THE SPANISH FARM
_At the Sign of_
THE CUPID AND LION
THE APPLE OF THE EYE
_by_ Glenway Wescott
THE LAND OF THE FATHERS
_by_ Sergey Gussiev Orenburgsky
THE SPANISH FARM
_by_ R. H. Mottram
STORIES FROM THE DIAL
1924
_The_
Spanish Farm
_By_
R·H·MOTTRAM
_With a Preface by_
JOHN GALSWORTHY
[Illustration: colophon]
LINCOLN MACVEAGH
THE DIAL PRESS
NEW YORK · MCMXXIV
COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY
DIAL PRESS, INC.
_Printed in the United States of America by_
J. J. LITTLE AND IVES COMPANY, NEW YORK
TO
MY WIFE
PREFACE
_By John Galsworthy_
“The Spanish Farm” attracts a preface because it exhibits a new form,
distinct even in this experimental epoch; and because one has not before
met with such a good realization of French character by an Englishman,
unless Renée, in “Beauchamp’s Career,” be excepted.
For four years and three months the British Army was in France, many
thousands of educated Englishmen were in touch with French character,
and, so far as I know, Madeleine in this book is the only full, solid,
intimate piece of French characterization which has resulted from that
long and varied contact. Madeleine is amazingly lifelike. I suspect her
to be a composite creation rather than drawn directly from one living
prototype; however that may be, there she is, an individual Frenchwoman
of the North, firm as ever stood on excellent legs--no compromise about
her outlines, nothing fluffy and nothing sketchy in her portrait from
beginning to end. She imposes herself, page by page, with her tenacity,
her clear knowledge of what she wants, her determined way of getting it,
her quick blood, her business capacity, and once more, her tenacity--the
tenacity which has kept the Spanish farm in her family since the days of
Alva. Besides being a warm-blooded, efficient, decisive human being,
with a wonderful eye to the main chance, she is evidence on French
character extremely valuable to those among us who really want to
understand the French.
And the minor portraits, of her lover Georges, and his old parents, of
her father, her sister, and the housekeeper at the château, with the
young English officer as foil, fill in a convincing picture of French
life and atmosphere in the war zone.
I suppose you would call this a war book, but it is unlike any other war
book that I, at least, have met with. Its defined and realized scope,
its fidelity and entire freedom from meretricity make it a singularly
individual piece of work.
And that brings me to its form--the chief reason for this short preface.
“The Spanish Farm” is not precisely a novel, and it is not altogether a
chronicle; and here the interest comes in--quite clearly the author did
not mean it to be a novel, and fail; nor did he mean it to be a
chronicle, and fail. In other words, he was guided by mood and
subject-matter into discovery of a new vehicle of expression--going
straight ahead with that bold directness which guarantees originality.
Easy enough to find fault with “The Spanish Farm” if you judge it
strictly as a novel, or strictly as a chronicle, in fact if you take it
strictly for what it is not--that pet weakness of hasty criticism. The
book has its imperfections;--what book has not?--but I do not think the
serious critic can miss the peculiar unforced feeling of novelty its
form has given me. You do not put it down saying: “I see perfectly what
form the fellow was trying for, but he didn’t bring it off.” You put it
down thinking: “The fellow didn’t seem to be trying for any form, but he
did bring it off.”
We know the self-conscious chronicle in fiction, and its--as a
rule--artificial effect. “The Spanish Farm” is as far from that as it is
from the dramatic novel. It just goes its own way, and quietly defeats
the search for parallels. One might perhaps best call it highly
humanized history. It is, anyway, a very interesting book, with a
just--if unexpected--title, for one never loses consciousness of
Madeleine’s home, that solid old farmstead of French Flanders, named in
the Spanish wars of centuries ago, and still in being, after the
greatest war of all time.
JOHN GALSWORTHY.
CONTENTS
PAGE
_Preface: by John Galsworthy_ vii
_Part I: La Patrie est en danger_ 3
_II: “On les aura”_ 115
_III: La Galette_ 213
_PART I_
LA PATRIE EST EN DANGER
PART I
_La Patrie est en danger_
A farmer stood watching a battalion of infantry filing into his pasture.
A queerer mixture of humanity could not have been imagined. The farmer
wore a Dutch cap, spoke Flemish by preference, but could only write
French. His farm was called Ferme l’Espagnole--The Spanish Farm--and
stood on French soil. The soldiers were the usual English
mixture--semi-skilled townsmen, a number of agricultural and other
laborers, fewer still of seafaring and waterside folk, and a sprinkling
of miners and shepherds, with one or two regulars.
The farmer, Mr. Vanderlynden, Jerome, described in the Communal records
as a Cultivator, sixty-five years of age, watching his rich grass being
tramped to liquid mud under the heavy boots of the incoming files, and
the shifting of foot-weary men as they halted in close column, platoon
by platoon, made no protest. This was not merely because under the
French law he was bound to submit to the needs of the troops, but also
because, after twelve months’ experience, he had discovered that there
were compensations attached to the billeting and encampment of English.
They paid--so much per officer or man--not always accurately, but
promptly always, and what would you more in war-time? The Spanish Farm
was less than twenty kilometres from the “Front,” the actual trenches,
whose ground-shaking gun-rumble was always to be heard, whose scouting
aeroplanes were visible and audible all day, whose endless flicker of
star shells made green the eastern horizon all night. The realities of
the situation were ever present to Mr. Jerome Vanderlynden, who besides
could remember a far worse war, that of 1870. Moreover, the first troops
passing that way in the far-off days of 1914 had been French, and had
wanted twice as much attention, and had never paid, had even threatened
him when he suggested it.
* * * * *
Standing with his great knotted earthy fists hanging by his side, as the
khaki stream poured and poured through the wide-set gate, he passed in
review the innumerable units or detachments that had billeted in the
Spanish Farm or encamped in its pastures. Uncritical, almost
unreasoning, the old peasant was far from being able to define the
difference he had felt when the first English arrived. He had heard tell
of them, read of them in the paper, but was far from imagining what they
might have been like, having no data to go on and no power of
imagination. He had been coming in from getting up the last of the
potato crop of 1914 when he had found flat-capped, mud-coloured horsemen
at his gate. Sure that they were Germans (the Uhlans had been as near as
Hazebrouck only a few weeks before), he hastily tied the old white horse
in the tombereau, and had gone forward cap in hand. But his daughter
Madeleine had already met the soldiers at the gate. A widower for many
years, Jerome Vanderlynden’s house was kept by his youngest child, this
Madeleine, now in her twentieth year. To say that he believed in her
does not do justice to his feelings. She had been the baby of the
family, had had a better education than he or his sons, at a convent in
St. Omer; added to all this, plus her woman’s prestige, was the fact
that she inherited (from heaven knows where!) a masterful strain. What
she said (and she was not lavish of words) was attended to. Whether it
were education, inspiration, or more probably an appreciation beyond the
powers of her father, that told her that English cavalry officers would
agree with her, it is certain that she started with those first
squadrons of the Cavalry Division a sort of understanding that she would
never have attempted with French troops. They paid her liberally and
treated her respectfully, probably confusing her in their minds with
English farmers’ wives to whom they were in the habit of paying for hunt
damage. They had money--officers and men wanted to supplement their
rations and the horses’ forage. Madeleine had eggs, coffee, soft bread,
beer, fried potatoes, beans, oats. She could and did wash collars and
shirts better than the average soldier servant. It took her some time to
understand that every English officer required many gallons of water to
wash in, at least once a day. But once she had grasped that too, she
attended to it, at a small charge.
* * * * *
And now it was October, 1915; more troops than ever, especially
infantry, were in the Commune, and an interpreter had warned Jerome
Vanderlynden that he would have a whole battalion in the farm. He made
no remark, but Madeleine had asked several questions. More awake
mentally than her father, it had not escaped her close reading of the
paper that a new sort of English troops were coming to France. They were
described indifferently as “Territorials” and as “New Army” or
“Kitchener’s Army,” and neither Madeleine nor indeed the newspapers of
the Department du Nord knew of any difference between them and the
Territoriaux of the French system. Madeleine put them down as
second-line troops and stored the fact in her vigilant mind.
She came and stood beside her father, as the 10th Battalion
Easthamptonshire Regiment broke up and moved off to its billets. Two of
the sadly depleted companies went to adjacent farms, two remained on the
premises. The officers--of whom only twelve survived the battle of
Loos--were busy with non-coms., going through nominal rolls, lists of
missing men or damaged equipment, trying to disentangle some sort of
parade state and indent for replacements.
Madeleine did not bother about them. She said to her father: “I am going
to find the Quarta-mastere!”
She found him, standing amid his stores in the hop-press, and knew him
by his gray hair and white-red-white ribbon. She had long ago inquired
and found out that this rank in the English Army were chosen from among
the old soldiers, and were quickest at getting to business. It had been
explained to her that the white-red-white ribbon was for length of good
conduct, and secretly tolerant of men’s foibles as of a child’s, she
stored this fact also, for identification purposes.
In this instance the Mess President having been killed, the old ranker,
Lieutenant and Quartermaster John Adams, was acting Mess President, and
doing nearly every other duty in the disorganization and readjustment
that followed the tragic bungle of the New Army’s first offensive.
He greeted her with his professional aplomb: “Good day, Maddam, dinner
for twelve officers; compris, douze!” He held up the fingers of both
hands and then two fingers separately.
“All right!” returned Madeleine in English. “Where are their rations?”
He replied, “Ah, you’re sharp!” and called to his storekeeper, “Jermyn,
officers’ rations to Maddam and tell the mess cook!” He went on to
bargain for other things--beds for the Colonel, the Adjutant and
himself--and in the course of the argument Madeleine informed him that
according to General Routine Orders there was to be no smoking in the
barns and no insanitary practices, that all gates must be kept closed,
and no movables removed. Handing him her price list, she withdrew to her
long coffin-shaped stove in the brick-floored kitchen.
* * * * *
Dusk settled down on the Spanish Farm--autumn dusk--with swathed mists
on the small flat chocolate-coloured fields, richest and best tilled in
the world--not bare of crops. The brilliant colours of the last
hop-leaves and of the regular rows of elms that bordered each pasture
were hidden, but the tops of the trees towered above the mist-line into
that wide blue vault that the old painters loved, nowhere wider than in
the Flemish plain. The Spanish Farm stood on the almost imperceptible
southern slope of the sandy ridge that divides in some degree the valley
of the Yser from that of the Lys, whose flat meadows lay spread out,
almost from Aire to the factory smoke of Armentières, at a slightly
lower level to the south. Northward, behind the house, the ground rose
very gradually in fertile field and elm-encircled pasture. Westward,
black against the last glow of the sunset, two little ’planes droned
their way from the aerodromes round St. Omer toward the eastern horizon
where the evening “hate” was toned down by the distance to the low boom
of “heavies,” the sharper note of the field-guns, the whip-lash crack of
rifles and machine-guns, and the flatter squashed-out reports of mortars
and grenades.
The house itself was a single-storied building of immensely thick walls
of red brick--much as the settlers under Alva had left it three hundred
years before--except for enlargement of windows and re-thatching--though
the existing thatch was so old that wall-flowers tasselled its ridge
from one octagonal spoke-tiled chimney-stack to the other. Originally a
simple block with door in the middle, outbuildings had been added at
each end, giving it the form of an unfinished quadrangle, the gap toward
the south, enclosing the great steaming midden of golden dung.
Completely surrounded by a deep wide moat, access to it was only
possible by a brick bridge on the southern side, guarded by a
twenty-foot extinguisher-roofed “shot” tower, whose loopholed bulk now
served for tool shed below and pigeon-loft above.
Further outbuildings stood outside the moat, a few to the north in the
smaller pasture behind the house, but a long broad range of cowshed,
stable, and hop-press stretched into the ten-acre “home” or “manor”
pasture.
Never, since Alva last marched that way, had the old semi-fortress been
so packed with humanity. Two companies, which even at their present
weakness must have numbered over three hundred men, were getting rid of
their arms and equipment and filing round to the north pasture where the
cookers flared and smoked, the cooks, demoniac in their blackened faces
and clothes, ladled out that standard compost that, at any time before
nine in the morning was denominated “coffee,” at any hour before or
after noon “soup,” until the end of the day, when, as a last effort, it
became “tea.” Derisive shouts of “Gyp-oh!” intended to convey that it
was accepted for what it was--yesterday’s bacon grease, hot water and
dust from the floor of a lorry--greeted it, as it splashed into the
tendered mess-tins of the jostling crowd.
* * * * *
Within the house, in the westward of the two principal rooms, Madeleine,
with Berthe, most useful of the Belgian refugees about the place, had
got her stove nearly red hot, and was silently, deftly handling her pots
and dishes, while the mess cooks unpacked the enamelled plates and cups
and carried them through to the other room where the table was being set
by the simple process of spreading sheets of newspapers upon it and
arranging the drinking-cups, knives and forks thereon. Bread being cut,
there only remained for “Maddam,” as they called Madeleine, to say that
all was ready, so that the brass shell-case in the passage could be used
as a gong. The Colonel appeared, and the Adjutant, both regular
soldiers, masking whatever they felt under professional passivity. There
were no other senior officers; the only surviving Major was with a
captainless outlying company. The two companies in the farm were
commanded by lieutenants. The junior officers were all Kitchener
enlistments. Some of them had hoped to spend that night in Lille.
The conversation was not so brilliant as the meal. In many a worse
billet, the Easthamptons looked back to their night at Spanish Farm.
Every one was dog tired and bitterly depressed. The Colonel only sat
the length of one cigarette. Adams took his food in his “bunk.” The
junior officers clattered up the narrow candle-lit stair into the loft
where two of them had a bedstead and two others the floor. The Adjutant
was left collating facts and figures, with the Doctor, who was going
through his stores. To them came the runner from the guard-room
(improvised in a tent at the brick-pillared gate of the pasture).
“Reinforcement officers, sir!”
There entered two rather bewildered young men who had passed during the
previous forty-eight hours through every emotion from a desperate fear
that the “victory” of Loos would end the war without their firing a
shot, to sheer annoyance at being dumped at a railhead and told to find
a battalion in the dark. They had lost everything they had except what
they carried on them, and were desperately hungry.
The Adjutant surprised even himself at the cordial greeting he gave the
two strangers--untried officers from a reserve battalion he had never
seen. He knew nothing of their history or capabilities, but the sense of
more people behind, coming to fill the gaps, warmed even the
professional soldier’s trained indifference. He got up, and went to the
door of the kitchen, calling for “Maddam” and repeating “Mangay” in a
loud voice to indicate that further refreshment was required.
Madeleine had just finished, with Berthe, the washing and cleaning up of
her cooking utensils, and was about to go to bed in her little single
bedroom that looked out over the northern pasture. She was just as
inclined to cook another meal as a person may be, who has already worked
eighteen hours and expects to rise at half-past five in the morning. Nor
was there anything in the stare of the shorter, fair-haired new arrival,
with his stolid silence, to encourage her. But the taller and darker of
the two asked her in fair French if she could manage an omelet and some
coffee. They regretted deranging her, but had the hunger of a wolf and
had not eaten since the morning. Whether it was being addressed in her
own tongue, or the fact that the young officer had hit on the things
that lay next her hand and would not take five minutes, or whether it
was something in the voice, Madeleine acquiesced politely, and set about
providing what was asked.
The Adjutant stared. He was not accustomed to interpolations in foreign
tongues in his orders. But this young officer was so obviously
unconscious of offense, and the interference so opportune, that there
was nothing to be said. He talked to the new-comers as they supped, and,
apologizing for having to put them in the little ground-floor room with
the orderly officer, retired to his own.
Silence and darkness fell upon the Spanish Farm, only broken by the
steps of the sentries, the change of guard, and the dull mutter and
star-shell flicker from the line, and for some hours all those human
beings that lay in and around the old house, lost consciousness of their
hopes, fears, and wants.
* * * * *
English officers and men who billeted in the Spanish Farm (and
practically the whole English Army must have passed through or near it
at one time or another) to this day speak of it as one of the few places
they can still distinguish in the blur of receding memories, one of the
few spots of which they have nothing but good to tell. In part this may
be easily explained. The old house was comparatively roomy, well kept,
water-tight. There was less overcrowding, no leaking roof to drip on
one’s only dry shirt--and besides, though the regulations were more
strictly observed here than anywhere, that fact gave almost an
impression of home--order, cleanliness, respect ruled here yet a
little--but perhaps there is another reason--perhaps houses, so old and
so continually handled by human beings, have almost a personality of
their own: perhaps the Spanish Farm that had sheltered Neapolitan
mercenaries fighting the French, Spanish Colonists fighting the Flemish,
French fighting English or Dutch--and now English and Colonials fighting
Germans--perhaps the old building bent and brooded over these last of
its many occupants--perhaps knew a little better than other houses what
men expected of it.
* * * * *
Madeleine thought no more of the War, and the population it had brought
to the Spanish Farm, until half-past seven, when the mess-orderlies
began to prepare breakfast. Obstinately refusing to allow anyone to
touch her stove, she cooked that incomprehensible meal of oat-soup
(“porridge” they called it!), and bacon and eggs, after which she knew,
they ate orange confiture. She, her father, and the farm hands, had long
taken their lump of bread and bowl of coffee, standing. Her attention
was divided between the hum of the separator in the dairy and her
washing drying on the line, when she heard her father’s voice calling:
“Madeleine, leinsche!” (“Little Madeleine!”). She called out that she
was in the kitchen.
The old man came, moving more quickly than usual, voluble in Flemish,
excited. The soldiers had moved out all the flax-straw lying in the long
wooden drying-shed behind the house, on the pasture, and all the
machines, reapers and binders, drills and rakes. Moreover, they had
taken for firewood hop-poles that had been expressly forbidden.
Madeleine washed her hands at the sink, saying she would see about it.
But she was saved the trouble. Her father went out into the yard, unable
to keep still in his impatience, and she heard him in altercation with
old Adams. They drifted into the mess-room. As she was drying her hands,
there was a knock on the kitchen door, and she saw her father ushering
in the dark young officer of the evening before. Her brow cleared. She
had not the least doubt she could “manage” the young man.
The young man surpassed expectations. Madeleine found it unnecessary to
keep to her rather limited English. His French, while not correct, was
expansive. He admitted her version of the farmer’s rights under
Billeting Law, but would not accept the sum, running into hundreds of
francs, which Jerome Vanderlynden, typical peasant at a bargain, asked
for compensation. It appeared that the quiet-looking young man knew
something of flax culture and more of agricultural machinery. He quoted
within a very little the cost of re-stacking the flax, oiling the
machinery, with the price of two burnt hop-poles. He offered forty
francs.
Old Vanderlynden made his usual counter: “What if I go to Brigade
Head-quarters about it!”
“Then you will get nothing at all. They are too busy, and we move on
to-day!”
The old man laughed and slapped his leg.
Madeleine, knowing by experience that the officer had been authorized to
spend fifty francs (a sum which appealed to the English, being
recognizable as a couple of sovereigns), began to respect him, took the
money, and signed the receipt.
Left alone, old Jerome remarked that the young man was very well brought
up. Madeleine was looking carefully through her pots and pans to see
that nothing had disappeared into the big messbox.
From the window she saw the battalion paraded, and watched them move
off, as she passed hastily from room to room, counting things. Her
father was round the outbuildings. The last to go was old Adams with the
wagons. A great stillness fell on the old farm, the litter of papers,
tins and ashes, and all the unmistakable atmosphere of a crowded place
suddenly deserted.
* * * * *
The day following the departure of the battalion was fine and still.
Even the Front was quieting down. After the early midday meal of soup
and bread, Madeleine put on her second-best frock, washed, did her hair,
spent a little time over her hands, and putting on her fur but no hat,
picked her way over the cobbles and left the farm by the main gate.
She walked with the ease of a person of perfect health, who knew what
she wanted and where she was going, and who had habitually no time to
stroll, no need to think. The clumsiness of a life of hard physical
labor had been corrected by a good education, and she might well have
passed in her dress that had so evidently been best, and was going to
be everyday, for an English girl. Only the boots and the hatless head
marked her for a follower of the continental tradition, though her
strong ankles and round neck would have well supported the low shoes and
simple felt or straw of an outdoor English-woman.
She said nothing to her father or to the farmhands as to her errand. No
one inquired. For a long while, ever since she had left the convent
school, she had been mistress of her own actions and of other people’s.
Old Vanderlynden, if he ever spoke of her to others, used not the
peasant’s usual “Ma fille”--“my little girl,” but “Ma demoiselle”--“my
young lady.” Her dress indicated nothing, for etiquette forbade her
going beyond the farm in her old worn “every-day” and apron, clogs and
upturned sleeves. Old men and women and children were plowing, manuring
and weed-burning in the fields bordering the hedgeless road. She spoke
to no one, and no one spoke to her. She met them all once a week, at
Mass, and that was sufficient. One or two of them, glancing at her
straight figure and level, unswerving gait, glanced at each other and
grinned. The usual surmises were probably made, for it was known that
she was keeping company with none of the young men of her generation
before they were all hurried off to the War--and it was plainly
unnatural that a good-looking young woman with a dowry should not be
sought in marriage. These surmises were all the more interesting because
nothing definite was known.
Some hundreds of yards before reaching the Lille-Calais road, Madeleine
passed under the shadow of one of those little woods of oak, crowning a
small conical hill, that constitute the only untilled plots of the
hard-worked Flemish border. Like its counterpart in all the neighboring
parishes, this wood also was called the “Kruysabel” or Poplar-cross, on
account of the crucifix that hid in its highest and thickest part, where
its five “rides” met in a tiny clearing. To the south of this clearing
was a little hunting shelter, brick, with mock-Gothic windows and leaded
lights, encircled by a timber-pillared verandah, on which the thatch of
the eaves descended, in the worst style of Lille garden-furnishing
(“rustic work” in England). After entering the wood by a wicket, it was
to this erection that Madeleine mounted by a soft squashy “ride” between
impenetrable walls of oak sapling, planted as close as it would grow,
and cut regularly, section by section, according to age, so that little
could be seen but slim straight gray-green stems on all sides.
Arrived at the little clearing on the summit, the girl took out a key
and entered the hunting shelter. The ornamental porch led straight into
a dining-place almost filled by the long table surrounded by benches.
The porch and windows filled the north wall, a great open birch-hearth
with fire-dogs, the western. Opposite was a long rack of antlers, false
or real, for greatcoats, guns and bags. On the remaining side was a
partition pierced by two doors. The apartment was clean and well
kept--nor was this wonderful to anyone who could have seen Madeleine
produce feather brush and duster, and go carefully along the
pine-boarded wainscot, round mouldings and window-ledges, and along the
frames of the photographs of many a jolly party--photographs in which a
man, appearing variously from middle age to past it, mustached and
whiskered in the fashion of his youth--which must have been the fall of
the Second Empire--and a youth who passed to manhood in the newest
group--were surrounded by male companions who tended to be less and less
hairy the newer the picture--and women in every fashion from crinolines
to gaiters and deerstalkers--live horses and dogs and dead birds and
beasts, on a background of hunting shelter and trees. Madeleine hardly
paused to gaze at one, but passed on, chasing spiders, fly marks, dust,
and looking for damp or wormholes. She was far from being a person to
stand in front of a photograph while there was work to do.
Next she opened the left-hand door and peered into the little kitchen
almost filled by the vase-and-coffin-style stove, at which she and
others had cooked many a hot-pot and lapin-chasseur. All was in order
here, and she only glanced to see that no invading hand had touched the
stacked fuel, and that the iron-ringed flagstone that opened on a
diminutive cellar had not been moved. She left the kitchen. Before the
other door some little animation gleamed through the naturally passive,
almost defensive expression--behind which she habitually concealed her
thoughts. Entering this third apartment, a little upholstered lounge,
twelve feet square, she closed the door softly and stood a moment
without moving. It had been originally a gun-room, but the present
Baron, her father’s proprietor, owner of two thousand hectares of
shooting of which this shelter was the center, had turned it into a
withdrawing-room for ladies, as their presence at the shooting parties
became more and more usual. A divan ran under the curtained windows,
west and south, a tiny fireplace was beside the door, while a corner had
been carved off the kitchen for toilet purposes. Otherwise it was pine
boarded and upholstered in plaited straw like the rest of the building.
But the straw surfaces were covered with cushions, mats and covers,
chiefly Oriental, and all collected, like the Flemish china on the
walls, and the fancy photographs “Kruysabel by Moonlight,” “Morning in
the Woods,” etc., etc., by Georges, the present Baron’s son.
* * * * *
It was this very Georges--spoiled, lovable, perverse, self-indulgent,
whose taste and personality penetrated and overcame the rococo-rustic
architecture and upholstery--that Madeleine had met in this very room,
every time she could and he would, all that summer that led up to the
declaration of war. How many times they had spent the Catholic five to
seven o’clock--she protected by endless subterfuges and evasions--he
coming easily of right--she was far from counting. Nor did she cast back
in her mind to the commencement of the thing. Indeed, there had been
nothing remarkable about it. It happened like this:
Her father was the old Baron’s chief tenant and head gamekeeper (as that
office is understood in France). She had known Georges as a thin,
dark-eyed, imperious, tyrannical boy. As a girl she had helped carry the
materials of the midday feast, that, cooked and served at the Kruysabel,
was the converging-point of the morning drives of the Baron’s shooting
parties. The last shoot of the spring of 1914 had finished in darkness,
and she had been left, as usual, to clear up. Her basket packed, the
place all squared-up and tidy, she had stood by candle-light, munching a
strip of buttered spiced-bread and finishing, careless of the dregs, the
last of a bottle of Burgundy that her Flemish soul loved as only a
Flemish soul can. She had caught Georges’ prominent brown eyes on her,
more than once during the day, as she moved about, waiting at table.
Conscious of looking her best, this had pleased her, beneath her
preoccupation with her duties of cooking and serving. Moreover, she had
a good day’s work behind her (the Baron paid well if he was satisfied),
and the Burgundy warmed her heart.
She heard footsteps behind her, and a tune hummed, and knew
instinctively who it was. She kept quite still. Instinct told her that
this was the most effective thing to do. Two arms, under hers, bent her
backwards, and Georges fastened his lips to hers. Self-controlled, she
neither called out nor resisted. Careful, even grudging in everything,
when she gave, she gave generously, no half measures. That was how it
had started. The most natural thing in the world. It had gone on in
spasms of passion, and interludes, as far as she was concerned, of cool
efficient concealment. Georges was a little younger, far less healthy in
mind or body, probably less strong, physically, than she. There may have
been an undercurrent of almost maternal feeling on her part, and
certainly not the least illusion as to the consequences of being found
out. And no one had found out.
* * * * *
But now, as she stood in the empty room, on this October afternoon of
1915, she was as far from ruminating on the beginnings of the affair as
she was from the neo-classic tower of Merville Church, visible fifteen
kilometers away, in the pale sunshine, through a gap in the branches.
She had to stop for a moment to get used to the atmosphere, as a diver
adjusts himself to the pressure of a lower level, but it was an
unconscious pause; then, pressing her lips together, she dusted and
swept, opened the windows, banged mats and covers. Not that she hoped by
the elaborate preparation of a room unused these fifteen months, and
destined to be empty many another, to charm back the man through whom
alone that room interested her. Madeleine’s point of view was much
simpler. Her father had charge of the shooting. She had automatically
undertaken the care of the shelter. Having done so, unasked and unpaid,
as part of the general unwritten arrangement between her father and the
Baron, she could be trusted to go through with it, whatever happened.
Her task finished, she straightened her back and stood, hands on her
hips, looking at nothing. From somewhere beyond Estaires, Civenchy or
Festubert perhaps, came the sound of guns; some petty incident of the
four-hundred-mile year-long battle was dragging out its squalid tragedy.
Her lips moved, formed the words “Bêtes--sales bêtes!” which mean so
much more than “dirty beasts” and something more immediate than “foul
brutes” in English. No sound came. All that feeling of hers was too deep
down to struggle into active expression through her habitual reserve
and acquiescence with current manners. Not hers to criticize or revolt,
hers only to feel, to feel with all the depth of a narrow, obstinate
nature. Anyone might have supposed that she was thinking of the Germans
who had killed one brother, and held another prisoner since Charleroi.
Could she have been induced to express herself, she might have said,
from mere habit of convention, that she meant the Germans. But it was
deeper than that, so deep as to be almost impersonal.
Years before, when she was but a little girl, she had stood by the
bedside of her mother, dying for want of proper medical attention, the
fees for which had been grudged until it was too late. Her mother had
said: “Pray to the Virgin, now that you are alone!” She had answered,
sobbing: “I will pray, and I will take care of father and brothers, and
they of me!” “Pray to the Virgin!” the mother repeated. “She is the only
one that will take care of you!” That unique effort of expression of a
life worn down with toil, and given up to save expense, had sunk into
Madeleine’s mind, been confirmed by the teaching of the convent school,
where the nuns seemed to be perpetually clearing up the mess men made of
things. When the war came Madeleine dumbly recognized it for a thing
that men did. She had none of the definite sex-antagonism of an English
suffragist, was affectionately tolerant of her father and brothers, and
constructively tender to Georges, would have loved to have surrounded
him with perpetual comfort and indulgence. But in the bulk, men were
always doing things like this war. Her smouldering, almost sulky
resentment had not decreased one particle during the fifteen months that
had passed. For her, the day of mobilization had been catastrophic.
Georges, grandson of an ennobled “industrialist” and of bourgeois blood
of the official classes, surprised everybody, surprised Madeleine,
surprised perhaps himself. The manifesto “La Patrie est en danger” had
just been issued. He seemed to have swallowed its sentiments whole. His
papers arrived, and found him in uniform--he was (of course) in the
cuirassiers. He mounted and rode off. Like so many others, the indolent,
expensive young man lost all thought of anything except what he deemed
“duty.”
Madeleine, who knew as well as anyone that his depot would be at Lille,
had taken her stand, that August morning, just inside the gate of the
Kruysabel. She had chosen that place for easy concealment, and she knew
he must pass that way; she was prepared to give him anything he might
want. He passed her at the trot, looking rather fine in his regimentals,
and well mounted. He raised his hand to the salute, but did not draw
rein. She had gone home and taken up her work where she had laid it
down.
Going about the endless jobs of a farmer’s daughter, her slow-moving
temper had risen and risen. She knew Georges, his impulses, his
absorption in the matter that held him for the moment, his spoiled
thriftlessness. He would rush into military life, engulf himself in it,
never thinking for a moment to take his fill of happiness first. He
would not write. She hoped he would not. There would be no means of
keeping the arrival of letters secret from the whole village. Nor would
she write to him. She made no bones over social distinctions, upheld
them rather. He was the young master. It was not for her to write. This
left a great ache in her, for which she presently found a partial cure.
It came to her as she was packing up parcels of small luxuries for her
brothers. She packed a third one, more carefully than the first two. As
the billeting of English troops on the farm became increasingly
regular, she managed to vary and improve that third parcel, obtaining
from the--to her--sumptuously overstocked canteens and private presents
of the men in khaki--tinned stuff, toilet wares, and the beautiful
English cigarettes Georges loved. She posted this third packet from
Hazebrouck each weekly market day, for however well known she was to the
farming community, she was a stranger to the small postal and other
officials of the railway town. She comforted herself that if anything
(it was always called “anything” by the women of the War, whatever their
nationality) had happened to Georges the parcel would be returned. She
was far from picturing the trenches to herself. So, with steady,
profitable work at the farm, now a camp and barrack as well, with a
weekly parcel to send, and a weekly visit to the shelter at Kruysabel,
the interminable months had passed. People--her father with one son dead
and one a prisoner--her sister, down in Laventie, within bullet-range of
the trenches--got accustomed to the war.
But not Madeleine.
* * * * *
So, as she stood in the fading light of the October sunset, resting a
moment before she returned to the farm, there was nothing petty or
personal in the grim set of her features, the slow-burning anger of her
eyes. She might have posed there for a symbolic figure of Woman
contemplating Fate. She stood straight in her neat, almost careful
dress, bought with one eye on looks and one on usefulness, solid
well-kept boots and stockings, thick but without hole or wrinkle. Large
boned, but so close-knit that she did not look disproportionately broad,
her figure, kept in check by hard work and frugal feeding, promised to
grow thick only with middle age. Anyone looking at her face would have
said, “What a handsome woman,” not “What a pretty girl.” There was
something below the surface that kept the red lips closed in their firm
line, the round chin lifted, the gray eyes and level brows serene. Her
dark hair, which she kept, while at work, tied in a duster, was neat and
smooth. Her skin had the pallor of health.
That internal quality that made her simple shapeliness so much more
arresting than any trick of dimple, glance, or elaborate preparation and
high color, was, like anything else worth having, the gradual
distillation of the hard-lived generations gone before. How much of it
came from the cultivators who had hung on to that low ridge between the
marshes and the sea, as French and Norman, English, Burgundian and
Spaniard swept over it, and how much from the Spanish blood of Alva’s
colonists who had held the old block-house-farm amid all the
unfriendliness of climate, native inhabitants, and chance, none can now
say.
Jerome Vanderlynden had a hook nose and beady brown eyes. Madeleine
rather took after her mother, a Delplice of Bailleul, in her straight
nose and fair complexion. But there it was, outwardly, obstinacy;
inwardly--something more. It was that “something more” that clouded her
smooth forehead and flashed in her stabbing, side-to-side stare. She
never even dreamed of envying the properly married women who had
received official and private recognition of the trouble the War had
brought them. Nor did she stop to pity the hundreds of thousands of
women of irregular position, who had been abandoned on the outbreak of
hostilities, without resources. Her feeling, if almost impersonal, was
simple, direct. This War, this “Bêtise,” this great Stupidity had taken
Georges from her. She would be even with it. She put away her duster and
brush, wrapped herself in her fur, and locking up, descended the ride
to the wicket without glancing at the scuttling rabbits, crossed two
arable fields by their narrow grass borders, and so through the north
pasture entered the house by the plank bridge and the scullery door.
Hanging her fur in her room, she slipped on her long blue apron, went to
the kitchen, and began doing the next thing.
* * * * *
Nearly a week passed before the advance-party of a new battalion,
consisting of an interpreter in the blue uniform of the French Mission
and an English officer, rode into the courtyard. They were received by
Madeleine, who gave them coffee and began to explain herself in English
as usual, as to what she was disposed to do, and charge, and the rules
she expected to be observed. The Englishman was the usual square, blond,
sheepishly-grinning grown-up boy, who nodded and said “All right”
whenever there was a pause. The interpreter was a middle-aged commercial
traveler for a colonial house, who talked glibly and respectfully, while
under the table his foot pursued Madeleine’s. The arrangements
completed, Madeleine left the two, who had obviously lunched well in
Hazebrouck or Cassel, to measure up and ticket the various rooms,
barns, and stables, according to their requirements.
It was again her day for the Kruysabel, and she went to her room,
slipping off her apron and her stained and mended dress, to tidy
herself. Her room was a small cell-like apartment looking out across the
moat to the north pasture. The distempered walls were marked with damp,
but the tiled floor was clean and the places round the window where the
plaster had come away were hidden by short curtains. Before this window,
which was in a corner, stood a chest of drawers, bearing the cheap deal
looking-glass and an old inlaid box containing the girl’s few treasures.
The remaining wallspace of the outside wall was filled by the great
wooden bedstead, above the head of which was a little china bracket
carrying the inevitable sprig of box-tree. The bed came so far down the
little room that there was only place for a wooden chair between its
foot and the door, on the other side of which stood a tall press,
reaching to the ceiling, and a wooden washstand, surmounted by a shelf
that held the relics of Madeleine’s first communion under a glass bell,
such as used to be seen in England encasing Dresden clocks. The
washstand just allowed for the drawers to open.
Thus, as she did her hair before the glass in the window, Madeleine
could see her door softly opened, to admit the interpreter, who had
drawn off his boots and tiptoed in, his brown eyes gleaming greasily at
the sight of her bare arms and neck, muttering: “What luck!” The words
died on shaking lips and the creased eyelids fluttered over downcast
eyes, as she turned in cold fury: “Get out of my bedroom!”
He hesitated, and catching the ewer of common white china she slung it
forward with the force of muscles accustomed to tossing swedes to feed
the mashing-machine. It broke on his forehead, cutting his eyebrow and
deluging him with water. With a gasp he was gone.
She called to Berthe to bring a swab and broom. When the mess was
cleared: “That imbecile of an interpreter!” she said.
“It is a dirty type,” grunted the philosophic Berthe. Madeleine forgot
the incident.
She recalled it, however, before the new battalion had been under the
roof of the Spanish Farm many hours. They broke every rule, stole,
destroyed, trespassed, and worst of all, left open the gate from the
pasture to the “plain” (the level range of arable), so that the cattle
got out and had to be chased back. Madeleine, having expostulated with
N.C.O.’s and men, finally appealed to the Major, who sent for the
Adjutant. The latter, not allowing for Madeleine’s English, said bluntly
that the interpreter had informed him that the people were Germans in
disguise, and would be better for a lesson.
Madeleine interposed with such energy and point that the officers
promised, in order to get rid of her, to issue orders. Not believing in
stones left unturned, Madeleine also wrote to the Chief of the French
Mission at Cassel. Then an idea struck her. She looked in her account
book, where under the heading “Easthamptonshire Regiment” she noted the
name of the dark young officer who spoke French so well, Lieutenant
Geoffrey Skene. She wrote to him as well, asking if he would come over
and intercede with the troops.
* * * * *
The day after, the battalion left, the Major giving her twenty francs
for wood burnt, fowls and eggs. As there had been over twenty officers
in the mess and nearly nine hundred men in the battalion, Madeleine
added up the billeting and mess money and was content. She received an
acknowledgment of her letter from the French Mission, but nothing else.
Again peace and emptiness fell on the Spanish Farm.
Again, nearly a week elapsed, when Madeleine, stirring the midday soup,
saw an officer ride into the courtyard. She called to her father, who
was sorting haricots. He went out and returned with Lieutenant Skene.
Madeleine did not understand the English and it did not worry her. She
had indeed required this young man to deal with a difficulty, but the
need had passed. Still, he might be useful, and she invited him to stay
to lunch, calling to Berthe to kill a fowl, while her father got up a
bottle of Burgundy. She heard politely a long explanation as to the
receipt of her letter, and the impossibility of replying sooner, owing
to conditions prevailing in the trenches. She understood what was said,
but paid little heed, not being interested. She had found this young man
so far “well brought up” and “malin,” “sharp at money” in contest with
her father. She now began to see that he was “serviable,” “willing.”
This thought, striking against her eternal preoccupation with Georges,
kindled a spark.
It was when the young officer mentioned that he lay in the trenches
next some French troops that the spark caught, flamed, became an idea.
She showed nothing, of course, presiding with her usual competence at
the long Flemish midday meal, which she felt to be his due, after having
got him to come so far on his useless errand. But as the four courses
followed one another, and a carafe of beer gave place to more Burgundy,
she was thinking. Her father went back to work, leaving the Lieutenant
smoking over his coffee and glass of Lille gin.