would have liked to have known about, that touched dim chords of memory sixty years back. He did have one success with them, however.
As the sun grew warmer and the grass drier he took to sitting out in the garden after dejeuner for half an hour, in a deck-chair. He was sitting so one day while the children played among the trees. He watched them covertly. It seemed that they wanted to play a game they called attention which demanded a whistle, and they had no whistle.
The little boy said: 'I can whistle with my mouth,' and proceeded to demonstrate the art.
His sister pursed up her immature lips and produced only a wet splutter. From his deck-chair the old man spoke up suddenly.
'I'll make you a whistle, if you like,' he said.
They were silent, staring at him doubtfully. 'Would you like me to make you a whistle?' he enquired.
'When?' asked Ronald.
'Now. I'll make you one out of a bit of that tree.' He nodded to a hazel bush.
They stared at him, incredulous. He got up from his chair and cut a twig the thickness of his little finger from the bush. 'Like this.'
He sat down again, and began to fashion a whistle with the pen-knife that he kept for scraping out his pipe. It was a trick that he had practised throughout his life, for John first and then for Enid when they had been children, more recently for little Martin Costello. The Cavanagh children stood by him watching his slow, wrinkled fingers as they worked; in their faces incredulity melted into interest. He stripped the bark from the twig, cut deftly with the little knife, and bound the bark back into place. He put it to his lips, and it gave out a shrill note.
They were delighted, and he gave it to the little girl, 'You can whistle with your mouth,' he said to Ronald, 'but she can't.'
'Will you make me one tomorrow?'
'All right, I'll make you one tomorrow.' They went off together, and whistled all over the hotel and through the village, till the bark crushed beneath the grip of a hot hand. But the whistle was still good for taking to bed, together with a Teddy and a doll called Melanic.
'It was so very kind of you to make that whistle for the children,' Mrs Cavanagh said that night, over coffee. 'They were simply thrilled with it.'
'Children always like a whistle, especially if they see it made,' the old man said. It was one of the basic truths that he had learned in a long life, and he stated it simply.
'They told me how quickly you made it,' she said. 'You must have made a great many.'
'Yes,' he said, 'I've made a good many whistles in my time.' He fell into a reverie, thinking of all the whistles he had made for John and Enid, so many years ago, in the quiet garden of the house at Exeter. Enid who had grown up and married and gone to live in the United States. John, who had grown up and gone into the Air Force. John.
He forced his mind back to the present. 'I'm glad they liked it,' he said. 'I promised Ronald that I'd make him one tomorrow.'
Tomorrow was the tenth of May. As the old man sat in his deck-chair beneath the trees carving a whistle for Ronald, German troops were pouring into Holland, beating down the Dutch Army. The Dutch Air Force was flinging its full strength of forty fighting planes against the Luftwaffe. A thousand traitors leapt into activity; all through the day the parachutists dropped from the sky. In Cidoton the only radio happened to be switched off, and so Howard whittled at his hazel twig in peace.
It did not break his peace much when they switched it on. In Cidoton the war seemed very far away; with Switzerland to insulate them from the Germans the village was able to view the war dispassionately. Belgium was being invaded again, as in the last war; the sale Boche! This time Holland, too, was in it; so many more to fight on the side of France. Perhaps they would not penetrate into France at all this time, with Holland to be conquered and assimilated first.
In all this, Howard acquiesced. He could remember very clearly how the war had gone before. He had been in it for a short time, in the Yeomanry, but had been quickly invalided out with rheumatic fever. The cockpit of Europe would take the shock of the fighting as it usually did; there was nothing new in that. In Cidoton, it made no change. He listened to the news from time to time in a detached manner, without great interest. Presently fishing would begin; the snow was gone from the low levels and the mountain streams were running less violently each day.
The retreat from Brussels did not interest him much; it had all happened before. He felt a trace of disquiet when Abbeville was reached, but he was no great strategist, and did not realise all that was involved. He got his first great shock when Leopold, King of the Belgians, laid down his arms on the 29th May. That had not happened in the last war, and it upset him.
But on that day nothing could upset him for very long. He was going fishing for the first time next morning, and the evening was occupied in sorting out his gear, soaking his casts and selecting flies. He walked six miles next day and caught three blue trout. He got back tired and happy at about six o'clock, had dinner, and went up immediately to bed. In that way he missed the first radio broadcasts of the evacuation of Dunkirk.
Next day he was jerked finally from his complacence. He sat by the radio in the estaminet for most of the day, distressed and worried. The gallant retreat from the beaches stirred him as nothing had for months; for the first time he began to feel a desire to return to England. He knew that if he went, there would be nothing for him to do, but he wanted to be back. He wanted to be in the thick of things again, seeing the British uniforms in the streets, sharing the tension and anxiety. Cidoton irked him with its rustic indifference to the war., By the 4th June the last forces had left Dunkirk, Paris had had its one and only air-raid, and Howard had made up his mind. He admitted as much that night to Mrs Cavanagh.
'I don't like the look of things at all,' he said. 'Not at all. I think I shall go home. At a time like this, a man's place is in his own country.'
She looked at him, startled. 'But surely, you're not afraid that the Germans will come here, Mr Howard? They couldn't get as far as this.' She smiled reassuringly.
'No,' he said, 'they won't get much farther than they are now. But at the same time, I think I shall go home. ' He paused, and then he said a little wistfully: 'I might be able to get into the A. R. P.'
She knitted on quietly. 'I shall miss having you to talk to in the evenings,' she said. 'The children will miss you, too.'
'It has been a great pleasure to have known them,' he said. 'I shall miss them.'
She said: 'Sheila enjoyed the little walk you took her for. She put the flowers in her tooth-mug.'
It was not the old man's way to act precipitately, but he gave a week's notice to Madame Lucard that night and planned to leave on the eleventh. He did it in the estaminet, and provoked a lively discussion on the ethics of his case, in which most of the village took part. At the end of an hour's discussion, and a round of Pernod, the general opinion was favourable to him. It was hard on Madame Lucard to lose her best guest, the gendarme said, and sad for them to lose their English Camarade, but without doubt an old soldier should be in his own country in these times. Monsieur was very right. But he would return, perhaps?
Howard said that he hoped to return within a very few weeks, when the dangerous stage of the war had passed.
Next day he began to prepare for his journey. He did not hurry over it because he meant to stay his week out. In fact, he had another day's fishing and caught another two blue trout. There was a lull in the righting for a few days after the evacuation from Dunkirk and he went through a day of indecision, but then the Germans thrust again on the Somme and he went on preparing to go home.
On the ninth of June Cavanagh appeared, having driven unexpectedly from Geneva in his little car. He seemed more worried and distrait than usual, and vanished into the bedroom with his wife. The children were sent out to play in the garden.
An hour later he tapped on the door of Howard's bedroom. The old man had been reading in a chair and had dropped asleep, the book idle on his lap. He woke at the second tap, settled his spectacles, and said: 'Come in!'
He stared with surprise at his visitor, and got up. 'This is a great pleasure,' he said formally. 'But what brings you out here in the middle of the week? Have you got a holiday?'
Cavanagh seemed a little dashed. 'I've taken a day off,' he said after a moment. 'May I come in?'
