Part 7

The book lies forgotten on my knee. The brown Meerschaum grows cold in my hand. My eyes, lost in musings among the flame-fringed logs, now peer beyond the past half-century—at a time which seems verily as far distant and as little related to the present as that year 1636 stamped and still faintly discernible on the antique cast-iron backplate of the fireplace.... I see a farm-house in a village of that province which in ancient days was known as Ile-de-France ‹I hate your modern régime départements›, by name Mesnil-le-Roy; not far distant from Mantes, the natty little town on the upper and green-watered Seine, generally adverted to as Mantes-la-Jolie.

Therein, during nearly a whole year, for reasons of delicate health, resided a certain very small English boy—French enough in those tender years. In this delectable old place, so full of good-smelling things in their seasons: hay, and grain, and fruit, and at all times the health-restoring cow, the house was in the spring-time covered with Glycine. And with the adorable Glycine the small boy, who loved flowers as much as milk and fruits and beasts, fell forthwith in love.

How that coquettish Jappy plant came originally to find a footing in so rustic a corner as Mesnil-le-Roy is more than I can account for. Your French peasant is not, as a rule, addicted to the delights of flower raising; and, in those distant days, Wisteria was still something of a rarity anywhere. But there it was, already in the sturdiest strength of its age, embracing the old walls, forcing its fibrous wood into every cranny of the greystone, framing every window, striving up the chimney stacks—and filling the air with honey sweetness. It must have taken at least two score years to reach such a size.

With the English boy, then barely four, it was a first love. He feasted on it with his every sense. From morning till eve he would be sucking the base of some blue corolla plucked from its calyx, for the sake of that intense sweetness to which the thing owes its Gallic name of Glycine; he would, whenever he could, run round and rejoice his eyes with the delicacies of pale green and purple, drink in the scent, and listen hypnotized to the never-ceasing buzz of honey-seekers in the sunshine. And, in the morning, his first thought, as he crept out of his small truckle-bed, was to go and plunge his hands into the dew that glittered upon these Glycine branches nodding in from every side at the mansarde window.

Like all first loves it was, as you see, violent. Well do I remember how, for months after he was removed back into the Paris house, the small boy would ply his mother with the yearning question, infantilely incorrect but vernacular: “Quand que nous retournerons aux Glycines, Maman?” always to receive the non-committal but consoling:

“Tantôt ... tantôt.”

This “tantôt” is the wonderful “by-and-by” which never comes to be!

And like all first loves this one was utterly forgotten in later years—to reappear, however, in the sere and yellow of age. For years a many, a purple Wisteria spreading about the eaves of a south-country house, was to me only a purple Wisteria. It was a creeper, and it was nothing more. It was not a “Glycine” until I had a creepered wall of my own. Then it surged before imagination’s eye with all the glamour of les premières amours, to which, in accordance with the old French saw, “on en revient toujours.”

Now, therefore, at Villino Loki, nothing will serve but a Glycine to creep along those walls which are more especially my own; to embrace my south windows and nod in at the casement. And the suave-breathed Eastern beauty, first brought over to the West and god-fathered by Professor Wister, will privily remain Glycine for me; although I may draw the indulgent visitor’s attention to her under the better-known name of Wisteria Sinensis.—I have, by the way, an ever-ready pretext; for I learn from “The Language of Flowers” that the special significance of this blossom is “Welcome, fair stranger!” I mean to have a profusion of it, for old sake’s sake. Besides, is it not meet that Loki should not be deprived, during his villeggiatura, of the company of some Chinese living thing?

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Strange how sharp and detailed will some of our very early memories remain in after life, when even important scenes of our later years are so easily forgotten! That old farm of Mesnil-le-Roy is still a clear picture, vignetted, so to speak, upon grey pages of oblivion.... I can yet see the orchard, strewn with myriad fallen apples—the byres, whereto at sundown returned the slow-pacing, dreamy, placid-eyed milch cows; the giant walnut-tree, with one of its main branches blasted by lightning—blasted on the stormy night, during which “thunder had fallen” freely ‹as the little boy heard the labourers say, awe-struck, in the morning; but during which he had slept under the brown-tiled roof without the slightest disturbance›.... I can see the Four Banal, that co-operative bread-oven, a relic of mediæval institutions, which was still common enough in those days; where you could have such an entrancing view of lambent blue flames lined with yellow when the door stood open to receive the unbaked loaves; and where the air smelt so divinely of hot wheaten crust when they were removed on completion....

It was, by the way, on that alluring spot—the boy used to find his way there regularly on the days when on cuisait—that he heard a certain remark, which to his child ears had no special meaning, but which remained on memory’s tablets to assume later an interesting significance. The country folk were very kind. The little English boy, left for the good of his health at the farm of père Pelletier, was known to everybody; was accepted and treated as one of the community. Rarely did he stroll, as might any roaming puppy dog, into an open door of the village without being supplied with a generous sup of milk, or a tartine de raisiné; or again, in season, with a pomme cuite. The roasted apple, be it said, browning and lusciously oozing caramel, was a standing affair in that old-world village. There was, however, on that day, a benighted wayfarer who obviously could not reconcile with these rustic surroundings the yellow-haired, barelegged little boy gravely gazing at the glowing oven.

“D’ousqui sort, ce gosse-là?” ‹for which barbarous lingo I take leave to give as an equivalent: Who’s the kid?› asked the man. And the answer came: “Ça?—ca, mais le p’tit godem, donc.” ‹That—why, that’s the little “goddam.”›

Le petit godem!... Such was the name under which that young innocent was known at Mesnil-le-Roy, and, be it understood, in all cordiality and benevolence! Of a certainty not one of those excellent people had the remotest idea of the meaning of their “godem:” with them it was only the established equivalent for English.

The term is a noun, not an expletive, which has come down through five centuries—from the days, in fact, of the English occupation of France. Among the written records of those stirring times we come across many a passage in which a Duguesclin, a Maid of Orleans, or a Dunois is heard to mention hatefully “les godems,” or “les godons d’Angleterre.” Now, all that fertile country of the Vexin, the Ile-de-France and the Beauce, of which the fat farm land of my old père Pelletier was so fair a sample, was obstinately fought for by the English for the best part of a century. Mantes-la-Jolie—now mainly famed for its river terraces, its sweet water grapes and its savoury matelottes or eel stews—was once a fortified place of note, taken and retaken by French and English more than once; but finally captured ‹in 1418› by the noble Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, the Achilles of England, as the French themselves dubbed him, and firmly held by the “godems” for more than thirty years. To have heard that mispleasing word used dispassionately, merely as a substantive, is indeed a link with the past.

Strange paths of the musing thought, winding from Wisteria Sinensis to the days of our conquering English archer!

* * * * *

I spoke of these childhood memories as of oddly clear pictures emerging here and there out of grey mists of oblivion. Another now detaches itself in the same way from the clouds of the very distant past.

It belongs to the following summer. A perfume of Glycine still lingers about it, no doubt; for there again, upon the stone and through the curvetting iron-work balconies of the fair Louis XV house overlooking the park of St. Cloud, pale silvery green leafage, with here and there a cluster of faint blue, spreads in a well-regulated display—widely different, though, from the foaming profusion of the Mesnil. But the impression more specially associated with those happy St. Cloud days is the incense of the Sweet Briar.

What has happened—I pause and ask indignantly—to the Sweet-Briar of the world? Whither has the celestial, the entrancing scent of the true Eglantine vanished? Our twentieth century Briar is still—there is no gainsaying it—a delicious being, in its ephemeral exquisiteness of flower and its pleasant, if but slightly more lasting, leafy odour. But never, in subsequent life, have I captured again the sudden delight first brought to my childish nostrils by a puff of breeze that had passed over some hidden clump of sweet Eglantine. This first impression is connected with certain grassy alleys piercing deep the grand old-world park, or rather forest, of St. Cloud, which were my favourite playgrounds in the early sixties of the last century. ‹There is something distinctly suitable to the status of Grandpa, albeit merely “brevet” rank as in my case, in memorising thus about a past century!›

I can see the five-year-old arrested short upon the turf, in the midst of the hot pursuit of a blue butterfly, by his first whiff in life of Rosa Rubiginosa: so might a setter halt and stiffen, having got the wind of a grouse.—The source of the fitful stream of fragrance was hidden among clumps of forbidding brambles. Besides, there was no following the trail: it seemed ubiquitous. Like some Puck in his most tantalising mood, it would lead up and down, up and down—luring now to right, now to left, now straight ahead, anon seemed to whisk past from behind, until, in a kind of “dwam,” the child would give up the baffled purpose and pensively trot home by the nurse’s side.

For days the ambrosial fragrance dwelt in his little turned-up nose. It haunted the sensitive child-mind much as, later, in budding manhood, the remembrance of some enchanting face seen for an instant and then lost to sight. He had at last to confide his hopeless passion to his mother. It smelt ‹he explained› like the Pomme Reinette of the dessert plates, but oh, so much, so much better! The reference to the well-known and excellent variety of apple left no doubt about the nature of the plant which had exhaled the elusive trails of perfume. “Reinette” became the accepted name of the woodland charmer and the hunt for Reinette bushes in the more devious paths of the wood a daily occupation.

* * * * *

With these expeditions is associated another first acquaintance that made a singularly strong impression.

There was, at the end of one of those heavenly grassed alleys, a group of brushwood greenery from which the unmistakable fragrance flowed deliciously across the path when the wind blew from a certain direction—I should say, now, from the west; for the path led to Garches, a place which, some eight years later, during the siege of Paris, became notorious as the scene of some very ferocious bayonet fighting. Undoubtedly there was a wealth of the desirable “Reinette” amid that underwood. But, to the mild surprise of nurse or mother, or whoever it might be who escorted the child upon his daily constitutional in the wood, nothing could induce him to draw that particular cover. He developed an ingenuity ‹or rather should it be called a disingenuousness› for pushing investigations or carrying on a game in paths that gave this spot a wide berth. Whenever possible, even, he found some specious argument for avoiding the Garches-ward alley altogether. No one, I believe, ever knew the reason.

The fact is that, hard thereby, as if standing sentinel, rose a company of tall, slender Aspens—trees that, in a small boy’s estimation, did not behave as mere trees should. He had realised this, with a suddenness that first made his heart jump, and then rooted him on the spot, one day when, having caught up his scent, he was rushing with a whoop to the capture of his bush. The Aspens, up to that instant quite placid, palely green, grew all at once white with excitement and nodded their heads to each other; after which came the noise of their leaves; not the honest rustle of green trees, but derisive laughter; sounds, too, weirdly human, ringing as though in mockery of the discomfited invader.

Mark you, there is something decidedly uncanny in the deportment of the Aspen and its gracile, long-stalked trembling leaves, the white undersides of which any puff of wind exposes simultaneously to view—turning, on the instant, the whole of the green to foaming silver. There was no doubt about the matter then. These paling and odd rustling trees completely overawed Master Louis ‹Louis is Loki’s grandpa’s baptismal name, now sunk into disuse›, though, in his budding masculine pride, he kept the secret of his abhorrence very close within his own little bosom.

On one occasion, however, when he had had to make up his mind to walk past the blanching, murmuring group unless he were prepared ‹which he was not› to explain the nature of his objection, he asked, with a fair show of indifference, what manner of tree it was which “made that funny noise: he-he-he-he.” “One would say,” he added with elaborate airiness, “that they make a mock of one!”