Fair Stood the Wind for France

by H. E. Bates

  ‘Afraid?’ he said. ‘Good God!’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You have been afraid all morning. But there is no need to be.’

  ‘Afraid? Why should I be?’

  ‘You have been afraid of someone coming. You have been afraid for the others. You have been afraid of us. And just now you said you were afraid for us.’

  For a moment he did not answer. What she said was true. He had had the jitters all morning; he was afraid of all the things she said. Not consciously afraid, but with a slight wateriness of the stomach. He looked at her and saw once again how clear and untroubled her face was. Its clarity was almost a state of excitement. She looked like someone who had waited for something for a long time; almost like someone who had prayed for something a long time. It seemed almost like the fulfilment of some dangerous devotion.

  ‘You are naturally worried because you are tired,’ she said.

  ‘It is natural I should be worried,’ he said. ‘It is my responsibility.’

  ‘You know what grand’mère says? Go to sleep and trust in God. Isn’t that very sensible?’

  ‘It is very sensible,’ he said.

  ‘Then you go now and get some sleep,’ she said.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Thank you for doing my arm.’

  She smiled and did not say anything. He stood at the door.

  ‘What is your name?’ he said.

  ‘Françoise.’ She waited a moment. ‘What is yours7’

  ‘My name is John,’ he said. ‘They call me Frankie.’

  To make it difficult?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘My name is John Franklin. My mother calls me John. But everyone else calls me Frankie. It is a diminutive. Do you understand?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘It is a diminutive of my father’s name.’

  ‘What was your father’s name?’

  ‘He was called Henry. But it has nothing to do with it.’

  ‘You said it had.’ She looked bewildered and did not understand. And in that moment, as she stood there, slightly puzzled, her lips slightly parted, he had the first full picture of her: young and fearless in her devotion to the dangerous moment, now troubled by the simple contradiction of his name. As he looked at her, she still trying to work out the small stupid problem of what he was called, he felt her wonderful coolness break down and the warmth of her simplicity take its place. And he knew in that moment that if he had been afraid of anything he had been afraid of her. He had been afraid simply of that immense assurance, frightening because it was so clear and unequivocal and young. And now as he saw her troubled by the confusion of his name he was no longer afraid or even perturbed for her. For the first time he felt nearer to her, and could talk to her like an ordinary girl. ‘It would be simpler if you called me John,’ he said.

  ‘John is better,’ she said. She pronounced it in the French way.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I am going to sleep now.’

  ‘You can sleep all day,’ she said. ‘I will see you across the yard.’

  She stood at the door of the kitchen and looked out, her dark head leaning forward and turning in the sun. She called that it was all right and as she spoke the hens came running down from the orchard at the sound of her voice. He crossed the yard as they came running down, and then as he went out of the hot sun into the cold shade of the mill, into the dusty petrified air, he heard her voice turning them back, voluble and high and clear, in the French way: a repetition of the first moment he had seen her in the morning sun.

  Up in the room on the second floor the four sergeants were already lying down, eyes closed, on beds made up of sacks and straw, their flying-jackets rolled up as pillows. They had made him a bed in one corner.

  O’Connor opened his eyes. ‘Arm O.K.’

  ‘Pretty well,’ he said.

  He folded his flying-jacket as best he could with one hand, and then put it on the straw and lay down. He lay for a moment with eyes open, looking at the sky very blue beyond the small window in the wall. Then he closed them, and felt the blood and the darkness and the bright light beating together in his mind.

  CHAPTER 6

  FRANKLIN, the girl, and Pierre drove into the town on the following morning, starting about nine o’clock.

  The girl sat holding two chickens, tied in brown paper, on the broad seat in the front of the low cart. Pierre was driving the cart and Franklin, wearing black trousers with a faint pinstripe and a black jacket and striped blue shirt, sat between Pierre and the girl. The jacket was buttoned up so that his injured arm, tucked into the shirt, was not visible. The land, flat and white in the hot sun with many clear patches of corn-stubble beyond the river, began to rise after the first few miles into a country of more vineyards. All along the roadside the grasses and the leaves of beet and potatoes, and then, on the higher land, the leaves of the vines, were white with the dust of summer.

  ‘How far is the town?’ Franklin said.

  ‘It’s about six kilometres,’ the girl said.

  ‘What town is it?’

  ‘It is a market town. There is a market to-day.’

  He knew that she did not want to tell him the name of the town, and he decided not to ask again. He decided that even if he saw it or heard it mentioned he would never convey to her that he knew it. He would use it solely as a means of orientating their position on the map. He did not know at all what plans she had for their escape but he had decided that, whatever they were, he would work out alternative plans of his own. He knew that these plans depended on his fixing their position on the map, and he knew, too, that these plans, and perhaps still more her own, depended entirely on his arm.

  It struck him as they drove along that he had already got fully into the habit, begun the day before, of regarding the girl as completely in charge of things. It struck him as curious that, from the first, he had put all his faith in her. He had scarcely thought of Pierre, the old woman, or the father, and now he suddenly remembered that he had not seen the father since the previous day. ‘I haven’t seen your father to-day,’ he said. ‘Has he gone away?’

  ‘For a short time.’

  ‘Is your grandmother alone at the mill?’

  ‘For a few hours, yes.’

  ‘Supposing something happens?’

  ‘Well, it will happen.’

  ‘And if somebody comes?’

  ‘She has lived in three wars,’ the girl said. ‘She knows better than I what to do.’

  ‘You have great trust in her.’

  ‘No,’ the girl said. ‘I have great trust in God.’

  They drove on for a long time after that without speaking; he felt once again that he could not argue beyond the simple finality of her words. The road was very straight now, with double lines of tall poplars that threw diagonal brushes of shade across the white stubble and the dust-whitened patches of roots and potatoes. In some parts of the road, dust had gathered as thick as white sand on the edge of a river and lay deep and unblown because there was little traffic to blow it away. A few bicycles came along the road and a few peasants walking, but there were no cars. Once he heard the high sustained hooting of a horn, and two army trucks came fast from behind them, not slowing down to pass the cart, blowing great clouds of dust and raising a wind that went rattling down the avenue of big flat poplar trees. They were two-ton trucks of the German army. The second truck was fitted with breakdown gear, and he saw two German troopers lying asleep on the floor of the lorry by the crane.

  They were the first Germans he had seen; he felt it was time to talk again.

  ‘What is the procedure in the town?’ he said. ‘Shall we be stopped?’

  ‘There is no procedure,’ the girl said. ‘Some days they stop you, and some days they don’t stop you. That’s all.’

  ‘What do we do?’

  ‘We drive straight in.’

  ‘It seems very obvious.’

  ‘It is better to do the obvious thing. Better than trying to be clever.’

&n
bsp; Now the avenue of poplars had ended and beyond them he could see groups of red and white houses. In a few moments the road turned and began to go uphill. On each side of the hill ran the beginnings of a sidewalk, seedy and dusty and unrepaired.

  As the road went uphill into the town the sand of the sidewalk gave way to stones, roughly embedded like cobbles, and then the stones to slabs of broken paving, split and uplifted by the roots of the street trees. Little red and white houses at the foot of the hill gave way in time to larger villas standing back from the road; seedy and unpainted and shuttered against the sun. In the gardens in front of them stood occasional groups of yuccas, the stalks of the flowers creamy-brown and dead, the sword-flat leaves grey with dust blown in from the rainless road. Sometimes the larger houses were enclosed by high walls of stone smeared over with plaster. Beyond the walls were strips of trees and you could see sometimes the white scrapings of bootmarks on the wall-plaster where someone had climbed the wall to break the branches of a fig tree. Between the high walls, on the hillside, the heat of the sun was caught and held, dusty and flat and arid as the air of decay.

  Pierre drove the cart on into the centre of the town, the horse always walking, the villas giving way gradually to shops, the dusty broken sidewalk to a pavement without trees. There were cafés now among the shops and all the awnings were down against the sun. Most of the tables were empty, and outside one café Franklin saw a waiter sprinkling the pavement beyond the empty tables with a carafe of water. He could see how he held his thumb in the mouth of the carafe and then released it in jerks, swinging the carafe so that the water made a sprinkled arc in the sun. Then the shops and the cafés became larger, and there were more people, both on foot and in carts and on bicycles. Franklin saw an occasional queue of women outside a shop, and in the windows of the pâtisserie shops trays of bread. The bread was underbaked and grey, and there were no pâtisseries. Then he began to look for Germans, and discovered as he did so that he was holding himself very tense. He was pressing his feet hard against the floor of the cart, tightening the muscles of his legs. Then suddenly he saw his first Germans. They were two troopers, and they were coming along the pavement towards the cart. They were men of thirty-five or so, and the elder of them had grey hair. Suddenly they stopped on the edge of the pavement, looking up and down the street. Franklin looked straight ahead, seeing nothing but the blur of people and traffic in the sun, the moving head of the horse and the two troopers waiting. This is the bloodiest business I was ever in, he thought. He saw the Germans out of the corner of his eye and thought in that moment of all that he had ever heard of people escaping through France; how they went at night and avoided towns and kept away from trouble, in secret, walking, hiding, and not being seen. And here he was in broad daylight, with a wounded arm stuck up for anyone to see. And in that moment too, as the cart came abreast of the troopers, he remembered the girl. Even if she isn’t scared, he thought, I am. This is worse than the bloodiest trip I ever did. He half looked at her. She was looking straight ahead, not tensely or proudly, but simply and negatively, and she was holding the chickens lightly and indifferently but firmly in her hands. And suddenly as he looked at her it seemed that her hands, brown and firm and unexcited, had all the assurance in the world.

  When he looked up from her hands again the cart had passed the troopers and it was all over. He felt the pressure of his feet relax, becoming fully aware of how great it had been. The cart was coming now to a central square, with fruit-stalls along three of the four sides and country carts parked in three or four rows by a fountain in the centre. The fountain was not playing, but on the stone steps, on the shady side, a few old men sat with their heads leaned back, half asleep against the cool stone. On the fruit-stalls there were heaps of small green-red peaches and small green grapes and yellow summer pears. On the fourth side of the square, where there were no stalls, there was a big church. The front was wide and ornate, with two spires, and there were wide steps leading up to a single central door.

  Pierre drove the cart into the centre of the square and during the last few yards of the journey, as the wheels bumped over the heavy flags, the girl began to talk to Franklin, telling him what to do.

  ‘You see the church,’ she said. ‘To the right of the church is the rue St Honoré. It is the first street on the right. You see?’ she said. ‘The street where the two men on bicycles are just going in?’

  ‘I see it,’ he said.

  ‘Go down the rue St Honoré and take the first turning on the right. It is a little street and it is called rue Richer. Is it clear?’

  ‘It is quite clear,’ he said.

  ‘Go to Number 9,’ she said. ‘Ring the bell twice and say I have brought the chickens.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘That is all. My father has arranged it. The doctor and he are friends.’

  ‘Is that where your father has been?’

  ‘Partly. Partly he has been arranging other things.’

  ‘For us?’

  ‘Yes, I hope so. We shall know what he has done when we get back home.’

  ‘I am very grateful,’ he said. He tried to put into his voice a feeling deeper than gratitude. His French seemed stiff and formal. ‘I am most truly grateful,’ he said. ‘I understand and I am truly grateful.’

  She was smiling a little as he spoke. She laid the chickens on his knees as she smiled, and the cart came to a halt in the middle of the square.

  ‘Where will you be?’ he said.

  ‘I shall be in the church,’ she said.

  ‘However long I am?’

  ‘However long you are.’

  ‘Shall I come back to you there?’

  ‘Yes, you had better come back there,’ she said. ‘If you don’t come back there I shall know that something has happened.’

  ‘And Pierre?’

  ‘Pierre will wait somewhere here.’

  ‘By the fountain,’ Pierre said.

  Franklin got down from the cart and held the chickens under his good arm. He had brown canvas shoes on, and as his feet touched the ground, light and soft, he felt unexpectedly sure and free,

  ‘Don’t hurry,’ the girl said. ‘Walk as if it did not matter.’

  In another moment he was walking away across the market square. He did not look back. He walked quite slowly, his feet light and soundless in the canvas shoes. He came in about fifteen seconds to the rue St Honoré: he saw the blue and white nameplate on the corner of the street as he turned in. It was a long street, fairly narrow and quite straight, with four-storeyed business premises and houses and a few shops on either side. A few people were going down it. There was a café at the corner. Walking into the street, out of the unbroken sunlight of the square, out of the morning heat into the empty shade, he felt suddenly washed out of the war. He was in any French provincial town, on a hot morning in late summer, and no one knew who he was. Walking in the brown canvas shoes, in the strange clothes and down the strange street of the strange town, he was himself no longer. He remembered as he walked what the newspapers in England had said about the rising tide of war, and how, only a day or two ago, he did not feel part of that tide. Well, he thought, I am part of it now. The tide had washed him down into the marsh when the Wellington had crashed, across the moonlit countryside and across the river and the field to where the vineyards lay above the mill; it had washed him into the moment when he had seen the girl feeding the hens in the morning sun under the fruit trees and it had washed him forward now, alone, apart from the girl, apart from Sandy and O’Connor and Godwin and Taylor, utterly apart from his flying and all the life of operational war, to the moment when he was walking out of the rue St Honoré into the rue Richer, out of the shade once more into the sun, detached from everybody and everything, no longer afraid.

  The rue Richer was about a hundred yards long, and it was numbered from the end at which he had come. He was walking on the side with the even numbers, and he crossed to Number 9. He went up the steps without waitin
g or looking round, and rang the bell. He heard the bell ringing deep in the house.

  He held the chickens ready and listened for the sound of feet. He looked up and down the street as he waited. Outside a café at the corner, leaning against the pole that kept up a red-and-white-striped awning, a waiter was looking out across the street, staring idly at Franklin. Under the edge of the awning a row of short evergreen shrubs, in boxes, divided the tables from the street. The waiter, his cloth under one arm, was breaking off the leaves of the shrubs and idly destroying them with his fingers. Franklin could plainly see the dark fragments of leaves falling, and then the waiter’s hand reaching out, his head not turning, as he broke off another leaf to destroy.

  The door of the house opened as he was looking at the waiter. He turned, feeling his heart beat heavily, and saw a woman of sixty or so, dressed in black, with a white starched apron, like a nurse. She stood with her body half behind the door.

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Good morning,’ Franklin said. ‘I have brought the chickens.’

  ‘Come in,’ she said. Stiffly she held open the door an inch or two wider and Franklin went into the house. Uneasy, he wondered how little or how much the woman knew.

  She shut the door behind him and led him down the passage without another word. The passage was quite dark, and it seemed suddenly like a trap. It was not real, and it seemed so fantastic that he did not feel himself. Then he remembered the girl in the church; he remembered the reality of the little cart; and he felt calm again.

  ‘Wait here,’ the woman said. She opened a door at the end of the passage and he walked into the room beyond. The room was square, with big French windows. One window was open and there was a high surgical chest, with small drawers, along one wall and a plain wooden table in the centre. Above the table was a single electric bulb, with an adjustable fitting.

  The doctor came in almost at once; a tall man with a short black-red beard. He was wearing a white coat. He switched on the electric light and said ‘Good morning’, and then shut the French windows and pulled the dark green curtains across them. ‘It is all right,’ he said to Franklin. ‘Take your coat off.’