CHAPTER VIII
There were so many things to see by the way, and so many thoughts to think about them, that Father Beckett and Brian decided on an all night stop at Bar-le-Duc. The town hadn't had an air raid for weeks, and it looked a port of peace. As well imagine enemy aeroplanes over the barley-sugar house of the witch in the enchanted forest, as over this comfortable home of jam-makers!
"Jim always asked for currant jam of Bar-le-Duc on his birthdays, ever since he was a little, little boy," Mrs. Beckett remembered aloud. "And even when he was grown up! But then, he wouldn't wait for birthdays. He wanted it every day for breakfast; and for tea at those grand New York hotels, where I wouldn't go without him, any sooner than in a lion's den. Oh, it will be nice to stay at Bar-le-Duc! If there's been a jam factory blown up, we'll help build it again, to please Jim."
Father Beckett was shrewdly of opinion that the jam factories could take care of themselves, which rather disappointed his wife. She was vaguely disappointed too, in Bar-le-Duc. I think she expected to smell a ravishing fragrance of Jim's favourite confiture as we entered the town. It had been a tiring day for her, with all our stops and sightseeing, and she had less appetite for history than for jam. We had passed through lovely country since Châlons, decorated with beautiful tall trees, high box hedges, and distant, rolling downs golden with grain and sunlight. Also, whenever our road drew near the railway, we'd caught exciting glimpses of long trains "camouflaged" in blurry greens and blues, to hide themselves from aeroplanes. Nevertheless, Mother Beckett had begun to droop. Her blue eyes hardly brightened to interest when Brian said we were in the famous region of the Meuse, part of the Austrian Empire in Charlemagne's day: that somewhere hereabout Wittekind, the enslaved Saxon, used to work "on the land," not dreaming of the kingly house of Capet he was to found for France, and that Bar-le-Duc itself would be our starting-point for Verdun, after Nancy and the "Lorraine Front."
For her Bar-le-Duc had always represented jam, endless jam, loved by Jim, and talk of the dukes of Bar brought no thrill to Jim's mother. She cared more to see the two largest elms in France of which Jim had written, than any ruins of ducal dwellings or tombs of Lorraine princes, or even the house where Charles-Edouard the Pretender lived for years.
Fortunately there was a decent hotel, vaguely open in the upper town on the hill, with a view over the small tributary river Ornain, on which the capital city of the Meuse is built. One saw the Rhine-Marne Canal, too, and the picturesque roofs of old fifteenth-century houses, huddled together in lower Bar-le-Duc, shut in among the vine-draped valleys of Champagne.
As we left the car and went into the hotel (I lingering behind to help Brian) I noticed another car behind us. It was more like a taxi-cab than a brave, free-born automobile, but it had evidently come a long way, as it was covered with dust, and from its rather ramshackle roof waved a Red Cross flag.
In the good days before the war I should have thought it the most natural thing on earth if a procession of twenty motors had trailed us. But war has put an end to joy-rides. Besides, since the outskirts of Paris, we had been in the zone de guerre, constantly stopped and stared at by sentinels. The only cars we passed, going east or west, were occupied by officers, or crowded with poilus, therefore the shabby little taxi became of almost startling interest. I looked back, and saw that it was slowing down close behind our imposing auto, from which a few small pieces of luggage for the night were being removed.
The Red Cross travellers were evidently impatient. They did not wait for our chauffeur to drive away. The conductor of the car jumped down and opened the door of his nondescript vehicle. I made out, under a thick coat of dust, that he wore khaki of some sort, and a cap of military shape which might be anything from British to Belgian. He gave a hand to a woman in the car—a woman in nurse's dress. A thick veil covered her face, but her figure was girlish. I noticed that she was extremely small and slim in her long, dust-dimmed blue cloak: a mere doll of a creature.
The man's back was turned toward me as he aided the nurse; but suddenly he flung a glance over his shoulder, and stared straight at me, as if he had expected to find me there.