The Spanish farm

by R. H. Mottram

PART II
“ON LES AURA”

MADELEINE went to Amiens, but it hardly describes what happened to say that she went by herself without other companions than chance fellow-travelers, for, in her, there entered the capital of Northern France more than a single Flemish girl. She took up with her, all about her, an atmosphere of the frontier, of staunch Flanders, of the Spanish Farm. Countrified she might be, certainly a stranger, but there was nothing callow or helpless about her. She showed that maturity that connoisseurs of wine mean when they speak of “body.” Generations, a whole race, living in one way, confronted century after century with much the same environments, had prepared that quality in her, which led no one to wonder at or pity her. Had there been any Society for the Protection of Young Girls at the station at Amiens, it would not have considered her a “case,” as she swung down on to the platform, produced her ticket and papers, and bargained with an old man with a barrow to take her box—a bargain she struck much to her advantage by shouldering the said box and starting to carry it herself.

The Amiens to which Madeleine went was the Amiens of mid-war—that is to say, a general manufacturing town of eighty thousand people, provincial, antiquated as such towns can be only in France—which town, plunged into European war, had seen the Germans march through its streets. It was now reserve railhead, camping-ground, last-civilized-spot for the avalanches of reinforcements the English were pouring into the line. Most of the French who fought beside them in that northern sector had to pass through it. Madeleine had not been able to calculate with any nicety how her move had increased her chances of meeting Georges, but she got as far as beginning to understand what the Baron had meant by the “English effort,” the immensity of that Volunteer Army, the constant watching and waiting that would be necessary to find Georges among the hundreds of French Mission officers that went with it. But like all vague steps, the one that she had taken was comforting because of its novelty, its unplumbed depths of possibility. Once cut adrift from home, and having suppressed a tiny shyness, rising in the throat, she flung herself into the new life with gusto. She was not wholly ignorant of towns, had been to Hazebrouck and St. Omer, to Dunkirk even, once, and was ready as any country-grown girl to fall under the spell of town life and strive desperately to look as if she had always lived it.

* * * *

Her job was in one of those Government Departments, whose staff, depleted by general mobilization, and further by repeated “combing-out,” hardly sufficed to keep going that multiplicity of printed forms by which France is governed. She wrote a good hand, having acquired that art at a convent school where it, at least, was not reckoned among the subversive sciences. Perhaps she dimly saw in the power to write and read one of the advantages that such as she possessed over the less lucky. Handwriting, at any rate, was no difficulty. Figures she handled with respect, almost with appetite. As the first newness of the life thawed and broke before her, she began to prepare herself to take the lead in the office, as she had taken it at the farm. By the time August was turning into September, she almost smiled as she took her week’s money. She would not have paid Berthe so much for doing such a job. Eight to twelve and two to six seemed to her a ridiculously light day. The heat of the town was sometimes oppressive, but the office, about the ill-kept state of which she grimaced to herself, was on the north side of one of those rococo barrack-like buildings that link the architecture of the chef-lieux of Northern France to that of Mediterranean civilization. That is, it had the dank chill of a tomb. She survived. As for the life in general, her iron health stood it well. She missed the air and exercise, but her diet was not full enough to allow her to fatten. She had been welcomed, of course, by Cécile Blanquart, and taken, not without a shade of kindly patronage, to lodge with the aunt who sheltered Cécile. The aunt was one of those widows of the small official class who seemed to have disappeared from England since Dickens. She was poorer, prouder, more impossibly ugly and mean than anything surviving to us. She would have housed Madeleine, had not each of her tiny rooms already contained two people at least. Clinging to any ha’pence that were to be had, she arranged that the new-comer should dine at the frugal common table she kept, and sleep a few streets away in the third-floor attic over the pork butcher’s. Madeleine appeared to her what is called in France “sérieuse.” To Madeleine, the arrangement appeared nothing short of heaven sent.

She had applied herself to her job. She had put out all her most feminine sensibilities to catch the right note in dress and looks, for she was nothing if not conventional. But in her heart she was simply passing the days and waiting her chance to find Georges. As she did her work, altered and supplemented her clothes, took little evening walks or visited the cinema with the other girls, to all appearance just a strapping country cousin fitting herself into new surroundings, she was, all the time, vigilant, relentless. She drew the others down to the station on the pretext of buying a paper at the hour the troop trains passed or stopped. She preferred for her small needs the shops that fronted the well-known officers’ restaurant, for Georges, she knew, would do himself well if he had the chance. As to what exactly she would say or do if she saw him she was not the girl to wonder. She had perfect faith in her illusion—just to see him face to face, anyhow, anywhere.

* * * *

Her companions with whom she worked, ate, and spent her evenings did not annoy her. That is as much as she felt about them. Although only a year or so her juniors, there was nothing about them to excite her jealousy or even her respect. As she listened to them, making little muddles over their jobs, giving way to small passions and routine indispositions, chattering with affected solemnity or secrecy of their opinions, hopes, fears—above all of their love affairs—she almost smiled. She put more of herself into even the purchase of hairpins than they did into their liaisons. Not that she was more generous or less acquisitive than they, but simply because there was more of her. She had known real work, hard bargains, the utter depth of passion—things undreamed of in their little world of petty officialdom and shop-assistantship. Even the country girls like Cécile stood mentally where she, Madeleine, had not done since her mother died. Probably her principal minor preoccupation (as distinct from her one great secret preoccupation) was the size of her body. She was half a head taller and much more substantial than most of them. She knew she was dressing herself right, somber colors, good material and cut, little or no ornament—but her hands and feet gave her some anxious moments, they seemed so big. She gave considerable attention to her hands, using every means she could hear of to whiten them, and manicuring them elaborately, bringing to the work much patience and sense and no imagination. For her feet, she simply bought the best she could afford, not attempting to pinch them, relying on her strong ankles, straight back, and developed hips to keep her extremities in proportion. She was right. Men turned to look at her often enough and never with the superior, amused eye that she saw bent on her companions. She did not consciously care whether men looked or not, but there was just that comfort in it that she could tell that she was interpreting this strange new world rightly. Had she but known, she possessed two of the greatest advantages over most of the women in those surroundings—radiant health, that brightened her glance, polished her skin, burnished her hair—and, in spite of her quiet clothes and steady eyes, an air of independence of which she was probably unconscious, but which was far more attractive than the air of facile complicity with male patronage that many girls wore. Like all advantages, these carried with them their own inconvenience, as she soon discovered.