The Little French Girl

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

Madame Vervier, after her pause, advanced slowly into the room, and her smile did not conceal from Giles her covert examination of himself. It was a smile deep and soft; superficially acquiescent; but concealing much. Vigilance was in it, and the sense, perhaps, of a special need for vigilance; the recognition, too, perhaps, of something unforeseen that England had already done to her child. Such untroubled intimacy between young man and maiden was not, Giles divined, in the traditions to which madame Vervier was accustomed. Yet her smile suggested no reproof and seemed to acquiesce serenely in Alix’s demonstration of alien habits.

She moved to them, and passed her arm in Alix’s, so that they stood, all three, linked together, and, smiling on, she remarked: “You must not give your good friend cause for such fancies, darling.”

She spoke in English and her English was almost as perfect as Alix’s. The r of “darling,” just rolled, like the almost imperceptible ripple on the smooth surface of a shell, made the word at once more playful and more caressing. And she went on, looking from one to the other: “You must not seem to forget him in finding me. Our kind allies must have no cause, at any time, for suspecting that we French have not faithful hearts.”

“But I have just told him, Maman, that I should never forget him,” said Alix as they moved towards the door. “And there can be no question of that, Giles, for you will come often and often to Les Chardonnerets, will you not?”

Giles did not answer this question. It was unexpected, and its sweetness was unexpected. His mind, however, was occupied with the discomfort that came to him at seeing himself made to appear so personally involved in regrets for Alix’s removal. It was not himself, first and foremost, he had been thinking of at all when he felt those regrets; it was of England; of his mother and Toppie; of the noisy, untidy, but devoted family life; of the birch-wood at evening where he had taught Alix the song of the willow-warbler; of his beautiful Oxford and “The Messiah” on Winter evenings. These were the things he wanted Alix to remember, and it could not console him to know that she expected to see him again when he felt sure that she would see his England disappear from her life without one pang.

CHAPTER IV

A table had been laid in a corner of the verandah, and a stout woman, bareheaded and in savates, was carrying out tea and coffee.

Madame Vervier rearranged the tray, setting the tongs on the sugar, the strainer on a cup, placing the plate of madeleines here, the brioches there; all mildly, with no savour of criticism for Albertine’s haphazard methods. In England such a ministrant at the tea-table would have been felt as a flaw on the prevailing perfection; yet Albertine, Giles divined, was also the cook; and a bevy of trim, capped English maids could hardly have evolved the lustre of cleanliness that reigned throughout the lovely little house. It was difficult to think of madame Vervier as poor; and more difficult to think of her doing things for herself. Yet all the loveliness had, he felt, been gathered together with something of the same mild dexterity that now brought order and comeliness to the tea-table. Madame Vervier was the sort of person who would pick up lovely things for a song; the Louis Quinze bedstead, the voile de Gênes, the tall cream-white cafetière, like one he had seen in a picture by—Chardin, wasn’t it?—and the teapot with a delicate spray of grey flowers, just touched with gilt, on its side—had all, he could imagine, been brought to her nest by the unerring instinct that leads the bird to select the white feather or the lichen. Alix had said, he remembered, that part of their revenue was derived from the rent of the fairy-tale house; he was sure that it was an investment that paid well. And she had probably herself made the dresses she and Alix wore. She could be extravagant if the money were there; if it were not, she was careful. One felt in her the essential freedom from material bondage.

Monsieur de Maubert was still in his shady corner with the Nouvelle Revue Française on his knee. The young artist had reappeared and was sitting on the steps, his chin on his hands, looking out at the sea. Madame Vervier took her place at the tea-table, monsieur de Maubert drew his chair beside her, and Giles’s friend strolled up from the cliff-path accompanied by yet another noticeable personage.

This was a youngish woman, though younger in form than in face, bareheaded and wearing a very short white skirt and a flame-coloured silk jacket. It was almost like seeing a tongue of electric fire, brilliant, supple, cold, run in among them, so different was she from the sunlight which seemed so completely madame Vervier’s element. It did not surprise Giles to gather, presently, that mademoiselle Blanche Fontaine was an actress, and a distinguished one. She was charming; he had seen that at once; but he had seen as soon that it was a charm with which he had nothing at all to do; the sort of charm one expected to pay ten-and-six for the sight and sound of and to feel, while it operated upon you, safely barred away from by a row of footlights. A presence so brilliant could not be said to cast a chill, but for Giles it certainly cast a discomfort. Who was she? What did she mean? Where had she come from, this young woman so lean, so white, so sickly-looking, yet so tough? Her smile, as she bit into her madeleine, brought a long dimple that was almost a wrinkle into her cheek and her long, pale eyes scintillated under darkened lashes. He realized how noticeably independent of artificial aids to significance was madame Vervier from noting how frankly mademoiselle Fontaine had made use of them. She might even, by nature, he surmised, be a swarthy woman; but art had transformed her to a dazzling whiteness and her crinkled hair, that might be really black, repeated the lustrous flame of her jacket. Something in the fervour of her thin, gay lip, in the vigour of her thin, questing nose, even suggested to Giles a Semitic strain; but upon the racial edifice she had laid a pattern of strange, chiming colour that seemed in its vehemence and oddity to alter the very contour of her face. She had made of herself what she would; what she was, was unfathomable by any plummet in Giles’s possession.