Chapter V

Saturdays were Mélanie’s days of Freedom. This one began with a great wind making the windows rattle early in the morning, rushing through the trees so that the forest echoed like an ocean and the roar of these airy waves reached the house on the Avenue. Mélanie was up with the birds—to be exact, a bird, the woodpecker who had begun tapping one of the elms just outside the window, insistently, as soon as it was light. Soon he was joined by a chorus of sparrows, cheeping busily in their nests in the wistaria that covered the house, by the blackbird sending his cool spring song out from the willow. The whole garden was alive with birds. Moïse answered them plaintively from her stall Mélanie couldn’t stay in bed with all that going on outside. Besides, there were a thousand things to do—these were the days, these April days, when the garden claimed her whole attention. The house might fall to pieces (but Bo-Bo would see that it didn’t!), she herself must be out sowing and planting and cultivating, transplanting vegetables from the cold frames, cutting back the bushes, uncovering the flower beds, trimming the hedges. It was simply endless.

Croll arrived at seven, and while she got him a bowl of goat’s milk and put Moïse to pasture, he began already to open the big cistern from which he would draw up pailfuls of human manure to put on the garden.

Croll was over seventy and seemed to have grown into his clothes as if the dark brown corduroy were the bark of a tree. His chin wore a perpetual thick stubble that never turned into a beard. His fly had lost all its buttons. He was practically deaf, and as he stood in the courtyard, drinking the milk, holding the bowl awkwardly in his two gnarled hands, he looked primeval, like some spirit of the earth, Mélanie thought, hardly human. But he knew this garden as if it were his own and cared for it with irritable passion, complaining all the time, accomplishing the work of three younger men. He seemed to feel with the plants and trees, to know what they needed as if he had roots in the earth himself. Mélanie hardly ever gave him any orders. They worked together, serving the garden, slaving for it, talking little. He was not interested in the life inside the house, ignored M. Paul. Only Françoise followed him around like a flirtatious kitten, and to her he sometimes talked, telling her his troubles and angers, but all in Flemish so, though she listened gravely, she understood only a word or two. No doubt that was why he talked.

Croll’s wife had died twenty years before in childbirth. That much Mélanie knew from hearsay in the village. And his son had come back a few months before, having fought before Liége and later with the Belgian armies in France.

All around them the garden seemed in movement, alive—the burnished leaves shining and waving in the sun and wind, the last year’s autumn leaves blown wildly down the paths, while with bent backs they slowly (for how heavy and earth-bound a human body is!) went about their tasks. Mélanie was transplanting lettuce from the cold frames. She could see Croll coming up the path wheeling the metal container with its rich excrement to pour on the garden.

Something was the matter with Croll this morning. He stopped rather often on the way and sighed quite audibly. When Filibert wound herself round his legs purring, he flung her aside roughly—a strange and violent gesture for him.

Mélanie wondered what was wrong. She asked him over to help her for a few moments and talked of this and that while she handed him the little plants one by one. Finally she said:

“What is your son going to do now he is home again?”

Croll went off with the plants and set them down near the beds as if he hadn’t heard.

But Mélanie followed him and shouted the question again.

This time he stood up, took off his cap, and scratched his head in a bewildered way. It seemed a hard question to answer. Finally he looked down at his sabots, kicked a bit of dirt, and said shortly:

“He’s a lazy good-for-nothing.”

Mélanie remembered the pride with which he had brought his son to see her in 1913 when Jacques was called up for military service. He was a fine gay boy with a red face and the rather bold good humor of the Flemish peasant, quite unabashed and natural as he joked with Paul. What had happened to him? He had been working as a delivery boy for a big dairy in the neighborhood then and was proud of his horses. Instantly Mélanie decided to go and find him right after breakfast. She never doubted that she could help people, that she knew what was good for them, what they needed.

Croll had gone back to his own job and they did not talk any more. It was time anyway to go in and wash before breakfast.

A couple of hours later, with Françoise skipping like a lamb with spring fever beside her, Mélanie walked toward the village across the great fields at the end of the avenue. The skies over these fields were always magnificent, and today, with immense white clouds sailing across them, the earth itself seemed lifted up and to be soaring through space. It almost made one dizzy.

Françoise never stopped asking questions.

“What is that man over there doing, Mamie?”

“Sowing oats for the horses, darling. See what a great gesture he makes with his arm as he walks—and that big sack over his shoulder is full of seed.”

“Who lives in that little hole, Mamie?” and she bent down to peer inside it.

“A rabbit, my treasure.”

“What is that singing up in the air? Where is it, Mamie?”

“That’s a lark—he’s so high up we can’t see him.”

But Françoise was so busy with her questions that she couldn’t be bothered listening to the answers.

When they got to the village Mélanie stopped at La Grand Louise’s (as she was called to distinguish her from La Petite Louise who worked for the Duchesnes). La Grande Louise came every two weeks to do the heavy laundry.

“Hé, bonjour!” she called from her tiny vegetable garden.

Françoise had never seen her except bending over a big wooden tub in the courtyard at home. She stared now, full of amazement to think that La Grande Louise ever did anything else.

“Run along to the end of the garden and look at the rabbits, darling.”

Immediately the two women began an animated conversation. Even Mélanie’s gestures became the gestures of a peasant when she spoke Flemish. She might have been a neighbor from across the road. After she had asked about the garden, and about Louise’s family and they had spoken of the cold spring, she came to the point.

“I have come to find out what is wrong with Jacques, Croll’s son.”

“Ah, madame”—Louise shook her head—“he’s changed. He has the war sickness——”

“You don’t say.” Mélanie frowned and nodded back, one hand on her hip. The people of the village loved her. She felt somehow like family. She was not proud. She had none of the airs of the small bourgeois who came to jerry-built summer villas in the late spring and looked down on the peasants.

“And where could I find him, Louise? Let me have a talk with him. I’ve known him since he was Françoise’s age.”

Louise nodded her head in the direction of Croll’s house. “Likely he’s in bed still. Old Croll is helpless. The boy is too strong for him. What he needs is a good beating first and then a mother, someone to look out for him, that’s what he needs,” she said, smiling a broad smile with her wide mouth as Mélanie went off, only calling back:

“Keep Françoise with you, Louise. I’ll be back in half an hour.”

Croll’s house was the poorest in the village, but his garden was always neat and he had two fine rose bushes Mélanie had given him on either side of the stone front doorstep. Instinctively she looked them over to see how they had survived the winter. Inside, the little stone house was dark with the dank smell of a hearth where the fire has died out and of Croll’s abominable tobacco which he made himself out of weeds. It had only one room. Jacques was asleep on the double bed, half dressed, with a dirty old quilt pulled over him. Mélanie longed to get at it and give it a thorough scrubbing. But she had not come for that.

She went over to the bed and looked down at his sleeping face. He’s nothing but a child, she thought with instant compassion. And heaven knows what he’s been through.

Mélanie went to the hearth and started to light a fire with the few pieces of sticks and wood lying about.

Suddenly Jacques sat up, still half asleep, and shouted:

“Who’s there?”

“It’s all right, Jacques. It’s Mme. Duchesne, your old friend.”

As he woke himself up, his face became sullen and empty.

“What are you doing here?”

For a moment Mélanie hesitated. She had had no plan when she arrived, but in that moment of hesitation she made up her mind.

“I need an extra man, Jacques. We are in the middle of the spring planting. I wondered if you would come and help.”

“Why should I?” He yawned and reached for a shirt hanging over the end of the bed. The tone was insolent.

“You mustn’t speak to me like that, Jacques,” she said firmly.

For the first time a glimmer of his old face slid over the new mask, like a faint light that came on and then went off.

“I’m no good for work, madame. I don’t like work,” he explained rather patiently.

“Nonsense. I never knew a harder worker than you. You’re going to come along with me now and have a try. Do it for me. Remember how you used to come over and steal the apples? We were good friends then.”

But as Mélanie talked to him with brisk assurance she felt more and more that there was a real barrier between him and the world. The war sickness, that was what Louise had called it. Well, they must get him well. And the first thing was to get him away from the demoralizing atmosphere of the house.

The fire was burning brightly now, and she looked around for some coffee to heat in the one saucepan hanging on a nail by the hearth. While she made coffee Jacques stumbled out to the pump and threw cold water over his face. He looked a little more like a human being when he came in. His clothes, Mélanie thought, exactly expressed his state of mind—somewhere between army and civilian life. He still wore army pants and boots but had taken one of his father’s blue shirts.

“Come,” she said, “let’s have our coffee out of doors in the sun.”

He followed her to the step and sat down, bringing two tin cups with him. It was easier outside. They sat still in the sun, silently, and drank the hot brown liquid which was mostly chicory and tasted bitter. There was no sugar in the house.

“It’s been a long time, eh, Jacques?” Mélanie spoke out of the silence.

He looked away and didn’t answer. Somewhere, somehow the light had gone out of him, the desire to live had gone out of him. He was passive. There was no time, long or short, in the place where he was now.

If she could only get him to laugh, just once, Mélanie thought, that would be the beginning. He was looking at her sideways now.

“I’ll come with you,” he said. “Might as well,” he added.

“Come along, then. Half my morning is gone. We’ll have to work like beavers to catch up.”

From behind the tiny windows in the stone farmhouses the neighbors watched them go down the street and nodded to each other. Trust Mme. Duchesne to know when she was needed. She was better than a priest.

At Louise’s house they stopped to pick up Françoise.

“Oh, Mamie, can’t we take one with us?” she begged, hating to leave the rabbits, but then stopped and stared silently.

“Françoise, this is Jacques, Croll’s son. He is back from the army now and he is coming to help us with the garden.”

As they began the walk home, Mélanie talked about the garden and the animals and told Jacques something of what had happened while he was away. He didn’t answer or seem to be paying attention, and she observed him curiously.

He was tall and gangling, the very opposite type from his father, and he had grown thinner. Mélanie suspected that he didn’t get enough to eat. Later she would get the family doctor over to examine him.

After a while, as they came up into the great rolling fields, they were silent. Françoise clung to her mother’s hand. Jacques looked out on the familiar land as if he were a stranger.

All around them, as they reached the high plateau, the larks were singing loudly. Jacques stopped and took notice for the first time.

“It’s good to hear the larks again—that means we are really in the spring,” she said.

“They sang over the guns,” he answered shortly. “Stupid little creatures.”

But once more the glimmer of light came and went in his eyes. Then they trudged on.

Later, in the garden, when Françoise had gone off for her lesson (Mélanie arranged it so that Jacques would be out of earshot of his father), she tried to get him to talk about the war. He worked badly, stopping for no reason, as if lost, hardly in thought, but in a sort of stupor. And she did not push him. She knew she mustn’t force things or he wouldn’t come back. And her whole plan depended on his coming back.

In the middle of the morning Paul came down to find Mélanie, to get a breath of air, to tell her that today Françoisc’s lesson had gone very well and he was pleased with her; and in her turn she took him to see the quince bursting out into pale pink flowers and already buzzing with greedy bees. She told him about Jacques. Paul was interested at once. Their house was always the haven for some lame duck or other, and the minute people were in trouble Paul could be unbelievably patient and kind as well as understanding.

A half hour later Mélanie was delighted to hear laughter from the far corner of the garden where she had left Jacques to trim the paths. Paul was telling him long grotesque stories of how the Belgians had teased the occupying forces all through the war. The universal weapon had been mockery of all kinds, from the broad humor of stealing the pants of a group of officers who had gone for a swim in the lake in the forest to more subtle and daring jokes like that of seeing that a copy of the chief underground paper, La Libre Belgique, found its way every morning to the commanding general’s desk in Brussels. “And if there’s one thing the German can’t stand, it’s being laughed at.”

But when Paul had gone back to his study, Jacques lay down in the grass among the daisies and looked up at the sky until he fell asleep. Croll’s anger and Mélanie’s imperious maternal solicitude could not touch him yet.

There Françoise found him; she stood a long time looking down at this strange man lying in the grass. But when he opened his eyes and stared at her as if he didn’t see her at all, with a goat’s blank gaze, she ran, ran away to find Bo-Bo at the top of the house, cleaning out the attic.

“What is it, my treasure? What’s the matter?”

“Oh, Bo-Bo,” she said, hiding her face in Bo-Bo’s clean cotton skirt that smelled so safe, “there’s a soldier—he’s sleeping in the garden.”

“Well,” said Bo-Bo matter-of-factly, “no doubt he’s tired. Let him sleep, then.”

“It’s Croll’s son, Bo-Bo.” And then she burst into tears without knowing why and sobbed, “I don’t like soldiers. I hate them!”