F. Berkeley Smith

“ It massacres when it can and adds you to the line of dead things along its edge where you are only remembered by the ebb and flow of the tide. On blue calm mornings, being part of the jetsam, you may glisten in the sun beside a water-logged spar; at night you become a nonentity, of no more consequence along the wavering line of drift than a rotten gull. But if, like Marianne, you have fought skilfully, you may again enter Pont du Sable with a quicker eye, a harder body, and a deeper knowledge of the southwest gale. ”

“ The more I know this modest [Pg 22] great man the more I like him, and I have known him in all kinds of wind and weather, for Tanrade is an indefatigable hunter. He and I have spent nights together in his duck-blind—a submerged hut, a murderous deceit sunk far out on the marsh—cold nights; soft moonlight nights—the marsh a mystic fairy-land; black nights—-mean nights of thrashing rain. Nights that paled to dawn with no luck to bring back to Suzette's larder. Sunny mornings after lucky nights, when Tanrade and I would thaw out over our coffee in the garden among the roses. ”

“ Pont du Sable was awake for the day.
It is the most unimportant of little villages, yet it is four centuries old, and of stone. It seems to have shrivelled by its great age, like its oldest inhabitants. One-half of its two score of fishermen's houses lie crouched to the rambling edge of its single street; the other half might have been dropped at random, like stones from the pocket of some hurrying giant. Some of these, including the house of the ruddy little mayor and the polite, florid grocer, lie spilled along the edge of the marsh. ”

“ I have never regarded Suzette as a servant—she has always been to me more like a child whom I was responsible for. What would my house abandoned by the marsh have been without her cheeriness, and her devotion, I thought, and what would it be when she was gone? No other Suzette would ever be like her—and her cooking would vanish with the rest. Diable! these little marriages play the devil with us at times. And yet, if any one deserved to be happy it was Suzette. ”

“ The real grain of saneness left in young Garron was his inborn love of a gun. It was the gun which brought him down from Paris, back to the Great Marsh now and then when the ducks were on flight.
He had his own gabion now at the lower end of the bay at Pont du Sable, in which he slept and shot from nights when the wind was northeast—a comfortable, floating box of a duck-blind sunk in an outer jacket of tarred planks and chained to a heavy picket driven in the mud and wire grass, for the current ran dangerously strong there when the tide was running out. ”

“ A heavy peasant's cart goes by, groaning in agony under the brake. When the wind is from the sea, it is like a bevy of witches shrilling my doom down the chimney. "Aye, aye, 'tis he," they seem to scream, "the stranger—the s-t-r-a-n-g-e-r." One's mind is alert at this hour—one must be brave in a foreign land.
And so I sat up late, smoking a black pipe that gurgled in unison with the purring on my chest while I thought seriously of Marianne.
I had seen her go laughing to jail two months ago, handcuffed to a gendarme on the back seat of the last car of the toy train. ”

“ Needless to say, nothing ever happened to anything. He could make more noise and do less harm than any one I ever knew. Then he would sing us both into good humour until Suzette's peasant cheeks shone like ripe apples.
"It is not the same without Monsieur Tanrade," Suzette sighed to-day as she brought my luncheon to my easel in a shady corner of my wild garden—a corner all cool roses and shadow. ”

“ Then he stopped and inquired seriously—"What will you do without her?"
"One must not be selfish," I replied with a helpless shrug. "Suzette has earned it—so has Tanrade. It was his unfinished opera that was in the way: Alice was clever."
He crossed to where I stood and laid his hand on my shoulder, and though he did not open his lips I knew what was passing in his mind.
"Charity to all," he said softly at length. "It is so good to make others happy! Courage, mon petit—the price we pay for love, devotion—friendship, is always a heavy one." ”

“ The stopping of an automobile at his gate now caused him to look up significantly. Madame de Bréville had arrived. As Alice entered every man in the room rose to his feet. Never had I seen her look lovelier, gowned, as she was, in simple black, her dark hair framing her exquisite features, pale as ivory, her sensitive mouth tense as she pressed Tanrade's hand nervously, and took her seat beside us. For an instant, I saw her dark eyes flash as she met the steady gaze of the curé's. ”

“ It is surprising how quick Suzette can heat the milk.
The old man is now seated in her kitchen before a cold duck of the curé's killing and hot coffee—real coffee with a stiff drink of applejack poured into it, and there is bread and cheese besides. Like hungry men, he eats in silence and when he has eaten he tells me his dog is dead—that woolly sheep dog of his with a cast in one fishy green eye. ”

“ There is little harmony between rising yeast and a failing heart. Again the bell jingles; this time it is [Pg 19] the Mère Marianne, with a basket of quivering, iridescent mackerel just in from the night's fishing.
Mère Marianne, who once was a village belle, is now thirty-three years of age, strong as a man, fair-haired, hatless, bronzed by the sun, salt-tanned, blue-eyed, a good mother to seven fair-haired, blue-eyed children; yet a hard, amiable drinker in her leisure hours after a good catch.
"Bonjour, my all beautiful!" she greets Suzette as the door opens. ”

“ He forgot during such moments of ecstasy that his father was either out at sea with his nets or back in the village good-naturedly drunk, or that his mother, whom he vaguely remembered, was dead.
Tanrade was a so much better father to him than his own that the rest of his wretched little existence did not count. When the father was fishing, the little boy cared for himself. He knew how to heat the pot and make the soup when there was any to make. He knew where to dig for clams and sputtering crabs. It was the bread that bothered him most—it cost two sous. ”

“ One evening I had shot late on the marshes and started for home by way of La Poche. It was bright moonlight when I reached a trail new to me and approached the deserted village by way of a tangled, overgrown road.
The wind had gone down with the rising of the moon, and the intense stillness of the place was such that I could hear about me in the tangle the lifting of a trampled weed and the moving of the insects as my boots disturbed them. The silence was uncanny. Under the brilliancy of the moon all things gleamed clear in a mystic light, their shadows as black as the sunken pits of a cave. ”

“ I laughed.
"I am," replied the curé frankly. "I believe in her; she is afraid of nothing. You see her as a vagabond—an outcast, and the next instant, Parbleu! she forces out of you your camaraderie—even your respect. You shake her by the hand, that straight old hag with her clear blue eyes, her square jaw and her hard face! She who walks with the stride of a man, who is as supple and strong as a sailor, and who looks you squarely in the eye and studies you calmly, at times disdainfully—even when drunk." ”

“ Three cobwebbed bottles of Burgundy are now carefully ranged before the crackling blaze in the living room. At six-thirty Suzette lays the generous dark-oak table in lace and silver, thin glasses, red-shaded candles, and roses—plenty of roses from the garden. Her kitchen by this time is no longer open to visitors. It has become a sacred place, teeming with responsibility—a laboratory of resplendent shining copper sauce-pans, pots and casseroles, in which good things steam and stew and bubble under lids of burnished gold, which, when lifted, give one a rousing appetite. ”

“ They slip out of my back gate at daylight, bound for the seat of war and slip in again at sundown like obedient children, talk in kitchen whispers to Suzette over hot cakes and cider, and go punctually to bed at nine—the very hour when the roaring old general and his aide-de-camp are toasting their gold spurs before my fire.
The general is tall and broad-shouldered, and as agile as a boy. ”

“ They are no longer desert wastes of sand and wire-grass, 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 ”

“ With the exception of the Municipal Council, consisting of the baker, the butcher, the grocer, and two raisers of cattle, none were to be admitted at the mayor's save Tanrade, myself and Alice de Bréville, whose presence the mayor had judged imperative, and who had been summoned from Paris.
Tanrade and I had arrived early—the mayor greeting us at the gate of his trim little garden, and ushering us to our chairs in the clean, well-worn kitchen, with as much solemnity as if there had been a death in the house. ”

“ I rang the bell of the presbytery early the next morning, by inserting my jackknife, to spare my fingers, in a loop at the end of a crooked wire which dangles over the rambling wall of the curé's garden. The door itself is of thick oak, and framed by stones overgrown with lichens—a solid old playground for nervous lizards when the sun shines, and a favourite sticking place for snails when it rains. ”

“ She knew, too, how far the incoming tide had reached, for she had just left it at her bare heels by way of a winding narrow causeway with a hard shell bottom that led to the marsh. She did not call for help, for she knew what lay before her and there was not a second to lose. The next instant, she had sprung out on the treacherous slime, running for a life in the fast-deepening glaze of water. ”

“ The air vibrates with the rip and rattle of musketry—savage volleys, filling the heavens with shrill, vicious waves of whistling bullets that kill at a miraculous distance. It is well that all this murderous fire occurs beyond the desert of dunes skirting the open sea, for they say the result upon the iron targets on the marsh is something frightful. The general in command is in a good humour over the record.
Despatch-bearers gallop at all hours of the day and night through Pont du Sable's single street. The band plays daily in the public square. ”

“ Over the soot-blackened chimney-piece is a painted figure of the Virgin, and a frigate in a bottle.
Monsieur le Curé had been watching all night beside the mahogany bed. Now and then he slipped his hand in the breast of his soutane of rusty black, drew out a steel watch, felt under a patchwork-quilt for a small feverish wrist, counted its feeble pulse, and filling a pewter spoon with a mixture of aconite, awakened the little boy who gazed at him with hollow eyes sunken above cheeks of dull crimson. ”

“ Now all the bay is alive. Moreover, the sea is sweeping in, filling the bay like a bath-tub, obliterating the causeways under millions of dancing ripples of turquoise. Soon my decoys are out, and I am sunk in a sand-pit at the edge of the sea. The wind holds strong from the northeast, and I am kept busy until my gun-barrels are too hot to be pleasant. ”

“ Under my friendly but somewhat judicial cross-examination that ensued, it was evident that not a word had escaped Alice's lips that any one but that big optimistic child of a Tanrade could have construed as her promise to be his wife. He confided her words to me reluctantly, now that he realized how little she had meant.
"Come," said I, in an effort to cheer him, "have courage! A woman's heart that is won easily is not worth fighting for. You shall see, old fellow—things will be better." ”

“ It was dark when she let down the bars of the orchard, leading into the farm-yard. Here the air was moist and heavy with the pungent odour of manure; a turkey gobbler and four timid hens roosting in a low apple tree, stirred uneasily as the cows passed beneath them to their stable next to the kitchen—a stable with a long stone manger and walls two feet thick. Above the stable was a loft covered by a thatched roof; it was in a corner of this loft, in a large box filled with straw and provided with a patchwork-quilt, that Yvonne slept. ”

“ The land lay still and cold under millions of stars. High above my chimney came faintly the "Honk, honk," of a flock of geese.
I closed my door, bolted the inner shutter, lighted my candle and motioned to Mr. Bear. The Essence of Selfishness was first on the creaky stairs. She paused half way up to let Mr. Bear pass, her ears again flat to her skull. Then I took them both to my room where they slept in opposite corners.
Lost village by the tawny marsh. Lost village, indeed, to-night! in which were hearts I loved, good comrades and sound red wine—Hark! the rush of wings. I must be up at dawn. ”