Читать книгу In the Track of R. L. Stevenson and Elsewhere in Old France - John Alexander Sir Hammerton - Страница 19

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We made a swift descent to La Bastide, and by way of Chasseradès, where Stevenson slept in the common bedroom of the inn, reached Le Bleymard late in the afternoon, passing through a country of bare hills and poor villages clustered in gusty hollows or hanging like swallows' nests on craggy slopes. The valley of the Lot, rich and beautiful westward to Mende, possesses no elements of charm in the neighbourhood of Bleymard, and we found that town so mean and featureless, that we had no wish to pass the evening there. The inn we wanted was, so a crippled girl told us, at La Remise, on the high road, and we must have passed it. We remounted our cycles and retraced our path across the river, a distance of perhaps three furlongs, and lo! there stood the charred remains of the Hôtel du Lot, where we had hoped to rest ourselves. We had passed the place without noticing it, and the view of its gaunt and smoky walls, now that they had acquired so personal an interest, chilled our hearts, for the need to rest and refresh ourselves was pressing. It was after sundown, and there lay between us and Pont de Montvert a mountain higher than Ben Nevis.

Opposite the unlucky Hôtel du Lot stood a small auberge, kept by one Teissier. Two men were drinking absinth at a table by the doorway. One was a thick-set fellow, wearing eyeglasses, and clothed not unlike a foreman mechanic in England. The other was the familiar dark French type, thin of features, eyes bright as those of a consumptive, his beard ample and of a jet black, against which his ripe red lips showed noticeably. He was dressed like a clerk or commerçant. They made us welcome at their table, and we fell at once to discussing the situation, from which it was evident we could not hope to cross the Lozère that night. Some tourists had experienced a bad time traversing the mountain the previous Sunday, and as we could not hope to do more than reach the Baraque de Secours by nightfall, it would be madness to attempt the descent into the valley of the Tarn after dark, the road lying in many places along the lip of a precipice. Besides, this wayside inn was very well managed, said the absinth drinkers; they had lived there since being burned out across the way, a statement that cheered us not a little, as every other feature of the place was extremely uninviting.

The landlady, who had shown no interest in us whatever, I found busy at a large cooking-range in a tiny kitchen, which opened off the common sitting-room, and served also for the living-room of the servants and familiar loungers. She was a woman of austere countenance, displaying like so many middle-aged Frenchwomen a considerable moustache; but I noticed that her teeth were white. Yes, she would be glad to supply dinner if we were to stay overnight. We were, I confessed without enthusiasm; whereupon she specified glibly the resources of her kitchen. We could have soup, trout, jugged hare, chicken, fillet of beef, potatoes, pastries, cheese, and other things, and by naming one dish and connecting it to the next with et puis, an aldermanic banquet seemed about to be conjured up from the dirty little room and its greasy stove. The common room of the inn had a sanded floor, and was furnished with a plain deal table, round which some country bumpkins were sitting on rush-bottomed chairs drinking beer and spitting freely in the sand. A few cheap oleographs nailed on the dingy walls were the only efforts at decoration. Two drab and unattractive girls gossiping with the customers appeared to be the staff of the hotel.

I returned to the Frenchmen outside, and found that my companion, anxious not to enter the place until the last moment, was playing at a game resembling bowls with some village urchins, though understanding not one word of their speech. But he came up in a little while to learn the results of my inquiries within, and soon we were all engaged in a very entertaining discussion. It appeared that the Frenchmen were concerned in the zinc mines near Bleymard, him of the oily clothes being chief engineer, the other business manager. I suppose they would be the two best conditioned residents in the district, and here they were lodging at an hotel which, apart from cooking, was below the standard of comfort to be found in a crimp's den in the region of Ratcliffe Highway. The Frenchman is a wonderfully adaptable creature: give him a table to drink at, a chair to sit upon, and a bed anywhere under a roof, and he can contrive to be happy.

The Baraque de Secours

"The Lozère lies nearly east and west; its highest point, this Pic de Finiels, on which I was then standing, rises upwards of 5,600 feet above the sea."—R. L. S.

ON THE LOZÈRE

M. l'Ingénieur, although he spoke no English, had seen something of the world, and had even been to Klondyke. He could not understand why anyone should have wandered to such a hole as this—for pleasure! But he expected that next year's guide-books would describe Bleymard as notable for the ruins of the Hôtel du Lot. A wag, obviously. If we wanted to see places worth looking at, there was Nice and Nîmes, said his friend M. Barbenoire. Together they extolled, with a rare gush of adjectives, the beauty of these places, and promised to show us picture postcards that would lure us into visiting them. Tourists did come sometimes to climb the Lozère, from the top of which in clear weather one might see the Alps. The engineer laughed merrily at this, and said the story was as much legend as the exploits of the beast of Gévaudan. He discussed in a very practical mind the question of miners' wages, and thought that the Bleymard zinc workers were better off with four francs a day than English miners with five or six shillings.

Sooner than we had expected dinner was declared ready, and we went inside with no great avidity; but to our surprise we found the meal laid in a little room at the other end of the drinking den, tolerably clean though dingy and tasteless in its appointments. There we were joined by the wife of M. Barbenoire and two immense dogs of unfamiliar breed. The maid who served us was engagingly free from the usual formalities of the table, and between the courses would sit coyly on the knee of the engineer, munching a piece of bread; but for the rest, ours was no Barmecide feast. The aldermanic banquet appeared in all essentials save the serving, and we fared so well that we began to hope our bedroom would even be comfortable.

When, later in the evening, we took our courage in both hands and penetrated to the upper story by way of a spiral iron staircase through the kitchen roof and along a dark lobby of loose boards, we were heartened not a little to find in our room two good beds, clean and curtained. Sleep was thus assured, though the smell from the stable through the wall was redolent of rats. It was "a wonderful clear night of stars" when we looked out of our window before retiring, and we went to bed determined upon an early start. The bellowing of the oxen in the stable and the shouts of the buveurs below did not come long between us and the drowsy god.