“The girls will all buy new clothes,” he said, “for which I shall pay. They will make themselves agreeable to the English mercenaries, but”—with a snap of his blue eyes—“nothing more. The good God has sent us a harvest to reap; I say we shall reap it.”
During the six months that followed the little shop behind the church teemed with life. The Beduys girls were glad enough to find men to talk to for the linguistic difficulty was soon overcome—to flirt with mildly, and in front of whom to show off their newly-acquired finery. From morn till dewy eve the shop was crowded, and occasionally an officer or two would dine in the back parlour, kiss Martha if they felt like it, and not worry much over a few sous change.
In the meantime old Hans waxed financially fat, bought a new Sunday suit, worked the life out of his girls, and prayed nightly that the Canadians would arrive in the vicinity of his particular “Somewhere in Belgium.”
In a little while they came.
Blossoming forth like a vine well fertilised at the roots, the little shop became more and more pretentious as the weekly turnover increased. Any day that the receipts fell below a certain level old Beduys raised such a storm that his bevy of daughters redoubled their efforts.
Martha had become an enthusiastic business woman. Her fair head with its golden curls was bent for many hours in the day over a crude kind of ledger, and she thought in terms of pickles, canned fruits, chocolate, and cigarettes. The spirit of commerce had bitten deep into Martha’s soul.
More and more officers held impromptu dinners in the back parlour. Martha knew most of them, but only one interested her. Had he not shown her the system of double entry, and how to balance her accounts? He was a commercial asset.
As for Jefferson, it was a relief to him, after a tour in the trenches, to have an occasional chat with a moderately pretty girl.
One rain-sodden, murky January night, very weary, wet, and muddy, Jefferson dropped in to see, as he would have put it, “the baker’s daughter.”
Martha happened to be alone, and welcomed “Monsieur Jeff” beamingly.