September, just as she was beginning to feel no more strange as a
government clerk in Amiens than she had felt as a farmer’s daughter in
Hondebecq, there spread through the minor French circles the news of a
further English offensive. From what source it came and how it took
shape no one will ever know, but the perpetual hungry curiosity of the
sort of people among whom Madeleine now lived, was suddenly glutted with
the news that there was to be an offensive, and that the Prince of Wales
was taking part. This set flame to the French imagination, among whose
republican embers a royalist spark has ever glowed.
To Madeleine, whose restricted imagination conjured up some long defile
of troops through the cobbled streets, led by a fair-haired English boy,
the news seemed of great promise. Georges was certain to be there. She
saw him, accurately enough, in the blue and strawberry of the French
Mission, riding in the cavalcade. She got a day off--her old man was
“complaisant,” as the French say, and she found herself with a whole day
on her hands, an equinoctial day of chill drafts and paling sunshine, of
fluttering leaves and a stir in the blood.
She had tried to get some idea as to when and where the troops would
pass, but all that she could gather was that the English police had been
doubled. This only endorsed her preconceived notion of a parade through
the town. She rose in good time and dressed herself carefully--in somber
colors, in coat and skirt, inclining rather to the English model,
implacably neat, well-buttoned, without a spot of bright color or a
trace of expression on her face. She went out and down to the station,
bought a paper, lingered about, tried to feel what was going on. The
streets were crowded, and as she was seldom about at this hour she drew
comfort from the fact. It was of course the usual crowd of the nearest
town behind the line of an offensive, men of all ranks going and coming
on leave, base and line-of-communication people, young officers with a
day off, grizzled officers’ servants sent in from the innumerable camps
for shopping. There were English, of north country and south country,
London and Liverpool, Welsh, Scotch, Irish, Channel Isles. There were
Canadians talking Yankee, Anglo-Indians, in wonderful blouses with
mailed shoulder-straps, tall gaunt Australians, fresh-faced New
Zealanders, swarthy or tanned English South Americans, South Africans
and Naval details. More than once she was stared at, twice spoken to,
once followed. If the Prince of Wales did pass down that street, it was
in one of those fleet Vauxhall cars, with red-capped staff officers.
There was no cheering, no procession, nothing of the crude, out-of-date
spectacle that would have delighted and encouraged her. By one o’clock
she was desperately hungry and tired, and burning with a sort of
spiritual fever.
She did not give up, however. Partly faithful, partly merely obstinate,
she stuck to her furtive prowling, keeping ever closer to the well-known
Restaurant “à la Paysanne Flamande.” She knew her Georges. A thousand
accidents might take him into this or that street, by rail or car, on
horseback or on foot, but, between noon and two o’clock, there was no
possible error, Georges would be sitting before the best-laid table he
could find, napkin tucked into his buttonhole, saying he had the hunger
of a wolf, making caustic fun of the bill of fare, and standing no
nonsense with the waiter. The celebrated restaurant, entirely a creation
of the War, before which it had led a struggling existence dependent on
a billiard-table and a mixed clientèle, presented a glass swing-door
between two large plate-glass windows, protected by round iron tables
and chairs set among desolate shrubs in boxes. The door opened into a
little-used café-lounge; the eating-room had replaced the billiard-table
on the raised portion of the floor up four steps at the back. Thus the
public in the street could see the legs and half the bodies of the
diners, but not their faces. Outside, a great sign-board, swung
English-fashion on a bracket, depicted an alleged Flemish peasant-woman,
in national costume, with international features, and the immemorial
vulgarity of such efforts. Madeleine never even guessed that the square
of brilliant paint was an allegorical representation of herself, and
would have been much astonished to have been told so.
Two o’clock struck, and half-past, and suddenly she had a physical
qualm. What was it? She realized she was faint with hunger. Together
with the bodily emptiness and dizziness, there rose in her a bitter
wave of disgust and disillusionment. For the second time she set her
teeth. She would not stand it. Careless of the fact that she was doing
what was only done by women of a sort she despised, because she
considered they were driving a dangerous, badly paid trade, she pushed
open the door, walked steadily into the café, and sat down just as the
tables were beginning to go round. It was partly want of food, as she
told herself, but partly, if she had admitted it, the moisture of
desperate vexation in her eyes. She ordered a café crême of an unwilling
waiter, who did not want French people there, in such a way that he
brought it, at once, and properly done. The scalding sips soon revived
her. She began to think, if thinking it can be called. Rather she just
sat and felt. She felt the French equivalents of “I’m fed up with
this”--“I’m going to put an end to it”--whatever It exactly was. Then
less articulately she just felt sore. It was not in her to feel
passively sore, but how to express her feeling by activity she could not
see, at the moment.
* * * * *
The souls of women come, perhaps rather more often than those of men, to
steep places down which the least touch will cause them to hurl
themselves. Madeleine had been hanging on some such edge ever since the
day of the Horse Show. It needed but the stroke of a feather to send her
over.
Her trance was broken by the sound of field-boots on the steps that led
down from the dining-room. Two officers were passing to the door,
middle-aged junior officers of infantry or artillery, with cleaned-up,
discolored uniforms, and faces and voices of those who had been “through
it,” and had a good deal more to go through before they would have done
with “it”--“it” being the War. Madeleine had seen hundreds such, going
up to the line, coming down from the line, sitting round her father’s
table, taking charge of parties of men, with shy resolution. Little
given to guessing, she could have told almost of what they were
talking--of what they had done on leave, what sort of “show” they were
going to be involved in, possibly of the very inn of the “Lion of
Flanders” where they might have snatched a comfortable meal in the
intervals of sleeping in their clothes and eating out of their hands.
They passed beside her and she smiled involuntarily. Her long vigil had
not been in vain. All the English divisions were bound to pass into the
Somme offensive sooner or later, and there was nothing wonderful in her
meeting two officers whom she had seen before. Nor was it because she
was feeling the homesickness or the loneliness of the acutely sensitive.
But just because the starvation of her Fixed Idea had wrought her up to
a point culminating at that moment, she smiled.
The shorter, fairer of the two, whose mere name she remembered (for she
had that sort of memory, very useful for checking billeting returns),
recognized her and spoke to his companion. The other turned. It was
Lieutenant Skene, whom she had not seen, or indeed thought of, since the
Horse Show. He turned, and their glances met. She saw in a moment that
it mattered intensely to both of them what she did, how or why she could
not see, but she knew that it mattered. She kept perfectly still, her
face molded in a smile. The door clicked. They were alone. Skene sat
before her. What had she done? Nothing. By doing nothing she had placed
him there.
He began questioning her: what was she doing in Amiens? and she replied
briefly, not thinking of the words. She pushed aside her cup and rested
one elbow on the table, her chin in her hand. She stared into his eyes,
gray-brown, dilated by shell-fire, and reddened at the rims by gas, but
full of feeling which she recognized at a glance as genuine. That
feeling was concern for her welfare. She did not admit to herself, still
less to him, that there was anything to be concerned about. But it
warmed her in the depths of her heart, just as the liqueur he had
ordered for her (with sweet cakes, and the way in which he did it showed
his solicitude) warmed her stomach. It was true he was talking about
himself. She knew in a moment that this was not egotism but English
shyness. She answered him in a dream, rocking her body ever so slightly
on her chair, as if she were nursing something. Indeed, she was--nursing
some part of her spirit, bruised just as violently as her knees had been
when the old horse fell down and threw her on to the pavé of the Lille
road--for she had just been thrown out of her closed self-control, that
hid unwelcome Truth even from herself, on to the bare realization of the
long fast of two years, the sharp starvation of two months.
Now he was talking about _her_, with the polite candor which had made
her say, the first time she saw him, that he was “well brought up” and
“willing.” More, he was inquiring about Georges. She was not surprised;
that was all part of it. She heard herself, as another person, replying
coolly: “He is dead!” and when pressed further: “He is dead for me.” She
could have laughed aloud at the same time, not for joy, but from the
steady mounting beat of her own heart. His concern was trebled. Her
heart beat faster, not feverishly, steadily. She had thought of her
trouble: “I’ll put an end to this!” She was putting an end to it!
Then he actually touched her, and made sympathetic remarks. He was
advising her not to frequent officers’ restaurants, and she replied she
did not care. It was true. She cared for nothing at the moment, had
never felt more light-hearted. He asked what she was going to do next.
She wanted to laugh more than ever as she said, “Nothing!” He proposed a
cinema. She assented delightedly, feeling as though she would have
proposed it herself in a moment, it was so inevitable. She made a quick
calculation. Cécile Blanquart and the other girls were at the office.
Aunt Blanquart and the pork butcher’s wife, at whose house she lodged,
would not be shopping in the main streets, rendered expensive by English
custom. It was safe enough.
Out in the street she stepped beside him with a pride which, she
suddenly realized, she had never known. There are inconveniences about
clandestine liaisons. She almost enjoyed the publicity. Fortified by
coffee, cakes and brandy, as tall as he was to an inch or so, she seemed
to float along on the wings of new-found comfort, effortless, smiling.
The cinema was full. He was nonplussed, she could see, did not know what
to do next--knew what he wanted (as she did, and hugged herself), but,
being English, had a difficulty in saying it. He wanted her. That was
natural enough. She knew herself to be desirable. It amused her to hear
him proposing to see her home to her “Aunt’s”--for thus she had
described her lodging. She let him. It seemed now she had only to go on
letting him, and the riddle of life was solved. She had not known an
hour before that there was a riddle. Now she only knew she was
approaching a solution.
They arrived in the narrow by-street near the cathedral as the clocks
chimed four. At that hour the place was deserted. Their footsteps
echoed, they might have been treading a world of their own. Madeleine
felt it, but noticed that he was feeling something stronger. He had
almost shed his English reserve--was talking volubly, about himself--how
he had been twice in hospital, and must now go back to the fighting--how
men like himself wanted a little comfort before they died. He spoke in
English, but she understood most of the words and all the drift. His
feelings coincided with hers and saved her the trouble of expressing
them, to which she was unused and averse. At the door of her lodging
they both stopped, she with her key in the lock, he looking at her with
eyes that he immediately averted, and which pivoted round, in spite of
him, to her. As she turned the key and opened the door, she said, with
the feeling of turning something in her heart and opening it: “Here we
are!” Inevitably, as if she had taught him the words, he was saying:
“Don’t send me away, let me stay!” and with a great sigh of happiness
such as she had felt once before in her life--another life, surely--she
retreated into the dark entry before him with: “Well then, my poor
friend!”
* * * * *
When Madeleine next had attention to spare for such matters, the chimes
were telling six o’clock, and through the glass of the skylight-window a
little star twinkled. She became conscious that he was slowly awakening
from the stupor in which they had plunged each other, and was lying,
open-eyed, waiting for her to move (just like him). Her mind sprang at
once to the practical:
“What time is your train?”
“Gone this half-hour!”
She sat up in alarm: “You will have trouble!”
“They can’t tell to a few hours when I left camp!”
Reassured, she passed on to the next thing.
“You are hungry!”
“Yes!”
She was fully alive to the situation. The pork butcher’s wife downstairs
had opened, like every one in Amiens who could manage it, an
eating-room. The particular public for which it catered were English and
French N.C.O.’s of garrison formations, not a field for high profit, but
respectable and regular. There was a back room. It was better than
courting trouble by going outside. She explained this to Skene as she
sat up, shivered slightly at the contact of the air, lit the candle, and
tidied herself. She was not ill at ease before him. Thorough in
everything, when she gave she knew no stint. She did not boggle over the
irregularity of their situation, any more than over her semi-nudity. Why
should she? She had perfect confidence in what she had done, just as in
her things, which were clean and good in quality, and in her body, which
was firm and fresh with health. Of course, out in the street the
conventions constrained one to dissemble, to conceal what one did, and
only to show as much of one’s skin as fashion allowed for the moment.
But with Skene she was as frank as she had been with herself, poured him
out clean water, and explained that with a small gratuity and a generous
order, Madame would make no scruple of their having the best time they
could. There were the French police to bribe, possibly, and worse still,
the English, but it could be managed.
She was proud of Skene when they interviewed Madame. He spoke French
with some fluency, and knew just how to flatter the old lady’s
sensibility and appeal to her greed. When they sat opposite each other
in the little back room, he turned on her eyes still bemused, and
looked at his watch with frank pleasure: “No train till six-thirty.
Still nearly twelve hours!” he said. Under the table she rubbed his
ankle with her slippered foot. Their little dinner ended, as, alas! all
dinners must. The pork butcher’s wife, overpaid and adroitly flattered,
rallied them, almost blessed them, as, his arm round her waist, her arm
round his neck, they mounted slowly the dark, narrow stairs.
Hardly a breath of disillusionment spoiled their few hours together. He
took what life could give him--life that was likely to end for him so
soon and so abruptly. She, woman-like, put into it something almost
sacramental, as though she were devoting to flames some cherished
possession, and devoting it willingly. There was nothing Skene could not
have asked her for that she would not have given him, from money to her
heart’s blood. He asked simply to be loved--comforted, more exactly, in
his starved, war-worn body. That was easy. She gloried in it, even went
so far outside her usual self as to point out the bare cleanliness and
order of her little room. That was just about the length of her
knowledge of English character. A clean room would appeal to him. She
never even stopped to wonder that she should be so anxious to please
this chance acquaintance--this man of different race, religion, and
language. She had never read a novel and was innocent of the romantic
theories of love at first sight. She acted as she did from one of her
slow-moving, undemonstrative impulses--just then so strong that it
amounted to a feeling of almost physical well-being in her
limbs--traceable, possibly, if she had been the sort to theorize about
origins of feeling, to starved maternal instinct. She missed
something--petulance, perversity--the whims of a spoiled child that she
would have loved to gratify, as she had, long before, in the secrecy of
the hut in the Kruysabel. But she did not miss her spoiled child much,
for she had instead this good child--this man of quiet good manners,
whose behavior she had noted the first time she saw him, and who now
accepted her suggestions without a murmur. So she invited him gently to
see how she had moved the few articles of furniture, scrubbed the floor,
cleaned the skylight, pasted paper on the damp-stained walls, hung her
few dresses on hooks beneath a curtain, and put a rose-colored paper
shade round her candle. She was gratified to see how pleased he was,
little suspected that she had laid her finger on the very deepest desire
in him. He had told her that he was no soldier, but a member of a
profession that he had practised for twenty years before volunteering in
August, 1914. Yet she was very far from forming any conception of the
decent orderliness of the life he had left, the life of an assistant
diocesan architect in a provincial English town, with its rooted habit
of cleanly comfort and moderate happiness, that the war had hurt so
horribly; and she never guessed what dim echoes her own Flemish domestic
virtues aroused, of all he had ever felt to be the necessities of
existence.
She was even farther away from him when his self-consciousness,
awakening with the small hours, drew him to think of the future--of his
and of hers. Like many another man in those years, his courage ebbed at
the false dawn, and he questioned Fate aloud as to whether he would see
another--whether he would ever again know the comfort of her. The simple
cunning of her kind led her to propose arrangements to meet him again.
This in turn led to the question of where she was to be found. This drew
from him anxious questions, that flattered her immensely by the
importance he attached to her welfare, but brought back unpleasantly
into prominence that other whom she was trying so hard, so
unconsciously, to forget. She burst out with a few fierce words,
stamping and stamping on that dead image of love to make it disappear
from view. It was when she did this, brutally dismissing from memory
that spoiled child of her affections, that her new, good, well-behaved
child gave her the first taste of his imperfections. He was solicitous,
punctilious to a degree, questioned if he ought to take what was
Georges’. She would have been angry with him in another moment had not a
stronger, surer, more positive instinct prevailed. They had such a
little time, might never have another. She wound her bare arms round his
head and stifled his questions and doubts against the present reality of
her tangible self. And surely she was right. In all those years of loss
and waste it occurred to her naturally to build and replace what she
could, and all the love and care she could not give to the children she
might not bear, she gave to this grown-up child, who needed it, and took
it willingly enough, once he ceased to think.
* * * * *
In the gray dawn she was up and about, making coffee, heating water for
him to shave, helping clean his endless buckles and straps. She let him
out in good time for his train, and sweetened her kiss with the eternal
hopefulness of that “à bientôt,” “until soon,” that is the happiest
thing in French farewells. Then slowly, carefully, she made herself
ready for the day at the office, proud of the dark touches under her
eyes, of the mat-pallor of her skin, of the little smiles that curled
the corners of her mouth. And many a man, seeing her, wished he had been
the source of the deep secret satisfaction she seemed to give herself
that day.
All that week she retained the feeling of having done a good action--or,
as she would have expressed it, had she expressed it at all--driven a
good bargain with Fate. At the end of the week “Papa,” as the girls in
the office called the head of the room, waited for her and asked her to
spend the Sunday afternoon with him. It was his birthday, and he and she
would celebrate it with a little Festivity. She did not look at him for
fear she should laugh, for, taller than he by inches, she caught the
sparkle of the electric light reflected on the top of his bald head.
She asked, with averted face, “Will there be many invitations!”
“But no--you and I alone, naturally!”
She shook her head slowly from side to side as she hooked her fur under
her chin and surveyed herself in the little glass that hung on the door
of the girl’s lobby.
“But you promised last time that there should be other times----” His
voice had risen, his eyes darkened. It was wonderful what malignity
could still reside in a little old man. Something stronger still
inhabited Madeleine, since those few hours she had spent with Skene.
Once again the blood in her veins had run like molten honey, and she, no
spendthrift of herself, had felt in every limb as she gave herself up
utterly: “This is right--right--right!”
She was in no mood for senile trifling, and turned on him with the
arrogance of youth, blazing, magnificent: “And now I promise you there
will not!” and left him, breathless and a little afraid.
* * * * *
Another week passed. Madeleine became uneasy. The strongest emotional
impression will not last. The time she had had with Skene began to fade
into the background. It had been such a minute. It had no result.
Instead of feeling perversely resentful against Georges, she now felt so
against both of them. Skene neither wrote nor made any sign. He did not
even give her the dubious satisfaction of obliterating the shame she
felt at Georges’ neglect. All this lay, a dumb ache, in her uncritical
soul. But she had more immediate cause for annoyance. She became
conscious that she was being looked at, whispered about. It did nothing
more than ruffle the surface of her self-confidence, but when she and
Cécile Blanquart went to the cinema together--she hardly noticed a
half-unwillingness on Cécile’s part, and that the other girls who often
accompanied them had made excuses--she was brought face to face with the
matter. Cécile said shyly, in the melodious darkness of the one-franc
seats, where one had to keep one’s hands in one’s lap, because so many
soldiers were lonely:
“You know what they are saying about you at the office?”
“No--what?”
“Oh--I daren’t tell you!”
Madeleine did not press her. There is only one thing said by girls who
cannot mind their own business--having, indeed, no business to mind.
Madeleine had never spread nor listened with interest to rumors about
other girls, simply because she minded her own business, having always
had business to mind. But she knew well enough what the village gossip
of Hondebecq was, and had found out that an office in a provincial town
is only a village without elbow-room. She pondered a little over the
matter, which grew increasingly serious as she did so. She did not
bother greatly as to the source of any rumor about her. Spite on the
part of “Papa,” love of scandal in the heart of the pork butcher’s wife
of her lodging--mere empty interest on the part of some person or
persons who had seen her with Skene or with “Papa,” it might be! The
point that disturbed her was the possible effect on her freedom of
action. It might make it more difficult for her to profit by the next
opportunity of seeing Skene-Georges--for the two were slowly merging
into one at the back of her mind. This roused her. She began to think
seriously, but in her slow way.
* * * * *
Then came a letter from home--from Marie.