Page:Wounded Souls.djvu/37

 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