Читать книгу Home Fires in France - Dorothy Canfield Fisher - Страница 5

Two weeks after the German retreat from the Aisne was rumored, five days after the newspapers were printing censored descriptions of the ravaged country they had left, and the very moment the official bulletin confirmed the news, Pierre Nidart presented himself to his lieutenant to ask for a furlough, the long-delayed furlough, due for more than two years now, which he had never been willing to take. His lieutenant frowned uneasily, and did not answer. After a moment's silence he said, gently, "You know, my old fellow, the Boches have left very little up there."

(Nidart was not an old fellow at all, being but thirty-four, and the father of two young children. His lieutenant used the phrase as a term of endearment, because he had a high opinion of his silent sergeant.) Nidart made no answer to his officer's remark. The lieutenant took it that he persisted in wanting his furlough. As he had at least three furloughs due him, it was hard to refuse. There was a long silence. Finally, fingering the papers on the dry-goods box which served him as desk, the lieutenant said: "Your wife is young. They say the Germans carried back to work in Germany all women under forty-five, or those who hadn't children under three."

Nidart swallowed hard, looked sick, and obstinately said nothing. His lieutenant turned with a sigh and motioned the fourrier to start the red tape for the authorization for the furlough. "All right, I think I can manage a three weeks' 'permission' for you. They're allowing that, I hear, to men from the invaded regions who haven't taken any furloughs since the beginning of the war."

"Yes, mon Lieutenant. Thank you, mon Lieutenant." Nidart saluted and went back to his squad.

His lieutenant shook his head, murmuring to the fourrier: "Those north-country men! There is no use saying a word to them. They won't believe that their homes and families aren't there, till they see with their own eyes … and when they do see. … I've heard that some of the men in these first regiments that followed up the Boche retreat across the devastated regions went crazy when they found their own villages … Nidart has just one idea in his head, poor devil!—to go straight before him, like a homing pigeon, till … " He stopped, his face darkening.

"Oh, damn the Boches!" the fourrier finished the sentence fervently.

"You see, Nidart is a master-mason by trade, and he built their own little house. He carries around a snapshot of it, with his wife and a baby out in front."

"Oh, damn the Boches!" responded the fourrier on a deeper note.

"And like all those village workmen, they got half their living out of their garden and a field or two. And you've read what the Boches did to the gardens and fruit-trees."

"Isn't there anything else we can talk about?" said the fourrier.

Nidart passed through Paris on his way (those being before the days of strictly one-destination furloughs) and, extracting some very old bills from the lining of his shoe, he spent the five hours between his trains in hasty purchasing. At the hardware shop, where he bought an ax, a hammer, some nails, and a saw, the saleswoman's vivacious curiosity got the better of his taciturnity, and she screwed from him the information that he was going back to his home in the devastated regions.

At once the group of Parisian working-people and bourgeois who happened to be in the shop closed in on him sympathetically, commenting, advising, dissuading, offering their opinions with that city-bred, glib-tongued clatter which Nidart's country soul scorned and detested.

"No, no, my friend, it's useless to try to go back. The Germans have made a desert of it. My cousin's wife has a relative who was in the regiment that first followed the Germans after their retreat from Noyon, and he said … "

"The Government is going to issue a statement, saying that land will be given in other parts of France to people from those regions, because it's of no use to try to rebuild from under the ruins."

"No, not the Government, it's a society for the Protection of the People in the Invaded Regions; and they are Americans, millionaires, every one. And it's in America they are offering land, near New York."

"No, near Buenos Aires."

"The Americans want the regions left as a monument, as a place to see. You'll make much more money as a guide to tourists than trying to … "

"Your family won't be there, you know. The Boches took all the able-bodied women back with them; and the children were sent to … "

"Give me my change, won't you!" said Nidart with sudden fierceness, to the saleswoman. He turned his back roughly on the chattering group and went out. They shrugged their shoulders. "These country-people. Nothing on earth for them but their little hole of a village!"

Down the street, Nidart, quickening to an angry stride his soldierly gait, hurried along to a seed-store.

That evening when he got into the battered, dingy, third-class compartment of the train going north, he could hardly be seen for the innumerable packages slung about his person. He pulled out from one bulging pocket a square piece of bread, from another a piece of cheese, and proceeded to dine, bent forward with the weight of his burdens and his thoughts, gazing out through the dirty windows at the flat farming country jerking by him in the moonlight. It was so soon after the retreat that the train went no further north than Noyon, and Nidart had lived far beyond Noyon. About midnight, he rolled off the train, readjusted his packages and his knapsack, and, after showing his perfectly regular sauf-conduit to five or six sentries along the way, finally got out of town.

He found himself on the long, white road leading north. It was the road down which they had driven once a week, on market-days. Of all the double line of noble poplar-trees, not one was standing. The utterly changed aspect of the familiar road startled him. Ahead of him as he tramped rapidly forward, was what had been a cross-roads, now a gaping hole. Nidart, used to gaping holes in roads, walked down into this, and out on the other side. He was panting a little, but he walked forward steadily and strongly. …

The moon shone full on the place where the first village had stood, the one where his married sister had lived, where he and his wife and the children used to come for Sunday dinners once in a while. He stood suddenly before a low, confused huddle of broken bricks and splintered beams, and looked about him uncomprehending. The silence was intense. In the instant before he understood what he was seeing, he heard and felt a rapid vibration, his own heart knocking loudly. Then he understood.

A moment later, mechanically, he began to move about, clambering up and down, aimlessly, over the heaps of rubble. Although he did not know it, he was looking for the place where his sister's house had stood. Presently his knees gave way under him. He sat down suddenly on a tree-stump. The lopped-off trunk beside it showed it to have been an old cherry-tree. Yes, his sister's big cherry-tree, the pride of her garden. A long strip of paper, one end buried in a heap of bits of plaster, fluttered in the night-wind. It beat against his leg like some one calling feebly for help. The moon emerged from a cloud and showed it to be a strip of wall-paper; he recognized the pattern; he had helped his brother-in-law put it on the bedroom of the house. His sister's four children had been born within the walls of that bedroom. He tried to fix his mind on those children, not to think of any other children, not to remember his own, not to …

The paper beat insistently and rhythmically against his leg like a recurrent thought of madness—he sprang up with the gesture of a man terrified, and stumbling wildly among the formless ruins sought for the road again.

He walked heavily after this, lifting his feet with an effort. Several miles further, at the heap of débris which had been Falquières, where his wife's family had lived, he made a wide detour through the fields to avoid passing closer to the ruins. At the next, Bondry, where he had been born and brought up, he tried to turn aside, but against his will his feet carried him straight to the center of the chaos. When the first livid light of dawn showed him the two stumps of the big apple-trees before the door, which his grandfather had planted, he stopped short. Of the house, of the old walled garden, not a trace beyond the shapeless heap of stones and plaster. He stood there a long time, staring silently. The light gradually brightened, until across the level fields a ray of yellow sunshine struck ironically through the prone branches of the murdered trees upon the gray face of the man.

At this he turned and, walking slowly, dragging his feet, his head hanging, his shoulders bent, he followed the road which led like a white tape laid straight across the plain, towards—towards … The road had been mined at regular intervals, deep and broad craters stretching across it, enough to stop a convoy of camions, not enough to stop a single soldier, even though he stumbled along so wearily, his cumbersome packages beating against his legs and arms, even though he walked so slowly, more and more slowly as he came in sight of the next heaped and tumbled mound of débris. The sun rose higher. …

Presently it shone, with April clarity, on Nidart lying, face downwards, upon a heap of broken bricks.

For a long hour it showed nothing but that—the ruins, the prostrate trees, the man, like them stricken and laid low.

Then it showed, poor and miserable under that pale-gold light, a wretched ant-like procession issuing from holes in the ground and defiling slowly along the scarred road towards the ruins; women, a few old men, a little band of pale and silent children. They approached the ruins and dispersed. One of the women, leading three children, picked her way wearily among the heaps of stone, the charred and twisted beams … stopped short, both hands at her heart.

And then the sun reeled in the sky to a sound which rang as strangely from that silent desolation as a burst of song out of hell, scream after scream of joy, ringing up to the very heavens, frantic, incredulous, magnificent joy.

There they stood, the man and wife, clasped in each others' arms in the ruins of their home, with red, swollen eyes, smiling with quivering lips, silent. Now that the first wild cries had gone rocket-like to the sky and fallen back in a torrent of tears, they had no words, no words at all. They clasped each other and the children, and wept, constantly wiping the tears from their white cheeks, to see each other. The two older children, a little shy of this father whom they had almost forgotten, drew away constrained, hanging their heads, looking up bashfully under their bent brows. Nidart sat down on a heap of stone and drew the little girl to him, stroking her hair. He tried to speak, but no voice issued from his lips. His wife sat down beside him, laying her head on his shoulder, spent with the excess of her relief. They were all silent a long time, their hearts beginning to beat in the old rhythm, a sweet, pale peace dropping down upon them.

After a time, the youngest child, cowering under the woman's skirts, surprised at the long silence, thrust out a little pale face from his shelter. The man looked down on him and smiled. "That's a Dupré," he said in his normal voice, with conviction, all his village lore coming back to him. "I know by the Dupré look of his nose. He looks the way my cousin Jacques Dupré used to, when he was little."

These were the first articulate words spoken. With them, he turned his back on the unfriendly, unknowable immensity of the world in which he had lived, exiled, for three years, and returned into the close familiar community of neighbors and kin where he had lived for thirty-four years—where he had lived for hundreds of years. The pulverized wreck of this community lay all about him, but he opened its impalpable doors and stepped once more into its warm humanity. He looked at the little child whom he had never seen before and knew him for kin.

His wife nodded. "Yes, it's Louise and Jacques' baby. Louise was expecting him, you know, when the mobilization … he was born just after Jacques went away, in August. We heard Jacques was killed … we have heard everything … that Paris was taken, that London was burned. … I have heard twice that you were killed. Louise believed it, and never got out of bed at all after the baby came. She just turned over and let herself die. I took the baby. Somebody had to. That's the reason I'm here now. 'They' carried off all the women my age unless they had children under three. They thought the baby was mine.'

"But Jacques isn't killed," said Nidart; "he's wounded, with one wooden leg, frantic to see Louise and the baby. … " He made a gesture of blame. "Louise always was a fool! Anybody's a fool to give up!" He looked down at the baby and held out his hand. "Come here, little Jeannot."

The child shrank away silently, burrowing deeper into his foster-mother's skirts.

"He's afraid," she explained. "We've had to make the children afraid so they would keep out of sight, and not break rules. There were so many rules, so many to salute and to bow to, the children couldn't remember; and when they forgot, they were so dreadfully cuffed, or their parents fined such big fines. … "

"I never saluted!" said the boy of ten, wagging his head proudly. "You have to have something on your head to salute, they won't let you do it bareheaded. So I threw my cap in the fire."

"Yes, he's gone bareheaded since the first days, summer and winter, rain and shine," said his mother.

"Here, Jean-Pierre," said his father, wrestling with one of his packages, "I've got a hat for you. I've been saving it for you, lugged it all over because I wanted my boy to have it." He extracted from its brown canvas bag a German helmet with the spike, which he held out. "And I've got something for my little Berthe, too." He fumbled in an inner pocket. "I made it myself, near Verdun. The fellows all thought I was crazy to work over it so, when I didn't know if I'd ever see my little girl again; but I was pretty sure Maman would know how to take care of you, all right." He drew out from a nest of soft rags a roughly carved aluminum ring and slipped it on the child's forefinger.

As the children drew off a little, to compare and examine, their parents looked into each other's eyes, the deep, united, serious look of man and wife before a common problem.

"Eh bien, Paulette," said the man, "what shall we do? Give up? Move away?"

"Oh, Pierre!" cried his wife. "You wouldn't?"

For answer, he shook himself free of his packages and began to undo them, the ax, the hammer, the big package of nails, the saw, the trowel, the paper bags of seeds, the pickax. He spread them out on the clutter of broken bricks, plaster, splintered wood, and looked up at his wife. "That's what I bought on the way here."

His wife nodded. "But have you had your breakfast? You'd better eat something before you begin."

While he ate his bread and munched his cheese, she told him, speaking with a tired dullness, something of what had happened during the years of captivity. It came out just as she thought of it, without sequence, one detail obscuring another. "There wasn't much left inside the house when they finally blew it up. They'd been taking everything little by little. No, they weren't bad to women; they were horrid and rough and they stole everything they could, but they didn't mistreat us, only some of the foolish girls. You know that good-for-nothing family of Boirats, how they'd run after any man. Well, they took to going with the Boches; but any decent woman that kept out of sight as much as she could, no, I wasn't afraid of them much that way, unless they were drunk. Their officers were awfully hard on them about everything—hard! They treated them like dogs. We were sorry for them sometimes."

Yes, this ignorant woman, white and thin and ragged, sitting on the wreck of her home, said this.

"Did you hear how they took every single thing in copper or brass—Grandfather's candlesticks, the andirons, the handles of the clothes-press, the door-knobs, and all, every one of my saucepans and kettles?" Her voice trembled at this item. "The summer after that, it was everything in linen. I had just the chemise I had on my back … even what was on the clothes-line, drying, they took. The American Committee distributed some cotton material and I made a couple for me and Berthe, and some drawers for Jean-Pierre and the baby. That was when we could still get thread. The winter after that, it was woolen they took, everything, especially mattresses. Their officers made them get every single mattress in town, except the straw ones. Alice Bernard's mother, they jerked her mattress right out from under her, and left her lying on the bed-ropes. And M. le Curé, he was sick with pneumonia and they took his, that way, and he died. But the Boches didn't dare not to. Their officers would have shot them if they hadn't."

"I can make beds for you," he said. "There must be trenches somewhere, near,"—she nodded—"they'll have left some wire-netting in an abri. You make a square of wood, and put four legs to it, and stretch the wire-netting over it and put straw on that. But we had some wire-netting of our own that was around the chicken-yard."

"Oh, they took that," she explained—"that, and the doors of the chicken-house, and they pried off our window-cases and door-jambs and carried those off the last days, too … but there was one thing they wouldn't do, no, not even the Boches, and that was this dirty work!" She waved her hand over the destruction about her, and pointed to the trees across the road in the field, all felled accurately at the same angle. "We couldn't understand much of what happened when they were getting ready to leave, but some of them had learned enough French to tell us they wouldn't 'do it'—we didn't know what. They told us they would go away and different troops would come. And Georges Duvalet's boy said they told him that the troops who were to come to 'do it' were criminals out of the prisons that the officers had let out if they would 'do it'—all this time we didn't know what, and somebody said it was to pour oil on us and burn us, the way they did the people in the barn at Vermadderville. But there wasn't anything we could do to prevent it. We couldn't run away. So we stayed, and took care of the children. All the men who could work at all and all the women too, unless they had very little children, were marched away, off north, to Germany, with just what few extra things they could put in a big handkerchief. Annette Cagnon, she was eighteen, and had to go, but her mother stayed with the younger children—her mother has been sort of crazy ever since. She had such a long fainting turn when Annette went by, with a German soldier, we thought we never could bring her to life. … " The rough, tired voice shook a moment, the woman rested her head again on her husband's arm, holding to him tightly. "Pierre, oh Pierre, if we had known what was to come—no, we couldn't have lived through it, not any of us!" He put his great, working-man's hand on her rough hair, gently.

She went on: "And then the troops who had been here did go away and the others came, and they made the few of us who were left go down into the cellars of those old houses down the road. They told us to stay there three days, and if we went out before we'd get shot. We waited for two whole days. The water they had given us was all gone, and then old Granny Arnoux said she was all alone in the world, so it wouldn't make any difference if she did get shot. She wanted to make sure that her house was all right. You know what she thought of her house! So she came up and we waited. And in half an hour we heard her crutches coming back on the road, and she was shrieking out. We ran up to see. She had fallen down in a heap. She hasn't known anything since; shakes all the time as if she were in a chill. She was the first one; she was all alone, when she saw what they had done … and you know … "

Nidart turned very white, and stood up. "God! yes, I know! I was alone!"

"Since then, ten days ago, the French soldiers came through. We didn't know them for sure, we were expecting to see the red trousers. I asked everybody about you, but nobody knew. There are so many soldiers in an army. Then Americans came in cars and brought us bread, and blankets and some shoes, but they have leather soles and I make the children keep them for best, they wear out so. And since then the Government has let the camions that go through to the front, leave bread and meat and once a bag of potatoes for us. The préfet came around and asked if we wanted to be sent to a refugee home in Paris or stay here, and of course I said stay here. The children and I have come every day to work. We've got the plaster and bricks cleared out from the corner of the fireplace, and I cook there, though there isn't any chimney of course, but I think the tiles of the kitchen floor are mostly all there still. And oh, Pierre, we have one corner of the garden almost cleared, and the asparagus is coming up! Come and see! They cut down everything they could see, even the lilac bushes, but what was in the ground, alive, they couldn't kill."

Nidart put the shovel in his wife's hand, and took up the pickax. "Time spent in traveling isn't counted on furloughs," he said, "so we have twenty-one days, counting to-day. The garden first, so's to get in the seeds."

They clambered over the infernal disorder of the ruins of the house, and picked their way down and back into what had been the garden. A few sections of the wall were still standing, its thick solidity resisting even dynamite petards.

"Oh, see, almost all of the pleached trees are saved!" cried Nidart, astonished, "that part of the wall didn't fall."

"I'm not sure I pruned those right," said his wife doubtfully, glancing at them. "I couldn't remember whether you left two or four buds on the peaches, and I just gave up on the big grapevine. It grew so, it got all ahead of me!"

"Did they bear well?" asked the man, looking across the trash heap at the well-remembered trees and vines. "We'd better leave those till some odd time, they won't need much care. I can do them between other things some time when I'm too tired to do anything else. Here is where the big job is." He looked the ground over with a calculating eye and announced his plan of campaign.

"We won't try to carry the rubbish out. It's too heavy for you, and my time has got to go as far as it can for the important things. We'll just pile it all up in a line along the line where the walls used to stand. All of us know that line! I'll use the pickax, and Maman the shovel. Jean-Pierre will throw the bigger pieces over on the line, and Berthe will go after and pick up the littler ones."

They set to work, silently, intensely. When they reached the currant-bushes, all laid low, Pierre gave a growl of wrath and scorn, but none of them slackened their efforts. About eleven the big convoy of camions on the way to the front came through, lurching along the improvised road laid out across the fields. The workers, lifting their eyes for the first time from their labors, saw at a distance on the main road the advance guard of the road-menders already there, elderly soldiers, gray-haired territorials, with rakes and shovels, and back of them, shuttle-like, the big trucks with road-metal coming and going.

Reluctantly leaving her work, Paulette went to get the supplies for dinner, and started an open-air fire in the cleared-out corner of the chimney. Over this she hung a big pot, and leaving it to boil she hurried back to her shovel. "The soup-kettle and the flat-irons," she told her husband, "they were too hard to break and too heavy to carry away, and they are about all that's left of what was in the house."

"No, I found an iron fork," said Berthe, "but it was all twisted. Jean-Pierre said he thought he could … "

"Don't talk," said their father firmly—"you don't work so fast when you talk."

At noon they went back to the fire burning under the open sky, in the blackened corner of the fireplace where it had cooked the food during the years past. The man looked at it strangely, and turned his eyes away.

"Now where is your fork, little Berthe?" he said. "I'll straighten it for you. With that and my kit … "

"I have my jackknife too," said Jean-Pierre.

They ate thus, dipping up the stew in the soldier's gamelle, using his knife and fork and spoon and the straightened iron fork. The baby was fed on bread soaked in the gravy, and on bits of potato given him from the end of a whittled stick. In the twenty minutes' rest which their captain allowed the little force after the meal, he and Jean-Pierre whittled out two wooden forks, two-tined, from willow twigs. "That's one apiece now," said Nidart, "and the asparagus bed is all cleared off. We have made a beginning."

They went back to work, stooping, straining, heaving, blinded with the flying plaster, wounded with the sharp edges of the shattered stones. The sun shone down on them with heavenly friendliness, the light, sparkling air lifted the hair from their hot foreheads. After a time, Nidart, stopping for an instant to wipe away the sweat which ran down into his eyes, said: "The air has a different feel to it here. And the sun looks different. It looks like home."

At four they stopped to munch the piece of bread which is the supplementary meal of French working-people at that hour. Nidart embellished it with a slice of cheese for each, which made the meal a feast. They talked as they ate; they began to try to bridge over the gap between them. But they lacked words to tell what lay back of them; only the dry facts came out.

"Yes, I've been wounded, there's a place on my thigh, here, put your hand and feel, where there isn't any flesh over the bone, just skin. It doesn't bother me much, except when I try to climb a ladder. Something about that position I can't manage … and for a mason … "

"I'll climb the ladders," said Jean-Pierre.

"Yes, I was pretty sick. It got gangrene some. They thought I wouldn't live. I was first in a big hospital near the front, and then in a convalescent hospital in Paris. It was awfully dull when I got better. They thought if I had made an application to be réformé and retired I could be like Jacques Dupré with his wooden leg. But with you and the children here … what could I have done with myself? So I didn't say anything, and when my time was up in the hospital I went back to the trenches. That was a year ago last winter."

"Berthe and Jean-Pierre had the mumps that winter," said their mother. "The baby didn't get it. I kept him away from them. The Boches shut us up as though we had the smallpox. They were terribly strict about any sickness. The Boche regimental doctor came every day. He took very good care of them."

"He wanted to give me a doll because I didn't cry when he looked in my throat," said Berthe.

"Of course she didn't take it," said Jean-Pierre. "I told her I'd break it all to pieces if she did."

"But she cried afterwards."

"Come," said the father, "we've finished our bread. Back to work."

That night, after the children were asleep on straw in the cellar down the road, their parents came back to wander about in the moonlight over their ravaged little kingdom. The wife said little, drawing her breath irregularly, keeping a strained grasp on her husband's arm. For the most part he succeeded in speaking in a steady voice of material plans for the future—how he could get some galvanized roofing out of the nearest trench abri; how he could use the trunks of the felled trees to strengthen his hastily constructed brick walls, and for roof-beams; what they could plant in the garden and the field—things which she and the children could cultivate after he had gone back.

At this reminder of the inevitable farewell again before them, the wife broke out in loud wailings, shivering, clutching at him wildly. He drew her down on a pile of rubbish, put his arms around her, and said in a peremptory tone: "Paulette! Listen! You are letting the Boches beat you!" He used to her the tone he used for his squad, his new soldier's voice which the war had taught him, the tone which carried the laggards up over the top. At the steel-like ring of it his wife was silent.

He went on: "There's nothing any of us can do but to go on. The only thing to do is to go on without making a fuss. That's the motto in the army, you know. Don't make a fuss." He lifted his head and looked around at his home dismantled, annihilated. "Not to give up—that and the flat-irons are about all the Boches have left us, don't you see?"

He was silent a moment and went on with his constructive planning. "Perhaps I can get enough lime sent on from Noyon to really rebuild the chimney. With that, and a roof, and the garden, and the allocation from the Government … "

"Yes, Pierre," said his wife in a trembling voice. She did not weep again.

He himself, however, was not always at this pitch of stoicism. There were times when he looked up suddenly and felt, as though for the first time, the downfall and destruction of all that had been his life. At such moments the wind of madness blew near him. The night after they had moved from the cellar into the half-roofed, half-walled hut, to sleep there on the makeshift beds, he lay all night awake, crushed with the immensity of the effort they would need to put forth and with the insignificance of any progress made. There came before him the long catalogue of what they had lost, the little decencies and comforts they had earned and paid for and owned. He sickened at the squalid expedients of their present life. They were living like savages; never again would they attain the self-respecting order which had been ravished from them, which the ravishers still enjoyed. With all his conscious self he longed to give up he struggle, but something more than his conscious self was at work. The tree had been cut down, but something was in the ground, alive.