Fifteen Days
Just before the end of the world they were together at the château.
They thought it was to have been for the last time. There had been many things they needed to talk over and arrange together, and why not quietly. They were "done with passion, pain, and anger." They thought to bid one another good-bye when everything was arranged, wishing one another well, and go their different ways.
There were no children, they were hurting no one. They had been hurting one another too long, for ten years—they were both still so young that it seemed to them half a lifetime—and now they thought they would never hurt one another any more. It was an immense relief to each of them to feel that it was over, quite over, dead and done with. But it was not over.
From the first moment of talk of war his one idea was to get himself taken for the army. When he was a boy, a fall in hunting had hurt his spine seriously; he had never been able to do his military service. The trouble had grown worse, and now, with his crooked back and halting step, there was nothing, exactly nothing, it seemed, he could do.
She stayed with him through those days of the utmost nervous tension. How could she leave him then? She understood him so well in his moods, now in despair, now hopeful, now in despair again; disgraced, he would say, worthless, ashamed before his peasants, before the castle servants, who were, all of them, going to join the colours; angry against everything, he had such need of her to tell it all to. He exhausted himself with hurried, futile journeys hither and yonder to find some one whose influence might get him "taken." He spent his nights walking the wide floors up and down, and writing letters to people he thought might "do something." But none of it was of any use. He worried himself ill. He fainted twice in one day, the day the papers told of the taking of the first German flag. It was a flaming white hot day in their country of the Aisne.
There were days of the passing through of their own troops. For days the valley was one deep, endlessly drawn-out trail of dust, from which came unceasingly the turmoil of hoofs and wheels and men's shouting, the horns and rush of motors, bugle-calls, the hot beating of drums.
Night after night the village took in the men billeted upon it, lodged them somehow, fed them somehow. The château received the officers, and did what it could for them.
Those were days of great enthusiasm. Trains passed full of flowers, of men laughing and singing. Trainloads of great dust-coloured cannon passed, covered with flowers.
Claire started a canteen at the station, the little country station by the river, in the fields of August wheat and poppies.
Those were exalted, wonderful days for her. She knew how agonizing they were for Rémy, and she felt about him very tenderly.
She was a beautiful, strong creature, her beauty and strength for years now had annoyed and been a grievance to him. But now he seemed to have need of her strength and quietness. She pitied him for what she meant to him in those days.
But when bad news came, everything changed for him.
There were so many things for him to do. He was maire of the village—the village counted on him, he was not useless any more. He had been really ill with grieving, but now that he was of use, he was as well as she had ever seen him before. All his small nervous ways fell from him; she did not understand him any more than if he had been a child grown up suddenly beyond her; but she was immensely pleased with him. She was so glad to be able to feel him stronger than she. It was very good to be able to turn to him now for help and comfort.
Her canteen at the station served trains that were full of wounded. Some of the wounded were so bad that they had to be taken out of the trains. She got a hospital arranged as well as she could in the château. For days it was so full that the wounded and dying lay on beds of straw on the floor of the great salons, not a scrap of linen in the château but was used for dressings and bandages.
Then the refugees from the villages of the north and the east began to pour through, telling of ghastly things. And then came the troops in retreat.
The hospital had to be evacuated in dreadful haste. It was more dreadful than anything she had ever imagined. There was a day when the old town-crier went through the streets, beating a drum, and calling out the warning to evacuate. All the people who could do so fled. They fled, and left everything they possessed behind them.
It was said that when the troops were passed, the bridge at the bend of the river must be blown up after them, and so the village would be cut off and left to the enemy.
Rémy made the villagers give him the keys of their houses, and he put up a notice in the Grand' Place that any one wishing to enter the houses must apply for the keys to the château; he wrote the notice in German.
Claire was proud that he did not suggest that she should go away, that he took for granted she was at least as strong as he.
The explosion of the blowing up of the old bridge was like the final note of all the things that used to be. The dust of the valley settled down for an hour, and things seemed strangely quiet.
All the people of the village who had not been able to get away came to the château, the very old people and the sick, and some women with babies, begging shelter for the night.
Three wounded men, whom it had been impossible to remove, were left behind in the great Salle des Miroirs. Claire was with them all night. The curé had stayed, and the sage-femme of the village had also remained to help her; the doctor and the chemist were both fled.
One of the men died in the night.
Another, who was delirious, kept singing all the time, "Auprès de ma Blonde."
It frightened Claire. There was a moment when she was uncontrollably afraid. She was afraid, not of the things that were coming to pass, but with a nightmare panic of the wounded man, singing, "Auprès de ma Blonde."
She could not bear it. She rushed in desperate panic to find Rémy.
It was in the moment before dawn; the birds in the garden and park were waking; the halls and stairs were still dark. She thought she never would find him; then she thought he must be in the kitchen, where the village people were huddled together.
She found him there, talking to them quietly.
There was a girl who had St. Vitus dance; she sat by the big kitchen table, one of her hands, that would not keep still, thumping and thumping the table. Claire was afraid to go into the kitchen.
Rémy came out into the passage to her, and shut the kitchen door behind him.
The lamp was still burning in the passage.
She caught his hands; and suddenly she had buried her face in his shoulder and was crying.
"There, there," he said, patting her hair.
She sobbed, clinging to him.
"You have been so brave," he said, "poor child."
She could have cried for a long time with his arms around her.
But he said, "You must not let them find you like this, you know; they might think you were afraid."
They came, very shortly after.
There was a galloping of hoofs into the château courts, and a shouting.
Then came the mass of them, surging into the court, greenish-yellow, with their loud, snarling voices.
Claire saw them from the windows over the court; Rémy had gone down to meet them.
She came down to the great central hall, not afraid any more. She had dressed carefully, and arranged her hair specially well. Tall and fine, she came slowly down the curving staircase, and stopped half-way to look on what was passing below.
The German officers seemed to her to be all gigantic creatures; Rémy looked more than ever small and frail among them. They were commanding, this way and that, roughly. Rémy stood silent, watching them. His look was so high and cool, so proud in the bitterness of the moment, that she drew herself up with pride in him.
The colonel was speaking with him, and moved toward the door of the Salle des Miroirs. Rémy stepped before him. "Not there," he said, "two men are dying in that room."
Claire came down into the hall and crossed between the officers and went to stand beside her husband. She was very proud to stand beside him. Something in her bearing seemed to carry weight with the officers; they drew back, less insistent before her, from the door of the Salle des Miroirs.
Again and again, in the fifteen days that followed, she felt that same effect of her presence upon them, and knew that it was a help to Rémy.
In the fifteen days he and she had opportunity for very few words together, the Germans always watching them suspiciously.
All the days were full of confusion; Rémy was kept constantly about with the German officers to arrange for the billeting of the men in the village, the stabling of horses and motors, interpreting, explaining. No one but he could get the frightened people, the few there were of them remaining, to go back to their houses and do the things required of them. No one but he could protect them, and at the same time see to it that they gave no offence. The least rousing of the Germans' anger would, he knew, have to be paid for dreadfully. Their demands were made at the point of the bayonet. They were angry because the bridge had been destroyed, and only Rémy's cool, quiet strength of insistence kept them from carrying out the threat to burn the village in reprisal. To hold his own, the while obeying as he must obey, yielding this point and that, submitting, and yet faithfully defending all that depended on him, was no easy matter of accomplishment. He must keep faith and dignity, and yet he must not give offence.
There were very desperate moments when the Germans would be asking for information, about the telephones and telegraphs, and about the country, the roads, and the marble quarries, the rebuilding of the bridge. Such help he could not give them, and there were moments when his refusal to talk, like his refusal to take a cigarette, risked everything.
Claire came to have a special dread of the colonel's fat leather cigarette-case. Rémy must wave it aside saying, so that his meaning was quite clear and yet courteous, that he had given up smoking for the time. The little scene of it was repeated night after night.
At first the Germans would have him always stand up in their presence. They would send for him while they dined, and have him stand there while they questioned and commanded. Then they realized that it was his wish to stand, that few things would have been more hateful for him than to have sat down with them.
After that they would have him and Claire dine with them. They sent for Claire to come down to the dining-room, where they were already seated at table and Rémy was standing. She must sit on the colonel's right, and drink a glass of champagne with him.
One of the officers called to her down the table, "There is yet left many a toast we can drink together, the brave and the fair!"
She thought that Rémy's fury would get the better of him, and she spoke quickly, before he could speak. She moved quickly between him and the colonel.
The colonel, sitting at the head of the table, under the portraits of generations of Rémy's people, glared up at her as she stood, very tall.
"You will do as I command you, madame," he said.
There seemed to be no escape. Desperately chancing it, she said, "But you will not stoop to command so idly. You know that we have no help but to obey you. Of what value could be forced obedience to you in so petty a thing? I know you will not command a thing so trivial and poor."
And he did not ask it of them.
Her days as well as Rémy's were crowded. The Germans required so many things, and there was no one left to serve them. She had only a few peasant servants to help her. The Germans demanded food, and there was scarcely anything to give them. Very little could be got in the emptied village; there was no more meat or bread. These people must eat, or they would become ugly. She must manage it somehow. She had to get the bakery started again, and make the villagers understand that they must give what they had in their little gardens, and their chickens and the rabbits. Old Jantot at the castle was quite unable to do the work of the kitchen-gardens and dairies. She worked hard helping him.
All the day of the arrival of the Germans she had been pitching hay from the stable loft to make bedding for the men quartered there; she scarcely left her work that day, except to go to the funeral of the soldier who had died in the Salle des Miroirs.
The curé helped old Jantot to carry him, and she followed them out through the courts, and past the German guard.
The two other wounded men in the Salle des Miroirs died while the strange alien life of the château went on. Three or four people of the village were ill; one woman and her newly born child died; there was no one but Claire to help the sage-femme.
The Germans accused the old curé of signalling from the church tower. They took him into the market-place, with a rope tied round his neck, to hang him, they said, under the plane-tree by the fountain. Rémy stood by him, risking everything to make them delay a few minutes.
Claire found the colonel; she never could remember what she said, how she pleaded. But the colonel said, "If we find these things true against him, then it will be your husband who will hang for it."
In one of the rare moments when they were alone together, Rémy said something which gave her more pleasure to hear than anything that had ever been told her before. He told her that but for her he did not think he could possibly endure it, that only her presence there, so brave and strong, the one thing left in the world, gave him strength to go on.
He had come up to her room, a small tower room she had withdrawn to when the Germans arrived. It was late in the evening, the room was almost dark, and she had lighted two candles on the little table, by the window, where she was having bread and soup on a tray. He had had scarcely anything to eat all day, and she made him share the soup and the bread. They laughed because he was really hungry. Cut off from the world, completely alone together in the most intense isolation, having no one, nothing, left, either of them, but each the other, in a world terrible beyond belief, they laughed together because he was so absurdly hungry.
They knew nothing but what the Germans told them of things that were happening in the world.
How could they believe such things? They did not believe, and yet to hear them said!
Fifteen days passed, that they could not have lived through if there had not been so much for them to do in every moment, and if they had not had each of them the comfort and support of the other's presence. Fifteen days passed, of helplessness and dread, almost despair.
Then, in one day, something was changed for the Germans; there was no knowing what it was; their mood took on a new ugliness.
It was that day that some of the men hanged Claire's St. Bernard puppy. They hanged him on the terrace from the branch of the big chestnut tree and left him there. Claire came up through the park from the village and found him. They never knew why the men had done it; it seemed so small and useless a thing to have done.
For two days she and Rémy were kept as prisoners, allowed to leave their rooms only attended by a soldier, and not to go to the village at all. There seemed to be a great confusion and commotion in the village and in the castle, but no explanation was given them.
Then, in one night, the Germans were gone.
Village and castle were left empty for scarcely a morning, and then came French troops, in hot pursuit from the victory of the Marne.
From the victory of the Marne—there had been a victory, a great victory! What a thing to hear, after their almost hopeless days! Hopelessness had been so black and close about them. And now it was lifted, dispersed, in a moment, by a word. Here come their own people crying victory. In their own tongue, their own men, dressed in blue, told them of victory.
Those things the Germans had said were not true. They had never believed, but now they knew. To think of looking into the faces of friends, of talking with friends! The humblest little soldier was a friend, the most wonderful of all things.
Rémy, who had all his life been distant and cold, was inexpressibly happy to wring a friend's hand, and sit with him, or pace the floor with him, and smoke with him.
What a pleasure to give all one had to friends!
How happy Claire was to help scrub and cook for friends!
It was a madness of relief and joy.
There was little time for thinking about it though. The new possession of the château was a desperately risky thing.
But these were friends, to suffer with and die with, if need be. Nothing could be as terrible as in those past days of isolation among enemies. Among friends they met what came.
In a few hours death and destruction were upon everything. And then, day after day, day after day, the battle raged along the river and under the edge of the hills; the sound of the cannon grew to be a familiar part of the nights and days; the screech of a shell was no longer strange.
The Germans had withdrawn to the strongholds of the marble quarries, just above the village. The village was crossed by the two fires. The poor people were killed in their little houses.
Men who went up on the château roofs to reconnoitre, were brought back dead. An officer was killed by a shell on the terrace, under the big chestnut tree.
Claire had to leave her tower room, and next day it had fallen with all the roofs of the east wing of the castle. Two men were killed in the fall of the east wing roofs, and the chestnut tree of the terrace, that had shaded generations of pleasant dreaming, was struck down under falling of tiles and stone.
They established the staff of the Etat-Major for greater safety in the cellars.
More than half the village was destroyed in those days. Claire and her husband lodged the homeless people as best they could in the dairy, the ground floor of the château was already crowded with the officers, and the stables and farm-buildings with the men.
For Rémy and Claire there was left one room, not too exposed, on the first floor.
From the window of it, together, one night, they watched the burning of a village over across the valley. It was a village of nearly all thatched roofs: it must have caught fire from the shells, and in that one night it was burnt to the ground.
As she and Rémy stood in the window, with nothing left about them but ruin and death, she remembered how, just before all this, they had thought they were come to the end of their life together; they had thought they were nothing to one another any more. And then suddenly they had come to be everything to each other. How could they either of them have borne it without the other?
Now their intense, their desperate solitude, together, was at an end. Others had come to share with them the burden of these things. There were others to whom they could turn now for comradeship. All of it was horrible, but now the world was again about them, life was opening its ways again.
She wondered, standing there by him, if, when some day the dreadful sounds of war were ceased and there was given them a chance to take up what they might of life again and go on with it—would they go on with it together? She wondered if he knew of what she was thinking as they stood there side by side? They had now become used to feeling one another's thoughts.
She was thinking that surely, after this, whatever happened they would have to go on with it together? They had gone through too much together ever again to break away. She would not have it otherwise, oh, not for all the world would she have had it otherwise. But she was wondering, if the great need passed, and life became small again, would they be changed enough? Would all this they had gone through have given them greatness enough to face, down length of days, the little things together?