I little knew what he was offering.
The sleeping-room was furnished with two beds. I had one; and I will own
I was a little abashed to find a young man and his wife and child in the
act of mounting into the other. This was my first experience of the
sort; and if I am always to feel equally silly and extraneous, I pray God
it be my last as well. I kept my eyes to myself, and know nothing of the
woman except that she had beautiful arms, and seemed no whit embarrassed
by my appearance. As a matter of fact, the situation was more trying to
me than to the pair. A pair keep each other in countenance; it is the
single gentleman who has to blush. But I could not help attributing my
sentiments to the husband, and sought to conciliate his tolerance with a
cup of brandy from my flask. He told me that he was a cooper of Alais
travelling to St. Etienne in search of work, and that in his spare
moments he followed the fatal calling of a maker of matches. Me he
readily enough divined to be a brandy merchant.
I was up first in the morning (Monday, September 23rd), and hastened my
toilette guiltily, so as to leave a clear field for madam, the cooper's
wife. I drank a bowl of milk, and set off to explore the neighbourhood
of Bouchet. It was perishing cold, a grey, windy, wintry morning; misty
clouds flew fast and low; the wind piped over the naked platform; and the
only speck of colour was away behind Mount Mezenc and the eastern hills,
where the sky still wore the orange of the dawn.
It was five in the morning, and four thousand feet above the sea; and I
had to bury my hands in my pockets and trot. People were trooping out to
the labours of the field by twos and threes, and all turned round to
stare upon the stranger. I had seen them coming back last night, I saw
them going afield again; and there was the life of Bouchet in a nutshell.
When I came back to the inn for a bit of breakfast, the landlady was in
the kitchen combing out her daughter's hair; and I made her my
compliments upon its beauty.
'Oh no,' said the mother; 'it is not so beautiful as it ought to be.
Look, it is too fine.'
Thus does a wise peasantry console itself under adverse physical
circumstances, and, by a startling democratic process, the defects of the
majority decide the type of beauty.
'And where,' said I, 'is monsieur?'
'The master of the house is upstairs,' she answered, 'making you a goad.'
Blessed be the man who invented goads!
