A Village of Vagabonds

Chapter One

THE HOUSE BY THE MARSH

It was in fat Madame Fontaine's little café at Bar la Rose, that Norman village by the sea, that I announced my decision. It being market-day the café was noisy with peasants, and the crooked street without jammed with carts. Monsieur Torin, the butcher, opposite me, leaned back heavily from his glass 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? Hélas! It is not possible, my friend, you are in earnest!"

"That lost hole of a village of sacré vagabonds," echoed Pompanet. "Why, the mud when the tide is out smells like the devil. It is unhealthy."

"Père 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 fishing-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 glass 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 fishing-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 class; 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 rushing off frantically in tangents. No wonder the train to my lost village is called "Le petit déraillard"--"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 shine, 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 passengers, for most of them come running after it out of breath.

"Hurry up, mademoiselle!" cries the engineer to a rosy-cheeked girl in sabots, rushing 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-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; 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 Curé; 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 massive 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.

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