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A HEAD BETWEEN THE BUSHES They've done it! What? The German frontier-post... at the circus of the Butte-aux-Loups. What about it? Knocked down. Nonsense! See for yourself.
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PART I
CHAPTER I
A HEAD BETWEEN THE BUSHES "They've done it!" "What?"
"The German frontier-post ... at the circus of the
Butte-aux-Loups." "What about it?" "Knocked down." "Nonsense!" "See
for yourself."
Old Morestal stepped aside. His wife came out of the
drawing-room and went and stood by the telescope, on its tripod, at
the end of the terrace. "I can see nothing," she said, presently.
"Don't you see a tree standing out above the others, with lighter
foliage?" "Yes." "And, to the right of that tree, a little lower
down, an empty space surrounded by fir-trees?" "Yes." "That's the
circus of the Butte-aux-Loups and it marks the frontier at that
spot." "Ah, I've got it!... There it is!... You mean on the ground,
don't you? Lying flat on the grass, exactly as if it had been
rooted up by last night's storm...." "What are you talking about?
It has been fairly felled with an axe: you can see the gash from
here." "So I can ... so I can...."
She stood up and shook her head: "That makes the
third time this year.... It will mean more unpleasantness."
"Fiddle-de-dee!" he exclaimed. "All they've got to do is to put up
a solid post, instead of their old bit of wood." And he added, in a
tone of pride, "The French post, two yards off, doesn't budge, you
know!" "Well, of course not! It's made of cast-iron and cemented
into the stone." "Let them do as much then! It's not money they're
wanting ... when you think of the five thousand millions they
robbed us of!... No, but, I say ... three of them in eight
months!... How will the people take it, on the other side of the
Vosges?"
He could not hide the sort of gay and sarcastic
feeling of content that filled his whole being and he walked up and
down the terrace, stamping his feet as hard as he could on the
ground.
But, suddenly going to his wife, he seized her by
the arm and said, in a hollow voice: "Would you like to know what I
really think?" "Yes." "Well, all this will lead to trouble." "No,"
said the old lady, quietly. "How do you mean, no?" "We've been
married five-and-thirty years; and, for five-and-thirty years,
you've told me, week after week, that we shall have trouble. So,
you see...."
She turned away from him and went back to the
drawing-room again, where she began to dust the furniture with a
feather-broom.
He shrugged his shoulders, as he followed her
indoors: "Oh, yes, you're the placid mother, of course! Nothing
excites you. As long as your cupboards are tidy, your linen all
complete and your jams potted, you don't care!... Still, you ought
not to forget that they killed your poor father." "I don't forget
it ... only, what's the good? It's more than forty years ago...."
"It was yesterday," he said, sinking his voice, "yesterday, no
longer ago than yesterday...." "Ah, there's the postman!" she said,
hurrying to change the conversation.
She heard a heavy footstep outside the windows
opening on the garden. There was a rap at the knocker on the
front-door. A minute later, Victor, the man-servant, brought in the
letters. "Oh!" said Mme. Morestal. "A letter from the boy.... Open
it, will you? I haven't my spectacles.... I expect it's to say that
he will arrive this evening: he was to have left Paris this
morning." "Not at all!" cried M. Morestal, glancing over the
letter. "Philippe and his wife have taken their two boys to some
friends at Versailles and started with the intention of sleeping
last night at the Ballon de Colnard, seeing the sunrise and doing
the rest of the journey on foot, with their knapsacks on their
backs. They will be here by twelve."
She at once lost her head: "And the storm! What
about last night's storm?" "My son doesn't care about the storm! It
won't be the first that the fellow's been through. It's eleven
o'clock. He will be with us in an hour." "But that will never do!
There's nothing ready for them!"
She at once went to work, like the active little old
woman that she was, a little too fat, a little tired, but
wide-awake still and so methodical, so orderly in her ways that she
never made a superfluous movement or one that was not calculated to
bring her an immediate advantage.
As for him, he resumed his walk between the terrace
and the drawing-room. He strode with long, even steps, holding his
body erect, his chest flung out and his hands in the pockets of his
jacket, a blue-drill gardening-jacket, with the point of a
pruning-shears and the stem of a pipe sticking out of it. He was
tall and broad-shouldered; and his fresh-coloured face seemed young
still, in spite of the fringe of white beard in which it was
framed. "Ah," he exclaimed, "what a treat to set eyes upon our dear
Philippe again! It must be three years since we saw him last. Yes,
of course, not since his appointment as professor of history in
Paris. By Jove, the chap has made his way in the world! What a time
we shall give him during the fortnight that he's with us! Walking
... exercise.... He's all for the open-air life, like old
Morestal!"
He began to laugh: "Shall I tell you what would be
the thing for him? Six months in camp between this and Berlin!"
"I'm not afraid," she declared. "He's been through the Normal
School. The professors keep to their garrisons in time of war."
"What nonsense are you talking now?" "The school-master told me
so."
He gave a start: "What! Do you mean to say you still
speak to that dastard?" "He's quite a decent man," she replied.
"He! A decent man! With theories like his!"
She hurried from the room, to escape the explosion.
But Morestal was fairly started: "Yes, yes, theories! I insist upon
the word: theories! As a district-councillor, as Mayor of
Saint-Élophe, I have the right to be present at his lessons. Oh,
you have no idea of his way of teaching the history of France!...
In my time, the heroes were the Chevalier d'Assas, Bayard, La Tour
d'Auvergne, all those beggars who shed lustre on our country.
Nowadays, it's Mossieu Étienne Marcel, Mossieu Dolet.... Oh, a nice
set of theories, theirs!"
He barred the way to his wife, as she entered the
room again, and roared in her face: "Do you know why Napoleon lost
the battle of Waterloo?" "I can't find that large breakfast-cup
anywhere," said Mme. Morestal, engrossed in her occupation. "Well,
just ask your school-master; he'll give you the latest up-to-date
theories about Napoleon." "I put it down here, on this chest, with
my own hand." "But there, they're doing all they can to distort the
children's minds." "It spoils my set." "Oh, I swear to you, in the
old days, we'd have ducked our school-master in the horse-pond, if
he had dared.... But, by Jove, France had a place of her own in the
world then! And such a place! ... That was the time of
Solferino!... Of Magenta!... We weren't satisfied with chucking
down frontier-posts in those days: we crossed the frontiers ... and
at the double, believe me...."
He stopped, hesitating, pricking up his ears.
Trumpet-blasts sounded in the distance, ringing from valley to
valley, echoing and re-echoing against the obstacles formed by the
great granite rocks and dying away to right and left, as though
stifled by the shadow of the forests.
He whispered, excitedly: "The French bugle...." "Are
you sure?" "Yes, there are troops of Alpines manoeuvring ... a
company from Noirmont.... Listen ... listen.... What gaiety!...
What swagger!... I tell you, close to the frontier like this, it
takes such an air...."
She listened too, seized with the same excitement,
and asked, anxiously: "Do you really think that war is possible?"
"Yes," he replied, "I do."
They were silent for a moment. And Morestal
continued: "It's a presentiment with me.... We shall have it all
over again, as in 1870.... And, mark you, I hope that this time
..."
She put down her breakfast-cup, which she had found
in a cupboard, and, leaning on her husband's arm: "I say, the boy's
coming ... with his wife. She's a dear girl and we're very fond of
her.... I want the house to look nice for them, bright and full of
flowers.... Go and pick the best you have in your garden."
He smiled: "That's another way of saying that I'm
boring you, eh? I can't help it. I shall be just the same to my
dying day. The wound is too deep ever to heal."
They looked at each other for a while with a great
gentleness, like two old travelling-companions, who, from time to
time, for no particular reason, stop, exchange glances or thoughts
and then resume their journey.
He asked: "Must I cut my roses? My Gloires de
Dijon?" "Yes." "Come along then! I'll be a hero!" *
Morestal, the son and grandson of well-to-do
farmers, had increased his fathers' fortune tenfold by setting up a
mechanical saw-yard at Saint-Élophe, the big neighbouring village.
He was a plain, blunt man, as he himself used to say, "with no
false bottom, nothing in my hands, nothing up my sleeves;" just a
few moral ideas to guide his course through life, ideas as old and
simple as could be. And those few ideas themselves were subject to
a principle that governed his whole existence and ruled all his
actions, the love of his country, which, in Morestal, stood for
regret for the past, hatred of the present and, especially, the
bitter recollection of defeat.
Elected Mayor of Saint-Élophe and a
district-councillor, he sold his works and built, within view of
the frontier, on the site of a ruined mill, a large house designed
after his own plans and constructed, so to speak, under his own
eyes. The Morestals had lived here for the last ten years, with
their two servants: Victor, a decent, stout, jolly-faced man, and
Catherine, a Breton woman who had nursed Philippe as a baby.
They saw but few people, outside a small number of
friends, of whom the most frequent visitors were the special
commissary of the government, Jorancé, and his daughter
Suzanne.
The Old Mill occupied the round summit of a hill
with slopes shelving down in a series of fairly large gardens,
which Morestal cultivated with genuine enthusiasm. The property was
surrounded by a high wall, the top of which was finished off with
an iron trellis bristling with spikes. A spring leapt from place to
place and fell in cascades to the bottom of the rocks decked with
wild flowers, moss, lichen and maiden-hair ferns. *
Morestal picked a great armful of flowers, laid
waste his rose-garden, sacrificed all the Gloires de Dijon of which
he was so proud and returned to the drawing-room, where he himself
arranged the bunches in large glass vases.
The room, a sort of hall occupying the centre of the
house, with beams of timber showing and a huge chimney covered with
gleaming brasses, the room was bright and cheerful and open at both
fronts: to the east, on the terrace, by a long bay; to the west, by
two windows, on the garden, which it overlooked from the height of
a first floor.
The walls were covered with War Office maps, Home
Office maps, district maps. There was an oak gun-rack with twelve
rifles, all alike and of the latest pattern. Beside it, nailed flat
to the wall and roughly stitched together, were three dirty, worn,
tattered strips of bunting, blue, white and red. "They look very
well: what do you say?" he asked, when he had finished arranging
the flowers, as though his wife had been in the room. "And now, I
think, a good pipe ..."
He took out his tobacco-pouch and matches and,
crossing the terrace, went and leant against the stone balustrade
that edged it.
Hills and valleys mingled in harmonious curves, all
green, in places, with the glad green of the meadows, all dark, in
others, with the melancholy green of the firs and larches.
At thirty or forty feet below him ran the road that
leads from Saint-Élophe up to the Old Mill. It skirted the walls
and then dipped down again to the Étang-des-Moines, or Monks' Pool,
of which it followed the left bank. Breaking off suddenly, it
narrowed into a rugged path which could be seen in the distance,
standing like a ladder against a rampart, and which plunged into a
narrow pass between two mountains wilder in appearance and rougher
in outline than the ordinary Vosges landscape. This was the Col du
Diable, or Devil's Pass, situated at a distance of sixteen hundred
yards from the Old Mill, on the same level.
A few buildings clung to one of the sides of the
pass: these belonged to Saboureux's Farm. From Saboureux's Farm to
the Butte-aux-Loups, or Wolves' Knoll, which you saw on the left,
you could make out or imagine the frontier by following a line of
which Morestal knew every guiding-mark, every turn, every acclivity
and every descent. "The frontier!" he muttered. "The frontier here
... at twenty-five miles from the Rhine ... the frontier in the
very heart of France!"
Every day and ten times a day, he tortured himself
in this manner, gazing at that painful and relentless line; and,
beyond it, through vistas which his imagination contrived as it
were to carve out of the Vosges, he conjured up a vision of the
German plain on the misty horizon.
And this too he repeated to himself; and he did so
this time as at every other time, with a bitterness which the years
that passed did nothing to allay: "The German plain ... the German
hills ... all that land of Alsace in which I used to wander as a
boy.... The French Rhine, which was my river and the river of my
fathers.... And now Deutschland ... Deutsches
Rhein...."
A faint whistle made him start. He leant over
towards the staircase that climbed the terrace, a staircase cut out
of the rock, by which people coming from the side of the frontier
often entered his grounds so as to avoid the bend of the road.
There was nobody there nor anybody opposite, on the roadside slope
all tangled with shrubs and ferns.
And the sound was renewed, discreetly, stealthily,
with the same modulations as before. "It's he ... it's he ..."
thought M. Morestal, with an uncomfortable feeling of
embarrassment.
A head popped from between the bushes, a head in
which all the bones stood out, joined by prominent muscles, which
gave it the look of the head of an anatomical model. On the bridge
of the nose, a pair of copper-rimmed spectacles. Across the face,
like a gash, the toothless, grinning mouth. "You again,
Dourlowski...." "Can I come?" asked the man. "No ... no ... you're
mad...." "It's urgent." "Impossible.... And besides, you know, I
don't want any more of it. I've told you so before...."
But the man insisted: "It's for this evening, for
to-night.... It's a soldier of the Börsweilen garrison.... He says
he's sick of wearing the German uniform." "A deserter.... I've had
enough of them.... Shut up and clear out!" "Now don't be nasty, M.
Morestal.... Just think it over.... Look here, let's meet at four
o'clock, in the pass, near Saboureux's Farm ... like last time....
I shall expect you.... We'll have a talk ... and I shall be
surprised if ..." "Hold your tongue!" said Morestal.
A voice cried from the drawing-room: "Here they
come, sir, here they come!"
It was the man-servant; and Mme. Morestal also ran
out and said: "What are you doing here? Whom were you talking to?"
"Nobody." "Why, I heard you!..." "No, I assure you...." "Well, I
must have imagined it.... I say you were quite right. It's twelve
o'clock and they are here, the two of them." "Philippe and Marthe?"
"Yes, they are coming. They are close to the garden-entrance. Let's
hurry down and meet them...."
CHAPTER II
THE GIRL WITH THE BARE ARMS "He hasn't changed a bit.... His complexion is as fresh as ever.... The eyes are a little tired, perhaps ... but he's looking very well...." "When you've finished picking me to pieces, between you!" said Philippe, laughing. "What an inspection! Why don't you give my wife a kiss? That's more to the point!"
Marthe flung herself into Mme. Morestal's arms and into her father-in-law's and was examined from head to foot in her turn. "I say, I say, we're thinner in the face than we were!... We want picking up.... But, my poor children, you're soaked to the skin!" "We were out all through the storm," said Philippe. "And what do you think happened to me?" asked Marthe. "I got frightened!... Yes, frightened, like a little girl ... and I fainted.... And Philippe had to carry me ... for half an hour at least...." "What do you say to that?" said Morestal to his wife. "For half an hour! He's the same strong chap he was.... And why didn't you bring the boys? It's a pity. Two fine little fellows, I feel sure. And well brought up too: I know my Marthe!... How old are they now? Ten and nine, aren't they? By the way, mother got two rooms ready. Do you have separate rooms now?" "Oh, no," said Marthe, "only down here!... Philippe wants to get up before day-break and ramble about the roads ... whereas I need a little rest." "Capital! Capital! Show them to their rooms, mother ... and, when you're ready, children, come down to lunch. As soon as we've finished, I'll take the carriage and go and fetch your trunks at Saint-Élophe: the railway-omnibus will have brought them there by this time. And, if I meet my friend Jorancé, I'll bring him back with me. I expect he's in the dumps. His daughter left for Lunéville this morning. But she said she had written to you...." "Yes," said Marthe, "I had a letter from Suzanne the other day. She didn't seem to like the idea, either, of going away...." *
Two hours later, Philippe and his wife settled themselves in two pretty, adjoining bedrooms on the second floor, looking out on the French side. Marthe threw herself on her bed and fell asleep almost immediately, while her husband, with his elbows on the window-sill, sat gazing at the peaceful valley where the happiest days of his boyhood had been spent.
It was over yonder, in the straggling village of Saint-Élophe-la-Côte, in the modest dwelling which his parents occupied before they moved to the Old Mill. He was at the boarding-school at Noirmont and used to have glorious holidays play...
Table of contents
- PART I
- CHAPTER I
- CHAPTER II
- CHAPTER III
- CHAPTER IV
- CHAPTER V
- CHAPTER VI
- CHAPTER VII
- CHAPTER VIII
- PART II
- CHAPTER I
- CHAPTER II
- CHAPTER III
- CHAPTER IV
- CHAPTER V
- CHAPTER VI
- CHAPTER VII
- CHAPTER VIII
- PART III
- CHAPTER I
- CHAPTER II
- CHAPTER III
- CHAPTER IV
- Copyright