The Little French Girl

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

“Ma chérie! Ma petite chérie!” she said.

The train had come to a standstill and it was as if Alix had flown into her arms. She had been as silent as a spectre on that spectral day when he had first seen her. Her voice now startled him, as the missel-thrush’s voice had done. Tears were in it and tears were in her eyes as she clasped her child. And then, again, as they stood embraced, it was of something Greek they made Giles think; some beautiful relief on the pediment of a sunlit temple; garlands above them and happy maidens in procession on either side carrying baskets of fruit and chanting the reunion of mother and child. Ceres and Persephone it might be. Happy little Persephone, escaped at last from the kingdom of Dis.

Giles stood by, holding Alix’s dressing-case, and felt himself a modern tourist gazing at the masterpiece. Just as little difference, he saw it suddenly and clearly, any knowledge of his would make to madame Vervier. She was lifted, how or why he did not know, far above the dusty impressions of the throng, impervious to their comments, whether of blame or admiration. Even when in another moment her lovely eyes turned on him and, holding Alix against her with one arm, she stretched out a welcoming hand to him and said “Soyez le bien-venu, monsieur Giles. My little girl has had only good things to tell me of you”—even then he could not feel that he had gained in significance. So a queen might have received the young equerry who had safely restored to her the princess royal. They had been good to her child, the dusty throng. That was the importance they had in madame Vervier’s eyes; that, and no more.

Struggling with many thoughts Giles followed mother and daughter. The ghost of Owen walked beside him, and did it whisper: “You see: how could I have helped myself?”

Two other young men were also following madame Vervier and Alix. “Vous jouez le tennis, monsieur?” said one of them, the elegant one, in a gentle voice. He was a charming white-clad person, tall and slender, with eyes intensely blue, black hair brushed back from a starry forehead; and a face like a fox for finesse and flair and like a seraph’s for sweetness. Perhaps he had perceived the something gagged and struggling in Giles’s demeanour and had wanted at once to make him feel that, unimportant as any young man must be to a goddess, he might count on having significance for a new friend. Giles said that he did play, and he and the charming person exchanged smiles. They might, somehow, have fought in the same trenches, side by side, Giles felt. There was at once a link between them. The other young man, who must, Giles thought, be an artist, was dressed in brown velveteen and blue linen and had a dark, square, suffering head.

The place outside the station was white and glaring, and the noises that came from the café across it were glaring, too. Giles reflected, with a certain satisfaction, that Alix need, at all events, feel no pride in this typical scene, and it was disconcerting to have his companion, as they made their way to the little waiting car, indicate with a wave of the hand the dusty green trees, the dusty white houses, the untidy green shutters, and the brittle lights on glasses and brasses in the restaurant and say: “This is the subject that our friend here has just been painting. You shall see it. A little masterpiece of light and colour.”

Of course, Giles growled inwardly as he doubled himself up on the strapontin at right angles to Alix and her mother—the two young men in front—of course, the fact that a beautiful picture might be elicited from the stimuli of the place did not make the place itself more beautiful. And yet the memory of it, framed in this new conception of its uses, grew vexatiously in his mind as they left it far behind, eliminating the weary traveller’s impressions of noise, dust, and disorder, and growing to a pattern of white and green and grey wreathed harmoniously about a tawny ellipse. Yes, one could make something æsthetic out of it, ugly though it was for practical purposes; even inartistic he could see that—hang it!

The road counted off its sections in tall poplars. They passed behind madame Vervier’s head, and, though Giles was so aware of her, he looked at the poplars and the fields beyond them rather than at her. She and Alix talked in French together and Alix’s voice was revealed to him as like her mother’s when she spoke her native tongue; musical; rhythmical; dipping; poising, and then rising to a final lift, like a swallow’s flight. Their hands were clasped. Their eyes were on each other.

He could look at Alix after all, and from the poplars he shifted his eyes to her. He had never seen the child with that face before. Tender, radiant, and with something of pride so deep that it hovered on the brink of tears. Her glance met his and was tender for him, too, as though with Owen’s ghost it said: “You see: how is it possible not to love her?”

But was she as beautiful as all that? Giles gathered himself away from the admission. Was she even beautiful at all? He would have to look at her carefully if he were to say, and he stayed himself on the conviction that if it came to structure and line she could not be compared to Alix.