It was when the young officer mentioned that he lay in the trenches next some French troops that the spark caught, flamed, became an idea. She showed nothing, of course, presiding with her usual competence at the long Flemish midday meal, which she felt to be his due, after having got him to come so far on his useless errand. But as the four courses followed one another, and a carafe of beer gave place to more Burgundy, she was thinking. Her father went back to work, leaving the Lieutenant smoking over his coffee and glass of Lille gin.
She began to question him with infinite caution, trying to find out what his strange view of life might be. She made up her mind, after rallying him (as was rather the fashion) on his conquests of her sex in France, that he was very innocent, well brought up, sharp at money, willing, and now she added in her mind, “rather a child,” “un peu enfant.” It did not displease her. On the contrary, it was all to the good. She rather expected the English to be like that. He did not take the subject up and feign interest in her, as a Frenchman would have done, but remained serious. She was therefore obliged to say right out what was in her mind. It was to ask him, next time he went up to the trenches, next to the French troops, to try and obtain news of Georges for her. She had heard that his regiment was in the northern sector. She formed no idea of the trenches, of the camps and resting places next to them. She simply said what she wanted. Once the words were out she had to use all her self-control. The sound of her request, the speaking aloud of what had been going round and round in her mind for so long, brought a rush of feeling such as she had not experienced since the first day of mobilization. She bit her lips to keep back tears and sobs. Then she was glad to hear the Lieutenant promising to do what he could. There was some difficulty about it, apparently, she was not curious to understand. She was glad she had asked an Englishman, realizing now how the thing sounded, and what a tale a Frenchman would have made of it. All she cared about now was for this young man to go—she was aching with the effort of restraint—and get her the news she wanted. She had no clear idea what. She pictured in a dim way Georges sending a message that he was all right, and making an appointment to meet her, in St. Omer—Calais—where he liked. Further than that her imagination could not take her.
She thanked the young man cordially, and offered him more gin. He refused, and went away, assuring her that he was at her service in this as in other matters. She forgot him before he was out of the yard, and fearing that she would cry—a thing she had not done since she was a tiny girl—she went to her room. But she did not cry. She sat on the wooden chair at the foot of the bed, her hands on the wooden rail, her face upon her hands. Nothing happened. She soon went back to her work, for her feelings were even worse in that little room of hers than in the big kitchen where she had so much to do. Gradually her heart ceased to thump, her eyes to smart. But she had taken the first active step towards getting Georges back—towards that recovery of anything taken away from her, that was her deepest instinct. And she knew that she would not stop at any first step—not she!
* * * *
It took more than a mere European war twenty miles off to interrupt the regular life of the Spanish Farm. Troops came and troops went, and Madeleine watched them, watched the payments made by the messes for extra accommodation and cooking, and the weekly payments through the Mairie for billeting and stabling, watched the storing of the crops, the thrashing, the milking, the feeding of the fowls. Every week she went to market, sold what she could, bought as little as possible, and sent her parcel, surreptitiously, from the post office. She neither heard nor saw anything of Georges. She neither heard nor saw anything of Lieutenant Skene. But, sure enough, on the first opportunity, she was obliged to try to get news of Georges.
It happened, as winter came on, that “the château” had need of some things, eggs, and hare pâté—nowhere so good as at the Spanish Farm—and Madame la Baronne wanted some sewing done, rather special, better than any of her women could do. A message came via the Baron, who shouted from horseback, as he rode by, to Vanderlynden, at work in the plain. Old Vanderlynden handed it on to Madeleine, as he bent in an attitude half of prayer, half a crouching ape’s, over the midday soup.
Madeleine nodded and told him to put in the horse—not that she could not have done it, but she must clean herself. Accordingly, half an hour later, there might have been seen issuing from the yard of the Spanish Farm, over the brick bridge, along the earth road that divided the manor pasture, out by the brick-pillared gate on to the road, surely the oldest, most repaired of high black gigs, drawn by an old white horse whose sonorous walk took it along at perhaps two miles an hour. Framed in the dark aperture of the hood, upright, expressionless, sat Madeleine, bareheaded, but in her best dress, holding the reins in a gloved hand, basket between her feet. Silent, expressionless, she may have been, but when she turned into the Lille-Calais road and met a string of English transports, limbers and wagons, it was noticeable that the Quartermaster-Sergeant, after glancing at her face, instead of shouting to her to get out of the way, turned in his saddle and shouted to the drivers, “Right o’ the road!”
She came to the village and crossed the empty Grand’ Place, where the old houses stared unchanged over the notice-boards of the offices of the Head-quarters of an English Division, and the church, newly faced with red brick, showed the zeal of the pious Flemings. Turning sharply out of this, she mounted, at the snail pace of the old white horse, a steep street between little houses of people who had retired to live on about the equivalent of forty pounds English per annum (as people do in France). It ended in a great eighteenth-century iron grille, the entry to the château. The central gates stood open and she drove straight along a road deep between high banks covered with shrubs, which followed for some fifty yards the old line of the moat, until she came under the back part of the château where a broad terrace of gravel separated the basement offices from the kitchen garden. Leaving the old horse, with perfect confidence, looking down his nose into a laurel bush, Madeleine took her basket on her arm, and entered the great square kitchen.
One of the things that renders life so easy in France is the absence of change. Anywhere outside Paris, and often in it, change seems to have worn itself out, and to have ceased. In that remote corner of Flanders, Madeleine had no shyness, hesitation, or doubt, in entering the house of her father’s landlord and her lover’s mother. She would not have dreamed of entering by the front. No less would she have thought of leaving the house without seeing Madame la Baronne in person. She was not alone in this. The establishment was ruled by a lean, gaunt, gray-mustached person, discernible to be of the female sex only by her clothes, named Placide. Just as for Madeleine, so for Placide, life was an easy riddle. She knew her place to a hair’s breadth, between God, and her master and her mistress, on the one hand, and the servants, tenants, tradespeople on the other. The great square block of a house, the main building of the older castle, whose wings had been thrown into its moat, whose forecourt had become flower gardens in the revolution of 1790, went on its even way under her iron rule, undisturbed by wars. The presence of a mess of English officers in the Baron’s quarters, east of the main staircase, the absence of young Master Georges, of all the men-servants, and of some of the women who had gone to work on farms, did not throw Placide out of her stride. When Madeleine entered, she was standing with her back to the dresser with its shining pots and pans, telling a maid-servant her duties. The following conversation ensued:
“Good morning, Madeleine, how goes it?”