his strange view of life might be. She made up her mind, after rallying
him (as was rather the fashion) on his conquests of her sex in France,
that he was very innocent, well brought up, sharp at money, willing, and
now she added in her mind, “rather a child,” “un peu enfant.” It did not
displease her. On the contrary, it was all to the good. She rather
expected the English to be like that. He did not take the subject up and
feign interest in her, as a Frenchman would have done, but remained
serious. She was therefore obliged to say right out what was in her
mind. It was to ask him, next time he went up to the trenches, next to
the French troops, to try and obtain news of Georges for her. She had
heard that his regiment was in the northern sector. She formed no idea
of the trenches, of the camps and resting places next to them. She
simply said what she wanted. Once the words were out she had to use all
her self-control. The sound of her request, the speaking aloud of what
had been going round and round in her mind for so long, brought a rush
of feeling such as she had not experienced since the first day of
mobilization. She bit her lips to keep back tears and sobs. Then she was
glad to hear the Lieutenant promising to do what he could. There was
some difficulty about it, apparently, she was not curious to understand.
She was glad she had asked an Englishman, realizing now how the thing
sounded, and what a tale a Frenchman would have made of it. All she
cared about now was for this young man to go--she was aching with the
effort of restraint--and get her the news she wanted. She had no clear
idea what. She pictured in a dim way Georges sending a message that he
was all right, and making an appointment to meet her, in St.
Omer--Calais--where he liked. Further than that her imagination could
not take her.
She thanked the young man cordially, and offered him more gin. He
refused, and went away, assuring her that he was at her service in this
as in other matters. She forgot him before he was out of the yard, and
fearing that she would cry--a thing she had not done since she was a
tiny girl--she went to her room. But she did not cry. She sat on the
wooden chair at the foot of the bed, her hands on the wooden rail, her
face upon her hands. Nothing happened. She soon went back to her work,
for her feelings were even worse in that little room of hers than in the
big kitchen where she had so much to do. Gradually her heart ceased to
thump, her eyes to smart. But she had taken the first active step
towards getting Georges back--towards that recovery of anything taken
away from her, that was her deepest instinct. And she knew that she
would not stop at any first step--not she!
* * * * *
It took more than a mere European war twenty miles off to interrupt the
regular life of the Spanish Farm. Troops came and troops went, and
Madeleine watched them, watched the payments made by the messes for
extra accommodation and cooking, and the weekly payments through the
Mairie for billeting and stabling, watched the storing of the crops,
the thrashing, the milking, the feeding of the fowls. Every week she
went to market, sold what she could, bought as little as possible, and
sent her parcel, surreptitiously, from the post office. She neither
heard nor saw anything of Georges. She neither heard nor saw anything of
Lieutenant Skene. But, sure enough, on the first opportunity, she was
obliged to try to get news of Georges.
It happened, as winter came on, that “the château” had need of some
things, eggs, and hare pâté--nowhere so good as at the Spanish Farm--and
Madame la Baronne wanted some sewing done, rather special, better than
any of her women could do. A message came via the Baron, who shouted
from horseback, as he rode by, to Vanderlynden, at work in the plain.
Old Vanderlynden handed it on to Madeleine, as he bent in an attitude
half of prayer, half a crouching ape’s, over the midday soup.
Madeleine nodded and told him to put in the horse--not that she could
not have done it, but she must clean herself. Accordingly, half an hour
later, there might have been seen issuing from the yard of the Spanish
Farm, over the brick bridge, along the earth road that divided the
manor pasture, out by the brick-pillared gate on to the road, surely the
oldest, most repaired of high black gigs, drawn by an old white horse
whose sonorous walk took it along at perhaps two miles an hour. Framed
in the dark aperture of the hood, upright, expressionless, sat
Madeleine, bareheaded, but in her best dress, holding the reins in a
gloved hand, basket between her feet. Silent, expressionless, she may
have been, but when she turned into the Lille-Calais road and met a
string of English transports, limbers and wagons, it was noticeable that
the Quartermaster-Sergeant, after glancing at her face, instead of
shouting to her to get out of the way, turned in his saddle and shouted
to the drivers, “Right o’ the road!”
She came to the village and crossed the empty Grand’ Place, where the
old houses stared unchanged over the notice-boards of the offices of the
Head-quarters of an English Division, and the church, newly faced with
red brick, showed the zeal of the pious Flemings. Turning sharply out of
this, she mounted, at the snail pace of the old white horse, a steep
street between little houses of people who had retired to live on about
the equivalent of forty pounds English per annum (as people do in
France). It ended in a great eighteenth-century iron grille, the entry
to the château. The central gates stood open and she drove straight
along a road deep between high banks covered with shrubs, which followed
for some fifty yards the old line of the moat, until she came under the
back part of the château where a broad terrace of gravel separated the
basement offices from the kitchen garden. Leaving the old horse, with
perfect confidence, looking down his nose into a laurel bush, Madeleine
took her basket on her arm, and entered the great square kitchen.
One of the things that renders life so easy in France is the absence of
change. Anywhere outside Paris, and often in it, change seems to have
worn itself out, and to have ceased. In that remote corner of Flanders,
Madeleine had no shyness, hesitation, or doubt, in entering the house of
her father’s landlord and her lover’s mother. She would not have dreamed
of entering by the front. No less would she have thought of leaving the
house without seeing Madame la Baronne in person. She was not alone in
this. The establishment was ruled by a lean, gaunt, gray-mustached
person, discernible to be of the female sex only by her clothes, named
Placide. Just as for Madeleine, so for Placide, life was an easy
riddle. She knew her place to a hair’s breadth, between God, and her
master and her mistress, on the one hand, and the servants, tenants,
tradespeople on the other. The great square block of a house, the main
building of the older castle, whose wings had been thrown into its moat,
whose forecourt had become flower gardens in the revolution of 1790,
went on its even way under her iron rule, undisturbed by wars. The
presence of a mess of English officers in the Baron’s quarters, east of
the main staircase, the absence of young Master Georges, of all the
men-servants, and of some of the women who had gone to work on farms,
did not throw Placide out of her stride. When Madeleine entered, she was
standing with her back to the dresser with its shining pots and pans,
telling a maid-servant her duties. The following conversation ensued:
“Good morning, Madeleine, how goes it?”
“Good morning, Placide, not too badly!”
“You have brought the things!”
“Here they are.”
“What will you have to take?”
“Nothing, thank you!”
“Come, a glass of beer, a cup of coffee!”
“Nothing, thank you all the same!”
“But you will say ‘Good day’ to Madame!”
“Why yes, if Madame wishes it.”
This little formality, for both speakers had said just those words
hundreds of times and knew them by heart, being over, Placide went to
see if Madame were free to see Madeleine, and Madeleine sipped coffee as
though she had not refused it, and gossiped with the girls.
She was then ushered through the paved and plastered back passage,
smelling of all the game that had been carried through it, and of all
the corks that had been drawn in it, to the front hall floored with
black and white stone, on which stood heavy old furniture, a little of
each period and a good deal of 1860 to 1870, between walls that were
painted in landscape as a background to the plaster statues of classical
deities and symbolic figures of the virtues, holding lamps. From this,
the high double doors opened into the drawing-room or salon, where
Madame sat since the use of Monsieur’s apartments by English troops had
forced her to relinquish her boudoir to serve as his bedroom.
Madame la Baronne d’Archeville had been married when the Empress Eugénie
was the first lady of Europe, and taking marriage very seriously, had
never tried to change since. Although she had neither the height nor
carriage of her imperial example, she continued in 1915 doing her hair
and wearing her clothes as she had begun, and the effect was all her
own. Herself of high bourgeois blood, she had married when told to,
without demur, the Baron, who, son of an army contractor and, so he
said, great-grandson of an emigré of 1792, had re-purchased with money
made out of républiques and empires, what those empires and républiques
had taken from his ancestors, real or imaginary.
The room in which Madame sat looked like it. Originally the banqueting
hall of the small feudal castle from which the château had grown, it ran
from back to front of the modernized building, with two tall windows
looking on to the kitchen garden behind, and two others, opposite,
looking on to the flower garden in front, and over trees and village
roofs into the rich undulations of the plain. The great beams that held
the roof were visible, but below them the walls that had been panelled
were papered cream and gold. Against this background hung two rows of
pictures, the upper row smallish and very dark, displaying, as far as
could be seen, grim old men in more or less armor, and stolid ladies in
stuffs, laces and jewels hardly less resisting. The lower row was
composed of portraits of whiskered men in uniforms of recent eras, and
women, all in evening dresses of the nineteenth century, varied by
landscapes, some good, some too good to be true, in pairs. Below the
pictures were marble slabs on gilt brackets, tables shining with brass
inlay. The floor space was occupied with curly armed, heavily stuffed
chairs and settees. It was a room into which the Second Empire seemed to
have burst in flood, washing up the drift of earlier ages, and to have
ebbed, leaving a carpet shiny from use.
But to Madame la Baronne, and Madeleine, no such thoughts occurred. To
Madame it was her salon. To Madeleine it was Madame’s salon. To
Madeleine, Madame said:
“Good day, Madeleine. All goes well at the farm?”
“Yes, Madame la Baronne. I hope that the health of Monsieur and Madame
is good, and that there is good news of Monsieur Georges.”
She stood, square planted and upright, not quite so near the door as a
servant, not quite so near Madame’s chair as a visitor. She was
perfectly conscious that on her left, in the curve of the grand piano,
was a red, blue and white draped easel on which was a picture in oils of
Georges, as a boy, in a white sailor suit, lips parted, eyes staring a
little, evidently just going to say, “I want so-and-so,” in his spoiled
way. But she spoke his name without tremor, and heard the reply:
“Thank you, we are well; we have no news of my son, but that is good
news, is it not?”
“Yes, Madame. I have brought the things.”
“Very well. Placide will pay you. Good day.”
“Good day, Madame la Baronne, and thank you.”
Backing with a curtsy to the door, she let herself out, took her money
from Placide, received her basket with her cloths and terrine, jerked up
the head of the old white horse, and drove back to the farm. She had got
what she wanted--the assurance of no ill news of Georges.
* * * * *
That evening in the lamp-lit salon, after Madame had said, “There is
nothing more; good night, Placide,” there was silence only broken by
the Baron puffing his cigar. He supported the war very badly. He was too
old to serve and was prevented from fishing or shooting by English
water-supply officers, who dammed up and filtered his waters, and by
French Gendarmerie Commandants, who stopped his supplies of cartridges.
At last he exploded:
“Nothing ever happens in this cursed war. You, what have you done
to-day?”
Madame la Baronne replied, after a moment’s silence that was partly
protest at his manners and partly some tiny instinctive defensiveness,
“I have seen Madeleine Vanderlynden!”
“Ah, she brought the ham and the hare pâté!”
“Yes.” Madame was struggling with that tiny instinct--could not quite
catch what it prompted--her feeling only materialized into the words:
“She has bold eyes!”
“It is a fine girl. Probably she knows it!” qualified the Baron, and
mused.
Madame mused too. But the necessity, forced upon her early in married
life with the Baron, of shutting one’s eyes and ears to what men did and
said about women, prevented her connecting Madeleine’s composure with
her own family. She could only fall back on her stock complaint.
“She will never be like her mother, that poor Sylvie!”
But irritation had supervened with the Baron: “You’re not obliged to
receive the girl!”
“One has to do what one can for one’s people. They wouldn’t like it if
one didn’t say a word to them when they come with things.”
“Do what you like so long as I have hare pâté,” yawned the Baron. “Ugh,
this war, I do nothing but yawn and sleep!”
“I pray!” said Madame to herself, and rose to go to the little “chapel”
in the turn of the stairs to do so.
* * * * *
Madeleine had no theory of the Irony of Fate. She had a merely hard
experience of it, gained from watching crops and prices. Reassured as to
Georges’ safety by what she had heard at the château, she took what
comfort she could.
Three days after her visit, she was sewing and mending by the kitchen
stove, using the light of the dying sunset to the last glimmer. There
were no English troops in the farm on that day, and outside were the
sounds of her father putting up the horses, on a background of damp
late-autumn silence, and behind that, the muffled vibration of the
eternal battle, that made the window-panes tremble ever so little.
Suddenly there came the sound of whistling--the last bars of the
well-worn tune:
“Madelon--lon--lon
Madelon 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 of Victor 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 habit of 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 lifted her 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 all Flemish 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 mixed border
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.