Old Jerome came at Madeleine’s cry of “Papa, kom ben t’haus!” from picking over his seed potatoes.
Madeleine, who wanted the men out of the way, let it pass for politeness that she took the carafe of beer and two hastily washed glasses into the kitchen, swabbed the table and invited the Baron to place himself. She went back to her wringer, leaving the door into the scullery open. One never knew. She had kept her secret in her heart ever since her visit to the English hospital. She had no news, and had been able to think of no new way of getting even with the War, but she had forgotten nothing, forgiven nothing, renounced nothing.
Old Jerome, who, even a year before, would have stood in the Baron’s presence until told to be seated, now sat down beside his landlord without apology.
The Baron did not remark on this, but said: “Then, you have your farm all full of English?”
“Very likely, but you have the right to be paid!”
“They pay, but they do damage all the same.”
Old Jerome was not going to let go a possible advantage.
The Baron, whose feelings against the English had been cool from 1870 until Fashoda, then violent until the idea of the Entente and its meaning had filtered into his unreceptive mind, had just been reading propagandist literature, “The English Effort,” and so forth, designed for just such as he. Expanding with the new ideas he had received, he reviewed the situation at some length, dwelling on England’s immense resources of material, untouched reserves of men, all that cheerful unknown which was so comforting in face of unpleasant known facts of the growing wastage of France.
Jerome added one remark born of the unaccustomed way money was now handed about. “Besides, they are rich!” which led the Baron on again, along the path pointed out by yet another pamphlet he had been reading, on the subject of the new war loan.