The Old Blood Part 14

For the time being he said nothing about it to Henriette, but occasionally his glance stole away from her toward Helen, who kept on with her labour. The breeze carried her voice and laugh, which was like a rich echo of Henrietta's, and at length he heard her singing a French song, in which the other workers joined. Time pa.s.sed rapidly watching the figures in the field and Henriette--too rapidly.

"We are started, though there is nothing to see," said Henriette finally. "We will rest till after luncheon."

The peasants, too, had stopped work. They were seating themselves on the sheaves or sprawling on the hard, dry, yellow stubble for their mid-day meal. He heard them laugh at some sally of Helen's before she started across the field toward where he was sitting. Flushed from the sun and exercise, she cried out, as she approached:

"They say I do it like a veteran! It was great fun--and I was helping France!"

Phil had been envying her the exercise and told her so.

"There's room for volunteers," she suggested. And she looked at him and then at Henriette. "I dare you both to come out there this afternoon!" she added.

"Done--if your sister will let me off! Will you?"

Henriette shot one of her quick glances at Helen.

"Perhaps you will volunteer, too," Helen parried.

"Why not? I'm game!" Henriette replied.

"Good! It's the best way of helping that I know. They are very hard pressed to get the grain cut before it is overripe. It will be straight sickling this afternoon on the Pigou patch. Poor Madame Pigou's son is at the front and she has only Jean who is but ten to help, and she's too poor to hire a reaper."

When Madame Ribot heard the plan she smiled and nodded approval, reminding Henriette that she must wear gloves in order not to blister her hands. She herself, under her parasol, walked out to see them begin.

Madame Pigou, with deep wrinkles around her kindly mouth and hands already stiffened by labour at forty, protested at first.

"Such work is not for you," she said to Henriette. "Nothing takes it out of your back more than sickling, unless it's hoeing."

"Oh, none of us expects to be as adept as you," replied Henriette, "or as Helen, who has a natural talent for such things."

"Mademoiselle Helene," said Madame Pigou, with an affectionate smile of fellowship at Helen, "is one of us. Thank you all--thank you for the sake of Armand. I shall write him how you helped," she added.

"Mind that you don't overdo!" Madame Ribot warned Henriette as she started back to the chateau.

Henriette did not overdo. With skirt tucked above her slim ankles and an old pair of gloves up to her elbows, she used her sickle much as she had her brush, cutting her small swaths handily after she had learned the trick and often stopping to deride her own efforts or to boast of them very merrily, holding the attention of every one on herself. It was no cross to her that she did not keep up with the others. Madame Pigou complimented her for another reason. It was wonderful that Henriette should cut even a single sheaf; the condescension of a beautiful princess who used a real trowel and some real mortar in laying the cornerstone of a public building.

Helen, humming s.n.a.t.c.hes of song, kept her swath even with Madame Pigou.

Her plain features as she bent to her work seemed in keeping with it.

There was truth in Madame Pigou's saying that she was "one of us." But Madame did not set a fast pace, for she saw that Helen meant to hold her own.

When Phil had finished a swath he turned and cut toward Henriette in hers, and thus they met face to face as he nipped the last straws from in front of her sickle; her face flushed, too, with exercise, as they both stood erect, he with head bare, his sleeves rolled, drawing a deep breath and stretching his supple, square shoulders.

Helen pausing to rest had a glimpse of him thus; and it occurred to her how he must have looked far away in the Southwest when he was directing the workmen in railroad-building. Then she sent the sharp knife athwart the bundle of straws that she had gathered in her hand.

"A good, straight man!" whispered Madame Pigou. "He knows how to work."

"So I was thinking," murmured Helen absently. Then, a sheaf finished, she looked up again to see them standing in quite the same position of confidential comradeship. "Cousin, more praise!" she called, and repeated in English what Madame Pigou had said of him.

"A real compliment, this!" he replied.

"And tell him that he should put on a hat," said Madame Pigou. "The sun is hot."

"Not so. Not to me. I like it. I play tennis in August bare-headed."

"The Americans stand the sun better than we," said Madame Pigou.

"But he is not an Indian. He is white," Helen explained. "American summers are hotter."

For Madame thought that most of the population of the States were Indians. Phil caught what she was saying.

"A white Indian, but not savage!" he called.

It had all been as good as play to young Jean, watching these grand people from the chateau reaping, until a distant sound on the road attracted his attention. It was the faint tramp of men and the rumble of guns. As the head of a column of infantry appeared past the screen of a stretch of woodland, he cried out, "Soldiers!" and ran.

The cry was taken up far and near over the fields. Most of the harvesters started toward the road and with them went Henriette and Helen and Phil. But not Madame Pigou. She stood watching the figures all of a pattern in their uniforms, moving like automatons sharp cut against the skyline, and then bent to her work. Her son could not be among these battalions. She knew that he was in Alsace. Buxom peasant girls and toothless old men and women standing by the roadside called out the joyful G.o.d-speed of their hearts to the soldiers of France.

The men in their red trousers and blue coats knew nothing of where they were going; and the gunners astride their horses and seated on the gun-carriages and caissons looked as if they did not care, if only action soon came. Still they kept coming, that myriad-legged, human caterpillar, its convolutions following the grade of the road in either direction to the horizon. It seemed a creature of irresistible man-power and still coming, when the cousins started back to their field.

"They are between us and the Germans, those brave fellows!" said Madame Pigou, her features in a transport of joy, with a long look toward the moving blue silhouettes sharpened now by the low sun. What more was there to say?

"I hope we shall not see them driven back," Helen whispered in English.

She took the lead in insisting that Madame Pigou stop work. If she did not, they would not help her to-morrow. They walked back to the village with her.

"In America the women do not work in the fields," Phil managed to say in French.

"What do they do?" asked Madame Pigou. "Ah, I understand. They are all rich."

Jean who had gone ahead came running toward them with a letter which the postman had left during the day at the cottage. There was an inarticulate explosion of breath from Helen. She had recognised the nature of the letter, though the peasant woman had not.

"The first in our village!" Helen whispered to Phil.

He understood her meaning. How could they ease the blow for the mother was their thought, as her calloused fingers tore open the envelope?

There was no way. They had to watch it fall.

"Dead on the field of honour!" she repeated to herself. She half closed her eyes as silently she adjusted herself to fate's decree, then folded the message and placed it in her bosom. "It is for France! It is war!" she said, this woman of a race that knows well what war is and what it brings. "Jean, you must be my man, now. Armand is dead!"

Jean, hoa.r.s.e from cheering the battalion on the road, nestled against his mother.

"Thank you for helping me!" she said simply, turning to the others.

Her stoicism seemed to have its roots in the soil itself, tilled and fought for by centuries of ancestors. But the suppressed suffering in her eyes as she spoke had brought the war nearer to Mervaux than the throb of marching infantry and the thunder of guns and nearer to Phil than anything he had seen or felt before.

"Letters of that kind are dropping all over France," said Helen, when she described the incident to her mother.

"Don't!" said Madame Ribot. "Don't let us dwell upon it!"

So it was not mentioned at dinner. Yet though the food was equally good, Madame Ribot equally genial and Henriette equally sparkling, none could help thinking of Madame Pigou; and the fact of that column on the way to the front brought a suggestion of possibilities.

"Remember that you are to remain as long as you please," said Madame Ribot to Phil as she bade him good-night. "I feel some way that--well, you give us a sense of security."