Читать книгу Round about Bar-le-Duc - Susanne R. Day - Страница 9

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SETTLING-IN

Our first duty on arriving in the town was to go to the Bureau de Police and ask for a permis de séjour. We understood that without it there would be short shrift and a shorter journey into a world which has not yet been surveyed. So we sallied forth to the Bureau at break of day, and there we interviewed an old grognard—the only really grumpy person I met in France—who scowled at us and scolded us and called the devil to witness that these English names are barbarous, the chatter of monkeys, unintelligible to any civilised ear. We soothed him with shaking knees; suppose he refused us permission to reside in the town? And presently he melted. He never really liquified, you know, there was always a crust; but once or twice on subsequent occasions a drop, just a teeny, weeny drop of the milk of human kindness oozed through. He demanded our photographs, and when he saw my "finished-while-you-wait" his belief in our Simian ancestry took indestructible form. The number of my photographs now scattered over France on imposing documents is incalculable, and the number of times I have had to howl my age into unsympathetic ears so great that all my natural modesty in dealing with so delicate a subject has wilted away.

The grognard dismissed us at length, feeling like the worm that perisheth, and a fortnight or so later presented us with our permis de séjour (which warned us that any infringement of its regulations would expose us to immediate arrest as spies), and with an esoteric document called an Extrait du Registre d'Immatriculation whose purpose in history we were never able to determine. No one ever asked to see it, no one ever asked to see our permis de séjour, in fact the gendarmes of the town showed a reprehensible lack of interest in our proceedings.

In addition to these we were provided as time went on with a carte d'identité, a permission to circulate on a bicycle in districts specified, a permission to take photographs not of military interest, and later on with a carnet d'étranger which gripped us in a tight fist, kept us at the end of a very short chain, and made us rue the day we were born. And of course we had our passports as well.

Not being a cyclist, I used that particular permission when tramping on the Sabbath beyond the confines of the town. Once a bright military star tried to stop some one who followed my example. "It is a permission to cycle. You are on foot," he argued.

"But the bicycle could not get here without me," she replied, and her merciless logic dimmed his light.

As for me, I carried all my papers on all occasions that took me past a sentry. It offended my freeborn British independence to be held up by a blue-coated creature with a bayonet in his hand on a road that I choose to grace with my presence, and so I took a mild revenge. The stoutest sentry quailed before such evidence of rectitude, and indeed we secretly believed that sheer curiosity prompted many a "Halte-là."

Once as I trudged a road far from Bar two gorgeous individuals mounted on prancing chargers swept past me. A moment later they drew rein, and with those eyes of seventh sense that are at the back of every woman's head I knew they were studying my retreating form. A lunatic or a spy? Surely only one or the other would wear that grey dress. A shout, "Holà." I marched on. If French military police wish to accost me they must observe at least a measure of propriety. Again the "Holà." My shoulders crinkled. Would a bullet whiz between? A thunder of galloping hoofs, a horse racing by in a cloud of dust, a swirl and a gendarme majestically barring the way.

"Where are you going, Madame?"

Stifling a desire to ask what business it was of his, I replied suavely—

"To Bar-le-Duc."

"Bar-le-Duc? But it is miles from here."

"Eh bien? What of it? On se promene."

"I must ask to see your papers."

Out they all came, a goodly bunch. He took them, appalled. He fingered them; he stared.

"Madame is English?"

"But certainly? What did Monsieur suppose?"

The papers are thrust into my hand, he salutes, flicks his horse with a spur, and I am alone on the undulating road with the woods just touched by spring's soft wing, spreading all about me.

But this happened when sentries and bayonets had lost their terror. There were days when we treated them with more respect. Familiarity breeds contempt—when one knows that the bayonet is not sharpened.

Our papers in order, our heads no longer wobbling on our shoulders, our next duty was to call on the élite of the town. In France you don't wait to be called upon, you call. It was nerve-racking work for two miserable foreigners, one of whom had almost no French, while that of the other abjectly deserted her in moments of perturbation. But we survived it, perhaps because every one was out. Only at Madame B.'s did we find people at home, and she—how she must have sighed when we departed! We all laboured heavily in the vineyard, but fright, shyness, the barrier of language prevented us—on that day at least—from gathering much fruit. Exhausted, humbled to the dust, thinking of all the brilliant things we might have said if only we could have taken the invaluable Bellows with us, we crawled home to seek comfort in a brioche de Lorraine and a cup of China tea which we had to make for ourselves, as "Madame" had not yet learned the method. In fact there were many things she had not learned, and one of them was what the English understand by the word rubbish. It was a subject on which for many a day her views and ours unhappily rarely coincided. Once we caught her in the Common-room, casting baleful eyes on cherished treasures.

"Do you wish that I shall throw away these ordures, Mademoiselle?" she asked.

Ordures! Ye gods! A bucketful of gladioli and stocks and all sorts of delicious things gathered in the curé's garden at Naives, and she called them ordures. With a shriek we fell upon her and her broom. Did she not know they were flowers? What devil of ignorance possessed her that she should call them rubbish?

"Flowers! bien entendu, but what does one want with flowers in a sitting-room? The petals fall, they are des ordures." Again the insulting word.

"Don't you like flowers, Madame?" we asked, and she turned resigned eyes to ours. These English! Perhaps the good God who made them understood them, but as for her, Odille Drouet ... With a shrug she consigned us to the limbo of the inscrutable. A garden was the place for flowers, why should we bring them into the house?

French logic. Why, indeed?

Madame never understood us, but I think she grew to tolerate us in the end, and perhaps even to like us a little for our own queer sakes. Once, when she had been with us for a few weeks, she exclaimed so bitterly, "I wish I had never seen the English," we wondered what we could possibly have done to offend her. Agitated inquiries relieved our minds. We were merely a disagreeable incident of the war. If the Germans had not pillaged France we would not have come to Bar-le-Duc. Cause and effect linked us with the Boche in her mind, and I think she never looked at us without seeing the Crown Prince leering over our shoulder.

A woman of strange passivity of temper, a fatalist—like so many of her countrymen—she had a face that Botticelli would have worshipped. Masses of dark hair exquisitely neat were coiled on her head (why, oh why, do our English women wear hats? Is not half a French woman's attraction in the simple dignity of the uncovered head? I never realised the vulgarising properties of hat till I lived in France), her eyes were dark, her brows delicately pencilled, her features regular. Gentleness, resignation, patience were all we saw in her. She had one of the saddest faces I have ever seen.

No doubt she had good reason to be sad. Her husband, a well-to-do farmer, died of consumption in the years before the war, and she who now cooked and scrubbed and dusted and tidied for us once drove her own buggy, once ruled a comfortable house and superintended the vagaries of three servants. In her fine old cupboards were stores of handspun linen sheets, sixty pairs at least, and ten or twelve dozen handspun, handmade chemises. Six lits montés testified to the luxury of her home; on the walls hung rare pottery, Lunéville, Sarréguemin and the like.

A lit monté is a definite sign of affluence, and well it may be so. The French understand at least two things thoroughly—sauces and beds. Incidentally I believe that the French woman does not exist who cannot make a good omelette. I saw one made once in five minutes over a smoky wood fire, the pan poised scientifically on two or three crosswise sticks. An English woman cooking on such an altar would have offered us an imitation of chamois leather, charred, toughened and impregnated with smoke. Madame the wife of the Mayor of Vavincourt offered us—dare I describe it? Perhaps one day I shall write a sonnet to that omelette; it must not be dishonoured in prose.

Yes, the French can cook, and they can make beds, and unless you have stretched your wearied limbs in a real lit monté, unless you have sunk fathoms deep in its downy nest and have felt the light, exquisite warmth of the duvet steal through your limbs, you have never known what comfort is.

You gaze at it with awe when you see it first, wondering how you are to get in. I know women who had to climb upon a chair every night in order to scale the feathery heights. For my own part, being long of limb, I found a flying leap the most graceful means of access, but there are connoisseurs who recommend a short ladder.

Piled on the top of a palliasse and a mattress are a huge bed of feathers, spotless sheets, a single blanket, a coverlet, and then the crimson silk-covered duvet, over which is spread a canopy of lace. The cost must be fabulous, though oddly enough no one ever mentioned a probable price. But no refugee can speak of her lost lits montés without tears.

Madame had six of them, and cattle in her byre, and horses in her stable, and all the costly implements of a well-stocked farm. Yet for months she lived with her little girl, her father, and her mother in a single room in the Place de la Halle, a dark, narrow, grimy room that no soap and water could clean. Her bed was a sack of straw laid upon the ground, and—until the Society provided them—she had no sheets, no pillow-cases, indeed I doubt if she even had a pillow. Her farm is razed to the ground, and no doubt some fat unimaginative sausage-filled Hausfrau sleeps under her sheets and cuddles contentedly under her duvet o' nights.

The little party of four were six weeks on the road to Bar from that farm beyond Montfaucon, and during the whole time they never ate hot food and rarely cooked food. No wonder Madame seldom laughed— those weeks of haunting fear and present misery were never forgotten—no wonder it was months before we shook her out of her settled apathy and saw some life, some animation grow again in her quiet face.

If sometimes we felt inclined to shake her for other reasons than those of humanity her caution was to blame. Never did she commit herself. To every question inviting an opinion she returned the same exasperating reply, "C'est comme vous voulez, Mademoiselle." I believe if we had asked her to buy antelopes' tongues and kangaroos' tails for dinner she would have replied equably, tonelessly, "C'est comme vous voulez."

Whether the point at issue was a warm winter jacket, or a table, or a holiday on the Sabbath, or cabbage for dinner, the answer was always the same. Once in a moment of excitement—but this was when she had got used to us, and found we were not so awful as we looked—she exclaimed, "Oh, mais taisez-vous, Mademoiselle," and we felt as if an earthquake had riven the town.

Later she developed a quiet humour, but she always remained aloof. Unlike Madame Philipot who succeeded her, she never showed the least interest in the refugees who besieged our door. "C'est une dame." The head insinuated through the door would be withdrawn and we left to the joys of conjecture. The "lady" might be that ragged villain from the rue Phulpin, wife of a shepherd, a drunken dissolute vagabond who pawned her all for liquor, or it might be Madame B., while "C'est un Monsieur" might conceal a General of Division, or the Service de Ville claiming two francs for delivery of a parcel, in its cryptic folds.

She had no curiosity, vulgar or intellectual, that we could discover. She was invariably patient, sweet-tempered, gentle of voice, courteous of phrase. She came to her work punctually at seven; going home, unless cataclysms happened, at twelve. If the cataclysms did occur, even through no fault of our own, we felt as guilty as if we had murdered babies in their sleep, Madame being an orderly soul who detested irregularity. And punctually at half-past four she would come back again, cook the dinner, wash up la vaisselle and quietly disappear at eight.

The manner of her going was characteristic.

French women seem to have a horror of being out alone after dark (perhaps they have excellent reason for it, they know their countrymen better than I do), and Madame was no exception to the rule. Perhaps she was merely bowing her head to national code, the rigid comme il faut, perhaps it was a question of temperament. Anyway the fact emerged, Madame would not walk home alone. Who, then, should accompany her? Her parents were old and nearly bedridden, she had no husband, brother, or friend. The crazy English who careered about at all hours of the day and night? We had our work to do.

Juliana was ordered to fetch her. This savouring of adventure and responsibility fell in with Juliana's mood. She consented. Now she was her mother's younger daughter and her age was twelve. Can you understand the psychology of it? This is how I read it. A child was safe on the soldier-frequented road, a mother with her child would not be intercepted, but a good-looking woman alone—well, as the French say, that was quite another paire de bottines.

What would have happened had Juliana declined the honour, I simply dare not conjecture. For that damsel did precisely as she pleased. Her mother's passivity, fatalism, call it what you will, was the mainspring of all her relations with her children. "Que voulez-vous? She wishes it." Or quite simply, "Juliana does not wish it," closed the door against all remonstrance. Madame was a strong-willed woman, she never yielded an iota to us, but her children ruled. When the elder girl, aged fourteen and well-placed with a good family in Paris, came to Bar for a fortnight and then refused to go back, Madame shrugged. Some one in Paris may have been, indeed was, seriously inconvenienced, but "Que voulez-vous?"

"Don't you wish her to go back, Madame?"

"But certainly. What should she do here? It is not fit for a young girl, but que voul——" We fled.

Parental authority seems to be a negligible quantity in France. So far as I could see children did very much as they liked, and were often spoiled to the verge of objectionableness. Yet the steadfastness, courage, thoughtfulness and whole-souled sanity of many a young girl—or a child—would put older and wiser heads to shame.

A puzzling people, these French, who refute to-morrow nearly every opinion they tempt you to formulate about them to-day.

If English women struggling with "chars" and "generals" knew the value of a French femme de ménage there would be a stampede across the Channel in search of her. She does your marketing much more cheaply than you could do it yourself, she keeps her accounts neatly, she is punctual, scrupulously honest, dependable and trustworthy. She may not be clean with British cleanness, her dusting may be superficial (her own phrase, "passer un torchon," aptly describes it), but she understands comfort, and in nearly twenty months' experience of her I never knew a dinner spoiled or a dish unpalatably served.

Of course it is arguable that Madame was not a femme de ménage, nor of the servant class at all. Granted! But there were others. There was the bonne à tout faire (general servant) of the old curé at N. who ruled him with a rod of iron and cooked him dinners fit for a king. And there was Eugénie, the Abbé B.'s Eugénie, who, loving him with a dog-like devotion, was his counsellor and his friend. She corrected him for his good when she thought he needed it, but she mothered and cared for him in his exile from his loved village—French trenches run through it to-day—as only a single-minded woman could.

Yes, Madame—whether ours or some one else's—is a treasure, and we guarded ours as the apple of our eye. There were moments when we positively cringed before her, so afraid were we that she might leave us; for she hated cooking, hers having always been the life of the fields, and though no self-respecting Frenchwoman regards herself as a servant or as a menial, there must have been many hours when the cruelty of her position bit deep. Nevertheless she bore with us for a year, and then the air raids began. And the air raids shattered the nerves of Juliana—a brave little soul, but delicate (we feared tainted with her father's malady); and flight in the night to the nearest cellar, unfortunately some distance away, brought the shadow of Death too close to the home. So the elders counselled flight. Juliana begged to be taken away. Madame wished to remain. The matter hung in uncertainty for some days, then eight alarms and two raids in twenty-four hours settled it.

The alarms began on Friday morning; on Saturday Madame told us that the old people would stay in Bar no longer and she had applied for the necessary papers. They were going south to the Ain on the morrow. Not a word of regret or apology for leaving us at a moment's notice, or for giving us no time in which to replace her. Why apologise since she could neither alter nor prevent? She went through no wish of her own, went at midday, just walked out as she had done every day for a year, but came back next morning to say good-bye and ask us to store some odds and ends. When she had a settled address would we send them on?

So she went away, and our memory of her is of one who never fought circumstances, never wrestled with Fate. When the storms beat upon her, when rude winds blew, she bowed her head and allowed them to carry her where they listed. I think the spring of her life must have broken on that August day when she turned her cattle out on the fields and, closing the door behind her, walked out of her house for ever.