Page:Wounded Souls.djvu/38

 you are an insolent pig, like all Germans,' I remarked. That cost me a fine of ten thousand francs."

Madame Chéri saw nothing wrong in swearing falsely to a German. I think she held that nothing was wrong to deceive or to destroy any individual of the German race, and I could understand her point of view when Pierre Nesle told me of one thing that had happened which she never told to me. It was about Hélène.

A German captain was billeted in the house. They ignored his presence, though he tried to ingratiate himself. Hélène hated him with a cold and deadly hatred. She trembled if he passed her on the stairs. His presence in the house, even if she did not see him, but only heard him move in his room, made her feel ill. Yet he was very polite to her and said, "Guten Tag, gnädiges Fräulein" whenever they met. To Edouard also he was courteous and smiling, though Edouard was sullen. He was a stout little man with a round rosy face and little bright eyes behind big black-rimmed glasses, an officer in the Kommandantur, and formerly a schoolmaster. Madame Chéri was polite to him but cold, cold as ice. After some months she found him harmless, though objectionable because German. It did not seem dangerous to leave him in the house one evening when she went to visit a dying friend—Madame Vailly. She was later than she meant to be—so late that she was liable to arrest by the military police if they saw her slip past in the darkness of the unlit streets. When she came home she slipped the latch-key into the door and went quietly into the hall. The children would be in bed and asleep. At the foot of the stairs a noise startled her. It was a curious creaking, shaking noise as of a door being pushed by some heavy weight, then banged by it. It was the door at the top of the stairs, on the left. Hélène's room.

"Qu'est-ce que tu fais là?" said Madame Chéri.