Wildfire Quest

by Jane Arbor

  The Feu-Follet plantation, where Raoul took Maryan first and where the young saplings were only waist-or shoulder-high, was equally open to the glaring heat. But the woods of long-standing matured trees—oak and chestnut and pine—were dark and cool and silent as empty cathedral naves.

  Their floors were a fine, rich loam, with undergrowth kept strictly in check by Raoul’s foresters. Mostly man-planted by design, the ranks of the trees were regular, the trunks straight and aspiring and the leaves of the upper branches a closed canopy which allowed only a dappling of sunlight through.

  Maryan stroked a smooth bole from as high above her head as her fingertips would reach. ‘Trees take so long to grow and they work so hard at it that I always hate to see them felled,’ she told Raoul, balanced on his heels to lean against a nearby trunk, watching her.

  She had expected he might scoff, and was glad when he nodded. ‘I know,’ he agreed. ‘It’s a sentimental view one can’t help feeling, though while people prefer to sit up to table on chairs, instead of eating off clay floors, for instance, what choice is there? Besides, look at it this way—if it hadn’t been for old man Chambrelant back in the seventeen-hundreds, most of the timber in the region wouldn’t have had any life at all; it would still be fighting for survival—and losing—against the mess of bog myrtle and cotton grass and sphagnum and bamboo in the marais. It was only his original plantings of maritime pines which reclaimed all this for forest land; just as we’re reclaiming Feu-Follet with young pine-growth now.’

  ‘And you only began that a few years ago?’

  ‘About eight.’ Raoul paused to laugh shortly. ‘Too bad of me yesterday to tease you about ironclad promises. Because, before he died, I gave one of that very kind to my father, without a clue as to how it was to be carried out.’

  You too? thought Maryan, remembering her own pledged word which had brought her back to France on her profitless mission. Aloud she asked, ‘Why, what promise did you give to Monsieur Leduc that you had to keep?’

  ‘To get possession of Feu-Follet at all costs. For years its lie—almost literally cutting the Domaine in two—had been his bete-noire, and I hope he may have died a little the happier for my promise that I wouldn’t rest until it was in Leduc hands.’

  ‘And that you achieved? What had been the difficulty before?’ Maryan asked, wanting his version to add to Maitre Druot’s conjectures on whatever run of events had at last made Feu-Follet part of the Leduc Domaine.

  ‘Oh—doubt of ownership, lost deeds, withheld deeds, the 1ot.’

  ‘But you got it in the end?’

  Raoul looked away, far down an aisle of the regimented trees. ‘At a price,’ he said. And then, with a backward thrust of his shoulders levering himself from the support of the tree-trunk, ‘Anyway, the next time you’re sorry for felled timber, remember that skilled foresters like us aren’t compulsive murderers. In fact, you could say that the little we take, compared with the wealth we leave standing, only amounts to a kind of fair interest on a pretty rich capital—if that makes sense. Does it?’

  ‘Put like that—yes.’

  ‘And we return what we take in full measure by replantings. Happier now?’ Without waiting for her reply, he slung the satchel and walked on, presently challenging Maryan to a competition in scuffing arcs of the powdery underfoot leaf-mould as far ahead as possible with the toes of their sandals.

  They came out after a time on a clearing where some felling had been done and a gang of the estate’s woodmen were cutting the boles into manageable logs ready for their lashing to power-tractors and being towed for storage in the log-ponds of the sawmills some ten kilometres nearer the coast. By now it was blazing noon; work had stopped for the men’s lunch. Maryan was aware of causing some curious glances, and when Raoul left her to go to speak to the gang foreman, she realised she was the subject of some muttered talk on the shade side of a thin boundary hedge.

  Someone was identifying her for someone else. ‘Who? Why, the English one, of course. The one who is living at the Pavilion with Mademoiselle.’

  ‘A friend then of Mademoiselle?’

  For reply there was a guffaw. Then, ‘You could say that. Also perhaps that she is the little friend of Monsieur too—h’m?’

  ‘What—another one?’

  ‘And why not? He is a man who—’

  Maryan moved away, feeling the bright, carefree morning had been spoilt for her. ‘Little friend’, used so, had its own unsavoury meaning and the false surprise of ‘Another one?’ stung even more. When Raoul beckoned to her to rejoin him she went laggardly, half wishing she could turn and run the other way.

  He suggested next they should lunch themselves, and they chose a spot on the edge of a beech plantation where there was a choice of shade or sun for the asking.

  Under his critical eye she unpacked the meal she had brought. After he had left her yesterday she had gone shopping for the makings of the creamy pate which had been a favourite snack of her father’s, and this she had spread for convenience over thick butter on corner-slices of French bread. Cheese had been forbidden her, so there was smoked Bayonne ham, garnished with olives and pickled walnuts speared on cocktail sticks, and for dessert, almond pralines and bronze-flecked apricots. For the wine Raoul produced a red Saint Emilion which, jealously, she hoped he had chosen himself, without reference to Ninon.

  Perhaps mellowed by the wine, perhaps reassured by Raoul’s easy, companionable manner, Maryan forgot the slur of ‘la petite amie de Monsieur’ and felt her spirits lift again. As Raoul lay back, making a pillow of his clasped hands, and she tidied away the leftovers of the meal, she was unaware she was humming wordlessly until he turned a lazy eye on her. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh—’ She stopped humming. ‘I told you—we persuaded Lois to sing for us the other night. This was one she sang, and we have an English version of it to the same tune.’

  Raoul hummed a bar or two. ‘ “Giroflee Girofla”, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. “Wallflower, wallflower ‘ Lois says that in France it’s an action game the children dance to—like “Sur le Pont d’Avignon”, but with us it’s a choosing game, more like “Nuts in May”.’

  Raoul objected logically, ‘In France one does not gather nuts in May. In September, October, yes— not in May.’

  Maryan laughed. ‘Well, nor in England, naturally. It’s a corruption of “knots of may”, and they sing it while they choose a child to pull over from one camp to the other.’

  ‘And “Giroflee Girofla”?’

  ‘Much the same. At the lines—“Turn your face to the wall again, Or you will surely die—” the child who hasn’t been chosen has to turn her back and wait for the next round,’ said Maryan.

  Raoul rolled over. His chin now propped in his hands, he surveyed her. ‘You’ve played it yourself?’

  ‘At baby-school, yes.’

  ‘And were you ever left to die with your face to the wall?’

  ‘Quite often, I daresay.’

  ‘Surely not? I’d have chosen you, if you were as wallflower-coloured then as you are now.’

  Maryan looked away. ‘ “Wallflower-coloured”?’

  ‘M’m—all gold-brown. Gold-brown hair, gold-brown skin; the perfect wallflower—’ He broke off to question her short, laugh, ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  She laughed again. ‘Nothing. Except that it’s no compliment. In English a wallflower is what she is in the game—a left-over at a dance.’

  ‘But not in French. Of such an unfortunate we say, “Elle fait sa tapisserie”—“She is doing her embroidery”. Or “Elle fait le galerie”—“She is of the audience”, which I’m sure you never were.’

  ‘I’d be an exception if I hadn’t been, sometimes.’

  ‘Then your English men need spectacles.’ Supporting himself on one elbow, his other hand went out to her at arm’s length. ‘Come here ... Giroflee,’ he invited softly.

  Still kneeling at her task, just out of his reach, Maryan flushe
d; wanting to obey, but sensing the imminence of a flirtation he had promised he wouldn’t inflict on her again. Without moving, avoiding his glance, ‘Why?’ she asked.

  He didn’t reply for so long that at last she was forced to lift her eyes to the provocative scrutiny of his.

  ‘Why?’ he echoed. ‘Why not—if only to make sure you don’t have to resort to your embroidery?’ The forefinger of his still outstretched hand crooked, beckoned to her. ‘Come !—’ he said—and then, in almost a single movement, had turned over, was sitting upright, then standing, shading his eyes and listening for something to follow the great explosive burst of sound which had shattered the silence of the brooding noonday, bringing Maryan too to her feet.

  What followed was the confused shouting of men, reaching them across the distance between them and where they had left the felling-gang half a kilometre back. Raoul breathed ‘Something—What?’ and then was running, leaving Maryan, running too, far in his wake.

  When she came up with him, he was already one of the clamorous group of men beside a loaded power-tractor, impacted in violent collision with a pair of stout trees at the bottom of a slope. Off from the group sat a boy, his head in his hands, his lank hair falling forward, his body one long shudder following another. On the ground, surrounded by the group, lay a man, still unconscious, his face a mask of pain, one leg twisted at an ugly, unnatural angle from his suntanned torso. Though what had happened must have been told before Maryan arrived, someone was telling it again muddledly, accusingly—

  ‘The type there’—a jerk of the head indicated the boy—‘left the thing in gear. But of course—up yonder.’ Another jerk pointed to the top of the slope. ‘Brake slipped. Gaston here—here, yes. It had to be Gaston, of course—deaf as a corpse. Would have heard nothing; it had him pinned before he—’

  ‘Enough. Cut that.’ It was Raoul’s voice, curt, commanding silence and then attention to his orders.

  ‘Where is your first-aid kit? Good. But no stretcher? Then rig one. Bring down an empty tractor. All loaded? Then unload one, man. You all came up on them or on foot? Nobody by car?’ At a nod from one of the group, ‘You did, Agar? So you will take Mademoiselle Vaile back to the Pavilion, and you’—he told Maryan—‘will telephone Bayonne Hospital to say we’re on our way. Quicker than waiting for an ambulance to get up here. Yes, of course, put them in the picture—almost certainly a broken thigh; some possible internal injuries too. Blaise—go with Agar, see Gaston’s wife and have the Lion d’Or taxi take’ her to Bayonne. You, Baptiste—!’

  Under his hand, the rescue operation went smoothly into gear. Nobody argued, nobody demurred, ‘But— ?’ Everyone obeyed his unruffled command without question. This was a Raoul in action that was new to Maryan. A Raoul wholly stripped of his veneer of flippancy; a Raoul proving his critics wrong; a hard-cored, purposeful Raoul whom, however fruitless the experience, she knew she was proud to love.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE day ended without Maryan’s seeing Raoul again. She carried out the mission he had given her and he telephoned her to say he was staying at the hospital for the results of Gaston Vernier’s X-rays and the setting of his fracture. Therefore he would leave collecting his car until the next day; getting a lift from Ninon, with whom, as it fortunately happened, he had a luncheon date in the city.

  This item of news gave Maryan an imaginary glimpse into his diary—‘Tuesday. Conducted tour of the estate for M.V.’ ‘Wednesday—Luncheon to N.B.’—making their picnic an obligation sandwiched into whatever other commitments he had for the week. That was unfair of her, she knew. But jealousy was unfair, and she had wanted to keep for a little longer the empty hope that if she had had the chance to answer the invitation of his beguiling, ‘Come— there would have been more for her than a second disillusionment, sharper than the first.

  She had to remind herself she had settled for loving him as he was and it helped to remember her witness of his authoritative handling of a crisis where time and swift action were of the very essence. And to add to that she had been allowed a glimpse of another facet she hadn’t expected—his tolerance for the boy whose carelessness had been the cause of the accident.

  Maryan had been waiting for the man Agar to fetch his car when Raoul had gone over to the boy, touched his bowed shoulder lightly, then gripped it until the shuddering stopped and the boy looked up.

  ‘Blaming yourself—huh?’ she had heard Raoul ask.

  The boy nodded wordlessly, compressing his lips.

  ‘And so you should. Pretty daft thing to do, I’ll say,’ was Raoul’s brusque reply. He had paused, then asked, ‘Suppose, do you, my friend, that at some time or another, none of us have done anything as stupid or worse?’

  ‘What of it, m’sieur? This time it was me,’ the boy had said dully.

  ‘As you say—this time it had to be you, and your bad luck that Gaston’s deaf ears didn’t hear the thing coming. But that’s life. That’s ill-chance. And what are you ready to bet that you’ll never again park a vehicle on a slope without checking and double-checking your gears before you leave it?’

  Another long shudder. ‘I never shall. But I couldn’t bet with you, m’sieur. It wouldn’t be— right.’

  ‘Who says so? If I want to bet, you can’t deny me. Come—even money; five francs. What do you say?’

  The boy’s mouth quivered in a half-smile. ‘Very well, agreed, m’sieur. A wager of five francs—’

  ‘Done. And don’t ever dare to allow me to collect, that’s all,’ Raoul had challenged before going to superintend the transfer of the injured man to the improvised stretcher the others had rigged from larch poles and stretched tarpaulins.

  Maryan didn’t know what time to expect Lois to return from Perigueux. If she and Arnold stayed for any of the evening activities, it was sure to be late, and in the event, it was—so late that Maryan had fallen asleep in a chair, nursing an equally slumbrous Mackerel, before Lois came in.

  The kitten, waking and stretching, dug needles into her knee as she came to with a start. ‘Oh—I didn’t even hear the car,’ she told Lois. ‘I suppose you dropped Arnold at the Lion d’Or on the way?’

  ‘No. He came with me, saying he would walk back. Where is Raoul? Why is his car still outside?’ Lois asked. As she spoke she took off her light coat and her headscarf and then, most unusually for her, went to look at herself in a wall-mirror, pushing up her flattened hair and thoughtfully smoothing a forefinger across her cheekbones in a feminine gesture which was quite foreign to her. In Maryan’s experience, Lois, at home and at the end of a long day, never cared enough how she looked to consult a mirror with a view to making running repairs.

  She continued to look at herself while Maryan answered her question and described how her own day out had been curtailed. She turned when Maryan asked about the felibree and whether Arnold had enjoyed the experience.

  ‘Very much, I think. It was all he had expected, and more. A day he would remember for a very long time, he said,’ Lois reported, stooping to pick the kitten from Maryan’s lap and—again unusually —to dandle it idly, tickling its forepaws and feinting and dodging its playful batting at her face and hair. Maryan found herself hoping whimsically that the kitten appreciated this attention from someone who hitherto had been merely a conscientious provider of food and shelter, a dutiful shape, no more. Never until now, a playmate. Lois with time and patience to spare for a kitten bent on kitten tricks was someone quite new, Maryan thought as she stood up and told Lois she had coffee ready to serve if Lois wanted it.

  ‘That would be nice.’

  ‘I’ll bring it.’ Maryan paused on her way to the kitchen. ‘I suppose Arnold will want to see me before he leaves tomorrow night?’ she queried.

  ‘Tonight, you mean. It is nearly two o’clock.’ Lois sat down, cradling the kitten, which fell asleep as promptly as if its eyes worked on strings. Not looking up, she said, ‘No. He asked me to tell you. He has some business in Bayonne, so he is leaving Peyrolle early
in the morning—too early to get you up. He will write from Rudesheim in a day or two, if that is all right?’

  ‘Oh—Why, yes, of course.’ As Maryan went on her way she caught back a small chuckle before Lois, intent upon her small burden, heard it.

  So much for Ninon Barbe’s quaint notion of Arnold as her ardent suitor; taking himself off to his next assignment without so much as an au revoir, she thought, resolving to slip Ninon the news of his unceremonious departure at her earliest chance.

  When she went back with the coffee, the kitten had turned over and was now nuzzling into the crook of Lois’s elbow. Lois was crooning a Basque cradle-song to it, and she left her coffee untouched until the kitten shifted position again, setting her hand and arm free.

  Maryan woke to a vague sense of promise offered by the day. What was it? Ah, of course—Raoul was coming for his car. Admittedly, straight from a date with Ninon, but coming, on however commonplace an errand, and thereby giving Maryan a chance to gauge, perhaps, just what had been interrupted by yesterday’s crisis.

  Love could feed hope on so very little! On the inflection of a voice; on a look; on a word, remembered and probed for depth, over and over.

  ‘Wallflower-coloured,’ he had called her. ‘Gold-brown.’ Claimed that in a nursery-game he would have chosen her. Had called her ‘Giroflee’ and had invited her—as a sweetheart had the right to order?—‘Come here.’

  Supposing she had gone; hadn’t been cheated of the chance to go? Cheated of tenderness? Or spared humiliation? How could she know? Only seeing him again was likely to tell her; whatever he said or looked, pointers one way or the other. There was a shiver of dangerous anticipation to the prospect.

  If he were lunching in Bayonne with Ninon, she calculated he couldn’t arrive until at least late afternoon. So that when, in mid-afternoon, Lois had an errand to be done in the village, she volunteered for it and set out. She had plenty of time, and even if by chance Raoul arrived, she felt no doubt that he would wait to see her, (if only?) to report on the man Gaston’s condition.