Surmise

...the water foams and grows white with suds...

...of drought, when the soil was but crumbs and crust, when everything green turned brown and everything brown cracked and split in shreds...

...People crowd through the square on their way to Mass, but this family continues its business, quite as though it were not conscious of being the initial incident, the indispensable accompaniment of all the pardons of the countryside...

...Next it they set an open stand, stocked with candies, toys, candles of every length and those glass paperweights filled with water, having in them replicas of the Virgin and Child that are drowned in flying flakes when you shake them...

...He has them now—God be praised—stretched on their sides in a cart, their legs well tied together, and already bid for...

...A woman at another window in the hotel is staring at me so musingly that she is slow to recover herself...

...But the curtained windows make their privacy complete...

...A beggar comes whining in the door, and has a copper and an oath for his complaint...

...Then, going to the brink of a stream nearby, she begins slapping the garments on some stones...

...Then he stuffs his kerchief back into his pocket, spits,, and strolls toward the river...

...They stir up a heap of dry straw, chasing the bits as though they were rabbits, and fleeing from them as though they were wolves...

...Blue smoke begins to rise from the tin chimney...

...The smoke begins pouring forth then, as though the stove within were incandescent with the energy of dinner-making...

...In her, his wife, I see the heaviness of those same cares that make him sober...

...The door opens again, and the father appears with an older girl...

...The father stands a moment in the sunlight, looking both ways and up at the sky, sniffing the wind...

...From my hotel window I look down into the square, and notice, among the first comers to the festival, a small green house on wheels...

...When a drunken fellow bumps him in passing, he merely pulls in his feet, sets his glass straight, and wipes the bottom and sides of it dry with a red kerchief...

...A stolid boy sits on a wooden box in their midst and makes something with nails and string...

...but whereas in him they lie not uncomfortably on his mind, in her they have passed through her body...

...Out from the cart comes the stout mother, lumbering backward down the steps, and dragging after her a basket of clothes...

...together they put up a merry-go-round with flying rings...

...In imagination, I follow the father into the tavern, to see the table, the boon companions, the bubbling wine...

...Marie...

...The church bells begin to ring, and at once they rise and saunter out...

...He listens and scratches the back of his neck, giving no offence and taking none...

...Such activity, beyond a doubt, means nothing less than that they are having crepes to eat, served hot from the fire—brown, crisp films of batter, the pancakes of a fairy-tale, big as the moon when the moon is small as a pond...

...A second peasant, his face a red button under a shock of red hair, empties his bottle while the others are sipping their glasses, and curses the calves that took so long in coming...

...With her husband, she walks to the church, leaving the children, for this hour at least, to play outside...

...When they bump against him, he only grunts, and facing in another direction, goes on with his work...

...her shoulders are bowed to take any load flung over them...

...They doubtless talk of harvests they have reaped, when there have been a favorable sun and no crop of insects to plague them...

...She speaks a word to little Henri, who promptly clambers up and disappears within the house...

...The name "Marie" adheres to her like a petal to a granite menhir...

...When the mother comes back, she herds the children before her into the cart...

...The father is the most reticent of them—a man of affairs, a family man...

...The people moving toward the church must pick their way among them: the girls do not hear the chimes that fill the air, nor does the boy look up to see that flurry of straw and swallows...

...As the wine sinks in the tumblers, the mellow glow is heightened in the men...

...Then she pulls together her curtains, leaving me nothing for it but to close mine...

...It settles itself by the tavern, the door at the back opens and out fall a family of tow-haired children, who at once begin playing in the dust among the chickens of the yard...

...The girls shout, and toss their locks, and sit down when they least expect to...

...I lean my elbows on the sill, and follow their every movement...

...She has doubtless passed it on to a daughter, and has grown herself to be a Marthe, a patient Griselda, waiting not on love, but on rest...

...Some instinct leads me to turn my head suddenly to the right...

...Her hands, rough and red, with ragged nails, can roast a fowl or scour a pan...

...I stare at them in unabashed content at being allowed to see so much, surmising their past and assigning to each a future...

...then blows his nose like a horn...

...But with it all, she is garrulous as a jay that must scold and chatter while it lives...

...Though her face has not the lines and lights that mental agitation gives, her body works incessantly in perfect, self-initiated intelligence...

...her husband and oldest girl come after, leaving a neighbor to tend the counter...

...One old fellow, in a dirty blue jacket, with a nose that twists one way and a mouth another, boasts of his brushwood brooms, stacked by the church gate, that sell for only a franc and clean a house as holy water cleans the heart—till both are ready for Sunday...

...The door slams as they leave, but it bounds open again, and a cat, thin as a fagot, crawls in...

...The girl stays to tend the booth while her father saunters off for his wine...