The Rough Road Part 51

So, on the day of the funeral of Aunt Morin, the whole of the billet sent in a wreath to the house, and the whole of the billet attended the service in the little church, and they marched back and drew up by the front door--a guard of honour extending a little distance down the road. The other men billeted in the village hung around, together with the remnant of the inhabitants, old men, women and children, but kept quite clear of the guarded path through which Jeanne was to pa.s.s. One or two officers looked on curiously. But they stood in the background.

It was none of their business. If the men, in their free time, chose to put themselves on parade, without arms, of course, so much the better for the army.

Then Jeanne and the old cure, in his time-scarred shovel-hat and his rusty soutane, followed by Toinette, turned round the corner of the lane and emerged into the main street. A sergeant gave a word of command. The guard stood at attention. Jeanne and her companions proceeded up the street, unaware of the unusual, until they entered between the first two files. Then for the first time the tears welled into Jeanne's eyes. She could only stretch out her hands and cry somewhat wildly to the bronzed statues on each side of her, "_Merci, mes amis, merci, merci_," and flee into the house.

The next day Maitre Pepineau, the notary, summoned her to his _cabinet_. Maitre Pepineau was very old. His partner had gone off to the war. "One of the necessities of the present situation," he would say, "is that I should go on living in spite of myself; for if I died, the whole of the affairs of Frelus would be in the soup." Now, a fortnight back, Maitre Pepineau and four neighbours--the four witnesses required by French law when there is only one notary to draw up the _instrument public_--had visited Aunt Morin; so Jeanne knew that she had made a fresh will.

"_Mon enfant_," said the old man, unfolding the doc.u.ment, "in a previous will your aunt had left you a little heritage out of the half of her fortune which she was free to dispose of by the code. You having come into possession of your own money, she has revoked that will and left everything to her only surviving son, Gaspard Morin, in Madagascar."

"It is only just and right," said Jeanne.

"The unfortunate part of the matter," said Maitre Pepineau, "is that Madame Morin has appointed official trustees to carry on the estate until Monsieur Gaspard Morin can make his own arrangements. The result is that you have no _locus standi_ as a resident in the house. I pointed this out to her. But you know, in spite of her good qualities, she was obstinate.... It pains me greatly, my dear child, to have to state your position."

"I am then," said Jeanne, "_sans-asile_--homeless?"

"As far as the house of Monsieur Gaspard Morin is concerned--yes."

"And my English soldiers?" asked Jeanne.

"Alas, my child," replied the old man, "you will find them everywhere."

Which was cold consolation. For however much inspired by patriotic grat.i.tude a French girl may be, she cannot settle down in a strange place where British troops are billeted and proceed straightway to minister to their comfort. Misunderstandings are apt to arise even in the best regulated British regiments. In the house of Aunt Morin, in Frelus, her position was una.s.sailable. Anywhere else ...

"So, my good Toinette," said Jeanne, after having explained the situation to the indignant old woman, "I can only go back to my friend in Paris and reconst.i.tute my life. If you will accompany me----?"

But no. Toinette had the peasant's awful dread of Paris. She had heard about Paris: there were thieves, ruffians that they called _apaches_, who murdered you if you went outside your door.

"The _apaches_," laughed Jeanne, "were swept away into the army on the outbreak of war, and they've nearly all been killed, fighting like heroes."

"There are the old ones left, who are worse than the young," retorted Toinette.

No. Mademoiselle could teach her nothing about Paris. You could not even cross a street without risk of life, so many were the omnibuses and automobiles. In every shop you were a stranger to be robbed. There was no air in Paris. You could not sleep for the noise. And then--to live in a city of a hundred million people and not know a living soul!

It was a mad-house matter. Again no. It grieved her to part from mademoiselle, but she had made her little economies--a difficult achievement, considering how regardful of her pence Madame had been--and she would return to her Breton town, which forty years ago she had left to enter the service of Madame Morin.

"But after forty years, Toinette, who in Paimpol will remember you?"

"It is I who remember Paimpol," said Toinette. She remained for a few moments in thought. Then she said: "_C'est drole, tout de meme._ I haven't seen the sea for forty years, and now I can't sleep of nights thinking of it. The first man I loved was a fisherman of Paimpol. We were to be married after he returned from an Iceland voyage, with a _gros benefice_. When the time came for his return, I would stand on the sh.o.r.e and watch and watch the sea. But he never came. The sea swallowed him up. And then--you can understand quite well--the child was born dead. And I thought I would never want to look at the sea again. So I came here to your Aunt Morin, the daughter of Doctor Kersadec, your grandfather, and I married Jules Dagnant, the foreman of the carters of the hay ... and he died a long time ago ... and now I have forgotten him and I want to go and look at the sea where my man was drowned."

"But your grandson, who is fighting in the Argonne?"

"What difference can it make to him whether I am in Frelus or Paimpol?"

"That's true," said Jeanne.

Toinette bustled about the kitchen. Folks had to eat, whatever happened. But she went on talking, Madame Morin. One must not speak evil of the dead. They have their work cut out to extricate themselves from Purgatory. But all the same--after forty years' faithful service--and not to mention in the will--_meme pour une Bretonne, c'etait raide_. Jeanne agreed. She had no reason to love her Aunt Morin. Her father's people came from Agen on the confines of Gascony; he had been a man of great gestures and vehement speech; her mother, gentle, reserved, _un pen devote_. Jeanne drew her character from both sources; but her sympathies were rather southern than northern.

For some reason or the other, perhaps for his expansive ways--who knows?--Aunt Morin had held the late Monsieur Bossiere in detestation. She had no love for Jeanne, and Jeanne, who before her good fortune had expected nothing from Aunt Morin, regarded the will with feelings of indifference. Except as far as it concerned Toinette.

Forty years' faithful service deserved recognition. But what was the use of talking about it?

"So we must separate, Toinette?"

"Alas, yes, mademoiselle--unless mademoiselle would come with me to Paimpol."

Jeanne laughed. What should she do in Paimpol? There wasn't even a fisherman left there to fall in love with.

"Mademoiselle," said Toinette later, "do you think you will meet the little English soldier, Monsieur Trevor, in Paris?"

"_Dans la guerre on ne se revoit jamais_," said Jeanne.

But there was more of personal decision than of fatalism in her tone.

So Jeanne waited for a day or two until the regiment marched away, and then, with heavy heart, set out for Paris. She wrote, indeed, to Phineas, and weeks afterwards Phineas, who was in the thick of the Somme fighting, wrote to Doggie telling him of her departure from Frelus; but regretted that as he had lost her letter he could not give him her Paris address.

And in the meantime the house of Gaspard Morin was shuttered and locked and sealed; and the bureaucratically minded old Postmaster of Frelus, who had received no instructions from Jeanne to forward her correspondence, handed Doggie's letters and telegrams to the aged postman, a superannuated herdsman, who stuck them into the letter-box of the deserted house and went away conscious of duty perfectly accomplished.

Then, at last, Doggie, fit again for active service, went out with a draft to France, and joined Phineas and Mo, almost the only survivors of the cheery, familiar crowd that he had loved, and the grimness of battles such as he had never conceived possible took him in its inexorable grip, and he lost sense of everything save that he was the least important thing on G.o.d's earth struggling desperately for animal existence.

Yet there were rare times of relief from stress, when he could gropingly string together the facts of a pre-Somme existence. And then he would curse Phineas l.u.s.tily for losing the precious letter.

"Man," Phineas once replied, "don't you see that you're breaking a heart which, in spite of its apparent rugosity and callosity, is as tender as a new-made mother's? Tell me to do it, and I'll desert and make my way to Paris and----"

"And the military police will see that you make your way to h.e.l.l via a stone wall. And serve you right. Don't be a blithering fool," said Doggie.

"Then I don't know what I can do for you, laddie, except die of remorse at your feet."

"We're all going to die of rheumatic fever," said Doggie, shivering in his sodden uniform. "Blast this rain!"

Phineas thrust his hand beneath his clothing and produced a long, amorphous and repulsive substance, like a painted tallow candle overcome by intense heat, from which he gravely bit an inch or two.

"What's that?" asked Doggie.

"It's a stick of peppermint," said Phineas. "I've still an aunt in Galashiels who remembers my existence."

Doggie stuck out his hand like a monkey in the Zoo.

"You selfish beast!" he said.

CHAPTER XXIII

The fighting went on and, to Doggie, the inhabitants of the outside world became almost as phantasmagorical as Phineas's providential aunt in Galashiels. Immediate existence held him. In an historic battle Mo Shendish fell with a machine bullet through his heart. Doggie, staggering with the rest of the company to the attack over the muddy, sh.e.l.l-torn ground, saw him go down a few yards away. It was not till later that he knew he had gone West with many other great souls.

Doggie and Phineas mourned for him as a brother. Without him France was a muddier and a bloodier place and the outside world more unreal than ever.

Then to Doggie came a heart-broken letter from the Dean. Oliver had gone the same road as Mo. Peggy was frantic with grief. Vividly Doggie saw the peaceful deanery on which all the calamity of all the war had crashed with sudden violence.

"Why I should thank G.o.d we parted as friends, I don't quite know,"

said Doggie, "but I do."