CHAPTER XIV

THE WAYS OF LITERATURE

"The voyage of even the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks."

From Jersey Val had made a bee-line for Paris which she knew well, and where she had hopes of renewing her mental energy by the sights and sounds of a great city and association with other brain workers. Autumn removals were in full swing and there was no great difficulty in finding house-room for herself and the children, though she was unprepared to find how Paris rents had risen since the days when she and her mother sojourned in the Latin Quarter. It was to that part of Paris she naturally turned--the only possible part for artists and writers to live, though the rich and empty-headed are fond of calling it the "wrong side" of the river. A studio seemed the most suitable form of residence, for she knew she would not be able to work in a small room, and she hated the sordid construction of a cheap flat. She was fortunate in finding a good _atelier_ in a little secluded _rue_ on the confines of the Quarter--a big, high room, with kitchen and small bedroom attached, looking out onto a little square yard with clusters of shrubs, ivied walls, and a few old battered statues that lent a picturesque air. Here she had settled down and with resolute energy begun the series of "Wanderfoot" articles for which Branker Preston had obtained a commission. It was an arduous task. No matter how much material is stored in the mind it is not easy to import the air and colour of far-off lands into a Paris _atelier_. The art of putting things down had not yet been recaptured either. Still, the stimulus of even the short journey from Jersey to Paris had done something for her, and though to her critical eye the articles she achieved seemed but pale echoes of her former work, they at least paid the rent and kept things going in rue Campagne Premiere. The continuation of Haidee's education became a problem needing instant attention; for Val very soon realised that the Latin Quarter with its liberal ideas of morality and its fascinating students was no place for a young impressionable girl. Her own child she would have allowed to stay, for she knew that anything with her nature would come to no harm among these careless, attractive people, to whom she felt herself blood-kin. But Haidee, the child of a pretty flighty mother, was of different stock. Besides, there was a responsibility to Westenra in the matter. There were no convents left in Paris, or indeed, in France. All those lovely homes where girls learned a sweet sedateness and many beautiful arts had been closed by a ruthless government. No more in France may the gentle coifed women impart composure and beauty of mind to English and American girls and train the aristocratic children of France to a love of Church and Country. What the loss is to the sum of the world's harmony can never be computed, but American and English mothers have a slight realisation of it.

It was in Belgium that Val at last found what was needed for Haidee--a little community of French nuns who, refusing to unveil, had been obliged to flee over the border, and there had founded a convent to which many good Catholics in Paris sent their children. It was well within Val's means too, for the living is cheap in Belgium, and the fare in the convent was simple though good. Haidee hated terribly to go, but Val was firm, though she held out the promise of early liberation if Haidee would work well at French and try and pass her _brevet simple_. This was no difficult task, for the girl had been well grounded in French during their sojourn in Jersey. Remained the problem of Bran--and little children are a problem in France to parents of limited means. No one caters for them as in other countries. No one even understands the art of teaching and amusing them at the same time, nor even how to feed them. There are no kindergartens and no milk puddings! Small wonder that French babies are small and sallow and sad! Since the nuns were driven out there are only the public Lycees where strong and weak, rough and gentle, are jumbled together with results that no thinking woman would welcome for her child. From their tenderest years French children are crammed with lessons, pushed ahead to pass exams, while the business of play so necessary for little children is almost entirely suppressed.

Val very certainly had no intention of confiding her son to such institutions. She was therefore obliged to hire a daily governess for him, for though, at his age, he needed little teaching, he had to be sent out of doors so that she might have silence and solitude wherein to work. Even this was a costly business. In England a nursery governess can be afforded by almost every one, but in France it costs one hundred francs a month to have your child well taken care of and taught his alphabet for a few hours a day.

Val did not grudge it, but what worried her was that Bran did not thrive. Paris was no place for him. The Luxembourg Gardens make a good play-ground for city-bred children, but Bran was Val's own child in his need of air and space and horizon. His bloom faded a little, and he began to look very fair and spiritual. Also his love of the picture and statue galleries seemed to his mother something too wistful and wonderful in a small boy, and brought tears to her pillow in the silence of many a night. Then she took him to Belgium for awhile and left him with Haidee and the good nuns. He was a shy creature, though he hated any one to know it, and believed he hid his secret well behind a set smile and little hardy incomprehensible sayings. When the nuns clustered round him calling him their "little Jesus," a favourite name in France for a pretty child, he disdained to shelter behind Val's skirts, as instinct bade him, but nothing could be got out of him except an enigmatic saying he always kept for strangers:

"The cat says bow-wow-wow, and The dog says meow, meow, meow."

All the while he smiled his little bright smile and his eyes roving keenly noted every detail of the pale aesthetic faces. Even the tears in the Reverend Mother's eyes did not escape him. Afterward he said to Val:

"I like that one with the floating eyes. I think she wishes she had a nice little boy like me. Her voice was littler than a pin's head when she called me her _petit Jesu_. But why do they nearly all have green teeth?"

When Val kissed him farewell it nearly broke her heart to see the brave smile he maintained, though Haidee was sniffling and snuffling at his elbow, partly with momentary grief but mostly with indignation at being, as she rudely phrased it: "Shut up in a convent with a lot of old pussycats."

Back in Paris the studio seemed desolate and empty. Bran had become so much a part of his mother's being and life that without him she was like a bird from whom a wing had been torn. A month later Haidee wrote:

"I think Bran is fretting. Whenever I speak to him he puts that little fixed grin on his mouth, but you should see his eyes."

Within an hour Val was in the Brussels express speeding for that dear sight. On the journey back to Paris, happy now and healed of her broken wing, she heard all the history of his lonely nights and the "purply-red pain" that he got in his stomach when he thought of her. Cuddled to her side he wept as he had never wept whilst separated from her, and Val's tears ran down her face too while she listened, registering a vow that she would never part with him again.

So once more he went out with a governess and came home to his mother full of original criticisms of Moreau's pictures and the statues of Rodin, until one morning nearly two years after their arrival in Paris, and just when Haidee had arrived for the summer holidays, Val rose up from her bed with the itch for travel in her feet, and the longing quickly communicated to the children for the sight of a clear horizon. They tore their possessions from the walls, stuffed them into trunks, and shook the dust of Paris from their feet.

"Let's go to Italy and live on olives and spaghetti, "was Haidee's suggestion, but Bran knew the news of the world.

"We might get an earthquake!"

The size of the cheque from Branker Preston, however, was what really decided the affair, limiting them to wandering happily enough in Brittany. But the water and primitive methods of Breton cooks made Val think nervously of typhoid, and after a time she headed for Normandy. Normans are cleaner in their household ways than Bretons, of whom they slightingly speak as "_les pores Bretons_," declaring that they eat out of holes in the table and never wash the holes. Besides, Normandy in winter is milder than Brittany. So, travelling by highways and byways, they happened at last on Mascaret.

It was the tag end of September when they arrived. All the summer visitors were gone and the big silver beach deserted, but summer itself still lingered. They got an entrancing glimpse of the gentle green and gold beauty of the place before the chills of autumn set in. Even then they had been able to bathe and go sailing in the fishing boat of one of _pere_ Duval's sons, who was now in his turn lighthouse-keeper of Mascaret. For ten sunny October days, too, they had assisted with all the ardour of novitiates at _pere_ Duval's cider making, becoming acquainted with the secrets of _cidre bouche_, and the grades to be found in _cidre ordinaire_ unto the third and fourth watering. They even sampled the latter as drunk by the fishermen and called for at the cafes by the name of _le boisson avec le brulot dedans_: which signifies cider very liberally diluted with French cognac. Then the winter closed in on Mascaret with wild gales and high-flowing tides. On Christmas Eve snow came softly down, so that the walk to midnight mass had been like acting in that scene painted by a Dutch painter where the village folk are seen winding their way through the snow, lanterns and hot-water bottles in their hands, to the distant church with windows full of red light. All the winter interests of the simple village had been sampled and shared by Val and the children, and they had been happier there than ever in France. The children loved the freedom of the place and the _bonhomie_ of the French folk so different to English people of that class. The three went about in their red sweaters and lived a life of absolute unconvention. It was a good place to write a masterpiece in--if one were only a master--was Val's ironical thought, and in spite of her self-directed irony, she did achieve during the first months there a wonderful little curtain raiser, which Branker Preston had no difficulty in disposing of to a London manager. It dealt with Boers and Zulus, and had been well received, but unfortunately the play it had preceded in the bill was a failure and the two were withdrawn together before Val could greatly benefit, but it had brought in five guineas a week for six weeks, and this success had put her in heart for further work of the kind. She had sickened of writing "Wanderfoot" articles from a chair. She could by this time have written some very spirited ones on the subject of France in general and Normandy in particular, but she had her reasons for not wishing to attract attention to her whereabouts, as such articles would surely have done. Preston advised her to write a novel, but she knew she had neither the patience to spin a long story through many chapters to its end, nor the gift of character portrayal. What was hers was a sense for situation, colour, and atmosphere, and it occurred to her that the best vehicle for a display of these qualities was the theatre. Her first little venture had attracted the attention of several managers, and one of them told Preston that he was ready to consider a three-act play by her. It was this play she was busy upon now. But it was sometimes hard to transport the atmosphere of far-away tropical Natal into a little wooden villa facing the English Channel, with a wild spring gale tearing at the windows, and the rollers booming like cannon on the Barleville beach--for the promise of summer had gone as swiftly as it came, and the spring tides were flooding up the river flinging great walls of spray over the _digue_ and splashing three feet deep across the Terrasse, right to the steps of the _Hotel de la Mer_, so that the journey to the village had to be made by a path up the cliff.

Val found that the only way to ignore Normandy and the bleak mists of _La Manche_ was to sit over a _chaufferette_ full of bright red embers of charcoal, letting the heat steal up her skirts and enveloping her whole person from the soles of her feet to her scalp in a lovely glow. Immediately she would begin to write things full of the tropical languor of Africa. In her brain palms waved, little pot-bellied Kaffirs rolled in the hot dirt, sunshine blazed over a blue and green land, the air was filled with the scent of mimosa, and great-limbed Zulus danced in rhythmic lines with chant and stamp and swing of assegai before Cetewayo, the great and cruel king.

Unfortunately, a _chaufferette_ is not always an easy thing to manage. Like everything French it has a temperament, and is liable to moods when it will burn and moods when it won't. It is a wooden or tin box, perforated at the top and open at one side to admit an earthenware bowl full of the charcoal which is called _charbon de bois_--actually calcined morsels of green wood. The baker makes this charbon by sticking green wood branches into his hot oven after he has finished baking his bread, but each baker makes a limited supply only, and will not sell it except to people who buy his bread. Every one uses _chaufferette_ in Normandy during the winter, and visitors are given one to put their feet on as soon as they enter a house, though sometimes when the host is rich enough to keep a perpetual fire going, a supply of hot bricks is kept in the oven instead.

Val's _chaufferette_ was of most uncertain temper. Hortense always lit it in the morning, and left it by the writing-table. When Val came to it all that had to be done was to gently insert an old spoon under the little ash heap and lift it all round, when a red hot centre of glowing embers would disclose itself. But sometimes an old nail or piece of "Carr-_diff_" found its way by accident into the pot, then the charbon would immediately sulk itself into oblivion, or sometimes for no reason at all after being perfectly lighted it would just go out. Ensued a struggle in which Val and Haidee invariably came off second-best. They would take the pot out of its box and stand it on a window-sill with the window drawn low to make a draught; put it on the front door step and, kneeling down, blow on it until fine ash sat thick upon their noses and their eyes were full of tears; build paper bonfires on it; fan it wildly with newspapers. All to no avail! Usually that was the end of work and inspiration for the day. Val declared that she could not _think_ with cold feet. But sometimes old _pere_ Duval, compassionate for the mad, would send up his wooden box, large enough for two men to warm their feet on, with a great iron saucepan full of glowing charbon inside, and Val would sit toasting over it and write things of a tropical languor extraordinary.

Haidee had passed her _brevet simple_, an exam, about equal to the English Oxford Junior, and the American 6th standard, and was now working for the _brevet superieure_ with a French woman who had been a governess before she married a retired commercial traveller and settled in Mascaret. The discovery of this good woman was a stroke of luck for Val, though certainly Haidee did not consider it so. However, her lessons only took up four hours a day. For the rest she and Bran idled joyous and care-free through life, climbing the cliff, fishing, digging for sand-eels, making long excursions inland, or meeting the fishing boats in the evening when they came in with the day's haul, and all the villagers would be at the _port_ to bargain for fish. Haidee usually haggled for and bought a _raie_ (dog-fish) for the next day's dinner, and Bran would run a stick through its ribald-looking mouth, and carry the slithery monstrous thing home, to be met by scowls from Hortense, who, stolid as she was, hated the sight of a _raie_, and could not face the business of washing and gutting it without cries of _douleur_ and disgust.

"_Ah! C'est craintive! C'est affreux!_"

But meat was too dear for daily consumption, and _raie_ the only fish brought in by the boats throughout the winter months, so it had to be eaten, and some one had to prepare it. And after all, wrestling with _raie_ was one of the jobs for which Hortense was paid three francs a week. It was her business to come in the morning at seven o'clock, make the fires, and deliver "little breakfast" at each bedside; afterwards she swept and made the beds, then disappeared until just before lunch, when she came to perform upon the _raie_ and execute one or two culinary feats that were beyond the scope of Val or Haidee--such as cutting up onions, which neither of them could accomplish without weeping aloud, or putting the chipped potatoes into a pan full of boiling dripping, a business that when conducted by Val made a rain of grease spots all over the kitchen and scalded every one in sight. After washing the midday dishes, and chopping up vegetables for the soup, Hortense would consider her function over for the day, and leave Val and Haidee to grapple as best they might with tea, supper, fires, and the _chaufferette_. The supper was no very great difficulty, merely a matter of putting the cut vegetables into a pot with a large lump of specially prepared and seasoned dripping, and standing said pot on the stove until supper-time, when its contents would be marvellously transformed into _soupe a la graise_, a savoury and nourishing broth eaten as an evening meal by every peasant in Normandy. The fires were the greatest nuisance. The stove in the kitchen either became a red-hot furnace and purred like a man-eater, or else went out; and the stove with an open grate in Val's room, which old man Duval had paid a month's rent for and gone all the way to Cherbourg to fetch, had a way of going out also before any one even noticed that it was low; then there would be much scratching with a poker, searching for kindling wood, pouring out of paraffin, sudden happy blazes that nearly took the roof off, and black smuts everywhere. When all was over, and a beautiful fire roaring after the united efforts of the family, Val would find that her _chaufferette_ had gone out! It was hard to even think masterpieces among such distractions, to say nothing of writing them. Tea was easily got. Haidee made the toast on the salad fork, Val buttered it with dripping, Bran laid the table. Then all three sat with their feet on the stove, drinking out of the big coffee bowls, eating every scrap of the delicious smoky toast and licking their fingers afterwards. If Val had written anything funny or dramatic that day she would sometimes read it out to them, but for the most part her instinct was to hide what she wrote. She said she felt as if she had lost something afterwards, and if any one had been even looking at her written sheets they never seemed quite the same to her again--some virtue went out of her work the moment she shared it with any one.

Usually, after tea she settled down for another struggle with her ideas, and Bran and Haidee went for a prowl on the _digue_ in the hope of adventures. Bran, whose mind was as full of fairies as if he had been born in the wilds of Ireland, was always in hope of meeting a giant or a dwarf, but he had learned not to mention these aspirations to Haidee. Anyway, there was always the village gossip to listen to in the _petit port_, where the fishing boats anchored and usually the excitement of watching the _Quatre Freres_ come chup--chup--chupping up the river to her moorings. She was a natty and picturesque trawler, with a petrol engine that was the admiration of the village installed in her bowels. Because of this engine she was known as the _Chalutier a petrole_, but at Villa Duval she was called by Bran's translation of her name, _The Cat's Freres_. She never caught anything but _raie_, and of this despised species far fewer than any of the other boats, but she dashed in and out of the harbour with great slam and needed five men to handle her. There was a legend that the petrol engine frightened the fish away. It was known that the four brothers who owned her were anxious to get rid of her. Every one knew that she cost more than she brought in. But Haidee and Bran shared a fugitive hope that Val's play would make them all so rich that they would be able to acquire her as a pleasure boat.

Sometimes strange craft from Granville or a Brittany port would come in for the night, and there was the _St. Joseph_, a great fishing trawler from Lannion, carrying a master and seven hands, that put in when weather was heavy. Her sails were patched with every colour of the rainbow, her decks were filthy, and her years sat heavy upon her--you could hear her creaking and groaning two miles from shore: but to Haidee and Bran she stood for the true romance! She always brought in tons of fish, not only the everlasting _raie_, but deep-sea fish, and as soon as her arrival was heralded all the village sabots came clipper-clopping down the terrace, shawls clutched round bosoms, the wind flicking bright red spots in old cheeks, every one anxious to pick and choose from the mass of coal-fish, red gurnet, plaice, congers, and mullets that was hooked out of the hold and flung quivering ashore. The big weather-beaten fishermen in their sea-boots bandied jests with the carking old village wives and the girls showered laughter. In the end, the villagers departed with full baskets, and the seamen well content adjourned to the _petit cafe_ close by for a "cup of coffee with a burn in it" and a good meal.