by H. E. Bates
The young woman put the tray on the table but did not speak. With the coffee there was bread, in slices cut from the stick, and butter.
‘Real butter,’ the man said. ‘And real coffee. All right?’ He smiled.
The young woman went out.
‘Help yourself,’ the man said. ‘Real coffee.’
Françoise began to pour out the coffee. It smelled very good and there was white sugar in a bowl; very white against the clear black coffee.
‘I tell you what I will do,’ the man said. ‘I have to make a living somehow.’
Françoise put hot milk in the coffee and gave one cup to Franklin. He took a slice of bread and spread butter on it. The bread jumped about on his plate because he had no other hand with which to hold it.
‘As a favour I will buy the boat for three hundred francs.’
‘And out of that you charge two hundred francs for taking us over?’
‘I have to make a living somehow,’ the man said.
‘No.’
‘You need the money. You said so.’
‘Not as badly as that.’
Franklin drank his coffee. It was strong and hot and very good. He looked at the girl: she was holding her cup with both hands, blowing on the coffee and watching with clear, bright eyes the little waves of steam rise into the sun.
‘What is your idea of the value of the boat?’ the man said. ‘I want to be fair.’
‘You know what it’s worth,’ she said.
‘How should I know? I don’t know. I’m just trying to make a living with the estaminet.’
‘A thousand francs.’
The man made an enormous gesture with his arms. It seemed to embrace every impossibility in the world, leaving him very tired.
‘We shall never get on like this.’
‘It is a very good boat,’ the girl said.
Franklin tried to butter himself another piece of bread. The bread bounced on his plate, and at last the girl took it and slowly and calmly spread the butter on it herself. He felt helpless and small as he watched her.
The man seemed to go off into a dream. The girl, after she had buttered the bread, picked up her coffee and again blew the steam gently into the sun.
‘All right,’ the man said. ‘I tell you what I will do. I do it because you are young and because the young man has had a misfortune.’ He looked very tired. ‘I want to be fair.’
Slowly, without looking up, the girl sipped her coffee.
‘You give me the boat and one hundred francs —’
‘We have no money,’ the girl said.
‘Holy Mary, Mother of God!’ the man said. He picked up his cap. ‘Just pay for the coffee and we will call it off.’
‘What were you going to say?’ the girl said. ‘Without the hundred francs.’
‘All right.’ The man laid his cap on the table. He was still very tired. ‘I will do this. I will make an exchange. You give me the boat and I will give you the means of transport on the other side.’
‘What transport?’
‘Bicycles.’
The girl did not answer. Drinking her coffee very slowly, looking over the brim of the cup into the sun, she seemed to consider it. Franklin, watching her, wondered if he could cycle with one hand, and then decided it was better to cycle than to be thrown by the gendarmes off the train.
‘It will take longer to cycle,’ the man said, ‘but you will get there.’
The girl was still considering it, slowly drinking her coffee.
‘If you come back this way I will buy the bicycles back,’ the man said.
‘What about food?’
‘I will give you food for one day,’ the man said.
‘What about the oars?’
‘Oars?’
‘There are two oars and a very good tarpaulin in the boat,’ the girl said. ‘What about them?’
The man got up from the table and walked about the room, swinging his cap up and down as though at last he had lost all hope in the girl. After a few moments he came back, very weary, and sat down.
‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘You need a room to-day and to-night. You can’t sleep out there. For the tarpaulin and the oars I will give you all the food you need to-day and somewhere to sleep to-night. That’s fair.’
‘And you take us over to-morrow night?’
‘I take you over to-morrow.’
‘All right,’ the girl said.
She reached across the table and buttered another piece of bread for Franklin, and then took his cup and poured into it more milk and coffee.
‘How many rooms will it be?’ the man said. ‘One or two? I don’t ask questions.’
The girl sat smiling into the sun, blowing the steam of her coffee into the air in a little trembling cloud.
‘It will be a bargain for you if we have one,’ she said.
CHAPTER 19
THEY rested all that day and all the next, talking in low whispers in the end room of the estaminet. On the wall of the house was a fig tree and its big green leaves flapped continually against the window in the breeze that came off the river. And as the sun got round in the afternoons the large broken leaf shadows trembled expansively on the grey distempered walls above the bed. The sunlight was soft and golden, and a feeling of autumn blew into the open windows with the wind.
‘To-morrow we shall be free,’ Franklin said. He was very confident and very happy.
‘Free?’
‘At least no Germans.’
‘Don’t talk yet of being free,’ the girl said. ‘We have a long way to go.’
At five o’clock on the second morning, while it was still dark, they rowed across the river to the other side. The man from the estaminet put the bicycles in the boat. ‘You are getting a bargain with the bicycles,’ he said.
‘It is about a fifth of the bargain you are getting with the boat,’ the girl said.
‘You have a wonderful wife,’ he said to Franklin. ‘Wonderful.’ His voice was full of ironical admiration.
Franklin did not speak.
‘If she bargains as well at the hospital in Marseilles they will probably give you a new arm and a new tongue.’ He sighed in the darkness. ‘The bicycles alone would cost you two thousand francs apiece anywhere to-day.’
‘I will remember that,’ the girl said. ‘In case we wish to sell them if we come back.’
He gave up at this and, tired, silent, and in gloom, rowed them across the river. It was still quite dark, the sky cloudless, with many stars, and there would be no light for more than an hour. Half-way across the dark water the man rested on his oars and told them, for the last time, where they must go. ‘There is a little gravel path with a fence each side it. Keep to it for about half a mile. It comes out on to the road. Turn left there. If you turn right you’ll end up in the yards at the railway station. They have guards there. Keep left whatever you do.’
‘We would like to thank you,’ the girl said.
’That’s all right. I have been your friend,’ the man said. ‘From the first moment. There was a time when you doubted me, but I was your friend.’
‘I apologize for doubting you,’ the girl said. ‘We thank you very much.’
‘I do not hold with Vichy,’ the man said angrily. ‘Blast them. I have an elder boy and he is a prisoner. He would not have been a prisoner if we had gone on fighting. France is in great trouble. If you want a friend when you come back don’t forget me. I know how it is.’
‘We won’t forget,’ the girl said.
‘I hope your husband will get well,’ the man said. ‘Have you got everything? The bread and wine? The sausage? I put in some mustard for the sausage. It is very good mustard.’
‘I think we have everything,’ the girl said. ‘Thank you for everything again.’
‘That’s all right,’ the man said. He lifted the oars and began to row again. ‘Don’t talk any more now.’
He rowed them across in silence, and on the other side pulled the boat into a
narrow strip of muddy shore. Franklin could smell the mud and the cold water, and sometimes, on the wind, the smell of locomotive smoke drifting from the railway yards down the river. He got out of the boat and took one of the bicycles and held it while the man from the estaminet strapped the attaché case on the back. The girl took the other bicycle and hung the bag of food on the handlebars.
The man held out his hand and spoke in a whisper. ‘Goodbye,’ he said. ‘It is a little after five now. You can walk till daylight.’
‘Good-bye,’ the girl said.
‘Good-bye, m’sieu.’
Franklin held out his hand; the man grasped it and shook it. Franklin could just see the small face, with its black moustache, uplifted in the darkness.
‘You don’t mind if I say something?’ the man said. ‘I heard you talking once in the bedroom. It is all right. Nothing to worry about. I just wanted you to know. Good-bye. I hope you have luck.’
Franklin spoke for the first and last time. ‘Good-bye,’ he said. It did not seem to matter now.
He turned and pushed the bicycle up the bank, following the girl. He grasped the handlebars in the centre. He could see quite well: fringes of trees, the wires of a fence, and once, as he looked back, the reflected stars in the quiet black water; and then, for the last time, the boat itself, moving away.
He saw the double lines of fence and wire at last and pushed the bicycle between them. A breath of wind came up from the river, bringing with it once more the thick and in some way friendly smell of locomotive smoke, and away in the darkness a line of trucks shot against each other, with the slow repeated sound of a gun firing flatly. The path between the fences went on for about half a mile, and the tyres crackled on the cinders. After about ten minutes the girl stopped ahead of Franklin and, without speaking, pointed to the left. He saw the white neck of her blouse showing from beneath her coat, and then she moved on with the bicycle. The cinders ceased to crackle under the tyres, and he knew now that it was the road. After a moment or two he drew level with her. A curious feeling that someone was following him made him turn round, but there was nothing there in the darkness, and when he turned again, his face towards the south-east, the wind blowing slightly at his back, he saw the first line of light in the east, a pale break above the hills, and he knew then that the morning was coming. He knew then that he was free.
The mustard was bright yellow in the brown sausage as they ate it, sitting on the top of a hill, about two hours farther on. Below them spread wide deep country, and there were views of bright bronze, with finer veins of yellow, in the many dark woods between the fields. Franklin sat with sausage and bread in his hand, and felt the sting of mustard on his tongue like the sting of his own exhilaration. He looked at the enormous autumn valley shining in the early morning sun below, that seemed to stretch away, green and bronze and summer-faded, to the edge of the world, and remembered the day when he had looked down, with Sandy and O’Connor and the two young sergeants, on just such wide, deep country. The river was flowing below, white in the morning sun, as it had done then: the same river as far as he could guess, but narrower now, coming up with a long sweep from the south between red and white clusters of houses and stubble fields intersected now with brown bars of autumn ploughing. In two days the river would be nothing but a spring in the southern hills. In less than a week they would be in Marseilles.
And suddenly as he sat there the delight of being free went through him with a stab of wonder. It was fine and beautiful to be in the cool autumn country. It was fine and beautiful to be going south, farther and farther south, out of German range. It was fine and beautiful to be eating the mustard in the late October air. He remembered with kindness the man at the estaminet; how suspicious they had been, how the girl had beaten him down about the boat, and how they had slept late in bed in the morning, lazily watching the broad flapping leaves of the fig tree and then sleepily watching the afternoon sun quivering on the wall, and how the man had called Franklin the husband. All that was fine and beautiful, too.
‘What will we do in Marseilles?’ he said.
‘First we have to get to Marseilles,’ she said. ‘It’s a long way for you. With only the one arm.’
‘I can ride all the way with no hands,’ he said proudly. ‘What will we do there?’
‘I don’t know. Get a train I expect.’
‘Would you marry me in Marseilles?’ he said.
She did not answer. He saw the youth in her face still and grave, as if he had shocked her.
‘Let’s get married,’ he said. He felt very sure of himself, impulsive and light-hearted but very sure. ‘There may be an English parson there who hasn’t gone. We could find him perhaps. There are plenty of English still in Marseilles.’
She still did not say anything.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘Let’s get married.’
‘I don’t ask it,’ she said.
‘You mean you don’t want to?’ he said. He was still light-hearted, almost light-hearted at the thought of being free. ‘We’re almost married now. We have our things in the same case and we stayed together at the estaminet.’
‘It’s not that,’ she said. ‘I mean I don’t ask it of you unless you want to give it more than anything in the world.’
‘Oh, Jesus,’ he said. He put his face against her shoulder and felt the smallness and selfish light-heartedness of himself die away. ‘I do want it. Oh, Jesus, I do want it. I want it so much. Believe me, please.’
She looked at him simply, with bright wonder.
‘Then it couldn’t be otherwise,’ she said.
‘It never has been,’ he said.
The thought of marrying her somewhere, ultimately, if not in Marseilles then in England, remained with him all that day and all the next, not diminishing, as they bicycled down the river valley in the October sun. Sometimes, too, side by side with the clear simple idea of marriage, there flowed along with him a chain of entangled ideas about the war. He was getting closer and closer to it again, and he wondered now what the state of it was. He tried to remember what had been happening in August, before the crash, but all the events of the year, stale and sterile as they had seemed even then, had already become part of a vacuum, quite meaningless and void. The war that would begin for him soon, when he reached England, would be a new war. It would be stiff, of course, with the old stupidities, but he would be aware of them, and perhaps, in reality, it was only himself that would be new. The person who had flown out over the Alps, grasping at the edges of fatigue, caring more about flying than about people, scared into a dishonest but inevitable show of bravery, very afraid to die because dying seemed a personal thing that had never happened to anyone before – that person was not going back. A man can die only once, he thought. The doctor had died, and the father had died; and back there, in the mill, on the scorching bright afternoons, he knew that only merciful clouds of pain had kept him from knowing the closeness of death himself. He could never go back so lightly to life again; he would never again feel that death was a special personal pain. The doctor and the father had lifted him above that now.
They rode on like this into the third day, sleeping each night in small hotels in villages beside the river that narrowed rapidly until it was not much more than the width of a small road. When the food from the estaminet was finished they bought whatever they could from bread shops in the villages: generally bread, greyer if anything as they went farther south, perhaps a little cheap meat paste, and always apples. In the woods on the roadside the trees of Spanish chestnut were ripe, their big papery fawn leaves floating down in the clear October air to cover the green husks of shining nuts on the black earth. At noon they would push the bicycles into a wood and the girl would husk sweet chestnuts and then peel them for Franklin. They were clean and sweet to eat after the meat paste and mustard, and right and beautiful with the wine.
They bicycled on for most of the third day, seeing the last of the river, a small bright stream flowing past between woodl
and, about noon. Franklin was not tired, and had become very adept with the bicycle. He rode sometimes with his feet on the handlebars, as he had done when a boy, and was very happy because the girl was scared. The happiness of being together, cycling on through the autumn countryside, unoppressed, and as it seemed to him, entirely and finally free, had never been so beautiful as now.
They came into the outskirts of a small town late that afternoon. The seedy edge of the town, its paths of concrete broken, its small low concrete houses unfinished on half-developed building lots, gave way to streets that seemed to have become grey and harsh from long sun. On the brick walls of empty houses there were many posters of political leaders, Pétain among them, and many chalked slogans about Peace and France and Unity. Some of the slogans had been rubbed out. Sometimes at some of the shops there would be a queue of people, mostly women, and over on the opposite side of the street, a waiter leaning at the door of a café to watch them. Franklin then remembered the waiter in the rue Richer, back in August, who had stood in that same lost attitude, staring into nowhere. He had seen many a small bombed English town in which there was more light and pride in the queues of waiting faces. The odour of bombing, sour but angering, had never seemed so desolate as the dusty smell of this small tired town. It had never smelled so dead.
‘I don’t like this place,’ he said. ‘I’m not tired. Let’s go on.’
‘We have to stay here,’ she said. ‘I have friends here.’
‘What friends? I don’t like it’
‘Pierre’s sister,’ she said. ‘Don’t you remember? He gave me the address and I promised to call. This is the place.’
He felt impotent and depressed.
‘You wouldn’t want to disappoint Pierre?’ she said. ‘Would you?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘They are very nice people and we could stay the night,’ she said.
He did not say anything else as they pushed the bicycles through the town, past the waiting queues. Going out of the main street, into smaller side streets empty of traffic, he felt miserable and frustrated. Dust in small ground clouds blew on a rising wind out of the sun. It bore along the pavement dirty scraps of paper that became flattened against walls and the pavement edge. For a time the wind would hold them there and then suddenly the wind would drop and the papers would fall, emptied of life until the wind listlessly caught them up again.