High Bonnet

by Idwal Jones

  Raban sped to him. “What,” asked Casson in a whisper, “what did you give that ruffian tonight. What has he got there on his plate—that unworthy boor?”

  “Ah, it is a navarin of mutton, M’sieu. A printanier!” Raban grinned toothlessly at us, rubbing his hands.

  Casson gave a snort that would have done credit to an enraged boar at the zoo. “But the turnips, man! Where did you get them? Aren’t they the little Teltower turnips?”

  “Precisely, M’sieu. It is quite evident that M’sieu is a connoisseur in turnips. Perhaps even a botanist!”

  “Raban, you are fittingly named!” said Casson. (And I should explain it was not a very good pun, though “Raban” is underworld or Apache jargon for a rope halter, or noose.) “Now why is it he gets a printanier, and I didn’t?”

  “Ah, but you see, M’sieu, Grasset brought them in himself tonight. Only a hatful. They’ve just come into Les Halles, where he works.”

  “Pardon,” said my friend. “And if there’s any left, I wish you’d keep them for my luncheon tomorrow. And please give my compliments to M’sieu Grasset.”

  As the owner went over to deliver the message, Casson murmured with interest. He knew the tastes of everyone Chez Raban. He often dined here even when flush after receiving his monthly check. Had it not been for those checks from England—his intellect alone, fine botanist though he was, would have brought him to poverty—he could not have been a patron of the Roi Nantois.

  “A surprising fellow, Grasset,” he remarked, “though a rough Apache to the eye. He is passing rich, also; owns the dray and horses with which he trucks beef and cabbages for Les Halles. He has not lost grip with the soil. Out at Grisy-Suisnes he has a little hidden farm that earns him not a sou, but gives his soul all it craves. He is rose-mad. He dreams of roses while his truck rattles over the cobbles in the slums at night.

  “Do you know how beautiful a Damask rose can be? I never did until I saw that drayman’s garden walled by yews—a place of visions, full of the rustling of dryads.”

  Casson took a long sip of marc, and shrugged. “Nostalgia for the earth,” he said. “In my calling, one finds many in thrall to it, and they are to be envied.

  “Once I was in Philadelphia—my first visit—and I gave a talk at a college on what we are doing here in the Jardin des Plantes, and the work of some of its old professors, like Buffon and Lamarck. The people of that city were most hospitable. For a month or longer I was quite in the hands of garden lovers and students of esoteric horticulture, herbs and simples and their legends. So many of them were Quakers, all most kind and helpful, and I kept busy lecturing before one little herbal society after another.

  “One afternoon I spoke at Chester, and when I got back to my hotel a letter was awaiting me. An invitation. From a Mr. Vignal, and delivered by hand. A very nice letter, saying how deeply interested he had been in my talks, and asking if I would dine with him that night. He seemed assured I would come. It happened that I had two or three other invitations for the night, and one I had halfway accepted. But something about this letter held me. He spoke about herbs and plants in a strain of exaltation, of fanaticism, almost. And that decided me. I have a curious liking for fanatics if their devotion—whether to artifacts, flints, Siamese cats, spinet music, the ancient trade routes of Africa, ghosts—is of the harmless and intense sort. Their passionately extreme interest is often the outcome of a revelation, or an experience that is valid to themselves. It may even be communicable. I could do with a spark of it.

  “I changed my clothes and waited. Mr. Vignal came—a vigorous, large man, weatherbeaten, with crinkly eyes and a Swedish accent. We drove out in threatening weather, drove for twenty miles, the end of the journey in rain and black fog. A very quiet man, hardly anything to say, but I felt that he was an amateur gardener who had not been very long in this region, hardly more than a year. We turned off a road, and he opened a large iron portal that clanged behind us like the gate of a prison. The driveway was steep; it wound through grounds that must have been landscaped in the extreme. I couldn’t see a damn thing except clumps of trees and bushes. Lilacs, mostly, and now and then I got the scent of a fir. The trees were innumerable.

  “What an estate! At the end of a colonnade of firs the car stopped. Here was a house that I could barely see in the glim of a lantern in the portico. We hurried in through the rain.

  “Behind the marble-trimmed hall, like an office, was the living room. It was small, simply furnished, with books on the walls, hundreds of books, and a cheerful fire in the grate. We sat before it, our fists around a hot drink, while brisk Mrs. Vignal chatted and spread the dinner table.

  “It was not unlike a modest farmhouse, this place. Bits of fir, larch cuttings, vine, and flowers on the shelves; pine cones, lumps of bark, and specimens of wood on the side table, which had an array of specimen jars and a microscope.

  “The dinner came on. Very sensible, very French; a gigot of mutton in a casserole, with buttered haricots, a salad of lettuce and chives. The Vignals’ daughter joined us: a brown-haired girl of about fifteen, as quiet as her father, but with preternatural, almost sullen, gravity. How well they were bringing her up! She brought hot bread from the oven. And from a cupboard among the books she fetched a dark bottle of wine. How did that bit of flotsam, that Domaine de Chevalier, tinged with antiquity, drift to him, do you suppose? Vignal knew, and the ghost of a smile hovered about his thin lips as he poured it out, with precision, but generously, into our thick tumblers. Then we had a crag of herb cheese, aged in some dry cellar, water biscuits, and a musky pear. It was a far better dinner than I deserved.

  “The table cleared, we sat about the fire of oak logs. It was late summer, but the fogs from the Susquehanna can often be cool at this altitude. The girl brought us coffee, bubbling hot, with the tang of chicory. Will the French ever cease to be grateful for this one result of the English blockade in Napoleonic times, when coffee was scarce and chicory cheap? We drank it, toasted our feet in the glow of the hearth, and burned such quantum of tobacco, in cob pipes, that the walls seemed to melt away in the smoke. Mrs. Vignal, her feet on a hassock, knitted away quietly, and if she spoke at all it was to her daughter, who sat behind her in a chair, bent forward, listening to us, intently, and I wondered what she could find of interest in our talk of soil, plants, herbs, and so forth. But she laughed often, overeager, I thought, to find our talk amusing. It was quite noticeable. That gave me my cue. I gave an account of the queer things that had happened to me at the Jardin des Plantes, and in knocking around London. I laid on the color.

  “She laughed, mirthfully. But I wished she had laughed without that sharp, hysterical undertone. Vignal smoked in content, nodding his head, but talking very little indeed, as if his mind were elsewhere, out in his garden, or at sea. He had no ready gift of speech, though his life had been full of strange experience. So I talked only for the girl. This was a holiday evening for her.

  “At midnight the party broke up. Vignal went upstairs to get his best hat and coat, and his wife followed him, to pick out a warm muffler. That left me alone a minute with the girl.

  “ ‘I hope you will come here often,’ she said. ‘Do come whenever you can. Do you know what it means to us—to me—to hear people laugh?’ She gripped my wrist. Her eyes were wistful and pleading. ‘For a long time after we came here to live, I thought I couldn’t stand it. So please, Mr. Casson—’

  “ ‘Assuredly I’ll come,’ I said. ‘The very first time I’m this way again.’

  “Her parents came down. I said good-by to her and the cheery Mrs. Vignal, and went out into the driveway. How refreshing was the air! The plants were quick with odor. Azaleas were heavy along the path, and there was a skirting of basils and salvia, and marjorams, their curly tops lolling like the heads of cherubim. I got into the car, and we drove off.

  “Vignal was in easier mood on this drive, more of the host, more communicative. He had a lot to say of horticulture, though he spoke with hesitancy and
an accent, and after a while lapsed into French. He was born in Dalecarlia, a farming region in Sweden, and reared there. It was a life that made a deep impression on him. He talked of the birds, the trees lashed by the wind, the immense storms, the harvests, and the old farmhouse with swallows’ nests under the eaves. And when he was eighteen he went to sea.

  “ ‘You have had enough sea life?’ I asked.

  “ ‘Too much. Nearly thirty years of it. Even when I was master I dreamed of the land. I could smell it leagues out at sea. I was drawn to it by a great longing that I cannot describe. Just as some men have a longing for the unseen and the eternal.

  “ ‘And now I am upon it. What more can I ask? I have my trees and shrubs and grass to take care of. And there is the smell of the fresh earth. I am happy when I dig in it, when my spade cuts handily into the packed soil and rings sharp against the gravel. There is no smell like the incense of the upturned earth, the aroma of it when it is moist and deep under turf. When I dig in full sunlight, a steam rises, and butterflies dance in it as birds do in the spray of a fountain.

  “ ‘No, I shall never weary of it. To me it is the breath of life itself. It is another wine. It goes to my head, and I could work in it all day and half the night.’

  “He broke off to speak about his wife. He met her when he was at Havre during the war. He brought his wife to Baltimore, then became a citizen. Just a year now, it was, that he had been living out here in the country.

  “ ‘She was very glad to see you,’ he said. ‘It is not often that she hears her own language.’

  “ ‘For an exile she has done very well,’ I remarked. ‘And I am sure she is quite content.’

  “ ‘Oh, yes.’

  “He threw me a glance, then fell silent. I had it on the tip of my tongue to speak about the girl, but I knew what was going through his mind, and I refrained. So we talked about something else. I promised him I’d come again, if luck should bring me to Philadelphia once more. He said that he’d be on the lookout for me. Soon we were at the hotel, and, as it was late, our farewell was brief.

  “I stayed in town only a day more. Going into a shop I bought some books I felt Dittany Vignal would like.

  “ ‘And the address?’ asked the clerk.

  “I didn’t know. It had been most negligent of me not to inquire. However, the clerk was obliging, and, with the one clue that the place was out in the country somewhere, hunted through the directory.

  “ ‘I believe we have it now,” she said, looking up. ‘There is a Mr. Vignal resident out at Woodmere. That is a cemetery, sir. And he is the caretaker.’ ”

  XIII

  TINKERS’ HOLIDAY

  About this time I suddenly wearied of my way of life—of the heated kitchen, the smells of roasting meat, the sad, Dervish-like cries of the waiters, the intrigues of the under-chefs, the ephemeral nature of the work in hand, the endless voracity, the plaints of the same overstuffed clients night after night. Bread was good enough for them—bread and water! I loathed the sight of food. It is a malaise that frequently attacks chefs, and waiters. I had made the wrong choice of arts, and was now in black despair. I envied the tinker, and the pavior by the roadside, sitting under a hedge with his pipe, cracking stones with his long hammer, his luncheon of bread and an apple tied up in a red kerchief. Their crafts were humble, but they could see in a mended kettle that would long endure, or a length of smooth road that would outlast themselves, justification for their toil, and next morning behold the sun rise above another hill. In short, I was filled with ennui.

  And there also had been Célie.

  Célie sat at the marble counter by the door of the Roi Nantois, taking in the money and selling the cigars. Her upper lip was short and curled, her hair a coppery tumble. She was stout, and she was older than I. Three times in a month I had taken her to the cinema in the Rue de la Gaîté, and on her free days to the Luxembourg to hear the band music. It was an infatuation, but terrible while it lasted. We kissed often, in the doorway to her lodging, and I went reeling home under the stars, drunk of an insensate folly. François it was who brought me back more or less to my wits. He took me by the shoulders one night in the park, shook me until I was stupefied, and bellowed truth into my ears. My infatuation was the scandal of the Roi Nantois, and the jest of the dishwashers. Célie Duval was more than twice my age; she was uglier than Pierre; and a clandestine affair of one night was the utmost I could ever dream of for a reward, and that too was a hopeless dream, for she was not only the most grubbing of skinflints, but she was living with a station porter, who was to marry her after they had hoarded up, sou by sou, enough to buy a little café in Rouen. There was more, but I shall not add to my chagrin by setting it all down.

  It takes more than a pitchfork to drive out passion. I do not know what would have become of me if the cauldron at the Roi Nantois had not sprung a leak. It was a sort of talisman, a large and ancient copper pot, perhaps two centuries old, with a rim carved in a design of acorns and leaves. In a couple of months when the tourist season began, it would be needed. I engaged a carter, and with this cupola of a pot drove out to a gypsy camp the other side of the forest at Fontainebleau. There are no repairers of pots like the gypsies, and I knew this tribe of coppersmiths, the Vascucci, who had come to the Roi Nantois a few times, and Tino, the head of the family, had once repaired a sugar boiler for my uncle in Provence.

  Tino fell on my neck, so enchanted he was at seeing not only me but so handsome a pot. It was an hour’s task for him to scratch about the leak the outline of a star—a six-pointed star, the coat of arms, the sign manual of the Vascucci—saw it out, fit in another star of copper, burnishing the hair-line joint so that the spelter shone like platinum. Then his two sons, and twenty gypsies from another camp, stood about, admiring the finished work.

  “Jean-Marie,” said Tino, in tearful pride, “do not go yet, for I must enjoy this masterpiece of cauldrons a whole hour to myself!”

  Years of heat had, indeed, so dulled the ring of the cauldron when smitten that it gave forth a leaden sound. Tino squatted on the turf, lighted a pipe, upturned the cauldron, and swaged it all over with the flat of a mallet, so that after an hour it was singing like the matins bell in the tower of Saint Séverin. Down the road came another music: a Savoyard was playing his flute, and behind him was his wife trundling a handcart laden with adorable little Brieuc cheeses, while all about them capered their brown goats. It was a lovely, sunlit day, and linnets were singing madly in the beeches. The wind was blowing through the foliage and the telegraph wires as on an Aeolian harp. Tino lifted the cauldron into the cart.

  “Where do you go now?” I asked, paying him the inadequate fee of thirty francs. “Toward the city?”

  “We go South,” said Tino. “Myself in this van, my two sons with the Gaspards, and three more vans of the Lavell family. South through the Auvergne, with its jam or biscuit works in every village, and as far as Arles, where they make nougats.”

  “Then I will come with you,” I said, and sent the carter back home with the pot.

  For two months with Tino and his group I traveled the road, le grand jaspiner of the French gypsies and the wandering showmen, a route so ancient that we came across cauldrons bearing signs and marks of tinkers whose families had died out a century before the Revolution. Those marks on pots, Tino read aloud for us, as if they were a book of history or inscriptions left on the walls of a cave by primitive man. The life in itself was admirable. We slept and ate in dens open only to the initiates of the road and the tan bark; or under hedges, dining on roast hedgehog, bread, and thistle greens—rough fare, but honestly gained, and seasoned well with hunger. With the gendarmes we got along on terms of self-respecting hostility. But no trouble befell us. Twice, perhaps, some of the Gaspards were locked up after the loss of somebody’s goose, or for carrying a knife a mere hand’s-breadth too long, and had to wait until Tino arrived to spring them.

  Tino Vascucci had the knack of clearing up these embarrassing matter
s in no time at all. He had flowing mustachios, candid eyes, and the dignity of an Arab patriarch. There was the time I went with him to the police yard at Figeac, where his two sons and the Gaspards, a sturdy brood, lolling about under the trees, nonchalant, smoking, were awaiting us.

  “Stealing a goose, you say?” he echoed, shocked to the boots. “Impossible!”

  “But they were seen,” insisted the commissioner. “One moment the goose was in the field, and next moment it was gone—and there these Bohemians driving down the street.”

  “That still proves nothing!” Tino cried out in triumph. “And, besides, these are rightly brought up young men, incapable of such trickeries! Now, if it were a horse, or a pair of oxen—one might understand. But a fowl, that would be illogical. And again, never in their lives have they been in trouble!” This was a flight of rhetoric, of course. Also it was but the beginning of Tino’s declamation, which brought in a crowd from the street. “And to prove what admirable reputations these youths possess—behold!”

  He would unfold a paper, always the same paper, for the gendarmes to scan, impressed, and to discuss with frowns and nods and twistings of their mustaches. Ten minutes more, for the sake of formality, and the Gaspards, the Vascucci, and myself would be driving down the street again, free as birds.

  That paper always worked, and Tino kept it under his seat, ready for any emergency. I asked him what it was, and how he came by it.

  “That young crew of originals, I could not get them out of jail without that paper!” chuckled Tino. “It always works the first time!

  “I was going down the Rue Gambetta one day, and what should I see but a doorway hung with crape. I watched, and saw there was to be a funeral. Evidently, from all the gendarmes in the house, it was the funeral of a high police official. At the door was a little table with a condolence book on it, and it seemed all the gendarmes in Paris were writing their names in it.