THE weary weeks passed by with their alternations of hopes and fears.
Martin, insignificant speck of blue and red, was in the Argonne.
Sergeant Bigourdin of the _Armée Territoriale_ was up in the north. The
history of their days is the history of the war which has yet to be
written; the story of their personal lives is identical with that of the
personal lives of the millions of men who have looked and are looking
Death always in the face, cut off as it were from their own souls by the
curtain of war.
Things went drearily at the Hôtel des Grottes. But little manhood
remained at Brantôme. Women worked in the fields and drove the carts and
kept the shops where so few things were sold. Félise busied herself in
the _fabrique_, her staff entirely composed of women. Fortinbras made a
pretence of managing the hotel to which for days together no travellers
came. No cars of pleasant motorists were unloaded at its door. Now and
then an elderly bagman in vain quest of orders sat in the solitary
_salle-à-manger_, and Fortinbras waited on him with urbane melancholy.
Thrown intimately together father and daughter grew nearer to each
other. They became companions, walking together on idle afternoons and
sitting on mild nights on the terrace, with the town twinkling
peacefully below them. They talked of many things. Fortinbras drew from
the rich store of his wisdom, Félise from her fund of practical
knowledge. There were times when she forgot the harrowing mystery of her
mother, and, only conscious of a great and yearning sympathy, unlocked
her heart and cried a little in close and comforting propinquity.
Together they read the letters from the trenches, all too short, all too
elusive in their brave cheeriness. The epistles of Martin and Bigourdin
were singularly alike. Each said much the same. They had not the
comforts of the Hôtel des Grottes. But what would you have? War was war.
They were in splendid health. They had enough to eat. They had had a
sharp tussle with the _Boches_ and many of their men were killed. But
victory in the end was certain. In the meanwhile they needed some warm
underclothes as the nights were growing cold; and would Félise enclose
some chocolate and packets of Bastos. Love to everybody and _Vive la
France!_
These letters Fortinbras would take to the Café de l’Univers and read to
the grey-headed remnant of the coterie, each of whom had a precisely
similar letter to read. The _Adjoint du Maire_ was the first to come
without a letter. He produced a telegram which was passed from hand to
hand in silence. He had come dry-eyed and brave, but when the telegram
reached him, after completing its round, he broke down.
“_C’est stupide!_ Forgive me, my friends. I am proud to have given my
son to my country. _Mais enfin_, he was my son—my only son. For the
first time I am glad that his mother is no longer living.” Then he
raised his head valiantly. “_Et toi_, Viriot—Lucien, how is he doing?”
Then some one heard of the death of Beuzot, the young professor at the
Ecole Normale.
At last, after a long interval of silence came disastrous news of
Bigourdin, lying seriously, perhaps mortally wounded in a hospital in a
little northern town. There followed days of anguish. Telegrams elicited
the information that he had been shot through the lung. Félise went
about her work with a pinched face.
In course of time a letter came from Madame Clothilde Robineau at
Chartres:
My Dear Niece:
Although your conduct towards me was ungrateful, I am actuated
by the teachings of Christianity in extending to you my
forgiveness, now that you are alone and unprotected. I hear from
a friend of the Abbé Duloup, a venerable priest who is
administering to the wounded the consolations of religion, that
your Uncle Gaspard is condemned to death. Christian duty and
family sentiment therefore make it essential that I should offer
you a home beneath my roof. You left it in a fit of anger
because I spoke of your father in terms of reprobation. But if
you had watched by the death-bed of your mother, my poor sister,
as I did, in the terrible garret in the Rue Maugrabine, you
would not judge me so harshly. Believe me, dear child, I have at
heart your welfare both material and spiritual. If you desire
guidance as to the conduct of the hotel I shall be pleased to
aid you with my experience.
Your affectionate Aunt,
Clothilde Robineau.
The frigid offer well meant according to the woman’s pale lights, Félise
scarcely heeded. Father or no father, uncle or no uncle, protector or no
protector, she was capable of conducting a score of hotels. The last
thing in the world she needed was the guidance of her Aunt Clothilde.
Save for one phrase in the letter she would have written an immediate
though respectful refusal and thought nothing further of the matter. But
that one phrase flashed through her brain. Her mother had died in the
Rue Maugrabine. They had told her she had died in hospital. Things
hitherto bafflingly dark to her became clear—on one awful, tragic
hypothesis. She shook with the terror of it.
It was the only communication the postman had brought that late
afternoon. She stood in the vestibule to read it. Fortinbras engaged in
the bureau over some simple accounts looked up by chance and saw her
staring at the letter with great open eyes, her lips apart, her bosom
heaving. He rose swiftly, and hurrying through the side door came to her
side.
“My God! Not bad news?”
She handed him the letter. He read, his mind not grasping at once that
which to her was essential.
“The priests are exaggerating. And as for the proposal——”
“The Rue Maugrabine,” said Félise.
He drew the quick breath of sudden realisation, and for a long time they
stood silent, looking into each other’s eyes. At last she spoke, deadly
white:
“That woman I saw—who opened the door for me—was my mother.”
She had pierced to the truth. No subterfuge he could invent had power to
veil it. He made a sad gesture of admission.
“Why did you hide it from me?” she asked.
“You had a beautiful ideal, my child, and it would have been a crime to
tear it away.”
She held herself very erect—there was steel in the small body—and
advanced a step or so towards him, her dark eyes fearless.
“You know what you gave me to understand when I saw her?”
“Yes, my child,” said Fortinbras.
“You also were an ideal.”
He smiled. “You loved me tenderly, but I was not in your calendar of
saints, my dear.”
She mastered herself, swallowing a sob, but the tears rolled down her
cheeks.
“You are now,” she said.
He laughed uncertainly. “A poor old sinner of a saint,” he said, and
gathered her to him.
And later, in the salon, before the fire, for the autumn was damp and
cold, he told her the cheerless story of his life, concealing nothing,
putting the facts before her so that she could judge. She sat on the
rug, her arm about his knee. She felt very tired, as though some part of
her had bled to death. But a new wonder filled her heart. In a way she
had been prepared for the discovery. In her talks with her uncle and
with Martin she had been keen to mark a strange disingenuousness. She
had accused them of conspiracy. They were concealing something; what,
she knew not; but a cloud had rested on her mother’s memory. If, on that
disastrous evening, the frowsy woman of the Rue Maugrabine had revealed
herself as her mother, her soul would have received a shock from which
recovery might have been difficult. Now the shock had not only been
mitigated by months of torturing doubt, but was compensated by the
thrill of her father’s sacrifice.
When he had ended, she turned and wept and knelt before him, crying for
forgiveness, calling him all manner of foolish names.
He said, stroking her dark hair: “I am only a poor old bankrupt
_Marchand de Bonheur_!”
“You will be _Marchand de Bonheur_ to the end,” she said, and with total
want of logical relevance she added: “See what happiness you have
brought me to-night.”
“At any rate, my dear,” said he, “we have found each other at last.”
She went to bed and lay awake till dawn looking at a new world of wrong
doing, suffering and heroism. Who was she, humble little girl, living
her sequestered life, to judge men by the superficialities of their
known actions? She had judged her father almost to the catastrophe of
love. She had judged Martin bitterly. What did she know of the riot in
his soul? Now he was offering his life for a splendid ideal. She felt
humble beside her conception of him. And her Uncle Gaspard, great,
tender, adored, was lying far, far away in the north, with a bullet
through his body. She prayed her valiant little soul out for the two of
them. And the next morning she arose and went to her work brave and
clear-eyed, with a new hope in God based upon a new faith in man.
A day or two later she received a wild letter from Corinna Hastings.
Corinna’s letters were as frequent as blackberries in March. Félise
knitted her brows over it for a long time. Then she took it to her
father.
“The sense,” she said, “must lie in the scrabble I can’t make out.”
Fortinbras put on his spectacles and when, not without difficulty, he
had deciphered it, he took off the spectacles and smiled the benevolent
smile of the _Marchand de Bonheur_.
“Leave it to me, my dear,” said he. “I will answer Corinna.”
* * * * *
In the tiny town of Wendlebury, in the noisy bosom of her family,
Corinna was eating her heart out. During the latter days of June she had
returned to the fold, an impecunious failure. As a matter of theory she
had upheld the principles of woman suffrage. As a matter of practice, in
the effort to obtain it, she loathed it with bitter hatred. She lacked
the inspiration of its overwhelming importance in sublunary affairs. She
was willing enough to do ordinary work in its interests, at a living
wage, even to the odious extent of wearing an anæmic tricolor and
selling newspapers in the streets. But when her duties involved
incendiarism, imprisonment and hunger, striking, Corinna revolted. She
had neither the conviction nor the courage. Miss Banditch reviled her
for a recreant, a snake in the grass and a spineless doll and left the
flat, forswearing her acquaintance for ever. Headquarters signified
disapproval of her pusillanimity. Driven to desperation she signified
her disapproval of Headquarters in unmeasured terms. The end came and
prospective starvation drove her home to Wendlebury. When the war broke
out, in common with the rest of the young maidenhood of the town, she
yearned to do something to help the British Empire. Her sister Clara, to
satisfy this laudable craving, promptly married a subaltern, and, when
he was ordered to the front, went to live with his people. The next
youngest sister, Evelyn, anxious for Red Cross work, found herself
subsidised by an aunt notoriously inimical to Corinna. Corinna therefore
had to throw in her lot with Margaret and Winnie, chits of fifteen and
thirteen—the intervening boys having flown from the nest. What was a
penniless and, in practical matters, a feckless young woman to do? She
knitted socks and mufflers and went round the town collecting money for
Belgian refugees. So did a score of tabbies, objects of Corinna’s
scornful raillery who district-visited the poor to exasperation. She
demanded work more glorious, more heroic; but lack of funds tied her to
detested knitting-needles. As the Vicar’s daughter she was compelled to
go to church and listen to her father’s sermons on the war; compared
with which infliction, she tartly informed her mother, forcible feeding
was a gay amusement.
Once or twice she had a postcard from Martin in the Argonne. She cursed
herself, her destiny and her sex. If only she was a man she would at
least have gone forth with a gun on her shoulder. But she was a woman;
the most helpless thing in women God ever made. Even her mother, whom
she had rated low on account of intellectual short-comings, she began to
envy. At any rate she had generously performed her woman’s duty. She had
brought forth ten children, five men children, two of whom had rushed to
take up arms in defence of their country. Martin’s last postcard had
told Corinna of Bigourdin being called away to fight. In her enforced
isolation from the great events of the great world she became acutely
conscious that in all the great world only one individual had ever found
a use for her. A flash of such knowledge either scorches or illuminates
the soul.
Then early in November she received a misspelt letter laboriously
written in hard pencil on thin, glazed paper. It was addressed from a
hospital in the North of France.
Mademoiselle Corinna:
I have done my best to strike a blow for my beloved country. It
was written that I should do so, and it was written perhaps that
I should give my life for her. I am dictating these words to my
bedside neighbour who is wounded in the knee. For my part, a
German bullet has penetrated my lung, and the doctors say I may
not live. But while I still can speak, I am anxious to tell you
that on the battlefield your image has always been before my
eyes and that I always have in my heart a love for you tender
and devoted. Should I live, Mademoiselle, I pray you to forget
this letter, as I do not wish to cause you pain. But should I
die, let me now have the consolation of believing that I shall
have a place in your thoughts as one who has died, not
unworthily or unwillingly, in a noble cause.
Gaspard-Marie Bigourdin.
Corinna sat for a long time, frozen to her soul, looking out of her
bedroom window at the hopeless autumn drizzle, and the sodden leaves on
the paths of the vicarage garden. Then, with quivering lips, she sat
down at the rickety little desk that had been hers since childhood and
wrote to Bigourdin. She sealed it and went out in the rain and dropped
it in the nearest pillar box. When she reached her room again, the
realisation of the inadequacy of her words smote her. She threw herself
on her bed and sobbed. After which she wrote her wild letter to Félise.
For the next few days a chastened Corinna went about the Vicarage. An
unusual gentleness manifested itself in her demeanour, and at last
emboldened Mrs. Hastings, good, kind soul, to take the unprecedented
step of enquiring into her wayward and sharp-tongued daughter’s private
affairs.
“I’m afraid, dearie, that letter you had from France contained bad
news.”
“Yes, mother,” said Corinna, with a sigh.
They were alone in the drawing room. Mrs. Hastings laid aside her
knitting, rose slowly—she was a portly woman—and went across to
Corinna and put her arm about her shoulders.
“Can’t you tell me what it was, dearie?” she whispered.
Corinna melted to the voice. It awakened memories of unutterable comfort
of childish years. She surrendered to the embrace.
“Yes, mother. The truest man I have ever known—a Frenchman—is dying
over there. He asked me to marry him a year ago. And I was a fool,
mother. Oh! an awful fool!”
And half an hour later, she said tearfully: “I’ve been a fool in so many
ways. I’ve misjudged you so, mother. It never occurred to me that you
would understand.”
“My dear,” said Mrs. Hastings, stroking her hair, “to bring ten children
into the world and keep them going on small means, to say nothing of
looking after a husband, isn’t a bad education.”
The next day came a telegram.
“Re letter Félise. If you want to find yourself at last go straight to
Bigourdin. Fortinbras.”
The message was a lash. She had not contemplated the possibility of
going to France. In the sleepless nights she had ached to be with him.
But how? In Tierra del Fuego he would be equally inaccessible.
“Go straight to him.” The words were very simple. Of course she would
go. Why had she waited for Fortinbras to point out her duty?
Then came the humiliating knowledge of impotence. She looked in her
purse and counted out her fortune of thirteen shillings and sevenpence
halfpenny. A very humble Corinna showed letter and telegram to her
mother.
“The war seems to have turned everything upside down,” said the latter.
“You ought to go, dear. It’s a sacred duty.”
“But how can I? I have no money. I can’t ask father.”
“Come upstairs,” said Mrs. Hastings.
She led the way to her bedroom and from a locked drawer took an
old-fashioned japanned despatch-box, which she opened.
“All my married life,” she said, “I have managed to keep something
against a rainy day. Take what you want, dear.”
Thus came the overthrowal of all Corinna’s scheme of values. She went to
France, a woman with a warm and throbbing heart.