* * * * *

The square-footed beakers, of the sort which would be called “rummers”

in England, were empty, the substantial finger-pieces munched and

swallowed, before there came the sound of spurred boots on the cobbles

and the clients began to arrive. First two Canadian majors with the

Maire came to claim the table they had reserved, and found it kept for

them, the coarse napkins starched, the heavy cutlery and glass in place,

and Madeleine with her best smile and hardly a trace of accent asking:

“What would you like for lunch?” at which the Maire stared. Behind them

trooped others. The room was soon full, the glass windows clouded with

steam, the noise of conversation and table-ware deafening.

Imperturbable, Madeleine moved among it. The waiting may have been

amateur. The cooking was thorough in the solid Flemish fashion. At

least, no one was left staring at an empty plate or glass. Madeleine, a

smile for every one, and a glib English explanation for every

difficulty, used the mental arithmetic she had learnt at the market, in

calculating bills. Her clients went off with heightened color and

laughing voices, amid trails of tobacco smoke. Manfully, Madeleine and

her staff cleared the place, fed themselves and washed up. They had

only got the tables reset before that extraordinary meal “afternoon tea”

was demanded of them. Madeleine was equal to the occasion. It might be a

foolish custom, but it paid. And this merged into dinner, long and heavy

as is the Flemish custom. Younger officers, and especially those down

from the line, were getting boisterous, rude. She had to put up with

many a clumsy joke, many a suggestion. She was too busy and too utterly

unafraid to care. One thing did rather amuse her. At the table he had

reserved for his party, the Lieutenant Skene was following her with his

eyes and ears, and getting so cross at the treatment she was receiving.

At length, just as it was all becoming too boisterous, and the younger

officers were getting out of hand, suddenly, from the little private

room that had been reserved for Brigadier-General Devlin and his

friends, came the sound of a piano--the good piano she had got from the

château. Not musical, and unwilling to spend time over such trifles, she

was forced to stop and listen. It was Chopin, some one said. It had the

most extraordinary effect. General Devlin and the officer who had been

playing went away. The rest of the crowd in the big room went also, the

rowdiness gone from them, subdued, seduced from their daily selves by

the music. On Madeleine the effect was strongest. Wrought up by the

events of the day and by sheer fatigue (she had been on her feet twelve

hours), the lovely stuff, that could not act on her unreceptive spirit,

antipathetic to it, merely saddened her. After another laborious wash

up, she dismissed her helpers, locked the house and started for home. It

was past midnight, and the day that had been so fine left a dark windy

night, promising rain before morning. As she trod the pavé of the

grand’route and the earth of the farm road, she felt miserable and

beaten. It was easy enough to say, “I won’t stand it!” Like so many

other people, she found it so difficult to do. How not to stand and what

not to stand? Forget Georges? Could she? Would she if she could? Go and

find him, and thus make him forget her? Which?

* * * * *

The corps did not have a horse show every day, but the one just passed

had been a good advertisement for the “Lion of Flanders,” and Madeleine

began to do a quiet, regular business in luncheons and teas for the

officers that incessantly circled round and about Corps Head-quarters.

To be busy soothed her feeling of helplessness, and the necessity for

this soothing kept her polite, skilful, attentive. Some weeks passed,

and then again, far away, and high up, undreamed of by her, things began

to happen.

The English offensive in the Somme, heralded as a great victory, had in

reality made infinitesimal gains at the cost of enormous loss. The

British Great Head-quarters, then still functioning in complete disunity

with Great Head-quarters of France, and often in good-humored disregard

of the advice given it, went on butting, like an obstinate ram, at the

same place. This, though it surprised the Germans more than the most

subtle strategy would have done, cost the lives of many a thousand

English soldiers. It was necessary to economize and economize again. The

reserve corps would have to disappear, the line northward be more

sparsely held. Here the long chain of action and reaction touched

Madeleine.

For two days she was feverishly busy, officers wanting meals at all

hours in great numbers. On the third morning, as she came down in the

blaze of July seven-o’clock weather, she found a long string of lorries,

grinding and jolting, behind them officers’ servants with led horses,

mess-carts, police. They went. A silence as of peace-time settled on

the remote Flemish village, lost in the undulating fertile plateau

between Dunkirk and Lille. Twenty kilometers eastward was the line, full

of troops. Twenty kilometers west were the great manœuver areas where

men learned to kill and not be killed more and more scientifically. At

Hondebecq, nothing. It took nearly a week to convince Madeleine, who was

interested in the more general aspects of the War. She was not really

convinced until the Baron walked into her empty dining-room.

“Good day, Madeleine, you have lost all your clients.”

Looking up from her knitting, she said gravely:

“It seems so!” But secretly she now believed it. If it were not true he

would not have come. He disliked the crowd of junior officers who joked

about his beard.

What was to be done? Not retain an empty restaurant where no one ever

came. She saw enough at home in the evenings to know that Marie was

firmly settled in, and didn’t want her. The situation was beyond her.

Her practical mind focussed on the immediate was baffled. But things

went on happening and once again the long arm of chance touched her.

It was about a fortnight after Hondebecq had been plunged in its

unnatural silence. She was going home in the long July twilight. She no

longer waited to serve late dinners, her only customers being occasional

passing troops during the day. No local people used the “Lion of

Flanders,” it was essentially an English restaurant. She was stopped at

the level-crossing by the evening train from Calais going southward. As

the smoke and noise faded away, she ran into Blanquart, the schoolmaster

and communal secretary, stumbling over the platform-edging, wiping his

eyes. The sight of that familiar figure in tears gave her pause.

“Why, Monsieur Blanquart, what is it?”

“It is my little Cécile!”

“What has she got, Cécile?”

Monsieur Blanquart blew his nose and said: “I ought not to complain. She

was a good girl. Naturally she has got a good job.”

“What job has she got? Where has she gone, then?”

“But to Amiens! You haven’t seen the discourse of M. Paul Deschanel on

the Recruitment of Women? It is hanging in the Mairie if that gives you

any pleasure.”

Madeleine, gray-eyed, her mouth a straight line, her hands crossed over

the little bag that contained the day’s takings, stared at him between

the eyes a full half-minute. Then she said:

“Ah, I sympathize with you. Good evening, Monsieur Blanquart.”

She went away thinking, and thought to some effect.

* * * * *

First, a refugee Belgian family was installed in the derelict “Lion of

Flanders,” where they all lived in the dining-room round the stove,

boarded up the big windows, and got jobs in the village. Then Madeleine

was seen in earnest consultation with Blanquart. Finally it was known

that she had got a job in a Government office at Amiens, from which the

men had just been combed out.

“Tiens!” said the gossips. “Cécile Blanquart first, now Madeleine

Vanderlynden. Who next?”

The formalities took a week. Then Madeleine emerged with the papers of

her appointment in her hands. She went first to the “Lion of Flanders”

and told the refugee family in no equivocal terms, how, when and where

to pay their rent to Marie. Leaving them in a state of guttural

exclamation, half gratefulness, half apprehension, she turned for a

moment into the church, and stood by the high-backed prie-Dieu that bore

the initials V.D.--Vanderlynden-Del-place--staring at the gimcrack

ornaments of the altar, the eternal childish innocence of the Catholic

Church decoration. Old Justine Schact was fidgeting about her verger’s

duties. Birds scuffled in the belfry as the chimes played their verse

and a half of hymn tune that marked the quarter hour.

Madeleine’s lips, set by habit to utter a prayer in those surroundings,

formed something like this: “Saint Madeleine, out of your divine pity,

grant me that I may see him, then it will be all right!” Her lips ceased

to move. In her unbowed head, her steady eyes took on the gleam of

frosted marsh-pools. She squared her fine shoulders and clasped her

large, capable hands on the chair-back. She might have been an allegory

of indomitable Flanders. There was no mistaking the glance she bent on

the altar. It said, “Saint Madeleine, if you don’t....” But the threat

was never articulated. She turned and walked out, erect and sure-footed.

At the farm she told her father what time to put the horse in, and when

it came, appeared from her room, her canvas-covered wooden box locked

and corded. She made her adieu thus shortly:

“Good-bye, Marie, what luck you came. I can go with a tranquil heart.

Berthe will help you well. Good-by, Berthe. Good-by, Emilienne, I will

send you a pretty postcard!” To the old house in which she and her

father, and no one knows how many ancestors had been born, in which her

mother had died, not a look. Either it was too familiar, or simply did

not appeal to her. To the Kruysabel where she had known her brief hours

of bliss--not a look. She was going to something better. Or perhaps, in

her narrow personal way, she felt that these things were part of her,

and that, so far as they existed, they went with her.

At the station, standing beside her box as the train came in, she turned

with real affection to her father, probably the one being in the world

she thoroughly understood and sympathized with. But she only said, “Au

revoir, Father,” and he only replied, “Au revoir, my girl.” Then with a

hoist of strong arms and legs, she was into the train, after which the

old man stood a moment, staring. But she was already settling herself in

her place, taking stock of her neighbors, girding herself for her new

campaign.

_PART II_

“ON LES AURA”

PART II

“_On les aura_”

Madeleine went to Amiens, but it hardly describes what happened to say

that she went by herself without other companions than chance

fellow-travelers, for, in her, there entered the capital of Northern

France more than a single Flemish girl. She took up with her, all about

her, an atmosphere of the frontier, of staunch Flanders, of the Spanish

Farm. Countrified she might be, certainly a stranger, but there was

nothing callow or helpless about her. She showed that maturity that

connoisseurs of wine mean when they speak of “body.” Generations, a

whole race, living in one way, confronted century after century with

much the same environments, had prepared that quality in her, which led

no one to wonder at or pity her. Had there been any Society for the

Protection of Young Girls at the station at Amiens, it would not have

considered her a “case,” as she swung down on to the platform, produced

her ticket and papers, and bargained with an old man with a barrow to

take her box--a bargain she struck much to her advantage by shouldering

the said box and starting to carry it herself.

The Amiens to which Madeleine went was the Amiens of mid-war--that is to

say, a general manufacturing town of eighty thousand people, provincial,

antiquated as such towns can be only in France--which town, plunged into

European war, had seen the Germans march through its streets. It was now

reserve railhead, camping-ground, last-civilized-spot for the avalanches

of reinforcements the English were pouring into the line. Most of the

French who fought beside them in that northern sector had to pass

through it. Madeleine had not been able to calculate with any nicety how

her move had increased her chances of meeting Georges, but she got as

far as beginning to understand what the Baron had meant by the “English

effort,” the immensity of that Volunteer Army, the constant watching and

waiting that would be necessary to find Georges among the hundreds of

French Mission officers that went with it. But like all vague steps, the

one that she had taken was comforting because of its novelty, its

unplumbed depths of possibility. Once cut adrift from home, and having

suppressed a tiny shyness, rising in the throat, she flung herself into

the new life with gusto. She was not wholly ignorant of towns, had been

to Hazebrouck and St. Omer, to Dunkirk even, once, and was ready as any

country-grown girl to fall under the spell of town life and strive

desperately to look as if she had always lived it.

* * * * *

Her job was in one of those Government Departments, whose staff,

depleted by general mobilization, and further by repeated “combing-out,”

hardly sufficed to keep going that multiplicity of printed forms by

which France is governed. She wrote a good hand, having acquired that

art at a convent school where it, at least, was not reckoned among the

subversive sciences. Perhaps she dimly saw in the power to write and

read one of the advantages that such as she possessed over the less

lucky. Handwriting, at any rate, was no difficulty. Figures she handled

with respect, almost with appetite. As the first newness of the life

thawed and broke before her, she began to prepare herself to take the

lead in the office, as she had taken it at the farm. By the time August

was turning into September, she almost smiled as she took her week’s

money. She would not have paid Berthe so much for doing such a job.

Eight to twelve and two to six seemed to her a ridiculously light day.

The heat of the town was sometimes oppressive, but the office, about the

ill-kept state of which she grimaced to herself, was on the north side

of one of those rococo barrack-like buildings that link the architecture

of the chef-lieux of Northern France to that of Mediterranean

civilization. That is, it had the dank chill of a tomb. She survived. As

for the life in general, her iron health stood it well. She missed the

air and exercise, but her diet was not full enough to allow her to

fatten. She had been welcomed, of course, by Cécile Blanquart, and

taken, not without a shade of kindly patronage, to lodge with the aunt

who sheltered Cécile. The aunt was one of those widows of the small

official class who seemed to have disappeared from England since

Dickens. She was poorer, prouder, more impossibly ugly and mean than

anything surviving to us. She would have housed Madeleine, had not each

of her tiny rooms already contained two people at least. Clinging to any

ha’pence that were to be had, she arranged that the new-comer should

dine at the frugal common table she kept, and sleep a few streets away

in the third-floor attic over the pork butcher’s. Madeleine appeared to

her what is called in France “sérieuse.” To Madeleine, the arrangement

appeared nothing short of heaven sent.

She had applied herself to her job. She had put out all her most

feminine sensibilities to catch the right note in dress and looks, for

she was nothing if not conventional. But in her heart she was simply

passing the days and waiting her chance to find Georges. As she did her

work, altered and supplemented her clothes, took little evening walks or

visited the cinema with the other girls, to all appearance just a

strapping country cousin fitting herself into new surroundings, she was,

all the time, vigilant, relentless. She drew the others down to the

station on the pretext of buying a paper at the hour the troop trains

passed or stopped. She preferred for her small needs the shops that

fronted the well-known officers’ restaurant, for Georges, she knew,

would do himself well if he had the chance. As to what exactly she would

say or do if she saw him she was not the girl to wonder. She had perfect

faith in her illusion--just to see him face to face, anyhow, anywhere.

* * * * *

Her companions with whom she worked, ate, and spent her evenings did not

annoy her. That is as much as she felt about them. Although only a year

or so her juniors, there was nothing about them to excite her jealousy

or even her respect. As she listened to them, making little muddles over

their jobs, giving way to small passions and routine indispositions,

chattering with affected solemnity or secrecy of their opinions, hopes,

fears--above all of their love affairs--she almost smiled. She put more

of herself into even the purchase of hairpins than they did into their

liaisons. Not that she was more generous or less acquisitive than they,

but simply because there was more of her. She had known real work, hard

bargains, the utter depth of passion--things undreamed of in their

little world of petty officialdom and shop-assistantship. Even the

country girls like Cécile stood mentally where she, Madeleine, had not

done since her mother died. Probably her principal minor preoccupation

(as distinct from her one great secret preoccupation) was the size of

her body. She was half a head taller and much more substantial than

most of them. She knew she was dressing herself right, somber colors,

good material and cut, little or no ornament--but her hands and feet

gave her some anxious moments, they seemed so big. She gave considerable

attention to her hands, using every means she could hear of to whiten

them, and manicuring them elaborately, bringing to the work much

patience and sense and no imagination. For her feet, she simply bought

the best she could afford, not attempting to pinch them, relying on her

strong ankles, straight back, and developed hips to keep her extremities

in proportion. She was right. Men turned to look at her often enough and

never with the superior, amused eye that she saw bent on her companions.

She did not consciously care whether men looked or not, but there was

just that comfort in it that she could tell that she was interpreting

this strange new world rightly. Had she but known, she possessed two of

the greatest advantages over most of the women in those

surroundings--radiant health, that brightened her glance, polished her

skin, burnished her hair--and, in spite of her quiet clothes and steady

eyes, an air of independence of which she was probably unconscious, but

which was far more attractive than the air of facile complicity with

male patronage that many girls wore. Like all advantages, these carried

with them their own inconvenience, as she soon discovered.

* * * * *

Among Aunt Blanquart’s lodgers were men, too weedy or too well protected

to have been mobilized. They functioned on the railway, or some other

public service, she did not care what, with colored brassards on their

arms. She had paid no heed to them, secure in the fatal confidence of a

strong nature, merely getting out of them anything they knew about the

movements of troops, feigning the fatuous gossiping curiosity that was

common enough. She was so immersed in her Fixed Idea that she was

astonished when the more pimply of them slipped past Aunt Blanquart’s

semi-official vigilance, as she was going home to her room, and

following her, proposed, “Suppose we take a little walk, as the English

say!”

Madeleine turned on him a freezing stare:

“What for?” she demanded, standing her ground.

The pimply-faced one faded back into the house, muttering excuses, only

to confide in his friends later that Madeleine was a “rosse,” “an

awkward beast,” as one should say.

Then again, when the skull-capped old gentleman who controlled her room

went sick, the worried head of the department came across to Madeleine

naturally with: “Give out the work to the room, while this old

Do-nothing is away, will you?”

She did the distribution of the endless schedules, minutes and circulars

deftly enough, and corrected the errors with a firm hand. It took far

less thought than most of her days at the farm. When the “old

Do-nothing” returned, skull-capped, pallid, smelling of lozenges, she

met him with, “I have done” so and so, and “you will find this” there

and that “under the paper weight!” etc., going quietly back to her desk.

At night he lingered, and was left alone with her, because she was never

in such a hurry as the others to crowd downstairs, squabble in the lobby

over the inadequate space allowed for dressing oneself for the walk

home. She turned and stared as he asked her to dine with him.

An idea--one of her rare, slowly born ideas--had come to being in her

head. In her seriousness she hardly noticed that he had taken it for

granted that she would go with him. But she almost smiled when he began

to detail his little plan. She, who had known not merely trials of

cunning with Belgian horse dealers and hop merchants, but desperate

evasion and deceit to meet Georges in the Kruysabel, agreed to pretend

to Aunt Blanquart that she had a headache, and to meet this old man at

the corner of the street. Fortunately it was dark at the hour

named--dark with that war-time darkness of a town within the bombing

area. She had a difficulty to recognize him in the crowd--and a great

temptation to help his shuffling steps. She felt a sort of charity

towards him, an inclination to take his arm and help him--a feeling

which increased as she saw what careful plans he had laid. He did not

take her to a restaurant, where the unequal couple they made would

certainly have been the object of more or less concealed amusement, but

to the back sitting-room of an old servant of his, who was now caretaker

at a big shop. It was discreet, cozy. The cooking was good, the dinner

ample, chosen from the more easily digested dishes. She was so touched

by his evident enjoyment--though she had her own quiet confidence in her

desirability--and by his desire to give her a good time--and things had

been rather thin since mobilization--that the only tyranny she practised

on him was to make him send out for a bottle of Burgundy; the pale sweet

wines he offered seemed to her below the occasion.

There was no awkwardness during the meal, for she asked prudent,

calculated questions--who really moved, housed and regulated the flow of

troops--did he know the numbers or composition of the English

divisions--all the small details most Frenchwomen--utterly innocent of

spying--asked eternally out of sheer curiosity and interferingness. And

when they had done eating she had to put up with the demonstrations that

men make, who have either not had their fill in middle life, or who have

come to regard it as a necessity not to be foregone. She had found that

he did possess information and perhaps connections that might be useful

to her Fixed Idea, and tolerated his attempts to solace his waning

instincts, until, hearing the hour chime, she shook herself free, put

herself tidy, and left him to find his way home--only, because he might

be useful and sounded disappointed, she murmured, “Another time,” at the

door. Once in the street, she stepped briskly home, arrived at the door

of her lodging about the usual hour of her return from Aunt

Blanquart’s, and went up to bed. She was plotting and scheming busily

and had already forgotten her entertainer as though he had never

existed.

* * * * *