The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition (9 page)

It was not long after I had started to go to the local elementary school, where I sat with great embarrassment among the very smallest children, and tried to pick up French as we went along, that Father had already drawn up plans for the house we would build on the land he had now bought at the foot of Calvary. It would have one big room, which would be a studio and dining room and living room, and then upstairs there would be a couple of bed-rooms. That was all.

We traced out the foundations and Father and a workman began to dig. Then a water diviner came in and found us water and we had a well dug. Near the well Father planted two poplar trees—one for me,
one for John Paul—and to the east of the house he laid out a large garden when the following spring came around.

Meanwhile, we had made a lot of friends. I do not know whether it was through the capitalist, Rodolausse, or through the radical-socialist teamster Pierrot, that we got in contact with the local rugby football club, or they with us: but one of the first things that happened after our arrival was that a delegation from the club, the “Avant-Garde de Saint-Antonin,” presented themselves to Father and asked him to become president of the club. He was English, and therefore he was an expert, they assumed, in every type of sport. As a matter of fact, he had played rugby for his school in New Zealand. So he became president of the club, and occasionally refereed their wild games, at the risk of his life. It was not only that the rules had changed, since his time, but there was a special interpretation of the rules in St. Antonin which no one could discover without a private revelation or the gift of the discernment of souls. However, he lived through the season.

I used to accompany him and the team to all the games they played away from home, going as far as Figeac to the northeast, deep in the hill country of Rouergue; or Gaillac, on the plains of Languedoc, to the south, a town with one of those fortress-churches and a real stadium for its rugby team. St. Antonin was not, of course, called in to play the Gaillac first-fifteen, but only to play an opener, while the crowds were coming in for the principal game.

In those days the whole south of France was infected with a furious and violent passion for rugby football, and played it with a bloodthirsty energy that sometimes ended in mortal injuries. In the really important games, the referee usually had to be escorted from the grounds afterwards by a special bodyguard, and not infrequently had to make his escape over the fence and through the fields. The only sport that raised a more universal and more intense excitement than rugby, was long-distance bicycle racing. St. Antonin was off the circuit of the big road races, but occasionally there would be a race that came through our hills, and we would stand at the end of the long climb to the top of Rocher d’Anglars, and watch them coming slowly up the hill, with their noses almost scraping the front wheels of their bikes as they bent far down and toiled, with all their muscles clenched into tremendous knots. And the veins stood out on their foreheads.

One of the members of the rugby team was a small, rabbit-like man, the son of the local hay and feed dealer, who owned a car and drove most of the team back and forth from the games. One night he nearly killed himself and about six of us when a rabbit got into the lights on the road ahead of us and kept running in front of the car. Immediately, this wild Frenchman jammed his foot down on the gas and started after the rabbit. The white tail bobbed up and down in the light, always just a few feet ahead of the wheels, and whipping from one side of the road to the other, to throw the auto off his scent: only the auto didn’t hunt that way. It just kept roaring after the rabbit, zig-zagging from one side of the road to the other and nearly spilling us all into the ditch.

Those of us who were piled up in the back seat began to get a little nervous, especially when we observed that we were coming to the top of the long steep hill that went winding down into the valley where St. Antonin was. If we kept after that rabbit, we would surely go over the bank, and then we wouldn’t stop turning over until we landed in the river, a couple of hundred feet below.

Somebody growled a modest complaint:

“
C’est assez, bein? Tu ne l’attraperas pas!
”

The son of the hay and feed dealer said nothing. He bent over the wheel with his eyes popping at the road, and the white tail in front of us kept darting away from the wheels of the car, zig-zagging from the high bank on one side to the ditch on the other.

And then we came over the hill. The darkness and emptiness of the valley was before us. The road began to descend.

The complaints in the back seat increased, became a chorus. But the driver stepped on the gas even harder. The car careened wildly across the road; we had nearly caught the rabbit. But not quite. He was out there ahead of us again.

“We’ll get him on the hill,” exclaimed the driver. “Rabbits can’t run down-hill, their hind legs are too long.”

The rabbit ahead of us was doing a fine job of running down-hill, just about five feet ahead of our front wheels.

Then somebody began to yell: “Look out, look out!”

We were coming to a fork in the road. The main road went on to the left, and an older road sloped off at a steeper incline to the right. In between them was a wall. And the rabbit headed straight for the wall.

“Stop! Stop!” we implored. Nobody could tell which way the rabbit was going to go: and the wall was flying straight at us.

“Hold on!” somebody shouted.

The car gave a wild lurch, and if there had been any room in the back we would all have fallen on the floor. But we were not dead. The car was still on the main road, roaring down into the valley and, to our immense relief, there was no rabbit, out there in the lights.

“Did you catch him?” I asked hopefully. “Maybe you caught him back there?”

“Oh, no,” replied the driver sadly, “he took the other road.”

Our friend the teamster Pierrot was a huge, powerful man, but he did not play on the football team. He was too lazy and too dignified, although he would have been a decorative addition to the outfit. There were three or four others like him, big men with huge black moustaches and bristling eyebrows, as wild as the traditional representations of Gog and Magog. One of them used to play whole games wearing a grey, peaked street-cap. I suppose if we had ever played on a really hot day he would have come out on the field with a straw hat on. Anyway, this element of the team would have made a fine subject for Douanier-Rousseau, and Pierrot would have fitted in admirably. Only his sport was sitting at the table of a café imbibing cognac. Sometimes, too, he made excursions to Toulouse, and once, while we were standing on the bridge, he gave me a bloodcurdling description of a fight he had had with an Arab, with a knife, in the big city.

It was Pierrot who took us to a wedding feast at a farm up by Caylus. I went to several of these feasts, during the time when I was at St. Antonin, and I never saw anything so Gargantuan: and yet it was never wild or disordered. The peasants and the foresters and the others who were there certainly ate and drank tremendously: but they never lost their dignity as human beings. They sang and danced and played tricks on one another, and the language was often fairly coarse, but in a manner which was more or less according to custom, and on the whole the atmosphere was good and healthy, and all this pleasure was sanctified by a Sacramental occasion.

On this occasion Pierrot put on his good black suit and his clean cap and hitched up a gig, and we drove to Caylus. It was the farm of his uncle or cousin. The place was crowded with carts and carriages, and the feast was a more or less communal affair. Everybody had provided something towards it, and Father brought a bottle of strong, black Greek wine which nearly pulverized the host.

There were too many guests to be contained in the big dining room and kitchen of the farm, with its blood-sausages and strings of onions hanging from the beams. One of the barns had been cleaned out and tables had been set up in there, and about one o’clock in the afternoon everybody sat down and began to eat. After the soups, the women began to bring in the main courses from the kitchen: and there were plates and plates of every kind of meat. Rabbit, veal, mutton, lamb, beef, stews and steaks, and fowl, fried, boiled, braised, roasted, sautéed, fricasseed, dished this way and that way, with wine sauces and all other kinds of sauces, with practically nothing else to go with it except an occasional piece of potato or carrot or onion in the garnishing.

“All the year round they live on bread and vegetables and bits of sausage,” Father explained, “so now they don’t want anything but meat.” And I suppose he had the right explanation. But before the meal was half over, I got up from the table and staggered out into the air, and leaned against the wall of the barn, and watched the huge, belligerent geese parading up and down the barn-yard, dragging their tremendous overstuffed livers in the dirt, those livers which would soon he turned into the kind of pâté de foie gras which even now made me sick.

The feast lasted until late in the afternoon, and even when night fell some were still at it there in the barn. But meanwhile the owner of the farm and Pierrot and Father and I had gone out to see an old abandoned chapel that stood on the property. I wonder what it had been: a shrine, a hermitage perhaps? But now, in any case, it was in ruins. And it had a beautiful thirteenth- or fourteenth-century window, empty of course of its glass. Father bought the whole thing, with some of the money he had saved up from his last exhibition, and we eventually used the stones and the window and the door-arches and so on in building our house at St. Antonin.

By the time the summer of 1926 came around, we were well established in St. Antonin, although work on the house had not yet really begun. By this time I had learned French, or all the French that a boy of eleven was expected to use in the ordinary course of his existence, and I remember how I had spent hours that winter reading books about all the other wonderful places there were in France.

Pop had sent us money, at Christmas, and we used some of it to buy a big expensive three volume set of books, full of pictures, called
Le Pays de France.
And I shall never forget the fascination with which I studied it, and filled my mind with those cathedrals and ancient abbeys and those castles and towns and monuments of the culture that had so captivated my heart.

I remember how I looked at the ruins of Jumièges and Cluny, and wondered how those immense basilicas had looked in the days of their glory. Then there was Chartres, with its two unequal spires; the long vast nave of Bourges; the soaring choir of Beauvais; the strange fat romanesque cathedral of Angouleme, and the white byzantine domes of Perigueux. And I gazed upon the huddled buildings of the ancient Grande Chartreuse, crowded together in their solitary valley, with the high mountains loaded with firs, soaring up to their rocky summits on either side. What kind of men had lived in those cells? I cannot say that I wondered much about that, as I looked at the pictures. I had no curiosity about monastic vocations or religious rules, but I know my heart was filled with a kind of longing to breathe the air of that lonely valley and to listen to its silence. I wanted to be in all these places, which the pictures of
Le Pays de France
showed me: indeed, it was a kind of a problem to me and an unconscious source of obscure and half-realized woe, that I could not be in all of them at once.

THAT SUMMER
, 1926,
MUCH TO FATHER’S DISTRESS-BECAUSE
he wanted to stay at St. Antonin and work on the house and at his painting—Pop gathered up a great mountain of baggage in New York, stirred Bonnemaman into action, dressed up my brother john Paul in a new suit and, armed with passports and a whole sheaf of tickets from Thomas Cook and Son, boarded the liner
Leviathan
and started for Europe.

News of this invasion had been disturbing Father for some time. Pop was not content to come and spend a month or two in St. Antonin with us. In fact, he was not particularly anxious to come to this small, forgotten town at all. He wanted to keep on the move and, since he had two months at his disposal, he saw no reason why he could not cover the whole of Europe from Russia to Spain and from Scotland to Constantinople. However, being dissuaded from this Napoleonic ambition, he consented to restrict his appetite for sight-seeing to England, Switzerland, and France.

In May or June the information reached us that Pop had descended in force upon London, had scoured the Shakespeare country and other parts of England—and was now preparing to cross the channel and occupy the north of France.

We were instructed to get ourselves together and to move northward, join forces with him in Paris, after which we would proceed together to the conquest of Switzerland.

Meanwhile at St. Antonin we had peaceful visitors, two gentle old ladies, friends of the family in New Zealand, and with them we started out, with no haste, on our northward journey. We all wanted to see Rocamadour.

Rocamadour is a shrine to the Mother of God, where an image of Our Lady is venerated in a cave-chapel half way up a cliff, against the side of which a monastery was built in the Middle Ages. The legend says that the place was first settled by the publican Zacchaeus, the man who climbed the sycamore tree to see Christ as He came by, and whom Christ told to climb down again, and entertain Him in his own house.

At the moment when we were leaving Rocamadour, after a short visit that filled my mind with memory of a long summer evening, with swallows flying around the wall of the old monastery up against the cliff, and around the tower of the new shrine on top of it, Pop was riding around all the chateaux of the Loire in a bus full of Americans. And as they went whizzing through Chenonceaux and Blois and Tours, Pop, who had his pockets crammed full of two- and five-sou pieces, and even francs and two-franc pieces, would dig in and scatter handfuls of coins into the streets whenever they passed a group of playing children. And the dusty wake of the bus would ring with his burst of laughter as all the kids plunged after the coins in a wild scramble.