CHAPTER V
MME. GABRIELLE
Every village, everywhere, has its stronger characters, to whom the community looks up, perhaps unconsciously. Canizy, having been deprived of its normal leaders in the Curé, a prisoner, and the teacher, transferred to the school at Hombleux, looked up in this way to Mme. Lefèvre and Mme. Gabrielle. The former was the especial friend of our medical department. In fact, she rented one of her two rooms for our use as a dispensary, and her flagged kitchen was always open to her neighbours and to us. Here I measured out milk to half the village, or distributed the loaves of bread which we ourselves purveyed from the crabbed Garde Champêtre at Hombleux. Or, had I neither the time nor the patience, Mme. Lefèvre herself made the distribution, and gave me a list of the recipients, and always the correct amount of neatly stacked coppers in change. A shrewd face had Mme. Lefèvre, wrinkled by humour as well as by sorrow. She had been taken away by the Boches in their retreat, but later, for some reason unknown, was allowed to return. Her three daughters, however, and her husband, all were in the hands of the enemy. She lived alone, therefore, and busied herself in her late-planted garden, and in her neighbours’ affairs.
—C’est pas moi!... c’est lui.
[I didn’t do it ... he did!]
Most of them, it seemed, were related to her in one way or another, all the Genses being of her kin. Of these there were Mme. Gense-Tabary, already mentioned, and her swarming family of eight, bright and pretty as pictures, and dirty as little pigs. She, lodged near the bank of the canal, really had no excuse for this chronic condition, and was encouraged to scrub by object lessons, clean clothing, and gifts even of long bars of savon marseilles. I remember her yet, two or three children tagging at her skirts, knocking at the door of my baraque of a Sunday morning, to tell me that she must have more soap. All the way from Canizy she had walked to get it; and she did not go back without. Mme. Gense-Tabary’s eldest daughter, known as Germaine Tabary, was the sorrow of the village, even more than its daughters who had gone into captivity; for she had become an earlier victim of the invaders, and with her unborn baby was left behind. Mme. Marie Gense, another unfortunate, was a niece by marriage of Mme. Lefèvre’s. Her husband was a soldier. She had lived in a little cottage whose blue and white tiled floor I often had occasion to admire, next the church. But being left with two growing boys, and no resources, what was she to do? What she did was to add to her family a Paul, and one bitter winter night which our doctors and nurses well remember, a Paulette. “What would you?” she expostulated. “I had no bread for the children; in this way they were fed.” That two more months were added, and that her lean-to of ten feet by twelve could not accommodate them, were facts which did not seem to concern her. And of all good children, her two boys, Désiré and Robert, were certainly the best. But Aunt Lefèvre looked upon her niece’s conduct as a scandal. She was forbidden the kitchen, and it was even known that the quarrel had come to the point of knives. With the children, that was different. “Yes,” said Mme. Lefèvre on the arrival of the new baby, “Désiré may sleep in the Dispensary if you so wish. It is your room; you pay for it.” That Désiré did, though I had a bed put up for him, I misdoubt. But Robert, happy-go-lucky Robert, with his head cocked on one side and a smile rippling his brown eyes, even Aunt Lefèvre could not help loving him. There was no question of his sleeping out, however, he being nurse to the babies and to his mother as well. Another wayward connection of Mme. Lefèvre’s was a sister of Mme. Marie Gense’s, known as Mme. Payelle. She had three children as cunning as you could wish to see, clean—as were Marie’s—and sunny-tempered. Their parentage also was a mystery. But this blot did not rest by rights on the village escutcheon. Mme. Payelle had been installed there by one of her admirers, a soldier en permission; she really did not belong to Canizy.
To keep her social position in the midst of these misfortunes was a tribute to Mme. Lefèvre’s worth. She was always doing kindnesses, and speaking to us on her neighbours’ behalf. Beneath her shed stood one of the four chaudières, or washing cauldrons, which survived the general destruction. These, varying in capacity from 50 to 250 litres, are an indispensable utensil of housekeeping in Picardy. In them, week by week, the soiled clothes are boiled. Not even the lack of a pump—and there was only one left in the village—was so much deplored as the loss of the cauldrons. In view of these two handicaps and the dearth of soap, the squalor of the village on our arrival seems excusable. Mme. Lefèvre, at least, did her share toward remedying it. Without charge, her chaudière was in constant use, and her shed became a neighbourhood rendezvous.
It will be seen that all the Genses were by no means a bad lot, Mme. Lefèvre being one herself. Of an older generation, and I know not of what degree of kinship to her, is Mme. Hélène Gense, grandmother to Mme. Gabrielle, that energetic, substantial young Widow, not Mme. Thuillard nor yet Veuve Thuillard, but Mme. Gabrielle to all Canizy. In pre-war times, she owned, through her parents and not by marriage, the most central homestead in the village. There remain now only the arched gate into the courtyard, the brick rabbit hutches, a heap of débris, and a tottering wall. She and ten-year-old Adrien lodge, therefore, in the first house on the left as you come past the Calvary, with Grand’mère Gense. This ell, flanked though it is by the ruin of the main building, is the most cheerful spot in the village. The narrow yard before the door is swept; a row of geraniums blossoms beneath the windows. Above all, there are windows, two of them, and curtains at each. Outside the door, if you are fortunate in the hour of your call, will stand two pairs of worn sabots. Or perhaps the door may be open, framing Grand’mère, bent almost at right angles, Mme. Gabrielle, and Bobbinot. Bobbinot is a dog, iron-grey, smooth-coated, with a white band on his breast and a white vest. He has no pedigree, his mistress assures me, but his brown eyes and his square, intelligent head bear out her statement that he is “très loyal.” All three welcome me; a chair is proffered near the fire. Grand’mère sinks carefully into her low seat, Mme. Gabrielle sets on a saucepan of coffee, and we sit down to chat.