The Little French Girl
PART I

CHAPTER I

A clock struck eight, a loud yet distant clock. The strokes, Alix thought, seemed to glide downwards rather than to fall through the fog and tumult of the station, and, counting them as they emerged, they were so slow and heavy that they made her think of tawny drones pushing their way forth from among the thickets of hot thyme in the jardin potager at Montarel. Sitting straightly in her corner of the Victoria waiting-room, the little French girl fixed her mind upon the picture thus evoked so that she should not feel too sharply the alarming meaning of the hour, and seemed again to watch the blunt, sagacious faces of the drones as they paused in sulky deliberation on the tip of a spray before launching themselves into the sunlight. What could be more unlike Montarel than this cold and paltry scene? What more unlike that air, tranced with sunlight and silence, than this dense atmosphere? Yet the heavy, gliding notes brought back the drones so vividly that she found herself again in the high-terraced garden under the sun-baked old château. The magnolia-trees ate into the crumbling walls and opened lemon-scented cups beneath her as she leaned her arms on the hot stone and looked across the visionary plains to the Alps on the horizon, blue, impalpable, less substantial to the sight than the clouds that sailed in grandiose snowy fleets above them. Alix had always felt that it was like taking great breaths to see the plains and like spreading immense wings to see the mountains, and something of invulnerable dignity, of inaccessible remoteness in her demeanour as she sat there might well have been derived from generations who had lived and died in the presence of natural sublimities. Her brows were contemplative, her lips proud. She was evidently a foreigner, a creature nurtured in climes golden yet austere and springing from an aromatic, rocky soil. The pallor of her extreme fatigue could not efface the sunny tones of her skin; her hair was the blacker for its bronzed lights, and if her eyes were blue, it was not the English blue of a water-side forget-me-not, but the dense, impalpable blue of the Alps seen across great distances.

Two women, pausing on their way out to look at her, drew her mind back from Montarel. She knew that she might look younger than her years. Her bobbed hair was cut straight across her forehead and her skirt displayed a childish length of leg. It was no wonder that, seeing her there, alone, they should speak of her with curiosity, perhaps with solicitude; for there was kindness in their eyes. But she did not like pity, and, drawing herself up more straightly, wrapping her arms in the scarf that muffled her shoulders, she fixed her eyes blankly above their heads until they had passed on. They were kind women; but very ugly. Like jugs. All the people that she had seen since landing on this day of grey and purple flesh-tones had made her think of the earthenware jugs that old Marthe used to range along her upper shelves in the little dark shop that stood on the turn of the road leading down from the château to the village. Their eyes were joyless yet untragic. Their clothes expressed no enterprise. She did not think that they could feel ecstasy, ever, or despair. Yet they were the people of Captain Owen, and she could not be really forgotten, for Captain Owen’s family were to come for her. It was only some mistake; but more than the strokes of the clock the women’s eyes had made her feel how late it was, how young she was, and how hungry.

Maman’s déjeuner, the long buttered petits pains with ham in them, she had eaten on the boat; and, far away, seen across the leaden waters of the November channel, was the bright petit déjeuner, in Paris that morning, and Maman before the wood fire, her beauty still clouded by sleep, sweet, sombre, and gay as only she could be, her russet locks tossed back and her white arms bare in the white woollen peignoir. “They will, I know, be good to my darling,” Maman had said, buttering her roll while Albertine brought in the coffee, “and keep her warm and well-fed through this hard winter.” Firmness and resource breathed from Maman. She knew what she was doing and Alix saw herself powerless in her hands. Yet she could read her, too. Even though she could not always interpret the words, she could always read Maman, and the meaning, as it were, of the sentence would come to her in a feeling rather than in an idea. She had felt that morning that Maman’s heart was not at ease. It was true that the Armistice had been signed but the other day, that the war was hardly over, and that everything would be more expensive than ever. It was true that she was going to friends, though to unknown friends; to the family of their dear Captain Owen, killed in battle only nine months ago. He had so often said that they must know his family, and it had been his mother who had written so kindly to say that Giles would meet her. But if all this were so natural, why had she felt that touch of artifice in Maman’s manner, that resource in her so many reasons? Perhaps they did not really want her. And perhaps there was some mistake and they did not expect her to-night. If no one came, what was she to do? She had only five shillings in her purse. The porter had placed her little box and her dressing-case on the seat beside her, and if no one came was she to sit on here all night, in the waiting-room, this horrid feeling, half hunger, half fear, gnawing at the pit of her stomach? “Dieu, que j’ai faim!” she thought; and as she now leaned back her head and closed her eyes, the sadness that flowed into her carried her far back to Montarel again and it was Grand-père that she saw, passing under the pollarded lime-trees with his dragging footsteps and looking down on the ground as he went, with no eyes for the climbing vineyards, no eyes for the plains, the river, the Alps; his short white beard and jutting nose giving him still the air of a commandant, high on his fortress; but so old, so ill, so poor and so despairing.

The dappled shadows of the limes lay brightly blue at his feet. His bleached hands were clasped behind him on his stick. He wore a black silk skull-cap and a white silk handkerchief was knotted around his neck. It had always frightened her a little to see Grand-père, and it frightened her now to remember him, the commandant, defeated, broken; yet still with that sombre fire smouldering in his eyes. “Tout-à-fait une tête de Port-Royal,” she had heard someone say of him once; and so a devout noble of the time of Louis Quatorze might have looked. Only she did not see Grand-père as appeased, withdrawn from the world and its illusions; he brooded, rather, in bitterness upon them. He minded everything so terribly.

She remembered as if it were yesterday the dreadful summer afternoon when the bell had clanged hoarsely in the courtyard, and Mélanie, wiping her steaming arms on her apron, had come clapping in her savates across the paving-stones to let in the opulent gentleman who had arrived in his motor to take away the Clouets. That was the day that had revealed to her what Grand-père’s poverty must be. He had sold the Clouets at last; after selling so many things. The great gaunt salles, the little panelled salons, the rows of incommodious bedrooms, looking, from high up, over the plains, all were empty; and the Clouets now were to go.

With a child’s awed heart, half comprehending, Alix had followed Mélanie and the stranger, up the winding staircase in the turret—Mélanie took him by that circuitous route so that Grand-père should catch no glimpse of him; along the chill stone passages, to the little room where she and Grand-père sat and read in the evenings. The lit de repos stood there, draped in its tattered brocades, dignified and irrelevant, for no one ever thought of lying down on it; and Grand-père’s old bergère, and her tabouret drawn up to the table before her histories. And there, upon the sea-green panelled walls, the silvery Clouets hung, Mouverays among them; frigidly smiling in their ruffs.

Mélanie, mute, grim, inscrutable, helped the gentleman from Paris to take them down, one by one, and wrap them up and carry them across the courtyard to the waiting car: and Alix had watched it all, knowing that a final disaster had fallen upon her house.

But poverty had not been the only reason for Grand-père’s bitterness. Even when he sat to watch her and Marie-Jeanne, his hands folded on his stick, quiet and at peace in the evening air as it might have seemed, she was aware of the bitterness brooding there, unappeased, at the bottom of the deep, considering look bent upon them. There had been no time to think about it while she played with Marie-Jeanne. Marie-Jeanne was the blacksmith’s daughter and there had been many happy days with her at Montarel. Marie-Jeanne had black eyes and her pig-tails were tied together with red tape and plaited so tightly that they surrounded her shrewd little face with a wiry circle. They brought up a family of dolls in a corner of the jardin potager; Alix was the father, for she had never cared fosteringly for dolls, and Marie-Jeanne the mother. They whipped their tops in the courtyard where the tall blue lilies stood in the damp about the well. The Renaissance wrought-iron windlass was all rusted and broken; and the lilies had thrust their cord-like roots through the cracked earthenware of their great pots. Looking out of the door in the courtyard, one might see the cheerful matelassière sitting in the shade of the enormous horse-chestnut-tree on the wayside grass. The heaped wool seemed to curdle and foam about her like a turbulent yet cosy sea. She combed it out on her loom and smiled and nodded at Alix. “Bonjour, la jolie petite demoiselle,” she would say. Mélanie grumbled at the matelassière and said she was a thief; but she gave Alix a bowl of café au lait to carry out to her when she remade their mattresses, and Alix felt a pleasing sense of complicity in lawlessness when the matelassière, bending her lips to the steaming coffee, would close one eye at her in a long wink. She seemed a very happy person.

The road led down to the village, stony, steep, and golden with the vineyards on either hand. The little houses were washed with pink and fawn and cream and their roofs were the colour of the underside of an old mushroom. Strings of onions hung from their eaves, and milk cheeses in flat wicker baskets. After the village came the river and the old stone bridge that led across to the forest, tall and dark, marching up the mountain and haunted by legends of ghosts and knights and fairies. Mélanie, when she was in a good humour, would tell of these, seated in the evening on her own particular little terrace where she kept the fowls and picked over the herbs that were to be dried for tisane. But old Mère Gavrault was the best story-teller, and Alix was sometimes allowed to go to the forest with her and find cêpes and help her to gather faggots for her winter store. Mère Gavrault told stories of goblins and headless riders. They would have been blood-curdling stories, had she not told them with such an unmoved, smiling face. It was difficult to think that Mère Gavrault would find anything blood-curdling. She had lost so many children and grandchildren and her husband had been drowned in the river. She had lived through everything, and only wanted faggots to keep her warm in winter. Her face in its close, clean cap of coarse linen was hard and brown and wrinkled. Yet she was only sixty-five years old; the age of madame Gérardin, one of Maman’s friends in Paris, whom Alix did not like. Clean, clean, old Mère Gavrault, and she had lived through everything and only wanted faggots; while madame Gérardin wanted innumerable things—cigarettes all day, for one of them; and if one were to wash her bright countenance, what strange colours would stain the water, what thick, pale sediments sink! Almost passionately Alix felt her preference for Mère Gavrault, who smelt of dew and smoke and who was as clean as a stone or an apple. Madame Gérardin was as much Paris as Mère Gavrault was Montarel. Yet Maman was Paris, too, and there was nothing in the world Alix loved as she did her mother. She had always loved her, and longed for her, through all those mysterious yearly separations that took her away from her to set her down at distant Montarel. And Grand-père must have known that she longed for her. Was it not here that the deepest reason for the bitterness lay? He had never spoken to her of her mother. Never; never. Not once through all the years that she had gone to him. They had not been unhappy, those days of childhood with Marie-Jeanne at Montarel; even without Maman they had known a childish gladness. But it was as if, from the earliest age, she had had, as it were, to be happy round the corner. One’s heart was there, aching, if one looked at it; and one tiptoed away cautiously and, at a safe distance, raced off to join Marie-Jeanne. But at night, when she could no longer hide from her heart, all the sadness of Grand-père’s eyes would flow into her and she would lie, for hours, awake, thinking of him and of Maman.

It was because of Maman that his footsteps had dragged and his eyes had fixed themselves so obstinately on the ground; perhaps it was because of her that the Clouets had been sold;—Maman who was his daughter-in-law and who did not bear his name. “La belle madame Vervier; divorcée, vous savez.”—The phrase came back to her, with its knife-like cut, as she had first heard it whispered. It conjured up a vision of harsh, cruel repudiation, of Maman driven forth from Montarel, running out at the courtyard door, down the steep road, like one of the hapless princesses in the fairy-tales;—crying, flying, stumbling on the stones. Grand-père and her father had driven her out. So it must have been. Because of some fault; some disastrous fault. Yet they had been cruel. Her father’s portrait hung in the dining-room at Montarel. He was in uniform; young, though grey-haired; with stern lips and cold blue eyes; like Grand-père’s; like her own. She was a Mouveray in every tint and feature; yet how unlike them. For though, by chance currents, such other aspects of the story as a child may apprehend came drifting to her, the first picture of harsh repudiation made a background to the later knowledge, and she saw Maman as a delicate flower or fruit crushed and broken between stony hands. Passionately she was Maman’s child; passionately she repelled their harshness. Yet her heart ached for Grand-père, and his sadness flowed into her as she sat with closed eyes thinking of him, of Marie-Jeanne, of Mère Gavrault and Montarel; Grand-père dead and the château sold; the solitary, sunny old château on the hill that she would never see again.

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