CHAPTER X.
Upon the second floor, above the room occupied by my poor old
grandmother, who sang the Marseillaise so constantly, in that part of
the house overlooking the yard and the gardens, lived my great-aunt
Bertha.
From her windows, across the houses and the walls covered with roses
and jasmine, one could see the ramparts of the town. They were so near
to us that their old trees were visible; and beyond them lay those
great plains of our country called prees (prairies) all so alike, and
as monotonous as the neighboring seas. From the window one also saw
the river. At full tide, when it almost overflowed its banks, it
looked, as it wound along through the green meadows, like silver lace;
and the large and small boats that passed in the far distance mounted
upon this silver thread toward the harbor and from there sailed out
into the great sea.
As this was our only glimpse of real country the windows in my aunt
Bertha's room had always a great attraction for me. Especially had
they in the evening at sunset, for from them I could watch the sun
sink mysteriously behind the prairies. Oh! those sunsets that I saw
from my aunt Bertha's windows, what ecstasy overcast with melancholy
they awakened in me! The winter sunsets seen through the closed
windows were a pale rose color. Those of summer time, upon stormy
evenings, after a hot, bright day, I contemplated from the open
window, and as I did so I would breathe in the sweet odors given out
by the jasmine blossoms growing on the wall: it seems to me that there
are no such sunsets now as there were then. When the sunsets were
notably splendid and unusual, if I was not in the room, aunt Bertha,
who never missed one, would call out hastily: "Dearie! Dearie! Come
quickly!" From any corner of the house I heard that call and
understood it, and I went swift as a hurricane and mounted the stairs
four steps at a time. I mounted the more rapidly because the stairway
had already begun to fill with dread shadows; and in the turnings and
corners I saw the imaginary forms of ghosts and monsters that at
nightfall always pursued me as I ran up the stairs.
My aunt Bertha's room, with its simple white muslin curtains, was as
modest as my grandmother's. The walls, covered with an old-fashioned
paper in vogue at the commencement of the century, were ornamented
with water colors similar to those in my grandmother's room. The
picture that I looked at most often was a pastel after Raphael of a
virgin in white, blue and rose color. The rays of the setting sun
always fell upon this picture (I have already said the hour of sunset
was the time I preferred most to be in this room). This virgin was
very much like my aunt Bertha; in spite of the great difference in
their ages, one was struck with the resemblance between the straight
lines and regularity of their profiles.
On this same floor, but upon the street side, lived my other
grandmother (the one who always dressed in black) and her daughter, my
aunt Claire, the person in the house who petted me most.
Upon winter evenings, after I had been to my aunt Bertha's room to see
the sunset, it was my custom to go to them. I usually found them
together in my grandmother's room and I would seat myself near the
fire in a little chair placed there for me. But the twilight hour
spent with them was always a disturbing one. . . . After all the
amusements, all the day's running and playing, to sit in the dusk
almost motionless upon my tiny chair, with eyes wide open, uneasily
watching for the least change in the shadows, especially on that side
of the room where the door opened on the dim stairway, was very
painful to me. . . . I am sure that if my grandmother and aunt had
known of the melancholy and terrors which the twilight induced in me,
they would have spared me by lighting the lamp, but they did not know
my sufferings; and it was the custom of the aged persons by whom I was
surrounded, to sit tranquilly at nightfall in their accustomed places
without having need for a lighted lamp. As it grew darker one or the
other, grandmother or aunt, would draw her chair closer to me, and
when I had that protection about me I felt completely happy and
reassured and would say: "Please tell me stories about the Island."
The Island, that is the Island of Oleron, was my mother's native
place, my grandmother's and aunt's also, which they had quitted twenty
years before my birth to establish themselves upon the main land. The
Island, or the least thing that came from it, had a singular charm for
me.
It was quite near us, for from a garret window at the top of the house
we could, upon a very clear day, see the extreme end of its extensive
plain; it appeared a little bluish line against a still paler one
which was the arm of the ocean separating us from it. . . . To get to
it we had to take a long journey in wretched country wagons and in
sailing boats; and often our boat had to make its way there in the
teeth of a strong gale. At this time in the village of St. Pierre
Oleron I had three old aunts who lived very modestly upon the revenues
of their salt marshes (the remains of a once great inheritance), and
their annual rents which the peasants still paid with sacks of wheat.
. . . When I went to visit them at St. Pierre there was for me a
certain joy, mingled with many kinds of conflicting emotions, which I
cannot explain, in trying to picture to myself their once great
station.
The Huguenot austerity of their manners, their mode of life, their
house and their furniture all belonged to a past time, to a bygone
generation. The sea surrounded and isolated us, and the wind
constantly swept over the moorland and over the great stretches of
sandy beach.
My nurse was also from the Island, of a Huguenot family, which
descending from father to son had been with us for a long time; and
she would say: "At home, on the Island," in such a way that with a
wave of emotion I understood her great homesickness for it.
We had about us a number of little articles that had come from there,
and which had places of honor in our home. We had some black pebbles
large as cannon-balls, that had been chosen from the thousands lying
on the Long-Beach because centuries of washing had polished and
rounded them exquisitely. These pebbles always played an important
part every winter evening, for with the greatest regularity the old
people would put them into the chimney-place where a wood fire blazed
and crackled; afterwards they slipped them into calico bags of a
flowered pattern, also brought from the Island, and took them to bed
where they served to keep their feet warm during the night.
In our cellar we had wooden props and firkins, and also a number of
straight elm poles for holding the washing which had been cut from the
choicest young trees in my grandmother's forest. I had the greatest
veneration for all these things. I knew that my grandmother no longer
owned the forests, nor the salt marshes, nor the vineyards; for I had
heard them say that she had sold them one at a time to put the money
into investments upon the mainland; and that an incompetent notary by
his bad investments had greatly reduced her income.
When I went to the Island and the old salt makers and vine dressers,
who had at one time worked for our family, still loyal and respectful
called me "our little master," I knew they did so out of pure
politeness and altogether in deference to our past grandeur.
I regretted that I could not spend my life in tending the vineyards
and the harvests, the occupations of several of my ancestors. Such a
life seemed a much more desirable one to me than my own which was
passed in a house in town.
The stories of the Island that my grandmother and aunt Claire related
to me were generally of the happenings of their own childhood, a
childhood that seemed so very far away that to me it had no more
reality than a dream.
There were stories of grandfathers, long dead; of great-uncles whom I
had never known, dead also for many years. When my aunt told me their
names and described them to me I would abandon myself to reverie.
There was in particular a grandfather Samuel who had preached at the
time of the religious persecution, whom I thought an extraordinarily
interesting person.
I did not care whether the stories were different or not, and I would
ask for the same ones over and over. Often they told me stories of
journeys they had taken on the little donkeys that played such an
important part in the lives of the people of St. Pierre. They would
ride upon them to visit distant properties and vineyards; to get to
these it was often necessary to travel along the sands of the Long-
Beach, and sometimes of an evening during these expeditions terrible
storms would burst upon the travellers and compel them to take shelter
for the night in the inns and farmhouses.
And as I sat in the darkness that no longer had terrors for me, my
imagination busy with the things and peoples of other days, tinkle,
tinkle would go the dinner bell; then I rose and jumped for joy, and
we would go down to the dining-room together and find all the family
gathered there in the bright gay room: then I would run to my mother
and in an excess of emotion hide my face in her dress.
