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The Little French Girl

BY ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK

Boston and New York HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge

SECOND IMPRESSION, AUGUST, 1924 THIRD IMPRESSION, SEPTEMBER, 1924 FOURTH IMPRESSION, SEPTEMBER, 1924

The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE ? MASSACHUSETTS PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

The Little French Girl

PART I

Two women, pausing on their way out to look at her, drew her mind back from Montarel. She knew that she might look younger than her years. Her bobbed hair was cut straight across her forehead and her skirt displayed a childish length of leg. It was no wonder that, seeing her there, alone, they should speak of her with curiosity, perhaps with solicitude; for there was kindness in their eyes. But she did not like pity, and, drawing herself up more straightly, wrapping her arms in the scarf that muffled her shoulders, she fixed her eyes blankly above their heads until they had passed on. They were kind women; but very ugly. Like jugs. All the people that she had seen since landing on this day of grey and purple flesh-tones had made her think of the earthenware jugs that old Marthe used to range along her upper shelves in the little dark shop that stood on the turn of the road leading down from the ch?teau to the village. Their eyes were joyless yet untragic. Their clothes expressed no enterprise. She did not think that they could feel ecstasy, ever, or despair. Yet they were the people of Captain Owen, and she could not be really forgotten, for Captain Owen's family were to come for her. It was only some mistake; but more than the strokes of the clock the women's eyes had made her feel how late it was, how young she was, and how hungry.

M?lanie, mute, grim, inscrutable, helped the gentleman from Paris to take them down, one by one, and wrap them up and carry them across the courtyard to the waiting car: and Alix had watched it all, knowing that a final disaster had fallen upon her house.

"Have you had anything to eat?" monsieur Giles almost shouted at her. "Where's your box? Is this all? I'm so horribly sorry."

"Yes, this is all. It has not been so long, really. I have not eaten. I was afraid to go to the restaurant lest I should miss you."

Her English was so good that she saw him at once a little reassured. He had shouted like that partly from embarrassment and partly because he thought she might only understand if he talked loud. His face, as he seized her box in his other hand, echoed her smile as it had echoed her distress. It was a kind face. It echoed people's feelings easily.

"Let me take the bag; you cannot carry all," said Alix.

But he shoved himself sideways through the door and then held it open while she passed out, commenting as he did so, "But, I say, you're not a child!"

"A year makes a great difference," said Alix. "And I was not really so young; already fifteen, when Captain Owen first saw me, last October, in Cannes."

Monsieur Giles said nothing to this, and she wondered what Captain Owen had written of her and Maman after that first meeting.

Now they were sitting opposite each other at a little table that seemed to have a great many cruets and salt-cellars upon it. It was a very bright and very ugly room, and through the doors, opening and shutting incessantly, came the muffled roar of incoming trains; but after the waiting-room it was homelike. She was safe with monsieur Giles. He was a person who made you feel safe. Soup was put before them, all substance and no savour, but she ate it eagerly, and said that, yes, please, she would like fish.

"I don't advise the beef, Sir," he said in a low, impassive voice. "It's specially tough to-day, Sir. You'd do better with the mutton."

"Mutton, then, by all means!" said Giles, laughing. "Rather nice, that, what?" he asked, smiling at Alix across the table when the waiter was gone.

"Not that, I think," said Maman thoughtfully; "but with another race it is difficult to tell."

"And since Captain Owen was so much our friend, what interest can it have for us?" Alix had inquired, with the dryness she could sometimes show towards Maman.

"You know," he said, "I'm not going to take you to Sussex to-night. It's too late and you're too tired. Don't try to eat that nasty sauce; scrape it off and leave it. I apologize for our sauces, Mademoiselle.--I'm going to take you to my aunt's. She'll be able to put us up and I'll telephone to her now. Don't run away in disgust with us and our sauces, while I'm gone."

"I've wired to Mummy, too," said Giles, when he came back, "and told her we'll turn up to-morrow morning; so that's all right." And now he asked her questions. What did she read? Did she care for pictures and music? How had she learned to speak such admirable English?

Alix told him that she and Maman had often spoken English together and that she had had English governesses. "I always liked your books, too. That made it easier. 'Alice' and the rabbit and 'Pride and Prejudice' and 'Dombey and Son.' Have you read those?"

"I question that!" said Giles, smiling at her. "Great books should be written for everybody."

"We can read Racine and Corneille and Lamartine," said Alix.

Alix reflected, a little vexed.

"Here's another kind of sauce," said Giles, as a portion of apricot tart was placed before each of them surrounded by a yellow glutinous substance. "I'll grant you your cooking if you'll grant me the best books for everybody.--Anyhow, I see you're too tired to argue. We'll fight it out some other time."

"But how did you come to appreciate our cooking so well?" Alix asked. "It is made with flour, this sauce, not properly cooked;--that is the trouble."

"The trouble is that it's the same sauce as the one that went with the fish, only coloured to look different.--I travelled in France when I was a boy, you see. And I'm just back from nine months there. I was in the East before that, for the first years of the war."

"In France for nine months? Why did you not come to see us?" Alix asked. She asked it without stopping to think, for it was so strange that they should not have seen Captain Owen's brother.

"I was at the front, and wanted all my leaves at home," said Giles, and he smiled very brightly at her. He did not look at all embarrassed now; yet she had a surmise. He stopped himself from showing embarrassment. Surely he could have come? Had he not wanted to come? And he was going on talking, while he paid the bill, as if he felt she might be asking herself that question: "My aunt lives in a part of London called Chelsea. At the time 'Pride and Prejudice' was written, it was all gardens there; it's mostly flats now. We've changed very much, in all sorts of ways from the England of 'Pride and Prejudice'; just as you have from the France of Lamartine."

From Giles she passed to Aunt Bella, who smelt of toilet vinegar and had a seal ring on her small glazed-looking hand.

After that Alix was only drowsily aware of a little pink bedroom where a row of pink, blue and green water-colours framed in gilt hung upon the walls. Her head sank into a pillow and all the troubled thoughts into sleep; but, just before she was quite oblivious, a little tap came to the door; it opened softly and a tall head, silhouetted on the lighted hall, looked in, and Giles said, "Good-night, Alix."

It was treating her as a child and it made her feel very safe.

For many hours the little French girl slept on dreamlessly, and when she woke it was as if an abyss of space and time lay between her and yesterday morning. As she gazed up at the dim ceiling, only the most recent memories wove themselves softly into her returning sense of identity: the yellow sauce that Giles had told her to scrape off; his faded khaki necktie; Aunt Bella's small, glazed hands. Kindness, security, lay behind these appearances, and an apprehension of pain seemed at first substanceless and irrational. Then, with a gathering effort, it shaped itself: France; Maman; what was she doing and was she happy?--She had not been really happy yesterday morning. Why had monsieur Giles been so troubled when they met? And why had he never come to see them in all the nine months he had been in France?

There was a tap at the door and an elderly maid came in, neatly capped, bearing a brass hot-water-can, which she stood in the basin. Then she drew the curtains and turned up the electric light and placed by the bedside a very amusing little tea-set on a tray. It was Alix's initiation into early-morning tea, and for a moment, as she gazed at it, she feared it was to be all her breakfast until the maid, withdrawing, said, very distinctly, as though she might be deaf: "Breakfast at nine, Miss; and the bathroom is opposite."

She was seated opposite the mantelpiece, Giles under it, and, following her eyes, Aunt Bella said: "That is our great Mr. Gladstone, Alix. You've heard of Mr. Gladstone."

Alix had to confess that she had not.

"Well, you'll have heard of George Washington, then," said Aunt Bella. "There he is, behind you." And Alix turned round to look up at the austere face in powdered hair.

"He was an American, was he not, and your enemy?" she inquired.

"He was the enemy of one of our foolish kings," said Aunt Bella, "but an Englishman, and one we are all proud of. And that's Cobden." She completed her educational round with the third large engraving that hung near the window.

Alix for a moment was afraid that Aunt Bella might really be going to instruct her, and she had not the least wish to know anything about any of the respectable gentlemen who presided over the breakfast-table.

But Giles was going on, with his bantering smile. "If you go to Aunt Bella, you'll get a one-sided impression, perhaps. She's a great Liberal. We are all Liberals in my family. What you'd call Republicans.--Aunt Bella, you're not asking this helpless French child to drink tea for her breakfast!"

"Doesn't she have tea?" Aunt Bella asked, and though Alix insisted that she did not mind it at all, there was much concerned conversation, and the elderly maid was summoned and told to ask cook to make some cocoa for the young lady.

"You hate tea, I suppose," said Giles, and Alix replied that she liked it very much at five o'clock, and Giles went on: "Whereas Aunt Bella likes it at all hours of the day and night; and Indian tea, I'm grieved to say; it's the only rift within our lute, Aunt Bella's Indian tea;--since we do agree about Gladstone. Now you're a Royalist, I suppose, Alix?"

"But surely no rational person in France is a Royalist any longer," said Aunt Bella.

"Grand-p?re did not love the Republic," said Alix, "but Maman admires Napoleon and the Revolution."

"I sometimes think we shall get both a revolution and a Napoleon in this country," said Aunt Bella, "at the rate things seem to be going."

"There'll never be a revolution in England," said Giles. "People who drink Indian tea could never make a revolution, could they, Alix?"

"I do not think so," Alix smiled. "Nor in a country with such fogs."

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