Our conversation was interrupted by a figure that slipped out of the
darkness of some doorway, hesitated before us, and then spoke in French.
“You are English officers? May I speak with you?”
It was a girl, whom I could see only vaguely in the darkness--she stood
in the shadow of a doorway beyond the moonlight--and I answered her
that I was English and my friend American.
“Is there any way,” she asked, “of travelling from Lille, perhaps to
Paris? In a motor-car, for example? To-night?”
I laughed at this startling request, put so abruptly. It was already
nine o’clock at night!
“Not the smallest chance in the world, mademoiselle! Paris is far from
Lille.”
“I was stupid,” said the girl. “Not all the way to Paris, but to some
town outside Lille. Any town. There are motor-cars always passing
through the streets. I thought if I could get a little place in one----”
“It is difficult,” I said. “As a matter of fact, it is forbidden
for officers to take civilians except in case of saving them from
danger--in shelled places.”
She came suddenly out of the shadow into the moonlight, and I saw that
she was a girl with red hair and a face strangely white. I knew by the
way she spoke--the accent--as well as by the neatness of her dress,
that she was not a working-girl. She was trembling painfully, and took
hold of my arm with both her hands.
“Monsieur, I beg of you to help me. I beseech you to think of some way
in which I may get away from Lille to-night. It is a matter of extreme
importance to me.”
A group of young men and women came up the street arm-in-arm, shouting,
laughing, singing the “_Marseillaise_.” They were civilians, with two
of our soldiers among them, wearing women’s hats.
Before I could answer the girl’s last words she made a sudden retreat
into the dark doorway, and I could see dimly that she was cowering back.
Dr. Small spoke to me.
“That girl is scared of something. The poor child has got the jim-jams.”
I went closer to her and heard her breathing. It was quite loud. It was
as though she were panting after hard running.
“Are you ill?” I asked.
She did not answer until the group of civilians had passed. They
did not pass at once, but stood for a moment looking up at a light
burning in an upper window. One of the men shouted something in a loud
voice--some word in _argot_--which I did not understand, and the women
screeched with laughter. Then they went on, dancing with linked arms,
and our two soldiers in the women’s hats lurched along with them.
“I am afraid!” said the girl.
“Afraid of what?” I asked.
I repeated the question--“Why are you afraid, mademoiselle?” and she
answered by words which I had heard a million times since the war began
as an explanation of all trouble, tears, ruin, misery.
“_C’est la guerre!_”
“Look out!” said the little doctor. “She’s fainting.”
She had risen from her cowering position and stood upright for a
moment, with her hand against the doorpost. Then she swayed and would
have fallen if the doctor had not caught her. Even then she fell,
indeed, though without hurt, because he could not support her sudden
weight--though she was of slight build,--and they sank together in a
kind of huddle on the door-step.
“For the love of Mike!” said Dr. Small. He was on his knees before
her now, chafing her cold hands. She came-to in about a minute, and
I leaned over her and asked her where she lived, and made out from
her faint whisper that she lived in the house to which this doorway
belonged, in the upper room where the light was burning. With numbed
fingers--“cold as a toad” said “Daddy” Small--she fumbled at her bodice
and drew out a latch-key.
“We had better carry her up,” I said, and the doctor nodded.
The front door opened into a dimly-lit passage, uncarpeted, and
with leprous-looking walls. At one end was a staircase with heavy
bannisters. The doctor and I supported the girl, who was able to walk a
little now, and managed to get her to the first landing.
“Where?” I asked, and she said, “Opposite.”
It was the front room looking on to the street. A lamp was burning on
the round table in the centre of the room, and I saw by the light of
it the poverty of the furniture, and its untidiness. At one end of the
room was a big iron bedstead with curtains of torn lace, and on the
wooden chairs hung some soiled petticoats, and blouses. There was a
small cooking-stove in a corner, but no charcoal burned in it, and I
remember an ebony-framed mirror over the mantelpiece. I remember that
mirror, vividly. I remember, for instance, that a bit of the ebony had
broken off, showing the white plaster underneath, and a crack in the
right-hand corner of the looking-glass. Probably my eyes were attracted
to it because of a number of photographs stuck into the framework.
They were photographs of a girl in a variety of stage costumes, and
glancing at the girl whom the doctor had put into a low arm-chair, I
saw that they were of her. But with all the tragic difference between
happiness and misery; worse than that--between unscathed girlhood and
haggard womanhood. This girl with red hair and a white waxen face was
pretty still. There was something more than prettiness in the broadness
of her brow and the long tawny lashes that were now veiling her closed
eyes as she sat with her head back against the chair, showing a long
white throat. But her face was lined with an imprint of pain and her
mouth, rather long and bow-like, was drawn with a look of misery.
The doctor spoke to me--in English, of course.
“Half-starved, I should say. Or starved.”
He sniffed at the stove and the room generally.
“No sign of recent cooking.”
He opened a cupboard and looked in.
“Nothing in the pantry, sonny. I guess the girl would do with a meal.”
I did not answer him. I was staring at the photographs stuck into
the mirror, and saw one that was not a girl’s portrait. It was the
photograph of a young French lieutenant. I crossed the room and looked
at it closer, and then spoke to the little doctor in a curiously
unexcited voice, as one does in moments of living drama.
“This girl is Pierre Nesle’s sister.”
“For the love of Mike!” said the little doctor, for the second time
that night.
The girl heard the name of Pierre Nesle and opened her eyes wide, with
a wondering look.
“Pierre Nesle? That is my brother. Do you know him?”
I told her that I knew him well and had seen him in Lille, where he was
looking for her, two days ago. He was now in the direction of Courtrai.
The girl was painfully agitated, and uttered pitiful words.
“Oh, my little brother!” she murmured. “My dear little comrade!” She
rose from her chair, steadying herself with one hand on the back of it,
and with feverish anxiety said that she must go at once. She must leave
Lille.
“Why?” I asked. “Why do you want to leave Lille?”
“I am afraid!” she answered again, and burst into tears.