Later he said: “You know Marie has returned to Laventie?”
Madeleine nodded. The remark was not so stupid as it sounded. He knew
she knew the fact. It was his way of appealing to her.
“Now you have come back, you will be just the Madeleine you used to be,
and all will go on as before, won’t it?”
Her nod was all the answer he asked.
Once again he spoke: “You know Marcel is dead?”
Again she nodded. Again it was only his way of saying, “Come what may,
you will see me through, we shall not be worse off for the cruelties of
Fate!” She understood and acquiesced. Nothing else passed until with
“Good night, father,” and “Good night, my girl,” they parted.
Of her life during the past twelve months and all it had contained, not
a word.
_PART III_
LA GALETTE
_PART III_
_La Galette_
The late summer of 1917, the summer of Haig’s offensive from Ypres, was
one of the wettest of the war, but the days following Madeleine’s return
opened fine.
She was up betimes, and soon made herself apparent in the life of the
farm. Harvest must begin the moment things were dry enough, and before
they became too dry, so that the cut grain would neither sprout as it
lay, nor spill itself as it fell. Besides herself and her father, they
had Berthe, and the family of Belgian refugees, two boys too young for
service, and eight women of all ages. A thoughtful government had added
two Territorial soldiers of the very oldest class, who could easily be
spared from such military duty as they were fit for; and to this, a
still more thoughtful Madeleine mentally added some amount of help that
could be extracted, by one means or another, from English troops resting
in the area. At the moment of her return there were no troops, but
artillery came on the following day. There also came a platelayer’s
family from Hazebrouck, whose house was too near the big shells that had
fallen. Madeleine drove a hard bargain with them, work in the fields as
the price of a loft in the outhouses, until the latter should be
required for potatoes. But these matters were not her first concern. She
made a long and careful scrutiny of the billeting money that had been
paid during her absence. Marie was too accustomed to the rough methods
of those who live on the edge of the trenches, and knew little of the
fine art of making the English pay.
Madeleine went to see Monsieur Blanquart in the morning recess of the
school, and found him perceptibly grayer and more harassed, almost
snowed under by the immense weight of paper, by which a government, in
sore straits, discharged its expedients upon its humbler
representatives. In addition to the correspondence and registration
necessitated by general mobilization, and by the occupation of an allied
army, there were now circulars and returns concerning food production,
waste prevention, aircraft precautions, counterespionage, and the
surveillance of prices. In such circumstances, Blanquart probably
wished her back in Paris, but she insisted. After bitter argument, he
suddenly surveyed her with a gleam of interest.
“There, you aren’t greatly changed; but what induced you to leave a good
job in the Ministry?”
Madeleine realized that she was an object of admiring interest, with
who-knows-what history invented for her by Cécile. She pushed it all
aside. “I had better things to do than to go moldy in an office. Now,
Monsieur Blanquart, for the month of March, there is only seventy-five
francs marked down. How do you explain it?” and so on.
* * * * *
She came back from the village across the fields, scrutinizing the
crops, the workers, the new drains and telegraph wires the English were
putting in everywhere. Already, in a few hours, her short assumption of
town life and habit was dropping from her. She had put it away with the
town hats Skene and Georges had bought for her, in the “cardboard,” on
the half-tester of her bed. She went bareheaded, already stepping longer
and holding her skirt, with both hands, up from the wetness of the
knee-high root crops, and away from the waist-high grains. Her illness
had squared and filled out her figure, deprived it of its virginal
severity, and now the refinement that indoor life, suffering, and
impaired health had given to her features and skin, was yielding before
fresh air, good food, vigorous action, and the habit of command. Only
her straight glance, and erect carriage, that she had taken to town
remained as the town was forgotten. The town could not take those from
her, the country could only confirm them. Two officers’ servants, who
had let the chargers they were leading graze surreptitiously on the rich
second cut of the water-meadows by the little stream that issued from
the moat, hastily pulled up the horses’ heads, and resumed the road. She
had made herself known to the new unit that morning, already.
In the dark passage she ran into a dragoon-like figure, that even her
accustomed eyes mistook for the moment for that of a soldier. Then she
saw who it was, swallowed a lump in the throat, and said:
“Hold, it is you, Placide, enter then, and be seated!”
“Ah, it is you, Madeleine, returned. How do you go on?”
“But well! and you? You can surely take a cup of coffee!”
“I shall not say no! One wants something to give courage in these times
that are passing!”
Madeleine was busy over the coffee-pot, and only said: “Monsieur the
Baron and Madame the Baronne have had a sad loss!”
Placide sighed like an eight-day clock running down, and then began. It
took ten minutes for her to give her description of the reception of the
news of Georges’ death at the château--of Monsieur’s fit of crying and
swearing--of Madame’s fainting and prayers. Madeleine stood before her,
hands on hips, planted, resisting the sudden, unexpected agony of
reviving grief. When Placide remembered what she had come for (eggs and
anthracite) and had gone, accompanied by a Belgian with a barrow,
Madeleine poured her untasted coffee carefully back into the pot, and
slipped out by the back door and away over the fields.
In a few minutes she was mounting the steep sodden path to the
Kruysabel. The sun was coming out, and all around the earth steamed.
The hunting shelter, intact and not noticeably weathered, had yet an air
of neglect. Grass grew where grass should not, the windows were dim with
cobweb and fly-smut. The door stuck, and inside the air was warm and
moldy. The photos stared at her, the guardian spirit of the place, as
she moved from room to room, tried handles, dusted, rubbed, and shook
things. The seats invited her, the mirrors showed her active
restlessness. At last she stood still, and some spasm of acute
realization seemed to gather and descend on her, and she wrung her
hands. “What will become of it all?” she cried aloud. It, undefined,
being the old happy easy life of pre-war. A great sob broke from her,
and at its sound in that lonely place of memories, she pulled herself
together, put away her things, and looked up. As she trod the reeking
moss and gluey mud on the way home, she seemed to be treading something
down into the earth, as, alas, many another was to do, like her,
throwing in vain a little mold of forgetfulness on the face of
recollection that, buried, yet refused to die.
* * * * *
Day succeeded day, mostly wet, almost always noisy. The interminable
offensive dragged to its sodden end. Unit succeeded unit, and then
French succeeded English, and even the heroes of Verdun, Champagne, the
Argonne had no good word to say of their new sector. Gas they knew, and
shells and machine-gun fire, but to be Drowned was the last refinement
of a war that had already surpassed all notions of possible evil, all
tales of Sedan, all histories of old-time carnage.
All this made little or no impression upon Madeleine. The old life had
slipped back upon her like a glove. German bombs dropped in or about the
pasture, spoiled her sleep, made her apprehensive of fire and damage.
Otherwise she merely learned from the talk around the kitchen stove that
the war was just what she had always felt it to be--a crowning
imbecility of insupportable grown-up children. All that one wanted was
to be left tranquil. There was always plenty to do, and, if one were
only left alone, money to be made. Economics, politics, sociology were
beyond her, and had they not been so, they would have weighed with her
no more than they ever have done with agricultural, self-contained,
homekeeping three-quarters of France. That Germany was anxious for her
young industries, England for her old ones, France for her language and
racial existence, that governments grow naturally corrupt as milk gets
sour, by mere effluxion of time, that captains of industry must be
ruthless or perish, all this did not sway her mind. All one wanted was
to be left tranquil. Tranquillity being denied, she did the best she
could.
The officers who hired the front rooms, the men and animals billeted in
the farm buildings, the N.C.O.’s, orderlies, what-not, might be
dispirited, jumpy, no longer the easy-going confident English of other
years, but they still bought what she had to sell, and paid for what
they had--more rather than less, as the conscripted civilian, craving
the comforts from which he had been torn, replaced the regular soldier
or early volunteer, who had never known or had disdained them. She got a
good deal of help with the harvest. The English had all sorts of stores,
appliances, above all, plenty of willing arms, that she wanted. The
troops “in rest” were glad enough for the most part, when off duty, to
do any small job to take their minds off the world-wide calamity that
enveloped them, or that gave the momentary illusion of peace-time ease
and freedom. Owing to the submarine campaign they were rather encouraged
than otherwise. The harvest, though not magnificent, was fair, and the
ever-rising scale of officially fixed prices left always a larger margin
of profit. Thus “One does what one can!” was Madeleine’s appropriate
comment, when asked. Very little escaped her, as that murderous sodden
autumn closed in.
* * * * *
It was about Christmas time that the bombardment of all the back areas,
especially Hazebrouck, recommenced in earnest. It was the period at
which the Germans regained the initiative. Madeleine noticed a fact like
that. She noticed also the extraordinary thinning out of the troops.
They either went forward into the line or far back, into rest, beyond
St. Omer. But the headlines of the papers, the rumors her father brought
home from the estaminet, moved her not one whit. The Russian revolution,
the advent of America, the British and French man-power questions,
Roumanian or Syrian affairs, all left her cold. She read of them in
French and English impartially, with all the distrust of her sort for
the printed word. It was not until she heard the Baron descant upon the
situation, during a visit he paid her father, that she began to take any
serious account of the way the war was trending. The Baron had been
severely shaken by the death of his son. A view of life, which seldom
went beyond personal comfort, had been vitally disconcerted by the final
dispersal of one of its cherished comforts, the idea of a son to succeed
to and prolong the enjoyment of life. He had the gloomiest forebodings,
blamed Russians, Roumanians, English, Americans, Portuguese, Turks,
Germans, in turn for the dark days certainly ahead. Madeleine listened
with the tolerant submission proper from a chief tenant’s daughter
toward the master. When the Baron spoke of “my son,” her just
appreciation was never misled into thinking that he meant her lover. The
two were distinct. She had her own bitter memories, black moods, tears
even. That was her affair. The Baron’s loss of his son was his, a
different matter. She sympathized demurely. As for the news he brought,
the probable German offensive in the spring, she made a rapid
calculation, and dismissed the matter. Not good at imagining, she could
not conceive of anything the Germans might do that she would not outwit.
The crops and animals, she reckoned, could be stored in safety, the
money and valuables she could trust herself to take care of; the solid
old house and furniture she could not picture as suffering much damage.
Of any personal fear for herself she felt no qualm. Except for a few
moments during her illness in Paris, she had known no physical terror
since, an infant, she had ceased to be afraid of the dark, finding by
experience that it did not touch her. She poured out the Baron’s drink
at her father’s request, and let him talk.
Poor Baron, though Madeleine did not realize it, what else could he do?
Born so that he was four years too young to take part in the war of
1870, he was now eight years too old to take part in that of 1914. He
could only fight with his tongue, and that he did. But he was
fundamentally unchanged, rallied Madeleine on the havoc her good looks
must have wrought in Amiens and Paris. Madeleine smiled dutifully. To
her he represented one of the guarantees of order and stability. Without
an elaborate argument, she concluded that so long as there was a baron
above her, and her father, there would be, at the other end of the
social scale, laborers, refugees, all sorts of humble folk just as far
beneath the level at which she and hers swam. It seemed just that those
above and those below should be equally exploitable by the adroit
farmer’s daughter, anchored securely midway.
* * * * *
Spring came, the spring of 1918: surely the most tragically beautiful of
all the springs the old world has seen! The frosts and darkness passed.
Flowers came out in the Kruysabel. It was a busy time of mucking,
plowing, rolling, sowing. Nothing happened. Hazebrouck, too much
bombarded, ceased to hold its market. Madeleine went to Cassel instead.
The news of the great German break-through on the Somme did not even
impress her, she was busy preparing to get the main-crop potatoes in,
before Easter. Let them fight on the Somme, so she might sow Flanders.
But three weeks later there did occur at length something to impress
her. On the unforgettable 11th of April, 1918, the guns were very loud.
On the 12th there were hurried movements of troops. All sorts of odd
rumors came floating back from all points between Ypres and La Bassée.
The Germans had broken through! The Germans had not broken through, but
had been thrown back! Estaires was on fire! Locre was taken, and so on.
Madeleine had occasion to go to the Mairie, to argue as to why her old
Territorials should have been recalled from the farm, and found Monsieur
Blanquart packing all his records into a great wooden case. He stopped
and stared at her:
“What are you doing, Monsieur Blanquart?”
He raised his hands with unaccustomed nervousness.
“It is a formal order from the Government!”
He would not listen to her tale of billeting money unpaid, and
government fertilizer not delivered: “There are other things to do at
this moment,” was all he would say. For once Madeleine did not get her
way. That impressed her. The next day the horizon to the south and east
was black with pillars of smoke. By night these became pillars of flame,
biblical, ominous. The incessant sounds of battle changed in timbre. The
heavy bombardment ceased. Nearer and nearer crept the rattle of machine
guns. Madeleine had one or two errands, and returning by the village
shortly afterwards, was astonished to find all the shops shut. Vanhove,
the butcher, was loading his best brass bedstead and mattress on
to--what of all conceivable vehicles? Madeleine stared before she took
it in. It was the roller, the road roller. None other. The well-known
road roller the English had installed. Built by Aveling & Porter at
Rochester in the ’eighties, it had ground and panted its unwieldy frame
northward through many a township and village of England, passing from
hand to ever poorer hand, as it deteriorated, until finally the obscure
and almost penniless Rural District Council of Marsham and Little
Uttersfield, failing to sell it, had painted their name on its boiler
and kept it. Unloaded, like so many other derelicts, into the arms of
the British Expeditionary Force in the glad enthusiasm of 1915, it had
served the turn of an intelligent English Engineer, who, early in the
war, had discovered that roads and railways, food and patience alone
could win in such a struggle. He had soon been shipped off to the East,
lest he bring shame upon his betters, but his roller had remained for
years now, on that section of the Joint Road Control of the Second
English Army, with the French Ponts et Chaussées Authority, who divided
acrimoniously between them the control of the Hazebrouck sub-area. The
machine had become a portent in Hondebecq. The children had swung behind
it, horses ceased to shy at it, and Madeleine herself had come, in time,
to have something almost like affection for it, as a monument of the
queer, wayward genius of the English. No such rollers ever rolled the
roads of France, but Madeleine had found it useful for both rolling and
traction. She had made friends with the two middle-aged, sooty-khakied
Derbyshire men who lived with it and got them to do jobs for her. Now
she laid a hand gingerly on the warm shining rail of the “cab” and asked
of the driver.
“What are you doing!”
“Got to go, Mamzelle, partee, you know!”
“You like a ride, miss? Get up and we’ll take you as far as St. Omer!”
his mate added. “Alleman’s coming, you know!”
Something fierce prompted Madeleine to say: “I’m not going to run away!”
But Vanhove, having hoisted his bedstead into the tender, was persuading
the men to drive on.
Madeleine saw the lever put over, and the ponderous machine of another
generation roar away upon the cobbles, its single cylinder panting
desperately. Then she felt indeed disturbed, as though she had been
forced to part with a conviction.
* * * * *
As she went back to the farm through the fairy beauty of the
evening--(were ever evenings so beautiful as those of the April
retreat?)--her step was no less firm, her glance as calm, as usual.
Passing over the plank bridge, and entering the house by the back, she
was confronted by the spectacle of Berthe in her best hat, with a
bundle.
“I’m going!” said the apparition simply.
“What has come over you?”
“After you were gone, an English wagon came, all full of people from
Armentières way. The secretary of Nieppe told the patron that the Bosche
are in Laventie, and that Marie has left, so the Patron has taken the
tumbril and gone after her potatoes!”
Madeleine was at no loss. She even approved the old man’s determination.
Only she considered that it would have been better for her to go.
“You stay here,” she said. “I’m going up to the château to borrow the
young Baron’s bicycle!” She knew well enough that Georges’ machine was
stowed away in the coachhouse. On that she could catch her father, and
send him back. But she had not reckoned up the situation.
“No,” said Berthe, “I’m going!”
“Why, you’re not frightened like that silly lot from Armentières?”
But the terror-stricken faces and bandaged heads of those civilians in
the lorry, who had so narrowly escaped the battle, had broken Berthe’s
nerve--which was never the equal of Madeleine’s. She shouldered her
bundle.
“I’m going!” she said simply.
Madeleine was not accustomed to being disobeyed, and there is no knowing
what she might not have done had she not been in a hurry herself.
“Very well, go then! Tell the Picquart family to lock up the sheds. I’m
going after the patron!”
“The Picquarts are gone, this half-hour, with their things in the
wheelbarrow!”
Just then the breeze that stirs at dusk blew open the door, and there
entered into the darkening passage with startling nearness the
rat-tat-tat-tat-tat of German machine guns. Madeleine flung away: “Go
and burst yourselves as quick as possible, heap of dirtiness!” she
cried, and set off at a run for the château.
The village seemed even more ominous than before, now it was half dark,
and not a light in the abandoned houses. Some English transport was
crossing the square, however, with the patient sour look of men going
“into it” again--“it,” the battle. She turned into the steep silent
alley that led through the iron grille, to the “drive” of the château,
and broke into a run again on the smooth gravel. She had not gone twenty
yards before she jumped as if shot. A black figure had risen behind the
trunk of a tree with a sharp “Hish!” She fell sideways, clutching an elm
sapling that bent with her, staring. The figure made two steps towards
her, and she, petrified, could only maintain her balance and stare. Then
with infinite relief she heard: “Tiens, it’s you, Madeleine! What do you
want?”
“Why, Monsieur le Baron, I didn’t know you!”
“Be quiet then. There is some one wandering round the château. It may be
the Bosche!”
“What, are they here?”
“The village has been formally evacuated. One expects them from one
moment to another!”
At that instant steps and voices could be heard on the terrace
surrounding the house, which, on account of the winding of the drive by
way of the old moat, was just above the level of their eyes. The Baron,
quivering all over, not with fear, but with sporting instinct, brought
his spiked camp stool to the charge, and tiptoed noiselessly up the
bank. Madeleine, clutching her skirt with one hand, swinging herself up
by the undergrowth with the other, arrived beside him just in time to
see two familiar Australian figures looming leisurely in the darkness.
In another instant the Baron would have sprung, with no one knows what
results. Madeleine pushed past him, stepped over the flower-bed that
bordered the terrace, and walked up to the visitors, addressing them in
their own inimitable language, learned from their own lips in the
kitchen of the Spanish Farm:
“Hello, Digger, what you want?”
The tall lean men turned without surprise:
“To get in,” replied the nearer.
Madeleine hastily translated. The Baron, after staring a moment, led the
way to the back.
The château possessed, of course, no bell or knocker, as Leon, the
concierge, or his wife, were always to be found near the gate, to steer
frontdoor visitors round to their appropriate entrance, and open for
them. Lesser mortals came to the kitchen door, where Placide dealt with
them as St. Peter is reported to deal with ambitious souls in another
place. Since the war, and more especially since the concierge and all
his family had been evacuated, the whole of the windows and doors were
closed, bolted and shuttered.
The first object that met the gaze of the little party, as they rounded
the corner of the building, was Leon’s garden ladder, reared against the
window of the Baron’s dressing-room, in the eastern wing, from which
protruded the hindquarters and legs of a man, in stout service riding
breeches and dirty boots.
“Thunder of God,” cried the Baron, seizing the ladder and shaking it
violently, “come down, or I’ll bring you!”
An Australian added quietly, “You’d best come down, Mercadet, and tell
Jim!”
A few hurried calls in Franco-English and laconic Australian replies,
and a French interpreter climbed, an Australian soldier slid, down the
ladder.
“Well, sir,” demanded the Baron of the former, “you have large views of
your duties!”
“Sir,” replied the interpreter, “the place is officially evacuated. We
have a right here. You have not!”
“I have said I will not budge,” replied the Baron, folding his arms,
“and budge I will not!”
“Monsieur le Baron,” interposed Madeleine, “all these will be very
useful if the Bosche come!”
The Baron strode to the heavy kitchen door and struck a succession of
blows with his stick, shouting at the top of his voice, “Placide, open
then, you are as lazy as stupid!”
Very shortly a light glimmered and the bolts shot back. The door turned,
and Placide barred the way, as an old-fashioned clothes-horse covers a
blazing fire. It took her a moment or two to understand.
“Ah, it is you, Monsieur le Baron!”
“Did you think it was the devil?”
“I was upstairs seeing to the calorifère of Madame, who is in the
chapel. I thought you were gone to the village!”
Her master pushed past. “Here are officers come to billet. Are the rooms
ready?”