Two Summers in Guyenne: A Chronicle of the Wayside and Waterside. Edward Harrison Barker
he raised a howl that said he was both surprised and shocked. Skipping with great agility, he avoided the next stone, and the expression of his face told me that he was already feeling very home-sick. He turned tail as quick as he could, and used very bad dog-language as the stones followed him down the hill. As a rule, dogs lose all their courage when they are out of sight of their own homes, unless someone whom they know well is near at hand to give them confidence in themselves.
I am again upon the moor. There is a deep silence over the heather, for the last bees have left the pink and purple bells. But there is still a wan glow in the air, which gives a sad beauty to the quiet, mournful land. A boy is returning with some cattle after spending the day upon the heath, and he sings as he thinks of his poor home, the blazing sticks on the hearth, the soup, the buckwheat cake, or the potatoes. Through a mask of silver birches I see a solemn ruddy light as of a funeral-torch in the far western sky. The breath of evening is made sweeter by the odour wafted from some distant fresh-cut grass or broom that has been drying in the September sun. A field-cricket, waking up, breaks the silence with its shrill cry that is quickly taken up by others near at hand and far away in the dusk. The light and colour of the day are now gone, but there is one beautiful star flashing in front of me like a lamp of the sanctuary when the vaulted minster is filled with shadow.
The rest of the walk to Neuvic was by night. The first auberge I entered in this small town of some three thousand inhabitants was a little too rough even for me. The family were at dinner, or at supper, as they would say, eating upon the bare board, without plates, potatoes boiled in their skins. I do not doubt there were hollows cut in the table to serve instead of plates, for this primitive contrivance still lingers in the wildest parts of the Limousin. In answer to my inquiry as to bed accommodation, I was told that I should have to sleep in the same room with others, probably the whole family. I had sufficient taste for civilization left to decline the proposed arrangement, and went in search of another inn.
Happily there was one, and of a better sort. It was thoroughly rustic, but there was not the squalor I had just encountered. In the kitchen, paved with small pebbles, two months' accumulation of used linen had been pressed down in an old wine-cask, and boiling water was now being poured upon it through a cloth covered with a layer of wood ashes. In these rural places the washing-day is usually once in two or three months. This simplifies matters, but it needs a considerable stock of linen, which, by-the-bye, peasants generally possess. The wash-house odour that arose from the lessive was not grateful, but I tried to accommodate myself to it. On the floor was a baby swaddled up, and tightly fitted into a small wooden cradle on huge rockers—a cradle that might have served for scores of babies, and been none the worse for wear. Although the fire on the hearth looked tempting, the proximity of the wine-cask and the linen that was being purified with potash made me glad to hear that my meal would be served in another room.
Considering the region, the dinner was not a bad one. I had soup, veal, eggs, and a fair wine. I had also a companion, but would rather have been without him. He was a young man, whose appearance gained by the contrast of a dusty wayfarer's, and he gave himself airs accordingly. I set him down as a petty functionary of the place, and a pensionnaire of the auberge. All the time I was with him his mind was exceedingly restless as to my intentions and business in those parts, and such explanations as I gave him to appease his insatiable curiosity and awkwardly-veiled suspicion evidently left him unsatisfied.
The next morning the hostess brought out her police register for me to enter my name, nationality, age, profession, destination, etc. I had no doubt that my acquaintance of the night before had reminded her of this little formality in order that he might afterwards see what I had written. All innkeepers in France are liable to a fine if they do not make every traveller who passes the night with them leave this record of himself for inspection, but the formality is much more often omitted than observed. I have not been able to overcome my English dislike of the practice, which is annoying and useless, like much more that belongs to the French administrative system.
By daylight I found Neuvic to be a cheerful, pleasant little town, with a venerable-looking old church, apparently of the twelfth century. It is entered by a cavernous portal under a very massive low tower, but the interior shows little of interest. What struck me, however, as something quite uncommon was a small altar in the centre of the nave just below the sanctuary. Upon it was an image of the Virgin, which a boy told me had been found in a neighbouring wood about a century ago.
On leaving Neuvic I noticed a woman carrying to the baker's a large dish of edible boleti, known to the French as cépes. This excellent fungus during the late summer and autumn is a very important article of food in France wherever there are extensive chestnut-woods. The orange mushroom is also much eaten in the same regions, for it likewise loves the chestnut forest; but it may be mistaken by those who do not know the signs for its relative, the crimson-capped fly-agaric, one of the most deadly of cryptogams.
After seeing the dish of cépes, I was not surprised to find many chestnut-trees along the road that I now took to St. Pantaléon. The country was less barren than that which I had passed over the day before. Although there was much heather, broom and furze, trees and pasture broke the monotony of the moorland. Here was the better Limousin landscape—every knoll and mamelon covered with heather and other moor-plants, woods and meadows in the dells and dips. The numerous clumps of silver birches, and the gorse arrayed in its new flowers of bright gold, added to the charm of the sunlit scene.
To me the weather was all the more delightful by being very warm, for I had run away from winter on the Auvergne mountains. The whirring noise of the grasshoppers as they flew across the road, and the tremulous sheen of their wings, coloured like blooming lavender, brought back to me the best recollections of other wayfaring days in the warm South, when all these things were new, and the sight feasted upon them with the eagerness of bees that suck the first flowers of spring.
I passed a little field of buckwheat that had been cut some days and had fully ripened. A woman was threshing out the grain with a flail upon a spread canvas, surrounded by a circle of purple-tinted cones, the sheaves leaning together. Now the wide level moor returned, but Nature was not quite the same here as she had been before. The vast expanse was dotted over with dark little juniper bushes. These were covered with berries which nobody seemed to think worth the picking. Rock-cist flourished, starring the turf all over with its yellow discs. This moor was an absolute desert.
Long I walked without seeing another human being. At length I met a woman carrying a distaff, and tried to get into conversation with her, but it was impossible; she could not speak a word of French, and I knew nothing of her Limousin patois.
By steadfastly following the road, I came to the village of St. Pantaléon, on the brow of a hill overlooking the Luxège, and stopped at a wayside inn. It was a poor auberge; but there was an air of reaching toward some ideal of superior life and softened manners that made itself felt in small ways not to be described with any certainty, but none the less real. The innkeeper, who was also a peasant-farmer, possessed the doubtful blessing of a mind that rose above what the logic of his existence, sternly bound to a plot of grudging soil and the petty needs of still poorer neighbours, demanded of it. He was blessed or afflicted with that hunger of knowledge and refinement which lifts and casts down, rejoices and saddens. He knew that such ambition with regard to himself was vain, that it was his destiny to live out his days on the edge of a moor in the Corrèze, and that it was his duty to thank Heaven that he was sheltered and had sufficient food, fuel, and clothing for himself and his family: all this he knew, and he accepted his lot bravely. But the fire was only damped down; it glowed in its hidden heart, and strove for a vent. It was not lighted without a purpose. The peasant had a son, to whom the flame had been passed on; for he aimed at the priesthood. This has ever been a refuge of ambitious minds that cannot rise by any other means above the dullness of the peasant's life, which is the more endurable the more the man is able to place himself upon the animal level of his plodding ox. The son was being educated in a seminary, but he was now home for the holidays. Presently he appeared. He was a youth of about nineteen, wearing a blouse like any other peasant. There was certainly nothing in his appearance to indicate that he was destined for the cure of souls. The proud father said: 'He is in philosophy.' The young man had a twinkle in his eye that might have been philosophical. Neither