walk that day was spoiled. But those that came afterward made it up to me.
There was the forest and there was the lake....
The forest, with certain farms and vineyards, made part of a historic domain, the château of which, after enduring sieges and entertaining great personages of the army or the church, was half in ruins and no longer habitable. The whole property belonged to a retired colonel of cavalry, son of a Baron of the Empire, whose fortune not being sufficient to keep it up decently, he was permitting it to fall into decay. He lived alone and spent the whole day riding about on one or another of his old horses, without ever going beyond his estate. Though it was entirely surrounded with a wall grandfather and I used to find our way in by breaches which we had discovered.
He led me about among the trees, taught me to distinguish their characteristics, and encouraged me to sit down under their shade, on the moss and not on the treacherous benches which we perceivedsparsely scattered here and there, the woodwork of which was rotten with damp. Grass was growing in the alleys, which under over-arching trees guided the gaze to portals of light, that seemed on one side to be blue, because of the lake which they framed in.
It was the month of June. A thousand tones of green were mingling, marrying, all around us, from the pale green of the parasite mistletoe to the almost black of the ivy which climbed the oak trunks. Spring was singing its whole gamut around us. And under the trees there still remained heaps of red leaves, vestiges of the former season.
I felt a vague fear at being thus alone, we two, amidst so imposing and silent an assembly, and I tried to talk, in order to make our presence there seem more real.
“Hush!” said grandfather; “be still and listen.”
Listen to what? And yet, little by little, I began to perceive a multitude of soft sounds. We were no longer alone, as I had thought; innumerable living things were all around us.
Far away two chaffinches were calling to one another at regular intervals. The more distant one took up softly the couplet which the other was pouring forth from a full throat. From tree to tree the latter drew nearer. I saw him, my eye met his—so little and round! As I did not stir, he remained. But what could be those dull, reiterated blows? Woodpeckers, tapping the trunks with their bills.
Long bands of light glided here and there between the branches andlay upon the ground; in their rays, which brought out the shapes of the leaves, spiders’ webs were swinging, their finest threads plain to see, and wasps, buzzing as they flew about. At last I could even hear the rustling of the grass;—the secret labour of the earth under the influence of heat. I was discovering a life of which I had never dreamed.
“What is that call, grandfather?” I asked in a low tone.
“It must be a hare; let’s hide, and perhaps, if you are very quiet, we shall see it before long.”
Upon this dialogue we softly dragged ourselves behind a bush. I knew hares only from having eaten of them on rare occasions of ceremony, though Aunt Deen deplored giving rabbit to children, because of the soiling of napkins and faces. The cry sounded again—nearer us this time.
“He is calling his doe,” whispered grandfather.
“His doe?”
“Yes, his wife. Be quiet.”
It was a gentle call, infinitely tender and languishing. Far away we heard another call, like it, but hardly audible. From opposite sides of the forest the duet went on; and I began to understand that animals, like people, love to see and talk to one another. Suddenly, before me, crossing the path, I saw two long ears and a little ball of a brown body which seemed to bound over it. At the very edge the hare stopped, hearkened to the distant, guiding voice, once again uttered his heart-breaking cry, and disappeared in the neighbouring underbrush.He was hastening to join his mate, but I had had time to see him quite plainly.
Another time it was a fox. He must have scented us with his pointed muzzle, for he fled at top speed, his tail between his legs. Being learned in such matters through La Fontaine’s fables, and the “Scenes in Animal Life,” I informed grandfather that this was a plot and it would be well for us to make off.
“How stupid you are!” he exclaimed. “The fox is harmless.”
At which I was somewhat scandalised. But our walks were not always calm to this degree. From our favourite nook we sometimes heard, like a heavy rain, the galloping of a horse, and we would hardly manage to hide behind the trunk of a beech, when the colonel would appear, on horse-back. He had a short nose, a stiff moustache and hollow cheeks. He sat upright, knees out, looking at nothing, and as he passed he seemed to me a fearful man. Grandfather hastened to reassure me.
“He’s an old beast,” he said, “and his mount can’t trot any longer.”
I later learned that both had fought at Reichhoffen.
But on a graver occasion grandfather himself gave the signal for retreat. I saw him cock his ear after the fashion of the hare, then rise hastily from the grass on which we were sitting.
“Dogs,” he murmured, fearfully. “Let’s go.”
We made for the wall as fast as his old legs and my too-new ones would permit. The dogs were already rushing upon us, barking and threatening, when grandfather, who had pushed me before him, reached the top. The alarm had agitated him and our safety by no means pacified him.
“Pretty proprietors!” he fulminated; “a little more and their dogs would have devoured us!”
Their ferocity furnished him the material for a lesson; he turned toward me:
“You see, my boy, men become wicked in towns, like apples that rot when they are heaped together. And then they turn round and pervert animals!”
In truth I could have brought forward two opposing arguments; the isolation of their estate and the ferocious nature of their beasts. He granted only the second, and overturned that in the next breath:
“You have seen the chaffinch, the hare and the fox. In their natural state they are incapable of doing harm. Tamed, all beasts sooner or later become dangerous, perfidious, ferocious and false. Well! it’s just the same with men! Free, they are kind and generous. Brutalised by discipline, like that old soldier, they become terrific!”
Never had he spoken so much at length, nor, to my mind, so enigmatically. No doubt the emotion caused by the dogs had made him forget, in a direct way, the promise my father had exacted from him. I was surprised at his eloquence, for which nothing had prepared me,and I at once drew practical conclusions from it. I had been brought up to believe in the benefits of authority; that of parents and school teachers. And now it appeared that to be good one must obey nobody.
This adventure disgusted us with “our” forest, and we frequented less extensive and more peaceful pieces of woods, preferably those situated on the communal lands, all the more agreeable to grandfather because of his hatred of private property. According to him, property was the great obstacle to human happiness, but I hesitated to adopt his views; I was pretty fond of owning things—for which he cared not at all.
As he had promised at the time of our first walk, he communicated to me his knowledge of mushrooms, the round-stemmed fleshy bolet, its dome the colour of a not quite ripe chestnut, the laseras, most beautiful of mushrooms, like an egg of which the shell has just been broken, the yellow, flower-shaped chanterelle were his favourites. I saw him bite, like the priest whose story he had told me, one of those Satan bolets, which turns blue when it is cut, the gash at once taking on the appearance of a frightful wound. Taught by Aunt Deen’s contagious fears, I was persuaded that his lips also would soon turn blue. I gazed at him all terror and curiosity, seeking for the symptoms of danger. But he digested his poison with marvellous ease.
“You see,” he observed in triumph, “the worthy priest for once wasright. Nature is a mother to us.”
Emboldened by this experiment, I gathered from the bushes some red berries that were very pleasing to the eye, but which gave me a sharp colic. Grandfather must be a bit of a sorcerer.
If ever we brought home from our hunt a handkerchief full of cryptogams, Aunt Deen, suspicious, would not fail to cry out:
“Those horrors again!”
She would look them over most carefully, keeping only those that were notoriously good to eat; she excelled in cooking them in butter, or preparing them as an hors-d’œuvre, with a sauce of wine, salt, pepper and herbs, and a dash of vinegar. Thus prepared the little balls, fresh, white and crisp, melted in the mouth. Now that I gathered them I, too, began to eat them.
I avenged myself of my hurtful berries by the strawberries and whortleberries that I found among the moss. I loved to fill my hand with them and then lick them up as goats do salt when it is given them. It is true that indigestible things had been forbidden me; the notion of duty was beginning to change in me, and I preferred to trust to that mother nature so much praised by grandfather, and whom he only had to invoke to be fed to heart’s content. Grandfather was constantly lauding her, offering to her litanies of eulogiums. And yet he ridiculed the chaplet that Aunt Deen and mother used to recite! And he took everyopportunity to instil into me an aversion to towns and love for the delights of the fields. Cities, he said, were full of ferocious, greedy folk, who would murder you for a piece of money, whereas in a village men lived peaceful and happy, and loved one another with brotherly love.
One day a peasant invited us into his half ruined arbour to eat one of those white cheeses over which they pour sweet cream. A bowl of wood strawberries accompanied this frugal and innocent repast. They made so delicious a mixture that I was inclined to believe blindly in universal happiness, provided, indeed, that every one would consent to leave the plague and leprosy infected city. In the country every one was kind, obliging and free into the bargain. We would have no more enemies. Aunt Deen’s they existed only in her old-woman’s imagination. Her ideas were narrow, she did not, like grandfather, rise above petty, every-day cares. I was peaceful, devout, disarmed. And now I knew the flower of rural pleasure, of which I have never lost the flavour.
“Stuff yourselves,” said our host genially; “the doctor cured me of chills and fever.”
We owed his kindliness to my father, but we preferred to suppose it the usual thing by way of verification of our theories. Having stuffed myself only too well, in fact, I suffered from indigestion on the way home, aggravated by grandfather’s unkindly humour.
“You will not boast of this,” he observed, when I was relieved.
I understood the significance of his advice, and resolved to preserve a prudent silence which would shield us in any whim we might indulge in future excursions. We reached home late: the want of punctuality seemed to me an elegant indifference. Why dine at one hour rather than at another? One could even do without dinner entirely, if one’s stomach was full of white cheese and cream. Grandfather explained where we had been and extolled peasant hospitality in choice terms.
“Ah, yes,” cried father, “you happened upon that rascal Barbeau. I think I did save him from death. He lives mostly by poaching and smuggling and owes me his bill yet. I am just as willing he should not pay it. The colour of his money is not clean.”
I considered that he was too severe upon so polite and generous a man. We went again to visit Barbeau, and were received by his wife. She was an aged, grey, gnarled, blear-eyed woman, who found nothing better to offer us than a miserable crust of gruyère cheese, which greatly vexed us. She said nothing as to her husband’s occupation but pursed up her lips to confide to us the fine places that her sons enjoyed. The eldest was postman in town, the second an employe at the railway station, and as for the third, oho! he was earning thousands and hundreds.
“Waiter in a hotel in Paris, Monsieur Rambert, waiter in a furnished hotel. He sends us money.”
“Bad trade,” observed grandfather.
“There is no bad trade,” insisted the old woman. “The one thing is to get money.”
“And you have none left?”
“Surely not,—there is none left. There is nobody any more who eats chestnuts and drinks cider, Monsieur Rambert. As for the land, see! I spit upon it!”
And the old hag did in fact spit upon the growing grain, now a pale green about to change to gold, which grew close around her hovel. One would have said that she was banning all the country-side.
It did not occur to me that this grain was the flour which at our house was blessed before being kneaded into dough, the bread which my father never cut before tracing upon the loaf the sign of the cross. All I saw was a disgusting act and involuntarily I laid down my share of the cheese which I had been eating without pleasure.
“Let’s go,” said grandfather abruptly.
Mother Barbeau’s remarks vexed him. At least I had no attack of nausea this time.
After this conversation he abandoned agricultural life for a time and decided to take me to the lake which we had not yet explored. He led me thither with no enthusiasm.
“It is a closed-in water,” he said contemptuously.
Were there open waters then? Of course—there was the sea. Until now the word had not impressed me and I attributed no meaning to it. When the mist hid the opposite shore the lake used to seem endless, and I had heard people around me say, “it’s like the sea.” I had paid no attention. Grandfather’s disdainful description brought to my imagination by contrast a free immensity. Later, when at last I saw the sea—it was at Dieppe, from the top of the cliff—I felt no surprise. It was simply an open water.
“Would you like a row?” grandfather asked one day.
Would I! I desired it all the more because such an expedition represented to me in some sort a substitution of the individual life for the family life. My parents had forbidden me to go out in a boat, after the fall into the water which had brought on my pleurisy. They were afraid both of the dampness and of my awkwardness. Once again, then,I was the fair child who had escaped from his mother’s arms. Themaiden with golden wingswho enticed me was my own good pleasure.
We took a canoe and rowed out of the port. Grandfather, who used the oars irregularly (which by no means reassured me), soon laid them down and left us to float.
“Where are we going?” I asked, somewhat uneasily.
“I don’t know.”
Uncertainty increased the mystery of the water. I amused myself with leaning over the gunwale, and dipping my hands in the water. The cold caress it gave me and the small danger we were encountering, or which I thought we were encountering, gave me a mingled but very exciting sensation.
What was the meaning of these brief flashes of silver which were lighted on the surface and at once went out? Around their dying spark a circle appeared, which grew ever larger and finally was lost. It was made by fish which came up to breathe. One of them, quite near, showed his little mouth and the shining scales on his head. I had come into contact with a new world—the submarine world.
When the wind began to blow grandfather would make me sit in the bottom of the boat, upon the boards, which would be pretty wet. From thence, being still not tall, I could perceive nothing but the sky. I could the better discern its dome and on fine days the continuous vibration of the ether. While grandfather was dreaming I would sit there motionless and happy. I formed the habit of being excessively happy without knowing why, as if existence had no limits and no purpose.
Grandfather made friends also with the fishermen who were setting their nets.
“They are good fellows,” he would say; “the lake is like the country. As man leaves the city he approaches the happy state of nature.”
We came to know the manners of the trout, the perch, the voracious pike and the char, the flesh of which is as savoury as the pink flesh of the salmon.
“Aha!” said one of these artless fishermen joyfully, “all my char is engaged by the Bellevue Hotel. We rake it in night and day. They are the customers for my money.”
Thus was I initiated into the life of the land and the water. Grandfather began to be interested in my progress in the friendship of nature. He had a disciple whom he had not sought. I was the first now to turn my back upon the town, leap over walls, cross the fields without the slightest care for the crops. He treated me as an heir, or a child worthy of being one of those sluggard kings who possess the world. And one hot day in July, after we had painfully climbed a hillock whence one could overlook the plain, the forest and the lake, he began to laugh at a notion that had occurred to him.
“You know, my boy, they think I have nothing, that I am just one of those clatter-clogs that shuffle along the road with a tramp’s bundle on his back. What a joke! There is no landed proprietor richer than I—do you hear?”
His words did not surprise me. I had lost that notion ofmineandthinethat divides riches from poverty.
“This water, these woods, these fields,” he went on, “all these are mine. I never take any care of them, and they are mine all the same.”And like an act of investiture he laid his hand upon my head, saying:
“They are mine; I give them to you.”
It was a playful, unceremonious presentation. Both of us amused ourselves with the idea. And yet, in spite of our laughter, I had a very clear impression that the world did in fact belong to me. I would no longer consent to have a small, narrow place in the world.
As we were going down from our hilltop we met upon the road a young woman who lived in a villa in the neighbourhood. She wore a white gown which left her forearms and neck bare, and on her head was a hat decorated with red cherries. Her parasol, a little behind her, made an aureola or background for a face which was as clear cut and delicate as one of those magnolia flowers in the garden that I loved for their colour, odour and form as of white birds with outspread wings. Still I should not have noticed her if grandfather had not stopped, riveted to the spot with admiration, and exclaimed aloud, “How lovely she is!”
The fair face crimsoned. But the young woman smiled at the too direct homage. I looked at her then, and so fixedly that I have never forgotten that vision, not even the cherries. But I made my reservations. To me she seemed already old, perhaps thirty. That is an advanced age in the pitiless eyes of a child. Her flower-like complexion made me think of that avowal of the nightingale from whichone day when I was reading the “Scenes in Animal Life,” I had drawn a fitful melancholy:I am in love with the Rose—I strain my throat all the night long for her, but she sleeps, and hears me not. And for the first time, and not without a secret anticipation, I associated an unknown woman with a yet more unknown love.
After this incident grandfather led me to a wooded slope where we had never been, and which he had represented to me as without interest when I proposed it as the object of a walk. We had to cross a little brook before reaching its foot. On the way he was self-absorbed and said not a word. At the top he turned to the east and led the way directly to a pavilion near a farm house but half-hidden in a clearing.
“There it is,” he said.
I understood that he was not speaking to me. This pavilion, one story above the ground floor, appeared to be in a miserable condition. The roof lacked slates, a surrounding gallery was rotting away. It must have been long since abandoned. Grandfather delighted in its ruinous and uninhabitable condition,—a thing which would have surprised me more if I had not grown accustomed to his whims.
“So much the better,” he murmured; “there is no one there.”
Returning to the farmhouse he perceived an old man who was warming himself upon a bench in the sun and dipping soup from a pot with a wooden spoon. With this old man he entered upon an interminable conversation which bored me, but which ended in some questions as to the pavilion.
“It is good for nothing but firewood,” said the peasant.
“There were people in it formerly,” insinuated grandfather.
“Formerly—a good many years ago.”
Grandfather appeared to hesitate as to continuing the conversation, but then resumed:
“Yes—a good many years ago. But you and I were not born to-day. Tell me, don’t you remember a lady?”
I at once thought of the lady in white with the cherries in her hat, and I summed up her figure in that clearing, at the door of the pavilion. My imagination was already at work upon this new theme.
“Oh,” said the old man, before swallowing the spoonful that he held in his hand—“as for women, I despise them.”
A gleam of rage shot across grandfather’s eyes, and I thought he was going to overset the old man and his pot. He at once cut short the conversation without another word. But as he turned away he took me to witness the beauty of the place.
“All the same, it’s sweet and wild here. The trees have hardly changed. They are all that is left.”
I never learned the adventure of the pavilion. But one day when we were passing the colonel’s tottering château another memory, less direct no doubt, awoke in his mind and without preparation he began:
“They called her the beautiful Alixe.”
“Who, grandfather?”
“She lived there. It was under the Empire.”
“You saw her, grandfather?”
“Oh, I; no! That’s too long ago. I am speaking of the first Emperor. Those who had seen her were old when I was young. Those who had seen her were bursting with pride merely at mentioning her name.”
These brief evocations of the past threw for me a lovely veil of romance over our walks, which had “happened” like history.
He never said more about either, as I expected him to do. He never supposed that I was watching his slightest words, and exaggerating their importance. Save the white lady with the cherries in her hat, who perhaps resembled, who doubtless resembled, some far-away picture of his past, he greeted women the most frankly in the world and never made any remark about them. When, several years later, one evening at school, I read the famous passage of the Iliad about the old men of Troy being disposed to forgive Helen because of her beauty, like that of the immortal goddesses, while my comrades were dozing over their Homer, I was seeing myself once more at my grandfather’s side on theroad by which the lady in white came to us. And ever since I have called that unknown one Helen.
Grandfather, who began to enjoy our friendship, consented to receive me in the tower chamber. He took no notice of my presence, however, now enveloping me with the smoke of his pipe, and again playing upon his violin, the notes of which mingled in my mind with the forest, the lake and all our secret retreats. That room was to me a continuation of my free out-of-door life. On stormy days, very rare in the course of that bright summer predicted by Mathieu de la Drôme, I used to watch the falling rain and the changing skies, lulled and softened by this spectacle of the uselessness of things. When the west was clear I could see the sun shooting into the waters of the lake a pillar of fire, which by degrees was changed into a sword and finally was reduced to a golden point, the reflection of the star resting upon the shoulder of the mountain, which was what the sun became for one second before it disappeared. In the evenings, after dinner, I used to obtain the favour of looking at the constellations through the telescope. As his former room had faced the south, grandfather, as I have said, was acquainted with only half the heavens, and refused to puzzle out the other half. Therefore I knew only Altair and Vega, Arcturus and the Virgin’s sheaf, which may be seen in the south in July. I was obliged to lean out todistinguish Antares on the edge of the roof. The other months all is confused to my eyes, and the same if I look toward the north.
The household was pleased with my new regimen. More than once father asked of grandfather:
“Truly, the boy doesn’t inconvenience you?”
“Oh, not at all,” grandfather would invariably reply.
And father would express his gratitude for my recovered health, Aunt Deen would declare that I no longer had my papier-mâché face, and would rub my cheeks to make them redder. My mother saw in grandfather’s affection a guarantee of peace and reconciliation. As for me, life had been insensibly changed. School, lessons, emulation, regular hours, work—all that no longer existed. I had only to turn my back upon the town and give myself up to lovely nature. I felt that, though I cannot explain it, at once clearly and confusedly: confusedly in my mind and clearly as a matter of practice.
And yet, on our return from our walks, grandfather would pretty often simply bring me back as far as the gate, and slip away in the direction of the accursed city.