Four winters passed by.
France lay in the warmth of a late spring evening, like a stricken deer
that has thrown off its pursuers momentarily, but is bleeding from a
hundred wounds. Month after month she had endured the invader, and the
cycle of years, instead of freeing her had only deepened her agony.
What had she left? The next attack would see Arras and her remaining
coalfields gone, the Channel ports captured, and then ... Paris?...
Paris?
Unperturbed, however, by any such thoughts, Petite Simunde--no one
thought of her by any other name--was driving four cows home from
pasture. The setting sun shed a kindly hue on her gingham garment that
was neither a frock nor an apron, yet served as both. Nor was the
mellowing sunlight unkind to her face, for the racial sallowness of her
cheeks, accentuated by too constant exposure to the elements, was
softened and shaded into a gentle brown. Her shoes, which were far too
large, were in the final stages of disrepair. About the brow her hair
was braided with a simplicity that was by no means devoid of charm. Her
eyes--but there she was really French. Simunde had never been farther
from the village of Le Curois than the neighboring town of Avesnes Le
Comte (unless one counts the momentous occasion, a year after her
birth, when she was taken to Arras for exhibition before an esteemed
and wealthy relative, who was so little impressed that he bequeathed
his entire estate, consisting of eight thousand francs, to a
manufacturer of tombstones); but a French woman does not acquire
coquetry--she is born with it. Even in church Simunde would cast such
languishing yet mischievous eyes upon the curé himself, that the poor
little man, who had never liked Latin at any time, used to stammer and
mumble his orisons like an over-conscientious penitent at confessional.
When her two brothers went to war Simunde, who was then sixteen,
assumed their tasks in addition to her own, in all of which she had the
able direction of "madame" her mother. Between them they performed a
day's work that would have exhausted two husky laborers. As is the
custom in most of northern France, their home was not on the farm, but
in the village, for one of the first essentials of existence to a
Frenchman is companionship. On the outskirts of Le Curois, just on the
hill, there was a great château, beautifully, gloomily aloof; but in
the one street of the village itself, pigs, cows, hens and their
offspring wallowed in mud and accumulated filth.
It is difficult to know which is the more striking: the French
peasant's stoicism in the presence of war, or his indifference to dirt.
On this particular evening in May of 1918 Simunde was frankly
regretting the absence of men. Not that she had ever been in love or
known the rapture of wandering in the moonlight with a man (France is
almost the only civilized country remaining that has not relegated
chaperons to the realm of fiction); but she wanted to use her eyes on
something more susceptible than a cow or a curé. It was spring, and she
felt pretty, and when a woman is conscious of her own charm she seldom
wishes to prove miserly with it.
She had just run across the road to convince a cow of its loss of the
sense of direction when she heard the neighing of a horse. Glancing
behind her, she looked directly into the eyes of a mounted British
officer, whereupon that gentleman brought his steed to a standstill.
"_Bon soir, mademoiselle_," he said.
"_Bon soir, monsieur_," she answered demurely. Her eyes were lowered
shyly, and her fingers played over the stick she was carrying, like a
flute-player caressing his instrument. The officer bowed slightly and
tried to recall his French vocabulary, though it must be admitted he
was never loquacious in any tongue when conversing with a daughter of
Eve. As for her, since it is a woman's _rôle_, she waited. Would he
speak again or would he pass on, leaving the memory of yet one more
meeting with a gentleman of adventure--one more roadside drama in which
the dialogue consisted only of an exchange of salutations. Most men who
have returned from France will recall for years to come how, a few
kilometres back from Hell, they often caught a glimpse of two dark eyes
and a tender smile. Just that and--
"_Bon soir, mademoiselle._"
"_Bon soir, monsieur._"
Commonplace, perhaps, in the telling, but in France it was the
commonplace that became romance.
A smile crept into the officer's eyes, which were blue and kindly,
though they had a glint in them--something like metal--a look that a
mother always noticed first when her son returned from the line.
"_Où est le village?_" he ventured.
"Le Curois?"
"_Oui!_ Le Curois."
"_Mais, monsieur_"--her eyes widened and her hands indicated the
village dwellings--"_c'est ici Le Curois_!"
He breathed deeply and ventured again.
"_Connaissez-vous un billet pour dix officiers?_"
He felt rather pleased with the sentence; it was true he had intended
to get accommodation for eleven officers, but it was moderately
accurate for a foreign tongue.
For answer Simunde led him, preceded by the four cows, to her domicile
as "Madame," like all French housewives had received billeting
instructions in the first year of the war. In conjunction with her
neighbors on either side, she speedily arranged accommodation for
eleven officers in their cottages, and for the officers' _domestiques_
in the barns.
One hour later the guests of war, their battalion having come out for a
rest, were dining comfortably in the home of Petite Simunde, while a
sow, attended by ten small pigs, snorted approvingly outside the door.
Less than an hour afterwards Private Des Rosiers, acting as temporary
batman to Major Douglas Campbell, was sitting on a chair in the
farm-yard, in the glittering moonlight, regaling Simunde and her mother
with grossly exaggerated stories of the mining country of Cobalt. He
told them of his misdeeds, not in humility, but with much
_braggadocio_, and his auditors listened, lost in gesticulatory
admiration. Simunde was thrilled from her ill-shod feet to her braided
brow. Jacque Des Rosiers was the first really wicked man she had met,
and, woman-like, she was fascinated; also he had nice teeth and
flashing eyes.
The picture of a young officer on horseback whose brown hair was almost
red and whose humorous blue eyes had a glint in them like metal, faded
as completely from her mind as the memory of the sunset that had thrown
its spell upon them.