In and Out of Three Normandy Inns | Page 5

of
demeanor--swaggering along as if conscious of there being a
full-grown man buttoned up within a boy's ragged coat. The swagger
was accompanied by a whistle, whose neat crispness announced habits
of leisure and a sense of the refined pleasures of life; for an artistic
rendering of an aria from "La Fille de Madame Angot" was cutting the
air with clear, high notes.
The whistle and the brown legs suddenly came to a dead stop. The
round blue eyes had caught sight of us:
"_Ouid-a-a!_" was this young Norman's salutation. There was very
little trouser left, and what there was of it was all pocket, apparently.
Into the pockets the boy's hands were stuffed, along with his
amazement; for his face, round and full though it was, could not hold
the full measure of his surprise.

"We came over by boat--from Havre," we murmured meekly; then, "Is
there a cake-shop near?" irrelevantly concluded Charm with an
unmistakable ring of distress in her tone. There was no need of any
further explanation. These two hearty young appetites understood each
other; for hunger is a universal language, and cake a countersign
common among the youth of all nations.
"Until you came, you see, we couldn't leave the luggage," she went on.
The blue eyes swept the line of our boxes as if the lad had taken his
afternoon stroll with no other purpose than to guard them. "There are
eight, and two umbrellas. _Soyez tranquille, je vous attendrai._"
It was the voice and accent of a man of the world, four feet high--a
pocket edition, so to speak, in shabby binding. The brown legs hung,
the next instant, over the tallest of the trunks. The skilful whistling was
resumed at once; our appearance and the boy's present occupation were
mere interludes, we were made to understand; his real business, that
afternoon, was to do justice to the Lecoq's entire opera, and to keep his
eye on the sea.
Only once did he break down; he left a high C hanging perilously in
mid-air, to shout out "I like madeleines, I do!" We assured him he
should have a dozen.
"_Bien!_" and we saw him settling himself to await our return in
patience.
Up in the town the streets, as we entered them, were as empty as was
the beach. Trouville might have been a buried city of antiquity. Yet, in
spite of the desolation, it was French and foreign; it welcomed us with
an unmistakably friendly, companionable air. Why is it that one is
made to feel the companionable element, by instantaneous process, as it
were, in a Frenchman and in his towns? And by what magic also does a
French village or city, even at its least animated period, convey to one
the fact of its nationality? We made but ten steps progress through
these silent streets, fronting the beach, and yet, such was the subtle
enigma of charm with which these dumb villas and mute shops were

invested, that we walked along as if under the spell of fascination.
Perhaps the charm is a matter of sex, after all: towns are feminine, in
the wise French idiom, that idiom so delicate in discerning qualities of
sex in inanimate objects, as the Greeks before them were clever in
discovering sex distinctions in the moral qualities. Trouville was so
true a woman, that the coquette in her was alive and breathing even in
this her moment of suspended animation. The closed blinds and iron
shutters appeared to be winking at us, slyly, as if warning us not to
believe in this nightmare of desolation; she was only sleeping, she
wished us to understand; the touch of the first Parisian would wake her
into life. The features of her fashionable face, meanwhile, were
arranged with perfect composure; even in slumber she had preserved
her woman's instinct of orderly grace; not a sign was awry, not a
window- blind gave hint of rheumatic hinges, or of shattered vertebrae;
all the machinery was in order; the faintest pressure on the electrical
button, the button that connects this lady of the sea with the Paris
Bourse and the Boulevards, and how gayly, how agilely would this
Trouville of the villas and the beaches spring into life!
The listless glances of the few tailors and cobblers who, with
suspended thread, now looked after us, seemed dazed--as if they could
not believe in the reality of two early tourists. A woman's head, here
and there, leaned over to us from a high window; even these feminine
eyes, however, appeared to be glued with the long winter's lethargy of
dull sleep; they betrayed no edge of surprise or curiosity. The sun alone,
shining with spendthrift glory, flooding the narrow streets and low
houses with a late afternoon stream of color, was