The Little French Girl/Part 2/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III
He could hardly find again the face of the February day in the Bois. It was her form, her poise that gave her to one now, and Giles's first impression of the white, sunlit figure waiting on the platform was of a Greek Victory, splendid, strong, exultant. Her face, under the falling lines of a white hat, was almost dissolved in a transparent shadow; only its grave, fixed smile, like a pearl in golden wine, remained, as it were, shaped and palpable.
He had seen her as the Parisienne; the creature of elegance and artifice; but he found her almost primitive, set here in the sea-breezes, and so much more robust than he had remembered; if anything so delicate could so be called. Freshness and force breathed from her, and the classic analogies she brought to his mind were emphasized by her straightly falling dress—a tennis-dress, perhaps, for her arms were bare—tying at the breast with tassels and at the waist with a loosely knotted sash.
“Ma chérie! Ma petite chérie!” she said.
The train had come to a standstill and it was as if Alix had flown into her arms. She had been as silent as a spectre on that spectral day when he had first seen her. Her voice now startled him, as the missel-thrush's voice had done. Tears were in it and tears were in her eyes as she clasped her child. And then, again, as they stood embraced, it was of something Greek they made Giles think; some beautiful relief on the pediment of a sunlit temple; garlands above them and happy maidens in procession on either side carrying baskets of fruit and chanting the reunion of mother and child. Ceres and Persephone it might be. Happy little Persephone, escaped at last from the kingdom of Dis.
Giles stood by, holding Alix's dressing-case, and felt himself a modern tourist gazing at the masterpiece. Just as little difference, he saw it suddenly and clearly, any knowledge of his would make to madame Vervier. She was lifted, how or why he did not know, far above the dusty impressions of the throng, impervious to their comments, whether of blame or admiration. Even when in another moment her lovely eyes turned on him and, holding Alix against her with one arm, she stretched out a welcoming hand to him and said “Soyez le bien-venu, monsieur Giles. My little girl has had only good things to tell me of you”—even then he could not feel that he had gained in significance. So a queen might have received the young equerry who had safely restored to her the princess royal. They had been good to her child, the dusty throng. That was the importance they had in madame Vervier's eyes; that, and no more.
Struggling with many thoughts Giles followed mother and daughter. The ghost of Owen walked beside him, and did it whisper: “You see: how could I have helped myself?”
Two other young men were also following madame Vervier and Alix. “Vous jouez le tennis, monsieur?” said one of them, the elegant one, in a gentle voice. He was a charming white-clad person, tall and slender, with eyes intensely blue, black hair brushed back from a starry forehead; and a face like a fox for finesse and flair and like a seraph's for sweetness. Perhaps he had perceived the something gagged and struggling in Giles's demeanour and had wanted at once to make him feel that, unimportant as any young man must be to a goddess, he might count on having significance for a new friend. Giles said that he did play, and he and the charming person exchanged smiles. They might, somehow, have fought in the same trenches, side by side, Giles felt. There was at once a link between them. The other young man, who must, Giles thought, be an artist, was dressed in brown velveteen and blue linen and had a dark, square, suffering head.
The place outside the station was white and glaring, and the noises that came from the café across it were glaring, too. Giles reflected, with a certain satisfaction, that Alix need, at all events, feel no pride in this typical scene, and it was disconcerting to have his companion, as they made their way to the little waiting car, indicate with a wave of the hand the dusty green trees, the dusty white houses, the untidy green shutters, and the brittle lights on glasses and brasses in the restaurant and say: “This is the subject that our friend here has just been painting. You shall see it. A little masterpiece of light and colour.”
Of course, Giles growled inwardly as he doubled himself up on the strapontin at right angles to Alix and her mother—the two young men in front—of course, the fact that a beautiful picture might be elicited from the stimuli of the place did not make the place itself more beautiful. And yet the memory of it, framed in this new conception of its uses, grew vexatiously in his mind as they left it far behind, eliminating the weary traveller's impressions of noise, dust, and disorder, and growing to a pattern of white and green and grey wreathed harmoniously about a tawny ellipse. Yes, one could make something æsthetic out of it, ugly though it was for practical purposes; even inartistic he could see that—hang it!
The road counted off its sections in tall poplars. They passed behind madame Vervier's head, and, though Giles was so aware of her, he looked at the poplars and the fields beyond them rather than at her. She and Alix talked in French together and Alix's voice was revealed to him as like her mother's when she spoke her native tongue; musical; rhythmical; dipping; poising, and then rising to a final lift, like a swallow's flight. Their hands were clasped. Their eyes were on each other. He could look at Alix after all, and from the poplars he shifted his eyes to her. He had never seen the child with that face before. Tender, radiant, and with something of pride so deep that it hovered on the brink of tears. Her glance met his and was tender for him, too, as though with Owen's ghost it said: “You see: how is it possible not to love her?”
But was she as beautiful as all that? Giles gathered himself away from the admission. Was she even beautiful at all? He would have to look at her carefully if he were to say, and he stayed himself on the conviction that if it came to structure and line she could not be compared to Alix.
It was not what she looked like; it was what she meant that he was so aware of now. He had never before found himself in the company of a woman who seemed so to typify the femme du monde, and if she were no longer of it, that fact was merely accidental. With every glance, gesture, rise and fall of voice, it was there that she belonged. He did not think that he liked the femme du monde, so apt, he felt, at showing you no more than what she intended to show you of her real purpose, so sure that for every occasion she would know what to do far better than you could even understand. And yet, more than the femme du monde she made him think of the mountain torrent—Alix had been right—in its strength, its splendour, and its danger, too. And he knew that he did not like dangerous women.
He had expected to find her gay, and, in spite of the memory, brooding, almost sombre, of the spectral spring day, to feel in her something of artifice and allurement. But if artifice there were, it was nothing added or adventitious; and of allurement there was none. She stood in her place, a goddess, and watched her worshippers, and when her human smile came, modelling her cheek to a sudden childlike candour, it had the oddity of an unexpected weakness.
It was to Alix alone that she talked; she had no word for him. Yet once or twice, as they drove, Giles was aware of being observed. All unimportant as he was, he felt her dark eyes turned on him, resting upon him, in meditation rather than in surmise. It was—he had noted this already—a curiously widely opened eye. Its rounded darkness gave to her contemplative gaze a fixed, abstracted quality. When you found her observing you, she did not look away; so that presently you wondered whether she was seeing you at all; whether the soft, wide gaze had not travelled to spaces far beyond you, including but forgetting you.
They had left the poplared road behind them and were among great fields, stretching on one hand to the horizon and on the other to the cliff-edge. A line of docile cows, tethered side by side, ate their way into a strip of wine-coloured clover; meadow pipits mounted from the turf and filled the salt, sweet air with myriads of falling silver bells; in the distance the tall palisades of a wood rose against the sky and it looked like an island floating on the level sunlight of the plain. The glimmer of white houses among the grey boles revealed, as they approached, an embowered village on the cliff and Giles needed to make no mental reconstruction of beauty here. He felt the authentic essence fill his breath as he gazed at the picture, never to be forgotten, he knew, of the vast blue sky, the vast sunlit plain, the tall trees green and silver, threaded with white cottages. His eyes were full of his delight.
“You know our villages?” said madame Vervier. It was the first phrase she had addressed him since they started.
“Only a few. Further north; and usually ruined ones,” said Giles.
“Only the tragic ones,” said madame Vervier. “Here we were untouched by the war, and our villages, too, are more beautiful than further north. In this part of Normandy they are often surrounded by these great ramparts of trees. It gives much character, much charm, does it not?”—and she smiled at him. She had noted his delight, and Alix was smiling at him, too.
“I've seen French pictures like it,” said Giles.
“Yes; some of the early Corots give one the grey and green and white.”
“Ah—it is too stately for a Corot.” The young man in white flashed a smile round at her as he drove. “Corot would see its intimacy, its charm, rather than its gravity. That great design against the sky;—no; we must find somebody else.”
Madame Vervier smiled back, sure of her point. “He would not look at the sky, my early Corot; he would look at the little white houses nestling in the trees; he would look at the curve of the white road with the whitewashed wall. That girl in the faded blue, with the brown hoop of bread upon her arm, he would put her in. Oh, yes; it is a Corot; an early Corot, André. I see the happy gentle touches of his brush.”
“Elle a raison,” said the young man with the dark square head, and André, driving with his easy skill, waved a hand of contented concession.
When they had passed within the precincts, the little town opened clearly to the sunlight and they were at once in the place that circled round a large pond where patient men in large straw hats sat fishing. Houses, stately in their modesty, looked over rows of pollarded fruit-trees and high walls tiled in red. Built of pale old brick and flint, with high-pitched roofs above dormer windows, they seemed to speak of a delicious leisure that was, in itself, an occupation. People who lived in such houses, Giles thought, would never be idle; yet all their industry would have the savour of an art. How darkly lustrous the windows shone; how unremittingly were those bright gardens tended. He saw, as they passed an open gate, a stout old man in a white linen coat tying muslin bags over the pears that ripened on the wall. Under a charmille a woman sat stemming currants. A family group in front of a shop were already taking the afternoon repose, the father with his newspaper, the wife and daughters with their sewing. Along the broad white street a peasant girl, her bare head as neat as a nut, clattered in sabots, carrying a great earthenware jar, and a small white woolly dog, of a breed unknown to Giles, barked languidly from his doorstep as they passed.
From the place the little town rayed out into leafy lanes and, as they entered one of them, a sunny round of sky and cliff-edge at the other end, framed in foliage, showed Giles that they were at their journey's end. High hedges and thickets of wind-swept trees protected the little house, brick, flint, and tiles, from the gales that must, in stormy seasons, beat upon it from the sea. Flowers grew gaily, though untidily, beside the narrow flagged path that led from the wicket-gate to the back door. They crossed a band of cobblestones where oleanders grew in tubs, and, as they entered, passed a kitchen gleaming with ranged coppers. Giles as he followed madame Vervier and Alix, had the sensation of stepping into a fairy-tale. The Three Bears and Goldilocks might have welcomed one to such a bright, dark little house among its sunny thickets; its very smell was a fairy-tale smell; beeswax, seashells, and coarse clean linen. Such a smell as a child, once meeting it, would never in a long life forget. A tall clock tick-tocked on the stair; there was a great Normandy armoire, softly gleaming, old and worn, at a turning of a passage; madame Vervier's white figure went on before, and as she bent her head to lift a latch he saw her russet hair twisted up from the nape of her neck; and that, again, was like a picture he had seen. And then they were suddenly out upon a broad verandah, broad and wide, washed with sunlight and opening only on the blue. Sea-gulls floated by, high above the sea, at the cliff's edge, on a level with the eyes. Vines fluttered, translucent, against the sunlight; the scent of the honeysuckle came balmily; the sea was sprinkled with white and russet sails.
A stately personage was reading in the shade. He was dressed in white; he had thick hair and a grey divided beard. Lifting his tortoiseshell eye-glasses from the bridge of his nose, he rose to greet them, and Giles found himself penetrated by the deep gaze of Jovian grey eyes set under a Jovian forehead; penetrated by the gaze and appraised, for the first time in his life, by standards mysteriously remote. This must be monsieur de Maubert, and Giles had never seen anyone like him, except once, perhaps, at Oxford, when a distinguished Frenchman had received a degree. Only the distinguished Frenchman, black, shrill, and restless, had so much less looked the part than did monsieur de Maubert. It was not exactly sustaining to say to himself that, hang it, monsieur de Maubert, after all, had probably never seen anyone like him; the advantage, he felt, must seem only to be his. But, under all his boyish perturbation, Giles knew that he was appraising monsieur de Maubert, too. Monsieur de Maubert was a magnificent person—magnificent, although his legs were short;—and he was a pagan. It was rather magnificent to be a pagan and Giles knew just how well he thought of the creed; but there were all sorts of things that monsieur de Maubert—he felt sure of it—could never see, and the difference between them was that, while Giles knew that he often groped in mystery, monsieur de Maubert would remain unaware that there could be anything significant unknown to him. Life, to him, was bathed in la lumière antique, and anything not so bathed was inessential. All sorts of things that Giles had only wondered about or surmised were suddenly made clear to him as he looked at madame Vervier's other guest.
Monsieur de Maubert turned from Giles to put his hand on Alix's shoulder. He observed her in silence for a moment with a most benignant smile, and then remarked: “Te voilà presque une grande personne, ma chère enfant,” and, stooping his head, he kissed her hand.
“Now you will want to see your room,” said Madame Vervier.
She had taken off her hat, and Giles for the first time saw her bareheaded. She stood there, looking at them, a little preoccupied, her hat hanging against her dress as she held it, and the sun flickered in upon her high-wreathed russet hair. Cut across her forehead and half tossed back, it seemed as simply, as cursorily done as that of a little girl who, for the first time, sweeps up her tresses. She was looking at them all; at monsieur de Maubert, at Alix, as he kissed her hand, and at Giles; but Giles felt, as he turned to her, that it was upon himself that the wide, abstracted gaze was dwelling. Monsieur de Maubert had appraised him; it was probable that madame Vervier had appraised him, too.
“After you have had your tea,” she said, “you will perhaps like to rest. Or would you care to come with us to Allongeville, where we are to play tennis?”
Giles said that he would write some letters after tea. He did not see his friend in white, who had apparently gone away with the car. And the dark young artist, too, had disappeared.
With Alix's arm passed in hers, madame Vervier led him up a narrow staircase where the smell of beeswax, seashells, and linen seemed to cluster yet more thickly, and along a passage carpeted in matting where the sea-breeze, blowing in from windows at each end, made a singing noise. “Is Giles to have the chambre rose, Maman?” said Alix, and she exclaimed, as her mother, smiling, said, “Yes,” “Oh, I am so glad! I hoped for that!”
It was at the end of the passage, and when one entered one had before one in the windows nothing but sea and sky. Grey woodwork framed panels of voile de Gênes, rose, white, russet, and sepia. The little Louis Quinze bed was of grey painted wood, stately under its pink and russet embroideries. A bowl of rose-coloured carnations filled the air with spicy fragrance, and there was a tiny cabinet de toilette with an ancient set of rose-and-white china. Giles had never found himself installed in such a lovely room.
“Yes; this is your room,” said madame Vervier, as if she replied to a question. “You will be happy here, I think.”
Giles could only murmur that he would.
“We are very primitive,” said madame Vervier. “There are no bells. If you want Albertine, you must go to the stair and call down for her. She will hear and come.”
“Ah, she will not always come,” Alix demurred; whereat madame Vervier smiled and said that in that case he must call Alix.
Then they left him, and he could go to the window, turning away instinctively from the room and all it meant of madame Vervier, and stare at the sea, and, with a rising sense of dismay and fierceness in his heart, ask himself what he did there in the Circe sweetness. He was there because of Alix, of course; but how far away Alix had become. The process of removal seemed to have begun as they had leaned on the railing of the deck and seen Dieppe emerge over the water. In her declaration to him, when their talk so disastrously ended, she had drawn still further away; and now he saw her almost as a stranger, in a strange land. A foreigner; French; the daughter, only, of madame Vervier; no longer his little Alix.
When she knocked at his door, twenty minutes later, and told him that tea was ready, he felt that it was with a dull gaze that he met her. She had asked him to come because of something he could do to help her, but now her radiant demeanour seemed to demonstrate that she had brought him so that he might be enchanted. Madame Vervier was not a person in any need of help. There was nothing she asked less of you. Circe, Circe; that was the word in his mind. Only Circe, he supposed, allured; enticed; while madame Vervier only gazed at you with those wide, intent, indifferent eyes.
“Do you like Les Chardonnerets?” said Alix, standing in the door and smiling at him. She had changed her travelling dress for a white one, a straight white one made of a thin woollen stuff, like her mother's; and her mother must have had it in readiness for her, for he had never seen her wear it before. Nor had he ever seen her look so happy.
“I suppose,” he said, with his hands in his pockets, standing in the middle of the lovely room, “you feel England has ceased to exist; and a good job, too.”
“But not at all, Giles,” said Alix, and there was a touch of gay malice in her smile. “How could I feel that when you are here?”
“Will cease to exist, as far as you are concerned, once I'm gone,” Giles amended.
“France has never existed for you at all,” Alix remarked, though her smile did not become less kind.
“I beg your pardon, young woman, it existed for me from the moment I set eyes on you,” said Giles gloomily, “to say nothing of the year I fought over here.”
Alix then did a very unexpected thing. She advanced into the centre of the room and clasped her hands around his arm and looked into his face. “Do not be heavy with me, Giles,” she said, “when I am so happy.”
He looked down at her fondly and sadly. “I suppose it's because I see you happy, for the first time, that I feel heavy.”
“But why, Giles? Why? Must not a child be happy at finding herself again with her mother; in her own country? Would you not be happy in such a case? Were you not happy when you returned to your home and to your mother after the war?”
“That's not quite the same,” Giles objected. “After all, you've not been in daily peril of your life. Of course you're happy. But try not to show me, too plainly, how little we all mean to you. Try not to show me how quickly you'll forget all about us when I'm gone.”
“But I should never forget you, Giles, even if I never saw you again!” said Alix, holding his arm and looking into his face.
Madame Vervier, as they stood thus, passed along the corridor and paused and looked in at them; looked, Giles felt, with surprise. Alix smiled round at her. “He thinks I do not care for England any longer, Maman, or for him, because I am so happy to be back in France with you,” she said.
Madame Vervier, after her pause, advanced slowly into the room, and her smile did not conceal from Giles her covert examination of himself. It was a smile deep and soft; superficially acquiescent; but concealing much. Vigilance was in it, and the sense, perhaps, of a special need for vigilance; the recognition, too, perhaps, of something unforeseen that England had already done to her child. Such untroubled intimacy between young man and maiden was not, Giles divined, in the traditions to which madame Vervier was accustomed. Yet her smile suggested no reproof and seemed to acquiesce serenely in Alix's demonstration of alien habits.
She moved to them, and passed her arm in Alix's, so that they stood, all three, linked together, and, smiling on, she remarked: “You must not give your good friend cause for such fancies, darling.”
She spoke in English and her English was almost as perfect as Alix's. The r of “darling,” just rolled, like the almost imperceptible ripple on the smooth surface of a shell, made the word at once more playful and more caressing. And she went on, looking from one to the other: “You must not seem to forget him in finding me. Our kind allies must have no cause, at any time, for suspecting that we French have not faithful hearts.”
“But I have just told him, Maman, that I should never forget him,” said Alix as they moved towards the door. “And there can be no question of that, Giles, for you will come often and often to Les Chardonnerets, will you not?”
Giles did not answer this question. It was unexpected, and its sweetness was unexpected. His mind, however, was occupied with the discomfort that came to him at seeing himself made to appear so personally involved in regrets for Alix's removal. It was not himself, first and foremost, he had been thinking of at all when he felt those regrets; it was of England; of his mother and Toppie; of the noisy, untidy, but devoted family life; of the birch-wood at evening where he had taught Alix the song of the willow-warbler; of his beautiful Oxford and “The Messiah” on Winter evenings. These were the things he wanted Alix to remember, and it could not console him to know that she expected to see him again when he felt sure that she would see his England disappear from her life without one pang.