Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/300

280 quiet's sake steps through an open doorway into an adjoining room. Through that open doorway all of the company, in groups or singly, presently will follow; and in the same easy fashion, as occasion arises, the bodiless souls departed will come back again through the unbarred portal: to mingle with the souls still incarnate, and to take a hand for good or for evil—usually for evil—in their affairs. The dead, indeed, are so intimately associated with the living, and have so many rights and privileges, that they must be considered with a constant attention; and constantly must be appealed to and placated if things are to go well.

While my driver told with spirit—an immediate exhalation of his pilgrim draught—his story of the enchanted boulders, the old horse jogged along very honestly down the dipping road; and by the time that the story was ended we were come among the alluring old houses and the highly repellent new villas of Ploumanac'h.

It is the misfortune of this beautiful coast region that it has become a summering-place to which swarms of middle-class French "vont en villégiature"—dressing for their part in uncontrolled blazes of flannel and housing themselves after the manner of their kind. The tawdry little villas—no other human beings can approach the bourgeois French in hopelessly vulgar villa-making—are an open scandal: and all the more an open scandal because they are so insolently at odds with the spirit of the land. Even the simplest of the Breton houses has about it a touch of dignity, and very much more than a touch of the picturesque. The undefined Breton villages, the most ragged and down-at-heel of them, are a delight: as is known to artists the world over, and as my own artist in his study of a street in one of them has shown. For my part, as a practical reformer, I gladly would see these execrable rusticators hung in their blazing flannels before their own abominable dwellings; and the dwellings reduced to fragments after such justice had been done.

Before the curse of villas was laid upon it, Ploumanac'h was altogether lovable; and even the villas have not killed its charm. Between high headlands of red granite—piled still higher with the fantastic boulders wherein abide those ill-advised Pagans who rejected Christianity—a narrow channel leads inward from the sea to a maze of granite-bordered bays; the largest of which, the main harbor, narrows at its landward end into a deep ravine. Off to the westward is a rocky country of little rounded hills. As the sun slips down beyond those hills, filling the broad main bay with gleams of reflected color, it all seems a bit direct from Paradise. Even the shocking villas are chastened in the waning light into a semi-propriety; and the little old houses scattered along the bayside—with high-peaked roofs of stone slabs or of thatch mellowed and greened by sun and rain—come easily and naturally into that sunset dream.

As no notice had been served upon Ploumanac'h that I was coming, I took it as a nice civility that the town drummer was out to receive me. He was a tall and lank and loose-jointed drummer, with a flaring grizzled beard, wearing clothes that had an ancient sea cut and a bravely wide-brimmed slouched hat in which by rights there should have been stuck a trailing feather. That, and a cutlass at his side and a brace of pistols in his belt, would have given him wholly the look of a pirate emeritus who had accepted a civic office on taking his retreat. The way that he nourished his drumsticks was a liberal education in the art of drumming. His great archetype, carved immortally on the Panthéon, did not make a better show at Arcolo. I never have been more gallantly drummed into any town.

Still another pretty touch was given to my entry. On the steps of the little Hotel des Bochers I found waiting to welcome me a charming representative of the race of curious smoke-gray bushy-tailed cats who dwell in Ploumanac'h. They are shy and nervous creatures, for the most part, with a marked disposition to run away from strangers and with a rabbitlike knack of running close to the ground. But the pretty personage who met me at the inn door was abeam with cat friendliness—as was also a peculiarly sweet-natured kitten, too young to know fear, whom I had the happiness to encoun-