The Little French Girl
PART I
CHAPTER V
She was not to escape Ruth and Rosemary for long.
Already, at lunch, she felt that Giles, talking gravely
with his mother of treaties and leagues and such dull
matters, seemed to have relegated her to their category.
Over the dining-room mantelpiece hung a portrait
of the late Mr. Bradley; she knew it must be he
from his likeness to Aunt Bella and Ruth and Rosemary,
and Alix felt sure, as she looked up at his pink
and yellow, his tweeds and watch-chain and good,
shrewd eyes, that Mrs. Bradley’s sons must always
have interested her more than their father. But she
would never have known this, just as she did not know,
nor did they, that she was fonder of her boys than of
Ruth and Rosemary. “But I believe that in this country
everybody is fonder of sons,” thought Alix, marvelling
at the reappearance of the strange cabbage cut
into squares and recalling impressions of English literature
where, despite romantic surfaces, it was apparent
to the discerning eye that men always counted
for more than women.
Mrs. Bradley carved. It was a well-roasted leg
of mutton, that made Alix think of the mutton in
“Alice.” The potatoes, too, were roasted and the
entremets a bread-and-butter pudding. Mr. Bradley
had been nourished on such meals. They would produce
Mr. Bradleys.
“Now we will show you everything,” said Ruth
when luncheon was over. The implication seemed to
be that a specially fortunate experience was in store
for her. A fond complacency breathed from both girls.
“And it is natural that one should love one’s home,”
thought Alix, the tolerance of her comprehension giving
her childish face a maturity beyond its years.
So she was led from the lawn to the shrubberies;
shown the summer-house where in summer they had
tea and the herbaceous border, neatly disposed for its
winter sleep. The kitchen-garden was displayed, and
at its far end they passed through a door to a little
path, bordered by gorse-bushes, that ran beneath the
garden-wall and then turned aside over the common.
It was a sheltered, solitary little path, the branches of
the garden fruit-trees hanging over it, and Alix felt
that it might often be a refuge for her. It was a
pretty path and had a character of its own. To Ruth
and Rosemary its meaning lay in leading somewhere
else, and they crossed the common and rambled in
the birch-wood, inciting each other to long jumps over
a sluggish little stream, half ditch, half brook, that
flowed through it, and encouraging the dogs with
loud cries to chase the scurrying rabbits on the further
hillside.
“There’s the jolliest walk along the top,” said Ruth,
“among the junipers. But perhaps you are tired.
French girls aren’t much good at walking, are they?”
“I walk a good deal in the country,” said Alix,
“but I think I will unpack my box now.”
“Edie will have unpacked it for you,” said Ruth,
“so we’ll go on; only say if you are tired. You wear
sensible shoes, I must say. I thought all French girls
pinched their toes.”
So they continued to walk, talking as they went,
asking her for none of her information, only imparting
theirs, as if it must, self-evidently, have superior value.
Alix heard them with interest when they told of Giles
and of his scholastic feats at Oxford, feats interrupted
by his departure for the war, but now to be resumed.
Philosophy was Giles’s special branch, and they told
her that he was going to teach philosophy, at Oxford
probably, and write it some day.
“Tiens!” said Alix, relapsing, as was her wont when
surprised, into French. She knew nothing of philosophers
and the word only conjured up a picture of someone
aged and bearded who drank hemlock.
“Yes,” said Ruth, accepting the ejaculation as a
tribute, “he’ll be a great man, all right, Giles.”
And Alix also learned that Ruth and Rosemary both
intended following professional careers and that their
father had come from the north and had built Heathside
and that their mother was a Londoner and that
her father had been the editor of an important London
paper. “What! Never heard of ‘The Liberal’!”
Ruth exclaimed. Ruth, as eldest, did most of the
talking, subjected to frequent interruptions from Rosemary.
“I should have thought even French people
would have heard of ‘The Liberal.’ Oh, yes, he was a
great swell, our grandfather.”
Alix did not think she would have found him so.
France, she saw, mainly existed for Ruth and Rosemary
as a place where one’s brothers had gone to
fight and one’s friends to nurse.
“And what is the pleasant house?” she inquired of
them, when, after their walk along the hilltop, they had
crossed the wood and emerged again upon the common.
It stood, with an air of serenity and detachment,
half a mile away, a tall house of pale, eighteenth-century
brick with a white door and white window-sills,
a formal garden before it and a neat hedge dividing it
from the road. One felt that the woods had grown up
around it and that it preserved a tranquil personality
of its own, unmoved by the haphazard accretions of a
century.
“Oh, that’s the Rectory; where Toppie lives,” said
Ruth. “You can see the church spire just above the
trees to the right. Pleasant, do you call it? I think it’s
rather dismal; so bare and square. It needs lots of
creepers and shrubberies to make it cheerful; but old
Mr. Westmacott doesn’t like them.”
“Creepers would not be in the character of that
house, I feel,” said Alix; “and they would hide the
pretty colour of the brick. There are a few roses, too,
are there not?”
“Yes; a few. Toppie would have her roses. I hate
a house without creepers.”
“Shall I soon see Toppie, do you think?”
“Oh, you’ll see her soon, all right,” said Ruth.
“She’ll be coming in to tea to-day, probably.”
“I know she’s coming,” said Rosemary. “She
asked me yesterday if Alix would be here, and when I
told her we’d had the wire, she said she’d come. I
think she’s rather keen on seeing you, Alix. Owen
wrote a lot about you, you see.”
They spoke without any emotion of Toppie. They
took her for granted. She was not, to them, a shrine.
But even before the scene in the train with Giles, Alix
had had a special feeling about Toppie herself, and as
she walked on with the chattering girls her mind went
back to the day at Cannes when Captain Owen had
first showed her and Maman Toppie’s photograph.
He carried the little leather case in his breast-pocket,
his mother’s picture on one side and hers on the other,
and Maman had said, as she took the case from him
and looked: “Elle est tout-à-fait ravissante.”
“You don’t see very much of her in that,” said Captain
Owen, wagging his foot a little, and Alix guessed
that he was moved in speaking of his fiancée. “But it
does show something. Lovely the shape of her face,
isn’t it? She’s not exactly beautiful.”
“Oh! ‘exactly’! Who would care to be ‘exactly’
beautiful!” said Maman.
He had told them that Miss Westmacott—Toppie’s
real name was Enid Westmacott—had come with her
father to live near them when she was only fifteen.
Mr. Westmacott was the Rector of their parish and
he had to explain to them—for Maman said that with
all her English she could never get it quite clear—what
rectors were and how they came to have daughters;
and when Maman said, as though rectors must
make up for having daughters by having devout ones,
“Elle est très dévote?” Captain Owen, with his charming
smile, rejoined, “Oh, much better than that!”
Later on, when they were alone, Maman had remarked
to her: “She is pretty; but nothing more.
Elle est nulle, cette Toppie; très, très nulle.” But Alix
had not agreed. Often she did not agree with Maman.
The little photograph had not said much, but it had
said something definite. “She is like someone in a
tower.” So she tried to fix her feeling.
“Even in a tower one may oneself be insignificant,”
said Maman, and to this Alix had replied: “Not if
one is the tower oneself.”
Toppie was there when they got in. A fire had
been lighted for tea in the drawing-room, a long
room with roses on the chairs and sofas and a high
wainscotting of dark woodwork, and above that blue
paper with old-fashioned crayon portraits and large
photographs from famous pictures. A tall grey figure
stood at the further end, and Alix knew at once that
it was Toppie who turned her head to look at her like
that. She was helping Mrs. Bradley arrange flowers,
Michaelmas daisies, oak leaves, and sprays of golden
larch. She held a large bronze vase and wore a grey
tweed skirt and a grey woollen jumper and grey shoes
strapping across the instep with a buckle. Her hair
was as fair as primroses and was ruffled up a little
above the black ribbon that bound it.
“This is Alix, Toppie, dear,” said Mrs. Bradley in
a gentle voice, and she came forward and passed her
arm in Toppie’s as if she knew that it must mean
something very special to her to see the little French
girl.
“I’m so glad,” said Toppie. She gazed at Alix for a
long moment, as though forgetting that she held the
vase; then, looking round her, vague in her absorption,
she set it down on a table and held out her hand.
The water from the vase had spilled over it, and as
it closed on Alix’s it made her think of the hand of
a dryad, a naiad, or some chill, unearthly creature.
“Yes; in towers,” she thought, as Toppie’s eyes dwelt
on her. “And how much she loved him!”
She saw then that Giles was there. He was stretched
out in a deep chair on one side of the fire, his hands
clasped behind his head, and he was watching Toppie;
her meeting with Toppie.
“And how much Giles loves her!” came the further
thought, sharp with its sense of sudden elucidation.
If he sat there, in that rather mannerless fashion, not
helping with the water-cans, the baskets of flowers,
the scissors, it was because he loved her and wanted to
watch her.
Toppie, still with her absorption, had picked up the
vase again and carried it to a far table.
“There; that’s the best we can do with the garden
just now,” said Mrs. Bradley, smiling at her. “And
without you, Toppie, I’d never have made the effort.
Toppie thinks a room without flowers so sad. She
made me come out with her and pick all these. It’s
astonishing, really, what one can still find in a November
garden.”
“They look awfully nice,” said Giles.
“Well, to tell you the truth,” said Ruth—Alix had
already noted of her that, on all occasions, she gave her
opinion without being asked—“they look to me rather
dingy and frost-bitten. Rather a waste of time, I
think, all this messing about to arrange flowers that
don’t exist!”—and Ruth laughed, pleased with her
own good sense, and went to seat herself on the arm of
Giles’s chair.
“She bores him; but he would not like to say it,”
thought Alix, seeing Giles’s kind but unwelcoming
look. She had a feeling of excitement, yet of oppression.
Toppie, she knew, was thinking of nothing but
her.
The tea-table stood before the sofa on the other side
of the fire from Giles, and Mrs. Bradley sat down to
it and Toppie came beside her, and then, looking up
at Alix, laying her hand on the place still vacant, said
“Come here, Alix.”
“There’s room for me, too,” cried Rosemary, plunging
down between them. “My place is always near
the cake!”
But Toppie looked at her quite coldly and said:
“There’s not room for you, Rosemary. Somewhere
else, please. You make us all uncomfortable.”
She was very fair, with a skin that would have been
of a milky whiteness had it not been thickly freckled.
Her lips were small and pale, her chin long and narrow;
all her head, bound round with the black ribbon, was
singularly narrow, and that, perhaps, was why her
grey eyes seemed to look out from towers. “And how
she has suffered!” thought Alix.
Nights; how many nights of sleepless suffering had
not Toppie known. The tears had run down as she
had lain in the long darknesses, remembering; always
remembering, seeing his face before her always. Tears;
vigils; remembrance;—all were in Toppie’s eyes.
“Oh, no, Maman; not nulle; anything but nulle,”
Alix thought, while, with a great wave of depression,
the meaning of the war, of all its lonely suffering,
swept over her. Was Captain Owen worth so much
suffering? His personality lived most for Alix in the
memory of his smile and his worth seemed to live
in that, too. He had been charming; and there was
worth in charm.
Tea was made and they were all talking of the things
they did and the people they did them with. Alix
heard of a Women’s Institute, of Boy Scouts and Girl
Guides, and a village Choral Society that Mrs. Bradley
conducted. Giles sang in it, and the girls and Jack
and Francis when they were at home. “And you must
sing with us, Alix,” said Mrs. Bradley, and they asked
her about her piano lessons and the singing at the
Lycée, and she had to confess that she had never heard
“The Messiah,” at which there was a shout of good-natured
protest from Ruth and Rosemary. “But
you’re not a musical nation, are you?” said Ruth; and
disposed of France as a musical nation.
The talk made Alix think of the thick slices of bread-and-butter
that Ruth and Rosemary and Giles were
eating, it was so kindly and useful. Very different
from the talk to which she was accustomed in Maman’s
salon; and Maman’s salon itself was as different from
this as the talk. It was small, yet it was stately. She
and Maman had done their best for the “petit trou”
of an appartement in the rue de Penthièvre, and
Maman’s russet head, as she sat with her cigarette at
the tea-table, had melted and shone against the old
tapestry, grey and green and citron, and her lovely
face had seemed to belong to the Empire sconces and
the carnations in their tall crystal vases that made
light constellations on the mantelpiece. Maman’s
salon, though stately, was dense and rich and sweet,
and the talk that passed, soft and shining, was like
a beautiful, iridescent soap-bubble tossed so lightly
from one to the other; from monsieur de Villanelle,
with his pointed red beard and sad blue eyes and long
Flemish nose like a Memling saint; to mademoiselle
Blanche Fontaine; and from her to monsieur de Maubert,
with his Jovian head; and from him to monsieur
Jules, dark and gloomy, who sometimes let it drop in
his abstraction, unless Maman gave it a little puff that
carried it on to madame Gérardin, who received it
with shrill little outcries, prettily playing with it—Alix
had to own that she played prettily with talk—until
it was safely back in Maman’s hands again. And
then another was blown. How Maman smiled; how
she lifted gay yet sombre brows; how lovely they all
thought her. And though one might see talk so light
only as a soap-bubble, Alix dimly apprehended that
it was fertile, creative; that it spread, like a sweet
fragrance; that it floated like a winged seed on the
breeze, out from Maman’s salon to permeate, alter the
world. It made a difference to the world what monsieur
Villanelle thought about the last book and poem;
what monsieur Jules thought about the last painter,
mademoiselle Blanche about the last play, and monsieur
de Maubert about the latest feat of Léon Daudet
or Charles Maurras. And since, to all of them, it was
in Maman’s reception of their ideas that the final
verdict lay, Maman, to the world at large, made the
greatest difference of all.
“You’ll see what a jolly life you’ll have here, my
dear kid,” Rosemary remarked to her; Rosemary, undismayed
by her rebuff, had worked through the
bread-and-butter and was now eating quantities of
cake. She was only six months older than Alix, but she
assumed protecting airs towards her. “Girls in France
have a beastly mewed-up time, haven’t they?”
“Have you been much in France?” Alix asked her.
She felt no call to combat Rosemary’s conceptions.
She was, indeed, completely indifferent to what they
might be. She asked her question from mere politeness.
“Not much; but Ruth and I stayed with a French
family once. My word! they were quaint! They
thought the Bible improper reading for jeunes filles
and picked their teeth at the table and I don’t believe
they ever took a bath. They almost had apoplexy
when we said we had to have one every day; thought
it would be sure to give us des rhumatismes.”
“Many of us are quite clean,” Alix remarked, and at
this Giles laughed loudly.
“There’s one for you, you young savage,” he commented,
whereupon Rosemary bounded at him and
grappled with his hair.
“Help, Ruth! He’s choking me!” she screamed,
and Alix, with some astonishment, watched the uncouth
game that followed, Giles throwing off his sisters
alternately until they tumbled on the floor and
sat, dishevelled and delighted, getting their breath
and smoothing back their loosened hair.
“Not quite so much noise, dears,” Mrs. Bradley remarked
once or twice, but she continued calmly to
converse with Toppie who glanced at the mêlée, Alix
thought, with a remote, repudiating eye, while she
said: “I find him a thoroughly bad boy. There’s
something fundamentally wrong with him.”
“Oh, poor little fellow!” Mrs. Bradley sighed. “His
home and heredity are great handicaps, aren’t they?”
“I don’t see why they should be,” said Toppie.
“Mrs. Brown is a patient hard-working woman and,
though the father drinks, I don’t think he is dishonest.
Whereas Percy is a sneak and a liar. He does mean
things and then is too much of a coward to confess
them.”
It was strange, thought Alix, listening, though not
in the least interested in Percy Brown’s heredity, that
with a face so sweet Toppie should have so cold a
voice. She would be sorry for Percy Brown, she felt
sure, if she were to see him confronting Toppie.
“It’s very difficult to confess when one has done a
mean thing,” Mrs. Bradley mused—and Alix almost
had to laugh at hearing her, so impossible was it to
imagine Mrs. Bradley involved in such a dilemma.
“The cowardice and the meanness go together, don’t
they, and Percy is so young that they are not worse,
really, than weakness and timidity. He may outgrow
it.”
“I don’t think he will. I think he is fundamentally
bad,” said Toppie, but now with more sadness than
severity, and, turning to Alix she said: “Will you
come and have tea with me to-morrow? We could
have a little walk first, and then you could come back
to tea with me and my father.”
“But she’s going to school with us, Toppie! We
have to teach her hockey!” cried Ruth.
“Not to-morrow. She need not begin till Monday,
need you, Alix?” Alix thought not, and though Ruth
declared, “You can’t begin a day too soon for hockey,”
Alix and Toppie had decided the question between
them.