mistress was occupied with the baby she slipped out and was gone. She
did not come back that day or the next. They never saw or heard of her
from that moment.
Madeleine and the children continued to live in that one room, shaken by
the incessant rumble of the passing artillery wagons and by the
hurrying tread of booted feet. They heard now and again incursions into
the other rooms of their home, and as long as there were loud voices and
trampling and clattering dishes, the children crept into bed beside
Madeleine and the baby, cowering together under the poor protection of
their mother's powerless arms. They never dared speak above a whisper
during those days. They heard laughing, shouting, cursing, snoring in
the rooms all around them. Once they heard pistol shots, followed by a
great splintering crash of glass and shouts of wild mirth.
Madeleine lost all count of the days, of everything but the diminishing
stock of food. She tried repeatedly to sit up, she tried to put her feet
to the floor, but she felt her head swim and fell back in bed. She had
little strength left to struggle now. The food was almost gone, and her
courage was almost gone. As though the walls of the room were closing in
on her, the approach of the spent, beaten desire to die began to close
in on her. What was the use of struggling on? If she could only kill the
children and herself ... there was no hope.
* * * * *
One morning Sylvie said in a loud, startled whisper: "Oh, _maman_, they
are going the other way! Back towards Lorat ... and yet they are still
hurrying as fast as ever ... faster!"
Madeleine felt her hair raise itself on her scalp. She sat up in bed.
"Sylvie, _are you sure_?"
And when the child answered, always in her strained whisper, "Yes, yes,
I am sure," her mother sprang out of bed with a bound and ran to the
window.
It was true. The dusty-gray tide had turned. They were raging past the
house, the horses straining at the heavy artillery wagons, lashed into a
clumsy canter by the drivers, leaning far forward, straining, urging;
the haggard men, reeling in fatigue, stumbling under their heavy packs,
pressing forward in a dog-trot; the officers with red angry faces,
barking out incessant commands for more haste ... and their backs were
turned to Paris!
The Frenchwoman, looking down on them, threw her arms up over her head
in a wild gesture of exultation. They were going back!
She felt as strong as ever she had in her life. She dressed herself, set
the wretched room in some sort of order, and managed to prepare an
edible dish out of soaked tapioca and sugar. The children ate it with
relish, comforted by their mother's new aspect.
About two o'clock that night Madeleine awoke to an awful sense of
impending calamity. Something had happened, some tremendous change had
come over the world. She lay still for a long moment, hearing only the
beating of her own heart. Then she realized that she heard nothing but
that, that the thunder of the trampling feet had stopped. She got out of
bed carefully, trying not to waken the children, but Sylvie, her nerves
aquiver, heard and called out in a frightened whisper, "_Maman, maman!_
What is it?" She caught her mother's arm, and the two went together to
the window. They leaned out, looked to right and left, and fell to
weeping in each other's arms. Under the quiet stars, the village street
was perfectly empty.
* * * * *
The next morning Madeleine made the children swallow a little food
before, all together, the baby in his mother's arms, they ventured out
from their prison-room. They found their house gutted and sacked and
sullied to the remotest corner. The old brocade on the chairs in the
salon had been slit to ribbons by sword-slashes, the big plate-glass
windows over the mantel-pieces had each been shattered into a million
pieces, all the silver was gone from the drawers, every piece of linen
had disappeared, the curtains had been torn down and carried away, and
every bit of bedding had gone, every sheet, every blanket, every
eiderdown quilt. The mattresses had been left, each having been cut open
its entire length and sedulously filled with filth.
The kitchen, emptied of all its shining copper and enamel utensils, was
one litter of splintered wood, remnants of furniture which had been cut
up with the ax for fuel. Madeleine recognized pieces of her mahogany
beds there. Through the kitchen window she looked down into the walled
space which had been the garden and saw it a bare, trampled stable-yard,
with heaps of manure at each end. She looked at all this in perfect
silence, the children clinging to her skirts, the baby sleeping on her
arm. She looked at it, but days passed before she really believed that
what she saw was real.
A woman's voice called quaveringly from the landing: "Madame
Brismantier, are you there? Are you alive? The Germans have gone."
Madeleine stepped to the landing and saw old Sister Ste. Lucie, her face
which had always been so rosy and fresh, as gray as ashes under her
black-and-white coif. She leaned against the wall as she stood. At the
sight of the sleeping baby in Madeleine's arms, the gray face smiled,
the wonderful smile which women, even those vowed to childlessness, give
to a new mother. "Oh, your baby came," she said. "Boy or girl?"
"Yes," said Madeleine, "he came. A boy. A nice little boy." For one
instant the two women stood there in that abomination of desolation,
with death all around them, looking down at the baby, and smiling.
Then Soeur Ste. Lucie said: "There is nothing left in the pharmacy, I
see. I thought maybe they might have left something, by chance, but I
see everything is smashed to pieces. You don't happen to have any
supplies up here, do you? We need bandages horribly at the Hospice, for
the wounded. There are forty there."
Madeleine knew the minute size of the little Hospice and exclaimed:
"_Forty!_ Where do you put them?"
"Oh, everywhere, on the floor, up and down the hall, in the kitchen. But
we haven't a thing except hot water to use for them; all the sheets were
torn up two days ago, what they hadn't stolen! If I only had a little
iodine, or any sort of antiseptic. Their wounds are too awful, all
infected, and nothing ..."
Without knowing it Madeleine took a first step forward into a new life.
"There's plenty of everything," she said. "I hid them all in the far
room of the cellar."
"God grant 'they' didn't find them!" breathed the nun.
Madeleine lighted a candle, left the sleeping baby in the charge of
Sylvie, and went with Soeur Ste. Lucie down into the cellar. They
found it littered and blocked with emptied and broken bottles. A strange
hoarse breathing from a dark corner frightened them. Lifting her candle,
Madeleine brought to view a German soldier, dead-drunk, snoring, his
face swollen and red. The women let him lie as an object of no
importance and turned to the hanging shelves. They heaved a long sigh;
the blind was still there, untouched. Madeleine's device was successful.
As they looked among the heaped-up supplies from the pharmacy for
bandages and antiseptics, Soeur Ste. Lucie told Madeleine very briefly
what had been happening. Madeleine listened in a terrible silence.
Neither she nor the nun had strength to spare for exclamations. Nor
could any words of theirs have been adequate. The news needed no
comment. M. le Maire was dead, shot in front of the Town Hall, on the
ground that there had been weapons found in one of the houses. "You know
in the Bouvines' house they had some Malay creeses and a Japanese sword
hanging up in M. Bouvines' study, things his sailor uncle brought back.
The Mayor never thought to take those down, and they wouldn't give him
time to explain. M. le Cure was dead, nobody knew or ever would know
why--found dead of starvation, strapped to a bed in an attic room of a
house occupied by some German officers. Perhaps he had been forgotten by
the person who had tied him there...." The nun's voice died away in
sobs. She had been brought up under M. le Cure's protection all her life
and loved him like a father.
Madeleine sorted bandages in silence, her throat very dry and harsh.
Later Soeur Ste. Lucie went on, trying to speak more collectedly: "The
worst of trying to care for these wounded is not being able to
understand what they say."
"How so?" asked Madeleine, not understanding in the least.
"Why, I don't speak German."
Madeleine stopped short, her hands full of bandages. "Are they _German_
wounded? Are we getting these things for _German soldiers_?"
Soeur Ste. Lucie nodded gravely. "Yes, I felt just so, too, at first.
But when I saw them wounded, bleeding, so sick, worn out.... How would
you like German women to treat your husband if he should be wounded in
Germany? We are all nothing but wretched sinners in the sight of God.
And are we not taught to do good to our enemies?"
Of all this (which meant in reality simply that Soeur Ste. Lucie was a
warm-hearted woman whose professional habit had been for forty years to
succor the afflicted) Madeleine took in very little at the time,
although it was to come back to her again and again. At the moment she
thought that she did not believe a single word of it. She certainly did
not at all think that we are the best of us but wretched sinners, and
she had as remotely academic a belief as any other twentieth-century
dweller in the desirability of doing good to your enemies. The idea of
Jules wounded in Germany did indeed bring a flood of confused emotions
into her mind. If Germany should be invaded, would Frenchmen be stamping
into strangers' houses and taking the food out of the mouths of the
owners, would they...?
"Well," said Soeur Ste. Lucie, impatient of her trance-like stare.
It was none of what she had been thinking which now moved Madeleine to
say automatically, "Oh, of course we'll have to give them the bandages
and the peroxide." She could not have named the blind impulse which
drove her to say this, beyond that a sort of angry self-respect was
mixed with it. Her head ached furiously, whirling with fatigue and lack
of food, her back ached as though it were being beaten with hammers. She
renounced any attempt to think.
"Here," said Soeur Ste. Lucie, staggering herself with exhaustion.
"The baby is only a few days old. You're not fit to be doing this."
Madeleine, who had lain flat on her back for two weeks after the birth
of the other two children, shook her head. "No, no, I can do it as well
as you. You look fearfully tired."
"I haven't had my clothes off for ten days," said the nun. "And I'm
sixty-two years old."
In the street door, with her basket of bandages on her arm, Soeur Ste.
Lucie stood looking around her at the desolate filth-strewn shop, the
million pieces of glass which had been its big windows covering the
floor, its counter hacked and broken with axes. She said: "We haven't
any mayor and the priest is dead, and we haven't any pharmacy and the
baker is mobilized, and there isn't one strong, well man left in town.
How are we going to live?"
Madeleine took another step, hesitating, along the new road. She leaned
against the counter to ease her aching body and put back her hair to
look around her at the wreck and ruin of her husband's business. She
said in a faint voice: "I wonder if I could keep the pharmacy open. I
used to help Jules with the accounts, I know a little about where he
bought and how he kept his records. I wonder if I could--enough for the
simpler things?"
"You have already," said the nun, as she went away, "and the first
things you have given out are bandages for your enemies. God will not
forget that."
Madeleine received this with an impatient shrug. She was not at all glad
that her first act had been to help the suffering among her enemies. She
had hated doing it, had only done it because of some confused sense of
decency. She heartily wished she had not had it to do. But if it had
been necessary, she would have done it again ... and yet to do it for
those men who had murdered M. le Maire, so blameless and M. le Cure--so
defenseless!... No, these were not the same men who lay bleeding to
death in the Hospice to whom she had sent bandages. _They_ had not
murdered ... as yet!
Her head throbbed feverishly. She renounced again the effort to think,
and thrusting all this ferment down into her subconsciousness she turned
to the urgent needs of the moment. It seemed to her that she could not
breathe till she had set the pharmacy as far as possible in the order
Jules had left it. This feeling, imperious and intense, was her only
refuge against her certainty that Jules was killed, that she would never
see him again. Without an attempt to set to rights even a corner of the
desolated little home, upstairs, she began toiling up and down the
cellar stairs carrying back the glass jars, the pots, the boxes, and
bottles and drawers. It seemed to her, in her dazed confusion, that
somehow she was doing something for Jules in saving his pharmacy which
he had so much cared for, that she was almost keeping him from dying by
working with all her might for him there....
In the middle of the morning she went upstairs and found that Sylvie,
working with Raoul, had cleared the kitchen of the worst of the rubbish.
In a pot-closet under the sink there were two old saucepans which had
not been stolen. Madeleine made a fire, stoically using her own
broken-up furniture, and, putting a few potatoes (the last of their
provisions) on to boil, sat down to nurse the hungry baby.
"_Maman_ dear," said Sylvie, still in the strained whisper of the days
of terror. She could not speak aloud for weeks. "_Maman_ dear," she
whispered, "in the salon, in the dining-room, I wanted to try to clean
it, but it is all nasty, like where animals have been."
"Hush!" said her mother firmly. "Don't think about that. Don't look in
there. It'll make you sick if you do. Stay here, tend the fire, watch
the baby, and play with Raoul." She outlined this program with decision
and hurried back downstairs to go on with the execution of one conceived
in the same spirit. If she could only get the pharmacy to look a little
as it had when Jules had left it, it seemed to her that Jules would seem
less lost to her.
She shoveled the incredible quantity of broken glass back through the
shop into what had been her garden, hardening herself against a qualm of
horror at the closer view of the wreckage there. The two big sycamore
trees had been cut down and sawn into lengths to use for fuel in the
open fire, the burned-out embers of which lay in a black ring where the
arbor had stood.
She went back to her work hastily, knowing that if she stopped for an
instant to look, she would be lost.
At noon she went upstairs, and with the children lunched on potatoes and
salt.
She was putting the last of the innumerable drawers back in its place,
after having tried it in all the other possible places, when a poorly
dressed, rough-haired, scrawny little boy came into the shop. Madeleine
knew him by sight, the six-year-old grandson of Madame Dulcet, a
bedridden, old, poor woman on Poulaine Street. The little boy said that
he had come to get those powders for his grandmother's asthma. She
hadn't slept any for two nights. As he spoke he wound the string about a
top and prepared to spin it, nonchalantly. Looking at his cheerful,
dirty little face, Madeleine felt herself a thousand years old,
separated for always and always from youth which would never know what
she had known.
"I don't know anything about your grandmother's asthma powders," she
said. The little boy insisted, astonished that a grown person did not
know everything. "_He_ always kept them. Grandmere used to send me twice
a week to get them. Grandmere will scold me awfully if I don't take them
back. She's scolding all the time now, because the Germans took our
soup-kettle and our frying-pan. We haven't got anything left to cook
with."
The memory of her immensely greater losses rose burningly to Madeleine's
mind. "They took _all my sheets_!" she cried impulsively,--"every one!"
"Oh," said the little boy indifferently, "we never had any sheets,
anyhow." This did not seem an important statement to him, apparently;
but to Madeleine, her old world shattered, emerging into new horizons,
beaten upon by a thousand new impressions, it rang loudly. The Germans,
then, had only put her in the situation in which a woman, like herself,
had always lived ... and that within a stone's throw of these
well-filled linen-closets of hers! There was something strange about
that, something which she would like to ponder, if only her head did not
ache so terribly. The little boy said, insistently, "_He_ always gave
me the powders, right away!"
Through obscure complicated mental processes, of which she had only the
dimmest perceptions, _Jules_ had always given the powders ... how
strange it was that precisely a bedridden woman who had most need of
them should have owned no sheets ... there came to her a great desire to
send that old woman the medicine she needed. "You go outside and spin
your top for a while," she said to the child; "I'll call you when I'm
ready."
She went upstairs. Holding her skirts high to keep them out of the
filth, she picked her way to the bookcase. Books were scattered all
about the room, torn, cut, trampled on, defiled; but for the most part
those with handsome bindings had been chosen for destruction. On the top
shelf, sober in their drab, gray-linen binding, stood Jules' big
record-books, intact. She carried down an armful of them to the
pharmacy, and opened the latest one, the one which Jules had put away
with his own hand the day he had left her.
The sight of the pages covered with Jules' neat, clear handwriting
brought a rush of scalding tears to her eyes. Her bosom heaved in the
beginning of sobs. She laid down the book, and, taking hold of the
counter with all her strength, she forced herself to draw one long,
regular breath after another, holding her head high.
When her heart was beating quietly again, quietly and heavily, in her
breast, she opened the book and began studying the pages. Jules set
everything down in writing, it being his idea that a pharmacist had no
other defense against making those occasional mistakes inevitable to
human nature, but which must not occur in his profession.
Madeleine read: "March 10, sold 100 quinine pills to M. Augier. Stock
low. Made 100 more, using quinine from the Cochard Company's
laboratories. Filled prescription...." Madeleine's eyes leaped over the
hieroglyphics of the pharmaceutical terms and ran up and down the pages,
filled with such items, looking for the name Duguet. She had almost
given up when she saw, dated July 30, 1914, the entry: "Made up fresh
supply Mme. Duguet asthma powders, prescription 457. Dr. Millier. Drawer
No. 17."
Madeleine ran behind the counter and pulled out No. 17. She found there
a little pasteboard box marked, "Duguet."
"Oh, boy, little boy!" she called.
When the child came in she asked, "Did your grandmother ever get any
other medicine here?"
"No," said the grandson of the bedridden woman, "she hasn't got anything
else the matter with her."
"Well," said the pharmacist's wife, "here is her medicine." She put the
box in his hand.
"Oh, we never get more than four at a time," he told her. "She never has
the money to pay for more. Here it is. Granny hid it in her hair so the
Germans wouldn't get it. She hid all we have. She's got more than _five
francs_, all safe."
He put a small silver coin in her hand and departed.
The mention of the meager sum of hidden money made Madeleine think of
her own dextrously concealed little fortune. She had noticed at once on
entering the shop that the arrangement of false shelves which concealed
the safe had not been detected, and was intact. She pushed the spring,
the shelves swung back, and disclosed the door of the safe just as
usual. She began to turn the knob of the combination lock. It worked
smoothly and in a moment the heavy door swung open. The safe was
entirely empty, swept clear of all the papers, titles, deeds, bonds
which had covered its shelves.
As actually as though he stood there again, Madeleine saw the polite
pseudo-Swiss geological gentleman, thanking Jules for the temporary use
of his excellent safe.
She was petrified by this new blow, feeling the very ground give way
under her feet. A cold, cold wind of necessity and stress blew upon her.
The walled and sheltered refuge in which she had lived all her life was
utterly cast down and in ruins. The realization came to her, like
something intolerable, indecent, that _she_, Madeleine Brismantier, was
now as poor as that old bedridden neighbor had been all her life ...
_all her life_....
Somehow, that had something to do with those sheets which she had had
and the other woman had not ... her mind came back with a mortal
sickness to the knowledge that she had now nothing, nothing to depend
upon except her own strength and labor--just like a _poor_ woman. She
_was_ a poor woman!
* * * * *
Somebody was weeping and tugging at her skirts. She looked down blindly.
It was Raoul, her little son. He was sobbing and saying: "Sylvie said
not to come, but I couldn't stand it any more. I'm hungry! I'm hungry,
and there isn't a thing left upstairs to eat! I'm hungry! I'm hungry!"
Madeleine put her hand to her head and thought. What had happened? Oh
yes, all their money had been stolen, all ... but Raoul was hungry, the
children must have something to eat. "Hush, my darling," she said to the
little boy, "go back upstairs and tell Sylvie to come here and look out
for the shop while I go out and find something to eat."
She went down the silent, empty street, before the silent empty houses
staring at her out of their shattered windows, and found not a soul
abroad. At the farm, in the outskirts of town, she saw smoke rising from
the chimney and went into the courtyard. The young farmer's wife was
there, feeding a little cluster of hens, and weeping like a child. She
stared at the newcomer for a moment without recognizing her. Madeleine
looked ten years older than she had a fortnight ago.
"Oh, madame, we had three hundred hens, and they left us just these
eight that they couldn't catch! And they killed all but two of our
thirty cows; we'd raised them ourselves from calves up. They killed them
there before the very door and cooked them over a fire in the courtyard,
and they broke up everything of wood to burn in the fire, all our hoes
and rake handles, and the farm-wagon and ... oh, what will my husband
say when he knows!"
Madeleine had a passing glimpse of herself as though in a convex mirror,
distorted but recognizable. She said, "They didn't hurt you or your
husband's mother, did they?"
"No, they were drunk all the time and they didn't know what they were
doing mostly. We could hide from them."
"Then your husband will not care at all about the cows and pigs and
farm-wagons," said Madeleine very firmly, as though she were speaking to
Sylvie. The young farmer's wife responded automatically to the note of
authority in Madeleine's voice. "Don't you think he will?" she asked
simply, reassured somewhat, wiping away her tears.
"No, and you are very lucky to have so much left," said Madeleine. "I
have nothing, nothing at all for my children to eat, and no money to buy
anything." She heard herself saying this with astonishment as though it
were the first time she had heard it.
The young wife was horrified, sympathetic, a little elated to have one
whom she had always considered her superior come asking her for aid; for
Madeleine stood there, her empty basket on her arm, asking for aid,
silently, helplessly.
"Oh, we have things left to _eat_!" she said. She put some eggs in
Madeleine's basket, several pieces of veal left from the last animal
killed which the Germans had not had time entirely to consume, and,
priceless treasure, a long loaf of bread. "Yes, the wife of the baker
got up at two o'clock last night, when she heard the last of the Germans
go by, and started to heat her oven. She had hidden some flour in
barrels behind her rabbit hutches, and this morning she baked a batch of
bread. It's not so good as the baker's of course, but she says she will
do better as she learns."