On the following Sunday, having drunk her coffee and eaten her roll, she replied to Marie’s letter. She expressed her sympathy with all those in the village who had suffered bereavement, sent her congratulations to all those who had bettered their state of life. She asked to hear further of Marcel. She mentioned the Baron and the Baronne in the former category, also the Dequidts. She sent her father much affection and promised to come and see him soon. This was a mere convention. He would have been astonished had she carried it into effect, but it was testimony of her gratitude to him for having guessed her Fixed Idea, and having so astutely helped her. The letter, evidence of an orderly, unimaginative mind, wound up with sisterly affection for Marie—also a convention—for the two girls, realists to the core, knew well enough that they were friendly so long as they remained apart—and kisses for Emilienne. Having completed this, and posted it, she went to second mass at the cathedral. There, when it was over, she sat in the dimness of the sand-bagged windows and the ancient stones. She had never read Mr. Ruskin, never glanced at the moral carvings of the west front, the historical carvings of the ambulatory—sand-bagged as were the first, and removed as were the second now—and would probably have made very little of them, save that they were the sort of carvings one saw in churches. Of all the long romance of that storied pile, from Robert de Luzarches to the German occupation of 1870, she knew and cared nothing—neither for its tons of masonry, glass and wood, nor for the million prayers that drifted on its stagnant air. Nor did she sit there alone from any religious motive. She was not truly religious—too sure of herself, too incurious, she kept of the faith of her fathers nothing but some habits, and some rags of superstition. She left, at one o’clock, when all the English officers were in their messes, and all the French homes had that air of preoccupation which accompanies the most important meal of the week. The streets were empty. She passed rapidly to the big shop at which “Papa’s” servant was caretaker, and found the side door unlocked. In the back sitting-room Papa was waiting for her, skull-cap, clean collar, eyes watering with pleasure. There, amid solid furniture, marble-topped chiffoniers and chests of drawers, hermetically sealed, chairs and settees upholstered as if for ever, they held “Papa’s Festivity.” Once again Madeleine was touched when she saw he had ordered red wine to please her. But after the table had been cleared and his senile familiarities began, she hardened her heart. She questioned him straightly and searchingly, making him buy, with information, every liberty she allowed him. She knew well enough how quickly men changed, once they were satisfied, and chose the very moment before he lay back on the plush settee, exhausted by the violence of his emotions, to extract a promise that he would get her transferred to Paris, and a second promise of secrecy—because, she told him, there were so many spiteful tongues. She looked him full in the eyes as she said this, but he was at the stage at which he could only say, “Yes, yes!” intent on gratifying his momentary needs. After this she poured him out some wine, and kissing him on his bald head—for his skull-cap had slipped off—she left him to reflect. She went to an appointment with Cécile Blanquart, whose father was visiting her for the day and chatted to him of village affairs. Her crude psychology was not at fault. For a day or two “Papa” left her alone, but before a week was out he was pestering her again. She took it as a right, believing that men who had once desired her must do so again. In fact, it was this point at which Georges’ neglect had so hurt her. But she had made her terms and stuck to them. She reminded “Papa” of his promises, and he demurred, temporized. She cut him severely for two days and brought him to heel. He was not likely to find many women who would have patience with him, feeble and mean about money as he was, in face of the chances of a good time with some English officer. He did as he was told. She had to interview the Controller of the Service, but fortunately Paris was always calling for more and more help to fill the places of men combed out, and she got her transfer, and all the accompanying papers, complete. She was to go the following Sunday. She knew enough of the working of things now to see that she was already out of the power of “Papa.” With this, all compunction left her. She promised gaily to dine with him, and he little suspected the real source of her pleasure: the feeling that at last she would be near Georges, easily able to meet him face to face as she desired, and that, once met, she would work on him her charm, in which she had such implicit trust.
She arranged to meet “Papa” at the station, because, she said, she wanted information about her train on the morrow. The information she really required was about that evening’s train, the 18.05 for Paris. He drew her into the buffet, anxious to prime himself for his evening’s enjoyment, and she went willingly, careless of appearances now. He ordered two of those compounds known as Quinine Tonics. She gulped hers down as the Boulogne-Paris train thundered in, bent forward to kiss him, and crying, “Au revoir, mind you are decent to the girls!” swung out of the door, across the waiting-hall, and through the wicket, where he could not follow, as he had no permit. In fact, he did not try. He was first so astonished, then so enraged, that he choked over his drink, and dropped his glass, for the breakage of which a callous waitress charged him forty centimes. Alas, that a long career of getting the most out of women, and giving the least, should descend to this!
* * * *
Although so short a time had elapsed, the Madeleine who traveled from Amiens to Paris was a very different girl from the Madeleine who had left Hondebecq three months earlier. The very manner of her shaking off “Papa” showed it: The habit of the village in which she had grown up, regarding railways, consisted in going to the station, hearing when the next train went to the required destination, and waiting for it. To possess and understand a time-table—more, to have mastered the complicated regulations of a military station in war-time, was the measure of how far Madeleine had advanced.
She found herself in a Paris that had an air of forced cheerfulness and dumb expectancy. True, the panic of the day of mobilization, growing right up to the Aisne battle, was over; the alarums of 1918 were not yet in sight. But it was a Paris bereft of men, many a shutter closed; a Paris as yet unhaunted by Americans, but beginning to be desperate in its pleasures. What its best historians, its great lovers, Murger or Victor Hugo, would have thought of it, cannot be conjectured. Its fabled gaiety was gone for good. Its heroism had that poisoned quality that makes women cover broken hearts with cheap finery.
Madeleine, who had never imagined a town of the size before, spent the first two months quietly taking it all in. She had the sense to see that she must start all over again. She did her work with zest—it suited her. That suited her Controller, who put her to lodge with relatives—retired people of official class, who lived in an “apartment,” a tiny flat in a huge block of buildings situated just where the scholarly Pantheon district trails off into the poverty of St. Étienne du Mont. No one could be more self-effacing than Madeleine when she wished to. During her first weeks in Paris she attended to her work, lived quietly with Monsieur and Madame Petit, dressed soberly, glanced at no one in the street, or in the great office where her duties lay. She made herself amiable and useful in the small precise household, left it in time to catch her ’bus, that landed her opposite the bridge, across which towered the world-famous gallery in which the Ministry to which she was attached was housed. She made herself agreeable to the girls with whom she worked. Some were country girls, shy or inefficient, but there was not a Fleming amongst them, and she concealed her opinion that she knew better than they about most things. As for the native Parisiennes, of whom all sorts and conditions were gathered into that great harbor of steady work and sure pay, she admired their ferocious femininity and put up with their moods—even when they called her “Boche du Nord”—the equivalent of calling a Worcestershire girl a Welshwoman—which they did at times, out of sheer dislike of her demure capacity. To have seen her, no one would have suspected that she was gleaning every scrap of information she could with regard to the Flying Corps units that formed the Air defence of Paris. And she had better opportunity now. Paris was by no means the town-just-behind-the-line that Madeleine was used to. Information was to be had, people got to know things and talked of them. Her Ministry, engaged in rationing one of the necessities of life, rationed Flying Corps troops among other people. She missed nothing. At last she found what she was looking for.
* * * *
In one of those innumerable lists of men that were being produced by Government Departments all over the world, as well as in her particular Ministry, she saw the name Georges d’Archeville. It was a list of those young men designated, with the picturesque appropriateness of the French language, as “aspiring aviators” who were “directed towards the Front,” that is, being sent into the line of battle. Madeleine and another girl were crossing them off the lists of the garrison of Paris. She stared so long and heavily that her companion bent over her: “What! You can’t find it—but there it is!”
Madeleine ticked the beloved name and went on, as in a stupor. This was really a blow. To come to Paris had seemed to her, somehow, the satisfactory culmination of her long vigil. She felt sure she would be successful in finding him. She had found him indeed. What now! The Paris garrison was not concerned with the fate of “aspiring aviators” once they were struck off its rolls. Their fate was not indeed in much doubt, but there remained the horrible uncertainty as to which of the graveyards behind the four hundred miles of Front would hold his grave. At this point her common-sense and practical knowledge of affairs deserted her. She just wanted him, that was all. Feigning a headache, she excused herself and got leave to go home; but instead of going, she lingered about the quays and bridges, never lovelier than in winter twilight, with golden wraiths of leaves spinning in the bitter wind along the severe, well-proportioned gray lines of masonry. The fresh air calmed her; hunger at length drove her back to the Petits’ apartment. She did not notice at first anything in the manner of her hosts. The only thing that she noticed was that M. Petit, as he handed her a letter, used the phrase:
“It came about four o’clock!”