The Little French Girl
PART II
CHAPTER II
The train moved slowly, almost ruminatingly, along
the golden landscape, a little local train stopping at
every station. The crops were still uncut and their vast
undulations were broken only by lines of lonely, poplared
road, or marshalled woods venturing out, here
and there, upon the plains. Empty and rather sad, for
all the splendour of the gold beneath, the blue above,
it looked to Giles; but that might have been, he knew,
because of its associations for him with scenes of the
war; and he was feeling a little sick, too, apprehensions
of the approaching future seizing him as he and
Alix sat silent in the second-class carriage, where both
the windows were tightly shut. Alix had widely opened
hers on entering, but at the first station a lady had got
in—little shopping people of the local bourgeoisie the
passengers were, more estranged from fashion, Giles
thought, than their equivalent English types—and,
wrapping a scarf at once about her neck, she had complained
of the effect of the courant d’air upon her
névralgie. Without comment, Alix at once closed her
window. No doubt she knew her compatriots and recognized
the futility of discussion on this theme; but
Giles reflected that Ruth and Rosemary would not so
have submitted. They would have entered into altercation
with the lady in the scarf and found pleasure in
demonstrating her folly to her even if they did not succeed
in keeping the window open. But to Alix altercation
had no charms. Even when the lady, still mysteriously
aggrieved in her furthest corner, murmured resentfully
on about les anglais qui viennent nous déranger,
Alix glanced meditatively at her for a moment and
then resumed her survey of the landscape, indifferent
to the misapprehension; and since Giles could not repress
a smile, the lady, who still held up her scarf in
retrospective protest, kept indignant eyes upon him.
“Now, you know, you are a worse-tempered people
than we are. She’s still nursing her wrongs,” Giles
murmured, and Alix, glancing at the lady of the
névralgie, answered, “She is negligible.”
Two men sat further on; one young, with high, ardent,
excited eyes, like a collie’s, in a thin head; the
other obese and red with white hair en brosse and a
purple nip of ribbon in his button-hole. They leaned
across the carriage towards each other and talked without
cessation, rapping each other on the chest to a constant
refrain of: “Puis—il me dit;—Et—je lui dis.”
Passionately swift and even vindictive in utterance as
they were, their personal geniality remained unimpaired.
A little boy on his mother’s lap ate chocolates,
smearing his cheeks and palms. Clambering down,
he was permitted, unchecked, to lurch towards Alix,
staying himself on the knees he passed, and when he
reached her he stretched forth his hand with assurance
for the box of apricots she held. “Est-il mignon!” exclaimed
the fond mother. But Alix did not even turn
her eyes from the landscape. The disconcerted child
stood gazing at her, too much astonished even to weep,
and Giles, taking pity on him, offered the tick of his
watch and jingled his bunch of keys in an attempt to
distract his attention. But the little boy gave him no
heed, and after a prolonged stare at Alix he made his
way back to his mother; his first encounter, Giles imagined,
with an unresponsive universe.
“I say, you are really rather hard-hearted,” he remarked.
Here was another difference, for neither Ruth
nor Rosemary could have remained so impervious to
even such a repulsive little boy.
But Alix said: “I cannot look at a dirty face like
that. If his mother had cleaned his face, I would have
given him one.”
“Well, since he’s gone back to her, and you needn’t
look at him, may I give him one?” said Giles; and, as
Alix smiling, assented, Giles handed an apricot to the
little boy, who took it without thanks and ate it, staring
solemnly at Alix the while.
A thin blue crescent of sea cut into the fields on the
right. In the distance, on a rise of country, a pale pink
château stood with wings of sculptured woodland on
either side, a long green lawn in front.
“It cannot be far now,” said Alix. The lady with
the scarf, the mother with the little boy, the stout marketing
lady, had all left them by now and she could
open her window and stand by it to look out. “Vaudettes
is four miles from the station. Maman will come
to meet us, with monsieur de Maubert.”
“Who is monsieur de Maubert?” asked Giles. He
had never heard the name before. But then he had
never heard any names connected with Maman. How
could he, since he never spoke of her?
“He is an old friend of ours; a very old friend,” said
Alix. “I do not remember the time when we did not
know monsieur de Maubert.”
“You like him?”
“Oh, very much. C’est un homme fort distingué,”
said Alix, relapsing into French, with the effect, to
Giles, of not sparing more than convention for their
conversation. Her thoughts were fixed in anticipation.
He could almost see her palpitate in her stillness with
it. She might have been kinder to the little boy had
she not been so unaware of everything but the approaching
figure of Maman.
“How distinguished?” Giles, however, persisted.
“Oh, I am so ignorant, Giles. Wise things do not
interest me, you know.” Alix smiled slightly down at
him over her shoulder. “He has excavated cities; Persian;
Mongolian;—que sais-je. He writes on antiquities.
He has a beautiful appartement in Paris with
collections of gems and bronzes. He is at once savant
and homme du monde.”
“And will he be the only guest except me?”
“Ah, that I do not know. There are three chambres
d’invités at Les Chardonnerets. But I have not heard
that there is, as yet, anyone else.”
“Chardonnerets? That means?”
“It means goldfinches. That was a bird we always
knew, even”—Alix paused—“even before your
brother told us more of birds. Flocks come in Autumn
to the thistles on the cliffs outside our gate. When they
all fly together one sees the squares of gold on their
wings—it makes a pattern on the sky, like a chain of
golden coins; monsieur de Maubert’s strange old
square coins. And their little twitter is like the chink
of thin gold. We love them, Maman and I, and there
is a tall ash-tree in the garden where they often perch in
summer. You will see them, Giles. You will like Les
Chardonnerets, I think.—Oh, now—I recognize now—I
know those woods. We find daffodils in them, in
Spring, among the faggots. You have not in England,
have you, Giles, our great woods with all the ranged
faggots that the woodmen pile so carefully in winter.
And in Spring, at the edge of the wood, one sees around
one the great plain, champagne-coloured. The next
station will be ours,” said Alix.