The Lorellards owned a little shop, the café, and a farm. The shop was
next to the café, and you entered it by a separate glass-panelled door.
Tod had to pass through the public room every time he left or entered
his billet; it was a biggish room with a queer little bar, half a dozen
clean white tables, a set of shelves almost barren of bottles, a dozen
chairs, and a bracket clock. This room was nearly always empty.
Sometimes Tod saw two or three old Frenchmen sitting at one of the
tables; his own men never came there, for the Lorellards had no need to
be very enthusiastic about the café. The shop was a more serious
proposition, but the child of their hearts was the farm.
It lay beyond the orchard and a row of tall beeches, and Tod discovered
it in company with Madame Lorellard. There were two little meadows
surrounded with willows, a broad strip of arable land green with young
wheat, a small wood of poplars, and a little field beyond the wood where
old Lorellard grew potatoes and Indian corn. The barn and his stables
were near the house.
Old Lorellard was always working. The back of his neck was all seamed
with wrinkles, and the colour of leather. His hands were knotty and
strong. In his old blue breeches and striped shirt, with a hoe in his
hands, he was the very soul of France, shrewd, cheerful, ready with a
mischievous gleam of the eyes under their badger grey eyebrows. He was a
philosopher, and in his way—a thinker.
Old Lorellard astonished Tod. He could talk unexpectedly about so many
unexpected things.
“Socialism, monsieur? We do not need socialism in Myonville. Look, you,
we all work here; there are no rich in Myonville.”
This was true.
“Moreover, there are no factories. It is the factories that make the
trouble.”
And then he asked Tod a question.
“Is it true, monsieur, that in your war factories you pay the workers,
even girls and boys, very much money?”
“That’s so,” said Tod.
“Then you will have much trouble after the war,” said old Lorellard; “no
one will know the value of money or the value of good sweat. But in
France we shall not have so much trouble.”
“Why?” Tod asked him.
Old Lorellard pointed to his crops.
“We grow things. We live close to Nature, and we know that she does not
give if we do not work. And work is good. They say we peasants are
misanthropes; sometimes it may be true. Look you, this land is mine;
there are thousands of little farms like mine in France. We work; we do
not waste money on things that do not matter. Paris is not France,
monsieur.”
“Are you happy?”
Old Lorellard gave him one of his shrewd, smiling looks.
“Well, what would you say, monsieur?”
“I hope I shall be as happy at your age,” said Tod.
Madame was like her man, only she went to church and he did not. Her old
sun-bonnet shaded a contented face, the face of a woman who had borne
strong children, and who had a right to be proud. Even the war had not
shaken her. Her boy’s three wounds were like red badges of honour over
her heart.
She talked quite frankly to Tod, sensing him as a man without guile.
“My other girl is married, monsieur. They are good girls, both of them,
though Josephine is a coquette. We do not spoil our girls, monsieur.
They understand what is expected of a woman.”
“And your niece?” Tod asked with a certain shyness.
Madame’s eyes lit up. Her heart was very warm towards Claire.
“A good girl, a very good girl, and so wise! She is an orphan, monsieur;
her father was a railway official; she had a good education.”
“And she is not—not engaged?” Tod asked.
“Oh, no, monsieur. It is unfortunate, but her dot will be very small.
Not but that men have asked for her, but she is very hard to please, is
Claire. She looks with those grey eyes of hers and waits and listens. A
good girl, so very strong yet gentle, and warm of heart, though she
seems so quiet. Such a wife for some man.”
And Tod wandered off into the orchard with a sad and very thoughtful
face. Why hadn’t he had the luck to find such a mate? There was
something mysterious and fine and compelling about Claire.
The staircase of the house led down into the kitchen, and Tod had to
pass through the kitchen whenever he went in and out. The Lorellards
made but little use of the sitting-room. Tod would always be passing
Claire. The school took but five days of her week, nor were the hours
long, and she sat by the kitchen window with her workbox on the
window-sill, and some work or other in her lap. She wore a rather shabby
black skirt, a white blouse with a faint blue stripe on it, and cut low
at the throat. On Sundays she wore a blouse with a pattern of little
mauve flowers, and a black cotton apron covered with blue pansies.
Sometimes she smiled at Tod, sometimes she looked at him with a baffling
seriousness and did not smile at all. She was not talkative; and though
her fingers were always busy, she had an air of pleasant repose.
“Always working, mam’selle,” Tod would say to her.
Her replies were never obvious.
“I think while I work,” or
“A woman is not all fingers.”
“Do you ever go out?” he asked her.
She laughed.
“Has not Monsieur le Colonel seen me sitting in the orchard? And I walk
every evening. There are always the children to walk with.”
“I wish——” said Tod, and then smothered the wish.
She guessed that he had wanted children.
Sometimes her face would glow with sudden light, and she would grow
animated. She had a very charming and expressive mouth, and the most
perfect white teeth; and when her eyes lit up Tod thought her beautiful,
beautiful in a way that was new to him. There seemed so much behind
those eyes.
Yet she baffled him, this daintily shabby, silent, children-teaching
Claire. She had such a sturdy poise of her own, the soft mystery of
woodlands that do not rush to you but wait for you to come to them, and
still remain mysterious. Tod found her serene, practical, strangely
quick to understand him, ready to listen, slow to speak. She seemed to
hold him at a distance. She was always a little way off.
He did not understand it then, that it was her strength, the strength of
a Frenchwoman who knew the passion latent within her, not the
Frenchwoman of the English idea, a woman far finer and more humanly wise
than that. She had something sacred within her, a passionate spirit that
no man should touch—until—— Until! That was the soft aloofness, Tod
saw in her eyes.
Each evening Tod became part of the family. Sometimes they sat in the
doorway, sometimes in the kitchen, sometimes in the orchard. Tod liked
the orchard best. He lay on the grass and watched the last sunlight on
the green boughs of the old trees and upon Claire’s face and hair.
Josephine was the talker, and Tod could fly a gaiety that would match
hers, but he did not look at Josephine as he looked at Claire.
Josephine made him talk.
“Were you always an officer, Monsieur le Colonel?”
Tod explained that he had begun the war as a private.
“And such a boy! And what are the ribbons for?”
He told them, looking at Claire as he spoke.
“Just luck, you know.”
“And in England I suppose you are rich? I should like to be rich. I
should have breakfast in bed each morning and in the winter I should go
to Nice.”
“And you would be none the happier,” said Claire, with one of her quick
flashes of aggressive truthfulness. “Too much money is like having too
many aprons; you never know which one to wear.”
Old Lorellard chuckled.
“Did you ever hear such wisdom? Quite a female Solomon.”
Claire blushed.
“I’m a poor man,” said Tod; “I never expect to be anything else. I agree
with Mademoiselle Vignard.”
Josephine gave Tod a gleam of her dark eyes, the look of a woman who
says in her heart: “Ah, it is like that, is it?” But if Josephine was a
coquette she was no cat. She was jealous for Claire when the real heart
of her was touched. Good women hold together.
These evenings left Tod astonished and full of pleasure in his own
astonishment. These people were peasants, substantial peasants, it is
true, but the fineness of their manners and the refinement of their
culture were unlike anything he had known in England. They made most
middle-class English families seem vulgar and ignorantly boorish. There
was no ostentation, no swelling up of the social frog, no fidgeting, no
giggling. Tod knew that the average Englishman is apt to be either
servile or insolent, and inclined to bray like a jackass at anything
that startles his complacent ignorance.
“They must be more civilised than we are,” he said to himself. “I know
I’m an ignorant beast.”
He learnt many things concerning Claire. She had been to school at
Tourcoing, a good school. She could read English, but speak it barely at
all, perhaps because Tod made her strangely shy. She could play the
violin. “But I play it very badly,” she confessed; “the war broke the
strings.” Her reading flustered Tod, who had never been much of a
reader. He did not know anything about the French classics, and he had
never heard of Ronsard, Montaigue, Pascal, Chateaubriand, Daudet or
Anatole France. She was surprised that he was ignorant of Balzac, and
Tod made a desperate grab and pulled up Dumas and Zola to impress her.
He could think of no other names. She had the advantage of him even in
the English classics, and she could have taught him his own history. And
yet there was nothing of the prig about her, nothing of the
schoolmistress. She could cook, sew, manage a house, and she had a
practical knowledge of farming and gardening. She had ideas about spiral
nebulæ and electrons and Mendelism, but such erudition struck Tod as
charmingly and wonderfully ridiculous.
“What do you want to know such things for?” he asked her.
“I don’t,” she said, “but it does not do me any harm, monsieur, so long
as I love children. A woman knows with her heart, a man with his head.”
And Tod’s consciousness began to be full of the eyes and the voice and
the soul of Claire.