The Old Countess (Sedgwick)/Chapter 6
IT was in early April that Jill and Richard Graham came back to Buissac. Jill drove the car along the winding valley road, its bordering poplars sharp and silvery against an apple-green sky. Behind them the sunset was apricot-coloured; and the cliffs were a cold mauve. Jill liked to drive and Graham liked to be driven; he said that he could not see anything at the steering-wheel. He sat, now, his scarf up around his ears, for the hood was down, gazing; silent. For hours, while they drove, he would sit like that, saying not a word, and Jill, as if she heard, through closed doors, a great orchestra playing, was vaguely aware of the splendid rhythms and harmonies that wreathed and unwreathed themselves in his mind. There was something sad in listening to an orchestra behind closed doors; yet something rather uplifting too. Even if one were left out, one was uplifted. She had not known the mingled state now for a long time.
Dick had disliked the Riviera as much as ever and had done no work there at all. In the intervals of tennis and dancing—and no one she had ever met, Jill considered, danced so divinely as Dick—he had sat in solitary, sunny corners above the sea and read metaphysics. Jill asked him to read aloud to her, when she found him thus, and stared at him with incredulous eyes after a page of 'Appearance and Reality.'—'Help! Help!' she cried. 'How perfectly devastating! How do you stand it? What's it all about?'
'You have to start young, Jill, to see that,' said Dick. He had laid his book face downward on his knee to look at her, and put his arm around her shoulders. He didn't care about her sharing philosophy a bit more than he did about her sharing art. All he wanted of her was her presence.
'What good does it do you?' asked Jill.
And, laughing, rising, stretching himself, Dick had answered, 'God knows! I only hope I may, too, if I go on looking.'
Dick was looking for something; that was what it came to. It was because of some inner quest that he had that remote, preoccupied, brooding gaze. How strange it was! Why couldn't people be satisfied with what was here and now?
She had not had to remind him of his promise to Madame de Lamouderie. After his long inaction his thoughts turned spontaneously to the Dordogne country where inspiration needed no seeking. Never, as he had told her, had he seen a country so tuned to his nature, so apt for his expression; and they were coming back to the Ecu d'Or because, of all the provincial inns they had stayed at, none had compared with it for economy and excellence.
The Ecu d'Or did not depend upon the precarious and seasonal supply of tourists—rare at the best in this district. The restaurant that opened, beneath the balcony, upon the road, was filled every day by local clients, and as Jill and Graham drove up in the sharp, spring evening air, it was uproarious with melody and laughter. Some recent fair or festival must so have crowded it and at the central table a sprawling youth, his soft black hat tipped over his ear, his arm uplifted, entertained his friends with a song, its nasal terminal e's prodigiously prolonged:
Nuit d'amour—'
came the refrain.
Graham laughed as they heard it. 'Irreverent dog! He makes light of national divinities like the nuit d'amour! It's good, you know;—the roguery of his phrasing.'
Jill's lip curled a little. 'One does get fed up with them sometimes,' she remarked. And she suddenly realized that she was feeling fed up. It was a new, yet an old adventure beginning again, and for once it found her jaded and unresponsive. She did not want to laugh.
Monsieur Michon, pink of face and black of eye, was hurrying forward to greet them, and Graham handed out the lighter luggage to Amélie, her gaunt face glazed, as usual, with fatigue and perspiration. As usual, Dick refused to allow her to charge herself like a beast of burden with the heavier valises and they made their way upstairs while Madame Michon, emerging from the kitchen to smile and bow, called up to Amélie that Monsieur et Madame were to have the rooms they had so much appreciated last year. 'C'est bon de vous revoir, Madame,' she said to Jill. 'Vous aimez donc notre petit Buissac?' and Jill had to say she did, though feeling that she so little loved to-night the noisy restaurant, Monsieur Michon's affability, or Madame Michon's mole with the crisp black hairs gushing out of it.
While Dick went to put away the car and while Amélie descended to fetch hot water, Jill leaned on her window-sill and looked out over the river. It was strange how she was thinking of England this evening, thinking of its quiet, its decorum, its dullness; and with yearning. How far away it seemed! How unattainable, almost! And what was she to do with herself now? Try to read and understand 'Appearance and Reality,' perhaps.
Graham had remarked, more than once, that the reason the food was so good at the Ecu d'Or was because they had not attempted baths or hot-water pipes, and Amélie soon appeared with the two steaming brocs.
Jill turned to smile at her. She had elicited from Amélie on her last stay that her wages were piteously small and had told her that she could easily find her a good place with friends in Paris; but Amélie was not able to leave une vieille Maman. Jill now asked after this impeding relative and heard, with regret, that she was in thriving health.
'How would you like, Jill,' Dick asked from the adjoining room, when he had come up and was splashing happily, 'to take a house here?—if you're fed up with this place.' Dick was often unaware of one's moods, but he never forgot an expressed feeling.
'Oh—it's not the Ecu d'Or I mind,' said Jill, getting out her little black crêpe-de-Chine dress. It was a delightful garment and had served her well for a year. One turn and it was over your head, and one tie and it was adjusted. She slipped on her pearls, for Dick liked to see her in them. 'It's France itself, sometimes, you know. We are such strangers here; and if we lived here for a hundred years we'd be strangers just the same. I suppose the place is still full of starving cats.'
'Let us hope that most of them have died during the winter,' said Dick cheerfully. 'People are much nearer the bare bones of existence here than with us. They're starved themselves, as I think I've said before.'
'Monsieur Michon isn't starved; or Madame either. It's a country of fat men and thin animals,' said Jill bitterly.
'The Michons aren't peuple. You don't see many fat peasants. I like it, you know. I like the bare bones; the sense of having got away from smugness and civilization. A place like this is still essentially mediæval.'
'Yes; and I suppose they left their dust lying in heaps along the road in the Middle Ages, too.'
'Worse than their dust.'
'Well, nothing could be worse than that headless corpse of a dog we found on the river-path. It had lain there for months and no one had troubled to take a spade and bury it.'
'They have no sense of public responsibility. They're individualists to a man. Even when they seem to have acquired it—in the big towns—it's only because an energetic mayor, with his eye on the Chambre des Députés, dragoons them into efficiency. I like it, as I say, if it doesn't leave too many dead dogs about.'
Monsieur Michon, in the stuffy little dining-room that smelt of beeswax and sour wine, was waiting to serve them himself and, as usual, the dinner was excellent. Monsieur Michon hovered near while they ate, eager to impart the history of each dish he found appreciated. The fish came from the river—and came that very afternoon; it was a fine fish, n'est-ce-pas;—and could he give Madame a little more of the sauce piquante? The chicken had been fattened in their own basse-cour and he brought the crisp salad and dressed it on the table before them so that they should observe his dexterous minglings and turnings.
'Do you know whether Madame de Lamouderie is well?' Jill asked, realizing that Monsieur Michon might find her silence unsympathetic, and feeling better, after the chicken.
'Ah, la vieille dame. I have not seen her all winter,' said Monsieur Michon, standing beside them ready for conversation over the pastry and wine. 'She is there, I know; but she never comes down into the village. Only Monsieur Trumier—the old servant. Madame Blondel, at the mercerie, is Monsieur Trumier's niece, and he often comes to see her and her children. But the old lady, no. It has been a cold winter. She will have found it long. But now that Mademoiselle Ludérac has returned it will go better with her.'
As she heard the name it seemed to Jill that she remembered something long forgotten; that she reëntered the sense of expectancy, of fairy-tale; sad or happy. She saw the solitary grave under the chestnut branches; the bare, sad room at the Manoir and the fading autumn roses.
'Does Mademoiselle Ludérac come down often?' she asked.
'She comes sometimes; yes; she comes. She is a very eccentric young lady,' said Monsieur Michon dispassionately.
'In what way eccentric?' It was Jill who questioned. Graham had ordered a glass of the cognac that he remembered as so excellent and was turning the stem of his glass slowly while he watched the light shine in it.
'She cares nothing—nothing at all for human beings, but has a mania for animals,' smiled Monsieur Michon. 'Did Madame not see many old useless animals up at the Manoir?—She finds them; she collects them—Dieu sait comment. They seem to know by instinct when she goes by. I have seen her pass with a mangy dog in her arms, a dirty old dog, full of vermin, which crawled out from a heap of refuse down by the river when she looked over the wall one day. He had been thrown down there to die, no doubt; and better to have left him.—But no. She carried him up to the Manoir and tended him and fed him, we may suppose, and Monsieur Trumier shot him to make a good end of the story. She does not carry her mania so far as to keep them all alive. When they are too old and ill, they are shot; dogs, cats, goats, what you will;—we heard of a sheep one day.—It is a strange occupation for a young lady.'
'I don't think it strange at all,' said Jill, but she was too much absorbed by what Monsieur Michon had told to speak indignantly; her eyes dwelt on him. 'I think it only too natural;—for there are a great many unhappy animals in Buissac.'
'Ah, Madame, there are unhappy people, and animals, everywhere,' said Monsieur Michon with a touch of dryness. 'For my part I think it more natural to devote oneself to one's own kind. The beasts do not feel as we do. And they are there for our use and convenience.'
Jill was now aware of indignation. 'They are only there like that because we are stronger than they are. They have just as much right to live as we have;—more right than a lot of us!' she exclaimed, while Graham, peeling an orange for her, listened with a smile.
'Well, Madame would then agree with Mademoiselle Ludérac,' said Monsieur Michon; and, a further memory coming, he laughed a little.—'She is a very eccentric young lady. She struck Monsieur le curé one day!'
'Struck him?' It was Graham who questioned, his face lighted by amusement. 'What for?'
'It was during a dispute over an animal—bien entendu. Monsieur le curé is irascible—and Mademoiselle Ludérac is not a favourite of his.—She is not pratiquante; though once a year she goes to High Mass with the old lady. It was his cat she had found; his own cat; very thin: soon to be a mother; and it had followed her crying. When Monsieur le curé met her, carrying it up to the Manoir, he was very angry. They came to bitter words. He tried, I believe, to take the cat from her. She resisted. Finally it was blows. All the village saw, though I, unfortunately, was absent on that day. The cat escaped in the scuffle and was never seen again; but Monsieur le curé always affirms that she managed to find it and to conceal—or kill it—up at the Manoir. He said that he had never possessed such a mouser. Madame Céleste, his housekeeper, depended on it. A cat does not catch mice well, Madame, if it is fed.' Monsieur Michon felt that Jill's sympathies were not with the curé.
'I hate their killing mice!' Jill exclaimed. 'I'm so glad it escaped. I'm glad she struck the curé, too.' And, laughing again, with a bow for a charming lady's extravagance, Monsieur Michon returned to his clients in the café below.
'How perfectly glorious!' Jill exclaimed. Her mood of apathy was gone—'It puts a new heart into one to hear anything like that. The starving cats of Buissac have a patron saint.'
'A warrior saint. Yes. She sounds a terrifying young person,' said Graham, still laughing and handing Jill her cleverly separated orange. 'Though I'm glad, too, that she struck the curé. I remember him. A fat old scoundrel; bloated with sacramental wine and wafers. But I'm afraid your heroine is a little détraquée, Jill. Monsieur Michon evidently thinks so.'
'Monsieur Michon would think Joan of Arc détraquée. I can't bear Monsieur Michon.'
'He's the same type as the curé, isn't he;—only gone into another business; dans la libre pensée, as he would put it. I hope the curé had an umbrella while he fought,' said Graham, still amused by the thought of the combat. 'That would complete the picture. One of those distended black cotton umbrellas they carry. And he'd stick it under his arm while he wrestled for his cat.'
'Poor, poor little creature! Soon to be a mother!' said Jill, thinking of their cherished family cat at home and her tenderly supervised accouchements. 'Yes. I can see the umbrella;—and I can see the cat, with its round, horrified eyes.'
'My dear Jill, life isn't long enough—we're not strong enough—to begin to think of all the cats.'
'Never mind. I'll think about Mademoiselle Ludérac's cats. And I shall go up and see her to-morrow,' said Jill.