Vignettes: A Miniature Journal of Whim and Sentiment. Hubert Crackanthorpe

up as a couturière. I asked her how long she had been blind:—

      “It is forty-eight years since I saw anything, monsieur. When I was young I had a great trouble. … For eighteen months I wept, and when I went back to work, my eyes were worn out, and I could see no more. … It is forty-eight years now, monsieur, since I saw anything. … Heureusement, il n’y en a plus pour longtemps … ce sera bientôt fini. …”

      She spoke simply, and with quiet dignity; though I could see that she was crying a little, as she fingered her handkerchiefs with her full-veined, tremulous hands.

      CASTELSARRASIN

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       May 17

      From afar off, high against the sky, we could see the ragged line of its roofs, like an ancient, tattered crest along the back of a precipitous, inaccessible-looking hill.

      To reach it we waded the Luys de France, with the water swishing under our horses’ bellies, and climbed a mule-track, tight-paved with cobbles, waywardly winding beneath the contorted limbs of leafy, Spanish chestnuts. The track led us around the outside of the village, close under the shadow of its houses—discoloured-yellow and musty-white, fissured and bestained, battered and starved, till everywhere their bones protruded, bulging, bursting beams.

      Low, sloping roofs, moss-grown, the colour of old gold, over-lapped the walls, like huge, ill-fitting caps; shading row upon row of wooden balconies, filled with a decrepid multitude of things, which, it seemed, could never have been new—broken earthenware pots; rickety rush-bottomed chairs; strips of old linen; worn-out bass brooms; stacks of dead branches. …

      Two geese, a yellow dog, and a little black pig had the village street all to themselves. The clock on the tower of the whitewashed church pointed half-past ten, though the twilight had not yet come. And our horses’ hoofs clattered, almost brutally, past the dank-smelling, mud-floored rooms, and the cracked, worm-eaten shutters, wearily moaning with the dull fatigue of stiff-jointed old age.

      Toiling up the hill, on the other side, we met a crooked old woman, barefooted, clad in a single frayed shirt, carrying a truss of sainfoin on her head.

      “Adechats,” she mumbled mechanically, and toiled on barefooted up the stony path, steadying the truss of sainfoin with both hands. …

      IN THE BASQUE COUNTRY

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       May 23

      All day an intense impression of lusty sunlight, of quivering golden-green … a long, white road that dazzles, between its rustling dark-green walls; blue brawling rivers; swelling upland meadows, flower-thronged, luscious with tall, cool grass; the shepherd’s thin-toned pipe; the ragged flocks, blocking the road, cropping at the hedge-rows as they hurry on towards the mountains; the slow, straining teams of jangling mules—wine-carriers coming from Spain; through dank, cobbled village streets, where the pigs pant their bellies in the roadway, and the sandal-makers flatten the hemp before their doors; and then, out again into the lusty sunlight, along the straight, powdery road that dazzles ahead interminably towards a mysterious, hazy horizon, where the land melts into the sky. …

      And, at last, the cool evening scents; soft shadows stealing beneath the still, silent oaks; and, all at once, a sight of the great snow-mountains, vague, phantasmagoric, like a mirage in the sky; and of the hills, all indigo, rippling towards a pale sunset of liquid gold.

      IN THE LANDES

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       May 27

      Since sunrise I had been travelling—along the straight-stretching roads, white with summer sand, interminably striped by the shadows of the poplars; across the great, parched plain, where, all the day’s length, the heat dances over the waste land, and the cattle bells float their far-away tinkling; through the desolate villages, empty but for the beldames, hunched in the doorways, pulling the flax with horny, tremulous fingers; and on towards the desolate silence of the flowerless pine-forests. …

      And there the night fell. The sun went down unseen; a dim flickering ruddled the host of tree trunks; and the darkness started to drift through the forest. The road grew narrow as a footpath, and the mare slackening her pace, uneasily strained her white neck ahead.

      Out of the darkness a figure sprang beside me. A shout rang out—words of an uncouth patois that I did not understand. And the mare, terrified, galloped forward, snorting, and swerving from side to side. …

      And a strange, superstitious fear crept over me—a dreamy dread of the future; a helpless presentiment of evil days to come; a sense, too, of the ruthless nullity of life, of the futile deception of effort, of bitter revolt against the extinction of death, a yearning after faith in a vague survival beyond. …

      And the words of the old proverb returned to me mockingly:—

      “The eye is not satisfied with seeing,

      nor the ear with hearing.”