The fog, though it still lay thickly over the sea, had left the garden now, and each petal and leaf glowed the brighter for the gift of moisture it had left them.
Colette planted her little stool in the middle of a moss-grown path beside a flower border, sat down and began to wonder. She wondered solidly for half an hour. Little arches covered with rambler roses spanned the path, and in the border beside her bloomed madonna lilies, Canterbury bells, phlox, and crown imperials. She looked at them all and wondered about them, and she wondered about the fat worm that was wriggling about under the little box hedge that bordered the path, and she wondered about God.
Only last week, on this very path, she had seen God, and she was still very excited about it. Her mother had told her about God long ago, of course, and read her stories about Him out of the red and gold Sunday Book, and she believed in Him just as she believed in Undine and Jack the Giant Killer, and all the people in the fairy-books. She had always said her prayers fervently because she had been told that little girls who said their prayers went to heaven, and she was very anxious to go to heaven because she wanted to see how the angels got their frocks on over their wings. This question of the angels’ wings kept her wondering for hours. Did they have holes in the backs of their frocks through which they poked their wings when they dressed? Or were they born in their frocks and wear them always, never taking them off even when they went to bed? In which case how did they wash? Or were the wings attached to the frocks and not to the angels? This question did not torment her as it would have tormented Michelle; she just wondered placidly about it.
But though she had always accomplished her religious duties with thoroughness and precision it was not until last week that she had really seen God for herself. It had all begun by her wondering about the Canterbury bells. There were great masses of them in the border, pink and blue and white, and she began by wondering whether they ever rang chimes like the church bells did. She tapped one fat pink bell with her finger to see if it rang, but it didn’t, it only fell off its stalk on to the path. She picked it up gently and stuck it on her finger and looked at it, and it struck her suddenly that it was pretty. It was the colour of Peronelle’s best petticoat and it was shaped like the little silver ornaments that father hung on the Christmas tree on Christmas Day. She liked it. She turned it upside down and looked inside. It was just as nice inside as it was outside. “Pretty,” she said. She got up and ran indoors to Rachell, who was making dumplings in the kitchen.
“Mother,” she said, “the Canterbury bells are pretty. Did God make them?”
“Yes,” said Rachell, sprinkling flour into her basin.
“Why?” asked Colette.
It was Monday morning and Rachell was really too busy to go into it.
“To please Colette,” she answered. “Pass me the currants, Sophie.”
Colette was quite satisfied with this answer—it had given her enough to wonder about, in all conscience—and she trotted back into the garden. Sitting on her stool she looked at the coloured world spread out around her, and for the first time noticed that it was very beautiful. A carpet of green moss under her feet, a canopy of blue sky over her head, flowers in their hundreds on either side of her, and all apparently let down from heaven, like a bale of coloured silk, for her delight.
She had not noticed beauty before. She had taken the gold-dusted whiteness of the lilies as much for granted as eggs for breakfast, but now she looked and looked, and wondered and wondered. The lilies were very tall and their flowers were shaped like bells too. “Bells.” A nice word. Bells rang for happy things; they rang at midnight on Christmas night when Christ was born, and all the animals all over the Island knelt down in their stables to say their prayers; they rang halfway through Mass, just at that moment when all the heads were bowed down like corn before the wind, and God lifted the latch and walked in; they rang when gentlemen in top hats went to church and got married to beautiful ladies done up in a lot of white stuff like presents in tissue paper; they rang too when dinner was ready.
God must have made all the bells all the world over to make people happy, just as He had made the Canterbury bells to please her. It was very kind of Him and it must have taken Him a long time. She felt much obliged. What a lot of bells all round her, and all of them beautiful, white bells of the lilies with gold dust inside, yellow bells of the crown imperials with bulging drops of honey inside, blue and pink and white Canterbury bells, hundreds and hundreds of them. She gazed and gazed and quite suddenly all the bells began to ring. She listened open-mouthed. Yes, they really were. They were swinging slowly from side to side, the lilies, the crown imperials and the Canterbury bells, and chiming away like mad.
Why? It wasn’t Christmas night; it wasn’t that moment at Mass when the heads are bowed. . . . Then something began to chime inside her and, looking up, she saw God walking down the garden path.
Every day since that Monday morning she had sat herself on her little stool on the moss-grown path, but He did not come again. Every day the lilies and Canterbury bells spread their petals in the sun and shook out little gusts of perfume when the sea wind touched them in passing, but they did not chime again. There was a dull pain in Colette’s heart because the bells did not ring any more. . . . Would they ever ring any more?
III
Breakfast was completely overshadowed by the wreck. Sophie had brought news of the disaster when she came that morning.
A boat coming from France to the Islands, while yet miles from port, had been wrecked on a hideous reef called La Catian Roque. As soon as the fog had lifted boats from the Island had set out to the rescue, but who knew what they would find when they got there? If the ship had been broken up, and the savagery of Catian rock was renowned, and there had been many on board, perhaps too many for the boats—what then?
“They expect the worst, m’sieur,” said Sophie with relish, as she thumped the plate of boiled eggs down in front of André. “I knew last night there was death at sea. I looked out before I went to my bed, m’sieur, and there was the King of the Auxcriniers riding the fog, as plain as plain. I screamed right out, and my cousin Jacquemin Gossilin he called out to me, ‘What ails you, girl? Is it a ghost that you have seen?’ ‘ ’Tis death itself that I have seen,’ I said, ‘riding the fog like the man in the Bible astride the black horse. ’Tis hell itself,’ I said.”
“That will do, Sophie,” said Rachell, “bring the coffee.”
“Tres bon, m’dame,” said Sophie, and departed, her broad peasant face wreathed in smiles, her black eyes snapping with excitement, her Sunday stays creaking.
“There were sarregousets in the water-lane last night, father,” cried Colin, waving his egg-spoon in an ecstasy of delight, “lots and lots of sarregousets, backwards and forwards all the time. That means death when they can’t keep still. I bet you all those people are drowned.”
“Death is very terrible, Colin,” said Rachell reprovingly.
“You told me last Sunday,” said Colin, “that death was beautiful. You said it was—” (he searched in his mind for the phrase she had used) “a sleep whose awakening is in heaven.”
Rachell sighed. The religious upbringing of children was really extraordinarily difficult. Short of keeping a notebook in which to record the various lies one had taught them, how was it possible to avoid inconsistency? André attempted to come to the rescue.
“Death is both, Colin,” he said, “everything in life can be looked at from several angles. Every fact of existence is a thing of facets.”
“Oh,” said Colin, “may I have another egg?”
Michelle leant across the table eagerly. She adored teaching and had the gift of simplification, while her father, when he attempted to explain in speech (with a pen in his hand he was a marvel of clarity) merely made confusion worse.
“Facets are different sides of the same thing,” she said, “now if you take a square box?
??”
“I don’t want to,” said Colin, “I want another egg.”
“Oh, be quiet, ’Chelle,” said Peronelle, “we aren’t at school. It’s Sunday.”
Michelle stopped, flushing. There was so much that she knew, and she was always trying to impart it, but her wretched family never seemed to want to hear. Did they not want, as she did, to climb up and up? Apparently not. Self-satisfied, conceited fools! She glanced at her father, and he smiled secretly at her. She wondered if he too felt he had something in him to give, some gift that must be used or it would turn sour and bitter within him, poisoning his whole life. . . . That secret smile was balm to them both.
Sophie, panting and creaking, came back with the coffee. Sophie always panted dreadfully on a Sunday, for it was the only day when she wore stays. On weekdays her ample figure, clothed in blue sprigged print and a voluminous white apron, bulged in accordance with nature’s whims, but on Sundays, with the assistance of her family and the bedpost, she confined her contours within a suit of whalebone armour inherited from a great aunt. The result, especially in church during the sermon, was a torture of breathlessness and sharp points that stuck in, but somehow the pain made her feel very religious, reminding her as it did of a picture she had once seen of St. Sebastian pierced by arrows and panting horribly. . . . Also she hoped that her Sunday curves would favourably impress her cousin, Jacquemin Gossilin, who was taking so long in making up his mind to range himself that she feared the sheets in her bottom drawer would have gone into holes in the folds before she had him safely between them. Sophie had a very economical mind, and the thought of those wasted sheets made her cry at night sometimes.
Breakfast over and cleared away the family fell into a flurry of preparation for church. Rachell went upstairs to unpack her husband’s sacred top hat from its tissue paper shrine under the four-poster, André went to the stable to superintend the Sunday exodus of the tumbledown old landau, and the children went to their bedrooms to find their handkerchiefs and books and to brush their hair.
Punctually at ten o’clock Brovard, one of the farm men, brought round the landau with Lupin, the old grey horse, between the shafts, and André, after testing the dilapidated harness, rushed upstairs to change into his swallow tails.
No matter how early he got up he seemed never able to get the farm work done by church time, but if he did not go to church Rachell grieved, and he preferred any amount of rush and sleeplessness to a grieved Rachell. This morning, after days of torturing worry, the strain of last night’s talk, a sleepless night of foreboding, and getting up at four, he was so tired that his fumbling fingers dropped everything he touched. On his knees looking for his stud, knocking his already aching head against the chest of drawers and the bedpost, he marvelled at the extraordinary stupidity of his life. He had no religion to speak of, and yet regularly once a week he dressed himself in garments unequalled for absurdity in the history of costume, and sat through a sermon that bored him, in order to do honour to a Deity in Whom he was not at all certain he believed. He hated his work and saw himself faced with ruin in it, and yet day after day, year after year, he forced his mind to it, adding the exhaustion of unwilling effort to the exhaustion of his toil. He had the gift of literary expression and day after day, year after year, he had to deny it life. He had not found the world sweet or easy, and yet he had chosen to bring five children into it, surely implying by that choice that the life he gave them was a gift worth having. Sham! Sham! The whole thing was a hideous sham. . . . Where was that damned stud? . . . And yet, and yet—there were two sides to the thing. He had had great happiness at Bon Repos. He had learnt to love. He had learnt to think. At the heart of a life he hated he had found a sort of peace. His gift, if wasted, was nevertheless there, and his own. If only this forcing of a personality into unnatural channels were not so exhausting—so damnably exhausting. God! How tired he was.
“André, are you ready?”
It was Rachell calling below. He could visualize her standing in the coolness of the hall, gracious and beautiful in her black silk Sunday dress with the lace mantle, and her bonnet trimmed with purple pansies. He supposed it was for her sake he lived this sham of a life; for her he went to church in a top hat; for her and the children he sweated in the fields and stables; for her he stayed lingering on at Bon Repos faced with certain ruin; he had not sufficient strength of character, he supposed, to fight her. When he thought of last night he felt hot with shame. What sort of a man was he to be so easily swayed by the foolish whim of a woman? He hit his head violently against the washstand and, as pain stabbed him, cursed himself for a weak cowardly wastrel. But though he might curse he did not waste time in self pity, he was too humble a man for that. He had the humility to lay his failure at the door of his own character. If his life was a sham was it not his own fault? Surely only the weak found themselves pushed by circumstances in the wrong direction. Only the weak—but meanwhile Rachell was waiting in the hall.
“I can’t find my stud,” he shouted.
He heard the rustle of her silk dress as she came up the stairs, then she came in, swaying slightly like a poplar tree as she walked, bringing tranquillity with her. She found the stud—staring him in the face, of course—she helped him into his coat and brushed it, she found his prayer book for him and handed him his top hat, smoothing it once more lovingly as she did so. Finally, with amazing skill, with a mere smile and a touch, she smoothed out André himself. Then she led the way downstairs.
André followed her, completely cheered up. What a woman! And he had made her—he and the children, and Bon Repos, had made her. He remembered the wild untutored girl who had come here as his bride, and marvelled again. Strange that contact with one weak man, five squalling brats and an old farmhouse should have made of that girl this gracious courageous woman. He supposed the very weakness of what she had had to grapple with had developed her love and strength—in which case, perhaps, he need not count himself a failure after all. Thankfully, as he followed her down the stairs, he propped himself in spirit against her strength. Let her lead—he would follow her, however crazy the path she was following seemed to him. With her more direct, more tranquil nature, she could see more clearly than he could, divided and tormented in mind as he always was.
The children were already in the landau, Colin on the box seat, the girls behind, looking perfectly delicious in their Sunday finery. André, as he took his seat and gathered up the reins, glanced from one to another, his eyes lingering longest on Michelle, his favourite. Darlings! If life were but good to them! He wished he could pray for their safety, as Rachell did. He wished he could trust them confidently to life, as she did, but he had not got her faith in life. He was tortured sometimes by the thought of Peronelle’s frail body in pain, of Jacqueline submerged by fear, of Michelle unable to her life’s end to adjust herself to her own humanity, of Colette—but no, he never worried about Colette, her coating of fat and her sense of humour would surely be adequate protection against all fate’s arrows. He was at ease about Colin, too. Anything as decided and impudent as Colin would surely always come out top.
The du Frocqs did not attend the Town Church behind the harbour, for that was Protestant, and the du Frocqs had for generations been Roman Catholics. The Island, in religion as in all else, was divided in allegiance between France and England. Of French blood, and yet subjects of Queen Victoria, the Islanders were curious hybrid creatures. A generation back the Island had been completely French, speaking the French language, turning to France rather than to England for contact with the outside world. But now, in 1888, it was as though England had stretched out arms and was slowly gathering her child to her.
Rachell and André, who had talked French as children, now spoke English. Their children had never talked anything else. To converse always in English was now the sign of a superior education. . . . Only the peasants and the poorer shopkeepers kept the music of the old patois sighing and singing
in the country lanes and up and down the narrow streets of St. Pierre.
The boys of the Island were no longer sent to school in France, the girls were no longer taught by the nuns in the old convent by the sea; instead the old boys’ school was brought up-to-date and a new one for girls was built in St. Pierre, and spectacled men and women from England, with adenoids and degrees, braved one of the nastiest sea passages in the world to bring the horrors of modern education to the poor little savages of the Island.
Rachell, who had spent much of her girlhood in the convent, sitting in an austere sun-drenched room within sound of the sea, being taught by Soeur Monique to make lovely lace while Soeur Ursule read aloud the lives of the saints in exquisite French, was thrilled when Peronelle came out top of her form at mathematics and Michelle burnt her eyebrows off doing chemistry. It was all very wonderful, Rachell thought, and André agreed with her. The Island was developing marvellously. Education was making enormous strides. The children were having wonderful advantages which had been denied to their parents. Rachell thanked God for it—and yet—when she and André were too tired to sleep at night they would chatter to each other softly in the French of their childhood and be comforted, and when Rachell felt worried she would bring out her lace-pillow and the tap of the flying bobbins would bring a smile to her lips, while Soeur Ursule’s stories of the saints, fluttering through her mind, would lift up her heart like a flight of butterflies. . . . To each generation the education it deserves. . . .
IV
But to return to the du Frocqs jolting along the lanes in their dilapidated landau.
Their progress was slow, for Lupin was very old, very fat, and very disinclined to take anybody anywhere. He advanced with a slow sideways motion, wheezing as he went, like an asthmatic crab. If he desired refreshment he stopped and partook of it, and if he desired to remove flies from the small of his back with his tail he stopped and gave his whole attention to it. But the du Frocqs bore it all with loving patience. They adored Lupin. They loved him even better than Maximilian and Marmalade, and that is saying a good deal.