________________________________________________
_ The next morning Claude awoke with such a sense of physical
well-being as he had not had for a long time. The sun was
shining brightly on the white plaster walls and on the red tiles
of the floor. Green jalousies, half-drawn, shaded the upper part
of the two windows. Through their slats, he could see the forking
branches of an old locust tree that grew by the gate. A flock of
pigeons flew over it, dipping and mounting with a sharp twinkle
of silver wings. It was good to lie again in a house that was
cared for by women. He must have felt that even in his sleep,
for when he opened his eyes he was thinking about Mahailey and
breakfast and summer mornings on the farm. The early stillness
was sweet, and the feeling of dry, clean linen against his body.
There was a smell of lavender about his warm pillow. He lay
still for fear of waking Lieutenant Gerhardt. This was the sort
of peace one wanted to enjoy alone. When he rose cautiously on
his elbow and looked at the other bed, it was empty. His
companion must have dressed and slipped out when day first broke.
Somebody else who liked to enjoy things alone; that looked
hopeful. But now that he had the place to himself, he decided to
get up. While he was dressing he could see old M. Joubert down in
the garden, watering the plants and vines, raking the sand fresh
and smooth, clipping off dead leaves and withered flowers and
throwing them into a wheelbarrow. These people had lost both
their sons in the war, he had been told, and now they were taking
care of the property for their grandchildren,--two daughters of
the elder son. Claude saw Gerhardt come into the garden, and sit
down at the table under the trees, where they had their dinner
last night. He hurried down to join him. Gerhardt made room for
him on the bench.
"Do you always sleep like that? It's an accomplishment. I made
enough noise when I dressed,--kept dropping things, but it never
reached you."
Madame Joubert came out of the kitchen in a purple flowered
morning gown, her hair in curl-papers under a lace cap. She
brought the coffee herself, and they sat down at the unpainted
table without a cloth, and drank it out of big crockery bowls.
They had fresh milk with it,--the first Claude had tasted in a
long while, and sugar which Gerhardt produced from his pocket.
The old cook had her coffee sitting in the kitchen door, and on
the step, at her feet, sat the strange, pale little girl.
Madame Joubert amiably addressed herself to Claude; she knew that
Americans were accustomed to a different sort of morning repast,
and if he wished to bring bacon from the camp, she would gladly
cook it for him. She had even made pancakes for officers who
stayed there before. She seemed pleased, however, to learn that
Claude had had enough of these things for awhile. She called
David by his first name, pronouncing it the French way, and when
Claude said he hoped she would do as much for him, she said, Oh,
yes, that his was a very good French name, "mais un peu, un peu.
. .romanesque," at which he blushed, not quite knowing whether
she were making fun of him or not.
"It is rather so in English, isn't it?" David asked.
"Well, it's a sissy name, if you mean that."
"Yes, it is, a little," David admitted candidly. The day's work
on the parade ground was hard, and Captain Maxey's men were soft,
felt the heat,--didn't size up well with the Kansas boys who had
been hardened by service. The Colonel wasn't pleased with B
Company and detailed them to build new barracks and extend the
sanitation system. Claude got out and worked with the men.
Gerhardt followed his example, but it was easy to see that he
had never handled lumber or tin-roofing before. A kind of rivalry
seemed to have sprung up between him and Claude, neither of them
knew why.
Claude could see that the sergeants and corporals were a little
uncertain about Gerhardt. His laconic speech, never embroidered
by the picturesque slang they relished, his gravity, and his
rare, incredulous smile, alike puzzled them. Was the new officer
a dude? Sergeant Hicks asked of his chum, Dell Able. No, he
wasn't a dude. Was he a swellhead? No, not at all; but he wasn't
a good mixer. He was "an Easterner"; what more he was would
develop later. Claude sensed something unusual about him. He
suspected that Gerhardt knew a good many things as well as he
knew French, and that he tried to conceal it, as people sometimes
do when they feel they are not among their equals; this idea
nettled him. It was Claude who seized the opportunity to be
patronizing, when Gerhardt betrayed that he was utterly unable to
select lumber by given measurements.
The next afternoon, work on the new barracks was called off
because of rain. Sergeant Hicks set about getting up a boxing
match, but when he went to invite the lieutenants, they had both
disappeared. Claude was tramping toward the village, determined
to get into the big wood that had tempted him ever since his
arrival.
The highroad became the village street, and then, at the edge of
the wood, became a country road again. A little farther on, where
the shade grew denser, it split up into three wagon trails, two
of them faint and little used. One of these Claude followed. The
rain had dwindled to a steady patter, but the tall brakes growing
up in the path splashed him to the middle, and his feet sank in
spongy, mossy earth. The light about him, the very air, was
green. The trunks of the trees were overgrown with a soft green
moss, like mould. He was wondering whether this forest was not
always a damp, gloomy place, when suddenly the sun broke through
and shattered the whole wood with gold. He had never seen
anything like the quivering emerald of the moss, the silky green
of the dripping beech tops. Everything woke up; rabbits ran across
the path, birds began to sing, and all at once the brakes were
full of whirring insects.
The winding path turned again, and came out abruptly on a
hillside, above an open glade piled with grey boulders. On the
opposite rise of ground stood a grove of pines, with bare, red
stems. The light, around and under them, was red like a rosy
sunset. Nearly all the stems divided about half-way up into two
great arms, which came together again at the top, like the
pictures of old Grecian lyres.
Down in the grassy glade, among the piles of flint boulders,
little white birches shook out their shining leaves in the
lightly moving air. All about the rocks were patches of purple
heath; it ran up into the crevices between them like fire. On one
of these bald rocks sat Lieutenant Gerhardt, hatless, in an
attitude of fatigue or of deep dejection, his hands clasped about
his knees, his bronze hair ruddy in the sun. After watching him
for a few minutes, Claude descended the slope, swishing the tall
ferns.
"Will I be in the way?" he asked as he stopped at the foot of the
rocks.
"Oh, no!" said the other, moving a little and unclasping his
hand.
Claude sat down on a boulder. "Is this heather?" he asked. "I
thought I recognized it, from 'Kidnapped.' This part of the world
is not as new to you as it is to me."
"No. I lived in Paris for several years when I was a student."
"What were you studying?"
"The violin."
"You are a musician?" Claude looked at him wonderingly.
"I was," replied the other with a disdainful smile, languidly
stretching out his legs in the heather.
"That seems too bad," Claude remarked gravely.
"What does?"
"Why, to take fellows with a special talent. There are enough of
us who haven't any."
Gerhardt rolled over on his back and put his hands under his
head. "Oh, this affair is too big for exceptions; it's universal.
If you happened to be born twenty-six years ago, you couldn't
escape. If this war didn't kill you in one way, it would in
another." He told Claude he had trained at Camp Dix, and had come
over eight months ago in a regimental band, but he hated the work
he had to do and got transferred to the infantry.
When they retraced their steps, the wood was full of green
twilight. Their relations had changed somewhat during the last
half hour, and they strolled in confidential silence up the
home-like street to the door of their own garden.
Since the rain was over, Madame Joubert had laid the cloth on the
plank table under the cherry tree, as on the previous evenings.
Monsieur was bringing the chairs, and the little girl was
carrying out a pile of heavy plates. She rested them against her
stomach and leaned back as she walked, to balance them. She wore
shoes, but no stockings, and her faded cotton dress switched
about her brown legs. She was a little Belgian refugee who had
been sent there with her mother. The mother was dead now, and the
child would not even go to visit her grave. She could not be
coaxed from the court-yard into the quiet street. If the
neighbour children came into the garden on an errand, she hid
herself. She would have no playmates but the cat; and now she had
the kittens in the tool house.
Dinner was very cheerful that evening. M. Joubert was pleased
that the storm had not lasted long enough to hurt the wheat. The
garden was fresh and bright after the rain. The cherry tree shook
down bright drops on the tablecloth when the breeze stirred. The
mother cat dozed on the red cushion in Madame Joubert's sewing
chair, and the pigeons fluttered down to snap up earthworms that
wriggled in the wet sand. The shadow of the house fell over the
dinner-table, but the tree-tops stood up in full sunlight, and
the yellow sun poured on the earth wall and the cream-coloured
roses. Their petals, ruffled by the rain, gave out a wet, spicy
smell.
M. Joubert must have been ten years older than his wife. There
was a great contentment in his manner and a pleasant sparkle in
his eye. He liked the young officers. Gerhardt had been there
more than two weeks, and somewhat relieved the stillness that
had settled over the house since the second son died in hospital.
The Jouberts had dropped out of things. They had done all they
could do, given all they had, and now they had nothing to look
forward to,--except the event to which all France looked forward.
The father was talking to Gerhardt about the great sea-port the
Americans were making of Bordeaux; he said he meant to go there
after the war, to see it all for himself.
Madame Joubert was pleased to hear that they had been walking in
the wood. And was the heather in bloom? She wished they had
brought her some. Next time they went, perhaps. She used to walk
there often. Her eyes seemed to come nearer to them, Claude
thought, when she spoke of it, and she evidently cared a great
deal more about what was blooming in the wood than about what the
Americans were doing on the Garonne. He wished he could talk to
her as Gerhardt did. He admired the way she roused herself and
tried to interest them, speaking her difficult language with such
spirit and precision. It was a language that couldn't be mumbled;
that had to be spoken with energy and fire, or not spoken at all.
Merely speaking that exacting tongue would help to rally a broken
spirit, he thought.
The little maid who served them moved about noiselessly. Her dull
eyes never seemed to look; yet she saw when it was time to bring
the heavy soup tureen, and when it was time to take it away.
Madame Joubert lad found that Claude liked his potatoes with his
meat--when there was meat--and not in a course by themselves. She
had each time to tell the little girl to go and fetch them. This
the child did with manifest reluctance,--sullenly, as if she were
being forced to do something wrong. She was a very strange little
creature, altogether. As the two soldiers left the table and
started for the camp, Claude reached down into the tool house and
took up one of the kittens, holding it out in the light to see it
blink its eyes. The little girl, just coming out of the kitchen,
uttered a shrill scream, a really terrible scream, and squatted
down, covering her face with her hands. Madame Joubert came out
to chide her.
"What is the matter with that child?" Claude asked as they
hurried out of the gate. "Do you suppose she was hurt, or abused
in some way?"
"Terrorized. She often screams like that at night. Haven't you
heard her? They have to go and wake her, to stop it. She doesn't
speak any French; only Walloon. And she can't or won't learn, so
they can't tell what goes on in her poor little head."
In the two weeks of intensive training that followed, Claude
marvelled at Gerhardt's spirit and endurance. The muscular strain
of mimic trench operations was more of a tax on him than on any
of the other officers. He was as tall as Claude, but he weighed
only a hundred and forty-six pounds, and he had not been roughly
bred like most of the others. When his fellow officers learned
that he was a violinist by profession, that he could have had a
soft job as interpreter or as an organizer of camp
entertainments, they no longer resented his reserve or his
occasional superciliousness. They respected a man who could have
wriggled out and didn't. _
Read next: Book Five: "Bidding the Eagles of the West Fly On": Chapter 7
Read previous: Book Five: "Bidding the Eagles of the West Fly On": Chapter 5
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