When he was nine years old, he had seen one night a
company of bourgeois et dames qui faisaient la manege avec des
chaises, and concluded that he was in the presence of a witches'
Sabbath. I suppose, but venture with timidity on the suggestion,
that this may have been a romantic and nocturnal picnic party.
Again, coming from Pradelles with his brother, they saw a great
empty cart drawn by six enormous horses before them on the road.
The driver cried aloud and filled the mountains with the cracking
of his whip. He never seemed to go faster than a walk, yet it was
impossible to overtake him; and at length, at the comer of a hill,
the whole equipage disappeared bodily into the night. At the time,
people said it was the devil qui s'amusait a faire ca.
I suggested there was nothing more likely, as he must have some
amusement.
The foreman said it was odd, but there was less of that sort of
thing than formerly. 'C'est difficile,' he added, 'a expliquer.'
When we were well up on the moors and the Conductor was trying some
road-metal with the gauge -
'Hark!' said the foreman, 'do you hear nothing?'
We listened, and the wind, which was blowing chilly out of the
east, brought a faint, tangled jangling to our ears.
'It is the flocks of Vivarais,' said he.
For every summer, the flocks out of all Ardeche are brought up to
pasture on these grassy plateaux.
Here and there a little private flock was being tended by a girl,
one spinning with a distaff, another seated on a wall and intently
making lace. This last, when we addressed her, leaped up in a
panic and put out her arms, like a person swimming, to keep us at a
distance, and it was some seconds before we could persuade her of
the honesty of our intentions.
The Conductor told me of another herdswoman from whom he had once
asked his road while he was yet new to the country, and who fled
from him, driving her beasts before her, until he had given up the
information in despair. A tale of old lawlessness may yet be read
in these uncouth timidities.
The winter in these uplands is a dangerous and melancholy time.
Houses are snowed up, and way-farers lost in a flurry within hail
of their own fireside. No man ventures abroad without meat and a
bottle of wine, which he replenishes at every wine-shop; and even
thus equipped he takes the road with terror. All day the family
sits about the fire in a foul and airless hovel, and equally
without work or diversion. The father may carve a rude piece of
furniture, but that is all that will be done until the spring sets
in again, and along with it the labours of the field. It is not
for nothing that you find a clock in the meanest of these mountain
habitations. A clock and an almanac, you would fancy, were
indispensable in such a life . . .
CHAPTER VII - RANDOM MEMORIES: ROSA QUO LOCORUM
Through what little channels, by what hints and premonitions, the
consciousness of the man's art dawns first upon the child, it
should be not only interesting but instructive to inquire. A
matter of curiosity to-day, it will become the ground of science
to-morrow. From the mind of childhood there is more history and
more philosophy to be fished up than from all the printed volumes
in a library. The child is conscious of an interest, not in
literature but in life. A taste for the precise, the adroit, or
the comely in the use of words, comes late; but long before that he
has enjoyed in books a delightful dress rehearsal of experience.
He is first conscious of this material - I had almost said this
practical - pre-occupation; it does not follow that it really came
the first. I have some old fogged negatives in my collection that
would seem to imply a prior stage 'The Lord is gone up with a
shout, and God with the sound of a trumpet' - memorial version, I
know not where to find the text - rings still in my ear from my
first childhood, and perhaps with something of my nurses accent.
There was possibly some sort of image written in my mind by these
loud words, but I believe the words themselves were what I
cherished. I had about the same time, and under the same
influence - that of my dear nurse - a favourite author: it is
possible the reader has not heard of him - the Rev. Robert Murray
M'Cheyne. My nurse and I admired his name exceedingly, so that I
must have been taught the love of beautiful sounds before I was
breeched; and I remember two specimens of his muse until this day:-
'Behind the hills of Naphtali
The sun went slowly down,
Leaving on mountain, tower, and tree,
A tinge of golden brown.'
There is imagery here, and I set it on one side. The other - it is
but a verse - not only contains no image, but is quite
unintelligible even to my comparatively instructed mind, and I know
not even how to spell the outlandish vocable that charmed me in my
childhood:
'Jehovah Tschidkenu is nothing to her'; {6} -
I may say, without flippancy, that he was nothing to me either,
since I had no ray of a guess of what he was about; yet the verse,
from then to now, a longer interval than the life of a generation,
has continued to haunt me.
I have said that I should set a passage distinguished by obvious
and pleasing imagery, however faint; for the child thinks much in
images, words are very live to him, phrases that imply a picture
eloquent beyond their value.
