Arrived at the little clearing on the summit, the girl took out a key and entered the hunting shelter. The ornamental porch led straight into a dining-place almost filled by the long table surrounded by benches. The porch and windows filled the north wall, a great open birch-hearth with fire-dogs, the western. Opposite was a long rack of antlers, false or real, for greatcoats, guns and bags. On the remaining side was a partition pierced by two doors. The apartment was clean and well kept—nor was this wonderful to anyone who could have seen Madeleine produce feather brush and duster, and go carefully along the pine-boarded wainscot, round mouldings and window-ledges, and along the frames of the photographs of many a jolly party—photographs in which a man, appearing variously from middle age to past it, mustached and whiskered in the fashion of his youth—which must have been the fall of the Second Empire—and a youth who passed to manhood in the newest group—were surrounded by male companions who tended to be less and less hairy the newer the picture—and women in every fashion from crinolines to gaiters and deerstalkers—live horses and dogs and dead birds and beasts, on a background of hunting shelter and trees. Madeleine hardly paused to gaze at one, but passed on, chasing spiders, fly marks, dust, and looking for damp or wormholes. She was far from being a person to stand in front of a photograph while there was work to do.
Next she opened the left-hand door and peered into the little kitchen almost filled by the vase-and-coffin-style stove, at which she and others had cooked many a hot-pot and lapin-chasseur. All was in order here, and she only glanced to see that no invading hand had touched the stacked fuel, and that the iron-ringed flagstone that opened on a diminutive cellar had not been moved. She left the kitchen. Before the other door some little animation gleamed through the naturally passive, almost defensive expression—behind which she habitually concealed her thoughts. Entering this third apartment, a little upholstered lounge, twelve feet square, she closed the door softly and stood a moment without moving. It had been originally a gun-room, but the present Baron, her father’s proprietor, owner of two thousand hectares of shooting of which this shelter was the center, had turned it into a withdrawing-room for ladies, as their presence at the shooting parties became more and more usual. A divan ran under the curtained windows, west and south, a tiny fireplace was beside the door, while a corner had been carved off the kitchen for toilet purposes. Otherwise it was pine boarded and upholstered in plaited straw like the rest of the building. But the straw surfaces were covered with cushions, mats and covers, chiefly Oriental, and all collected, like the Flemish china on the walls, and the fancy photographs “Kruysabel by Moonlight,” “Morning in the Woods,” etc., etc., by Georges, the present Baron’s son.
* * * *
It was this very Georges—spoiled, lovable, perverse, self-indulgent, whose taste and personality penetrated and overcame the rococo-rustic architecture and upholstery—that Madeleine had met in this very room, every time she could and he would, all that summer that led up to the declaration of war. How many times they had spent the Catholic five to seven o’clock—she protected by endless subterfuges and evasions—he coming easily of right—she was far from counting. Nor did she cast back in her mind to the commencement of the thing. Indeed, there had been nothing remarkable about it. It happened like this:
Her father was the old Baron’s chief tenant and head gamekeeper (as that office is understood in France). She had known Georges as a thin, dark-eyed, imperious, tyrannical boy. As a girl she had helped carry the materials of the midday feast, that, cooked and served at the Kruysabel, was the converging-point of the morning drives of the Baron’s shooting parties. The last shoot of the spring of 1914 had finished in darkness, and she had been left, as usual, to clear up. Her basket packed, the place all squared-up and tidy, she had stood by candle-light, munching a strip of buttered spiced-bread and finishing, careless of the dregs, the last of a bottle of Burgundy that her Flemish soul loved as only a Flemish soul can. She had caught Georges’ prominent brown eyes on her, more than once during the day, as she moved about, waiting at table. Conscious of looking her best, this had pleased her, beneath her preoccupation with her duties of cooking and serving. Moreover, she had a good day’s work behind her (the Baron paid well if he was satisfied), and the Burgundy warmed her heart.
She heard footsteps behind her, and a tune hummed, and knew instinctively who it was. She kept quite still. Instinct told her that this was the most effective thing to do. Two arms, under hers, bent her backwards, and Georges fastened his lips to hers. Self-controlled, she neither called out nor resisted. Careful, even grudging in everything, when she gave, she gave generously, no half measures. That was how it had started. The most natural thing in the world. It had gone on in spasms of passion, and interludes, as far as she was concerned, of cool efficient concealment. Georges was a little younger, far less healthy in mind or body, probably less strong, physically, than she. There may have been an undercurrent of almost maternal feeling on her part, and certainly not the least illusion as to the consequences of being found out. And no one had found out.
* * * *
But now, as she stood in the empty room, on this October afternoon of 1915, she was as far from ruminating on the beginnings of the affair as she was from the neo-classic tower of Merville Church, visible fifteen kilometers away, in the pale sunshine, through a gap in the branches. She had to stop for a moment to get used to the atmosphere, as a diver adjusts himself to the pressure of a lower level, but it was an unconscious pause; then, pressing her lips together, she dusted and swept, opened the windows, banged mats and covers. Not that she hoped by the elaborate preparation of a room unused these fifteen months, and destined to be empty many another, to charm back the man through whom alone that room interested her. Madeleine’s point of view was much simpler. Her father had charge of the shooting. She had automatically undertaken the care of the shelter. Having done so, unasked and unpaid, as part of the general unwritten arrangement between her father and the Baron, she could be trusted to go through with it, whatever happened.
Her task finished, she straightened her back and stood, hands on her hips, looking at nothing. From somewhere beyond Estaires, Civenchy or Festubert perhaps, came the sound of guns; some petty incident of the four-hundred-mile year-long battle was dragging out its squalid tragedy. Her lips moved, formed the words “Bêtes—sales bêtes!” which mean so much more than “dirty beasts” and something more immediate than “foul brutes” in English. No sound came. All that feeling of hers was too deep down to struggle into active expression through her habitual reserve and acquiescence with current manners. Not hers to criticize or revolt, hers only to feel, to feel with all the depth of a narrow, obstinate nature. Anyone might have supposed that she was thinking of the Germans who had killed one brother, and held another prisoner since Charleroi. Could she have been induced to express herself, she might have said, from mere habit of convention, that she meant the Germans. But it was deeper than that, so deep as to be almost impersonal.
Years before, when she was but a little girl, she had stood by the bedside of her mother, dying for want of proper medical attention, the fees for which had been grudged until it was too late. Her mother had said: “Pray to the Virgin, now that you are alone!” She had answered, sobbing: “I will pray, and I will take care of father and brothers, and they of me!” “Pray to the Virgin!” the mother repeated. “She is the only one that will take care of you!” That unique effort of expression of a life worn down with toil, and given up to save expense, had sunk into Madeleine’s mind, been confirmed by the teaching of the convent school, where the nuns seemed to be perpetually clearing up the mess men made of things. When the war came Madeleine dumbly recognized it for a thing that men did. She had none of the definite sex-antagonism of an English suffragist, was affectionately tolerant of her father and brothers, and constructively tender to Georges, would have loved to have surrounded him with perpetual comfort and indulgence. But in the bulk, men were always doing things like this war. Her smouldering, almost sulky resentment had not decreased one particle during the fifteen months that had passed. For her, the day of mobilization had been catastrophic. Georges, grandson of an ennobled “industrialist” and of bourgeois blood of the official classes, surprised everybody, surprised Madeleine, surprised perhaps himself. The manifesto “La Patrie est en danger” had just been issued. He seemed to have swallowed its sentiments whole. His papers arrived, and found him in uniform—he was (of course) in the cuirassiers. He mounted and rode off. Like so many others, the indolent, expensive young man lost all thought of anything except what he deemed “duty.”