Mona Caird

"Ai vist la roso adematin

Tout bello e fresco espandido...."

CHAPTER XIX

ROSES OF PROVENCE

What is the mysterious force in life that always makes it impossible to linger in any place where conditions are entirely congenial? We can stay so easily and with so much general approval in odious spots, among exasperating companions. But let a charm attach to any scene or circumstance and straightway every factor of one's destiny flies into violent collision with every other factor, so that immediate flight becomes necessary, to the farthest limits of the railway system.

Only "le violence de notre Étoile," or at any rate of Barbara's "Étoile," could drive us from these bright regions; but then her star was very violent. Our country clamoured for us. It would have seemed flattering had we not known that it sprang chiefly from the desire that consumes the majority of people to act as sheep-dog towards wandering members of the community; an instinctive feeling that if they are "away" it is high time that they should come back again.

Barbara announced that she must go in about a week or ten days; and all that remained for us to do was to make the most of her remaining time.

Our strange little mountains, the Alpilles, still held our fancy. Why not go to the little town at their foot, St. Remy, with its industry of seed culture? We had read of its Roman monuments and of the cordon of flowers which surround it in the blooming season.

runs the local rhyme.[20]

It must be beautiful here in May when the vines are yellow-green to the tips of their young fingers. But greater beauty than now, at this late time, is scarcely possible to believe in.

The plain is gold and brown, with splashes of crimson where the sun shines through some eccentric spray of vine-leaves passionately red beyond its fellows.

St. Remy is the ancient Glanum of the Romans, and has memories not scholastic of CÆsar's Gallic Wars. Along the passes of the Alpilles, Marius moved with his army at that stirring moment which was to decide whether the hordes of the Cimbri and the Teutons were to overrun all Italy and take possession of the Eternal City itself. So near a thing it was that the barbarians insolently asked the Roman soldiers if they had any messages for their wives and sweethearts in Rome, as they would soon be there.

Everything hung on the strategy of the Roman general, and it is only on the scene of that great contest that one realises what a desperate and universal moment it was.

Had the campaign of Marius ended otherwise than it did—had he yielded an hour too soon to the impatience of his soldiers to begin the fight—the whole course of history would have been different in all probability, and perhaps not one of us would have been born!

The railway from Tarascon to our little City of Gardens brings one into the very heart of the country. The carriages are so small—two-storied though they are—that one feels as if one were taking a drive in a donkey-cart or station fly, and more than once we were almost impelled to call out to our driver to stop and let us gather wild-flowers by the wayside. And the wayside is so absurdly near. There is none of the dignified aloofness of the ordinary train journey.

The same general features of the country are, of course, as before, but now we are intimately among its details: the vines, the low olive-bushes, the farmsteads, the cypresses, the patches of cultivation, the plantations of yellow canes rustling and swaying. And ever we are nearing the Alpilles. The train stops dutifully at a dozen little stations, where no one gets in or out. They are scarcely more than sentry-boxes; sometimes a mere frame filled in with the stalks of the reeds. Were it not that the mistral can blow through them, it seems impossible that these trivialities could withstand his lightest breath.

St. Remy, once the country seat of the Counts of Provence, has no walls of stone, but four-square leafy ramparts of plane-trees. From the door of the HÔtel de Provence one may turn to the right or left and blindly follow the avenues round the little town till one returns to one's starting-point, where probably a brown-eyed youth will still be grinding coffee beside the footpath. There are almost no sounds in St. Remy, for there are no vehicles except the hotel omnibus which trundles to and from the station, marking the lapse of time.

The visitors all, or nearly all, come with the same intent: to negotiate with the growers of seeds, and, at the proper season, they arrive in great numbers from every part of the world, including America the ever-enterprising.

Pinks and carnations and lilies, and purple acres of pansies with their texture of velvet; flowers and flowers in multitudes, blooming and budding and blushing—this is the sweet merchandise of St. Remy en Provence.

The hotel has the homely, spacious character of old-established inns in country towns. One feels a sense of comfort as one enters, and the courteous greeting of the landlord and his wife confirms one's satisfaction. The long, dark-papered salle-À-manger has a broad streak of sunshine across the polished floor from an open window which gives on to the regions at the back of the hotel. The waiter hastens to shut this, but desists with a shrug and a smile at our remonstrance. If we like to sit in draughts and endanger our lives, after all it is our own affair. He feels with Madame de SÉvignÉ, "Mais ce sont des Anglais!"

The window allows one to pass out into a nondescript territory where boots are cleaned, firewood is stacked, and the omnibus is regularly put to bed and tucked in after its day's work.

To the left, a magnificent plane-tree spreads golden foliage far and wide, brimming up to our bedroom windows just overhead. And a little further from the house, on this side of a sombre row of cypresses, with an ethereal view to the left of palest mountain peaks—a ProvenÇal rose garden!

"But gather, gather, Mesdames," invites our kind host, "gather as many as you will." He smiles at our amazed delight, and waves a hospitable hand towards the masses of blossom, radiantly fresh and fair.

Roses of Provence!

The sun draws out the fragrance and shines through the petals till they gleam like gemmed enamel. We linger entranced.

In the narrow path we are elbow high in roses. And everything seems to stand still and wait in the hot sun. Nothing moves on. There is only a tiny floating back and forwards of a thread of cobweb between rose and rose; and very slowly now and again a broad swathe of plane-foliage heaves up and down on a little swell of air which the tree has all to itself in the shade-dappled precincts that it rules.

Looking across the roses from this spot we can see the rich tapestry of blossom against the cypresses, tall, grave warders of the Garden of Pleasure.

And still nothing moves forward. The flies come out and make drowsy, foolish noises in the warmth. But they return upon their paths and make buzzing circuits. A particular spasmodic burnished insect that darts suddenly to a distance and then remains thunderstruck before the heart of a flower, keeps on doing the same ridiculous thing all round the garden, and only adds to the impression of changelessness. It is as if the world had really come to a pause, and time and trouble had ceased their eternal pulse-beat.

And we gather our roses—while we may.

"Mais Mesdames, vous n'avez choisi que les roses les plus communes; tenez Mesdames." And Monsieur the landlord plunges into the bushes and cuts bloom after bloom of the most exquisite sorts: red and yellow and creamy white, till his generous hand can grasp no more. He stands smiling discreetly while we bury our faces in the flowers, and hold them at arm's length to admire them the more.

"Elles vous rendent heureuses, les roses, Mesdames," he says, with a little smile and a bow; "alors vous rendez heureuses les roses—et votre serviteur."

We try to make a co-operative bow (bowing was not Barbara's strong point), and to indicate as well as we can that only in this delightful country had we ever met with such lovely roses or such kind people.

The first part of the day was occupied in wandering over the open country that surrounds this placid little town of the Romans. The plain is wide—immense in its spaces, marked with the inevitable walls of cypresses and dotted with shrubs and farms as far as the eye can follow.

The strange, almost grotesque outline of the Alpilles closes in this view to the South, and between these mountains and the town there are endless rough tracks and paths among the hollows and risings of the land, quaint cuttings in the soil which lead the eye to the blue of the hills.

Here and there would be a small dwelling, here and there a field enclosed for pasture, but this was rare. The greater part was wild, rough country, owing little to the care of man.

In one of the highest spots of this singular district stands a curious stone cross, called by the people La Croix de Vertu, why it is impossible to discover. It is a monolith supporting a small iron cross, which is doubtless of much later date than its support.

It is approached from four sides and occupies the highest ground at which the four paths meet.

A strange, little lonely mysterious monument, whereby, doubtless, hangs many an ancient tale!

We spent the rest of the day in visiting the Roman remains—two well-preserved relics of Imperial days—a triumphal arch and a tall monument which is said to have been built to celebrate the great victory of Marius over the Teutons.

They stand lonely and singularly unspoiled, at the foot of the Alpilles, and before them stretches a wide plain over which the light is growing soft and warm, the few shadows of olives and low bushes beginning to lengthen.

And we sit down on the dry grass near the monuments and are silent.

The agitated figures on the bas-relief of the triumphal edifice stand out well in the glowing light. They are fighting and struggling in some unknown contest which they take, poor things, so very seriously, and which really matters so very little after all! The broad, long lines of the landscape speak eloquently of the folly of that old death-struggle. It is strange to think of those stone warriors fighting on century after century as the seasons go by, always there and always fighting when the sun touches them in the morning, when the white moon peers over the jagged outline of the little mountains just behind, and finds them at it still! Do they not even rest when there is neither sun nor moon but only a great wide darkness over the land and the mountains are blotted out?

It seems as if there were a waking up rather than a resting as the night approaches.

We linger till the air is dim and mysterious, and the exquisite wreath of leaves on the archi-vault of the triumphal arch begins to get blurred, clean-cut and fresh though it is. But something seems to creep up out of the earth, to swarm round out of the mountains till there might be seen or felt a shadowy throng—inchoate presences that stream through the arch and crowd round the foot of the unresting monument.

Barbara judiciously looks at her watch. And we rise and walk slowly back to our hotel along the white road, silent, and perhaps rather sad.