“But you say your mother’s hands are so lame that she can’t hold a pen. And wouldn’t
At that his frown would lift. “Oh, yes. She would despise any attempt at concealment.”
“Well, then—what the deuce is the matter?”
“It’s when I see these devils’ traces—” he could only mutter.
One day, when we had passed through a particularly devastated little place, and had got from the cure some more than usually abominable details of things done there, Rechamp broke out to me over the kitchen-fire of our night’s lodging. “When I hear things like that I don’t believe anybody who tells me my people are all right!”
“But you know well enough,” I insisted, “that the Germans are not all alike—that it all depends on the particular officer….”
“Yes, yes, I know,” he assented, with a visible effort at impartiality. “Only, you see—as one gets nearer….” He went on to say that, when he had been sent from the ambulance at the front to a hospital at Moulins, he had been for a day or two in a ward next to some wounded German soldiers—bad cases, they were—and had heard them talking. They didn’t know he knew German, and he had heard things…. There was one name always coming back in their talk, von Scharlach, Oberst von Scharlach. One of them, a young fellow, said: “I wish now I’d cut my hand off rather than do what he told us to that night…. Every time the fever comes I see it all again. I wish I’d been struck dead first.” They all said “Scharlach” with a kind of terror in their voices, as if he might hear them even there, and come down on them horribly. Rechamp had asked where their regiment came from, and had been told: From the Vosges. That had set his brain working, and whenever he saw a ruined village, or heard a tale of savagery, the Scharlach nerve began to quiver. At such times it was no use reminding him that the Germans had had at least three hundred thousand men in the East in August. He simply didn’t listen….
III
The day before we started for Rechamp his spirits flew up again, and that night he became confidential. “You’ve been such a friend to me that there are certain things—seeing what’s ahead of us—that I should like to explain”; and, noticing my surprise, he went on: “I mean about my people. The state of mind in my
I saw that what he wanted was to talk to me of the girl he was engaged to.
Now and then she used to be driven over to play with the young Rechamps, and Jean remembered her as an ugly little girl in a plaid frock, who used to invent wonderful games and get tired of playing them just as the other children were beginning to learn how. But her domineering ways and searching questions did not meet with his mother’s approval, and her visits were not encouraged. When she was seventeen her guardian died and left her a little money. 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 Rechamp 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 Rechamps heard she was coming, but didn’t ask her to stay. Jean drove over to the shut-up chateau, however, and found
There was a deadly silence, and Jean did not raise the question again; but I can imagine his blue eyes getting obstinate.
Soon after
Before long they confessed their love—just like any young couple of Anglo-Saxons—and Jean went down to Rechamp 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! 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 Rechamp 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