The train moved slowly, almost ruminatingly, along the golden landscape,
a little local train stopping at every station. The crops were still
uncut and their vast undulations were broken only by lines of lonely,
poplared road, or marshalled woods venturing out, here and there, upon
the plains. Empty and rather sad, for all the splendour of the gold
beneath, the blue above, it looked to Giles; but that might have been,
he knew, because of its associations for him with scenes of the war; and
he was feeling a little sick, too, apprehensions of the approaching
future seizing him as he and Alix sat silent in the second-class
carriage, where both the windows were tightly shut. Alix had widely
opened hers on entering, but at the first station a lady had got
in—little shopping people of the local _bourgeoisie_ the passengers
were, more estranged from fashion, Giles thought, than their equivalent
English types—and, wrapping a scarf at once about her neck, she had
complained of the effect of the _courant d’air_ upon her _névralgie_.
Without comment, Alix at once closed her window. No doubt she knew her
compatriots and recognized the futility of discussion on this theme; but
Giles reflected that Ruth and Rosemary would not so have submitted. They
would have entered into altercation with the lady in the scarf and found
pleasure in demonstrating her folly to her even if they did not succeed
in keeping the window open. But to Alix altercation had no charms. Even
when the lady, still mysteriously aggrieved in her furthest corner,
murmured resentfully on about _les anglais qui viennent nous déranger_,
Alix glanced meditatively at her for a moment and then resumed her
survey of the landscape, indifferent to the misapprehension; and since
Giles could not repress a smile, the lady, who still held up her scarf
in retrospective protest, kept indignant eyes upon him.
“Now, you know, you _are_ a worse-tempered people than we are. She’s
still nursing her wrongs,” Giles murmured, and Alix, glancing at the
lady of the _névralgie_, answered, “She is negligible.”
Two men sat further on; one young, with high, ardent, excited eyes, like
a collie’s, in a thin head; the other obese and red with white hair _en
brosse_ and a purple nip of ribbon in his button-hole. They leaned
across the carriage towards each other and talked without cessation,
rapping each other on the chest to a constant refrain of: “_Puis—il me
dit;—Et—je lui dis._” Passionately swift and even vindictive in
utterance as they were, their personal geniality remained unimpaired.
A little boy on his mother’s lap ate chocolates, smearing his cheeks and
palms. Clambering down, he was permitted, unchecked, to lurch towards
Alix, staying himself on the knees he passed, and when he reached her he
stretched forth his hand with assurance for the box of apricots she
held. “_Est-il mignon!_” exclaimed the fond mother. But Alix did not
even turn her eyes from the landscape. The disconcerted child stood
gazing at her, too much astonished even to weep, and Giles, taking pity
on him, offered the tick of his watch and jingled his bunch of keys in
an attempt to distract his attention. But the little boy gave him no
heed, and after a prolonged stare at Alix he made his way back to his
mother; his first encounter, Giles imagined, with an unresponsive
universe.
“I say, you are really rather hard-hearted,” he remarked. Here was
another difference, for neither Ruth nor Rosemary could have remained so
impervious to even such a repulsive little boy.
But Alix said: “I cannot look at a dirty face like that. If his mother
had cleaned his face, I would have given him one.”
“Well, since he’s gone back to her, and you needn’t look at him, may I
give him one?” said Giles; and, as Alix smiling, assented, Giles handed
an apricot to the little boy, who took it without thanks and ate it,
staring solemnly at Alix the while.
A thin blue crescent of sea cut into the fields on the right. In the
distance, on a rise of country, a pale pink château stood with wings of
sculptured woodland on either side, a long green lawn in front.
“It cannot be far now,” said Alix. The lady with the scarf, the mother
with the little boy, the stout marketing lady, had all left them by now
and she could open her window and stand by it to look out. “Vaudettes is
four miles from the station. Maman will come to meet us, with monsieur
de Maubert.”
“Who is monsieur de Maubert?” asked Giles. He had never heard the name
before. But then he had never heard any names connected with Maman. How
could he, since he never spoke of her?
“He is an old friend of ours; a very old friend,” said Alix. “I do not
remember the time when we did not know monsieur de Maubert.”
“You like him?”
“Oh, very much. _C’est un homme fort distingué_,” said Alix, relapsing
into French, with the effect, to Giles, of not sparing more than
convention for their conversation. Her thoughts were fixed in
anticipation. He could almost see her palpitate in her stillness with
it. She might have been kinder to the little boy had she not been so
unaware of everything but the approaching figure of Maman.
“How distinguished?” Giles, however, persisted.
“Oh, I am so ignorant, Giles. Wise things do not interest me, you know.”
Alix smiled slightly down at him over her shoulder. “He has excavated
cities; Persian; Mongolian;—_que sais-je_. He writes on antiquities. He
has a beautiful _appartement_ in Paris with collections of gems and
bronzes. He is at once _savant_ and _homme du monde_.”
“And will he be the only guest except me?”
“Ah, that I do not know. There are three _chambres d’invités_ at Les
Chardonnerets. But I have not heard that there is, as yet, anyone else.”
“Chardonnerets? That means?”
“It means goldfinches. That was a bird we always knew, even”—Alix
paused—“even before your brother told us more of birds. Flocks come in
Autumn to the thistles on the cliffs outside our gate. When they all fly
together one sees the squares of gold on their wings—it makes a pattern
on the sky, like a chain of golden coins; monsieur de Maubert’s strange
old square coins. And their little twitter is like the chink of thin
gold. We love them, Maman and I, and there is a tall ash-tree in the
garden where they often perch in summer. You will see them, Giles. You
will like Les Chardonnerets, I think.—Oh, now—I recognize now—I know
those woods. We find daffodils in them, in Spring, among the faggots.
You have not in England, have you, Giles, our great woods with all the
ranged faggots that the woodmen pile so carefully in winter. And in
Spring, at the edge of the wood, one sees around one the great plain,
champagne-coloured. The next station will be ours,” said Alix.