"Were you, then, in Charleville all the time?"
"All the time. I knew them all."
In her eyes there flitted the image of enemies who had cried gaily to her from the street as she leant out of the open window of the house opposite. "Take anything," she said, with a shrug, to f.a.n.n.y. "See what you can make from it. If you can make one room habitable from this dust-heap, you are welcome. See, there is at least a saucepan. Take that. So much has gone from the house in these last years it seems hardly worth while to retain a saucepan for the owner."
"Who is the owner?"
"A rich lady who can afford it. The richest family in Charleville. She has turned _mechante_. She will abuse me when she comes here to see this--as though _I_ could have saved it. Her husband and her son were killed. Georges et Phillippe. Georges was killed the first day of the war, and Phillippe ... I don"t know when, but somewhere near here."
"You think she will come back?"
"Sometimes I think it. She has such a sense of property. But her daughter writes that it would kill her to come. Phillippe was the sun ... was the good G.o.d to her."
"I must go back to my work," said the lieutenant. "Can you be happy here in this empty house? There will be rats...."
"I can be very happy--and so grateful. I will move my things across to-day. My companions ... that is to say six more of us arrive in convoy from Chantilly to-morrow."
"Six more! Had you told me that before ... But what more simple! I can put them all in here. There is room for twenty."
"Oh...." Her face fell, and she stood aghast. "And you gave me this house for myself. And I was so happy!"
"You are terrible. If my business was to lodge soldiers of your s.e.x every day I should be grey-haired. You cannot lodge with an owl, you cannot lodge with your compatriots!..."
"Yet you were joking when you said you would put us all here?"
"I was joking. Take the house--the rats and the rubbish included with it! No one will disturb you till the owner comes. I have another, a better, a cleaner house in my mind for your companions. Now, good-bye, I must go back to my work. Will you ask me to tea one day?"
"I promise. The moment I have one sitting-room ready."
He left her, and she explored the upper storey with the _concierge._
"I should have this for your bedroom and this adjoining for your sitting-room. The windows look in the street and you can see life."
f.a.n.n.y agreed. It pleased her better to look in the street than into the garden. The two rooms were large and square. Old blue curtains of brocade still hung from the windows; in the inner room was a vast oak bed and a turkey carpet of soft red and blue. The fireplaces were of open brick and suitable for logs. Both rooms were bare of any other furniture.
"I will find you the mattress to match that bed. I hid it; it is in the house opposite."
She went away to dust it and find a man to help her carry it across the road. f.a.n.n.y fetched her luggage from her previous billet, borrowed six logs and some twigs from the _concierge,_ promising to fetch her an ample store from the hills around.
All day she rummaged in the empty house--finding now a three-legged armchair which she propped up with a stone, now a single Venetian gla.s.s scrolled in gold for her tooth gla.s.s.
In a small room on the ground floor a beautiful piece of tapestry lay rolled in a dusty corner. Pale birds of tarnished silver flew across its blue ground and on the border were willows and rivers.
It covered her oak bed exactly--and by removing the pillows it looked like a comfortable and venerable divan. The logs in the fire were soon burnt through, and she did not like to ask for more, but leaving her room and wandering up and down the empty house in the long, pale afternoon, she searched for fragments of wood that might serve her.
A narrow door, built on a curve of the staircase, led to an upper storey of large attics and her first dazzled thought was of potential loot for her bedroom. A faint afternoon sun drained through the lattice over floors that were heaped with household goods. A feathered brush for cobwebs hung on a nail, she took it joyfully. Below it stood an iron lattice for holding a kettle on an open fire. That, too, she put aside.
But soon the attics opened too much treasure. The boy"s things were everywhere, the father"s and the son"s. Her eyes took in the host of relics till her spirit was living in the lost playgrounds of their youth, pressing among phantoms.
"Irons ... For ironing! For my collars!"
But they were so small, too small. His again--the son"s. "Yet why shouldn"t I use them," she thought, and slung the little pair upon one finger.
Crossing to the second attic she came upon all the toys. It seemed as though nothing had ever been packed up--dolls" houses, rocking-horses, slates, weighing machines, marbles, picture books, little swords and guns, and strange boxes full of broken things.
Returning to the floor below with empty hands she brooded by the embers and shivered in her happy loneliness. Julien was no longer someone whom she had left behind, but someone whom she expected. He would be here ... how soon? In four days, in five, in six. There would be a letter to-morrow at the "Silver Lion." Since she had found this house, this perfect house in which to live alone and happy, the town outside had changed, was expectant with her, and full of his presence. But, ah ...
inhuman... was Julien alone responsible for this happiness? Was she not weaving already, from her blue curtains, from her soft embers, from the branches of mimosa which she had bought in the market-place and placed in a thin gla.s.s upon the mantelpiece, from the gracious silence of the house, from her solitude?
CHAPTER XVIII
PHILIPPE"S HOUSE
What a struggle to get wood for that fire? Coal wouldn"t burn in the open hearth. She had begged a little wood from the cook in the garage, but it was wet and hissed, and all her fire died down. Wood hadn"t proved so abundant on the hills as she had hoped. Either it was cut and had been taken by the Germans, or grew in solid and forbidding branches.
All the small broken branches and twigs of winter had been collected by the shivering population of the town and drawn down from the mountains on trays slung on ropes.
Stooping over her two wet logs she drenched them with paraffin, then, when she had used the last drop in her tin, got down her petrol bottle.
"I shall lose all my hair one day doing this...."
The white flame licked hungrily out towards her, but it too, died down, leaving the wet wood as angrily cold as ever.
Going downstairs she searched the courtyard and the hayloft, but the Bulgarians and Turks of the past had burnt every bit, and any twigs in the garden were as wet as those which spluttered in the hearth. Then--up to the attics again.
"I _must_ have wood," she exclaimed angrily, and picked up a piece of broken white wood from the floor.
It had "Philippe Seret" scrawled across it in pencil. "Why, it"s your name!" she said wonderingly, and held the piece of wood in her hand. The place was all wood. There was wood here to last her weeks. Mouse cages--white mouse cages and dormouse cages, a wooden ruler with idle scratches all over it and "P.S." in the corner--boxes and boxes of things he wouldn"t want; he"d say if he saw them now: "Throw it away"--boxes of gla.s.s tubes he had blown when he was fifteen, boxes of dried modelling clay....
"I must have wood," she said aloud, and picked up another useless fragment. It mocked her, it wouldn"t listen to her need of wood; it had "P.S." in clumsy, inserted wires at the back. His home-made stamp.
Under it was a grey book called "Grammaire Allemande." "It wasn"t any use your learning German, was it, Philippe?" she said, then stood still in a frozen conjecture as to the use and goal of all that bright treasure in his mind--his gla.s.s-blowing, his modelling, the cast head of a man she had found stamped with his initial, the things he had written and read, on slates, in books. "It was as much use his learning German as anything else," she said slowly, and her mind reeled at the edge of difficult questions.
Coming down from the attics again she held one piece of polished chair-back in her hand.
"How can I live in their family like this," she mused by the fire. "I am doing more. I am living in the dreadful background to which they can"t or won"t come back. I am counting the toys which they can"t look at.
Your mother will never come back to pack them up, Philippe!"
She made herself chocolate and drank it from a fine white cup with his mother"s initials on it in gold.
Work was over for the day and she walked down the main street by the "Silver Lion," from whose windows she daily expected that Julien"s voice would call to her.
"Mademoiselle has no correspondence to-day," said the girl, looking down at her from her high seat behind the mugs and gla.s.ses.
"He ought to be here to-day or to-morrow, as he hasn"t written," and even at that moment thought she heard hurrying feet behind her and turned quickly, searching with her eyes. An old civilian ran past her and climbed into the back of a waiting lorry.