Gradually, as the sisters stood watching as if in a trance, while the wind fluttered the ends of their black shawls and the dust rising from the road settled on their shoulders, they forgot their purpose there, and their faces became, rather than terrified, brooding, and grave. They resembled, in their apparent detachment from the hurrying, desperate, jostling throng below, two statues of Flemish saints standing high amidst the wheeling daws and the changing lights and winds of some ancient cathedral; both flat, brown faces wore just that open-eyed and pitying expression, mingled with wonder; but Jakoba’s, for all its calm, was also fierce.
One or two people glanced up at them, their anxious, wandering gaze caught and held for an instant by the two black figures standing high on the white dune against the sky, but, although Marie had uncovered the baby from her wrappings and both sisters half-hoped that someone might suddenly run out of the crowd and claim her, no-one paused in the agonized and headlong flight. The eyes glanced away again; they had already seen too much; if ever they reached safety, there would be more things that they had already seen than it would be possible to remember; on, let’s get on, anywhere away from here, on to safety.
“Now!” Jakoba said suddenly, while some farm-carts crammed with children and chickens and bedding crawled across the road.
She plunged downwards and the others followed; for an instant they were choking and coughing in the dust and the stench of the petrol and Klaartje was snorting with terror and disgust; then they were across; they were on the other side; and walking in short, rutted grass that led towards a lane bordered by poplars. There were people going down it, but not many, and it led into a maze of orchards and slowly-moving dykes and meadows, away from the road running beside the coast, into the country.
No-one spoke to them. They tramped on, Marie holding the baby more loosely now, and Klaas walking with bent head and his pipe cold between his teeth, and Jakoba stalking by the head of Klaartje, who had to be restrained from pausing to tear up grass from the side of the lane, and gradually the clamour from the road died away. Once they passed a meadow from which the horizon could be seen, and Jakoba nodded towards the open vista; on the farthest visible limit of sight, three faint, dark fingers pointed upwards into the tender mist of early summer: the cathedral, the belfry and the church, the Three who have watched for centuries over the city of Bruges. They seemed a very long way off this afternoon, and the sisters would have to get right up to them before they were at home, for they lived actually in the shadow of Our Lady’s spire.
The lane became narrower, and presently Jakoba, who was stalking ahead leading the party, turned aside and crossed a small bridge that spanned a slowly flowing dyke. It led into an orchard; the near distance was veiled here by a light curtain of green leaves and pink-and-white blossom supported on the black trunks and went off into a confusion of sunny light and dappling shadows, and there seemed to be no path. One or two people who were tramping silently, bent under the possessions they carried, in the same direction, glanced after the little party as it turned aside, but doubtfully; there was no path; surely it was safer to keep to a path, it might lead to a village or a farm where you could lie still and be quiet for an hour: and no-one followed them across the bridge; soon they were walking at the unhurried pace which they had kept up ever since leaving the dune, in the green light cast by the blossom and leaf-laden boughs, in a silence. The clamour from the roads had died away. The air smelled sweet and the bees droned peacefully in and out of the apple blossom.
“My feet … they feel red-hot,” Marie murmured, but neither of the others answered, and they kept unhurriedly but purposefully on.
Whenever they could see between the trees there were the big, calm meadows: so flat that it was possible for the eye to travel unimpeded on: round the outhouses of sturdy, whitewashed farms, across dykes whose limpid, slow-moving course was revealed by the double lines of old pollarded willows bordering their banks, past rows of lofty poplars whose feather-duster heads of light green nodded against the great sky, into the gentle, rich, tranquil distance. Tranquil, but not idle. Every foot of this land was at work; if not feeding the small fields of greening corn and sprouting vegetables, then it was pasturing the black-and-white cows, the clean pigs and few sheep and the big horses coloured, like Klaartje, a rich cinnamon, that grazed companionably together under the sapling trees or beside some small humpback bridge. Every visible object—soil, foliage, grazing animals, buildings—displayed a calm, ponderous, fruitful charm satisfying alike to the utilitarian compulsion in man and to the human eye. Flanders impressed the beholder as fertile and hard-working and content. To walk in this countryside was like strolling through the lines of a poem by Virgil bodied forth in facts.
And that was not going to save it from ravishment.
The wind must have changed; there were ominous sounds coming to them again; rumblings and jarrings of the earth beneath their feet and once, away to the east and very high up in the cloudless sky, a long falling scream followed by a tremendous explosion. Marie stared upwards while her work-worn brown fingers moved across her blouse in the sign of the cross. Oh, what was happening over there towards Holland, what kind of a thing was it that screamed high up in the air with a falling sound that died away?
She couldn’t keep quiet any longer; she must talk to someone; if only someone had been here who did talk and liked to talk; not Jakoba, who didn’t ever talk much and made it clear she didn’t want to; Jakoba, who would suddenly throw her shawl across her head and stride out of the house and down the street to the nearest café, there to sit drinking and laughing with male neighbours until the place shut up for the night … and sometimes go off alone to walk along beside the sea in her best Sunday costume, coming back all over dried salt from the spray, and sandy, and tired out …
Marie reassured herself, by a glance inside the shawl, that the child was still sleeping. Then she began to think with resentment about Jakoba … for all those years she had been telling her, Marie Michiels, what to do and exactly when and how to do it. And it wasn’t as if she was married, even if she was the eldest one. Marie was the married one. Even if it was twenty-five years ago since Jan had gone off, singing (so young, he had been; just twenty-three), to fight the Germans, with his rifle wreathed with flowers from their garden. Well, he hadn’t come back, and she had never really known how he had been killed, though there had been the letter from the Government, and the money they gave her … and Jakoba was the spinster, the unmarried one, and she didn’t treat her married sister with proper respect.
… Jakoba; she was undoubtedly a slavedriver, too, a tireless worker herself and determined that everybody else should be. Marie’s friend at the Béguinage, Mevrouw Schotte, who took the money and the tickets from the tourists who came to see the place … Gabrielle Schotte had more than once said that if Marie hadn’t sometimes stood up for herself when Jakoba was about, she would have become a slave, like one of those black people who waited on the Wijzen uit Den Oosten2 in the pictures painted by the famous old ones. Of course one should try to please Our Lady, and to do the will of God always, but Gabrielle had let it be known that Sœur Teresa herself—and she wasn’t the only one at the Béguinage by any means—thought that it mightn’t always be altogether displeasing to Them up in Heaven if people sometimes stood up for themselves. …
Marie looked up anxiously. Jakoba was stopping. What was the matter?
“Listen,” Jakoba said. They stood still, Marie holding the bundle tightly to her breast, and Klaas Impens cocking his head back to stare upwards, with his pipe clenched between his black stumps of teeth. Yes, Marie could hear it now; an increasing, throbbing, beating sound, of a peculiar intensity and majestic menace, that was beginning to fill the curved, whitening dome of the afternoon sky. But they could see nothing.
They stared at one another. Marie began to tremble. Jakoba was looking keenly about her. Plenty of trees, but what use were they? You wanted something underground; a cellar.
“Lie down, lie down, can’t you?” she said quickly and harshly, and stretched herself under the nearest willow at her extended length. Marie followed, lying carefully on her side so that the child might not be crushed. But Klaas stood by the head of Klaartje, ready to soothe him if there came an explosion, and very slowly began to pack with fresh tobacco his short, blackened pipe. His face looked as bitter as a quince.
Nothing happened. Feeling angry and sick, they lay there until the sound, having swelled until it was tremendous and almost unendurable, died slowly away towards the north in the level reaches of the sky. Still they had seen nothing. But there were clouds up there now, hiding everything.
Klaas made an ugly sound of laughter that showed his teeth, and gave a jerk to Klaartje’s rein. The sisters stood up, dusting their skirts, and the party went on.
Marie was walking now at Jakoba’s side. The wish to talk to someone was coming back. After another glance at the child (she looked better now, less tired; she had some colour in her cheeks) she said:
“Do you think she’s … what do you think she is? French?” looking down at the peaceful face, no wider than a hand’s span, framed in the black folds of the shawl.
“Might be. She’s very dark. Perhaps she’s a jodin, one of them that he’s making it so hot for over in Germany,” nodding towards the east, with a rough laugh.
“And come all this way …” Marie murmured, playing for a moment with the idea, but then she said, no, she didn’t think the baby was a tiny Jewess. “Though her people had money, that’s certain,” she went on; “look at her shoes,” uncovering; “real white kid … and she’s so clean and cared for … perhaps she had a nanni.”
Jakoba nodded. In ordinary times … even so short a time as three weeks ago this awful summer … they were accustomed to seeing hundreds of just such rich-looking little monkeys as this one … perhaps a bit older, but not much … hopping or staggering in and out of the sea at Zandeburghe, in smart bathing-drawers or as naked as they were born. This was the kind of child that careful parents or nannis lifted into the blue-and-yellow cart which was drawn by Klaartje to make the excursion à la mer, at one franc each a ride; down to the sea and back, in the blue-and-yellow cart, with herself or Marie walking at Klaartje’s head.
Not any more, now. The long beach of grey sand was empty. Empty … at the beginning of May. It was like a bad dream. Not for twenty-five years (and they had had the three bathing-huts and the blue-and-yellow cart at Zandeburghe for nearly thirty years now, they and their parents before them) had there been empty beaches at Zandeburghe in the beginning of May. And so far it hadn’t been such a bad season, in spite of those rumours that had kept pouring on in from the east, frightening the American tourists away, and all the men … seven hundred thousand of them or some such number, so she’d read … called up and waiting to see what those beasts were going to do …
“What?” she said impatiently to Klaas, who was jerking his thumb eastwards as he walked beside her holding the rein. “Yes, I can hear it, I can hear it; it’s the forts at Liège; I’m not deaf.”
“At Liège? A hundred and fifty kilometres away?” said Marie incredulously, but neither answered, though Klaas slowly turned on her a look as if she were one of the children who had been frightened by his bloodshot eyes and his habit of growling “Come on, that’s enough, get down” during the season. Those eyes lingered, now, on the face of the child asleep in the shawl, and presently there came a mutter of sound from his thin, purplish lips shaded with frosty stubble. He was nodding his head as he walked, staring down at the glimpse of stiff, but crumpled, white dress, and the dark hair tied with white ribbons, and the hand like a minute white starfish that had crept out of the black folds. A grin began to steal across his face.
“What?” Marie glanced at him. She didn’t like him, but neither did she ever think about him. He had been attached to their family almost since she could remember; a hanger-on, a silent helper and a sharer in the good times and the bad, ever since she and Jakoba had been big, raw-boned girls with red cheeks and masses of thick hair, and he a lout in a blue blouse, with big shoulders and a sly, malicious grin, whom her father had paid a few francs now and then to help with the roughest jobs: sawing logs and dragging them back over the fens for the stove in winter, tending the horse that pulled the cart and the wheeled bathing-machines; the dirtiest and hardest work had always gone to Klaas.
“What’s the matter?” she asked now. Even saying something to Klaas was better than walking in silence through this quiet, sunny place that made you almost forget the war—until you heard the far-off thundering of the forts of Liège.
He jerked the stem of his pipe towards her shawl.
“Met die manieren van een damen!”
“Ladified. Yes, bless her, like a lovely little doll, isn’t she?” said Marie, looking down hungrily at the sleeping face while her flat, strong, ageing body yearned towards it.
She had borne a child once, but it had died of some illness during the first war. She hadn’t even got that to remind her of her dead young husband. The body of this child whom she had found sitting in a heap of sand at the foot of the dune, playing with the silvery stuff, seemed to penetrate her own body with its soft warmth, and as she cradled it she was swearing to herself that, whatever Jakoba might say, she would never let it go. They must be fifteen kilometres, by now, from the place where they had found her, and between them and Zandeburghe there were hundreds—thousands—of refugees in cars and carts, and tramping the road with perambulators and boxes and bundles; everything was in an awful and terrifying confusion; turned upside down; people swarming out of their houses like mad things; strangers you’d never seen before in your life sitting by the side of the road and calling out to you with dead bodies lying across their knees—she wouldn’t forget that in a hurry—was it likely that anyone, even if they were to go back now, this minute, would have time to look at a lost baby girl? Was it likely they’d ever find her people, even if they looked from now until midnight? They might be dead. Probably were. That raid when she and Jakoba had laid down under the trees wasn’t the only one there’d been that morning; they’d seen some others of the beasts flying over towards the sea while they had still been a long way off from it, on their way out from Brugge … and then they had heard bombs dropping …
“Met die manieren van een damen!”
“Well, suppose she is? Nothing to laugh at, is it?” she said to Klaas in her surliest voice. Slowly the grin left his face and it changed. Shut in and glum now, with that bitter glare on it that she knew so well. Leave him alone and he’d get over it. But she looked at him for a moment rather curiously, before she nodded in reply to Jakoba’s remark that they were drawing near to Matthys Maes’ farm. Klaas had been sitting up there in the wood amongst the pines with Klaartje, waiting for them, for a long time before they got there. Had he seen anything?
“Nothing to laugh at, is there?” she said, rather threateningly this time. “What do you find so funny? Did you see anything while you were up there this morning?”
He did not even trouble to shake his head. With that bitter scowl on his face he tramped on, keeping his eyes fixed ahead on the whitewashed walls and green shutters of the village of Sint Niklaas, which they were now approaching; and she said no more, for she knew better than to try to get anything out of Klaas if he did not want to talk. If he knew that you wanted to get anything out, he would keep his mouth shut until the Last Day.
She glanced at Jakoba, who was saying something in a low tone. They could see through the lofty archway of whitewashed stone into the farmyard now, but although the chickens were pecking about as usual and the young tomato plants growing against the white brick looked healthy, this year, and it did you good just to see the place, they were there. The refugees. A handcart piled up with some neat bundles, from which protruded stiff, shining folds of brocade, stood near the front door, and on the bench beside it sat two nuns. One was drinking from a glass of water as though she
could never stop, with her veiled head flung back in a position of gusto that seemed to deny her habit and betray her stout Flemish blood, and the other was sitting with her head in her hands, her face hidden. And all the doors and windows were open. That wasn’t like Uncle Matthys, who was over seventy and who liked to feel that he was indoors, when once the work he did on the farm allowed him to get there. There were voices coming out through the door of the kitchen.
The party came to a halt in the middle of the yard, and Klaas pulled Klaartje up with a jerk, and then they all stood still. Marie gently eased her feet inside her sabots, wincing, and Klaartje whinnied and moved his head impatiently as he smelled the stables.
“What’s that?” asked a child’s voice behind her, and she turned round. Her uncle’s grandson, Jooris Gheldeere, stood there, pointing at the bundle in her arms; he was a thin boy of six or so, with a long nose in a red face, blue eyes and hair as silver as the sand of the dunes.
“Hullo, Jooris, what are you doing here?” she asked, then, as he stared at her but did not reply, “That? That’s my baby. I found her in the dunes this morning. Having a holiday, are you? Where’s Grandpa?”
“We’ve come to get away from the bombs,” he said. “He’s in the kitchen. What’s its name?” He was leaning forward and peering at the face in the shawl.
“I don’t know what her name is … I must sit down or my feet’ll fall off … here, you take her,” and she gently shoved the bundle at him; then, as he accepted it without displaying either reluctance or alarm, she settled it, wrapping his short arms about it, and limped off to the bench, where she sank down beside the nuns with a great sigh of relief. She did not look at them and they did not look at her; the nun who had been drinking was staring around her with a dazed expression, and the other, the one who had been sitting with her face hidden in her hands, had shut her eyes and was telling her rosary. Presently she opened them, and turned on Jakoba a look that seemed to come from a very long way off; then they moved to the cart near the door. She murmured something to her companion, who got up heavily (she was a stout old woman) and went across to the cart and inspected the protruding folds of brocade, trying to hide them under their coverings. Jakoba had gone into the kitchen, and Klaas, at a word from her, was leading Klaartje across the yard to some buildings amidst the flowering apple trees where the stables were.