standing at her side to look down on her face, sometimes bowed to his
knees by the burden of the years without her. When the priest came back
to rouse him he was crouched in the attitude of prayer; but his prayer
(if such it might be called) was only the eternal petition of the
bereaved, "Would God that I had died instead!"
The village sexton was of those who had already fled at the rumour of
the oncoming German; so that night the Englishwoman, who had acquired in
a west-country garden some skill in the handling of a spade, took turns
with a bent old peasant in digging a grave for Griselda. When daylight
failed them they dug by the shine of a lantern; the Englishwoman was not
over-imaginative or nervous but she found the job an eerie one--the more
so since the square-walled cemetery, like French graveyards in general,
lay well away from its village--and she was glad when the moment came to
pay off her companion and return to her quarters in the little Hotel de
la Gare. Other formalities in connection with the funeral there were
none--for the reason that the maire and his clerk, who in ordinary
seasons would have devoted much time and stationery to the subject, had
departed that evening, bearing with them the archives of the commune.
William, for his part, spent the night on the priest's horsehair sofa,
next door to the room where the candles burned around the body of his
wife. From weariness of the flesh he dozed now and again; but for the
greater part of the night lay wakeful and staring at darkness. There
were moments when the horsehair sofa shook beneath his sobbing; and
there were others when it seemed to him impossible that a horror so
brutal and so undeserved should have mangled his harmless life. At one
such moment he crept from his couch, felt his way across the room and
into the passage--possessed by some wild and unconfessed thought that he
might not find Griselda on the sheeted table with her hands crossed over
her breast. The door, when he tried it, was locked and the key
withdrawn--fastened by the priest or his housekeeper before they retired
for the night; but when he knelt down to peer through the keyhole he
could see two of the tall church candles and the vase with its bunch of
white roses that some one had placed near her head. He crept back,
knowing that she lay there indeed, and sat down to stare at the darkness
till it softened from black into grey.
The morning was still flushed in the east when the old woman came to him
with bread and a bowl of coffee; the coffee was hot, aromatic and sweet,
after the fashion of that which had once been brewed by Madame
Peys--and, remembering breakfasts not eaten alone, his tears dropped
into it thickly. While he ate, sitting humped on the edge of the
horsehair sofa, the street outside was already astir with traffic, nomad
and military; those fugitives who had rested in the village for the
night were once more taking to the road, other fugitives from the
neighbourhood were dribbling in to join them, troops were moving up and
to-day was even as yesterday. When he had finished his bread and coffee
the old woman signed him to the kitchen sink, where she furnished him
with soap and a towel; and, the process of washing completed, she
produced a clothes-brush, led him out into the garden and attacked with
vigour the mud and stain on his garments. He was standing passively
while she scoured at his shoulders when the Englishwoman came up, and,
looking anywhere except at his face, put his wife's rings into his
hands. There were two of them--the new gold band, with a month's wear
behind it, and the little engagement half-hoop--and at sight of them the
housekeeper ceased to scour and crept away with her brush. He looked
down at them lying in his palm till the tears veiled them, and knotted
them slowly and tightly in a corner of his handkerchief. His companion
cleared her throat and, still looking anywhere except at his face, told
him that the train to Paris--very probably the last one to run--would be
starting that morning.
"Yes?" he said vaguely, conscious that she expected a reply.
She explained that what she had meant was, the funeral must take place
immediately.... Chiefly for the sake of breaking the silence she
supposed that his wife was not a Roman Catholic?
He answered "No," staring at a row of hollyhocks and a butterfly that
quivered above them.
She asked, she explained, because in that case the priest would have
read the proper service. As it was ... She hoped he would understand
that they had done their best to--be reverent. But there were
difficulties--so many of the tradesmen were leaving or had left already.
Carpenters and so on.... He listened stupidly with his eyes on the
quivering butterfly, dumbly rebellious at the cruelty that tore him even
from the body--and it only dawned on him what she meant by her stumbling
hints when she led him through the house to the front door where a cart
stood waiting with the priest at the horse's head. It was a farm-cart,
borrowed by the priest from a neighbour; and on the floor of it that
which had been Griselda lay coffinless and wrapped in a sheet. There
were roses scattered on the folds of the sheet and the old Frenchwoman
was waiting at the gate with a shapeless little wreath of her own
manufacture which she pressed into William's hand.
They set out, a funeral procession of three, which at other times would
have drawn many curious glances; the priest leading the horse and
William and the Englishwoman walking side by side at the rear of the
cart. The cemetery lay outside the village, a half-mile or so from
their starting-point, and they passed wayfarers enough on the road, of
whom some bared their heads and crossed themselves, and others were too
busy with their own sorrows to give even a thought to the dead. The
gate of the graveyard was narrow and it was with difficulty that the
cart was manoeuvred between its posts. At an ordinary funeral the
hearse would have remained in the road; but this was no ordinary funeral
nor ordinary day, and it was as well not to tempt the footsore fugitive
by the sight of a vehicle unguarded. Accordingly, the cart was
manoeuvred through the gate before the priest, William and the
Englishwoman lifted out the body of Griselda and carried it to the grave
in the corner. The bent-backed old labourer was sitting beside it on
the mound that would shortly fill it; he rose when he saw them, leaning
on his spade and bared his grey hairs to the dead.
The grave was shallow--but, shallow as it was, the body, being
coffinless, was lowered with difficulty and the Englishwoman led William
a little way aside that he might not watch while the priest and the
peasant performed the last service Griselda would require of man; he
understood what she meant and stood with his back to the group round the
grave, staring at a granite tombstone bedizened with massive bead
wreaths. When she touched him on the shoulder, as sign that he might
turn, the priest was crossing himself at his prayers and the old man
standing by the heap of new turned earth. He went to the edge of the
grave, looked down at the crumpled sheet and then stupidly round at his
neighbour. He said nothing, but she thought he was expecting something;
so, as the priest still prayed with closed eyes in silence, she
struggled with the racial shyness where things of the spirit are
concerned and, swallowing her tears, spoke the funeral words for
Griselda.
"I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord: he that believeth
in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live..."
"Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord ... they rest from their
labours."
"Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live ... He cometh
up and is cut down..."
"Lord have mercy upon us!"
It was all she could remember; and when William had whispered Amen they
left the old peasant to his work.
*CHAPTER XIII*
At the gate of the cemetery they parted from the priest, who had charged
himself with the immediate return of the haycart which he had borrowed
from a neighbouring farm; he shook hands with them, nodded kindly to the
Englishwoman's thanks, climbed into the cart and drove off along the
dusty road. They saw him no more and often wondered what became of him
when the wave of Teutonic invasion swept over his parish and himself.
Their own way lay in the opposite direction--first back to the village
inn, where the Englishwoman picked up her bag and a package of
provisions for the journey, and then on to the station to await the
arrival of the train. William followed her incuriously, without
question or comment; and when she broke silence to explain what they
were doing he assented, speaking with an effort and hardly knowing to
what he assented.
The train to Paris had been announced by the station authorities for an
early hour in the morning, but morning dragged on and became afternoon
before it put in an appearance. They waited through long and shadeless
hours--till two o'clock and after--at the most insignificant of railway
stations with a crowd of would-be passengers; a crowd that swelled as
the hours crawled on until it flowed from the platform far along the
line, and it seemed doubtful if any train, however capacious, could
absorb its swarming multitude. It sat in families about the platform
and camped and shifted as an untidy fringe to the track; it was
querulous, weeping, apathetic--it was also, in patches, malodorous. At
midday it picknicked, squalidly enough, out of bottles and bulging
handkerchiefs, finding momentary distraction in the process; for the
rest it had nothing to do but exchange its miseries, stare at the curve
which the train must round, listen uneasily to the echo of artillery and
assail the station-master with complaining queries whenever he dared to
show his face. For the most part that hapless and harried
official--whose subordinates had been reft from him by mobilization and
who was only too conscious that his time-table was a snare and a
mockery--lay low in his miniature office; whence he peered out now and
again to make anxious estimate of the numbers that blackened and
overflowed his platform. As time went on and the throng grew denser, he
gave up his attempts to reconcile the extent of the crowd with the cubic
capacity of a highly problematical train, and retiring to his sanctum,
in despair and for good, locked the door on intrusion and complaint.
Whenever--as happened not once, but often--an engine was sighted
rounding the curve to the northward, there was instant bustle and
expectation on the part of the waiting multitude. Makeshift luggage was
collected and clutched at, mothers screamed to their straying young
families and herded them together in anxious preparation for the
formidable struggle ahead; but not once but often the alarm was a false
one, the preparations in vain, as the train sped by without halt. The
first to run past was a Red Cross train with bandaged men showing at the
windows; as it slid between the platforms the crowd buzzed its
disappointment and then--with the exception of some few determined souls
who vented their annoyance in raps on the station-master's door--settled
down in dejection to continue its weary waiting. Another half-hour of
sweltering impatience and again the mothers screamed and rounded up
their families, with the same result as before; this time the relentless
and undelaying train was packed, not with wounded soldiers, but with
refugees from higher up the line--like unto themselves but more
fortunate. It was packed to the doors and beyond the doors--since men
were hanging on the footboards.
For many reasons William and his guardian avoided the platform where the
crowd was thickest and sat under the hedge by the line. During the
first hour or two of their weary sojourn she judged him past rousing and
left him to his own thoughts; and he sat by her side with his hands
hugging his knees and seemingly unconscious of her presence. Later,
about midday, when she fed him from the store of provisions she had
brought for the journey, she essayed to rouse him by telling him how she
had come there and who she was. Her name was Haynes, Edith Haynes; she
had been some weeks in the neighbourhood, staying in the country house
of some distant French cousins. They had been warned, soon after
hostilities broke out, that proximity to the frontier might be
dangerous, but had been unable to leave owing to the illness of one of
the family. Yesterday the invalid, partially recovered, had been got
off with her mother in a car procured with difficulty; as it had other
occupants and could not carry the whole party, she--Miss Haynes--had
volunteered to remain behind and follow to Paris by rail. William
listened, occasionally nodding to show that he listened; in a way he was
grateful for her presence, but nothing seemed to matter ... and, seeing
that it was as yet too early to help him to other thoughts, she left him
again to his silence.
It was after two when a nearing train slowed down as it reached the
station--slowed down and came to a standstill to a tumult of pushing and
shouting. It was a train of more than ordinary dimensions--a couple of
engines to an interminable line of third-class carriages and vans--but
long as it was, it was none too long for the needs of the would-be
passengers. Vans and carriages alike were already well stocked with
humanity; but the other humanity on the platform, rendered desperate by
its waiting, hurled itself at the doors and pressed and fought a way in.
The sight was not pleasant--there was trampling, expostulation, threats.
The angry, frightened crowd was past minding its manners, and at times
the rush for the doors was carried on almost with savagery; women were
buffeted--and buffeted back--and children swept away in the press.
William and his friend--she was the sturdier as well as the taller of
the two--clambered up the steps of a covered truck and were thrust
through its opening by the weight of those pressing behind them. The
truck, when they gained it, was close, evil-smelling and crowded; so
crowded that many had to keep their feet for lack of the floor space to
sit. When the struggle for places was over--and it was not over
quickly--the train was packed end to end with sweating and exhausted
travellers.
There followed a journey that to those who endured it seemed endless, a
crawl punctuated with halts. The halts were lengthy as well as frequent;
sometimes in sidings where refugees perforce gave place to troop trains,
sometimes in junctions where they pulled up indefinitely at a platform
and where worn-out officials could give no information as to when a
fresh start would be made. The waits, wearisome as they were, were by
far more endurable than the wretched stages in between; which were
stages of sweating heat and smells, of stifling and cramped discomfort.
On the platform, at least, it was possible to stretch and breathe; in
the vans it was aching backs and bones and a foulness that thickened
with the miles. Children wept and sickened as the hours crawled by and
all through the darkness their crying was never stilled; as wretched
little wailing or angry howl, it mingled always with the throb and clank
of the train.
The delicate chill of morning was as nectar after the stench of the
crowded night. By special mercy, just as dawn broke they drew up in a
siding with fields to the right and left of them; neither William nor
his friend was asleep when the train stopped, and, crawling over
recumbent bodies on the floor of the van, they dropped down stiffly from
their pen and stood breathing in the clean, cool wind. With their damp
clothes sticking to their heated bodies, they sucked the air into their
lungs--even William, blind with his misery, conscious of the calm
loveliness of morning on stretches of green after the reek of the
lantern-lit van. His companion, shuddering at the sight of her hands,
went in search of water and discovered a tap on the platform; whereat
William, in his turn, drank thirstily and soused hands and face before
they settled down in a field at the side of the line. There, on the
good green turf, they shared the last remnants of their package of food,
some bread and an apple apiece. for all the hours they had spent on the
train they had accomplished only some half of the distance to Paris; and
as refreshment rooms--closed or cleared out by the troops--could no
longer be counted on to supply the needs of the traveller, they had
little prospect of further sustenance till they reached their journey's
end. They ate their small meal sitting as far as they deemed safe from
the train and the crowd it had disgorged--ate it in silence, for William
had not yet found speech. His world, for the time being, was formless
and void, and, as such, incapable of expression.
All day they travelled, as they had travelled on the day before: in
jolted crowds, in squalor, in heat, to the sound of the misery of
children. They ached, they wearied, they sweated, they thirsted--they
halted and lurched on again; too wearied even for impatience, they
endured without complaint until even the children were past crying. The
sun was low on the horizon when William, drowsily stupid, raised his
head from his knees as his friend touched him on the arm. He looked up
stupidly--the train was plodding through forest; he had ceased to hope
for the journey's end and sat for the most part with his head on his
knees in a dull, half-dozing resignation.
"If we don't stop again," she told him, "we ought to be in fairly soon.
I think that's Chantilly we've run through. We're only half an hour
from Paris--in ordinary times, that's to say."
The times were not ordinary and they took more than half an hour--very
much more--to get over the twenty odd miles. They slowed to a crawl for
the last stretch of the journey, and outside Paris, between Paris and
St. Denis, they halted and waited till well after night had fallen. But
at long last the interminable wait was ended and they creaked and crept
forward to a platform of the Gare du Nord--where William for the first
time set foot in the capital of France. As he did so he remembered a
fact that had hitherto slipped his memory--that Heinz and his
companions, when they took his pocket-book, had left him without a
penny. So far the loss of his purse had not troubled him; he had lived
as the beasts live and been cared for even as they; but Paris was
civilization where money would be needed for a lodging. He had no
resource but his companion, and, as they drifted along with the
slow-moving mass on the platform, he appealed perforce to her.
"I'm afraid," he stammered, "I've got no money. They took it away from
me--the Germans."
She reassured him briskly with: "Don't worry about that--I've got
plenty. I'll settle the hotel and the journey--you can pay me when we
get back to London. Stick close to me, whatever you do; if I once lose
you in this crowd I shall never find you again."
He replied with a mutter of thanks, and, obeying her injunction to stick
close, was crushed, in her wake, past the barrier at the end of the
platform, past the heated officials who were striving to deal with the
needs of the influx of refugees, and finally out of the station. There,
in the open space before the Gare du Nord, he stepped back suddenly from
the world of nightmare into the world as he had always known it. The
wide, lit street in front of the station was filled with a moving and
everyday crowd, in his ears were the buzz of the taxi and the warning
clang of the tram. The change from the horrible to normal
surroundings--from brutality and foulness to the order of a great
town--was so sudden and complete that it took away his breath like a
swift plunge into cold water; and as the life of the city enwrapped him
and claimed him for its own, for one crazy moment it seemed to him that
the last few days were impossible. Their fantastic cruelty was
something that could not have been ... and he almost looked round for
Griselda.
*CHAPTER XIV*
Edith Haynes knew her way about Paris; and the little hotel in a quiet
side-street, where a taxi deposited herself and her companion, was one
that had sheltered her in days less eventful and strenuous, and where
Madame, in consequence, was compassionate and not contemptuous at being
asked to shelter two late arrivals in the last stage of dirt and
untidiness. William, before he sat down to eat, had exchanged his torn
garments for the suit of an absent son, called up on the first day of
mobilization; and for all his ache and dull stupor of sorrow, he knew
something of the blessing of bodily relief when he washed in hot water
and was clean. He had had no real sleep since the night before Griselda
died; now the need for it came down on him like a heavy cloud and, great
as was also his need for food, he could hardly keep his eyes open
through supper. When he woke next morning it was nearing midday and he
had more than slept the clock round.
He pressed the bell as he had been told to do when he woke; and with the
coffee and rolls that arrived at the summons came a pencilled note from
his mentor. She had gone out to look up her relatives, and also to
inquire about the time and manner of the journey from Paris to London;
she wrote that she might not be back at the hotel for some hours, but
the envelope that enclosed her communication enclosed likewise a
tactfully proffered loan for the immediate needs of her
fellow-traveller's wardrobe. But for the reminder it would have hardly
occurred to him that his wardrobe was in need of renewal; he had grown
so accustomed in the last long days to being ordered, guided, or driven
that he had lost the habit of directing his own doings. As it was, he
breakfasted, dressed himself again in the suit of Madame's absent son,
and was instructed by Madame herself where to find a barber for an
overdue shave and an outfitter capable of English. Thither he went,
made his purchases mechanically and returned to the hotel with his new
suit of black in a parcel. It seemed to him, as he walked the Paris
streets, as he bought and paid and spoke of things that did not matter,
that his sense of loss and his longing for Griselda was stronger even
than in the first hours after her death. It was accentuated by his
contact with the civilized, the normal; by the sights and sounds of the
everyday world to which Griselda belonged. She had had no place in the
strange French village where she died, no place in the misery and dirt
of the crowded truck; but here where life, to all seeming, was as usual,
where the streets were like enough to English streets to produce, after
country solitude and the savagery of bloodshed, the illusion of dear
familiarity: here she should have walked with her arm in his. Here she
would have chatted, have gazed in shop windows and bargained ... and
long years faced him with their deadly never as he went his way without
her.
Later, when he had returned to the hotel and changed into his new black
suit, a wild fit of useless rage came over him--and alone in his
third-floor bedroom he cursed the devils who had killed his wife, the
devils who had made the war. Under his breath, lest he should be heard
in the corridor, he called down the vengeance of God on their evil
heads, breaking inevitably, as his own store of invective gave out into
lyrical reminiscence of that Biblical lore with which his mother had
imbued him through Sunday after Sunday of his childhood; believing in
the God whose existence he had usually ignored (and often doubted)
because of his need of an avenger and a present help in his trouble. In
that moment the God whom he sought--and it may be found--was the Lord
God of Hosts, the Mighty One of Israel, Who was wont to strike the
wicked and spare not; and the desire of his shaken and rebellious soul
was even as the desire of him who sang out his hatred by the alien
waters of Babylon. The hotel chambermaid put an end to his whispered
prayer and anathema by tapping on the door to inform him that lunch was
waiting on the table.