“Madelon—lon—lonMadelon donne-moi ton cœur!”
“Madelon—lon—lonMadelon donne-moi ton cœur!”
“Madelon—lon—lonMadelon donne-moi ton cœur!”
and shouted greetings. Then her father’s slouching tread and a brisk military stride. Then her father’s voice:
“Mad’leine, here is Victor Dequidt, home on leave!”
She got up, pushed the ever-ready coffee-pot over the heat of the fire, and greeted the guest. He was the son of a neighboring farmer, and if she ever bothered her head about such things, Madeleine was perhaps conscious deep down in herself that he liked her more than a little. They had played together as children, grown to adolescence together, had experiences in common, wandering in the Kruysabel. But ever since her mother’s death had forced her to early maturity, Madeleine had been very busy, then, with Georges, very busy and very happy, and since the War, very busy and preoccupied. Any memories ofVictor hardly disturbed the surface of her mind. If he liked to follow her about with his blue eyes, and pay her small compliments, why, let him. Most men looked at her, so might he. She poured him out coffee, and some of the rum she had got from the quartermasters of various English units, and listened politely, but without interest, to his talk.
It was the usual talk of men on leave. All that he said was being said in English, French, German, Italian, during years, whenever men got home for a few brief days. It was about food, railways, jokes, old acquaintances—never about the cosmic murder in which they were engaged, or their daily decreasing belief that they might escape alive. In the middle of the commonplaces that she had heard from different lips a hundred times in that kitchen, Madeleine heard the words:
“It was a good job, that stretcher-bearing business at the hospital, miles from the line—good food—a bunk to sleep in at night, and who do you think was the last stretcher-case I carried?”
Silence. Old Vanderlynden was not good at guessing. Madeleine was bored. Victor went on:
“Why, the young Baron Georges!”
Silence again. Old Vanderlynden, who could hardly see to fill his pipe, said:
“It’s as dark as a nigger’s back in here!” and held a paper spill to the candle on the mantelshelf.
Madeleine cried with a stamp of her foot:
“Don’t light up! don’t light up!”
Her father obediently lit his pipe, knocked out the half-burnt spill against the fireplace and put it back.
Victor, disappointed at the way his anecdote was received, said gallantly:
“One sees you are a good housekeeper, and not one to burn good money!”
But Madeleine was just succeeding, by sheer will-power in swallowing—swallowing down. It—the maniacal desire that had come rushing up from her heart into her head—the strong frenzy of a strong nature—bidding her catch up the great steel harl from the hearth and smash in the heads—not so much of her father and Victor, but of these two men—prototypes of all the other careless, mischievous, hopeless men, that had let Georges be hurt in their insane war. She swallowed, and the fury of that instant was gone, battened down, under control. She replied to Victor in a steady off-hand voice:
“Oh no, we have plenty of candles from the English. After all, you might as well light up, Father!”
As he did so, the old man asked:
“What had he the matter with him, the poor young Baron?”
“He had become consumptive, owing to the life.”
As the candle took heart and shone, Madeleine’s courage rose to meet the necessity for showing nothing and finding out everything which she deliberately courted. Sure of herself, she said gently:
“To which base hospital did you say he was going?” She saw her mistake in a moment. She was not so completely mistress of herself as she had thought. No hospital had been mentioned. But there was nothing subtle about Victor. He was only too pleased to have interested her. He replied:
“The English hospital in tents at Naes’ farm, there beside the St. Omer line. Ours are full.”
His gossiping talk flickered on like the candle flame—dim and alone. Madeleine and her father said scarcely a word, the former deliberately, wanting to be alone, the latter lacking the habitof speech. As no interest was shown and no further refreshment offered, Victor eventually rose to go. They bade him good night at the door, locked up, and turned to their rooms, with their usual brief word of nightly affection. The old man was snoring directly. Madeleine lay for hours on her back, her eyes burning at the dim ceiling of her little room, her legs and feet straight and rigid, hands clasped on her thumping heart. Surely he was a lucky man for whom she planned and schemed and longed so in her short, hard-earned time of rest!
* * * *
The next day Jerome Vanderlynden and Madeleine set out in the dark early morning and reached Hazebrouck before most of the market had foregathered. This the old man understood and agreed to. One got one’s own price by this means from people who were in a hurry. What he did not understand was why Madeleine had on her very best instead of her second best that she usually wore to market, without a hat. Incurious and incapable of challenging her decisions, he said nothing. The stuff sold well. By eight o’clock the basket and receptacles were almost empty. Then Madeleine said:
“We must go and see the young baron.”
“What do we want to go tra’passin’ over there for?”
“Because Victor may be wrong. The Baron and Madame had not heard the other day.”
“That’s their affair.”
“If it’s true, they’ll be glad enough to know.”
“It will cost something.”
“Leave the money to me.”
She had made up her mind and she was going. Independent as were few girls of her sort, she was too conventional to risk the journey alone. That would be to court scandal. So her father must come with her.
At the station they got into some difficulty about tickets. The line was almost entirely military. The gray-haired Commissioner was an acquaintance.
“What are you going to do there, you two?”
Madeleine pushed before her father.
“We are going to see a wounded relative in hospital!”
“Well, you can have privilege tickets. All you want is the certificate of the Mairie.”
Madeleine knew better than to argue on such a point. She drew the old man outside.
“Get down to the ‘Golden Key’ and come back with the cart. Look sharp!”
“Why not drive all the way?”
“Twenty kilometers there and twenty back; we should not be home all night, and supposing an English regiment comes to the farm when I’m not there?”
One of the great advantages Madeleine possessed over her father was that she could think so much quicker. The old man had fetched the cart, Madeleine had done her shopping, and they were two kilometers on the road home before he had thought of the next objection:
“What are you going to say to Blanquart?”
Blanquart was the schoolmaster and secretary of the Mairie.
“That I want a certificate that we have relatives at the war.”
“But that won’t get you a cheap ticket to visit the young baron in hospital.”
“You leave it to me.”
Obedient, the old man left it.
Blanquart was not at the Mairie, he was measuring fields for an “expertise,” a professional assessment.
Leaving the cart on the road, Madeleine liftedher best skirt and stepped over the clods to him. He was busy and interested in his job, and didn’t want to be dragged home to the Mairie. At her suggestion he wrote the certificate on the next fair page of the big square pocket-book he was covering with figures. He was not very curious about the matter. The Vanderlyndens were the best-known family in the parish. The loss of the two boys was no secret. He was asked every day for the endless certificates, questionnaires, lists and returns by which France is governed: “You are going to join the Society of the Friends of the Prisoners of War, I suppose?”
Madeleine let him suppose, only murmuring that one did what one could in such times.
He wrote: “I, Anastasius Amadeus Blanquart, Secretary of the Mairie of the Commune of Hondebecq, certify that Vanderlynden, Jerome, cultivator, has male relatives mobilized for military service,” and signed.
“Now you’ll want the official stamp. Ask my little Cécile. She knows where it is.”
“Perfectly. And we thank you many times.”
“There is nothing. Always at your service.”
“Good day, Monsieur Blanquart.”
Sure enough, at the schoolhouse, also in allFlemish villages the office of the Mairie, little Cécile Blanquart was proud to affix the official stamp, with its “République Française, Commune de Hondebecq” inscription in violet ink.
So back went the old gig, down the same road it had just come. In the distance rumbled the battle. Each side of the hedgeless road with its grassy stone pavé and “dirt” paths, the rich heavy lands gleamed with moisture in their nakedness, in the pastures the last leaves of the elms fluttered down upon thick grass that soaked and soaked. Flanders, the real Flanders, the strip of black alluvial soil between the chalky downs of France and the gravelly or stony waste border where the Germanic peoples begin, was preparing herself for another fruitful year, as she had, time out of mind, in war and in peace, paying as little attention to this war as to any other of the long series she had seen. And across her breast, on that Route Nationale that a French Emperor had built with stone from Picardy, went old Vanderlynden, child of her soil, inheritor of her endless struggle, and Madeleine, the newer, more self-conscious, better-educated generation, perhaps even more typical of her country than her father, showing the endless adaptability of her mixedborder race, absorbing the small steps of human progress, and emerging even more Flemish than before.
The old man, in his black suit and high-crowned peaked Dutch cap, sat almost crouching on the seat of the gig, knees nearly as high as his chin, wrists on knees, dark eyes fixed on the road ahead, speaking from time to time to the old white horse, who paid no attention nor varied its wooden shamble. Madeleine, whose clothes were almost those of a modern girl of the towns, sat upright, hands folded in her lap, head erect, in face and figure just another of those strongly built, tranquil, slightly “managing” Madonnas of the pictures of the old Flemish painters, if ever Madonna had so grim an immobility, such a slow-burning, unquenchable spark in the gray eye.
They reached the “Golden Key,” put up the horse and gig, and walked to the station. There was a train in ten minutes. They each took a bowl of coffee and slice of bread, not at the station buffet where the tariff was aimed at the hurried traveler, but at the little café outside, where the small ill-paid world employed at a French station gets itself served for twenty centimes a time less than other people. Then Madeleine went with her certificate, her own and her father’s identity cards, and her hand full of small notes, to the booking-office.
“Two third-class privilege tickets to Schaexen Halte, and return, to see a wounded relative!”
The booking-clerk took the papers and looked at them.
“This is no good,” he muttered through his decayed teeth.
Madeleine, with all the contempt of the comparatively free and wealthy farmer’s daughter for the small railway official, and all the cunning of one who deals with beasts and the law, held her peace.
The booking-office clerk was in that category of age and infirmity which alone in those days could exempt a man from mobilization. He worked fifteen hours a day in a pigsty of an office, whose glazed wicket made a perpetual draught. He was easily flustered.
“You asked for two privilege tickets to go and see a wounded relative in hospital.”
“That is what I said!”
“This certificate is incomplete!”
Madeleine said never a word, but leaned calmly on the ledge of the wicket, making herself lookas stupid as she could, by letting her lower lip droop. Behind her a queue was forming. Already there were cries of: “Come on!” “The train goes in five minutes,” and a wag, “They are making a film for the cinema!”
Tears of exasperation came into the little man’s eyes and his hand began to tremble. He stamped his foot.
“Write the name of the relative you are going to visit.”
“I have no pen.”
Men were hammering on the partition and women were saying, “Are we going to miss the train in addition to all our other miseries?”
The booking-office clerk flung his hairy crossed-nibbed pen at Madeleine. She took it, and wrote in the margin of Blanquart’s certificate the name of her dead brother, carefully using the Flemish script, which the railway people, mainly pure French, could not read. The paper was seized; the cards of identity, the privilege tickets, the change were thrust into her hands. She moved away, counting her change and smiling a very little to herself, and giving just a glance each to the English military policeman and the French gendarme at the platform entrance, both amusedspectators of the scene. Behind her, the booking-office clerk kept chewing over the words “sacred peasants,” “swine’s luck,” and other expressions of feeling, as he jabbed the date on tickets and served them in frenzied haste to the crowd that besieged his wicket.
On the wooden benches of the third-class compartment old Vanderlynden and Madeleine found many an acquaintance. There were cries of: “How goes it, Madeleine?” “Jerome, what are you jolly-well doing here, since when did you live St. Omer way?”
* * * *
Madeleine, who had foreseen this contingency, nudged her father, and replied for both:
“We have a little business to attend to,” having made up her mind that no one would guess what it was. She was right. Thus she set running the right stream of vague gossip. For weeks after, the news ran through all the surrounding communes, and flowed back to Hondebecq, that she and her father had been to St. Omer by train. It circulated from the inn of “Lion of Flanders” to the restaurant “The Three Crown-pieces,” even descended to mere estaminets like the “Return from the Congo” and the “BraveSapeur-Pompier.” No one could make it out. Victor Dequidt soon rejoined his regiment, and if he mentioned the young baron, no one except Madeleine was curious enough to ask which hospital he had gone to. Nor did anyone know of Madeleine’s particular interest in him. At last, when the tale got to the café-restaurant “de la Gare et de Commerce,” one of the gaziers or bullock merchants who used that more business quarter of the village was able to propound a theory. There was an English Forage Officer at St. Omer, and he had his depot just exactly at Naes’ farm, by the new sidings the English had had to make at Schaexen Halte for their hospital, so as to be out of the way of the bombing. No doubt old Vanderlynden had worked the trick all right with that officer (who was buying large quantities), and done well out of it. The certificate of having mobilized relatives that Blanquart had given in such a hurry (and which, of course, was known through Cécile and the other school-children), might be on account of Marcel Vanderlynden, or might be merely a blind. The original paper on which Madeleine had written her brother’s name remained in the archives of thestation until all were burnt in the bombardment of December, 1917.
* * * *
Descending at Schaexen Halte, Madeleine and her father made their way to the block of white marquees and tents that almost filled the manor pasture of Naes’ farm. In spite of the fresh air, the smell of anæsthetics and disinfectants hung over the duck-board paths and cindered drives, and mingled with the odor of cooking maconochie and the smoke of a giant incinerator that, never quenched, burned the daily load of discarded clothing and bandages, filthy with human refuse and trench mud. Near by, in the corner where Naes used to grow his maize, was a small neat cemetery of little mounds with inscribed wooden crosses, destined to grow with the years into a bigger area than the hospital and the sidings together, until lawyers had to argue out the compensation due to Naes for the expropriation. At this point luck deserted Madeleine, for no sooner had she and her father got into conversation with an orderly, than up rolled a convoy of a dozen ambulances, out ran all the available orderlies, and the whole place hummed like a railway station. There was no getting an answerto a question, and the pair were obliged to step into the nearest tent to avoid being run over. They found themselves, in the peculiar half light of such places, before a wooden table at which a sergeant was writing hurriedly. At Madeleine’s question he called over his shoulder:
“What about these civilians, sir, are they allowed?”
A young doctor came in from somewhere behind, buckling on a belt. He spoke kindly in French, but was obviously preoccupied. There had been some French casualties in the hospital, he thought, but it had not been his tour of duty, and they had been passed on at once.
“Besides,” he added, “all next-of-kin are informed if it is a serious case, and you will soon hear for certain.”
Aware of the truth of this, and of her false position, Madeleine did not press the matter. She knew the English were queer about such things. So were the French, but she understood their sort of queerness and sympathized with it, not the English sort.
The officer and sergeant went outside, and began examining, questioning, listing, sorting the long line of stretchers, each with its pale, patientface above dirty blankets, a line that grew faster than it could be dealt with. Madeleine drew her father outside and sent him off to the halte on the railway, to drink a glass of beer. She herself pried about among tent-pegs and ropes, canvas flaps and damp twilight. She managed to get into one big tent with iron beds in rows, and was going from one to the other when she was stopped by a girl of her own age, in the ugly gray and red uniform and beautiful white coif of English nurses. The girl said:
“Défendu!” She spoke with a queer accent.
Madeleine had a flash of inspiration:
“I am looking for my fiancé, a French soldier,” she said in English. The girl’s eyes melted.
“I’m so sorry, there are no French here, all gone!” She called an orderly to “show the lady out!”
Madeleine tried to question him, but all she got was: “Straight down the cinder track you’ll find the road!” and “Now then, mum, get on, ’ow the ’ell am I to evacuate these bloody blessays with you in the gangway. ’Tisn’t decent, besides!”
She made a détour and tried once more, but only once. She pushed her way into a tent behind some screens, and peeping over, saw a sergeant-major, followed by bearers with a stretcher covered by a Union Jack. They put it on the iron table, lifted the flag and began fetching water, unbinding and washing the helpless thing. She slipped away behind the screens unnoticed. She tried no more. She did not connect the dead body with Georges. She could not imagine him dead. But it was unlucky. Deep down some superstition was touched.
* * * *
She rejoined her father, and they caught a train that got back to Hazebrouck at four. Suddenly she wished to be alone, felt a necessity for a moment to gather herself for the next stroke, as it were. Her father had not said a word since the hospital, but she wanted him to go away. She sat in the salle d’attente and sent him for the horse and gig. She stared in front of her at the gathering shadows, between the sand-bagged windows. She heard the feet of the old horse, the rattle of the gig-wheels. Then suddenly her father appeared with Lieutenant Skene. She had not thought of him, but she thought fast enough now. Quickly, using the word “fiancé” for Georges, she explained her plight. He was thesame well-brought-up, handy, decorous young officer. In a moment he had broken into the Railway Transport Office, pushed aside the corporal, possessed himself of the telephone and was trying to get something definite from the hospital as to Georges’ destination after leaving the place. He came back disappointed; they could not trace the name.
Meantime, the fighting half of her spirit had got its breath, and cutting short his apologies, she went rapidly on to the next thing. Could he get her a lift in a car or lorry to the English base to which alone, so he said, casualties passing through English clearing-stations would go? In a moment she saw her mistake, she had asked too much, had run across some inexplicable—to her, unreasonable, prejudice in the young officer’s mind. She knew well enough that it was forbidden for civilians to travel in British vehicles, but had counted hastily on his position as an officer and her powers of persuasion. He began to use commonplaces, to inquire how she was getting on with the troops at the farm. Briefly, tartly, she replied she must be getting home, and rose to go. She did not bother about the look of concern on his face, but turning to say good-byefrom the gig, as it got slowly in motion, she reflected that it was foolish to throw away possible friends and their help, and called to him, “Come and see us soon.” He made a gesture and she accepted the fact that he was rather taken with her. He would be.
Driving home in the twilight, however, she had only one thought—rather one feeling. This war had dealt her a blow. She admitted that, on the day’s doings, she was worsted. Was she going to give in? Not she! Silent beside her father, up the road between the silent fields, one process only was going on in her. A hardening, a storing-up of strength. Done? She was only just beginning!
* * * *
She had plenty of time for reflection as the winter wore on. Madame la Baronne did not send down to the farm for anything special enough to be made a pretext for a visit to the château. Moreover, though she longed to go and ask boldly what had happened to Georges, and was only prevented by a sure knowledge of his resentment if she exposed herself and him in that way, yet she was able to tell herself with confidence that if the very worst had happened, it wouldhave got known—would have filtered out through the servants, through Masses announced in church, through mourning worn by the Baron and Madame. But there were no rumors, no horror-stricken whispers, no sign of black in Madame’s dress or in what the Baron called his “sports” (indicating cloths of material that meant to be Scotch tweed, color meant to be khaki, cut meant to be that of an English gentleman out shooting—but which failed at all points, as Frenchmen’s clothes so often do). So far, so good.
There existed in Madeleine, as in so many women of those days, the queerest contradiction. Fearing daily and desperately the very worst—death to their loved man—they never could believe in it happening, often even when it did actually happen, as was usual in those years. Relieved, respited at least from the major anxiety—for Georges must be in hospital or depot somewhere, and out of the fighting, Madeleine began to be a prey to a lesser—to know what had happened to him? which led her curiosity to explore the unknown at least once a day.
* * * *
Meanwhile, the war that had dealt her that private blow was gentle with her. The Englishkept on increasing. Seldom was the farm without its happy-go-lucky khaki crowd, whose slang, mixed with Indian words learned from old regular soldiers, and cheerful attempts at anglicized French phrases, Madeleine learned and used, as she learned the decorous politeness of the older officers, the shy good humor of the younger ones. Many a good sum did Blanquart pay her for billeting, many a neat bill did she receipt for anxious Mess Presidents. It was a queer education for a girl of her sort. At the convent school she had committed to memory certain facts about England and its people, not because they interested her, but because she soon discovered that it was easier to do lessons than to be punished for not doing them, and because her scheming mind knew by practice, if not by theory, that knowledge is power. And now she was having an object-lesson in very deed.
All the communes lying close to the line, whose population had been decimated by general mobilization, were being re-peopled by English-speaking men and women, in billets and horselines, rest-camp and hospitals, aerodromes and manœuver grounds. Night after night she heard the winter darkness atremble with traffic on the road, andlearned to know it as the sound of “caterpillars” (which she took to be the name of some new kind of road engine, and was not wrong) bringing up guns and yet more guns. This was interesting, comforting, profitable, there were no dull hours, no sense of danger, and plenty of money to be made. But it had an indirect effect which Madeleine saw clearly enough, if she did not trace the connection very closely. The more ships were torpedoed by German submarines, the fewer ships there were. The more English there were, the more ships were wanted. Therefore the still fewer ships to import foodstuffs. Therefore appeals from deputies, maires, publicists, parliamentarians of all sorts, praising, cajoling, inciting the “honest peasants” to grow more and more food. The greater waxed the importance of the question, the more the endless bargaining and speculating to which she and her father, instinctively prone, needed little encouragement.
Jerome Vanderlynden and all his sort—all backed up by wives and daughters more or less like Madeleine—hung on to their produce for better and better prices. Subsidies had to be granted, taxes eased, bounties promised, facilities given. Then they would go on and grow somemore—and then hang out again for greater and greater benefits. Beet, haricots, potatoes, wheat, barley, oats, all served their turn. Flax doubled in price, and doubled again. Hops were worth their weight in gold. Chicory had to be the object of special legislation. The farmers learned slowly, but surely. There was no brisk, open “business as usual” propaganda—and no need for it. The dour old men, and quiet, careful women and girls, were not likely to miss the opportunity. The atmosphere was right. If death and disaster come to-morrow—“gather ye rosebuds while ye may.” Gathering rosy thousand-franc notes is even better. And who would blame an old man with one son dead and one a prisoner, with his barn full of English soldiers who smoked pipes and set lighted candles among the straw as they wrote home, not to mention the ever-present possibility of shells—like all the farms Armentières way—or bombs—like all those toward St. Omer.
* * * *
As a side issue, the social position of the peasant farmer began to improve. He had been accustomed to brief spells of flattery at election times—not to the wave of adulation that now engulfed him. He began to look the whole world in theface, and fear not any man. But many a man began, if not to fear him, at least to seek his good offices. Besides all the politicians, the contractors, the endless train of semi-public opportunists the War had created, the easy-going world of retired middle-aged people that are to be found in every French Department, suddenly discovered that the only way to remain easy-going was to get the farmer to befriend them. Everything from coals to chicken meal, from bread to cotton was being rationed. That facile plenty which is the basis of the French provincial middle class was threatened. Thus, as 1916 advanced, and the long sordid epic of Verdun began to string out its desperate incidents, the Baron Louis d’Archeville, walking round his shooting with the air of a child gazing at a birthday cake it has been forbidden to touch, bowler hat, “sports,” camp-stool, all complete, stumped over the pavement of the yard, and found Madeleine putting her week’s washing through the portable wringer.
Having it in his mind to ask for wooden logs, eggs, ham, and anthracite, he naturally began:
“Ah, good day, Madeleine, pretty as ever!”
“Good day, Monsieur le Baron.”
“And this brave Jerome, he goes well? A glassof beer? I shall not say no!” He sat down on a wheelbarrow and waited for her to call her father.
Old Jerome came at Madeleine’s cry of “Papa, kom ben t’haus!” from picking over his seed potatoes.
Madeleine, who wanted the men out of the way, let it pass for politeness that she took the carafe of beer and two hastily washed glasses into the kitchen, swabbed the table and invited the Baron to place himself. She went back to her wringer, leaving the door into the scullery open. One never knew. She had kept her secret in her heart ever since her visit to the English hospital. She had no news, and had been able to think of no new way of getting even with the War, but she had forgotten nothing, forgiven nothing, renounced nothing.
Old Jerome, who, even a year before, would have stood in the Baron’s presence until told to be seated, now sat down beside his landlord without apology.
The Baron did not remark on this, but said: “Then, you have your farm all full of English?”
“They do damage enormously.”
“Very likely, but you have the right to be paid!”
“They pay, but they do damage all the same.”
Old Jerome was not going to let go a possible advantage.
The Baron, whose feelings against the English had been cool from 1870 until Fashoda, then violent until the idea of the Entente and its meaning had filtered into his unreceptive mind, had just been reading propagandist literature, “The English Effort,” and so forth, designed for just such as he. Expanding with the new ideas he had received, he reviewed the situation at some length, dwelling on England’s immense resources of material, untouched reserves of men, all that cheerful unknown which was so comforting in face of unpleasant known facts of the growing wastage of France.
Jerome added one remark born of the unaccustomed way money was now handed about. “Besides, they are rich!” which led the Baron on again, along the path pointed out by yet another pamphlet he had been reading, on the subject of the new war loan.
Much of the verbiage and all the argument was lost on old Jerome. He was thinking of his sonsand poured out another glass for himself and the Baron. “It’s a grievous business, this war,” he sighed. “You must feel that as much as I.”
The Baron did not miss the allusion, blinked a moment, for what is one to say to a man who has two sons, one of whom is dead and forever gone, and the other a prisoner, with uncertain prospects. He concluded that the most comforting thing was to talk of his own son. Besides, he preferred to.
“At last we have news of Georges. He has written to us, you will never divine from whence!”
He waited a moment, but old Jerome was not good at guessing. In the scullery the wringer was no longer creaking as it turned, and the splashing of water and the soft flop of the clothes into the tin pail had ceased.
“He has written from Monte Carlo. It seems that the army surgeons found he was making himself a bad chest, and sent him to the south for convalescence. He is being marked inapt for service, but he still wishes to do his part, and they will put him in this French Mission with the English Army as Officer-Interpreter. One day or another, we may see him here, if he is attached to a division that passes this way.”
In the scullery Madeleine was standing over the wringer, allowing herself to smile ever so little. Within her breast her blood was dancing to the tune “I knew it, I knew it!” Now, that terribly serious Georges of the day of mobilization that she did not understand and for whom she could do nothing would be changed back to the gay Georges (Monte Carlo, she had heard him speak of it, could see and hear him doing so now) that she did understand, and who would want her. The Baron was talking of other things now, of how the French would take it easy, and how the English would come in and finish the War. It was quite their turn. One had made sufficient sacrifices. Could Jerome let him have—this, that, and the other? She paid little heed. Her father bargained a bit, then acquiesced. She thought it fitting, when the Baron rose to go, to come to the door of the kitchen and say:
“Au revoir, Monsieur le Baron.”
“Au revoir, Madeleine, remain young and pretty, it is all one asks of you!”
* * * *
She on her side asked little. She would get Georges back. She was sure now. The days might pass, nothing happen, no news come, butshe was sure, sure as though he had written giving the date of his arrival.
Spring came—never more beautiful than in Flanders, where beauty can only exist on a basis of utility. It came shyly, a northern spring. The sodden grayness of the marshland winter on flat hedgeless fields gave way to cold and fitful sunshine that shone on rich young green everywhere, while the black dripping leaves of the elms in the dank pastures seemed blurred in vapor, that, upon examination, proved to be but a profusion of tiny light-colored buds. And then something happened. It began happening so far away and so high up among the principalities and powers of this world that it was weeks before Madeleine felt its effects.
As the horrors of Verdun dragged on, the wastage that was obvious to so mediocre an observer as the Baron began to be acutely felt at the more sensitive Great Head-quarters. So much so that Great Head-quarters of France insisted to British Great Head-quarters that something must be done. British Great Head-quarters, well groomed, well mannered, had a long way then still to go before it should shake off its slightly patronizing attitude towards its ally. It merelysaid that something should be done when it was ready. Great Head-quarters of France, doubting when that time would come to a people who had to be so well groomed and well mannered, insisted still harder. British Great Head-quarters replied good-humoredly, “Oh, very well then!” It became known that there was to be a British offensive in the Somme. Gigantic rearrangements were necessary, and among the million schemes, orders and moves, was the establishment of Corp Head-quarters at Hondebecq. This necessitated a lot of room, and the mere fighting troops had to be pushed farther out. Thus Madeleine, one fine morning early in March, only just saved herself from dropping a saucepan of boiling soup. An officer-interpreter, in the uniform of the French Mission, had ridden into the yard. She knew the uniform well, had seen many such a one, but since the Baron’s last visit it meant to her only one person. Her emotion, kept well under, was gone in a flash. She saw directly, as the officer dismounted, it was not Georges. He came from the new Corps Head-quarters to say that no more infantry would be billeted at the farm. Instead, she would be expected to house the Corps Salvage Officer.
Madeleine knew little and cared less as to whatthis might mean, except as it affected the work of the farm. She waited, and in a few days an elderly gentleman appeared who had the tall angular figure, whiskers, and prominent teeth of French caricatures of English people of the nineteenth century. With him came a gig, a motor-car, three riding horses, servant, groom, chauffeur and sundry dogs. He surveyed the room offered him coolly enough, had some alterations made in the position of bed and washstand, but warmed in his manner at once when he discovered, in the course of a few hours, that Madeleine could speak really resourceful if slangy English, and understood about his cold bath. He had had such difficulty, he told her, and the French were so dirty. Madeleine smiled (for he had passed her estimate for accommodation and cooking without a murmur) and took him under her wing. There was something about him that she dimly associated with what her father might have been, in totally different circumstances—a mixture of helplessness and partiality to herself. She mended his bed-socks and filled his india-rubber hot-water bottle almost with affection. He on his side would often say words which she took for endearment, in what he conceived to be French—was lesstrouble than the ever-changing battalion messes, and paid, in the long run, nearly as much. She was glad to have the barns freed from everlasting fear of fire, and to get them empty before the summer. The space which the Salvage required she had Blanquart measure up, and charged at the rate laid down in the billeting regulations. It came to nearly as much as housing infantry.
* * * *
This old gentleman, by name Sir Montague Fryern, and his “salvage dump” were merely concrete evidence which slowly revealed to Madeleine what was going on. The idea of “salvage” had been imposed upon English fighting formations unwillingly, from somewhere high up and far off, some semi-political Olympus near Whitehall. Divisional and Corps Staffs knew better than to resist. They thought it silly and superfluous—the war was trouble enough, and already much too long and dangerous for the average regular soldier, without having to economize material as well. But, wise with eighteen months of such a war as they had never dreamed of, and hoped never to see again, they had found out that the way to deal with these mad ideas invented by people at home, was to acquiesce, and then toside-track them. So when pressed for the third time for reasons why they had not appointed a Salvage officer, the Corps Staff now functioning at Hondebecq looked at one another, and some one said jokingly, “Let’s make old Fryern do the job!”
The baronet had been almost a national joke. In 1914 dapper old gentlemen in London clubs had said:
“Heard about old Fryern?”
“No!”
“He’s joined up as a private in the R.A.M.C.”
Some one said it was to avoid commanding a battalion, some that it was to escape scandal or a writ, others that it was merely “just like old Fryern!” In the course of a year he had become notorious for prolonging officers’ convalescence with illicit drink, and the King, it was said, had insisted on his taking a commission. Too eccentric to be put in a responsible position, and insisting on not remaining in England, he had drifted about Divisional, and then Corps Head-quarters until this heaven-sent opportunity housed him in a suitable nook. A man of unexpected resource, no sooner had he understood what was required of him than he began to gather at the SpanishFarm the most miscellaneous collection of objects ever seen together since Rabelais compiled his immortal lists of omnium gatherum. A field-gun, a motor-car, other people’s servants, several animals, French school books, Bosch pamphlets, sewing machines, plows and tinned food; nothing came amiss to him. What good he did, no one could say. Little of the stuff was reissued and served the purpose of economy, but when Dignitaries from British Great Head-quarters came down to see Corps Head-quarters and said to its old friends: “I say, Charles, you were awfully slack about the Salvage Order, you know!” the old friends were able to answer:
“Well, we aren’t now; you come and see old Fryern’s dump after lunch—say about three!”
“What, old ‘Chops’ Fryern?”
“No other, I assure you!” and so on.
* * * *
It happened, only a week or so after Sir Montague’s arrival at the farm, that a lorry stopped in the yard. There was nothing unusual in that. They did so at all hours of the day and most of the night. The English, so wits said, fought on rubber tyres. Old Jerome, leaning on his hoe, type of primitive man drudging with his primitiveimplement to wring a subsistence from inscrutable Nature, often stood to watch these powerful, docile servants of a younger age, that could do the work of ten men and four horses in half an hour. He was doing so now, and Madeleine, if she thought about it at all, thought like this: “Poor old father, he’s making old bones; it’s the boys he misses,” when she saw Jerome drop his hoe and run to the lorry to help out a woman with a shawl over her head.
In another moment Madeleine had no doubt. It was her sister Marie from Laventie. In a moment she was out. The men on the lorry, with the queer, dumb, unexpected kindliness of the poorer Englishman, were handing down Emilienne, Marie’s little girl, in a sort of frozen stupor of cold and fright. Madeleine ran to take the child, while her father helped Marie, who seemed dazed, into the house. Round the kitchen stove, quickly stoked until the top shone red, Madeleine plied them with the inevitable coffee, and presently with slabs of staunch farm bread.
Jerome stood by, the mere helpless male in the face of calamity. It was he who said first:
“What is it, my girl?”
At first Marie could only say, “O, my God!” and rock herself. But presently, reviving under the influence of food and drink, and the still more potent surroundings of safety in that familiar, warm old kitchen, where she had grown up, began to tell of the daily increase in shelling and bombing. In her half-empty farm-house, with the glass long gone from its shuttered windows, and the machine-gun bullets in its walls, relics of the first engagement with the Germans in 1914, she had billeted some English Engineers. The sector had been quiet ever since Neuve Chapelle, a year before. Suddenly, as the English sat with her around the fire, the shell had come. It had fallen in the doorway of the farm and had flung half the house upon the soldiers. Marie, protected by the solid brick chimney-piece, as soon as she got her breath, had scrambled under the débris to the room where Emilienne was crying to her. The door was jammed by a fallen beam. Some soldiers had run from a neighboring billet, had broken in the door and got the child out. How they had all tramped up the road, shells ahead, shells behind, shells falling each side, with the sky red and the air rocking with the English artillery retaliation, she could not tell. At last, at a dump of some sort the Engineers had put her ona lorry that had taken her to Strazeele. Farther than that they could not go; it was the limit of their Corps area. Marie and Madeleine had been educated by the past eighteen months, and knew better than to expect a lorry to go outside its Corps area. So Marie had had to walk, with the child in her arms, to Caestre, where she had found, thank God! plenty of lorries running back from railhead. On hearing her tale, an officer had allowed her to get into one that was going to Hondebecq, and she had easily persuaded the driver to go as far as Spanish Farm.
At this point there was a tap on the door, which was opened by a khaki-clad figure, with a sheepish face and unmistakable Cockney accent.
“Beg parding, mum, but ’ows yer little gal?”
“Give them something to take, they had been so——” she used the untranslatable word “gentil,” for which “decent” is perhaps the nearest equivalent. But Marie meant what the word perhaps originally meant—human as against inhuman, civilized as against barbarous.
Madeleine took out mugs of coffee and rum, and was rewarded by a cheerful, “Thank ye, kindly, miss, and here’s the very best!”
Madeleine came back, stepping softly. Emilienne had sunk into a deep, heavy sleep, interrupted by twitching and muttering, in the chimney corner. Giving her a glance, Madeleine clasped her hands.
“O Marie, all your things! The brass bedstead, the beer glasses, the clock!”
Marie shook her head, tears ran down her face.
Above her, old Jerome, caring little for women’s fallals, muttered: “Thank God, the little one was spared!”
Like all other incidents of the War, there it was. Shells fell, something was destroyed. One went on as well as one could. That was the history of the past eighteen months, was to be the history of another two years and a half—just a perpetual narrow margin of human survival over all the disasters humanity could bring upon itself. Not that the Vanderlyndens took the large impersonal view. Marie and Emilienne slept most of that day. The next, they started in to work, in their varying capacities. The first thing Marie did was to spend a day, bribing lorry drivers and cajoling officers, to get back to Laventie and see what was left. The beetroot had been sold, the potatoes had gone with the horse and cart to Aunt Delobeau’s near Bailleul, because for some timeMarie had been unable to keep a man on the farm, and had worked it with such village women as had been stranded like herself by general mobilization, the Government being only too glad to leave them there, to cultivate almost under machine-gun fire, as long as they would. But since the fatal night, the gendarmerie had become nervous of the place, though the actual shelling had ceased. They would not allow her to sow the ground, and were moving the powers that watch over France to obtain an order of general evacuation of the commune, which they no longer desired to patrol. With difficulty she obtained permission to fetch away the seed and one or two agricultural implements. The dwelling-house had burnt out, for the split stove had flung its flaming coals on thatch and beams. She was spared the spectacle of inevitable looting by Allies, and on returning to the Spanish Farm, settled down into the position she had left, in 1910, to be married.
Outwardly, Madeleine acquiesced. Marie was the elder sister—eldest child, in fact—and had all the prestige of a married woman. She was also more purely peasant than Madeleine and easily jealous of her rights. Madeleine, since she hadhad Georges, had ceased to envy her sister. Now, losing Georges, she lost her secret comfort, and any satisfaction she may have drawn from being mistress of the house, brains of the farm. But Madeleine by long brooding on her secret fixed idea—Georges—had come to that point at which she accepted these outward superficial happenings, estimating their importance solely by the standard of that Fixed Idea. At first she was unable to see how the advent of Marie and Emilienne affected her reconquest of Georges.
* * * *
She was soon to learn.
Marie, for a few days preoccupied with herself, startled by what had happened, and rather grateful for home and shelter, soon emerged from that numbed state which, medically the result of concussion, is one of the first universal symptoms of shell-shock. She began to be masterful and critical of Madeleine’s former management. She had run two messes for the Engineers in her small Lys valley house, with far less scope than the Spanish Farm afforded. Madeleine pointed out that she had done all that, and would have continued but for movements of troops over which she had no control. Marie agreed, sighing forthe busy days when she had cooked and done for three officers, and scores of hungry men, just out or just going into the trenches, to whom Emilienne had sold chocolate, cigarettes, writing paper and candles to great advantage. Perhaps also she was jealous of Madeleine, of the younger girl’s smarter looks, less peasant-like and matronly than her own, of her untouched good luck during the long anxiety of the war, for, like all the world, Marie knew nothing of the secret about Georges. But things kept happening. Presently the right thing happened.
Podevin, who kept the “Lion of Flanders” inn, on the Grand’ Place of Hondebecq, gave up. He had made money, of course, especially latterly since the Corps Head-quarters had been in the village, and had enabled him to open a dining-room for officers. But, like so many, he had lost his only son at Verdun, and, heartbroken, cared no longer even to amass wealth. The long, biscuit-colored house, with its two storeys and old steep-tiled roof was for sale. Marie saw the notice and told Madeleine at once:
“There’s your chance!”
Madeleine took her habitual half-minute of reflection, trying this new idea against her FixedIdea. They suited marvellously. Why had she not thought of it before? (The true answer was that she was not sufficiently imaginative.) She saw now that in taking the “Lion of Flanders” she would be placing herself exactly where Georges must come if his division were moved this way, which was sure to happen sooner or later. And the whole thing was so natural that he would never be able to make her the one reproach she feared so much—of running after him and making their liaison obvious.
The two women went to see Podevin together, before they told old Jerome. Podevin could only say, “I’ve lost my son—let me alone!”
They fetched in Blanquart, as was usual in such cases. The grizzled schoolmaster arranged it. Madeleine pretended to be shocked at the price, standing in Blanquart’s little parlor, with the sound of the school classes grinding out the morning lesson like some gigantic gramophone gone mad, just through the wall. But secretly she nudged Marie. The worst was over. The price named was well within what she kept about her in the house in notes. She would not have to draw on the savings bank at Hazebrouck. That made all the difference in tackling herfather. But when the two daughters broached the subject that evening, he acquiesced. It would be a good business, he said. Madeleine, who had never forgotten how he had, all unasked, fetched Lieutenant Skene to help her on the day of the visit to the hospital, wondered how much her father guessed of her secret. Something, surely. But it was just the sort of subject on which neither of them could speak to each other. So all she said was, “You know, you’re a good father!”
* * * *
The War, that had wounded her so deeply where she was most vulnerable, was kind to her in little things. No sooner was she installed in the “Lion of Flanders,” and had got together some three or four village women who had young families or other domestic ties that had made them anxious to get any work they could within a hundred yards of their doors, while forbidding them to go out for the day to the farms that needed them, than Corps Head-quarters arranged a Horse Show, a form of amusement that became very fashionable in the B.E.F. as the years went on. Officially, it was inaugurated to keep drivers and orderlies up to their work. Subconsciously itindulged that national failing, love of horses and open air, so curious in a town-bred nation. Madeleine, of course, paid no more heed to this than she did to any other of the curious foibles of those incomprehensible English, until she found that most of the officers of three divisions would be in the village nearly all day for this function, many of them ten miles from their own messes, and glad enough to find a decent meal. She laid her plans and purchased wisely and well. Then, only two days before the festival, Sir Montague offered to take her to the show. She thought for half a minute, and accepted, almost jubilantly.
* * * *
She was feeling the long strain, however much she concealed it with silent composure. And, as with all women in her particular “irregular” position, she had begun to hug the golden illusion that goes with it, and makes it for some so possible to bear. She had lost Georges; he was gone from her side, in spite of her, pulled away by something he held dearer. He had not come back, not written. She could not, dare not if she could, go or write to him. But she still believed, as all such women do, “Oh, if I could only see him!” She still nourished that pathetic faith, still believed that if only she could stand face to face with him, things would be again as they had been. There was, however, that terrible danger haunting the attempt to get face to face with him. He might think or feel she was following him. That, she knew, would be fatal. In Sir Montague, therefore, she saw a heaven-sent angel. Too old, too cranky, too well known (as she had soon discovered) to be the object of scandal regarding her, he would take her under his wing and she would be at the Horse Show, to be seen. Georges, if he were there, would see her. That was the safest. Once he saw her she had perfect confidence in herself. She would know instinctively, would not look, not she. But she would will it, and he would have to come. She recognized clearly enough now, how simply, passively, unconsciously she had made their first hour alone together, when she had given herself, in the shelter at the Kruysabel. She had only to do it again. This also comforted her, for she was not original. She accepted Sir Montague’s invitation graciously, and took care to look her best on the day.
* * * *
The day came, and she was ready. Radiant with health, wishing to be dressed in her ownway, in a mixture of country primness and the English style she secretly admired (coat and skirt and all-weather hat), she had compromised at the skirt of her pigeon-gray saxony costume, a cream-colored blouse that left her elbows and neck bare, with nothing on her head but her own crisp dark hair. Thus adorned, she esteemed herself as nearly a lady (i.e. a person who does no work) as she had any need to be, while not too far removed from the mistress of the “Lion of Flanders.”
Before Sir Montague came to fetch her, as she was perfecting her arrangements at her restaurant, Lieutenant Skene appeared with a gunner officer she did not like, who was obviously joking about her. She greeted her friend kindly, in English, and ignored the other. She was flattered to see that the lieutenant was evidently taking her part, trying to make the other behave, looking very sheepish and funny as he clumsily concealed his obvious feeling for her. They reserved a table and went away. Sir Montague was punctual and she stepped up into the gig with the ease of one who has always had to use her limbs. She was elated. Men looked after her. The sun shone. In the queer gauche Flemish springtime, buds and shoots hung stiffly in thestill air like heraldic emblems. A band was playing, people were moving about. Everything whipped her excitement. They drove on to Verbaere’s big pasture, behind the mill, and put the gig with the other vehicles, all parked and stewarded as on an English race-course. Sir Montague had a way of arching his elbow, twirling his whip, and fetching a great circle before he brought his conveyance to a standstill that caused, she noticed, much laughter, and the beginnings of a cheer.
He handed her into a rough enclosure, where English nurses in gray and red and white coifs, Canadian nurses in blue and scarlet, Australian sisters in gray-brown, fine big girls in their mannish hats, mixed with a sprinkling of the wives of local maires and notaries, small French officialdom and business circles. Some of these ignored Madeleine, perhaps did not know her, but the brewer’s wife from the next village, invited by the A.S.C. colonel billeted on her, gave a cheery “Good day, Madeleine,” that would have put anyone at ease. But Madeleine was already at her ease. She saw she was getting more attention than any other woman on the ground. She had dressed just right, awakened none of thesubmerged sensibilities of those queer English. That and a glance at the lovely horses, shining, prancing, bobbing head and floating tail—for she loved fine animals—was all she cared to notice before she settled herself, eyes straight to the front, and put out all her feelers for the one purpose for which she had come. Poor Madeleine, no one had bothered to tell her that there were already over fifty English divisions in France, and among the men before her she stood one chance in seventeen of finding Georges. They passed about her, Easthamptons, Lincolns, Norfolks, A.S.C., R.A.M.C., R.A.F., gunners, Engineers, French Mission in blue and strawberry, wonderful staff people, in khaki and leather so perfect that it outshone all the bright colors of the French. She took it all in, tried to sort it out, mused over it, especially the name “Lincoln,” which, like all French people, she was incapable of pronouncing. She could form no idea of which group was the likeliest to be Georges’, glanced over the face and figures of the French Mission officers. More than any close examination, her instinct told her, Georges was not there. A sort of numbness came over her, she felt it almost like a physical sensation. It seemed to be in her legs.She fought against it, would not give in to it. Then, all of a sudden, too suddenly for her strong, resolute, unimaginative nature, she did give in.
The corps officials had hardly begun judging the riding-horses when she slipped from her place, round behind the stand, out between the wagon-teams, waiting their turn, with cunning drivers of all arms surreptitiously dabbing metal and leather with handkerchiefs, looking stolidly over the exhibits they belonged to, speaking gently to them in low voices. She found a well-known gap in the hedge and got through into the back lane that ran towards Verbaere’s mill. Up this, picking her way in the mud to save her best boots, she came into the village by the yard of the “Lion of Flanders.” The numbness was gone from her legs. Instead, her pulse beat in her temples so loud that she hardly heard the band playing “Watch your Step,” and the cheering as the riding-horses, classed by the judges, filed round the ring, and out.
* * * *
She let herself into the “Lion of Flanders” by the back door, which she shut with a clang. She looked magnificent and just a bit desperate, so that, of her waiting-women, one said to another,“She’s in fine fettle this morning, our young patronne!” But she was not the woman to do the more ordinary desperate things. No—yes. A stitch of her close-sewn self-control had parted. She was not going to stand it. Her mental attitude contained nothing of an English suffragette’s logical, theoretical stand upon “rights.” Her pride was hurt. Georges was Georges, dearer than life, but there now glimmered behind him something dearer than that—her dignity, what was due to her—Herself, of course, in reality.
She swept a glance round the neat, well-laid tables, sniffed the redolent preparation of the kitchen. She—dragged about behind a man’s shadow that ever eluded her! Of course, her feeling was incoherent, ill-defined, just a sense of resentment against something she did not trouble to identify, but it was there. Reckless, she went down the stone steps into the cellar. Among the casks of weak beer and carefully “lengthened” wine she had taken over from Podevin, was a bottle marked “Chambertin,” which she recognized as an oversight. It was good stuff. She had hidden it with the English Expeditionary Force canteen whisky and the rum she had got out of Sir Montague. Now her thought was,“They shan’t have it, those English!” She took it up, glanced at the coating of the bottle neck, and mounted the stairs with it.
“Berthe,” she cried—she had borrowed the girl from the farm for the day—“four glasses and some bread!”
Putting on her black alpaca apron, she pulled the cork, holding the bottle steady with a firm wrist, and poured out. Raising her glass, she said to them: “I give you that!” and drank amid a murmur of “Thank you, Madeleine.” Outside the services of the Church, the only ceremonial she had ever been taught to observe was connected with good wine. The Chambertin lived up to her gesture, with its broad, almost coarse flavor, a legend among the frugal Flemish at their rare feasts. Outwardly, what she did was just a bit of unexpected generosity toward four employees who could do with a heartening for the twelve hours’ hard work that lay ahead of them, from which she intended to draw handsome profit. Within her heart it was, unconsciously, perhaps, almost a sacramental act, the opening of a new life. The blood in her was beating out the time, “I won’t stand it any longer!”
* * * *
The square-footed beakers, of the sort which would be called “rummers” in England, were empty, the substantial finger-pieces munched and swallowed, before there came the sound of spurred boots on the cobbles and the clients began to arrive. First two Canadian majors with the Maire came to claim the table they had reserved, and found it kept for them, the coarse napkins starched, the heavy cutlery and glass in place, and Madeleine with her best smile and hardly a trace of accent asking: “What would you like for lunch?” at which the Maire stared. Behind them trooped others. The room was soon full, the glass windows clouded with steam, the noise of conversation and table-ware deafening.
Imperturbable, Madeleine moved among it. The waiting may have been amateur. The cooking was thorough in the solid Flemish fashion. At least, no one was left staring at an empty plate or glass. Madeleine, a smile for every one, and a glib English explanation for every difficulty, used the mental arithmetic she had learnt at the market, in calculating bills. Her clients went off with heightened color and laughing voices, amid trails of tobacco smoke. Manfully, Madeleine and her staff cleared the place, fed themselves andwashed up. They had only got the tables reset before that extraordinary meal “afternoon tea” was demanded of them. Madeleine was equal to the occasion. It might be a foolish custom, but it paid. And this merged into dinner, long and heavy as is the Flemish custom. Younger officers, and especially those down from the line, were getting boisterous, rude. She had to put up with many a clumsy joke, many a suggestion. She was too busy and too utterly unafraid to care. One thing did rather amuse her. At the table he had reserved for his party, the Lieutenant Skene was following her with his eyes and ears, and getting so cross at the treatment she was receiving. At length, just as it was all becoming too boisterous, and the younger officers were getting out of hand, suddenly, from the little private room that had been reserved for Brigadier-General Devlin and his friends, came the sound of a piano—the good piano she had got from the château. Not musical, and unwilling to spend time over such trifles, she was forced to stop and listen. It was Chopin, some one said. It had the most extraordinary effect. General Devlin and the officer who had been playing went away. The rest of the crowd in the big room went also, the rowdinessgone from them, subdued, seduced from their daily selves by the music. On Madeleine the effect was strongest. Wrought up by the events of the day and by sheer fatigue (she had been on her feet twelve hours), the lovely stuff, that could not act on her unreceptive spirit, antipathetic to it, merely saddened her. After another laborious wash up, she dismissed her helpers, locked the house and started for home. It was past midnight, and the day that had been so fine left a dark windy night, promising rain before morning. As she trod the pavé of the grand’route and the earth of the farm road, she felt miserable and beaten. It was easy enough to say, “I won’t stand it!” Like so many other people, she found it so difficult to do. How not to stand and what not to stand? Forget Georges? Could she? Would she if she could? Go and find him, and thus make him forget her? Which?
* * * *
The corps did not have a horse show every day, but the one just passed had been a good advertisement for the “Lion of Flanders,” and Madeleine began to do a quiet, regular business in luncheons and teas for the officers that incessantly circled round and about Corps Head-quarters. To be busy soothed her feeling of helplessness, and the necessity for this soothing kept her polite, skilful, attentive. Some weeks passed, and then again, far away, and high up, undreamed of by her, things began to happen.
The English offensive in the Somme, heralded as a great victory, had in reality made infinitesimal gains at the cost of enormous loss. The British Great Head-quarters, then still functioning in complete disunity with Great Head-quarters of France, and often in good-humored disregard of the advice given it, went on butting, like an obstinate ram, at the same place. This, though it surprised the Germans more than the most subtle strategy would have done, cost the lives of many a thousand English soldiers. It was necessary to economize and economize again. The reserve corps would have to disappear, the line northward be more sparsely held. Here the long chain of action and reaction touched Madeleine.
For two days she was feverishly busy, officers wanting meals at all hours in great numbers. On the third morning, as she came down in the blaze of July seven-o’clock weather, she found a long string of lorries, grinding and jolting, behind them officers’ servants with led horses, mess-carts,police. They went. A silence as of peace-time settled on the remote Flemish village, lost in the undulating fertile plateau between Dunkirk and Lille. Twenty kilometers eastward was the line, full of troops. Twenty kilometers west were the great manœuver areas where men learned to kill and not be killed more and more scientifically. At Hondebecq, nothing. It took nearly a week to convince Madeleine, who was interested in the more general aspects of the War. She was not really convinced until the Baron walked into her empty dining-room.
“Good day, Madeleine, you have lost all your clients.”
Looking up from her knitting, she said gravely:
“It seems so!” But secretly she now believed it. If it were not true he would not have come. He disliked the crowd of junior officers who joked about his beard.
What was to be done? Not retain an empty restaurant where no one ever came. She saw enough at home in the evenings to know that Marie was firmly settled in, and didn’t want her. The situation was beyond her. Her practical mind focussed on the immediate was baffled. Butthings went on happening and once again the long arm of chance touched her.
It was about a fortnight after Hondebecq had been plunged in its unnatural silence. She was going home in the long July twilight. She no longer waited to serve late dinners, her only customers being occasional passing troops during the day. No local people used the “Lion of Flanders,” it was essentially an English restaurant. She was stopped at the level-crossing by the evening train from Calais going southward. As the smoke and noise faded away, she ran into Blanquart, the schoolmaster and communal secretary, stumbling over the platform-edging, wiping his eyes. The sight of that familiar figure in tears gave her pause.