The Rough Road
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She flushed deep red.
“Je ne suis pas malhonnête, monsieur.”
Doggie spread himself elbow-wise over the table. The girl’s visible register of moods was fascinating.
“Pardon, Mademoiselle Jeanne. You are quite right. But it’s not a question of what I was born to be – but what I was trained to be. I wasn’t trained to be a soldier. But I do my best.”
She looked at him waveringly.
“Forgive me, mademoiselle.”
“But you flash out on the point of honour.”
Doggie laughed. “Which shows that I have the essential of the soldier.”
Doggie’s manner was not without charm. She relented.
“You know very well what I mean,” she said rebukingly. “And you don’t deserve that I should tell it to you. It was my intention to say that you have sacrificed many things to make yourself a simple soldier.”
“Only a few idle habits,” said Doggie.
“You joined, like the rest, as a volunteer.”
“Of course.”
“You abandoned everything to fight for your country?”
Under the spell of her dark eyes Doggie spoke according to Phineas after the going West of Taffy Jones, “I think, Mademoiselle Jeanne, it was rather to fight for my soul.”
She resumed her sewing. “That’s what I meant long ago,” she remarked with the first draw of the needle. “No one could fight for his soul without passing through suffering.” She went on sewing. Doggie, shrinking from a reply that might have sounded fatuous, remained silent; but he realized a wonderful faculty of comprehension in Jeanne.
After awhile he said: “Where did you learn all your wisdom, Mademoiselle Jeanne?”
“At the convent, I suppose. My father gave me a good education.”
“An English poet has said, ‘Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers’” – Doggie had rather a fight to express the meaning exactly in French – “You don’t gather wisdom in convents.”
“It is true. Since then I have seen many things.”
She stared across the room, not at Doggie, and he thought again of the ghosts.
“Tell me some of them, Mademoiselle Jeanne,” he said in a low voice.
She shot a swift glance at him and met his honest brown eyes.
“I saw my father murdered in front of me,” she said in a harsh voice.
“My God!” said Doggie.
“It was on the Retreat. We lived in Cambrai, my father and mother and I. He was a lawyer. When we heard the Germans were coming, my father, somewhat of an invalid, decided to fly. He had heard of what they had already done in Belgium. We tried to go by train. Pas moyen. We took to the road, with many others. We could not get a horse – we had postponed our flight till too late. Only a handcart, with a few necessaries and precious things. And we walked until we nearly died of heat and dust and grief. For our hearts were very heavy, monsieur. The roads, too, were full of the English in retreat. I shall not tell you what I saw of the wounded by the roadside. I sometimes see them now in my dreams. And we were helpless. We thought we would leave the main roads, and at last we got lost and found ourselves in a little wood. We sat down to rest and to eat. It was cool and pleasant, and I laughed, to cheer my parents, for they knew how I loved to eat under the freshness of the trees.” She shivered. “I hope I shall never have to eat a meal in a wood again. We had scarcely begun when a body of cavalry, with strange pointed helmets, rode along the path and, seeing us, halted. My mother, half dead with terror, cried out, ‘Mon Dieu, ce sont des Uhlans!’ The leader, I suppose an officer, called out something in German. My father replied. I do not understand German, so I did not know and shall never know what they said. But my father protested in anger and stood in front of the horse making gestures. And then the officer took out his revolver and shot him through the heart, and he fell dead. And the murderer turned his horse’s head round and he laughed. He laughed, monsieur.”
“Damn him!” said Doggie, in English. “Damn him!”
He gazed deep into Jeanne’s dark tearless eyes. She continued in the same even voice:
“My mother became mad. She was a peasant, a Bretonne, where the blood is fierce, and she screamed and clung to the bridle of the horse. And he rode her down and the horse trampled on her. Then he pointed at me, who was supporting the body of my father, and three men dismounted. But suddenly he heard something, gave an order, and the men mounted again, and they all rode away laughing and jeering, and the last man, in bad French, shouted at me a foul insult. And I was there, Monsieur Trevor, with my father dead and my mother stunned and bruised and bleeding.”
Doggie, sensitive, quivered to the girl’s tragedy: he said, with tense face:
“God give me strength to kill every German I see!”
She nodded slowly. “No German is a human being. If I were God, I would exterminate the accursed race like wolves.”
“You are right,” said Doggie. A short silence fell. He asked: “What happened then?”
“Mon Dieu, I almost forget. I was overwhelmed with grief and horror. Some hours afterwards a small body of English infantry came – many of them had bloodstained bandages. An officer who spoke a little French questioned me. I told him what had happened. He spoke with another officer, and because I recognized the word ‘Uhlans,’ I knew they were anxious about the patrol. They asked me the way to some place – I forget where. But I was lost. They looked at a map. Meanwhile my mother had recovered consciousness. I gave her a little wine from the bottle we had opened for our repast. I happened to look at the officer and saw him pass his tongue over his cracked lips. All the men had thrown themselves down by the side of the road. I handed him the bottle and the little tin cup. To my surprise, he did not drink. He said: ‘Mademoiselle, this is war, and we are all in very great peril. My men are dying of thirst, and if you have any more of the wine, give it to them and they will do their utmost to conduct your mother and yourself to a place of safety.’ Alas! there were only three bottles in our little basket of provisions. Naturally I gave it all – together with the food. He called a sergeant, who took the provisions and distributed them, while I was tending my mother. But I noticed that the two officers took neither bite nor sup. It was only afterwards, Monsieur Trevor, that I realized I had seen your great English gentlemen… Then they dug a little grave, for my father… It was soon finished … the danger was grave … and some soldiers took a rope and pulled the handcart, with my mother lying on top of our little possessions, and I walked with them, until the whole of my life was blotted out with fatigue. We got on to the Route Nationale again and mingled again with the Retreat. And in the night, as we were still marching, there was a halt. I went to my mother. She was cold, monsieur, cold and stiff. She was dead.”
She paused tragically. After a few moments she continued:
“I fainted. I do not know what happened till I recovered consciousness at dawn. I found myself wrapped in one of our blankets, lying under the handcart. It was the market-square of a little town. And there were many – old men and women and children, refugees like me. I rose and found a paper – a leaf torn from a notebook – fixed to the handcart. It was from the officer, bidding me farewell. Military necessity forced him to go on with his men – but he had kept his word, and brought me to a place of safety… That is how I first met the English, Monsieur Trevor. They had carried me, I suppose, on the handcart, all night, they who were broken with weariness. I owe them my life and my reason.”
“And your mother?”
“How should I know? Elle est restée là-bas,” she replied simply.
She went on with her sewing. Doggie wondered how her hand could be so steady. There was a long silence. What words, save vain imprecations on the accursed race, were adequate? Presently her glance rested for a second or two on his sensitive face.
“Why do you not smoke, Monsieur Trevor?”
“May I?”
“Of course. It calms the nerves. I ought not to have saddened you with my griefs.”
Doggie took out his pink packet and lit a cigarette.
“You are very understanding, Mademoiselle Jeanne. But it does a selfish man like me good to be saddened by a story like yours. I have not had much opportunity in my life of feeling for another’s suffering. And since the war – I am abruti.”
“You? Do you think if I had not found you just the reverse, I should have told you all this?”
“You have paid me a great compliment, Mademoiselle Jeanne.” Then, after awhile, he asked, “From the market-square of the little town you found means to come here?”
“Alas, no!” she said, putting her work in her lap again. “I made my way, with my handcart – it was easy – to our original destination, a little farm belonging to the eldest brother of my father. The Farm of La Folette. He lived there alone, a widower, with his farm-servants. He had no children. We thought we were safe. Alas! news came that the Germans were always advancing. We had time to fly. All the farm-hands fled, except Père Grigou, who loved him. But my uncle was obstinate. To a Frenchman, the soil he possesses is his flesh and his blood. He would die rather than leave it. And my uncle had the murder of my father and mother on his brain. He told Père Grigou to take me away, but I stayed with him. It was Père Grigou who forced us to hide. That lasted two days. There was a well in the farm, and one night Père Grigou tied up my money and my mother’s jewellery and my father’s papers, enfin, all the precious things we had, in a packet of waterproof and sank it with a long string down the well, so that the Germans could not find it. It was foolish, but he insisted. One day my uncle and Père Grigou went out of the little copse where we had been hiding, in order to reconnoitre, for he thought the Germans might be going away; and my uncle, who would not listen to me, took his gun. Presently I heard a shot – and then another. You can guess what it meant. And soon Père Grigou came, white and shaking with terror. ‘Il en a tué un, et on l’a tué!’”
“My God!” said Doggie again.
“It was terrible,” she said. “But they were in their right.”
“And then?”
“We lay hidden until it was dark – how they did not find us I don’t know – and then we escaped across country. I thought of coming here to my Aunt Morin, which is not far from La Folette, but I reflected that soon the Boches would be here also. And we went on. We got to a high road – and once more I was among troops and refugees. I met some kind folks in a carriage, a Monsieur and Madame Tarride, and they took me in. And so I got to Paris, where I had the hospitality of a friend of the Convent who was married.”
“And Père Grigou?”
“He insisted on going back to bury my uncle. Nothing could move him. He had not parted from him all his life. They were foster-brothers. Where he is now, who knows?” She paused, looked again at her ghosts, and continued: “That is all, Monsieur Trevor. The Germans passed through here and repassed on their retreat, and, as soon as it was safe, I came to help my aunt, who was souffrante, and had lost her son. Also because I could not live on charity on my friend, for, voyez-vous, I was without a sou – all my money having been hidden in the well by Père Grigou.”
Doggie leant his elbows on the table.
“And you have come through all that, Mademoiselle Jeanne, just as you are – ?”
“How, just as I am?”
“So gentle and kind and comprehending?”
Her cheek flushed. “I am not the only Frenchwoman who has passed through such things and kept herself proud. But the struggle has been very hard.”
Doggie rose and clenched his fists and rubbed his head from front to back in his old indecisive way, and began to swear incoherently in English. She smiled sadly.
“Ah, mon pauvre ami!”
He wheeled round: “Why do you call me ‘mon pauvre ami’?”
“Because I see that you would like to help me and you can’t.”
“Jeanne,” cried Doggie, bending half over the table which was between them.
She rose too, startled, on quick defensive. He said, in reply to her glance:
“Why shouldn’t I call you Jeanne?”
“You haven’t the right.”
“What if I gain it?”
“How?”
“I don’t know,” said Doggie.
The door burst suddenly open and the anxious face of Mo Shendish appeared.
“’Ere, you silly cuckoo, don’t yer know you’re on guard to-night? You’ve just got about thirty seconds.”
“Good lord!” cried Doggie, “I forgot. Bon soir, mademoiselle. Service militaire,” and he rushed out.
Mo lingered, with a grin, and jerked a backward thumb.
“If it weren’t for old Mo, miss, I don’t know what would happen to our friend Doggie. I got to look after him like a baby, I ’ave. He’s on to relieve guard, and if old Mac – that’s McPhail” – she nodded recognition of the name – “and I hadn’t remembered, miss, he’d ’ave been in what yer might call a ’ole. Compree?”
“Oui. Yes,” she said. “Garde. Sentinelle.”
“Sentinel. Sentry. Right.”
“He – was – late,” she said, picking out her few English words from memory.
“Yuss,” grinned Mo.
“He – guard – house?”
“Bless you, miss, you talk English as well as I do,” cried the admiring Mo. “Yuss. When his turn comes, up and down in the street, by the gate.” He saw her puzzled look. “Roo. Port,” said he.
“Ah! oui, je comprends,” smiled Jeanne. “Merci, monsieur, et bon soir.”
“Good night, miss,” said Mo.
Some time later he disturbed Phineas, by whose side he slept, from his initial preparation for slumber.
“Mac! Is there any book I could learn this blinking lingo from?”
“Try Ovid – ‘Art of Love,’” replied Phineas sleepily.
CHAPTER XIV
The spell of night sentry duty had always been Doggie’s black hour. To most of the other military routine he had grown hardened or deadened. In the depths of his heart he hated the life as much as ever. He had schooled himself to go through it with the dull fatalism of a convict. It was no use railing at inexorable laws, irremediable conditions. The only alternative to the acceptance of his position was military punishment, which was far worse – to say nothing of the outrage to his pride. It was pride that kept the little ironical smile on his lips while his nerves were almost breaking with strain. The first time he came under fire he was physically sick – not from fear, for he stood it better than most, keeping an eye on his captain, whose function it was to show an unconcerned face – but from sheer nervous reaction against the hideous noise, the stench, the ghastly upheaval of the earth, the sight of mangled men. When the bombardment was over, if he had been alone, he would have sat down and cried. Never had he grown accustomed to the foulness of the trenches. The sounder his physical condition, the more did his delicately trained senses revolt. It was only when fierce animal cravings dulled these senses that he could throw himself down anywhere and sleep, that he could swallow anything in the way of food or drink. The rats nearly drove him crazy… Yet, what had once been to him a torture, the indecent, nerve-rasping publicity of the soldier’s life, had now become a compensation. It was not so much in companionship, like his friendly intercourse with Phineas and Mo, that he found an anodyne, but in the consciousness of being magnetically affected by the crowd of his fellows. They offered him protection against himself. Whatever pangs of self-pity he felt, whatever wan little pleadings for the bit of fine porcelain compelled to a rough usage which vessels of coarser clay could disregard came lingeringly into his mind, he dared not express them to a living soul around. On the contrary, he set himself assiduously to cultivate the earthenware habit of spirit; not to feel, not to think, only to endure. To a humorously incredulous Jeanne he proclaimed himself abruti. Finally, the ceaseless grind of the military machine left him little time to think.
But in the solitary sleepless hours of sentry duty there was nothing to do but think; nothing wherewith to while away the time but an orgy of introspection. First came the almost paralysing sense of responsibility. He must keep, not only awake, but alert to the slightest sound, the slightest movement. Lives of men depended on his vigilance. A man can’t screw himself up to this beautifully emotional pitch for very long and be an efficient sentry. If he did, he would challenge mice and shoot at cloud-shadows and bring the deuce of a commotion about his ears. And this Doggie, who did not lack ordinary intelligence, realized. So he strove to think of other things. And the other things all focussed down upon his Doggie self. And he never knew what to make of his Doggie self at all. For he would curse the things that he once loved as being the cause of his inexpiable shame, and at the same time yearn for them with an agony of longing.
And he would force himself to think of Peggy and her unswerving loyalty. Of her weekly parcel of dainty food, which had arrived that morning. Of the joy of Phineas and the disappointment of the unsophisticated Mo over the pâté de foie gras. But his mind wandered back to his Doggie self and its humiliations and its needs and its yearnings. He welcomed enemy flares and star-shells and excursions and alarms. They kept him from thinking, enabled him to pass the time. But in the dead, lonely, silent dark, the hours were like centuries. He dreaded them.
To-night they fled like minutes. It was a pitch-black night, spitting fine rain. It was one of Doggie’s private grievances that it invariably rained when he was on sentry duty. One of Heaven’s little ways of strafing him for Doggieism. But to-night he did not heed it. Often the passage of transport had been a distraction for which he had longed and which, when it came, was warmly welcome. But to-night, during his spell, the roadway of the village was as still as death, and he loved the stillness and the blackness. Once he had welcomed familiar approaching steps. Now he resented them.
“Who goes there?”
“Rounds.”
And the officer, recognized, flashing an electric torch, passed on. The diminuendo of his footsteps was agreeable to Doggie’s ear. The rain dripped monotonously off his helmet on to his sodden shoulders, but Doggie did not mind. Now and then he strained an eye upwards to that part of the living-house that was above the gateway. Little streaks of light came downwards through the shutter slats. Now it required no great intellectual effort to surmise that the light proceeded, not from the bedroom of the invalid Madame Morin, who would naturally have the best bedroom situated in the comfortable main block of the house, but from that of somebody else. Madame Morin was therefore ruled out. So was Toinette – ridiculous to think of her keeping all night vigil. There remained only Jeanne.
It was supremely silly of him to march with super-martiality of tread up the pavement; but then, it is often the way of young men to do supremely silly things.
The next day was fuss and bustle, from the private soldier’s point of view. They were marching back to the trenches that night, and a crack company must take over with flawless equipment and in flawless bodily health. In the afternoon Doggie had a breathing spell of leisure. He walked boldly into the kitchen.
“Madame,” said he to Toinette, “I suppose you know that we are leaving to-night?”
The old woman sighed. “It is always like that. They come, they make friends, they go, and they never return.”
“You mustn’t make the little soldier weep, grand’mère,” said Doggie.
“No. It is the grand’mères who weep,” replied Toinette.
“I’ll come back all right,” said he. “Where is Mademoiselle Jeanne?”
“She is upstairs, monsieur.”
“If she had gone out, I should have been disappointed,” smiled Doggie.
“You desire to see her, monsieur?”
“To thank her before I go for her kindness to me.”
The old face wrinkled into a smile.
“It was not then for the beaux yeux of the grand’mère that you entered?”
”Si, si! Of course it was,” he protested. “But one, nevertheless, must be polite to mademoiselle.”
“Aïe! aïe!” said the old woman, bustling out: “I’ll call her.”
Presently Jeanne came in alone, calm, cool, and in her plain black dress, looking like a sweet Fate. From the top of her dark brown hair to her trim, stout shoes, she gave the impression of being exquisitely ordered, bodily and spiritually.
“It was good of you to come,” he cried, and they shook hands instinctively, scarcely realizing it was for the first time. But he was sensitive to the frank grip of her long and slender fingers.
“Toinette said you wished to see me.”
“We are going to-night. I had to come and bid you au revoir!”
“Is the company returning?”
“So I hear the quartermaster says. Are you glad?”
“Yes, I am glad. One doesn’t like to lose friends.”
“You regard me as a friend, Jeanne?”
“Pour sûr,” she replied simply.
“Then you don’t mind my calling you Jeanne?” said he.
“What does it matter? There are graver questions at stake in the world.”
She crossed the kitchen and opened the yard door which Doggie had closed behind him. Meeting a query in his glance, she said:
“I like the fresh air, and I don’t like secrecy.”
She leaned against the edge of the table and Doggie, emboldened, seated himself on the corner by her side, and they looked out into the little flagged courtyard in which the men, some in grey shirt-sleeves, some in tunics, were lounging about among the little piles of accoutrements and packs. Here and there a man was shaving by the aid of a bit of mirror supported on a handcart. Jests and laughter were flung in the quiet afternoon air. A little group were feeding pigeons which, at the sight of crumbs, had swarmed iridescent from the tall colombier in the far corner near the gabled barn. As Jeanne did not speak, at last Doggie bent forward and, looking into her eyes, found them moist with tears.
“What is the matter, Jeanne?” he asked in a low voice.
“The war, mon ami,” she replied, turning her face towards him, “the haunting tragedy of the war. I don’t know how to express what I mean. If all those brave fellows there went about with serious faces, I should not be affected. Mais, voyez-vous, leur gaieté fait peur.”
Their laughter frightened her. Doggie, with his quick responsiveness, understood. She had put into a phrase the haunting tragedy of the war. The eternal laughter of youth quenched in a gurgle of the throat.
He said admiringly: “You are a wonderful woman, Jeanne.”
Her delicate shoulders moved, ever so little. “A woman? I suppose I am. The day before we fled from Cambrai it was my jour de fête. I was eighteen.”
Doggie drew in his breath with a little gasp. He had thought she was older than he.
“I am twenty-seven,” he said.
She looked at him calmly and critically. “Yes. Now I see. Until now I should have given you more. But the war ages people. Isn’t it true?”
“I suppose so,” said Doggie. Then he had a brilliant idea. “But when the war is over, we’ll remain the same age for ever and ever.”
“Do you think so?”
“I’m sure of it. We’ll still both be in our twenties. Let us suppose the war puts ten years of experience and suffering, and what not, on to our lives. We’ll only then be in our thirties – and nothing possibly can happen to make us grow any older. At seventy we shall still be thirty.”
“You are consoling,” she admitted. “But what if the war had added thirty years to one’s life? What if I felt now an old woman of fifty? But yes, it is quite true. I have the feelings and the disregard of convention of a woman of fifty. If there had been no war, do you think I could have gone among an English army —sans gêne– like an old matron? Do you think a jeune fille française bien élevée could have talked to you alone as I have done the past two days? Absurd. The explanation is the war.”
Doggie laughed. “Vive la guerre!” said he.
“Mais non! Be serious. We must come to an understanding.”
In her preoccupation she forgot the rules laid down for the guidance of jeunes filles bien élevées, and unthinkingly perched herself full on the kitchen table on the corner of which Doggie sat in a one-legged way. Doggie gasped again. All her assumed age fell from her like a garment. Youth proclaimed itself in her attitude and the supple lines of her figure. She was but a girl after all, a girl with a steadfast soul that had been tried in unutterable fires; but a girl appealing, desirable. He felt mighty protective.