'It Fatigues Her, However,' Said The Innkeeper; 'it Fatigues Her Greatly
On The March.
Look.'
Alas, there were her two forelegs no better than raw beef on the inside,
and blood was running from under her tail. They told me when I started,
and I was ready to believe it, that before a few days I should come to
love Modestine like a dog. Three days had passed, we had shared some
misadventures, and my heart was still as cold as a potato towards my
beast of burden. She was pretty enough to look at; but then she had
given proof of dead stupidity, redeemed indeed by patience, but
aggravated by flashes of sorry and ill-judged light-heartedness. And I
own this new discovery seemed another point against her. What the devil
was the good of a she-ass if she could not carry a sleeping-bag and a few
necessaries? I saw the end of the fable rapidly approaching, when I
should have to carry Modestine. AEsop was the man to know the world! I
assure you I set out with heavy thoughts upon my short day's march.
It was not only heavy thoughts about Modestine that weighted me upon the
way; it was a leaden business altogether. For first, the wind blew so
rudely that I had to hold on the pack with one hand from Cheylard to Luc;
and second, my road lay through one of the most beggarly countries in the
world. It was like the worst of the Scottish Highlands, only worse;
cold, naked, and ignoble, scant of wood, scant of heather, scant of life.
A road and some fences broke the unvarying waste, and the line of the
road was marked by upright pillars, to serve in time of snow.
Why any one should desire to visit either Luc or Cheylard is more than my
much-inventing spirit can suppose. For my part, I travel not to go
anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to
move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down
off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite
underfoot and strewn with cutting flints. Alas, as we get up in life,
and are more preoccupied with our affairs, even a holiday is a thing that
must be worked for. To hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a gale out
of the freezing north is no high industry, but it is one that serves to
occupy and compose the mind. And when the present is so exacting, who
can annoy himself about the future?
I came out at length above the Allier. A more unsightly prospect at this
season of the year it would be hard to fancy. Shelving hills rose round
it on all sides, here dabbled with wood and fields, there rising to peaks
alternately naked and hairy with pines. The colour throughout was black
or ashen, and came to a point in the ruins of the castle of Luc, which
pricked up impudently from below my feet, carrying on a pinnacle a tall
white statue of Our Lady, which, I heard with interest, weighed fifty
quintals, and was to be dedicated on the 6th of October. Through this
sorry landscape trickled the Allier and a tributary of nearly equal size,
which came down to join it through a broad nude valley in Vivarais. The
weather had somewhat lightened, and the clouds massed in squadron; but
the fierce wind still hunted them through heaven, and cast great ungainly
splashes of shadow and sunlight over the scene.
Luc itself was a straggling double file of houses wedged between hill and
river. It had no beauty, nor was there any notable feature, save the old
castle overhead with its fifty quintals of brand-new Madonna. But the
inn was clean and large. The kitchen, with its two box-beds hung with
clean check curtains, with its wide stone chimney, its chimney-shelf four
yards long and garnished with lanterns and religious statuettes, its
array of chests and pair of ticking clocks, was the very model of what a
kitchen ought to be; a melodrama kitchen, suitable for bandits or
noblemen in disguise. Nor was the scene disgraced by the landlady, a
handsome, silent, dark old woman, clothed and hooded in black like a nun.
Even the public bedroom had a character of its own, with the long deal
tables and benches, where fifty might have dined, set out as for a
harvest-home, and the three box-beds along the wall. In one of these,
lying on straw and covered with a pair of table-napkins, did I do penance
all night long in goose-flesh and chattering teeth, and sigh, from time
to time as I awakened, for my sheepskin sack and the lee of some great
wood.
OUR LADY OF THE SNOWS
'I behold
The House, the Brotherhood austere -
And what am I, that I am here?'
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
FATHER APOLLINARIS
Next morning (Thursday, 26th September) I took the road in a new order.
The sack was no longer doubled, but hung at full length across the
saddle, a green sausage six feet long with a tuft of blue wool hanging
out of either end. It was more picturesque, it spared the donkey, and,
as I began to see, it would ensure stability, blow high, blow low. But
it was not without a pang that I had so decided. For although I had
purchased a new cord, and made all as fast as I was able, I was yet
jealously uneasy lest the flaps should tumble out and scatter my effects
along the line of march.
My way lay up the bald valley of the river, along the march of Vivarais
and Gevaudan. The hills of Gevaudan on the right were a little more
naked, if anything, than those of Vivarais upon the left, and the former
had a monopoly of a low dotty underwood that grew thickly in the gorges
and died out in solitary burrs upon the shoulders and the summits.
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