A MESSAGE FROM ALSACE
Quite a sensational thing happened in the Ribot household. Usually
Madame Ribot had breakfast in her room and about ten went for a walk in
the garden. The morning after Phil's arrival she was on hand to pour
coffee in the dining-room and to serve one of Jacqueline's omelets.
"Mother, this is epochal!" said Henriette.
"An inspiration!" said Madame Ribot, who could never be accused of the
hypocrisy of feigning strenuosity. She was a frank advocate of repose
and it had not deserted her even with this departure from custom. "I
did it for our seventeenth cousin. I want him to feel at home."
She liked the seventeenth cousin. He was good-looking; he had good
manners. His American quality appealed to her French quality. She
would have liked to show him to her friends as a seventeenth cousin,
which would have been proof of the quality of her own origin on the
American side.
"You are to stay as long as you please," she went on. "If Longfield is
your American home and Truckleford your English home, then Mervaux is
your French."
"Not as long as I please," Phil replied. "One must have a sense of
self-denial."
"Very well said," she countered. It was worth while coming down to
breakfast to hear him say it. "Perhaps I shall insist that it be as
long as the hostess pleases. What then?"
Yes, what would he say to that? Her shrewd eyes reflected a teasing
spark which when she was young must have been as effectual as
Henriette's.
"But I might not know the signs," he said, "and mistake my pleasure for
yours."
"I should tell you."
"Does that mean that you think I should have to be told?" He was
enjoying this play of words as much as she.
"No, not you, cousin. You are the kind to whom one would always hate
to say _au revoir_ and could never say good-bye."
"This is almost a flirtation," said Henriette. "At least he must stay
till the portrait is finished. We shall start at once."
"I begin to feel awfully stuck on myself, as we say at home!" said
Phil. "Do I sit for both portraits at the same time?" he asked,
turning to Helen.
Henriette also looked at her sister rather quickly. Helen's eyes
smiled above her coffee cup, which hid the lump of nose; they, too, had
a teasing spark.
"No," she replied. "Oils take much longer than charcoal. Let
Henriette get started before I butt in. Isn't that it--butt in?"
"Yes, the correct American for your meaning--though a little archaic
now--but not for mine," he said. "I'm ready for all the artists. Let
them come."
"Not this morning," Helen concluded.
She had already put on her sun hat and gone when Madame Ribot smilingly
from the doorway watched Henriette and Phil, her easel under his arm,
going up the path. The bordering trees of the little estate were on a
terrace which gave a broad view. Here Henriette set up her easel and
put Phil in a rustic chair in the position that pleased her, his only
condition that he sit facing so he could watch her at work being
granted. She was the real picture to him; the one that made it worth
while to pose. He could look past her over the fields rolling away to
the horizon, with the rows of trees of the main road marching across
the foreground.
Human specks dotted the fields, women, old men, and boys who had been
at work since dawn harvesting the grain, since the able-bodied men were
away at war. A figure which he recognised approached a nearby group.
The bent backs straightened. Faintly he could hear their voices as
they passed the time of day, and then a laugh all round as Helen became
one of them in effort as well as in spirit, raking and binding the
sheaves.
For the time being he said nothing about it to Henriette, but
occasionally his glance stole away from her toward Helen, who kept on
with her labour. The breeze carried her voice and laugh, which was
like a rich echo of Henrietta's, and at length he heard her singing a
French song, in which the other workers joined. Time passed rapidly
watching the figures in the field and Henriette--too rapidly.
"We are started, though there is nothing to see," said Henriette
finally. "We will rest till after luncheon."
The peasants, too, had stopped work. They were seating themselves on
the sheaves or sprawling on the hard, dry, yellow stubble for their
mid-day meal. He heard them laugh at some sally of Helen's before she
started across the field toward where he was sitting. Flushed from the
sun and exercise, she cried out, as she approached:
"They say I do it like a veteran! It was great fun--and I was helping
France!"
Phil had been envying her the exercise and told her so.
"There's room for volunteers," she suggested. And she looked at him
and then at Henriette. "I dare you both to come out there this
afternoon!" she added.
"Done--if your sister will let me off! Will you?"
Henriette shot one of her quick glances at Helen.
"Perhaps you will volunteer, too," Helen parried.
"Why not? I'm game!" Henriette replied.
"Good! It's the best way of helping that I know. They are very hard
pressed to get the grain cut before it is overripe. It will be
straight sickling this afternoon on the Pigou patch. Poor Madame
Pigou's son is at the front and she has only Jean who is but ten to
help, and she's too poor to hire a reaper."
When Madame Ribot heard the plan she smiled and nodded approval,
reminding Henriette that she must wear gloves in order not to blister
her hands. She herself, under her parasol, walked out to see them
begin.
Madame Pigou, with deep wrinkles around her kindly mouth and hands
already stiffened by labour at forty, protested at first.
"Such work is not for you," she said to Henriette. "Nothing takes it
out of your back more than sickling, unless it's hoeing."
"Oh, none of us expects to be as adept as you," replied Henriette, "or
as Helen, who has a natural talent for such things."
"Mademoiselle Helene," said Madame Pigou, with an affectionate smile of
fellowship at Helen, "is one of us. Thank you all--thank you for the
sake of Armand. I shall write him how you helped," she added.
"Mind that you don't overdo!" Madame Ribot warned Henriette as she
started back to the chateau.
Henriette did not overdo. With skirt tucked above her slim ankles and
an old pair of gloves up to her elbows, she used her sickle much as she
had her brush, cutting her small swaths handily after she had learned
the trick and often stopping to deride her own efforts or to boast of
them very merrily, holding the attention of every one on herself. It
was no cross to her that she did not keep up with the others. Madame
Pigou complimented her for another reason. It was wonderful that
Henriette should cut even a single sheaf; the condescension of a
beautiful princess who used a real trowel and some real mortar in
laying the cornerstone of a public building.
Helen, humming snatches of song, kept her swath even with Madame Pigou.
Her plain features as she bent to her work seemed in keeping with it.
There was truth in Madame Pigou's saying that she was "one of us." But
Madame did not set a fast pace, for she saw that Helen meant to hold
her own.
When Phil had finished a swath he turned and cut toward Henriette in
hers, and thus they met face to face as he nipped the last straws from
in front of her sickle; her face flushed, too, with exercise, as they
both stood erect, he with head bare, his sleeves rolled, drawing a deep
breath and stretching his supple, square shoulders.
Helen pausing to rest had a glimpse of him thus; and it occurred to her
how he must have looked far away in the Southwest when he was directing
the workmen in railroad-building. Then she sent the sharp knife
athwart the bundle of straws that she had gathered in her hand.
"A good, straight man!" whispered Madame Pigou. "He knows how to work."
"So I was thinking," murmured Helen absently. Then, a sheaf finished,
she looked up again to see them standing in quite the same position of
confidential comradeship. "Cousin, more praise!" she called, and
repeated in English what Madame Pigou had said of him.
"A real compliment, this!" he replied.
"And tell him that he should put on a hat," said Madame Pigou. "The
sun is hot."
"Not so. Not to me. I like it. I play tennis in August bare-headed."
"The Americans stand the sun better than we," said Madame Pigou.
"But he is not an Indian. He is white," Helen explained. "American
summers are hotter."
For Madame thought that most of the population of the States were
Indians. Phil caught what she was saying.
"A white Indian, but not savage!" he called.
It had all been as good as play to young Jean, watching these grand
people from the chateau reaping, until a distant sound on the road
attracted his attention. It was the faint tramp of men and the rumble
of guns. As the head of a column of infantry appeared past the screen
of a stretch of woodland, he cried out, "Soldiers!" and ran.
The cry was taken up far and near over the fields. Most of the
harvesters started toward the road and with them went Henriette and
Helen and Phil. But not Madame Pigou. She stood watching the figures
all of a pattern in their uniforms, moving like automatons sharp cut
against the skyline, and then bent to her work. Her son could not be
among these battalions. She knew that he was in Alsace. Buxom peasant
girls and toothless old men and women standing by the roadside called
out the joyful God-speed of their hearts to the soldiers of France.
The men in their red trousers and blue coats knew nothing of where they
were going; and the gunners astride their horses and seated on the
gun-carriages and caissons looked as if they did not care, if only
action soon came. Still they kept coming, that myriad-legged, human
caterpillar, its convolutions following the grade of the road in either
direction to the horizon. It seemed a creature of irresistible
man-power and still coming, when the cousins started back to their
field.
"They are between us and the Germans, those brave fellows!" said Madame
Pigou, her features in a transport of joy, with a long look toward the
moving blue silhouettes sharpened now by the low sun. What more was
there to say?
"I hope we shall not see them driven back," Helen whispered in English.
She took the lead in insisting that Madame Pigou stop work. If she did
not, they would not help her to-morrow. They walked back to the
village with her.
"In America the women do not work in the fields," Phil managed to say
in French.
"What do they do?" asked Madame Pigou. "Ah, I understand. They are
all rich."
Jean who had gone ahead came running toward them with a letter which
the postman had left during the day at the cottage. There was an
inarticulate explosion of breath from Helen. She had recognised the
nature of the letter, though the peasant woman had not.
"The first in our village!" Helen whispered to Phil.
He understood her meaning. How could they ease the blow for the mother
was their thought, as her calloused fingers tore open the envelope?
There was no way. They had to watch it fall.
"Dead on the field of honour!" she repeated to herself. She half
closed her eyes as silently she adjusted herself to fate's decree, then
folded the message and placed it in her bosom. "It is for France! It
is war!" she said, this woman of a race that knows well what war is and
what it brings. "Jean, you must be my man, now. Armand is dead!"
Jean, hoarse from cheering the battalion on the road, nestled against
his mother.
"Thank you for helping me!" she said simply, turning to the others.
Her stoicism seemed to have its roots in the soil itself, tilled and
fought for by centuries of ancestors. But the suppressed suffering in
her eyes as she spoke had brought the war nearer to Mervaux than the
throb of marching infantry and the thunder of guns and nearer to Phil
than anything he had seen or felt before.
"Letters of that kind are dropping all over France," said Helen, when
she described the incident to her mother.
"Don't!" said Madame Ribot. "Don't let us dwell upon it!"
So it was not mentioned at dinner. Yet though the food was equally
good, Madame Ribot equally genial and Henriette equally sparkling, none
could help thinking of Madame Pigou; and the fact of that column on the
way to the front brought a suggestion of possibilities.
"Remember that you are to remain as long as you please," said Madame
Ribot to Phil as she bade him good-night. "I feel some way that--well,
you give us a sense of security."