The dark girl jumped up and ran out into the hall. I remember wondering: “Is it because she wants to have him to herself first—or because she’s afraid of their being startled?” I wished myself out of the way, but she took no notice of me, and going straight to Jean flung her arms about him. I was behind him and could see her hands about his neck, and her brown fingers tightly locked. There wasn’t much doubt about those two….
The next minute she caught sight of me, and I was being rapidly tested by a pair of the finest eyes I ever saw—I don’t apply the term to their setting, though that was fine too, but to the look itself, a look at once warm and resolute, all-promising and all-penetrating. I really can’t do with fewer adjectives….
Rechamp explained me, and she was full of thanks and welcome; not excessive, but—well, I don’t know—eloquent! She gave every intonation all it could carry, and without the least emphasis: that’s the wonder.
She went back to “prepare” the parents, as they say in melodrama; and in a minute or two we followed. What struck me first was that these insignificant and inadequate people had the command of the grand gesture—had la ligne. The mother had laid aside her knitting—_not_ dropped it—and stood waiting with open arms. But even in clasping her son she seemed to include me in her welcome. I don’t know how to describe it; but they never let me feel I was in the way. I suppose that’s part of what you call distinction; knowing instinctively how to deal with unusual moments.
All the while, I was looking about me at the fine secure old room, in which nothing seemed altered or disturbed, the portraits smiling from the walls, the servants beaming in the doorway—and wondering how such things could have survived in the trail of death and havoc we had been following.
The same thought had evidently struck Jean, for he dropped his sister’s hand and turned to gaze about him too.
“Then nothing’s touched—nothing? I don’t understand,” he stammered.
Monsieur de Rechamp raised himself majestically from his chair, crossed the room and lifted Yvonne Malo’s hand to his lips. “Nothing is touched—thanks to this hand and this brain.”
Madame de Rechamp was shining on her son through tears. “Ah, yes—we owe it all to Yvonne.”
“All, all! 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 don’t know exactly what she reminded me of: a dried bouquet, or something rich and clovy that had turned brittle through long keeping in a sandal-wood box. I suppose her sandal-wood box had been Good Society. Well, I had a rare evening with her. Jean and his parents were called down to see the cure, who had hurried over to the chateau when he heard of the young man’s arrival; and the old lady asked me to stay on and chat with her. 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; and they didn’t do me the honour of coming beyond my door. A glance sufficed them—an old woman like me!” she added with a phosphorescent gleam of coquetry.
“But they searched the chateau, surely?” “Oh, a mere form; they were very decent—very decent,” she almost snapped at me. “There was a first moment, of course, when we feared it might be hard to get Monsieur de Rechamp away with my young grandson; but Mlle. 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 fiancee 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.” And this champion of tradition smiled on me more intensely.
Little by little I got from her the story of the German approach: the distracted fugitives pouring in from the villages north of Rechamp, the sound of distant cannonading, and suddenly, the next afternoon, after a reassuring lull, the sight of a single spiked helmet at the end of the drive. In a few minutes a dozen followed: mostly officers; then all at once the place hummed with them. There were supply waggons and motors in the court, bundles of hay, stacks of rifles, artillery-men unharnessing and rubbing down their horses. The crowd was hot and thirsty, and in a moment the old lady, to her amazement, saw wine and cider being handed about by the Rechamp servants. “Or so at least I was told,” she added, correcting herself, “for it’s not my habit to look out of the window. I simply sat here and waited.” Her seat, as she spoke, might have been a curule chair.
Downstairs, it appeared, Mlle. Malo had instantly taken her measures. She didn’t sit and wait. Surprised in the garden with Simone, she had made the girl walk quietly back to the house and receive the officers with her on the doorstep. The officer in command—captain, or whatever he was—had arrived in a bad temper, cursing and swearing, and growling out menaces about spies. The day was intensely hot, and possibly he had had too much wine. At any rate Mlle. Malo had known how to “put him in his place”; and when he and the other officers entered they found the dining-table set out with refreshing drinks and cigars, melons, strawberries and iced coffee. “The clever creature! She even remembered that they liked whipped cream with their coffee!”
The effect had been miraculous. The captain—what was his name? Yes, Chariot, Chariot—Captain Chariot had been specially complimentary on the subject of the whipped cream and the cigars. Then he asked to see the other members of the family, and Mlle. Malo told him there were only two—“two old women!” He made a face at that, and said all the same he should like to meet them; and she answered: “‘One is your hostess, the Comtesse de Rechamp, who is ill in bed’—for my poor daughter-in-law was lying in bed paralyzed with rheumatism—‘and the other her mother-in-law, a very old lady who never leaves her room.’”
“But aren’t there any men in the family?” he had then asked; and she had said: “Oh yes—two. The Comte de Rechamp and his son.”
“And where are they?”
“In England. Monsieur de Rechamp went a month ago to take his son on a trip.”
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. It turned out afterward that he’d been climbing a garden wall after fruit, and cut himself on the broken glass at the top; but the blood was enough—they raised the usual dreadful outcry about an ambush, and a lieutenant clattered into the room where Mlle. Malo sat playing Stravinsky.” The old lady paused for her effect, and I was conscious of giving her all she wanted.