A FARMER stood watching a battalion of infantry filing into his pasture.
A queerer mixture of humanity could not have been imagined. The farmer
wore a Dutch cap, spoke Flemish by preference, but could only write
French. His farm was called Ferme l’Espagnole—The Spanish Farm—and
stood on French soil. The soldiers were the usual English
mixture—semi-skilled townsmen, a number of agricultural and other
laborers, fewer still of seafaring and waterside folk, and a sprinkling
of miners and shepherds, with one or two regulars.
The farmer, Mr. Vanderlynden, Jerome, described in the Communal records
as a Cultivator, sixty-five years of age, watching his rich grass being
tramped to liquid mud under the heavy boots of the incoming files, and
the shifting of foot-weary men as they halted in close column, platoon
by platoon, made no protest. This was not merely because under the
French law he was bound to submit to the needs of the troops, but also
because, after twelve months’ experience, he had discovered that there
were compensations attached to the billeting and encampment of English.
They paid—so much per officer or man—not always accurately, but
promptly always, and what would you more in war-time? The Spanish Farm
was less than twenty kilometres from the “Front,” the actual trenches,
whose ground-shaking gun-rumble was always to be heard, whose scouting
aeroplanes were visible and audible all day, whose endless flicker of
star shells made green the eastern horizon all night. The realities of
the situation were ever present to Mr. Jerome Vanderlynden, who besides
could remember a far worse war, that of 1870. Moreover, the first troops
passing that way in the far-off days of 1914 had been French, and had
wanted twice as much attention, and had never paid, had even threatened
him when he suggested it.
* * * *
Standing with his great knotted earthy fists hanging by his side, as the
khaki stream poured and poured through the wide-set gate, he passed in
review the innumerable units or detachments that had billeted in the
Spanish Farm or encamped in its pastures. Uncritical, almost
unreasoning, the old peasant was far from being able to define the
difference he had felt when the first English arrived. He had heard tell
of them, read of them in the paper, but was far from imagining what they
might have been like, having no data to go on and no power of
imagination. He had been coming in from getting up the last of the
potato crop of 1914 when he had found flat-capped, mud-coloured horsemen
at his gate. Sure that they were Germans (the Uhlans had been as near as
Hazebrouck only a few weeks before), he hastily tied the old white horse
in the tombereau, and had gone forward cap in hand. But his daughter
Madeleine had already met the soldiers at the gate. A widower for many
years, Jerome Vanderlynden’s house was kept by his youngest child, this
Madeleine, now in her twentieth year. To say that he believed in her
does not do justice to his feelings. She had been the baby of the
family, had had a better education than he or his sons, at a convent in
St. Omer; added to all this, plus her woman’s prestige, was the fact
that she inherited (from heaven knows where!) a masterful strain. What
she said (and she was not lavish of words) was attended to. Whether it
were education, inspiration, or more probably an appreciation beyond the
powers of her father, that told her that English cavalry officers would
agree with her, it is certain that she started with those first
squadrons of the Cavalry Division a sort of understanding that she would
never have attempted with French troops. They paid her liberally and
treated her respectfully, probably confusing her in their minds with
English farmers’ wives to whom they were in the habit of paying for hunt
damage. They had money—officers and men wanted to supplement their
rations and the horses’ forage. Madeleine had eggs, coffee, soft bread,
beer, fried potatoes, beans, oats. She could and did wash collars and
shirts better than the average soldier servant. It took her some time to
understand that every English officer required many gallons of water to
wash in, at least once a day. But once she had grasped that too, she
attended to it, at a small charge.
* * * *
And now it was October, 1915; more troops than ever, especially
infantry, were in the Commune, and an interpreter had warned Jerome
Vanderlynden that he would have a whole battalion in the farm. He made
no remark, but Madeleine had asked several questions. More awake
mentally than her father, it had not escaped her close reading of the
paper that a new sort of English troops were coming to France. They were
described indifferently as “Territorials” and as “New Army” or
“Kitchener’s Army,” and neither Madeleine nor indeed the newspapers of
the Department du Nord knew of any difference between them and the
Territoriaux of the French system. Madeleine put them down as
second-line troops and stored the fact in her vigilant mind.
She came and stood beside her father, as the 10th Battalion
Easthamptonshire Regiment broke up and moved off to its billets. Two of
the sadly depleted companies went to adjacent farms, two remained on the
premises. The officers—of whom only twelve survived the battle of
Loos—were busy with non-coms., going through nominal rolls, lists of
missing men or damaged equipment, trying to disentangle some sort of
parade state and indent for replacements.
Madeleine did not bother about them. She said to her father: “I am going
to find the Quarta-mastere!”
She found him, standing amid his stores in the hop-press, and knew him
by his gray hair and white-red-white ribbon. She had long ago inquired
and found out that this rank in the English Army were chosen from among
the old soldiers, and were quickest at getting to business. It had been
explained to her that the white-red-white ribbon was for length of good
conduct, and secretly tolerant of men’s foibles as of a child’s, she
stored this fact also, for identification purposes.
In this instance the Mess President having been killed, the old ranker,
Lieutenant and Quartermaster John Adams, was acting Mess President, and
doing nearly every other duty in the disorganization and readjustment
that followed the tragic bungle of the New Army’s first offensive.
He greeted her with his professional aplomb: “Good day, Maddam, dinner
for twelve officers; compris, douze!” He held up the fingers of both
hands and then two fingers separately.
“All right!” returned Madeleine in English. “Where are their rations?”
He replied, “Ah, you’re sharp!” and called to his storekeeper, “Jermyn,
officers’ rations to Maddam and tell the mess cook!” He went on to
bargain for other things—beds for the Colonel, the Adjutant and
himself—and in the course of the argument Madeleine informed him that
according to General Routine Orders there was to be no smoking in the
barns and no insanitary practices, that all gates must be kept closed,
and no movables removed. Handing him her price list, she withdrew to her
long coffin-shaped stove in the brick-floored kitchen.
* * * *
Dusk settled down on the Spanish Farm—autumn dusk—with swathed mists
on the small flat chocolate-coloured fields, richest and best tilled in
the world—not bare of crops. The brilliant colours of the last
hop-leaves and of the regular rows of elms that bordered each pasture
were hidden, but the tops of the trees towered above the mist-line into
that wide blue vault that the old painters loved, nowhere wider than in
the Flemish plain. The Spanish Farm stood on the almost imperceptible
southern slope of the sandy ridge that divides in some degree the valley
of the Yser from that of the Lys, whose flat meadows lay spread out,
almost from Aire to the factory smoke of Armentières, at a slightly
lower level to the south. Northward, behind the house, the ground rose
very gradually in fertile field and elm-encircled pasture. Westward,
black against the last glow of the sunset, two little ’planes droned
their way from the aerodromes round St. Omer toward the eastern horizon
where the evening “hate” was toned down by the distance to the low boom
of “heavies,” the sharper note of the field-guns, the whip-lash crack of
rifles and machine-guns, and the flatter squashed-out reports of mortars
and grenades.
The house itself was a single-storied building of immensely thick walls
of red brick—much as the settlers under Alva had left it three hundred
years before—except for enlargement of windows and re-thatching—though
the existing thatch was so old that wall-flowers tasselled its ridge
from one octagonal spoke-tiled chimney-stack to the other. Originally a
simple block with door in the middle, outbuildings had been added at
each end, giving it the form of an unfinished quadrangle, the gap toward
the south, enclosing the great steaming midden of golden dung.
Completely surrounded by a deep wide moat, access to it was only
possible by a brick bridge on the southern side, guarded by a
twenty-foot extinguisher-roofed “shot” tower, whose loopholed bulk now
served for tool shed below and pigeon-loft above.
Further outbuildings stood outside the moat, a few to the north in the
smaller pasture behind the house, but a long broad range of cowshed,
stable, and hop-press stretched into the ten-acre “home” or “manor”
pasture.
Never, since Alva last marched that way, had the old semi-fortress been
so packed with humanity. Two companies, which even at their present
weakness must have numbered over three hundred men, were getting rid of
their arms and equipment and filing round to the north pasture where the
cookers flared and smoked, the cooks, demoniac in their blackened faces
and clothes, ladled out that standard compost that, at any time before
nine in the morning was denominated “coffee,” at any hour before or
after noon “soup,” until the end of the day, when, as a last effort, it
became “tea.” Derisive shouts of “Gyp-oh!” intended to convey that it
was accepted for what it was—yesterday’s bacon grease, hot water and
dust from the floor of a lorry—greeted it, as it splashed into the
tendered mess-tins of the jostling crowd.
* * * *
Within the house, in the westward of the two principal rooms, Madeleine,
with Berthe, most useful of the Belgian refugees about the place, had
got her stove nearly red hot, and was silently, deftly handling her pots
and dishes, while the mess cooks unpacked the enamelled plates and cups
and carried them through to the other room where the table was being set
by the simple process of spreading sheets of newspapers upon it and
arranging the drinking-cups, knives and forks thereon. Bread being cut,
there only remained for “Maddam,” as they called Madeleine, to say that
all was ready, so that the brass shell-case in the passage could be used
as a gong. The Colonel appeared, and the Adjutant, both regular
soldiers, masking whatever they felt under professional passivity. There
were no other senior officers; the only surviving Major was with a
captainless outlying company. The two companies in the farm were
commanded by lieutenants. The junior officers were all Kitchener
enlistments. Some of them had hoped to spend that night in Lille.
The conversation was not so brilliant as the meal. In many a worse
billet, the Easthamptons looked back to their night at Spanish Farm.
Every one was dog tired and bitterly depressed. The Colonel only sat
the length of one cigarette. Adams took his food in his “bunk.” The
junior officers clattered up the narrow candle-lit stair into the loft
where two of them had a bedstead and two others the floor. The Adjutant
was left collating facts and figures, with the Doctor, who was going
through his stores. To them came the runner from the guard-room
(improvised in a tent at the brick-pillared gate of the pasture).
“Reinforcement officers, sir!”
There entered two rather bewildered young men who had passed during the
previous forty-eight hours through every emotion from a desperate fear
that the “victory” of Loos would end the war without their firing a
shot, to sheer annoyance at being dumped at a railhead and told to find
a battalion in the dark. They had lost everything they had except what
they carried on them, and were desperately hungry.
The Adjutant surprised even himself at the cordial greeting he gave the
two strangers—untried officers from a reserve battalion he had never
seen. He knew nothing of their history or capabilities, but the sense of
more people behind, coming to fill the gaps, warmed even the
professional soldier’s trained indifference. He got up, and went to the
door of the kitchen, calling for “Maddam” and repeating “Mangay” in a
loud voice to indicate that further refreshment was required.
Madeleine had just finished, with Berthe, the washing and cleaning up of
her cooking utensils, and was about to go to bed in her little single
bedroom that looked out over the northern pasture. She was just as
inclined to cook another meal as a person may be, who has already worked
eighteen hours and expects to rise at half-past five in the morning. Nor
was there anything in the stare of the shorter, fair-haired new arrival,
with his stolid silence, to encourage her. But the taller and darker of
the two asked her in fair French if she could manage an omelet and some
coffee. They regretted deranging her, but had the hunger of a wolf and
had not eaten since the morning. Whether it was being addressed in her
own tongue, or the fact that the young officer had hit on the things
that lay next her hand and would not take five minutes, or whether it
was something in the voice, Madeleine acquiesced politely, and set about
providing what was asked.
The Adjutant stared. He was not accustomed to interpolations in foreign
tongues in his orders. But this young officer was so obviously
unconscious of offense, and the interference so opportune, that there
was nothing to be said. He talked to the new-comers as they supped, and,
apologizing for having to put them in the little ground-floor room with
the orderly officer, retired to his own.
Silence and darkness fell upon the Spanish Farm, only broken by the
steps of the sentries, the change of guard, and the dull mutter and
star-shell flicker from the line, and for some hours all those human
beings that lay in and around the old house, lost consciousness of their
hopes, fears, and wants.
* * * *
English officers and men who billeted in the Spanish Farm (and
practically the whole English Army must have passed through or near it
at one time or another) to this day speak of it as one of the few places
they can still distinguish in the blur of receding memories, one of the
few spots of which they have nothing but good to tell. In part this may
be easily explained. The old house was comparatively roomy, well kept,
water-tight. There was less overcrowding, no leaking roof to drip on
one’s only dry shirt—and besides, though the regulations were more
strictly observed here than anywhere, that fact gave almost an
impression of home—order, cleanliness, respect ruled here yet a
little—but perhaps there is another reason—perhaps houses, so old and
so continually handled by human beings, have almost a personality of
their own: perhaps the Spanish Farm that had sheltered Neapolitan
mercenaries fighting the French, Spanish Colonists fighting the Flemish,
French fighting English or Dutch—and now English and Colonials fighting
Germans—perhaps the old building bent and brooded over these last of
its many occupants—perhaps knew a little better than other houses what
men expected of it.
* * * *
Madeleine thought no more of the War, and the population it had brought
to the Spanish Farm, until half-past seven, when the mess-orderlies
began to prepare breakfast. Obstinately refusing to allow anyone to
touch her stove, she cooked that incomprehensible meal of oat-soup
(“porridge” they called it!), and bacon and eggs, after which she knew,
they ate orange confiture. She, her father, and the farm hands, had long
taken their lump of bread and bowl of coffee, standing. Her attention
was divided between the hum of the separator in the dairy and her
washing drying on the line, when she heard her father’s voice calling:
“Madeleine, leinsche!” (“Little Madeleine!”). She called out that she
was in the kitchen.
The old man came, moving more quickly than usual, voluble in Flemish,
excited. The soldiers had moved out all the flax-straw lying in the long
wooden drying-shed behind the house, on the pasture, and all the
machines, reapers and binders, drills and rakes. Moreover, they had
taken for firewood hop-poles that had been expressly forbidden.
Madeleine washed her hands at the sink, saying she would see about it.
But she was saved the trouble. Her father went out into the yard, unable
to keep still in his impatience, and she heard him in altercation with
old Adams. They drifted into the mess-room. As she was drying her hands,
there was a knock on the kitchen door, and she saw her father ushering
in the dark young officer of the evening before. Her brow cleared. She
had not the least doubt she could “manage” the young man.
The young man surpassed expectations. Madeleine found it unnecessary to
keep to her rather limited English. His French, while not correct, was
expansive. He admitted her version of the farmer’s rights under
Billeting Law, but would not accept the sum, running into hundreds of
francs, which Jerome Vanderlynden, typical peasant at a bargain, asked
for compensation. It appeared that the quiet-looking young man knew
something of flax culture and more of agricultural machinery. He quoted
within a very little the cost of re-stacking the flax, oiling the
machinery, with the price of two burnt hop-poles. He offered forty
francs.
Old Vanderlynden made his usual counter: “What if I go to Brigade
Head-quarters about it!”
“Then you will get nothing at all. They are too busy, and we move on
to-day!”
The old man laughed and slapped his leg.
Madeleine, knowing by experience that the officer had been authorized to
spend fifty francs (a sum which appealed to the English, being
recognizable as a couple of sovereigns), began to respect him, took the
money, and signed the receipt.
Left alone, old Jerome remarked that the young man was very well brought
up. Madeleine was looking carefully through her pots and pans to see
that nothing had disappeared into the big messbox.
From the window she saw the battalion paraded, and watched them move
off, as she passed hastily from room to room, counting things. Her
father was round the outbuildings. The last to go was old Adams with the
wagons. A great stillness fell on the old farm, the litter of papers,
tins and ashes, and all the unmistakable atmosphere of a crowded place
suddenly deserted.
* * * *
The day following the departure of the battalion was fine and still.
Even the Front was quieting down. After the early midday meal of soup
and bread, Madeleine put on her second-best frock, washed, did her hair,
spent a little time over her hands, and putting on her fur but no hat,
picked her way over the cobbles and left the farm by the main gate.
She walked with the ease of a person of perfect health, who knew what
she wanted and where she was going, and who had habitually no time to
stroll, no need to think. The clumsiness of a life of hard physical
labor had been corrected by a good education, and she might well have
passed in her dress that had so evidently been best, and was going to
be everyday, for an English girl. Only the boots and the hatless head
marked her for a follower of the continental tradition, though her
strong ankles and round neck would have well supported the low shoes and
simple felt or straw of an outdoor English-woman.
She said nothing to her father or to the farmhands as to her errand. No
one inquired. For a long while, ever since she had left the convent
school, she had been mistress of her own actions and of other people’s.
Old Vanderlynden, if he ever spoke of her to others, used not the
peasant’s usual “Ma fille”—“my little girl,” but “Ma demoiselle”—“my
young lady.” Her dress indicated nothing, for etiquette forbade her
going beyond the farm in her old worn “every-day” and apron, clogs and
upturned sleeves. Old men and women and children were plowing, manuring
and weed-burning in the fields bordering the hedgeless road. She spoke
to no one, and no one spoke to her. She met them all once a week, at
Mass, and that was sufficient. One or two of them, glancing at her
straight figure and level, unswerving gait, glanced at each other and
grinned. The usual surmises were probably made, for it was known that
she was keeping company with none of the young men of her generation
before they were all hurried off to the War—and it was plainly
unnatural that a good-looking young woman with a dowry should not be
sought in marriage. These surmises were all the more interesting because
nothing definite was known.
Some hundreds of yards before reaching the Lille-Calais road, Madeleine
passed under the shadow of one of those little woods of oak, crowning a
small conical hill, that constitute the only untilled plots of the
hard-worked Flemish border. Like its counterpart in all the neighboring
parishes, this wood also was called the “Kruysabel” or Poplar-cross, on
account of the crucifix that hid in its highest and thickest part, where
its five “rides” met in a tiny clearing. To the south of this clearing
was a little hunting shelter, brick, with mock-Gothic windows and leaded
lights, encircled by a timber-pillared verandah, on which the thatch of
the eaves descended, in the worst style of Lille garden-furnishing
(“rustic work” in England). After entering the wood by a wicket, it was
to this erection that Madeleine mounted by a soft squashy “ride” between
impenetrable walls of oak sapling, planted as close as it would grow,
and cut regularly, section by section, according to age, so that little
could be seen but slim straight gray-green stems on all sides.
Arrived at the little clearing on the summit, the girl took out a key
and entered the hunting shelter. The ornamental porch led straight into
a dining-place almost filled by the long table surrounded by benches.
The porch and windows filled the north wall, a great open birch-hearth
with fire-dogs, the western. Opposite was a long rack of antlers, false
or real, for greatcoats, guns and bags. On the remaining side was a
partition pierced by two doors. The apartment was clean and well
kept—nor was this wonderful to anyone who could have seen Madeleine
produce feather brush and duster, and go carefully along the
pine-boarded wainscot, round mouldings and window-ledges, and along the
frames of the photographs of many a jolly party—photographs in which a
man, appearing variously from middle age to past it, mustached and
whiskered in the fashion of his youth—which must have been the fall of
the Second Empire—and a youth who passed to manhood in the newest
group—were surrounded by male companions who tended to be less and less
hairy the newer the picture—and women in every fashion from crinolines
to gaiters and deerstalkers—live horses and dogs and dead birds and
beasts, on a background of hunting shelter and trees. Madeleine hardly
paused to gaze at one, but passed on, chasing spiders, fly marks, dust,
and looking for damp or wormholes. She was far from being a person to
stand in front of a photograph while there was work to do.
Next she opened the left-hand door and peered into the little kitchen
almost filled by the vase-and-coffin-style stove, at which she and
others had cooked many a hot-pot and lapin-chasseur. All was in order
here, and she only glanced to see that no invading hand had touched the
stacked fuel, and that the iron-ringed flagstone that opened on a
diminutive cellar had not been moved. She left the kitchen. Before the
other door some little animation gleamed through the naturally passive,
almost defensive expression—behind which she habitually concealed her
thoughts. Entering this third apartment, a little upholstered lounge,
twelve feet square, she closed the door softly and stood a moment
without moving. It had been originally a gun-room, but the present
Baron, her father’s proprietor, owner of two thousand hectares of
shooting of which this shelter was the center, had turned it into a
withdrawing-room for ladies, as their presence at the shooting parties
became more and more usual. A divan ran under the curtained windows,
west and south, a tiny fireplace was beside the door, while a corner had
been carved off the kitchen for toilet purposes. Otherwise it was pine
boarded and upholstered in plaited straw like the rest of the building.
But the straw surfaces were covered with cushions, mats and covers,
chiefly Oriental, and all collected, like the Flemish china on the
walls, and the fancy photographs “Kruysabel by Moonlight,” “Morning in
the Woods,” etc., etc., by Georges, the present Baron’s son.
* * * *
It was this very Georges—spoiled, lovable, perverse, self-indulgent,
whose taste and personality penetrated and overcame the rococo-rustic
architecture and upholstery—that Madeleine had met in this very room,
every time she could and he would, all that summer that led up to the
declaration of war. How many times they had spent the Catholic five to
seven o’clock—she protected by endless subterfuges and evasions—he
coming easily of right—she was far from counting. Nor did she cast back
in her mind to the commencement of the thing. Indeed, there had been
nothing remarkable about it. It happened like this:
Her father was the old Baron’s chief tenant and head gamekeeper (as that
office is understood in France). She had known Georges as a thin,
dark-eyed, imperious, tyrannical boy. As a girl she had helped carry the
materials of the midday feast, that, cooked and served at the Kruysabel,
was the converging-point of the morning drives of the Baron’s shooting
parties. The last shoot of the spring of 1914 had finished in darkness,
and she had been left, as usual, to clear up. Her basket packed, the
place all squared-up and tidy, she had stood by candle-light, munching a
strip of buttered spiced-bread and finishing, careless of the dregs, the
last of a bottle of Burgundy that her Flemish soul loved as only a
Flemish soul can. She had caught Georges’ prominent brown eyes on her,
more than once during the day, as she moved about, waiting at table.
Conscious of looking her best, this had pleased her, beneath her
preoccupation with her duties of cooking and serving. Moreover, she had
a good day’s work behind her (the Baron paid well if he was satisfied),
and the Burgundy warmed her heart.
She heard footsteps behind her, and a tune hummed, and knew
instinctively who it was. She kept quite still. Instinct told her that
this was the most effective thing to do. Two arms, under hers, bent her
backwards, and Georges fastened his lips to hers. Self-controlled, she
neither called out nor resisted. Careful, even grudging in everything,
when she gave, she gave generously, no half measures. That was how it
had started. The most natural thing in the world. It had gone on in
spasms of passion, and interludes, as far as she was concerned, of cool
efficient concealment. Georges was a little younger, far less healthy in
mind or body, probably less strong, physically, than she. There may have
been an undercurrent of almost maternal feeling on her part, and
certainly not the least illusion as to the consequences of being found
out. And no one had found out.
* * * *
But now, as she stood in the empty room, on this October afternoon of
1915, she was as far from ruminating on the beginnings of the affair as
she was from the neo-classic tower of Merville Church, visible fifteen
kilometers away, in the pale sunshine, through a gap in the branches.
She had to stop for a moment to get used to the atmosphere, as a diver
adjusts himself to the pressure of a lower level, but it was an
unconscious pause; then, pressing her lips together, she dusted and
swept, opened the windows, banged mats and covers. Not that she hoped by
the elaborate preparation of a room unused these fifteen months, and
destined to be empty many another, to charm back the man through whom
alone that room interested her. Madeleine’s point of view was much
simpler. Her father had charge of the shooting. She had automatically
undertaken the care of the shelter. Having done so, unasked and unpaid,
as part of the general unwritten arrangement between her father and the
Baron, she could be trusted to go through with it, whatever happened.
Her task finished, she straightened her back and stood, hands on her
hips, looking at nothing. From somewhere beyond Estaires, Civenchy or
Festubert perhaps, came the sound of guns; some petty incident of the
four-hundred-mile year-long battle was dragging out its squalid tragedy.
Her lips moved, formed the words “Bêtes—sales bêtes!” which mean so
much more than “dirty beasts” and something more immediate than “foul
brutes” in English. No sound came. All that feeling of hers was too deep
down to struggle into active expression through her habitual reserve
and acquiescence with current manners. Not hers to criticize or revolt,
hers only to feel, to feel with all the depth of a narrow, obstinate
nature. Anyone might have supposed that she was thinking of the Germans
who had killed one brother, and held another prisoner since Charleroi.
Could she have been induced to express herself, she might have said,
from mere habit of convention, that she meant the Germans. But it was
deeper than that, so deep as to be almost impersonal.
Years before, when she was but a little girl, she had stood by the
bedside of her mother, dying for want of proper medical attention, the
fees for which had been grudged until it was too late. Her mother had
said: “Pray to the Virgin, now that you are alone!” She had answered,
sobbing: “I will pray, and I will take care of father and brothers, and
they of me!” “Pray to the Virgin!” the mother repeated. “She is the only
one that will take care of you!” That unique effort of expression of a
life worn down with toil, and given up to save expense, had sunk into
Madeleine’s mind, been confirmed by the teaching of the convent school,
where the nuns seemed to be perpetually clearing up the mess men made of
things. When the war came Madeleine dumbly recognized it for a thing
that men did. She had none of the definite sex-antagonism of an English
suffragist, was affectionately tolerant of her father and brothers, and
constructively tender to Georges, would have loved to have surrounded
him with perpetual comfort and indulgence. But in the bulk, men were
always doing things like this war. Her smouldering, almost sulky
resentment had not decreased one particle during the fifteen months that
had passed. For her, the day of mobilization had been catastrophic.
Georges, grandson of an ennobled “industrialist” and of bourgeois blood
of the official classes, surprised everybody, surprised Madeleine,
surprised perhaps himself. The manifesto “La Patrie est en danger” had
just been issued. He seemed to have swallowed its sentiments whole. His
papers arrived, and found him in uniform—he was (of course) in the
cuirassiers. He mounted and rode off. Like so many others, the indolent,
expensive young man lost all thought of anything except what he deemed
“duty.”
Madeleine, who knew as well as anyone that his depot would be at Lille,
had taken her stand, that August morning, just inside the gate of the
Kruysabel. She had chosen that place for easy concealment, and she knew
he must pass that way; she was prepared to give him anything he might
want. He passed her at the trot, looking rather fine in his regimentals,
and well mounted. He raised his hand to the salute, but did not draw
rein. She had gone home and taken up her work where she had laid it
down.
Going about the endless jobs of a farmer’s daughter, her slow-moving
temper had risen and risen. She knew Georges, his impulses, his
absorption in the matter that held him for the moment, his spoiled
thriftlessness. He would rush into military life, engulf himself in it,
never thinking for a moment to take his fill of happiness first. He
would not write. She hoped he would not. There would be no means of
keeping the arrival of letters secret from the whole village. Nor would
she write to him. She made no bones over social distinctions, upheld
them rather. He was the young master. It was not for her to write. This
left a great ache in her, for which she presently found a partial cure.
It came to her as she was packing up parcels of small luxuries for her
brothers. She packed a third one, more carefully than the first two. As
the billeting of English troops on the farm became increasingly
regular, she managed to vary and improve that third parcel, obtaining
from the—to her—sumptuously overstocked canteens and private presents
of the men in khaki—tinned stuff, toilet wares, and the beautiful
English cigarettes Georges loved. She posted this third packet from
Hazebrouck each weekly market day, for however well known she was to the
farming community, she was a stranger to the small postal and other
officials of the railway town. She comforted herself that if anything
(it was always called “anything” by the women of the War, whatever their
nationality) had happened to Georges the parcel would be returned. She
was far from picturing the trenches to herself. So, with steady,
profitable work at the farm, now a camp and barrack as well, with a
weekly parcel to send, and a weekly visit to the shelter at Kruysabel,
the interminable months had passed. People—her father with one son dead
and one a prisoner—her sister, down in Laventie, within bullet-range of
the trenches—got accustomed to the war.
But not Madeleine.
* * * *
So, as she stood in the fading light of the October sunset, resting a
moment before she returned to the farm, there was nothing petty or
personal in the grim set of her features, the slow-burning anger of her
eyes. She might have posed there for a symbolic figure of Woman
contemplating Fate. She stood straight in her neat, almost careful
dress, bought with one eye on looks and one on usefulness, solid
well-kept boots and stockings, thick but without hole or wrinkle. Large
boned, but so close-knit that she did not look disproportionately broad,
her figure, kept in check by hard work and frugal feeding, promised to
grow thick only with middle age. Anyone looking at her face would have
said, “What a handsome woman,” not “What a pretty girl.” There was
something below the surface that kept the red lips closed in their firm
line, the round chin lifted, the gray eyes and level brows serene. Her
dark hair, which she kept, while at work, tied in a duster, was neat and
smooth. Her skin had the pallor of health.
That internal quality that made her simple shapeliness so much more
arresting than any trick of dimple, glance, or elaborate preparation and
high color, was, like anything else worth having, the gradual
distillation of the hard-lived generations gone before. How much of it
came from the cultivators who had hung on to that low ridge between the
marshes and the sea, as French and Norman, English, Burgundian and
Spaniard swept over it, and how much from the Spanish blood of Alva’s
colonists who had held the old block-house-farm amid all the
unfriendliness of climate, native inhabitants, and chance, none can now
say.
Jerome Vanderlynden had a hook nose and beady brown eyes. Madeleine
rather took after her mother, a Delplice of Bailleul, in her straight
nose and fair complexion. But there it was, outwardly, obstinacy;
inwardly—something more. It was that “something more” that clouded her
smooth forehead and flashed in her stabbing, side-to-side stare. She
never even dreamed of envying the properly married women who had
received official and private recognition of the trouble the War had
brought them. Nor did she stop to pity the hundreds of thousands of
women of irregular position, who had been abandoned on the outbreak of
hostilities, without resources. Her feeling, if almost impersonal, was
simple, direct. This War, this “Bêtise,” this great Stupidity had taken
Georges from her. She would be even with it. She put away her duster and
brush, wrapped herself in her fur, and locking up, descended the ride
to the wicket without glancing at the scuttling rabbits, crossed two
arable fields by their narrow grass borders, and so through the north
pasture entered the house by the plank bridge and the scullery door.
Hanging her fur in her room, she slipped on her long blue apron, went to
the kitchen, and began doing the next thing.
* * * *
Nearly a week passed before the advance-party of a new battalion,
consisting of an interpreter in the blue uniform of the French Mission
and an English officer, rode into the courtyard. They were received by
Madeleine, who gave them coffee and began to explain herself in English
as usual, as to what she was disposed to do, and charge, and the rules
she expected to be observed. The Englishman was the usual square, blond,
sheepishly-grinning grown-up boy, who nodded and said “All right”
whenever there was a pause. The interpreter was a middle-aged commercial
traveler for a colonial house, who talked glibly and respectfully, while
under the table his foot pursued Madeleine’s. The arrangements
completed, Madeleine left the two, who had obviously lunched well in
Hazebrouck or Cassel, to measure up and ticket the various rooms,
barns, and stables, according to their requirements.
It was again her day for the Kruysabel, and she went to her room,
slipping off her apron and her stained and mended dress, to tidy
herself. Her room was a small cell-like apartment looking out across the
moat to the north pasture. The distempered walls were marked with damp,
but the tiled floor was clean and the places round the window where the
plaster had come away were hidden by short curtains. Before this window,
which was in a corner, stood a chest of drawers, bearing the cheap deal
looking-glass and an old inlaid box containing the girl’s few treasures.
The remaining wallspace of the outside wall was filled by the great
wooden bedstead, above the head of which was a little china bracket
carrying the inevitable sprig of box-tree. The bed came so far down the
little room that there was only place for a wooden chair between its
foot and the door, on the other side of which stood a tall press,
reaching to the ceiling, and a wooden washstand, surmounted by a shelf
that held the relics of Madeleine’s first communion under a glass bell,
such as used to be seen in England encasing Dresden clocks. The
washstand just allowed for the drawers to open.
Thus, as she did her hair before the glass in the window, Madeleine
could see her door softly opened, to admit the interpreter, who had
drawn off his boots and tiptoed in, his brown eyes gleaming greasily at
the sight of her bare arms and neck, muttering: “What luck!” The words
died on shaking lips and the creased eyelids fluttered over downcast
eyes, as she turned in cold fury: “Get out of my bedroom!”
He hesitated, and catching the ewer of common white china she slung it
forward with the force of muscles accustomed to tossing swedes to feed
the mashing-machine. It broke on his forehead, cutting his eyebrow and
deluging him with water. With a gasp he was gone.
She called to Berthe to bring a swab and broom. When the mess was
cleared: “That imbecile of an interpreter!” she said.
“It is a dirty type,” grunted the philosophic Berthe. Madeleine forgot
the incident.
She recalled it, however, before the new battalion had been under the
roof of the Spanish Farm many hours. They broke every rule, stole,
destroyed, trespassed, and worst of all, left open the gate from the
pasture to the “plain” (the level range of arable), so that the cattle
got out and had to be chased back. Madeleine, having expostulated with
N.C.O.’s and men, finally appealed to the Major, who sent for the
Adjutant. The latter, not allowing for Madeleine’s English, said bluntly
that the interpreter had informed him that the people were Germans in
disguise, and would be better for a lesson.
Madeleine interposed with such energy and point that the officers
promised, in order to get rid of her, to issue orders. Not believing in
stones left unturned, Madeleine also wrote to the Chief of the French
Mission at Cassel. Then an idea struck her. She looked in her account
book, where under the heading “Easthamptonshire Regiment” she noted the
name of the dark young officer who spoke French so well, Lieutenant
Geoffrey Skene. She wrote to him as well, asking if he would come over
and intercede with the troops.
* * * *
The day after, the battalion left, the Major giving her twenty francs
for wood burnt, fowls and eggs. As there had been over twenty officers
in the mess and nearly nine hundred men in the battalion, Madeleine
added up the billeting and mess money and was content. She received an
acknowledgment of her letter from the French Mission, but nothing else.
Again peace and emptiness fell on the Spanish Farm.
Again, nearly a week elapsed, when Madeleine, stirring the midday soup,
saw an officer ride into the courtyard. She called to her father, who
was sorting haricots. He went out and returned with Lieutenant Skene.
Madeleine did not understand the English and it did not worry her. She
had indeed required this young man to deal with a difficulty, but the
need had passed. Still, he might be useful, and she invited him to stay
to lunch, calling to Berthe to kill a fowl, while her father got up a
bottle of Burgundy. She heard politely a long explanation as to the
receipt of her letter, and the impossibility of replying sooner, owing
to conditions prevailing in the trenches. She understood what was said,
but paid little heed, not being interested. She had found this young man
so far “well brought up” and “malin,” “sharp at money” in contest with
her father. She now began to see that he was “serviable,” “willing.”
This thought, striking against her eternal preoccupation with Georges,
kindled a spark.
It was when the young officer mentioned that he lay in the trenches
next some French troops that the spark caught, flamed, became an idea.
She showed nothing, of course, presiding with her usual competence at
the long Flemish midday meal, which she felt to be his due, after having
got him to come so far on his useless errand. But as the four courses
followed one another, and a carafe of beer gave place to more Burgundy,
she was thinking. Her father went back to work, leaving the Lieutenant
smoking over his coffee and glass of Lille gin.
She began to question him with infinite caution, trying to find out what
his strange view of life might be. She made up her mind, after rallying
him (as was rather the fashion) on his conquests of her sex in France,
that he was very innocent, well brought up, sharp at money, willing, and
now she added in her mind, “rather a child,” “un peu enfant.” It did not
displease her. On the contrary, it was all to the good. She rather
expected the English to be like that. He did not take the subject up and
feign interest in her, as a Frenchman would have done, but remained
serious. She was therefore obliged to say right out what was in her
mind. It was to ask him, next time he went up to the trenches, next to
the French troops, to try and obtain news of Georges for her. She had
heard that his regiment was in the northern sector. She formed no idea
of the trenches, of the camps and resting places next to them. She
simply said what she wanted. Once the words were out she had to use all
her self-control. The sound of her request, the speaking aloud of what
had been going round and round in her mind for so long, brought a rush
of feeling such as she had not experienced since the first day of
mobilization. She bit her lips to keep back tears and sobs. Then she was
glad to hear the Lieutenant promising to do what he could. There was
some difficulty about it, apparently, she was not curious to understand.
She was glad she had asked an Englishman, realizing now how the thing
sounded, and what a tale a Frenchman would have made of it. All she
cared about now was for this young man to go—she was aching with the
effort of restraint—and get her the news she wanted. She had no clear
idea what. She pictured in a dim way Georges sending a message that he
was all right, and making an appointment to meet her, in St.
Omer—Calais—where he liked. Further than that her imagination could
not take her.
She thanked the young man cordially, and offered him more gin. He
refused, and went away, assuring her that he was at her service in this
as in other matters. She forgot him before he was out of the yard, and
fearing that she would cry—a thing she had not done since she was a
tiny girl—she went to her room. But she did not cry. She sat on the
wooden chair at the foot of the bed, her hands on the wooden rail, her
face upon her hands. Nothing happened. She soon went back to her work,
for her feelings were even worse in that little room of hers than in the
big kitchen where she had so much to do. Gradually her heart ceased to
thump, her eyes to smart. But she had taken the first active step
towards getting Georges back—towards that recovery of anything taken
away from her, that was her deepest instinct. And she knew that she
would not stop at any first step—not she!
* * * *
It took more than a mere European war twenty miles off to interrupt the
regular life of the Spanish Farm. Troops came and troops went, and
Madeleine watched them, watched the payments made by the messes for
extra accommodation and cooking, and the weekly payments through the
Mairie for billeting and stabling, watched the storing of the crops,
the thrashing, the milking, the feeding of the fowls. Every week she
went to market, sold what she could, bought as little as possible, and
sent her parcel, surreptitiously, from the post office. She neither
heard nor saw anything of Georges. She neither heard nor saw anything of
Lieutenant Skene. But, sure enough, on the first opportunity, she was
obliged to try to get news of Georges.
It happened, as winter came on, that “the château” had need of some
things, eggs, and hare pâté—nowhere so good as at the Spanish Farm—and
Madame la Baronne wanted some sewing done, rather special, better than
any of her women could do. A message came via the Baron, who shouted
from horseback, as he rode by, to Vanderlynden, at work in the plain.
Old Vanderlynden handed it on to Madeleine, as he bent in an attitude
half of prayer, half a crouching ape’s, over the midday soup.
Madeleine nodded and told him to put in the horse—not that she could
not have done it, but she must clean herself. Accordingly, half an hour
later, there might have been seen issuing from the yard of the Spanish
Farm, over the brick bridge, along the earth road that divided the
manor pasture, out by the brick-pillared gate on to the road, surely the
oldest, most repaired of high black gigs, drawn by an old white horse
whose sonorous walk took it along at perhaps two miles an hour. Framed
in the dark aperture of the hood, upright, expressionless, sat
Madeleine, bareheaded, but in her best dress, holding the reins in a
gloved hand, basket between her feet. Silent, expressionless, she may
have been, but when she turned into the Lille-Calais road and met a
string of English transports, limbers and wagons, it was noticeable that
the Quartermaster-Sergeant, after glancing at her face, instead of
shouting to her to get out of the way, turned in his saddle and shouted
to the drivers, “Right o’ the road!”
She came to the village and crossed the empty Grand’ Place, where the
old houses stared unchanged over the notice-boards of the offices of the
Head-quarters of an English Division, and the church, newly faced with
red brick, showed the zeal of the pious Flemings. Turning sharply out of
this, she mounted, at the snail pace of the old white horse, a steep
street between little houses of people who had retired to live on about
the equivalent of forty pounds English per annum (as people do in
France). It ended in a great eighteenth-century iron grille, the entry
to the château. The central gates stood open and she drove straight
along a road deep between high banks covered with shrubs, which followed
for some fifty yards the old line of the moat, until she came under the
back part of the château where a broad terrace of gravel separated the
basement offices from the kitchen garden. Leaving the old horse, with
perfect confidence, looking down his nose into a laurel bush, Madeleine
took her basket on her arm, and entered the great square kitchen.
One of the things that renders life so easy in France is the absence of
change. Anywhere outside Paris, and often in it, change seems to have
worn itself out, and to have ceased. In that remote corner of Flanders,
Madeleine had no shyness, hesitation, or doubt, in entering the house of
her father’s landlord and her lover’s mother. She would not have dreamed
of entering by the front. No less would she have thought of leaving the
house without seeing Madame la Baronne in person. She was not alone in
this. The establishment was ruled by a lean, gaunt, gray-mustached
person, discernible to be of the female sex only by her clothes, named
Placide. Just as for Madeleine, so for Placide, life was an easy
riddle. She knew her place to a hair’s breadth, between God, and her
master and her mistress, on the one hand, and the servants, tenants,
tradespeople on the other. The great square block of a house, the main
building of the older castle, whose wings had been thrown into its moat,
whose forecourt had become flower gardens in the revolution of 1790,
went on its even way under her iron rule, undisturbed by wars. The
presence of a mess of English officers in the Baron’s quarters, east of
the main staircase, the absence of young Master Georges, of all the
men-servants, and of some of the women who had gone to work on farms,
did not throw Placide out of her stride. When Madeleine entered, she was
standing with her back to the dresser with its shining pots and pans,
telling a maid-servant her duties. The following conversation ensued:
“Good morning, Madeleine, how goes it?”
“Good morning, Placide, not too badly!”
“You have brought the things!”
“Here they are.”
“What will you have to take?”
“Nothing, thank you!”
“Come, a glass of beer, a cup of coffee!”
“Nothing, thank you all the same!”
“But you will say ‘Good day’ to Madame!”
“Why yes, if Madame wishes it.”
This little formality, for both speakers had said just those words
hundreds of times and knew them by heart, being over, Placide went to
see if Madame were free to see Madeleine, and Madeleine sipped coffee as
though she had not refused it, and gossiped with the girls.
She was then ushered through the paved and plastered back passage,
smelling of all the game that had been carried through it, and of all
the corks that had been drawn in it, to the front hall floored with
black and white stone, on which stood heavy old furniture, a little of
each period and a good deal of 1860 to 1870, between walls that were
painted in landscape as a background to the plaster statues of classical
deities and symbolic figures of the virtues, holding lamps. From this,
the high double doors opened into the drawing-room or salon, where
Madame sat since the use of Monsieur’s apartments by English troops had
forced her to relinquish her boudoir to serve as his bedroom.
Madame la Baronne d’Archeville had been married when the Empress Eugénie
was the first lady of Europe, and taking marriage very seriously, had
never tried to change since. Although she had neither the height nor
carriage of her imperial example, she continued in 1915 doing her hair
and wearing her clothes as she had begun, and the effect was all her
own. Herself of high bourgeois blood, she had married when told to,
without demur, the Baron, who, son of an army contractor and, so he
said, great-grandson of an emigré of 1792, had re-purchased with money
made out of républiques and empires, what those empires and républiques
had taken from his ancestors, real or imaginary.
The room in which Madame sat looked like it. Originally the banqueting
hall of the small feudal castle from which the château had grown, it ran
from back to front of the modernized building, with two tall windows
looking on to the kitchen garden behind, and two others, opposite,
looking on to the flower garden in front, and over trees and village
roofs into the rich undulations of the plain. The great beams that held
the roof were visible, but below them the walls that had been panelled
were papered cream and gold. Against this background hung two rows of
pictures, the upper row smallish and very dark, displaying, as far as
could be seen, grim old men in more or less armor, and stolid ladies in
stuffs, laces and jewels hardly less resisting. The lower row was
composed of portraits of whiskered men in uniforms of recent eras, and
women, all in evening dresses of the nineteenth century, varied by
landscapes, some good, some too good to be true, in pairs. Below the
pictures were marble slabs on gilt brackets, tables shining with brass
inlay. The floor space was occupied with curly armed, heavily stuffed
chairs and settees. It was a room into which the Second Empire seemed to
have burst in flood, washing up the drift of earlier ages, and to have
ebbed, leaving a carpet shiny from use.
But to Madame la Baronne, and Madeleine, no such thoughts occurred. To
Madame it was her salon. To Madeleine it was Madame’s salon. To
Madeleine, Madame said:
“Good day, Madeleine. All goes well at the farm?”
“Yes, Madame la Baronne. I hope that the health of Monsieur and Madame
is good, and that there is good news of Monsieur Georges.”
She stood, square planted and upright, not quite so near the door as a
servant, not quite so near Madame’s chair as a visitor. She was
perfectly conscious that on her left, in the curve of the grand piano,
was a red, blue and white draped easel on which was a picture in oils of
Georges, as a boy, in a white sailor suit, lips parted, eyes staring a
little, evidently just going to say, “I want so-and-so,” in his spoiled
way. But she spoke his name without tremor, and heard the reply:
“Thank you, we are well; we have no news of my son, but that is good
news, is it not?”
“Yes, Madame. I have brought the things.”
“Very well. Placide will pay you. Good day.”
“Good day, Madame la Baronne, and thank you.”
Backing with a curtsy to the door, she let herself out, took her money
from Placide, received her basket with her cloths and terrine, jerked up
the head of the old white horse, and drove back to the farm. She had got
what she wanted—the assurance of no ill news of Georges.
* * * *
That evening in the lamp-lit salon, after Madame had said, “There is
nothing more; good night, Placide,” there was silence only broken by
the Baron puffing his cigar. He supported the war very badly. He was too
old to serve and was prevented from fishing or shooting by English
water-supply officers, who dammed up and filtered his waters, and by
French Gendarmerie Commandants, who stopped his supplies of cartridges.
At last he exploded:
“Nothing ever happens in this cursed war. You, what have you done
to-day?”
Madame la Baronne replied, after a moment’s silence that was partly
protest at his manners and partly some tiny instinctive defensiveness,
“I have seen Madeleine Vanderlynden!”
“Ah, she brought the ham and the hare pâté!”
“Yes.” Madame was struggling with that tiny instinct—could not quite
catch what it prompted—her feeling only materialized into the words:
“She has bold eyes!”
“It is a fine girl. Probably she knows it!” qualified the Baron, and
mused.
Madame mused too. But the necessity, forced upon her early in married
life with the Baron, of shutting one’s eyes and ears to what men did and
said about women, prevented her connecting Madeleine’s composure with
her own family. She could only fall back on her stock complaint.
“She will never be like her mother, that poor Sylvie!”
But irritation had supervened with the Baron: “You’re not obliged to
receive the girl!”
“One has to do what one can for one’s people. They wouldn’t like it if
one didn’t say a word to them when they come with things.”
“Do what you like so long as I have hare pâté,” yawned the Baron. “Ugh,
this war, I do nothing but yawn and sleep!”
“I pray!” said Madame to herself, and rose to go to the little “chapel”
in the turn of the stairs to do so.
* * * *
Madeleine had no theory of the Irony of Fate. She had a merely hard
experience of it, gained from watching crops and prices. Reassured as to
Georges’ safety by what she had heard at the château, she took what
comfort she could.
Three days after her visit, she was sewing and mending by the kitchen
stove, using the light of the dying sunset to the last glimmer. There
were no English troops in the farm on that day, and outside were the
sounds of her father putting up the horses, on a background of damp
late-autumn silence, and behind that, the muffled vibration of the
eternal battle, that made the window-panes tremble ever so little.
Suddenly there came the sound of whistling—the last bars of the
well-worn tune:
“Madelon—lon—lon
Madelon donne-moi ton cœur!”
and shouted greetings. Then her father’s slouching tread and a brisk
military stride. Then her father’s voice:
“Mad’leine, here is Victor Dequidt, home on leave!”
She got up, pushed the ever-ready coffee-pot over the heat of the fire,
and greeted the guest. He was the son of a neighboring farmer, and if
she ever bothered her head about such things, Madeleine was perhaps
conscious deep down in herself that he liked her more than a little.
They had played together as children, grown to adolescence together, had
experiences in common, wandering in the Kruysabel. But ever since her
mother’s death had forced her to early maturity, Madeleine had been very
busy, then, with Georges, very busy and very happy, and since the War,
very busy and preoccupied. Any memories of Victor hardly disturbed the
surface of her mind. If he liked to follow her about with his blue eyes,
and pay her small compliments, why, let him. Most men looked at her, so
might he. She poured him out coffee, and some of the rum she had got
from the quartermasters of various English units, and listened politely,
but without interest, to his talk.
It was the usual talk of men on leave. All that he said was being said
in English, French, German, Italian, during years, whenever men got home
for a few brief days. It was about food, railways, jokes, old
acquaintances—never about the cosmic murder in which they were engaged,
or their daily decreasing belief that they might escape alive. In the
middle of the commonplaces that she had heard from different lips a
hundred times in that kitchen, Madeleine heard the words:
“It was a good job, that stretcher-bearing business at the hospital,
miles from the line—good food—a bunk to sleep in at night, and who do
you think was the last stretcher-case I carried?”
Silence. Old Vanderlynden was not good at guessing. Madeleine was bored.
Victor went on:
“Why, the young Baron Georges!”
Silence again. Old Vanderlynden, who could hardly see to fill his pipe,
said:
“It’s as dark as a nigger’s back in here!” and held a paper spill to the
candle on the mantelshelf.
Madeleine cried with a stamp of her foot:
“Don’t light up! don’t light up!”
Her father obediently lit his pipe, knocked out the half-burnt spill
against the fireplace and put it back.
Victor, disappointed at the way his anecdote was received, said
gallantly:
“One sees you are a good housekeeper, and not one to burn good money!”
But Madeleine was just succeeding, by sheer will-power in
swallowing—swallowing down. It—the maniacal desire that had come
rushing up from her heart into her head—the strong frenzy of a strong
nature—bidding her catch up the great steel harl from the hearth and
smash in the heads—not so much of her father and Victor, but of these
two men—prototypes of all the other careless, mischievous, hopeless
men, that had let Georges be hurt in their insane war. She swallowed,
and the fury of that instant was gone, battened down, under control. She
replied to Victor in a steady off-hand voice:
“Oh no, we have plenty of candles from the English. After all, you might
as well light up, Father!”
As he did so, the old man asked:
“What had he the matter with him, the poor young Baron?”
“He had become consumptive, owing to the life.”
As the candle took heart and shone, Madeleine’s courage rose to meet the
necessity for showing nothing and finding out everything which she
deliberately courted. Sure of herself, she said gently:
“To which base hospital did you say he was going?” She saw her mistake
in a moment. She was not so completely mistress of herself as she had
thought. No hospital had been mentioned. But there was nothing subtle
about Victor. He was only too pleased to have interested her. He
replied:
“The English hospital in tents at Naes’ farm, there beside the St. Omer
line. Ours are full.”
His gossiping talk flickered on like the candle flame—dim and alone.
Madeleine and her father said scarcely a word, the former deliberately,
wanting to be alone, the latter lacking the habit of speech. As no
interest was shown and no further refreshment offered, Victor eventually
rose to go. They bade him good night at the door, locked up, and turned
to their rooms, with their usual brief word of nightly affection. The
old man was snoring directly. Madeleine lay for hours on her back, her
eyes burning at the dim ceiling of her little room, her legs and feet
straight and rigid, hands clasped on her thumping heart. Surely he was a
lucky man for whom she planned and schemed and longed so in her short,
hard-earned time of rest!
* * * *
The next day Jerome Vanderlynden and Madeleine set out in the dark early
morning and reached Hazebrouck before most of the market had
foregathered. This the old man understood and agreed to. One got one’s
own price by this means from people who were in a hurry. What he did not
understand was why Madeleine had on her very best instead of her second
best that she usually wore to market, without a hat. Incurious and
incapable of challenging her decisions, he said nothing. The stuff sold
well. By eight o’clock the basket and receptacles were almost empty.
Then Madeleine said:
“We must go and see the young baron.”
“What do we want to go tra’passin’ over there for?”
“Because Victor may be wrong. The Baron and Madame had not heard the
other day.”
“That’s their affair.”
“If it’s true, they’ll be glad enough to know.”
“It will cost something.”
“Leave the money to me.”
She had made up her mind and she was going. Independent as were few
girls of her sort, she was too conventional to risk the journey alone.
That would be to court scandal. So her father must come with her.
At the station they got into some difficulty about tickets. The line was
almost entirely military. The gray-haired Commissioner was an
acquaintance.
“What are you going to do there, you two?”
Madeleine pushed before her father.
“We are going to see a wounded relative in hospital!”
“Well, you can have privilege tickets. All you want is the certificate
of the Mairie.”
Madeleine knew better than to argue on such a point. She drew the old
man outside.
“Get down to the ‘Golden Key’ and come back with the cart. Look sharp!”
“Why not drive all the way?”
“Twenty kilometers there and twenty back; we should not be home all
night, and supposing an English regiment comes to the farm when I’m not
there?”
One of the great advantages Madeleine possessed over her father was that
she could think so much quicker. The old man had fetched the cart,
Madeleine had done her shopping, and they were two kilometers on the
road home before he had thought of the next objection:
“What are you going to say to Blanquart?”
Blanquart was the schoolmaster and secretary of the Mairie.
“That I want a certificate that we have relatives at the war.”
“But that won’t get you a cheap ticket to visit the young baron in
hospital.”
“You leave it to me.”
Obedient, the old man left it.
Blanquart was not at the Mairie, he was measuring fields for an
“expertise,” a professional assessment.
Leaving the cart on the road, Madeleine lifted her best skirt and
stepped over the clods to him. He was busy and interested in his job,
and didn’t want to be dragged home to the Mairie. At her suggestion he
wrote the certificate on the next fair page of the big square
pocket-book he was covering with figures. He was not very curious about
the matter. The Vanderlyndens were the best-known family in the parish.
The loss of the two boys was no secret. He was asked every day for the
endless certificates, questionnaires, lists and returns by which France
is governed: “You are going to join the Society of the Friends of the
Prisoners of War, I suppose?”
Madeleine let him suppose, only murmuring that one did what one could in
such times.
He wrote: “I, Anastasius Amadeus Blanquart, Secretary of the Mairie of
the Commune of Hondebecq, certify that Vanderlynden, Jerome, cultivator,
has male relatives mobilized for military service,” and signed.
“Now you’ll want the official stamp. Ask my little Cécile. She knows
where it is.”
“Perfectly. And we thank you many times.”
“There is nothing. Always at your service.”
“Good day, Monsieur Blanquart.”
Sure enough, at the schoolhouse, also in all Flemish villages the
office of the Mairie, little Cécile Blanquart was proud to affix the
official stamp, with its “République Française, Commune de Hondebecq”
inscription in violet ink.
So back went the old gig, down the same road it had just come. In the
distance rumbled the battle. Each side of the hedgeless road with its
grassy stone pavé and “dirt” paths, the rich heavy lands gleamed with
moisture in their nakedness, in the pastures the last leaves of the elms
fluttered down upon thick grass that soaked and soaked. Flanders, the
real Flanders, the strip of black alluvial soil between the chalky downs
of France and the gravelly or stony waste border where the Germanic
peoples begin, was preparing herself for another fruitful year, as she
had, time out of mind, in war and in peace, paying as little attention
to this war as to any other of the long series she had seen. And across
her breast, on that Route Nationale that a French Emperor had built with
stone from Picardy, went old Vanderlynden, child of her soil, inheritor
of her endless struggle, and Madeleine, the newer, more self-conscious,
better-educated generation, perhaps even more typical of her country
than her father, showing the endless adaptability of her mixed border
race, absorbing the small steps of human progress, and emerging even
more Flemish than before.
The old man, in his black suit and high-crowned peaked Dutch cap, sat
almost crouching on the seat of the gig, knees nearly as high as his
chin, wrists on knees, dark eyes fixed on the road ahead, speaking from
time to time to the old white horse, who paid no attention nor varied
its wooden shamble. Madeleine, whose clothes were almost those of a
modern girl of the towns, sat upright, hands folded in her lap, head
erect, in face and figure just another of those strongly built,
tranquil, slightly “managing” Madonnas of the pictures of the old
Flemish painters, if ever Madonna had so grim an immobility, such a
slow-burning, unquenchable spark in the gray eye.
They reached the “Golden Key,” put up the horse and gig, and walked to
the station. There was a train in ten minutes. They each took a bowl of
coffee and slice of bread, not at the station buffet where the tariff
was aimed at the hurried traveler, but at the little café outside, where
the small ill-paid world employed at a French station gets itself served
for twenty centimes a time less than other people. Then Madeleine went
with her certificate, her own and her father’s identity cards, and her
hand full of small notes, to the booking-office.
“Two third-class privilege tickets to Schaexen Halte, and return, to see
a wounded relative!”
The booking-clerk took the papers and looked at them.
“This is no good,” he muttered through his decayed teeth.
Madeleine, with all the contempt of the comparatively free and wealthy
farmer’s daughter for the small railway official, and all the cunning of
one who deals with beasts and the law, held her peace.
The booking-office clerk was in that category of age and infirmity which
alone in those days could exempt a man from mobilization. He worked
fifteen hours a day in a pigsty of an office, whose glazed wicket made a
perpetual draught. He was easily flustered.
“You asked for two privilege tickets to go and see a wounded relative in
hospital.”
“That is what I said!”
“This certificate is incomplete!”
Madeleine said never a word, but leaned calmly on the ledge of the
wicket, making herself look as stupid as she could, by letting her
lower lip droop. Behind her a queue was forming. Already there were
cries of: “Come on!” “The train goes in five minutes,” and a wag, “They
are making a film for the cinema!”
Tears of exasperation came into the little man’s eyes and his hand began
to tremble. He stamped his foot.
“Write the name of the relative you are going to visit.”
“I have no pen.”
Men were hammering on the partition and women were saying, “Are we going
to miss the train in addition to all our other miseries?”
The booking-office clerk flung his hairy crossed-nibbed pen at
Madeleine. She took it, and wrote in the margin of Blanquart’s
certificate the name of her dead brother, carefully using the Flemish
script, which the railway people, mainly pure French, could not read.
The paper was seized; the cards of identity, the privilege tickets, the
change were thrust into her hands. She moved away, counting her change
and smiling a very little to herself, and giving just a glance each to
the English military policeman and the French gendarme at the platform
entrance, both amused spectators of the scene. Behind her, the
booking-office clerk kept chewing over the words “sacred peasants,”
“swine’s luck,” and other expressions of feeling, as he jabbed the date
on tickets and served them in frenzied haste to the crowd that besieged
his wicket.
On the wooden benches of the third-class compartment old Vanderlynden
and Madeleine found many an acquaintance. There were cries of: “How goes
it, Madeleine?” “Jerome, what are you jolly-well doing here, since when
did you live St. Omer way?”
* * * *
Madeleine, who had foreseen this contingency, nudged her father, and
replied for both:
“We have a little business to attend to,” having made up her mind that
no one would guess what it was. She was right. Thus she set running the
right stream of vague gossip. For weeks after, the news ran through all
the surrounding communes, and flowed back to Hondebecq, that she and her
father had been to St. Omer by train. It circulated from the inn of
“Lion of Flanders” to the restaurant “The Three Crown-pieces,” even
descended to mere estaminets like the “Return from the Congo” and the
“Brave Sapeur-Pompier.” No one could make it out. Victor Dequidt soon
rejoined his regiment, and if he mentioned the young baron, no one
except Madeleine was curious enough to ask which hospital he had gone
to. Nor did anyone know of Madeleine’s particular interest in him. At
last, when the tale got to the café-restaurant “de la Gare et de
Commerce,” one of the gaziers or bullock merchants who used that more
business quarter of the village was able to propound a theory. There was
an English Forage Officer at St. Omer, and he had his depot just exactly
at Naes’ farm, by the new sidings the English had had to make at
Schaexen Halte for their hospital, so as to be out of the way of the
bombing. No doubt old Vanderlynden had worked the trick all right with
that officer (who was buying large quantities), and done well out of it.
The certificate of having mobilized relatives that Blanquart had given
in such a hurry (and which, of course, was known through Cécile and the
other school-children), might be on account of Marcel Vanderlynden, or
might be merely a blind. The original paper on which Madeleine had
written her brother’s name remained in the archives of the station
until all were burnt in the bombardment of December, 1917.
* * * *
Descending at Schaexen Halte, Madeleine and her father made their way to
the block of white marquees and tents that almost filled the manor
pasture of Naes’ farm. In spite of the fresh air, the smell of
anæsthetics and disinfectants hung over the duck-board paths and
cindered drives, and mingled with the odor of cooking maconochie and the
smoke of a giant incinerator that, never quenched, burned the daily load
of discarded clothing and bandages, filthy with human refuse and trench
mud. Near by, in the corner where Naes used to grow his maize, was a
small neat cemetery of little mounds with inscribed wooden crosses,
destined to grow with the years into a bigger area than the hospital and
the sidings together, until lawyers had to argue out the compensation
due to Naes for the expropriation. At this point luck deserted
Madeleine, for no sooner had she and her father got into conversation
with an orderly, than up rolled a convoy of a dozen ambulances, out ran
all the available orderlies, and the whole place hummed like a railway
station. There was no getting an answer to a question, and the pair
were obliged to step into the nearest tent to avoid being run over. They
found themselves, in the peculiar half light of such places, before a
wooden table at which a sergeant was writing hurriedly. At Madeleine’s
question he called over his shoulder:
“What about these civilians, sir, are they allowed?”
A young doctor came in from somewhere behind, buckling on a belt. He
spoke kindly in French, but was obviously preoccupied. There had been
some French casualties in the hospital, he thought, but it had not been
his tour of duty, and they had been passed on at once.
“Besides,” he added, “all next-of-kin are informed if it is a serious
case, and you will soon hear for certain.”
Aware of the truth of this, and of her false position, Madeleine did not
press the matter. She knew the English were queer about such things. So
were the French, but she understood their sort of queerness and
sympathized with it, not the English sort.
The officer and sergeant went outside, and began examining, questioning,
listing, sorting the long line of stretchers, each with its pale,
patient face above dirty blankets, a line that grew faster than it
could be dealt with. Madeleine drew her father outside and sent him off
to the halte on the railway, to drink a glass of beer. She herself pried
about among tent-pegs and ropes, canvas flaps and damp twilight. She
managed to get into one big tent with iron beds in rows, and was going
from one to the other when she was stopped by a girl of her own age, in
the ugly gray and red uniform and beautiful white coif of English
nurses. The girl said:
“Défendu!” She spoke with a queer accent.
Madeleine had a flash of inspiration:
“I am looking for my fiancé, a French soldier,” she said in English. The
girl’s eyes melted.
“I’m so sorry, there are no French here, all gone!” She called an
orderly to “show the lady out!”
Madeleine tried to question him, but all she got was: “Straight down the
cinder track you’ll find the road!” and “Now then, mum, get on, ’ow the
’ell am I to evacuate these bloody blessays with you in the gangway.
’Tisn’t decent, besides!”
She made a détour and tried once more, but only once. She pushed her way
into a tent behind some screens, and peeping over, saw a
sergeant-major, followed by bearers with a stretcher covered by a Union
Jack. They put it on the iron table, lifted the flag and began fetching
water, unbinding and washing the helpless thing. She slipped away behind
the screens unnoticed. She tried no more. She did not connect the dead
body with Georges. She could not imagine him dead. But it was unlucky.
Deep down some superstition was touched.
* * * *
She rejoined her father, and they caught a train that got back to
Hazebrouck at four. Suddenly she wished to be alone, felt a necessity
for a moment to gather herself for the next stroke, as it were. Her
father had not said a word since the hospital, but she wanted him to go
away. She sat in the salle d’attente and sent him for the horse and gig.
She stared in front of her at the gathering shadows, between the
sand-bagged windows. She heard the feet of the old horse, the rattle of
the gig-wheels. Then suddenly her father appeared with Lieutenant Skene.
She had not thought of him, but she thought fast enough now. Quickly,
using the word “fiancé” for Georges, she explained her plight. He was
the same well-brought-up, handy, decorous young officer. In a moment he
had broken into the Railway Transport Office, pushed aside the corporal,
possessed himself of the telephone and was trying to get something
definite from the hospital as to Georges’ destination after leaving the
place. He came back disappointed; they could not trace the name.
Meantime, the fighting half of her spirit had got its breath, and
cutting short his apologies, she went rapidly on to the next thing.
Could he get her a lift in a car or lorry to the English base to which
alone, so he said, casualties passing through English clearing-stations
would go? In a moment she saw her mistake, she had asked too much, had
run across some inexplicable—to her, unreasonable, prejudice in the
young officer’s mind. She knew well enough that it was forbidden for
civilians to travel in British vehicles, but had counted hastily on his
position as an officer and her powers of persuasion. He began to use
commonplaces, to inquire how she was getting on with the troops at the
farm. Briefly, tartly, she replied she must be getting home, and rose to
go. She did not bother about the look of concern on his face, but
turning to say good-bye from the gig, as it got slowly in motion, she
reflected that it was foolish to throw away possible friends and their
help, and called to him, “Come and see us soon.” He made a gesture and
she accepted the fact that he was rather taken with her. He would be.
Driving home in the twilight, however, she had only one thought—rather
one feeling. This war had dealt her a blow. She admitted that, on the
day’s doings, she was worsted. Was she going to give in? Not she! Silent
beside her father, up the road between the silent fields, one process
only was going on in her. A hardening, a storing-up of strength. Done?
She was only just beginning!
* * * *
She had plenty of time for reflection as the winter wore on. Madame la
Baronne did not send down to the farm for anything special enough to be
made a pretext for a visit to the château. Moreover, though she longed
to go and ask boldly what had happened to Georges, and was only
prevented by a sure knowledge of his resentment if she exposed herself
and him in that way, yet she was able to tell herself with confidence
that if the very worst had happened, it would have got known—would
have filtered out through the servants, through Masses announced in
church, through mourning worn by the Baron and Madame. But there were no
rumors, no horror-stricken whispers, no sign of black in Madame’s dress
or in what the Baron called his “sports” (indicating cloths of material
that meant to be Scotch tweed, color meant to be khaki, cut meant to be
that of an English gentleman out shooting—but which failed at all
points, as Frenchmen’s clothes so often do). So far, so good.
There existed in Madeleine, as in so many women of those days, the
queerest contradiction. Fearing daily and desperately the very
worst—death to their loved man—they never could believe in it
happening, often even when it did actually happen, as was usual in those
years. Relieved, respited at least from the major anxiety—for Georges
must be in hospital or depot somewhere, and out of the fighting,
Madeleine began to be a prey to a lesser—to know what had happened to
him? which led her curiosity to explore the unknown at least once a day.
* * * *
Meanwhile, the war that had dealt her that private blow was gentle with
her. The English kept on increasing. Seldom was the farm without its
happy-go-lucky khaki crowd, whose slang, mixed with Indian words learned
from old regular soldiers, and cheerful attempts at anglicized French
phrases, Madeleine learned and used, as she learned the decorous
politeness of the older officers, the shy good humor of the younger
ones. Many a good sum did Blanquart pay her for billeting, many a neat
bill did she receipt for anxious Mess Presidents. It was a queer
education for a girl of her sort. At the convent school she had
committed to memory certain facts about England and its people, not
because they interested her, but because she soon discovered that it was
easier to do lessons than to be punished for not doing them, and because
her scheming mind knew by practice, if not by theory, that knowledge is
power. And now she was having an object-lesson in very deed.
All the communes lying close to the line, whose population had been
decimated by general mobilization, were being re-peopled by
English-speaking men and women, in billets and horselines, rest-camp and
hospitals, aerodromes and manœuver grounds. Night after night she heard
the winter darkness atremble with traffic on the road, and learned to
know it as the sound of “caterpillars” (which she took to be the name of
some new kind of road engine, and was not wrong) bringing up guns and
yet more guns. This was interesting, comforting, profitable, there were
no dull hours, no sense of danger, and plenty of money to be made. But
it had an indirect effect which Madeleine saw clearly enough, if she did
not trace the connection very closely. The more ships were torpedoed by
German submarines, the fewer ships there were. The more English there
were, the more ships were wanted. Therefore the still fewer ships to
import foodstuffs. Therefore appeals from deputies, maires, publicists,
parliamentarians of all sorts, praising, cajoling, inciting the “honest
peasants” to grow more and more food. The greater waxed the importance
of the question, the more the endless bargaining and speculating to
which she and her father, instinctively prone, needed little
encouragement.
Jerome Vanderlynden and all his sort—all backed up by wives and
daughters more or less like Madeleine—hung on to their produce for
better and better prices. Subsidies had to be granted, taxes eased,
bounties promised, facilities given. Then they would go on and grow
some more—and then hang out again for greater and greater benefits.
Beet, haricots, potatoes, wheat, barley, oats, all served their turn.
Flax doubled in price, and doubled again. Hops were worth their weight
in gold. Chicory had to be the object of special legislation. The
farmers learned slowly, but surely. There was no brisk, open “business
as usual” propaganda—and no need for it. The dour old men, and quiet,
careful women and girls, were not likely to miss the opportunity. The
atmosphere was right. If death and disaster come to-morrow—“gather ye
rosebuds while ye may.” Gathering rosy thousand-franc notes is even
better. And who would blame an old man with one son dead and one a
prisoner, with his barn full of English soldiers who smoked pipes and
set lighted candles among the straw as they wrote home, not to mention
the ever-present possibility of shells—like all the farms Armentières
way—or bombs—like all those toward St. Omer.
* * * *
As a side issue, the social position of the peasant farmer began to
improve. He had been accustomed to brief spells of flattery at election
times—not to the wave of adulation that now engulfed him. He began to
look the whole world in the face, and fear not any man. But many a man
began, if not to fear him, at least to seek his good offices. Besides
all the politicians, the contractors, the endless train of semi-public
opportunists the War had created, the easy-going world of retired
middle-aged people that are to be found in every French Department,
suddenly discovered that the only way to remain easy-going was to get
the farmer to befriend them. Everything from coals to chicken meal, from
bread to cotton was being rationed. That facile plenty which is the
basis of the French provincial middle class was threatened. Thus, as
1916 advanced, and the long sordid epic of Verdun began to string out
its desperate incidents, the Baron Louis d’Archeville, walking round his
shooting with the air of a child gazing at a birthday cake it has been
forbidden to touch, bowler hat, “sports,” camp-stool, all complete,
stumped over the pavement of the yard, and found Madeleine putting her
week’s washing through the portable wringer.
Having it in his mind to ask for wooden logs, eggs, ham, and anthracite,
he naturally began:
“Ah, good day, Madeleine, pretty as ever!”
“Good day, Monsieur le Baron.”
“And this brave Jerome, he goes well? A glass of beer? I shall not say
no!” He sat down on a wheelbarrow and waited for her to call her father.
Old Jerome came at Madeleine’s cry of “Papa, kom ben t’haus!” from
picking over his seed potatoes.
Madeleine, who wanted the men out of the way, let it pass for politeness
that she took the carafe of beer and two hastily washed glasses into the
kitchen, swabbed the table and invited the Baron to place himself. She
went back to her wringer, leaving the door into the scullery open. One
never knew. She had kept her secret in her heart ever since her visit to
the English hospital. She had no news, and had been able to think of no
new way of getting even with the War, but she had forgotten nothing,
forgiven nothing, renounced nothing.
Old Jerome, who, even a year before, would have stood in the Baron’s
presence until told to be seated, now sat down beside his landlord
without apology.
The Baron did not remark on this, but said: “Then, you have your farm
all full of English?”
“They do damage enormously.”
“Very likely, but you have the right to be paid!”
“They pay, but they do damage all the same.”
Old Jerome was not going to let go a possible advantage.
The Baron, whose feelings against the English had been cool from 1870
until Fashoda, then violent until the idea of the Entente and its
meaning had filtered into his unreceptive mind, had just been reading
propagandist literature, “The English Effort,” and so forth, designed
for just such as he. Expanding with the new ideas he had received, he
reviewed the situation at some length, dwelling on England’s immense
resources of material, untouched reserves of men, all that cheerful
unknown which was so comforting in face of unpleasant known facts of the
growing wastage of France.
Jerome added one remark born of the unaccustomed way money was now
handed about. “Besides, they are rich!” which led the Baron on again,
along the path pointed out by yet another pamphlet he had been reading,
on the subject of the new war loan.
Much of the verbiage and all the argument was lost on old Jerome. He was
thinking of his sons and poured out another glass for himself and the
Baron. “It’s a grievous business, this war,” he sighed. “You must feel
that as much as I.”
The Baron did not miss the allusion, blinked a moment, for what is one
to say to a man who has two sons, one of whom is dead and forever gone,
and the other a prisoner, with uncertain prospects. He concluded that
the most comforting thing was to talk of his own son. Besides, he
preferred to.
“At last we have news of Georges. He has written to us, you will never
divine from whence!”
He waited a moment, but old Jerome was not good at guessing. In the
scullery the wringer was no longer creaking as it turned, and the
splashing of water and the soft flop of the clothes into the tin pail
had ceased.
“He has written from Monte Carlo. It seems that the army surgeons found
he was making himself a bad chest, and sent him to the south for
convalescence. He is being marked inapt for service, but he still wishes
to do his part, and they will put him in this French Mission with the
English Army as Officer-Interpreter. One day or another, we may see him
here, if he is attached to a division that passes this way.”
In the scullery Madeleine was standing over the wringer, allowing
herself to smile ever so little. Within her breast her blood was dancing
to the tune “I knew it, I knew it!” Now, that terribly serious Georges
of the day of mobilization that she did not understand and for whom she
could do nothing would be changed back to the gay Georges (Monte Carlo,
she had heard him speak of it, could see and hear him doing so now) that
she did understand, and who would want her. The Baron was talking of
other things now, of how the French would take it easy, and how the
English would come in and finish the War. It was quite their turn. One
had made sufficient sacrifices. Could Jerome let him have—this, that,
and the other? She paid little heed. Her father bargained a bit, then
acquiesced. She thought it fitting, when the Baron rose to go, to come
to the door of the kitchen and say:
“Au revoir, Monsieur le Baron.”
“Au revoir, Madeleine, remain young and pretty, it is all one asks of
you!”
* * * *
She on her side asked little. She would get Georges back. She was sure
now. The days might pass, nothing happen, no news come, but she was
sure, sure as though he had written giving the date of his arrival.
Spring came—never more beautiful than in Flanders, where beauty can
only exist on a basis of utility. It came shyly, a northern spring. The
sodden grayness of the marshland winter on flat hedgeless fields gave
way to cold and fitful sunshine that shone on rich young green
everywhere, while the black dripping leaves of the elms in the dank
pastures seemed blurred in vapor, that, upon examination, proved to be
but a profusion of tiny light-colored buds. And then something happened.
It began happening so far away and so high up among the principalities
and powers of this world that it was weeks before Madeleine felt its
effects.
As the horrors of Verdun dragged on, the wastage that was obvious to so
mediocre an observer as the Baron began to be acutely felt at the more
sensitive Great Head-quarters. So much so that Great Head-quarters of
France insisted to British Great Head-quarters that something must be
done. British Great Head-quarters, well groomed, well mannered, had a
long way then still to go before it should shake off its slightly
patronizing attitude towards its ally. It merely said that something
should be done when it was ready. Great Head-quarters of France,
doubting when that time would come to a people who had to be so well
groomed and well mannered, insisted still harder. British Great
Head-quarters replied good-humoredly, “Oh, very well then!” It became
known that there was to be a British offensive in the Somme. Gigantic
rearrangements were necessary, and among the million schemes, orders and
moves, was the establishment of Corp Head-quarters at Hondebecq. This
necessitated a lot of room, and the mere fighting troops had to be
pushed farther out. Thus Madeleine, one fine morning early in March,
only just saved herself from dropping a saucepan of boiling soup. An
officer-interpreter, in the uniform of the French Mission, had ridden
into the yard. She knew the uniform well, had seen many such a one, but
since the Baron’s last visit it meant to her only one person. Her
emotion, kept well under, was gone in a flash. She saw directly, as the
officer dismounted, it was not Georges. He came from the new Corps
Head-quarters to say that no more infantry would be billeted at the
farm. Instead, she would be expected to house the Corps Salvage Officer.
Madeleine knew little and cared less as to what this might mean, except
as it affected the work of the farm. She waited, and in a few days an
elderly gentleman appeared who had the tall angular figure, whiskers,
and prominent teeth of French caricatures of English people of the
nineteenth century. With him came a gig, a motor-car, three riding
horses, servant, groom, chauffeur and sundry dogs. He surveyed the room
offered him coolly enough, had some alterations made in the position of
bed and washstand, but warmed in his manner at once when he discovered,
in the course of a few hours, that Madeleine could speak really
resourceful if slangy English, and understood about his cold bath. He
had had such difficulty, he told her, and the French were so dirty.
Madeleine smiled (for he had passed her estimate for accommodation and
cooking without a murmur) and took him under her wing. There was
something about him that she dimly associated with what her father might
have been, in totally different circumstances—a mixture of helplessness
and partiality to herself. She mended his bed-socks and filled his
india-rubber hot-water bottle almost with affection. He on his side
would often say words which she took for endearment, in what he
conceived to be French—was less trouble than the ever-changing
battalion messes, and paid, in the long run, nearly as much. She was
glad to have the barns freed from everlasting fear of fire, and to get
them empty before the summer. The space which the Salvage required she
had Blanquart measure up, and charged at the rate laid down in the
billeting regulations. It came to nearly as much as housing infantry.
* * * *
This old gentleman, by name Sir Montague Fryern, and his “salvage dump”
were merely concrete evidence which slowly revealed to Madeleine what
was going on. The idea of “salvage” had been imposed upon English
fighting formations unwillingly, from somewhere high up and far off,
some semi-political Olympus near Whitehall. Divisional and Corps Staffs
knew better than to resist. They thought it silly and superfluous—the
war was trouble enough, and already much too long and dangerous for the
average regular soldier, without having to economize material as well.
But, wise with eighteen months of such a war as they had never dreamed
of, and hoped never to see again, they had found out that the way to
deal with these mad ideas invented by people at home, was to acquiesce,
and then to side-track them. So when pressed for the third time for
reasons why they had not appointed a Salvage officer, the Corps Staff
now functioning at Hondebecq looked at one another, and some one said
jokingly, “Let’s make old Fryern do the job!”
The baronet had been almost a national joke. In 1914 dapper old
gentlemen in London clubs had said:
“Heard about old Fryern?”
“No!”
“He’s joined up as a private in the R.A.M.C.”
Some one said it was to avoid commanding a battalion, some that it was
to escape scandal or a writ, others that it was merely “just like old
Fryern!” In the course of a year he had become notorious for prolonging
officers’ convalescence with illicit drink, and the King, it was said,
had insisted on his taking a commission. Too eccentric to be put in a
responsible position, and insisting on not remaining in England, he had
drifted about Divisional, and then Corps Head-quarters until this
heaven-sent opportunity housed him in a suitable nook. A man of
unexpected resource, no sooner had he understood what was required of
him than he began to gather at the Spanish Farm the most miscellaneous
collection of objects ever seen together since Rabelais compiled his
immortal lists of omnium gatherum. A field-gun, a motor-car, other
people’s servants, several animals, French school books, Bosch
pamphlets, sewing machines, plows and tinned food; nothing came amiss to
him. What good he did, no one could say. Little of the stuff was
reissued and served the purpose of economy, but when Dignitaries from
British Great Head-quarters came down to see Corps Head-quarters and
said to its old friends: “I say, Charles, you were awfully slack about
the Salvage Order, you know!” the old friends were able to answer:
“Well, we aren’t now; you come and see old Fryern’s dump after
lunch—say about three!”
“What, old ‘Chops’ Fryern?”
“No other, I assure you!” and so on.
* * * *
It happened, only a week or so after Sir Montague’s arrival at the farm,
that a lorry stopped in the yard. There was nothing unusual in that.
They did so at all hours of the day and most of the night. The English,
so wits said, fought on rubber tyres. Old Jerome, leaning on his hoe,
type of primitive man drudging with his primitive implement to wring a
subsistence from inscrutable Nature, often stood to watch these
powerful, docile servants of a younger age, that could do the work of
ten men and four horses in half an hour. He was doing so now, and
Madeleine, if she thought about it at all, thought like this: “Poor old
father, he’s making old bones; it’s the boys he misses,” when she saw
Jerome drop his hoe and run to the lorry to help out a woman with a
shawl over her head.
In another moment Madeleine had no doubt. It was her sister Marie from
Laventie. In a moment she was out. The men on the lorry, with the queer,
dumb, unexpected kindliness of the poorer Englishman, were handing down
Emilienne, Marie’s little girl, in a sort of frozen stupor of cold and
fright. Madeleine ran to take the child, while her father helped Marie,
who seemed dazed, into the house. Round the kitchen stove, quickly
stoked until the top shone red, Madeleine plied them with the inevitable
coffee, and presently with slabs of staunch farm bread.
Jerome stood by, the mere helpless male in the face of calamity. It was
he who said first:
“What is it, my girl?”
At first Marie could only say, “O, my God!” and rock herself. But
presently, reviving under the influence of food and drink, and the still
more potent surroundings of safety in that familiar, warm old kitchen,
where she had grown up, began to tell of the daily increase in shelling
and bombing. In her half-empty farm-house, with the glass long gone from
its shuttered windows, and the machine-gun bullets in its walls, relics
of the first engagement with the Germans in 1914, she had billeted some
English Engineers. The sector had been quiet ever since Neuve Chapelle,
a year before. Suddenly, as the English sat with her around the fire,
the shell had come. It had fallen in the doorway of the farm and had
flung half the house upon the soldiers. Marie, protected by the solid
brick chimney-piece, as soon as she got her breath, had scrambled under
the débris to the room where Emilienne was crying to her. The door was
jammed by a fallen beam. Some soldiers had run from a neighboring
billet, had broken in the door and got the child out. How they had all
tramped up the road, shells ahead, shells behind, shells falling each
side, with the sky red and the air rocking with the English artillery
retaliation, she could not tell. At last, at a dump of some sort the
Engineers had put her on a lorry that had taken her to Strazeele.
Farther than that they could not go; it was the limit of their Corps
area. Marie and Madeleine had been educated by the past eighteen months,
and knew better than to expect a lorry to go outside its Corps area. So
Marie had had to walk, with the child in her arms, to Caestre, where she
had found, thank God! plenty of lorries running back from railhead. On
hearing her tale, an officer had allowed her to get into one that was
going to Hondebecq, and she had easily persuaded the driver to go as far
as Spanish Farm.
At this point there was a tap on the door, which was opened by a
khaki-clad figure, with a sheepish face and unmistakable Cockney accent.
“Beg parding, mum, but ’ows yer little gal?”
“Give them something to take, they had been so——” she used the
untranslatable word “gentil,” for which “decent” is perhaps the nearest
equivalent. But Marie meant what the word perhaps originally
meant—human as against inhuman, civilized as against barbarous.
Madeleine took out mugs of coffee and rum, and was rewarded by a
cheerful, “Thank ye, kindly, miss, and here’s the very best!”
Madeleine came back, stepping softly. Emilienne had sunk into a deep,
heavy sleep, interrupted by twitching and muttering, in the chimney
corner. Giving her a glance, Madeleine clasped her hands.
“O Marie, all your things! The brass bedstead, the beer glasses, the
clock!”
Marie shook her head, tears ran down her face.
Above her, old Jerome, caring little for women’s fallals, muttered:
“Thank God, the little one was spared!”
Like all other incidents of the War, there it was. Shells fell,
something was destroyed. One went on as well as one could. That was the
history of the past eighteen months, was to be the history of another
two years and a half—just a perpetual narrow margin of human survival
over all the disasters humanity could bring upon itself. Not that the
Vanderlyndens took the large impersonal view. Marie and Emilienne slept
most of that day. The next, they started in to work, in their varying
capacities. The first thing Marie did was to spend a day, bribing lorry
drivers and cajoling officers, to get back to Laventie and see what was
left. The beetroot had been sold, the potatoes had gone with the horse
and cart to Aunt Delobeau’s near Bailleul, because for some time Marie
had been unable to keep a man on the farm, and had worked it with such
village women as had been stranded like herself by general mobilization,
the Government being only too glad to leave them there, to cultivate
almost under machine-gun fire, as long as they would. But since the
fatal night, the gendarmerie had become nervous of the place, though the
actual shelling had ceased. They would not allow her to sow the ground,
and were moving the powers that watch over France to obtain an order of
general evacuation of the commune, which they no longer desired to
patrol. With difficulty she obtained permission to fetch away the seed
and one or two agricultural implements. The dwelling-house had burnt
out, for the split stove had flung its flaming coals on thatch and
beams. She was spared the spectacle of inevitable looting by Allies, and
on returning to the Spanish Farm, settled down into the position she had
left, in 1910, to be married.
Outwardly, Madeleine acquiesced. Marie was the elder sister—eldest
child, in fact—and had all the prestige of a married woman. She was
also more purely peasant than Madeleine and easily jealous of her
rights. Madeleine, since she had had Georges, had ceased to envy her
sister. Now, losing Georges, she lost her secret comfort, and any
satisfaction she may have drawn from being mistress of the house, brains
of the farm. But Madeleine by long brooding on her secret fixed
idea—Georges—had come to that point at which she accepted these
outward superficial happenings, estimating their importance solely by
the standard of that Fixed Idea. At first she was unable to see how the
advent of Marie and Emilienne affected her reconquest of Georges.
* * * *
She was soon to learn.
Marie, for a few days preoccupied with herself, startled by what had
happened, and rather grateful for home and shelter, soon emerged from
that numbed state which, medically the result of concussion, is one of
the first universal symptoms of shell-shock. She began to be masterful
and critical of Madeleine’s former management. She had run two messes
for the Engineers in her small Lys valley house, with far less scope
than the Spanish Farm afforded. Madeleine pointed out that she had done
all that, and would have continued but for movements of troops over
which she had no control. Marie agreed, sighing for the busy days when
she had cooked and done for three officers, and scores of hungry men,
just out or just going into the trenches, to whom Emilienne had sold
chocolate, cigarettes, writing paper and candles to great advantage.
Perhaps also she was jealous of Madeleine, of the younger girl’s smarter
looks, less peasant-like and matronly than her own, of her untouched
good luck during the long anxiety of the war, for, like all the world,
Marie knew nothing of the secret about Georges. But things kept
happening. Presently the right thing happened.
Podevin, who kept the “Lion of Flanders” inn, on the Grand’ Place of
Hondebecq, gave up. He had made money, of course, especially latterly
since the Corps Head-quarters had been in the village, and had enabled
him to open a dining-room for officers. But, like so many, he had lost
his only son at Verdun, and, heartbroken, cared no longer even to amass
wealth. The long, biscuit-colored house, with its two storeys and old
steep-tiled roof was for sale. Marie saw the notice and told Madeleine
at once:
“There’s your chance!”
Madeleine took her habitual half-minute of reflection, trying this new
idea against her Fixed Idea. They suited marvellously. Why had she not
thought of it before? (The true answer was that she was not sufficiently
imaginative.) She saw now that in taking the “Lion of Flanders” she
would be placing herself exactly where Georges must come if his division
were moved this way, which was sure to happen sooner or later. And the
whole thing was so natural that he would never be able to make her the
one reproach she feared so much—of running after him and making their
liaison obvious.
The two women went to see Podevin together, before they told old Jerome.
Podevin could only say, “I’ve lost my son—let me alone!”
They fetched in Blanquart, as was usual in such cases. The grizzled
schoolmaster arranged it. Madeleine pretended to be shocked at the
price, standing in Blanquart’s little parlor, with the sound of the
school classes grinding out the morning lesson like some gigantic
gramophone gone mad, just through the wall. But secretly she nudged
Marie. The worst was over. The price named was well within what she kept
about her in the house in notes. She would not have to draw on the
savings bank at Hazebrouck. That made all the difference in tackling
her father. But when the two daughters broached the subject that
evening, he acquiesced. It would be a good business, he said. Madeleine,
who had never forgotten how he had, all unasked, fetched Lieutenant
Skene to help her on the day of the visit to the hospital, wondered how
much her father guessed of her secret. Something, surely. But it was
just the sort of subject on which neither of them could speak to each
other. So all she said was, “You know, you’re a good father!”
* * * *
The War, that had wounded her so deeply where she was most vulnerable,
was kind to her in little things. No sooner was she installed in the
“Lion of Flanders,” and had got together some three or four village
women who had young families or other domestic ties that had made them
anxious to get any work they could within a hundred yards of their
doors, while forbidding them to go out for the day to the farms that
needed them, than Corps Head-quarters arranged a Horse Show, a form of
amusement that became very fashionable in the B.E.F. as the years went
on. Officially, it was inaugurated to keep drivers and orderlies up to
their work. Subconsciously it indulged that national failing, love of
horses and open air, so curious in a town-bred nation. Madeleine, of
course, paid no more heed to this than she did to any other of the
curious foibles of those incomprehensible English, until she found that
most of the officers of three divisions would be in the village nearly
all day for this function, many of them ten miles from their own messes,
and glad enough to find a decent meal. She laid her plans and purchased
wisely and well. Then, only two days before the festival, Sir Montague
offered to take her to the show. She thought for half a minute, and
accepted, almost jubilantly.
* * * *
She was feeling the long strain, however much she concealed it with
silent composure. And, as with all women in her particular “irregular”
position, she had begun to hug the golden illusion that goes with it,
and makes it for some so possible to bear. She had lost Georges; he was
gone from her side, in spite of her, pulled away by something he held
dearer. He had not come back, not written. She could not, dare not if
she could, go or write to him. But she still believed, as all such women
do, “Oh, if I could only see him!” She still nourished that pathetic
faith, still believed that if only she could stand face to face with
him, things would be again as they had been. There was, however, that
terrible danger haunting the attempt to get face to face with him. He
might think or feel she was following him. That, she knew, would be
fatal. In Sir Montague, therefore, she saw a heaven-sent angel. Too old,
too cranky, too well known (as she had soon discovered) to be the object
of scandal regarding her, he would take her under his wing and she would
be at the Horse Show, to be seen. Georges, if he were there, would see
her. That was the safest. Once he saw her she had perfect confidence in
herself. She would know instinctively, would not look, not she. But she
would will it, and he would have to come. She recognized clearly enough
now, how simply, passively, unconsciously she had made their first hour
alone together, when she had given herself, in the shelter at the
Kruysabel. She had only to do it again. This also comforted her, for she
was not original. She accepted Sir Montague’s invitation graciously, and
took care to look her best on the day.
* * * *
The day came, and she was ready. Radiant with health, wishing to be
dressed in her own way, in a mixture of country primness and the
English style she secretly admired (coat and skirt and all-weather hat),
she had compromised at the skirt of her pigeon-gray saxony costume, a
cream-colored blouse that left her elbows and neck bare, with nothing on
her head but her own crisp dark hair. Thus adorned, she esteemed herself
as nearly a lady (i.e. a person who does no work) as she had any need to
be, while not too far removed from the mistress of the “Lion of
Flanders.”
Before Sir Montague came to fetch her, as she was perfecting her
arrangements at her restaurant, Lieutenant Skene appeared with a gunner
officer she did not like, who was obviously joking about her. She
greeted her friend kindly, in English, and ignored the other. She was
flattered to see that the lieutenant was evidently taking her part,
trying to make the other behave, looking very sheepish and funny as he
clumsily concealed his obvious feeling for her. They reserved a table
and went away. Sir Montague was punctual and she stepped up into the gig
with the ease of one who has always had to use her limbs. She was
elated. Men looked after her. The sun shone. In the queer gauche Flemish
springtime, buds and shoots hung stiffly in the still air like heraldic
emblems. A band was playing, people were moving about. Everything
whipped her excitement. They drove on to Verbaere’s big pasture, behind
the mill, and put the gig with the other vehicles, all parked and
stewarded as on an English race-course. Sir Montague had a way of
arching his elbow, twirling his whip, and fetching a great circle before
he brought his conveyance to a standstill that caused, she noticed, much
laughter, and the beginnings of a cheer.
He handed her into a rough enclosure, where English nurses in gray and
red and white coifs, Canadian nurses in blue and scarlet, Australian
sisters in gray-brown, fine big girls in their mannish hats, mixed with
a sprinkling of the wives of local maires and notaries, small French
officialdom and business circles. Some of these ignored Madeleine,
perhaps did not know her, but the brewer’s wife from the next village,
invited by the A.S.C. colonel billeted on her, gave a cheery “Good day,
Madeleine,” that would have put anyone at ease. But Madeleine was
already at her ease. She saw she was getting more attention than any
other woman on the ground. She had dressed just right, awakened none of
the submerged sensibilities of those queer English. That and a glance
at the lovely horses, shining, prancing, bobbing head and floating
tail—for she loved fine animals—was all she cared to notice before she
settled herself, eyes straight to the front, and put out all her feelers
for the one purpose for which she had come. Poor Madeleine, no one had
bothered to tell her that there were already over fifty English
divisions in France, and among the men before her she stood one chance
in seventeen of finding Georges. They passed about her, Easthamptons,
Lincolns, Norfolks, A.S.C., R.A.M.C., R.A.F., gunners, Engineers, French
Mission in blue and strawberry, wonderful staff people, in khaki and
leather so perfect that it outshone all the bright colors of the French.
She took it all in, tried to sort it out, mused over it, especially the
name “Lincoln,” which, like all French people, she was incapable of
pronouncing. She could form no idea of which group was the likeliest to
be Georges’, glanced over the face and figures of the French Mission
officers. More than any close examination, her instinct told her,
Georges was not there. A sort of numbness came over her, she felt it
almost like a physical sensation. It seemed to be in her legs. She
fought against it, would not give in to it. Then, all of a sudden, too
suddenly for her strong, resolute, unimaginative nature, she did give
in.
The corps officials had hardly begun judging the riding-horses when she
slipped from her place, round behind the stand, out between the
wagon-teams, waiting their turn, with cunning drivers of all arms
surreptitiously dabbing metal and leather with handkerchiefs, looking
stolidly over the exhibits they belonged to, speaking gently to them in
low voices. She found a well-known gap in the hedge and got through into
the back lane that ran towards Verbaere’s mill. Up this, picking her way
in the mud to save her best boots, she came into the village by the yard
of the “Lion of Flanders.” The numbness was gone from her legs. Instead,
her pulse beat in her temples so loud that she hardly heard the band
playing “Watch your Step,” and the cheering as the riding-horses,
classed by the judges, filed round the ring, and out.
* * * *
She let herself into the “Lion of Flanders” by the back door, which she
shut with a clang. She looked magnificent and just a bit desperate, so
that, of her waiting-women, one said to another, “She’s in fine fettle
this morning, our young patronne!” But she was not the woman to do the
more ordinary desperate things. No—yes. A stitch of her close-sewn
self-control had parted. She was not going to stand it. Her mental
attitude contained nothing of an English suffragette’s logical,
theoretical stand upon “rights.” Her pride was hurt. Georges was
Georges, dearer than life, but there now glimmered behind him something
dearer than that—her dignity, what was due to her—Herself, of course,
in reality.
She swept a glance round the neat, well-laid tables, sniffed the
redolent preparation of the kitchen. She—dragged about behind a man’s
shadow that ever eluded her! Of course, her feeling was incoherent,
ill-defined, just a sense of resentment against something she did not
trouble to identify, but it was there. Reckless, she went down the stone
steps into the cellar. Among the casks of weak beer and carefully
“lengthened” wine she had taken over from Podevin, was a bottle marked
“Chambertin,” which she recognized as an oversight. It was good stuff.
She had hidden it with the English Expeditionary Force canteen whisky
and the rum she had got out of Sir Montague. Now her thought was, “They
shan’t have it, those English!” She took it up, glanced at the coating
of the bottle neck, and mounted the stairs with it.
“Berthe,” she cried—she had borrowed the girl from the farm for the
day—“four glasses and some bread!”
Putting on her black alpaca apron, she pulled the cork, holding the
bottle steady with a firm wrist, and poured out. Raising her glass, she
said to them: “I give you that!” and drank amid a murmur of “Thank you,
Madeleine.” Outside the services of the Church, the only ceremonial she
had ever been taught to observe was connected with good wine. The
Chambertin lived up to her gesture, with its broad, almost coarse
flavor, a legend among the frugal Flemish at their rare feasts.
Outwardly, what she did was just a bit of unexpected generosity toward
four employees who could do with a heartening for the twelve hours’ hard
work that lay ahead of them, from which she intended to draw handsome
profit. Within her heart it was, unconsciously, perhaps, almost a
sacramental act, the opening of a new life. The blood in her was beating
out the time, “I won’t stand it any longer!”
* * * *
The square-footed beakers, of the sort which would be called “rummers”
in England, were empty, the substantial finger-pieces munched and
swallowed, before there came the sound of spurred boots on the cobbles
and the clients began to arrive. First two Canadian majors with the
Maire came to claim the table they had reserved, and found it kept for
them, the coarse napkins starched, the heavy cutlery and glass in place,
and Madeleine with her best smile and hardly a trace of accent asking:
“What would you like for lunch?” at which the Maire stared. Behind them
trooped others. The room was soon full, the glass windows clouded with
steam, the noise of conversation and table-ware deafening.
Imperturbable, Madeleine moved among it. The waiting may have been
amateur. The cooking was thorough in the solid Flemish fashion. At
least, no one was left staring at an empty plate or glass. Madeleine, a
smile for every one, and a glib English explanation for every
difficulty, used the mental arithmetic she had learnt at the market, in
calculating bills. Her clients went off with heightened color and
laughing voices, amid trails of tobacco smoke. Manfully, Madeleine and
her staff cleared the place, fed themselves and washed up. They had
only got the tables reset before that extraordinary meal “afternoon tea”
was demanded of them. Madeleine was equal to the occasion. It might be a
foolish custom, but it paid. And this merged into dinner, long and heavy
as is the Flemish custom. Younger officers, and especially those down
from the line, were getting boisterous, rude. She had to put up with
many a clumsy joke, many a suggestion. She was too busy and too utterly
unafraid to care. One thing did rather amuse her. At the table he had
reserved for his party, the Lieutenant Skene was following her with his
eyes and ears, and getting so cross at the treatment she was receiving.
At length, just as it was all becoming too boisterous, and the younger
officers were getting out of hand, suddenly, from the little private
room that had been reserved for Brigadier-General Devlin and his
friends, came the sound of a piano—the good piano she had got from the
château. Not musical, and unwilling to spend time over such trifles, she
was forced to stop and listen. It was Chopin, some one said. It had the
most extraordinary effect. General Devlin and the officer who had been
playing went away. The rest of the crowd in the big room went also, the
rowdiness gone from them, subdued, seduced from their daily selves by
the music. On Madeleine the effect was strongest. Wrought up by the
events of the day and by sheer fatigue (she had been on her feet twelve
hours), the lovely stuff, that could not act on her unreceptive spirit,
antipathetic to it, merely saddened her. After another laborious wash
up, she dismissed her helpers, locked the house and started for home. It
was past midnight, and the day that had been so fine left a dark windy
night, promising rain before morning. As she trod the pavé of the
grand’route and the earth of the farm road, she felt miserable and
beaten. It was easy enough to say, “I won’t stand it!” Like so many
other people, she found it so difficult to do. How not to stand and what
not to stand? Forget Georges? Could she? Would she if she could? Go and
find him, and thus make him forget her? Which?
* * * *
The corps did not have a horse show every day, but the one just passed
had been a good advertisement for the “Lion of Flanders,” and Madeleine
began to do a quiet, regular business in luncheons and teas for the
officers that incessantly circled round and about Corps Head-quarters.
To be busy soothed her feeling of helplessness, and the necessity for
this soothing kept her polite, skilful, attentive. Some weeks passed,
and then again, far away, and high up, undreamed of by her, things began
to happen.
The English offensive in the Somme, heralded as a great victory, had in
reality made infinitesimal gains at the cost of enormous loss. The
British Great Head-quarters, then still functioning in complete disunity
with Great Head-quarters of France, and often in good-humored disregard
of the advice given it, went on butting, like an obstinate ram, at the
same place. This, though it surprised the Germans more than the most
subtle strategy would have done, cost the lives of many a thousand
English soldiers. It was necessary to economize and economize again. The
reserve corps would have to disappear, the line northward be more
sparsely held. Here the long chain of action and reaction touched
Madeleine.
For two days she was feverishly busy, officers wanting meals at all
hours in great numbers. On the third morning, as she came down in the
blaze of July seven-o’clock weather, she found a long string of lorries,
grinding and jolting, behind them officers’ servants with led horses,
mess-carts, police. They went. A silence as of peace-time settled on
the remote Flemish village, lost in the undulating fertile plateau
between Dunkirk and Lille. Twenty kilometers eastward was the line, full
of troops. Twenty kilometers west were the great manœuver areas where
men learned to kill and not be killed more and more scientifically. At
Hondebecq, nothing. It took nearly a week to convince Madeleine, who was
interested in the more general aspects of the War. She was not really
convinced until the Baron walked into her empty dining-room.
“Good day, Madeleine, you have lost all your clients.”
Looking up from her knitting, she said gravely:
“It seems so!” But secretly she now believed it. If it were not true he
would not have come. He disliked the crowd of junior officers who joked
about his beard.
What was to be done? Not retain an empty restaurant where no one ever
came. She saw enough at home in the evenings to know that Marie was
firmly settled in, and didn’t want her. The situation was beyond her.
Her practical mind focussed on the immediate was baffled. But things
went on happening and once again the long arm of chance touched her.
It was about a fortnight after Hondebecq had been plunged in its
unnatural silence. She was going home in the long July twilight. She no
longer waited to serve late dinners, her only customers being occasional
passing troops during the day. No local people used the “Lion of
Flanders,” it was essentially an English restaurant. She was stopped at
the level-crossing by the evening train from Calais going southward. As
the smoke and noise faded away, she ran into Blanquart, the schoolmaster
and communal secretary, stumbling over the platform-edging, wiping his
eyes. The sight of that familiar figure in tears gave her pause.
“Why, Monsieur Blanquart, what is it?”
“It is my little Cécile!”
“What has she got, Cécile?”
Monsieur Blanquart blew his nose and said: “I ought not to complain. She
was a good girl. Naturally she has got a good job.”
“What job has she got? Where has she gone, then?”
“But to Amiens! You haven’t seen the discourse of M. Paul Deschanel on
the Recruitment of Women? It is hanging in the Mairie if that gives you
any pleasure.”
Madeleine, gray-eyed, her mouth a straight line, her hands crossed over
the little bag that contained the day’s takings, stared at him between
the eyes a full half-minute. Then she said:
“Ah, I sympathize with you. Good evening, Monsieur Blanquart.”
She went away thinking, and thought to some effect.
* * * *
First, a refugee Belgian family was installed in the derelict “Lion of
Flanders,” where they all lived in the dining-room round the stove,
boarded up the big windows, and got jobs in the village. Then Madeleine
was seen in earnest consultation with Blanquart. Finally it was known
that she had got a job in a Government office at Amiens, from which the
men had just been combed out.
“Tiens!” said the gossips. “Cécile Blanquart first, now Madeleine
Vanderlynden. Who next?”
The formalities took a week. Then Madeleine emerged with the papers of
her appointment in her hands. She went first to the “Lion of Flanders”
and told the refugee family in no equivocal terms, how, when and where
to pay their rent to Marie. Leaving them in a state of guttural
exclamation, half gratefulness, half apprehension, she turned for a
moment into the church, and stood by the high-backed prie-Dieu that bore
the initials V.D.—Vanderlynden-Del-place—staring at the gimcrack
ornaments of the altar, the eternal childish innocence of the Catholic
Church decoration. Old Justine Schact was fidgeting about her verger’s
duties. Birds scuffled in the belfry as the chimes played their verse
and a half of hymn tune that marked the quarter hour.
Madeleine’s lips, set by habit to utter a prayer in those surroundings,
formed something like this: “Saint Madeleine, out of your divine pity,
grant me that I may see him, then it will be all right!” Her lips ceased
to move. In her unbowed head, her steady eyes took on the gleam of
frosted marsh-pools. She squared her fine shoulders and clasped her
large, capable hands on the chair-back. She might have been an allegory
of indomitable Flanders. There was no mistaking the glance she bent on
the altar. It said, “Saint Madeleine, if you don’t....” But the threat
was never articulated. She turned and walked out, erect and sure-footed.
At the farm she told her father what time to put the horse in, and when
it came, appeared from her room, her canvas-covered wooden box locked
and corded. She made her adieu thus shortly:
“Good-bye, Marie, what luck you came. I can go with a tranquil heart.
Berthe will help you well. Good-by, Berthe. Good-by, Emilienne, I will
send you a pretty postcard!” To the old house in which she and her
father, and no one knows how many ancestors had been born, in which her
mother had died, not a look. Either it was too familiar, or simply did
not appeal to her. To the Kruysabel where she had known her brief hours
of bliss—not a look. She was going to something better. Or perhaps, in
her narrow personal way, she felt that these things were part of her,
and that, so far as they existed, they went with her.
At the station, standing beside her box as the train came in, she turned
with real affection to her father, probably the one being in the world
she thoroughly understood and sympathized with. But she only said, “Au
revoir, Father,” and he only replied, “Au revoir, my girl.” Then with a
hoist of strong arms and legs, she was into the train, after which the
old man stood a moment, staring. But she was already settling herself in
her place, taking stock of her neighbors, girding herself for her new
campaign.
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