did, in war-time. Skene, who at home would hardly have walked to the end
of the street with such an object--Madeleine, who had hardly heard of
such a thing before she went to Amiens--went to the nearest cinema
because it was war-time and no one wanted to think. Walking in the brisk
air of a Parisian winter evening, good meat and drink within them, they
enjoyed themselves prodigiously, Skene because he had existed in dubious
snatches of comfort for a long time, and was likely to so exist for an
indefinite period--Madeleine because of the reality of a man at her
side. He was making jokes about the Place Clichy being the Place Cliché!
She did not understand in the least, but laughed because he was happy
beside her. And so to the gaping portico of one of those establishments
which advertise what is known in France as “spectacle de famille.” This
last was being loudly cried by a person, paid to do so, at the door--who
added in stentorian tones that soldiers went in free, and nursemaids
half-price. It was typical of Skene that he paid for two of the most
expensive seats, and placed Madeleine in the one that gave him the best
view of her profile. The film, unfortunately, was a French one, not an
American. That is to say, instead of being confronted with the
improbable adventures of a man looking somewhat like Skene, Madeleine
realized with a start that she was watching a love story in which the
principal character was a tolerable travesty of Georges d’Archeville,
and behaved with just his perverse petulance. She turned her head,
smiled at Skene, played with her program, smoothed her gloves, and
arranged herself with minute care for her costume and the possible
effect of the seat on it. It was no good. Cinema screens are insistent.
It is difficult to avoid that great glare of white, with its intriguing
figures in motion. It revealed to her what she would never have invented
for herself--the idea that, like the hero of the film, Georges neglected
her because he was engrossed by some other woman. She could not dismiss
the idea; did not try, perhaps. She felt suddenly more wounded than she
had ever felt since August, 1914. That Georges might be hurt at her
sharing an English officer’s week of Leave never occurred to her. To her
practical soul, with its incapacity for flights of imagination, things
seemed all too readily what they appeared to the eye. Suddenly she rose.
“This representation is rasant,” she said to Skene, and marveled a
moment, as they threaded their way out, at his docile good temper. Not a
grumble, not a protest. He just followed her and snapped up a taxi. In
it he was more solicitous than ever, gentle, kind, with a Mid-Victorian
kindness she had never known--the manners of one whose boyhood has been
unspoiled by bitter thoughts about money.
They reached the little hotel at which they had dropped their baggage,
and he handed her in. By this time his way with her was having the
queerest effect. Had he been thoughtless, brutal, she would easily have
braced herself to meet it. As it was, she felt something slowly
dissolving in her. She held herself in yet a little, approving the place
he had chosen, clean and reasonable in price. But when the door of
their little room was bolted, and she stood in front of the mirror by
the rose-colored curtains, unpinning her hat, he came gently behind her
and slipped his hands under her arms. It was just Georges’ way. She
burst into tears. The moment the first sob had shaken itself free--for
she did nothing by halves, and when, rarely, she cried, she cried
bitterly--she knew she would feel better. Skene let her droop on to the
bed and sat beside her, one arm round her, making very small comforting
remarks in French and English alternately, but no inquiries. She kept
her handkerchief tight pressed upon her eyes with both hands, but her
sobs were lessening, and with every moment the agonizing vision of
Georges with some one else grew smaller and fainter. She leaned ever so
gently against Skene, who tended her as a woman might a child, did every
little service for her, amazing her, who had never been so treated since
she was four years old. Gradually she slipped down into the comfort of
those hard hands, whose fingers kept something of the skill and
discrimination of such as have been used for wise, gentle occupations.
But only when she was at ease, with dry bright eyes and braided hair,
did he seem to think of himself, and then only to ask so humbly for
what he wanted. She gave him all herself, fiercely, as if for ever to
prevent any of her from escaping again into those other hands that had
neglected her so. More, when they two swam slowly back to the surface of
normal existence again, in the quiet of the night only broken by the
discreet bubbling of the calorifère in the corner, she told him the
stark truth of herself and Georges, with a bareness of exposure of her
very soul she had never before permitted, of which, perhaps, she had
never before been capable. And when at last they slept, in each other’s
arms, it was the deep sleep of emotional reaction, for no less than she,
Skene had looked for years past on utter shipwreck--obliteration of his
individuality in the dark mud of Flemish trenches--and knew from a
different point of view all she suffered, and what comfort she clutched
at.
* * * * *
The next day passed in that atmosphere known to English honeymooners.
Not a trace remained of the emotions of the evening before--nothing but
two healthy young people out for a holiday, both in the most incurious
state of mind, and easily amused. The things they missed seeing far
out-numbered those they noticed, as is the case with honeymooners.
Madeleine was so used to the English that she hardly smiled when he
turned the little hotel upside down in order to have a hot bath and an
egg for breakfast. The establishment, at length conceding these
recondite advantages, ceased to interest them. They went out into the
busy streets, in the frosty air, Skene’s hands in the pockets of his
“British warm,” Madeleine with one hand tucked into his arm, the other
holding her fur tippet close across her throat, as she saw other girls
doing. To Skene, a free morning in Paris could only, by habit and
association, mean one thing:--pictures. To Madeleine it could only mean
another:--shops. As they descended into the roaring heart of the city,
never busier than in mid-war, they found some of the galleries were
still open, and Skene took her from room to room, pointing out old
favorites, lamenting new gaps left by careful storage of some of the
more valuable masterpieces. She moved beside him, confused, uncertain
whether to blush or look away in front of many a splendid nudity, but
drawn by the spirit that was on both, to squeeze his arm a little. In
the mood of the moment she unconsciously identified herself with all
feminine beauty, and he acquiesced. But he was not less in holiday mind
than she, stood patiently for half an hour at a time in big shops,
watching her wringing out to the uttermost centime the best value from
scowling shop-girls. Skene begged to give her what she wanted--he had
managed to visit three field cashiers and get francs from each--he had a
pocket full of money. She accepted, loyally keeping herself within
limits and wasting nothing. Both of them had their shocks. In one of the
turnings off the rue de Rivoli they met a tall fresh-cheeked young man,
scented and glittering, in a gray-green uniform Skene identified as
Russian. Skene fell into a growling condemnation of all “Base Pups,”
“Head-quarter people,” etc., etc., incomprehensible to her, save its
long-stored ill-humor. But she was after all only saying the same thing
in French, when a frail, fair, over-arranged lady kept her waiting in
the glove department of the Bon Marché, when Skene heard her grind her
white teeth, with: “That sort of animal doesn’t know what time’s worth!”
* * * * *
The next day was still queerer. Skene wanted what he called “a day in
the country.” Madeleine had no idea what he might mean, her notions of
a holiday being confined to Church Festivals. She went with him,
however, down the Seine Valley, as far as the regulations permitted. She
gathered he once had regular haunts here, had gone by steamer with
companions. She taunted him laughingly with having been one to “rigoler”
in his youth. She began to suspect that he was much richer than his worn
khaki and careful trench habits made apparent. He took her to a
well-known beauty spot, all shuttered and sad with war and winter,
roused the proprietor and persuaded him to give them food and drink in
the mournfulness of the dismantled salle à manger. The proprietor, like
so many others, had lost an only son. It took a lot of gentleness and
some of Skene’s Expeditionary Force canteen cigarettes to thaw him. But
gradually he expanded into the graveyard interest of his kind. What were
the trenches like? Were the dead buried properly? Would one find their
graves? Skene told all he could, painted a true picture as far as he
could, exaggerating no horror, slurring over none of the stark facts.
The old man was appeased. He liked to know. So his son was lying like
that, was he, amid the Meuse hillocks!
Madeleine took no part in the conversation, but sat looking at Skene,
totally uninterested in what he was saying, enjoying the masculinity of
his movements and gestures. She was beginning to be curious about the
one thing that ever aroused her speculation. What was this man’s
position in life? The men talked on into the winter dusk, the “patron”
offering liqueurs and cigars. She and Skene missed their train back and
had to walk to a neighboring depôt, and get seats on an army lorry.
Skene tipped the driver and Madeleine saw the man’s face. That night, as
they lay side by side in the sober companionship that both of them felt
so right and justifiable, she asked him of his home. She was somewhat
astonished at the result. He talked for twenty minutes, and was all the
time incomprehensible to her. The old house in the Cathedral Close, the
hereditary sinecure descending in the one family--the semi-public
school, wholly leisured-class prejudices and scruples--the circle of
maiden aunts living on railway dividends--the pet animals--the social
functions--made her pucker her smooth, regular forehead with complete
mystification. She could make nothing of it except that every one in
England was rolling in money.
* * * * *
Another day followed, and another. The end of the week was at hand. As
it approached, they both regarded the impending separation calmly. The
emotions that had brought them together were of the sort that will not
keep. Neither of them were bohemians of the true water. The life of the
little hotel where they slept and the restaurants where they fed was
soon drained of its attractiveness. If Skene really wanted anything, it
was to be back at his job in England. If Madeleine ever asked herself
what she found lacking in those brief days, the answer would have been a
farm of her own, a settled place in some village community, and,
perhaps, children. But she did not ask herself such questions, nor did
Skene admit for a moment that there was anything to desire other than
what they shared. But there fell long silences between them. The
tittle-tattle about topical events interested neither of them. The
little news they could tell each other was told. They could not talk of
Georges. Their only common memories were of the farm and the Easter
Horse Show of the division. Both subjects were stale. The small attempt
Madeleine made to understand Skene had led her into perplexity. Skene
had let her more intimate self alone, having neat provincial notions of
chivalry. The excursions of peace-time Paris no longer existed. The
cinema and most theaters bored Skene. Madeleine could not sit out
concerts. The day before the last, they went at Skene’s suggestion to
the Sorbonne. He wanted to feast his eyes, that must so soon look at
decauville railways and trench-mortar ammunition, on the Fresco, by
Puvis de Chavannes, which decorates the lecture hall of that
institution.
He had first seen it as a young man, and the impression it had made was
undimmed. He loved that blue-green twilight in which statuesque people
stood in attitudes among Greek pillars and poplar trees. He loved it
with an English love of things as they are not. Madeleine gazed at the
great lecture hall. At last she said, “It is not then a church!” No
fool, she had grasped the speculative, investigating atmosphere.
“No,” Skene replied, “it is a higher grade school!”
“As school decoration, it is not ver’ useful!”
Skene had nothing to say.
Later, as Skene wished to dawdle over some architectural drawings in the
Cluny Museum, she said frankly she would look at the shops. Their time
was drawing to a close. The next day was the last. Skene did not know
how to say that he hoped to meet her again. Did he?
* * * * *
For Madeleine it was easier. She simply went on behaving beautifully.
The week had not been spoiled by one cross word. To the end, she found
no fault with Skene, herself, or Fate. Such tenderness as life had not
already rubbed out of her, showed itself in her solicitude as to his
sandwiches and half-bottle of wine. It would be cold, she warned him, as
they paced the platform of the Gare du Nord. If he passed by the farm he
would say a word to her father and Marie. He promised, stoical as she,
and habituated to War-time farewells. He did not allude to the future.
She kept herself wrapped in uncritical passivity. The train was made up.
She saw his out-of-shape cap, khaki back, and tightly clothed legs
disappear successively in the doorway of the carriage. He came out
again, having secured his corner, and they paced the asphalt of the
station for yet a few minutes, in silence. Then at shoutings and
whistlings and blowings of tin trumpets, without which no French train
can start, he disappeared again, but, the door closed, hung out of the
window. The train was full of French leave-men, many drunk. One in
particular, who was wearing a bowler hat on his uniform, noticed Skene
and Madeleine just as the train began to move, and shouted, “I know what
you’ve been doing, English officer and little lady!” Skene waved and was
gone. Madeleine turned and went. “Know what you’ve been doing” rang in
her ears. A smile curled the corners of her mouth. Men looked after her
again now that she was alone. She walked, taking pleasure in exercise
and the keen air, to the little hotel in the stony street, paid the
bill, with the money Skene had given her, reclaimed her hold-all,
strained to bursting with the things he had bought for her. Then she
demanded a taxi, which she dismissed in front of the Pantheon, and
walked on foot to Monsieur and Madame Petit’s. She ascended the stone
stairs, cold and bare as penury, and knocked.
Monsieur opened to her with a short piece of candle, carefully screened
in his hand. He closed the door and led her into the fireless
dining-room, from which her room opened. He peered at her.
“Well, this war, how goes it?”
“But gently!” she replied, not guessing what he was driving at.
“Come, your brother told you nothing?”
In a moment it came back to her, that she had been spending a week’s
“leave” with her “brother.” She faced the peering old eyes.
“You know that the men in the trenches never say anything!”
He was rebuffed, but tried again.
“The Boulogne train must have been very late!”
But she was on her guard now, and replied readily enough:
“Very late. The Bosche were bombing Amiens!”
The old man grunted and left her. In her own room she smiled at her
reflection in the glass. She was looking magnificent, feeling
magnificent. To come from at least some degree of luxury, if not from
home and love, at least from entertainment and admiration, to the bleak
realities of her daily life, did not daunt her Flemish heart. She
unpacked and undressed methodically, passed her hands over that flesh
that had been so generously caressed, and seemed rounded and fortified
by it, and wrapped herself in the hard-worn bed-clothes, warming them
with her vitality. Could Skene, buttoned up in his “British warm,” miles
away on the northern railway, have seen her, he might have been
attracted, he would not have been harrowed or flattered. She had rubbed
off the contact with him by the passage of her hands over herself. She
rubbed him off her soul no less easily. She was at her place in the
Ministry on the morrow, and save that her appearance of well-being
excited desire or envy, created no sensation.
Then as the days passed, very slowly, and all the more surely, reaction
began to set in. She did not analyze it or express it, but it was there.
The old feeling of having been done, cheated! There was the old
void--and Skene, against whom she bore no malice, was partial,
rather--had tried to fill it and failed. It was not in him. Too, well
behaved, too incomprehensible, too English, he had, in fact, not asked
enough of her. She would have felt more at home with him had he been
subject to those moods of feverish desire and cold disgust that she
associated with all that was most admirable in men. For that male
perversity which, when it existed in her father and the Baron, in
“Papa,” and Monsieur Blanquart, in fact in all men, was the very thing
by which war had been brought about, and caused her separation from
Georges--when it appeared in that Georges himself, became simply one of
his attributes. Her “good child” bored her. Her spoiled, imperious one
was what she needed.
* * * * *
The evenings lengthened. February came, and the Bosche retreat. Marie
wrote that she was trying to get back to Laventie, where things were in
a pitiable state, but good land must not be allowed to lie waste. They
despaired of Marcel. Madeleine did not reply to this letter. The farm
and all it had contained seemed very remote. Yet the letter was a
comfort; it brought no bad news, and no news was good news. Already, she
thought again of nothing but Georges. As for any practical plan to find
him, she had long come to the end of the expedients that her not very
strong imagination could devise. She just wanted, and waited.
The chief of her department in the Ministry was one of those politicians
who found the War dull. Its concentration upon the one great effort to
beat the Bosche, and preserve the French nation alive, robbed such a
politician of his living. There was little scope for anything but
messing with contracts, trying and necessarily unspectacular. This one
among the party-bosses of the French Chamber hit upon a plan which would
advertise him, and at the same time give a sort of rallying-cry and
style for the next political stunt. He saw shrewdly enough that Peace
would one day burst upon an astonished world, and that those who were
unprepared for it would be badly left. And what would be the best
starting-place in the new Peace atmosphere? Why, obviously, to be hailed
in a million farms, a million small shops, as “That brave Monsieur
Dantrigues--he was good to our poor boys in the hospitals during the
War!” It could be used as common ground for Action Française on the one
hand, and the extreme socialists on the other. And no one dared raise
hand or word against it. The quickest, cheapest and best way to set it
afoot was, of course, to make use of the organizing power of his immense
department, the ocean of needy vanity in which the hundreds of temporary
typists and girl war-clerks swam; the comic papers could be got to
blaze it about--they were invariably hard up.
So it was that Madeleine, in common with all her companions, found
herself invited to take part in a gigantic Charitable Fête. They were
given little cards with the particulars--certain elements of costume
were to be uniform, also an electric lamp in the hair, and a basket of
gifts. They were to meet in the Tuileries, at certain spots indicated by
numbers, from which decorated lorries would take them to the various
hospitals of the metropolitan area, to distribute an Easter gift to
every sick or wounded soldier. Monsieur Dantrigues was smart enough to
see that this was much more effective than the same thing carried out
near the Front. For if a man has incurred a gumboil guarding a railway
in the Seine Valley, he likes just as well to be treated as a “brave
wounded,” and is just as likely to vote subsequently for the man who
organized people to think him so. On the other hand, the real fighting
soldiers, nearer the Front, would mostly be killed and never vote at
all.
The idea caught on. Generals, clerics, ladies old and young, blessed it
and gave funds for costumes and presents.
* * * * *
Never did government department function so ill as that which contained
Madeleine, as the ten thousand charitable maidens prepared themselves
for the fray. Madeleine entered into the affair rather than make herself
conspicuous. She had no sentiment about other people’s soldiers, no
anxiety to please men who did not interest her. But she went, took her
number, arranged herself with sense and taste, and found a little
comfort from looking nice. She managed to get a double supply of gifts
and send one lot to her brother Marcel, hoping that it might bring a
sign from him in his German prison.
The day came. Released at an early hour, the girls dispersed to costume
themselves. The short-sleeved tunic of thin white material, with its
girdle of artificial ivy leaves, suited Madeleine. Even Monsieur and
Madame Petit, never prodigal of praise, admitted that she looked well.
When she arrived at the rendezvous, she created some sensation. The
uniform dress brought out precisely her better proportions and carriage,
all her good looks that depended on health and hard work. As the lorries
that were to take them to their places swung alongside the pavement, one
of the girls said of her, “That great Flanders mare ought to have two
seats allowed her!” but the very spite of the speech was a compliment to
Madeleine. They were set down on the steps of one of those great palaces
of stone, common in Paris, that had been aroused from centuries of
slumber by the War, and now sheltered hundreds of narrow white beds.
Among these, up and down great vistas of ward and corridor, the girls
processed, music in front, bearers of lighted candles behind. The fête,
designed by a lady of cosmopolitan education, just then very intimate
with Dantrigues, had elements of English carol-singing and German
Christmas-tree effect, mixed with French delight in spectacle and
uniform. Then the girls were divided into pairs, and given so many beds
each for the distribution of gifts.
Madeleine was frankly bored with the whole thing. She hardly bothered to
make herself agreeable to the men in her section of beds--passing them
with a word or two of conventional good wishes, holding her clean,
fair-skinned, smiling, slightly obtuse profile high above them, stepping
easily, unencumbered by the basket on her hip. At the end of her bit
were several empty beds, the nursing sister on duty explaining that the
occupants were more or less convalescent, and had leave. She did not
trouble to hurry off elsewhere, nor to obtain a fresh supply of gifts.
The more or less innocent flirtations, which the other girls saw as one
of the chief attractions of the business, did not excite her. The
electric globe in her hair, which annoyed her, went out, and seeing a
glass door leading on to a verandah, all dark and quiet, she slipped
through unseen. She had hardly drawn the door to behind her than she had
a peculiar sensation. She had stepped into a mild, humid spring night,
the stars of which shone above the garden plantation of the place,
beyond the stone pillars of the balcony on which she stood. But in her
own mind she had stepped through the separation of over two years, as
one puts one’s foot through a paper screen. Georges was near her, she
knew. The back of the balcony, against the glazed windows of the ward,
was lined with a kind of fixed garden seat used by the convalescent. One
of these convalescents was seated, lying there rather, his attitude
expressive more of exasperation than of physical weakness. Before she
could analyze or act upon her queer feeling of nearness of Georges, his
voice arose from the recumbent figure, in the quakerish simplicity of
French intimacy: “It is thou!” was all he said.