narrow iron bed, one hand holding the pages of British Expeditionary
Force canteen block note-paper, which Marie used because it cost
nothing, covered with Marie’s sloping convent-school writing--the other
hand below her head, on which a handkerchief protected the long plaits
of her hair, that she had never bobbed at the command of fashion.
Gradually she mastered it. Marie was no correspondent; none of the sort
that she belonged to, cultivated letter-writing or exceeded what was
strictly necessary. The motive of the letter was baldly stated: “Father
demands to know how goes his daughter.” There followed a brief résumé of
village news. Victor Dequidt was reported missing. Other persons had
been married. There had been more bombing near St. Omer. There was no
news of brother Marcel; they feared the worst. Then followed the words:
“Father has seen Monsieur le Baron lately. He was furious. It seems that
his son Georges has left the French Mission, where he was in safety, and
has gone to make his training for an aviator in Paris. Madame is
desolated”; and then commonplaces to the end. “His son Georges” was a
way of speaking Marie had picked up from living in the Lys valley, in
the influence of Lille. It was not how they spoke in Hondebecq. This
displeased Madeleine an instant. Then the real meaning of the letter
dawned on her. Her father had shown by his conduct on the day of their
visit to the hospital how thoroughly he understood what was between
Georges and herself. He had made Marie write--Marie who knew and
suspected nothing. Madeleine--the youngest, the one who had lived
longest with him, who had replaced her mother in the house--responded to
the old man’s partiality for her. Unspoken, never visible, there was a
stronger link between them than existed with the others of the family.
She thought of him with affection. Her mind moved on. She could see the
Baron, stumping up and down the earth roads, with “Merde!” and “Name of
a name!” at every step; and the dining-room at the château, into which
she had been allowed to peep, when running errands from the farm. She
could hear Placide’s nasal chant announcing dinner: “Madame la Baronne
is served!” and the Baron, still “Merde”-ing and “Name of a name”-ing,
and the Baronne’s tearful but dignified “Voyons, Charles!” Paris,
Georges was in Paris! Although affectionate in her way, she hardly
paused to think of her brother Marcel, giving no sign from his German
prison.
* * * * *
Then she had one of her intuitions. The very thing. She would teach the
gossips of Amiens to tell tales about her--and give them something to
tell of, all in one blow. The very economy of the idea appealed to her.
There were always vacancies in the big Ministries in Paris, she had
heard “Papa” say. “Papa!” she almost laughed. He would have his
Festivity, after all. He should be made to work it. The idea was so new
and beautiful that it actually kept her awake for half an hour after she
had blown out her candle--a rare thing for a girl of her habits and
physique.
The first person who was astonished at the turn of affairs was “Papa.”
He became aware, as he snuffed with rage and ill-health at his desk
behind the screen by the stove, of kind looks and lingerings. His
resentment and small suspicions soon melted. He ventured half-apologetic
remarks, was not rebuffed. Nor did she hurry away with the other girls,
as she had done all the week since his last propositions. Eventually he
timidly complained that he had not had his little Festivity, that his
birthday had passed unhonored.
Madeleine felt something, almost compunction, but her Fixed Idea soon
resumed its empire over her mind. She listened to him.
On the following Sunday, having drunk her coffee and eaten her roll, she
replied to Marie’s letter. She expressed her sympathy with all those in
the village who had suffered bereavement, sent her congratulations to
all those who had bettered their state of life. She asked to hear
further of Marcel. She mentioned the Baron and the Baronne in the former
category, also the Dequidts. She sent her father much affection and
promised to come and see him soon. This was a mere convention. He would
have been astonished had she carried it into effect, but it was
testimony of her gratitude to him for having guessed her Fixed Idea, and
having so astutely helped her. The letter, evidence of an orderly,
unimaginative mind, wound up with sisterly affection for Marie--also a
convention--for the two girls, realists to the core, knew well enough
that they were friendly so long as they remained apart--and kisses for
Emilienne. Having completed this, and posted it, she went to second mass
at the cathedral. There, when it was over, she sat in the dimness of
the sand-bagged windows and the ancient stones. She had never read Mr.
Ruskin, never glanced at the moral carvings of the west front, the
historical carvings of the ambulatory--sand-bagged as were the first,
and removed as were the second now--and would probably have made very
little of them, save that they were the sort of carvings one saw in
churches. Of all the long romance of that storied pile, from Robert de
Luzarches to the German occupation of 1870, she knew and cared
nothing--neither for its tons of masonry, glass and wood, nor for the
million prayers that drifted on its stagnant air. Nor did she sit there
alone from any religious motive. She was not truly religious--too sure
of herself, too incurious, she kept of the faith of her fathers nothing
but some habits, and some rags of superstition. She left, at one
o’clock, when all the English officers were in their messes, and all the
French homes had that air of preoccupation which accompanies the most
important meal of the week. The streets were empty. She passed rapidly
to the big shop at which “Papa’s” servant was caretaker, and found the
side door unlocked. In the back sitting-room Papa was waiting for her,
skull-cap, clean collar, eyes watering with pleasure. There, amid solid
furniture, marble-topped chiffoniers and chests of drawers, hermetically
sealed, chairs and settees upholstered as if for ever, they held “Papa’s
Festivity.” Once again Madeleine was touched when she saw he had ordered
red wine to please her. But after the table had been cleared and his
senile familiarities began, she hardened her heart. She questioned him
straightly and searchingly, making him buy, with information, every
liberty she allowed him. She knew well enough how quickly men changed,
once they were satisfied, and chose the very moment before he lay back
on the plush settee, exhausted by the violence of his emotions, to
extract a promise that he would get her transferred to Paris, and a
second promise of secrecy--because, she told him, there were so many
spiteful tongues. She looked him full in the eyes as she said this, but
he was at the stage at which he could only say, “Yes, yes!” intent on
gratifying his momentary needs. After this she poured him out some wine,
and kissing him on his bald head--for his skull-cap had slipped off--she
left him to reflect. She went to an appointment with Cécile Blanquart,
whose father was visiting her for the day and chatted to him of village
affairs. Her crude psychology was not at fault. For a day or two “Papa”
left her alone, but before a week was out he was pestering her again.
She took it as a right, believing that men who had once desired her must
do so again. In fact, it was this point at which Georges’ neglect had so
hurt her. But she had made her terms and stuck to them. She reminded
“Papa” of his promises, and he demurred, temporized. She cut him
severely for two days and brought him to heel. He was not likely to find
many women who would have patience with him, feeble and mean about money
as he was, in face of the chances of a good time with some English
officer. He did as he was told. She had to interview the Controller of
the Service, but fortunately Paris was always calling for more and more
help to fill the places of men combed out, and she got her transfer, and
all the accompanying papers, complete. She was to go the following
Sunday. She knew enough of the working of things now to see that she was
already out of the power of “Papa.” With this, all compunction left her.
She promised gaily to dine with him, and he little suspected the real
source of her pleasure: the feeling that at last she would be near
Georges, easily able to meet him face to face as she desired, and that,
once met, she would work on him her charm, in which she had such
implicit trust.
She arranged to meet “Papa” at the station, because, she said, she
wanted information about her train on the morrow. The information she
really required was about that evening’s train, the 18.05 for Paris. He
drew her into the buffet, anxious to prime himself for his evening’s
enjoyment, and she went willingly, careless of appearances now. He
ordered two of those compounds known as Quinine Tonics. She gulped hers
down as the Boulogne-Paris train thundered in, bent forward to kiss him,
and crying, “Au revoir, mind you are decent to the girls!” swung out of
the door, across the waiting-hall, and through the wicket, where he
could not follow, as he had no permit. In fact, he did not try. He was
first so astonished, then so enraged, that he choked over his drink, and
dropped his glass, for the breakage of which a callous waitress charged
him forty centimes. Alas, that a long career of getting the most out of
women, and giving the least, should descend to this!
* * * * *
Although so short a time had elapsed, the Madeleine who traveled from
Amiens to Paris was a very different girl from the Madeleine who had
left Hondebecq three months earlier. The very manner of her shaking off
“Papa” showed it: The habit of the village in which she had grown up,
regarding railways, consisted in going to the station, hearing when the
next train went to the required destination, and waiting for it. To
possess and understand a time-table--more, to have mastered the
complicated regulations of a military station in war-time, was the
measure of how far Madeleine had advanced.
She found herself in a Paris that had an air of forced cheerfulness and
dumb expectancy. True, the panic of the day of mobilization, growing
right up to the Aisne battle, was over; the alarums of 1918 were not yet
in sight. But it was a Paris bereft of men, many a shutter closed; a
Paris as yet unhaunted by Americans, but beginning to be desperate in
its pleasures. What its best historians, its great lovers, Murger or
Victor Hugo, would have thought of it, cannot be conjectured. Its fabled
gaiety was gone for good. Its heroism had that poisoned quality that
makes women cover broken hearts with cheap finery.
Madeleine, who had never imagined a town of the size before, spent the
first two months quietly taking it all in. She had the sense to see that
she must start all over again. She did her work with zest--it suited
her. That suited her Controller, who put her to lodge with
relatives--retired people of official class, who lived in an
“apartment,” a tiny flat in a huge block of buildings situated just
where the scholarly Pantheon district trails off into the poverty of St.
Étienne du Mont. No one could be more self-effacing than Madeleine when
she wished to. During her first weeks in Paris she attended to her work,
lived quietly with Monsieur and Madame Petit, dressed soberly, glanced
at no one in the street, or in the great office where her duties lay.
She made herself amiable and useful in the small precise household, left
it in time to catch her ’bus, that landed her opposite the bridge,
across which towered the world-famous gallery in which the Ministry to
which she was attached was housed. She made herself agreeable to the
girls with whom she worked. Some were country girls, shy or inefficient,
but there was not a Fleming amongst them, and she concealed her opinion
that she knew better than they about most things. As for the native
Parisiennes, of whom all sorts and conditions were gathered into that
great harbor of steady work and sure pay, she admired their ferocious
femininity and put up with their moods--even when they called her “Boche
du Nord”--the equivalent of calling a Worcestershire girl a
Welshwoman--which they did at times, out of sheer dislike of her demure
capacity. To have seen her, no one would have suspected that she was
gleaning every scrap of information she could with regard to the Flying
Corps units that formed the Air defence of Paris. And she had better
opportunity now. Paris was by no means the town-just-behind-the-line
that Madeleine was used to. Information was to be had, people got to
know things and talked of them. Her Ministry, engaged in rationing one
of the necessities of life, rationed Flying Corps troops among other
people. She missed nothing. At last she found what she was looking for.
* * * * *
In one of those innumerable lists of men that were being produced by
Government Departments all over the world, as well as in her particular
Ministry, she saw the name Georges d’Archeville. It was a list of those
young men designated, with the picturesque appropriateness of the
French language, as “aspiring aviators” who were “directed towards the
Front,” that is, being sent into the line of battle. Madeleine and
another girl were crossing them off the lists of the garrison of Paris.
She stared so long and heavily that her companion bent over her: “What!
You can’t find it--but there it is!”
Madeleine ticked the beloved name and went on, as in a stupor. This was
really a blow. To come to Paris had seemed to her, somehow, the
satisfactory culmination of her long vigil. She felt sure she would be
successful in finding him. She had found him indeed. What now! The Paris
garrison was not concerned with the fate of “aspiring aviators” once
they were struck off its rolls. Their fate was not indeed in much doubt,
but there remained the horrible uncertainty as to which of the
graveyards behind the four hundred miles of Front would hold his grave.
At this point her common-sense and practical knowledge of affairs
deserted her. She just wanted him, that was all. Feigning a headache,
she excused herself and got leave to go home; but instead of going, she
lingered about the quays and bridges, never lovelier than in winter
twilight, with golden wraiths of leaves spinning in the bitter wind
along the severe, well-proportioned gray lines of masonry. The fresh air
calmed her; hunger at length drove her back to the Petits’ apartment.
She did not notice at first anything in the manner of her hosts. The
only thing that she noticed was that M. Petit, as he handed her a
letter, used the phrase:
“It came about four o’clock!”
That was the hour at which her eye had caught the name in the fatal
list. All the threads and tatters of superstition that clung to her
Flemish soul took life and substance at this. She muttered the words,
“Ah, yes! I expected it. It is a word from home!” She passed, quiet and
self-possessed, to her little bedroom, one of those little rooms which
lead one to ask if they were intended by the architect for anything, or
whether they might not be an inadvertence. Lighting her candle, she sat
on the thin coverlet of her bed, that reached from the tall window to
the door, and resting her feet on the lower shelf of the washstand,
thrust her thumb into the envelope and burst it open. It was from Skene.
It was what is called in those English romances Madeleine had never read
or imagined, a “love letter.” It asked her to spend his week’s leave
with him. That much she saw, and then put it down and buried her face in
her hands. She had expected it to contain news of the death of Georges.
Why or how she thought anyone should write to her on such a subject is
one of those mysteries that hang about the most clear-minded, least
bemused of people. She had felt rather than thought it, and the
revulsion was for the moment too much for her. She was roused by the
clatter of plates, and the acrid voice of Madame Petit, keeping the
supper within the smallest possible bounds. She changed her blouse,
washed and did her hair, and hurried out to help Madame.
During a meal whose frugality would have driven a monk from his vows,
she heard M. Petit say, “Well, have you good news from home!” and
herself replying: “Yes. My brother writes to say he has leave, and asks
me to go home to see him!”
She afterwards reflected that she could not have invented a better
answer. The envelope was stamped with the British military postmark. The
old man was inquisitive, and there was no knowing what use he might not
make of any conclusion he drew. To have a brother in the English area
was the one feasible explanation.
* * * * *
These considerations did not weigh heavily with her, however. She
slipped away as soon as she could, and read her letter through again and
then again. There was much in it that she did not come within a long way
of understanding--descriptions of the life of decent civilized men in
camp and billet, not to mention trench and dugout. These simply conveyed
nothing and did not interest her. Then there was an involved
scrupulousness that she had no means of sharing. But the main motive
that had caused the writing of those four sheets was clear enough--Skene
really wanted her. And if she did not admit it to herself, she wanted to
be wanted. She did not reply to the letter, but put it away in a safe
place, a little lock-up box in which she kept her immediate savings and
a trinket or two, and went to her work in the morning, a changed woman.
She had regained in a breath her old sureness. She now saw herself again
the woman she desired to be. “If I can only see him face to face” still
ran in her mind, but this time it was Skene whom she hoped to see.
Insensibly the symbol had changed, the emotions remained. She thought
the matter over in her cautious way. He had supposed her still to be in
Amiens and had written there. By good luck she had sent a card (one of
those war postcards, all khaki and azure and sentiment) to Cécile
Blanquart, having it in her mind that Cécile would describe to the full,
in her next letter home (for Cécile was the sort that wrote once a
week), anything that she, Madeleine, did. It had been an act of petty
pride. It now seemed like the work of Providence--Cécile had redirected
the letter, and here it was. Madeleine did not mistake what it meant. He
wanted a week, like the few hours he had had, in Amiens. That was
natural enough; she saw nothing in it. In her experience men were like
that, and she secretly approved. For a week, at least, she would have
some one belonging to her; beyond that she did not look.
After twenty-four hours’ consideration she took the letter from its
hiding-place, replied to it in most measured terms--judging to a nicety,
by some instinct, what would make him say a little more and say it a
little plainer, without committing her in any way. A week passed, and
back came a further letter. It filled her with a sort of steady glow.
There was no mistaking it. He had written for a room in an hotel he knew
of at the other end of the city, on the steep hill that leads from
behind the big stations to Montmartre. She did not reply until old M.
Petit, looking at her over his spectacles, asked her: “Well, and your
brother?”
She gathered herself together mentally. Of course, she had to fend off
all that sort of thing. She replied briefly: “I am going home for a
week!”
That evening she sent Skene a card on which Union Jack and Tricolor were
entwined. She wrote with a sort of exultation: “I wish to be all yours.”
Such an outburst must have been caused by something deeper than the
paltry bickering of a little old man, or the prospect of meeting a young
one with whom she had once passed a few hours of intimacy under the
stress of strong emotion.
* * * * *
The day came. She got her week’s leave. It is one of the victories of
women’s entry into ordinary commercial activities of business houses and
Government offices, that they have forced some humanity and reason into
the mechanical discipline of such places. Having made no plans, she had
put her few belongings into one of those black hold-alls that make all
French travelers seem countrified, and stood on the platform of the Gare
du Nord, waiting. She had dressed herself carefully--more carefully than
usual, with hardly a spot of color, and was conscious that every inch of
her that was covered showed the finest possible value for the money. Her
hands, neck and face had lost nothing in their firmness and pallor. The
figure she cut seemed to culminate in the little leather satchel clasped
against her fur--as if she were holding her heart in reserve, and
defending it at the same time. The train roared into the station, and
after a moment’s confusion, she saw Skene coming towards her. She had
been wondering fearfully for a moment if he would come, if she would
recognize him, if any unforeseen obstacle would arise. When he reached
her, she turned up her face and gave him her rare smile. When he slid
his hand under her arm and hurried her down the platform to catch one of
the few taxis, she pressed ever so little against him. Never in her life
had she been happier than in hearing those heavy boots clanking beside
her. Now that he had come she knew she was right. Skene was neither
exceptionally handsome, brave nor rich--and she would have thought
nothing the more of him if he had been. She neither knew nor cared for
heroes of fiction, but admired the clean, athletic type of young man
just then beginning to be popularized by the cinema. Skene had the looks
and bearing of what he was--an average Englishman of the professional
classes, who had passed through the successive stages of discomfort,
danger, all but death. He had the sure movements, straight glance, and
agreeable carelessness begotten of this, grafted on to middle-class
standards of manners. Superficially, at any rate, he was more
considerate than his nearest French equivalent would have been.
All this, which would have disappointed or amused many a Frenchwoman,
captivated Madeleine, and in the taxi she gave up her lips to him with
rich joy at the unmistakable warmth of his feelings. The moment,
however, the taxi stopped at the restaurant she had indicated, she made
herself prim and aloof. She had not wasted her time since she had been
in Paris, and knew her way about. The restaurant dated from the period
of those great Exhibitions that had served to rehabilitate Paris after
1870. Originally the home of the sort of people who gave some shadowy
substance to Murger’s bohemian Paris, it had long become the classic
rendezvous of English and American visitors and of Frenchmen who wanted
to sacrifice style to price. It still had the red-plush benches and
gaily frescoed walls of romance, but the service and cooking were what
Frenchmen call “serious.” The place had just been worth preserving on a
commercial basis in the commercial era, and consequently had been
preserved.
Madeleine had lost nothing of her idea of celebrating an occasion. She
ate heartily and did not refuse to drink with Skene. He was, of course,
ravenous, and in the state in which drink had no effect on him. She
smiled demurely across the table at him, more at home every moment. He
was also amused at something. He had only known Paris fifteen years
earlier, as a young architect half-way through his A.R.I.B.A., and was
marveling at the change--at the figure she cut in those surroundings
that had for him such different associations: she almost bourgeois--he
in the fancy dress of his uniform. Her manner with the waiter was
perfect, and perfect her assumption of respectability. He loved it,
felt almost at home, too. For in their secret hearts both of them were
domesticated, conventional to the core. Both of them loathed the War and
all it had brought. It was the queerest of contradictions that forced
them to comfort their ultra-respectable aspirations in such a place and
such a manner, both spoken of even in war-time by many people, as
“irregular.”
* * * * *