Edith Wharton

“ Old family servant, tears and hugs and so on. I know you affect to scorn the cinema, and this was it, tremolo and all. Hang it! This war’s going to teach us not to be afraid of the obvious.
We piled into the trap and drove down a long avenue to the house. Black as the grave, of course; but in another minute the door opened, and there, in the hall, was another servant, screening a light—and then more doors opened on another cinema-scene: fine old drawing-room with family portraits, shaded lamp, domestic group about the fire. ”

“ Before long they confessed their love—just like any young couple of Anglo-Saxons—and Jean went down to Réchamp to ask permission to marry her. Neither you nor I can quite enter into the state of mind of a young man of twenty-seven who has knocked about all over the globe, and been in and out of the usual sentimental coils—and who has to ask his parents’ leave to get married! ”

“ Marry Mlle. Malo! A young girl who lived alone! Travelled! Spent her time with foreigners—with musicians and painters! A young girl! Of course, if she had been a married woman—that is, a widow—much as they would have preferred a young girl for Jean, or even, if widow it had to be, a widow of another type—still, it was conceivable that, out of affection for him, they might have resigned themselves to his choice. But a young girl—bring such a young girl to Réchamp! Ask them to receive her under the same roof with their little Simone, their innocent Alain.... ”

“ Nearly all the old social thou-shalt-nots have gone: intelligent people nowadays don’t give a fig for them, and that simple fact has abolished them. They only existed as long as there was some one left for them to scare.” His grandmother listened with a sparkle of admiration in her ancient eyes. “And of course,” Jean pursued, “that can’t be the real reason for your opposing my marriage—a marriage with a young girl you’ve always known, who has been received here—”
“Ah, that’s it—we’ve always known her!” ”

“ Getting back to the lines through that pitch-black forest, and finding somebody to bring the gasolene back for me was about the weariest job I ever tackled. I couldn’t imagine why it wasn’t daylight when we finally got to the place where I had left the motor. It seemed to me as if I had been gone twelve hours when I finally caught sight of the grey bulk of the car through the thinning darkness.
Réchamp came forward to meet us, and took hold of my arm as I was opening the door of the car. “The man’s dead,” he said. ”

“ ON my first dash to the Northern fighting line—Greer told me the other night—I carried supplies to an ambulance where the surgeon asked me to have a talk with an officer who was badly wounded and fretting for news of his people in the east of France.
He was a young Frenchman, a cavalry lieutenant, trim and slim, with a pleasant smile and obstinate blue eyes that I liked. He looked as if he could hold on tight when it was worth his while. He had had a leg smashed, poor devil, in the first fighting in Flanders, and had been dragging on for weeks in the squalid camp-hospital where I found him. ”

“ Grandmamma will tell you!” Simone chimed in; and Yvonne, brushing aside their praise with a half-impatient laugh, said to her betrothed: “But your grandmother! You must go up to her at once.”
A wonderful specimen, that grandmother: I was taken to see her after dinner. She sat by the fire in a bare panelled bedroom, bolt upright in an armchair with ears, a knitting-table at her elbow with a shaded candle on it.
She was even more withered and ancient than she looked in her photograph, and I judge she’d never been pretty; but she somehow made me feel as if I’d got through with prettiness. ”

“ I could see them all over Jean’s shoulder: a grey-haired lady knitting with stiff fingers, an old gentleman with a high nose and a weak chin sitting in a big carved armchair and looking more like a portrait than the portraits; a pretty girl at his feet, with a dog’s head in her lap, and another girl, who had a Red Cross on her sleeve, at the table with a book. ”

“ Mlle. Malo was looking hard at me, but I wouldn’t let her see I knew it. “I’m going to leave you to hear the whole story now,” I said to Réchamp.
“But there isn’t any story for him to hear!” she broke in. She pointed at the serene front of the château, looking out across its gardens to the unscarred fields. “We’re safe; the place is untouched. Why brood on other horrors—horrors we were powerless to help?”
Réchamp held his ground doggedly. “But the man’s name is a curse and an abomination. Wherever he went he spread ruin.”
“So they say. Mayn’t there be a mistake? ”

“ The Vosges are splendid in winter. In summer they are just plump puddingy hills; when the wind strips them they turn to mountains. And we seemed to have the whole country to ourselves—the black firs, the blue shadows, the beech-woods cracking and groaning like rigging, the bursts of snowy sunlight from cold clouds. ”

“ Some are unobservant, or perhaps simply inarticulate; others, when going beyond the bald statistics of their job, tend to drop into sentiment and cinema scenes; and none but H. Macy Greer has the gift of making the thing told seem as true as if one had seen it. ”

“ The next day Jean himself advanced to the attack. His grandmother was the most intelligent member of the family, and she knew he knew it, and liked him for having found it out; so when he had her alone she listened to him without resorting to any valvular tricks. “Of course,” he explained, “you’re much too clever not to understand that the times have changed, and manners with them, and that what a woman was criticised for doing yesterday she is ridiculed for not doing to-day. ”

“ The maiden sister had gone dotty, there was nobody to look after Yvonne, and she went to Paris, to an aunt, broke loose from the aunt when she came of age, set up her studio, travelled, painted, played the violin, knew lots of people; and never laid eyes on Jean de Réchamp till about a year before the war, when her guardian’s place was sold, and she had to go down there to see about her interest in the property.
The old Réchamps heard she was coming, but didn’t ask her to stay. Jean drove over to the shut-up chateau, however, and found Mlle. Malo lunching on a corner of the kitchen table. ”

“ They were living, when the war broke out, at their country-place in the Vosges; his father and mother, his sister, just eighteen, and his brother Alain, two years younger. His father, the Comte de Réchamp, had married late in life, and was over seventy: his mother, a good deal younger, was crippled with rheumatism; and there was, besides—to round off the group—a helpless but intensely alive and domineering old grandmother about whom all the others revolved. ”

“ By rights we should have been off that morning; but there had been a sharp brush a few kilometres away, and a couple of poor devils had been brought to the château whom it would have been death to carry farther that day and criminal not to hurry to a base hospital the next morning. “We’ve simply got to stay till to-morrow: you’re in luck,” I said laughing.
He laughed back, but with a frown that made me feel I had been a brute to speak in that way of a respite due to such a cause.
“The men will pull through, you know—trust Mlle. Malo for that!” ”

“ Meanwhile Simone had been safe upstairs with her mother and grandmother, and none of the officers lodged in the château had—after a first hasty inspection—set foot in any part of the house but the wing assigned to them. On the third morning they had left, and Scharlach, before going, had put in Mlle. Malo’s hands a letter requesting whatever officer should follow him to show every consideration to the family of the Comte de Réchamp, and if possible—owing to the grave illness of the Countess—avoid taking up quarters in the château: a request which had been scrupulously observed. ”

“ She folded her shrivelled hands among their laces. “After that, the Germans were très bien—très bien. They stayed two days, and there was nothing to complain of. Indeed, when the second detachment came, a week later, they never even entered the gates. Orders had been left that they should be quartered elsewhere. Of course we were lucky in happening on a man of the world like Captain Chariot.”
“Yes, very lucky. It’s odd, though, his having a French name.”
“Very. It probably accounts for his breeding,” she answered placidly; and left me marvelling at the happy remoteness of old age. ”

“ I haven’t had time to get a consecutive account of what happened: they’re all too excited. Mlle. Malo is the only person who can tell me exactly how things went.” He swung about on me. “Look here, it sounds absurd, what I’m asking; but try to get me an hour alone with her, will you?”
I stared at the request, and he went on, still half-laughing: “You see, they all hang on me; my father and mother, Simone, the curé, the servants. The whole village is coming up presently: they want to stuff their eyes full of me. ”

“ The sense of loneliness and remoteness that the absence of the civil population produces everywhere in eastern France is increased by the fact that all the names and distances on the mile-stones have been scratched out and the sign-posts at the cross-roads thrown down. ”

“ Malo managed that very cleverly. They slipped off while the officers were dining.” She looked at me with the smile of some arch old lady in a Louis XV pastel. “My grandson Jean’s fiancée is a very clever young woman: in my time no young girl would have been so sure of herself, so cool and quick. After all, there is something to be said for the new way of bringing up girls. My poor daughter-in-law, at Yvonne’s age, was a bleating baby: she is so still, at times. The convent doesn’t develop character. I’m glad Yvonne was not brought up in a convent.” ”

“ The officer said: “I was told they were here to-day”; and Mlle. Malo replied: “You had better have the house searched and satisfy yourself.”
He laughed and said: “The idea had occurred to me.” She laughed also, and sitting down at the piano struck a few chords. Captain Chariot, who had his foot on the threshold, turned back—Simone had described the scene to her grandmother afterward. “Some of the brutes, it seems, are musical,” the old lady explained; “and this was one of them. While he was listening, some soldiers appeared in the court carrying another who seemed to be wounded. ”

“ After that, dead silence: and the poor devil left in the trenches to digest that “retook”!
There are thousands and thousands of just such cases; and men bearing them, and cracking jokes, and hitting out as hard as they can. Jean de Réchamp knew this, and tried to crack jokes too—but he got his leg smashed just afterward, and ever since he’d been lying on a straw pallet under a horse-blanket, saying to himself: “Réchamp retaken.”
“Of course,” he explained with a weary smile, “as long as you can tot up your daily bag in the trenches it’s a sort of satisfaction—though I don’t quite know why ”

“ He went on to tell me that the mill-owners lived in the manor, and were old friends of his people: good old local stock, who had lived there for generations and done a lot for the neighbourhood.
“It’s queer I don’t see their village-steeple from this rise. The village is just beyond the house. How the devil could I have missed the turn?” We ran on a little farther, and suddenly he stopped the motor with a jerk. We were at a cross-road, with a stream running under the bank on our right. ”

“ Her name is Yvonne Malo.”
He did not offer me the photograph, and I did not need it. That girl had a face of her own! Dark and keen and splendid: a type so different from the others that I found myself staring. If he had not said “ma fiancée” I should have understood better. After another pause he went on: “I will give you her address in Paris. She has no family: she lives alone—she is a musician. ”

“ Oh, I’m not disrespectful: they were like that in his generation! Besides—it’s better to laugh at things, isn’t it?” And suddenly his face would darken....
On the whole, however, his spirits were good till we began to traverse the line of ruined towns between Sainte Menehould and Bar-le-Duc. “This is the way the devils came,” he kept saying to me; and I saw he was hard at work picturing the work they must have done in his own neighbourhood. ”

“ She related their experiences with uncanny detachment, seeming chiefly to resent the indignity of having been made to descend into the cellar—“to avoid French shells, if you’ll believe it: the Germans had the decency not to bombard us,” she observed impartially. I was so struck by the absence of rancour in her tone that finally, out of sheer curiosity, I made an allusion to the horror of having the enemy under one’s roof. “Oh, I might almost say I didn’t see them,” she returned. “I never go downstairs any longer ”

“ Don’t let us try: it’s no use. We should only end by picturing him as an incorrigible ninny. But there isn’t a man in France who wouldn’t feel it his duty to take that step, as Jean de Réchamp did. All we can do is to accept the premise and pass on.
Well—Jean went down and asked his father and his mother and his old grandmother if they would permit him to marry Mlle. Malo ”