The Little French Girl/Part 2/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II
The train moved slowly, almost ruminatingly, along the golden landscape, a little local train stopping at every station. The crops were still uncut and their vast undulations were broken only by lines of lonely, poplared road, or marshalled woods venturing out, here and there, upon the plains. Empty and rather sad, for all the splendour of the gold beneath, the blue above, it looked to Giles; but that might have been, he knew, because of its associations for him with scenes of the war; and he was feeling a little sick, too, apprehensions of the approaching future seizing him as he and Alix sat silent in the second-class carriage, where both the windows were tightly shut. Alix had widely opened hers on entering, but at the first station a lady had got in—little shopping people of the local bourgeoisie the passengers were, more estranged from fashion, Giles thought, than their equivalent English types—and, wrapping a scarf at once about her neck, she had complained of the effect of the courant d'air upon her névralgie. Without comment, Alix at once closed her window. No doubt she knew her compatriots and recognized the futility of discussion on this theme; but Giles reflected that Ruth and Rosemary would not so have submitted. They would have entered into altercation with the lady in the scarf and found pleasure in demonstrating her folly to her even if they did not succeed in keeping the window open. But to Alix altercation had no charms. Even when the lady, still mysteriously aggrieved in her furthest corner, murmured resentfully on about les anglais qui viennent nous déranger, Alix glanced meditatively at her for a moment and then resumed her survey of the landscape, indifferent to the misapprehension; and since Giles could not repress a smile, the lady, who still held up her scarf in retrospective protest, kept indignant eyes upon him.
“Now, you know, you are a worse-tempered people than we are. She's still nursing her wrongs,” Giles murmured, and Alix, glancing at the lady of the névralgie, answered, “She is negligible.”
Two men sat further on; one young, with high, ardent, excited eyes, like a collie's, in a thin head; the other obese and red with white hair en brosse and a purple nip of ribbon in his button-hole. They leaned across the carriage towards each other and talked without cessation, rapping each other on the chest to a constant refrain of: “Puis—il me dit;—Et—je lui dis.” Passionately swift and even vindictive in utterance as they were, their personal geniality remained unimpaired.
A little boy on his mother's lap ate chocolates, smearing his cheeks and palms. Clambering down, he was permitted, unchecked, to lurch towards Alix, staying himself on the knees he passed, and when he reached her he stretched forth his hand with assurance for the box of apricots she held. “Est-il mignon!” exclaimed the fond mother. But Alix did not even turn her eyes from the landscape. The disconcerted child stood gazing at her, too much astonished even to weep, and Giles, taking pity on him, offered the tick of his watch and jingled his bunch of keys in an attempt to distract his attention. But the little boy gave him no heed, and after a prolonged stare at Alix he made his way back to his mother; his first encounter, Giles imagined, with an unresponsive universe.
“I say, you are really rather hard-hearted,” he remarked. Here was another difference, for neither Ruth nor Rosemary could have remained so impervious to even such a repulsive little boy.
But Alix said: “I cannot look at a dirty face like that. If his mother had cleaned his face, I would have given him one.”
“Well, since he's gone back to her, and you needn't look at him, may I give him one?” said Giles; and, as Alix smiling, assented, Giles handed an apricot to the little boy, who took it without thanks and ate it, staring solemnly at Alix the while.
A thin blue crescent of sea cut into the fields on the right. In the distance, on a rise of country, a pale pink château stood with wings of sculptured woodland on either side, a long green lawn in front.
“It cannot be far now,” said Alix. The lady with the scarf, the mother with the little boy, the stout marketing lady, had all left them by now and she could open her window and stand by it to look out. “Vaudettes is four miles from the station. Maman will come to meet us, with monsieur de Maubert.”
“Who is monsieur de Maubert?” asked Giles. He had never heard the name before. But then he had never heard any names connected with Maman. How could he, since he never spoke of her?
“He is an old friend of ours; a very old friend,” said Alix. “I do not remember the time when we did not know monsieur de Maubert.”
“You like him?”
“Oh, very much. C'est un homme fort distingué,” said Alix, relapsing into French, with the effect, to Giles, of not sparing more than convention for their conversation. Her thoughts were fixed in anticipation. He could almost see her palpitate in her stillness with it. She might have been kinder to the little boy had she not been so unaware of everything but the approaching figure of Maman.
“How distinguished?” Giles, however, persisted.
“Oh, I am so ignorant, Giles. Wise things do not interest me, you know.” Alix smiled slightly down at him over her shoulder. “He has excavated cities; Persian; Mongolian;—que sais-je. He writes on antiquities. He has a beautiful appartement in Paris with collections of gems and bronzes. He is at once savant and homme du monde.”
“And will he be the only guest except me?”
“Ah, that I do not know. There are three chambres d'invités at Les Chardonnerets. But I have not heard that there is, as yet, anyone else.”
“Chardonnerets? That means?”
“It means goldfinches. That was a bird we always knew, even”—Alix paused—“even before your brother told us more of birds. Flocks come in Autumn to the thistles on the cliffs outside our gate. When they all fly together one sees the squares of gold on their wings—it makes a pattern on the sky, like a chain of golden coins; monsieur de Maubert's strange old square coins. And their little twitter is like the chink of thin gold. We love them, Maman and I, and there is a tall ash-tree in the garden where they often perch in summer. You will see them, Giles. You will like Les Chardonnerets, I think.—Oh, now—I recognize now—I know those woods. We find daffodils in them, in Spring, among the faggots. You have not in England, have you, Giles, our great woods with all the ranged faggots that the woodmen pile so carefully in winter. And in Spring, at the edge of the wood, one sees around one the great plain, champagne-coloured. The next station will be ours,” said Alix.