“Very late. The Bosche were bombing Amiens!”
The old man grunted and left her. In her own room she smiled at her reflection in the glass. She was looking magnificent, feeling magnificent. To come from at least some degree of luxury, if not from home and love, at least from entertainment and admiration, to the bleak realities of her daily life, did not daunt her Flemish heart. She unpacked and undressed methodically, passed her hands over that flesh that had been so generously caressed, and seemed rounded and fortified by it, and wrapped herself in the hard-worn bed-clothes, warming them with her vitality. Could Skene, buttoned up in his “British warm,” miles away on the northern railway, have seen her, he might have been attracted, he would not have been harrowed or flattered. She had rubbed off the contact with him by the passage of her hands over herself. She rubbed him off her soul no less easily. She was at her place in the Ministry on the morrow, and save that her appearance of well-being excited desire or envy, created no sensation.
Then as the days passed, very slowly, and all the more surely, reaction began to set in. She did not analyze it or express it, but it was there. The old feeling of having been done, cheated! There was the old void—and Skene, against whom she bore no malice, was partial, rather—had tried to fill it and failed. It was not in him. Too, well behaved, too incomprehensible, too English, he had, in fact, not asked enough of her. She would have felt more at home with him had he been subject to those moods of feverish desire and cold disgust that she associated with all that was most admirable in men. For that male perversity which, when it existed in her father and the Baron, in “Papa,” and Monsieur Blanquart, in fact in all men, was the very thing by which war had been brought about, and caused her separation from Georges—when it appeared in that Georges himself, became simply one of his attributes. Her “good child” bored her. Her spoiled, imperious one was what she needed.
* * * *
The evenings lengthened. February came, and the Bosche retreat. Marie wrote that she was trying to get back to Laventie, where things were in a pitiable state, but good land must not be allowed to lie waste. They despaired of Marcel. Madeleine did not reply to this letter. The farm and all it had contained seemed very remote. Yet the letter was a comfort; it brought no bad news, and no news was good news. Already, she thought again of nothing but Georges. As for any practical plan to find him, she had long come to the end of the expedients that her not very strong imagination could devise. She just wanted, and waited.
The chief of her department in the Ministry was one of those politicians who found the War dull. Its concentration upon the one great effort to beat the Bosche, and preserve the French nation alive, robbed such a politician of his living. There was little scope for anything but messing with contracts, trying and necessarily unspectacular. This one among the party-bosses of the French Chamber hit upon a plan which would advertise him, and at the same time give a sort of rallying-cry and style for the next political stunt. He saw shrewdly enough that Peace would one day burst upon an astonished world, and that those who were unprepared for it would be badly left. And what would be the best starting-place in the new Peace atmosphere? Why, obviously, to be hailed in a million farms, a million small shops, as “That brave Monsieur Dantrigues—he was good to our poor boys in the hospitals during the War!” It could be used as common ground for Action Française on the one hand, and the extreme socialists on the other. And no one dared raise hand or word against it. The quickest, cheapest and best way to set it afoot was, of course, to make use of the organizing power of his immense department, the ocean of needy vanity in which the hundreds of temporary typists and girl war-clerks swam; the comic papers could be got to blaze it about—they were invariably hard up.
So it was that Madeleine, in common with all her companions, found herself invited to take part in a gigantic Charitable Fête. They were given little cards with the particulars—certain elements of costume were to be uniform, also an electric lamp in the hair, and a basket of gifts. They were to meet in the Tuileries, at certain spots indicated by numbers, from which decorated lorries would take them to the various hospitals of the metropolitan area, to distribute an Easter gift to every sick or wounded soldier. Monsieur Dantrigues was smart enough to see that this was much more effective than the same thing carried out near the Front. For if a man has incurred a gumboil guarding a railway in the Seine Valley, he likes just as well to be treated as a “brave wounded,” and is just as likely to vote subsequently for the man who organized people to think him so. On the other hand, the real fighting soldiers, nearer the Front, would mostly be killed and never vote at all.
The idea caught on. Generals, clerics, ladies old and young, blessed it and gave funds for costumes and presents.
* * * *