The air was quiet, and it smelled sweet. There were the usual noises that Marie always heard, without thinking about them, when the sisters came out to see Uncle Matthys, and because the farm, like the village of Sint Niklaas itself, stood in a wide, very slight depression in the flat countryside, this served to muffle the soft, distant rumblings from those forts. … Yes … Marie looked about her and sighed again, wiping her forehead with one of the small pieces of clean rag which she always carried about with her because they were useful in a dozen ways … there might almost not be any war, here; it might almost be an ordinary afternoon, one of the thousands that had passed during the last twenty-five years, with the light sloping down over the great plain running in from the sea and the meadows beginning to smell of evening.
But the voices coming from the kitchen weren’t peaceful; they sounded loud yet tired, and a child was crying in there in a terrified, snorting way as if it couldn’t stop. Bombs … the word was repeated over and over again. They must come from Aalst; they’d had bombs on them, there …
“Jooris?”
A young woman was standing at the kitchen door and looking anxiously out. When she saw the boy, sitting on the bench with the baby in his arms, she looked relieved, and, catching sight of Marie, she smiled. “Hullo, I didn’t see you …” She came across the yard and stood in front of her. She had very fair hair, and a sweet, round, stupid face with placid thick lips and red-rimmed blue eyes. “Oh …” she let out a long sigh and lowered her head, “isn’t it awful … I can’t believe it now …”
“When did you come?”
“Yesterday. Father came over and fetched us. (By train, he had to come. The roads were terrible. But the train was full of soldiers, too.) I didn’t know what to do. There was a bomb on the house across our street and our apartment was all blown in … all over dust … and the floor gave way. … Thank God we weren’t at home, I’d gone shopping … and all my things ruined … I couldn’t stop crying … ‘Pierre’, I kept on saying, ‘Pierre’ …”
“Is he still away?” Marie asked. She didn’t want to hear about the bombs. Already, after only about three days of it, she had stopped finding this kind of story worth listening to and she wanted to hear a bit of good news.
“Oh yes. Oh Marie … he’s in the fighting. Round Rotterdam.” Mevrouw Gheldeere nodded, and the tears rushed back again. “He is. And they’ve been landing the Germans by air, you know, up there … dropping them out of the sky …” She took out a handkerchief and wiped her eyes in a business-like way; then they strayed to her son. “Why, he’s got a little girl there,” she said, in a quite different voice; “whose is that? What a little love.”
Marie turned round. Jooris was stooping in the dust, carefully supporting the newly-awakened figure, so much smaller than himself in its crumpled white dress, and setting her on her feet. She was deeply flushed and her cheeks were creased with sleep but she did not seem inclined to cry; her very dark, very large, and long-shaped eyes were fixed unwaveringly upon his face.
“Why, she’s awake!” Marie got up and went towards them. “We don’t know whose she is. We found her this morning, up on the great dune outside Zandeburghe, sitting playing with the sand,” she said, over her shoulder. “We reckon her people must have sat down to rest and she wandered off.” She knelt down in front of the little girl. “Well. Had a good sleep, darling?” she demanded. The eyes languidly left Jooris’s face, and fixed themselves upon her own. The mouth was the colour, and rather the shape, of an apple-blossom bud.
There was a rush and a pounce, and an exclamation of “Bless her little heart!” and Mevrouw Gheldeere, sweeping past her elderly cousin, scooped the baby up into her arms.
“There, there …” she crooned, pressing kisses over her face and into the warm, small neck. “Oh the love, did they lose her, then? oh the darling …” The caresses were accepted passively.
Marie, after this had been going on for some moments, turned to Jooris. “You going to stay here?” she demanded.
She did not like watching Janine Gheldeere going on in that way; it was all very well for her, she still had a chance, Pierre might come out of the war and then she might have another … only what was going to become of them all, with bombs, and the Germans getting nearer every hour? … Anyway, she didn’t want to look. She stared severely at Jooris and repeated her question.
“We’re going to stay here until Father comes back. Grandad says so. And I’m going to help him. I’m going to milk the cows. And I can ride on the van that takes the vegetables into Brugge.”
“Do you remember … you came to see Auntie Jakoba and me? And you had the doll down from the attic?”
He nodded, staring at her grim brown face that looked as if were carved from wood; was, in fact, not unlike that of the Dutch plaything just mentioned, which wore a full, old-fashioned costume of faded threadbare velvet that had once, no doubt, been the covering of a chair, and was the only toy surviving from many quiet childhoods passed in the shelter of the Maes family. That had been a good day at the Aunties in Brugge. Although Auntie Marie hadn’t let him step into the house until she had put down sheets of the Brugsch Handelsblad on the clean, tiled floor, she had let him eat as much as he wanted, and later on, when they all went to Zandeburghe, he and his father and mother and grandad, the aunties had let him ride on Klaartje. Suddenly Jooris did a handstand, with his silvery hair in the dust of the yard.
“Jooris!” his mother shouted threateningly, but absently, “mind what you’re about.” She was sitting down now, with the baby girl perched across her wide, warm knees, and deftly unfastening buttons and tapes. The two nuns were murmuring together over their cart, looking at the sky, and then in the direction of the road, as if they were meditating going on; no-one was taking any notice of them.
“Haven’t you undressed her?” Janine Gheldeere called to Marie, who turned, and strolled over unconcernedly.
“Not properly, we haven’t. There wasn’t the time. And …” she checked herself. She didn’t want Jakoba to overhear a remark about not knowing what they were going to do with the kid. Jakoba’s loud voice could be heard in the kitchen, exclaiming over the stories told by them from Aalst: good thing if she’d forgotten their find, for the time being; the nearer home she, Marie, could get the little thing, the better it would be.
“There’ll be a mark on her clothes, perhaps,” Janine was saying.
She whisked off the stiff little full-skirted dress with its embroidery of white flowers, pausing to scan the work. “Hand-done,” she pronounced. She laid it down carefully beside her on the bench; already her face was less strained, and her eyes looked calmer, “good, neat work, too,” she added, not possessing fairy-like or exquisite in her small store of expressions.
The child gave a funny little shudder as the frock was drawn briskly across her face and head, then sat quietly, while the hand-made white petticoat and the tiny drawers (from a shop, these) were whisked off. Then Mevrouw Gheldeere gave a cry of triumph. Round the small, naked body was a narrow white ribbon, and attached to it a card on which was some writing. Together the fair head and the one with severely arranged iron-grey hair bent over it. But the words were hopelessly blurred; they had run into one another.
“She’s been in the sea; I thought she had; she wasn’t quite dry when we found her,” Marie murmured, removing the very utilitarian spectacles which she had taken from her pocket. “Can you make out anything?”
Janine shook her head. “There’s something …” she said doubtfully, “it looks like a big ‘y’ … and then a ‘d’. Here …” She straightened herself and sat up, passing her hand across her warm forehead; she had forgotten the war. She looked across the courtyard. “My Sister,” she called in a respectful voice, “could you help us, please? … we can’t quite make this out.”
The younger of the two nuns, a very pale creature with absolutely colourless lips and sandy eyebrows and lashes, came swiftly and lightly across to them. When she saw the baby,
she did not smile, but looked at her steadily, and Marie saw her face become if possible even paler. Ah, thought the older woman, yes, it’s going to be a bad time for the children, God have mercy on them all. But I’m sticking to this one. Here’s one that’s going to be safe, until they kill me.
The young Sister did not touch the child. She bent over her, with a guarded, shrouded expression, studying the card. In a minute she said:
“Ydette.”
“Ydette?” Mevrouw Gheldeere repeated slowly.
“Ydette?” said Marie Michiels.
“Yes.” The nun stood upright. “That’s all I can make out. The rest of it must be her address. But it’s hopeless. The card has been in the water.” She glanced at the child and seemed about to ask a question, but she did not.
“I never heard that before,” Mevrouw Gheldeere murmured. “Ydette …” The name, with its initial sound seeming to echo from the stateliness and ceremony of a former age, and its final syllable containing the prettiness and the simplicity of an idealized peasant world, sounded softly on the soft air of afternoon; soft, even when spoken in those peasant voices.
“I suppose it is her name,” Marie said, in doubt. “It’s outlandish, isn’t it? Isn’t it outlandish, don’t you think so, my Sister?”—respectfully.
“Oh yes, it must be her name. It isn’t a usual name, but I have heard it before. It’s good Flemish,” the nun said.
“Perhaps it’s the name of a house,” suggested Mevrouw Gheldeere.
“It’s a girl’s name,” repeated the young nun. Then she smiled remotely at them and turned away, not aimlessly, but with an air of recollecting some duty to be done, and went across to her companion. The latter had wandered out of the yard and away to the left, where a meadow was separated from the road by a dyke, and was standing on the brink of the water with her black skirts amidst the yellow kingcups and grass, staring down the lane. Suddenly she called out, and began to run as fast as her size would permit across the little humpbacked bridge; then she turned back, waving and calling, and the other nun, tucking her hands into her sleeves, literally sprang away after her; gliding across the grass like some black mechanical toy, following her towards the road. Mevrouw Gheldeere and Marie stared towards it, and saw a big car bumping slowly forward over the ruts, overflowing with black habits and white coifs and pink faces and bundles and holy images and pictures and golden banners and long, blue, holy ribbons. All the faces were smiling, but some were crying too. The car stopped. There was a great exclaiming, and some of of them climbed out, and then back sped their nun, the young one with the sandy eyebrows, and darted at the cart in the corner and began to tug out the bundles. Two more were hurrying after her across the bridge. The air, quiet now, except for the distant thudding and thumping, was full of the low, orderly chatter of their voices. …
“What’s up now?” demanded a strong old voice at the kitchen door, and Matthys Maes looked out, with Jakoba peering over his shoulder.
The old man looked gruff, as usual (he was never easy to get on with), and his eyes moved authoritatively about the yard as if to collect everything that had happened in his absence, and control it. But there was a kind of helplessness in them, and a bewilderment, beneath their habitual expression, and he was very pale; the red of his cheeks and the tan looked almost as if they were painted on, under the white stubble.
“You’d better bring her in and give her a drop of milk,” he said, nodding towards Ydette, who, re-dressed and set down with a kiss, was making a slow progress round the yard with Jooris as protector against the chickens, from which she decidedly shrank. “You going to keep her?”
Marie almost held her breath.
“S’pose so, for the time being,” said Jakoba indifferently; “it’ll be more trouble, just now, getting anyone to take her off us than it’ll be to keep her. Besides, Mother’ll like to see her.”
“She won’t be the only one that’s lost,” said Mevrouw Maes; “at least one of them’ll be taken care of.”
“No … God knows. And she seems good,” put in Marie casually.
“Jooris, you go indoors with Grandpa and he’ll give you a drop of milk for Ydette. And then you can see she takes it,” his mother said.
“And then we’ll be off,” said Jakoba.
“The sooner we’re home the better,” Marie added, thinking with fear of the ten kilometres to be got over before they were safe under the shadow of Our Lady’s tower; “we’ll go and have a look at Klaartje, and then we’ll be off.”
Jakoba was wondering whether at the last moment her uncle would suggest that Klaas should stay behind at the farm, to look after the horse.
It would be better there; that shed in the sandy field on the outskirts of Zandeburghe, where he had been living for the last ten years, wasn’t going to be a safe place from now on. Come to that, nowhere was going to be. But the farm would be safer than anywhere near the sea, and there would be food there … if there was food anywhere. A kind of black panic rushed up inside her, but she drove it down with anger, and as the good hot rage rushed through her veins she felt better; she absorbed it, as if it were nourishing food.
They went back into the kitchen, after they had stared at the car laden with the nuns driving slowly away between the apple trees, and stayed just long enough to eat a bit of bread and drink some coffee; the afternoon sunlight shone in between the white curtains and the red geranium blossoms at the window, and the tiled floor was so gratefully cool to the sisters’ feet (they had both slipped off their sabots as they sat at the long table) that Jakoba’s eyelids began to droop, shutting out the long faces and the dishevelled, hastily-dressed figures of them from Aalst, sitting all round the room holding their coffee-bowls as if they could never let them go … where would they be tonight? She didn’t know and she didn’t care; perhaps, if they all went off somewhere, Matthys would ask Klaas to stay. After all, he wasn’t like an old man, he could still do a day’s work with anyone.
Both sisters knew that they should be moving, yet they lingered. The child who had been sobbing had dropped asleep at last, the loud, tired, excited voices of the family from Aalst spoke less and less frequently; an exhausted silence crept into the low, sunny room where the faint rumbling and shaking of the air outside was muffled by the thick old walls that had been built before Waterloo was fought; they were accustomed, these walls, to absorbing the sound of distant gunfire …
“The van’ll come as usual tomorrow, then.” Her uncle’s voice awoke Jakoba; her eyelids flew open and she sat up.
“Very well, Uncle.” She began to count off items on her fingers. “Fifty cabbages, twenty-five bunches of spring onions, thirty pounds of peas, four bunches of Sweet Williams …”
“Flowers? Who’s going to want them, with all this going on?” demanded Marie, looking up from feeding Ydette, who was sitting on her knee, with fragments of bread and butter.
“Madame van Roeslaere, for one,” said Jakoba, with her laugh.
“They won’t be here when we get back; Sophie said they were going off this afternoon,” said Marie.
“The chimneys down at the hothouses haven’t been smoking since before yesterday,” said Matthys Maes, “and I saw young Lombaers’ car go by this morning, full up. They’ve gone off, like all the rest.”
“Is old Lombaers going?” Jakoba asked.
“I didn’t see him. I don’t expect so. He’s like me—too old a dog to learn new tricks,” and for a moment his broad wrinkled face with the wide chin covered in white stubble showed a spasm of rage; it shook him, sending the blood racing protestingly through his narrowing arteries. “He’ll want to keep an eye on the hothouses,” he ended.
He did not add, so far as he can, for what was the use? What was the use—when all of them here who were over fifty could remember the Uhlans, and this new kind was said to be worse; much worse? And in the last one there hadn’t been the bombs.
He got heavily to his feet. He was glad, now, that his wife had died a year ago.
“We’ll take a look at that horse of yours,” he said, and they followed him out of the room.
Jooris had lifted up Ydette and was making quite a good effort at carrying her; he staggered a little from time to time, but he had shown her how to clasp her arms around his neck, so that she should contribute to her own safety, and he was enjoying the experience; he liked the clean smell of her hair and skin and dress; and from time to time, as they went across the yard towards the stables, he kissed her and blew into her neck, causing her to give a silent, writhing movement accompanied by an equally silent smile as she stared down at the chickens. Marie glanced back at them once or twice and shook her head at him: why, she did not quite know, but it never did any harm to warn boys.
They found Karel, who worked for Matthys Maes, milking the six cows in the warm, dark, reeking stable, while Klaas sat on a heap of straw silently wiping the last crust of what had been nearly half a loaf round a bowl that had held coffee. Trust him; he can look after himself, thought Jakoba, when she saw that her supposition (it had been too slight to be called a fear) that he might go unrefreshed had been groundless. He had simply edged into the kitchen amidst the uproar and confusion, and helped himself. Well, he had had to; Uncle Matthys never had been one to do anything for Klaas. Didn’t think much of him. And she hadn’t been going to ask for a bit of something for him. Catch her.
Klaas looked up as they came in, and his frosty blue eyes saw everything that was going on. But he didn’t speak, and Matthys Maes didn’t look at him. Klaartje was in the far corner of the long, whitewashed shed, with the two horses belonging to the farm. He was a much finer animal than either of them, standing above them by a good two hands, and the curve of his long, banana-shaped nose seemed to show that he knew it. He acknowledged the words of Jakoba and Marie with an indulgent movement of his head and a droop of his lashes.