CHAPTER C

The "pendulum of time" has continued its swing. It even seems that it has moved more quickly than usual, for the week's leave which had been given me is almost over.

Every day we spend in the woods. The weather is splendid. The heather, the foxgloves, the red silenes, all are in flower.

There had been a great "pardon" on Sunday, one of the most famous of this region of Brittany: it was held near the chapel of _Our Lady of Good Tidings_--which stands alone in the heart of the woods as if it had been sleeping there, forgotten, since the middle ages.

It happened that the day before, the Saturday, we had sat down in the shade, Yves, little Pierre and I, near the church, in the hour of the great calm of noon. A very silent spot, above which the ancient oaks and beeches linked, as if they had been arms, their great moss-grown branches.

Two women had come, one young, the other old and decrepit; they wore the costume of Rosporden and seemed to have travelled far. They carried large keys.

And they opened the old sanctuary, which remains closed throughout the year, and began to prepare the altar for the feast of the following day.

In the green half-light of the windows and the trees, we saw them busying themselves about the statues of the old saints, dusting them, wiping them; and then sweeping the flagstones covered with dust and saltpetre.

At the foot of Our Lady someone, out of piety, had placed a skull, found, no doubt, in the earth of the wood. Greenish-looking, the cranium staved in, it gazed at us from the bottom of the chapel, with its two black eye sockets.

"Tell me, godfather, what is that? . . . Did someone find that face in the earth? . . ."

Little Pierre is vaguely disturbed by this thing, the like of which he had never seen; as if it was for him the first revelation of an order of sinister objects dwelling under the earth. . . .

The weather, for this day of pardon, was a little dull, but delightful nevertheless.

For ten hours, the bagpipes played in front of the chapel, under the great oaks, and gavottes were danced on the mossy turf.

That indescribable quality of Breton summers, which is somehow melancholy, is, if one may so express it, a compound of many things: the charm of the long, warm days, rarer here than elsewhere and sooner over; the tall-growing herbage fresh and green, with the extreme profusion of red flowers; and then the sentiment of olden times, which seems to slumber here, to permeate everything.

Old land of Toulven, great woods where the black fir trees, trees of the north, mingle already with the oaks and beeches; Breton countrysides, which seem to be wrapt still in the past. . . .

Great rocks covered with grey lichen, as fine as an old man's beard; plains in which the granite crops out of the ancient soil, plains of purple heather. . . .

They are impressions of tranquillity, of appeasement, which this country brings me; and also an aspiration towards a more complete repose under the mossy turf, at the foot of the chapels which are in the woods. And, with Yves, all this is vaguer, more inexpressible, but more intense also, as with me when I was a child.

To see us sitting together in the woods in the calm of these fine summer days, one would never imagine what our youth had been, what life we had lived, nor what terrible scenes there had been between us formerly, when first our two natures, very different and very alike, had come in conflict one with the other.

Every evening before we go to bed, we play with little Pierre a Toulven game, amusing enough, which consists in holding one another by the chin and reciting, without laughing, a long rigmarole: "By the beard of Minette I hold you. The first of us two who shall laugh . . . etc." At this game little Pierre is always caught.

After that come the gymnastics. Yves goes through the performance with his son, turning him over, making him "go about," head down, legs in the air, at arm's length, then raising him very high. "Tell me, little Pierre, when will you have arms like mine? Tell me! Oh, never; never arms like yours, father; I shall not suffer hardship enough for that, I am sure."

And when Yves, dishevelled, tired from having romped so much, says, as he readjusts his clothes, in his most serious way: "Now then, little Pierre has finished his gymnastics for the present," little Pierre comes to me with that smile which always gets for him what he wants: "It is your turn, godfather; come!" And the gymnastics begin again.