I
Need Hardly Say They Are Neither Of Them French; For, Of All
English Phrases, The Phrase 'for Exercise' Is The Least
Comprehensible Across The Straits Of Dover.
All goes well for a
while with the pedestrians.
The wet woods are full of scents in
the noontide. At a certain cross, where there is a guardhouse,
they make a halt, for the forester's wife is the daughter of their
good host at Barbizon. And so there they are hospitably received
by the comely woman, with one child in her arms and another
prattling and tottering at her gown, and drink some syrup of quince
in the back parlour, with a map of the forest on the wall, and some
prints of love-affairs and the great Napoleon hunting. As they
draw near the Quadrilateral, and hear once more the report of the
big guns, they take a by-road to avoid the sentries, and go on a
while somewhat vaguely, with the sound of the cannon in their ears
and the rain beginning to fall. The ways grow wider and sandier;
here and there there are real sand-hills, as though by the sea-
shore; the fir-wood is open and grows in clumps upon the hillocks,
and the race of sign-posts is no more. One begins to look at the
other doubtfully. 'I am sure we should keep more to the right,'
says one; and the other is just as certain they should hold to the
left. And now, suddenly, the heavens open, and the rain falls
'sheer and strong and loud,' as out of a shower-bath. In a moment
they are as wet as shipwrecked sailors. They cannot see out of
their eyes for the drift, and the water churns and gurgles in their
boots. They leave the track and try across country with a
gambler's desperatin, for it seems as if it were impossible to make
the situation worse; and, for the next hour, go scrambling from
boulder to boulder, or plod along paths that are now no more than
rivulets, and across waste clearings where the scattered shells and
broken fir-trees tell all too plainly of the cannon in the
distance. And meantime the cannon grumble out responses to the
grumbling thunder. There is such a mixture of melodrama and sheer
discomfort about all this, it is at once so grey and so lurid, that
it is far more agreeable to read and write about by the chimney-
corner than to suffer in the person. At last they chance on the
right path, and make Franchard in the early evening, the sorriest
pair of wanderers that ever welcomed English ale. Thence, by the
Bois d'Hyver, the Ventes-Alexandre, and the Pins Brules, to the
clean hostelry, dry clothes, and dinner.
THE WOODS IN SPRING
I think you will like the forest best in the sharp early
springtime, when it is just beginning to reawaken, and innumerable
violets peep from among the fallen leaves; when two or three people
at most sit down to dinner, and, at table, you will do well to keep
a rug about your knees, for the nights are chill, and the salle-a-
manger opens on the court. There is less to distract the
attention, for one thing, and the forest is more itself. It is not
bedotted with artists' sunshades as with unknown mushrooms, nor
bestrewn with the remains of English picnics. The hunting still
goes on, and at any moment your heart may be brought into your
mouth as you hear far-away horns; or you may be told by an agitated
peasant that the Vicomte has gone up the avenue, not ten minutes
since, 'a fond de train, monsieur, et avec douze pipuers.'
If you go up to some coign of vantage in the system of low hills
that permeates the forest, you will see many different tracts of
country, each of its own cold and melancholy neutral tint, and all
mixed together and mingled the one into the other at the seams.
You will see tracts of leafless beeches of a faint yellowish grey,
and leafless oaks a little ruddier in the hue. Then zones of pine
of a solemn green; and, dotted among the pines, or standing by
themselves in rocky clearings, the delicate, snow-white trunks of
birches, spreading out into snow-white branches yet more delicate,
and crowned and canopied with a purple haze of twigs. And then a
long, bare ridge of tumbled boulders, with bright sand-breaks
between them, and wavering sandy roads among the bracken and brown
heather. It is all rather cold and unhomely. It has not the
perfect beauty, nor the gem-like colouring, of the wood in the
later year, when it is no more than one vast colonnade of verdant
shadow, tremulous with insects, intersected here and there by lanes
of sunlight set in purple heather. The loveliness of the woods in
March is not, assuredly, of this blowzy rustic type. It is made
sharp with a grain of salt, with a touch of ugliness. It has a
sting like the sting of bitter ale; you acquire the love of it as
men acquire a taste for olives. And the wonderful clear, pure air
wells into your lungs the while by voluptuous inhalations, and
makes the eyes bright, and sets the heart tinkling to a new tune -
or, rather, to an old tune; for you remember in your boyhood
something akin to this spirit of adventure, this thirst for
exploration, that now takes you masterfully by the hand, plunges
you into many a deep grove, and drags you over many a stony crest.
it is as if the whole wood were full of friendly voice, calling you
farther in, and you turn from one side to another, like Buridan's
donkey, in a maze of pleasure.
Comely beeches send up their white, straight, clustered branches,
barred with green moss, like so many fingers from a half-clenched
hand.
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