Читать книгу The Insect Man - Eleanor Doorly - Страница 11

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“Far are those tranquil hills

Dyed with fair evening rose,

On urgent, secret errand bent,

A traveller goes.”

Walter de la Mare.

They had arrived!

All the car’s doors flew open at once and its four occupants fell out on to the high tableland of the Rouergue, where Fabre said he was born.

They had hunted that place through great and lovely France, almost like Fabre himself pursuing a beetle to its burrow through earth and rocks. Their hunt seemed as hard as his; for the Rouergue is a high, hidden, mysterious place and not Fabre himself could have found in the heart of earth stranger things than they had seen in the heart of France. They had already decided that the Rouergue was a pleasant place wherein to be born, for they had come past bright green rivers and golden trees. They had climbed over the snow of high passes and threaded at last the wild gorges that lead up to Fabre’s country. There, in the gorges of the Dourbie and Tarn, they had followed a road that runs at the bottom of great crevasses. Villages overhang it, perched on ledges of rock and reached by stairs instead of streets. There, where rocks in fantastic shapes seemed to reach the sky, they had seen battlemented cliffs like castles high in air, and huge stones, that balance themselves giddily on the points of slim pinnacles, and stone men and beasts in a crumbled city of natural rock. They had grown more and more excited as they thought how Fabre must have loved to live in so wild a place. They almost held their breath, as they wondered what the land would be like that had so weird a succession of avenues leading to it.

And now they were really there!

This was the kind of place where Fabre spent his childhood. They were on the top of the world!

The wind caught their breath and pinned their clothes tight against their chests and swept their hair behind them and bit tears from their eyes. They looked out upon a barren moorland, stony, moss-covered, marshy. Here and there a whipped and pollarded tree added desolation to its woe-begoneness; here and there the marsh gathered into small lakes that lit the scenery as they caught the sun.

It is all just as Fabre described it, said Penelope, and if it is as cold as this in the middle of April, he must have been accustomed to long winters of wind and frost and snow.

“That’s snow over there,” exclaimed Giles, “I am fetching some!” and in a minute, he was back scattering snow on the road.

“It may be cold,” said Margaret, “but it is a great sight. The mountains, which may be the Cevennes or the Auvergne, look just a purple blueness scored with giant bands of amethyst and pearl. I suppose those are the rocks we have come through? And oh, look! The snow-covered peaks beyond, under those waves of sunlit cloud!”

Geraldine turned slowly round. “There are snow mountains everywhere,” she said, “and just one cowslip—not a house to be seen. And the poor sheep are so tall and thin, because they have walked miles and miles to collect their bits of grass. Now! Let us find St. Léons, Fabre’s village.”

That was not so easy, for St. Léons was not on their map, although it had once been a market town. They paused at a rutty, muddy lane that turned from the high road to the left. The children were for going down to try it, but Penelope could not believe that any town, of even past importance, could be approached by so slender a path. So, encouraged by the map which mentioned a town called Bois du Four, they went on. They found two cottages at a cross-road and were told by the children in the two doorways that they were at Bois du Four and that the rutty lane was the best way of approach to St. Léons; that it was longish and that no one would go there at sunset. That warning roused Geraldine’s curiosity, but Penelope was stern. Fabre’s village was to wait for morning. But they did get a glimpse of it on their way to a sleeping-place. In the distance, they saw a dark, grey, sombre stone village scrambling down the mountain-side towards a mass of dark trees and towering over it, a grim, four-towered castle.

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Next morning, the little rutty lane on the side of a hill winding among bright trees proved narrower than it looked. Nowhere in its two-and-a-half kilometres did it seem possible to pass another vehicle, but they met nothing. They seemed in that early morning of that entrancing day to be wandering alone in a deserted world. If there had been two paths, there was no one of whom to ask the way; but the lane twisted and turned, solitary too. By the first stone wall in St. Léons they halted, a little subdued by their own excitement. In a broiling sun, the four stood by the car gazing up, gazing down. A rocky path to the left wound up rough stone steps apparently to a sombre deserted castle. To the right, a flight of precipitous stairs in the rock led down through a street of half-ruined houses. Ahead, the road turned out of sight and seemed almost on a level with the top of the church spire. Beyond, were barren hills with the tops of trees bright in the sunshine suggesting woods in the hollows. The village seemed deserted and silent, except for the singing birds and, faintly, afar, the singing waters.

Then a slow heavy footstep came up behind them and a shepherd appeared.

Is this St. Léons? asked Penelope. Is Henri Fabre’s house here?

“Yes, that one,” he said, pointing to a tiny grey stone house just facing them.

Can we get in?

“Yes, just go up those steps,” indicating the pathway, “and push open that door.”

Geraldine crept forward on tiptoe as if she feared to awaken a sleeper and pushed hard at a high, narrow, wooden door in a high, stone, garden wall.

The others crept after her feeling shy at entering other people’s property unshepherded. Perhaps they all echoed Geraldine’s “Oh!” for what they came to was very unexpected: a tiny garden, just a square grass plot, sun-bathed; a tiny grey house with only a door on the garden side; and, in the centre of the grass, a statue, so exactly Fabre himself, that Geraldine sat straight down on the grass to stare up into the face and make his acquaintance. He was a little, thin, old man in a shabby coat, with pockets bulging with a box for collecting specimens. Under a large-brimmed, soft hat was a wrinkled face with a beautifully thin nose, long, thin, tight-compressed lips and eyes intently fixed on something—an insect of course. Geraldine had never seen anything so intensely and absorbingly occupied as that statue. Fabre was leaning against a broken tree-stump and on it was a kind of lizard. With one hand he was holding a magnifying-glass over the insect and with the other throwing the light properly by holding his coat up to his ear. Now she knew exactly how the great scholar looked when he was watching things; but never in her life had she imagined a statue could be so alive.

“It’s just as if he were here,” she said. “His father must have been very poor, or he would not have been born in such a tiny house. What is the next thing we hear about him?”

He was christened in the grey church below the garden on September the 22nd, 1823, and given the names Jean Henri Casimir. Then, while he was still a very little boy, his grandfather, his father’s father, took him away to Malaval to make one mouth less in the poor home. We are going there this afternoon.

“It’s too far to go and come back, I suppose?” asked Geraldine. “I should like to follow him in the order in which he did things.”

Penelope always spoilt Geraldine. So, back along the little lane they went, thinking of Fabre’s father, Antoine, when, perhaps in the farm cart from Malaval, he set out to take his small boy along that very road more than a hundred years ago. With their slow way of travelling, they must have taken all the day over the journey. First, when the lane was done, they would go straight across the road to Rodez that the little Henri was to know so well later, on and up again to still higher hills.

A long, lovely road the four found it, that sunny spring morning! But soon the car began to crunch over hard, frozen snow. Snow was heaped in drifts among the gorse and at the roots of occasional trees, and above all, so high up were they, snow in glaciers was visible afar on the horizon, on the distant Alpine ranges.

They passed the turning to Vezins, and saw, in a slight hollow, the market town to which Fabre’s neighbours drove their sheep. In Vezins wood, the little Fabre used to lie on his back on the moss and sun himself, while he ate black bread and cream and listened to the church bells of St. Léons. Or sometimes, when he was not so good, he would help the other boys to catch the Vezins bulls by the tails. Beyond the wood, they met a flock of sheep led by a shepherd, who drew them after him by whistling to them like dogs. They saw the peasants burning gorse to make their land a little more fertile, just as the little Fabre saw them. They met carts drawn by great-eyed, slow-moving oxen. One of these they stopped to ask the way to Malaval. The carter said: “You mean where le grand entomologiste lived?” And Penelope wondered if an English carter would have known anything about an entomologist who lived one hundred years ago in his village.

“Ask at the farm on the road,” he said, “and they will tell you. It is hard to find.”

It stood in a wild country, that farm. Penelope knocked at the door, but almost ran away as a very ill-looking, very unsteady farmer slowly opened it.

“Malaval? Ah! vous cherchez la maison du grand entomologiste,” said he. “Yes, I’ll come with you and show you the way. I’ve got measles and am just out of bed; I feel a bit shaky but come along!”

Oh, No! exclaimed Penelope, we can find it quite easily. It would be dangerous for you to come out in this bitter wind and I’m so afraid the children may catch it.

“Bless you, no! I’m getting better. It’s there!”

So a long way away they saw, close under a stretch of snow, a lonely dark grey farm. It was the middle of April and yet snow lay at the very door of the farm-house! Nothing seemed growing near, just rolling hills heather-covered with, of course, no heather in bloom. There was marsh, a stream in the valley, and close to them, but far enough away from Malaval, the charming, long grey church of Lavaysse with its low spire. That was all the sign of habitation near except the sick man’s house. They dared not take their guide any farther. They wanted to go on alone, but a marshy valley to cross, a bridgeless stream, a pathless mountain to climb and watchdogs already barking at strangers snatched away their morning courage.

Fabre must tell us about it, said Penél, as they sat, a little disconsolate, amid the wind-scorched heather gazing at the lonely and distant farm. Imagine the little boy stumping about in that farm-yard, knee-deep in cow dung and pools of brownish damp, himself deliciously dirty, friends with the geese, calves and sheep.

Then, one morning, something great happened to him—he, the future scientist, made his first scientific discovery. He discovered all for himself that he saw the sun with his eyes and not with his mouth! This is how he tells the tale^[3]:

“I was five or six years old. I see myself in a homespun pinafore trailing about my bare toes; I remember my hanky hanging to my belt tied on with a piece of string, because I lose it so often and use my sleeve instead. There I am one morning, my hands behind my back, a thoughtful imp facing the sun. Its dazzling splendour fascinates me. I am the moth that the candle draws to itself. Is it with my mouth? Is it with my eyes that I enjoy this radiant glory?

“Such is the question my earliest curiosity asks. Don’t smile. The future observer is practising. I open my mouth wide and shut my eyes, the glory disappears. I open my eyes and shut my mouth, the glory reappears. I do it over again with the same result. So that’s that. I know by experience that I see the sun with my eyes. What a discovery! In the evening I take the household into my confidence. My grandmother smiles, pondering at my innocence. The others laugh. That’s the way of the world.

“Another discovery. At nightfall, in the thicket, a sort of click, click, catches my attention, heard very faintly in the evening silence. What makes that noise? Is it a bird calling from its nest? I shall have to see and as quickly as possible. Of course, there is the wolf to be thought of which they have told me comes out of the wood at this hour. Let’s go all the same, but not far, only just there behind that clump of broom.

“I keep still and listen for a long time but nothing happens. At the least sound of a twig snapping in the thicket the click stops. The next night and the next I go. Then my tenacity triumphs. Fuff! a quick movement of my hand and I have caught the singer. A grasshopper. Now I know by observation that grasshoppers sing.”

Inside that farm-house, there’s a large kitchen if no one has altered it since Fabre’s day, with a huge open fireplace big enough to burn whole tree trunks. Often in the winter evenings the only light was given by a cluster of specially luminous pine splinters used to save the oil.

Picture the family as it used to be: Grannie, perhaps still wearing indoors her Rouergue peasant hat, flat, large-brimmed, as big as a wheel, with a tiny crown no bigger than a five-shilling piece and tied under her chin with a black ribbon. We haven’t met one such hat to-day, perhaps no one wears them any more.

At meal-times the old lady would stand over the big pot and ladle out the soup into each one’s plate and then plomp his share of turnip and fat ham on top. At the other end of the table stood the water jug for the thirsty to have as much as they liked. “Ah,” writes Fabre, “what a good appetite we had and what a gay meal, especially when a white cheese, home-made, came to finish off the feast.”

Then after dinner Grannie would spin with a real spinning-wheel and the little boys and little girls would kneel in circle round her, stretching their hands to the joyous flame and listening with all their ears. “She told us tales,” says Fabre, “not of much variety indeed, but full of marvels and very welcome, for the wolf often appeared in them, that hero who so frequently made our flesh creep. I should have liked to see him, but the shepherd always refused to let me share his watch in his straw hut.”

And after the tales, Fabre as youngest, slept on a mattress, but the others had only straw. That shows how poor they were, but his poverty did not make him less great.

When he was seven, he had to go to school, and, as there was no school at Malaval, he returned to St. Léons. Let us imagine we have a rough pony, or perhaps a slow bullock, in front of a two-wheeled cart and are driving with him home. He was probably sad, for he loved his grandmother very much, probably more than anybody in the world just then. He must have spent a long time saying good-bye to the geese and pigs and calves. Little boys do not care much about scenery, so perhaps he did not look back at the snow peaks.

“These beeches saw him pass,” said Giles; “they are more than a hundred years old.”

“He must have been very excited at the thought of seeing his father and mother again after so long a time,” suggested Margaret.