XXVOUR HOMEWARD JOURNEY
EVERY detail of that delightful journey is still present to me. It seemed to me that I was undertaking something tremendous, which was going to last for an indefinite time.
The young, spirited horse delighted my father and me. He took up all our attention at first. We looked at nothing else. Ah! what was his name?
The groom told us it was Coq or Cock. He didn’t know whether it was “Coq” or the English name.
“‘No! no, never in France, never shall England reign!’” I cried, recalling the air I had heard inCharles VI.“It shall be Coq.”
Coq almost flew along the road. After a while the groom left us, telling us the names of the villages and the post-relays where we were to stop during the day, or were to sleep at night.
My father and I recalled our longest drives around Blérancourt, but they were not like this one—a real journey. He laughed at all my observations and reflections, and said often to me: “Ah!you are, indeed, my daughter. You resemble me more than any one else.”
We had left Amiens at eleven o’clock in the morning, and had not yet, at five o’clock in the afternoon, thought of making our first halt. We had brought some fruit and cakes, and so long as our handsome Coq was not tired we determined to continue our way.
“Juliette,” said father to me, at a time when Coq was going slower, “have you never asked yourself whether I could indefinitely submit to our separation, if I could always bear the pain of seeing your mind fashioned by others than myself? My greatest ambition is to make your mind the offspring of my own. It will come some day; it must be so.”
I answered nothing. I said over to myself my father’s phrase: “Make your mind the offspring of my own,” and I thought to myself that as I was his daughter, my whole self should be his also; but then, being grandchild of my grandmother, whom I adored, how could I be at once all my grandmother’s and all my father’s? The feeling I had of the difficulty brought about by my double love for my grandmother and my father, the thought of sharing myself between them, filled me with sadness, and my heart ached as I thought I shouldfeel in the future, more and more deeply, the sorrow I might cause each when I left either of them, because each would feel when I returned that I would come back with my heart and mind filled with the one whom I had left. I was still angry at my grandmother for having sold my garden. The large house at Chauny, which formerly pleased me more than the small one at Blérancourt, seemed like a prison now. The yard, full of flowers, had been gay only because it preceded the garden; cut off from it, it would look, under the shadow of the great wall they were building, like a little plot resembling those in the graveyards.
My father thought also of many sad things; our gaiety now ran away from us, and we could not regain it. All my childhood spent in that beloved garden came back to me: the springtime, with the rows of violets along the walls at its end; the summer, with the baskets of strawberries that I would run to pick myself, as we were sitting down at table; fruits of all kinds, whose growth I watched with such interest, and which I kept tasting—apples, pears, plums, cherries, and apricots, enjoying the greatest delight a child can have—that of eating to its fill all kinds of fruit throughout the whole year.
“Papa, do you approve grandmother’s having sold her garden?” I asked him suddenly, determined all at once to confide my sorrow to him, without speaking of thedot.
“Why, yes, because she received a good price for it.”
“So, in your opinion she has done well?”
“Without doubt—she would never have found such a good chance again. Perhaps, besides the question of money, she decided to do it a little for your sake.”
“Oh! that is too much!”
“Why? You will have only a few steps to take to go to your school. She will even be able to see you play from a wing she wishes to build.”
“Then grandmother is going to make the little yard still smaller? Well, papa, I cannot tell you the pain all this gives me. They have taken away the paths where I used to walk and play, my trees, all that I loved in immaterial things; they have deprived me of the happiness of looking at growing leaves, of studying how plants bud, how blossoms become fruit; they have prevented me from listening to the stirring and putting forth of all that has life in it, and from hearing the sigh, followed by cold silence, of that which dies. To me,papa, the sun is a divine being to whom I speak and who answers me in written signs, which I see in the rays of its light. I will make you half close your eyes at mid-day, and will show you the shining signs, the golden writing. The moon follows me as I walk, and I feel that it is a friend. I assure you, papa, I have heard the earth burst with a little sound above the asparagus heads, or when the seeds that have been sown sprout forth. I do not know how to express all this to you, or how to explain these things, but if I love to read, if books instruct me so greatly—above all, if travels make the world larger to me—I think, papa, I have learned a great deal in my garden about all small things.”
My father listened to me, his eyes fixed on mine; he held the reins so loosely in his hands that suddenly, feeling gay, or perhaps made nervous by fatigue, Coq began to behave badly for the first time. A stroke of the whip calmed him.
“This Coq,” said my father, “is unworthy of too much confidence.” Then he added:
“Go on talking, Juliette, dear, go on. You do not know the pleasure you give me. You love nature as I love it; you feel it, you poetise it as I do. Ah! old Homer is giving back to me to-day what I gave to him in teaching you to love him. It ishe who has given you the love of immaterial things. You will be a heathen some day, I am certain of it.”
“Oh, papa! what an abominable thing to say! Don’t repeat it, especially before grandmother—it would give her too much pain, and, besides, it isn’t true; it was not the dryads, the nymphs, the homodryads, that I saw and listened to in my garden; it was really the trees, the plants, and the fruits.”
“Well, well,” said father, “I have promised your grandmother and your mother to let you make your first communion as they desire. They have taken your childhood from me, let them keep it; but your youth shall belong to me, and we will talk again about all this. I have now, to calm me and to make me wait patiently, the anticipation of the happy days that I foresee, and the result of all that you, my dear Juliette, have just been saying to me.”
“Having my garden no longer, I must forget all that I loved and learned in it, so as not to suffer too much in having lost it,” I replied. “I have so many dead things to weep over,” I continued, “I have heard so many trees sigh and utter their last cry when they were cut down, that in thinking of it, I seem to hear them again and my heartaches, for it is dreadful to have destroyed so many of those old companions that gave us such delicious fruit to make us love them, and it is a crime to have covered with gravel the good earth which would always have brought forth the seeds planted in it and borne harvests.”
On the evening of that day my father stopped at a post-relay at a large, clean, and bright-looking inn, where I went to see a dozen chickens roasted on a spit in the kitchen. The travellers by diligence dined there.
When my father put me to sleep in one of the huge beds in our room, I was feverish, and talked all night of my garden. He prevented me from speaking of it the next day, and told me some lovely stories of Greece which he had not yet related to me.
Our journey ended without further incident, and I found grandmother wildly happy at seeing me again; but as we had arrived late at night, and as I was tired, they put me to bed at once. Grandmother wished that I should sleep near her that night, as my father had spoken of my fever, and the door having been left open, I heard him say to my grandparents:
“I don’t think she can ever be consoled for having lost her garden.”
“As it is clear that she will marry a country gentleman,” said grandfather, laughing, “and, as the education she is receiving from her aunts will probably incline her to marry some perfect Roussot, she will be able after her honeymoon to treat herself to some trees and grounds, so we need not pity her present unhappiness in an exaggerated manner.”
My grandparents had quarrelled, as usual, during my absence. I had the proof of it in grandmother’s answer. The “they” and “one” which I had nearly banished, had returned to their conversation.
“Oneis always joking,” she said, “even about what touches me the most—Juliette’s sorrow. Since I have seen how much she suffers from being deprived of her garden, I reproach myself bitterly for having taken it from her.Oneshould understand that, and not laugh, whenoneknows that I would not have run the risk of giving pain to Juliette without having been moved by a feeling which was in her interest, but which I cannot express to everybody.”
“Well, well,” grandfather replied, “onehas no need of a lesson;onelovesone’sgrandchild as much as mother and father and grandmother.Oneonly jokes about Juliette’s sorrow, andonewillcontinue to do so for the simple reason thatonethinks it will be the best way to console her.”
My grandmother’s regrets calmed my grief, but my poor grandfather was snubbed many times for his way of “consoling” me.