Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/306

286 companying drawing was made—he has endeavored diplomatically to end it by setting up on the little island-altar, in place of the old wooden image, a fine new image of stone: into which pins will not go. I am glad to add that his move has not produced its intended result. The old image, being held in such reverence that it could not be hidden away in a corner, has been set up in Saint Guirec's chapel—and there the prayerful pin-sticking keeps on. They are picked out again, these prayer-pins—by the Curé's orders, I suppose—very sedulously. "Of an evening, Monsieur, sometimes a whole handful will be taken away," one of the women told me. "But that does not matter, because the prayers that went with them have been heard." She may have exaggerated a little; but I know that the custom does continue, because I myself found a bright pin freshly planted in the good old Saint's breast.

The men with whom I talked laughed at it all; but the women, and especially the older women—when they found that I was not joking with them—took my questioning gravely. One dear old body, whom I met in a by-path near the Saint's chapel, was very earnest indeed; and ended by saying: "When I made my prayer to our Saint I stuck my pin deep into him, Monsieur, and he heard me and answered me. He gave me my good old Jean, who for forty years made me happy—until the sea took him from me and I was left alone," and her voice broke and tears were in her eyes as she turned away.

Out of the sea comes the life of these dwellers on the Breton coast, and out of the sea comes death to many of them. There are no better sailors than the Breton fishermen; but every year the Channel gales take toll of the little boats, and the fleet of larger boats that sails away annually to the Iceland fisheries rarely returns entire. The men who go, not to come back again, have no long suffering. They and the storms come to terms quickly. The real tragedy is with the women who stay. To them every shift of wind into a stormy quarter is a threat. Then you will find them in the dusky churches on their knees praying their hearts out; or you will come upon one desolately sitting in a church porch—on the walls about her tablets to the dead telling of prayers unanswered—in dreading sorrow too hopeless to be cast into words.

But there is a cheerful side to these little dark churches of the Breton coast villages. For the women—and to a less degree for the men—they are the social centres of each community. In each one of them, once a year, there is a great festival, the Pardon, in honor of its dedicate saint, to which all the countryside comes. More familiarly, because confined to the dwellers in its own parish, in each of them the major and minor feasts of the Christian year are celebrated. And all the year round, on Sundays when the service is ended, there is a grand gossiping in the churchyard among neighbors and friends.

As in country churchyards the world over, the men and the women keep apart from each other in these talking bouts; and the women—possibly that their nicely black Sunday sabots and their trim Sunday stockings may be seen to a better advantage—have a habit of sitting with dangling legs along the churchyard walls. Few of them wear colors; and at a little distance, what with their white starched caps and their black frocks, they give the impression of overgrown magpies perched in a chattering row. Off the walls and standing in groups, they plant their hands on their hips and set their arms akimbo in a way that gives them a frankly easy and somewhat masculine air. Even the younger ones—who court disaster by wearing their hair unbecomingly knobbed out in tight coils upon their temples—rarely are pretty; and all of them seem to grow hard-featured as they grow old.

During the Sunday that I spent in Ploumanac'h Saint Guirec's little chapel remained open, after the service was ended, all day. Into the dusk of it, from the outside sunshine, old men and old women shuffled in slowly and slowly went down on their creaking old knees on the stone-slabbed floor. Some of them drowsed a little, there in the twilight; and waked with a start and looked about them wondering for a moment, to get their bearings, before they went on again with their slumber-broken old prayers. But Saint Guirec seemed to accept in good part their half-real, half-dreamed,