Seven Men of Gascony

by R. F Delderfield

  The girl sat there for close on half an hour, oblivious of Gabriel sketching from his ambush in the alder clump. Perhaps this is why the picture has such appeal. It is the only portrait in the book for which the subject did not pose.

  When Gabriel was putting the finishing touches to his portrait, smiling to himself with satisfaction at having completed it without advertising his presence, the girl seemed to recollect her work on the farm, a white building which was just visible on a low plateau immediately above the woods. Suddenly she stood up and waded into the stream, calling to her cows and driving them round to the path.

  One beast was loth to go. Instead of responding to her cries it waded beyond her depth and stood flank deep in the current, cropping the bushes within inches of Gabriel’s punt.

  A mischievous impulse seized the young Frenchman. Tearing the page from his book, he reached out and drove the corner of the stiff paper onto the animal’s horn. The cow, startled by the movement, shied away from the bushes and stumbled back to its own side of the stream, with the sketch hanging incongruously over its left ear.

  From his screen of alders Gabriel grinned at the girl’s astonishment. He saw her hesitate a moment and glance both left and right before stepping forward to snatch the page from its peg.

  She studied it for a moment, flushing with pleasure; then, holding the drawing to her breast, she turned to run up the path in the wake of her cows. Gabriel pushed off from the bank and sent the punt skimming through the leaves half-way across the stream. He called: “Wait, please wait!” in his best German.

  She stopped, indecisively, at the foot of the incline. He stood up and waved and the flat-bottom skiff lurched, throwing him head foremost into the shallow water. Above the splash he heard her peal of laughter.

  She retraced her steps down the path as he waded ashore. A pair of kingfishers, disturbed by the commotion, returned to their scrutiny in the iris clump by the water’s edge. He dragged the punt onto the tiny beach and sat on the thwarts, dashing the drops from his hair.

  The girl looked at the drawing again. Smiling, he held out his hand, but she shook her head vigorously and held it close to her laced bodice.

  “I shall keep it!” she told him firmly.

  “I will make another and a better one.”

  “When?” He detected an eagerness in her voice and it flattered him.

  “Now?”

  She shook her head. “I have been here too long. There is work at the farm. Come,” she held out her hand, “I will dry your clothes while you eat.”

  The simplicity of the gesture and her childlike assurance touched him. He recalled a comment of Old Jean’s when they had passed a group of peasants whilst marching in from Wagram: “No wonder we beat these people. They are babies at war.”

  He took her hand, wondering how the palm of a peasant should be so soft. It was like the hand of a burgher’s daughter in Agen, a girl groomed and petted for a wealthy marriage. But she had no intention of letting him leave the punt without his sketchbook and crayons. Happily he tucked them under his arm and followed her up the gully to the farm.

  The farm was a small, ramshackle building of four rooms, built of cob and thatched with local reed gathered beside the stream. In the large tiled kitchen there was a warm smell of baking bread and chicken mash. A tall, strongly built woman with a wealth of dark-chestnut hair was making pastry near the open window. The cowherd went up to her and handed her the drawing, saying something in a dialect which Gabriel could not understand. The tall woman gave an exclamation of pleasure and at once broke into a torrent of speech. From their gestures Gabriel concluded that they were discussing the picture. The young woman went through a pantomime of the recent encounter, ending in an amusing reconstruction of Gabriel’s tumble into the water. The tall woman threw back her head and laughed, showing strong white teeth. Gabriel stood by the stove, conscious of a new sense of peace and serenity.

  Presently the woman dropped back into the Viennese dialect he understood and bade him sit down and eat. They gave him two monstrous pasties, flavoured too highly with garlic but far tastier than any of the food he had bought in the cafés during the last few weeks. His shirt and breeches dried on him as he ate and washed down the pasties with a draught of heady local wine.

  When the sun began to get low an elderly man, gnarled and white-haired, came into the kitchen. He showed no surprise on seeing Gabriel, but there was another lengthy inquest on the picture, which the girl had propped against a large copper jug on the table. When the old man had finished his meal he offered Gabriel a pipe and tobacco. They sat and smoked and drank home-brewed beer. The cowherd, Karen, hovered delightedly in the background and Gabriel noticed that her eyes constantly roved back to his drawing. Presently the tall woman fetched his sketchbook and thrust it into his hands.

  “Make a picture of my father,” she asked him.

  Gabriel took out his crayons and carefully selected three or four colours.

  “I will make a picture of you all,” he told them.

  Gabriel remained at the farm that night, sleeping on a truss of sweet-smelling hay in the loft above the byre. The combined effects of the wine, the beer and the old peasant’s strong tobacco had rendered him pleasantly intoxicated by nightfall. Underneath him the cattle stamped and rustled. As sleep came to him he heard the distant ripple of the stream at the foot of the gully, and he thought how gentle life could be if it were not for the rattle of side-arms and the shrill blare of the cavalry trumpet. Once in the night he awoke with a cry of terror. He had seen a large, amber-coloured insect wade into a pool of blood and stop, its feelers hovering over a shapeless thing huddled on the dusty floor. He almost sobbed with relief when he reached out and touched the fragrant hay and saw the white stars winking through the open casement of the loft. Then he fell to sleep again, this time dreamlessly.

  The girl Karen called him in the morning, shouting his name from the cobbles in the yard below. He jumped down, shivering slightly in the keen morning air, and breakfasted on fresh rolls, served with strong black coffee. He offered money, but it was refused indignantly, and when he enquired after the old man, anxious to thank him for his hospitality, Karen told him that her father and her sister, Louise, had already gone to the fields and would not be back until they came for their noonday meal. He asked her if he might come again, bringing a friend, and she agreed eagerly, adding that he was to be sure and bring his sketchbook. She came down to the punt with him and placed his book reverently in the bows.

  He took both her hands, smiling down at her.

  “You are very happy here,” he said.

  She looked into his eyes and saw that they were strikingly blue in the strong morning sunlight.

  “Yes,” she said simply, “we are happy enough.”

  As though moved by a simultaneous impulse they embraced, gently and without passion, as two children might. He climbed into the punt and she gave it a playful push with her clogged foot. He looked back and saw her smiling as he poled himself downstream.

  All hours of the day, whenever he could escape from his duties in the city, Gabriel spent sketching and working on the smallholding, helping Karen or her sister with their livestock, feeding the hens, repairing outhouses, sometimes painting scenes of farm life, the simplest of which never failed to delight the two girls and earn the solemn appreciation of their father.

  Karen was the only child of a second marriage and was ten years younger than Louise, her stepsister. There was a boy, Karl, by the first wife, but he had been called away by the conscription decree of four years ago and they had heard nothing of him since he left, for he was unable to write so much as his name.

  For a time, particularly during harvesting or when one of the cows calved, the old man had missed his son’s slow, stubborn strength, and the farm, a sub-tenant’s holding from a large manor farm higher up the river, had shrunk to a few fields of maize and barley and an acre or two of pasturage beside the backwater. The goats roamed the plateau, and
the poultry, which included a flock of fine geese, scratched about the yard and in the copse behind the cottage. The family lived simply, seldom leaving their fields and rarely travelling as far as Vienna, less than three leagues distant. They worked from dawn until dusk, and after supper they went to bed. They had no immediate neighbors, for the soil on this side of the river was too poor to attract the more ambitious farmers. The old man paid his rent in kind, driving a two-wheeled cart laden with mixed produce over to his landlord’s farm at stipulated intervals. Gabriel reflected that the life of such sub-tenants had undergone no important change during the past ten centuries. Dynasties came and went. Wars surged up and down the Danube Valley and occasionally the younger peasants were forced to take part in them. But, sooner or later, all who survived found their way back to the fields to go on ploughing until they became too crippled with rheumatism to stir from the fireside. Karen’s father, Stepan, had perhaps half a dozen years of active life ahead of him. One day, he said, Karl would come back, or one of the girls would marry and her husband would probably agree to some arrangement concerning the future of the farm. Louise, his elder daughter, had given birth to a child years ago. He could not say who the father had been, probably one of the men who came in to help with the harvesting before casual labour died out under the strain of successive conscriptions. Gabriel asked what had become of the child. The priest took it, Stepan told him; Louise had been too busy to nurse it after they had called his son into the army.

  The old man looked into the fire a while. Suddenly he said: “Why don’t you take her? She’d make you a good wife and she’s as strong as a bull. Why don’t you stay here? It’s better than marching about the country with nothing but roots to eat half the time. Or perhaps you would rather have Karen? She’s not such a good worker as Louise, but she milks well. The cows like someone with a soft hand who isn’t in too much of a hurry.”

  Gabriel would have chuckled inwardly if this invitation had been made a month or two ago, but now he found himself giving it serious consideration. Desertion, at this short distance from the camp, was practically an impossibility, but there were other means at his disposal. With his aunt’s money, which old Crichot continued to forward in methodically spaced driblets, he could purchase a discharge, if he went about it with sufficient care and gave bribes to the right people. An old friend of Jean’s had managed it only a month ago, cashing in his accumulated loot and setting himself up as an innkeeper at Innsbruck. Why not? It was better, as Stepan pointed out, than marching about Europe eating roots; it was infinitely better than getting killed, or maimed, or rotting in a damp fortress as a prisoner of war awaiting one of the inevitable gaol epidemics.

  Perhaps Gabriel was feeling the reaction of the recent campaign. In the army the veterans had a saying: “A man fights best in his first battle.” After two major engagements Gabriel had had enough war. It seemed to him that he had lived through a whole lifetime since that day, barely eight months ago, when he had buried Aunt Marie and set off for the recruiting depot at Bordeaux. He sometimes asked himself if he had found what he sought in the colour and movement of the camps, and in the easy companionship of his six comrades, but he could never answer this query to his own satisfaction. It depended so much on the mood of the moment.

  The sun-drenched landscape of the Danube Valley inclined a man towards lotus-eating. For a brief space he had resisted the inertia, but he found it increasingly difficult to return to billets after off-duty periods at the farm. During the hours he spent with Karen his happiness was complete and he sketched easily and well. Her health and simplicity were a twin inspiration. He did a crayon study of Karen milking in the byre, a shaft of sunlight striking through the broken tiles and lighting her head with a golden halo. He caught her turning half sideways and smiling up at him through the haze of vapour rising from the cow’s flanks.

  There is another sketch of her in a hayfield, beside the backwater, and here she looks less simple, almost coquettish. Her startlingly blue eyes are half closed, and a cornstalk droops from her red mouth. It is an idealized picture, not so carefully done as the original sketch from the alder clump, but with the same quality of innocence, as though artist and sitter were two children romping in sweet-smelling clover.

  In after years Gabriel often wondered whether the old man, Stepan, had dropped a hint to his elder daughter after his invitation to Gabriel to become one of the family.

  One night when, tired out with hay-raking, Gabriel had climbed the ladder to his bed in the loft, he was awakened by a heavy rustle in the hay at his side. Too drowsy to take alarm, he reached out and touched a woman beside him. His disappointment was intense when he heard the voice of Louise whisper: “It’s me, Gabriel!” He lay silent whilst she held him in her arms, too sensitive about her feeling to resist. She was gone again by morning and Gabriel felt cheated as he drank the coffee that Karen prepared for him. He said nothing to her, but on his return to the camp he told Manny, who threw back his head and bellowed with laughter.

  “It’s time you took me out there,” he said, and Gabriel thought the idea a good one. That afternoon he punted Manny up the winding backwater and presented him to the family. His eyes sparkled when Louise served their supper. Gabriel thought that she must be aware of his subterfuge, for she paid their guest special attention. After that Manny always accompanied him and all three of the peasants made him welcome.

  As the summer passed, and the first leaves began to fall in the tall beechwoods behind the cottage, Gabriel felt a new, more intense fascination for the place. One afternoon when he and Karen had been tending the goats on the hillside he suddenly turned to her and covered her face with shy kisses. She returned them and laid her sunburned cheek against his, making little sounds, like a young mother soothing a child. He too felt like a child, crying for comfort, not to a pretty peasant girl but to all the women in the world whose sons and lovers buckled their belts and bandoliers about them and marched out to play the child’s game of war. He dared not tell her that earlier in the day the Eighty-seventh had received orders to break camp and move up to the north-west, where Massena was assembling a vast army for the Spanish Peninsula. For the first time since he had enlisted he hated his military obligations. He felt he could have stayed here in this field forever, holding this woman to his breast.

  When the sun went down they wandered silently back to the cottage. A stranger was sitting at the table, wolfing an omelette. He glared balefully in their direction but said nothing. A home-made crutch rested against his chair.

  “It’s Karl,” Louise told them, “back from the hospital at Litz. He’s been discharged.”

  Gabriel saw that the peasant’s right leg was missing. His thigh ended in a knot of dirty bandages and a leather pad, kept in place by an ugly network of tapes that reached up to a sword-belt buckled round his waist. The wound and its amateur appliances looked obscene. The Frenchman observed that the man’s face was worn with pain and fatigue. He ate as though he had not seen food for days, hardly pausing to glance at the strangers or his stepsister, but reserving the whole of his concentration for the food they ladled onto his plate.

  Karen went over and kissed him on the forehead, while the old man talked to him about the farm. Manny sat in the chimney seat, looking somewhat uncomfortable. Once or twice he glanced sharply in Gabriel’s direction, and Gabriel sensed the warning hint in his eyes.

  When at length the two voltigeurs climbed the loft to their bed, Manny said: “Damn the fellow! Why couldn’t he die and be done with it! He’s no use here, Stepan will have to feed him for nothing!” Then, as though relenting, he added, “Poor devil, he’s quite mad.”

  Gabriel felt a surge of fear for the trio in the cottage. He asked Manny: “Did you tell Louise that we were leaving in the morning?”

  “No, let them be; it’s just as well we are leaving. There’s murder in that fellow down there.”

  “What can we do?” said Gabriel.

  “Do?” Manny grunted, so far from h
is usual good humour that he seemed almost a stranger. “We can’t do a thing. This time tomorrow we’ll be a dozen leagues away.” And then, more drowsily, “Damn the fellow, he’s spoiled my last night with the woman, unless she has the sense to come out here in spite of him.”

  He dozed off then, but within an hour Gabriel heard a creak on the ladder. He sat up, unreasonably alarmed, and reached out to shake Manny, who was a heavy sleeper.

  It was only Louise, however, and Manny gratefully pulled her down in the hay beside him. For a time Gabriel heard them talking in low whispers. Unable to sleep again, he got up, dressed and went out.

  He went into the yard and leaned on the gate, inhaling the soft night air, yearning for the warmth of the girl’s body, the scent of her hair in his nostrils, but prevented from going round to the back of the cottage and calling her name by a gnawing anxiety which he could not explain. Finally he vaulted the gate and climbed the hillside to the spot where he had lain with her that afternoon. He stood there for a long time, looking down at the faint glimmer of the starlight on the tiny bay where he had seen her first.

  Down in the fold of the hillside, where the cottage crouched in the deep shadow of the woods, he saw a sudden spurt of flame, then another and then a shapeless white glow that almost dazzled him, lighting up the barn and the outbuildings as if it were day.

  He cried out and began to run, stumbling down the uneven slope, slipping and rolling in the furze bushes and among the rabbit warrens. It seemed an endless time before he flung himself into the yard, scratched, bruised and sobbing for breath. The whole cottage was now a whirling mass of flames, spitting showers of sparks that had already ignited the barn, where the hay flared up like pitch. He could hardly see the cottage walls for the thick clouds of smoke that caught at his throat and sent him reeling against the byre. Inside he heard the outcry of terrified cattle.