CHAPTER X

After we had lunched together at the best inn, we found that the winter's morning had yielded place to a fine May day. In the empty little streets, branches of lilac, clusters of wistaria, pink foxgloves which no one had sown brightened the grey walls; the sun was really shining and all about was a savour of spring.

And Yves took in everything, marvelling that no recollection of his early childhood came back to him, seeking, seeking in the dim background of his memory, recognizing nothing, and then, little by little, becoming disillusioned.

On the grand'place of Saint Pol the crowd of the Sunday was assembled. It seemed a picture of the Middle Ages. The cathedral of the old bishops of Léon dominated the square, overwhelming it with its dark denticulated mass, throwing over it a great shadow of bygone times. Around were ancient houses with gables and little turrets; all the drinkers of the Sunday, wearing aslant their wide felt hats, were sitting at table before the doors. This crowd in its Breton dress, living and alert here, this, too, might have been a crowd of olden days; in the air, one heard vibrate only the harsh syllables, the northern _ya_ of the Celtic tongue.

Yves passed rather distractedly into the church, over the memorial stones and over the old bishops asleep beneath.

But he stopped, suddenly thoughtful, at the door, before the baptismal font.

"Look!" he said. "They held me above this. And we must have lived quite near here; my poor mother has often told me that, on the day of my baptism, on the day, you know, when they so cruelly insulted us by not ringing the bell for me, she had heard, from her bed, the singing of the priests."

Unfortunately Yves had omitted to obtain from his mother, at Plouherzel, the information necessary to identify the house in which they used to live.

He had reckoned on his godmother, Yvonne Kergaoc by name, who, he understood, lived quite close to the church. And on our arrival we had asked for this Yvonne Kergaoc: "Kergaoc." . . . They remembered her well.

"But from where do you come, my good sirs? . . . She is dead these twelve years!"

As for the Kermadecs no one had any recollection of them. And it was scarcely to be wondered at: it was more than twenty years since they left the town.

We climbed the tower of Creizker; naturally it was high, it seemed never to end, this point in the air. We greatly disturbed the old crows who had their nests in the granite.

A marvellous lace-work of grey stone, which mounted, mounted endlessly, and was so slender it produced sensations of vertigo. We climbed within it by a narrow and steep spiral staircase, discovering through all the openings of the "open tower" infinite vistas.

At the top, isolated, the two of us, in the keen air and the blue sky, we saw things as a hovering bird might see them. First, below our feet, were the crows which whirled in a dark cloud, giving us a concert of mournful cries; much lower, the old town of Saint Pol, all flattened out, a Lilliputian crowd moving about in its little grey streets, like a swarm of ants; as far as eye could see, to the south, stretched the Breton country up to the Black Mountains; and, to the north, was the port of Roscoff, with thousands of strange little rocks riddling with their pointed tops the mirror of the sea--the mirror of the great pale blue sea which stretched away to mingle in the farthest distance with the similar blue of the sky.

It pleased us to have succeeded at last in climbing this Creizker, which had so many times watched us pass in the midst of that infinity of water; it was so calm, planted there, so permanent, so inaccessible and unchanging, while we, poor waifs of the sea, were at the mercy of every angry wind that blew.

This granite lace-work which supported us in the air had been smoothed and worn by the winds and rains of four hundred winters. It was of a grey deepened by warm pinkish tones; and over it, in patches, was that yellow lichen, that moss peculiar to granite, which takes centuries to grow and throws its golden tint over all the old Breton churches. The ugly-faced gargoyles, the little monsters with irregular features, who live high up there in the air, were making faces at our side in the sun, as if they resented being looked at from so near, as if they were surprised themselves to be so old, to have endured through so many tempests and to find themselves once more in the sunlight. It was these people who had presided from above over the birth of Yves; it was these people also who from afar watched us with friendliness as we passed by at sea, when we, for our part, saw only a vague black shaft. And now we were making their acquaintance.

Yves was still very disappointed, however, that he had discovered no trace of his old home nor of his father; no recollection, either in the memory of others or his own. And he continued to gaze upon the grey houses below, especially at those which were nearest the foot of the tower, awaiting some intuition of the place where he was born.

We had now only half an hour to spend in Saint Pol before catching the evening diligence. Tomorrow morning we should have to be back in Brest, where our ship was waiting to take us once more very far from Brittany.

We sat down to drink some cider in an inn on the _Place de l'Église_, and there again we questioned the hostess, who was a very old woman. And she, as chance would have it, started suddenly on hearing Yves' name.

"You are Yves Kermadec's son?" she said. "Oh! Did I know your parents! I should think so, indeed. We were neighbours in those days. Why, when you arrived in the world, they sent to fetch me. But you are like your father, you know! I watched you when you came in. But you are not so handsome as he, bless me, though, to be sure, you are a fine-looking man."

Yves, at this compliment, glanced at me, repressing a strong inclination to smile; and then the old woman, growing very talkative, began to tell him a multitude of things over which more than twenty years had passed, while he listened attentive and greatly moved.

Then she called some other old women, who also had been neighbours, and they all began to talk.

"Bless my soul!" they said. "How is it that no one was able to answer you sooner? Everybody remembers them, remembers your parents. But people are stupid in these parts; and then, when strangers come in this way, it isn't surprising that people should hesitate to talk."

Yves' father had left in the country round a reputation a little legendary of a kind of giant of rare beauty, who was never able to conform to the ways of others.

"What a pity, sir, that such a man should so often go astray! It was the tavern that ruined him, your poor father; for all that, he was very fond of his wife and children, he was very gentle with them, and in the country round everybody loved him except M. le Curé."

"Except M. le Curé!" Yves repeated to me in a low voice, becoming serious. "You see it is what I told you, on the subject of my baptism."

"One day, there was a battle, here on the square, in 1848, for the revolution; your father withstood single-handed the market people and saved the life of the Mayor."

"He had a big horse," said the hostess, "which was so wild that no one dared to approach it. And people kept out of the way, I assure you, when he passed mounted on the beast."

"Ah!" said Yves, struck suddenly with a recollection which seemed to have come to him from a great distance. "I remember that horse, and I recall that my father used to lift me up and sit me on it when it was tied in the stable. It is the first recollection I have of my father and I can just picture a little his face. The horse was black, was it not, with white hoofs?"

"That's it! That's it," said the old woman. "Black with white hoofs. It was a wild beast, and, bless my soul! what an idea for a sailor to have a horse!"

The inn is full of men drinking cider. They make a cheerful noise of glasses and Breton conversations. And gradually they gather round and make a sort of circle about us.

The hostess has four granddaughters, all alike, and all ravishingly pretty in their white coifs. They do not look like daughters of an inn. They are the perfect type of the handsome Breton race of the north, and they have the calm, thoughtful expression of those women of olden times which the old portraits have preserved for us. They, too, gathered round us, looking and listening.

We are questioned in our turn. Yves replies: "My mother is still living at Plouherzel with my two sisters. My two brothers, Gildas and Goulven, are at sea, on American whalers. I myself have been for the last ten years in the Navy."

There is not much time to lose if we want to see before we go the old home of the Kermadecs. It is quite near, by the very side of the church. They show it to us from the door, and advise us to ask to be allowed to see the room on the left, on the first floor; that is the room in which Yves was born.

At the side of the house is the large abandoned park of the bishopric of Léon, where, it seems, Yves, when he was quite a little child, used to play every day in the grass with Goulven. It is very thick to-day, this grass of May, and full of Easter daisies and silenes. In the park roses and lilac are growing wild now, as in a wood.

We knock at the door of the house which the good women have pointed out to us, and those who live there are a little surprised at the request we make. But we do not inspire distrust, and they ask us only not to make a noise when we enter the first floor room, on account of the old grandmother who is sleeping there and is on the point of death. And then, considerately, they leave us alone.

We enter on tiptoe. It is a large room, poor and almost empty. The things in it seem to have a presentiment of the grim visitor who is expected; one is tempted almost to ask whether he has not already arrived, and our eyes glance uneasily at a bed, the curtains of which are drawn. Yves looks all round, trying to stretch his intelligence into the past, to force himself as it were to remember. But it is no use. It is finished; and even here he can find nothing.

We were descending preparatory to leaving, when suddenly something came back to him like a light in the distance.

"Ah!" he said, "I think now that I recognize this staircase. Wait! Below there should be a door on that side leading into a yard, and a well on the left with a large tree, and, at the back, the stable where we used to keep the horse with the white hoofs."

It was as if there had suddenly come a break in the clouds. Yves stood still on the stairs, gazing through this gap which had just been opened on the past; he was thrilled to feel himself at grips with that mysterious thing which men call memory.

Below, in the yard, we found everything as he had described it, the well on the left, the tree, the stable. And Yves said to me with an emotion of awe, removing his hat as if he were by a grave:

"Now I can see quite clearly my father's face."

It was high time to depart, and the diligence was waiting for us.

Throughout our journey over this golden-coloured moor, during the long May twilight, our eyes were fixed on the Creizker tower which was disappearing in the distance, and was lost at last in the depths of the limpid darkness. We were bidding it adieu, for we were going to leave to-morrow for very distant seas, where it would no longer be able to see us pass.

"To-morrow morning," said Yves, "you must let me come into your room on board very early, so that I may write at your desk. I want to tell all that we have found out to my mother before leaving France. And, you know, I am sure that tears will come into her eyes when my letter is read to her."