Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship)
himself and murmured his morning orison, his eyes still fixed on his
mother's head:
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I give you my heart, take it please, and
preserve it from sin."
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I give you my soul and my life.
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, help me in my last agony.
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, grant that I live and die in thy holy company.
Amen."
Immediately afterwards humour, that Irish vice, overcame all gentler
feelings; like a certain famous Bishop of Down, Bran would lose a friend
for a joke. He woke Val with a cruel jest:
"_Bon jour, Monsieur le Cure!_"
The cure of Mascaret was a Breton as rugged as his country, with haggard
spiritual eyes and an upper lip you could built a fort on, as the saying
is; he intensified his uncomeliness by wearing his hair so close-shaved
that it was impossible to say where his _tonsure_ began or ended. To be
told by her loving but candid son that she resembled this good man was a
cruel thrust to Val, and the memory of it darkened life for many days to
come. She wrapped herself in gloom and the blue veil, and nothing more
was heard of the fez cap and cigarettes except that in good time the
Stores forwarded them and the French Customs taxed them. After once
trying on the fez and finding herself the image of a sallow and
melancholy Turk, she had cast it from her. Her one instinct was to hide
her ugliness from every one. Even at the sight of John the Baptist she
would fly and hide, and she never left the house except after dark, when
for exercise she would sometimes race Haidee up and down the _digue_, or
run along the beach at midnight, her scarf floating behind her in the
wind, and her head bare to give her "roots" a chance.
These proceedings gravely annoyed the Customs officers distributed in
the little straw-littered watch-huts that line the Normandy coast.
Instead of tucking themselves in their blankets for a peaceful night,
they were obliged to keep awake for fear the mad American woman meant
either to commit suicide or meet a boat full of brandy and cigars from
Jersey.
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