Out they all came, a goodly bunch. He took them, appalled. He fingered them; he stared.
"Madame is English?"
"But certainly? What did Monsieur suppose?"
The papers are thrust into my hand, he salutes, flicks his horse with a spur, and I am alone on the undulating road with the woods just touched by spring's soft wing, spreading all about me.
But this happened when sentries and bayonets had lost their terror. There were days when we treated them with more respect. Familiarity breeds contempt—when one knows that the bayonet is not sharpened.
Our papers in order, our heads no longer wobbling on our shoulders, our next duty was to call on the élite of the town. In France you don't wait to be called upon, you call. It was nerve-racking work for two miserable foreigners, one of whom had almost no French, while that of the other abjectly deserted her in moments of perturbation. But we survived it, perhaps because every one was out. Only at Madame B.'s did we find people at home, and she—how she must have sighed when we departed! We all laboured heavily in the vineyard, but fright, shyness, the barrier of language prevented us—on that day at least—from gathering much fruit. Exhausted, humbled to the dust, thinking of all the brilliant things we might have said if only we could have taken the invaluable Bellows with us, we crawled home to seek comfort in a brioche de Lorraine and a cup of China tea which we had to make for ourselves, as "Madame" had not yet learned the method. In fact there were many things she had not learned, and one of them was what the English understand by the word rubbish. It was a subject on which for many a day her views and ours unhappily rarely coincided. Once we caught her in the Common-room, casting baleful eyes on cherished treasures.
"Do you wish that I shall throw away these ordures, Mademoiselle?" she asked.
Ordures! Ye gods! A bucketful of gladioli and stocks and all sorts of delicious things gathered in the curé's garden at Naives, and she called them ordures. With a shriek we fell upon her and her broom. Did she not know they were flowers? What devil of ignorance possessed her that she should call them rubbish?
"Flowers! bien entendu, but what does one want with flowers in a sitting-room? The petals fall, they are des ordures." Again the insulting word.