The Happy Foreigner Part 39

"I am in no hurry," she said, sure that he would come, and walked on into the Spanish Square, to stare in the shops behind the arcaded pillars. Merchandise trickled back into the empty town in odd ways. By lorry, train, and touring car, merchants penetrated and filled the shops with provisions, amongst which there were distressing lacks.

The trains, which had now been extended from Rheims over many laborious wooden bridges, stopped short of Charleville by four miles, as the bridges over the Meuse had not yet been made strong enough to support a railroad. To the pa.s.senger train, which left Paris twice a week, one goods truck full of merchandise was attached--and it seemed as though the particular truck to arrive was singled out casually, without any regard to the needs of the town. As yet no dusters, sheets or kitchen pans could be bought, but to-day in the Spanish Square every shop was filled to overflowing with rolls of ladies' stays; even the chemist had put a pair in the corner of his window. f.a.n.n.y inquired the cause. A truck had arrived filled with nothing but stays. It was very unfortunate as they had expected condensed milk, but they had accepted the truck, as, no doubt, they would find means of selling them--for there were women in the country round who had not seen a pair for years.

A man appeared in the Square selling boots from Paris--the first to come to the town with leather soles instead of wooden ones. Instantly there was a crowd round him.

It was dark now and the electric street lamps were lit round the pedestal of the Spanish Duke. The organisation of the town was jerky, and often the lights would come on when it was daylight and often disappear when it was dark. Where Germans had been there were always electric light and telephones. No matter how spa.r.s.e the furniture in the houses, how ragged the roof, how patched the windows--what tin cans, paper and rubbish lay heaped upon the floors, the electric light unfailingly illumined all, the telephone hung upon the wall among the peeling paper.

A little rain began to fall lightly and she hurried to her rooms. There, once within, the padlock slipped through the rings and locked, the fire lighted, the lamps lit, the room glowed before her. The turkey carpet showed all its blues and reds--the mimosa drooped above the mantelpiece, the willow palm in the jar was turning yellow and shedding a faint down.

"You must last till he comes to tea!" she rebuked it, but down it fluttered past the mirror on to the carpet.

"He will be here before they all fall," she thought, and propped open her window that she might hear his voice if he called her from the street below.

She boiled her kettle to make chocolate, hanging it upon a croquet hoop which she had found in the garden--Philippe's hoop. But Philippe was so powerless, he couldn't even stop his croquet hoop from being heated red-hot in the flames as a kettle-holder ... One must be sensible. He would allow it. That was the sort of device he would have thought well of.

"He rushed about the town on a motor-bicycle," the _concierge_ had said, when asked about him. But that was later. There had been other times when he had rocked a rocking-horse, broken a doll's head, sold meat from a wooden shop, fed a dormouse.

"Did Philippe," she wondered, "have adventures, too, in this street?"

She felt him in the curtains, under the carpet like a little wind.

The days pa.s.sed.

Each day her car was ordered and ran to Rheims and Chalons through the battlefields, or through the mountains to Givet, Dinant or Namur.

Changes pa.s.sed over the mountains as quickly as the shades of flying clouds. The spring growth, at every stage and age from valley to crest, shook like light before the eyes. There were signs of spring, too, in the battlefields. Cowslips grew in the ditches, and gra.s.s itself, as rare and bright as a flower, broke out upon the plains.

A furtive and elementary civilisation began to creep back upon the borders of the national roads. Pioneers, with hand, dog, and donkey carts, with too little money, with too many children, with obstinate and tenacious courage, began to establish themselves in cellars and pill-boxes, in wooden shelters sc.r.a.ped together from the _debris_ of their former villages. In those communities of six or seven families the re-birth and early struggles of civilisation set in. One tilled a patch of soil the size of a sheet between two trenches--one made a fowl-yard, fenced it in and placed a miserable hen within. Little notices would appear, nailed to poles emerging from the bowels of the earth. "Vin-Cafe" or "Small motor repairs done here."

All this was noticeable along the great national roads. But in the side roads, roads deep in yellow mud, uncleared, empty of lorries and cars, no one set up his habitation.

A certain lawlessness was abroad in the lonelier areas of the battlefields. Odds and ends of all the armies, deserters, well hidden during many months, lived under the earth in holes and cellars and used strange means to gain a living.

There had been rumours of lonely cars which had been stopped and robbed--and among the settlers a couple of murders had taken place in a single district. The mail from Charleville to Montmedy was held up at last by men in masks armed with revolvers. "We will go out armed!"

exclaimed the drivers in the garage, and polished up their rifles.

After that, when the Americans hi the camps around, hungry upon the French ration, or drunk upon the mixture of methylated spirits and whisky sold in subterranean _estaminets_ of ruined villages, picked a quarrel, there were deaths instead of broken heads and black eyes. "They must ... they MUST go home!" said the French, turning their easy wrath upon the homesick Americans.

Somewhere beyond Rheims the wreck of a cindery village sprawled along a side road. Not a chimney, not a pile of bricks, not a finger of wood or stone reached three feet high, but in the middle, a little wooden stake rose above the rubbish, a cross-bar pointing into the ground, and the words "Vin-Cafe" written in chalk upon it. f.a.n.n.y, who was thirsty, drew up her car and climbed across the village to a hole down which the board pointed. Steps of pressed earth led down, and from the hole rose the quarrelling, fierce voices of three men. She fled back to the car, determined to find a more genial _cafe_ upon a national road.

The same day, upon another side road, she came on the remains of a village, where the road, instead of leading through it, paused at the brink of the river, over which hung the end spars of a broken bridge.

"I will make a meal here," she thought, profiting by the check--and pulled out a packet of sandwiches, driving her car round the corner of a wall out of the wind. Here, across the road, a donkey cart was standing, and a donkey was tied to a brick in the gutter.

Upon the steps of a doorway which was but an aperture leading to nothing, for the house itself lay flat behind it and the courtyard was filled with trestles of barbed wire, a figure was seated writing earnestly upon its knees. She went nearer and saw an old man, who looked up as she approached.

"Sir ..." she began, meaning to inquire about the road--and the wind through the doorway blew her skirt tight against her.

"I am identifying the houses," he said, as though he expected to be asked his business. She saw by his face that he was very old--eighty perhaps. The book upon his knee contained quavering drawings, against each of which a name was written.

"This is mine," he said, pointing through the doorway on whose step he sat. "And all these other houses belong to people whom I know. When they come back here to live they have only to come to me and I can show them which house to go to. Without me it might be difficult, but I was the oldest man here and I know all the streets, and all the houses. I carry the village in my head."

"That is your donkey cart, then?"

"It is my son's. I drive here from Rheims on Sat.u.r.days, when he doesn't want it."

He showed his book, the cheap paper filled with already-fading maps, blurred names and vague sketches. The old man was in his dotage and would soon die and the book be lost.

"I carry the village in my head," he repeated. It was the only life the village had.

So the days went on, day after day, and with each its work, and still no letter at the "Silver Lion," Though vaguely ashamed at her mood, she could not be oppressed by this. Each cold, fine, blooming day in the mountains made him less necessary to her, and only the delicate memory of him remained to gild the town. When hopes wither other hopes spring up. When the touch of charm trembles no more upon the heart it can no longer be imagined.

CHAPTER XIX

PHILIPPE'S MOTHER

The horn of a two days' moon was driving across the window; then stars, darkness, dawn and sunrise painted the open square; till rustling, and turning towards the light, she awoke. At the top of the window a magpie wiped his beak on a branch, bent head, and tail bent to balance him --then dropped like a mottled pebble out of sight. She sat up, drew the table prepared overnight towards her, lit the lamp for the chocolate --thinking of the dim Julien who might pay his beautiful visit in turn with the moon and the sun.

She got up and dressed, and walked in the spring morning, first to the bread shop to buy a pound of bread from the woman who wouldn't smile ... so serious and puzzling was this defect that f.a.n.n.y had once asked her: "Would you rather I didn't buy my bread here?"

"No, I don't mind."

Then to the market for a bunch of violets and an egg.

And at last through the "Silver Lion"--for luck, opening one door of black wood, pa.s.sing through the hot, sunny room, ignoring the thrilled glances of soldiers drinking at the tables, looking towards the girl at the bar, who shook her head, saying: "No, no letter for you!" and out again into the street by the other black door (which was gold inside).

She pa.s.sed the morning in the garage working on the Renault, cleaning her, oiling her--then ate her lunch in the garage room with the Section.

Among them there ran a rumour of England--of approaching demobilisation, of military driving that must come to an end, to give place to civilian drivers who, in Paris, were thronging the steps of the Ministry of the Liberated Regions.

"Already," said one, "our khaki seems as old-fashioned as a crinoline.

A man said to me yesterday: 'It is time mademoiselle bought her dress for the summer!'"

(What dream was that of Julien, and of a summer spent in Charleville!

The noise of England burst upon her ears. She heard the talk at parties--faces swam so close to hers that she looked in their eyes and spoke to them.)

And how the town is filling with men in new black coats, and women in shawls! Every day more and more arrive. And the civilians come first now! Down in the Co-operative I asked for a tin of milk, and I was told: 'We are keeping the milk for the "Civils."' 'For the "Civils"?' I said, for we are all accustomed to the idea that the army feeds first."

"Oh, that's all gone! We are losing importance now. It is time to go home."

As they spoke there came a shrill whistle which sounded through Charleville.

"Ecoute!" said a man down the street, and the Section, moving to the window, heard it again, nameless, and yet familiar.

Unseen Charleville lifted its head and said, "Ecoute."