“Madame—I prefer to believe you.”
“You must believe me, monsieur. We are reviled, we are threatened; we are allowed no food, no coal, no light. Even—the water——”
She spoke slowly, clearly, as though giving him every chance to follow her. He nodded.
“You are not alone here.”
“No, monsieur—Gabrielle, my daughter.”
“Yes, I must have seen her this morning in the garden.”
The woman’s eyelids flickered momentarily.
“It was not because I did not trust you. Does monsieur understand? I would explain——”
“Tell me.”
She let her thin hands lie upon her knees.
“It happened in this way, monsieur. For two years I had the German commandant billeted in my house. No—he was a good man. He hated the war—as we did. He had a wife and children at home, and he was kind. He liked my daughter to play on the piano; even he used to work in the garden; he was at home with us, and friendly. He made life—the life of prisoners—easy for us. We had food, fuel, as much of everything as could be had. Does monsieur understand what I am saying?”
Manners nodded.
“I understand.”
She was silent for a moment, looking at her hands.
“But this is the tragedy, monsieur, that my enemies should be—not the Germans—but these people in my own town, people who were jealous, people who could think nothing but evil. I did not understand till the Germans left us—that I and my daughter were to be named among those who had given themselves—— At first—I could not believe it. But then—the persecution began, insults, disgusting threats. We were treated as outcasts. I had to hide my daughter. Does monsieur understand?”
Again Manners nodded.
“But have you not asked for protection?”
“I appealed to the burgomaster, monsieur, but he is a weak man, cowardly and cynical. He shrugged his shoulders. He advised us to go away.”
“But—the police?”
“We have but one gendarme, monsieur, these days, and he is as bad as those others. There is nothing but your presence—in my house—that saves us.”
In the course of the war Manners had had to tackle many problems, and he had found a ruthless self-confidence the most active of solvents. You made your own plan, and compelled or persuaded other men to accept it. He had a reputation in the Division. He said to the woman on the stairs, “I will do something,” and he began by going out and chalking upon the front door the mystic symbols—“Under the protection of the English Army.” The crowd still loitered. He walked to the gate, and pointed with his cane.
“Go, clear out,” and they went.
But an autocratic gesture such as this could be no more than a compromise, and he knew it. He had a heart-to-heart talk with the colonel; he walked up to the chateau, and asked the advice of a brigade major, who was a good fellow.
“We can order a guard to be detailed. We have had to place sentries outside several houses. One woman has had her hair cut off, and her clothes torn to pieces.”
Manners reflected.
“It’s very good of you. But I don’t think a man with a bayonet is going to solve this problem.”
The brigade major made a suggestion.
“Why don’t you doctors do something? Rather a delicate matter, of course, but you could co-opt the local priest, and the Belgian doctor. The priest is a sportsman.”
Manners looked grave.
“Yes, it’s an idea. But that one should have to certify a girl’s decency in order to placate a lot of sluts——!”
He went to see the Catholic priest. He found him to be a stout old person, bald, buxom, and with a jocund eye. He was a humanist. He had a little English, and between his English and Manners’s French they contrived to understand each other and to understand each other as men.
Almost the old man broke the seal of the confessional.
“My assurance is, monsieur, that the accusation is not true. I have known Madame Mercier and her daughter for many years. I knew the German officer who lived in the house. He was a Catholic, and a decent, fatherly fellow. He had arrived at the age when a man is wholly philosopher or wholly beast. I will do all that I can to help these two ladies.”
They smiled upon each other.
“Do you smoke, Father?”
“I do—a pipe.”
“I will send you over some English tobacco.”
The priest bowed in his chair.
“All good Christians smoke pipes. And there are some Christians left, in spite of the war. May I ask you a question, Monsieur le Major?”
“Certainly.”
“Have you seen Madame Mercier’s daughter?”
“Once, and only in the distance, from my window.”
The priest nodded.
“So—your compassion is impersonal, a flower of the open mind. It is well. See her.”
Manners returned to the house with the green shutters. Madame Mercier let him in. He showed her those mystic symbols in chalk upon her door. She looked at them with the faintest of smiles.
“Will it suffice, monsieur?”
He asked her a question:
“Madame, how much food have you in the house?”
She had closed the door, and her long, thin figure drooped.
“Very little, monsieur.”
“I see. We must alter that.”
He walked down the passage towards the kitchen with the air of an officer conducting an inspection. The door stood ajar. He pushed it open. There was an exclamation from the mother.
“Monsieur——!”
A girl was sitting by the stove with a black shawl over her shoulders, her hands extended towards the iron surface. Startled, she turned her head and looked at the Englishman; she hesitated; she stood up.
Manners saluted her.
“Mademoiselle, please sit down.”
He crossed over to the stove, opened its iron door, and saw a miserable little fire in the heart of which a green log sizzled unconsentingly. He reclosed the door. He turned to Madame Mercier.
“Madame—I apologize. I have robbed you of your coal. I will see that it is replaced.”
He was very conscious of the girl sitting there with her hands clasped in her lap, a frightened, gentle, dark thing. She was half starved and cold and afraid, but she sat there with a kind of childish dignity. Her large, soft eyes observed him.
Manners looked at her, smiled, and moved towards the door.
“You will forgive me for having intruded.”
He made a sign to the mother. She followed him into the passage, and opened the door of an icy little salon in which a piano stood with its keyboard closed. There was dust on it. And Manners, with a queer, abstracted air, passed a finger over the dusty surface.
“One cannot play the piano with frozen hands.”
He looked out of the window.
“I have taken advice, madame. Certain things were suggested to me, but now—having seen Mademoiselle Mercier—I do not think they will be necessary. I have visited your priest, and in him you have a friend. Will you permit me to remain in your house?”
She stood very still.
“Monsieur—I thank you. But—as you see—it will be difficult for me to give monsieur that comfort——”
“I think I can arrange these difficulties. There have been other occasions when we have been allowed to provide civilians with food, and medical comforts. It has been necessary. You will allow me, madame, to arrange these matters.”
He was formal, kind, sparing a self-restraint that he divined to be on the edge of breaking. He went out quickly, aware of a pathetic figure sitting rigid on a sofa, with tears beginning to show. He closed the door.
He said to himself in the English way, “Damn it, how do I know that I’m not a fool?” but that he did know it was part of his nature.
That night Gabrielle Mercier played her piano in a room that was warmed. The sound filled the dead house a
nd made it alive, and someone, knocking at the door, was received as a friend.
“Madame—with your permission—I am very fond of music.”
He was given a chair by the stove. The girl played Chopin; Madame’s knitting needles clicked.
On a subsequent Sunday sundry Englishmen in khaki saw an English major walking to church with two Belgian ladies. It appeared to be a family affair. If there were grins, such expressions of human feeling were neither destructive nor wholly cynical. Manners was well liked by the men; they had profited by his humanity; they allowed him its virtues.
The gay Sanger chose to be facetious in the mess.
“Old Uncle seems to have gone in off the deep end.”
He tried teasing Manners, but was so sagely and seriously snubbed that in the future he refrained. Old Uncle was not the man to be fooled with when he was not feeling like it. His folly—if it was folly—was a delicate and personal affair.
The people of St. Hubert saw what these English soldiers saw, and each man and woman saw it with the eyes of his or her secret soul. To some, Manners was a gentleman, to others a complaisant fool. They might say that he had stepped into the shoes of the German, or fallen in love with Mademoiselle Gabrielle Mercier who had the eyes of the Holy Virgin and whose hands made music.
DR. MORROW’S PATIENT
Dr. Morrow lit his pipe.
On this November night he was glad of the fire, of his arm-chair and his book. The muffled hootings of the taxis in Welbeck Street hardly penetrated to this quiet room at the back of the house where the light from the amber-shaded pedestal lamp fell upon the pages of the doctor’s book. His large, strong body spread itself. The day’s work was done; he had dined; the frost and the fog of London could be left to a world that worked less hard than he did.
Someone climbed the flight of stairs to the first floor. There was a knock, and his door opened, and looking over his shoulder he saw the tall, compressed figure of Mrs. Prince, his cook-housekeeper. Her blackness was Victorian in its gravity.
“I am going now, sir.”
Mrs. Prince’s formalism was a virtue that had to be suffered, for all her other virtues were solid and unprovocative.
“All right, Mrs. Prince. What’s the night like?”
“Foggy, sir.”
“I thought so. Hope you’ll find your mother better. You had better take the tube.”
Mrs. Prince had the air of regarding all advice as superfluous.
“If I am late, sir——”
“It won’t matter.”
“I have let the girl go out.”
“I’m not expecting anybody.”
“The telephone is switched on here, sir.”
“Thank you. Hope I shan’t want it. Good night, Mrs. Prince.”
“Good night, sir.”
Her thin, black figure was effaced by the edge of the closing door, and Morrow crossed his legs, and letting the book lie, he watched the fire. Excellent woman, Mrs. Prince; she appeared and disappeared as though you pulled a piece of string, and a little door opened and shut. Women could be such an infernal nuisance when the world had labelled you an expert and expected you to be nothing but an expert. Women became jealous of your job. He bit hard at his pipe and remembered things, how three years ago he had had a wife, and that on just such a night as this she had left him. Yes, she had gone off with another fellow, a chap who danced. She had wanted someone to play with. She had been bored in the house of a busy professional man. And he had shrugged his big shoulders and felt savage and cynical until a calmer comprehension of their married life had persuaded him that she had not been wholly to blame. He had not divorced her. He had not bothered. He was too absorbed now in his work to trouble much about women.
Poor Kitty! He sometimes wondered what she had made of the new adventure, and of her little smart man about town. He had not heard of her since that night. She was out of his life for good, and as though to emphasize his realization of it he raised his book and went on reading. It was a dull book and highly technical, and in a little while he began to yawn. His pipe burned itself out and he laid it aside on the table. The book followed it. He switched off the lamp and dozed.
Morrow had been asleep for less than five minutes when the door opened noiselessly and a dim face appeared. It seemed to hang there in the doorway as though its eyes were reconnoitring the interior of the room. Then a figure slipped in, a woman’s figure. She closed the door and stood for a moment with her back to it, observing the man asleep in front of the fire. Her immobility suggested a kind of desperate indecision.
Suddenly she moved to the centre of the room, and picking up a book from the mahogany table, she dropped it on the floor.
Morrow, awake, sat up in his chair.
“Hallo! Who’s there?”
A voice answered him, “A patient.”
He turned and saw her, a mere dark shape in the firelit room, but before he could rise she spoke. His hand was reaching out towards the lamp.
“Don’t turn up the light.”
“Who are you?”
“Have you forgotten my voice?”
“Kitty!”
For it was the voice of the woman who had been his wife, and yet somehow different and like her reputation a little worn and frayed. He rose slowly from his chair, and stood on the hearthrug. He made no attempt to turn up the light. His surprise had an edge of anger.
“So—it’s you?”
“Yes.”
“What the devil are you doing here?”
She stood very still, looking past him at the light of the fire.
“I came as a patient.”
“At this hour?” and his voice was ironic. “How did you get in?”
“I let myself in.”
“Let yourself in!”
She was carrying a vanity-bag, and she opened it, and taking something out, held it up for him to see.
“I had this key. It was in my bag when I went away. I forgot to leave it behind. And I kept it. I don’t know why I kept it. Does one know why one does certain things? You see—I——”
She seemed to give a little shiver. She dropped the key back into the bag and closed it with a snap.
“Things don’t always stay put like this key.”
And suddenly she began to cough. It was one of those hard, dry coughs, a spasm in throat and chest that was beyond control. She tried to smother it, but without success, and Morrow’s hand went out to the lamp on the pedestal table. He switched on the light, and they ceased to be mere shapes in a firelit room. They became alive to each other, he with his massive head and his ugliness and his rather prominent eyes that had the stillness of eyes accustomed to observe, she one of those fragile, dark-haired women quick in their colour and their impulses, and who retain—even when tashed and world-worn—a suggestion of something virginal.
Morrow looked at her.
“Yes, some things don’t stay put.”
He crossed the room and turned on the ceiling lights.
“Let’s see, how long is it? About three years?”
She was struggling with her cough.
“It seems much longer.”
“O, time’s relative, you know.”
He stood studying her with the air of a doctor, and she tried to meet his eyes, but her glances were self-conscious and uncertain.
“Must you look at me like that?”
“Just how?”
“As though you had me stripped.”
“I was looking at you as a doctor. How long have you had that cough?”
“Does it matter?”
“Perhaps not, but you may as well answer my question.”
“O, not long. Perhaps a couple of months.”
“You look as though you have had it longer than that.”
“You’re not flattering.”
“We are not paying each other compliments, are we? Smoke much?”
“Not now.”
She stood looking obliquely past him at the fire, as thou
gh its warmth drew her. Her mouth was both sullen and appealing. She had ceased to cough. She was very conscious of being studied, and of the shabby smartness of her clothes, and of her cold, underfed body. She could have told him that starved people lack courage.
“I suppose I ought to apologize, but I wanted an opinion, someone who would tell me——”
He put out a hand and grasped her wrist.
“You’re cold.”
“It was rather raw outside.”
He touched her coat.
“In a damned flimsy thing like this. Go and sit down in that chair by the fire and get warm.”
“It’s your chair.”
“Yes, same old chair. People used to get sentimental about chairs. That sort of nonsense is dead, you know. Go on, warm yourself.”
She glanced momentarily at him and almost with a whimsical smile, as though this roughness of his was strangely familiar. He had pushed the chair nearer to the fire, and was bending down and using the poker. She sat down in the chair.
“You still burn coal.”
“You can use a poker on coal. I like using a poker.”
It was her turn to be ironical.
“Yes, you always did.”
“And it used to annoy you.”
Still holding the poker, he straightened himself and stood leaning against the mantelpiece. He was thinking of their marriage and of modern marriage in particular, a thing like an electric heater that can be switched on and off as you please. She was stretching out her hands to the fire, and he saw her as a woman who was thin and ill and shabby, a woman with frightened eyes. Her casual cynicism was very much a mask, an attempt at nonchalance that could not deceive.
He spoke more gently.
“By the way—I like to know a patient’s name.”
Her dark eyes had a vagueness.
“Name?”
“Yes, the man’s name was Carthew—if I remember. Is the same label attached?”
She looked through her spread fingers at the fire.
“I’m known as Mrs. Carthew, if that is what you mean. You wouldn’t divorce me. I can never understand——”
“Because I happened to have views. Or was it because I did not bother? Well, never mind. When a thing smashes these days it is just pushed off the road. But as a doctor, I’m curious. What is in your mind at the moment?”
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