“Well, we aren’t now; you come and see old Fryern’s dump after lunch—say about three!”
“What, old ‘Chops’ Fryern?”
“No other, I assure you!” and so on.
* * * *
It happened, only a week or so after Sir Montague’s arrival at the farm, that a lorry stopped in the yard. There was nothing unusual in that. They did so at all hours of the day and most of the night. The English, so wits said, fought on rubber tyres. Old Jerome, leaning on his hoe, type of primitive man drudging with his primitive implement to wring a subsistence from inscrutable Nature, often stood to watch these powerful, docile servants of a younger age, that could do the work of ten men and four horses in half an hour. He was doing so now, and Madeleine, if she thought about it at all, thought like this: “Poor old father, he’s making old bones; it’s the boys he misses,” when she saw Jerome drop his hoe and run to the lorry to help out a woman with a shawl over her head.
In another moment Madeleine had no doubt. It was her sister Marie from Laventie. In a moment she was out. The men on the lorry, with the queer, dumb, unexpected kindliness of the poorer Englishman, were handing down Emilienne, Marie’s little girl, in a sort of frozen stupor of cold and fright. Madeleine ran to take the child, while her father helped Marie, who seemed dazed, into the house. Round the kitchen stove, quickly stoked until the top shone red, Madeleine plied them with the inevitable coffee, and presently with slabs of staunch farm bread.
Jerome stood by, the mere helpless male in the face of calamity. It was he who said first:
“What is it, my girl?”
At first Marie could only say, “O, my God!” and rock herself. But presently, reviving under the influence of food and drink, and the still more potent surroundings of safety in that familiar, warm old kitchen, where she had grown up, began to tell of the daily increase in shelling and bombing. In her half-empty farm-house, with the glass long gone from its shuttered windows, and the machine-gun bullets in its walls, relics of the first engagement with the Germans in 1914, she had billeted some English Engineers. The sector had been quiet ever since Neuve Chapelle, a year before. Suddenly, as the English sat with her around the fire, the shell had come. It had fallen in the doorway of the farm and had flung half the house upon the soldiers. Marie, protected by the solid brick chimney-piece, as soon as she got her breath, had scrambled under the débris to the room where Emilienne was crying to her. The door was jammed by a fallen beam. Some soldiers had run from a neighboring billet, had broken in the door and got the child out. How they had all tramped up the road, shells ahead, shells behind, shells falling each side, with the sky red and the air rocking with the English artillery retaliation, she could not tell. At last, at a dump of some sort the Engineers had put her on a lorry that had taken her to Strazeele. Farther than that they could not go; it was the limit of their Corps area. Marie and Madeleine had been educated by the past eighteen months, and knew better than to expect a lorry to go outside its Corps area. So Marie had had to walk, with the child in her arms, to Caestre, where she had found, thank God! plenty of lorries running back from railhead. On hearing her tale, an officer had allowed her to get into one that was going to Hondebecq, and she had easily persuaded the driver to go as far as Spanish Farm.
At this point there was a tap on the door, which was opened by a khaki-clad figure, with a sheepish face and unmistakable Cockney accent.