4
After leaving the square, the Herr Doktor and Jeanne Rouannès found every street and every alley barred. And though the uniform of the 'Militär-Arzt' generally opened a way without much difficulty, Max Keller soon realised, with bitter, dumb self-reproach that he had wasted priceless minutes in asking and in answering futile questions. Perhaps because he had now spent a length of treasure-stored days in a country where time means at once so very much more, and so very much less, than it does in modern Germany, he was no longer in mental touch with the type of human being created by the sinister amalgam of sentimental idealism and military discipline.
To a German officer any waste of time, especially on active service, is abhorrent, and during the half-hour the Herr Doktor and his companion had spent in the square, Valoise had been rapidly divided into districts, and the looting therein, as far as was possible, systematised. Thus as soon as a certain number of marauders had been allowed to go through into it, further entry to a street was barred; and to the Herr Doktor there was something horribly grotesque in the contrast between the sharp discipline enforced by the patrols who sealed each thoroughfare, and the orgy of thieving and senseless destruction which they were apparently set there to supervise and protect.
It seemed, too, as if Nature herself had become a willing accomplice to the powers of evil, for the bright, delicious sunlight, the delicate breeze already touched to an autumnal sharpness, shone on, and blew about, the pitiful heaps of household plenishings which grew and swelled before each doorway.
In tacit agreement the two fugitives—for such they now felt themselves to be—chose a roundabout way to the Rue des Jardins; and as they hurried along, looking straight before them, averting their eyes from the sights which lay to their right and to their left, the Herr Doktor yet became conscious that here and there a house was being spared outrage. Before one such a number of his fellow-countrymen had squatted down on the cobble-stones, and were engaged in happily eating and drinking their fill. An old Frenchwoman, with a pitifully eager, servile manner, was waiting on them, bringing out of the villa, of which she was evidently the care-taker, armfuls of red-sealed bottles of wine. And yet, as he passed this house which was being spared outrage, the Herr Doktor quickened his footsteps. Somehow the sight he saw there shocked him more than did that of greater disorder.
Tides of shame, bewilderment, and pain welled up in his sore, burdened heart. Would the girl who now walked, with quick short steps, her head held high, looking always straight before her, ever forget the scenes they were now passing through? There was no fear now in her face, only a look of measureless scorn, disgust, and contempt. And it was he, rather than she, who felt a passion of relief when at last they emerged, through a final patrol, to find the intersecting web of streets composing the highest lap of the Haute Ville still free of soldiery.
The long, sunny Rue des Jardins looked unnaturally as usual, but when the two walked up through the garden of the Villa Rouannès, they saw that the front door was still locked, and the green wooden shutters of all the windows on the ground floor still barred. Thérèse and Jacob had evidently been stopped, and turned back, on their flight home from the cemetery.
'I think we can get in at the back, through the kitchen,' said Jeanne, breaking silence at last.
She led him round the house, to a door which stood wide open, and through the pleasant, exquisitely clean kitchen, where he had sometimes had occasion to seek old Thérèse while tending the dying Frenchman.
Together they walked through into the empty house, and the Herr Doktor spent the short time she kept him waiting in walking restlessly about the darkened salon, which had become so familiar and so dear.
Each minute seemed an eternity—an eternity filled with suspense and acute, unreasoning fear, for he knew that any moment he might hear the sound of eager, predatory feet tramping up the Rue des Jardins; and he visualised with dreadful clearness the little fragrant garden filled with a mob of his fellow-countrymen, decent enough men at home no doubt, but here, in their grey uniforms and spiked helmets, transformed into thieves, drunkards, and, he feared, worse.
At last Jeanne Rouannès opened the door. She was clad in the Red Cross uniform and veil-like cap which had now come to look unfamiliar in his eyes, for she had never worn them in her father's presence. She held a large, shabby leathern purse in her hand. 'This is the money—a thousand francs—my father always kept in the house. Will you take care of it for me?' She held it out to him. 'They say that'—she hesitated a moment, then said reluctantly—'they say that the Prussians always look first for the money, and then for the wine.'
He took the purse from her silently, and then, for what seemed to him a long time, though it was not five minutes, she stood in the centre of the square, shadowed sitting-room. A little light filtered through the chinks in the old wooden shutters, and slowly she gazed this way and that, as if desirous of imprinting an image of everything that was there on her heart and memory. But when they had left the house, and were walking through the garden, even when they reached the door in the wall, she did not once look back.
They met with no adventures on their way to the Grande Place, for they chose a roundabout way, along field paths, and under the glades of the forest trees in what had been one of the loveliest of the smaller royal demesnes of old France. And as they at last came out from behind the Abreuvoir the Herr Doktor saw with silent, intense relief that here, too, everything looked as usual. The great open space before them was as empty of life and movement as he had always known it. There was, however, one rather curious exception; but it was a pleasant exception, for it lent an air of spurious brightness, even of cheerfulness, to the scene. This was that the doors and windows of the large villas which formed the left of the Grande Place of Valoise were now all wide open, and were evidently being prepared for the overflow from the Tournebride.
Suddenly, however, as the Herr Doktor's eyes wandered down the broad thoroughfare leading straight to the river, he saw that all was not quite as normal in this part of the town as he had at first thought, for all the way down the hill, every window of the humbler houses had been battered in!
An old woman was even now engaged in carefully sweeping up the glass in the roadway in front of her little shop, and gradually he became aware that the shop itself was completely gutted, and that there was a dark yawning hole where the window, filled with toys and sweetmeats, had been.
Once more his heart ached with sick disgust and pain while slowly he and his companion began walking towards the long, low buildings of the Tournebride.
The beautiful old inn, at any rate, looked exactly as when he had last seen it that morning, though the great gilt gates, which had been closed for over a fortnight, were now wide open. It was clear that the Commandant of the German forces now holding Valoise had fixed his headquarters there, but the Herr Doktor's eyes sought vainly for the sentries who should have been standing at either side of the open gates. This second occupation of Valoise was indeed unlike the first!
'While I the Herr Commandant interview, can you with Madame Blanc here stay?' he observed suddenly.
As they passed through the gates the Herr Doktor was sorry indeed to see that hundreds of empty and broken bottles were lying under the chestnut trees, on the now wine-stained paving stones. These empty, broken bottles gave an untidy, rakish air to the shady, stately courtyard where the first conquerors of Valoise had spent such peaceful, restful hours.
On they walked, picking their way among the débris. The place seemed deserted.
Puzzled, and feeling at once relieved and uncomfortable, the Herr Doktor stayed his steps for a moment, and the girl at his side did so too. Her eyes filled with tears, a sense of terrible degradation seemed to soil her soul, and, as the moments sped by, her companion was filled with growing apprehension and unease.
Why was the Tournebride thus deserted? Officers, as well as the men who had drunk the wine from the bottles now lying empty and broken about his feet, had been here very lately, for on a wooden table standing in the middle of the courtyard were a dozen or more large glass goblets—one even now half full of white wine—and empty, gold-foiled bottles. There also, on this wooden table, lay the bunch of keys which always dangled at Madame Blanc's ample waist.
Madame Blanc? Yes, if, as now seemed to be the case, the Commandant and his staff were all out in the town, he could leave Mademoiselle Rouannès with her while he went to look for them. In that thought he found a measure of relief. The knowledge that Jeanne Rouannès would have to run the gauntlet of the Prussian officers' eyes had been hateful to him.
But where was Madame Blanc?
Calling out her name, he walked across to the half-open door of the kitchen; and then, suddenly, Jeanne Rouannès, hardened as she had become that day to dreadful sights and sounds, uttered a low exclamation of fear and surprise. 'Great God!' she exclaimed in French, 'what is that? What is that, down there?'
The Herr Doktor peered towards the place where she was staring, and with eyes which gradually filled with pain and horror, he saw that a thin stream of blood was oozing sluggishly through the doorway where he had stood so often talking to the Frenchwoman, with whom, at last, he had become good friends.
He stumbled forward, full of a dreadful foreboding, and tried to push back the door. But it would only swing forward.
Waving the girl back with a sharp, quick gesture, he pressed through the aperture, and then he, too, uttered an exclamation, a hoarse guttural cry of distress, for just behind the door, huddled up on the floor of her kitchen, lay the dead body of Madame Blanc.
The landlady of the Tournebride had been shot half a dozen times, at close range, in the breast, not struck—as the German surgeon for a brief moment had supposed and hoped—by a stray fragment of shell.
'Ach!' he muttered under his teeth, 'this is bad—very bad!' But Jeanne Rouannès, now standing just behind him, remained silent. She looked as if the tears had frozen on her face, and of the two she was the more composed, as, in silence, they dragged the dead woman a little further into the kitchen, and tried to arrange her poor, fat body into some semblance of decent death.
At last, having done the little they could, they came out again into the sunshine, and crossed once more the courtyard of the ownerless Tournebride. And still, of the two, it was the man who looked, and perchance felt, the more affected. In his companion all sensation seemed dulled, and as they walked along, perforce traversing many painful scenes—for they had now re-entered the zone of looting and disorder—she seemed really unconscious of what was going on about her.
Not till they had wandered for a long way, hither and thither, did they find the headquarters of the Commandant established in the Mairie. It was there that the Herr Doktor listened, with a rush of impotent anger, to the curt intimation that the French Red Cross nurse, instead of receiving a pass out of Valoise, must proceed at once to the German Field Ambulance which was already at work in the church hard by.