CHAPTER L

17_th June_, 1878.

We rose early to go into the woods and gather "luzes" (little blue-black fruits which are found in the deepest of the thickets, on plants which resemble the mistletoe).

Anne no longer wore her gay festival attire: she had put on a large smooth collarette and a simpler head-dress. Her Breton dress of blue cloth was ornamented with yellow embroidery: on each side of her bodice were designs imitating rows of eyes such as butterflies have on their wings.

Along the sunken lanes, in the green night, we met women who were going into Toulven to hear the early morning mass. From the end of these long corridors of verdure, we saw them coming with their collarettes, their tall white head-dresses, the sides of which fell symmetrically over their ears, like the bonnets of the Egyptians. Their waists were tightly compressed in bodices of blue cloth which resembled the corselets of insects and on which were embroidered always the same designs, the same rows of butterfly eyes. As they passed they gave us good-day in Breton and their tranquil faces wore an expression of primitive times.

And at the doors of old grey granite cottages which were almost hidden in the trees, we found old women sitting and minding little children; old women with long unkempt white hair, in tattered blue cloth cut in the fashion of long ago, with the remains of Breton embroideries and rows of eyes: the poverty and primitiveness of olden times.

Ferns, ferns, all along these lanes--ferns of the most elaborate kind, the finest, the rarest, which have flourished there in the damp shade, forming sheaves and carpets--and pink foxgloves, too, shooting up like pink rockets, and, pinker even than the foxgloves, the silenes of Brittany, scattering over all this fresh verdure their little carmine-coloured stars.

To us, maybe, the verdure seems greener, the woods more silent, the perfumes more penetrating, to us who live in wooden houses in the midst of the sound of the sea.

"It seems to me very pleasant here," said Yves. "A little later on when little Pierre is big enough for me to lead him by the hand, we will go together to pick all kinds of things in the woods--and, later again, we can shoot. To be sure! I will buy a gun, as soon as I have saved a little money, to kill the wolves. I don't think I shall ever be bored in this country here."

I knew well, alas! that sooner or later he would weary of it; but it served no purpose to tell him so and it was better to let him, as one lets children, cherish his illusion.

Besides, he also was about to depart; two days after me, he was due at Brest, to embark once more. This was only a very brief rest in our life, this sojourn at Toulven, only a little interlude of Brittany, after which we must resume once more our business of the sea.

We were in the heart of the woods. No pathways now, no cottages. Nothing but a succession of hills following one another into the distance, covered with beeches, with brushwood, with oaks and heather. And flowers, a profusion of flowers; the whole countryside was flowered like an Eden: honeysuckle, tall asphodels with white distaffs and foxgloves with pink distaffs.

In the distance, the song of cuckoos in the trees, and, around us, the humming of bees.

The berries grew thick here and there, on the stony soil, mingled with flowering heather. Anne always found the best and gave them to me in handfuls. And big Yves watched us with a grave smile, conscious that he was playing, for the first time, a kind of rôle of mentor, and finding it very surprising.

The place had a wild air. These wooded hills, these carpets of lichen, resembled a landscape of olden times, though bearing the mark of no precise epoch. But Anne's costume was clearly of the Middle Ages and the impression that one had was of that period.

Not the gloomy and twilight Middle Ages as understood by Gustave Doré, but the Middle Ages sunlit and full of flowers, of these same eternal flowers of the fields of Gaul, which bloomed as now for our ancestors.

It was eleven o'clock when we returned to the cottage of the old Keremenens for dinner. It was very warm that summer in Brittany; the ferns and the little red flowers of the roadside bowed down under the unaccustomed sun, which exhausted them, tempered though it was by the green branches.

_One o'clock._ For me, the hour of departure. I went first of all to kiss little Pierre, asleep still in his old oaken cradle, as if these four days had not sufficed him for recovering from the fatigue he had suffered in coming into the world.

I bade good-bye to all. Yves, thoughtful, leaning against the door, was waiting to accompany me as far as Toulven, whence the diligence would take me to the station at Bannalec. Anne and old Corentin also insisted on escorting me.

And, when I saw Toulven disappearing in the distance, its grey steeple and its mournful pond, my heart contracted. How many years would it be before I should return to Brittany? Once more we were separating, my brother and I, and both of us were going away into the unknown. I was uneasy about his future, over which I saw dark clouds gathering. . . . And I thought also of these Keremenens whose welcome had touched me. I asked myself whether my poor Yves, with his terrible failings and his uncontrollable character, was not going to bring unhappiness upon them, under their roof of thatch covered with little red flowers.