as it affected the work of the farm. She waited, and in a few days an
elderly gentleman appeared who had the tall angular figure, whiskers,
and prominent teeth of French caricatures of English people of the
nineteenth century. With him came a gig, a motor-car, three riding
horses, servant, groom, chauffeur and sundry dogs. He surveyed the room
offered him coolly enough, had some alterations made in the position of
bed and washstand, but warmed in his manner at once when he discovered,
in the course of a few hours, that Madeleine could speak really
resourceful if slangy English, and understood about his cold bath. He
had had such difficulty, he told her, and the French were so dirty.
Madeleine smiled (for he had passed her estimate for accommodation and
cooking without a murmur) and took him under her wing. There was
something about him that she dimly associated with what her father might
have been, in totally different circumstances--a mixture of helplessness
and partiality to herself. She mended his bed-socks and filled his
india-rubber hot-water bottle almost with affection. He on his side
would often say words which she took for endearment, in what he
conceived to be French--was less trouble than the ever-changing
battalion messes, and paid, in the long run, nearly as much. She was
glad to have the barns freed from everlasting fear of fire, and to get
them empty before the summer. The space which the Salvage required she
had Blanquart measure up, and charged at the rate laid down in the
billeting regulations. It came to nearly as much as housing infantry.
* * * * *
This old gentleman, by name Sir Montague Fryern, and his “salvage dump”
were merely concrete evidence which slowly revealed to Madeleine what
was going on. The idea of “salvage” had been imposed upon English
fighting formations unwillingly, from somewhere high up and far off,
some semi-political Olympus near Whitehall. Divisional and Corps Staffs
knew better than to resist. They thought it silly and superfluous--the
war was trouble enough, and already much too long and dangerous for the
average regular soldier, without having to economize material as well.
But, wise with eighteen months of such a war as they had never dreamed
of, and hoped never to see again, they had found out that the way to
deal with these mad ideas invented by people at home, was to acquiesce,
and then to side-track them. So when pressed for the third time for
reasons why they had not appointed a Salvage officer, the Corps Staff
now functioning at Hondebecq looked at one another, and some one said
jokingly, “Let’s make old Fryern do the job!”
The baronet had been almost a national joke. In 1914 dapper old
gentlemen in London clubs had said:
“Heard about old Fryern?”
“No!”
“He’s joined up as a private in the R.A.M.C.”
Some one said it was to avoid commanding a battalion, some that it was
to escape scandal or a writ, others that it was merely “just like old
Fryern!” In the course of a year he had become notorious for prolonging
officers’ convalescence with illicit drink, and the King, it was said,
had insisted on his taking a commission. Too eccentric to be put in a
responsible position, and insisting on not remaining in England, he had
drifted about Divisional, and then Corps Head-quarters until this
heaven-sent opportunity housed him in a suitable nook. A man of
unexpected resource, no sooner had he understood what was required of
him than he began to gather at the Spanish Farm the most miscellaneous
collection of objects ever seen together since Rabelais compiled his
immortal lists of omnium gatherum. A field-gun, a motor-car, other
people’s servants, several animals, French school books, Bosch
pamphlets, sewing machines, plows and tinned food; nothing came amiss to
him. What good he did, no one could say. Little of the stuff was
reissued and served the purpose of economy, but when Dignitaries from
British Great Head-quarters came down to see Corps Head-quarters and
said to its old friends: “I say, Charles, you were awfully slack about
the Salvage Order, you know!” the old friends were able to answer:
“Well, we aren’t now; you come and see old Fryern’s dump after
lunch--say about three!”
“What, old ‘Chops’ Fryern?”
“No other, I assure you!” and so on.
* * * * *
It happened, only a week or so after Sir Montague’s arrival at the farm,
that a lorry stopped in the yard. There was nothing unusual in that.
They did so at all hours of the day and most of the night. The English,
so wits said, fought on rubber tyres. Old Jerome, leaning on his hoe,
type of primitive man drudging with his primitive implement to wring a
subsistence from inscrutable Nature, often stood to watch these
powerful, docile servants of a younger age, that could do the work of
ten men and four horses in half an hour. He was doing so now, and
Madeleine, if she thought about it at all, thought like this: “Poor old
father, he’s making old bones; it’s the boys he misses,” when she saw
Jerome drop his hoe and run to the lorry to help out a woman with a
shawl over her head.
In another moment Madeleine had no doubt. It was her sister Marie from
Laventie. In a moment she was out. The men on the lorry, with the queer,
dumb, unexpected kindliness of the poorer Englishman, were handing down
Emilienne, Marie’s little girl, in a sort of frozen stupor of cold and
fright. Madeleine ran to take the child, while her father helped Marie,
who seemed dazed, into the house. Round the kitchen stove, quickly
stoked until the top shone red, Madeleine plied them with the inevitable
coffee, and presently with slabs of staunch farm bread.
Jerome stood by, the mere helpless male in the face of calamity. It was
he who said first:
“What is it, my girl?”
At first Marie could only say, “O, my God!” and rock herself. But
presently, reviving under the influence of food and drink, and the still
more potent surroundings of safety in that familiar, warm old kitchen,
where she had grown up, began to tell of the daily increase in shelling
and bombing. In her half-empty farm-house, with the glass long gone from
its shuttered windows, and the machine-gun bullets in its walls, relics
of the first engagement with the Germans in 1914, she had billeted some
English Engineers. The sector had been quiet ever since Neuve Chapelle,
a year before. Suddenly, as the English sat with her around the fire,
the shell had come. It had fallen in the doorway of the farm and had
flung half the house upon the soldiers. Marie, protected by the solid
brick chimney-piece, as soon as she got her breath, had scrambled under
the débris to the room where Emilienne was crying to her. The door was
jammed by a fallen beam. Some soldiers had run from a neighboring
billet, had broken in the door and got the child out. How they had all
tramped up the road, shells ahead, shells behind, shells falling each
side, with the sky red and the air rocking with the English artillery
retaliation, she could not tell. At last, at a dump of some sort the
Engineers had put her on a lorry that had taken her to Strazeele.
Farther than that they could not go; it was the limit of their Corps
area. Marie and Madeleine had been educated by the past eighteen months,
and knew better than to expect a lorry to go outside its Corps area. So
Marie had had to walk, with the child in her arms, to Caestre, where she
had found, thank God! plenty of lorries running back from railhead. On
hearing her tale, an officer had allowed her to get into one that was
going to Hondebecq, and she had easily persuaded the driver to go as far
as Spanish Farm.
At this point there was a tap on the door, which was opened by a
khaki-clad figure, with a sheepish face and unmistakable Cockney accent.
“Beg parding, mum, but ’ows yer little gal?”
“Give them something to take, they had been so----” she used the
untranslatable word “gentil,” for which “decent” is perhaps the nearest
equivalent. But Marie meant what the word perhaps originally
meant--human as against inhuman, civilized as against barbarous.
Madeleine took out mugs of coffee and rum, and was rewarded by a
cheerful, “Thank ye, kindly, miss, and here’s the very best!”
Madeleine came back, stepping softly. Emilienne had sunk into a deep,
heavy sleep, interrupted by twitching and muttering, in the chimney
corner. Giving her a glance, Madeleine clasped her hands.
“O Marie, all your things! The brass bedstead, the beer glasses, the
clock!”
Marie shook her head, tears ran down her face.
Above her, old Jerome, caring little for women’s fallals, muttered:
“Thank God, the little one was spared!”
Like all other incidents of the War, there it was. Shells fell,
something was destroyed. One went on as well as one could. That was the
history of the past eighteen months, was to be the history of another
two years and a half--just a perpetual narrow margin of human survival
over all the disasters humanity could bring upon itself. Not that the
Vanderlyndens took the large impersonal view. Marie and Emilienne slept
most of that day. The next, they started in to work, in their varying
capacities. The first thing Marie did was to spend a day, bribing lorry
drivers and cajoling officers, to get back to Laventie and see what was
left. The beetroot had been sold, the potatoes had gone with the horse
and cart to Aunt Delobeau’s near Bailleul, because for some time Marie
had been unable to keep a man on the farm, and had worked it with such
village women as had been stranded like herself by general mobilization,
the Government being only too glad to leave them there, to cultivate
almost under machine-gun fire, as long as they would. But since the
fatal night, the gendarmerie had become nervous of the place, though the
actual shelling had ceased. They would not allow her to sow the ground,
and were moving the powers that watch over France to obtain an order of
general evacuation of the commune, which they no longer desired to
patrol. With difficulty she obtained permission to fetch away the seed
and one or two agricultural implements. The dwelling-house had burnt
out, for the split stove had flung its flaming coals on thatch and
beams. She was spared the spectacle of inevitable looting by Allies, and
on returning to the Spanish Farm, settled down into the position she had
left, in 1910, to be married.
Outwardly, Madeleine acquiesced. Marie was the elder sister--eldest
child, in fact--and had all the prestige of a married woman. She was
also more purely peasant than Madeleine and easily jealous of her
rights. Madeleine, since she had had Georges, had ceased to envy her
sister. Now, losing Georges, she lost her secret comfort, and any
satisfaction she may have drawn from being mistress of the house, brains
of the farm. But Madeleine by long brooding on her secret fixed
idea--Georges--had come to that point at which she accepted these
outward superficial happenings, estimating their importance solely by
the standard of that Fixed Idea. At first she was unable to see how the
advent of Marie and Emilienne affected her reconquest of Georges.
* * * * *
She was soon to learn.
Marie, for a few days preoccupied with herself, startled by what had
happened, and rather grateful for home and shelter, soon emerged from
that numbed state which, medically the result of concussion, is one of
the first universal symptoms of shell-shock. She began to be masterful
and critical of Madeleine’s former management. She had run two messes
for the Engineers in her small Lys valley house, with far less scope
than the Spanish Farm afforded. Madeleine pointed out that she had done
all that, and would have continued but for movements of troops over
which she had no control. Marie agreed, sighing for the busy days when
she had cooked and done for three officers, and scores of hungry men,
just out or just going into the trenches, to whom Emilienne had sold
chocolate, cigarettes, writing paper and candles to great advantage.
Perhaps also she was jealous of Madeleine, of the younger girl’s smarter
looks, less peasant-like and matronly than her own, of her untouched
good luck during the long anxiety of the war, for, like all the world,
Marie knew nothing of the secret about Georges. But things kept
happening. Presently the right thing happened.
Podevin, who kept the “Lion of Flanders” inn, on the Grand’ Place of
Hondebecq, gave up. He had made money, of course, especially latterly
since the Corps Head-quarters had been in the village, and had enabled
him to open a dining-room for officers. But, like so many, he had lost
his only son at Verdun, and, heartbroken, cared no longer even to amass
wealth. The long, biscuit-colored house, with its two storeys and old
steep-tiled roof was for sale. Marie saw the notice and told Madeleine
at once:
“There’s your chance!”
Madeleine took her habitual half-minute of reflection, trying this new
idea against her Fixed Idea. They suited marvellously. Why had she not
thought of it before? (The true answer was that she was not sufficiently
imaginative.) She saw now that in taking the “Lion of Flanders” she
would be placing herself exactly where Georges must come if his division
were moved this way, which was sure to happen sooner or later. And the
whole thing was so natural that he would never be able to make her the
one reproach she feared so much--of running after him and making their
liaison obvious.
The two women went to see Podevin together, before they told old Jerome.
Podevin could only say, “I’ve lost my son--let me alone!”
They fetched in Blanquart, as was usual in such cases. The grizzled
schoolmaster arranged it. Madeleine pretended to be shocked at the
price, standing in Blanquart’s little parlor, with the sound of the
school classes grinding out the morning lesson like some gigantic
gramophone gone mad, just through the wall. But secretly she nudged
Marie. The worst was over. The price named was well within what she kept
about her in the house in notes. She would not have to draw on the
savings bank at Hazebrouck. That made all the difference in tackling
her father. But when the two daughters broached the subject that
evening, he acquiesced. It would be a good business, he said. Madeleine,
who had never forgotten how he had, all unasked, fetched Lieutenant
Skene to help her on the day of the visit to the hospital, wondered how
much her father guessed of her secret. Something, surely. But it was
just the sort of subject on which neither of them could speak to each
other. So all she said was, “You know, you’re a good father!”
* * * * *
The War, that had wounded her so deeply where she was most vulnerable,
was kind to her in little things. No sooner was she installed in the
“Lion of Flanders,” and had got together some three or four village
women who had young families or other domestic ties that had made them
anxious to get any work they could within a hundred yards of their
doors, while forbidding them to go out for the day to the farms that
needed them, than Corps Head-quarters arranged a Horse Show, a form of
amusement that became very fashionable in the B.E.F. as the years went
on. Officially, it was inaugurated to keep drivers and orderlies up to
their work. Subconsciously it indulged that national failing, love of
horses and open air, so curious in a town-bred nation. Madeleine, of
course, paid no more heed to this than she did to any other of the
curious foibles of those incomprehensible English, until she found that
most of the officers of three divisions would be in the village nearly
all day for this function, many of them ten miles from their own messes,
and glad enough to find a decent meal. She laid her plans and purchased
wisely and well. Then, only two days before the festival, Sir Montague
offered to take her to the show. She thought for half a minute, and
accepted, almost jubilantly.
* * * * *
She was feeling the long strain, however much she concealed it with
silent composure. And, as with all women in her particular “irregular”
position, she had begun to hug the golden illusion that goes with it,
and makes it for some so possible to bear. She had lost Georges; he was
gone from her side, in spite of her, pulled away by something he held
dearer. He had not come back, not written. She could not, dare not if
she could, go or write to him. But she still believed, as all such women
do, “Oh, if I could only see him!” She still nourished that pathetic
faith, still believed that if only she could stand face to face with
him, things would be again as they had been. There was, however, that
terrible danger haunting the attempt to get face to face with him. He
might think or feel she was following him. That, she knew, would be
fatal. In Sir Montague, therefore, she saw a heaven-sent angel. Too old,
too cranky, too well known (as she had soon discovered) to be the object
of scandal regarding her, he would take her under his wing and she would
be at the Horse Show, to be seen. Georges, if he were there, would see
her. That was the safest. Once he saw her she had perfect confidence in
herself. She would know instinctively, would not look, not she. But she
would will it, and he would have to come. She recognized clearly enough
now, how simply, passively, unconsciously she had made their first hour
alone together, when she had given herself, in the shelter at the
Kruysabel. She had only to do it again. This also comforted her, for she
was not original. She accepted Sir Montague’s invitation graciously, and
took care to look her best on the day.
* * * * *
The day came, and she was ready. Radiant with health, wishing to be
dressed in her own way, in a mixture of country primness and the
English style she secretly admired (coat and skirt and all-weather hat),
she had compromised at the skirt of her pigeon-gray saxony costume, a
cream-colored blouse that left her elbows and neck bare, with nothing on
her head but her own crisp dark hair. Thus adorned, she esteemed herself
as nearly a lady (i.e. a person who does no work) as she had any need to
be, while not too far removed from the mistress of the “Lion of
Flanders.”
Before Sir Montague came to fetch her, as she was perfecting her
arrangements at her restaurant, Lieutenant Skene appeared with a gunner
officer she did not like, who was obviously joking about her. She
greeted her friend kindly, in English, and ignored the other. She was
flattered to see that the lieutenant was evidently taking her part,
trying to make the other behave, looking very sheepish and funny as he
clumsily concealed his obvious feeling for her. They reserved a table
and went away. Sir Montague was punctual and she stepped up into the gig
with the ease of one who has always had to use her limbs. She was
elated. Men looked after her. The sun shone. In the queer gauche Flemish
springtime, buds and shoots hung stiffly in the still air like heraldic
emblems. A band was playing, people were moving about. Everything
whipped her excitement. They drove on to Verbaere’s big pasture, behind
the mill, and put the gig with the other vehicles, all parked and
stewarded as on an English race-course. Sir Montague had a way of
arching his elbow, twirling his whip, and fetching a great circle before
he brought his conveyance to a standstill that caused, she noticed, much
laughter, and the beginnings of a cheer.
He handed her into a rough enclosure, where English nurses in gray and
red and white coifs, Canadian nurses in blue and scarlet, Australian
sisters in gray-brown, fine big girls in their mannish hats, mixed with
a sprinkling of the wives of local maires and notaries, small French
officialdom and business circles. Some of these ignored Madeleine,
perhaps did not know her, but the brewer’s wife from the next village,
invited by the A.S.C. colonel billeted on her, gave a cheery “Good day,
Madeleine,” that would have put anyone at ease. But Madeleine was
already at her ease. She saw she was getting more attention than any
other woman on the ground. She had dressed just right, awakened none of
the submerged sensibilities of those queer English. That and a glance
at the lovely horses, shining, prancing, bobbing head and floating
tail--for she loved fine animals--was all she cared to notice before she
settled herself, eyes straight to the front, and put out all her feelers
for the one purpose for which she had come. Poor Madeleine, no one had
bothered to tell her that there were already over fifty English
divisions in France, and among the men before her she stood one chance
in seventeen of finding Georges. They passed about her, Easthamptons,
Lincolns, Norfolks, A.S.C., R.A.M.C., R.A.F., gunners, Engineers, French
Mission in blue and strawberry, wonderful staff people, in khaki and
leather so perfect that it outshone all the bright colors of the French.
She took it all in, tried to sort it out, mused over it, especially the
name “Lincoln,” which, like all French people, she was incapable of
pronouncing. She could form no idea of which group was the likeliest to
be Georges’, glanced over the face and figures of the French Mission
officers. More than any close examination, her instinct told her,
Georges was not there. A sort of numbness came over her, she felt it
almost like a physical sensation. It seemed to be in her legs. She
fought against it, would not give in to it. Then, all of a sudden, too
suddenly for her strong, resolute, unimaginative nature, she did give
in.
The corps officials had hardly begun judging the riding-horses when she
slipped from her place, round behind the stand, out between the
wagon-teams, waiting their turn, with cunning drivers of all arms
surreptitiously dabbing metal and leather with handkerchiefs, looking
stolidly over the exhibits they belonged to, speaking gently to them in
low voices. She found a well-known gap in the hedge and got through into
the back lane that ran towards Verbaere’s mill. Up this, picking her way
in the mud to save her best boots, she came into the village by the yard
of the “Lion of Flanders.” The numbness was gone from her legs. Instead,
her pulse beat in her temples so loud that she hardly heard the band
playing “Watch your Step,” and the cheering as the riding-horses,
classed by the judges, filed round the ring, and out.
* * * * *
She let herself into the “Lion of Flanders” by the back door, which she
shut with a clang. She looked magnificent and just a bit desperate, so
that, of her waiting-women, one said to another, “She’s in fine fettle
this morning, our young patronne!” But she was not the woman to do the
more ordinary desperate things. No--yes. A stitch of her close-sewn
self-control had parted. She was not going to stand it. Her mental
attitude contained nothing of an English suffragette’s logical,
theoretical stand upon “rights.” Her pride was hurt. Georges was
Georges, dearer than life, but there now glimmered behind him something
dearer than that--her dignity, what was due to her--Herself, of course,
in reality.
She swept a glance round the neat, well-laid tables, sniffed the
redolent preparation of the kitchen. She--dragged about behind a man’s
shadow that ever eluded her! Of course, her feeling was incoherent,
ill-defined, just a sense of resentment against something she did not
trouble to identify, but it was there. Reckless, she went down the stone
steps into the cellar. Among the casks of weak beer and carefully
“lengthened” wine she had taken over from Podevin, was a bottle marked
“Chambertin,” which she recognized as an oversight. It was good stuff.
She had hidden it with the English Expeditionary Force canteen whisky
and the rum she had got out of Sir Montague. Now her thought was, “They
shan’t have it, those English!” She took it up, glanced at the coating
of the bottle neck, and mounted the stairs with it.
“Berthe,” she cried--she had borrowed the girl from the farm for the
day--“four glasses and some bread!”
Putting on her black alpaca apron, she pulled the cork, holding the
bottle steady with a firm wrist, and poured out. Raising her glass, she
said to them: “I give you that!” and drank amid a murmur of “Thank you,
Madeleine.” Outside the services of the Church, the only ceremonial she
had ever been taught to observe was connected with good wine. The
Chambertin lived up to her gesture, with its broad, almost coarse
flavor, a legend among the frugal Flemish at their rare feasts.
Outwardly, what she did was just a bit of unexpected generosity toward
four employees who could do with a heartening for the twelve hours’ hard
work that lay ahead of them, from which she intended to draw handsome
profit. Within her heart it was, unconsciously, perhaps, almost a
sacramental act, the opening of a new life. The blood in her was beating
out the time, “I won’t stand it any longer!”