into sudden life, he heaved himself up, clutched her in his arms, bent
down her face to his. For some time, who can tell how long, neither of
them thought of anything, content just to feel the emotions of the
moment. Amid these arose the jangle of a bell. It brought Madeleine to
her senses at once. It was the arranged signal--five minutes’ warning
before the charitable maidens rejoined their lorries. M. Dantrigues’
lady friend had thoughtfully suggested that some of the young women
might want to put themselves tidy. Madeleine stood up, telling Georges
briefly what was intended. He replied with an army word, intimating how
much he cared. She was tender, docile, careful with him, spoiling him
every minute.
“Yes, yes, my little one. I know. But it is worth more to arrange where
we can meet. Your Mado will wait for you wherever you say!”
It was the pet name he had for her those ages ago in the Kruysabel. At
the sound of it, spoken as she spoke, all that lost Peace-time ease
arose ghostly before them. He vented his indignation against Fate by
picking up her basket and flinging it into the night, where it crashed
softly among earth and leaves. The gesture delighted her. It was the
old Georges, the real “young master” of first love. She had been
terribly frightened by his first greeting, that meek “It is thou!” so
unlike him, that he had uttered. He pleased her still more when he went
on:
“If that’s your bell, you’d better go. Don’t get caught in this sacred
box, whatever you do!”
“Tell me where,” she whispered.
“I’ll find a place and let you know. I must get out of here. If not,
I’ll burst myself as I have bursted so many Bosches. Where do you live?”
She told him, pressed a kiss on his lips, and was gone in a flash,
quiet, confident, alert. She was herself again.
The journey back to the rendezvous in the lorry was noisy and amusing. A
score or two of young women, mainly at the minx stage of unattachment,
chattered and squabbled, mimicked and raved. Madeleine sat in a corner
unheeding. From the rendezvous home she took no account of time, nor
place, could not have said by which street she passed, or at what hour
she sat down to the Petit’s supper. They were rather nicer than usual to
her that night, feeling perhaps that she was a credit to them--for the
charitable fête had been discussed from every possible point of view in
that quarter of shabby gentility, and every one in the block of flats
knew that the Petits’ lodger had taken part. Madame Petit had seen to
that. But Madeleine was not responsive--wrapped herself in a brown
study--or was it a golden dream?--and retired early to her room.
* * * * *
The next day she was the same--quiet, polite, but detached, went to the
office as usual, returned at the same hour, replied to questions in
monosyllables, went to bed early. Monsieur Petit began to have his
suspicions--could it be that the young woman had fallen in love (“made a
friend” was the expression he used to his wife) at the fête?
The next morning, as they sipped coffee in their several déshabillés,
there came a knock on the door. A message! Monsieur Petit, who took it
in, handed it to Madeleine through the two inches that she opened her
door. He dressed hurriedly, agog with excitement. The hour at which she
usually left for the office passed, and she did not appear. Finally, she
did leave her room, at nearly ten o’clock, dressed in her best,
carrying her hold-all and a hat-box.
“Good-bye,” she said. “I have left everything in order and the week’s
money on the dressing-table.”
Monsieur Petit stammered, “But why?”
Madeleine’s eyes gleamed in such a way that he stood aside to let her
pass. “Because I am leaving,” she said. “Make my adieux to Madame. She
is occupied, I know!”
And the old man stamped with rage as he heard her firm footfall
descending the stone stairs. She was going, taking away a secret with
her. Almost as well have taken one of the bronze figures of saints or
knights on horseback from the dining-room--that would have been no more
a robbery than to take away a secret from that little home where bronze
statuettes and curiosity about other people’s affairs were the only
luxuries.
At the foot of the stairs Madeleine hailed a taxi and gave an address in
the northwestern quarter of the city, from the paper in her hand. Then
she folded the paper carefully, and replaced it in her hand-bag with her
money and little mirror, as the vehicle bounded down the Boulevard St.
Michel. Poor Monsieur Petit was not to be allowed to forget her
departure. Three days later the postman brought a letter for Madeleine.
Monsieur Petit turned it over and over, his fingers itched. Then
something in his memory of superannuated government service stirred. He
knew what it was, and told his wife, nodding and glaring malignantly.
“I have sent hundreds in my time. It is the dismissal!”
It appeased him somewhat, for naturally he could imagine nothing more
fatal than to be dismissed from the service of the government he had
served for fifty years, and which paid him his pension in consequence.
Retribution indeed had fallen on Madeleine, in Monsieur Petit’s eyes.
* * * * *
Could Monsieur Petit have divined whither Madeleine had flown, could he
have followed her, confronted her as he longed to, crying, “See,
abandoned girl, cheater of my curiosity, how Fate has overtaken you!” it
is doubtful if Madeleine would have bothered even to laugh at him. She
sat perfectly upright, swaying with the rocking vehicle, staring at the
chauffeur’s back, as she was carried down steep crowded streets, across
wide vistas of bridge and quay, square and avenue, up into quiet,
almost sinister-quiet, respectable streets. Dismissing and paying her
taxi, and watching him out of sight, she shouldered her baggage and
found her way along by sign and number to a tall block of small flats,
like a hundred other such. She waited a moment, hesitating between
dislike of the concierge and equal dislike of becoming conspicuous by
standing in the road. Finally, she walked boldly in, disregarding the
gaping eyes and mouth that followed her from the basement, mounted to
the floor she required, and knocked. She had to repeat her knock more
than once before it was answered and the door was left unlocked for her
to push open. There was no one in the little vestibule. She dropped her
things, and, guided by Georges’ voice, found the bedroom, where Georges,
who had pulled the clothes over him again, was cursing the cold floor he
had had to tread. That was the real Georges, the man who wanted her
without bothering to get up to open the door for her, the man for whom
she would have died. She put her arms around his neck, and bent down to
him, so that he could have her.
* * * * *
He was very much real Georges that day. He lay in bed until hunger
forced him to rise, and then would neither dress nor shave. He was not
of that type that lives on the interest of the past, nor hurriedly
discounts the future. Nor can it be said that the thought of Lieutenant
Skene crossed Madeleine’s mind. Had it done so, she might have reflected
how much more she loved this, her spoiled child, than that, her good
one. But she, too, was absorbed in the present. She did not even
remember the Ministry, whose service she had so peremptorily abandoned.
When the first gladness of reunion was slowing down into the assurance
that she really had got him back, and had now only to devise how to keep
him--a task she did not feel very difficult--she began to question him,
very gently and indirectly, as to his plans. She remonstrated with him
on the folly of their being there together, an object of interest to the
concierge, still more on his insistence that she should stay there. But
he only shouted that he would “burst up” all the concierges, and she had
to humor him and promise to stay for the present at least. Not that he
threatened to leave her, but that she would not and could not threaten
to leave him. At length, in the evening, as he sat in gown and slippers
before the fire she had made, at the supper she had fetched and set,
while she tidied the room strewn with his things, he began to think of
her, asked for her father. He only asked one or two brief questions not
being the man to take deep interest in anything outside his own comfort.
When she had answered, he just said: “This sacred war!” Nothing else.
But Madeleine knew what he meant. There it was, all round and over them,
enveloping, threatening, thwarting. No less than he, she rebelled
against it, in her decorous woman’s way. But for him she rebelled
against it twice over, hated it, made it responsible for his loss of
health that was new, and his violence that was habitual--forgave him, on
account of it, his carelessness of her--this way in which he wanted to
live--the obvious fact that he had had other women in this room. She did
not reflect upon her own record, then. But she coaxed him to take
supper--she had bought the war-products that were nearest to the hare
pâté and spicebread and confiture of old times--gave him a bowl of hot
wine and water, as she had many a time that he had found her, he,
glowing and triumphant, with a dog at his heels. And sure enough, under
the spell of her magic, in that firelit bed-sitting room of the little
flat in Paris, there came back, gradually but surely, the Georges of old
days. His worn cheeks filled out, his eyes were less sunken, his hand
less thin and shaky. He began to hold up his head and hum a tune. She
hung near him, watching him, foreseeing not only every need, but every
whim. He became almost liberal, expansive. He had fourteen days’
“convalo”--a visit every day to the hospital, which institution would
not otherwise bother about him. At the end of that time he would either
go back to hospital, or up to the front. He did not care which, he said,
smiling. For the first time since she had rediscovered him, he did not
call anything sacred, wish to “burst” anyone, or use the expressive,
untranslatable verb “foutre.” She cleared away and tidied up and
prepared herself for the night, as he sat glancing through the
newspapers humming to himself, content, asking nothing. When he felt
tired, he just turned out the light, and rolled into the place she had
made warm for him.
* * * * *
Days so spent soon pass, nor is there anything more tragic than physical
satiety, with its wiping out of what has gone before. Madeleine, not
naturally apprehensive, would have gone on had not hard facts pulled
her up. Georges had spent his pocket-money on paying the quarter’s rent
of their retreat. She had spent hers on food for him and herself. No
bohemian, she began to take counsel with herself as to how to obtain
fresh supplies. One source of funds she dismissed at once. She would not
ask Georges for a penny. That would have seemed outrageous to her. She
did not attempt it. She had a handsome sum in the Savings Bank at
Hazebrouck. But how get it? She did not want to write to Monsieur
Blanquart or to Marie. Even if they could have withdrawn it for her (and
the difficulties of such a step she did not clearly foresee), they would
both of them have found out sooner or later something about Georges. And
that she would not have for all the world. Her father she could trust,
but she also knew his ingrained habits regarding money, his incapacity
for reading and writing. A letter would simply stupefy him. If he got
some one to read it to him, he would simply be stupefied the more. His
Madeleine spending her savings? Never! He would do nothing. Should she,
then, go by train and get the money? There would be endless difficulties
in getting authority to journey into the British Military Zone--but the
great difficulty to her mind, the insurmountable one, was to leave
Georges for two days. She was nonplussed.
Just then it happened that Georges, turning towards her in one of his
more expansive moments, said, in his spoiled way: “My God, how I want
you!”
Occupied fully with him at the moment, her mind retained the words, her
memory searching for the last occasion on which she had heard them.
Georges went out to his club that morning, leaving her sewing, washing,
doing a hundred and one jobs in her thorough housekeeper’s way. She sat
brooding, almost waiting for some stroke of luck to help her with her
difficulty. Suddenly she remembered who it was that last used that
phrase--Lieutenant Skene. She sat down at once and wrote to him. She had
no scruples. All the English were rich. This one had no outlet for his
money. She had been worth it. The reply came in three days, to the
post-office address she had given. It brought a hundred francs. They
lasted a week, and few people could have made them last more, save that
Georges only came in to supper now. He was getting restless, smelled of
drink. She wrote again to Skene. No reply came. Instead there came the
end of the fortnight of Georges’ “convalo.” That day she sat alone
waiting for two things, a letter bringing money, or Georges bringing
fatal news. Either he was not well enough to go back to the front, so
that his state must indeed be serious, or he was well enough, which was
even worse. She dared not ask him; he vouchsafed nothing, seemed well
enough, but restless. She, meanwhile, for the first time in her life was
feeling really ill. She had never met before with this particular
cruelty of Fate, resented it, but only felt worse. Perhaps the town life
had sapped her vitality. Perhaps Georges had brought home from his
hospital, on his clothes, in his breath, the germ of some war fever. The
following day Georges was excited, and talked loud and long when he came
back from the club. Her head felt so strange she did not understand.
* * * * *
Perhaps it was as well she did not. Georges had been granted another
fortnight “convalo,” but it was not that. It was the news of the battle
of Vimy that excited him. The English, of whom he was good-humoredly
jealous, had taken that battered ridge, disputed for years. There was
talk of eleven thousand prisoners and a quantity of guns. He had missed
being “in it.” But with the news came rumor more important still. The
French were preparing a great offensive in Champagne. He would not miss
that one, sacred name, not he! The spirit of that period of the war, the
spirit of “On Les Aura” burned in his veins like fire. As he strode and
shouted about the room, cursing his “convalo” that, a week ago was all
he desired, because now it prevented his being in the show.
Madeleine had the queerest feeling of all her life up to that day, for
she was not a girl to faint--a sinking feeling, not painful, rather
comforting. Then nothing. Then a reawakening, not so comfortable,
dismay, weakness. Georges, who did nothing by halves, became, for the
nonce, generous to the utmost limit of the nature of a man born with a
silver spoon in his mouth and a cheque-book in the pocket of his first
suit. Probably it never crossed his mind that she had taken infection
from some carelessness of his. But he did better. He promptly called a
young doctor of his set, who, having been badly wounded, was now
permanently attached to the Paris garrison. Between affection for
Georges and a handsome bribe--for the proceeding was thoroughly
irregular--flat contrary to every by-law of the town and every order of
the Medical Service--this young man took Madeleine in hand, visited her
daily, did what was necessary in the way of prescribing, got a discreet
sister of charity to nurse her. Being a man of the world, he further
suggested to her, as soon as she was well enough to make inquiries, that
she would not care for Georges to see her in her present state. That
kept her quiet during the weeks of recovery. But there came a fine June
day when she was well enough to walk out a little in a Paris ever more
feverish and deserted. Then the young doctor, as thorough as Georges or
herself, told her the truth. Georges’ thoroughness had taken the form of
borrowing the identity disc and paybook of a hospital casualty whom he
resembled in height and complexion. The young doctor had connived at the
fraud, with the cynicism of Georges himself and all his set. Thus
furnished, Georges had gone straight into the heart of that ghastly
failure of the French in Champagne, during May, 1917. The hurried
scrutiny of his credentials had not found him out, he was in the line
and fighting when his half-recovered health broke down once more, and
fatally. He was buried in a huge, ever-growing cemetery, near the
Aerodrome, at Avenant-le-Petit.
* * * * *
When Madeleine realized it, she sat still, looking at nothing, gathering
within her all her physical vitality to meet this blow to the spirit. On
her face, refined by illness, was something of the look that horses have
under heavy shell-fire, bewildered resistance to the unknown. The young
doctor let her alone for twenty-four hours, and then very gently led her
mind back to practical considerations. The period for which Georges had
hired the flat was expiring shortly. Had she money, or the means of
getting some? It did not take her long to run over the alternatives--an
attempt to get back into some sort of office--or a begging letter to
Skene? She avoided both, not from any sense of shame, but simply because
now Paris and its life had no meaning for her. She had wanted Georges.
She had said, “If I could only see him!” She had seen him. Now she would
never see him again. Why bother?
The young doctor then suggested that he could obtain her a permission to
travel by train to Hazebrouck. This brought to her mind the almost
certain death of her brother, Marcel, in his German prison camp, and of
Marie’s return to Laventie. The mere name of the market town called up
at once associations so potent, so much more real than all that had
happened since. The farm understaffed, the old father being swindled out
of billeting money! Those were realities. Those things appealed to her
more than this tragic dream-life. She accepted gladly the young doctor’s
offer, and left him looking after her and muttering: “What a type, all
the same!” But she had no special contempt or dislike for him.
She left Paris in the same way as she left him. The old sacred towers,
the new garish restaurants, the keen bitter energy, the feminine grace,
of that metropolis of the world, that had once again had the enemy at
its gates, and was yet to be bombarded by such engines as had never
before been turned upon city of man--she turned her back upon it all,
and, for her, it was not. On a gray July day she entered the train. As
she traveled homewards, the day grew grayer and wetter. She passed,
unheeding, through an immense bustle between Abbeville and Calais, and
down to St. Omer. Her train stopped frequently, and she glanced,
uninterested, at the trains and trucks, materials and men, that choked
rail and road. About her, people talked of the great offensive the
English had begun, from Ypres to the sea. She looked at the crops and
houses, thought of her father, whose very double, tall, old,
dark-clothed, and bent, she saw in almost every teeming field of flax or
hops, grain or roots, of that rich valley. Perhaps she had occasional
bitter spasms of anger against this war, that had enslaved, and then
destroyed Georges. But to her, facts were facts, and she did not deny
them.
* * * * *
Outside Hazebrouck the train stopped interminably. The guns had been
audible, loud and angry for some time, but the long roll of them was
punctuated now by a sharper nearer sound, that clubbed one about the
ears at regular intervals--artillery practising, no doubt, she thought.
After waiting in the motionless train as long as she considered
reasonable, she got out, finding a perverse satisfaction in the use of
her limbs, swinging down the steep side of the second-class carriage of
the Nord Railway, and asking for her box and “cardboard” (containing
hats) to be handed down to her. Shouldering these, she marched along
the asphalt with which the prodigal English had re-enforced the
embankment, showing no concern at the cries of “They bombard!” shouted
to her by her fellow-passengers. She passed the engine, from which the
driver and fireman were peering ahead. The fields were very deserted,
but she was hardly the sort to be frightened in daylight, or dark
either. She passed the points where the Dunkirk line joined that from
St. Omer. Near by, stood a row of cottages, known as the “Seven
Chimneys,” the first houses of Hazebrouck, on the station side. Her idea
was to leave her trunk at the estaminet, for her father to fetch in the
morning. To her astonishment, the whole row appeared deserted, empty,
doors open, fires burning, food cooking. Somewhat nonplussed, she
stopped a moment to get her breath, pushed her box behind the counter of
the estaminet, where she was known, and then passed on, with her
“cardboard,” keeping the path that separates the St. Omer road from the
railway. Where this reached its highest point, just at the entry to the
town, she happened to glance across the rich, lonely, hedgeless fields
towards the Aire road, and saw, on that side, every wall and alley black
with people. She had no time to reflect on this peculiarity before she
was deafened by such a roaring upheaval of earth as she had certainly
never imagined. It took away her breath, wrenched her “cardboard” out of
her hands. For some seconds she could hear nothing, see nothing, but
when her senses returned, the first thing she noticed was the patter of
falling débris. The shell had fallen in the ditch of the railway
embankment, and made a hole the size of the midden at home, and three
times as deep. She picked herself up from her knees, dusted herself,
recaptured her “cardboard,” and passed on, greeted by a long
“Ah--a--ah!” from scores of throats of the spectators, a quarter of a
mile away. The incident annoyed her. They were bombarding, and no
mistake. But it would take worse than that to prevent her from crossing
the railway under the arch, and taking the Calais road. The rue de St.
Omer was empty, but undamaged. They were a jumpy lot, she thought; it
revolted her to see all those good houses, left unlocked and open to all
the ills that attack abandoned property. There was not even another
shell-hole nearer than the station, so far as she could see. She would
have liked a cup of coffee and a slice of bread, but the town was empty
as an eggshell. She heard another explosion behind her as she reached
the Calais pavé. The persistence of those Bosches! But she was
persistent too, and gathered her damp clothes and battered “cardboard”
to her, as she strode vigorously home. She was not sentimental--no one
less so, but it may well have been that her blood quickened, and her
rooted strength returned, as she found herself, once more, facing that
salt wind, under those low gray skies, among which she had been bred and
born.
At length she came to the earth road, the signpost, and the turning, and
saw the farm, the fringe of dead wallflower stalks on the ridge of the
thatch, the old “shot” tower by the bridge over the moat. It was between
six and seven when she passed the brick-pillared gate, noted a new
bomb-hole, and signs of military occupation. Entering by the door, she
found her father in the passage.
“It’s our Madeleine,” he said quietly.
Madeleine kissed him and told him to fetch her box in the morning, from
“Seven Chimneys.”
He said, “Thy room is empty,” and went into the kitchen, while she said
a word to Berthe. It was true, her little room was just as she had left
it a year before. She noted the fact with quiet satisfaction, but did
not bother over the significance of it--over the fact that her father,
who usually paid so little heed to anything that went on in the house,
had kept her room untouched and empty for her. She quietly accepted the
fact, conscious that he felt that neither the God to whom he muttered
prayers on Sunday, nor the various temporal powers whom he obeyed, when
he had to, on weekdays, really understood him or cared for him as his
younger daughter did. She sat down with him, in the dim kitchen, to the
evening meal, by the light of the day that was dying in thin drizzle and
incessant mutter of guns. Once some fearful counter-barrage made the old
panes of the oriel window rattle, and the old man said:
“It’s a swine of a war, all the same!”
Madeleine replied: “It’s something new for them to be bombarded in
Hazebrouck!”
“I’m going to take the money out of the Savings Bank,” he commented. In
his mind, unused to the facilities of bookkeeping, and cradled in the
cult of the worsted stocking for savings, he probably thought of his
money as being held in notes or coin in the stoutly-barred vault behind
the Mairie. After a long pause, during which he surveyed her hands,
busy with household mending, somewhat neglected since Marie had
relinquished it to Berthe, he spoke again:
“You are quite a fine lady of the town!”