Coming Home Page 3

  “The elm—there’s the old elm in front of the church!” he shouted in a voice like a boy’s. He ran back and caught me by both hands. “It was true, then—nothing’s touched!” The old woman asked: “Is this Rechamp?” and he went back to the horse’s head and turned the trap toward a tall gate between park walls. The gate was barred and padlocked, and not a gleam showed through the shutters of the porter’s lodge; but Rechamp, after listening a minute or two, gave a low call twice repeated, and presently the lodge door opened, and an old man peered out. Well—I leave you to brush in the rest. Old family servant, tears and hugs and so on. I know you affect to scorn the cinema, and this was it, tremolo and all. Hang it! This war’s going to teach us not to be afraid of the obvious.

  We piled into the trap and drove down a long avenue to the house. Black as the grave, of course; but in another minute the door opened, and there, in the hall, was another servant, screening a light—and then more doors opened on another cinema-scene: fine old drawing-room with family portraits, shaded lamp, domestic group about the fire. They evidently thought it was the servant coming to announce dinner, and not a head turned at our approach. I could see them all over Jean’s shoulder: a grey-haired lady knitting with stiff fingers, an old gentleman with a high nose and a weak chin sitting in a big carved armchair and looking more like a portrait than the portraits; a pretty girl at his feet, with a dog’s head in her lap, and another girl, who had a Red Cross on her sleeve, at the table with a book. She had been reading aloud in a rich veiled voice, and broke off her last phrase to say: “Dinner….” Then she looked up and saw Jean. Her dark face remained perfectly calm, but she lifted her hand in a just perceptible gesture of warning, and instantly understanding he drew back and pushed the servant forward in his place.

  “Madame la Comtesse—it is some one outside asking for Mademoiselle.”

  The dark girl jumped up and ran out into the hall. I remember wondering: “Is it because she wants to have him to herself first—or because she’s afraid of their being startled?” I wished myself out of the way, but she took no notice of me, and going straight to Jean flung her arms about him. I was behind him and could see her hands about his neck, and her brown fingers tightly locked. There wasn’t much doubt about those two….

  The next minute she caught sight of me, and I was being rapidly tested by a pair of the finest eyes I ever saw—I don’t apply the term to their setting, though that was fine too, but to the look itself, a look at once warm and resolute, all-promising and all-penetrating. I really can’t do with fewer adjectives….

  Rechamp explained me, and she was full of thanks and welcome; not excessive, but—well, I don’t know—eloquent! She gave every intonation all it could carry, and without the least emphasis: that’s the wonder.

  She went back to “prepare” the parents, as they say in melodrama; and in a minute or two we followed. What struck me first was that these insignificant and inadequate people had the command of the grand gesture—had la ligne. The mother had laid aside her knitting—_not_ dropped it—and stood waiting with open arms. But even in clasping her son she seemed to include me in her welcome. I don’t know how to describe it; but they never let me feel I was in the way. I suppose that’s part of what you call distinction; knowing instinctively how to deal with unusual moments.

  All the while, I was looking about me at the fine secure old room, in which nothing seemed altered or disturbed, the portraits smiling from the walls, the servants beaming in the doorway—and wondering how such things could have survived in the trail of death and havoc we had been following.

  The same thought had evidently struck Jean, for he dropped his sister’s hand and turned to gaze about him too.

  “Then nothing’s touched—nothing? I don’t understand,” he stammered.

  Monsieur de Rechamp raised himself majestically from his chair, crossed the room and lifted Yvonne Malo’s hand to his lips. “Nothing is touched—thanks to this hand and this brain.”

  Madame de Rechamp was shining on her son through tears. “Ah, yes—we owe it all to Yvonne.”

  “All, all! Grandmamma will tell you!” Simone chimed in; and Yvonne, brushing aside their praise with a half-impatient laugh, said to her betrothed: “But your grandmother! You must go up to her at once.”

  A wonderful specimen, that grandmother: I was taken to see her after dinner. She sat by the fire in a bare panelled bedroom, bolt upright in an armchair with ears, a knitting-table at her elbow with a shaded candle on it.

  She was even more withered and ancient than she looked in her photograph, and I judge she’d never been pretty; but she somehow made me feel as if I’d got through with prettiness. I don’t know exactly what she reminded me of: a dried bouquet, or something rich and clovy that had turned brittle through long keeping in a sandal-wood box. I suppose her sandal-wood box had been Good Society. Well, I had a rare evening with her. Jean and his parents were called down to see the cure, who had hurried over to the chateau when he heard of the young man’s arrival; and the old lady asked me to stay on and chat with her. She related their experiences with uncanny detachment, seeming chiefly to resent the indignity of having been made to descend into the cellar—“to avoid French shells, if you’ll believe it: the Germans had the decency not to bombard us,” she observed impartially. I was so struck by the absence of rancour in her tone that finally, out of sheer curiosity, I made an allusion to the horror of having the enemy under one’s roof. “Oh, I might almost say I didn’t see them,” she returned. “I never go downstairs any longer; and they didn’t do me the honour of coming beyond my door. A glance sufficed them—an old woman like me!” she added with a phosphorescent gleam of coquetry.

  “But they searched the chateau, surely?” “Oh, a mere form; they were very decent—very decent,” she almost snapped at me. “There was a first moment, of course, when we feared it might be hard to get Monsieur de Rechamp away with my young grandson; but Mlle. Malo managed that very cleverly. They slipped off while the officers were dining.” She looked at me with the smile of some arch old lady in a Louis XV pastel. “My grandson Jean’s fiancee is a very clever young woman: in my time no young girl would have been so sure of herself, so cool and quick. After all, there is something to be said for the new way of bringing up girls. My poor daughter-in-law, at Yvonne’s age, was a bleating baby: she is so still, at times. The convent doesn’t develop character. I’m glad Yvonne was not brought up in a convent.” And this champion of tradition smiled on me more intensely.

  Little by little I got from her the story of the German approach: the distracted fugitives pouring in from the villages north of Rechamp, the sound of distant cannonading, and suddenly, the next afternoon, after a reassuring lull, the sight of a single spiked helmet at the end of the drive. In a few minutes a dozen followed: mostly officers; then all at once the place hummed with them. There were supply waggons and motors in the court, bundles of hay, stacks of rifles, artillery-men unharnessing and rubbing down their horses. The crowd was hot and thirsty, and in a moment the old lady, to her amazement, saw wine and cider being handed about by the Rechamp servants. “Or so at least I was told,” she added, correcting herself, “for it’s not my habit to look out of the window. I simply sat here and waited.” Her seat, as she spoke, might have been a curule chair.

  Downstairs, it appeared, Mlle. Malo had instantly taken her measures. She didn’t sit and wait. Surprised in the garden with Simone, she had made the girl walk quietly back to the house and receive the officers with her on the doorstep. The officer in command—captain, or whatever he was—had arrived in a bad temper, cursing and swearing, and growling out menaces about spies. The day was intensely hot, and possibly he had had too much wine. At any rate Mlle. Malo had known how to “put him in his place”; and when he and the other officers entered they found the dining-table set out with refreshing drinks and cigars, melons, strawberries and iced coffee. “The clever creature! She even remembered that they liked whipped cream with their coffe
e!”

  The effect had been miraculous. The captain—what was his name? Yes, Chariot, Chariot—Captain Chariot had been specially complimentary on the subject of the whipped cream and the cigars. Then he asked to see the other members of the family, and Mlle. Malo told him there were only two—“two old women!” He made a face at that, and said all the same he should like to meet them; and she answered: “‘One is your hostess, the Comtesse de Rechamp, who is ill in bed’—for my poor daughter-in-law was lying in bed paralyzed with rheumatism—‘and the other her mother-in-law, a very old lady who never leaves her room.’”

  “But aren’t there any men in the family?” he had then asked; and she had said: “Oh yes—two. The Comte de Rechamp and his son.”

  “And where are they?”

  “In England. Monsieur de Rechamp went a month ago to take his son on a trip.”

  The officer said: “I was told they were here to-day”; and Mlle. Malo replied: “You had better have the house searched and satisfy yourself.”

  He laughed and said: “The idea had occurred to me.” She laughed also, and sitting down at the piano struck a few chords. Captain Chariot, who had his foot on the threshold, turned back—Simone had described the scene to her grandmother afterward. “Some of the brutes, it seems, are musical,” the old lady explained; “and this was one of them. While he was listening, some soldiers appeared in the court carrying another who seemed to be wounded. It turned out afterward that he’d been climbing a garden wall after fruit, and cut himself on the broken glass at the top; but the blood was enough—they raised the usual dreadful outcry about an ambush, and a lieutenant clattered into the room where Mlle. Malo sat playing Stravinsky.” The old lady paused for her effect, and I was conscious of giving her all she wanted.

  “Well—?”

  “Will you believe it? It seems she looked at her watch-bracelet and said: ‘Do you gentlemen dress for dinner? I do—but we’ve still time for a little Moussorgsky’—or whatever wild names they call themselves—‘if you’ll make those people outside hold their tongues.’ Our captain looked at her again, laughed, gave an order that sent the lieutenant right about, and sat down beside her at the piano. Imagine my stupour, dear sir: the drawing-room is directly under this room, and in a moment I heard two voices coming up to me. Well, I won’t conceal from you that his was the finest. But then I always adored a barytone.” She folded her shrivelled hands among their laces. “After that, the Germans were tres bien—tres bien. They stayed two days, and there was nothing to complain of. Indeed, when the second detachment came, a week later, they never even entered the gates. Orders had been left that they should be quartered elsewhere. Of course we were lucky in happening on a man of the world like Captain Chariot.”

  “Yes, very lucky. It’s odd, though, his having a French name.”

  “Very. It probably accounts for his breeding,” she answered placidly; and left me marvelling at the happy remoteness of old age.

  VI

  The next morning early Jean de Rechamp came to my room. I was struck at once by the change in him: he had lost his first glow, and seemed nervous and hesitating. I knew what he had come for: to ask me to postpone our departure for another twenty-four hours. By rights we should have been off that morning; but there had been a sharp brush a few kilometres away, and a couple of poor devils had been brought to the chateau whom it would have been death to carry farther that day and criminal not to hurry to a base hospital the next morning. “We’ve simply got to stay till to-morrow: you’re in luck,” I said laughing.

  He laughed back, but with a frown that made me feel I had been a brute to speak in that way of a respite due to such a cause.

  “The men will pull through, you know—trust Mlle. Malo for that!” I said.

  His frown did not lift. He went to the window and drummed on the pane.

  “Do you see that breach in the wall, down there behind the trees? It’s the only scratch the place has got. And think of Lennont! It’s incredible—simply incredible!”

  “But it’s like that everywhere, isn’t it? Everything depends on the officer in command.”

  “Yes: that’s it, I suppose. I haven’t had time to get a consecutive account of what happened: they’re all too excited. Mlle. Malo is the only person who can tell me exactly how things went.” He swung about on me. “Look here, it sounds absurd, what I’m asking; but try to get me an hour alone with her, will you?”

  I stared at the request, and he went on, still half-laughing: “You see, they all hang on me; my father and mother, Simone, the cure, the servants. The whole village is coming up presently: they want to stuff their eyes full of me. It’s natural enough, after living here all these long months cut off from everything. But the result is I haven’t said two words to her yet.”

  “Well, you shall,” I declared; and with an easier smile he turned to hurry down to a mass of thanksgiving which the cure was to celebrate in the private chapel. “My parents wanted it,” he explained; “and after that the whole village will be upon us. But later—”

  “Later I’ll effect a diversion; I swear I will,” I assured him.

  *****

  By daylight, decidedly, Mlle. Malo was less handsome than in the evening. It was my first thought as she came toward me, that afternoon, under the limes. Jean was still indoors, with his people, receiving the village; I rather wondered she hadn’t stayed there with him. Theoretically, her place was at his side; but I knew she was a young woman who didn’t live by rule, and she had already struck me as having a distaste for superfluous expenditures of feeling.

  Yes, she was less effective by day. She looked older for one thing; her face was pinched, and a little sallow and for the first time I noticed that her cheek-bones were too high. Her eyes, too, had lost their velvet depth: fine eyes still, but not unfathomable. But the smile with which she greeted me was charming: it ran over her tired face like a lamp-lighter kindling flames as he runs.

  “I was looking for you,” she said. “Shall we have a little talk? The reception is sure to last another hour: every one of the villagers is going to tell just what happened to him or her when the Germans came.”

  “And you’ve run away from the ceremony?”

  “I’m a trifle tired of hearing the same adventures retold,” she said, still smiling.

  “But I thought there were no adventures—that that was the wonder of it?”

  She shrugged. “It makes their stories a little dull, at any rate; we’ve not a hero or a martyr to show.” She had strolled farther from the house as we talked, leading me in the direction of a bare horse-chestnut walk that led toward the park.

  “Of course Jean’s got to listen to it all, poor boy; but I needn’t,” she explained.

  I didn’t know exactly what to answer and we walked on a little way in silence; then she said: “If you’d carried him off this morning he would have escaped all this fuss.” After a pause she added slowly: “On the whole, it might have been as well.”

  “To carry him off?”

  “Yes.” She stopped and looked at me. “I wish you would.”

  “Would?—Now?”

  “Yes, now: as soon as you can. He’s really not strong yet—he’s drawn and nervous.” (“So are you,” I thought.) “And the excitement is greater than you can perhaps imagine—”

  I gave her back her look. “Why, I think I can imagine….”

  She coloured up through her sallow skin and then laughed away her blush. “Oh, I don’t mean the excitement of seeing me! But his parents, his grandmother, the cure, all the old associations—”

  I considered for a moment; then I said: “As a matter of fact, you’re about the only person he hasn’t seen.”

  She checked a quick answer on her lips, and for a moment or two we faced each other silently. A sudden sense of intimacy, of complicity almost, came over me. What was it that the girl’s silence was crying out to me?

  “If I take him away now he won’t have seen you at all,” I continued.
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  She stood under the bare trees, keeping her eyes on me. “Then take him away now!” she retorted; and as she spoke I saw her face change, decompose into deadly apprehension and as quickly regain its usual calm. From where she stood she faced the courtyard, and glancing in the same direction I saw the throng of villagers coming out of the chateau. “Take him away—take him away at once!” she passionately commanded; and the next minute Jean de Rechamp detached himself from the group and began to limp down the walk in our direction.

  What was I to do? I can’t exaggerate the sense of urgency Mlle. Malo’s appeal gave me, or my faith in her sincerity. No one who had seen her meeting with Rechamp the night before could have doubted her feeling for him: if she wanted him away it was not because she did not delight in his presence. Even now, as he approached, I saw her face veiled by a faint mist of emotion: it was like watching a fruit ripen under a midsummer sun. But she turned sharply from the house and began to walk on.

  “Can’t you give me a hint of your reason?” I suggested as I followed.

  “My reason? I’ve given it!” I suppose I looked incredulous, for she added in a lower voice: “I don’t want him to hear—yet—about all the horrors.”

  “The horrors? I thought there had been none here.”

  “All around us—” Her voice became a whisper. “Our friends… our neighbours… every one….”

  “He can hardly avoid hearing of that, can he? And besides, since you’re all safe and happy…. Look here,” I broke off, “he’s coming after us. Don’t we look as if we were running away?”