In and Out of Three Normandy Inns | Page 5

little trouser left, and what there was of it was all pocket, apparently. Into the pockets the boy's hands were stuffed, along with his amazement; for his face, round and full though it was, could not hold the full measure of his surprise.
"We came over by boat--from Havre," we murmured meekly; then, "Is there a cake-shop near?" irrelevantly concluded Charm with an unmistakable ring of distress in her tone. There was no need of any further explanation. These two hearty young appetites understood each other; for hunger is a universal language, and cake a countersign common among the youth of all nations.
"Until you came, you see, we couldn't leave the luggage," she went on.
The blue eyes swept the line of our boxes as if the lad had taken his afternoon stroll with no other purpose than to guard them. "There are eight, and two umbrellas. _Soyez tranquille, je vous attendrai._"
It was the voice and accent of a man of the world, four feet high--a pocket edition, so to speak, in shabby binding. The brown legs hung, the next instant, over the tallest of the trunks. The skilful whistling was resumed at once; our appearance and the boy's present occupation were mere interludes, we were made to understand; his real business, that afternoon, was to do justice to the Lecoq's entire opera, and to keep his eye on the sea.
Only once did he break down; he left a high C hanging perilously in mid-air, to shout out "I like madeleines, I do!" We assured him he should have a dozen.
"_Bien!_" and we saw him settling himself to await our return in patience.
Up in the town the streets, as we entered them, were as empty as was the beach. Trouville might have been a buried city of antiquity. Yet, in spite of the desolation, it was French and foreign; it welcomed us with an unmistakably friendly, companionable air. Why is it that one is made to feel the companionable element, by instantaneous process, as it were, in a Frenchman and in his towns? And by what magic also does a French village or city, even at its least animated period, convey to one the fact of its nationality? We made but ten steps progress through these silent streets, fronting the beach, and yet, such was the subtle enigma of charm with which these dumb villas and mute shops were invested, that we walked along as if under the spell of fascination. Perhaps the charm is a matter of sex, after all: towns are feminine, in the wise French idiom, that idiom so delicate in discerning qualities of sex in inanimate objects, as the Greeks before them were clever in discovering sex distinctions in the moral qualities. Trouville was so true a woman, that the coquette in her was alive and breathing even in this her moment of suspended animation. The closed blinds and iron shutters appeared to be winking at us, slyly, as if warning us not to believe in this nightmare of desolation; she was only sleeping, she wished us to understand; the touch of the first Parisian would wake her into life. The features of her fashionable face, meanwhile, were arranged with perfect composure; even in slumber she had preserved her woman's instinct of orderly grace; not a sign was awry, not a window- blind gave hint of rheumatic hinges, or of shattered vertebrae; all the machinery was in order; the faintest pressure on the electrical button, the button that connects this lady of the sea with the Paris Bourse and the Boulevards, and how gayly, how agilely would this Trouville of the villas and the beaches spring into life!
The listless glances of the few tailors and cobblers who, with suspended thread, now looked after us, seemed dazed--as if they could not believe in the reality of two early tourists. A woman's head, here and there, leaned over to us from a high window; even these feminine eyes, however, appeared to be glued with the long winter's lethargy of dull sleep; they betrayed no edge of surprise or curiosity. The sun alone, shining with spendthrift glory, flooding the narrow streets and low houses with a late afternoon stream of color, was the sole inhabitant who did not blink at us, bovinely, with dulled vision.
Half an hour later we were speeding along the roadway. Half an hour--and Trouville might have been a thousand miles away. Inland, the eye plunged over nests of clover, across the tops of the apple and peach trees, frosted now with blossoms, to some farm interiors. The familiar Normandy features could be quickly spelled out, one by one.
It was the milking-hour.
The fields were crowded with cattle and women; some of the cows were standing immovable, and still others were slowly defiling, in processional dignity, toward their homes.