The Christening
In front of the farm-gates the men were waiting in their Sunday clothes. The May sun shed its burning light on the flowering apple trees which roofed the whole farmyard with blossom in great round fragrant bunches of pink and white. Petals fell round them in a ceaseless shower, fluttering and eddying into the tall grass, where the dandelions glittered like flames and the poppies were splashed in drops of blood.
A sow slumbered on the side of the manure-heap, and a band of little pigs with twisted, cord-like tails ran round her huge belly and swollen dugs.
Far away, through the trees behind the farmhouse, the church-bell suddenly rang out. Its iron voice sent up a faint and distant cry to the radiant heavens. Swallows darted arrow-like across the blue spaces bounded by the still shafts of tall beeches. A faint smell of stables mingled with the soft sweet fragrance of the apple trees.
One of the men standing by the gate turned towards the house and cried:
“Coom quick, Mélina; t’bell’s ringin’.”
He was about thirty years of age, a tall young peasant, as yet not bowed or deformed by long labour in the fields. His old father, gnarled like the trunk of an oak, with scarred wrists and crooked legs, announced: “Women, they bean’t never ready first.”
The two other sons laughed, and one, turning to the eldest brother, who had shouted first, said: “Go fetch ’em, Polyte. They’ll not be here before noon, I’m thinkin’.”
The young man entered the house.
A flock of ducks near at hand began to quack and flap their wings, and waddled off down to the pond.
Then at the open door appeared a stout woman carrying a two-months-old child. The white strings of her high bonnet hung down her back, streaming over a shawl as violently scarlet as a house on fire. The child, wrapped in white garments, rested against the nurse’s protruding stomach.
Next came the mother, a tall strong girl barely eighteen, fair and smiling, holding her husband’s arm. The two grandmothers followed, wrinkled like old apples, weariness apparent in their bowed backs, long since bent by rough and patient toil. One was a widow; she took the arm of the grandfather waiting at the gate, and they left at the head of the procession, just behind the child and the midwife. The rest of the family followed, the younger ones carrying paper bags full of sweets.
The little bell rang ceaselessly, calling with all its strength to the tiny mite it awaited. Children clambered on the dikes; heads appeared at gateways; milkmaids set down their pails and stood between them to watch the christening go by.
And the nurse moved on triumphantly with her living burden, stepping between puddles on the road which ran between the tree-crowned banks. And the old people advanced with ceremonious steps, walking a little crookedly, because of their age and infirmity. And the young folk were eager to dance, and looked at the girls who came to see them go by; and the father and mother walked with graver mien, following the child who would take their place and carry on their name in the country, the honoured name of Dentu.
They emerged on the plain and struck across the fields, avoiding the long roundabout road. Now the church came into view, with its pointed steeple. Just below the slate roof was an aperture, within which something swung swiftly backwards and forwards, passing and repassing behind the narrow window. It was the bell, still ringing, calling the newborn child to come for the first time to the
