PART I

CHAPTER I

A clock struck eight, a loud yet distant clock. The strokes, Alix thought, seemed to glide downwards rather than to fall through the fog and tumult of the station, and, counting them as they emerged, they were so slow and heavy that they made her think of tawny drones pushing their way forth from among the thickets of hot thyme in the jardin potager at Montarel. Sitting straightly in her corner of the Victoria waiting-room, the little French girl fixed her mind upon the picture thus evoked so that she should not feel too sharply the alarming meaning of the hour, and seemed again to watch the blunt, sagacious faces of the drones as they paused in sulky deliberation on the tip of a spray before launching themselves into the sunlight. What could be more unlike Montarel than this cold and paltry scene? What more unlike that air, tranced with sunlight and silence, than this dense atmosphere? Yet the heavy, gliding notes brought back the drones so vividly that she found herself again in the high-terraced garden under the sun-baked old château. The magnolia-trees ate into the crumbling walls and opened lemon-scented cups beneath her as she leaned her arms on the hot stone and looked across the visionary plains to the Alps on the horizon, blue, impalpable, less substantial to the sight than the clouds that sailed in grandiose snowy fleets above them. Alix had always felt that it was like taking great breaths to see the plains and like spreading immense wings to see the mountains, and something of invulnerable dignity, of inaccessible remoteness in her demeanour as she sat there might well have been derived from generations who had lived and died in the presence of natural sublimities. Her brows were contemplative, her lips proud. She was evidently a foreigner, a creature nurtured in climes golden yet austere and springing from an aromatic, rocky soil. The pallor of her extreme fatigue could not efface the sunny tones of her skin; her hair was the blacker for its bronzed lights, and if her eyes were blue, it was not the English blue of a water-side forget-me-not, but the dense, impalpable blue of the Alps seen across great distances.

Two women, pausing on their way out to look at her, drew her mind back from Montarel. She knew that she might look younger than her years. Her bobbed hair was cut straight across her forehead and her skirt displayed a childish length of leg. It was no wonder that, seeing her there, alone, they should speak of her with curiosity, perhaps with solicitude; for there was kindness in their eyes. But she did not like pity, and, drawing herself up more straightly, wrapping her arms in the scarf that muffled her shoulders, she fixed her eyes blankly above their heads until they had passed on. They were kind women; but very ugly. Like jugs. All the people that she had seen since landing on this day of grey and purple flesh-tones had made her think of the earthenware jugs that old Marthe used to range along her upper shelves in the little dark shop that stood on the turn of the road leading down from the château to the village. Their eyes were joyless yet untragic. Their clothes expressed no enterprise. She did not think that they could feel ecstasy, ever, or despair. Yet they were the people of Captain Owen, and she could not be really forgotten, for Captain Owen’s family were to come for her. It was only some mistake; but more than the strokes of the clock the women’s eyes had made her feel how late it was, how young she was, and how hungry.

Maman’s déjeuner, the long buttered petits pains with ham in them, she had eaten on the boat; and, far away, seen across the leaden waters of the November channel, was the bright petit déjeuner, in Paris that morning, and Maman before the wood fire, her beauty still clouded by sleep, sweet, sombre, and gay as only she could be, her russet locks tossed back and her white arms bare in the white woollen peignoir. “They will, I know, be good to my darling,” Maman had said, buttering her roll while Albertine brought in the coffee, “and keep her warm and well-fed through this hard winter.” Firmness and resource breathed from Maman. She knew what she was doing and Alix saw herself powerless in her hands. Yet she could read her, too. Even though she could not always interpret the words, she could always read Maman, and the meaning, as it were, of the sentence would come to her in a feeling rather than in an idea. She had felt that morning that Maman’s heart was not at ease. It was true that the Armistice had been signed but the other day, that the war was hardly over, and that everything would be more expensive than ever. It was true that she was going to friends, though to unknown friends; to the family of their dear Captain Owen, killed in battle only nine months ago. He had so often said that they must know his family, and it had been his mother who had written so kindly to say that Giles would meet her. But if all this were so natural, why had she felt that touch of artifice in Maman’s manner, that resource in her so many reasons? Perhaps they did not really want her. And perhaps there was some mistake and they did not expect her to-night. If no one came, what was she to do? She had only five shillings in her purse. The porter had placed her little box and her dressing-case on the seat beside her, and if no one came was she to sit on here all night, in the waiting-room, this horrid feeling, half hunger, half fear, gnawing at the pit of her stomach? “Dieu, que j’ai faim!” she thought; and as she now leaned back her head and closed her eyes, the sadness that flowed into her carried her far back to Montarel again and it was Grand-père that she saw, passing under the pollarded lime-trees with his dragging footsteps and looking down on the ground as he went, with no eyes for the climbing vineyards, no eyes for the plains, the river, the Alps; his short white beard and jutting nose giving him still the air of a commandant, high on his fortress; but so old, so ill, so poor and so despairing.

The dappled shadows of the limes lay brightly blue at his feet. His bleached hands were clasped behind him on his stick. He wore a black silk skull-cap and a white silk handkerchief was knotted around his neck. It had always frightened her a little to see Grand-père, and it frightened her now to remember him, the commandant, defeated, broken; yet still with that sombre fire smouldering in his eyes. “Tout-à-fait une tête de Port-Royal,” she had heard someone say of him once; and so a devout noble of the time of Louis Quatorze might have looked. Only she did not see Grand-père as appeased, withdrawn from the world and its illusions; he brooded, rather, in bitterness upon them. He minded everything so terribly.

She remembered as if it were yesterday the dreadful summer afternoon when the bell had clanged hoarsely in the courtyard, and Mélanie, wiping her steaming arms on her apron, had come clapping in her savates across the paving-stones to let in the opulent gentleman who had arrived in his motor to take away the Clouets. That was the day that had revealed to her what Grand-père’s poverty must be. He had sold the Clouets at last; after selling so many things. The great gaunt salles, the little panelled salons, the rows of incommodious bedrooms, looking, from high up, over the plains, all were empty; and the Clouets now were to go.