CÉLESTINE By JAMES HOPPER From Collier’s

IN March the war came much nearer to the town, and an aviation camp was set up just outside, in the wheatfields by the National Road. It took shape, as it were, overnight, as if by some enchantment; Célestine, from the round window of her garret room in the inn, saw the planes alighting like white birds in the rose of the dawn. They came five by five from the east; for two days they remained as they had landed, shelterless and inert, as if worn out. Then heavy trucks came rumbling, threw off bales of canvas and partitions of thin wood, and soon a flying camp stood complete, with its tents and its sheds, its hundreds of busy mechanics.

Many of the white birds seemed wounded. Holes were in the wings, some of the wings trailed. The conductors of those weary dragons were sunken-eyed; their faces tattooed with oil, their hair matted. But a lull had come; somewhere in the hills to the east the new drive at last had been stopped; you could hear at night the soft drumming of the guns. The flying men cleaned up. Primp, in freshly pressed uniforms and shining boots, they strolled about, very young men, slim and elegant, twirling swagger sticks and parading gaiety. Gaiety, although each one of them bore stamped upon his heart, as pure gold is stamped, a small secret figure which stood for a certain day, a certain hour, the end of youth, of joy, of adventure and love. Mostly they passed by the inn, on their way to the brighter cafés at the centre of the town; but some of them stopped at the inn and sat at the tables under the trees. Célestine’s heart beat faster when they were there; she watched them as she worked; from a distance, for she did not wait on the tables.

She was not allowed to wait on the tables because she was not pretty.

The mistress of the inn believed in pretty serving maids, and Célestine was not pretty. The thick skin of her face was a mask which let pass not a ray of the iridescences of the soul; before that sad dead face men stood embarrassed or even angry. So she did not wear the white aprons and caps, the lacy waists of the tablemaids, but rough blue garments; and did not flit outside under the trees, but was held to the bedrooms and the kitchen’s back regions. She was the drudge; she started with the day. She polished boots, laid fires, carried hot water and trays up countless stairs, made beds, swept rooms, swabbed halls. She carried heavy luggage upstairs and obeyed the rageful tyranny of the bells. Midnight would strike before she threw herself upon her narrow pallet under the eaves.

Every afternoon, from four to six, she took the baby of the mistress of the inn out in its perambulator. This was her recreation and her rest. After the flying field had been established on the National Road, it was there she would go. The place had become the town promenade. Out to it, along the road, especially on Sundays, the inhabitants would go in family groups—in family groups in which there were no men, unless, perhaps, some brittle old grandfather.

Once at the field, they stood about respectfully noting everything avidly and calling one another’s attention to what they saw; and small boys, terribly interested in what for several years now had been the male’s sole interest, slipping under the ropes, got to where they had no business to be.

Célestine, still more shy than the rest, took her station across the road from the camp and a little to one side. From here she could see across the plains to the hills in the east, and also that part of the flying field from which the planes sprang into the air or hoveringly landed. She sat in the clover; it was peaceful here; the baby slept; her own soul drowsed. An old farmer across the way ploughed slowly behind his one old horse; now and then a lark went high up in the air and sang. It was hard to remember that in the low hills beyond, pretty as opals, red carnage boiled and men died.

From those far hills the planes came winging back late in the afternoon. Far-fixed eyes of mechanics on the field, a pointing finger here or there, were the first signs to Célestine.

She saw dots, small and incredibly high. They became moths, shining—white—and quick as thunder the fliers were near. They came from great battles, and jousts, and fabulous adventures; and as they neared, with hearts seemingly full of a secret joy at terrible pranks they had played, they gambolled and capered and tumbled along the skies.

Usually they came in by fives, in arrow formation, but there were two that always went paired. Célestine learned to distinguish these two. One was a young Frenchman who, on the ground, wore the dark blue of an Alpine chasseur; but the other, in a drab uniform, was a foreigner. These two homed it later than the others: so late that sometimes Célestine could not wait and had to go away without seeing them. When they alighted, the pilots who had come in ahead, and the mechanics who stayed on the ground, strolled to the two planes; they asked questions and looked amused, and sometimes laughed loudly. One day Célestine heard herself resume to herself in words the effect this daily scene had upon her. “These two are the favourites,” she said to herself. “They are the Benjamins of the camp!”

The civilian onlookers, loitering about the camp, called the one in yellow uniform “l’Américain” and credited him with great deeds. “There’s a rough boy!” they would say. “There’s one who does tricks in the air!” For him Célestine felt a secret preference. The way he landed delighted her. As his plane, swirling down, touched the earth, he looked, in his leather helmet and armour, like some fabulous knight of the air; but even as his plane still rolled along the ground, he snatched off the leather helmet and became a red-headed boy. He always landed thus. While still rushing along the ground at tremendous speed, he snatched off his helmet and became a boy with carrot-red hair. Then something laughed within Célestine, and a bubble of tenderness burst softly in her heart.

Years ago, when a little girl in her native village in Brittany, she had loved secretly the neighbour’s son, whose hair was just like that. Now, whenever the plane landed, she saw her native village; she saw the small port, the stone mole, the painted boat heaving, the blue sea.

Gradually Célestine’s life, her drab beastlike life, became lit with a dim radiance as from a shaded lamp; her life centred itself altogether on the flying field. In the morning she kept running to her garret room as she worked; and, if she had any luck, saw the planes depart, five by five, five by five, then two. In the afternoon she was at her post in the clover field across the road from the camp. The farmer ploughed over there, a lark singing over his bent head. Farther, the hills were like opals in the sun. And on the other side of those hills the war was going on. She imagined the two fliers in the sky over there. Holding her eyes shut, she saw them in the great heights, wheeling and circling, falling and rising, in a cloud of enemy planes. She saw them, in manœuvres abrupt as lightning, pierce again and again the hostile envelopment—and planes fell, many, falling slowly, like snow drifting.

Late in the afternoon the two came home. The others came first, by fives, sometimes in quick succession, sometimes with long waits between. Sometimes, instead of five, there were four, the winged squadron was broken and on the field there would be much agitation, runnings to and fro, anxious questionings. But the two for whom Célestine waited usually came last, and came always in joy, tumbling like clowns down the skies. The American struck the earth—fabulous and formidable like a god. He snatched off his helmet—and he was a boy, a laughing red-haired boy. Through Célestine’s tired body a dull thud of tenderness went resounding deliciously.

About this time the enemy began to bomb the town at night. When came the first of these air raids Célestine did not know what was happening. She was awakened by a rapping of machine guns, by a boom-rrump, boom-rrump of upward shooting cannon, and, leaning out of her garret window, saw pretty cracklings of light up in the sky, as of many fireflies flashing into life suddenly and then dying. Then came an enormous single explosion, and everything went quiet. Célestine slid out into the black silent streets which were ghostily filling with whispering, shivering people; and following them came to a place, near the railroad track, where a little house had stood which she knew very well. The house was no longer there; where it had stood was only a great black hole.

But next night was worse. As, awakened again by the machine guns, Célestine stood uncertain in the narrow hallway outside of her room, a great explosion pressed both walls against her flanks as if they were going to meet, and another, following still nearer, shook the inn as if it were coming down like a pack of cards. Explosion followed explosion for hours as the malevolent birds buzzed in the dark sky overhead; and when at last they had gone, in the light of dawn Célestine saw that a whole block of houses near by lay ripped open, with red-quilt shreds of pulverized beds waving slowly in the cold morning wind.

The people of the town began to go out into the fields every night. By five every afternoon the iron shutters of all the shops clattered shut simultaneously, and along the streets went processions of women, children, babes, and old men, carrying their blankets out to the fields for the night; by sundown the city was an empty city. Célestine remained in her garret room and, lying on her back in her narrow bed, shook to ecstasies of fear and exulting vision. Lying there, rocked by terrific concussions, the whole world seemingly going to pieces beneath and about her body, small kernel in a cosmic chaos, she looked upward out of her soul into the night’s black inverted bowl and saw her champions flying there. In thunder-swift chargings, they darted to and fro among the night-enshrouded invaders. The American led all. For a time she saw him as pilot of a plane; then suddenly the wings attached themselves to his body, and he was an archangel with terrible swift sword; then again he was a boy, a laughing red-headed boy—and her withered heart, compressed layer and layer upon itself, opened out like a flower in the midst of her ignoble terror.

Just as abruptly as the night raiding had begun, it ceased for a time, and one evening the two fliers appeared at the inn and took rooms for the night. They had a ten-days’ leave, were going to Paris on the early morning train, and were very gay. Célestine watched them from her work with beating heart as they sat at their table in the court, lingering over their wine; and when finally she understood that they had taken rooms and were to be here for the night, a great excitement possessed her. She ran up to the rooms, although she had made them up early in the day, and made them up all over again; and when they had retired she stationed herself in the dark hallway, to await a possible call for service, hopeful at once and afraid.

After a while the door opened, light splashed out into the hall, and a voice called.

She rushed to answer it. The young Frenchman stood in the doorway. “Dis-donc, Madelon,” he said lightly, giving her the name of the song. “Dis-donc, Madelon, you know, we are freezing in this big tomb of yours!”

She ran swiftly down the three flights to the cellar, and came back with kindling and paper; she ran down once more and returned with a basket full of small logs. She squatted before the hearth and built up a fire.

She felt, rather than saw, the two armchairs behind her, spread side by side before the hearth as for a vigil of friendship. The young Frenchman was in one; the other was empty. Her heart gave a queer jump as she heard a step approach. It came from the other room, approached, stopped; there was the creak of crushed springs. He was there too, now, the other one, the American, in his big chair. She tried to strike a match, and failed.

The young Frenchman began to twit her amorously. Seen from behind, she was attractive enough, with firm white neck upon which strayed ringlets of her yellow hair. He rose, he stooped, he was near her. “Allons, Madelon, my lass—a little kiss. Just one small one, there where thy hair makes shadow!”

At another time probably she would not have been displeased: it was so seldom a man mistook and made love to her. But, somehow, the American’s being here made a difference. Somehow, this was not the way she wished to be seen by the American. She turned toward her gay persecutor the mask of her face—usually this was enough. But this time, perhaps because of the wine, or because of the frolic in his veins at the thought of his leave from Death’s incessant haunting, or merely because the flame of the fire left her in shadow, the boy did not quit, but rather increased his half-mocking demonstration of a half-assumed order, and finally, unconsciously, she turned to the other the eyes of one harassed. He sat there at ease, half smiling, but immediate communication leaped to him from her. “Come,” he cried, “Pierre! Quit this—you’re an utter nuisance!”

And smiling at her, he added, enunciating very slowly and carefully: “One must pardon him, mademoiselle: he is a little saoul, vous savez.”

The contrast between his scrupulous manner and his use of that word “saoul,” supposed to be uttered only by such low-class people as she, and not by gentlemen like him; the funny mewing drawl of his “voo-oo-ah saaav-ez”; and something so simple about him—these things suddenly created in her a tender delight, and she broke out laughing. He joined in, laughing at himself; the other joined in: all three were laughing. The young Frenchman, content with himself, and rather glad to have been stopped, let her be.

But then, after they had laughed, there was no more reason for staying. The fire was now drawing finely; everything about the room was in order; the two friends, in their chairs, were lighting their pipes. Célestine tiptoed out and closed the door.

She was out in the dark cold hall once more, all alone. But something of them was there. Their boots. They stood at the door, two pairs of them; one pair standing up stiff, as if at attention, the other pair careened over, as if tired. She gathered them up to her bosom, and took them up to her room to clean them.

By the light of the candle, reflected in her cracked mirror, she looked at them long after she had set them up on her washstand. One pair was light, of fine leather moulded to slender leg, and just a little fussy with many hooks; the other two were heavy and honest, and with enormous feet—ah, enormous!

She held the boots up before her eyes to realize fully the enormity of those feet, and laughed delightedly—then passed her hands over them in caress.

She now set to work and scrubbed and polished with adoration till late into the night.

They left early in the morning, and she did not see them. Once they called for hot water, but seized the pitcher with disembodied hands that reached out at the end of bare arms thrust through the door’s narrow crack. And when they came downstairs, all ready to go, her first intention, which had been to view them in their lustrous boots, dissolved into a sudden panic which sent her scurrying into the farthest depths of the black corridor.

So she did not see them, and when they returned they did not stop at the inn, but reported directly to the camp. The first she knew of their return was when, from her daily stationing in the field, she saw them, winged once more, swooping down like thunder out of the drifting opalescence of a sunset sky. The old relation reëstablished itself; every afternoon, in the field across the way from the Fliers’ Camp, Célestine stood and waited, and watched them as they homed.

As she stood thus in the clover field one late afternoon a plane came winging all alone from afar toward the camp—fast, with the directness of a wounded thing seeking its lair to die. As it came near, it did not approach the ground in the usual gradual circlings, but lit straight, with a sort of desperate urgency—and Célestine recognized the young Frenchman. Even as he still rolled along the ground, his helmet-framed face was turned sidewise toward the sheds, and with open mouth he was shouting out a question. Everybody about the camp was running to him; when the plane at last came to a standstill, all the men of the camp, pilots and mechanics, were grouped about it. Sagging in his seat, again he was asking the question. Célestine, from where she stood, could not hear at all, but just as surely as if she had heard, she knew that it was a question he was thus asking with his open mouth, and what question.

The men about the plane all shook their heads negatively; then, all together, they raised their heads and looked afar toward the east, the seams in their faces showing deep.

The flier climbed stiffly out of his cockpit and stood among the others. He was relating something. Not able to hear a word, Célestine followed what he said, terribly, by the way his hands went. There had been a combat. Two planes high in flight—this the two hands showed—and then many, many attacking them. The two hands, in fight and flight, darted here, darted there, rose, fell, turned over, slid sidewise down, for a while stubbornly together. Then the two hands went apart—and the tale continued, told by only one hand—the tale of one plane only—of the teller’s own plane. That plane was alone, cut off, pursued by many, in dire distress; it twisted and strove like a moth in a flame. Finally it abandoned itself, it fell; fell long, forsaken and loose like a dead leaf—it was doomed. But no—abruptly, the descriptive hand, almost touching the earth, straightened out with a supple movement; the plane, at full speed, went scuttling along the heads of the wheat, the pursuit shaken off, free!

The narrator halted. Again he shouted his question, fiercely, as though the violence of it might have potency in creating the right answer. But the others, all shaking their heads, stepped free from the plane and looked upward in the sky, toward the east.

It was time for Célestine to go, but she could not go. In the field she remained, waiting—but out of the east no more planes were coming. The crying of the child in its carriage finally recalled her to herself.

During the following days she saw that the young Frenchman was not flying; he loitered aimlessly among the sheds. He began to come to the inn. He would sit in a corner, looking fixedly at his table, drinking one glass of strong stuff after the other, till finally, told that the place was shutting up for the night, he would stiffly depart without a glance at the one who had spoken.

Then one day he shook himself and rose after the first drink. And the following afternoon Célestine saw that he was flying once more, captain of a squadron of five.

This, somehow, settled her last doubt, and when night had come, in a corner of the inn garden, she made a little grave.

It was thus they did in her native village, in Brittany. There, when a fisherman, gone to the far banks of Iceland, did not return at the end of the season, little untenanted graves were made along the churchyard wall in memory of those who had thus vanished.

Célestine made such a grave, in a corner of the garden where two thick stone walls met behind a thick chestnut tree. The recess was well hidden; few ever came there. She made a rectangular outline with white pebbles, drawing it thin so that one happening here should not quite be sure of what he saw; she bought a small Virgin of green porcelain and set it at the head. The little Virgin stood there always, a rosary drawn through her rudimentary hand, and with downcast eyes seemed to meditate upon the grave.

Every night now, no matter how weary she was, Célestine came here, and in the silence and the darkness said a prayer. This is all she had of what had passed—the little make-believe grave, and the nightly prayer, there in the secret silence behind the tree. The war had moved on to the east; there was talk of great victories; and the flying camp had gone to other parts as suddenly as it had come a few months before.

The moment of prayer at the end of the day came to have for her a sweet importance. It coloured the day, the long hard day. It lay there ahead, through the effort, the sweat, and the grime, like a small still harbour of pure blue water. And its peace overflowed back into the day; it made of the whole day a still, white peace. Within the peace she moved and toiled as if in a haze, deliciously numb of life’s asperities and life’s screams.

The war ended; she held to her grave, her prayer, and her secret, and a year went by. Then, one summer day, suddenly he reappeared, solid, alive, in flesh and blood.

She was washing the red flagging at the entrance of the court, and was on her knees amid soap and suds, as the omnibus, come from the station with many valises on its top, halted before the entrance. And he, leaping out, turned to give his hand to a fair-haired girl who was stepping down after him.

At first Célestine did not believe her eyes; then, when she did, she began to tremble. Kneeling there on the wet flagging, she trembled and trembled, her big opaque blue eyes raised to the newcomers as if they had been gods arisen from the sea.

His eyes fell upon her. “Hello,” he said shortly, “there’s Madelon!”

“Bonjour, Madelon,” he said, in that French which had so delighted her that day so long ago. “Bonjour, Madelon—do you not remember me?”

The fair-haired girl, standing by his side, her hand trustingly resting on his arm, also was looking down at the kneeling woman. Célestine rose suddenly, and, altogether shaken out of her usual heavy reticence, cried: “My faith—I had thought you dead!”

A burst of laughter from both, after a moment’s hesitation followed her words, and she, too, found herself laughing.

“My faith,” she explained, “you flew away and never came back!”

“It was to Germany I flew, Madelon—not because I wanted to. And you’re not the only one who thought me gone to another place. But now I live in America once more, and this is my new little wife. Shake hands with my little wife, Madelon.”

Célestine wiped her hands laboriously on her apron, and took, in one thick red one, the little white one offered her.

“And now me,” he said, and pumped her hand up and down, while she felt her face distended in a stupid grin.

But there were things to see about, many things. She ran to the valises and began to carry them in. She ran upstairs to the room, and refreshed the sheets and pillow slips; brought clear water. A sort of mad joy was in her heart, and her thick legs were light. In a moment, between jobs, she ran out into the court and, stooping behind the chestnut tree, with one large gesture of her heavy hand, scattered the little white pebbles and whisked the little Virgin into her pocket.

They remained three days, the young man and his bride; three days during which Célestine spent herself in an adoration of service.

Then they were gone—away to some of the other battlefields they went to visit—gone for ever.

For some time the happiness of those three days remained in Célestine’s heart like a vague resonance of music, then little by little her life discoloured into a bleak emptiness. The memory of the return, the fact that he whom she had mourned was really alive—these things her mind somehow would not hold; little by little they ceased to be in her; they were no guard and no refuge, and she missed greatly what had been before.

The happy haze in which she had then stirred was gone; life once more was sharp and screamed; out of the profundities of a deep stillness, like a happy dead disturbed, she had been brought up to a surface of raw airs and intolerable glitters.

After a time she knew what she missed; now and then the knowledge brought her, hesitant, to the small inclosed space behind the chestnut tree.

Then one night her mind was made up. From her small room beneath the eaves she stole down into the darkened garden.

Down on both knees, in the dark damp space behind the chestnut tree she outlined with white pebbles a small simulated grave; she placed at its head the little porcelain Virgin.

There—it was done. With bowed head, she said a prayer. Every night now she came here and said a prayer.

And little by little the old happiness returned, and finally it was as though he had never come back. At the end of each day stood the awaiting moment of prayer like a small still harbour of pure blue water. Its peace overflowed back into the day; it made of the entire day a still, white peace. The delicious numbness once more enwrapped her in its soft haze, deadening life’s sharp angles and sharp screams.

It was as though he had not returned; the memory of this interruption grew fainter and fainter; flattened out; ceased to be. She was left with her sweet dim sorrow; her grave, her secret, and her prayer.