King of Camargue
by Jean Aicard · English · Gutenberg #33867 · 461,074 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: King of Camargue
Author: Jean Aicard
Illustrator: George Roux
Louis Ruet
Translator: George Burnham Ives
Release date: October 16, 2010 [eBook #33867]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33867
Credits: Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Sam W. and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK KING OF CAMARGUE ***
Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Sam W. and the Online
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BIBLIOTHEQUE
DES CHEFS-D'OEUVRE
DU ROMAN
CONTEMPORAIN
_KING OF CAMARGUE_
JEAN AICARD
PRINTED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY BY
GEORGE BARRIE & SONS, PHILADELPHIA
COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY GEORGE BARRIE & SON
THIS EDITION OF
KING OF CAMARGUE
HAS BEEN COMPLETELY TRANSLATED
BY
GEORGE B. IVES
THE ETCHINGS ARE BY
LOUIS V. RUET
AND DRAWINGS BY
GEORGE ROUX
CHEFS-D'OEUVRE
DU
ROMAN CONTEMPORAIN
ROMANCISTS
THIS EDITION
DEDICATED TO THE HONOR OF THE
ACADEMIE FRANCAISE
IS LIMITED TO ONE THOUSAND NUMBERED AND REGISTERED
SETS, OF WHICH THIS IS
NUMBER 358
THE ROMANCISTS
JEAN AICARD
KING OF CAMARGUE
[Illustration: Chapter VI
_This woman had a way of looking at people that disconcerted
them. You would say that a sharp, threatening flame shot from
her eyes. It penetrated your being, searched your heart, and
you were powerless against it._]
TO EMILE TRELAT
My Very Dear Friend:
Permit me to dedicate this book to you, whose incomparable friendship
has been to the poet, obstinate in his idealism, of hourly assistance,
a constant proof of the reality of true generosity and kindness of
heart.
Jean Aicard.
_La Garde, near Toulon, April 11, 1890._
Contents
PAGE
I LIVETTE AND ZINZARA 3
II IN CAMARGUE 13
III THE DROVERS 21
IV THE SEDEN 27
V THE LOVERS 39
VI RAMPAL 51
VII THE MEETING 57
VIII ON THE BENCH 73
IX THE PRAYER 83
X THE TERRACE 91
XI THE HIDING-PLACE 99
XII A SORCERESS 121
XIII THE SNAKE-CHARMER 143
XIV JOUSTING 165
XV MONSIEUR LE CURE'S ARCHAEOLOGY 177
XVI ON THE ROOF OF THE CHURCH 205
XVII THE OLD WOMAN 219
XVIII THE BLESSED RELICS 231
XIX THE BRANDING 247
XX THE SNARE 261
XXI HERODIAS 279
XXII IN THE NEST 291
XXIII THE PURSUIT 303
XXIV IN THE GARGATE 323
XXV THE PHANTOM 331
NOTES 345
List of Illustrations
KING OF CAMARGUE
PAGE
RAMPAL AND THE GIPSY _Fronts._
RENAUD IN THE TOILS OF THE QUEEN 64
LIVETTE AND RENAUD 88
LIVETTE WATCHES ON THE CHURCH ROOF 216
THE GIPSY'S COUCH 312
KING OF CAMARGUE
I
LIVETTE AND ZINZARA
A shadow suddenly darkened the narrow window. Livette, who was running
hither and thither, setting the table for supper, in the lower room of
the farm-house of the Chateau d'Avignon, gave a little shriek of
terror, and looked up.
The girl had an instinctive feeling that it was neither father nor
grandmother, nor any of her dear ones, but some stranger, who sought
amusement by thus taking her by surprise.
Nor a stranger, either, for that matter,--it was hardly possible!--But
how was it that the dogs did not yelp? Ah! this Camargue is frequented
by bad people, especially at this season, toward the end of May, on
account of the festival of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, which attracts,
like a fair, such a crowd of people, thieves and gulls, and so many
mischievous gipsies!
The figure that was leaning on the outside of the window-sill,
shutting out the light, looked to Livette like a black mass, sharply
outlined against the blue sky; but by the thick, curly hair,
surmounted by a tinsel crown, by the general contour of the bust, by
the huge ear-rings with an amulet hanging at the ends, Livette
recognized a certain gipsy woman who was universally known as the
Queen, and who, for nearly two weeks, had been suddenly appearing to
people at widely distant points on the island, always unexpectedly, as
if she rose out of the ditches or clumps of thorn-broom or the water
of the swamps, to say to the laborers, preferably the women: "Give me
this or that;" for the Queen, as a general rule, would not accept what
people chose to offer her, but only what she chose that they should
offer her.
"Give me a little oil in a bottle, Livette," said the young gipsy,
darting a dark, flashing glance at the pretty girl with the fair,
sun-flecked hair.
Livette, charitable as she was at every opportunity, at once felt that
she must be on her guard against this vagabond, who knew her name. Her
father and grandmother had gone to Arles, to see the notary, who would
soon have to be drawing up the papers for her marriage to Renaud, the
handsomest drover in all Camargue. She was alone in the house.
Distrust gave her strength to refuse.
"Our Camargue isn't an olive country," said she curtly, "oil is scarce
here. I haven't any."
"But I see some in the jar at the bottom of the cupboard, beside the
water-pitcher."
Livette turned hastily toward the cupboard. It was closed; but, in
truth, the stock of olive oil was there in a jar beside the one in
which they kept Rhone water for their daily needs.
"I don't know what you mean," said Livette.
"The lie came from your mouth like a vile black wasp from a
garden-flower, little one!" said the motionless figure, still leaning
heavily on the window-sill, evidently determined to remain. "The oil
is where I say it is, and more than twenty-five litres too; I can see
it from here. Come, come, take a clean bottle and the tin funnel and
give me quickly what I want. I'll tell you, in exchange, what I see in
your future."
"It's a deadly sin to seek to know what God doesn't wish us to know,"
said Livette, "and you can guess that oil is kept in cupboards and
still be no more of a sorceress than I am. Go about your business,
good-wife. I can give you some of this bread, fresh baked last night,
if you wish, but I tell you I haven't any oil."
"And why do they call you Livette," said the Queen calmly, "if it
isn't on account of the field of old olive-trees--the oldest and
finest in the country--owned by your father, near Avignon? There you
were born. There you remained until you were ten years old, and at
that age--seven years ago, a mystic number--you came here, where your
father was made farmer, overseer of drovers, manager of everything, by
the Avignonese master of this 'Chateau d'Avignon,' the finest in all
Camargue.--'Livettes! livettes!' that's the way you used to ask for
_olivettes_, olives, when you were a baby. You were very fond of them,
and the nickname clung to you. A pretty nickname, on my word, and one
that suits you well, for if you're not dark like the ripe olive,
you're fair as the virgin oil, a pearl of amber in the sunlight, and
then you are not yet ripe. Your face is oval, and not stupidly round
like a Norman apple. You have the pallor of the olive-leaves seen from
below.--And that you may soon see them so, little one, is the blessing
I ask for you, as the cures of your chapels say, where they take us in
for pity. Be compassionate as they are, in the name of your Lord Jesus
Christ, and give me some oil quickly, I say--in the name of extreme
unction and the garden of agony!"
The gipsy had said all this without stopping to breathe, in a dull,
monotonous, muffled voice, but she added abruptly in loud, piercing,
incisive tones: "Do you understand what I say?" imparting to those
simple words an extraordinarily imperious and violent expression.
Livette hastily crossed herself.
"Come, enough of this!" said she, "I have nothing here for you, and we
keep the oil of extreme unction for better Christians! Begone, pagan,
begone!" she added, trying to counterfeit courage.
"Of the three holy women," continued the gipsy, "who took ship, after
the death of Jesus Christ, to escape the crucifying Jews, one was
like myself, an Egyptian and a fortune-teller. She knew the science of
the Magi, of those with whom great Moses contended for mastery in
witchcraft. She could, at will, order the frogs to be more numerous
than the drops of water in the swamps, and she held in her hand a rod
which, at her word, would change to a viper. Before Jesus she bowed,
as did Magdalen, and Jesus loved her too. In the tempest, as they were
crossing the sea, her wand pointed out the course to follow, and, to
do that with safety, had no need to be very long. Must you have more
pledges of my power and my knowledge? What more must I tell you to
induce you to give me the oil I need so much? If you were a man, I
would say: 'Look! I am dark, but I am beautiful! I am a descendant of
that Sara the Egyptian who, when the boat of the three holy women drew
near the sands of Camargue, paid the boatman by showing him her
undefiled body, stripped naked, with no thought of evil and without
sin, but knowing well that true beauty is rare and that the mere sight
of it is better than all the treasures of Solomon. So be it!'"
Livette was thoroughly alarmed. The gipsy's assurance, her hollow,
penetrating voice, imperious by fits and starts, these strange tales
filled with evil words on sacred subjects, this devilish mixture of
things pagan and things mystic, the consciousness of her own
loneliness, all combined to terrify her. She lost her head.
"Away with you, away with you," she cried, "queen of robbers! queen
of brigands! away with you, or I will call for help!"
"Your drover won't hear you; he's tending his drove to-day beside the
Vaccares. Come, give me the oil, I say, or I'll throw this black wand
on the ground, and you will see how snakes bite!"
But Livette, brave and determined, said: "No!" shuddering as she said
it, and, to glean a little comfort, cast a glance at the low beam
along which her father's gun was hanging. The gipsy saw the glance.
"Oh! I am not afraid of your gun," said she, "and to prove it--wait a
moment!"
She left the window. The light streamed into the room, bringing a
little courage to Livette's terrified heart, as she followed the gipsy
with her eyes. In the bright light of that beautiful May evening, the
gipsy woman stood out, a tall figure, against the distant, unbroken
horizon line of the Camargue desert, which could be seen through a
vista between the lofty trees of the park.
Livette felt a thrill of joy as she saw a troop of mares trotting
along the horizon, followed by their driver, spear in air--Jacques
Renaud, her fiance, without doubt.--But how far away he was! the
horses, from where she stood, looked smaller than a flock of little
goats. And her eyes came back to the gipsy queen. A few steps from the
farm-house, in front of the seigniorial chateau, a huge square
structure, with numerous windows, long closed,--a structure of the
sort that arouses thoughts of neglect and death and the grave,--the
gipsy stood on tiptoe, drawing down the lowest branch of a thorn-tree.
The thorns were long, as long as one's finger. With a twig of a tree
of that species the crown of the Crucified One was made.
She broke off a twig thickset with thorns, bent it into a circle,
twisting the two ends together like serpents, and returned to the
window.
Livette noticed at that moment that the two watch-dogs were following
the gipsy, with their tails between their legs, their noses close to
her heels, with little affectionate whines. And she, the gipsy Queen,
as slender as haughty, erect upon her legs, in a ragged skirt with
ample folds through the holes in which could be seen a bright red
petticoat, her bust enveloped in orange-colored rags crossed below her
well-rounded breasts, her amulets tinkling at her ears, medallions
jangling on her forehead, which was encircled by a gaudy fillet of
copper,--she, the Queen, came forward, holding in her hand the crown
of long stiff thorns, to which a few tiny green leaves clung in
quivering festoons;--and in a low, very low tone, she murmured the
same caressing plaint that the two great cowed dogs were murmuring,
saying to them, in their own language, mysterious things they
understood.
"Take this," said the gipsy, "let your kind heart be rewarded as it
deserves! Misfortune, which is at work for you, will soon make itself
known to you. How, may God tell you! In love, the wind that blows for
you is poisoned by the swamps. The charity your God enjoins is, so
they say, another form of love that brings true love good fortune. And
here is my queenly gift!"
She threw the crown of thorns through the window at Livette's feet.
"Madame!" exclaimed Livette in dismay.
But the gipsy had disappeared.
Infinite distress filled the poor child's heart. With her eyes fixed
on the crown, Livette recalled the legends in which the good Lord
Jesus appears disguised as a beggar--and in which He rewards those who
have received Him with sweet compassion.
In one of those legends, the Poor Man, welcomed with harsh words,
subjected to mockery and cowardly insults, struck with staves and
goblets and bottles thrown by drunken revellers--at last, standing
against the wall, begins to be transformed into a Christ upon the
Cross, bleeding at the holes in his hands and feet!--And, sick with
terror, she asked herself if she had not received with unkindness one
of the three holy women who, after the death of Jesus, crossed the sea
in a boat to the shores of Camargue, using their skirts for sails, and
assisted by the oars of a boatman, whom one of their number, Sara the
Egyptian, paid in heathen coin, by allowing him to see, as the price
of a Christian action, her undefiled body, entirely naked, upon the
self-same spot on which the church stands to-day.
Slowly she picked up the crown and threw it into the fire over which
the soup was stewing. Before it melted into ashes, the crown of thorns
seemed for a moment to be pure gold.
II
IN CAMARGUE
Every year, at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, the village that stands at
the southern end of Camargue, above the marshes, on a sand beach, the
line of which is constantly changed by the action of the waves and
high winds, every year, the feast of Saintes-Maries is celebrated on
May 24th; and at the time of that festival the gipsies flock to
Camargue in large numbers, impelled by a curious sort of piety,
mingled with a desire to pilfer the pilgrims.
Legends, like trees, spring from the soil,--are its expression, so to
speak. They are also its essence. At every step in Camargue, you find
the everlasting legend of the holy women, just as you everlastingly
see there the same tamarisk-trees, confused, against the horizon, with
the same mirages.
The two Marys, so runs the legend, Jacobe, Salome, and--according to
some authorities--Magdalen, and with them their bondwomen, Marcella
and Sara, adrift on the sea in a boat without masts or sails, pursued
by the accursed Jews, after the Saviour's death, spread to the breeze
strips of their skirts and their long, thin veils, and the wind
carried them to this beach at Camargue.
There a church was built. The sacred bones, found by King Rene, were
enclosed in a reliquary, which has never ceased to perform miracles.
And every year, from every corner of Provence, from the Comtat and
from Languedoc, the last of the believers throng to the spot, bringing
their aspirations and their prayers, dragging with them their sick
friends and kindred, or their own wretchedness, their wounds and their
lamentations.
Nothing more strange can be imagined than this land of desolation,
traversed every year by a multitude of cripples on their way to hope!
From afar, at the end of the desert tract, can be seen the
battlemented church that tells of the wars of long ago, of Saracen
invasions, of the precarious life led by the poor in the Middle Ages.
It stands there with its turrets and its bell-tower, which, like the
stumps of gigantic masts, tower above the cluster of houses grouped
about it; and the village, cut at about mid-height of the lower houses
by the horizon line of the sea, seems drifting like a phantom ship
among the billows of sand, like the boat of the holy women of the
olden time, doomed to founder at last in the desolation of the desert.
In this Camargue everything is strange. There are ponds like the huge
central pond, the Vaccares, in the centre of which one can wade with
ease; there are tracts of land where the pedestrian sinks out of sight
and is drowned. Here deception is easy. Yonder green slime that you
take for a level plain--beware!--men are drowned therein; those vast
stretches of water which seem to you small seas--return that way
to-morrow; they will have evaporated, leaving only a mirror of white
salt that crackles beneath your feet. Yonder, do you see the calm,
deep water? and trees on the shore? Ah! no, you can run along the
surface of that water; it is dry land; the mirage alone formed those
trees, just as it showed you the little child walking a league away,
apparently near at hand and very tall. A land of visions, dreams, and
hard work. A land of sedentary folk, who inhabit a vast space on the
shore of endless waters, with an infinity of variations of mirages,
sunbeams, reflections, and bright colors. A land of fever, where
strong men daily bring wild bulls to earth. A land of leave-takings,
for it is on the confines of an almost uninhabited land, on the shore
of that great blue and white thoroughfare, the sea; just at the point
where the Rhone, coming from the mountains, sets out upon its long
journey to the bottomless waters, where the sun will take it up again
to restore it to its source. An impressive land, which one feels to be
the end of so many things; of the great city-making river, of the
great expiring Faith, which flies to the sands to breathe its last,
with its dying waves beating at the foundations of a poor
battlemented church, amid the psalms, mingled with lamentations of a
dying race.
The ceremony of May 24th, at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, is
unquestionably one of the most barbarous spectacles which men of
modern times are permitted to witness.
Since science made the conquest of men's minds, the faith of the last
believers has changed. The most bigoted know, of course, that God can
manifest Himself when and how He pleases, but they also know that He
never pleases, in our positive days, to modify the movements of the
vast mechanism of His creation, not even for the lowly pleasure of
proving His existence to His creatures. The faith of civilized men no
longer expects anything from Heaven in this world.
Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, on the 24th of May, is the rendezvous of the
last savages of the Faith.
They who come to pray to the holy women for health of body and of
heart are unpolished creatures of a primitive belief. They believe,
and that is the whole of it. A cry, a prayer, and, in reply, the
saints can give them what they have not: eyes, legs, arms, life! And
they ask them to perform a miracle as artlessly as a condemned man
implores his pardon from the head of the State. That their prayers
should be granted is quite as possible, almost more probable, for the
saints have more pity. The few thousands of believers--it is long
since their numbers have been added to--who pay a visit to the saints
every year, see one or two miracles on each occasion. When the priest,
coming from the church, followed by a procession, stretches out toward
the sea the _Silver Arm_ which contains the relics, they see the sea
recede! That happens every year. Imagine, then, how strenuously they
importune the saints who can do so much with so little exertion! with
what energy they hurry to the spot! with what sighs they pour out
their hearts! with what a howling they utter their prayers! with what
fervor they raise their eyes, stretch out their necks and their arms!
All, all in vain. The last posturings of the great, fruitlessly
imploring sorrow are to be seen there, in that desert corner of
France, between the arms of that dying stream, on the shore of the sea
that is eating away the island; beneath the arches of yonder church,
so white without, so black within, wherein every hand holds a taper,
flickering like a star of human misery, which burns for God and
greases the fingers, and for which the beggar, whose heart would be
made glad by a single sou, must pay five sous.
The whole region seems to be at once the highway to exile, and a wild
place of refuge. Therefore, the gipsies love it. It is one of the main
cross-roads of their interlacing highways which envelop the whole
world; it is one of the favorite countries of the race that has no
country.
And every year, the gipsies come to Camargue to enjoy their very
ancient privilege of occupying a black crypt or underground chapel,
under the choir of the church, consecrated to Saint Sara the Egyptian.
In that cavern they can be seen crouching at the foot of an altar
whereon is a little shrine--Saint Sara's--all filthy from much
kissing, while above, in the church, the great shrines of the two
Marys are lowered from the vaulted roof amid vociferous prayers.
There, in the crypt, the gipsies sit upon their haunches,
curly-headed, hot-lipped, sweating profusely, amid hundreds of
candles, which exude tallow and overheat the stifling oven, telling
their greasy beads, exhaling an odor similar to that of wild beasts in
their den, emitting from time to time a hoarse appeal to Saint Sara,
wearing the smile of premeditated crime upon their faces mingled with
the grimace due to remorse that may be sincere; looking with envious
eye at every sou, pilfering handkerchiefs, scratching their wounds,
swarming in a mysterious dunghill, where one feels, in spite of
everything, that some mystic flower is springing into life, the
involuntary aspiration of depravity toward purity.
Early in May of this year, the band of gipsies had brought with them
to the saints a young woman whom they called their "Queen."
This "Queen," pending the arrival of the approaching fete-day, passed
part of her time seated on the wooden bench under the canopy of
thorn-broom erected by the customs' officers between two tamarisks, on
the sand-dune just in front of the village; and there she sat and
gazed at the sea.
Her name was Zinzara.
Her thick, black, wavy hair was twisted carelessly into a mass on top
of her head. Two locks came forward to her temples, which were sunken
and filled with shadows. Her piercing black eyes gleamed from beneath
her thick arching eyebrows. A copper circlet with sequins hanging from
it was placed upon her forehead, slightly at one side, after the
manner of a crown.
The glaringly bright materials in which she enveloped her figure
revealed the outline of her powerful chest, and her hips that swayed
at every step she took. And the fragment that formed her skirt fell in
graceful folds, beneath which her naked foot peeped out, glistening
with sand.
Evening surprised her upon her bench beneath the broom, looking out
upon the sea. The sun tinged the waves and the sand with golden
yellow, then with red. The night wind made the reeds and rushes
quiver. Slowly the gipsy drew a bright-colored handkerchief from her
girdle and arranged it on her head. She put it over her face to tie
the ends together behind the mass of hair, then raised it and threw it
over her head, so that it fell upon her back. Thus arranged as a
head-dress, it framed the face in stiff, broad folds, falling on both
sides,--and the Egyptian, her hands spread out upon her knees, her
eyes fixed on the horizon, resembled some figure of Isis, while about
her a flock of red flamingoes or a solitary ibis, in hieroglyphic
cries, told the sands of Camargue and the rushes of the Rhone tales of
the sands of Libya and the lotus-trees of the Nile.
III
THE DROVERS
Jacques Renaud, Livette's lover, was employed as drover of bulls and
horses in this strange Camargue country, on the estate of the Chateau
d'Avignon.
The _manades_, or droves, of Camargue bulls and mares live at liberty
in the vast moor, leaping the ditches, splashing through the swamps,
browsing on the bitter grass, drinking from the Rhone, running,
jumping, wallowing, neighing and lowing at the sun or the mirage,
lashing vigorously with their tails the swarms of gadflies clinging to
their sides, then lying down in groups on the edge of the swamp, knees
doubled under their bulky bodies, tired and sleepy, their dreamy eyes
fixed vaguely on the horizon.
The mounted drovers leave them at liberty, but keep a watchful eye on
their freedom; and according to the time of year and the condition of
the pasturage, "round up" their herds, keep them together, and direct
their movements.
In the distance, as they sit motionless, and straight as arrows, on
their saddles _a la gardiane_, astride their white horses, with the
spear-head resting on the closed stirrup, they resemble knights of the
Middle Ages, awaiting the flourish of the herald's trumpet to enter
the lists.
The Camargue horse, with his powerful hind-quarters, stout shoulders,
head a little heavy,--an excellent beast withal,--is descended from
Saracen mares and the palfrey of the Crusades. He still wears antique
trappings. Huge closed stirrups strike against his sides; the broad
strap of the martingale passes through a heart-shaped piece of leather
on his chest, and the saddle is an easy-chair, wherein the rider sits
between two solid walls, the one in front as high as that at his back.
At certain times, when the best pasturage is on the other bank of the
Rhone, the drovers drive their _manades_ toward the river. When they
reach the shore, they press close upon them to force them in. The
earth-colored water of the river flows bubbling by. The beasts
hesitate. Some slowly put their heads down to the stream and drink,
not knowing what is required of them. Others suddenly show signs of
life at the "singing" of the water, stretch their necks, breathe
noisily, and low and neigh. A horse, urged forward by a drover, rebels
and rushes back, then rears and falls backward into the water, which
splashes mightily under the weight of his great body; but he has made
a start; he swims, and all the others follow. Muzzles and nostrils,
manes and horns, wave wildly about above the river, which is now a
swarm of heads. They blow foam and air and water all around. More than
one, in jovial mood, bites at a neighboring rump. Feet rise upon
backs, to be shaken off again with a quick movement of the spinal
column, and thrown back into the waves. Sometimes a frightened beast,
confused by the plunging and kicking, tries to return to the bank,
and, being driven in once more by the drovers, loses his head, follows
the current, sails swiftly seaward, feels his strength failing,
drinks, struggles, turns over and over, plunges, drinks again,
founders at last like a vessel and disappears.
Finally the bulk of the drove has reached the opposite bank, and there
they shake themselves in the sunlight, snort with delight, and caper
over the fields. Tails lash sides and buttocks. Some young horses,
excited by their bath, scamper away, side by side, toward the horizon,
biting at the long hairs of each other's flying manes.
Then it is the turn of the drovers. Some ride their horses into the
river. Others, in the midst of the rearguard of the _manade_, guide,
with the paddle, a flat-bottomed boat that a blow of the foot would
shatter, and their horses, held by their bridles, swim behind.
At other times, the drovers are employed driving from the plains of
Meyran or Arles, Avignon, Nimes, Aigues-Mortes to the branding-places
at Camargue the bulls that are to take part in the sports at the
latter place.
These bulls sometimes travel in captivity, in a sort of high
enclosure, without a floor, mounted on wheels and drawn by horses; the
bulls walk along the ground, beating their horns against the resonant
wooden walls.
Generally the bulls go to the games unconfined, but under the eye of
mounted drovers, spear in hand.
These journeys are made at night. As they pass through the villages,
the people rush to their windows. The young men are on the watch for
the "cattle" and try to drive them out of the circle of drovers, who
lose their temper, and swear and strike: that sport is called the
_abrivade_. In Arles, if the bulls happen to arrive by daylight, the
drovers have a hard task, for all the young men in the city do their
utmost to break the line of horsemen, in order to cut out one bull, or
several, if possible, and then drive them through the city. The city
assumes a posture of defence. Overturned carts barricade the ends of
the streets. Shops are closed. The bull, in a frenzy, rushes here and
there, stands musing for a moment at the corners, decides to take a
certain direction, rushes at a passer-by, knocks him down, and
generally selects the shop of a dealer in crockery and glassware in
which to make merry, amid the shouts of an excited populace.
The drovers are a free, fearless, savage race, a little contemptuous
of cities, devoted to their desert.
A drover is at home alike in sun and rain, in the wind from the land,
and the wind from the sea.
A drover knows how to deal blows and to receive them; he pursues a
bull at the gallop, and with a blow of the spear upon his flank,
judiciously selecting his time, "fells" him unerringly.
He knows the trick of pursuing a wild bull making for the open
country. His well-trained horse bites the furious beast on the
hind-quarters, and he turns. The drover, spear in rest, pricks the
bull in the nose as he rushes upon him, and checks him.
Sometimes a drover, on foot and alone, pursued by a cow with calf, and
apparently in imminent danger from the furious beast, will suddenly
turn about, and--with arm outstretched, as if he held his spear--point
his three fingers at the animal, separated so as to represent the
three points of the trident. In face of the motionless man, the cow,
seized with terror, recoils, pawing up the earth, with lowered head
and threatening horns; and, as soon as she thinks she is well out of
the man's reach, she turns and flies.
A common performance of the drover, when he is in good spirits, is
this: pursuing the bull, he passes beyond him some twenty or thirty
yards, then stops short and leaps down from his horse; the bull, taken
by surprise, rushes at the man, who has one knee on the ground. The
bull comes rushing on with lowered horns. Three sharp hand-claps: the
bull has stopped! His hot breath strikes the face of his subduer, who
has already seized him with both hands by the horns. The man,
springing instantly to his feet, struggles to throw the beast over to
the right. The bull, resisting, throws himself in the opposite
direction. The two forces neutralize each other for an instant, almost
equal, the result uncertain; then the man suddenly yields, and the
beast, unexpectedly impelled in the direction of his own efforts,
falls upon his side. Skill is seconded by the creature's whole
strength in its struggle for victory.
This is the method adopted at the _ferrades_, or brandings, where the
sport consists in branding the young animals with a red-hot iron.
For a drover, to seize a colt by the nose, and mount him bareback; to
roll with his steed at the bottom of a ditch and emerge firmly seated
in the saddle; to subdue stallions by fatigue, and, if dismounted and
wounded by a kick, to dress the wound as tranquilly as the cork-cutter
dresses the scratch made by his knife,--all this is mere child's-play.
A drover, caught between two horns--luckily well separated--and tossed
into the air, has but one thought when he picks himself up after
falling to the ground--a thought so surprising as not to be
ridiculous: to rearrange his breeches and readjust his belt.
A unique race it is, rough and brutal, which would be esteemed heroic,
like the Corsican race, if it had great affairs in which to display
its great qualities.
IV
THE SEDEN
Jacques Renaud, Livette's betrothed, was, as we have said, one of the
most fearless drovers in Camargue.
He could pursue and catch and subdue a wild horse, attack a rebellious
bull and master it, as no other could; he was the king of the moor.
For occasions of public rejoicing, at Nimes or Arles, he was always
sent for when they desired a really fine performance in the arena. And
he had so often called forth the exclamation, in all the arenas
throughout Provence: "Oh! that fellow is _the king_ of them all!" that
the name had clung to him. And he himself had given to his finest
stallion the name of "Prince."
Whatever feats of address and strength were performed by others, he
performed better than they.
And with it all he was a handsome fellow, not too tall or too short,
with a well-shaped head, clear, dark complexion, short, thick, matted
black hair, a well-defined moustache of the same devil's black as the
hair, and cheeks and chin always closely shaven, for this savage
always carried in the leather saddle-bags hanging at the bow of his
saddle a razor-edged knife, a stone to sharpen it upon, and a little
round mirror in a sheep-skin case.
And when, with his stout and shapely legs encased in heavy boots, his
feet in the closed stirrups, his long spear resting on his boot, he
sat erect and motionless in his high-backed saddle, his size
heightened by the refraction of the desert, amid his little tribe of
mares and wild bulls, wearing upon his head the round narrow-brimmed
hat that made for him a crown of gleaming golden straw, indeed the
drover did resemble the king of some outlandish race!
And yet it was not on the day of a _ferrade_, nor because of his great
deeds as tamer of wild beasts, that the gentle, fair-haired girl had
come to love him.
In the first place, she was accustomed to seeing many of these
drovers; and then, being the daughter of a rich intendant, she might
have been inclined rather to look down upon them a little, as mere
herdsmen. Indeed her father and grandmother did not readily agree to
give her hand to Renaud, who was poor and had no kindred; but Livette
was an only child, and had wept and prayed so hard, the darling, that
at last they had said _yes_.
And this is how it came to pass that the drover Renaud, who was used
to being run after by pretty girls, had taken Livette's trembling
little heart in his great hand.
It was one morning when he was making a new _seden_ for his horse,
who had lost his the night before, while bathing in the Rhone.
The _seden_, as it is called in Camargue, is a halter, but a halter
made of mares' hair braided, it being customary always to allow the
manes and tails of stallions to grow as long as they will, as a mark
of strength and pride. The _seden_ is generally black and white. It
is, in a word, a long rope, which hangs in a coil about the horse's
neck, and may serve, as occasion arises, many purposes, being
generally used as a halter, sometimes as a lasso.
But the _seden_, being a thing essentially Camarguese, should never go
from the province. Many a one does so, no doubt, but it is on account
of the contemptible greed of this or that drover, who snaps his
fingers at the old customs that were good enough for his ancestors.
Renaud, then, was making a _seden_. It was in front of one of the
farm-houses appertaining to the Chateau d'Avignon, a long, low
structure, rather a drover's cottage than a farm-house, lost in the
moor, and so squat that it had the appearance of not wanting to be
seen, like an animal burrowing in the ground.
It was October. The larks were singing merrily. Mounted upon Blanquet
(or Blanchet), her favorite horse, the little one, in obedience to her
father's orders, was out in search of Renaud, and she spied him at a
distance, walking backward, playing the rope-maker. From a piece of
canvas tied around his waist and swelling out in front of him, like an
apron turned up to make a great pocket, he was taking little bunches
of white and black hair alternately, braiding them together and
twisting them into a rope, which grew visibly longer. A child was
turning the thick wooden wheel upon which the _seden_, already of
considerable length, was wound; and Renaud--keeping time to the wheel,
which struck a dull blow against something or other at every
revolution--was singing a ballad which floated to Livette's ears on
the gentle breeze that was blowing, like a sweet, strong call from the
love of which she as yet knew nothing.
"N'use pas sur les routes
Tes souliers;
Descends plutot le Rhone
En bateau.
"Laisse Lyon, Valence,
De cote;
Salue-les de la tete
Sous les ponts."
He had a fine voice, smooth and clear, powerful without effort, and of
wide range.
"Avignon est la reine----
Passe encor;
Tu ne verras qu'en Arles
Tes amours----
"La plaine est belle et grande,
Compagnon----
Prends tes amours en croupe,
En avant!"[1]
Livette had stopped her horse, to hear better. It was in the morning.
In the light there was the reflection that tells that the day is
young, that makes hope dance in hearts of sixteen, and sows hope anew
even in the hearts of the old.
A vague hope that is naught but the desire to love; but its loss,
bitterer than death, makes the thought of death a consolation!
"Prends tes amours en croupe----
En avant!"
the singer repeated, and the little one involuntarily urged her horse
toward the song that called to her to come.
"Aha!" said Renaud, pausing in his work, "aha! young lady! you are
astir early!--with a white horse that will soon be all red!"
"Yes," she said, laughing, "with gnats and gadflies; there are swarms
of them! too many, by my faith in God!"
"You are covered with them, young lady, as a bit of honey is covered
with bees, or a tuft of flowering genesta! But what brings you here?"
"I come from my father. You must come with me at once."
"But comrade Rampal borrowed my horse just now to go to Saintes. They
went off one upon the other."
"Take mine, then," said Livette.
"And what will you do, young lady?"
She was ashamed of her thoughtlessness, and blushed scarlet.
"I?" said she, and the words of the ballad rang in her heart:
"Prends tes amours en croupe,
En avant!"
"Unless," said he, laughing in his turn, "you care to take me _en
croupe_?"
"People would never stop talking about it all over our Camargue," said
she, with laughter in her voice. "A drover like you, the terror of
riders, _en croupe_ like a girl? No, no; no false shame, that is my
place. We will take off my saddle, and you can bring it to me
to-morrow."
"Very luckily," said Renaud, "Rampal didn't take mine, which I never
lend."
Livette jumped down from her horse; and at the breeze made by her
skirt a cloud of great flies and enormous mosquitoes rose and flew
buzzing about her. Blanchet's snow-white rump looked as if it were
covered with a net of purple silk, there was such a labyrinth of
little streams of blood crossing and recrossing one another. Another
instant, and gadflies and mosquitoes settled down again upon the
bleeding surface and dotted it with a myriad of black spots; but
Blanchet, albeit somewhat cross, was used to that annoyance.
Livette fastened him to one of the rings in the wall, and sat down
upon the stone bench, waiting until Renaud had finished his _seden_.
The wheel turned and turned, striking its dull blow with perfect
regularity at every turn.
"That was a pretty song, Renaud," said Livette suddenly, answering her
thoughts without intention; "that was a pretty song you were singing
just now."
"I learned it," said Renaud, "from a boatman, a friend of my father,
with whom I went up the Rhone as far as Lyon--and then came down
again----"
"And is all that country very beautiful up there?" said she.
"Yes," he answered, "it is beautiful."
And he said nothing more.
"You don't look as if you meant what you say, Renaud. Pray, didn't you
like the city of Lyon we hear so much about?"
There was a long silence, broken only by the monotonous rhythm of the
wheel.
"No sun!" said Renaud abruptly. "It's a city in a cold cloud!--The
Rhone isn't fine till you come down again," he added.
Livette looked at him, and her wide-open eyes seemed to say:
"Why is that?"
He answered her look.
"When one of us goes up yonder, young lady, you understand, he leaves
everything to go nowhere, and when he gets there, all he asks is to
start back again!--When he comes from there here, on the contrary, he
leaves nothing at all, and knows that, at the end of the journey, he
will have arrived somewhere! You see, young lady, the best horse must,
of necessity, stop at the sea--and that is the only place where I am
willing to consent to go no farther. Where the sea is not, you have
all the rest of the journey still to do.--Enough, my boy!" he added,
raising his voice.
The wheel stopped. He examined the _seden_. The rope, of black and
white strands in regular alternation, was finished.
"That's a good piece of work," said he; "look, young lady."
He leaned over, almost against her, to look at a point in the rope
which seemed to him defective; he leaned over, and a short black curl
touched lightly the disordered, almost invisible, locks that formed a
sort of fleecy golden cloud over Livette's forehead. And thereupon it
seemed to both of them--young as they were!--that their hair blazed up
and shrivelled softly, like the fine grass that takes fire in summer,
under the hot sun. Ah! holy youth!
Then, for the first time, Renaud thought of the girl. Hitherto he had
seen in Livette only the "young lady." They remained bending forward,
she over the rope which she seemed to be examining attentively, he
over Livette's hair. Livette wore her "morning head-dress," consisting
of a little white handkerchief which covered the _chignon_, and was
tied in such fashion that the two ends stood up like little hollow,
pointed ears on top of her head. When they are in full-dress, the
women of Camargue surround the high _chignon_, covered by a fine white
linen cap, with a broad velvet ribbon, almost always black, whose
long, unequal ends fall behind the head, a little at one side.
Renaud, then, was looking at Livette's clear flaxen hair,--in which
there was, here and there, a lock of a darker golden hue,--symmetrically
massed on top of her head, advancing in little waves toward her temples,
coquettishly arranged, but so short and fluffy that some few locks
escaped, here, there, and everywhere, enough to form the faint golden
mist above her head.
He looked at the pretty, round neck, whence the fair hair seemed to
spring, like a vigorous plant, so slender and so fine! so long, and
full of life! And the temptation to press his lips upon it drew him
on, as, after a long day's journey among dry, stony hills, the sight
of the water draws on the horses of Camargue, accustomed to moist
pasturage.
She felt that she was being stared at too long.
"Let us go!" she said, suddenly. "My father's orders were that you
should come as soon as possible."
Renaud felt as if he were waking from a long sleep and from a dream.
He jumped to his feet. Without a word, he went to Blanchet, took off
the woman's saddle and carried it into the house, placed his own upon
the beast, which the mosquitoes had at last made restive, and leaped
upon his back.
Livette, assisted by the drover's strong hand, leaped to the croup
behind him with one spring; highly amused she was as she threw one arm
around Renaud's waist. It is the fashion among the Camarguese young
women, all of whom, on fete-days, ride to the plains of Meyran, or to
Saintes-Maries, "fitted" to the horses of their promised husbands.
The drover started Blanchet off at a gallop, gave him his head, and
let him take his own course. Blanchet left the travelled road, headed
straight for the chateau across the moor, through the sand thickly
sown with stiff, rounded clumps of saltwort at irregular intervals.
The good horse flew over these clumps, scarcely touching the tops,
landing always between them in the damp sand, from which, however, by
force of long habit, he withdrew his feet without effort, calculating
in advance the distance between the obstacles, galloping freely and
evenly, changing feet as he chose, making sport of his heavy burden,
happy at being left to himself.
And Livette must needs hold tight to the drover's waist; he was a
lithe, supple fellow, and swayed with the horse. And the swift
motion, the free air, youth and love, all combined to intoxicate the
two young people; and without meaning it, without thinking of it, the
horseman repeated his song of a few moments before, between his teeth,
but loud enough to be overheard by the girl:
"Prends tes amours en croupe!
En avant!"
And it seemed to them as if the whole horizon were theirs.
When they dismounted, in front of the farm-house of the chateau, they
had not spoken a word, but they had exchanged in silence the subtlest
and strongest part of themselves.
From that day, Renaud, being sincerely in love, exerted himself to
please. He was careful about his dress, paid more attention to the
adjustment of his neckerchief, shaved more closely, and had not a
single glance to spare for the other girls, even the prettiest of
them.
At last, he said to Livette one day:
"Your father will never be willing!"
Those were his first words of love.
"If I am willing, my father will be. And when my father is willing,
grandmother always is!"
"The good God grant it!" replied Jacques.
And it had happened as she said. For almost five months now they had
been betrothed.
The fascinating thing about Livette was that she was just the
opposite of Renaud, so slender and delicate, so fair and such a
child,--and, furthermore, that she loved him with all her might, the
sweetheart,--there was no mistake about that.
V
THE LOVERS
Livette was so fresh and sweet that people often repeated, in speaking
of her, the Provencal expression: "You could drink her in a glass of
water!"
In loving Livette, Renaud experienced the pleasant feeling, so dear to
the heart of strong men, of having some one to protect, a little wife,
who was no more than a child. Because of Livette's fragility and
slender stature, the rough drover, made for violent passions, the
horseman of the Camargue desert, the hard-fisted herdsman, the subduer
of mares and bulls, felt the love that is based upon sweet compassion,
upon respect for charming weakness; in a word, he learned the secret
of true tenderness which he could not have felt, perhaps, for one of
his own class.
It would never have occurred to him to tell her any of the vulgar
jests with a double meaning, with which he regaled the more robust
fair ones of his acquaintance on branding-days or on race-days. To do
that would have seemed to him to be a villainous misuse of his power
and his experience as a man. Still less did Livette cause him to feel
the fierce desire, well known to him, which sometimes, with other
girls, went to his brain like a rush of blood,--the desire to touch
with his hands, to take in his arms, to throw down into the ditch,
laughing at the gentle resistance, at the consent which repels a
little, at the equal struggle between the youth and the maiden, who
have, in reality, a tacit understanding to be robber and robbed. No:
in Livette's presence, Renaud felt that he was a new man. There came
to him, in regard to the little damsel with the golden hair, a
tranquillity of heart that surprised him greatly. Love has a thousand
forms. That which Renaud felt for Livette was a soothing emotion. He
"wished her well." That was what he kept repeating to himself as he
thought of her. And, as he desired all the others something after the
fashion of the bulls of his _manade_, in the season when the germs are
at work, it so happened that he seemed not to desire the only woman he
really loved.
There was a sweet fascination in the thought, which he relished like a
draught of pure water after a long day's walk through the dust in the
hot sun. He rejoiced inwardly in his love as in a halt for rest in the
shade of a great tree, beside a clear, cool spring, while the birds
sang their greeting to the morning. Sometimes, in the blazing heat of
midday, when he was riding across the mirror-like waste of sand and
salt and water, his horse plodding wearily along with hanging head,
the thought of Livette would steal softly into his mind, and it would
seem as if a cool breeze were blowing on his forehead, washing away,
in a sense, the dust and fatigue, like a bath. He would feel
refreshed, and a smile would come unbidden to his lips. His whole
being would thrill with pleasure, and, with renewed life, he would
imperceptibly, with hand and knee alike, order his horse to raise his
head. And the lover's steed would raise his head without further
bidding, and snort and toss his mane, scatter, with a sudden lash of
his tail, the gadflies that were streaking his sides with blood, and,
with quickened step, reach the shelter of the hawthorns and the
poplars on the Rhone bank--whose leaves forever quiver and rustle like
the water, like the heart of man, like everything that lives and hopes
and suffers and then dies!
Not only by her grace and weakness did she win his heart, strong and
rough as he was; but also by the care expended on her dress, by the
splendor of her surroundings, she, the wealthy farmer's daughter,
enchanted him, the poor drover; and she seemed to him a strange,
unfamiliar creature from another world. And so she was in fact. Of a
different quality, he said to himself: a being outside his sphere,
far, far above it.
That he might one day unloose the latchets of her little shoes had not
occurred to him, and, lo! she was his! Livette, the daughter of the
intendant of the Chateau d'Avignon! she was his fiancee, his
betrothed, his future wife!
He seemed to himself the heir to a throne. In face of the mere thought
of his future, he felt something like the embarrassment a beggar feels
on the threshold of a palace, before the carpets over which he must
pass to enter, with shoes heavy with mud.
She had in his eyes something of the sanctity of the blessed Madonna,
carved from wood, painted blue and gold, and overladen with pearls and
flowers, that he used to see when a child in the church of
Saint-Trophime at Arles.
So it was that he felt a secret amazement at finding himself beloved.
It did not seem to him that it could really be true; and as he must
needs be convinced of the fact every time he spoke to her, his love
constantly appealed to him with all the force of novelty.
He was a little embarrassed, too, in her presence, could not find his
words, contented himself with smiling at her, with yielding submission
to her like a child, with running to fetch this or that for her,
divining her desires from her glance; mistaking now and then, but
rarely; feeling the same pleasure in being the maiden's footman that
is felt by the misshapen court dwarf in love with the king's fair
daughter.
His sobriquet of _The King_ seemed to him a mockery beside her. She
embarrassed him; in her presence he was meek and lowly.
He was surprised, indignant even, in his heart, at the familiar tone
assumed by others with Livette. It seemed strange to him that her
companions should treat her as an equal; that her father and her
grandmother should not have the same respect and consideration for his
fiancee that he himself had.
Frequently, when the grandmother cried to Livette: "Do this or that;
run! be quick!" he would be angry, and would long to say to her: "Why
do you order her about? She was not made to obey! You're a bad
grandmother! Don't you see that she is too delicate and pretty for
such tasks?"
But this was a feeling kept hidden in his heart; he would not have
dared to avow it, for women are made, according to our ancestors, to
be the slaves of man. So he said no word of what he felt. He even
deemed himself a little ridiculous to feel it. He contented himself by
doing in a twinkling, in Livette's stead, the thing she was bidden to
do, if it was something within his power.
Ah! but if any man had ventured to indulge in any ill-sounding
pleasantry with Livette, to take any liberty with her--oh! then, be
sure that he would without reflection have felled him on the spot with
his stout fist!
Why, if any one, man or woman, in the crowd on a fete-day, happened to
make a coarse remark in her hearing,--one of the sort that he himself
knew how to make with great effect upon occasion,--he would be
overcome with rage against that person; it seemed to him that every
one should take notice of Livette's presence, should feel that she was
near, and understand that, before her, they should show some
self-respect.
All this he would have been incapable of explaining, but he felt it
all, confusedly and vaguely, in his heart.
Livette, for her part, was keenly conscious of the drover's adoration.
She revelled in it, without unduly seeming to do so. She saw very
plainly that she had, without effort, tamed a wild beast. She laughed
sometimes, as she looked at him--a frank, ringing laugh, in which
there was, however, a touch of the triumph of the mysterious feminine
witchery, the marvellous invention of nature, which decrees that the
strong man shall be vanquished, rolled in the dust, at the pleasure of
fascinating weakness. This miracle, performed by life, by nature, by
love, she believed to be her own work,--hers, Livette's,--and the
little woman was a bit swollen with pride! More than frequently she
would say to herself: "What have I done? I don't deserve this good
fortune; no, indeed, I don't deserve it!" She saw very clearly that,
in his eyes, she was a being apart: that he did not treat her by any
means as everybody else did: and, greatly astonished as she was, she
was proud of it.
Thereupon, wondering in her sincere heart what she had "more" or
better than another, and finding no answer to the question, it came
about that she deemed her lover a little, just a very little, stupid
to be so dominated by her, and he so strong! And then she would
prettily make fun of him and laugh aloud at him, saying:
"Ah! great booby!"
So it was that the whole essence of Woman, profound, seductive,
existed in this simple, obscure peasant-girl, who could have told
nothing as to her own character.
In time, too, she came to look upon herself as pretty, beautiful, the
prettiest, the loveliest of all, and to admire her own charms. When
such thoughts came to her, and if the truth must be known, none were
more frequent,--ah! then she felt her pride! And she no longer deemed
her lover stupid in the least degree; on the contrary, he seemed to
her very fortunate, too fortunate! and then it was he who hardly
deserved her! At such times, she received his attentions, his
humility, with the air of a princess accustomed to homage.
Then, too, she would wonder why all the others did not do for her what
he did? And, thereupon, she would conceive a sort of gratitude for
him. Such a constant revolution in our hearts of impressions, often
irreconcilable and ever changing, around a fixed idea, is love.--Yes,
in very truth he deserved to be loved simply because he had known
enough to appreciate her! to choose her! The other young men were the
fools, one and all!
Warm was his welcome if he arrived at the farm when that thought was
in her mind. She would give the little cry of a happy bird, and run
to meet her lover.
"Good-morning, Monsieur Jacques!"
"Good-morning, Demoiselle Livette!"
They would shake hands.
"Will you come to the Rhone?"
"With all my heart!"
And often they would go and sit together beside the Rhone, beneath the
great hawthorn--a tree more than a hundred years old and known to
everybody. The hawthorn, like the aspen and the birch, is a familiar
Camarguese tree.
Sometimes, on the way, she would hold out to him a flexible green
twig, broken from a poplar by the roadside, and they would walk along,
united and kept apart at the same time by the short branch, followed
by a swarm of gnats with their tiny iris-hued wings.
She was very fond of this sport of making him walk thus, not too near,
not too far away, holding him without touching him, drawing him nearer
or keeping him at a distance, as her fancy dictated, making of the
leafy wand a whip if he showed signs of rebellion.
She had the feeling that thus she was indeed his mistress, remembering
how she used sometimes to make her horse Blanchet follow her docilely
in the same way by holding out to him a small wisp of flowering
oats;--how she had sometimes, by the same means, led back behind her,
quiet as an ox, a vicious bull that had escaped, wounded, from the
arena, and that she had encountered by the roadside, in a thicket of
thorn-broom, bathing his foaming tongue in the streams of blood that
were flowing from his nostrils.
Arrived at the bank of the Rhone, beneath the great hawthorn with the
gnarled black trunk and smooth white branches, that stretches its
abundant rustling foliage well out over the stream, the lovers would
sit down, side by side, upon the roots protruding from the ground or
upon a bundle of cut reeds.
And they would watch the water flow. The earthy, yellowish water, with
its whirling masses of foam, rushing toward the sea.
They would sit and gaze.
They would not speak. They would live on in silence, listening to the
plashing of the Rhone, the tiny wavelets that came rippling in
obliquely to the bank, to loiter there among the feet of countless
reeds and poplars, while the main current in the centre of the stream
flowed swiftly, hurriedly along, as if in haste to reach the sea, and
there be swallowed up.--There they would sit and dream, not speaking.
They felt that they were living the same life as everything about
them. From time to time, a kingfisher, sky-blue and reddish-brown,
would pass before them, light on a low branch, gazing sidewise at the
water with his beak ready to strike, then, suddenly, fly off across
the Rhone. And, with the sky-blue bird, their thoughts would cross
the river, there to light again upon a branch, bent like a bow, whose
slender point trailed in the water, vibrating in the current, and
surrounded with a mass of foam, dead leaves, and twigs. And suddenly
the bird, like a sorcerer, had disappeared.
"How pretty!" Livette would sometimes say.
And that was all.
He would make no reply. He knew not what to say to her. He was too
happy. He would not call the king his cousin!
In the evening twilight, many little rabbits, young in that month of
May, would run out from the park, through the wild hedges, almost
invisible in their gray coats, and play in the shadow at the foot of
the bushes, their presence betrayed by the rustling of a tuft of grass
or a low-hanging, horizontal branch that barred their path.
To heighten the enjoyment of the lovers, there was the nightingale's
song, at the rising of the moon. Listen to it: 'tis always lovely in
the darkness, is the nightingale's song. It begins with three
distinct, long-drawn-out cries; you would say it was a signal, a
preconcerted call; it enjoins attention. Then the modulations
hesitatingly arise. You would say that it is timid, that it fears its
prayer will not be granted. But soon it takes courage, self-assurance
comes, and the song bursts forth and soars and fills the air with its
melodious uproar. 'Tis love, 'tis youth and love that can no longer
be restrained, that nothing stays, that claim their rights in
life.--His song is done.
His song is done, but still the lovers listen on and on to the bird's
song, echoed in the dark recesses of their own hearts.
At last, it would be time to return. They would rise and walk back
toward the farm, not far away.
The grandmother would be calling from the doorway:
"Livette! Livette!"
Her voice would reach their ears, with a plaintive, caressing accent,
tinged with sadness, from the edge of the vast expanse that rose in
the darkness toward the stars, toward life and love,--a long,
melancholy call. The voice at night upon the moor fills the air and
rises tranquilly, disturbed by no echo, sad to be alone in a too great
solitude.
Around the lovers as they returned to the farm, in the orchards, in
the park, as the darkness increased, the deafening clamor of the frogs
would soon be heard, a mighty noise, the sum total of a multitude of
feeble sounds, a frightful din, composed of many minor croakings of
unequal strength, which, massed together, drowning one another, mount
at last into a rhythmic tumult like the ceaseless roaring of a
cataract.
And amid this formidable everlasting clamor, made by the voices of
myriads of amorous little frogs, accentuated by the cry of a curlew,
or a heron on the watch, and accompanied by the humming of the two
Rhones and the plashing of the sea--the lovers, both deeply moved,
heard nothing save the calm beating of their hearts.
As time went on, their love waxed greater, increased by the memory of
all these hours lived together.
Renaud was no longer simple Renaud in Livette's eyes, but the being by
whom she knew what life was, through whom came to her that
overwhelming consciousness of everything, of the horizons of land and
sea, that sentiment of _being_, that longing for the future, for
growth, that inflow of vague hopes that comes of love and gives a zest
to life.
And now, if any one had sought to wrest Jacques from Livette, she
would have died of it, and he who should try to wrest Livette from
Jacques would have died of it--he would, my friends, even more
certainly.
It is a good and excellent thing that love should be always busied in
making the world younger--and the nightingale, like the frogs, is
never weary of repeating it.
VI
RAMPAL
Rampal, who had borrowed Jacques Renaud's horse, had not returned.
Renaud now rode no other horse than Blanchet.
Rampal was a low rascal, gambler, hanger-on of wine-shops, well-known
at Arles in all the vile haunts scattered along the Rhone.
Dismissed by several masters, a drover without a drove, he passed his
life in these days, riding from town to town, from Aigues-Mortes to
Nimes, from Nimes to Arles, from Arles to Martigues, and in each of
these towns plied some doubtful trade, cheated a little at cards,
winning the means of living a week without doing anything, and
returning, for that week, to the Camargue he loved, where there were,
in two or three farm-houses, women who smiled upon his mysterious,
piratical existence.
For that existence, a horse was essential. Rampal, serving as a drover
on foot, had, in the first place, stolen a horse from a _manade_, but
he broke his tether the second night, left his master, swam the
Rhone, and rejoined his fellows. Then it was that the rascal, having,
in truth, important business on hand, had said to Renaud:
"I have to go to Saintes, I'll take your horse, Cabri."
"Take my horse," Renaud replied.
It did not occur to him that Rampal would not return. Jacques relied
so surely upon his own reputation for strength and courage that he did
not think that any one would venture to arouse his wrath.
And then he had a sort of pity for Rampal, mingled with a little
admiration. He was a bold horseman, was Rampal, and, except for women
and cards, he would have been, with Renaud, or just after him, a king
of the drovers! So that, if Rampal aroused Renaud's compassion, Renaud
aroused Rampal's envy.
However, the vagaries of this _marrias_, this good-for-nothing knave,
were the pranks of a free man. Neither married nor betrothed,
fatherless and motherless, with no one to support or assist, no one
whom he must please, he had a perfect right to live as he pleased! At
least, that is what most people thought.
Moreover, Renaud, although an honest man, had the tastes of a
vagabond. Before his heart was filled with his strange affection for
Livette, by which he felt as if he were bound hand and foot, he had,
in truth, borne a part with Rampal in many curious adventures.
More than once they had galloped along side by side toward the open
moor, each having _en croupe_ a laughing damsel, who, after the close
of a bull-fight at Aigues-Mortes or Arles, had consented to accompany
them for a night.
But on such occasions Renaud had always dealt frankly, never promising
marriage nor any other thing, but simply giving the fair one a
present, a souvenir, a brass ring, or a silk handkerchief--a _fichu_
to pleat after the Arlesian fashion, or a broad velvet ribbon for a
head-dress; while Rampal was treacherous, promised much and did
nothing,--in short, was nothing but _fena_, a good-for-nothing.
So Rampal had borrowed Renaud's horse with the intention of bringing
him back the same evening; but that evening he had heard of a fete at
Martigues and had ridden away thither without worrying about Renaud.
"He'll take a horse out of his _manade_," he said to himself.
Now, Audiffret, Livette's father, had insisted that Renaud should take
Blanchet.
"Take Blanchet," he said. "I don't like to have our girl ride him.
He's a fine horse, but bad-tempered at times. Finish breaking him for
us. I want him to run in the races at Beziers this year. Take him."
Happy to have Blanchet in the hands of "her dear," for so she already
called Renaud in her heart, Livette, who was fond of Blanchet, simply
said:
"Take good care of him."
That was more than six months before.
Rampal, who had caused considerable gossip meanwhile, and of whom
Renaud had heard more than once, had not brought back the horse.
Renaud did not lose his patience. Several times, being informed that
Rampal was in this or that place, he had tried to find him, but had
not succeeded.
"I shall catch him some day!" said Renaud. "He loses nothing by
waiting."
He hoped that the fete at Saintes-Maries would bring the rascal back.
"He will come back with the thieving gipsies!" he said; and he was not
mistaken.
Not for an empire would Rampal have missed making the pilgrimage to
Saintes-Maries. The rascal would have thought himself everlastingly
damned. It had been his habit from childhood to come and ask
forgiveness of his sins from the two Marys and Sara the bondwoman, at
whom he did nothing but laugh in a boastful way, unable to satisfy
himself whether he believed in them or not.
This year, being affiliated with the gipsies in matters of
horse-trading (every one knows that the gipsies, men and
women,--_roms_ and _juwas_, as they say,--have a profound acquaintance
with everything connected with the horse), Rampal had been a fruitful
source of information to them.
By divers methods they had led him to talk about this and that, about
every one and everything. He had no idea himself that he had told so
many things. They had questioned him, sometimes directly, taking him
unawares; sometimes in a slow, roundabout way; when he was drunk, and
when he was asleep. And his replies had been pitilessly registered in
the gipsies' unfailing memory--the wherewithal to astonish all
Camargue.
Rampal had not even been questioned by the gipsy queen, who did not
trust his discretion; she learned the secrets of the province at
second-hand.
Once only had he spoken to her. It was one evening when the beggar
queen began to dance for her own amusement on the high-road, to the
music of her tambourine, which she hardly ever laid aside.
"You are beautiful!" he said to her.
"You are ugly!" she replied, quickly, in a contemptuous tone.
"Give me the ring on your finger," said Rampal, "and I'll give you
another."
She glanced with a gleaming eye at her fantastic ring of hammered
silver, then at the insolent Christian, and said:
"A sound cudgelling about your loins is what I will give you, dog, if
you don't leave me!"
And she spat fiercely at him as if in disgust.
Rampal, somewhat abashed, abandoned the game.
This woman had a way of looking at people that disconcerted them. You
would say that a sharp, threatening flame shot from her eyes. It
penetrated your being, searched your heart, and you were powerless
against it. She fathomed your glance, but you could not fathom
hers--which, on the contrary, repelled you, turned you back like a
solid wall. And, at such moments, she would stand proudly erect, her
head thrown slightly back, her whole body poised, at once so sinuous
and so rigid, that she might have been compared to a horned viper
standing on his tail, fascinating his prey and preparing to spring.
"I can't explain, Jacques, how that woman frightened me," said Livette
to Renaud. "My blood is still running cold!--She threatened me! And
when that crown of thorns fell at my feet--Holy Mother!--I thought I
was going to faint!"
"If I meet her," Renaud replied, "she'll find she has some one to
settle with!"
"Let the heathen alone, Jacques! It isn't well to have aught to do
with the devil."
But the drover loved a fight, and he longed for nothing so much as to
fall in with Rampal and Zinzara, the gambler and the queen of the
cards; "a pair of gipsies, a pair of thieves," thought Renaud.
VII
THE MEETING
The gipsy queen was the first of the two he met.
Renaud, mounted on Blanchet, was riding along the beach toward
Saintes-Maries.
The sea was at his right; at his left, the desert. He was riding
through the sand, and from time to time the waves rolled up under his
horse's feet, surrounding with sportive foam the rosy hoofs rapidly
rising and falling.
Renaud was thinking of Livette.
He looked ahead and saw the tall, straight, battlemented walls of
Saintes-Maries, and wondered whether he would lead his little queen,
dressed in white, and crowned with flowers, to the altar there, or at
Saint-Trophime in Arles.
He looked at the sea and wondered if nothing would come to him from
that source; if his uncle, captain of a merchantman, who sailed on his
last voyage so many years ago, would not come into port some day with
a cargo of vague, marvellous things, a million in priceless stuffs and
precious stones? In the poor, ignorant fellow's imagination, the
thought of a fortune was a vision of legendary treasures, like those
discovered in caverns in the Arabian tales.
For an instant, he seemed to see it with his eyes, to see his vision
realized in the dazzling splendor of the boundless sea, that lay
glistening in the sunlight, with sharp, fitful flashes, like a mirror
broken into narrow, moving fragments of irregular shape. It was an
undulating sheet of diamonds and sapphires. The sun's rays, as he sank
lower and lower toward the horizon, assumed a ruddier hue as they fell
obliquely upon the fast-subsiding waves, and soon the water was like a
sheet of old burnished gold, moving slowly up and down; one would have
said it was a vast melted treasure beneath a polished vitreous
surface! At long intervals, a solitary wave greater than its fellows
fell with a dull roar upon the beach, and ever and anon a cloud passed
overhead; and in the mist flying from the gold-tipped wave, in the
slow-moving shadow of the cloud, the water seemed a deep, dark blue.
The sun sank lower, and broad bright red bands began to overshadow the
bands of ochre, amethyst, light green, pale blue, that rose one above
another on the horizon line. The changing sea was now like a cloak of
royal purple, with fringe of azure, gold, and silver.
On the desert side, the marshes likewise were changed to vast floors
carpeted with gorgeous drapery and rich embroidery. Everything was
ablaze with sparkles--sea, sand, and salt. At intervals, a red
flamingo rose from among the reeds, flew heavily along, seeming to
carry on his side a little of the ruddy hue of sky and sea,--then
lighted on the brink of the gleaming water.
The gulls were like white dream-birds in this enchanted country. They
sat in lines, like brooding doves, on the crests of the waves in the
offing, or on the hot sands, or on the surface of the ponds.
And, down in the northwest, Renaud was looking for the high, square
terrace of the Chateau d'Avignon, for Livette sometimes went up there
to see if she could not spy Blanchet and her dear Renaud's straight
spear somewhere in the plain.
Suddenly Renaud checked his horse and gazed fixedly at a black object
moving on the surface of the water, rising and falling with the motion
of the waves, some two hundred feet from shore.
He thought he could descry a woman's head; a head covered with
dripping black hair and surrounded by a copper circlet, from which
depended glistening Oriental medallions.
The gipsy was swimming, disporting herself in the waves, which, coming
from the deep sea, rose and fell slowly and at long intervals. She
glided through them like a conger-eel, happy in the sensation caused
by the gentle lapping of the salt water caressing her flesh. Her
movements were undulating, like those of the waves themselves; she
writhed and twisted like seaweed tossed about by the surf. Now and
then a heavier, higher wave would come upon her. She would turn and
face it, put her hands together in a point above her lowered head, as
divers do, plunge into the broad wave horizontally, and cleave it
through from front to rear.
From his horse, Renaud watched the dark head emerge on the other side
of the swelling wave, which, as it approached the shore, curled over
with whitening crest, broke upon the beach in snowy foam and spread
out over the sand, beneath and all about him, in shallow, transparent,
overlapping streams, all studded with sparks. He could not see the
swimmer's body distinctly. Its fleeting outlines could scarcely be
made out beneath the clear, transparent water, ere they were blotted
out again by the undulations and reflections.
Suddenly the swimmer turned toward the shore, apparently gained a
footing, and, raising one arm out of the water, motioned to Renaud to
be gone, shouting:
"Go your way!"
But he, who had thus far watched her with curiosity and with no
feeling of anger, was irritated by those words. Certainly he had
forgotten none of Livette's grievances against the gipsy. Not a week
had passed since her threatening visit to the Chateau d'Avignon. But,
in that beautiful evening light, Renaud's heart felt at peace, and he
had recognized the gipsy queen without emotion. It may be that
curiosity was dominant in his heart, and urged him toward this
mysterious being, surprised in her bath, in the utter solitude of the
desert at evening; the curiosity of a traveller to examine a strange
animal, of a Christian to investigate a heathen woman. "Go your way!"
This command, hurled at him from afar by a woman's voice, wounded him
in that part of his heart where the memory of the gipsy's threat
against Livette was stored away.
"Ah! it's you," he cried, "you, who go about and stand in doorways to
frighten young girls when they happen to be left alone! who tell lies
and play monkey-tricks to make them give you what they refuse to give!
Don't let it happen again, thief! or you'll find out how the pitchfork
and the goad feel!"
The insulted queen was absolutely convulsed with furious rage. If she
had been near the drover, she would have jumped straight at his
throat, as the serpent straightens itself out like an arrow and darts
at its prey. She felt that she grew pale, a shiver ran through her
whole body, and swaying a little, like the adder about to spring, with
her head thrown slightly back, she walked toward the horseman--but how
far away he was!
"Aha!" he cried, "you are coming near to hear better! Come on, you
heathen, come! I will explain it all to you!"
As he remembered how the woman had threatened Livette, his wrath rose
within him. They were not Christians, these Bohemian creatures, but
thieves, bandits, one and all. Why, it was said that they ate human
flesh, child's flesh, when they could find nothing better. If that
were not true, how would they have whole quarters of bleeding flesh in
their kettles so often? Ah! a race of wolves, of accursed foxes!
"Come on!" he cried again.
She came on, but not without difficulty, having to force her way step
by step through the resisting waves. Her shoulders were not yet
visible, and she was accelerating her speed by using her arms under
the water. She could have made the same distance more quickly by
swimming, but she did not even think of that. She was thinking of
something very different!
Renaud mechanically cast his eye along the shore, behind him, and saw,
a few steps away, the gipsy's clothes lying in a heap out of reach of
the waves,--and her tambourine on top of them; then he looked around
once more at the woman coming toward him. The water was now up to her
armpits, and not until then did he see that she was entirely naked.
Her bust slowly emerged from the water. At a hundred paces from the
shore, the water reached only to her knees. She was beautiful. Her
slender, well-knit body was very youthful. She stood very erect, and
seemed as if she were going into battle without any thought of shame.
She had been assailed: she was rushing at her assailant, that was the
whole of it. Her fists were clenched, her arms slightly bent, her head
still thrown back a little. Her whole attitude was threatening. The
water was rolling down in glistening pearls from her neck to her feet,
over every part of her swarthy, bronzed body. Her swelling chest
seemed to be put forward, as if it were ready, like a magic buckler,
to receive the blows that would be powerless to injure it.
The drover sat still in speechless amazement. He gazed at the
approaching woman, who, as he saw her, springing from the water,
surrounded by white foam, with her unusual coloring, appeared to him
like a supernatural being.
What was she there for? She came forward, boldly aggressive; and her
witch's mind was revolving many evil schemes, no doubt.
Did she not bend over a moment, as if to pick up pebbles from beneath
the water, with which to stone her enemy? Was she not holding them now
in her clenched fists. No: the sands of Camargue stretch very far
beneath the water, sloping very gradually, and not the tiniest pebble
meets the swimmer's bare foot.
What was she doing then?
And now she was close beside the horseman, whose curiosity constantly
increased. But he had ceased questioning himself. He simply stared at
her, stupefied and enchanted.
He followed her with his eyes, fascinated, forgetting his spear
resting upon his stirrup, forgetting his horse, forgetting everything.
And now she was within three paces of him, standing perfectly
straight, insolent in her whole bearing, in every undulation of her
figure, looking him in the face, with eyes from which a steely flame
shot forth, and which no other eye could penetrate. And as she
presented her profile to him for a second, he had a swift, hardly
conscious thought that the lower part of the face--from below the
nostrils to the base of the chin--resembled the head of the lizard of
the sand, and the turtles and snakes of the swamp. There was the same
vertical line, broken by thin, slightly-receding lips, whence he
expected to see a forked, vibrating tongue come forth, as in a dream
of the devil.
But this impression was but momentary, and he saw naught but the
woman, young, fair, unclothed, seemingly offering herself voluntarily
to his savage lust, in the security of that deserted shore, amid the
plashing of the waves, in the fresh breeze blowing from the sea, and
the evening sunlight, which, with the salt water, coursed in streams
over the whole lovely body.
Dazzled, blinded, drunken with the waves of blood, which from his
heart, whither it had rushed at first, suffocating him and making him
waver in his saddle,--now poured back to his brain, suffusing his face
and bull-like neck with red,--he was about to leap down from his
horse, or perhaps to stoop over only, snatch up the creature--a mere
feather in his hands--by strength of wrist, and centaur-like carry her
away _en croupe_,--when she, more prompt to act, darted forward,
stretching out her arms, and with her left hand seized and pulled
back with all her strength the double rein of Renaud's horse, making
him rear and fall back. And with her right hand she struck the
creature's face!
[Illustration: Chapter VII
_He saw naught but the woman, young, fair, unclothed,
seemingly offering herself voluntarily to his savage lust,
*** when she, more prompt to act, darted forward, stretching
out her arms, and with her left hand seized and pulled back
with all her strength the double rein of Renaud's horse,
making him rear and fall back._]
"Go, dog! go and tell your people that a woman has revenged herself
upon you and has struck the horseman on his horse's face! Coward! Vile
neat-herd! Go and tell it to your sweetheart! Go, tell her that when I
struck you, you knew not what to do or say!"
There was no wrath left in Renaud; he had no feeling but fear mingled
with amazement. The woman's performance seemed to him in very truth
surprising, diabolical. In coloring, bearing, expression, and
audacity, she was the sorceress to the life. A strange terror took
possession of him. Perhaps he would have gone astray gaily, without
remorse, with any other than this ill-omened gipsy, who terrified him.
He was especially alarmed for Livette. He felt that she, and he
himself with her, were threatened by some mysterious, obscure
disaster; and the thought of being unfaithful to her filled him with
dismay, as the beginning of the end. He was afraid of himself; afraid,
for Livette, of this unforeseen, inexplicable creature, who rose up
before him, challenging him to contend with her, for what?--Thus,
malignity and hatred brought the woman to him as love would not have
done!--He was bewildered. He simply waited till his rein should be let
go, ready to start off at a gallop, feeling no longer in his heart the
wrath a man must feel in order to ride down any woman, though she
were a witch, and trample her beneath his horse's feet, at the risk of
killing her.
But why was he no longer angry? Because his eyes, against his will,
followed every movement of that body with its weird beauty,--the body
of an enemy.
"You would like to fly like a coward, would you?" she suddenly cried.
"You shall not go until I choose!"
Profiting by the horseman's open-mouthed stupor, she had seized with
her teeth a hanging end of the lasso that was coiled about the horse's
neck, and with the assistance of one hand--the other still holding the
rein--had swiftly passed it about the nostrils and tied it in a cruel
knot. With a fierce pull upon this instrument of torture, she held the
beast fast just where she wished him to be.
"You must wait until your comrades pass!" she said. "They must see a
bull-tamer tamed by a woman!"
"Upon my word," thought Renaud, "that would be, as she says, a very
absurd thing!" And he drew his horse back a little, thinking he might
release him, but the horse stretched out his head and neck, balked,
dropped his tail, and stiffened his four legs, as if he were tied to a
wall. The gipsy did not stir. She laughed, showing an unbroken set of
small, white, pretty, formidable teeth.
"Take care!" said Renaud at last, "I am going to ride my horse upon
you!"
"I defy you to do it!" she replied tranquilly.
She saw with her unerring glance signs of confusion in the drover's
eyes: the charm was working! Through a mist he now gazed upon this
woman, whose captive he was, by virtue of a burning curiosity already
closely akin to love. She smiled.
This lasted some time. At last, Renaud felt that his wits were leaving
him. To remain faithful to Livette, whom he could not betray with the
very woman upon whom he had promised to avenge her, he must not
dismount from his horse, for as soon as he put his foot to the ground
he would have become the stronger of the two! To remain faithful he
must have courage to remain vanquished in this struggle of beauty
against strength. And he waited.
She surprised the drover glancing for an instant toward the moor.
"Aha! you are afraid some one will see you, coward! but never fear!
Every one shall know what has happened to you, all the same. I will
take care of that! Some day you shall come and tell me what your
pale-faced, white-blooded blonde had to say to it!"
Humiliated at being forced thus to obey a woman, but rendered wavering
and weak by the physical delight she caused him to feel, he remained
where he was! His horse, as he irritated without maddening him, tried
several times to free himself, but without success. Renaud looked on.
Slight, supple as a tiger's whelp, active and strong, and accustomed
to contend with horses, the gipsy, still holding the cruel cord in
her left hand, had seized the long mane and wound it about her right
hand, and when the horse reared, she being thus made fast to him,
allowed herself to be raised from the ground, standing erect upon the
tips of her rigid toes--or else she would twine her feet about the
rider's leg, clinging to him as the polypus clings, with its tendons
to the rock, and laughing always, with a wicked, obstinate, triumphant
air.
"You shall never be rid of me again!"
At last, becoming more and more alarmed, he came to have a horror of
her, as of a poisonous insect, seen in a dream, a spider or a
dragon-fly, that follows you obstinately, or of an adder that
conceives a strange, almost human hatred for you, persists in
following your footsteps, with unwearying patience, and becomes an
object of terror, despite his puny size, because of his supernatural
tenacity.
And in very truth the fierce resolution, the malevolent perseverance,
the demoniacal obstinacy of the woman, protected as she was by her
beauty and her weakness, were terrifying.
But the play of the muscles, causing that gleaming flesh, now moist
with perspiration, to throb and undulate, aroused the man's interest,
in spite of everything, and pleased him more and more. Desire awoke in
him. And instantly he refused to accept his defeat, and rebelled.
"Look out!" he cried, and he urged his horse forward, driving his
spurs into his sides; but the beast, held fast by the nostrils, gave
but three leaps and then stopped short, breathing fire. Poor Blanchet,
who was used to his young mistress's caresses and sweetmeats! he was
learning now to know woman's true nature.
At last, the gipsy released her double prey.
"Go! you have looked at me enough!" she suddenly exclaimed.
Renaud gazed at her an instant longer, without speaking or moving. The
strength and chaotic character of his temptations held him fast there
for another moment. So this extraordinary experience (which would
never be repeated!) was ended at last!--Mad thoughts, each clear
enough in itself, but confused by their great number, jostled one
another in his brain. Why had he not sooner put an end to this
conflict? What would people say of him when it was known? How could it
be that he, the king of the moor, had not stooped to pick up this
joy?--But Livette?--ah, yes! Livette!
He buried his spurs in Blanchet's flanks, and the beast flew away
toward Saintes-Maries.
The gipsy stood on the shore a long while, looking after the fugitive.
She smiled. She reviewed in her mind the varying fortunes of the
battle, and gauged the extent of her victory. She recalled, one by
one, to enjoy them to the full, the thoughts that had passed through
her mind when she was wading toward the shore.
She had not premeditated her assault, as she made it--her first idea
had been to pick up some stones and throw them at Renaud's head, being
an adept in the art. But she could find none. So she had continued her
forward movement, not knowing what she would do, but certain that she
must do something to punish the insolent Christian.
But when she felt the cool air blowing upon her bare breast, she had
said to herself in her mysterious language, full of cabalistic words
and images, that if a saint had been able to recompense a boatman--her
good friend--simply by revealing to him her beauty all unclothed, a
heathen might, by similar means, chastise a brutal drover; for love is
the magician's herb, the bitter-sweet, the plant with two savors, balm
and poison at once; and woman is bitter as the salt sea water,
frightful as death,--her hands are chains stronger than iron, and her
whole being is as much to be dreaded as an army!
Could not she, brown as she was, almost black beside the white-skinned
blondes, domineer over the pale-faced Livette's lover, if she chose?
Indeed, what more need she do, to make him unfaithful to his fair
fiancee, than show herself to him, and could she not do it without
seeming to intend it? As she had, beyond question, been insulted by
this Christian, she could pretend to forget her nudity in her wrath,
and thus attack him with that same nudity!--No, no, there was no need
of philters, magic incantations, or fires lighted at night when the
moon is young, under tripods on which marsh-water, filled with snakes,
is boiling--no need of such things to bewitch this fellow! She would
come forth from the water, naked and lovely as she was, and the devil,
at her command, would do the rest! What were the stones she might
throw at a young man, compared with the power that exhaled from
herself? Yes, therein lay the charm of charms. She knew it,--being a
witch like every other woman! Lust for her body was what she would
throw at him like an evil destiny; with that she would poison his
life--and then, she would calmly watch the ravages of the poison.
And so she had come forward, small but formidable--the queen! She knew
also that in former times, in the days of pagan Europe, an immortal
goddess had issued from the sea, had sprung forth, fair and naked,
like a marvellous flower, and, standing on the blue waves, her feet
resting in a shell of mother-of-pearl, had long held sway over
men--before the reign of Jesus Christ.
Renaud, turning in his saddle, saw the gipsy standing there, still
naked, waving her arms in the sunlight, as if she wished still, from
afar, to hold Livette's betrothed spellbound and fascinated by her
beauty.
The sun disappeared below the horizon, and the naked woman's figure,
even more mysterious in the gathering twilight, was outlined in black
against a coppery red sky.
VIII
ON THE BENCH
From Saintes-Maries, whither he went to ask how many bulls he was
expected to bring on the day of the fete, Renaud rode away at once to
the Chateau d'Avignon.
He was in haste to see Livette once more, and sitting by her side to
forget the scene of the afternoon, to which, despite his efforts, his
mind constantly reverted.
A ride of four or five leagues and he reached his destination.
Livette and her father and grandmother were sitting just outside the
farm-house, enjoying the fresh air on the stone bench against the
facade of the chateau, among the old climbing rose-bushes which frame
the windows above with their bunches of green leaves interspersed with
flowers.
This was also one of the favorite resorts of our lovers, who liked to
have above their heads the perfumed foliage, to which one of the
nightingales from the park often came to sing.
"Ah! good-evening, Jacques."
"Good-evening, all."
"What brings you so late? You have dined, of course?"
"I ate some anchovies at the Saintes----"
"They're good for nothing but to give you an appetite. Would you like
something else? you have only to speak."
"Thanks, Master Audiffret. I'll just go and look after Blanchet in the
stable and then come back. I won't go to the _jass_ to-night. I'll
sleep in the hay-loft with the horses."
Master Audiffret, with his pipe between his lips, rose and followed
Renaud as far as the door of the stable, and from there watched him
rub down his horse.
"Whenever you please, Master Audiffret, you can take him back for
Livette. I don't find any faults in him; far from it. He is a good
horse, and very gentle."
"He is quiet with you because you tire him out, you see; but she
didn't use him every day, not by any means; I am always afraid for
her. If she takes a fancy to ride him sometimes, you can lend him to
her, and take the first horse that comes along for yourself. By the
way, I hope you will soon have your Cabri again. Somebody saw Rampal
yesterday in Crau. He was riding your horse, so he hasn't sold him, at
all events. It's fair to suppose he means to bring him back to you."
"Oh! I will go to meet him," said Jacques, "for as to thinking he
will bring him back to me--oh! no; he would have done that before
now!--Can you tell me, Audiffret, where Rampal was seen yesterday?"
"Between Tibert's farm and Icard's in Crau. Right there, as you know,
in the middle of a bog, is a hut you can only get to by a plank walk
built on piles and covered by the water--you can only tell where it
is, when you know the place, by stakes sticking up at intervals the
whole length of the walk. I have an idea he means to go in hiding
there, the beggar, like the deserter who went there to pass his time
of service----"
"Aha! he has gone to the Conscript's Hut, has he? Very good; I will go
to see him there, never fear!" said Renaud.
Blanchet, having been well rubbed down, was grinding the good lucern
between his teeth. Renaud went out of the stable, and with Audiffret
sat down beside Livette and the grandmother.
All four kept silence for a long moment. Nothing could be heard but
the unceasing, melancholy croaking of the frogs, and beneath it, but
indistinguishable, the dull murmuring of the two Rhones and the sea.
The sky was swarming with innumerable tiny stars, which seemed to
answer the various noises of the palpitating moor; and, just as the
waters of the Rhone, after it rushes into the blue ocean, pursue their
own course for a long while therein, unmingled, without losing their
earthy color; so the Milky-Way, made of a dust of stars, pursued its
course, easily distinguishable, through the ocean of starry worlds.
Renaud had a feeling of constraint.
When he joined his fiancee, he did not feel all that he ordinarily
felt--a joyful impulse to run to meet her, a sort of oppression at the
pit of the stomach, a sudden delicious rush of the blood to the
throbbing heart!--And Livette, too, so soon, was conscious of a vague
inexplicable feeling at the bottom of her heart that something was
wrong. There was something between them! Indeed, he had, for the first
time, something to conceal from her; and, thinking that it might, that
it must be apparent, he suddenly said:
"I am not well to-night."
"Look out for the fever!" said Audiffret. "I know it is not as
frequent or as dangerous as it used to be, but you must be on your
guard, all the same! Be on your guard, and take the remedy. Up in the
pharmacy of the chateau are the registers of the time the land was
first exploited--the time when the Chateau d'Avignon people were
gaining a little arable land from the swamps every day. Why, men went
to the hospital, fifteen, twenty a day. And such doses of quinine, my
children! It is all written down in the _Livre de Raison_ up there. In
those days, all the farms hereabout had the same kind of a book,
called by the same name, just as sailors have a log-book. Those were
the days of good order and gallantry. The peasant-women in those days
didn't try to copy Parisian bourgeoises,--eh, grandmamma?--by wearing
dresses that didn't suit them, instead of the old-fashioned gowns that
made them attractive because they were so becoming."
"Yes," sighed the grandmother, "this is the age of pride, and my time
has gone by."
That is the common remark of all our old peasants.
"People didn't read so many newspapers in those days," continued
Audiffret, "they didn't worry so much about the affairs of the whole
world, and every man paid much more attention to his own affairs.
Things went better for it. Landowners lived on their estates and
raised families, instead of going to Paris and dying there, of pride
or debt or something else. The _Livre de Raison_ up yonder describes
our ancestors' battles with the swamps and the fever. The pharmacy is
still in good order, with the scales and the jars in the pigeon-holes,
under the dust. And the book tells everything, diseases and deaths.
To-day, hardly any one dies of the fever in our neighborhood. It is
dying out. The dikes and canals have done good service, and this
Cochin China of France, as that sailor called it that I took to see
the Giraud rice-fields, this Camargue of ours is as healthy to-day as
Crau!--However, be on your guard, I tell you, and take the remedy!
don't wait till to-morrow; Livette will give you what you need. Now, I
am going to bed. Stay up a little longer, young people, if you
choose. Are you coming, grandma?"
"No, I'll stay out a moment longer with the young folks," said the old
woman.
Audiffret knocked the ashes out of his pipe against the corner of the
bench, and having put it in his pocket, went up to bed.
Silence reigned upon the bench.
The grandmother was tired and sleepy: every little while she would
raise her head as if suddenly awakened,--then it would begin to fall
forward again, slowly, slowly----
"A heavy dew is falling," observed Livette, suddenly.
"Yes, demoiselle."
"See!" said she ingenuously, holding out her arm so that he could feel
the dampness on the sleeve of her dress. But he did not put out his
hand. He was not all Livette's that evening, as usual. Strangely
enough, she did not frighten him that evening. He was not, as usual,
overcome with diffidence in her presence. She no longer dominated him.
And he was angry with himself. He suffered. He realized that his
thoughts were more frequently busied with the memory of the day than
with his sweetheart, who was sitting so near him.
"What are you thinking about?" said Livette, who had had her eyes upon
him for a moment past, as if she could see his face distinctly,
although they were sitting in the shadow. Beyond question, she felt
that his thoughts were elsewhere. There is nothing more subtle than a
lover's divination.
"I am thinking," said Renaud, a long minute after the question, "about
my horse, which I propose to take back from Rampal to-morrow if he can
be found in Camargue or Crau."
"And then?"
"And then?" he repeated--"I was thinking of the Conscript's Hut, where
he is at this moment, perhaps,--in hiding."
"And of what else?" Livette insisted.
"Oh! how do I know! of the fever--of all we have just been saying----"
"Alas!" said the maiden, "and not at all of me, Renaud? do you not
think of me any more?"
Her voice was sad.
He shuddered, and the movement did not escape the little one's notice.
It seemed to him, as Livette uttered that reproach, that he saw the
gipsy again as he had seen her in the afternoon, standing before him,
near at hand, all naked and so brown! as if she were accustomed to
pass her days naked in the sun, and were tanned from head to foot by
his rays. And how lithe and sinewy the wild creature was! A genuine
animal, a little Arabian mare, of much finer breed than the Camargue
stock. Alas! for too long a time, through fidelity to his fiancee, he
had been as virtuous as a girl, and now the hot-blooded fellow's
continence was taking its revenge upon him, a cruel revenge, arousing
mad, amorous longings that were not for Livette. And so his very
respect for her--poor child!--turned against her!
"Jacques?" said Livette, in the hardly audible tone the sentiment of
love imparts to the lover's voice, a soft, veiled tone, heard by the
heart rather than by the ear.
Renaud did not hear her. He _saw_.--He saw the gipsy as plainly as if
she were there before him, even more plainly. In the darkness of the
night, her body, brown as before, seemed luminous, like an opaque
substance giving forth a pale light. Her naked figure, obscure and
bright at the same time, was standing motionless before his eyes--then
it moved--and he fancied that he saw the gipsy bathing in the
phosphorescent water peculiar to the summer months,--when swimmers
cause a cold, liquid light to dart hither and thither through the dark
water, following and marking the outlines of their forms, from which
it seems to radiate.
"Have I the fever?" he said to himself.
As if in answer to the unspoken question, Livette took his hand. She
felt it from wrist to finger-ends, to see if it were dry and hot.
"Yes," said she, "you must look out; father was right, you have a
touch of fever. Come up and find the medicine."
"Come on," said he, glad of the diversion.
"Come," she repeated, "but move softly: grandma has fallen asleep!"
The old lady was asleep, as she said. She was leaning against the
wall, perfectly motionless. The white handkerchief, tied in the
Arlesian fashion, instead of covering her _chignon_ only, enveloped
almost her whole head, allowing two tufts of coarse, white hair, all
in disorder, to protrude, like mist, on each side of her face.
She was asleep, her mouth partly open, a ray of light shining through
upon her teeth, which were still beautiful.
They left her there.
IX
THE PRAYER
Livette opened the farm-house door, which creaked loudly in the
resonant emptiness of the spacious stone staircase.
She lighted the lamp, which was hanging on a nail, and they went
up-stairs together, she absorbed by thoughts of him, and he of her,
but no longer in their accustomed condition of affectionate
embarrassment.
He held the iron lamp, hanging at the end of its hooked stick; and to
relieve his conscience, to do his duty as a lover, and perhaps in that
way to change the current of his thoughts, perhaps to set at rest the
amorous anxiety with which he was assailed,--to force himself to
return, heart and soul, to Livette, and, who knows?--so hard to fathom
is man with his background of devil!--perhaps, with her and unknown to
her, to satisfy to some extent the passion kindled by the other--for
all these reasons together, more inextricably mingled than the twigs
of the climbing rose-bushes, he said to himself: "I will kiss her!" He
had never done that thing,--except in the presence of the old
people,--but the Renaud of that evening was not the Renaud of other
days, in his feeling for Livette. The powerful leaven of his wild
nature was swelling his veins to bursting. In very truth, he had the
fever,--at all events, a species of fever. All his nerves were
overstrained; in his eyes, even the most indifferent objects wore an
unusual look. And in Livette he saw, in spite of himself, reproaching
himself bitterly therefor, things which ordinarily he refused to see.
And as, being always dressed in the Arlesian fashion, she wore the
_fichu_ of white muslin crossed upon her breast so low as to afford a
glimpse, beneath the gold chain and cross, of the white throat, above
the meeting of the stiff folds, laid neatly one upon another, his
passionate gaze fell upon that spot, amid the modest arrangement of
muslin, prettily called "the chapel."
In his left hand was the lamp, which he held shoulder-high, and as far
away as possible, to avoid the drops of oil,--and he wound his right
arm about Livette's waist as she placed her hand upon the iron rail.
At every step they climbed, he felt the play of the muscles of his
fiancee's youthful frame, imparting to the arm about her waist a
soothing languor that ran through his whole being,--and yet his heart
did not rejoice thereat; and he realized that, ordinarily, if the end
of the velvet ribbon in Livette's head-dress touched his face, it
caused a sweeter thrill of pleasure in his blood, and more than all
else, a pleasure which there was no mistaking. And, thereupon, he
grew vexed with himself as for a failure of duty, he was oppressed by
a presentiment of disaster, vague but inevitable. And she felt more
and more keenly the rebound of his emotions. She was conscious that
her peace of mind was endangered. Something certainly was against her.
The arm, which had sometimes been about her waist as now, no longer
seemed to be her lover's arm, but a mere ordinary man's. She suffered,
and did not understand. The look she saw in his eyes was a strange
look from him, without affection, without pity even. She knew him
well, honest Renaud, her promised husband, and yet she was afraid of
him as of a stranger!
All these thoughts passed very quickly through their minds, the more
quickly because they were simply conscious of them, and did not stop
to try to analyze them. The all-powerful human electricity, less known
than the other variety, was playing its game, impossible to follow, in
their hearts, with its vast net-work of currents and connections. In
these two creatures of instinct, the ever-recurring prodigy of love,
of natural affinity--of the sympathies and their opposite--was seen
once more, as mysterious, as marvellous, as profound as ever. So far
as nature is concerned, there are two beings: man and woman; there are
no subdivisions. At the basis of humanity, all life is the same, all
passion is the same. The student of the higher races labors
incessantly to perfect his reasoning and his powers of expression,
but there is more overflowing, complicated life in the heart of his
ignorant brother than in the heads of the philosophers, who, by dint
of self-analysis, have lost the faculty of emotion. They who deem
themselves most skilful in discovering the real man in themselves, do
not perceive that they pervert the secret impulses of their hearts by
keeping too close a watch upon them. The light of their miner's lamp
changes the psychological conditions, just as constant light would
modify the physiological condition of human beings and plants. And,
meanwhile, love and death repeat, in the eternal darkness of their
simple hearts, their unwitnessed miracles.
They had reached the landing on the first floor--as large as an
ordinary room. At the last step, Renaud, almost lifting Livette to the
landing, tried to draw her to him, but she was seized with an impulse
to resist, and he with a sudden impulse to resist himself; separately,
the two impulses would have had no effect; but combined, they exerted
sufficient force to place an obstacle between them, as if by mutual
consent. That force was the witchery at work.
As they did not exchange a word, their embarrassment increased.
Hastily, to escape the constraint each imposed upon the other, she ran
to the door at the right and entered. And he, well pleased to be able
to do or say something to bring them nearer together, called out:
"Wait for the light, Livette! I am coming."
But Livette had suddenly remembered the gipsy's threat. "It is fate,"
she said to herself, "I see it now!" And she felt herself grow pale.
Then she had an inspiration.
"Follow me, Renaud."
They passed through rooms where furniture of the time of the Empire
was sleeping beneath its covers, and the long hangings falling from
the ceiling in broad, stiff folds, and withered, as it were, by time;
rooms seldom visited by the master, but kept in order by Livette and
her grandmother.
At last, Renaud and Livette reached an apartment with bare,
whitewashed walls, once used as a chapel.
A wooden altar, entirely devoid of fittings and ornament, stood at one
end of the room. Before the white and gold door of the tabernacle the
sacred stone was missing, leaving a square hole in the wood-work of
the altar.
But Livette opened a broad door flush with the wall. It opened into a
closet in the wall. When the door was thrown wide open, they could
see, below a shelf about level with their heads, chasubles and stoles
hanging straight and stiff--with great crosses in heavy gold
embroidery--suns from which the dove came forth; and mystic triangles,
and _Agnus Deis_. Among all the others were vestments for use in
mourning ceremonies,--black, with bones and executioners' ladders,
hammers and nails, in heavy white embroidery; and--to Livette's
amazement--there, in the centre of a stole, on silk as black as night,
was worked a crown of thorns in silver, which, in the lamplight,
seemed to emit bright rays.
On the shelf, above all these priestly vestments--which were arranged
with the backs outward, hung in such fashion that you seemed to be
looking at the priests standing at the altar--on the shelf, between
the goblet and the pyx, shone the consecrated host, a radiant sun,
mounted upon a pedestal like a candelabrum; and in the centre of its
rays was a gleaming circle of plain glass, which also reflected, in
fantastic guise, the flame of the lamp.
"Kneel, Renaud!" said Livette. "Prayer is the cure for what is
happening to us. Kneel and let us pray!"
The drover obeyed. He understood that Livette's purpose was to
exorcise fate.
She prayed in silence fervently. He, marvelling, unwonted to the
attitude of prayer, and striving to keep himself in countenance,
looked from time to time at the lamp he held in his hand, raised it to
get a better view of the ecclesiastical treasures, and, diverted for
the moment, by constant effort, from the perplexity that weighed upon
his heart, he was the more wretched when his mind suddenly reverted to
Livette.
Thereupon he said to himself that she certainly had guessed the truth;
that there was, in fact, a spell upon him, and, in his heart, he
implored the merciful God of the Cross, the mystic triangle, the
symbolical bird and lamb, to come to his aid.
[Illustration: Chapter IX
_In his left hand was the lamp, which he held shoulder-high,
and as far away as possible, to avoid the drops of oil,--and
he wound his right arm about Livette's waist as she placed
her hand upon the iron rail._]
"Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against
us!" Livette suddenly exclaimed, aloud, thinking of the gipsy.--"O
God," she added, "we promise Thee that on Saintes-Maries Day, which is
near at hand, we will each carry three tapers to their church, and
wait, until they are so far consumed, one after the other, in their
honor, that our finger-tips are burned!"
Then she rose--but before they left the room, they closed the
unpretentious double door upon the objects of a dead cult, left in the
darkness of abandonment--the goblet without wine, the pyx without
bread, and the consecrated host, whose polished metal case held naught
within.
X
THE TERRACE
He was well aware that he needed no fever medicine, and that his fever
did not come from the swamps.
She said no more about the drug, but as they stood on the landing and
he was preparing to descend, she said:
"Suppose we go out on the terrace?"
Livette wished to prolong the tete-a-tete, to ascertain if, after her
prayer, she would find _her_ Renaud in him once more.
He placed his lamp on the floor at the top of the staircase, and,
pushing open the door just above the last step, they both stood on the
terrace that overlooks the whole chateau.
A square terrace, and in the centre the great bell lay upon its side
in its iron cage--the great bell, three feet in diameter, that in the
old days called to work as well as to prayer, and when it rang the
Angelus caused the fever-haunted farm-laborers to fall upon their
knees on the brink of the miasmatic bogs.
Both of them, one after the other, mechanically struck the bell with
their foot, as it lay there on its side. It gave forth a short,
plaintive note, quickly stifled by contact with the flag-stones. It
was like the sigh of a mystery-haunted soul.
With hearts as sad as the bell, they leaned on the stone parapet in
presence of the night.
Livette and Renaud loved each other, but affection was no longer
enough for him. The sap of the spring-time, boiling in his veins in
lustful desire, gave birth, in Livette's heart, to sweet flowers of
reverie.
The swarming of the stars above their heads was beyond comprehension.
They were as many as the gadflies and frogs in the desert, or the
waves of the sea. They seemed to open and half close, like flowers in
a meadow, waved to and fro by a light, quickly-passing breath, like
eyelids making signs.
They seemed to have something to say, to move like lips speaking a
living language, telling of something of great moment that must be
known at once--but no sound coming from them reaches the ears of men,
for human hearing is not keen enough. Nor is the human sight keen
enough to see that the dust of the Milky-Way (pale as the pollen of
flowers) is also made of stars. Though men have seen it with a
different sight, afforded by man's inventive genius, that sight is
powerless to pierce farther and deeper--to learn all there is to know.
Moreover,--and Renaud himself had heard the story from the shepherds
who pass the winter in Camargue and Crau, and spend their nights in
summer counting the stars upon the summits of the Alps,--there are, in
space, beyond the skies visible to our eyes, fires alight so far away
from us, so far away that their light, now on its way toward our
earth, will not reach us for centuries to come. The men who follow us
centuries hence will see twinkling stars that even in our day were
lighted and making signs we could not see. And in those days ideas,
which are already kindled in men's minds, and are seen to-day by none
save those in whom their light is shed, will shine for all, and one of
them will be, for every mortal, the love and pity of the world.
Certain it is, that neither Renaud nor Livette could fathom those
infinite depths; but from the vast expanse of heaven, swarming with
tiny lights, a nameless emotion stole into their hearts, made up of
all their hopes to come.
Future worlds, lovelier than this of ours, were dreaming in them, with
them.
In them, too, because they were young and human, there was a share in
the future. In them, too, was the responsibility for future lives. In
them, too, lurked the mystery of generations to be born, for whom a
single couple, surviving the wreck of the demolished world, would be
enough to bestow upon them the desire to live and the power.
A spark is the basis of all fire. A man and a woman are the basis of
all love. Infinity is no greater than the number two. And that is why
the great scholars, who figure like Barreme, know no more of life and
the heart than Livette and Renaud--who knew nothing at all.
They knew naught save that they were alive and that they wished to
love each other and that they sought and shunned each other at the
same moment--but they did not ask each other why. They said nothing.
They felt. They could not say to each other that rivalry and jealousy,
that is to say grief, serve the designs of nature, whose purpose
doubtless is, by arousing those emotions, to quicken desire, so that
creation may be assured by outbursts of passion, and the future of
mankind by the imperious need of pleasure.
What does the law care for the weak and the vanquished? the strong
alone, they say, it wishes to perpetuate.
Pity and justice are human inventions, and will never triumph until
they have been slowly assimilated by the human mind to the matter of
which it is made.
They suffered, they longed for happiness--beneath that mystery-laden
spring sky. They awaited the coming of their joy, they summoned their
every hope, and they gazed at the dark horizon, at the desert, where
the tracts of sand shone like mirrors among the dark reeds, and the
ponds glistening with salt between the black lines of tamarisks. They
gazed upon the boundless expanse in which they seemed lost, and where,
nevertheless, they felt that they alone were an epitome of everything;
they listened, without hearing them, to the unending noises of the
island,--the murmuring of the water, the rustling of the reeds, the
waving foliage, the growling of wandering beasts, the distant roaring
of two rolling rivers and a restless sea;--and this combined voice of
the whole island formed a fitting accompaniment, by reason of the
extent and number of the sounds that composed it, to the silent
twinkling of the stars, that no one hears.
There was in the park, invisible to them at that hour, a foreign tree,
on which the flowers could be seen, by daylight, opening with a slight
noise. They sometimes amused themselves by watching that tree, said to
have come from Syria. A slight report, as if muffled, and a tiny
cloud, of very powerful odor, would issue from the bursting cell. The
tree continued, during the night, to send out its dust of passions in
quest of prey, and its strange perfume was wafted upward to the
lovers.
They trembled with joy at the slightest contact with each other. Ah!
if she could but have given him, on that beautiful May evening, all
the love his lusty youth demanded; if he could but have felt her
clinging lips melt beneath his burning ones, upon that lofty terrace
overlooking the rounded tops of the huge trees in the park, beneath
that dark star-spangled sky, doubtless his little betrothed would
have remained sole mistress of his heart!
But there were too many obstacles between Livette and Renaud; and as
he struggled virtuously to keep away from her, his thoughts flew off
to the other.
And Livette was already conscious of the heartache of the deserted
lover. All the broad expanse of level country that her eyes knew so
well, and that she felt about her in the darkness, suddenly seemed
empty to her, a desert in very truth, and thereby to resemble her own
heart. And softly, silently, she began to weep,--whereupon one of the
great farm dogs, her favorite, who had been seeking her in every
direction, came up to her and licked her hand as it hung at her side.
And down yonder, far down above the dark line of the sea, Renaud,
meanwhile, fancied that he saw a naked woman's form emerge from the
water, and await his coming, suspended in mid-air, or standing on the
surface of the waves.
"Livette! Livette!"
It was the grandmother's voice calling.
They went down without exchanging a word.
"Good-night, Monsieur Jacques," said the maiden.
"Good-night, mademoiselle," Renaud replied.
So they called each other monsieur and mademoiselle that night, and, a
moment after they had parted, Renaud took his horse from the stable in
perfect silence, and rode away.
His heart did not tell him that Livette, at her window, watched him
depart, her eyes filled with tears.
"Where is he going?"
She followed for a moment with her glance the luminous point (the
reflection of a star upon the head of the drover's spear) dancing
about in the darkness among the trees like a will-o'-the-wisp,--and
when that spark went out, she no longer saw the stars.
XI
THE HIDING-PLACE
Whither he was going he had no idea. He rode at random under the spur
of the energy that was rampant within him, demanding to be expended.
Love guided him as he himself guided his horse. He was the rider of
his own steed, and at the same time the accursed steed of the passion
that impelled him, spurred him on, shouted to him: "Forward!" guided
this way and that, without purpose, his mad race across the moor. He,
too, was mounted, harassed, bridled, whipped, bit in mouth, raging and
powerless. And the horse shared the mad humor of his master, who was
under the spell of love, so that Blanchet, wearied though he was by
his day's labor, having had but a very brief rest, was wild with
excitement none the less. Fortunately, he knew all the ditches and
canals and bogs, and, in his rapid flight with the reins lying on his
neck, he chose his own road. Sometimes he would slacken his pace on
approaching a ditch, in order to walk down into it, head first,
compelling his rider to stand in his great stirrups, with his back
touching the croup: sometimes he leaped them at full speed.
Drunken, bareheaded,--his hat having blown away somewhere in the
darkness,--the wind whistling through his hair, Renaud rode, for the
sake of riding, because the violence of his pace corresponded to the
violence of the passions that were raging within him. He tore along as
a beast does in the rutting season, from its mad desire to be alone.
And he said to himself that it was abominable to think of the other,
when he had for his own that flower of beauty, chastity and sweetness;
but he was thirsting for something very different; and he was
conscious of an intensely bitter taste in his mouth, a clinging, dry
saliva, a moisture that made his thirst the more unbearable.
Powerless to devise a means of escape from all the evil impulses in
his heart, he rode on confessing to two longings: either to meet
Rampal and take vengeance upon him for everything, or else to fall
over backward into a ditch and rise no more, thus giving a different
turn to his evil destiny;--and a third longing which he did not admit
even to himself: to meet the gipsy at daybreak, begging at the door of
some farm.--And then?--He did not know!
Suddenly he thought that he heard a beating of hoofs behind him, the
echo of his own gallop; he turned and saw--he saw in very
truth!--pursuing him at full speed, the naked gipsy, sitting firmly
astride her saddle, man-fashion, upon a shadowy horse whose feet did
not touch the ground.
She flew through the air, laughing in mockery as she cried to him:
"Stop, coward!"
He said to himself that it was not real, but he did not say to himself
that it was a vision; he thought: "It is witchcraft!" and fear seized
upon him, fear as powerful as his desire, and he fled from the image
of her he sought.
He turned to look no more; he fled. He heard the double gallop still:
his own and the other's. He rode through the transparent mist that
hovered over the damp, salt sand; and as he cut through those crawling
clouds it seemed to him as if he were riding through the sky, above
the higher clouds. In very truth, his brain was wandering, for love
will be obeyed, and his youthful passion was like insanity.
Suddenly Blanchet's four legs, as he flew over the ground, became
motionless and rigid as stakes, and his shoeless feet began to slide
over an absolutely smooth surface of clay, hard as iron and as
slippery as if it had been soaped. Swiftly the horse slid along,
digging furrows with his hoofs upon the polished surface, and when he
lost his acquired momentum, he stopped, tried to resume his former
pace, raised one foot and fell heavily to the ground, exhausted, his
mouth and nostrils breathing despair.
In an instant, Renaud, leaning on his spear, which he had not let go,
stood at his horse's head, struggling to lift him up, and encouraging
him with his voice. Blanchet, supported by the rein in his master's
hand, regained his feet after two fruitless slides.
Renaud looked about: there was nothing to be seen save darkness, the
desert, the stars,--tatters of pallid mist that strayed hither and
thither, as if clinging to a bush, a tamarisk, a clump of rushes,--and
assumed, from time to time, the shape of fantastic animals.
Renaud mounted Blanchet once more, but he was moved to pity for him.
And the horse, sometimes letting himself slide upon his shoeless feet,
his four legs perfectly stiff, sometimes putting one foot before the
other, testing the ground, which was firm and hard beneath his weight,
but soft beneath his sharp, scaly hoof, carried him at last away from
the clayey tract.
Pity and remorse at once were awakened in Renaud's heart by Livette's
horse.
What right had he, the drover, to ruin the favorite steed of his
darling fiancee in the service of his passion for a witch?
So Renaud dismounted, removed Blanchet's saddle and bridle, and said
to him: "Go! do what you will." Then he cut a bundle of reeds with
which he made himself a bed, and lay upon his back, with his saddle
under his head and a handkerchief over his face, waiting for dawn.
He fell into a heavy sleep, during which his trouble swelled and
burst within him, forced its way out, and took on form and
feature.--The same vision constantly returned.
When he awoke, two hours later, he found his cheeks wet with tears and
his hands over his face. Then he took pity upon himself, and, having
begun to weep in his dream, he let the tears flow freely that he would
have forced back had they sought an outlet on the previous day.
He deemed himself a miserable wretch, and wept over his fate, at first
madly, convulsively, and then with joy, as if, in weeping, he had
poured out all his sorrow forever. He wept to think that he was
caught, powerless, between two contrary, irreconcilable things: that
he wished for the one, and thirsted, against his will, for the other.
He beat his hands upon the ground; he tore his cravat, which strangled
him; he ground the reeds with his teeth, and cried aloud like a
child,--he, an orphan:
"O God! my mother!"
And he would have wept on for a long while, perhaps, and emptied the
springs of bitterness in his heart, had he not suddenly felt a warm
caress--two soft, warm, moist caresses upon his cheek, his forehead,
his closed eyes.
He half opened his eyelids and saw Blanchet standing beside him,
touching his face with his pendant lip as he used to touch Livette's
hand when in search of a bit of sugar.
Another animal had imitated Blanchet; it was the _dondaire_, Le Doux,
the drover's favorite, the leader of his drove of wild bulls and cows,
whose bell he had not heard, but who had recognized his master.
The compassion of these two dumb animals aggravated Renaud's bitter
grief at first. Like children, who begin to howl as soon as you
sympathize with them, he, when he found he was so wretched as to
arouse the pity of beasts, cried aloud in his heart, but stifled the
cry at his throat; then, touched at the sight of their kindly faces,
and distracted thereby from his own thoughts, he became suddenly calm,
sat up, put out his hand toward the muzzles of the powerful yet docile
creatures, and spoke to them:
"Good fellows, good fellows! oh! yes, good fellows!"
Day began to break. And the great black bull and the white horse,
both, as if in answer to the man and in answer likewise to the first
gleam of returning day, which sent a thrill of delight over all the
plain, stretched out their necks toward the east; and the neighing of
the horse arose, loud and shrill as a flourish of trumpets, sustained
by the bass of the bull's bellowing.
Instantly a chorus of neighs and bellows arose on all sides of Renaud.
His free drove had passed the night in the neighborhood. He was
surrounded by the familiar forms of his own beasts.
They came at the call of Blanchet and Le Doux and the drover's voice.
The mares were white as salt. Some of them came trotting up, some
galloping, some followed by their foals; and passed their heads
between the reeds, peered curiously in, and stood there,--or else,
with a cunning air, set off again, as who should say: "There's the
tamer, let us be off!" And there was a great kicking and flinging of
heels away from the man's side.
Some bulls, thin, nervous black fellows, whipping their sides with
their long tails, also came up, took alarm, remembering that they had
been punished for some shortcoming, and, turning tail, decamped in the
same way, and when they were out of sight, suddenly stopped.
But as the _dondaire_ remained there, few of the horses and cattle
left the spot.
Some, the oldest or the wisest, slowly assumed a kneeling posture, as
if to resume their interrupted repose, then, scenting the approaching
sun, wound their tongues about the tufts of salt grass, drew them into
their mouths and chewed placidly, while the silvery foam fell from
their muzzles.
Others, in the same posture, lazily licked their sides. A mother,
nursing her calf, watched him with a calm, gentle eye.
Here a stallion drew near a mare, reached her side in two bounds, with
tail in air and bristling mane, and bold, sonorous, trumpet-like
call--then reared, and when the mare leaped aside, bit at her and with
a sudden sidewise movement dodged the kick she aimed at him.
More than one bull, too, paid court to the other sex, rose clumsily
on his hind legs, only to fall again on his four feet, with nothing
beneath him.
The awakening of the drove was not complete. The animals were still
dull and heavy. They were awaiting the coming of the sun.
Renaud approached a half-broken stallion he had sometimes ridden, and
threw over his neck the _seden_ he had just coiled for that
purpose--Livette's _seden_ and Blanchet's, all stained with mud from
having brought so many beasts to earth.
He gave sugar to the wild creature, who allowed himself to be saddled
without overmuch resistance, desirous, perhaps, to enjoy for a day the
abundant supply of hay in the stables of the chateau, which he had not
forgotten.
"Go and rest, old fellow!" said Renaud to Blanchet.
And he set off on his fresh steed, spear in hand, with the idea of
seeking Rampal.
The stallion he rode was his favorite, the one he had named Prince.
And he felt a thrill of honest satisfaction as he said to himself that
at all events Livette's horse would not have to put up with his whims
and follies as a lover any more. He felt highly pleased at that
thought, being lightened of a threefold responsibility, as rider,
drover, and lover.
Prince seemed disappointed when Renaud compelled him to turn his back
on the Chateau d'Avignon.
He rode in the direction of the cabin mentioned by Audiffret. It was
very possible, after all, that Rampal had taken up his quarters there,
and he proposed to find out. Now, as this cabin was, as we have seen,
not in Camargue, but in Crau, not far from the Icard farm, between
nine and ten leagues to the eastward, it was necessary to cross the
main stream of the Rhone. But, in that vast plain, men rode long
distances for a _yes_ or a _no_, and thirty or forty kilometres had no
terrors for Renaud.
From his present position, it seemed to him that his shortest road
would be to skirt the southern shore of the Vaccares.
The cool, fresh morning air drove away all his black thoughts, his
visions and nightmares; he felt something like tranquillity. Moreover,
he was so overdone with weariness that he seemed half-asleep, and the
feeling was delicious. He no longer had the strength to follow his
thoughts, still less to guide them, so that he was submissive as a
blade of grass, as any inanimate thing, to the passing breeze, to the
sun's rays.
The hour and the coloring of the earth and sky were in very truth
enough to rejoice the heart, and physical gaiety took possession of
him, as he had ceased to reflect.
A fresh breeze, smelling of the sea, sent a shiver over the water and
the grass. The sun was rising. A moment more and he would appear to
cast his net of gold horizontally over the plain. He appeared. The
vague murmurs became distinct sounds; reflection changed to brilliant
light, drowsiness to activity.
Renaud, who was galloping along with his spear resting in his stirrup,
his head leaning heavily on the arm that held it and his eyes closed,
under the influence of the rocking motion of the horse, suddenly
reopened them, and looked about with the joyous glance of a king.
He paused a moment to gaze at a huge plough drawn by several horses,
which was transforming a wretched stony field into cleared land ready
for the vine.
The phylloxera, which has done so much harm in rich and healthy
districts, affords Camargue a new opportunity to fight the fever and
to gain ground on the swamp. The sand is, in fact, very favorable to
the vine and very unfavorable to the parasitic insect, and this watery
country will gradually become, please God, a genuine land of the vine!
Renaud watched the ploughman with a feeling of delight at the thought
of his native country being enriched by honest toil; and with a
confused feeling of regret, too, for he preferred that the moor should
remain uncultivated and wild and free. The idea of a flat plain,
tilled from end to end, where no room was left for the straying feet
of horses as God made them--that idea saddened him.
He would always say to himself as he rode through more civilized
regions: "Now there, you know, a man can neither live nor die."
The fields of wheat or oats, even in the summer season when they have
such a lovely reddish tinge, so like the overheated earth, so like the
turbid, gleaming waters of the Rhone, had no attraction for him. They
gave him the impression of an obstacle that he must ride his horse
around, and Renaud did not recognize the respectability of any
obstacle--except the sea!
He was more inclined to look favorably upon the vine, because it
seemed to him that it was a glorious thing for his country to produce
wine, just at the time when other districts in France had exhausted
their producing power. And then, the Rhone, the _mistral_, horses,
bulls, and wine, all seemed to him to go together, as things that told
of holiday-making, of manly strength and courage and joy. They knew
how to drink, never fear, did the men of Saint-Gilles and Arles and
Avignon. Renaud had attended wedding-parties more than once on the
island of Barthelasse in the middle of the Rhone, opposite Avignon,
and there he had tasted a red wine whose color he could still see. It
was an old Rhone wine, so they had told him, and he remembered that,
being desirous to do honor to the wine as well as to the bride, and
being a little exhilarated, he had solemnly thrown his cup into the
Rhone after the last bumper. There are, at the bottom of the Rhone,
many such cups, dead but not broken, from which joy was quaffed but
yesterday. They go gently down, turning over and over, through the
water to its sandy bed. There they sleep, covered with sand, and two
or three thousand years hence--who knows?--the venerable scholars of
that day will discover them, as they are discovering amphorae of baked
earth at Trinquetaille to-day, and now and then beside them a glass
urn, wherein all the colors of the rainbow chase one another about as
soon as its robe of dust is removed.
Who can say that Renaud's brittle glass, from which he drank the best
wine of his youth, will not remain for ages full of the sand and water
of the Rhone, and that--in days to come--other youths will not find
therein the same delight? For everything begins anew.
Thus did the wanderer's thoughts wander from point to point, from vine
to glass. Ah! that glass of his, thrown into the Rhone! His mind
recurred once more to that memory of a debauch. It seemed to him now,
that, by throwing it into the river on the wedding-day, he had
foretold his own destiny, and that he, Livette's fiance, would never
be married! He would drink no more from the discarded glass.
The first impulse of delight that came to him with the newness of the
morning had already passed; his sadness had returned as the day lost
the charm that attaches to a thing just beginning.
Dreaming thus, Renaud rode across the marshes, Prince splashing
through the water up to his thighs.
Yes, my friends, he forgave the vine, did Renaud, for invading
Camargue.
Moreover, after the harvest was gathered, did not the red and white
vineyards afford excellent pasturage for the bulls? There are some
that are all red in the autumn, and others all white, or of a light
golden yellow--as if the vines had amused themselves by reproducing
the two colors of the wine under the gorgeous sunsets. He has seen
nothing who has not seen the beams of the setting sun, in November,
now yellow as gold, now red as blood, spreading over a field of red
vines, over a field of yellow vines, which themselves spread out as
far as the eye can reach. Indeed, is not Camargue the home of the
_lambrusque_? The _lambrusque_ is the wild, Camarguese vine, different
from our cultivated vines in that the male and female are on separate
plants. The grapes that grow on the female _lambrusque_ make a
somewhat tart but pleasant wine, and the shoots of the vine make
light, stout staves for the hand.
Arrived at Grand Patis, Renaud swam the Rhone three times, from
Camargue to Ile Mouton, from Ile Mouton to Ile Saint-Pierre, and from
Ile Saint-Pierre to the mainland.
He was now in the swamps of Crau, a stony desert adjoining Camargue,
which is a desert of mud.
To the eye these two deserts seem to join hands across the Rhone. From
Aigues-Mortes to the pond of Berre is a pretty stretch of flat
country, my friends, and the sea-eagle, try as he may, cannot make it
less than twenty good leagues in a straight line! And that is the
kingdom of King Renaud.
Camargue has its saltwort, its grain and plantains and burdocks,
growing in small clumps, with sandy intervals between; it has its
_gapillons_, which are green rushes split into bouquets, with
thousands of sharp points finer than needles; and here and there
tamarisk-trees; and, on the banks of the two Rhones, great elms, so
often cut and hacked to procure wood to burn, that they resemble huge
caterpillars sitting erect upon their tails, their short hair
bristling as if in anger.
Crau is a land of naked plains and heather. It is, to tell the truth,
a veritable field of stones. They have come, people say, from Mont
Blanc, all the stones that now lie sleeping there. The Rhone and the
Durance have borne them down, then changed their beds, after having
jousted together on the vast space at the foot of the little Alps.
From beneath the stones of Crau, in May, there springs a rare,
delicate plant, the _paturin_, or dog's tooth. The sheep push the
stone away with their noses and browse upon the slender stalks while
the shepherd stands and dreams in the wind and sun.
But this stony Crau is farther away, beyond the pond of Ligagnou,
which skirts the river. Here, in the Crau that lies along the banks of
the Rhone, we are in the midst of the marshes, which are dry during
the greater part of the year; some of them, however, are very
treacherous, and one should know them well.
Renaud rode in a northeasterly direction, and soon reached the
neighborhood of the Icard farm.
He drew rein.
"Where is the hiding-place?" he muttered.
And he tried with all his eyes to pierce the thick underbrush of
reeds, rushes, cat-tails, sedges, and bull-rushes, springing from the
midst of a deep bog. This bog did not seem, to the eye, more
formidable than another, but the bulls and mares feared it and
carefully avoided it.
On the surface of the water was what looked like a thick crust of
mouldy verdure. It was not, however, the leprous formation of
duck-weed that lies sleeping on our stagnant ponds. It was a sort of
felt-like substance, composed of dead rushes, roots, twined and
twisted weeds, which made a solid but movable crust upon the water,
swaying beneath the feet that ventured upon it, ready to bear their
weight for a moment and ready to give way beneath them.
This crust (the _transtaiere_) was broken with fissures here and
there, through which the water could be seen, dark as night, its
surface flecked with transient specks of light, gleaming like a mirror
of black glass. Around the edges, at the foot of the scattered
tamarisks, grew reeds innumerable in thick clusters, always rustling
against one another, and incessantly brushed, with a noise like
rustling paper, by the slender wings of the dragon-flies with their
monster-like heads.
Many of these _caneous_ bear white flowers streaked with purple. As
they rise above one another on the long stalks, you would take them
for the flowers of a tall marsh-mallow. These reeds, with their long
leaves, remind one of the _thyrsi_ of antiquity, left standing there
in the damp earth by bacchantes who have gone to rest somewhere near
at hand in the shade of the tamarisks, or to abandon themselves to the
centaurs. They make one think, also, of the wand of the fable, which,
when planted in the ground, was at once covered with flowers, and
thereby had power over marriages.
These _thyrsi_ of the bog are reeds besieged by climbing plants. The
convolvulus fastens itself to the reed, twines its arms about it,
rises in a spiral course, seeks the sunlight at its summit, and robes
the long murmuring stalk in brilliant and harmonious colors.
The sharp leaves of the young reeds stand erect like lance-heads. The
older ones break off and fell at right angles. The delicate, graceful
foliage of the tamarisks is like a transparent cloud, and their little
pink flowers, hanging in clusters that are too heavy for the branches,
especially before they open, cause the flexible plumes of the
gracefully rounded tree-top to bend in every direction.
Through the reeds and tamarisks Renaud sought to discover the hut that
he knew, and that Audiffret had spoken of to him the night before. But
he could hardly distinguish the little inclined cross placed at the
highest point of the roof of all the Camargue cabins, which are built
of joists, boards, grayish mud (_tape_), and straw. The cabin was
formerly entirely visible from the spot where he stood, but the reeds
had grown so thickly on the islet on which it was built, that they
completely hid it. The path leading to it was on the opposite side of
the bog. He must make a wide detour in order to reach it, the bog _de
la Cabane_, so called, being of a very erratic shape.
From the south side of the cabin he went around to the north side. He
no longer had the _transtaiere_ in front of him; but beneath the
surface of the water, where reeds and thorn-broom flourish, was the
_gargate_, the slime, wherein he who steps foot is quickly buried.
There are many other dangers in these accursed bogs. There are the
_lorons_, a sort of bottomless well found here and there under the
water, the location of which must be thoroughly understood. The mares
and heifers know them and are clever in avoiding them, but now and
then one of them falls in, and now and then a man as well. And he who
falls in remains. No time for argument, my man! You are in--adieu!
The drovers will tell you, and it is the truth, that from every
_loron_ comes a little twisting column of smoke, by which those mouths
of hell can be located. A hundred _lorons_, a hundred columns of
smoke. There, my friends, is something to dream about, is it not, when
the malignant fever, bred in the swamps, smites you on the hip?
Renaud was anxious to know if Rampal was occupying the cabin, but not
to attack him there, for it is a treacherous spot. "If he is there, he
will come out some time or other. I will wait for him on the solid
ground. Ah! I see the path!"
It was a winding path hiding under a sheet of shallow water. The bed
of the path was of stones, very narrow but very firm, the right edge
being marked, as far as the cabin, by stakes at short intervals, just
on a level with the water.
Renaud dismounted, and looked for the first stake, holding his horse
by the rein. Although he knew its location, it took him some time to
find it. With the end of his spear he put aside the grass, and when he
discovered the stake, he felt for the solid road whose width it
measured. Bending over, he gazed long and very closely at the grasses
and the reeds, which met in places above the concealed pathway, and
when he rose he was certain that it had not been used for some time.
He was not mistaken. In truth, Rampal was a little suspicious of that
hiding-place, which was too well known, he thought, and to which he
could easily be traced. He often slept in the neighborhood, ready to
take refuge in the _cul-de-sac_, if it should become necessary, but he
preferred, meanwhile, to feel at liberty, with plenty of open space
about him.
Renaud remounted Prince, and crossed the Rhone again an hour later.
That night he lay in one of the great cabins which serve as
stables--winter _jasses_--for the droves of mares, in those months
when the weather is so bad that the bulls can find no pasturage except
by breaking the ice with their horns.
The next day, an hour before noon, he saw before him the church of
Saintes-Maries standing out like a lofty ship against the blue
background of the sea.
Little black curlews were flying hither and thither around it, mingled
with a flock of great sea-gulls with gracefully rounded wings.
A cart was moving slowly over the sandy road.
"Good-day, Renaud."
"Good-day, Marius. Where are you going?"
"To carry fish to Arles."
Marius raised the branches which apparently made up his load, but
which were simply used to shade a dozen or more baskets and hampers.
Well pleased with his freight, he put aside the cloth that was spread
over his treasure under the branches. Baskets and hampers were filled
to the brim with fish taken in the ponds and the sea. There were
mullet and bream, still alive, animated prisms with mouths and gills
wide open like bright red marine flowers amid a mass of dark-blue,
olive-green, and gleaming gold. There were enormous eels, too, caught
for the most part in the canals of Camargue, which are veritable
fish-preserves.
The dark-hued, slippery creatures twisted in and out, tying and
untying endless slip-knots with their snake-like bodies. By the livid
spots upon some of the great eels, Renaud recognized them as _muraenae_,
possessors of voracious mouths, well stocked with sharp teeth.
"See how they all keep moving!" said Marius.
At that moment, as if to justify his words, a great flat fish flapped
out of one of the baskets and fell to the ground.
With the end of his three-pronged spear the mounted drover nailed him
to the earth to prevent his leaping into the ditch, filled with water,
that ran along the road.
"Hallo!" said he in surprise, "isn't that a cramp-fish. When I spear
one of them with my regular fish-spear, which is longer than this
three-pronged one, it gives me a shock I didn't feel at all to-day."
"That's because the fish is in the water then, and your spear is
damp," said Marius, laughing. "But let the fellow stay there," he
added. "He isn't worth much. The snakes will have a feast on him."
Thereupon, horseman and fisherman went their respective ways.
The drover's thoughts wandered from the cramp-fish and the _muraenae_ to
the electric fish of America, of which old sailors had spoken to him.
They had told him that it was charged with electricity like the
cramp-fish, but resembled the conger more in shape, and that it could,
with its overpowering current, kill a horse; in order to make it
exhaust its stock of electricity, so that it can safely be taken, it
is customary to send wild horses into the water against it; they
receive the first shock, and sometimes die from the effects.
As he rode on toward Saintes-Maries, Renaud mused in a vague way upon
the miracles of life, which there is naught to explain.
XII
A SORCERESS
Livette did not go to sleep. When Renaud had passed out of sight in
the darkness, she softly closed her windows, and, throwing herself on
the bed with her face buried in the pillow, wept in dismay.
Meanwhile,--while Livette was weeping and Renaud, bewitched, was
galloping over the moor, fancying that he was pursued by the
gipsy,--the gipsy herself was asleep.
The two beings whose lives she was beginning to destroy were already
suffering a thousand deaths, and she, lying, fully dressed, under one
of the carts of her tribe, in their regularly pitched camp outside the
village, was sleeping tranquilly, her pretty, puzzling face smiling at
the stars of that lovely May night.
When Renaud left her, at sunset, all naked on the beach, she had
slowly stretched her sun-burned arms, taking pleasure in the sense of
being naked in the open air, of feeling the caressing breath of the
sea-breeze that dried the great drops of water rolling down her body.
Then, still slowly, she had dressed herself,--very slowly, in order to
postpone as long as possible the renewed subjection to the annoyance
of clothes, in order to enjoy unrestricted freedom of movement, like a
wild beast.
She had then walked along the beach, leaving the imprint of her bare,
well-shaped foot in the sand, covered at intervals by a shallow wave
that gradually washed away the mark.
The last kiss of the sea upon her feet, to which a bit of sparkling
sand clung, delighted her. She laughed at the water, played with it,
avoiding it sometimes with a sudden leap, and sometimes going forward
to meet it, teasing it.
She fancied that she could see, in the undulating folds of the
wavelets, the tame snakes which she sometimes charmed with the notes
of a flute, and which would thereupon come to her and twine about her
arms and neck, and which were at that moment waiting for her, lying on
their bed of wool at the bottom of their box in her wagon.
She had already ceased to think of Renaud. She was always swayed by
the dominating thought of the moment, never feeling regret or remorse
for what was past,--having no power of foresight, except by flashes,
at such times as passion and self-interest bade her exert it. Her
reflection was but momentary, by fits and starts, so to speak; and
her depth, her power, the mystery that surrounded her, were due to her
having no heart, and, consequently, no conscience.
The men and women who approached her might hope or fear something at
her hands, imagine that she had determined upon this or that course,
and try to defeat her plan; but she never had any plan, which fact led
them astray beforehand.
She routed her enemies and triumphed over them, first of all, by
indifference; and then she would abruptly cast aside her indolence,
like an animal, at the bidding of a passion or a whim, and would still
render naught every means of defence--her attack, her decisions, her
clever wiles, being always spontaneous, born of circumstances as they
presented themselves.
No: she made no plans beforehand, in cold blood; she never concocted
any complicated scheme; but she could, at need, invent one on the spur
of the moment and carry it out instantly, at a breath,--or perhaps she
would begin to execute it in frantic haste, and abandon it almost
immediately from sheer _ennui_, to think no more of it until the day
that some burst of passion should suddenly bring it back to her mind.
She was like a spider spinning its whole web in the twinkling of an
eye to catch the fly on the wing; or she would spin the first thread
only, and forget it until something happened to remind her to spin a
second.
Thus constituted, she was at the same time better and worse than
other women, because she was more changeable than the surface of the
water,--because she was of the color of the moment.
Being a fatalist, the gipsy said to herself that whatever is to
happen, happens, and she had never taken the trouble to devise a
scheme of revenge. She would simply utter a threat, knowing well that
the terror inspired by a prediction is the first calamity that
prepares the way for others, by disturbing the mind and heart and
judgment. And then, something always goes wrong in the course of a
year, collaborating, so to speak, with the sorcerer, and attributed by
the victim to the "evil spell" cast upon him. It is upon him, in
reality, because he believes that it is. In short, if opportunity
offered, she would assist the mischievous propensities of fate, with a
word, a gesture, a trifle--and, if opportunity did offer, it was
because it was decreed long ages ago, written in the book of destiny
that so it should be!
A true creature of instinct, the gipsy had no other secret than that
she had none.
She followed her impulses, satisfied her desire for revenge, her love
or her hate, without stopping to consider anything or anybody; and,
like the wild beast, she, a human being, became an object of dread to
civilized people, as nature itself is. Such creatures are implacable.
The gipsy loved life, and lived as animals live, without reflection.
It was the paltry yet profound mystery of the sphinx repeated. Her
actions were those of a brute, not far removed from the lower types of
mankind, notwithstanding her lovely human face, in which the eyes,
like Pan's, not clear, seemed veiled with falsehood because they were
veiled to their own sight with their own lack of knowledge, their
uncertainty and suspense. Look at the eyes of a goat or a heifer. They
are as deep as Bestiality, cunning and strong, cowering in the shadow
of the sacred wood. Life longs to live. It is lying in ambush there.
It is sure of her and bides its time. The human beast not only has
more craft than the fox or tiger, but has the power of speech as well.
Nothing is more horrible than words without a conscience.
After all, Zinzara was always sincere, although she never appeared so,
because her versatility placed her from moment to moment in
contradiction with herself.
The caress and the wound that one received from her in rapid
succession did not prove that she had feigned love or hate. She did,
in fact, love and hate by turns, from moment to moment, or rather,
without loving or hating, she acted in accordance with her own fancy,
sincere in her contradictions--and very artlessly withal.
She bore some resemblance to the ape, as it sits among the branches,
softly rocking its little one in its arms with an almost human air,
then suddenly relaxes its hold and lets its offspring fall, forgotten,
to the ground, in order to pluck a fruit that hangs near by.
She was a personage of importance in her own eyes, and she saw nobody
but herself at all times and under all circumstances.
The gipsy was formidable, as a spirit concealed in an element whose
slave it should be. She had the force of a thunderbolt, of an
earthquake, of any fatal occurrence impossible to foresee or to ward
off.
The viper is not evil-minded. He does not prepare his own venom. He
finds it all prepared. Disturb him, and he bites before he makes up
his mind to do it.
Like the cramp-fish or the electric eel, the gipsy could discharge a
fatal current of electricity as soon as you approached her,--by virtue
of the very necessity of existence. It might happen to her also to
indulge in the sport of exerting her malignant power around her, for
no reason, simply to watch its effects, because it was her day and her
hour, her whim.
She had the same means of defence and amusement.
It was not in her nature to be malignant. It simply was not necessary
for her to think of you, that was all. As a matter of fact, a man was
fortunate if she did not look at him.
Although born of a race that holds chastity in high esteem, she was
not chaste; not that she loved debauchery above everything else, but
she used it as a means of domination,--the more unfailing because she
made little account of it. Always superior, in her coldness, to the
passion she inspired, it was in that more than all else that she
really felt herself a queen, a sorceress--aye, a goddess, by favor of
the devil! The caress of the water in which she bathed afforded her
more pleasure than it afforded others. She was like the female plant
of the _lambrusque_, which is fertilized by the wind.
Like the mares of Camargue, that often assemble on the shore to
breathe the fresh sea air,--when she opened her lips to the salty
breeze, on those fine May evenings, she was happier than any man's
kiss could make her. The wandering spirit of her race breathed upon
her lips, in the air, with the freedom of the boundless waste--a vague
hope, vain and unending.
Being thus constituted, she knew that she exercised a disturbing
influence upon others, and that she was herself protected by something
that relieved her of responsibility. That thought filled her with
pride. There was a reflection of that pride in her smile. There was
also the constant remembrance of the sensations she had experienced,
known to her alone, and a certain number of men, who knew nothing of
one another.
Their ignorance, which was her work, also made her smile. And that
smile was a mixture of irony and contempt. She knew her own strength
and their weakness. So she was always smiling.
With no other policy than this, she reigned over her nomadic tribe,
changing her favorite, like a genuine queen, as chance or her own
impulses willed, but giving each one of them to believe that he was
the only man she had ever really loved, even if he were not her first
lover.
To deceive the _zingari_--that was a notable triumph for a _zingara_!
Among the fifteen or twenty children in her party, there was a young
dauphin, the queen's offspring; but since he had left her breast, she
had bestowed no more care upon him than the bitch bestows upon her
puppy some day to become her mate.
When she came near her camping-ground, excited by her recent contact
with the waves and the salt, which, as it dried upon her, pressed
against her soft, velvety flesh, the gipsy, tingling with warmth in
every vein, cast a sidelong glance at one of the male members of the
tribe, a young man with a bronzed skin and thin, curly beard.
And, in the darkness,--when they had eaten the soup cooked in the
kettle that hung from three stakes in the open air,--the _zingaro_
glided to the _zingara's_ side.
At that very moment, by her fault, two human beings were suffering in
the inmost recesses of their consciences, where Livette and Renaud
were gazing at each other with eyes in which there was no look of
recognition.
The betrothed lovers, her victims, were struggling under the evil
spell cast upon them by her glance, at the moment that that glance
seemed to grow tender in response to that with which her lover
enveloped her, on the edge of the ditch, beneath the feeble light of
the stars.
Renaud at that moment was dreaming that he had seen the naked gipsy
again and triumphed over her, and was asking himself, at the memory of
that robust, youthful form, if she were not a virgin, even though a
child of the high-road; recalling confusedly a strange, overpowering,
absolute passion, the triumphal possession of a new being, a heifer
hitherto wild and vicious, even to the bulls; of a mare that had never
known bit or saddle, and had maintained a rebellious attitude in
presence of the stallion.
Renaud was dreaming all that, but Renaud no longer existed for
Zinzara.
Zinzara, just at that moment, in the dew-drenched grass, was writhing
about like the legendary conger-eel, that comes out of the sea to
abandon itself to the labyrinthine caresses of the reptiles on the
shore.
Two days Livette waited, wondering what was taking place. Weary at
last of seeking without finding, she set out for Saintes-Maries on the
morning of the third day.
"There," she thought, "I may, perhaps, hear some news."
Her father saddled an honest old horse for her use.
"You must go to Tonin the fisherman's at noon," said he, "and eat your
_bouille-abaisse_. Send him word, when you arrive, with a good-day
from me."
Livette, as she rode along, looked about her at the peaceful green
fields, joyous and bright in the light that fell from the sky and the
light that rose on all sides from the water.
The gnats danced merrily in the sunbeams. When the gnats dance, they
furnish the music for the ball with their wings, and on calm days
there is a sound like the strumming of a guitar on the golden strings
of light over all the plain. There were also in the air long, slender
threads,--the "threads of the Virgin," or gossamer,--come from no one
knows where, which waved gently to and fro, as if some of the fragile
strings of the invisible instrument on which the little musicians of
the air perform, being broken, had become visible, and were floating
away at the pleasure of a breath.
It may be that those threads came from a long distance. It may be that
the toiling spiders who patiently spun them lived in the forests of
the Moors, in Esterel. A breath of air had taken them up very gently,
and now they were on their travels.
Livette watched them floating quietly by, and thought of a tale her
grandmother had told her. According to the grandmother, the threads
came from the cloaks spread to the wind as sails by the three holy
women. The wind, as it filled them, had unravelled them a little, very
carefully; and the slender threads, taken long ago from the woof of
the miraculous cloaks, hover forever above the sands of Camargue,
where stands the church of the holy women.--Above the strand they
hover night and day, as so many tokens of God's blessing; but they are
rarely visible, and if, by chance, on a fine day, you do see them, it
means that some great good fortune is in store for you.
In the transparent azure of the morning sky Livette's heart clung to
each of the passing threads; but the child tried in vain to acquire
confidence,--her heart was too heavy to remain long attached to the
fleeting things. She was afraid, poor child, and felt influences at
work against her that she could not see.
Alas! while the golden threads floated over her head, the black spider
was weaving his web somewhere about, to catch her like a fly.
Still musing, Livette rode on, and could distinguish at last, far
before her, the swallows and martins soaring above the steeple. They
were so far away you would have said they were swarms of gnats. And
with the swallows and martins were numberless sea-mews. This host of
wings, large and small, now dark as seen from below, now bright and
gleaming as seen from above, turned and twirled and gyrated in
countless intricate, interlacing circles. Instinct with the spirit of
the spring-time and the morning, they were frolicking in the fresh,
clear air.
It occurred to Livette to ride by the public spring in quest of
news, for it was the hour when the women and maidens of
Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer go thither to procure their daily supply of
water.
As she entered the village, she noticed the gipsy camp at her right
hand, but turned her head.
At that moment, she met two women on their way to the spring, walking
steadily between the two bars, the ends of which they held in their
hands, and from which, exactly in the middle, the water-jug was
suspended by its two ears.
"It is just the time for the spring," said Livette to herself, and she
followed them at a foot-pace.
"Good-day, mademoiselle," the women said as they passed, for the
pretty maiden of the Chateau d'Avignon was known to everybody.
There was as yet no one at the spring. The two women waited, and
Livette with them.
"How do you happen to be riding about so early, mademoiselle? Are you
looking for some one?"
"I am out for a ride," said Livette, "and as it's the time for drawing
water, I thought I would stop here a moment. My friends will surely
come sooner or later."
No more was said, and Livette, having nothing else to do, looked
closely for the first time at the carved stone escutcheon in the
centre of the high arched wall above the spring. It is the town crest,
and it is needless to say that it includes a boat, a boat without mast
or oars, in which the two Maries--Jacobe and Salome--are standing.
"I have often wondered," said Livette, "why they put only the figures
of two holy women in the boat. For haven't our mothers always told us
there were three of them? Were there three or not?"
"Certainly there were three, my pretty innocent," said the older of
the two women, "but Sara was the servant, and no honor is due to her."
"If the third was Saint Sara, then there were not three Marys, eh? But
I have always heard it said that the Magdalen was there, and that she
went away from here and died at Sainte-Baume."
"Yes, so she was, and many others besides! Lazarus was in the boat,
too, but when they were once on shore, every one went his own way:
Magdalen went to Baume, and the two Maries and Sara remained with us.
That was when a spring came out of the sand, by the favor of our Lord.
When they built the church, they walled in the spring in the centre of
it."
"Faith, they would have done well to leave the spring outside the
church!"
"Why so? is the water spoiled by it?"
"It's only good on the fete-day."
"After so many years! And there's so little of it!"
"We ought to have asked the saints to make it pure and abundant. If we
had all set about it with our prayers, they would have done it for
us."
"One miracle more or less!"
"The miracles, my dear, are only for strangers."
"And that is just what we need, neighbor. If it wasn't so, you see,
strangers wouldn't come any more--and without them what would the
country live on? poor we! Where are our harvests? Where are our wheat
and our grain, good people, tell me that? If it wasn't for the saints,
this would be a cursed country! One fete-day a year, and the
pilgrims--God bless them!--fill our purses for us."
"Miracle days are only too few and far between. We ought to have two
fete-days a year!"
"What are you saying, you foolish woman? Two fete-days a year! Mother
of God! That would mean death to pilgrimages. To keep the custom
going, everything must be just as it is and nothing change at all. Our
men know that well enough. Remember the visit the Archbishop of Aix
and those great ladies paid us twenty years ago."
And once more the story was told of the visit of the Archbishop of Aix
to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer twenty or thirty years before.
On a certain 24th of May the archbishop arrived at Saintes-Maries with
several elderly ladies of the nobility of Aix. But it so happened that
that 24th of May was the evening of the 25th! Anybody may be
mistaken!--So that, instead of being lowered at four o'clock, the
reliquaries were raised again on that day, and when monseigneur
entered the church with his fair companions, it was good-by, saints!
They had already been hoisted up at the end of their ropes to the
lofty chapel, amid the singing of canticles.
"Oh! well!" said the archbishop to the cure, "they must come down
again for us."
The cure was about to obey, but a rumor of what was going on had
already spread through the village!--Ah! bless my soul, what a
commotion!
"What!" said the old villagers. "They would lower the reliquaries on
some other day than the 24th, would they? Why, if it is such a simple
thing and can be done so often, why do you make the poor devils from
every corner of Provence and all the rest of the world come hurrying
to us on a special day? No, no, it would be the ruin of the country,
that is certain!"
To make a long story short, the people of Saintes-Maries took their
guns, and under arms, in the church itself, compelled the prince of
the Church to respect the sovereign will of the people of the town.
And they did very well, for rarity is the quality by virtue of which
miracles retain their value.
One of the women having told this anecdote, which was perfectly well
known to them all, they began, as soon as she had finished, to make up
for their long silence by loud talk, vying with one another in their
approval of the villagers' revolt against the bishops, who would have
abused the good-will of the two Maries.
"We are very lucky, all the same," said one of the old women, "to have
a good well with good stone walls instead of the brackish spring the
saints had to get their drinking-water from. I can remember the time
when we got our water from the _pousaraque_ (artificial pond), as the
people on our farms do to-day. The Rhone water that was brought into
them through the canals was always so thick and muddy you could cut it
with a knife!"
"Bah! it had time enough to settle in our jars."
"It is funny, though, to be so hard up for water in such a wet
country!" said a young woman who had just arrived. "This water is a
nuisance! Saint Sara, the servant, ought to have known from experience
that a woman has enough work to do at home without wasting her time
waiting in front of closed spigots. Saint Sara, protect us, and make
them turn on the water!"
The women began to laugh.
Almost all the housekeepers of Saintes-Maries had assembled by this
time. A last group arrived upon the scene. Some carried jars, without
handles, upon their heads, balancing them by a graceful swaying of the
whole body. With their hands upon their hips, they themselves were not
unlike living amphorae. Others, having one jug upon the head, carried
another in each hand--the stout _dourgue_, with handle and mouth;
others had wooden pails, others, glass jars, each having selected a
larger or smaller vessel, according to the necessities of her
household.
"What sort of a pot have you there, Felicite?"
Whereat there was a general laugh.
She to whom the question was directed, replied:
"I broke my jug, poor me! And, as I had to have some water, I took an
old thing I found that has always been standing behind the door at our
house since I can remember. If it will hold water, it will do for me
to-day, my dear!"
"Take it to monsieur le cure for his library; it's an antique, and is
worth money!"
Felicite had, in fact, come to the spring with a genuine Roman
amphora, found in the sandy bed of the Rhone--a jar two thousand years
old and hardly chipped!
Each family at Saintes-Maries is entitled to one or two jars of water
each day, according to the number of its members.--The water had not
begun to flow.
Livette, sitting upon her horse, thoughtful and sad amid the chatter,
was still awaiting her friends.
"What were you saying just now?" asked some late comers.
And having been informed, each one of them proceeded to expound her
ideas upon the subject of the saints and Sara the bondwoman, paying no
heed to what the others were saying--so that the jabbering of the
women and girls seemed like a _Ramadan_ of magpies and jays assembled
in one of the isolated clumps of pines so often seen in Camargue.
"I would like to know if it's fair," cried one of the women, "not to
put in Saint Sara's portrait, too! A saint's a saint, and where
there's a saint there isn't any servant!"
"The saints aren't proud! and Saint Sara cares mighty little whether
her picture's there or not!"
"She may not care, but it was an insult to her!"
"Oh!" said another, "good King Rene and the Pope knew what they were
doing when they arranged things so. Sara was Pontius Pilate's wife,
and she was the one who advised her husband to wash his hands of the
heathens' crime!"
A murmur of reproof ran from mouth to mouth among the gossips.
"Ah! here's old Rosine, she'll set us right."
Motionless upon her horse Livette listened vaguely. She was
absent-minded, yet interested.
When old Rosine, who was very deaf, had finally been made to
understand what was wanted of her, and that she was expected to give
her views concerning Sara the bondwoman, she began:
"Ah! my children, God knows his own, and Sara was a great saint, for
sure----"
Here Rosine crossed herself, and was at once imitated by all the old
women.
"But," added Rosine, "Sara was a heathen woman from Egypt, and not a
Jewess of Judea; and the heathens, you see, come a long way after the
Jews in the world's esteem. Don't you see that the Jews are scattered
all over the world, but they stay everywhere, and become masters by
force of avarice. That is their way of being blessed by their Lord.
But the heathens of Egypt, on the contrary, are wanderers and poor,
although they are thieves, and more scattered and more accursed than
the Jews. Well, you see, my children, Saint Sara is their saint, the
saint of the Egyptian heathens! She wasn't a very good Catholic saint,
to pay the boatman for her passage by a sight of her naked body--with
the indifference of an old sinner, I fancy! So it is right that she
should come after the two Marys, for there are different ranks in
heaven. And that is why Saint Sara's bones are not between the boards
of the great shrine in the church, but under the glass of the little
shrine in the crypt--or the cellar, you might say. The cellar is a
good enough place--under the feet of Christians--for miserable
gipsies! And it is right that it should be so."
"What Rosine says is true!" cried one of the women. "These frequent
visits of the gipsies are the ruin of the country. When our pilgrims
come, rich and poor, do you suppose they like to find all these
scamps, who are so clever at stealing folks' handkerchiefs and purses,
settled here before them? Don't you suppose that drives people away
from us? How many there are who would like to come, but don't care to
compromise themselves by being found in such company!"
"Bah! such nonsense!" said a humpbacked woman; "those who have faith
don't stop half-way for such a small matter! And those who have some
troublesome disease and hope to cure it here aren't afraid of the
thieves nor their vermin. Take away my hump, mighty saints, and I will
undertake to get rid of my lice and my fleas one by one, without any
assistance!"
This speech was greeted by a roar of laughter, which stopped abruptly,
as if by enchantment. The little gate to the spring was opened at
last, and, at the sound of the water rushing from the pipe, all the
women ran to take their places in the line--not without some trifling
disputes for precedence.
At last, some of Livette's girl friends arrived. Spying them at some
little distance, she went to meet them.
"What brings Livette here so early, on horseback?" said the women,
when she had moved away.
"Why, she's looking for her rascal of a Renaud, of course!" said the
hunchback. "That fellow isn't used to being tied like a goat to a
stake, and the little one will have a hard time to keep him true to
her, for all her fine _dot_!--The other day, Rampal--you know, the
drover, a good fellow--saw him at a distance on the beach talking with
a gipsy who wasn't dressed for winter!"
"Not dressed for winter? what do you mean?"
"She wore no furs, nor cloak, nor anything else, poor me! She was
taking a bath as God made her. The plain isn't a safe place for that
sort of thing. You think you can't be seen because you think you can
see a long distance yourself, but a tuft of heather is enough for the
lizard to hide his two eyes behind while he looks."
Again the women began to chuckle and laugh, but for a moment only.
Meanwhile, Livette's friends were saying to her:
"No, we haven't seen your sweetheart, my dear; but they are already
putting the benches in place against the church for the branding, and
he can't fail to be here soon."
At that moment, a strain of weird music arose not far away. It was
produced by a flute, and the notes, softly modulated at first, were
abruptly changed to heart-rending shrieks. A strange, dull, monotonous
accompaniment seemed to encourage the sick heart, that called for help
with piercing cries.
"Hark! there are the gipsies and their devil's music, Livette. Just go
and look--it is such an amusing sight. We will join you in a little
while."
"What about my horse?" said Livette.
"If you haven't come to stay, there's a heavy iron bracelet just set
into the wall of the church to hold the bars of the enclosure for the
branding. Tie your horse to that, and don't be afraid that he will
disappear. Every one will know he's yours by those pretty letters in
copper nails you have had put on your saddle-bow."
Livette fastened her horse to the ring in the church-wall, and walked
in the direction of the gipsy music. It seemed to her that she might
probably learn something there.
Now, Zinzara the Egyptian had seen Livette ride into the village, and
her music had no other purpose than to attract her, and Renaud, her
fiance, with her, if he were there. Why? to see;--to bring together
for an instant, with no fixed purpose, upon the same point of the vast
world through which she wandered, two of the personages with whom she
"beguiled her time;" to look on at the comedy of life, and to watch
the sequel, with the inclination to give an evil turn to it, chance
aiding. She loved the anomalies that result from the chaotic jumbling
together of circumstances.
Zinzara was turning a kaleidoscope whose field was vast like the
horizon of her never-ending travels, and whose bits of glass,
multicolored, were living souls.--She turned the wheel to see what
calamity destiny, with her assistance, would bring to pass. The
amusement of a woman, of a sorceress.
XIII
THE SNAKE-CHARMER
Life is an enigma. The everlasting silence of space is but the endless
murmuring of invisible circles which, twining in and out, part and
meet again, lose and never find one another, or are inextricably
interwoven forever. Life is an enigma. We can see something of its
beginning, nothing of its close; its meaning escapes us, but all the
links make the chain, and some one knows the rest.
That there are two ends to the ladder is certain. Day is not night,
and one does not exist without the other. There are joy and sorrow,
health and sickness, happiness and unhappiness, life and death--in a
word, good and evil, for the beast of flesh and bone. This is a good
man, that a bad. Religion and morals have nothing to do with it, and
afford no explanation; but little children know that it is so, and
fools know it likewise. They who undertake to reason the thing out
learnedly, befog it. They who pull the thread break it. There is some
one and there is something. Nothing is null, I tell you, my good
friends, and yonder drivelling old idiot, sitting on the stone at the
foot of the Calvary before the church, and holding out his hand to
Livette, knows two things better than we--good and evil. The idiot,
when he passed the gipsies' wagons in the morning, talked amicably,
yes, he talked for some minutes with two or three gaunt dogs chained
up under the wagons; but when he saw Zinzara, the queen, fix her eyes
upon him, the idiot was afraid and limped away as fast as he could. He
was afraid because _there was_, in Zinzara's look, _something not
good_.
And now Livette, as she passes by, glances at him, and the idiot--poor
human worm--smiles and holds out to her a glass pearl,--a treasure in
his eyes,--which he found that morning in the filth of the gutter near
by. The pearl glistens. It is bright blue. The idiot sees beauty in
it, and offers it to the pretty girl passing by. Livette smiles at
him, and he, the drivelling idiot, the cripple who drags himself along
the ground, laughs back at Livette. He laughs and feels his man's
heart vaguely opening within him--why?--because of _something good_ in
Livette's eyes.
God is above us, and the devil beneath us. God? what do you mean by
God? Kindly humanity, which is above us and toward which we are
ascending; the ideal, evolved from ourselves which, by dint of
declaring itself and compelling love, will be realized in our
children. The devil? what is that? the obscure beast, the ravenous,
blind worm, which we were, and from which we are moving farther and
farther away.
There is something nearer the mystery than the mind, and that
something is the instinct. Certainly we are nearer to our origin than
to our end, and instinct almost explains the origin because it is
still near at hand, but the mind cannot explain the end because it is
still so far away! Whence come we? The crawling beast may
suspect.--Whither go we? How can the beast tell, when he cannot fly?
The bond that binds us fast to earth is not cut. Man bears forever the
scar of his birth. He has, therefore, always before him evidence of
how he is connected with infinity _behind_ him; but how he is
connected, by death, with the life everlasting, _before_ him, he does
not see.
Instinct, like a glow-worm, lights up the depths from which man comes
forth, but intelligence casts no light into the boundless expanse on
high, wherein it loses itself, just at the point where God
begins.--Ah! how mysterious is God!
Yes, between the intelligence and man's origin, instinct stretches
like a bridge. Between the intelligence and man's end, there is a
yawning chasm. The reason cannot cross it. There is no way but to
leap. Man finds it easy to imagine what lies below; his own weight
draws him down to a point where he can understand it.
To understand what is above, it is essential to have a power of
lightening one's self, a wing which man has not. Here instinct acts
upon the mind in a direction opposed to mental effort.
To some minds this faculty of rising sometimes comes, but man's
conceptions depend upon his experiences, and the time has passed when
reliance was placed upon the "wise men," upon those whose conceptions
far outran their experiences. Perhaps it is better so. Perhaps every
man ought to form his ideas for himself and no one will know anything
_for good and all_ until he has earned the right.
Sometimes, for a moment, especially in dreams, but occasionally in his
waking hours, man _knows_. He has profound intuition; but nothing is
more fleeting than this sudden glimpse of eternity.
The best of us are blind men haunted by the memory of a flash of
light.
Which of us has not known, by personal experience, how a man can fly
away from himself? The sense of mystery, scarcely detected, has
escaped us, but who has not been conscious of it for a second?
Truth, like love, reveals itself for a second only, but we must
believe in it--forever.
These thoughts are properly presented here, for everything is in
everything. One man studies the hyssop, another the oak; Cuvier the
mastodon, and Lubbock the ant, but they all arrive at the same point,
a point which includes everything.
Do you know why the gipsies, Bohemians, gitanos, zincali, zingari,
zigeuners, zinganes, tziganes, romani, romichal,--all different
appellations of the same wandering race,--arouse such intense interest
on the part of civilized peoples?
There are two reasons.
The first is, that the gipsy, being very primitive and wild, appears
among civilized beings as the image of themselves in the past. It is
as if they were our own ghosts.
When we see them among us, we amuse ourselves, in the shelter of our
established homes, by thinking regretfully that we no longer have
before us the broad plains so dear to the beasts we are; that we are
no longer in constant contact with the earth, the plants, the animals,
which are the _mothers_ that bore us, and whom we love for that
reason. They have remained what we were when we left them, and that
touches us.
The second reason is that they really discovered long ago something of
the meaning of life.
It is certain that they are magicians. They have seen the hidden
spring and have a vague remembrance of it; they have retained its dark
reflection in their glance.
The glance! they know its dormant and insinuating power. They know how
to subdue weak minds by a glance.
The least skilled in magic among them still believe that the "secret"
of things is hidden away somewhere under a stone, and in their travels
through every country on earth they often raise heavy boulders, whose
peculiar shapes seem to indicate that they may conceal the mystery.
They never find under the boulders anything but toads and snakes and
scorpions, but they are skilled at making powerful potions from the
blood and venom of the reptiles.
They know, also, the secret properties of plants, and that the hemlock
and belladonna vary in their effects when cut at certain times of the
year and at certain hours, according to the influence of the seasons
and the moon's rays.
The gipsies are skilled in the science of poisons. Men and
women--_roms_ and _juwas_--excel in the art of giving diseases to
cattle.
Their trades are only pretexts for calling at the houses they pass.
They are coppersmiths simply because the art of subjecting metals to
the action of fire was invented by the son of Cain, the progenitor of
all accursed mortals. And they are saddlers because they like to be
about horses, dear to all vagabonds.
The gipsies, who were originally worshippers of fire, and now have no
religion of their own, but always adopt that of the country they are
passing through, are to mankind what Lucifer is to the angels.
"We come from Egypt, if you please," Zinzara would sometimes say to
the people of her tribe. "Indeed, that is where we had our homes and
were a powerful race in the days of Moses. Then our ancestors were
magicians to the kings of Egypt, who overcame death; but our origin is
higher and farther away.
"We come from a country where the _Secret Power of the World_ was
discovered: a dragon guards the mystery on the summit of a lofty
mountain, in a cavern, out of reach of whatever floods may come.
"Our ancestor Coudra learned from the high-priests the method of
compelling the dragon to obey him. He entered the cavern and conceived
the idea of universal knowledge, and resolved to avail himself of it
in the outside world, in order that he might become a king and mighty
among men--for why was he poor? Why does poverty exist, why death?
"He had no sooner conceived his project of justifiable rebellion than
the dragon sought to devour him. Our ancestor eluded him, and believed
that, by virtue of the secrets he had discovered, he would be
omnipotent on earth, but suddenly he found that he had almost
forgotten them all, as if by magic. He no longer remembered any of
them except those that do harm, those that produce disease, sorrow,
misery, and death--all the evils from which he would have liked to
free himself.
"And the high-priests cursed him and his sons. Manou spoke against
them thus: _They shall dwell outside of cities; they shall possess
none but broken vessels; they shall have nothing of their own, except
it be an ass or a dog. They shall wear the clothes they steal from
the dead; their plates shall be broken; their jewels shall be of iron.
They shall journey, without rest, from place to place. Every man who
is faithful to his duty shall hold himself aloof from them. They shall
have no dealings except with one another. And they shall marry only in
their own race._
"And the _Tchandalas_ were able to flee the country, but not the
sentence.
"And that is our present case.
"The crown of Coudra is a broken ring--with sharp points, like a dog's
collar, and his sceptre is an iron staff, broken but formidable. For
why does want exist, and pain and death? God is wicked!"
With this tale, set to music, the gipsy queen sometimes lulled her son
to sleep.
And when, at the entrance to some chateau, she cast a long, malevolent
glance upon a young mother, who, upon catching sight of her, quickly
carried her little child within, such thoughts as these would run
through Zinzara's head: "The secrets that are known to our prophets,
our dukes and princes and kings, will cause all your cities, your
churches, and your thrones to tremble on their foundations, for why
does want exist, and pain and death? The hour will come--we await
it--when your nations will be scattered to the winds of wrath, unless
the wise men who invoked a curse on us become their masters--but you
are too far from their wisdom for that! You will be ours.
"Meanwhile, woe to those of you whom we find alone! We look fixedly
at them, and the spirit of evil does the rest."
And this is what little Livette saw when she approached the gipsy
camp.
The whole tribe was there. Their numerous wagons were of different
sizes, most of them being made in the shape of small oblong houses,
with little windows, very like the Noah's arks made for children in
Germany. The gipsies had arranged their wagons side by side, in a
line, each one opposite a house in the village. Thus the line of
wheeled houses formed with the houses of the village a winding street,
which, if prolonged, would have surrounded Saintes-Maries like a
girdle. Thus, while their sojourn lasted, the gipsies could cherish
the illusion that they were settled there, that they were inhabitants
of the village, one dwelling opposite the baker, another opposite the
wine-shop; but no one forgot that the gipsy houses were built upon
wheels that turn and can make the tour of the world.
"I pity the tree," says the gipsy, "it looks enviously at me as I
pass. It is jealous of my ass's feet."
Most of the wagons were patched with boards of many colors, picked up
or stolen here and there.
As a matter of fact, the wagons of the tribe were placed in the rear
of the village houses, so that the occupants of those houses, the
innkeeper or the baker, being busy in the front part of their
establishments, could naturally dispense with a too frequent
appearance in the gipsy street.
The nomads alone swarmed there undisturbed. They passed but little
time in the wagons, except when they were on the road or tired or
sick; their days were passed in the open air, squatting in the dust,
or on the steps of the little ladders which they lowered from the
doors of their wagons to the ground; or else they passed long hours
lying in the shade under the wagon--smoking their pipes and dreaming.
For the moment, some of the women here and there through the camp were
intent upon the same occupation: searching, in the bright morning
light, for vermin among the matted hair of their children, whom they
held tightly between their knees as in a vise.
From time to time, one of the little fellows would howl with pain,
when his mother inadvertently pulled or tore out one of his wiry,
coal-black hairs. Then he would wriggle and squirm to get away, but
the vise formed by the knees would nip him again and hold him tight,
and there would be a squealing as of sucking pigs loth to be bled.
Then blows would rain down and the shrieks redouble. Suddenly the
urchin that was howling most lustily would cease, and follow, with a
lively interest, the movements of a chicken from some neighboring
coop, or the antics of a hunting-dog that had wandered that way and
was well worth stealing.
The mothers went through with their matutinal task in an automatic
way that said as clearly as possible: "It is of no use to try to do
this, for the vermin breed and always will breed; but we must do
something. It is always a good thing to be busy; and then it makes an
excellent impression, here under the eye of civilized people. They see
that we are clean and neat."
"Buy my dog," said one of them with a leer to an open-mouthed
villager. "You will be well satisfied with his fidelity. He is
faithful, I tell you! so faithful that I have been able to sell him
four times.--He always comes back!"
All these women had a coppery, sun-burned, almost black skin, and hair
of a peculiar, dull charcoal-like black.--Some wore it twisted in a
heavy coil on top of the head. Several of the younger women let it
hang in long, snake-like locks over their breasts and backs. Their
eyes also were a curious shade of black, very bright, like black
velvet seen through glass. Life shone but dully in them, without
definite expression. Some mothers were attending to their duties with
a child on their back, wrapped in a sheet which they wore
bandoleer-fashion, with the ends knotted at the shoulder. The little
one slept with his head hanging, tossed and shaken by every movement.
Red, orange, and blue were the prevailing colors of their tattered
garments, but they were tarnished and faded and almost blotted out by
layers of dust and filth;--a smoke-begrimed Orient.
Many of the women had short pipes between their teeth. The men who
lay about here and there, with their elbows on the ground, were almost
all smoking placidly, their Sylvanus-like eyes fixed on vacancy. They
made a great show of pride under their rags. Some were asleep under
the rolling cabins.
The line of wagons along the outskirts of the village was still in
shadow, but at the head of the line, the first of the wagons, standing
a little apart, beyond the line of the houses, was in the sunlight.
This wagon, which was painted and kept up better than the others, was
Zinzara's, and a few of the villagers had collected in the sunshine in
front of it, attracted by the notes of the flute and tambourine.
Livette, as she approached the group, had no suspicion that, in the
wine-shop facing the wagon, behind the curtains of a window on the
first floor, Renaud had stationed himself, there, at his ease, to
watch the gipsy, who was playing the flute and dancing at the same
time, her feet and arms bare.
Zinzara held the flute--a double flute with two reeds diverging
slightly--with much grace, and blew upon it with full cheeks, raising
and lowering her fingers to suit the requirements of a weird air,
sometimes slow, sometimes furiously fast and jerky. Her head was
thrown back, so that she appeared more haughty and aggressive than
ever.
As she played upon her flute, Zinzara danced--a dance as mysterious
as herself. With her bare feet she simply beat time on the ground. Her
dance was naught but a play of attitudes, so to speak. She constantly
varied the rhythmical undulations of her flexible, vigorous body,
whose outline could be traced at every movement beneath the clinging
material of her dress. When the movement quickened, she stamped her
feet faster, still without moving from where she stood, as if in haste
to reach a lover's rendezvous, where languor would replace activity.
Seated a few steps from the dancer, a young gipsy, with a vague,
dreamy expression, was pounding with his fist, thinking of other
things the while, upon a large tambourine, to which amulets of divers
kinds were attached,--Egyptian beetles, mother-of-pearl shells,
finger-rings, and great ear-rings,--which danced up and down as he
played.
And the tambourine seemed to say to the double flute:
"Never fear: your mate is watching over you. I am here, father or
betrothed, I, your strong-voiced mate, and you can sing freely of your
joy and sorrow; no one shall disturb you; I am on the watch, and for
you my heart beats in my great, sonorous breast."
But to the gipsy's ear the music of the tambourine said something very
different; and with a smile upon her lips, blowing into her flute with
its diverging reeds, raising and lowering her slender fingers over the
holes, Zinzara, exerting a subtle influence over all about her,
dressed in soft rags that clung tightly to her form and marked the
outlines of her hips and of her breast in turn; displaying her tawny
calves beneath her skirts, which were lifted up and tucked into her
belt,--Zinzara seemed not to see the spectators.
Twenty or thirty people were looking at her, and still she seemed to
be dancing for her own amusement; but her witch's eye followed,
without seeming to do so, the slightest movement of Renaud's head, the
whole of which could be seen at times between the serge curtains with
red borders, behind the windows of the wine-shop, under the eaves of
the house across the way.
When she saw Livette approach, the dancer beat her feet upon the
ground more rapidly, as if annoyed, and the flute emitted a cry, a
shrill war-cry, like the sound made by tearing silk quickly.
Livette involuntarily shuddered, but she mingled with the group,
momentarily increasing in size, and looked on.
Zinzara made a sign, and uttered some strange, guttural words between
two loud notes--words that were, evidently, a precise command, for a
gipsy child, who had come to her side a moment before, glided under
the wagon, whence he emerged armed with a long white stick, with which
he motioned to the spectators to fall back a little. Then he stationed
himself in front of Zinzara, in the centre of the first row of
spectators, and, turning toward them, enjoined silence upon them by
placing his finger on his lips. The word was passed along, and the
bystanders ceased their conversation, realizing that _something_ was
about to happen.
The dance was at an end.--The tambourine ceased to beat time. The
flute alone sang on in Zinzara's hands, as her fingers moved slowly up
and down.--Now it gave forth a thin, clear note, like the prolongation
of the sound made by a drop of water falling in a fountain; it was a
sweet, insinuating appeal, as melancholy as the croaking of a frog at
night, on the shores of a pond, at the bottom of an echoing, rocky
valley.
And, with the end of his wand, the child pointed out to one of the
spectators something that came crawling out from under the wagon. It
was a tiny snake, with red and yellow spots, and it drew near,
evidently attracted by the notes of the flute. Another followed, and
soon there were several of them--five in all.
When they were in front of the flute-player, between her and the boy
with the wand, they raised their heads and waved them back and forth,
slowly at first, then more quickly, keeping time with the flute. The
serpents danced, and the mind of every spectator involuntarily
compared their dance with the woman's that he had seen a moment
before. There was the same undulating movement, the same evil charm,
and every one was conscious of an uncomfortable feeling at the sight.
Livette, surprised and strangely moved, thought that she was
dreaming. The spectacle before her was curiously, deplorably in accord
with the state of her heart. She did not understand its hidden,
intimate connection with her own destiny, but she felt its baleful
effects. Zinzara's glance, from time to time, swept over the girl's
face, but did not rest upon it. On the subject of her own influence,
Zinzara knew what she knew.
Soft, soft as spun silk, the notes of the flute arose, very soft and
prolonged, like threads extending from the instrument and winding
about the necks of the little snakes; and the little snakes followed
the notes of the flute, which drew them on and on. Zinzara walked
backward. The little snakes followed her as if they were held fast by
the notes of the flute as by silken threads. The gipsy stopped, and
the notes _grew shorter_, so to speak, like the threads one winds
about a bobbin. Then the snakes approached the sorceress, and as
Zinzara stooped slowly over them, and put down her hands, still
holding the flute, upon which she did not cease to play, the snakes
twined themselves about her bare arms. Thence one of them climbed up
and wound about her neck, letting his little head, with its wide open
mouth and quivering tongue, hang down upon her swelling breast. And
when she stood erect again, two others were seen at her ankles, above
the rings she wore on her legs. Then she laid aside her flute and
began to laugh. Her laugh disclosed her regular, white teeth.
"Now," said she, "if any one will give me his hand, I will tell his
fortune!"
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