All over the island—and, still more ubiquitously, all over the quay-sides—are girls and women hawking fruit and cakes and chocolate. The girls are pretty. They better custom by fooling English Tommies to the top of their bent by that French-Arcadian intersexual frankness of discourse and gesture of which English girls know so little, and which Tommy adores so ardently and furtively. This gives the right to put up the price. Tommy, in this land of vines, and in the season—finds himself paying her two francs a pound for grapes. "Très cher aujourd'hui, Monsieur!"—"Mais oui, m'selle—voulez-vous m'embrasser?"—."Nothin' doin', ole shap!" ... These girls are quick-brained, as alertful in mind as you could expect by their well-moulded features and their lithe, straight bodies. There is no insistence, in France, upon the ugly vulgarism of rotundity in women and girls. The girls of France spell, in their bodies, anything but sombreness in spirit or clumsiness in brain. They have never been out of Rouen, but they fling repartee in Arabic at Australians as though they had lived in Cairo. Their only source of such an accomplishment is the Australian soldier himself, and the persistence of Arabic with him. And he does not go out of his way to teach anyone. He learns French with halting slowness, even when some Rouennaise is making efforts to teach him. But these girls take up his English and his incidental Arabic in their swift and light mental stride.
CHAPTER IV
ROUEN REVUE
Except when Lena Ashwell comes with her English concert-party, evening entertainments—that is, public entertainments—in Rouen are limited by some cinemas and two theatres that stage revue. The cinemas are like all other cinemas, except that the humour is broader and sexual intrigue is shown in a more fleshly and passionate form. The audience differs from an English, not in that flirtation is more fierce, but in the running fire of comment directed at the film, and from the way in which crises in the plot are hailed. Everyone smokes who has the habit. The women who do not, masticate noisily at sweets. The girls in the front row of stalls playfully pull the hair of the orchestra, specialising in the 'cello: his deep, detached notes amuse them. This is their way of showing he attracts their attention. The conductor is the pianist too. In his dual capacity he displays astounding resource and agility. The combination of these functions is diverting, even in an Englishman. The films present a preponderance of carnal domestic problems.
Revue is another story. An Englishman has no right to attend French revue without being prepared to discount it at a rate governed by the difference between the national temperaments. Where English revue suggests and insinuates, French explicates the detail. French insinuates too, on occasion, but with the motive of subtlety as distinct from that of English furtiveness: the difference between cleverness and morbidity. All this applies to amours, chiefly between the already-married. French revue goes further, and deals disgustingly in physiological detail which the English stage declines to handle even by implication. And the ladies on the stage are obviously amused by the cruder passages to an unprofessional degree. They giggle outright. The work on the stage, in fact, is curiously informal. Dialogue sotto voce in the corners is not make-believe—nor rehearsed. They carry on a genuine conversation, much of which is criticism of their colleagues at work, much personal comment on the advanced rows of the audience. A French company is never afraid to let you know that, after all, it's only acting you're looking at. English downrightness would maintain the delusion at all costs.
A lot of improvisation goes on—some by choice, some of necessity. French versatility flashes out brilliantly here and there with something that's not in the book; and when a fellow's memory fails he improvises with convincing readiness. There's no such thing as a breakdown, though revue here runs for so long a season that actors might easily be forgiven for growing too stale to improvise. But that they avert by the habit of improvisation from choice.
When, therefore, there comes a "turn" which purports to be classical poses, the effect is blasphemous rather than ludicrous. The spectacle of thick-painted whores clutching clumsily at the spirit of Greek motion and Greek suspension-of-motion, with their lewd simperings and vulgar disproportion of bust, is repellent. At the critical moment someone giggles in the wings and the goddess baulks. The orchestra swells to cover the gaping hiatus which no improvisation can bridge. The Salome-dance and the ballet are quite other things. They perform them here to perfection. Their temperament provides the abandon without which such turns fall stodgy. But classical poses? No!—hardly that!
A French audience in war-time clamours for a military turn or two; and gets them. There's a scene from the trenches presented with a convincing sort of realism—from the death of a comrade to the exchange of fornicatory ribaldries and the pursuit of vermin. Asphyxiation is effected, not by the enemy, but by the corporal's removing his boots. The humour is broad and killing. Shrieking applause drowns half the repartee. Judged by the accompanying gesture, some obviously good things are missed. The delivery of the mail under the parapet, and its perusal, leave little doubt as to the proper function of la bonne marraine—the fair unknown correspondent acquired by advertisement.