Tante Joséphine snored. Pierre ceased to push.
"Allons, Allons. Pierre, que veux-tu? Is it that the Germans shall catch us and make of you a stew for their supper?" Tante Joséphine had wakened up.
"I am tired."
"Ah, paresseux." The volcano became active again.
Pierre looked at Grandmère. How old she was! And why did she look so white as she trailed her feet bravely through the wood?
"Grandmère is ill. She must ride!"
What Tante Joséphine said the woods have gathered to their breast. Pierre became pensive, then he smiled. "Eh, bien. En route."
The kilomètre becomes very long when one is eighty-two, but Grandmère was a daughter of France. Her head was high, her eye steadfast as she plodded on, taking no notice of the way, never seeing the deep drain that ran beside the path. But Pierre saw it. He must have, because he saw everything. He was made that way. And that is why Tante Joséphine has never been able to understand why she dreamed she was rolling down a precipice with a railway train rolling on top of her, and wakened to find herself deep in the soft mould at the bottom of the drain, the brouette reclining on—well, on the highest promontory of her coast-line, while Pierre and Grandmère peered over the top with the eyes of celestial explorers who look down suddenly into hell.
So and in such wise was the manner of their going. Of the return Tante Joséphine does not speak. For a time they hid in the woods, other good Sermaizians with them. How did they live? Ah, don't ask me that! They existed, somehow, as birds and squirrels exist, perhaps, and then one day they said they were going home. I am not at all sure that the authorities wanted to have them there. For only a handful of houses remained, and though many a cellar was still intact under the ruins, cellars, considered as human habitation, may, without undue exaggeration, be said to lack some of the advantages of modern civilisation. How was Tante Joséphine, how were the stained and battered scarecrows that accompanied her to provide for themselves during the winter? Would broken bricks make bread? Would fire-eaten iron-work make a blanket? Authority might protest, Sermaizians did not care. They crept into the cellars that numbed them to the very marrow on cold days, living like badgers and foxes in their dark, comfortless holes, enduring bitter cold and terrible privation, lacking food and clothes and fire and light, but telling themselves that they were at home and sucking good comfort from the telling.