The Europe That Was (22 page)

While the file of some twenty persons advanced into the chancel, the choir full-bloodedly sang the 65th Psalm to the joyous score of our own organist. The dean's sense of theatre was as faultless as ever. Lavish in ritual and his own vestments; he then played his part with the utmost simplicity. He thanked and blessed each giver almost conversationally.

Last in the procession were four boys of the cathedral school bearing a great silver bowl of nuts gathered in the hedgerows. The gift and their movements were traditional. As they separated, two to the right and two to the left, leaving the dean alone upon the altar steps, a shadow appeared at his feet and vanished so swiftly that by the time our eyes had registered its true, soft shape it was no longer there.

The dean bent down and picked up a dead field-mouse. He was not put out of countenance for a moment. He laid it reverently with the other gifts. No one was present to be thanked; but when the dean left the cathedral after service and stopped in the porch to talk to Abner he was—to the surprise of the general public—still wearing his full vestments, stiff, gorgeous and suggesting the power of the Church to protect and armour with its blessing the most humble of its servants.

FRANCE

THE SWORD AND THE RAKE

Young Georges Dumont, garage proprietor and agricultural engineer, crashed his motor cycle into first gear, roared the engine and dismounted at the door of Papa Arneguy's cottage. On the valley slopes the silent, orderly beds of the market garden were intensely green and black in the last of the setting sun.

‘Attention!' he yelled. ‘Radishes into column of troop, right wheel!'

Père Arneguy looked up from the seedsman's catalogue upon which he was making notes—without glasses, though he was well over sixty. He found the youth of France a little comic; it did not believe in doing anything with hand or foot which could possibly be done by electricity or a two-stroke engine. But, if motor cycles had to exist, that was the way to stop them—with a flourish.

‘It never existed, your order,' he replied peaceably. ‘Will you take a glass?'

‘Willingly.'

Père Arneguy always had excellent wine, though heaven only knew how he had the ready cash to buy it after feeding his large self and his larger horse.

‘But I have little time,' Georges Dumont added. ‘An urgent duty …'

‘It is always the same with the young,' said Arneguy, wiping out excuses from the air around him with a wave of his massive hand. ‘You spend so much time mending your machines that you have none for anything else.'

‘And you, you old cave artist, how many hours a day do you spend grooming the Shah?'

It exasperated the younger generation of the village of Achard that Papa Arneguy should continue to work his three hectares of land with hand tools and a horse when a cultivator—as Georges Dumont had proved to him a dozen times—could be bought on hire purchase and would pay for itself in two years. Fathers and grandfathers were just as obstinate, but from sheer inability to understand the economics of machinery. The infuriating thing about Papa Arneguy was that his arithmetic remained sound and his intelligence quick. He was not out-of-date because he couldn't help it. He chose to be out-of-date.

He was a typical Basque, individualist all through. In 1914 he had
gone to war as a cuirassier, helmeted, breast-plated and making as much noise at the trot as a cart-load of cymbals. When provoked—which was often, since his thundering good humour in argument could entertain a whole café—he maintained that such gay and useless ironmongery had been far more satisfying to the human spirit than sitting at the bottom of a trench with a lot of machines which might or might not work when they were needed.

He still looked the part. Those great shoulders and long grey moustache belonged to the cuirassier. Georges Dumont admitted that a squadron of Arneguys might indeed have had the moral effect of a tank. Yet, while working his land, the same shoulders and moustache gave an impression of the utmost peace and benignity. So did the Shah, a barrel-shaped half-bred Percheron whose keep alone used up one of Arneguy's three hectares.

‘It's always when I can't stop that someone offers me Burgundy as good as this,' said Dumont, regretfully finishing his glass.

‘What's your hurry? There is plenty more.'

‘Flood warning. I am on my way down river.'

‘There has been no flood here since Noah. Look at the river—decently in her bed like a good bourgeoise!'

‘All the same, she may not be alone between the sheets tonight.'

‘So they have made a mistake up there, have they?'

Père Arneguy had no respect whatever for the contractors and engineers who were damming and tunnelling the foothills of the Pyrenees above his village.

‘At that level one does not make mistakes,' Dumont answered, rushing to the defence of fellow technicians. ‘And you have nothing against their electricity, I suppose?'

Arneguy mischievously shrugged his shoulders. In fact, he had a high opinion of electricity.

‘It's true one hasn't got to take a spanner to it,' he said.

‘And what in God's name is wrong with a spanner? This from him, who farms with a sword and rake like an ancient Roman!'

Père Arneguy grinned at the retort. He enjoyed a ferocious mock battle with Georges Dumont. He did, in fact, keep a vast cuirassier's sabre hanging on the wall of his cottage, and it was not wholly for decoration. In one point he obeyed the laws of economics; he kept nothing he did not use. The sword, which had as fine an edge on it as his scythe, was occasionally drawn from its scabbard for odd jobs too delicate for the bill-hook and too heavy for the pruning knife.

As for the rake, it was the proud jest of the village. Arneguy liked beds of noble width—parade grounds of crumbly loam where lettuces, radishes and spring onions were massed in column. Once the crop had been thinned, no weed was allowed to grow so large that a hoe would be required to remove it. The rake was sufficient. It was a
formidable weapon of his own invention with four-inch tines and a nine-foot handle. His immense forearm handled the tool as delicately as a toothpick, stirring the soil between a dozen lettuces simultaneously.

‘All the same, when I make a dam it lasts.'

‘The dam is immovable for ever, Père Arneguy. But one cannot foresee freaks of geology. There must be a cave in the limestone below the centre of the lake. They say there was a swirl on the surface as if a plug had been pulled out.'

‘The water has reappeared?'

‘It is beginning. In the gorge east of the dam. If they cannot control it, the flood will come tonight and last four or five hours. Achard is in no danger, but all livestock and farm machinery must be moved from the bank of the river. Incredible, the activity! Dynamite, echo soundings, bulldozers lowered into the gorge!'

‘And the island?'

‘There will be a team and trucks in half an hour to evacuate the island. Will you let the widow Ibarra know, and see that she is sensible?'

‘At once,' said Père Arneguy, driving right home the cork of the bottle with his grey-haired fist.

As the roar of the motor cycle faded away between the hills he tramped down to the river at the bottom of his land. For most of its course it was a mountain torrent, but at the lower end of the little Achard valley it was blocked by the boulders of an old moraine through which the water tumbled down to the Gave d'Oleron. Above these rapids it gave the impression of some peaceful tributary of the Loire with a fertile island floating in the middle of it upon which was an ancient, white-washed farmhouse standing well above the level of the spring floods.

Now, in autumn, it was hardly an island at all. On the eastern side the water divided into several little branches running between pebble shoals. To the west it was separated from Arneguy's land by a channel some eighty feet wide, knee-deep and flickering with small trout shaped like miniatures of the island itself.

Père Arneguy hailed the farm. Marie-Claire came to fetch him with the punt, pulling herself across the channel by a slack and dripping cable which stretched between two little, stone landing-stages—one beneath the farm-house windows, the other on the river bank.

It was a very wet and primitive method of ferrying. Père Arneguy had several times offered to install a running mooring instead of a single cable fastened to ring-bolts. Marie-Claire who was twelve years old and prided herself on being up-to-date, was all in favour. Her mother, Madame Ibarra, was not. She insisted that they would never
feel safe in their beds if anyone could pull the punt back from the island.

Marie-Claire was excited by the news. Her island was to be the centre of fascinating efficiency merely for the sake of a foot of water on the ground floor. Madame Ibarra, however, was incredulous, then tearful, then appalled. She imagined the dam emptying in a wall of water as high as itself. Arneguy considered they were both wrong, but long life as a fatherly bachelor had taught him that women found comfort in exaggeration.

Georges Dumont, at any rate, had been exact. Five large trucks appeared on the river bank with a team of thirty men under the supervision of one of the contracting engineers. His first duty appeared to be public relations. He assured Madame that the entire organization was at her service. She and her charming daughter would be spared all possible inconvenience and indemnified against any financial loss.

Even while he was talking, the farm as a human home began to disappear. The punt was unshackled and pulled on shore ready for loading. A timber ramp and rolls of wire netting went into the channel. The trucks began to cross and pull out again loaded with furniture, implements and animals. All breakables were carried up to the top floor, for there might be no time to pack them. Urgency was in the flood lights and the silent figure who sat on the bank with his walkie-talkie, continually in communication with the dam site.

Père Arneguy felt old. There was nothing for him to do, not even a haul for the powerful quarters of the Shah. It was no longer a neighbour's business to deal with emergencies. Trained men did it better. By ten o'clock the farm had been stripped, and Madame and Marie-Claire were housed with relations in Achard. There was even a champagne supper laid out with the compliments of the dam contractors.

He went to bed with his clothes on—aware that it was no more than an old cuirassier's gesture—and slept soundly. Before breakfast he examined the river and its lifeless island. The water was discoloured and had posibly risen an inch or two; but there was no sign of flood.

At half past eight he was cleaning out the stable when he heard the whoosh of powerful rockets. One would have said it was the fourteenth of July. He approved of the technicians. That was the good old way to give warning—better than the telephone and their little wireless sets.

He strolled round the corner of the stable in time to see a wall of water higher than a man sweep down the bed of the river and break on the bows of the island, throwing up a curtain of spray which hid the trees. There were no rockets. The noise had been the rush of the wave.

When the spray fell, the island was not there, only the farm and its buildings standing in a lake. Beyond them, over the pebbles and fields to the east, the river had risen to its fullest spring width. The current
steadied. For second after second the water climbed the stubble on the lower slope of Père Arneguy's land. It would do no harm there. The Shah's rations for the year were already in the barn.

The shutters of a top-floor window flew open, and Marie-Claire came through on to the iron balcony. The lake which surrounded her again became a torrent as the water surged clear over the boulders and narrows at the lower end of the valley. The old cow-shed upstream from the farmhouse crumbled and vanished.

Both banks were filling with the inhabitants of Achard accompanied by firemen, police, the mayor and a newsreel cameraman. As he ran to meet them, Père Arneguy looked, from force of habit, for the town band. The dam contractors had sent a powerful rescue squad in case of unforseen emergency: men, ropes, an amphibious vehicle and a rubber dinghy. He waved to them, pointing to Marie-Claire. The thunder of the water made shouting useless.

They were fast, the engineers. No denying that. In two minutes they had launched their amphibian well upstream. Two minutes later she was hurled back into the shallows, riding at the end of her cable over Arneguy's stubble.

They tried again, attaching light lines to the crew of two and providing the boat with an anchor weighted by a block of concrete. This time her engines took her far enough out. The anchor went overboard and the crew paid out the cable, bringing her nearly into position under the balcony. But anchor and weight were rolling together down the bed of the river. The amphibian vanished. The crew were pulled ashore.

It was clear that in such a race boats were as useless as Madame Ibarra's outstretched arms and the incoherent advice which she screamed across the water. Marie-Claire herself, now that rescue was on the way, seemed astonishingly self-disciplined. The poise of the fair head and brown school uniform impressed Père Arneguy. She belonged to the youth which knew so much. Perhaps she was right to be confident.

‘But what happened, Madame?' he asked. ‘I cannot conceive …'

‘She forgot her homework.'

‘You mean—for a damned exercise book?'

‘But who would have thought it?' wept Mme Ibarra. ‘I wondered why she left so early for school. Who would have guessed what she intended? When one's home is destroyed, does one think of bits of paper carried up to the attic? She must have crossed from the other bank. She often does so at this time of year when she is too impatient to pull herself over in the boat.
Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu
! She jumped from shoal to shoal like a little deer! It used to delight me to watch her.'

‘But the warning, Madame?' protested the smooth young engineer
who had supervised the removal the night before. ‘Achard had ten minutes' warning.'

‘She was already on her way here. And I who thought she was at school!'

‘Tell Madame there is no need to worry, Père Arneguy,' whispered Georges Dumont. ‘To you she will listen. They have ordered up a helicopter.'

‘How long will it be, your helicopter?'

‘Half an hour at the most.'

The outbuildings upstream, which had been acting as bastion to the house, disappeared. There was not even a splash. The old grey mortar had quietly reached a limit of resistance as the water sucked at the dry holes where generations of lizards had hidden and bred.

Someone in the crowd hoisted a placard for Marie-Claire to read:
HELICOPTER ON THE WAY

The child waved, and then turned in alarm as she felt the house shudder. The ground floor was divided by a wide archway where in old days the farm carts had been kept. Arneguy saw the great wooden doors which closed it give way. Immediately afterwards there was a swirl at the downstream end of the house. The wall of the coach-house had gone. The top floor was nothing but a doubtful bridge over the current.

‘We will try to catch her at the narrows,' said the engineer.