The Little French Girl/Part 3/Chapter 1
PART III
CHAPTER I
What had happened to Giles?
He was waiting for her on the Victoria platform and his patient gaze and poise told her that her train was late;—but fatigue did not account for what Alix saw at once as she stood at the door of her carriage and found his face. Her dear Giles. Her good Giles. What had happened to him?
Alix was aware that a great deal had happened to herself since she had last seen Giles, only two months ago. It was not only her lengthened skirts and her turned-in locks that gave her her new sense of maturity. Perhaps one only began really to be grown up when one began to know why one was unhappy. A child suffers in ignorance of the cause of its suffering and it can forget more easily because of that merciful vagueness. Unhappiness is only a cloud to put away or pass out of. But grown-up unhappiness was four solid walls of fact enclosing one.
Groping round and round her prison and finding always that solid facts were there resisting all attempts at forgetfulness, Alix, though she still could not see just what they were, sometimes asked herself if that was because she was still too young to understand, or because Maman, so deftly, so tenderly, with as much compassion as compunction, passed a bandage round her eyes and kept her blindfolded? She could not tell; but she knew that another mark of her own maturity was her understanding of Maman, her new capacity for helping her; and more than in any other way she helped her by never lifting a hand to push away the bandage and by never asking a question that Maman might find it difficult to answer.
She had known intuitively, in the past, that some questions must not be asked; questions about her father; about monsieur Vervier; about divorce. But now there were more pressing questions, and the first and foremost of them was the question of André de Valenbois.
He was there; in their lives. She had left him behind her in Paris; no longer their guest, but as much as at Les Chardonnerets the presiding presence. He was a great friend. So Maman had said to her, strangely pale, on that night when at Les Chardonnerets she had heard Giles and André de Valenbois talk of her return to England. Maman had great friends. And great friends made one suffer—Maman had not said that but Alix had seen it—and many things in life must be sacrificed to them. It was not that they were more loved than a child—oh, she was sure not!—though that was a surmise that had pierced her through; it was simply that one could not be sure of keeping them always; as one was sure of keeping one's child; and because one was not sure, one suffered. It was something from which one could not free oneself. It was something that made one helpless.
So Alix knew herself changed; a grave, meditative person; garnering in her silence and her submissiveness a power to meet all the emergencies that must lie in her path since, so obviously, they lay in Maman's.
“Hello, Alix,” said Giles. His eyes had found her and he was there below her, taking from her the basket she had lifted off the seat; and she said, “Hello, Giles,” though it seemed to her always such an odd phrase to meet upon.
“Is this the kitten?” said Giles.
“Yes. This is Blaise. You expected him? I wrote to Mrs. Bradley.”
“Expected him! Rather! They're wanting to see him almost as much as to see you.”
“That is well, then,” Alix smiled. “You haven't been ill, Giles?”
“Ill! Rather not! I'm as right as rain,” said Giles; and he added, hastily she felt: “But I say, you're quite different. What is it? Your clothes? Your hair?”
“Maman thought I was getting too old for short hair. It is taken back from my forehead, too. It makes me very digne, I assure you. And my skirts are nearly as long, you see, as anybody's skirts.”
Alix wore a dark blue dress and a dark blue cape, buttoned with little buttons on her breast and showing a satin lining of striped grey and blue. Her shoes and stockings were grey, and her loose, long gloves, and her soft little hat curving down over her brows with the big bow knotted at the side. Maman had made her, though so sober, very chic, and Giles was taking it all in; as far as he could; and that, she feared, with tender irony, was not very far.
Giles, as they moved along the platform, pursued the topic of her appearance, feeling it evidently opportune. He did not wish to speak about his own. “It's that you look so tremendously foreign;—the way you walk; the way your things are put on; the way your hat comes down like that. Even the way you speak English is as French as possible, for anyone who speaks it perfectly; and I'd never noticed that before.”
“When you first met me,” said Alix, putting the obvious explanation with mild competence before him, “what chiefly engaged your attention was that I spoke English at all. Now you notice that though I speak it so well I speak with my French accent. I am French, Giles.” She slightly smiled round at him, for she need not emphasize it. He as well as she would remember their last talk on the cliff-path. “I am a foreigner.”
“I suppose you are,” said Giles, and it was gravely, almost gloomily that he said so.
“Was the walking tour a success?” Alix asked him, while they waited at the customs, Alix's box, this time, being larger than the last and subjected to the vicissitudes of a separate transit. “You did not overtire yourself? You look a little tired, you know.”
“Do I really? I haven't been sleeping very well; it's been so hot. Cornwall was a great success. I want you to see Cornwall some day.”
“It has been hot in Paris, too. But I always love Paris at this season, the stones all baked with sun, the trees all bronze. We have been dining in the Bois almost every night, at a little restaurant under the trees. It has been delicious. And the drive back down the avenue du Bois.—Calme-toi, mon chéri,” she addressed the kitten who was wailing.
“Poor little chap. He hasn't liked the journey. Is he prettier?” asked Giles.
“He is uglier,” said Alix. “It is l'âge ingrat, you know. No longer kitten, and yet not cat. Like me. It is only the basket that troubles him. I had him out for most of the day, in my arms, and he was quiet and good.”
“It reassures me to see you still so fond of kittens,” Giles smiled at her. “It makes me feel you are still something of one yourself.”
“But I shall always be fond of kittens,” said Alix.
They were again to spend the night with Aunt Bella and in the taxi Alix opened the basket and displayed her pet. Very ugly indeed; gaunt in structure, though fully fed, of a most undistinguished white and brindle, with a nose already over-long and ears over-large; but as it nestled into Alix's neck with loud choking purrs Giles owned that it was a nice little beast.
“And so full of love; and so intelligent, Giles,” said Alix, pleased by his commendation. “More loving, more intelligent, these common little cats are, than chats de race, I always think.”
London, dusty and drowsy on this Autumn evening, seemed to yawn and smile and had, Alix thought, a welcoming air. It was a kind city. She even saw beauty in it, and commented on the Royal Hospital as they drove through Chelsea. “How well it goes in the thick, soft air—that period, that colour.” She had never liked London so much, although she came to it with an unwillingness so much greater than the unwillingness of last year, and it seemed to her, leaning back in the taxi beside Giles, her kitten against her cheek, that the dropped aitches, the little green-grocer's shops, the strolling lovers, and the river gliding silvery-grey behind its trees, all went together in the impression of ease and kindliness.
In Aunt Bella's flat all the windows were widely opened to the freshness, and Aunt Bella received not only her, but Blaise, quite as a matter of course. This matter-of-courseness, Alix had begun to feel, was a distinctive English trait. Once they knew you, they accepted you; you and your kittens. They had no surmises about you. You were simply there. Was it, Alix wondered, while she changed her dress in her little pink room—Blaise cautiously reconnoitring from piece to piece of the furniture—was it that Aunt Bella saw her benevolently as an œuvre de guerre, or sentimentally as a legacy from the dead nephew? As she reflected on her own presence, so intimately among them, Alix felt that if Maman's motives were mysterious to her from their complexity, Aunt Bella's would be mysterious from their simplicity. And it was all like London again; like the cosy little shops with the carrots and cabbages heaped before their windows, the muffling air and unadventurous river. There was peace in such simplicity, peace in being among people who had nothing to hide and who would hardly be able to imagine that you might have.
She felt at dinner that Aunt Bella looked at her, in her altered way of dressing, a little as Miss Grace and Jennifer had looked when Lady Mary talked to her about Henri de Mouveray. Aunt Bella, no doubt, found the little dress that Maman had so cleverly contrived out of two Empire scarves, curious rather than interesting. Charming in colour, dull blue shot with silver, it was a marvel of convenience as well as so pretty. One turn and it fell into place, leaving arms and shoulders bare, knotting low about the hips and falling in long silvery fringes to the ankle. Seen in Aunt Bella's flat it had undoubtedly a very Parisian air, and perhaps Aunt Bella felt it too Parisian, for she began to question Alix about France's foreign policy with some severity. Alix gathered that in Aunt Bella's eyes her country was behaving badly.
“But we want the Germans to suffer,” she said. “If they are not made to suffer sufficiently, they will make us suffer again and perhaps destroy us.”
“But that is being revengeful, my dear child. And so short-sighted, too. You don't change people's hearts by making them suffer. You harm yourself as well as them.”
“I do not think we want to change their hearts.” Alix, all unversed in these large subjects as she was, felt herself impelled to make the answer so obvious to every French mind. “I do not think we care about their hearts. When a bad man is guillotined, it is sufficient that his head should be gone. His heart does not concern us.”
Giles at this laughed loudly and Aunt Bella's eye-glassed gaze turned to glitter reprobation at him. “She doesn't know what she's saying, Giles. She is too young to have followed or understood the lamentable policy of her country. You really shouldn't encourage her.”
“But it seems to me she has been following. She's made the only honest answer. Have you heard people talking about it a good deal, Alix?”
She did not mind his mirth or Aunt Bella's reprobation. She did not care at all what they thought about France. How could one expect even English friends really to understand? “I have heard people talk at Maman's,” she said.
Blaise was on a chair beside her eating an excellent dinner, and Giles, still laughing, said: “Do you know what he looks like? A Boche baby. There was one born in a village we occupied after the Germans had been there for two years. It was the funniest, jolliest little fellow; but awfully ugly; with a face just like that.”
“But it was half French, I imagine,” said Alix dryly.
“Certainly half French, I regret to say. But he looked all German. And I'm sure that if you'd had to take care of him you'd have been as kind to him as you are to your kitten.”
“I do not care for babies,” Alix objected.
“You'd have been kind to him all the same. You wouldn't have wanted to see his head cut off.”
“I do not want to see anyone's head cut off; but if it were a choice between a Boche and a French baby, I should choose the French one to live. That is all we ask of our allies,” Alix added, looking over at Giles with kindly determination; “to help us to live;—as we have helped them;—even at the expense of the Germans.”
Aunt Bella, now, changed the subject. “How is Mr. Westmacott, Giles?”
“No better, I'm afraid.”
“Have they a trained nurse yet?”
“He won't have one. He won't admit he's so bad.”
“It must be very taxing for Enid.” (Aunt Bella always called Toppie by her real name.) “How does she bear it?”
“She looks very worn,” said Giles.
“And I'm afraid she won't be at all well off when he dies,” said Aunt Bella, as though she placed Toppie's approaching bereavement and subsequent impoverishment in the same category. “She won't be able to go on living in the way she does now. And she has been trained to no profession. I have always so blamed Mr. Westmacott for keeping her with him and giving her no education.”
“Toppie is educated, I think,” said Giles, dryly, but his dryness did not conceal from Alix the distress Aunt Bella's surmises caused him. How much more capable Aunt Bella was, Alix reflected, of sympathizing with large vague masses of humanity than with one human being.
“Not educated at all from the modern point of view,” she returned decisively. “Quite incapable of making her own living. A very dear, good girl, but a useless girl, and there is no room in the world nowadays for useless people.” “There's room for Toppie,” said Giles coldly; and then, perhaps, Aunt Bella remembered that he had a special feeling about Toppie, for she desisted.
“I didn't know Toppie's father was so ill,” Alix said to Giles when he and she were for a little while alone in the drawing-room, Aunt Bella engaged on the telephone in the hall. “I had only one letter from her, from Bournemouth, and it did not lead me to think he was so seriously ill.”
“I'm afraid he is. She didn't realize it then, perhaps. I'm afraid it's only a question of time now,” said Giles, sunk in a deep chair and watching her while she pretended to play with Blaise. Was it grief, anxiety about Toppie, that had wrought the change in him? It had to do with Toppie she felt sure; but had it to do with her as well? Aunt Bella still issued directions on the telephone and Alix felt suddenly that she must ask him.
“Giles,” she said, not looking up from Blaise, who made soft onslaughts at her hand, “does Toppie know?”
“Know?” His echo had the strangest reverberations.
“About Captain Owen is what I mean;—that he cared so much for Maman.” She looked down at Blaise and moved her knotted handkerchief before his nose; and she felt the colour rising in her face.
Perhaps it was because he felt her confusion and shared it that he had to pause before replying. “Of course she doesn't know,” he then said very gently.
“And you will not forget what you promised me?”
“What did I promise you?”
“That if she did know she would still want me back.”
And again there was a silence. How carefully Giles was considering his answer was made apparent by the length of the silence; but what he said finally, more gently than ever, seemed clear. “I'm more sure of that than ever, Alix. You see, she's so fond of you.”