That month of May in Myonville was the most wonderful month in Tod’s
life, full of the sadness of beauty and the beauty of sadness, exquisite
and strange. The war had been with Tod for more than three and a half
years. He had lived only with men, a very simple and big-hearted
soldier, taking the dirt and the wounds with them, boasting no poignant
memories of home, a very lonely man in that inner life where only women
and children and a few friends matter. He had given up his soul to the
war and his heart to his men, and they adored him. The clever little
people who wriggled into the safe corners at home do not understand
these things. How should they? They would have criticised that word
“adoration,” and they would have been bored by Tod’s simplicity. They
remained clever, with all the meanness of cleverness, while simpler men
became great.
Tod had had nothing to sweeten the war, save his success as a soldier,
the love of his men, and the big heartedness of Julian Burgetrode. His
memories of his wife were sordid and painful, memories of an overblown
young woman living in a London flat, a young woman of expensive habits
and extravagant clothes, hard, restless and sinister. There was a smear
on the face of Tod’s marriage. It was a thing of suspicion, horrible in
its dubiousness, its sly suggestion of disloyalty, its too obvious
materialism. And yet something restrained him, a sensitive generosity, a
reticence that kept a grimly shut mouth, perhaps that spirit of
discipline that Tod had taught to his men, for Tod could be very stern
to the shirker and the slacker. There were a few bad men who hated him,
because he had made them afraid, and was their master. They did not
matter. The battalion had faith in Tod, and a kind of schoolboy delight
in his shrewdness and his exposure of tricksters. “He’ll sweat blood for
you,” was the saying, “raise hell if anybody tries to do you down, but
if you run crooked with him, look out.”
In Myonville Tod found all that the heart of him had hungered for, green
leaves and cloth of gold, the smell of lilacs in a garden, red thorns in
bloom, the dear grey eyes of a girl. It was all so good, so wholesome,
so beautiful. He loved the beech trees and the orchards, the little
house with its soul of the home; he loved old Lorellard and his wife; he
loved the children in the streets, the horses that went to drink at the
big pond, the pigeons, the chestnut trees with their wax white flowers;
and perhaps without realising the pain and the beauty of it he loved
Claire.
She was Myonville; she was the spring, the greenness and perfume, the
soul of all he desired. She began to fill his whole consciousness, this
dainty shabby little woman with her grey eyes and shining hair, her
white throat, her busy fingers and her wisdom. She roused in Tod all
that passionate tenderness that memory connected with his mother. It was
only when he realised how much he wanted her that he discovered the
tragedy of it all.
Claire still puzzled him.
One evening he had tried to make her read an English book. Their heads
were together, by the lamp on the table. Old Lorellard was smoking his
pipe; madame dozing; Josephine watching Tod and her cousin. It was a
moment of gaiety, Claire laughing, expostulating, hesitating, with a
little finger pointing at some difficult word.
“But, monsieur, it is so absurd, your English endings. Puff and trough,
and though and enough. There’s no system.”
“There never is a system, except in the army,” laughed Tod; “I’ll get
the Army Council to get it all altered. Supposing you write me a
letter?”
“Be serious,” said Claire, touching the crown on his sleeve for a moment
with the tip of her little finger.
“I am serious,” said Tod, with a look of his blue eyes.
And suddenly she grew shy, strange. She drew the book away, and went to
Josephine almost with the air of a child asking for protection. Tod was
puzzled. Josephine began to talk to him in her gay and eager way, but
Tod did not want to talk to Josephine. Old Lorellard, that kind old man
of the world, refilled Tod’s glass, and smiled at him from under his
bushy eyebrows.
“To the end of the war, monsieur.”
“With all my heart!” said Tod.
“And monsieur will go to his home.”
Tod nearly choked over that glass of wine. He had glimpsed something
that he had not glimpsed before. Claire was nothing to him, even though
he had realised with a sudden anguish that she was everything. Perhaps
these good people were trying to make him understand; their eyes had
been open to his blindness? But, after all, he had spoken no single
word! It was just his own silly fancy, the sensitive boy in him, nothing
more, and for some days he tried to believe it was that.
He tried to pretend to a happy gaiety, to accept these weeks in
Myonville as nothing more than a charming interlude, a drawing of the
breath before more effort. His officers noticed that Tod was growing
solitary and silent, not morosely so, but with the gentle and quiet look
of a man who had worries. He was out much on his horse, and it was on
one of these rides of his that Tod came nearer to a realisation of the
truth.
He had ridden to Eu; and was trotting back in the evening from that very
French and pleasant old town, enjoying the rolling country and the blue
sky and the beech woods, when he came upon three little people resting
by the road. A girl was sitting on the grass, holding a weeping child in
her lap, and a small boy was standing beside her and looking with quaint
melancholy at his dirty shoes. He seemed undecided as to whether he
should laugh or weep. The girl was Claire, very pretty in her simple
Sunday clothes.
Tod dismounted. Her grey eyes looked up at him gladly.
“What’s this! Oh, mam’selle, why this grief?”
“I’m so tired, monsieur,” said the child.
Claire explained.
“We have been to Le Treport. I promised to take them to the sea; we
missed the last train. I think there are only two trains in the day,
monsieur.”
“So you started to walk?”
“And mam’selle has been carrying Marie,” put in the boy; “and Marie is
heavy.”
Tod looked into Claire’s tired eyes, and knew now how he loved her.
“Ma pauvre petite,” he said, “did no one stop to give you a ride?”
“A car of the Croix Rouge passed us, but the driver shouted that it was
forbidden.”
“Punch knows how to disobey orders, don’t you, old chap? Who wants a
ride? Come along, Marie; up in the saddle; he’s such a quiet old horse.
Now then, Thomas, up you go too.”
He lifted the children on to Punch’s back, and then turned to Claire.
“You are tired,” he said, and his eyes added: “Ma chérie, so tired.”
His man’s tenderness betrayed itself so utterly that she flushed and
looked confused.
“I am no longer tired, monsieur.”
“We have eight more kilometers.”
“I’m very strong. It was carrying the child.”
“I wish I could carry you,” said Tod.
There was a welling up of light into her eyes, a light that is seen but
rarely in the eyes of a woman. Then she laughed.
“Monsieur would soon be tired of it,” she said. “I am little, but so
solid!”
Tod’s coming changed that weary pilgrimage into a triumphal return.
Punch behaved like a gentleman, walking stolidly with his bridle on
Tod’s arm. The children, surmounting a brief awe of Tod, began to laugh
and chatter.
“Who are they?” he asked.
Claire looked straight ahead down the avenue of beeches. “The mother is
a widow, a widow of the war. And she could not afford——”
“So you stepped in?”
“Well, it is a pleasure.”
“It would be to you,” he said, “anything that is fine and good——”
“Monsieur!” she exclaimed softly, but with a touch of reproach.
Tod flushed.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, “I couldn’t help it. And you love
children?”
“Is it not nature?”
“I have none,” he said, “but I was very happy when I was a child. I
remember it all so well. My mother was the best woman in all the world,
and I should like to be to my boy what my father was to me.”
“They are dead, then?” said Claire.
“Yes.”
“It is sad for monsieur. But you have a home.”
“No, not a home like the Lorellards’. If I get killed it won’t matter
much.”
“You must not say that,” she said, “there are too few good men in the
world.”
The two children demanded a large part of the conversation, and Claire
and Tod drew apart to meet again in the chatter of the youngsters. Old
Punch looked at Tod now and again with a question in those soft eyes of
his. “Is this according to Army Orders, sir, and am I doing the job
correctly?” Tod rubbed Punch’s nose, and then pretended to tickle
Mademoiselle Marie’s leg.
“Naughty,” she said highly delighted. “Naughty man.”
And all the time Tod was conscious of Claire stepping along beside him
as though they were mated and these two children on old Punch’s
back——! But Tod was dreaming dreams.
When they came to the outskirts of Myonville Claire looked questioningly
at Tod.
“Monsieur le Colonel would prefer to ride in alone?”
“I? Why should I?”
“The English are so correct.”
He regarded her earnestly.
“I’m as happy as a king and as proud. But is it not allowed for you and
these children?”
“I was not thinking of myself,” she said, “but of the dignity of the
English officer.”
“Please God,” said Tod, “may I be kicked into the nearest ditch if my
dignity is so shabby a thing as that.”
She gave him a flash of her eyes.
“You are a good man, Monsieur Tod.”
And Tod went into Myonville with the happy face of a Sir Percival, past
many of his own men who saluted him with hand and eyes, past the sacred
doorway of his own orderly-room and the brisk face of the battalion
sergeant-major. Somewhere near the church a man of the new draft that
had just come to the battalion, a little literary gent or something
jerked in for the last phase, chose to be facetious in the hearing of
one of Tod’s veterans.
“The C.O.’s found a hot billet. These officer chaps——”
The back of a hard hand swung swiftly, struck him in the mouth.
“You b——y little blighter! He’s worth a brigade of you scribbling
rotters. Don’t you try that sort of stuff on us.”
The literary gent had a bloody lip, and he was frightened.
“Can’t a chap have a little joke——?”
“No, not you, when you want to put it on the colonel. He was out in ’14
while you were polishing the seat of a chair. You aren’t in the same
class.”
It had been a happy evening for Tod, happy in its innocence and its
simplicity and in his comradeship with Claire. She had talked to him
more intimately and with a freedom that had brought him very near to
her, yet perhaps because of the day’s happiness he was a little blind to
what it meant to her. Tod had not realised the woman under that calm and
courageous surface. He had not fathomed the depths of her, the
possibilities of passion that a weaker woman might have betrayed to a
weaker man. He had not divined what had happened to Claire any more than
he quite realised all that had happened to himself.
The Lorellards were sitting in the big kitchen when Tod returned from
the mess. There happened to be a Frenchman with them, an interpreter
attached to an English Division, and an old friend. He lived in the next
village and was home on leave.
Tod was introduced. He sat down and began to talk. The kitchen was in
semi-darkness, for there were no lights; they had to be careful in
Myonville because the German planes were searching each night for a big
ammunition dump somewhere near the mouth of the Somme. And then Tod
missed Claire from the pleasant friendliness of the family circle. She
was in the kitchen. She had taken a chair over to the far corner of the
door that opened into the shop, and she was sitting there alone in the
dusk, a little figure, almost invisible, save for her pale face.
Tod was puzzled.
She did not move, or join in the conversation, but sat there mutely,
isolated, wholly apart.
“Mademoiselle Vignard is tired,” he said to Josephine. “Is not that so,
Mademoiselle Claire?”
“Perhaps,” she answered him with an almost casual abruptness.
She did not speak again, but something emanated from her, a pathetic
sense of resistance, an obstinate sadness that challenged Tod. He did
not understand her silence and her isolation, and in groping for an
explanation, wondered whether he was in the way.
The interpreter did not stay long. Tod stood there awkwardly after the
Frenchman had gone. Claire was still detached and silent in her corner.
“Have I driven your friend away?” he asked them.
Josephine answered him.
“Oh, no, monsieur. He was just a friend of my brother’s. He is not very
acceptable to us and to Claire.”
Tod thought he had found the explanation of Claire’s aloofness, but he
was wrong.
When he said “Good-night” to the Lorellards she did not come out of her
corner, and her good night was almost inaudible. “Bon soir, monsieur.”
Tod went upstairs to his room, troubled.
“Have I offended her?” he thought, “and how?”