The Spanish farm

by R. H. Mottram

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Among Aunt Blanquart’s lodgers were men, too weedy or too well protected to have been mobilized. They functioned on the railway, or some other public service, she did not care what, with colored brassards on their arms. She had paid no heed to them, secure in the fatal confidence of a strong nature, merely getting out of them anything they knew about the movements of troops, feigning the fatuous gossiping curiosity that was common enough. She was so immersed in her Fixed Idea that she was astonished when the more pimply of them slipped past Aunt Blanquart’s semi-official vigilance, as she was going home to her room, and following her, proposed, “Suppose we take a little walk, as the English say!”

Madeleine turned on him a freezing stare:

“What for?” she demanded, standing her ground.

The pimply-faced one faded back into the house, muttering excuses, only to confide in his friends later that Madeleine was a “rosse,” “an awkward beast,” as one should say.

Then again, when the skull-capped old gentleman who controlled her room went sick, the worried head of the department came across to Madeleine naturally with: “Give out the work to the room, while this old Do-nothing is away, will you?”

She did the distribution of the endless schedules, minutes and circulars deftly enough, and corrected the errors with a firm hand. It took far less thought than most of her days at the farm. When the “old Do-nothing” returned, skull-capped, pallid, smelling of lozenges, she met him with, “I have done” so and so, and “you will find this” there and that “under the paper weight!” etc., going quietly back to her desk. At night he lingered, and was left alone with her, because she was never in such a hurry as the others to crowd downstairs, squabble in the lobby over the inadequate space allowed for dressing oneself for the walk home. She turned and stared as he asked her to dine with him.

An idea—one of her rare, slowly born ideas—had come to being in her head. In her seriousness she hardly noticed that he had taken it for granted that she would go with him. But she almost smiled when he began to detail his little plan. She, who had known not merely trials of cunning with Belgian horse dealers and hop merchants, but desperate evasion and deceit to meet Georges in the Kruysabel, agreed to pretend to Aunt Blanquart that she had a headache, and to meet this old man at the corner of the street. Fortunately it was dark at the hour named—dark with that war-time darkness of a town within the bombing area. She had a difficulty to recognize him in the crowd—and a great temptation to help his shuffling steps. She felt a sort of charity towards him, an inclination to take his arm and help him—a feeling which increased as she saw what careful plans he had laid. He did not take her to a restaurant, where the unequal couple they made would certainly have been the object of more or less concealed amusement, but to the back sitting-room of an old servant of his, who was now caretaker at a big shop. It was discreet, cozy. The cooking was good, the dinner ample, chosen from the more easily digested dishes. She was so touched by his evident enjoyment—though she had her own quiet confidence in her desirability—and by his desire to give her a good time—and things had been rather thin since mobilization—that the only tyranny she practised on him was to make him send out for a bottle of Burgundy; the pale sweet wines he offered seemed to her below the occasion.

There was no awkwardness during the meal, for she asked prudent, calculated questions—who really moved, housed and regulated the flow of troops—did he know the numbers or composition of the English divisions—all the small details most Frenchwomen—utterly innocent of spying—asked eternally out of sheer curiosity and interferingness. And when they had done eating she had to put up with the demonstrations that men make, who have either not had their fill in middle life, or who have come to regard it as a necessity not to be foregone. She had found that he did possess information and perhaps connections that might be useful to her Fixed Idea, and tolerated his attempts to solace his waning instincts, until, hearing the hour chime, she shook herself free, put herself tidy, and left him to find his way home—only, because he might be useful and sounded disappointed, she murmured, “Another time,” at the door. Once in the street, she stepped briskly home, arrived at the door of her lodging about the usual hour of her return from Aunt Blanquart’s, and went up to bed. She was plotting and scheming busily and had already forgotten her entertainer as though he had never existed.

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