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Updated: May 8, 2025
Read this," he added, handing the lad a Bulletin of the Bureau; "it has only just come out, and if I have judged you rightly, you'll come here on June fifteenth so eager to get to a mussel-bed that there will be no holding you!" Two hours later, the Deputy Commissioner, leaving the office for the day, started on his walk home, going through the park in the direction of the Smithsonian Museum.
Surely there had never been any beds, or any mussels, or any toiling fish-wives; or if there had, it was all a world that the sea had washed up, and then as quietly, as heedlessly, as pitilessly had obliterated. It was the very epitome of life itself. Our visit to the mussel-bed, as we soon found, had been our formal introduction to the village.
Now there's a lesson in patience for you. She's sixty- five, if she's a minute; she's been working here, on this mussel-bed, for five years, to pay the mortgage off her farm; when that is done, her daughter Augustine can marry; Augustine's dot is the farm." "Augustine at our inn?" "The very same." "And the blonde the handsome man at the creamery, he is the future ?"
And everywhere there were groups of old women, or of women still young, to whom the look of age had come long before its due time. The village seemed peopled with women, sexless creatures for the most part, whom toil and the life on the mussel-bed or in the field had dried and hardened into mummy shapes.
Like all entirely perfect experiences in life, the lane ended almost as soon as it began; it ended in a steep pair of steps that dropped, precipitously, on the pebbles of the beach. For some reason best known to the day and the view, we all, with one accord, proceeded to seat ourselves on the topmost step of this stairway. We were waiting for the tide to fall, to go out to the mussel-bed.
"Bonjour, mere, how goes it?" He nodded as he sketched at a wrinkled, bent figure, who was smiling out at him from beneath her load of mussels. "Pas mal e' vous, M'sieur Renard?" "All right and the mortgage, how goes that?" "Pas si mal it'll be paid off next year." "Who is she? One of your models?" "Yes, last year's: she was my belle the belle of the mussel-bed for me, a year ago.
I'll offer her three, and she'll drop like a shot." "I'll make it a red picture," he continued, dipping his brushes into a little case of paints he held on his thumb; "the mussel-bed a reddish violet, the sky red in the horizon, and the girl in the foreground, with that torrent of hair as the high light. I've been hunting for that hair all over Europe." And he began sketching her in at once.
And the sea is wonderful. Pity you're going. Grand day for the mussel-bed. However, I shall see you, I shall see you. Remember me to Monsieur Paul; tell him to save me a bottle of his famous old wine. Good-by, good-by."
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