A Village of Vagabonds.

by F. Berkeley Smith.

CHAPTER ONE

THE HOUSE BY THE MARSH

It was in fat Madame Fontaine's little cafe at Bar la Rose, that Norman village by the sea, that I announced my decision. It being market-day the cafe was noisy with peasants, and the crooked street without jammed with carts. Monsieur Torin, the butcher, opposite me, leaned back heavily from his gla.s.s of applejack and roared.

Monsieur Pompanet, the blacksmith, at my elbow, put down his cup of black coffee delicately in its clean saucer and opened his honest gray eyes wide in amazement. Simultaneously Monsieur Jaclin, the mayor, in his freshly ironed blouse, who for want of room was squeezed next to Torin, choked out a wheezy "_Bon Dieu!_" and blew his nose in derision.

"Pont du Sable--_Bon Dieu!_" exclaimed all three. "Pont du Sable--_Bon Dieu!_"

"_Cristi!_" thundered Torin. "You say you are going to _live_ in Pont du Sable? _Helas!_ It is not possible, my friend, you are in earnest!"

"That lost hole of a village of _sacre_ vagabonds," echoed Pompanet.

"Why, the mud when the tide is out smells like the devil. It is unhealthy."

"Pere Bordier and I went there for ducks twenty years ago," added the mayor. "We were glad enough to get away before dark. B-r-r! It was lonely enough, that marsh, and that dirty little fis.h.i.+ng-village no longer than your arm. Bah! It's a hole, just as Pompanet says."

Torin leaned across the table and laid a heavy hand humanely on my shoulder.

"Take my advice," said he, "don't give up that snug farm of yours here for a lost hole like Pont du Sable."

"But the sea-shooting is open there three hundred and sixty-five days in the year," I protested, with enthusiasm. "I'm tired of tramping my legs off here for a few partridges a season. Besides, what I've been looking for I've found--a fine old abandoned house with a splendid old courtyard and a wild garden. I had the good luck to climb over a wall and discover it."

"I know the place you mean," interrupted the mayor. "It was a post-tavern in the old days before the railroad ran there."

"And later belonged to the estate of the Marquis de Lys," I added proudly. "Now it belongs to me."

"What! You've bought it!" exclaimed Torin, half closing his veal-like eyes.

"Yes," I confessed, "signed, sealed, and paid for."

"And what the devil do you intend to do with that old stone pile now that you've got it?" sneered Jaclin. "Ah! You artists are queer fellows!"

"Live in it, messieurs," I returned as happily as I could, as I dropped six sous for my gla.s.s into Madame Fontaine's open palm, and took my leave, for under the torrent of their protest I was beginning to feel I had been a fool to be carried away by my love of a gun and the picturesque.

The marsh at Pont du Sable was an old friend of mine. So were the desert beach beyond the dunes, and the lost fis.h.i.+ng-village--"no longer than your arm." I had tramped in wind and rain and the good sunlight over that great desert of pasty black clay at low tide. I had lain at high tide in a sand-pit at the edge of the open sea beyond the dunes, waiting for chance shots at curlew and snipe. I had known the bay at the first glimmer of dawn with a flight of silver plovers wheeling for a rush over my decoys. Dawn--the lazy, sparkling noon and the golden hours before the crisp, still twilight warned me it was high time to start back to Bar la Rose fourteen kilometres distant. All these had become enchanting memories.

Thus going to Pont du Sable for a day's shooting became a weekly delight, then a biweekly fascination, then an incorrigible triweekly habit. There was no alternative left me now but to live there. The charm of that wild bay and its lost village had gotten under my skin.

And thus it happened that I deserted my farm and friends at Bar la Rose, and with my goods and chattels boarded the toy train one spring morning, bound for my abandoned house, away from sufficient-unto-itself Bar la Rose and its pigheaded inhabitants, the butcher, the blacksmith, and the mayor.

It is such a funny little train that runs to my new-found Paradise, rocking and puffing and grumbling along on its narrow-gauge track with its cars labelled like grown-up ones, first, second, and third cla.s.s; and no two painted the same colour; and its noisy, squat engine like the real ones in the toy-stores, that wind up with a key and go rus.h.i.+ng off frantically in tangents. No wonder the train to my lost village is called "_Le pet.i.t deraillard_"--"The little get-off-the-track." And so I say, it might all have come packed in excelsior in a neat box, complete, with instructions, for the sum of four francs sixty-five centimes, had it not been otherwise destined to run twice daily, rain or s.h.i.+ne, to Pont du Sable, and beyond.

Poor little train! It is never on time, but it does its best. It is at least far more prompt than its pa.s.sengers, for most of them come running after it out of breath.

"Hurry up, mademoiselle!" cries the engineer to a rosy-cheeked girl in sabots, rus.h.i.+ng with a market-basket under one arm and a live goose under the other. "Eh, my little lady, you should have gotten out of bed earlier!" laughs the conductor as he pulls her aboard.

"Toot! Toot!" And off goes the little get-off-the-track again, rocking and rumbling along past desert stretches of sand dunes screening the blue sea; past modern villas, isolated horrors in brick, pink, and baby blue, carefully planted away from the trees. Then suddenly the desert is left behind! Past the greenest of fields now, dotted with sleek, grazing cattle; past groves of pine; past snug Norman farms with low-thatched roofs half-smothered in yellow roses. Again the dunes, as the toy train swings nearer the sea. They are no longer desert wastes of sand and wire-gra.s.s, but covered now with a riot of growing things, running in one rich congested sweep of orchards, pastures, feathery woodlands and matted hedges down to the very edge of the blue sea.

A sudden turn, and the toy train creeps out of a grove of pines to the open bay. It is high tide. A flight of plover, startled by the engine, go wheeling away in a silver streak to a spit of sand running out from the marsh. A puff of smoke from the sand-spit, and the band leaves two of its members to a gentleman in new leather leggings; then, whistling over the calamity that has befallen them, they wheel again and strike for the open sea and safety.

Far across the expanse of rippling turquoise water stands a white lighthouse that at dusk is set with a yellow diamond. Snug at the lower end of the bay, a long mile from where the plovers rise, lies the lost village. Now the toy train is crawling through its crooked single street, the engine-bell ringing furiously that stray dogs and children, and a panicky flock of sheep may have time to get out of the way. The sheep are in charge of a rough little dog with a cast in one eye and a slim, barelegged girl who apologizes a dozen times to monsieur the engineer between her cries to her flock.

"They are not very well brought up, my little one--those sacred mutton of yours," remarks the engineer as he comes to a dead stop, jumps out of his cab, and helps straighten out the tangle.

"Ah, monsieur!" sighs the girl in despair. "What will you have? It is the little black one that is always to blame!"

The busy dog crowds them steadily into line. He seems to be everywhere at once, darting from right to left, now rounding up a stubborn ewe and her first-born, now cornering the black one.

"Toot! Toot!" And the little get-off-the-track goes rumbling on through the village, past the homes of the fishermen--a straggling line of low stone houses with quaint gabled roofs, and still quainter chimneys, and old doorways giving glimpses of dark interiors and dirt floors. Past the modest houses of the mayor, the baker, the butcher and Monsieur le Cure; then through the small public square, in which nothing ever happens, and up to a box of a station.

"Pont du Sable!" cries the conductor, with as much importance as if he had announced Paris.

I have arrived.

There was no doubt about my new-found home being abandoned! The low stone wall that tempered the wind from courtyard and garden was green with lichens. The wide stone gateway, with its oaken doors barred within by ma.s.sive cross-hooks that could have withstood a siege; the courtyard, flanked by the house and its rambling appendages that contained within their cavernous interiors the cider-press and cellars; the stable with its long stone manger, and next it the carved wooden bunk for the groom of two centuries ago; the stone pig-sty; the tile-roofed sheds--all had about them the charm of dignified decay.

But the "chateau" itself!

Generations of spiders had veiled every nook and corner within, and the nooks and corners were many. These cobwebs hung in ghostly festoons from the low-beamed ceiling of the living room, opening out upon the wild garden. They continued up the narrow stone stairway leading to the old-fas.h.i.+oned stone-paved bedrooms; they had been spun in a labyrinth all over the generous, spooky, old stone-paved attic, whose single eye of a window looked out over the quaint gables and undulating tiled roofs of adjoining attics, whose dark interiors were still pungent with the tons of apples they had once sheltered. Beyond my rambling roofs were rich orchards and n.o.ble trees and two cool winding lanes running up to the green country beyond.

Ten days of strenuous settling pa.s.sed, at the end of which my abandoned house was resuscitated, as it were. Without Suzette, my little maid-of-all-work, it would have been impossible. I may say we attacked this seemingly superhuman task together--and Suzette is so human. She has that frantic courage of youth, and a smile that is irresistible.

"To-morrow monsieur shall see," she said. "My kitchen is clean--that is something, eh? And the beds are up, and the armoires, and nearly all of monsieur's old studio furniture in place. _Eh, ben!_ To-morrow night shall see most of the sketches hung and the rugs beaten--that is again something, eh? Then there will be only the bra.s.s and the andirons and the guns to clean."

Ten days of strenuous attack, sometimes in the rain, and when I hammer my fingers in the rain I swear horribly; the average French saw, too, would have placed Job in a sanitarium. Suzette's cheery smile is a delight, and how her st.u.r.dy, dimpled arms can scrub, and dust, and cook, and clean. When she is working at full steam she invariably sings; but when her souffle does not souffle she bursts into tears--this good little peasant maid-of-all-work!

And so the abandoned house by the marsh was settled. Now there is charm, and crackling fires o' nights within, and sunny breakfasts in the garden without--a garden that grew to be gay with flowers, and is still in any wind, thanks to my friend the lichen-stained wall over which clamber vines and all manner of growing things; and sometimes my kitten with her snow-white breast, whose innocent green eyes narrow to slits as she watches for hours two little birds that are trying to bring up a small family in the vines. I have told her plainly if she even touches them I will boil her in oil. "Do you hear, Miquette?" and she turns away and licks her pink paw as if she had not heard--you essence of selfishness that I love!

Shall I tell you who is coming to dine to-night, Green-eyes? Our neighbours! Madame Alice de Breville who spoils you, and the Marquis de Clamard who does not like p.u.s.s.y-cats, but is too well-bred to tell you so, and the marquise who flatters you, and Blondel! Don't struggle--you cannot get away, I've got you tight. You are not going to have your way all the time. Look at me! Claws in and your ears up! There! And Tanrade, that big, whole-souled musician, with his snug old house and his two big dogs, either one of which would make mince-meat of you should you have the misfortune to mistake his garden for your own. Madame de Breville--do you hear?--who has but to half close her eyes to make Tanrade forget his name. He loves her madly, you see, p.u.s.s.y-kit!

Ah, yes! The lost village! In which the hours are never dull. Lost village! With these Parisian neighbours, whose day of discovery antedated mine by several years. Lost village! In which there are jolly fishermen and fishergirls as pretty as some gipsies--slim and fearless, a genial old mayor, an optimistic blacksmith, and a butcher who is a seigneur; gentle old women in white caps, blue-eyed children, kind dogs, fresh air, and _life_!

There is a mysterious fascination about that half-hour before the first glimmer of dawn. The leaves, this September morning, are s.h.i.+vering in the dusk of my garden; the house is as silent as my sleeping cat save for the resonant tick-tock, tick-tock, of the tall Norman clock in the kitchen, to which I tiptoe down and breakfast by candle-light.

You should see the Essence of Selfishness then as she purrs around a simmering saucepan of milk destined for my coffee, and inspects the toast and jam, and sniffs at my breech-loader, well greased with neatsfoot-oil, and now the ghostly light in the courtyard tells me to hurry out on the bay.

Low tide. Far out on the desert of black clay a colony of gulls have spent the night. Their quarrelsome jargon reaches me as I cautiously raise my head over the dunes, for often a band of plover is feeding at dawn out on the mud, close enough for a shot. Nothing in view save the gulls, those gossiping concierges of the bay, who rise like a squall of snow as I make a clean breast of my presence, and start across the soggy, slippery mud toward the marsh running out to the open sea. A curlew, motionless on his long legs, calls cheerfully from the point of sand: "Curli--Curli!" Strong, cheerful old bird. The rifts of white mist are lifting from the bay, thinned into rose vapour now, as the sun creeps above the green hillsides.

Swis.h.!.+ Three silver plovers flash back of me--a clean miss. If we never missed we should never love a gun. It is time now to stalk the bottoms of the narrow, winding causeways that drain the bay. Their beds at low tide are full of dead mussels, dormant clams, and awkward sputtering crabs; the old ones sidling away from you with threatening claws wide open for combat; the young ones standing their ground bravely, in ignorance.