Part 24

"Ah, les cochons!" he would say; "while one finger does not move, they shall pay me!" He was very bitter against all "majors" save one, who it seemed had actually sympathised with him, and all députés, who for him constituted the powers of darkness, drawing their salaries, and sitting in their chairs. ("Ah! les chameaux!")

Though he was several years younger than oneself, one always thought of him as "Old Poirot" indeed, he was soon called "le grand-père," though no more confirmed bachelor ever inhabited the world. He was a regular "Miller of Dee," caring for nobody; and yet he was likeable, that humorous old stoic, who suffered from gall-stones, and bore horrible bouts of pain like a hero. In spite of all his disabilities his health and appearance soon became robust in our easy-going hospital, where no one was harried, the food excellent, and the air good. He would tell you that his father lived to eighty, and his grandfather to a hundred, both "strong men" though not so strong as his old master, the squire, of whose feats in the hunting-field he would give most staggering accounts in an argot which could only be followed by instinct. A great narrator, he would describe at length life in the town of Nancy, where, when the War broke out, he was driving a market cart, and distributing vegetables, which had made him an authority on municipal reform. Though an incorrigible joker, his stockfish countenance would remain perfectly grave, except for an occasional hoarse chuckle. You would have thought he had no more power of compassion than a cat, no more sensibility than a Chinese idol; but this was not so. In his wooden, shrewd, distrustful way he responded to sympathy, and was even sorry for others. I used to like very much his attitude to the young "stable-companion" who had arrived with him; he had no contempt, such as he might easily have felt for so weakly a creature, but rather a real indulgence towards his feebleness. "Ah!" he would say at first; "he won't make old bones--that one!" But he seemed extremely pleased when, in a fortnight or so, he had to modify that view, for Bidan (Prosper) prospered more rapidly even than himself. That grey look was out of the boy's face within three weeks. It was wonderful to watch him come back to life, till at last he could say, with his dreadful Provençal twang, that he felt "très biang." A most amiable youth, he had been a cook, and his chief ambition was to travel till he had attained the summit of mortal hopes, and was cooking at the Ritz in London. When he came to us his limbs seemed almost to have lost their joints, they wambled so. He had no muscle at all. Utter anæmia had hold of all his body, and all but a corner of his French spirit. Round that unquenchable gleam of gaiety the rest of him slowly rallied. With proper food and air and freedom, he began to have a faint pink flush in his china-white cheeks; his lids no longer drooped, his limbs seemed to regain their joints, his hands ceased to swell, he complained less and less of the pains about his heart. When, of a morning, he was finished with, and "le grand-père" was having his hands done, they would engage in lively repartee--oblivious of one's presence. We began to feel that this grey ghost of a youth had been well named, after all, when they called him Prosper, so lyrical would he wax over the constitution and cooking of "bouillabaisse," over the South, and the buildings of his native Aix-en-Provence. In all France you could not have found a greater contrast than those two who had come to us so under the weather; nor in all France two better instances of the way men can regain health of body and spirit in the right surroundings.

We had a tremendous fall of snow that winter, and had to dig ourselves out of it. Poirot and Bidan were of those who dug. It was amusing to watch them. Bidan dug easily, without afterthought. "Le grand-père" dug, with half an eye at least on his future; in spite of those stiff fingers he shifted a lot of snow, but he rested on his shovel whenever he thought you could see him--for he was full of human nature.

To see him and Bidan set off for town together! Bidan pale, and wambling a little still, but gay, with a kind of birdlike detachment; "le grand-père" stocky, wooden, planting his huge feet rather wide apart and regarding his companion, the frosted trees, and the whole wide world, with his humorous stare.

Once, I regret to say, when spring was beginning to come, Bidan-Prosper returned on "le grand-père's" arm with the utmost difficulty, owing to the presence within him of a liquid called Clairette de Die, no amount of which could subdue "le grand-père's" power of planting one foot before the other. Bidan-Prosper arrived hilarious, revealing to the world unsuspected passions; he awoke next morning sad, pale, penitent. Poirot, au contraire, was morose the whole evening, and awoke next morning exactly the same as usual. In such different ways does the gift of the gods affect us.

They had their habits, so diverse, their constitutions, and their dreams--alas! not yet realised. I know not where they may be now; Bidan-Prosper cannot yet be cooking at the Ritz in London town; but "grand-père" Poirot may perchance be distributing again his vegetables in the streets of Nancy, driving his two good little horses--des gaillards--with the reins hooked round "l'empereur." Good friends--good luck!

XIII

THE MUFFLED SHIP

It was cold and grey, but the band on shore was playing, and the flags on shore were fluttering, and the long double-tiered wharf crowded with welcomers in each of its open gaps, when our great ship slowly drew alongside, packed with cheering, chattering crowds of khaki figures, letting go all the pent-up excitement of getting home from the war. The air was full of songs and laughter, of cheers, and shouted questions, the hooting of the launches' sirens, the fluttering flags and hands and handkerchiefs; and there were faces of old women, and of girls, intent, expectant, and the white gulls were floating against the grey sky, when our ship, listed slightly by those thousands of figures straining towards the land which had bred them, gently slurred up against the high wharf, and was made fast.

The landing went on till night had long fallen, and the band was gone. At last the chatter, the words of command, the snatches of song, and that most favourite chorus: "Me! and my girl!" died away, and the wharf was silent and the ship silent, and a wonderful clear dark beauty usurped the spaces of the sky. By the light of the stars and a half moon the far harbour shores were just visible, the huddled buildings on the near shore, the spiring masts and feathery appanage of ropes on the moored ship, and one blood-red light above the black water. The night had all that breathless beauty which steeps the soul in a quivering, quiet rapture....

Then it was that clearly, as if I had been a welcomer standing on land in one of the wharf gaps, I saw her come--slow, slow, creeping up the narrow channel, in beside the wharf, a great grey silent ship. At first I thought her utterly empty, deserted, possessed only by the thick coiled cables forward, the huge rusty anchors, the piled-up machinery of structure and funnel and mast, weird in the blue darkness. A lantern on the wharf cast a bobbing golden gleam deep into the oily water at her side. Gun-grey, perfectly mute, she ceased to move, coming to rest against the wharf. And then, with a shiver, I saw that something clung round her, a grey film or emanation, which shifted and hovered, like the invisible wings of birds in a thick mist. Gradually to my straining eyes that filmy emanation granulated, and became faces attached to grey filmy forms, thousands on thousands, and every face bent towards the shore, staring, as it seemed, through me, at all that was behind me. Slowly, very slowly, I made them out--faces of helmeted soldiers, bulky with the gear of battle, their arms outstretched, and the lips of every one opened, so that I expected to hear the sound of cheering; but no sound came. Now I could see their eyes. They seemed to beseech--like the eyes of a little eager boy who asks his mother something she cannot tell him; and their outstretched hands seemed trying to reach her, lovingly, desperately trying to reach her! And those opened lips, how terribly they seemed trying to speak! "Mother! Mother Canada!" As if I had heard, I knew they were saying--those opened lips which could speak no more! "Mother! Mother Canada! Home! Home!..."

And then away down the wharf some one chanted: "Me and my girl!" And, silent as she had come, the muffled ship vanished in all her length, with those grey forms and those mute faces; and I was standing again in the bows beside a huge hawser; below me the golden gleam bobbing deep in the oily water, and above me the cold start in beauty shining.

XIV

HERITAGE

(AN IMPRESSION)

From that garden seat one could see the old low house of pinkish brick, with a path of queer-shaped flagstones running its length, and the tall grey chapel from which came the humming and chanting and organ drone of the Confirmation Service. But for that, and the voices of two gardeners working below us among the fruits and flowers, the July hush was complete. And suddenly one became aware of being watched.

That thin white windmill on the hill!

Away past the house, perhaps six hundred yards, it stood, ghostly, with a face like that of a dark-eyed white owl, made by the crossing of its narrow sails. With a black companion--a yew-tree cut to pyramid form, on the central point of Sussex--it was watching us, for though one must presume it built of old time by man, it looked up there against the sky, with its owl's face and its cross, like a Christo-Pagan presence.

What exactly Paganism was we shall never know; what exactly Christianism is, we are as little likely to discover; but here and there the two principles seem to dwell together in amity. For Paganism believed in the healthy and joyful body; and Christianism in the soul superior thereto. And, where we were sitting that summer day, was the home of bodies wrecked yet learning to be joyful, and of souls not above the process.

We moved from the grey-wood seat, and came on tiptoe to where house and chapel formed a courtyard. The doors were open, and we stood unseen, listening. From the centre of a square stone fountain a little bubble of water came up, and niched along one high wall a number of white pigeons were preening their feathers, silent, and almost motionless, as though attending to the Service.

The sheer emotion of church sounds will now and then steal away reason from the unbeliever, and take him drugged and dreaming. "Defend, O Lord, this Thy child!...." So it came out to us in the dream and drowse of summer, which the little bubble of water cooled.

In his robes--cardinal, and white, and violet--the good Bishop stood in full sunlight, speaking to the crippled and the air-raid children in their drilled rows under the shade of the doves' wall; and one felt far from this age, as if one had strayed back into that time when the builders of the old house laid slow brick on brick, wetting their whistles on mead, and knowing not tobacco.

And then, out by the chapel porch moved three forms in blue, with red neckties, and we were again in this new age, watching the faces of those listening children. The good Bishop was making them feel that he was happy in their presence, and that made them happy in his. For the great thing about life is the going-out of friendliness from being to being. And if a place be beautiful, and friendliness ever on the peace-path there, what more can we desire? And yet--how ironical this place of healing, this beautiful "Heritage!" Verily a heritage of our modern civilisation which makes all this healing necessary! If life were the offspring of friendliness and beauty's long companionship, there would be no crippled children, no air-raid children, none of those good fellows in blue with red ties and maimed limbs; and the colony to which the Bishop spoke, standing grey-headed in the sun, would be dissolved. Friendliness seems so natural, beauty so appropriate to this earth! But in this torn world they are as fugitives who nest together here and there. Yet stumbling by chance on their dove-cotes and fluttering happiness, one makes a little golden note, which does not fade off the tablet.

* * * * *

How entrancing it is to look at a number of faces never seen before--and how exasperating!--stamped coins of lives quite separate, quite different from every other; masks pallid, sunburned, smooth, or crumpled, to peep behind which one longs, as a lover looking for his lady at carnival, or a man aching at summer beauty which he cannot quite fathom and possess. If one had a thousand lives, and time to know and sympathy to understand the heart of every creature met with, one would want--a million! May life make us all intuitive, strip away self-consciousness, and give us sunshine and unknown faces!

What were they all feeling and thinking--those little cripples doing their drill on crutches; those air-raid waifs swelling their Cockney chests, rising on their toes, puffing their cheeks out in anxiety to do their best; those soldiers in their blue "slops," with a hand gone there and a leg gone here, and this and that grievous disability, all carrying on so cheerfully?

Values are queer in this world. We are accustomed to exalt those who can say "bo" to a goose; but that gift of expression which twines a halo round a lofty brow is no guarantee of goodness in the wearer. The really good are those plucky folk who plod their silent, often suffering, generally exploited ways, from birth to death, out of reach of the music of man's praise.

The first thing each child cripple makes here is a little symbolic ladder. In making it he climbs a rung on the way to his sky of self-support; and when at last he leaves this home, he steps off the top of it into the blue, and--so they say--walks there upright and undismayed, as if he had never suffered at Fate's hands. But what do he and she--for many are of the pleasant sex--think of the sky when they get there; that dusty and smoke-laden sky of the industrialism which begat them? How can they breathe in it, coming from this place of flowers and fresh air, of clean bright workshops and elegant huts, which they on crutches built for themselves?