Madeleine said never a word, but leaned calmly on the ledge of the wicket, making herself look as stupid as she could, by letting her lower lip droop. Behind her a queue was forming. Already there were cries of: “Come on!” “The train goes in five minutes,” and a wag, “They are making a film for the cinema!”
Tears of exasperation came into the little man’s eyes and his hand began to tremble. He stamped his foot.
“Write the name of the relative you are going to visit.”
“I have no pen.”
Men were hammering on the partition and women were saying, “Are we going to miss the train in addition to all our other miseries?”
The booking-office clerk flung his hairy crossed-nibbed pen at Madeleine. She took it, and wrote in the margin of Blanquart’s certificate the name of her dead brother, carefully using the Flemish script, which the railway people, mainly pure French, could not read. The paper was seized; the cards of identity, the privilege tickets, the change were thrust into her hands. She moved away, counting her change and smiling a very little to herself, and giving just a glance each to the English military policeman and the French gendarme at the platform entrance, both amused spectators of the scene. Behind her, the booking-office clerk kept chewing over the words “sacred peasants,” “swine’s luck,” and other expressions of feeling, as he jabbed the date on tickets and served them in frenzied haste to the crowd that besieged his wicket.
On the wooden benches of the third-class compartment old Vanderlynden and Madeleine found many an acquaintance. There were cries of: “How goes it, Madeleine?” “Jerome, what are you jolly-well doing here, since when did you live St. Omer way?”
* * * *
Madeleine, who had foreseen this contingency, nudged her father, and replied for both:
“We have a little business to attend to,” having made up her mind that no one would guess what it was. She was right. Thus she set running the right stream of vague gossip. For weeks after, the news ran through all the surrounding communes, and flowed back to Hondebecq, that she and her father had been to St. Omer by train. It circulated from the inn of “Lion of Flanders” to the restaurant “The Three Crown-pieces,” even descended to mere estaminets like the “Return from the Congo” and the “Brave Sapeur-Pompier.” No one could make it out. Victor Dequidt soon rejoined his regiment, and if he mentioned the young baron, no one except Madeleine was curious enough to ask which hospital he had gone to. Nor did anyone know of Madeleine’s particular interest in him. At last, when the tale got to the café-restaurant “de la Gare et de Commerce,” one of the gaziers or bullock merchants who used that more business quarter of the village was able to propound a theory. There was an English Forage Officer at St. Omer, and he had his depot just exactly at Naes’ farm, by the new sidings the English had had to make at Schaexen Halte for their hospital, so as to be out of the way of the bombing. No doubt old Vanderlynden had worked the trick all right with that officer (who was buying large quantities), and done well out of it. The certificate of having mobilized relatives that Blanquart had given in such a hurry (and which, of course, was known through Cécile and the other school-children), might be on account of Marcel Vanderlynden, or might be merely a blind. The original paper on which Madeleine had written her brother’s name remained in the archives of the station until all were burnt in the bombardment of December, 1917.