Читать книгу Wounded Souls - Philip Gibbs - Страница 7

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I had the luck to be billeted in Lille at the house of Madame Chéri, in the rue Esquermoise.

This lady was the mother of the girl with the pig-tail and the two children with whom Wickham Brand had made friends on this morning of liberation—the wife of that military officer whom Pierre Nesle had known at Verdun and knew to be killed. It was my luck, because there were children in the house—the pig-tailed girl, Hélène, was more a woman than a child, though only sixteen—and I craved for a touch of home-life and children’s company, after so long an exile in the war-zone always among men who talked of war, thought of it, dreamed of it, year in, year out.

Madame Chéri was, I thought when I saw her first, a beautiful woman, not physically—because she was too white and worn—but spiritually, in courage of soul. Pierre Nesle, our liaison officer, told me how she had received the news of her husband’s death—unflinchingly, without a cry. She knew, she said, in her heart, that he was dead. Some queer message had reached her one night during the Verdun battles. It was no ghost, or voice, but only a sudden cold conviction that her man had been killed. For the children’s sake she had pretended that their father might come back. It gave them something to look forward to. The little ones were always harping on the hope that when peace came this mysterious and glorious man whom they remembered only vaguely as one who had played bears with them, and had been the provider of all good things, would return with rich presents from Paris—tin soldiers, Queen-dolls, mechanical toys. Hélène, the elder girl, was different. She had looked curiously at her mother when the children prattled like that, and Madame Chéri had pretended to believe in the father’s home-coming. Once or twice the girl had said, “Papa may be killed,” in a matter-of-fact way. Yet she had been his devoted comrade. They had been such lovers, the father and daughter, that sometimes the mother had been a little jealous, so she said in her frank way to Pierre Nesle, smiling as she spoke. The war had made Hélène a realist, like most French girls to whom the idea of death became commonplace, almost inevitable, as the ceaseless slaughter of men went on. The German losses had taught them that.

I had the Colonel’s dressing-room—he had attained the grade of Colonel before Verdun, so Pierre told me—and Madame Chéri came in while I was there to see that it was properly arranged for me. Over his iron bedstead (the Germans had taken the woollen mattress, so that it had been replaced by bags of straw) was his portrait as a lieutenant of artillery, as he had been at the time of his marriage. He was a handsome fellow, rather like Hélène, with her delicate profile and brown eyes, though more like, said Madame Chéri, their eldest boy Edouard.

“Where is he?” I asked, and that was the only time I saw Madame Chéri break down, utterly.

She began to tell me that Edouard had been taken away by the Germans among all the able-bodied men and boys who were sent away from Lille for digging trenches behind the lines, in Easter of ’16, and that he had gone bravely, with his little pack of clothes over his shoulder, saying, “It is nothing, maman. My Father taught me the word courage. In a little while we shall win, and I shall be back. Courage, courage!”

Madame Chéri repeated her son’s words proudly, so that I seemed to see the boy with that pack on his shoulder, and a smile on his face. Then suddenly she wept bitterly, wildly, her body shaken with a kind of ague, while she sat on the iron bedstead with her face in her hands.

I repeated the boy’s words.

“Courage, courage, madame!”

Proudly she wailed out in broken sentences:

“He was such a child!... He caught cold so easily!... He was so delicate!... He needed mother-love so much!... For two years no word has come from him!”

In a little while she controlled herself and begged me to excuse her. We went down together to the dining-room, where the children were playing, and Hélène was reading; and she insisted upon my drinking a glass of wine from the store which she had kept hidden from the Germans in a pit which Edouard had dug in the garden, in the first days of the occupation. The children were delighted with that trick and roared with laughter.

Hélène, with a curl of her lip, spoke bitterly.

“The Boche is a stupid animal. One can dupe him easily.”

“Not always easily,” said Madame Chéri. She opened a secret cupboard behind a bookcase standing against the panelled wall.

“I hid all my brass and copper here. A German police officer came and said, ‘Have you hidden any copper, madame?’ I said, ‘There is nothing hidden.’ ‘Do you swear it?’ he asked. ‘I swear it,’ I answered very haughtily. He went straight to the bookcase, pushed it on one side, tapped the wall, and opened the secret cupboard, which was stuffed full of brass and copper. ‘You are a liar, madame,’ he said, ‘like all Frenchwomen.’ ‘And you are an insolent pig, like all Germans,’ I remarked. That cost me a fine of ten thousand francs.”

Madame Chéri saw nothing wrong in swearing falsely to a German. I think she held that nothing was wrong to deceive or to destroy any individual of the German race, and I could understand her point of view when Pierre Nesle told me of one thing that had happened which she never told to me. It was about Hélène.

A German captain was billeted in the house. They ignored his presence, though he tried to ingratiate himself. Hélène hated him with a cold and deadly hatred. She trembled if he passed her on the stairs. His presence in the house, even if she did not see him, but only heard him move in his room, made her feel ill. Yet he was very polite to her and said, “Guten Tag, gnädiges Fräulein” whenever they met. To Edouard also he was courteous and smiling, though Edouard was sullen. He was a stout little man with a round rosy face and little bright eyes behind big black-rimmed glasses, an officer in the Kommandantur, and formerly a schoolmaster. Madame Chéri was polite to him but cold, cold as ice. After some months she found him harmless, though objectionable because German. It did not seem dangerous to leave him in the house one evening when she went to visit a dying friend—Madame Vailly. She was later than she meant to be—so late that she was liable to arrest by the military police if they saw her slip past in the darkness of the unlit streets. When she came home she slipped the latch-key into the door and went quietly into the hall. The children would be in bed and asleep. At the foot of the stairs a noise startled her. It was a curious creaking, shaking noise as of a door being pushed by some heavy weight, then banged by it. It was the door at the top of the stairs, on the left. Hélène’s room.

“Qu’est-ce que tu fais là?” said Madame Chéri.

She was very frightened with some unknown fear, and held tight to the bannister, as she went upstairs. There was a glimmer of light on the landing. It was from a candle which had almost burnt out, and was guttering in a candlestick placed on the topmost stair. A grotesque figure was revealed by the light—Schwarz, the German officer, in his pyjamas, with a helmet on his head and unlaced boots on his feet. The loose fat of the man no longer girded by a belt made him look like a mass of jelly, as he had his shoulder to the door, shoving and grunting as he tried to force it open. He was swearing to himself in German, and now and then called out softly in French, in a kind of drunken German-French:

“Ouvrez, kleines Mädchen, ma jolie Schatz. Ouvrez donc.”

Madame Chéri was paralysed for a moment by a shock of horror; quite speechless and motionless. Then suddenly she moved forward and spoke in a fierce whisper.

“What are you doing, beast?”

Schwarz gave a queer snort of alarm.

He stood swaying a little, with the helmet on the back of his head. The candlelight gleamed on its golden eagle. His face was hotly flushed, and there was a ferocious look in his eyes. Madame Chéri saw that he was drunk.

He spoke to her in horrible French, so Pierre Nesle told me, imitating it savagely, as Madame Chéri had done to him. The man was filthily drunk and declared that he loved Hélène and would kill her if she did not let him love her. Why did she lock her door like that? He had been kind to her. He had smiled at her. A German officer was a human being, not a monster. Why did they treat him as a monster, draw themselves away when he passed, become silent when he wished to speak with them, stare at him with hate in their eyes? The French people were all devils, proud as devils.

Another figure stood on the landing. It was Edouard—a tall, slim figure with a white face and burning eyes, in which there was a look of fury.

“What is happening, maman?” he said coldly. “What does this animal want?”

Madame Chéri trembled with a new fear. If the boy were to kill that man, he would be shot. She had a vision of him standing against a wall....

“It is nothing,” she said. “This gentleman is ill. Go back to bed, Edouard. I command you.”

The German laughed, stupidly.

“To bed, shafskopf. I am going to open your sister’s door. She loves me. She calls to me. I hear her whisper, ‘Ich liebe dich!’”

Edouard had a stick in his hand. It was a heavy walking-stick which had belonged to his father. Without a word he sprang forward, raised his weapon, and smashed it down on the German’s head. It knocked off Schwarz’s helmet, which rolled from the top to the bottom of the staircase, and hit the man a glancing blow on the temple. He fell like a log. Edouard smiled and said, “Très bien.” Then he rattled the lock of his sister’s door and called out to her:

“Hélène.... Have no fear. He is dead. I have killed him.”

It was then that Madame Chéri had her greatest fear. There was no sound from Hélène. She did not answer any of their cries. She did not open the door to them. They tried to force the lock, as Schwarz had done, but though the lock gave at last the door would not open, kept closed by some barricade behind it. Edouard and his mother went out into the yard and the boy climbed up to his sister’s window and broke the glass to go through. Hélène was lying in her nightdress on the bedroom floor, unconscious. She had moved a heavy wardrobe in front of the door, by some supernatural strength which came from fear. Then she had fainted. To his deep regret Edouard had not killed the German.

Schwarz had crawled back to his bedroom when they went back into the house, and next morning wept to Madame Chéri, and implored forgiveness. There had been a little banquet, he said, and he had drunk too much.

Madame Chéri did not forgive. She called at the Kommandantur where the General saw her, and listened to her gravely. He did not waste words.

“The matter will be attended to,” he said.

Captain Schwarz departed that day from the house in the rue Esquermoise. He was sent to a battalion in the line and was killed somewhere near Ypres.