The Little French Girl/Part 1/Chapter 4

third-class carriage was not foul and wooden as it would have been in France, and they had it to themselves; but the cushions smelt of fog, and Alix thought she had never seen anything so ugly as the view from the window. It had been too dark to see the suburbs of London the night before, on the way up from Newhaven; but they lay all mean and low and toad-coloured this morning, wet under the lifted fog, and for as far as the eye could follow there was nothing to be seen but squatting roofs and gaunt factory chimneys.

“Bad, isn't it?” said Giles. He sat opposite her, looking out with his face so young and so worn. She liked him so much and felt so safe with him, and yet it frightened her a little to look at him, just—strange association—as it had frightened her to look at Grand-père. Only Giles was kinder, far, than Grand-père. “But worse, do you think,” he went on, “than the suburbs of Paris?”

Alix did not quite like to say how much worse she thought it; it did not seem polite. “There, at least, one has the sky to look at,” she suggested. “It is happier, I think.”

“We're not always in a fog, you know,” said Giles. “And Aunt Bella is very keen on Smoke Abatement. Perhaps we'll look happier some day.”

“I am very glad your family does not live in London,” said Alix. She felt more shy of Giles this morning, shut up with him in the intimacy of the chill, smoky carriage, than she had last night in the station dining-room. And it was as if she felt him more shy, too. They were making talk a little.

“Wouldn't you have come, if we'd lived in London?” he inquired.

“Maman would have sent me just the same, I think,” said Alix. “She wanted me to know England. And your family, specially, of course. Captain Owen always said I must know his family.”

“Oh, yes. Of course,” said Giles. He got up then and looked at the heat regulator and said it was cold, did she mind? There seemed no heat. Then he sat down again and fell into a silence, his arms folded, his long legs stretched as best they could, before him, and they both, again, looked out of the window.

On it went, the dreadful city; but at last furtive squares and triangles of green were stealing into it and sparsely placed trees edged streets that adventured forth, at random, it seemed, to end, almost with a stare of forlorn astonishment, in fields ravaged of every trace of beauty. But the green spread and widened like a kindly tide, and though the brick and slate was encrusted at intervals, like an eruption, upon the land, there were copses and rises of meditative meadow and the white sky was melting here and there to a timid blue above little hamlets that seemed to have a heart and to be breathing with a life of their own. Beside a brook a girl was strolling with scarf and stick, two joyous dogs racing ahead of her; a cock-pheasant ran, startled, through a wood sprinkled with gold and russet, and presently there was a deeper echo of the blue overhead in the blue of quiet hills on the horizon.

“This is better, isn't it?” said Giles, bringing his eyes to her at last. “Don't you call this pretty?”

“Very pretty,” said Alix. And it was pretty, though to her eyes it was also insignificant and confused, its lack of design or purpose teasing her mind with its contradiction of the instinct for order and shapeliness that dwelt there. “Is it because of the season and your mistiness that everything seems very near one? The horizon is so near, and even the sky comes quite close down.”

“Like nice, kind arms, I always think,” said Giles. “No, even in the Lake Country, even in Scotland, we don't get your splendid distances; or very rarely.”

“But it is very pretty,” Alix repeated. “I like the woods. Did you see the girl and the dogs a little while ago? I imagine that your sisters look like that.”

“Our dogs look like that. Ruth and Rosemary aren't quite so grown up. We have three dogs. Are you fond of them?”

“Oh, very fond; though I have never had a dog of my own. Maman thinks them too much trouble for a little appartement in Paris. But I had a cat at Montarel. A yellow cat with blue eyes. Have you ever seen one like that? He was so affectionate and intelligent and remembered me perfectly from year to year. He used to put his paws on my breast and rub against my face. The thought of seeing him again made it easier to bear leaving Maman when my half-year at Montarel came round.”

“Your half-year at Montarel?” Giles asked the question, but she saw that it was after a hesitation. She wondered how much Captain Owen had told them. She felt suddenly that she wanted to tell Giles everything there was to tell.

“I spent half the year with Grand-père at Montarel and half with Maman in Paris. Did you not know?” she said, looking him in the eyes. “My father and mother were parted. They were divorced. But it could not have been more Maman's error since the judge allowed her to have me for half the time. It is arranged like that, you know, as fairer. And since my father died when I was hardly more than a baby, it was Grand-père who had me for that side of the family.—I tell it to you as I imagine it to have been, for Maman has never spoken to me of it.”

Giles was making it easy. He was looking at her with no sign of discomfort, looking, indeed, as if he knew it already. “Oh, yes,” he said. And then he added: “And when your grandfather died? Was there no one else on his side of the family? Don't you go to Montarel any more?”

“No one at all,” said Alix, shaking her head. “I am the last of the Mouverays. That was why the château was sold and why Maman has me now entirely. But though it was sad to lose my grandfather, I love my mother best of course.”

“I hope you won't miss her too much,” said Giles after a moment and in a kind voice. “We'll try to give you a happy life, you know.”

“I am sure you will. But one must always miss one's mother and one's country. And then I always wonder if she is happy. Though I am only a child, she depends on me.”

“You have the comfort of knowing that Paris is only a few hours away,” said Giles, smiling.

“Ah, but Cannes isn't. She is to be at Cannes this winter.”

“Oh, yes, I remember. She spends the winters at Cannes.”

“She enjoys her life there. She plays tennis beautifully and has so many friends, as perhaps Captain Owen told you. But I know that she misses me. I have always been with her there before. I was with her, you know, when Captain Owen met us.”

“I should rather say I did know,” said Giles. “We heard all about your kindness to him, you may be sure. You may be sure we are a very grateful family.” Giles spoke with heartiness, and though she felt something a little forced in it there was nothing forced in his evident kindness towards herself. They were talking happily. As they had talked last night at dinner.

“And you may be sure we heard all about you,” said Alix, smiling across at him. “All about Ruth and Rosemary and Francis and Jack. What a large family you are. It must be very happy being so many.”

“I say!” laughed Giles, “you have a good memory! To get us in our order, too.”

“But how could I forget when he told us so much! We saw all your photographs so often. Only one does not get so clear an idea from photographs. I would not have known you from yours. And there was Toppie. After your mother, he talked most of all about Toppie. I shall see her, too, shall I not?”

It was as if she had struck him. The violent red that mounted to his face was echoed in Alix's cheeks. It was as if, with her innocent words, she had struck him, and in the silence that followed them, while he gazed at her, and she, helplessly, gazed back, she saw that what had underlain the confusion of yesterday had simply been suffering. She had laid it bare. She was looking at it now.

He tried to master it; to conceal it; in a moment he stammered: “Oh, he talked most about Toppie, did he?”

“Was she not his betrothed?” asked Alix in a feeble voice. She felt exhausted. He had struck her, too.

“Of course she was,” said Giles, and his eyes now lifted from her face and fixed themselves over her head on Maman's dressing-case.

“And—is she not still living?”

“Toppie? Living?” His eyes came back to her. “I should rather say so. You see,” he went on at once, though Alix could not see the relevance, “she was so horribly cut up by his death.”

“Of course,” Alix murmured. “I am so sorry. I should not have spoken of him at all, when you have lost him. I did not mean to be stupid; unfeeling.”

“But, good Heavens! you're not stupid! Not a bit unfeeling!” cried Giles, and seeing her distress, his eyes actually filled with tears. “It's not Owen at all. We often speak of him. It's Toppie. And it's I who am such a dunderhead. You see, she's all that's left of him. I mean, all that's loveliest; most sacred. She cared for him so much. She's like something in a shrine, to us all.”

“Yes. Yes. I see. I understand,” said Alix; though, still, she could not see. “I spoke lightly. I do not forgive myself.”

“But it's nothing to do with you,” Giles almost shouted as he had shouted at her last night. “I always get like that when she's talked about, with him. You poor, dear child, it's nothing on earth to do with you. It's absolutely my stupidity,” Giles assured her, their suffusion giving his eyes a strange heaviness.

It must be left at that. There was nothing for her to say. He was suffering and he tried to conceal from her how much; but she had seen it too plainly. All unwittingly she had blundered, blundered horribly, in speaking of Captain Owen and his betrothed, and a sense of depression, dark, like the London fog, penetrating and bitter like the London smoke, settled upon her.

“Here's the station! There's Mummy!” cried Giles. They had sat silent, and now he sprang up as if with great gaiety. He was doing his best. He was trying to make her forget; it was a little stupid of him if he thought he could succeed, Alix felt; but she summoned a responsive smile with which to greet Giles's mother.

She recognized her at once as the train slid into the little station. She stood there, tall and slender, wistful and intent, with her spare grey skirt and black hat and scarf, and hair straying about her ears, as shy, as gentle as a girl. In her photograph, seen at Cannes, it had seemed incredible that she should be Captain Owen's mother, and though her face showed as faded and worn in the morning light, it was even more incredibly young. She must be fifty, yet Maman, unflawed and radiant in her thirty-seven summers, had a greater maturity of aspect. “She is so innocent,” thought Alix; not clearly seeing, yet deeply feeling the meaning of the word.

She was walking beside the train, smiling up at them, her hand laid on the window of their carriage, and Giles did not wait for it to stop before he sprang out beside her and kissed her, doffing his cap. There was no confusion, no trouble, in the eyes of Giles's mother; they had nothing to hide; this was the next thought that came to Alix; they were only shy and sweet and sad. She did not speak at first. She took Alix by the hand and stood so holding her while Giles got out the dressing-case, and then led her along beside them, glancing down at her as they went; and Alix saw that with all the memories her own presence recalled, words were too difficult.

Giles was telling of the Victoria disaster. “I missed that first train, Mummy. I didn't get to Victoria till nearly two hours after hers had come in. But she's forgiven us. She's a most forgiving disposition,” said Giles, “I've discovered that. She won't resent any of the wrongs we put upon her.”

“Two hours! How dreadful! Oh, how dreadful!” Mrs. Bradley was exclaiming, “What must you have thought of us, Alix!”

“But it wasn't your wrong, at all,” said Alix; “it was Maman's mistake. I think telegrams take very long now from France to England.”

“There always are mistakes about meetings,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Dreadful things always do seem to happen.—Shall I drive, Giles, dear? or sit behind with Alix so that we can talk? That will be best, I think.”

They drove over commons and along woodland roads. The air was white and chill yet dimly transfused with sunlight, and there was a smell of wet pine-trees and wet withered heather. Alix's spirits lifted a little with the scent and swiftness, and they lifted still further, seeming, like the sky, to show a rift of blue, when in her gentle, slightly hoarse voice, Mrs. Bradley said: “Is your mother well, dear? How did you leave her?” This was the first inquiry about Maman she had heard, the first interest she had seen displayed. Giles, she remembered it now, had volunteered not a remark or question.

“She wrote so kindly,” said Mrs. Bradley. “She understood, I know, how much we hoped to see you here, how much pleasure it would give us. I wish she could have come, too. Owen so often wrote about you both, from Cannes. He said you made him think of Jeanne d'Arc, and your mother of Madame Récamier.—I'm glad you still do your hair like that,” said Mrs. Bradley, smiling shyly, and Alix saw that she had forgotten nothing and that all the links that Giles had ignored were cherished by her.

There were links, however, that she would not see. That must be, Alix reflected, what she had felt as her innocence. The pleasure that her coming might give to the Bradleys had never been part of Maman's motive. She had taken it for granted, but it had not counted. Maman had sent her because she had conceived of the winter in England as an advantage for her child and because—Alix saw further into these motives than Maman intended her to do—it had not been convenient to take her to Cannes. But there were few of Maman's motives, Alix felt, as she listened to the gentle, hesitating voice, that Mrs. Bradley would divine. Perhaps it was that that made Maman seem so much the older. Yet Maman, too, might have blindnesses. She would have been blind, for instance, in saying of Mrs. Bradley—and Alix could hear her saying it: “Un peu bê-bête, n'est-ce pas, ma chérie?” Mrs. Bradley was simple, very simple; but she was not bête. Alix felt that she understood Mrs. Bradley as Maman would not understand her, and it was perhaps because of this that Mrs. Bradley spoke presently about her dead son, for to any one who did not understand her she could not have spoken. She would never be bête about things like that. She was longing to speak about him, Alix saw; to ask questions, to reënforce her store of precious memories by such fragments as the little French girl could offer her. Alix told her of their walks above the sea at Cannes, of the concerts he had so loved, and of how much he had had to tell and teach them of flowers and birds.

“Oh, yes, the birds; he loved them,” said Mrs. Bradley, turning away her eyes that were full of tears. She was like this November day, with its suffused sunlight, and fresh, sad fragrance; there were no tocsins or trumpets in her blood, either; yet all the same she knew what suffering was as well as Maman. The hoarseness of her voice had come, perhaps, in part from crying; something scared, that one caught in her glance at moments, had not been there, Alix felt sure, before the war; before the news of her son's death had been brought to her. And as Alix thought of Captain Owen's death and of what his mother must have felt, there rose in her memory a picture of a Spring morning in Paris, the wild, wet day, with shafts of sunlight slanting through the rain and striking great spaces on the pavements to azure. She had been standing at the window of their salon, looking at the rain and sunlight, and at the flower-woman on the corner opposite, her basket heaped with pink and white tulips, and she had heard Maman, suddenly, behind her, saying, as if she had forgotten that Alix was there: “Dieu!—Dieu!—Dieu!” And, looking round she had seen her with the letter in her lap and had read the catastrophe in her white face and horror-filled eyes. So many of their friends had fallen in the war, but for none of them had Maman mourned as she had for Captain Owen.

The car turned, now, with careful swiftness, into an entrance gate which opened against a well-clipped hedge. A curve among the trees brought them to the front of a large house, red brick below, gables above, with beams and plaster. A great many gables, a great many creepers, large windows open to the air. A kind, capacious house, promising comfort; but how ugly, thought Alix, as they alighted; “Combien peu intéressante.” It was difficult to believe that from its cosy portals Captain Owen and Giles had gone forth to tragedy.

Two girls, at the sound of the car, had burst out upon the steps, and three dogs; an Irish terrier, a fox terrier, and a West Highland terrier;—“I like him best”—thought Alix of the last;—and they bounded in the air while the girls shouted:

“I say, Giles, you did serve us a turn last night! Your wire never got here until this morning! We sat up till eleven!”

They wore knitted jumpers and had corn-coloured hair and pink faces. They were delighted to see their brother back after his misadventures; the dogs were delighted to see him; only the dogs did not shout, which was an advantage. Alix had never heard such a noise.

“And here is Alix,” said Mrs. Bradley, who had stopped to take the appealing fox terrier in her arms; the fox terrier was a lady, no longer young, and the uproar affected her too much; Mrs. Bradley soothed and reassured her.

Ruth and Rosemary, as though aware for the first time of Alix's presence, turned their attention to her and cried “Hello” heartily, while they shook her by the hand. They were like Aunt Bella in their rosiness, robustness, their air of doing things all the time with absorption and energy; and like Aunt Bella and the house they were “peu intéressantes.”

“Did you have a good crossing? Are you a good sailor?” asked Rosemary; while Ruth said: “Let me carry' up her bag.—Do you play hockey?—Jouissez-vous le hockey?”

“She speaks English better than you do,” said Giles, pulling his sister's rope of hair; “and your French is a disgrace to your family.”

They all went into a hall that had wide windows in unexpected places and an important oak staircase winding up from it, also in an unexpected place. Alix was dimly aware of earnest, cheerful attempts at originality in its design; but the originality did not go beyond the windows and staircases, the high wainscotting and oaken pillars. Everything else, from the brasses of the big chimney-place to the florid crétonnes on the window-seats, followed a bright household formula. The brightness would have been a little oppressive had it not lapsed to a benign shabbiness, and the two good-tempered maids who followed with Alix's box belonged to it all, ornamental in their crisp pink print dresses, yet a little dishevelled; their caps perched far back on large protuberances of hair and fashionable whiskers of curl coming forward on their cheeks.

Alix felt all sorts of things about the hall and about the crétonnes and about the maids as Ruth and Rosemary and the dogs hustled her along. What it amounted to she did not clearly know, except that Giles did not really go with the hall, while his sisters did, and that Mrs. Bradley did not like the caps and the whiskers, but that she would always sacrifice her own tastes—hardly aware that she had them—to other people's cheerfulness.

“Oh, well, of course you play tennis,” Ruth was saying. “Everybody plays tennis. But you must learn hockey at once. It's the great game at our school and you're nowhere unless you play it.—Down, Bobby, down! He's made friends with you already.—The mud will come off all right.—One can't mind mud if one has dogs, can one? Down, you silly duffer!”

“Never mind. Let him jump. I am fond of dogs,” said Alix, patting the ardent head of the Irish terrier. “What is the name of the little, low, white one? He is quieter, but I think he likes me too.”

“His name is Jock, and Mummy's fox terrier is Amy. Oh, they'll all like you, all right; they're as friendly as possible—though Amy can be a bit peevish at moments; Mummy spoils her.—Here's your room,” said Rosemary, ushering her in. “It's a jolly room, isn't it? Mummy thought you'd like the one with the view best. The other spare-room looks over the kitchen-garden. It's a jolly view, isn't it? One doesn't often get a view like that. Put the box here, Edie.—Oh, the bathroom is on the landing, that door, you see. We have our baths in the morning and the water doesn't run very hot for more than two. So will you have yours at night? Mummy does. Ruth and I like it best in the morning, and Giles doesn't mind if his is cold.—French people don't care about baths, anyway, do they?—Lunch will be ready in twenty minutes. Can you find your way down?” Rosemary added rapidly, her eye on the staircase where Giles was descending, “I want to speak to Giles.”

“No, you don't! It's my place to tell him first!” screamed Ruth.

“It's about the football, Giles!”

“Oh, shut up!” shouted Giles affectionately. “What a frightful row you're making!”

And Alix at last heard them all hurtling down the stairs together.

Jock, who was old and a little melancholy, remained with her, seating himself on the hearth rug and surveying her with kindly but disenchanted eyes.

''“Dieu! Quel bruit!”'' Alix addressed him. She felt that Jock agreed with her about the noise and in finding Ruth and Rosemary, as well as Bobby, too turbulent. She listened at the door to be sure that they were safely gone. Then she tiptoed softly down and peeped in at the bathroom. It was large and untidy. She, too, preferred her bath hot and in the morning. Ruth and Rosemary were kind, but your preferences would never stand in the way of theirs. No, never would she find them interesting. But they did not ask it of you, Alix reflected, going back to her room. All they asked of you was to let them bathe at the time that best pleased them, play hockey with them, and admire their view. She went to look at the view. A pleasant, heathery common dipping at its further edge to a birch-wood. That was all. And another gabled roof rose among pines on a near hillside. All comfort; no beauty, thought Alix, and the sky came so closely down that it made her feel suffocated. And as she leaned looking out she thought of the roll of the mighty Juras, and the plain, and the river shining across it. How tame this was, a piping, perching little bird beside an eagle of great flights and soarings. Why had Maman sent her here? She could never be happy; never, never, under this low sky, among these noisy girls. And wave after wave there mounted in her an old, well-remembered homesickness for Maman and a new homesickness for France.