Part 88

My meals have never disagreed with me either--but I have always found them monotonous; they have always been so simple and so regular when I've had the ordering of them! Fried soles, chops or steaks, and that sort of thing, and a pint of lager-beer--no wine for me, thank you; I sell it--and all this just to serve as a mere foundation for a smoke--and a chat with Barty, if possible!

Hardly ever an ache or a pain, and I wouldn't live it all over again! yet I hope to live another twenty years, if only to take Leah's unborn great-grandchildren to the dentist's, and tip them at school, and treat them to the pantomime and Madame Tussaud's, as I did their mothers and grandmothers before them--or their fathers and grandfathers.

This seems rather inconsistent! For would I care, twenty years hence, to re-live these coming twenty years? Evidently not--it's out of the question.

So why don't I give up at once? I know how to do it, without pain, without scandal, without even invalidating my life-insurance, about which I don't care a rap!

Why don't I? why don't you, O middle-aged reader--with all the infirmities of age before you and all the pleasures of youth behind? Anyhow, we don't, either you or I--and so there's an end on't.

O Pandora! I have promised myself that I would take a great-grandchild of Barty's on a flying-machine from Marsfield to London and back in half an hour--and that great-grandchild can't well be born for several years--perhaps not for another twenty!

And now, gentle reader, I've had my little say, and I'm a good deal better, thanks, and I'll try not to talk about myself any more.

Except just to mention that in the summer of 1876 I contested East Rosherville in the Conservative interest and was successful--and owed my success to the canvassing of Barty and Leah, who had no politics of their own whatever, and would have canvassed for me just as conscientiously if I'd been a Radical, probably more so! For if Barty had permitted himself any politics at all, he would have been a red-hot Radical, I fear--and his wife would have followed suit. And so, perhaps, would I!

Part Tenth

"Je suis allé de bon matin Cueillir la violette, Et l'aubépine, et le jasmin, Pour célébrer ta fête. J'ai lié de ma propre main Bouton de rose et romarin Pour couronner ta blonde tête.

"Mais de ta royale beauté Sois humble, je te prie. Ici tout meurt, la fleur, l'été, La jeunesse et la vie: Bientôt, bientôt ce jour sera, Ma belle, où l'on te portera Dans un linceul, pâle et flétrie."

--A Favorite Song of Mary Trevor's.

That was a pleasant summer.

First of all we went to Ste. Adresse, a suburb of Hâvre, where there is very good bathing--with rafts, périssoires, pique-têtes to dive from--all those aquatic delights the French are so clever at inventing, and which make a "station balnéaire" so much more amusing than a mere British watering-place.

We made a large party and bathed together every morning; and Barty and I taught the young ones to dive and do "la coupe" in the true orthodox form, with that free horizontal sweep of each alternate arm that gives it such distinction.

It was very good fun to see those rosy boys and girls taking their "hussardes" neatly without a splash from the little platform at the top of the pole, and solemnly performing "la coupe" in the wake of their papa; one on his back. Right out to sea they went, I bringing up the rear--and the faithful Jean-Baptiste in attendance with his boat, and Leah inside it--her anxious eyes on the stretch to count those curly heads again and again. She was a good mathematician, and the tale always came right in the end; and home was reached at last, and no one a bit the worse for a good long swim in those well-aired, sunlit waves.

Once we went on the top of the diligence to Étretat for the day, and there we talked of poor Bonzig and his first and last dip in the sea; and did "la coupe" in the waters that had been so fatal to him, poor fellow!

Then we went by the steamer Jean Bart to Trouville and Deauville, and up the Seine in a steam-launch to Rouen.

In the afternoons and evenings we took long country walks and caught moths, or went to Hâvre by tramway and cleared out all the pastry-cooks in the Rue de Paris, and watched the transatlantic steamers, out or home, from that gay pier which so happily combines business with pleasure--utile dulci, as Père Brossard would have said--and walked home by the charming Côte d'Ingouville, sacred to the memory of Modeste Mignon.

And then, a little later on, I was a good Uncle Bob, and took the whole party to Auteuil, near Paris, and hired two lordly mansions next door to each other in the Villa Montmorency, and turned their gardens into one.

Altogether, with the Scatcherds and ourselves, eight children, governesses, nurses, and other servants, and dogs and the smaller animals, we were a very large party, and a very lively one. I like this sort of thing better than anything else in the world.

I hired carriages and horses galore, and for six weeks we made ourselves thoroughly comfortable and at home in Paris and around.

That was the happiest holiday I ever had since the vacation Barty and I spent at the Lafertés' in the Gué des Aulnes when we were school-boys.

And such was our love for the sport he called "la chasse aux souvenirs" that one day we actually went there, travelling by train to La Tremblaye, where we spent the night.

It was a sad disenchantment!

The old Lafertés were dead, the young ones had left that part of the country; and the house and what remained of the gardens now belonged to another family, and had become formal and mean and business-like in aspect, and much reduced in size.

Much of the outskirts of the forest had been cleared and was being cleared still, and cheap little houses run up for workmen; an immense and evil-smelling factory with a tall chimney had replaced the old home-farm, and was connected by a single line of rails with the station of La Tremblaye. The clear, pellucid stream where we used to catch crayfish had been canalized--"s'est encanaillé," as Barty called it--its waters fouled by barge traffic and all kinds of horrors.

We soon found the haunted pond that Barty was so fond of--but quite in the open, close to an enormous brick-field, and only half full; and with all its trees cut down, including the tree on which they had hanged the gay young Viscount who had behaved so badly to Séraphine Doucet, and on which Séraphine Doucet afterwards hanged herself in remorse.