“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.
MADELEINE went to Amiens, but it hardly describes what happened to say that she went by herself without other companions than chance fellow-travelers, for, in her, there entered the capital of Northern France more than a single Flemish girl. She took up with her, all about her, an atmosphere of the frontier, of staunch Flanders, of the Spanish Farm. Countrified she might be, certainly a stranger, but there was nothing callow or helpless about her. She showed that maturity that connoisseurs of wine mean when they speak of “body.” Generations, a whole race, living in one way, confronted century after century with much the same environments, had prepared that quality in her, which led no one to wonder at or pity her. Had there been any Society for the Protection of Young Girls at the station at Amiens, it would not have considered her a “case,” as she swung down on to the platform, produced her ticket and papers, and bargained with an old man with a barrow to take her box—a bargain she struck much to her advantage by shouldering the said box and starting to carry it herself.
The Amiens to which Madeleine went was the Amiens of mid-war—that is to say, a general manufacturing town of eighty thousand people, provincial, antiquated as such towns can be only in France—which town, plunged into European war, had seen the Germans march through its streets. It was now reserve railhead, camping-ground, last-civilized-spot for the avalanches of reinforcements the English were pouring into the line. Most of the French who fought beside them in that northern sector had to pass through it. Madeleine had not been able to calculate with any nicety how her move had increased her chances of meeting Georges, but she got as far as beginning to understand what the Baron had meant by the “English effort,” the immensity of that Volunteer Army, the constant watching and waiting that would be necessary to find Georges among the hundreds of French Mission officers that went with it. But like all vague steps, the one that she had taken was comforting because of its novelty, its unplumbed depths of possibility. Once cut adrift from home, and having suppressed a tiny shyness, rising in the throat, she flung herself into the new life with gusto. She was not wholly ignorant of towns, had been to Hazebrouck and St. Omer, to Dunkirk even, once, and was ready as any country-grown girl to fall under the spell of town life and strive desperately to look as if she had always lived it.
* * * *
Her job was in one of those Government Departments, whose staff, depleted by general mobilization, and further by repeated “combing-out,” hardly sufficed to keep going that multiplicity of printed forms by which France is governed. She wrote a good hand, having acquired that art at a convent school where it, at least, was not reckoned among the subversive sciences. Perhaps she dimly saw in the power to write and read one of the advantages that such as she possessed over the less lucky. Handwriting, at any rate, was no difficulty. Figures she handled with respect, almost with appetite. As the first newness of the life thawed and broke before her, she began to prepare herself to take the lead in the office, as she had taken it at the farm. By the time August was turning into September, she almost smiled as she took her week’s money. She would not have paid Berthe so much for doing such a job. Eight to twelve and two to six seemed to her a ridiculously light day. The heat of the town was sometimes oppressive, but the office, about the ill-kept state of which she grimaced to herself, was on the north side of one of those rococo barrack-like buildings that link the architecture of the chef-lieux of Northern France to that of Mediterranean civilization. That is, it had the dank chill of a tomb. She survived. As for the life in general, her iron health stood it well. She missed the air and exercise, but her diet was not full enough to allow her to fatten. She had been welcomed, of course, by Cécile Blanquart, and taken, not without a shade of kindly patronage, to lodge with the aunt who sheltered Cécile. The aunt was one of those widows of the small official class who seemed to have disappeared from England since Dickens. She was poorer, prouder, more impossibly ugly and mean than anything surviving to us. She would have housed Madeleine, had not each of her tiny rooms already contained two people at least. Clinging to any ha’pence that were to be had, she arranged that the new-comer should dine at the frugal common table she kept, and sleep a few streets away in the third-floor attic over the pork butcher’s. Madeleine appeared to her what is called in France “sérieuse.” To Madeleine, the arrangement appeared nothing short of heaven sent.
She had applied herself to her job. She had put out all her most feminine sensibilities to catch the right note in dress and looks, for she was nothing if not conventional. But in her heart she was simply passing the days and waiting her chance to find Georges. As she did her work, altered and supplemented her clothes, took little evening walks or visited the cinema with the other girls, to all appearance just a strapping country cousin fitting herself into new surroundings, she was, all the time, vigilant, relentless. She drew the others down to the station on the pretext of buying a paper at the hour the troop trains passed or stopped. She preferred for her small needs the shops that fronted the well-known officers’ restaurant, for Georges, she knew, would do himself well if he had the chance. As to what exactly she would say or do if she saw him she was not the girl to wonder. She had perfect faith in her illusion—just to see him face to face, anyhow, anywhere.
* * * *
Her companions with whom she worked, ate, and spent her evenings did not annoy her. That is as much as she felt about them. Although only a year or so her juniors, there was nothing about them to excite her jealousy or even her respect. As she listened to them, making little muddles over their jobs, giving way to small passions and routine indispositions, chattering with affected solemnity or secrecy of their opinions, hopes, fears—above all of their love affairs—she almost smiled. She put more of herself into even the purchase of hairpins than they did into their liaisons. Not that she was more generous or less acquisitive than they, but simply because there was more of her. She had known real work, hard bargains, the utter depth of passion—things undreamed of in their little world of petty officialdom and shop-assistantship. Even the country girls like Cécile stood mentally where she, Madeleine, had not done since her mother died. Probably her principal minor preoccupation (as distinct from her one great secret preoccupation) was the size of her body. She was half a head taller and much more substantial than most of them. She knew she was dressing herself right, somber colors, good material and cut, little or no ornament—but her hands and feet gave her some anxious moments, they seemed so big. She gave considerable attention to her hands, using every means she could hear of to whiten them, and manicuring them elaborately, bringing to the work much patience and sense and no imagination. For her feet, she simply bought the best she could afford, not attempting to pinch them, relying on her strong ankles, straight back, and developed hips to keep her extremities in proportion. She was right. Men turned to look at her often enough and never with the superior, amused eye that she saw bent on her companions. She did not consciously care whether men looked or not, but there was just that comfort in it that she could tell that she was interpreting this strange new world rightly. Had she but known, she possessed two of the greatest advantages over most of the women in those surroundings—radiant health, that brightened her glance, polished her skin, burnished her hair—and, in spite of her quiet clothes and steady eyes, an air of independence of which she was probably unconscious, but which was far more attractive than the air of facile complicity with male patronage that many girls wore. Like all advantages, these carried with them their own inconvenience, as she soon discovered.
* * * *
Among Aunt Blanquart’s lodgers were men, too weedy or too well protected to have been mobilized. They functioned on the railway, or some other public service, she did not care what, with colored brassards on their arms. She had paid no heed to them, secure in the fatal confidence of a strong nature, merely getting out of them anything they knew about the movements of troops, feigning the fatuous gossiping curiosity that was common enough. She was so immersed in her Fixed Idea that she was astonished when the more pimply of them slipped past Aunt Blanquart’s semi-official vigilance, as she was going home to her room, and following her, proposed, “Suppose we take a little walk, as the English say!”
Madeleine turned on him a freezing stare:
“What for?” she demanded, standing her ground.
The pimply-faced one faded back into the house, muttering excuses, only to confide in his friends later that Madeleine was a “rosse,” “an awkward beast,” as one should say.
Then again, when the skull-capped old gentleman who controlled her room went sick, the worried head of the department came across to Madeleine naturally with: “Give out the work to the room, while this old Do-nothing is away, will you?”
She did the distribution of the endless schedules, minutes and circulars deftly enough, and corrected the errors with a firm hand. It took far less thought than most of her days at the farm. When the “old Do-nothing” returned, skull-capped, pallid, smelling of lozenges, she met him with, “I have done” so and so, and “you will find this” there and that “under the paper weight!” etc., going quietly back to her desk. At night he lingered, and was left alone with her, because she was never in such a hurry as the others to crowd downstairs, squabble in the lobby over the inadequate space allowed for dressing oneself for the walk home. She turned and stared as he asked her to dine with him.
An idea—one of her rare, slowly born ideas—had come to being in her head. In her seriousness she hardly noticed that he had taken it for granted that she would go with him. But she almost smiled when he began to detail his little plan. She, who had known not merely trials of cunning with Belgian horse dealers and hop merchants, but desperate evasion and deceit to meet Georges in the Kruysabel, agreed to pretend to Aunt Blanquart that she had a headache, and to meet this old man at the corner of the street. Fortunately it was dark at the hour named—dark with that war-time darkness of a town within the bombing area. She had a difficulty to recognize him in the crowd—and a great temptation to help his shuffling steps. She felt a sort of charity towards him, an inclination to take his arm and help him—a feeling which increased as she saw what careful plans he had laid. He did not take her to a restaurant, where the unequal couple they made would certainly have been the object of more or less concealed amusement, but to the back sitting-room of an old servant of his, who was now caretaker at a big shop. It was discreet, cozy. The cooking was good, the dinner ample, chosen from the more easily digested dishes. She was so touched by his evident enjoyment—though she had her own quiet confidence in her desirability—and by his desire to give her a good time—and things had been rather thin since mobilization—that the only tyranny she practised on him was to make him send out for a bottle of Burgundy; the pale sweet wines he offered seemed to her below the occasion.
There was no awkwardness during the meal, for she asked prudent, calculated questions—who really moved, housed and regulated the flow of troops—did he know the numbers or composition of the English divisions—all the small details most Frenchwomen—utterly innocent of spying—asked eternally out of sheer curiosity and interferingness. And when they had done eating she had to put up with the demonstrations that men make, who have either not had their fill in middle life, or who have come to regard it as a necessity not to be foregone. She had found that he did possess information and perhaps connections that might be useful to her Fixed Idea, and tolerated his attempts to solace his waning instincts, until, hearing the hour chime, she shook herself free, put herself tidy, and left him to find his way home—only, because he might be useful and sounded disappointed, she murmured, “Another time,” at the door. Once in the street, she stepped briskly home, arrived at the door of her lodging about the usual hour of her return from Aunt Blanquart’s, and went up to bed. She was plotting and scheming busily and had already forgotten her entertainer as though he had never existed.
* * * *
Indeed, he might have saved himself that trouble. In that last week of September, just as she was beginning to feel no more strange as a government clerk in Amiens than she had felt as a farmer’s daughter in Hondebecq, there spread through the minor French circles the news of a further English offensive. From what source it came and how it took shape no one will ever know, but the perpetual hungry curiosity of the sort of people among whom Madeleine now lived, was suddenly glutted with the news that there was to be an offensive, and that the Prince of Wales was taking part. This set flame to the French imagination, among whose republican embers a royalist spark has ever glowed.
To Madeleine, whose restricted imagination conjured up some long defile of troops through the cobbled streets, led by a fair-haired English boy, the news seemed of great promise. Georges was certain to be there. She saw him, accurately enough, in the blue and strawberry of the French Mission, riding in the cavalcade. She got a day off—her old man was “complaisant,” as the French say, and she found herself with a whole day on her hands, an equinoctial day of chill drafts and paling sunshine, of fluttering leaves and a stir in the blood.
She had tried to get some idea as to when and where the troops would pass, but all that she could gather was that the English police had been doubled. This only endorsed her preconceived notion of a parade through the town. She rose in good time and dressed herself carefully—in somber colors, in coat and skirt, inclining rather to the English model, implacably neat, well-buttoned, without a spot of bright color or a trace of expression on her face. She went out and down to the station, bought a paper, lingered about, tried to feel what was going on. The streets were crowded, and as she was seldom about at this hour she drew comfort from the fact. It was of course the usual crowd of the nearest town behind the line of an offensive, men of all ranks going and coming on leave, base and line-of-communication people, young officers with a day off, grizzled officers’ servants sent in from the innumerable camps for shopping. There were English, of north country and south country, London and Liverpool, Welsh, Scotch, Irish, Channel Isles. There were Canadians talking Yankee, Anglo-Indians, in wonderful blouses with mailed shoulder-straps, tall gaunt Australians, fresh-faced New Zealanders, swarthy or tanned English South Americans, South Africans and Naval details. More than once she was stared at, twice spoken to, once followed. If the Prince of Wales did pass down that street, it was in one of those fleet Vauxhall cars, with red-capped staff officers. There was no cheering, no procession, nothing of the crude, out-of-date spectacle that would have delighted and encouraged her. By one o’clock she was desperately hungry and tired, and burning with a sort of spiritual fever.
She did not give up, however. Partly faithful, partly merely obstinate, she stuck to her furtive prowling, keeping ever closer to the well-known Restaurant “à la Paysanne Flamande.” She knew her Georges. A thousand accidents might take him into this or that street, by rail or car, on horseback or on foot, but, between noon and two o’clock, there was no possible error, Georges would be sitting before the best-laid table he could find, napkin tucked into his buttonhole, saying he had the hunger of a wolf, making caustic fun of the bill of fare, and standing no nonsense with the waiter. The celebrated restaurant, entirely a creation of the War, before which it had led a struggling existence dependent on a billiard-table and a mixed clientèle, presented a glass swing-door between two large plate-glass windows, protected by round iron tables and chairs set among desolate shrubs in boxes. The door opened into a little-used café-lounge; the eating-room had replaced the billiard-table on the raised portion of the floor up four steps at the back. Thus the public in the street could see the legs and half the bodies of the diners, but not their faces. Outside, a great sign-board, swung English-fashion on a bracket, depicted an alleged Flemish peasant-woman, in national costume, with international features, and the immemorial vulgarity of such efforts. Madeleine never even guessed that the square of brilliant paint was an allegorical representation of herself, and would have been much astonished to have been told so.
Two o’clock struck, and half-past, and suddenly she had a physical qualm. What was it? She realized she was faint with hunger. Together with the bodily emptiness and dizziness, there rose in her a bitter wave of disgust and disillusionment. For the second time she set her teeth. She would not stand it. Careless of the fact that she was doing what was only done by women of a sort she despised, because she considered they were driving a dangerous, badly paid trade, she pushed open the door, walked steadily into the café, and sat down just as the tables were beginning to go round. It was partly want of food, as she told herself, but partly, if she had admitted it, the moisture of desperate vexation in her eyes. She ordered a café crême of an unwilling waiter, who did not want French people there, in such a way that he brought it, at once, and properly done. The scalding sips soon revived her. She began to think, if thinking it can be called. Rather she just sat and felt. She felt the French equivalents of “I’m fed up with this”—“I’m going to put an end to it”—whatever It exactly was. Then less articulately she just felt sore. It was not in her to feel passively sore, but how to express her feeling by activity she could not see, at the moment.
* * * *
The souls of women come, perhaps rather more often than those of men, to steep places down which the least touch will cause them to hurl themselves. Madeleine had been hanging on some such edge ever since the day of the Horse Show. It needed but the stroke of a feather to send her over.
Her trance was broken by the sound of field-boots on the steps that led down from the dining-room. Two officers were passing to the door, middle-aged junior officers of infantry or artillery, with cleaned-up, discolored uniforms, and faces and voices of those who had been “through it,” and had a good deal more to go through before they would have done with “it”—“it” being the War. Madeleine had seen hundreds such, going up to the line, coming down from the line, sitting round her father’s table, taking charge of parties of men, with shy resolution. Little given to guessing, she could have told almost of what they were talking—of what they had done on leave, what sort of “show” they were going to be involved in, possibly of the very inn of the “Lion of Flanders” where they might have snatched a comfortable meal in the intervals of sleeping in their clothes and eating out of their hands. They passed beside her and she smiled involuntarily. Her long vigil had not been in vain. All the English divisions were bound to pass into the Somme offensive sooner or later, and there was nothing wonderful in her meeting two officers whom she had seen before. Nor was it because she was feeling the homesickness or the loneliness of the acutely sensitive. But just because the starvation of her Fixed Idea had wrought her up to a point culminating at that moment, she smiled.
The shorter, fairer of the two, whose mere name she remembered (for she had that sort of memory, very useful for checking billeting returns), recognized her and spoke to his companion. The other turned. It was Lieutenant Skene, whom she had not seen, or indeed thought of, since the Horse Show. He turned, and their glances met. She saw in a moment that it mattered intensely to both of them what she did, how or why she could not see, but she knew that it mattered. She kept perfectly still, her face molded in a smile. The door clicked. They were alone. Skene sat before her. What had she done? Nothing. By doing nothing she had placed him there.
He began questioning her: what was she doing in Amiens? and she replied briefly, not thinking of the words. She pushed aside her cup and rested one elbow on the table, her chin in her hand. She stared into his eyes, gray-brown, dilated by shell-fire, and reddened at the rims by gas, but full of feeling which she recognized at a glance as genuine. That feeling was concern for her welfare. She did not admit to herself, still less to him, that there was anything to be concerned about. But it warmed her in the depths of her heart, just as the liqueur he had ordered for her (with sweet cakes, and the way in which he did it showed his solicitude) warmed her stomach. It was true he was talking about himself. She knew in a moment that this was not egotism but English shyness. She answered him in a dream, rocking her body ever so slightly on her chair, as if she were nursing something. Indeed, she was—nursing some part of her spirit, bruised just as violently as her knees had been when the old horse fell down and threw her on to the pavé of the Lille road—for she had just been thrown out of her closed self-control, that hid unwelcome Truth even from herself, on to the bare realization of the long fast of two years, the sharp starvation of two months.
Now he was talking about her, with the polite candor which had made her say, the first time she saw him, that he was “well brought up” and “willing.” More, he was inquiring about Georges. She was not surprised; that was all part of it. She heard herself, as another person, replying coolly: “He is dead!” and when pressed further: “He is dead for me.” She could have laughed aloud at the same time, not for joy, but from the steady mounting beat of her own heart. His concern was trebled. Her heart beat faster, not feverishly, steadily. She had thought of her trouble: “I’ll put an end to this!” She was putting an end to it!
Then he actually touched her, and made sympathetic remarks. He was advising her not to frequent officers’ restaurants, and she replied she did not care. It was true. She cared for nothing at the moment, had never felt more light-hearted. He asked what she was going to do next. She wanted to laugh more than ever as she said, “Nothing!” He proposed a cinema. She assented delightedly, feeling as though she would have proposed it herself in a moment, it was so inevitable. She made a quick calculation. Cécile Blanquart and the other girls were at the office. Aunt Blanquart and the pork butcher’s wife, at whose house she lodged, would not be shopping in the main streets, rendered expensive by English custom. It was safe enough.
Out in the street she stepped beside him with a pride which, she suddenly realized, she had never known. There are inconveniences about clandestine liaisons. She almost enjoyed the publicity. Fortified by coffee, cakes and brandy, as tall as he was to an inch or so, she seemed to float along on the wings of new-found comfort, effortless, smiling.
The cinema was full. He was nonplussed, she could see, did not know what to do next—knew what he wanted (as she did, and hugged herself), but, being English, had a difficulty in saying it. He wanted her. That was natural enough. She knew herself to be desirable. It amused her to hear him proposing to see her home to her “Aunt’s”—for thus she had described her lodging. She let him. It seemed now she had only to go on letting him, and the riddle of life was solved. She had not known an hour before that there was a riddle. Now she only knew she was approaching a solution.
They arrived in the narrow by-street near the cathedral as the clocks chimed four. At that hour the place was deserted. Their footsteps echoed, they might have been treading a world of their own. Madeleine felt it, but noticed that he was feeling something stronger. He had almost shed his English reserve—was talking volubly, about himself—how he had been twice in hospital, and must now go back to the fighting—how men like himself wanted a little comfort before they died. He spoke in English, but she understood most of the words and all the drift. His feelings coincided with hers and saved her the trouble of expressing them, to which she was unused and averse. At the door of her lodging they both stopped, she with her key in the lock, he looking at her with eyes that he immediately averted, and which pivoted round, in spite of him, to her. As she turned the key and opened the door, she said, with the feeling of turning something in her heart and opening it: “Here we are!” Inevitably, as if she had taught him the words, he was saying: “Don’t send me away, let me stay!” and with a great sigh of happiness such as she had felt once before in her life—another life, surely—she retreated into the dark entry before him with: “Well then, my poor friend!”
* * * *
When Madeleine next had attention to spare for such matters, the chimes were telling six o’clock, and through the glass of the skylight-window a little star twinkled. She became conscious that he was slowly awakening from the stupor in which they had plunged each other, and was lying, open-eyed, waiting for her to move (just like him). Her mind sprang at once to the practical:
“What time is your train?”
“Gone this half-hour!”
She sat up in alarm: “You will have trouble!”
“They can’t tell to a few hours when I left camp!”
Reassured, she passed on to the next thing.
“You are hungry!”
“Yes!”
She was fully alive to the situation. The pork butcher’s wife downstairs had opened, like every one in Amiens who could manage it, an eating-room. The particular public for which it catered were English and French N.C.O.’s of garrison formations, not a field for high profit, but respectable and regular. There was a back room. It was better than courting trouble by going outside. She explained this to Skene as she sat up, shivered slightly at the contact of the air, lit the candle, and tidied herself. She was not ill at ease before him. Thorough in everything, when she gave she knew no stint. She did not boggle over the irregularity of their situation, any more than over her semi-nudity. Why should she? She had perfect confidence in what she had done, just as in her things, which were clean and good in quality, and in her body, which was firm and fresh with health. Of course, out in the street the conventions constrained one to dissemble, to conceal what one did, and only to show as much of one’s skin as fashion allowed for the moment. But with Skene she was as frank as she had been with herself, poured him out clean water, and explained that with a small gratuity and a generous order, Madame would make no scruple of their having the best time they could. There were the French police to bribe, possibly, and worse still, the English, but it could be managed.
She was proud of Skene when they interviewed Madame. He spoke French with some fluency, and knew just how to flatter the old lady’s sensibility and appeal to her greed. When they sat opposite each other in the little back room, he turned on her eyes still bemused, and looked at his watch with frank pleasure: “No train till six-thirty. Still nearly twelve hours!” he said. Under the table she rubbed his ankle with her slippered foot. Their little dinner ended, as, alas! all dinners must. The pork butcher’s wife, overpaid and adroitly flattered, rallied them, almost blessed them, as, his arm round her waist, her arm round his neck, they mounted slowly the dark, narrow stairs.
Hardly a breath of disillusionment spoiled their few hours together. He took what life could give him—life that was likely to end for him so soon and so abruptly. She, woman-like, put into it something almost sacramental, as though she were devoting to flames some cherished possession, and devoting it willingly. There was nothing Skene could not have asked her for that she would not have given him, from money to her heart’s blood. He asked simply to be loved—comforted, more exactly, in his starved, war-worn body. That was easy. She gloried in it, even went so far outside her usual self as to point out the bare cleanliness and order of her little room. That was just about the length of her knowledge of English character. A clean room would appeal to him. She never even stopped to wonder that she should be so anxious to please this chance acquaintance—this man of different race, religion, and language. She had never read a novel and was innocent of the romantic theories of love at first sight. She acted as she did from one of her slow-moving, undemonstrative impulses—just then so strong that it amounted to a feeling of almost physical well-being in her limbs—traceable, possibly, if she had been the sort to theorize about origins of feeling, to starved maternal instinct. She missed something—petulance, perversity—the whims of a spoiled child that she would have loved to gratify, as she had, long before, in the secrecy of the hut in the Kruysabel. But she did not miss her spoiled child much, for she had instead this good child—this man of quiet good manners, whose behavior she had noted the first time she saw him, and who now accepted her suggestions without a murmur. So she invited him gently to see how she had moved the few articles of furniture, scrubbed the floor, cleaned the skylight, pasted paper on the damp-stained walls, hung her few dresses on hooks beneath a curtain, and put a rose-colored paper shade round her candle. She was gratified to see how pleased he was, little suspected that she had laid her finger on the very deepest desire in him. He had told her that he was no soldier, but a member of a profession that he had practised for twenty years before volunteering in August, 1914. Yet she was very far from forming any conception of the decent orderliness of the life he had left, the life of an assistant diocesan architect in a provincial English town, with its rooted habit of cleanly comfort and moderate happiness, that the war had hurt so horribly; and she never guessed what dim echoes her own Flemish domestic virtues aroused, of all he had ever felt to be the necessities of existence.
She was even farther away from him when his self-consciousness, awakening with the small hours, drew him to think of the future—of his and of hers. Like many another man in those years, his courage ebbed at the false dawn, and he questioned Fate aloud as to whether he would see another—whether he would ever again know the comfort of her. The simple cunning of her kind led her to propose arrangements to meet him again. This in turn led to the question of where she was to be found. This drew from him anxious questions, that flattered her immensely by the importance he attached to her welfare, but brought back unpleasantly into prominence that other whom she was trying so hard, so unconsciously, to forget. She burst out with a few fierce words, stamping and stamping on that dead image of love to make it disappear from view. It was when she did this, brutally dismissing from memory that spoiled child of her affections, that her new, good, well-behaved child gave her the first taste of his imperfections. He was solicitous, punctilious to a degree, questioned if he ought to take what was Georges’. She would have been angry with him in another moment had not a stronger, surer, more positive instinct prevailed. They had such a little time, might never have another. She wound her bare arms round his head and stifled his questions and doubts against the present reality of her tangible self. And surely she was right. In all those years of loss and waste it occurred to her naturally to build and replace what she could, and all the love and care she could not give to the children she might not bear, she gave to this grown-up child, who needed it, and took it willingly enough, once he ceased to think.
* * * *
In the gray dawn she was up and about, making coffee, heating water for him to shave, helping clean his endless buckles and straps. She let him out in good time for his train, and sweetened her kiss with the eternal hopefulness of that “à bientôt,” “until soon,” that is the happiest thing in French farewells. Then slowly, carefully, she made herself ready for the day at the office, proud of the dark touches under her eyes, of the mat-pallor of her skin, of the little smiles that curled the corners of her mouth. And many a man, seeing her, wished he had been the source of the deep secret satisfaction she seemed to give herself that day.
All that week she retained the feeling of having done a good action—or, as she would have expressed it, had she expressed it at all—driven a good bargain with Fate. At the end of the week “Papa,” as the girls in the office called the head of the room, waited for her and asked her to spend the Sunday afternoon with him. It was his birthday, and he and she would celebrate it with a little Festivity. She did not look at him for fear she should laugh, for, taller than he by inches, she caught the sparkle of the electric light reflected on the top of his bald head. She asked, with averted face, “Will there be many invitations!”
“But no—you and I alone, naturally!”
She shook her head slowly from side to side as she hooked her fur under her chin and surveyed herself in the little glass that hung on the door of the girl’s lobby.
“But you promised last time that there should be other times——” His voice had risen, his eyes darkened. It was wonderful what malignity could still reside in a little old man. Something stronger still inhabited Madeleine, since those few hours she had spent with Skene. Once again the blood in her veins had run like molten honey, and she, no spendthrift of herself, had felt in every limb as she gave herself up utterly: “This is right—right—right!”
She was in no mood for senile trifling, and turned on him with the arrogance of youth, blazing, magnificent: “And now I promise you there will not!” and left him, breathless and a little afraid.
* * * *
Another week passed. Madeleine became uneasy. The strongest emotional impression will not last. The time she had had with Skene began to fade into the background. It had been such a minute. It had no result. Instead of feeling perversely resentful against Georges, she now felt so against both of them. Skene neither wrote nor made any sign. He did not even give her the dubious satisfaction of obliterating the shame she felt at Georges’ neglect. All this lay, a dumb ache, in her uncritical soul. But she had more immediate cause for annoyance. She became conscious that she was being looked at, whispered about. It did nothing more than ruffle the surface of her self-confidence, but when she and Cécile Blanquart went to the cinema together—she hardly noticed a half-unwillingness on Cécile’s part, and that the other girls who often accompanied them had made excuses—she was brought face to face with the matter. Cécile said shyly, in the melodious darkness of the one-franc seats, where one had to keep one’s hands in one’s lap, because so many soldiers were lonely:
“You know what they are saying about you at the office?”
“No—what?”
“Oh—I daren’t tell you!”
Madeleine did not press her. There is only one thing said by girls who cannot mind their own business—having, indeed, no business to mind. Madeleine had never spread nor listened with interest to rumors about other girls, simply because she minded her own business, having always had business to mind. But she knew well enough what the village gossip of Hondebecq was, and had found out that an office in a provincial town is only a village without elbow-room. She pondered a little over the matter, which grew increasingly serious as she did so. She did not bother greatly as to the source of any rumor about her. Spite on the part of “Papa,” love of scandal in the heart of the pork butcher’s wife of her lodging—mere empty interest on the part of some person or persons who had seen her with Skene or with “Papa,” it might be! The point that disturbed her was the possible effect on her freedom of action. It might make it more difficult for her to profit by the next opportunity of seeing Skene-Georges—for the two were slowly merging into one at the back of her mind. This roused her. She began to think seriously, but in her slow way.
* * * *
Then came a letter from home—from Marie.
She read it several times, by candle-light, lying on her back in her narrow iron bed, one hand holding the pages of British Expeditionary Force canteen block note-paper, which Marie used because it cost nothing, covered with Marie’s sloping convent-school writing—the other hand below her head, on which a handkerchief protected the long plaits of her hair, that she had never bobbed at the command of fashion. Gradually she mastered it. Marie was no correspondent; none of the sort that she belonged to, cultivated letter-writing or exceeded what was strictly necessary. The motive of the letter was baldly stated: “Father demands to know how goes his daughter.” There followed a brief résumé of village news. Victor Dequidt was reported missing. Other persons had been married. There had been more bombing near St. Omer. There was no news of brother Marcel; they feared the worst. Then followed the words: “Father has seen Monsieur le Baron lately. He was furious. It seems that his son Georges has left the French Mission, where he was in safety, and has gone to make his training for an aviator in Paris. Madame is desolated”; and then commonplaces to the end. “His son Georges” was a way of speaking Marie had picked up from living in the Lys valley, in the influence of Lille. It was not how they spoke in Hondebecq. This displeased Madeleine an instant. Then the real meaning of the letter dawned on her. Her father had shown by his conduct on the day of their visit to the hospital how thoroughly he understood what was between Georges and herself. He had made Marie write—Marie who knew and suspected nothing. Madeleine—the youngest, the one who had lived longest with him, who had replaced her mother in the house—responded to the old man’s partiality for her. Unspoken, never visible, there was a stronger link between them than existed with the others of the family. She thought of him with affection. Her mind moved on. She could see the Baron, stumping up and down the earth roads, with “Merde!” and “Name of a name!” at every step; and the dining-room at the château, into which she had been allowed to peep, when running errands from the farm. She could hear Placide’s nasal chant announcing dinner: “Madame la Baronne is served!” and the Baron, still “Merde”-ing and “Name of a name”-ing, and the Baronne’s tearful but dignified “Voyons, Charles!” Paris, Georges was in Paris! Although affectionate in her way, she hardly paused to think of her brother Marcel, giving no sign from his German prison.
* * * *
Then she had one of her intuitions. The very thing. She would teach the gossips of Amiens to tell tales about her—and give them something to tell of, all in one blow. The very economy of the idea appealed to her. There were always vacancies in the big Ministries in Paris, she had heard “Papa” say. “Papa!” she almost laughed. He would have his Festivity, after all. He should be made to work it. The idea was so new and beautiful that it actually kept her awake for half an hour after she had blown out her candle—a rare thing for a girl of her habits and physique.
The first person who was astonished at the turn of affairs was “Papa.” He became aware, as he snuffed with rage and ill-health at his desk behind the screen by the stove, of kind looks and lingerings. His resentment and small suspicions soon melted. He ventured half-apologetic remarks, was not rebuffed. Nor did she hurry away with the other girls, as she had done all the week since his last propositions. Eventually he timidly complained that he had not had his little Festivity, that his birthday had passed unhonored.
Madeleine felt something, almost compunction, but her Fixed Idea soon resumed its empire over her mind. She listened to him.
On the following Sunday, having drunk her coffee and eaten her roll, she replied to Marie’s letter. She expressed her sympathy with all those in the village who had suffered bereavement, sent her congratulations to all those who had bettered their state of life. She asked to hear further of Marcel. She mentioned the Baron and the Baronne in the former category, also the Dequidts. She sent her father much affection and promised to come and see him soon. This was a mere convention. He would have been astonished had she carried it into effect, but it was testimony of her gratitude to him for having guessed her Fixed Idea, and having so astutely helped her. The letter, evidence of an orderly, unimaginative mind, wound up with sisterly affection for Marie—also a convention—for the two girls, realists to the core, knew well enough that they were friendly so long as they remained apart—and kisses for Emilienne. Having completed this, and posted it, she went to second mass at the cathedral. There, when it was over, she sat in the dimness of the sand-bagged windows and the ancient stones. She had never read Mr. Ruskin, never glanced at the moral carvings of the west front, the historical carvings of the ambulatory—sand-bagged as were the first, and removed as were the second now—and would probably have made very little of them, save that they were the sort of carvings one saw in churches. Of all the long romance of that storied pile, from Robert de Luzarches to the German occupation of 1870, she knew and cared nothing—neither for its tons of masonry, glass and wood, nor for the million prayers that drifted on its stagnant air. Nor did she sit there alone from any religious motive. She was not truly religious—too sure of herself, too incurious, she kept of the faith of her fathers nothing but some habits, and some rags of superstition. She left, at one o’clock, when all the English officers were in their messes, and all the French homes had that air of preoccupation which accompanies the most important meal of the week. The streets were empty. She passed rapidly to the big shop at which “Papa’s” servant was caretaker, and found the side door unlocked. In the back sitting-room Papa was waiting for her, skull-cap, clean collar, eyes watering with pleasure. There, amid solid furniture, marble-topped chiffoniers and chests of drawers, hermetically sealed, chairs and settees upholstered as if for ever, they held “Papa’s Festivity.” Once again Madeleine was touched when she saw he had ordered red wine to please her. But after the table had been cleared and his senile familiarities began, she hardened her heart. She questioned him straightly and searchingly, making him buy, with information, every liberty she allowed him. She knew well enough how quickly men changed, once they were satisfied, and chose the very moment before he lay back on the plush settee, exhausted by the violence of his emotions, to extract a promise that he would get her transferred to Paris, and a second promise of secrecy—because, she told him, there were so many spiteful tongues. She looked him full in the eyes as she said this, but he was at the stage at which he could only say, “Yes, yes!” intent on gratifying his momentary needs. After this she poured him out some wine, and kissing him on his bald head—for his skull-cap had slipped off—she left him to reflect. She went to an appointment with Cécile Blanquart, whose father was visiting her for the day and chatted to him of village affairs. Her crude psychology was not at fault. For a day or two “Papa” left her alone, but before a week was out he was pestering her again. She took it as a right, believing that men who had once desired her must do so again. In fact, it was this point at which Georges’ neglect had so hurt her. But she had made her terms and stuck to them. She reminded “Papa” of his promises, and he demurred, temporized. She cut him severely for two days and brought him to heel. He was not likely to find many women who would have patience with him, feeble and mean about money as he was, in face of the chances of a good time with some English officer. He did as he was told. She had to interview the Controller of the Service, but fortunately Paris was always calling for more and more help to fill the places of men combed out, and she got her transfer, and all the accompanying papers, complete. She was to go the following Sunday. She knew enough of the working of things now to see that she was already out of the power of “Papa.” With this, all compunction left her. She promised gaily to dine with him, and he little suspected the real source of her pleasure: the feeling that at last she would be near Georges, easily able to meet him face to face as she desired, and that, once met, she would work on him her charm, in which she had such implicit trust.
She arranged to meet “Papa” at the station, because, she said, she wanted information about her train on the morrow. The information she really required was about that evening’s train, the 18.05 for Paris. He drew her into the buffet, anxious to prime himself for his evening’s enjoyment, and she went willingly, careless of appearances now. He ordered two of those compounds known as Quinine Tonics. She gulped hers down as the Boulogne-Paris train thundered in, bent forward to kiss him, and crying, “Au revoir, mind you are decent to the girls!” swung out of the door, across the waiting-hall, and through the wicket, where he could not follow, as he had no permit. In fact, he did not try. He was first so astonished, then so enraged, that he choked over his drink, and dropped his glass, for the breakage of which a callous waitress charged him forty centimes. Alas, that a long career of getting the most out of women, and giving the least, should descend to this!
* * * *
Although so short a time had elapsed, the Madeleine who traveled from Amiens to Paris was a very different girl from the Madeleine who had left Hondebecq three months earlier. The very manner of her shaking off “Papa” showed it: The habit of the village in which she had grown up, regarding railways, consisted in going to the station, hearing when the next train went to the required destination, and waiting for it. To possess and understand a time-table—more, to have mastered the complicated regulations of a military station in war-time, was the measure of how far Madeleine had advanced.
She found herself in a Paris that had an air of forced cheerfulness and dumb expectancy. True, the panic of the day of mobilization, growing right up to the Aisne battle, was over; the alarums of 1918 were not yet in sight. But it was a Paris bereft of men, many a shutter closed; a Paris as yet unhaunted by Americans, but beginning to be desperate in its pleasures. What its best historians, its great lovers, Murger or Victor Hugo, would have thought of it, cannot be conjectured. Its fabled gaiety was gone for good. Its heroism had that poisoned quality that makes women cover broken hearts with cheap finery.
Madeleine, who had never imagined a town of the size before, spent the first two months quietly taking it all in. She had the sense to see that she must start all over again. She did her work with zest—it suited her. That suited her Controller, who put her to lodge with relatives—retired people of official class, who lived in an “apartment,” a tiny flat in a huge block of buildings situated just where the scholarly Pantheon district trails off into the poverty of St. Étienne du Mont. No one could be more self-effacing than Madeleine when she wished to. During her first weeks in Paris she attended to her work, lived quietly with Monsieur and Madame Petit, dressed soberly, glanced at no one in the street, or in the great office where her duties lay. She made herself amiable and useful in the small precise household, left it in time to catch her ’bus, that landed her opposite the bridge, across which towered the world-famous gallery in which the Ministry to which she was attached was housed. She made herself agreeable to the girls with whom she worked. Some were country girls, shy or inefficient, but there was not a Fleming amongst them, and she concealed her opinion that she knew better than they about most things. As for the native Parisiennes, of whom all sorts and conditions were gathered into that great harbor of steady work and sure pay, she admired their ferocious femininity and put up with their moods—even when they called her “Boche du Nord”—the equivalent of calling a Worcestershire girl a Welshwoman—which they did at times, out of sheer dislike of her demure capacity. To have seen her, no one would have suspected that she was gleaning every scrap of information she could with regard to the Flying Corps units that formed the Air defence of Paris. And she had better opportunity now. Paris was by no means the town-just-behind-the-line that Madeleine was used to. Information was to be had, people got to know things and talked of them. Her Ministry, engaged in rationing one of the necessities of life, rationed Flying Corps troops among other people. She missed nothing. At last she found what she was looking for.
* * * *
In one of those innumerable lists of men that were being produced by Government Departments all over the world, as well as in her particular Ministry, she saw the name Georges d’Archeville. It was a list of those young men designated, with the picturesque appropriateness of the French language, as “aspiring aviators” who were “directed towards the Front,” that is, being sent into the line of battle. Madeleine and another girl were crossing them off the lists of the garrison of Paris. She stared so long and heavily that her companion bent over her: “What! You can’t find it—but there it is!”
Madeleine ticked the beloved name and went on, as in a stupor. This was really a blow. To come to Paris had seemed to her, somehow, the satisfactory culmination of her long vigil. She felt sure she would be successful in finding him. She had found him indeed. What now! The Paris garrison was not concerned with the fate of “aspiring aviators” once they were struck off its rolls. Their fate was not indeed in much doubt, but there remained the horrible uncertainty as to which of the graveyards behind the four hundred miles of Front would hold his grave. At this point her common-sense and practical knowledge of affairs deserted her. She just wanted him, that was all. Feigning a headache, she excused herself and got leave to go home; but instead of going, she lingered about the quays and bridges, never lovelier than in winter twilight, with golden wraiths of leaves spinning in the bitter wind along the severe, well-proportioned gray lines of masonry. The fresh air calmed her; hunger at length drove her back to the Petits’ apartment. She did not notice at first anything in the manner of her hosts. The only thing that she noticed was that M. Petit, as he handed her a letter, used the phrase:
“It came about four o’clock!”
That was the hour at which her eye had caught the name in the fatal list. All the threads and tatters of superstition that clung to her Flemish soul took life and substance at this. She muttered the words, “Ah, yes! I expected it. It is a word from home!” She passed, quiet and self-possessed, to her little bedroom, one of those little rooms which lead one to ask if they were intended by the architect for anything, or whether they might not be an inadvertence. Lighting her candle, she sat on the thin coverlet of her bed, that reached from the tall window to the door, and resting her feet on the lower shelf of the washstand, thrust her thumb into the envelope and burst it open. It was from Skene. It was what is called in those English romances Madeleine had never read or imagined, a “love letter.” It asked her to spend his week’s leave with him. That much she saw, and then put it down and buried her face in her hands. She had expected it to contain news of the death of Georges. Why or how she thought anyone should write to her on such a subject is one of those mysteries that hang about the most clear-minded, least bemused of people. She had felt rather than thought it, and the revulsion was for the moment too much for her. She was roused by the clatter of plates, and the acrid voice of Madame Petit, keeping the supper within the smallest possible bounds. She changed her blouse, washed and did her hair, and hurried out to help Madame.
During a meal whose frugality would have driven a monk from his vows, she heard M. Petit say, “Well, have you good news from home!” and herself replying: “Yes. My brother writes to say he has leave, and asks me to go home to see him!”
She afterwards reflected that she could not have invented a better answer. The envelope was stamped with the British military postmark. The old man was inquisitive, and there was no knowing what use he might not make of any conclusion he drew. To have a brother in the English area was the one feasible explanation.
* * * *
These considerations did not weigh heavily with her, however. She slipped away as soon as she could, and read her letter through again and then again. There was much in it that she did not come within a long way of understanding—descriptions of the life of decent civilized men in camp and billet, not to mention trench and dugout. These simply conveyed nothing and did not interest her. Then there was an involved scrupulousness that she had no means of sharing. But the main motive that had caused the writing of those four sheets was clear enough—Skene really wanted her. And if she did not admit it to herself, she wanted to be wanted. She did not reply to the letter, but put it away in a safe place, a little lock-up box in which she kept her immediate savings and a trinket or two, and went to her work in the morning, a changed woman. She had regained in a breath her old sureness. She now saw herself again the woman she desired to be. “If I can only see him face to face” still ran in her mind, but this time it was Skene whom she hoped to see. Insensibly the symbol had changed, the emotions remained. She thought the matter over in her cautious way. He had supposed her still to be in Amiens and had written there. By good luck she had sent a card (one of those war postcards, all khaki and azure and sentiment) to Cécile Blanquart, having it in her mind that Cécile would describe to the full, in her next letter home (for Cécile was the sort that wrote once a week), anything that she, Madeleine, did. It had been an act of petty pride. It now seemed like the work of Providence—Cécile had redirected the letter, and here it was. Madeleine did not mistake what it meant. He wanted a week, like the few hours he had had, in Amiens. That was natural enough; she saw nothing in it. In her experience men were like that, and she secretly approved. For a week, at least, she would have some one belonging to her; beyond that she did not look.
After twenty-four hours’ consideration she took the letter from its hiding-place, replied to it in most measured terms—judging to a nicety, by some instinct, what would make him say a little more and say it a little plainer, without committing her in any way. A week passed, and back came a further letter. It filled her with a sort of steady glow. There was no mistaking it. He had written for a room in an hotel he knew of at the other end of the city, on the steep hill that leads from behind the big stations to Montmartre. She did not reply until old M. Petit, looking at her over his spectacles, asked her: “Well, and your brother?”
She gathered herself together mentally. Of course, she had to fend off all that sort of thing. She replied briefly: “I am going home for a week!”
That evening she sent Skene a card on which Union Jack and Tricolor were entwined. She wrote with a sort of exultation: “I wish to be all yours.” Such an outburst must have been caused by something deeper than the paltry bickering of a little old man, or the prospect of meeting a young one with whom she had once passed a few hours of intimacy under the stress of strong emotion.
* * * *
The day came. She got her week’s leave. It is one of the victories of women’s entry into ordinary commercial activities of business houses and Government offices, that they have forced some humanity and reason into the mechanical discipline of such places. Having made no plans, she had put her few belongings into one of those black hold-alls that make all French travelers seem countrified, and stood on the platform of the Gare du Nord, waiting. She had dressed herself carefully—more carefully than usual, with hardly a spot of color, and was conscious that every inch of her that was covered showed the finest possible value for the money. Her hands, neck and face had lost nothing in their firmness and pallor. The figure she cut seemed to culminate in the little leather satchel clasped against her fur—as if she were holding her heart in reserve, and defending it at the same time. The train roared into the station, and after a moment’s confusion, she saw Skene coming towards her. She had been wondering fearfully for a moment if he would come, if she would recognize him, if any unforeseen obstacle would arise. When he reached her, she turned up her face and gave him her rare smile. When he slid his hand under her arm and hurried her down the platform to catch one of the few taxis, she pressed ever so little against him. Never in her life had she been happier than in hearing those heavy boots clanking beside her. Now that he had come she knew she was right. Skene was neither exceptionally handsome, brave nor rich—and she would have thought nothing the more of him if he had been. She neither knew nor cared for heroes of fiction, but admired the clean, athletic type of young man just then beginning to be popularized by the cinema. Skene had the looks and bearing of what he was—an average Englishman of the professional classes, who had passed through the successive stages of discomfort, danger, all but death. He had the sure movements, straight glance, and agreeable carelessness begotten of this, grafted on to middle-class standards of manners. Superficially, at any rate, he was more considerate than his nearest French equivalent would have been.
All this, which would have disappointed or amused many a Frenchwoman, captivated Madeleine, and in the taxi she gave up her lips to him with rich joy at the unmistakable warmth of his feelings. The moment, however, the taxi stopped at the restaurant she had indicated, she made herself prim and aloof. She had not wasted her time since she had been in Paris, and knew her way about. The restaurant dated from the period of those great Exhibitions that had served to rehabilitate Paris after 1870. Originally the home of the sort of people who gave some shadowy substance to Murger’s bohemian Paris, it had long become the classic rendezvous of English and American visitors and of Frenchmen who wanted to sacrifice style to price. It still had the red-plush benches and gaily frescoed walls of romance, but the service and cooking were what Frenchmen call “serious.” The place had just been worth preserving on a commercial basis in the commercial era, and consequently had been preserved.
Madeleine had lost nothing of her idea of celebrating an occasion. She ate heartily and did not refuse to drink with Skene. He was, of course, ravenous, and in the state in which drink had no effect on him. She smiled demurely across the table at him, more at home every moment. He was also amused at something. He had only known Paris fifteen years earlier, as a young architect half-way through his A.R.I.B.A., and was marveling at the change—at the figure she cut in those surroundings that had for him such different associations: she almost bourgeois—he in the fancy dress of his uniform. Her manner with the waiter was perfect, and perfect her assumption of respectability. He loved it, felt almost at home, too. For in their secret hearts both of them were domesticated, conventional to the core. Both of them loathed the War and all it had brought. It was the queerest of contradictions that forced them to comfort their ultra-respectable aspirations in such a place and such a manner, both spoken of even in war-time by many people, as “irregular.”
* * * *
The meal at an end, they went, as a matter of course, to a cinema. One did, in war-time. Skene, who at home would hardly have walked to the end of the street with such an object—Madeleine, who had hardly heard of such a thing before she went to Amiens—went to the nearest cinema because it was war-time and no one wanted to think. Walking in the brisk air of a Parisian winter evening, good meat and drink within them, they enjoyed themselves prodigiously, Skene because he had existed in dubious snatches of comfort for a long time, and was likely to so exist for an indefinite period—Madeleine because of the reality of a man at her side. He was making jokes about the Place Clichy being the Place Cliché! She did not understand in the least, but laughed because he was happy beside her. And so to the gaping portico of one of those establishments which advertise what is known in France as “spectacle de famille.” This last was being loudly cried by a person, paid to do so, at the door—who added in stentorian tones that soldiers went in free, and nursemaids half-price. It was typical of Skene that he paid for two of the most expensive seats, and placed Madeleine in the one that gave him the best view of her profile. The film, unfortunately, was a French one, not an American. That is to say, instead of being confronted with the improbable adventures of a man looking somewhat like Skene, Madeleine realized with a start that she was watching a love story in which the principal character was a tolerable travesty of Georges d’Archeville, and behaved with just his perverse petulance. She turned her head, smiled at Skene, played with her program, smoothed her gloves, and arranged herself with minute care for her costume and the possible effect of the seat on it. It was no good. Cinema screens are insistent. It is difficult to avoid that great glare of white, with its intriguing figures in motion. It revealed to her what she would never have invented for herself—the idea that, like the hero of the film, Georges neglected her because he was engrossed by some other woman. She could not dismiss the idea; did not try, perhaps. She felt suddenly more wounded than she had ever felt since August, 1914. That Georges might be hurt at her sharing an English officer’s week of Leave never occurred to her. To her practical soul, with its incapacity for flights of imagination, things seemed all too readily what they appeared to the eye. Suddenly she rose.
“This representation is rasant,” she said to Skene, and marveled a moment, as they threaded their way out, at his docile good temper. Not a grumble, not a protest. He just followed her and snapped up a taxi. In it he was more solicitous than ever, gentle, kind, with a Mid-Victorian kindness she had never known—the manners of one whose boyhood has been unspoiled by bitter thoughts about money.
They reached the little hotel at which they had dropped their baggage, and he handed her in. By this time his way with her was having the queerest effect. Had he been thoughtless, brutal, she would easily have braced herself to meet it. As it was, she felt something slowly dissolving in her. She held herself in yet a little, approving the place he had chosen, clean and reasonable in price. But when the door of their little room was bolted, and she stood in front of the mirror by the rose-colored curtains, unpinning her hat, he came gently behind her and slipped his hands under her arms. It was just Georges’ way. She burst into tears. The moment the first sob had shaken itself free—for she did nothing by halves, and when, rarely, she cried, she cried bitterly—she knew she would feel better. Skene let her droop on to the bed and sat beside her, one arm round her, making very small comforting remarks in French and English alternately, but no inquiries. She kept her handkerchief tight pressed upon her eyes with both hands, but her sobs were lessening, and with every moment the agonizing vision of Georges with some one else grew smaller and fainter. She leaned ever so gently against Skene, who tended her as a woman might a child, did every little service for her, amazing her, who had never been so treated since she was four years old. Gradually she slipped down into the comfort of those hard hands, whose fingers kept something of the skill and discrimination of such as have been used for wise, gentle occupations. But only when she was at ease, with dry bright eyes and braided hair, did he seem to think of himself, and then only to ask so humbly for what he wanted. She gave him all herself, fiercely, as if for ever to prevent any of her from escaping again into those other hands that had neglected her so. More, when they two swam slowly back to the surface of normal existence again, in the quiet of the night only broken by the discreet bubbling of the calorifère in the corner, she told him the stark truth of herself and Georges, with a bareness of exposure of her very soul she had never before permitted, of which, perhaps, she had never before been capable. And when at last they slept, in each other’s arms, it was the deep sleep of emotional reaction, for no less than she, Skene had looked for years past on utter shipwreck—obliteration of his individuality in the dark mud of Flemish trenches—and knew from a different point of view all she suffered, and what comfort she clutched at.