one conceived the notion of interesting him, too, in Flotsam. A learned,
kindly, influential man--well-fed--something might come of it, even that
'_reforme_,' that sending home, which all agreed was what poor Roche
needed, to restore his brain. He was brought in, therefore, amongst the
chattering party, and stood, dark, shy, his head down, like the man in
Millet's 'Angelus,' his hands folded on his cap, in front of his
unspeakably buttoned blue baggy trousers, as though in attitude of
prayer to the doctor, who, uniformed and grey-bearded, like an old
somnolent goat, beamed on him through spectacles with a sort of shrewd
benevolence. The catechism began. So he had something to ask, had he? A
swift, shy lift of the eyes: 'Yes.' 'What then?' 'To go home.' 'To go
home? What for? To get married?' A swift, shy smile. 'Fair or dark?' No
answer, only a shift of hands on his cap. 'What! Was there no one--no
ladies at home?' '_Ce n'est pas ca qui manque!_' At the laughter
greeting that dim flicker of wit the uplifted face was cast down again.
That lonely, lost figure must suddenly have struck the doctor, for his
catechism became a long, embarrassed scrutiny; and with an: '_Eh bien!
mon vieux, nous verrons!_' ended. Nothing came of it, of course. '_Cas
de reforme?_' Oh, certainly, if it had depended on the learned, kindly
doctor. But the system--and all its doors to be unlocked! Why, by the
time the last door was prepared to open, the first would be closed
again! So the 'Powers' gave Roche more string--so good, you know, to see
him interested in something!... It does take an eye to tell salvation
from damnation! For he began to go down now of an afternoon into the
little old town--not smelless, but most quaint--all yellowish-grey, with
rosy-tiled roofs. Once it had been Roman, once a walled city of the
Middle Ages; never would it be modern. The dogs ran muzzled; from a
first-floor a goat, munching green fodder, hung his devilish black beard
above your head; and through the main street the peasant farmers, above
military age, looking old as sun-dried roots, in their dark _pelerines_,
drove their wives and produce in little slow carts. Parched oleanders in
pots one would pass, and old balconies with wilting flowers hanging down
over the stone, and perhaps an umbrella with a little silver handle, set
out to dry. Roche would go in by the back way, where the old town
gossips sat on a bench in the winter sunshine, facing the lonely cross
shining gold on the high hill-top opposite, placed there in days when
there was some meaning in such things; past the little '_Place_' with
the old fountain and the brown plane-trees in front of the Mairie; past
the church, so ancient that it had fortunately been forgotten, and
remained unfinished and beautiful. Did Roche, Breton that he was--half
the love-ladies in Paris, they say--falsely, no doubt--are
Bretonnes--ever enter the church in passing? Some rascal had tried to
burn down its beautiful old door from the inside, and the flames had
left on all that high western wall smears like the fingermarks of hell,
or the background of a Velasquez Crucifixion. Did he ever enter and
stand, knotting his knot which never got knotted, in the dark loveliness
of that grave building, where in the deep silence a dusty-gold little
angel blows on his horn from the top of the canopied pulpit, and a dim
carved Christ of touching beauty looks down on His fellow-men from above
some dry chrysanthemums; and a tall candle burned quiet and lonely here
and there, and the flags of France hung above the altar, that men might
know how God--though resting--was with them and their country? Perhaps!
But, more likely, he passed it, with its great bell riding high and open
among scrolls of ironwork, and--Breton that he was--entered the nearest
cabaret, kept by the woman who would tell you that her soldier husband
had passed 'within two fingers' of death. One cannot spend one's
earnings in a church, nor appease there the inextinguishable longings of
a sailor.
And lo!--on Christmas day Roche came back so drunk that his nurse Mignan
took him to his bedroom and turned the key of the door on him. But you
must not do this to a Breton fisherman full of drink and
claustrophobia. It was one of those errors even Frenchmen may make, to
the after sorrow of their victims. One of the female 'Powers,' standing
outside, heard a roar, the crash of a foot against the panel of a door,
and saw Roche, 'like a great cat' come slithering through the hole. He
flung his arm out, brushed the 'Power' back against the wall, cried out
fiercely: '_La boite--je ne veux pas la boite!_' and rushed for the
stairs. Here were other female 'Powers'; he dashed them aside and passed
down. But in the bureau at the foot was a young Corporal of the '_Legion
Etrangere_'--a Spaniard who had volunteered for France--great France; he
ran out, took Roche gently by the arm, and offered to drink with him.
And so they sat, those two, in the little bureau, drinking black coffee,
while the young Corporal talked like an angel and Roche like a wild
man--about his mother, about his dead brother who had been sitting on
his bed, as he said, about '_la boite_,' and the turning of that key.
And slowly he became himself--or so they thought--and all went in to
supper. Ten minutes later one of the 'Powers,' looking for the twentieth
time to make sure he was eating, saw an empty place: he had slipped out
like a shadow and was gone again. A big cavalryman and the Corporal
retrieved him that night from a _cafe_ near the station; they had to
use force at times to bring him in. Two days later he was transferred to
a town hospital, where discipline would not allow him to get drunk or
climb trees. For the 'Powers' had reasoned thus: To climb trees is bad;
to get drunk is bad; but to do both puts on us too much responsibility;
he must go! They had, in fact, been scared. And so he passed away to a
room under the roof of a hospital in the big town miles away--_la boite_
indeed!--where for liberty he must use a courtyard without trees, and
but little tobacco came to his cheek; and there he eats his heart out to
this day, perhaps. But some say he had no heart--only the love of drink,
and climbing. Yet, on that last evening, to one who was paying him for a
little net, he blurted out: 'Some day I will tell you something--not
now--in a year's time. _Vous etes le seul--!_' What did he mean by that,
if he had no heart to eat?... The night after he had gone, a little
black dog strayed up, and among the trees barked and barked at some
portent or phantom. 'Ah! the camel! Ah! the pig! I had him on my back
all night!' Grandpere Poirot said next morning. That was the very last
of Flotsam....
And now to Jetsam! It was on the day but one after Roche left that Gray
was reported missing. For some time past he had been getting stronger,
clearer in speech. They began to say of him: 'It's wonderful--the
improvement since he came--wonderful!' His salvation also seemed in
sight. But from the words 'He's rather a dear!' all recoiled, for as he
grew stronger he became more stubborn and more irritable--'cunning
egoist' that he was! According to the men, he was beginning to show
himself in his true colours. He had threatened to knife any one who
played a joke on him--the arrogant civilian! On the day that he was
missing it appears that after the midday meal he had asked for a '_cafe
natur_' and for some reason had been refused. Before his absence was
noted it was night already, clear and dark; all day something as of
Spring had stirred in the air. The Corporal and a 'Power' set forth down
the wooded hill into the town, to scour the _cafes_ and hang over the
swift, shallow river, to see if by any chance Gray had been overtaken by
another paralytic stroke and was down there on the dark sand. The sleepy
gendarmes too were warned and given his description. But the only news
next morning was that he had been seen walking on the main road up the
valley. Two days later he was found, twenty miles away, wandering
towards Italy. '_Perdu_' was his only explanation, but it was not
believed, for now began that continual demand: '_Je voudrais aller a
Lyon, voir mon oncle--travailler!_' As the big cavalryman put it: 'He is
bored here!' It was considered unreasonable, by soldiers who found
themselves better off than in other hospitals; even the 'Powers'
considered it ungrateful, almost. See what he had been like when he
came--a mere trembling bag of bones, only too fearful of being sent
away. And yet, who would not be bored, crouching all day long about the
stoves, staunching his poor dribbling mouth, rolling his inevitable
cigarette, or wandering down, lonely, to hang over the bridge parapet,
having thoughts in his head and for ever unable to express them. His
state was worse than dumbness, for the dumb have resigned hope of
conversation. Gray would have liked to talk if it had not taken about
five minutes to understand each thing he said--except the refrain which
all knew by heart: '_Les Boches--ils vont en payer cher--les Boches!_'
The idea that he could work and earn his living was fantastic to those
who watched him dressing himself, or sweeping the courtyard, pausing
every few seconds to contemplate some invisible difficulty, or do over
again what he had just not done. But with that new access of strength,
or perhaps the open weather--as if Spring had come before its time--his
fixed idea governed him completely; he began to threaten to kill himself
if he could not go to work and see his uncle at Lyon; and every five
days or so he had to be brought back from far up some hill road. The
situation had become so ridiculous that the 'Powers' said in despair:
'Very well, my friend! Your uncle says he can't have you, and you can't
earn your own living yet; but you shall go and see for yourself!' And go
he did, a little solemn now that it had come to his point--in specially
bought yellow boots--he refused black--and a specially bought overcoat
with sleeves--he would have none of a _pelerine_, the arrogant civilian,
no more than of a military _capote_. For a week the hospital knew him
not. Deep winter set in two days before he went, and the whole land was
wrapped in snow. The huge, disconsolate crows seemed all the life left
in the valley, and poplar-trees against the rare blue sky were dowered
with miraculous snow-blossoms, beautiful as any blossom of Spring. And
still in the winter sun the town gossips sat on the bench under the
wall, and the cross gleamed out, and the church bell, riding high in its
whitened ironwork, tolled almost every day for the passing of some
wintered soul, and long processions, very black in the white street,
followed it, followed it--home. Then came a telegram from Gray's uncle:
'Impossible to keep Aristide (the name of the arrogant civilian), takes
the evening train to-morrow. Albert Gray.' So Jetsam was coming back!
What would he be like now that his fixed idea had failed him? Well! He
came at midday; thinner, more clay-coloured in the face, with a bad
cold; but he ate as heartily as ever, and at once asked to go to bed. At
four o'clock a 'Power,' going up to see, found him sleeping like a
child. He slept for twenty hours on end. No one liked to question him
about his time away; all that he said--and bitterly--was: 'They wouldn't
let me work!' But the second evening after his return there came a knock
on the door of the little room where the 'Powers' were sitting after
supper, and there stood Gray, long and shadowy, holding on to the
screen, smoothing his jaw-bone with the other hand, turning eyes like a
child's from face to face, while his helpless lips smiled. One of the
'Powers' said: 'What do you want, my friend?'
'_Je voudrais aller a Paris, voir ma petite fille._'
'Yes, yes; after the war. Your _petite fille_ is not in Paris, you
know.'
'_Non?_' The smile was gone; it was seen too plainly that Gray was not
as he had been. The access of vigour, stirring of new strength,
'improvement' had departed, but the beat of it, while there, must have
broken him, as the beat of some too-strong engine shatters a frail
frame. His 'improvement' had driven him to his own undoing. With the
failure of his pilgrimage he had lost all hope, all 'egoism.'... It
takes an eye, indeed, to tell salvation from damnation! He was truly
Jetsam now--terribly thin and ill and sad; and coughing. Yet he kept the
independence of his spirit. In that bitter cold, nothing could prevent
him stripping to the waist to wash, nothing could keep him lying in bed,
or kill his sense of the proprieties. He would not wear his overcoat--it
was invalidish; he would not wear his new yellow boots and keep his feet
dry, except on Sundays: '_Ils sont bons!_' he would say. And before he
would profane their goodness, his old worn-out shoes had to be reft from
him. He would not admit that he was ill, that he was cold, that he
was--anything. But at night, a 'Power' would be awakened by groans, and,
hurrying to his room, find him huddled nose to knees, moaning. And now,
every evening, as though craving escape from his own company, he would
come to the little sitting-room, and stand with that deprecating smile,
smoothing his jaw-bone, until some one said: 'Sit down, my friend, and
have some coffee.' '_Merci, ma soeur--il est bon, il est bon!_' and
down he would sit, and roll a cigarette with his long fingers, tapering
as any artist's, while his eyes fixed themselves intently on anything
that moved. But soon they would stray off to another world, and he would
say thickly, sullenly, fiercely: '_Les Boches--ils vont en payer
cher--les Boches!_' On the walls were some trophies from the war of
'seventy.' His eyes would gloat over them, and he would get up and
finger a long pistol, or old _papier-mache_ helmet. Never was a man who
so lacked _gene_--at home in any company; it inspired reverence, that
independence of his, which had survived twenty months of imprisonment
with those who, it is said, make their victims salute them--to such a
depth has their civilisation reached. One night he tried to tell about
the fright he had been given. The Boches--it seemed--had put him and two
others against a wall, and shot those other two. Holding up two tapering
fingers, he mumbled: '_Assassins--assassins! Ils vont en payer cher--les
Boches!_' But sometimes there was something almost beautiful in his
face, as if his soul had rushed from behind his eyes, to answer some
little kindness done to him, or greet some memory of the days before he
was 'done for'--_foutu_, as he called it.
One day he admitted a pain about his heart; and time, too, for at
moments he would look like death itself. His nurse, Corporal Mignan,
had long left his _'deux phenomenes!_' having drifted away on the tides
of the system, till he should break down again and drag through the
hospitals once more. Gray had a room to himself now; the arrogant
civilian's groaning at night disturbed the others. Yet, if you asked him
in the morning if he had slept well, he answered invariably,
'_Oui--oui--toujours, toujours!_' For, according to him, you see, he was
still strong; and he would double his arm and tap his very little
muscle, to show that he could work. But he did not believe it now, for
one day a 'Power,' dusting the men's writing-room, saw a letter on the
blotter, and with an ashamed eye read these words:--
_'Cher Oncle,_
_J'ai eu la rage contre toi, mais c'est passe maintenant. Je
veux seulement me reposer. Je ne peux pas me battre pour la
France--j'ai voulu travailler pour elle; mais on ne m'a pas
permi._
_Votre neveu, qui t'embrasse de loin.'_
_Seulement me reposer_--only to rest! Rest he will, soon, if eyes can
speak. Pass, and leave for ever that ravished France for whom he wished
to work--pass, without having seen again his _petite fille_. No more in
the corridor above the stove, no more in the little dining-room or the
avenue of pines will be seen his long, noiseless, lonely figure, or be
heard his thick stumbling cry:
_'Les Boches--ils vont en payer cher--les Boches!_'
1917.
IV
THE BRIGHT SIDE
A little Englishwoman, married to a German, had dwelt with him eighteen
years in humble happiness and the district of Putney, where her husband
worked in the finer kinds of leather. He was a harmless, busy little man
with the gift for turning his hand to anything which is bred into the
peasants of the Black Forest, who on their upland farms make all the
necessaries of daily life--their coarse linen from home-grown flax,
their leather gear from the hides of their beasts, their clothes from
the wool thereof, their furniture from the pine logs of the Forest,
their bread from home-grown flour milled in simple fashion and baked in
the home-made ovens, their cheese from the milk of their own goats. Why
he had come to England he probably did not remember--it was so long ago;
but he would still know why he had married Dora, the daughter of the
Putney carpenter, she being, as it were, salt of the earth: one of those
Cockney women, deeply sensitive beneath a well-nigh impermeable mask of
humour and philosophy, who quite unselfconsciously are always doing
things for others. In their little grey Putney house they had dwelt
those eighteen years, without perhaps ever having had time to move,
though they had often had the intention of doing so for the sake of the
children, of whom they had three, a boy and two girls. Mrs.
Gerhardt--she shall be called, for her husband had a very German name,
and there is more in a name than Shakespeare dreamed of--Mrs. Gerhardt
was a little woman with large hazel eyes and dark crinkled hair in which
there were already a few threads of grey when the war broke out. Her boy
David, the eldest, was fourteen at that date, and her girls, Minnie and
Violet, were eight and five, rather pretty children, especially the
little one. Gerhardt, perhaps because he was so handy, had never risen.
His firm regarded him as indispensable and paid him fair wages, but he
had no "push," having the craftsman's temperament, and employing his
spare time in little neat jobs for his house and his neighbours, which
brought him no return. They made their way, therefore, without that
provision for the future which necessitates the employment of one's time
for one's own ends. But they were happy, and had no enemies; and each
year saw some mild improvements in their studiously clean house and tiny
back garden. Mrs. Gerhardt, who was cook, seamstress, washerwoman,
besides being wife and mother, was almost notorious in that street of
semi-detached houses for being at the disposal of any one in sickness or
trouble. She was not strong in body, for things had gone wrong when she
bore her first, but her spirit had that peculiar power of seeing things
as they were, and yet refusing to be dismayed, which so embarrasses
Fate. She saw her husband's defects clearly, and his good qualities no
less distinctly--they never quarrelled. She gauged her children's
characters too, with an admirable precision, which left, however,
loopholes of wonder as to what they would become.
The outbreak of the war found them on the point of going to Margate for
Bank Holiday, an almost unparalleled event; so that the importance of
the world catastrophe was brought home to them with a vividness which
would otherwise have been absent from folks so simple, domestic, and
far-removed from that atmosphere in which the egg of war is hatched.
Over the origin and merits of the struggle, beyond saying to each other
several times that it was a dreadful thing, Mr. and Mrs. Gerhardt held
but one little conversation, lying in their iron bed with an immortal
brown eiderdown patterned with red wriggles over them. They agreed that
it was a cruel, wicked thing to invade "that little Belgium," and there
left a matter which seemed to them a mysterious and insane perversion of
all they had hitherto been accustomed to think of as life. Reading their
papers--a daily and a weekly, in which they had as much implicit faith
as a million other readers--they were soon duly horrified by the reports
therein of "Hun" atrocities; so horrified that they would express their
condemnation of the Kaiser and his militarism as freely as if they had
been British subjects. It was therefore with an uneasy surprise that
they began to find these papers talking of "the Huns at large in our
midst," of "spies," and the national danger of "nourishing such vipers."
They were deeply conscious of not being "vipers," and such sayings began
to awaken in both their breasts a humble sense of injustice as it were.
This was more acute in the breast of little Mrs. Gerhardt, because, of
course, the shafts were directed not at her but at her husband. She knew
her husband so well, knew him incapable of anything but homely, kindly
busyness, and that he should be lumped into the category of "Huns" and
"spies" and tarred with the brush of mass hatred amazed and stirred her
indignation, or would have, if her Cockney temperament had allowed her
to take it very seriously. As for Gerhardt, he became extremely silent,
so that it was ever more and more difficult to tell what he was feeling.
The patriotism of the newspapers took a considerable time to affect the
charity of the citizens of Putney, and so long as no neighbour showed
signs of thinking that little Gerhardt was a monster and a spy it was
fairly easy for Mrs. Gerhardt to sleep at night, and to read her papers
with the feeling that the remarks in them were not really intended for
Gerhardt and herself. But she noticed that her man had given up reading
them, and would push them away from his eyes if, in the tiny
sitting-room with the heavily-flowered walls, they happened to rest
beside him. He had perhaps a closer sense of impending Fate than she.
The boy, David, went to his first work, and the girls to their school,
and so things dragged on through that first long war winter and spring.
Mrs. Gerhardt, in the intervals of doing everything, knitted socks for
"our poor cold boys in the trenches," but Gerhardt no longer sought out
little jobs to do in the houses of his neighbours. Mrs. Gerhardt thought
that he "fancied" they would not like it. It was early in that spring
that she took a deaf aunt to live with them, the wife of her mother's
brother, no blood-relation, but the poor woman had nowhere else to go;
so David was put to sleep on the horsehair sofa in the sitting-room
because she "couldn't refuse the poor thing." And then, of an April
afternoon, while she was washing the household sheets, her neighbour,
Mrs. Clirehugh, a little spare woman all eyes, cheekbones, hair, and
decision, came in breathless and burst out:
"Oh! Mrs. Gerhardt, 'ave you 'eard? They've sunk the _Loositania_! Has I
said to Will: Isn't it horful?"
Mrs. Gerhardt, with her round arms dripping soap-suds, answered: "What a
dreadful thing! The poor drowning people! Dear! Oh dear!"
"Oh! Those Huns! I'd shoot the lot, I would!"
"They _are_ wicked!" Mrs. Gerhardt echoed: "That was a dreadful thing to
do!"
But it was not till Gerhardt came in at five o'clock, white as a sheet,
that she perceived how this dreadful catastrophe affected them.
"I have been called a German," were the first words he uttered; "Dollee,
I have been called a German."
"Well, so you are, my dear," said Mrs. Gerhardt.
"You do not see," he answered, with a heat and agitation which surprised
her. "I tell you this _Lusitania_ will finish our business. They will
have me. They will take me away from you all. Already the papers have:
'Intern all the Huns.'" He sat down at the kitchen table and buried his
face in hands still grimy from his leather work. Mrs. Gerhardt stood
beside him, her eyes unnaturally big.
"But Max," she said, "what has it to do with you? You couldn't help it.
Max!"
Gerhardt looked up, his white face, broad in the brow and tapering to a
thin chin, seemed all distraught.
"What do they care for that? Is my name Max Gerhardt? What do they care
if I hate the war? I am a German. That's enough. You will see."
"Oh!" murmured Mrs. Gerhardt, "they won't be so unjust."
Gerhardt reached up and caught her chin in his hand, and for a moment
those two pairs of eyes gazed, straining, into each other. Then he said:
"I don't want to be taken, Dollee. What shall I do away from you and the
children? I don't want to be taken, Dollee."
Mrs. Gerhardt, with a feeling of terror and a cheerful smile, answered:
"You mustn't go fancyin' things, Max. I'll make you a nice cup of tea.
Cheer up, old man! Look on the bright side!"
But Gerhardt lapsed into the silence which of late she had begun to
dread.
That night some shop windows were broken, some German names effaced. The
Gerhardts had no shop, no name painted up, and they escaped. In Press
and Parliament the cry against "the Huns in our midst" rose with a fresh
fury; but for the Gerhardts the face of Fate was withdrawn. Gerhardt
went to his work as usual, and their laborious and quiet existence
remained undisturbed; nor could Mrs. Gerhardt tell whether her man's
ever-deepening silence was due to his "fancying things" or to the
demeanour of his neighbours and fellow workmen. One would have said that
he, like the derelict aunt, was deaf, so difficult to converse with had
he become. His length of sojourn in England and his value to his
employers, for he had real skill, had saved him for the time being; but,
behind the screen, Fate twitched her grinning chaps.
Not till the howl which followed some air raids in 1916 did they take
off Gerhardt, with a variety of other elderly men, whose crime it was to
have been born in Germany. They did it suddenly, and perhaps it was as
well, for a prolonged sight of his silent misery must have upset his
family till they would have been unable to look on that bright side of
things which Mrs. Gerhardt had, as it were, always up her sleeve. When,
in charge of a big and sympathetic constable, he was gone, taking all
she could hurriedly get together for him, she hastened to the police
station. They were friendly to her there: She must cheer up, Missis,
'e'd be all right, she needn't worry. Ah! she could go down to the 'Ome
Office, if she liked, and see what could be done. But they 'eld out no
'ope! Mrs. Gerhardt waited till the morrow, having the little Violet in
bed with her, and crying quietly into her pillow; then, putting on her
Sunday best she went down to a building in Whitehall, larger than any
she had ever entered. Two hours she waited, sitting unobtrusive, with
big anxious eyes, and a line between her brows. At intervals of half an
hour she would get up and ask the messenger cheerfully: "I 'ope they
haven't forgotten me, sir. Perhaps you'd see to it." And because she was
cheerful the messenger took her under his protection, and answered: "All
right, Missis. They're very busy, but _I'll_ wangle you in some'ow."