The next day was still queerer. Skene wanted what he called “a day in the country.” Madeleine had no idea what he might mean, her notions of a holiday being confined to Church Festivals. She went with him, however, down the Seine Valley, as far as the regulations permitted. She gathered he once had regular haunts here, had gone by steamer with companions. She taunted him laughingly with having been one to “rigoler” in his youth. She began to suspect that he was much richer than his worn khaki and careful trench habits made apparent. He took her to a well-known beauty spot, all shuttered and sad with war and winter, roused the proprietor and persuaded him to give them food and drink in the mournfulness of the dismantled salle à manger. The proprietor, like so many others, had lost an only son. It took a lot of gentleness and some of Skene’s Expeditionary Force canteen cigarettes to thaw him. But gradually he expanded into the graveyard interest of his kind. What were the trenches like? Were the dead buried properly? Would one find their graves? Skene told all he could, painted a true picture as far as he could, exaggerating no horror, slurring over none of the stark facts. The old man was appeased. He liked to know. So his son was lying like that, was he, amid the Meuse hillocks!
Madeleine took no part in the conversation, but sat looking at Skene, totally uninterested in what he was saying, enjoying the masculinity of his movements and gestures. She was beginning to be curious about the one thing that ever aroused her speculation. What was this man’s position in life? The men talked on into the winter dusk, the “patron” offering liqueurs and cigars. She and Skene missed their train back and had to walk to a neighboring depôt, and get seats on an army lorry. Skene tipped the driver and Madeleine saw the man’s face. That night, as they lay side by side in the sober companionship that both of them felt so right and justifiable, she asked him of his home. She was somewhat astonished at the result. He talked for twenty minutes, and was all the time incomprehensible to her. The old house in the Cathedral Close, the hereditary sinecure descending in the one family—the semi-public school, wholly leisured-class prejudices and scruples—the circle of maiden aunts living on railway dividends—the pet animals—the social functions—made her pucker her smooth, regular forehead with complete mystification. She could make nothing of it except that every one in England was rolling in money.
* * * *
Another day followed, and another. The end of the week was at hand. As it approached, they both regarded the impending separation calmly. The emotions that had brought them together were of the sort that will not keep. Neither of them were bohemians of the true water. The life of the little hotel where they slept and the restaurants where they fed was soon drained of its attractiveness. If Skene really wanted anything, it was to be back at his job in England. If Madeleine ever asked herself what she found lacking in those brief days, the answer would have been a farm of her own, a settled place in some village community, and, perhaps, children. But she did not ask herself such questions, nor did Skene admit for a moment that there was anything to desire other than what they shared. But there fell long silences between them. The tittle-tattle about topical events interested neither of them. The little news they could tell each other was told. They could not talk of Georges. Their only common memories were of the farm and the Easter Horse Show of the division. Both subjects were stale. The small attempt Madeleine made to understand Skene had led her into perplexity. Skene had let her more intimate self alone, having neat provincial notions of chivalry. The excursions of peace-time Paris no longer existed. The cinema and most theaters bored Skene. Madeleine could not sit out concerts. The day before the last, they went at Skene’s suggestion to the Sorbonne. He wanted to feast his eyes, that must so soon look at decauville railways and trench-mortar ammunition, on the Fresco, by Puvis de Chavannes, which decorates the lecture hall of that institution.
He had first seen it as a young man, and the impression it had made was undimmed. He loved that blue-green twilight in which statuesque people stood in attitudes among Greek pillars and poplar trees. He loved it with an English love of things as they are not. Madeleine gazed at the great lecture hall. At last she said, “It is not then a church!” No fool, she had grasped the speculative, investigating atmosphere.
“No,” Skene replied, “it is a higher grade school!”
“As school decoration, it is not ver’ useful!”
Later, as Skene wished to dawdle over some architectural drawings in the Cluny Museum, she said frankly she would look at the shops. Their time was drawing to a close. The next day was the last. Skene did not know how to say that he hoped to meet her again. Did he?
* * * *