So we soon began to feel comfortably assured that the tenants of Maison Blanpain and of one or two other rookeries were the scum of the refugee pool, idle, disreputable, swearing, undeserving vagabonds every one. They took us in gloriously many a time, they fooled us to the top of our sentimental bent—at first—but we could not have done without them. For though Virtue may bathe the world in still, white light, it is Vice that splashes the dancing colours over it.
IV
Yes, I suppose we were taken in at times!
On the outskirts of Bar, beyond the Faubourg Marbot, lies a wood called the Bois de Maestricht. The way to it lies through a narrow winding valley of great beauty, especially in the autumn when the fires of the dying year are ablaze in wood and field. Just at the end of the road where the woods crush down and engulf it is a long strip of meadow, a nocturne in green and purple when the autumn crocus is in flower, and in the woods are violets and wild strawberries, and long trails of lesser periwinkle, ivy crimson and white, and hellebore and oxlips and all sorts of delicious things, with, from just one point on one of the countless uphill paths, a view of Bar, so exquisite, so ethereal it almost seems like a glimpse of some far dream-silvered land.
And it was here, just on the edge of the wood, in a small rough shack, that Madame Martin and her family took up their abode. The shack consisted of one room, not long and certainly not wide, a slice of which, rudely partitioned off, did duty as a cow-house. Here lived Madame Martin and her husband, her granddaughter Alice, a small boy suffering from a malady which caused severe abdominal distention, and one or two other children. Le Père Battin, whose relationship was obscure but presumably deeply-rooted in the family soil, shared the cow-end with his beloved vache, a noble beast and, like himself, a refugee.
Le Père Battin always averred that he had adopted the cow, it being obviously an orphan, homeless and a beggar, but my own firm conviction is that he stole it. It was a kindly cow and a generous, for it proceeded speedily to enrich him with a calf which, unlike most refugee babies, throve amazingly, and when I saw it took up so much space in the narrow shed there was hardly room enough for its mother. How Le Père Battin squeezed himself in as well is a pure wonder. But squeeze he did, and when delicately suggesting that a gift of sheets from "Les Anglaises" would completely assuage the miseries of his lot, he showed me his bed. It was in the feeding-trough. One hurried glance was enough. I no longer wondered why the first visitor to the Martin abode, having unwisely settled down for a chat, spent the rest of the day and the greater part of the night in fruitless chase. I did not settle down. "It was fear, O Little Hunter, it was fear."
Nor did I give the sheets. The cow would have eaten them.
I remarked that the day was hot, and repaired to the garden (a wilderness of weeds and despairing flowers), and there Madame entertained me.
She was an ideal "case." Just the person whose photograph should be sent to kindly, generous souls at home. She was small, active, rather witty, a good talker, with darting brown eyes and a bewitching grin. She wore a befrilled cap, and oh, she could flatter with her tongue! A nice old soul in spite of the villainy with which Père Battin subsequently charged her. Her first visitor—she who unfortunately sat down—fell a victim on the spot. So did we all. Heaven had made Madame that way. It was inevitable. So all the riches of our earth were poured forth for her, and she devoured largely of our substance. Then the girl Alice developed throat trouble and was ministered to by our nurse, and she, I grieve to say, coming home one day from the Bois, hinted dark things about Alice—things which made our righteous judgment to stand on end. We continued to pet Madame Martin; we did everything we could for her except eat her jam. Having seen the shack, and le Père Battin and that one overcrowded room where flies in dense black swarms settled on everything, where dogs scratched and where age-old dirt gathered more dirt to its arms with the dawning of every day, that jam pot contained so many possibilities, we felt that to eat its contents would be sheer murder.
And so the autumn wore away and winter came, and then one day as I was going through the valley to visit some woodcutters in the Bois, I met le Père Battin driving home his cow. And he stopped me. Once when speaking of the Emperor of Austria he had said, "Il est en train de mourir? Bon. On a eu bien assez de ces lapins-là." (He is dying? Good. We have had enough of such rabbits.)