PART TWO

Chapter Thirty

The village of Myonville, like many of the old Picardy villages in what had once been Ponthieu, hid itself in trees. You rode between the flat fields and the orchards, as young Seymour, the billeting officer, rode that May morning, and saw ahead of you a mass of towering elms and beeches, with a bit of white plastered wall showing here and there like a patch of light sky at the end of a wood. Even the church steeple was invisible, when the leaves were out, and the roads leading into the village were great green tunnels.

“It’s good,” said young Seymour to himself, “It’s damned good.”

And so it was.

For Myonville was a virgin village; troops had rarely been quartered there during the three and a half years of the war. It had had its sorrows, but they, like the village, were secret and beautiful, part of the low, white-walled and red-roofed houses; part of its orchards and bits of garden and great pensive trees. And the spring was in Myonville, an indescribable greenness, a glimpse of lush blue-grass under the pink and white of the apple trees, perhaps a clump of daffodils—goblin gold under the blue sky.

Young Seymour found the secretary of Monsieur le Maire. He was the schoolmaster, big, stately, with the baggy black clothes of a French civilian, shabby, but rather proud.

“Billets? Yes. For a battalion, Monsieur le Capitaine?”

“Eight officers and seventy-three men and three horses,” said Seymour.

The schoolmaster raised his eyebrows.

“It is very small.”

“Well, you see,” said Seymour, “during the retreat the Boches were so loving that there wasn’t much left of us. Now, where am I to put the colonel?”

The placing of the colonel seemed to be the most sacred act in Seymour’s ritual.

“A big house, perhaps, Monsieur le Capitaine?”

“The colonel does not love big houses. A little house—with a garden.”

“There is the Café de la Paix.”

“Noisy?”

“Very quiet, monsieur.”

“Any children? The colonel loves children.”

“There are plenty of children in Myonville,” said the schoolmaster with an amused twinkle.

So young Seymour went off with his list, and called first at the Café de la Paix. The choosing of the colonel’s billet appeared to be a very serious business, but as a matter of fact, it was a labour of love.

“Madame Lorellard? Bonjour, madame. I want to place Monsieur le Colonel in your house, with your good permission.”

Seymour was a pink and white boy, and very polite.

“Josephine,” called the old lady, “ici,” and she smiled like a red apple upon Seymour.

Josephine, the black, handsome Josephine, Josephine the talkative, the temperamental, came gliding out of the inner room.

“My daughter, monsieur. She manages everything.”

Seymour paid the colonel’s court to Josephine. She was put out, annoyed, haughty, yet polite. Strange officers were a nuisance. Besides, André, her brother, was expected home on leave, and she wanted the room for him.

“It is a very small room, monsieur.”

“The colonel loves a small room mademoiselle. May I see it?”

Josephine took him upstairs, and was yet more annoyed when Seymour looked at the sheets.

“Monsieur, you insult me!”

“Oh, mademoiselle, I do not; I was admiring the linen.”

Someone had shown some sense in selecting Seymour as billeting officer.

He chalked the outer door and went about the rest of his business. Josephine was walking up and down the kitchen, talking in her excitable way to her mother and Cousin Claire. Claire taught in the school. She had been a solemn child, addicted to wild bouts of elfin mischief, a child with brown gold hair and great grey eyes.

“A colonel! Oh, la, la, he will be old and fussy, and he will want hot water at all hours, and baths, and he will stamp about the clean floors and scold. I know all about English colonels. Gabrielle had one at Doullens, cross and red as a lobster.”

“He can’t eat us,” said Claire, thrusting her needle into one of madame’s stockings she was darning.

“No, but he will be cross, and he will be rude, and he will always be calling for red wine.”

“Josephine, the stew is boiling over,” said Madame Lorellard.

Josephine dealt with the stew, and Claire’s eyes had a little mischievous glimmer of light in them.

“What a monster you expect! But then, if he is old he will not be a nuisance in other ways.”

“Tiens!” said the black girl. “They are worse than the young ones sometimes. Old pigs!”

About three o’clock that afternoon Claire was washing lace in the little backyard and splashing soapsuds from her tub on to the leaves of the old pear tree trained against the wall. Madame had gone out into the fields to help old Lorellard with his hoeing; Josephine was in the garden picking herbs. Claire heard someone open the door of the café and walk in, and then an English voice called: “Madame!”

Claire went through the kitchen with a ball of wet lace in her two hands. The glass door leading into the café room was open. She saw an officer standing there.

“Monsieur?”

He turned, smiled and saluted. Claire was strangely conscious of his eyes; they were blue eyes, rather sad, rather tired, but brave, very brave and so honest.

“I am billeted here, mam’selle.”

He spoke quite good French. She looked at his sleeve and Tod Western looked at her arms. Somehow he saw something very beautiful and peaceful and good in those plump arms of hers, the two strong little hands holding the ball of wet lace.

“But monsieur is so young!”

And Tod laughed.

“Mam’selle, did you expect a grandfather?”

“But we thought—and the young officer was so careful.”

Tod was still smiling, and she understood of a sudden why the tired but smiling eyes had brought an atmosphere into the house. As a woman she was quick to feel, though very slow to like. She noticed that he was wearing two ribbons, and that his left arm looked stiff.

“Monsieur would like to see his room?”

She was pressing the ball of lace between her two hands; a drop of water fell on the floor.

“If you please,” said Tod, as though he were listening to some soft voice speaking inside him.

She put down the lace and dried her hands.

“It is a very small room, monsieur.”

Tod was absorbing all the pleasant homeliness of the place, the table scrubbed white as hollywood, the red-tiled floor, the black stove standing out into the room with the inevitable coffee-pot warming on it, the bright pots and jars, the plain wooden chairs. It was simple, austere, exquisitely clean. The doorway opening on to the yard showed Tod a garden and a great green orchard beyond it, and in the orchard a blackbird was singing.

His silence made Claire glance around at him as she dried her hands. He was looking out into the orchard and smiling, and his blue eyes were full of light. And again she understood; this was a man who loved simple things, children, dogs, a green tree in leaf, the singing of a bird, a field of corn rippling in the wind, red apples on a bough, a warm place by the fire.

“I beg your pardon, mam’selle,” said Tod abruptly, “but all this is so very good.”

She crossed the kitchen and raised the latch of the door that opened on the stairs.

“Monsieur has suffered,” she said.

She ran up the steep stairs, a sturdy, graceful little figure, full throated, her old shoes making a merry clatter. Tod followed her, noticing the cleanness of that carpetless house, a row of shoes and sabots lined up on a shelf, a couple of mauve linen bonnets hanging on a nail, a table with clean linen laid out on it on the landing above. He had a glimpse of a room, a woman’s room with clothes hanging under a curtain and a red duvet on the bed. Claire had opened a door, and she went before him into the room.

“It is a comfortable bed, monsieur, and the room is quiet, for, as you see, the window looks out on the orchard.”

She was quite natural and unembarrassed, without a trace of coquettish false modesty.

“It is a very nice room,” said Tod.

“Is there anything that monsieur desires?”

“A table—a table to write on, if it will cause you no trouble. My servant will carry it in.”

“We will find you a table, and it is no trouble.”

She left him and met Tod’s servant in the kitchen, a shy, rosy-faced boy playing at Atlas with the colonel’s brown valise on his back. She pointed him up the stairs, picked up the lace, and went back to her washing. She could hear the voices of the two men in the room above, and a sound of devoted activity on the part of the boy with the rosy face.

“You’ll have some hot water, sir?”

“If you can get it, Cane. Don’t worry the people.”

“I’ve got out a clean pair of pyjamas, sir. And your slacks.”

“They have promised me another table, Cane. I shall want it to-night.”

“It will be here, sir,” said the boy.

He spoke the truth, for Tod was a man who was loved with a very great love by all men who had faced death with him.

There were other voices now in the kitchen. Josephine had returned, and so had the old people, for Père Lorellard had hoed all the weeds.

“He is quite young,” said Claire calmly, drying her hands on a towel.

“Oh, la la, the young ones can be a nuisance.”

Her cousin said nothing.

And then Tod descended upon them, a quiet man, very much at his ease, a man without guile.

He bowed to grand’mère.

“It is very good of you to take me in, madame. I shall give you no trouble.”

He bowed to Josephine, but a little more stiffly.

“My room is charming.”

That mercurial and handsome young woman became instantly the coquette. Would Monsieur le Colonel take a cup of coffee or a glass of red wine? Yes, the war, the terrible war! How much longer was it going to last, and would the Germans ever come to Myonville? Claire was busy hanging her lace on a little line near the stove. She appeared to be absorbed in what she was doing, and she took no part in the conversation.

Tod sat down and drank a cup of coffee, and talked to Josephine, whose elbows were on the table. She was leaning forward, her handsome and expressive face upturned, her black eyes looking straight into Tod’s blue ones. She liked homage, did Josephine; she liked to have a man impressione, interested in her and in her alone.

Tod gave it as his opinion that the Germans would never come to Myonville, and that they would go on fighting till the Germans were beaten. Josephine became voluble and eloquent on what France had suffered, how her brother André had been wounded three times, and how it was impossible to buy new clothes. Claire went on hanging up her lace, and saying nothing.

Tod looked at Josephine because he was a gentleman, but he looked now and again at Claire because he wanted to. A ray of sunlight was stealing through the window, and it fell upon her brown gold hair and white neck and plain black dress. She was a little woman, la petite Claire, but Tod had a feeling that there was nothing little about her. He liked her calmness, her quietude, those enigmatically frank grey eyes of hers, and the way she went on doing things.

“The aeroplanes, we hear them each night now,” said the dark girl, “and the bombs! Oh, la la! And Abbeville is being destroyed. I cannot sleep. I walk up and down, or run into the fields. It is so much safer in the fields.”

Claire spoke for the first time.

“If I am to be killed at night, I will be killed in my bed,” she said; “it will just happen so.”

Tod looked at her.

“You will not be killed,” he said, “but you are very wise.”

Tod had work to do, a fatherly care for this battered remnant of his battalion, part of the battered remnant of a division. No one knew what they were doing in Myonville; Tod did not know, nor did the red men at D.H.Q. They had been pushed about the country, thrust into any odd corner, left on the rubbish heap so to speak, while over yonder men fought with their backs to the sea. Rumour had it that they were to train Americans; but neither the war, nor the Americans, nor the great spring offensive concern this tale—this green season in the village of Myonville in Ponthieu by the sea.

Tod spent an hour in the orderly-room, went round the men’s billets, inspected the kitchen, and was taken by Seymour to the officer’s mess.

“Is your billet all right, sir?”

“Just what I wanted, Jack. By Jove, aren’t those beech trees fine?”

“Gorgeous!” said the boy.

Tod wandered out after dinner into the lanes of Myonville. He had two letters in his pocket, but he did not want to read them yet. For Tod was sad, sad with the brave sadness of a strong man who had seen defeat, and whose heart was full of the thought of the men—his men—who were dead. He was sick of the war, soul-sick and very weary; there seemed no end to the bloody business, no end to the hopes that were dashed.

“We’ve got to beat them,” was all that Tod would ever say; “we’ll go on till we do it.”

He was not a man of rhetoric, a man of phrases or of elaborate theories, one of your clever little people who sit in chairs in London and spill ink in wrangling over things they do not understand. Tod had no use for the war news of the journalists.

“Just tosh for the old women.”

He left it at that.

But these beech trees and orchards—these hills and little old houses and these rich fields! How good they were! Such gentle lights on the green grass, such mystery in the dim alleys of the orchards, such a smell of growth, such human tenderness! Tod’s heart had been made bigger by the war. The change in him could be summed up in those few words; while over in England! What had those damned “leaves” of his given him? Nothing, nothing at all.

It was growing dark when he returned to the Rue de l’Eglise and the Café de la Paix. Peasants were sitting at their doors, and Tod found the Lorellards grouped in the doorway of the café. It was a plain old brick house standing on the street, next door to the schoolhouse where Claire Vignard taught her children.

The whole family rose.

“Please don’t get up,” said Tod.

He was introduced to Père Lorellard, a ruddy old man who kept an everlasting chuckle under his waistcoat, and whose blue eyes were full of mischief.

Tod sat down between Josephine and Claire. There was no embarrassment, no English awkwardness about these people. They accepted Tod, treated him with the exquisite and intelligent politeness of the French peasant, found their chairs just as comfortable although he had joined them. And Tod felt happily at home, the simplest of men chatting to two girls and two old people.

They praised his French.

“I’m half a Frenchman,” he laughed, passing his cigarette-case to old Lorellard.

Josephine was the ready coquette, making her dark eyes mysterious and mischievous in the dark.

“Monsieur will stay in France after the war, perhaps?”

“I’m married,” said Tod, glancing instinctively at Claire.

The fair girl did not look at him, but she had noticed a quick change in his voice.

“And how many children have you?” madame wanted to know.

“None,” said Tod, like a man rebutting an accusation.

“Oh, mon Dieu!”—this was Josephine—“but the lines on my hand say that I am to have seven. Seven children, monsieur! Oh, la la!”

Little Claire broke in in that queer, abrupt way of hers.

“Why work if you are to have no children? What is the good of it—just for yourself?”

Her eyes met Tod’s in the dark, but she turned her head away almost immediately, and a silence fell upon Tod. A vague sadness seemed to steal in at the open doorway; and Tod rose and said “Good night.”

“I have letters,” he said.

Josephine lit him a candle, and waited for him to smile at her, but Tod did not smile.

“He is thinking of his home,” she said, when Tod had gone upstairs. “He is not happy.”

But Claire had a feeling that Tod was not happy because of his home.

The colonel was sitting at his table, and he had pulled those two letters out of his pocket. One was from Mr. Burgetrode; the other from his wife. He read Mr. Burgetrode’s who had grown even bigger with the war, a creative giant labouring to beat the Boche. It was a long letter, an intimate letter, almost fatherly in some of its touches. Tod spent half of each leave with Mr. Julian Burgetrode; they had grown fond of each other for there was the same bigness in them both.

His wife’s letter brought a touch of grimness to Tod’s face. He was happy with his men, but miserable with those other memories. Millie had a little flat in town, and even a lieutenant-colonel’s pay was inadequate to explain her palpable opulence. Those “leaves” of his had worried Tod, sent him back to France with intolerance and suspicion in his heart. He suspected her of slyness, and of more than slyness.

“Have her watched,” some very merciless Stoic had said to him.

“I can’t,” Tod answered. “How can I? I’m up against death out here. That changes a man. Set some sneak to spy on her? Damn it—I can’t do it! I couldn’t do it—somehow—even if I felt sure——”

A woman would have said that Tod was right.

Chapter Thirty-one

The Lorellards owned a little shop, the café, and a farm. The shop was next to the café, and you entered it by a separate glass-panelled door. Tod had to pass through the public room every time he left or entered his billet; it was a biggish room with a queer little bar, half a dozen clean white tables, a set of shelves almost barren of bottles, a dozen chairs, and a bracket clock. This room was nearly always empty. Sometimes Tod saw two or three old Frenchmen sitting at one of the tables; his own men never came there, for the Lorellards had no need to be very enthusiastic about the café. The shop was a more serious proposition, but the child of their hearts was the farm.

It lay beyond the orchard and a row of tall beeches, and Tod discovered it in company with Madame Lorellard. There were two little meadows surrounded with willows, a broad strip of arable land green with young wheat, a small wood of poplars, and a little field beyond the wood where old Lorellard grew potatoes and Indian corn. The barn and his stables were near the house.

Old Lorellard was always working. The back of his neck was all seamed with wrinkles, and the colour of leather. His hands were knotty and strong. In his old blue breeches and striped shirt, with a hoe in his hands, he was the very soul of France, shrewd, cheerful, ready with a mischievous gleam of the eyes under their badger grey eyebrows. He was a philosopher, and in his way—a thinker.

Old Lorellard astonished Tod. He could talk unexpectedly about so many unexpected things.

“Socialism, monsieur? We do not need socialism in Myonville. Look, you, we all work here; there are no rich in Myonville.”

This was true.

“Moreover, there are no factories. It is the factories that make the trouble.”

And then he asked Tod a question.

“Is it true, monsieur, that in your war factories you pay the workers, even girls and boys, very much money?”

“That’s so,” said Tod.

“Then you will have much trouble after the war,” said old Lorellard; “no one will know the value of money or the value of good sweat. But in France we shall not have so much trouble.”

“Why?” Tod asked him.

Old Lorellard pointed to his crops.

“We grow things. We live close to Nature, and we know that she does not give if we do not work. And work is good. They say we peasants are misanthropes; sometimes it may be true. Look you, this land is mine; there are thousands of little farms like mine in France. We work; we do not waste money on things that do not matter. Paris is not France, monsieur.”

“Are you happy?”

Old Lorellard gave him one of his shrewd, smiling looks.

“Well, what would you say, monsieur?”

“I hope I shall be as happy at your age,” said Tod.

Madame was like her man, only she went to church and he did not. Her old sun-bonnet shaded a contented face, the face of a woman who had borne strong children, and who had a right to be proud. Even the war had not shaken her. Her boy’s three wounds were like red badges of honour over her heart.

She talked quite frankly to Tod, sensing him as a man without guile.

“My other girl is married, monsieur. They are good girls, both of them, though Josephine is a coquette. We do not spoil our girls, monsieur. They understand what is expected of a woman.”

“And your niece?” Tod asked with a certain shyness.

Madame’s eyes lit up. Her heart was very warm towards Claire.

“A good girl, a very good girl, and so wise! She is an orphan, monsieur; her father was a railway official; she had a good education.”

“And she is not—not engaged?” Tod asked.

“Oh, no, monsieur. It is unfortunate, but her dot will be very small. Not but that men have asked for her, but she is very hard to please, is Claire. She looks with those grey eyes of hers and waits and listens. A good girl, so very strong yet gentle, and warm of heart, though she seems so quiet. Such a wife for some man.”

And Tod wandered off into the orchard with a sad and very thoughtful face. Why hadn’t he had the luck to find such a mate? There was something mysterious and fine and compelling about Claire.

The staircase of the house led down into the kitchen, and Tod had to pass through the kitchen whenever he went in and out. The Lorellards made but little use of the sitting-room. Tod would always be passing Claire. The school took but five days of her week, nor were the hours long, and she sat by the kitchen window with her workbox on the window-sill, and some work or other in her lap. She wore a rather shabby black skirt, a white blouse with a faint blue stripe on it, and cut low at the throat. On Sundays she wore a blouse with a pattern of little mauve flowers, and a black cotton apron covered with blue pansies.

Sometimes she smiled at Tod, sometimes she looked at him with a baffling seriousness and did not smile at all. She was not talkative; and though her fingers were always busy, she had an air of pleasant repose.

“Always working, mam’selle,” Tod would say to her.

Her replies were never obvious.

“I think while I work,” or

“A woman is not all fingers.”

“Do you ever go out?” he asked her.

She laughed.

“Has not Monsieur le Colonel seen me sitting in the orchard? And I walk every evening. There are always the children to walk with.”

“I wish——” said Tod, and then smothered the wish.

She guessed that he had wanted children.

Sometimes her face would glow with sudden light, and she would grow animated. She had a very charming and expressive mouth, and the most perfect white teeth; and when her eyes lit up Tod thought her beautiful, beautiful in a way that was new to him. There seemed so much behind those eyes.

Yet she baffled him, this daintily shabby, silent, children-teaching Claire. She had such a sturdy poise of her own, the soft mystery of woodlands that do not rush to you but wait for you to come to them, and still remain mysterious. Tod found her serene, practical, strangely quick to understand him, ready to listen, slow to speak. She seemed to hold him at a distance. She was always a little way off.

He did not understand it then, that it was her strength, the strength of a Frenchwoman who knew the passion latent within her, not the Frenchwoman of the English idea, a woman far finer and more humanly wise than that. She had something sacred within her, a passionate spirit that no man should touch—until—— Until! That was the soft aloofness, Tod saw in her eyes.

Each evening Tod became part of the family. Sometimes they sat in the doorway, sometimes in the kitchen, sometimes in the orchard. Tod liked the orchard best. He lay on the grass and watched the last sunlight on the green boughs of the old trees and upon Claire’s face and hair. Josephine was the talker, and Tod could fly a gaiety that would match hers, but he did not look at Josephine as he looked at Claire.

Josephine made him talk.

“Were you always an officer, Monsieur le Colonel?”

Tod explained that he had begun the war as a private.

“And such a boy! And what are the ribbons for?”

He told them, looking at Claire as he spoke.

“Just luck, you know.”

“And in England I suppose you are rich? I should like to be rich. I should have breakfast in bed each morning and in the winter I should go to Nice.”

“And you would be none the happier,” said Claire, with one of her quick flashes of aggressive truthfulness. “Too much money is like having too many aprons; you never know which one to wear.”

Old Lorellard chuckled.

“Did you ever hear such wisdom? Quite a female Solomon.”

Claire blushed.

“I’m a poor man,” said Tod; “I never expect to be anything else. I agree with Mademoiselle Vignard.”

Josephine gave Tod a gleam of her dark eyes, the look of a woman who says in her heart: “Ah, it is like that, is it?” But if Josephine was a coquette she was no cat. She was jealous for Claire when the real heart of her was touched. Good women hold together.

These evenings left Tod astonished and full of pleasure in his own astonishment. These people were peasants, substantial peasants, it is true, but the fineness of their manners and the refinement of their culture were unlike anything he had known in England. They made most middle-class English families seem vulgar and ignorantly boorish. There was no ostentation, no swelling up of the social frog, no fidgeting, no giggling. Tod knew that the average Englishman is apt to be either servile or insolent, and inclined to bray like a jackass at anything that startles his complacent ignorance.

“They must be more civilised than we are,” he said to himself. “I know I’m an ignorant beast.”

He learnt many things concerning Claire. She had been to school at Tourcoing, a good school. She could read English, but speak it barely at all, perhaps because Tod made her strangely shy. She could play the violin. “But I play it very badly,” she confessed; “the war broke the strings.” Her reading flustered Tod, who had never been much of a reader. He did not know anything about the French classics, and he had never heard of Ronsard, Montaigue, Pascal, Chateaubriand, Daudet or Anatole France. She was surprised that he was ignorant of Balzac, and Tod made a desperate grab and pulled up Dumas and Zola to impress her. He could think of no other names. She had the advantage of him even in the English classics, and she could have taught him his own history. And yet there was nothing of the prig about her, nothing of the schoolmistress. She could cook, sew, manage a house, and she had a practical knowledge of farming and gardening. She had ideas about spiral nebulæ and electrons and Mendelism, but such erudition struck Tod as charmingly and wonderfully ridiculous.

“What do you want to know such things for?” he asked her.

“I don’t,” she said, “but it does not do me any harm, monsieur, so long as I love children. A woman knows with her heart, a man with his head.”

And Tod’s consciousness began to be full of the eyes and the voice and the soul of Claire.

Chapter Thirty-two

That month of May in Myonville was the most wonderful month in Tod’s life, full of the sadness of beauty and the beauty of sadness, exquisite and strange. The war had been with Tod for more than three and a half years. He had lived only with men, a very simple and big-hearted soldier, taking the dirt and the wounds with them, boasting no poignant memories of home, a very lonely man in that inner life where only women and children and a few friends matter. He had given up his soul to the war and his heart to his men, and they adored him. The clever little people who wriggled into the safe corners at home do not understand these things. How should they? They would have criticised that word “adoration,” and they would have been bored by Tod’s simplicity. They remained clever, with all the meanness of cleverness, while simpler men became great.

Tod had had nothing to sweeten the war, save his success as a soldier, the love of his men, and the big heartedness of Julian Burgetrode. His memories of his wife were sordid and painful, memories of an overblown young woman living in a London flat, a young woman of expensive habits and extravagant clothes, hard, restless and sinister. There was a smear on the face of Tod’s marriage. It was a thing of suspicion, horrible in its dubiousness, its sly suggestion of disloyalty, its too obvious materialism. And yet something restrained him, a sensitive generosity, a reticence that kept a grimly shut mouth, perhaps that spirit of discipline that Tod had taught to his men, for Tod could be very stern to the shirker and the slacker. There were a few bad men who hated him, because he had made them afraid, and was their master. They did not matter. The battalion had faith in Tod, and a kind of schoolboy delight in his shrewdness and his exposure of tricksters. “He’ll sweat blood for you,” was the saying, “raise hell if anybody tries to do you down, but if you run crooked with him, look out.”

In Myonville Tod found all that the heart of him had hungered for, green leaves and cloth of gold, the smell of lilacs in a garden, red thorns in bloom, the dear grey eyes of a girl. It was all so good, so wholesome, so beautiful. He loved the beech trees and the orchards, the little house with its soul of the home; he loved old Lorellard and his wife; he loved the children in the streets, the horses that went to drink at the big pond, the pigeons, the chestnut trees with their wax white flowers; and perhaps without realising the pain and the beauty of it he loved Claire.

She was Myonville; she was the spring, the greenness and perfume, the soul of all he desired. She began to fill his whole consciousness, this dainty shabby little woman with her grey eyes and shining hair, her white throat, her busy fingers and her wisdom. She roused in Tod all that passionate tenderness that memory connected with his mother. It was only when he realised how much he wanted her that he discovered the tragedy of it all.

Claire still puzzled him.

One evening he had tried to make her read an English book. Their heads were together, by the lamp on the table. Old Lorellard was smoking his pipe; madame dozing; Josephine watching Tod and her cousin. It was a moment of gaiety, Claire laughing, expostulating, hesitating, with a little finger pointing at some difficult word.

“But, monsieur, it is so absurd, your English endings. Puff and trough, and though and enough. There’s no system.”

“There never is a system, except in the army,” laughed Tod; “I’ll get the Army Council to get it all altered. Supposing you write me a letter?”

“Be serious,” said Claire, touching the crown on his sleeve for a moment with the tip of her little finger.

“I am serious,” said Tod, with a look of his blue eyes.

And suddenly she grew shy, strange. She drew the book away, and went to Josephine almost with the air of a child asking for protection. Tod was puzzled. Josephine began to talk to him in her gay and eager way, but Tod did not want to talk to Josephine. Old Lorellard, that kind old man of the world, refilled Tod’s glass, and smiled at him from under his bushy eyebrows.

“To the end of the war, monsieur.”

“With all my heart!” said Tod.

“And monsieur will go to his home.”

Tod nearly choked over that glass of wine. He had glimpsed something that he had not glimpsed before. Claire was nothing to him, even though he had realised with a sudden anguish that she was everything. Perhaps these good people were trying to make him understand; their eyes had been open to his blindness? But, after all, he had spoken no single word! It was just his own silly fancy, the sensitive boy in him, nothing more, and for some days he tried to believe it was that.

He tried to pretend to a happy gaiety, to accept these weeks in Myonville as nothing more than a charming interlude, a drawing of the breath before more effort. His officers noticed that Tod was growing solitary and silent, not morosely so, but with the gentle and quiet look of a man who had worries. He was out much on his horse, and it was on one of these rides of his that Tod came nearer to a realisation of the truth.

He had ridden to Eu; and was trotting back in the evening from that very French and pleasant old town, enjoying the rolling country and the blue sky and the beech woods, when he came upon three little people resting by the road. A girl was sitting on the grass, holding a weeping child in her lap, and a small boy was standing beside her and looking with quaint melancholy at his dirty shoes. He seemed undecided as to whether he should laugh or weep. The girl was Claire, very pretty in her simple Sunday clothes.

Tod dismounted. Her grey eyes looked up at him gladly.

“What’s this! Oh, mam’selle, why this grief?”

“I’m so tired, monsieur,” said the child.

Claire explained.

“We have been to Le Treport. I promised to take them to the sea; we missed the last train. I think there are only two trains in the day, monsieur.”

“So you started to walk?”

“And mam’selle has been carrying Marie,” put in the boy; “and Marie is heavy.”

Tod looked into Claire’s tired eyes, and knew now how he loved her.

“Ma pauvre petite,” he said, “did no one stop to give you a ride?”

“A car of the Croix Rouge passed us, but the driver shouted that it was forbidden.”

“Punch knows how to disobey orders, don’t you, old chap? Who wants a ride? Come along, Marie; up in the saddle; he’s such a quiet old horse. Now then, Thomas, up you go too.”

He lifted the children on to Punch’s back, and then turned to Claire.

“You are tired,” he said, and his eyes added: “Ma chérie, so tired.”

His man’s tenderness betrayed itself so utterly that she flushed and looked confused.

“I am no longer tired, monsieur.”

“We have eight more kilometers.”

“I’m very strong. It was carrying the child.”

“I wish I could carry you,” said Tod.

There was a welling up of light into her eyes, a light that is seen but rarely in the eyes of a woman. Then she laughed.

“Monsieur would soon be tired of it,” she said. “I am little, but so solid!”

Tod’s coming changed that weary pilgrimage into a triumphal return. Punch behaved like a gentleman, walking stolidly with his bridle on Tod’s arm. The children, surmounting a brief awe of Tod, began to laugh and chatter.

“Who are they?” he asked.

Claire looked straight ahead down the avenue of beeches. “The mother is a widow, a widow of the war. And she could not afford——”

“So you stepped in?”

“Well, it is a pleasure.”

“It would be to you,” he said, “anything that is fine and good——”

“Monsieur!” she exclaimed softly, but with a touch of reproach.

Tod flushed.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, “I couldn’t help it. And you love children?”

“Is it not nature?”

“I have none,” he said, “but I was very happy when I was a child. I remember it all so well. My mother was the best woman in all the world, and I should like to be to my boy what my father was to me.”

“They are dead, then?” said Claire.

“Yes.”

“It is sad for monsieur. But you have a home.”

“No, not a home like the Lorellards’. If I get killed it won’t matter much.”

“You must not say that,” she said, “there are too few good men in the world.”

The two children demanded a large part of the conversation, and Claire and Tod drew apart to meet again in the chatter of the youngsters. Old Punch looked at Tod now and again with a question in those soft eyes of his. “Is this according to Army Orders, sir, and am I doing the job correctly?” Tod rubbed Punch’s nose, and then pretended to tickle Mademoiselle Marie’s leg.

“Naughty,” she said highly delighted. “Naughty man.”

And all the time Tod was conscious of Claire stepping along beside him as though they were mated and these two children on old Punch’s back——! But Tod was dreaming dreams.

When they came to the outskirts of Myonville Claire looked questioningly at Tod.

“Monsieur le Colonel would prefer to ride in alone?”

“I? Why should I?”

“The English are so correct.”

He regarded her earnestly.

“I’m as happy as a king and as proud. But is it not allowed for you and these children?”

“I was not thinking of myself,” she said, “but of the dignity of the English officer.”

“Please God,” said Tod, “may I be kicked into the nearest ditch if my dignity is so shabby a thing as that.”

She gave him a flash of her eyes.

“You are a good man, Monsieur Tod.”

And Tod went into Myonville with the happy face of a Sir Percival, past many of his own men who saluted him with hand and eyes, past the sacred doorway of his own orderly-room and the brisk face of the battalion sergeant-major. Somewhere near the church a man of the new draft that had just come to the battalion, a little literary gent or something jerked in for the last phase, chose to be facetious in the hearing of one of Tod’s veterans.

“The C.O.’s found a hot billet. These officer chaps——”

The back of a hard hand swung swiftly, struck him in the mouth.

“You b——y little blighter! He’s worth a brigade of you scribbling rotters. Don’t you try that sort of stuff on us.”

The literary gent had a bloody lip, and he was frightened.

“Can’t a chap have a little joke——?”

“No, not you, when you want to put it on the colonel. He was out in ’14 while you were polishing the seat of a chair. You aren’t in the same class.”

It had been a happy evening for Tod, happy in its innocence and its simplicity and in his comradeship with Claire. She had talked to him more intimately and with a freedom that had brought him very near to her, yet perhaps because of the day’s happiness he was a little blind to what it meant to her. Tod had not realised the woman under that calm and courageous surface. He had not fathomed the depths of her, the possibilities of passion that a weaker woman might have betrayed to a weaker man. He had not divined what had happened to Claire any more than he quite realised all that had happened to himself.

The Lorellards were sitting in the big kitchen when Tod returned from the mess. There happened to be a Frenchman with them, an interpreter attached to an English Division, and an old friend. He lived in the next village and was home on leave.

Tod was introduced. He sat down and began to talk. The kitchen was in semi-darkness, for there were no lights; they had to be careful in Myonville because the German planes were searching each night for a big ammunition dump somewhere near the mouth of the Somme. And then Tod missed Claire from the pleasant friendliness of the family circle. She was in the kitchen. She had taken a chair over to the far corner of the door that opened into the shop, and she was sitting there alone in the dusk, a little figure, almost invisible, save for her pale face.

Tod was puzzled.

She did not move, or join in the conversation, but sat there mutely, isolated, wholly apart.

“Mademoiselle Vignard is tired,” he said to Josephine. “Is not that so, Mademoiselle Claire?”

“Perhaps,” she answered him with an almost casual abruptness.

She did not speak again, but something emanated from her, a pathetic sense of resistance, an obstinate sadness that challenged Tod. He did not understand her silence and her isolation, and in groping for an explanation, wondered whether he was in the way.

The interpreter did not stay long. Tod stood there awkwardly after the Frenchman had gone. Claire was still detached and silent in her corner.

“Have I driven your friend away?” he asked them.

Josephine answered him.

“Oh, no, monsieur. He was just a friend of my brother’s. He is not very acceptable to us and to Claire.”

Tod thought he had found the explanation of Claire’s aloofness, but he was wrong.

When he said “Good-night” to the Lorellards she did not come out of her corner, and her good night was almost inaudible. “Bon soir, monsieur.”

Tod went upstairs to his room, troubled.

“Have I offended her?” he thought, “and how?”

Chapter Thirty-three

Two nights later Myonville was bombed. Some German airman, searching for that monstrous dump, and somewhat at sea in his reckoning, dropped his explosives on that great patch of blackness, Myonville and its trees. There was much noise; some tense terror; but not a house was touched: the German bombs fell in the gardens, and the orchards and the fields.

Tod was undressing when he heard the German plane overhead, and the excited voices of people in the street. He put on his tunic, leant out of the window and listened, seeing the orchard of the Lorellards all black under the full moon. A door banged in the house. He heard frightened footsteps on the stairs, and Josephine’s voice high pitched and excited.

“Claire, Claire, come into the fields. Maman is waiting.”

“I shall stay here,” said a quiet voice.

Then a bomb crashed somewhere over by the church and Tod saw Josephine and her mother rush across the yard. The girl turned at the orchard gate.

“Claire, do not be so foolish!”

Tod returned.

“I will bring her, mam’selle,” he called; “go on with madame.”

He knew the door of Claire’s room, and he crossed the landing and knocked.

“Are you dressed, mam’selle?”

“Yes,” she answered him.

“Then you will come out into the fields?”

“I am not afraid.”

“But—I—am afraid,” he said; “you will come out with me into the fields?”

She seemed to hesitate; then she opened her door. Tod was standing there with the moonlight on his face, and no man could have looked less unafraid or more calm.

“Come,” he said, “it is wiser.”

She preceded him down the stairs, not hurrying, moving almost reluctantly. He had dominated her for the moment, and his domination was so sweet that it hurt.

They reached the orchard, with its mystery of moonlight and of shadows. The grass was heavy with dew, and the trunks of the old trees looked black as ebony.

“Why did you lie to me?” she said suddenly.

“I do not understand you.”

“You said you were afraid. You are not afraid.”

“I was not afraid for myself,” said Tod.

She looked at him sharply in the moonlight.

“Sometimes one does not care.”

And then she tried to smother the half-confessed cry of pain in those words.

“I mean—that it is just chance, monsieur.”

But Tod’s face had the tense, white listening look of the soldier, of a man grown cunning in the hell’s music of the war. They were close to the orchard ditch, and Tod pulled the girl into it with a fierceness that was too elemental to wait for words.

“Down, down on your face!”

It was like the plunge and crash of some meteorite. The ground shook; the whole orchard was a sudden yellow glare; fragments of metal, sods, shreds of splintered wood went seething through the apple bough and through the hedge behind them. One heavy bit of steel whined low over Tod’s head, and fell with a “phut” into the bank behind him.

He found himself holding Claire’s hand. She was trembling, and bending low upon her knees.

“Thank God,” said Tod, lifting his face into the moonlight.

She drew her breath in deeply, and then suddenly withdrew her hand.

“I’m sorry if I was rough,” Tod said to her.

“It was necessary, monsieur. I understand now.”

“Perhaps you understand,” he said, “why I was afraid? Rather than anything should happen to you——”

She stood up and astonished him with a sudden outburst of gaiety. Tod had seen men laugh in a hysterical sort of way when they had escaped some great danger, but the girl’s soft laughter was far more elusive and subtle. It sounded very strange to him in that solemn orchard with the German plane still droning overhead.

“And grandpère is still asleep. I am sure of it. We always say that he will not hear the trumpet of the Angel Gabriel. I wish to see the great hole in the ground.”

She went forward lightly between the orchard trees, a quick and graceful little figure, sometimes in the moonlight, sometimes in the shadow. To Tod she had become a tantalising and baffling creature, surprising him with her silence or her laughter, her flashes of frankness or an aloofness that left him puzzled and alone.

“Here, monsieur! Oh, the poor earth! the poor tree!”

He found her standing on the edge of a black pit, with all the wet grass about her covered with sods and dirt. An old pear tree, splintered at the base, had toppled sideways, and lay with its boughs trailing in the crater like a dead thing with spread arms and tumbled hair. Claire was standing like a child and looking down into the pit, a sudden solemnity upon her and pity in her eyes.

“It was such a good tree,” she said, “and bore such sweet fruit.”

Tod looked at her with a great longing.

“Better the tree than you.”

She did not seem to hear him.

“André was so fond of this tree. We used to have a swing on that big bough. And Uncle will be grieved. He loves all trees.”

Tod said nothing. He had seen so many dead men and so many dead trees.

They heard voices in the meadow beyond the orchard, the voices of women and children and old men. Josephine’s voice was audible above all the others.

“It fell in our orchard, I am sure. Oh, mon Dieu! supposing the house had been struck!”

Claire turned suddenly and went in the direction of the voices.

“Josephine, ici, ici. We are safe. The old yellow pear tree has been broken.”

They came pouring into the orchard with all the eagerness and the sangfroid of the French, those wonderful peasants whom Tod had learnt to respect from the bottom of his heart. Josephine ran and kissed Claire.

“Where is mon père?”

“Asleep, I believe.”

There was a chorus of laughter, exclamations. They gathered round the black hole and the broken tree, observing everything with the simplicity of children, immensely interested, sympathetic. A boy slid down into the crater and began grubbing with his hands for souvenirs.

Tod had placed himself close to Claire.

“It is good luck,” he said; “you will never be so near to a bomb again.”

She smiled queerly, her two hands folded below her throat, her eyes looking up at the moon. And then she slipped away, withdrawing herself with an unobtrusive gentleness, and going to Josephine, who was looking at the tree.

Something held Tod back. He did not follow her, for that little act of hers had affected him profoundly. It was so symbolical, so delicate, yet so strong.

Later they gathered in the kitchen, where old Lorellard had been found quietly smoking his pipe.

“It is all over, is it?” he said.

“Mon père, the yellow pear tree is broken.”

“Well, it died for France,” quoth old Lorellard with a wink and a cock of his chin.

Josephine, a flushed and tumultuous Josephine, had run to the cellar for a bottle of red wine.

“It is a celebration, a great deliverance,” she said, “for the whole family and Monsieur le Colonel.”

Tod bowed to her.

“France has taught me many things, mademoiselle, the great things that matter.”

They drank the red wine, all save Claire, who refused to touch it, and the old people went to bed. Tod and the two girls sat talking for half an hour with the moonlight shining in upon the floor and glinting on the buckles of Claire’s shoes. Her face was in the shadow, Josephine’s in the light.

“Such danger is but child’s play to monsieur,” said the dark girl.

Tod seemed to be thinking.

“There are things that hurt one more than wounds,” he said.

And he heard Claire sigh.

Josephine lit the candles.

“It is safe now.”

She gave one to Tod and went up the stairs, Claire following her. Tod came last. Josephine’s room was at the top of the stairs, but Claire and Tod had to cross the big landing that was larger than any of the rooms. Their two doors were opposite each other.

“Good night, Mademoiselle Claire,” said Tod, looking back.

And for one moment she turned her head and gave him the most wonderful look in all the world, a shine of the eyes, a soft and splendid tenderness, a flash of exaltation touched with despair.

Tod went into his room, walked up and down for half a minute, and then knelt at the open window.

“God, bless her always and always,” he said, “and make me strong.”

Chapter Thirty-four

It was washing day, and Josephine and madame were hanging out the linen in the orchard. A pair of Papa Lorellard’s blue linen trousers flaunted it in the sunlight between the two white sheets; and a red petticoat completed the tricolour. From the schoolhouse across the lane came a murmur of children’s voices. Old Lorellard’s geese gaggled in the meadow.

“The colonel is in love with Claire,” said Josephine to her mother.

Madame Lorellard was pegging up a pair of lace-edged pillow slips.

“It is understandable,” quoth the old lady; “I have seen it for days.”

“It is a pity,” said the daughter.

“Why a pity? I do not think that any harm will come of it.”

Josephine grimaced.

“No; they are both too strong, and monsieur is not like other officers. But it is a pity.”

“Well?”

“That he is married. He would have married Claire.”

“Ma chérie, what a romancer you are!”

“I am not, Maman. And Claire wants him.”

Madame Lorellard’s kind blue eyes grew sharp and questioning.

“Has she told you?”

“Would Claire tell me, or anybody? But she wants him as she has never wanted a man, and he—he is hers—body and soul. They are in heaven, and in hell, Maman.”

“How do you know?”

“I have sharp eyes and a heart. My dear Maman, I am a woman, a vain one, a talkative one, but I love Claire. I am handsome, yes, and I have black eyes, and a mouth that troubles most men, but this man is different; he has fallen down at little Claire’s feet. He could not help it, I think. These things just happen.”

Madame Lorellard went on hanging up her linen. Her ruddy face looked impressive, untroubled, the face of an old woman who was not easily shaken. Her blue eyes were proud.

“Yes, it is a pity,” she said, “and yet I clap him on the shoulder for it. A man of sense, a good man, so merry, and so courteous. He will not do her any harm.”

“But she will suffer,” said Josephine; “Claire is not like the vain, light-hearted ones.”

“But it is a triumph,” said the old Frenchwoman; “such a man and an English colonel, a good soldier. Let her look at it in that way.”

“Claire cares nothing for triumphs. She wants the man—the one man, and his children.”

“Bless the girl,” said Madame Lorellard, “but if he had married her we might have lost her. Is not that something?”

“You are growing old, Maman,” said her daughter.

Even the children at the school were aware of a change in Mademoiselle Claire Vignard, or “la petite mère,” as they called her. She looked sad, so sad at times; the class noticed it when it should have been absorbed in its sums. There were moments when “la petite mère” was strangely inattentive, and she could be caught gazing out of the window at the white road and the beech trees and the great clouds and the blue sky. She was like a child whose heart was not in her lessons, and who wanted to be away somewhere; the class understood that quite well, but the reason of it was beyond the understanding of the class. Claire had always been so vital, so smiling, so shrewd, so calm, so full of interest in her teaching, a little mother who had persuaded the lazy ones to take trouble. Half the small boys were in love with her. She was so much prettier, so much more charming than Mademoiselles Epinard and Fleury, those two rather thin women who were so ready to scold.

And then came that morning when Mademoiselle Claire Vignard worked out a sum incorrectly on the blackboard, and did not notice it. But Monsieur Moreau, the schoolmaster, who happened to come into the room, noticed it and was shocked.

Such a thing had never happened before in Claire’s career.

“Mademoiselle Vignard! It is incorrect!”

“Which, monsieur?”

“The example on the blackboard.”

The class maintained a grave silence. Claire, faintly flushed, had left her chair and was looking at the chalked figures on the board. Then she took a duster and a stick of chalk and made the proper corrections.

“I am sorry, monsieur.”

M. Moreau happened to be worried, and in a bad temper.

“Please be more careful in future.”

The class was indignant, scandalised. For any man to speak to “la petite mère” in such a fashion! Little Emile, the chanticleer of the class, protruded a contemptuous tongue behind M. Moreau’s back.

“Cochon!” muttered the infant.

Claire smiled at them all when the schoolmaster had marched out. She had recovered herself.

“Did none of you see that I was saying my prayers on the blackboard?” she asked them.

Emile stood up and replied with great solemnity. He was destined to be an orator.

“The class would never confess that Mademoiselle Vignard could make a mistake,” he said; “the error was in M. Moreau’s manners.”

Claire’s laughing eyes thanked this sententious little diplomat of seven.

“Perhaps I shall never make a mistake again, Emile. If I do, the class shall correct me.”

Tod, too, had touched a season of great sadness. The gods were warning him that this happy sojourn in Myonville was drawing to a close, for were not reinforcements arriving, and a temporarily depressed brigadier showing a new sparkle and a more critical alertness. Some day their marching orders would arrive with all the blind suddenness of a bolt from Olympus. And Tod’s heart was in Myonville. He could not help it; it had just happened so. This green and golden month had been a season of strange beauty and tenderness, the happiest and yet the saddest month in all Tod’s life.

He would never see Claire again. He had no right to see her again, and he knew that he loved as he had never thought to love any woman, as his father must have loved his mother. It was all so hopeless and so tragic, and yet there was no bitterness in Tod’s heart; the romance was too great for that. He was just a big man, profoundly touched, profoundly sad, not a little afraid of hurting the heart of the woman he loved, still more sad when he thought of that other woman.

Tod was tempted, but the Quixote in him kept its face in the sunlight.

“If you took the trouble to find out,” said the voice, “you might discover things that would set you free.”

And Tod refused.

“It can’t be done,” he answered. “I can’t play the spy and the cad to win her.”

But he wanted to pour out his heart to Claire, to express that love of his with all the passion and the tenderness that cried out in him like the joy of the spring. There was such an exultation in loving her as he did, and yet it was the thought of the afterwards that made him pause and remain silent. Tod knew that he would suffer most terribly when he left her, but he would have a man’s work to do, other men to think of, while Claire—would just have this little village and her children. She had been contented before his coming, and Tod spent those last days in wondering whether she cared, whether she cared as he did. He did not want to suffer; his vanity was not concerned in it, and yet—— What a memory to carry in his heart, what a splendid tenderness for a man to die with after all the little meannesses of his marriage!

It was Tod’s last evening but one in Myonville, though he did not know it then, and he walked over the fields to Gibas where another battalion was quartered, and had tea with the officers who were billeted in the château. The colonel was a ragged old ruffian of a Scot, lean, biting, merciless, but with a heart of gold. He had a peculiar affection for Tod; in a sense they were rivals. Both battalions swore by their colonels.

“You will be staying to dinner, Western?”

And Tod refused.

“Sorry, Colonel, but I must get back.”

“Must—must! There’s no must about it! Just a wee French lassie somewhere, my lad!”

Tod blushed.

“I’m nearly twenty years younger than you are, sir.”

“Ye soft-tongued young scamp, calling me sir! Well, get along with you.”

And Tod went, old Melville walking as far as the red-brick gate-house with him, eager as some rough-haired terrier over the news that was coming in.

“We’ll be at them again in ten days, my lad. They say we shall move north to St. Omer to pick up some more men and spend a week knocking them into shape.”

“I’m ready,” said Tod with a far-away smile as the old Scot turned back at the gate, “though I had almost forgotten the war back here.”

“Yes, it has been a brave month, Western. I’m the better for a sight of the children and those big trees.”

Tod walked back through the deep lanes of Gibas, with the elms and the beeches meeting above his head and a small stream that had grown tired of its proper bed winding as it pleased about the sandy road. The blue sky was almost invisible, so thick was the canopy of leaves, and the little white houses seemed lost and hidden in this world of green growth. The road climbed slowly out of these woodland deeps like a snake crawling out to bask in the sun. Tod had a sweep of fields before him, sheeted with red sainfoin and wheat full of scarlet poppies. The distant trees of Myonville cut the deep blue arch of the sky like the misty towers of a distant town. A great iron crucifix stood on a mound just where the road left the shadows of the trees.

Tod took a field-track that branched away to the left. It was a favourite walk of his, a sort of pilgrim’s way that was in no hurry to get to any particular place, turning aside and loitering when a tree or a piece of orchard or a row of old trees pleased it. At times it cut deep into the fields like the sunk bed of a stream. Tod knew that it would bring him into Myonville close to old Lorellard’s poplar wood, where he could turn into the meadows and so through the orchard to the Lorellards’ house. He felt that he wanted to be alone and to escape the salutes of his men.

Half-way across the fields the track skirted a little grove of aspens, and sitting on the grass bank under one of these trees Tod saw Claire Vignard. She was all alone there like some Joan of Arc under the trees of Domrémy, and so absorbed in her own thoughts that she did not see Tod or hear his footsteps, so that he came on her like a figure that steps down out of a dream.

Tod had faltered for a moment, swept by a rush of great tenderness. She looked so much alone with her dear self, a little lost, so unconsciously sad that his heart misgave him. He wanted to go to her, reach out his hands and meet the soft light of her grey eyes and utter those words that haunted him day and night:

“Ma chérie, I love you.”

Yet when he saw her sitting there alone, gazing towards the far horizon of her dreams, his own tenderness smote him in the mouth. There was nothing that he might say to her, nothing that he had the right to say.

He moved on again, and suddenly she saw him, the very man of her thoughts, the mate of her dear desires, but she remained still, still as a bird whose startled heart beats rapidly. Deep in her eyes shone a soft inward glow. She felt Tod loved her, and would never speak.

“No school to-day?”

“It is a holiday, monsieur.”

Tod stood looking down at her, the little woman with the sunlight on her face and hair, her bosom moving with a suggestion of slight breathlessness under the plain white blouse, her grey eyes shining—yet faintly clouded, each hand clasping a tuft of grass. Tod trembled on the edge of that tragic tenderness of his. He wanted her, and she, in her dreams, had felt herself embraced by him.

“It is so beautiful and peaceful here,” he said.

“Not a leaf moves,” she answered, looking upwards.

“Still as an empty church.”

She closed her eyes for a moment and dreamed. Tod was so near, yet she knew that he would come no nearer.

“You have been very happy in Myonville?” she asked him suddenly.

“Very happy.”

And then he added:

“I know that I shall never be so happy again.”

Those were the only words he could utter, but in the stillness of the fields she took them into her heart.

“I am going back now, monsieur,” she said.

“May I walk with you?”

“If you wish it.”

And silence walked with them nearly all the way.

Chapter Thirty-five

Tod knew next morning that the battalion was to leave Myonville within twenty-four hours. A dispatch-rider brought him an early morning order from brigade headquarters, and Tod’s orderly-room in Widow Dubois’ house near the church began to function with great vigour. Tod was there before breakfast, with both hands deep in a basketful of official detail. A lorry arrived for the quartermaster and thundered off to Abbeville to draw ordnance stores. The transport officer had horses to collect. The battalion was to parade at nine, in battle order, for the C.O.’s inspection.

Tod rushed his breakfast and was back in the orderly-room. He was grim, brisk, a little feverish, conscious of a little woman with grey eyes waiting for him beyond all that mass of mechanical detail, the one thing in life that mattered. The war mattered, but it had become a habit, and Myonville had broken the habit. The work irritated him, though it had to be gone through with, and Tod pushed his way through as though he were forcing his way through a wood.

Tod inspected the battalion, went round all the billets, spent another hour in the orderly-room with his adjutant and felt himself nearer Claire.

“We move at nine, James. It’s all quite simple. We are due at the starting-point at nine-fifteen. Seymour can ride on for billets at St. Riquier. We have an hour’s break on the road.”

“I’ll see to everything, sir.”

“I think I’ll go round and get some of my things together,” said Tod.

Then the office orderly rushed in.

“The general, sir, the Divisional general.”

“Damn him!” said Tod under his breath.

It took another hour to get rid of the Divisional general. Tod had a reputation, and the great man was critical and inquisitive. He told Tod that his horses were dirty, and then asked him to dinner.

“I’m awfully sorry, sir,” said Tod, “but I have arranged to spend my last evening with some friends here.”

The general was sportive and no fool.

“That’s all right, Western; I quite understand.”

Tod saluted him with great affection and watched him ride round the corner, and then started for his billet. The orderly-room sergeant pursued Tod.

“Will you sign these letters, sir?”

“Get Captain James to do it, Murray. I don’t want to see any more of these damned things to-day.”

Claire Vignard had just come in from the school. She was sitting sewing by the kitchen window, with the familiar work-basket on the window-sill beside her. She happened to be alone, for Josephine was busy in the shop, and the old Lorellards were down in the fields.

She heard the door of the café open, and a man’s footsteps crossing the outer room. It was Tod; she knew that quick step of his so well, and the quiet way he had of closing the door.

“Back from school, mademoiselle.”

He came into the kitchen, and put his cap and stick on the table. She could see that he was much moved, and pretending to be casual; but he was flushed, and his eyes were restless. He walked to the window and stood looking at the orchard, a tense figure, head drawn back, eyes at gaze.

Suddenly he turned to her.

“Always working,” he said.

She did not raise her head.

“Yes, it is good to work.”

“I shall always think of you like that,” he said, “sitting by the window sewing. We go to-morrow.”

“To another village, Monsieur Tod?”

Her voice was very steady.

“No, to the front. I’m glad it’s the front.”

He turned again to the window, heart-sick, but very determined.

Claire had gone white, and her eyes seemed blind for the moment. She kept her head bowed and went on with her work.

“Ssst!”

Tod turned sharply.

“What is it?”

“Nothing, monsieur.”

He saw a drop of blood, very red in the sunlight, showing on the tip of one of her fingers, but her hands moved steadily at their work, and presently a red stain showed on the white linen.

Tod never forgot that little drop of blood on Claire’s finger. It remained a vivid memory through the coming months.

“I am sorry it is the trenches,” she said, after that short silence.

“Where else could a soldier go?” he answered. “I am not afraid of the trenches.”

“I cannot think of you as being afraid, monsieur. I can only wish you bon chance.”

Tod was looking at the orchard trees, and in their greenness he saw Myonville, the spring, all the beauty of that quiet month, and perhaps—the heart of Claire Vignard.

“I have been very happy here,” he said slowly, almost like a man praying; “it has taught me so much. I don’t know whether I shall ever come back again; I should like to come back, some day. You have all been so good to me.”

Claire’s head had dropped a little lower.

“It has been a pleasure to—us, monsieur.”

And Tod smiled, a far-away, wondering smile.

“Life is queer, isn’t it? Well, one does not forget. It’s for France and you, anyway, if anything happens, I shan’t regret it.”

She gave him a brave flash of her grey eyes.

“I shall not forget, monsieur. It will be a good memory.”

“God bless you, ma petite,” said Tod, and went blundering up the steep stairs to his room with the excuse that he had to look through his kit. But he sat on the bed and stared at the wall.

“It’s all over,” he said to himself; “she’s—she’s——”

He could not say what Claire was, for his thoughts were a mere fumbling tenderness; but Claire was staring at the little red mark on the white linen, and wondering whether he knew.

Lieut.-Colonel Western spent his last evening with the Lorellards. They took their chairs and a little table into the orchard, also five glasses and a bottle of red wine. It was a sad evening, dying away into the soft June dusk, and Tod and Josephine were the talkers. Old Lorellard puffed at his pipe and appeared depressed; madame had been working in the sun and was tired; Claire’s eyes were watching Tod as though she wished to burn the memory of him into her mind. Tod was calm, very gay, smiling in the face of his own sadness.

“I shall be fighting for all of you,” he said; “for madame and monsieur and the little farm, for Mademoiselle Josephine and the shop, for Mademoiselle Claire and the children.”

“I am not a religious man, monsieur,” said old Lorellard, “but I shall think of you when I use my scythe and my hoe.”

“That’s as good as a prayer, my friend.”

“Good men do not need praying for,” said Claire Vignard suddenly; “it is enough for us to remember them.”

“Thank you, mademoiselle,” said Tod.

The battalion was to move at nine, and Tod’s servant had orders to call him at six, but Tod needed no calling. He could not sleep. He was thinking of Claire, thinking of her all the night, and how absurd it seemed that he might never see her again. He could not bring himself to realise it, though the man in him knew that it was true. Old memories of Spaniards Row came back to Tod. All that he suffered that night, the silence and the helpless yearning of it made him think of the night when his mother died. She had slipped away from him into the darkness, never to return—but Tod’s mother had died; Claire was a living Claire.

And so wonderfully alive, so wholesome, so comely and desirable, such a soft sweet thing to be embraced, that Tod could hardly believe that he was losing her. It seemed so wrong, so damnably and ridiculously wrong, almost as monstrous as the death of his mother had seemed to Tod—the child.

When the dawn came he left that most comfortable of French beds in which he had been unable to sleep, washed himself, put on his best tunic and riding-breeches and his new field-boots, and went softly on to the broad, white-floored landing. The house seemed silent and asleep, and Tod slipped silently down the stairs, yet not so silently that he passed unheard by someone else who had been unable to sleep. Claire, standing at her window in her nightdress, saw Tod walk out towards the orchard. He paused by the gate to light his pipe.

“Mon pauvre,” she said to herself, “for you too the dawn is a sad one after a night of sadness. Will you call your pipe by my name, I wonder, as French boys do? Why did you come to us—ah!—why did you come?”

She watched Tod disappear into the orchard, and then slipped back into bed.

“I will not see him again,” she said. “I do not think that I could bear it. I shall stay here till he has gone.”

Tod walked up and down the orchard for an hour. Perhaps—lover-like—he had hopes of seeing Claire again and of speaking a few last words to her, words that would remain after he had left, but it was not Claire who came to him, but Josephine on her way to the woodstack to bring in an armful of dry wood.

“Bonjour, monsieur. You are very early.”

Her dark eyes looked straight at Tod.

“I could not sleep,” he said, with brotherly frankness.

She paused by him, a woman who understood all that had happened to these two people, but whose thoughts were with Claire.

“You have been too happy in Myonville, Monsieur Tod.”

“Happy!”

He felt that Josephine understood.

“But not now.”

“Mon ami,” she said, “you will go to your home when the war is over, and you will forget.”

“I shall have no home,” he answered, “and I shall never forget. Some day—perhaps——”

She looked at him pityingly with her dark eyes.

“It is serious with you; I know. It is very hard.”

Tod thought a moment.

“Josephine—I wonder if I might write to her?”

She answered him at once and very firmly.

“No, monsieur. It would not be fair.”

“Not even once?”

“If wounds are kept open——”

Tod looked her straight in the face.

“You are right, absolutely right,” he said, “it would not be fair.”

And Josephine kissed him.

“Claire will understand,” she said.

Chapter Thirty-six

The battalion bugles were blowing and the men were falling in on the square by the church. The transports had hooked in and were waiting in the little Rue des Fermes. Half Myonville was there by the church, crowded against the fronts of the little white houses and under the pollarded limes, laughing and exchanging banter with the soldiers and wishing them good luck.

“Where’s the C.O.?”

The adjutant, glancing at his watch and rather worried, threw this question at Haines the doctor, who came up jamming a packet of sandwiches into his haversack.

“He left me at the mess. Said he had forgotten something at his billet.”

“It’s three minutes to nine. Sergeant-Major!”

“Sir?”

“Send the colonel’s horse along to his billet, the café down by the school.”

“Never known him late,” said James to the doctor, “not by ten seconds.”

Tod had gone back to his billet, for an overmastering impulse had taken him there. Claire had hidden herself and he had not seen her to say “good-bye” when he had left the house at half-past seven. And suddenly the thought had shocked him, the thought of “I shall never see her again,” and his heart had answered—“I must.”

The café door was locked. Tod went round to the gate that led into the yard, and came face to face with Josephine.

“Mademoiselle.”

Josephine understood.

“She is in her room.”

“I have a minute, no more. Josephine, you can trust me.”

“I trust you,” she said, and walked away towards the orchard.

Tod stood in the little brick-paved yard, looking up at the house all green with the leaves of the great pear tree. A little smoke rose from one of the chimneys. Claire’s window, with its white lace curtains, was half closed.

“Claire,” he called softly, “Mademoiselle Claire.”

Then he saw her at the window. She was dressed, and he had a glimpse of her white blouse and the top of her black apron with the blue pansies.

“Monsieur——!”

She had gone pale at the sound of his voice, and she was trembling.

“It is au revoir, I had not seen you.”

“Je ne descende pas,” she said; “I cannot, monsieur.”

She looked down at him for a moment with a sudden tragic radiance that was near to tears. And then her hand dropped something, a little book bound with a slip of blue ribbon. It was a little Testament that had belonged to her mother. Tod picked it up.

“God bless you for ever and ever,” he said.

And then he turned and ran.

He was buttoning that little brown book into the breast pocket of his tunic, when an orderly met him with his horse.

“All right, Smith. Thanks. Now then, Punch, old boy.”

He swung into the saddle and rode down the street to the church. The church clock struck nine as he reached the battalion, those brown men in their fighting kit standing steady, eyes to the front.

And Tod smiled. It was a brave smile. He was the soldier again.

“Nearly late, James.”

“It never happens, sir.”

“All ready?”

“All ready, sir.”

“Then we’ll move off.”

So Tod rode out of Myonville at the head of his men, and Claire went to the school and sat calmly through the morning under the eyes of the children.

“Is it all true?” her heart kept saying. “Why did he ever come to me?”

And yet she knew that she would not have had it otherwise.

Chapter Thirty-seven

Tod fought all through the summer months; in the autumn he fought at Le Cateau and Landrecies, and even before he had reached that October phase he was made to realise that he was not going to be killed. At Wallincourt he had a house knocked down about his head, and beyond being buried and smothered with plaster, he was not hurt. James, his adjutant, was shot dead beside him in a street in Le Cateau. Somewhere near Landrecies Tod missed the exploding of a “delayed action mine,” and missed it with a margin of forty seconds. “The C.O.’s luck.” It was proverbial, and the men agreed that he deserved it, but they warned Cane, his servant, to look out. “You be very careful, Whacker, or some bloomin’ shell that ’asn’t the cheek to touch him will blow you to b——y blazes.”

Cane “looked out” until the Armistice intervened, and he found himself tacking oiled linen over the broken windows of a villa in Landrecies, and arranging old pails to catch the drip from the ceiling. Cane believed in the colonel; he believed too in that little old French Testament which he knew Tod always carried in the breast pocket of his tunic. Cane was a religious boy, though the battalion had given him the irreverent name of “Whacker.”

Tod felt lost, most strangely lost. The amazing business was over, the high spirited tension of it relaxed after those years of inward discipline. It was as though the world had struck work of a sudden, and stood waiting at the street corners for God and the millennium to arrive on earth. Tod did not quite know whether he was glad or sorry. He was glad for these poor French folk, but he had a feeling that something fine and heroic and simple had gone out of life, and that the great adventure was at an end.

They had reached the top of the hill, and the dull misty November sky was like a grey curtain showing the world nothing but a huge question mark. What next? Whither? How?

Were they going back down the hill again, back to the old life, or would they push on to other hills vaguely imagined in the grey distance?

To Tod it was a day of interrogation.

He remembered standing in the garden of the little rococo French villa that had been hit by a couple of German shells. Through one big hole in the brickwork the staircase leading to the attics was visible, hanging derelict in mid-air, its banisters splintered and twisted. A broken lime tree lay half across the iron gate, resting on one of the brick pillars. The grass plot was covered with broken tiles and bricks, the flower beds pulped and trampled. The front door hung by one hinge, a pathetic and drunken door. But the villa was not dead. An old Frenchman in carpet slippers was patiently raking up the rubbish and taking it off in a basket to a far corner of the garden. Madame and her two daughters had carried out some chairs and a settee and were dusting them with affectionate care.

Tod was touched.

“They don’t understand these things in England,” he said to himself; “they never will.”

He went across and spoke to the old Frenchman, who was his host.

“To-morrow, monsieur, I will get some of my men to help you. It was bad luck, those two shells, after all these years.”

“Ah, Monsieur le Colonel, we are quite happy. Are we not free?”

“I admire your courage, monsieur,” said Tod, “and the courage of madame and her daughter.”

The Frenchman pointed with his rake at the hole in the wall.

“Bricks, monsieur, only bricks; not the blood of my children. That can be remedied. We shall get to work in France; we shall clean up all the rubbish.”

“I wish England had had some of this,” said Tod thoughtfully; “the few bombs we got were nothing. I suppose that is why you French are so much finer than our people.”

“But your army, monsieur, is it not superb?”

“There was nothing wrong with our army; I’m thinking of some of those people at home.”

Tod wandered out alone one afternoon, and passing through a battered and slimy-streeted old town, broke away into the country that was strangely still and quiet under the grey November sky. It was a land of little farms and green meadows shut in by high hedges, and Tod followed the track of a tank that had cut square gaps in the hedgerows, the bushes lying flattened like crushed faggots in the ditches. There were shell holes everywhere, turf and scattered earth where the barrage of the English guns had advanced across the fields. The farmhouses still seemed to be deserted, and a great silence reigned over those little secret meadows.

But Tod was not concerned with the war and its last dramatic phases. He had come to the edge of the “Afterwards,” an afterwards that was as sudden and strange as the sea to a man who has marched for months through a forest. Tod wanted to think. He had been thinking in jerks and spasms during the war, disconnectedly, rather vaguely, though certain stark and fundamental facts had emerged from the chaos. He had learnt to know men. He had learnt that they were utterly unequal. He loved them, even though he knew that most of them were good-hearted sluggards, born to be led and managed. He had discovered the bad man, who was often clever and dangerous, and who responded to nothing but fear and the voice of a master. Tod had been a master. No man less of a bully than he, but he had learnt the great lesson of mastery. Character; that was the one thing that counted. And because of his ideals, his love of men and his passionate vision of what life should be for them in the future, he was torn within himself, puzzled, challenged. He had had dreams of a new leader and a new earth. Socialism—perhaps? But what of the master-men, the leaders? Was not good staff-work as important in a State as in an army? Was not civil discipline as necessary as military discipline? Could a committee of battalion cooks have schemed and carried through a big offensive? Were not the best talkers often the worst fighters, and the least dependable of men? Tod had been living with realities. He had learnt the great lesson, that the very nature of man has a way of upsetting the most elaborate and beautiful theories. You can use workmen to build a cathedral, but you cannot use the workmen’s backs in place of stones. You can set a hundred men running a race, but the whole hundred will not breast the tape together. Life was still a race. Penalise the speedy men, and the thing would become a farce, a disgraceful strolling match for loafers. Nature would put up her starting pistol, and go in search of a better strain, of new men. Civilisation’s business was to see that there was a fair start for all, and no fouling.

In wandering over those wet fields Tod came upon a little orchard close to a long rambling red-roofed house whose eyes still seemed to be staring in a blind and frightened way at certain horrors that had been enacted close to it. The orchard had been a German howitzer position. A scattering of poplars and willows in the surrounding hedgerows had screened it well, but chance or some English airmen had spotted those squat black cannon, and death had come out of the grey sky.

The orchard was all brown with shell holes and scattered earth. Half the trees had been smashed. One big howitzer lay wallowing in a crater like some huge black beast dead and swollen. A second had been caught in the act of making off towards the road, and stood where it had been left, its snout cocked in the air as though it had been squealing in terror. The ground round about was littered with wicker cases, fuse boxes, shells, German helmets, overcoats, gas-masks, a torn and bloody tunic. Two or three dead Germans still sprawled under the hedge. Tod could picture the fierce intensity of that battle scene. The sudden plunging shells, the crash of the explosives, the spurts of dirt and smoke, the shrinking desperate men drifting away from their smothered guns, the dead left lying. What a glimpse of the last judgment on the men who had conceived and created the war!

Tod sat down on a wooden case. He was used to such scenes. This smashed German battery was a thing of the past, and Tod’s thoughts were in the future.

He had a packet of Mr. Burgetrode’s letters in his pocket, and he wanted to read them again at his leisure. Some of them were in answer to the scrawls he had sent to this big friend, the curt, frank outpourings of a soldier to a man who understood.

There were many passages in Julian Burgetrode’s letters that spoke as an answering voice to Tod’s thoughts.

“Am I an idealist? Of course I am an idealist, but I prefer good concrete for my foundations, to building in a bog of sentimental and Utopian slush.”

“If you think you are coming back to a new heaven and a new earth, my son, get rid of that idea at once. We are going forward, but I think that we shall go forward in a way very different from what most people imagine. Read French history as it concerns a period like our own. And don’t think that England has been chastened, as the best of you have been chastened out there. It hasn’t. The grocer is still stronger than God.”

“Keep away from the people who are always calling on the State to do this and to do that. Don’t be befogged by that word ‘State.’ Be ready to take your coat off and fell your own trees.”

“After all, what is the ‘State’ to which these good people are always appealing? Such a State is nothing but officialdom. And who is your official? Just old Mr. Peasgood Nonsuch, a rather dull and phlegmatic old gentleman who goes back to Surbiton or Ealing each evening, and grumbles over the paper, with his feet in the fireplace. Mr. Peasgood Nonsuch, and whole cohorts of Nonsuches are not going to do your business for you.”

“The country that sits down and waits for someone to hand it its spade, bring it its dinner, and wipe its unsweated forehead, is going to the devil.”

“Tod, my boy, you must know that men have to be managed and to be moved. Most of them are just marionettes. Necessity is the great wire. Cut it and you will stop the vital current to the whole complex scheme. And an intoxicated mob of fools will be fighting like starving dogs.”

“We are still creatures of necessity, not democratic demigods. We have created our scheme of civilisation, and we have got to live with it; it’s our Sphinx, our Master. Nature is not going to be cheated.”

“For the average man needs fear, the fear of hunger and no fire. The truth is as old as Adam. Have we suddenly become automatic angels?”

“Tod, my man, don’t sink yourself to the level of the pap-mongers and visionary journalists. Don’t be quixotically unselfish. Not one man in ten thousand really cares about the big dream. He’s thinking of his coal-cellar and the income tax. The grocer will beam you his blessing and do you behind your back. It’s in the blood.”

“Nature is not going to let us all wallow in a social elysium just yet. We have got to be up and doing, every man of us. Those who sit under the apple tree and smoke and wait for Mr. Peasgood Nonsuch to climb up and throw down the apples won’t get ’em. They don’t deserve to get ’em.”

“Get power. Be big. Keep away from the clever little people. Character and courage are worth more than cleverness. As you say—the war has taught us that.”

“Get power. Use it benignantly, wisely, but get power. Why should a man be afraid to be big? What sort of world would it be if we were all like a field of cabbages. Refuse to be lopped and dragged down by the people who haven’t the heart to be big.”

“Is it wrong to say that all the great work of the world has been done by adventurers, pioneers, students, individuals? The mob of little men comes trailing along through the gaps cut by the pioneers, and you will hear the little men shouting: ‘How well we are doing this job!’ ”

“I’m not talking ‘superman stuff.’ It is that other damned creed that I’m attacking, the cry of ‘all in the trough together,’ the mob spirit that lusts to pull down because it has not the grit to climb up.”

“You seem to write at times, Tod, as though you wondered whether I ever felt afraid of the power I happen to hold. I don’t. I created what I have created; no other man has a grip of the great machine as I have. I’m not modest about it, because it is a fact.”

“Why should one be so absurdly sensitive? I’m fair to the men who work for me; I try to do all I can for them; I try to push up the keen and the good ones.”

“I can almost imagine the day when the Proletariat will say to God: ‘Look here, you come down out of that. We’re fed up with your swank. We can run the bally show ourselves.’ ”

“And supposing God agreed?”

“Take it another way. Supposing a general of a division was seized with a hypersensitive false modesty. ‘I must really apologise to you men for having the impertinence to be in authority over some fifteen thousand of you. I suggest you elect a committee and fight the division. Of course, if I might tender a little innocent advice—now and again, but believe me I shall not intrude upon your authority!’ ”

“No, I’m not going to abdicate. I’m not senile just yet. The man who knows that he can lead is a coward if he abdicates.”

“I often think there is too much open-mindedness about our young men of brains. A little more backbone and a little more battle-axe would be better.”

Tod smiled over these letters of Mr. Burgetrode’s. They were so fresh, so pungent, so vigorous, and they echoed many of the grim facts that Tod has discovered during the war. He had learnt how to father a battalion, that little world of men in miniature.

And then he re-read Julian Burgetrode’s last letter.

“So the Bloody Business is nearly over. It has been the most religious thing in all history. The German organisation should have won. It was beaten by something higher and finer than mere organisation. Character, the good heart of the plain man.

“I want you back with me, and I shall agitate when the time comes. I am getting a little old. I want you to help me to manage men.”

Tod put those letters away, and began to think of other things. In this battered orchard under the grey of the November sky, his thoughts went back to Myonville and Claire—sturdy, grey-eyed, deep-bosomed Claire. He had carried the little book she had given him, still tied about with a bit of blue ribbon, a warm memory next to his heart. He unbuttoned the flap of his breast pocket, drew out the worn, brown Testament, and, looking at it, thought of her with a tenderness that was as sacred as the memory of his mother.

That other life was claiming him again. He saw himself going back to England, to the woman who inspired in him nothing but a profound distrust. He had no letter from Millie in his pocket. It was three weeks since he had received one from her, and perhaps the silence between her letters had been a relief to him. He did not want to remember his wife.

Walking home towards the pale winter sunset, Tod tried to hold fast to some of Julian Burgetrode’s words.

“Be big. Work is more lasting and more satisfying than love.”

And in Landrecies Tod happened to see a French soldier, home on leave in Landrecies after more than four years of its occupation, being embraced by his weeping wife.

“Oh, Jean, mon mari!”

“Damn!” said Tod; “Burgetrode’s wrong.”

Chapter Thirty-eight

The Armistice was not more than three weeks old when Tod walked into Mr. Burgetrode’s private room in the Hotel Europa. Mr. Julian Burgetrode had been the Controller of Something during the latter part of the war, and his department inhabited the whole of the hotel. A certain notorious daily paper had said ferocious things about Mr. Burgetrode, referring to him as the “Autocrat with the Red Tie,” yet nothing had happened. Many people had discovered that it was impossible to hurt Mr. Burgetrode; he walked over them with a grim and humorous smile, and his reply was his silence.