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At Landrecies the rain still fell and the wind still blew; but we found a double-bedded room with plenty of furniture, real water-jugs with real water in them, and dinner: a real dinner, not innocent of real wine. After having been a pedlar for one night, and a butt for the elements during the whole of the next day, these comfortable circumstances fell on my heart like sunshine.
And then it was unsettling to be with her in such a house as the Fulmers', away from the large setting of luxury they were both used to, in the cramped cottage where their host had his studio in the verandah, their hostess practiced her violin in the dining-room, and five ubiquitous children sprawled and shouted and blew trumpets and put tadpoles in the water-jugs, and the mid-day dinner was two hours late-and proportionately bad because the Italian cook was posing for Fulmer.
There was yet more of the fair to see the stalls of Caucasian wares, the silks, the guns, the knives, Armenian and Persian carpets, Turkish slippers, sandals, yards of brown pottery, where at each turn one sees huge pitchers and water-jugs and jars that might have held the forty thieves. At one booth harness is sold and high Turkish saddles, at another pannier baskets for mules.
The salesman is out, but his boy, as you see, has taken the opportunity to eat some apples. I wonder whether he got them at the grocer's? His father sells water-jugs and jars made of porous earth. Oh what a blessing those jars are to all the people of this hot and dry country. We have no ice in Arabia and so no refrigerators; the wells are never very deep and the water comes a long distance.
"Ah, Father Jean! Do you live like the grasshoppers? Nobody ever sees you eat, Father Jean! Father Jean lives on cold water. The man who grows old becomes a child again! "What will you put into your beautiful vase, if you ever make it, silly old fellow? It will not hold even a drop of water from your well. Go and paint the hen-coops and make water-jugs!"
We all know what it is to embark for a day's travel, but we do not all understand the charm of being stowed away like freight in a boat such as the one here faintly sketched; how seats are improvised; how umbrellas are converted into stationary screens, and awnings grow out of inspiration; how baskets are hidden carefully among carpet-bags, and camp-stools, and water-jugs, and stowed-in-shavings ice; how the long-suffering, patient ladies shelter themselves in the tiny, stifling cabin, while those of the merry, complexion-careless sort lounge in the daylight's glare, and one couple, fond of seclusion and sentiment, discover a good place for both, at the rudder-end.
There they would hide behind boxes, or get under beds, and into water-jugs and baths, and, in fact, into every possible corner, They would even get into boots; and these had always to be shaken before being put on, in case frogs or insects should have taken up their abode there.
He tore it open, and found four billets de banque for 1,000 francs each, a sum equivalent in our money to about L160. "Who sent this, the the lady from whom I brought the note?" "Madame de Merville? certainly not, sir," said Madame Dufour, who, with the privilege of age, was now unscrupulously filling the water-jugs and settling the toilette-table.
The atmosphere of the room must have been a very Tower of Babel, where strange foreign bacilli from all parts of the world rose up and wrangled in the air. Upon a sham Empire table, tres antique, near the window, stood three water-jugs and a glass of imitation Venetian work.
He tore it open, and found four billets de banque for 1,000 francs each, a sum equivalent in our money to about L160. "Who sent this, the the lady from whom I brought the note?" "Madame de Merville? certainly not, sir," said Madame Dufour, who, with the privilege of age, was now unscrupulously filling the water-jugs and settling the toilette-table.
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