The village of Myonville, like many of the old Picardy villages in what
had once been Ponthieu, hid itself in trees. You rode between the flat
fields and the orchards, as young Seymour, the billeting officer, rode
that May morning, and saw ahead of you a mass of towering elms and
beeches, with a bit of white plastered wall showing here and there like
a patch of light sky at the end of a wood. Even the church steeple was
invisible, when the leaves were out, and the roads leading into the
village were great green tunnels.
“It’s good,” said young Seymour to himself, “It’s damned good.”
And so it was.
For Myonville was a virgin village; troops had rarely been quartered
there during the three and a half years of the war. It had had its
sorrows, but they, like the village, were secret and beautiful, part of
the low, white-walled and red-roofed houses; part of its orchards and
bits of garden and great pensive trees. And the spring was in Myonville,
an indescribable greenness, a glimpse of lush blue-grass under the pink
and white of the apple trees, perhaps a clump of daffodils—goblin gold
under the blue sky.
Young Seymour found the secretary of Monsieur le Maire. He was the
schoolmaster, big, stately, with the baggy black clothes of a French
civilian, shabby, but rather proud.
“Billets? Yes. For a battalion, Monsieur le Capitaine?”
“Eight officers and seventy-three men and three horses,” said Seymour.
The schoolmaster raised his eyebrows.
“It is very small.”
“Well, you see,” said Seymour, “during the retreat the Boches were so
loving that there wasn’t much left of us. Now, where am I to put the
colonel?”
The placing of the colonel seemed to be the most sacred act in Seymour’s
ritual.
“A big house, perhaps, Monsieur le Capitaine?”
“The colonel does not love big houses. A little house—with a garden.”
“There is the Café de la Paix.”
“Noisy?”
“Very quiet, monsieur.”
“Any children? The colonel loves children.”
“There are plenty of children in Myonville,” said the schoolmaster with
an amused twinkle.
So young Seymour went off with his list, and called first at the Café de
la Paix. The choosing of the colonel’s billet appeared to be a very
serious business, but as a matter of fact, it was a labour of love.
“Madame Lorellard? Bonjour, madame. I want to place Monsieur le Colonel
in your house, with your good permission.”
Seymour was a pink and white boy, and very polite.
“Josephine,” called the old lady, “ici,” and she smiled like a red apple
upon Seymour.
Josephine, the black, handsome Josephine, Josephine the talkative, the
temperamental, came gliding out of the inner room.
“My daughter, monsieur. She manages everything.”
Seymour paid the colonel’s court to Josephine. She was put out, annoyed,
haughty, yet polite. Strange officers were a nuisance. Besides, André,
her brother, was expected home on leave, and she wanted the room for
him.
“It is a very small room, monsieur.”
“The colonel loves a small room mademoiselle. May I see it?”
Josephine took him upstairs, and was yet more annoyed when Seymour
looked at the sheets.
“Monsieur, you insult me!”
“Oh, mademoiselle, I do not; I was admiring the linen.”
Someone had shown some sense in selecting Seymour as billeting officer.
He chalked the outer door and went about the rest of his business.
Josephine was walking up and down the kitchen, talking in her excitable
way to her mother and Cousin Claire. Claire taught in the school. She
had been a solemn child, addicted to wild bouts of elfin mischief, a
child with brown gold hair and great grey eyes.
“A colonel! Oh, la, la, he will be old and fussy, and he will want hot
water at all hours, and baths, and he will stamp about the clean floors
and scold. I know all about English colonels. Gabrielle had one at
Doullens, cross and red as a lobster.”
“He can’t eat us,” said Claire, thrusting her needle into one of
madame’s stockings she was darning.
“No, but he will be cross, and he will be rude, and he will always be
calling for red wine.”
“Josephine, the stew is boiling over,” said Madame Lorellard.
Josephine dealt with the stew, and Claire’s eyes had a little
mischievous glimmer of light in them.
“What a monster you expect! But then, if he is old he will not be a
nuisance in other ways.”
“Tiens!” said the black girl. “They are worse than the young ones
sometimes. Old pigs!”
About three o’clock that afternoon Claire was washing lace in the little
backyard and splashing soapsuds from her tub on to the leaves of the old
pear tree trained against the wall. Madame had gone out into the fields
to help old Lorellard with his hoeing; Josephine was in the garden
picking herbs. Claire heard someone open the door of the café and walk
in, and then an English voice called: “Madame!”
Claire went through the kitchen with a ball of wet lace in her two
hands. The glass door leading into the café room was open. She saw an
officer standing there.
“Monsieur?”
He turned, smiled and saluted. Claire was strangely conscious of his
eyes; they were blue eyes, rather sad, rather tired, but brave, very
brave and so honest.
“I am billeted here, mam’selle.”
He spoke quite good French. She looked at his sleeve and Tod Western
looked at her arms. Somehow he saw something very beautiful and peaceful
and good in those plump arms of hers, the two strong little hands
holding the ball of wet lace.
“But monsieur is so young!”
And Tod laughed.
“Mam’selle, did you expect a grandfather?”
“But we thought—and the young officer was so careful.”
Tod was still smiling, and she understood of a sudden why the tired but
smiling eyes had brought an atmosphere into the house. As a woman she
was quick to feel, though very slow to like. She noticed that he was
wearing two ribbons, and that his left arm looked stiff.
“Monsieur would like to see his room?”
She was pressing the ball of lace between her two hands; a drop of water
fell on the floor.
“If you please,” said Tod, as though he were listening to some soft
voice speaking inside him.
She put down the lace and dried her hands.
“It is a very small room, monsieur.”
Tod was absorbing all the pleasant homeliness of the place, the table
scrubbed white as hollywood, the red-tiled floor, the black stove
standing out into the room with the inevitable coffee-pot warming on it,
the bright pots and jars, the plain wooden chairs. It was simple,
austere, exquisitely clean. The doorway opening on to the yard showed
Tod a garden and a great green orchard beyond it, and in the orchard a
blackbird was singing.
His silence made Claire glance around at him as she dried her hands. He
was looking out into the orchard and smiling, and his blue eyes were
full of light. And again she understood; this was a man who loved simple
things, children, dogs, a green tree in leaf, the singing of a bird, a
field of corn rippling in the wind, red apples on a bough, a warm place
by the fire.
“I beg your pardon, mam’selle,” said Tod abruptly, “but all this is so
very good.”
She crossed the kitchen and raised the latch of the door that opened on
the stairs.
“Monsieur has suffered,” she said.
She ran up the steep stairs, a sturdy, graceful little figure, full
throated, her old shoes making a merry clatter. Tod followed her,
noticing the cleanness of that carpetless house, a row of shoes and
sabots lined up on a shelf, a couple of mauve linen bonnets hanging on a
nail, a table with clean linen laid out on it on the landing above. He
had a glimpse of a room, a woman’s room with clothes hanging under a
curtain and a red _duvet_ on the bed. Claire had opened a door, and she
went before him into the room.
“It is a comfortable bed, monsieur, and the room is quiet, for, as you
see, the window looks out on the orchard.”
She was quite natural and unembarrassed, without a trace of coquettish
false modesty.
“It is a very nice room,” said Tod.
“Is there anything that monsieur desires?”
“A table—a table to write on, if it will cause you no trouble. My
servant will carry it in.”
“We will find you a table, and it is no trouble.”
She left him and met Tod’s servant in the kitchen, a shy, rosy-faced boy
playing at Atlas with the colonel’s brown valise on his back. She
pointed him up the stairs, picked up the lace, and went back to her
washing. She could hear the voices of the two men in the room above, and
a sound of devoted activity on the part of the boy with the rosy face.
“You’ll have some hot water, sir?”
“If you can get it, Cane. Don’t worry the people.”
“I’ve got out a clean pair of pyjamas, sir. And your slacks.”
“They have promised me another table, Cane. I shall want it to-night.”
“It will be here, sir,” said the boy.
He spoke the truth, for Tod was a man who was loved with a very great
love by all men who had faced death with him.
There were other voices now in the kitchen. Josephine had returned, and
so had the old people, for Père Lorellard had hoed all the weeds.
“He is quite young,” said Claire calmly, drying her hands on a towel.
“Oh, la la, the young ones can be a nuisance.”
Her cousin said nothing.
And then Tod descended upon them, a quiet man, very much at his ease, a
man without guile.
He bowed to _grand’mère_.
“It is very good of you to take me in, madame. I shall give you no
trouble.”
He bowed to Josephine, but a little more stiffly.
“My room is charming.”
That mercurial and handsome young woman became instantly the coquette.
Would Monsieur le Colonel take a cup of coffee or a glass of red wine?
Yes, the war, the terrible war! How much longer was it going to last,
and would the Germans ever come to Myonville? Claire was busy hanging
her lace on a little line near the stove. She appeared to be absorbed in
what she was doing, and she took no part in the conversation.
Tod sat down and drank a cup of coffee, and talked to Josephine, whose
elbows were on the table. She was leaning forward, her handsome and
expressive face upturned, her black eyes looking straight into Tod’s
blue ones. She liked homage, did Josephine; she liked to have a man
_impressione_, interested in her and in her alone.
Tod gave it as his opinion that the Germans would never come to
Myonville, and that they would go on fighting till the Germans were
beaten. Josephine became voluble and eloquent on what France had
suffered, how her brother André had been wounded three times, and how it
was impossible to buy new clothes. Claire went on hanging up her lace,
and saying nothing.
Tod looked at Josephine because he was a gentleman, but he looked now
and again at Claire because he wanted to. A ray of sunlight was stealing
through the window, and it fell upon her brown gold hair and white neck
and plain black dress. She was a little woman, _la petite_ Claire, but
Tod had a feeling that there was nothing little about her. He liked her
calmness, her quietude, those enigmatically frank grey eyes of hers, and
the way she went on doing things.
“The aeroplanes, we hear them each night now,” said the dark girl, “and
the bombs! Oh, la la! And Abbeville is being destroyed. I cannot sleep.
I walk up and down, or run into the fields. It is so much safer in the
fields.”
Claire spoke for the first time.
“If I am to be killed at night, I will be killed in my bed,” she said;
“it will just happen so.”
Tod looked at her.
“You will not be killed,” he said, “but you are very wise.”
Tod had work to do, a fatherly care for this battered remnant of his
battalion, part of the battered remnant of a division. No one knew what
they were doing in Myonville; Tod did not know, nor did the red men at
D.H.Q. They had been pushed about the country, thrust into any odd
corner, left on the rubbish heap so to speak, while over yonder men
fought with their backs to the sea. Rumour had it that they were to
train Americans; but neither the war, nor the Americans, nor the great
spring offensive concern this tale—this green season in the village of
Myonville in Ponthieu by the sea.
Tod spent an hour in the orderly-room, went round the men’s billets,
inspected the kitchen, and was taken by Seymour to the officer’s mess.
“Is your billet all right, sir?”
“Just what I wanted, Jack. By Jove, aren’t those beech trees fine?”
“Gorgeous!” said the boy.
Tod wandered out after dinner into the lanes of Myonville. He had two
letters in his pocket, but he did not want to read them yet. For Tod was
sad, sad with the brave sadness of a strong man who had seen defeat, and
whose heart was full of the thought of the men—his men—who were dead.
He was sick of the war, soul-sick and very weary; there seemed no end to
the bloody business, no end to the hopes that were dashed.
“We’ve got to beat them,” was all that Tod would ever say; “we’ll go on
till we do it.”
He was not a man of rhetoric, a man of phrases or of elaborate theories,
one of your clever little people who sit in chairs in London and spill
ink in wrangling over things they do not understand. Tod had no use for
the war news of the journalists.
“Just tosh for the old women.”
He left it at that.
But these beech trees and orchards—these hills and little old houses
and these rich fields! How good they were! Such gentle lights on the
green grass, such mystery in the dim alleys of the orchards, such a
smell of growth, such human tenderness! Tod’s heart had been made bigger
by the war. The change in him could be summed up in those few words;
while over in England! What had those damned “leaves” of his given him?
Nothing, nothing at all.
It was growing dark when he returned to the Rue de l’Eglise and the Café
de la Paix. Peasants were sitting at their doors, and Tod found the
Lorellards grouped in the doorway of the café. It was a plain old brick
house standing on the street, next door to the schoolhouse where Claire
Vignard taught her children.
The whole family rose.
“Please don’t get up,” said Tod.
He was introduced to Père Lorellard, a ruddy old man who kept an
everlasting chuckle under his waistcoat, and whose blue eyes were full
of mischief.
Tod sat down between Josephine and Claire. There was no embarrassment,
no English awkwardness about these people. They accepted Tod, treated
him with the exquisite and intelligent politeness of the French peasant,
found their chairs just as comfortable although he had joined them. And
Tod felt happily at home, the simplest of men chatting to two girls and
two old people.
They praised his French.
“I’m half a Frenchman,” he laughed, passing his cigarette-case to old
Lorellard.
Josephine was the ready coquette, making her dark eyes mysterious and
mischievous in the dark.
“Monsieur will stay in France after the war, perhaps?”
“I’m married,” said Tod, glancing instinctively at Claire.
The fair girl did not look at him, but she had noticed a quick change in
his voice.
“And how many children have you?” madame wanted to know.
“None,” said Tod, like a man rebutting an accusation.
“Oh, mon Dieu!”—this was Josephine—“but the lines on my hand say that
I am to have seven. Seven children, monsieur! Oh, la la!”
Little Claire broke in in that queer, abrupt way of hers.
“Why work if you are to have no children? What is the good of it—just
for yourself?”
Her eyes met Tod’s in the dark, but she turned her head away almost
immediately, and a silence fell upon Tod. A vague sadness seemed to
steal in at the open doorway; and Tod rose and said “Good night.”
“I have letters,” he said.
Josephine lit him a candle, and waited for him to smile at her, but Tod
did not smile.
“He is thinking of his home,” she said, when Tod had gone upstairs. “He
is not happy.”
But Claire had a feeling that Tod was not happy because of his home.
The colonel was sitting at his table, and he had pulled those two
letters out of his pocket. One was from Mr. Burgetrode; the other from
his wife. He read Mr. Burgetrode’s who had grown even bigger with the
war, a creative giant labouring to beat the Boche. It was a long letter,
an intimate letter, almost fatherly in some of its touches. Tod spent
half of each leave with Mr. Julian Burgetrode; they had grown fond of
each other for there was the same bigness in them both.
His wife’s letter brought a touch of grimness to Tod’s face. He was
happy with his men, but miserable with those other memories. Millie had
a little flat in town, and even a lieutenant-colonel’s pay was
inadequate to explain her palpable opulence. Those “leaves” of his had
worried Tod, sent him back to France with intolerance and suspicion in
his heart. He suspected her of slyness, and of more than slyness.
“Have her watched,” some very merciless Stoic had said to him.
“I can’t,” Tod answered. “How can I? I’m up against death out here. That
changes a man. Set some sneak to spy on her? Damn it—I can’t do it! I
couldn’t do it—somehow—even if I felt sure——”
A woman would have said that Tod was right.