Birds of a Feather: V. the Best Way (Concluded)

TRANSLATED BY FLORENCE CONVERSE

IV. EVERYONE TO HIS TASTE

‘WHERE’S your mother?’

M. Bassinet entered the porter’s lodge after wiping his big boots on the door-mat in the passage.

‘You’re home early, papa,’ replied Sophie, who was watering the pot of pansies in the window, with a thousand precautions.

‘Lolotte was tired — me too. Since morning we’ve whisked from Dauphiné to Vincennes, and from Montpernasse¹ to Montmertre² — We haven’t either of us stopped a minute. Ah! is that fried potatoes you’re cooking, Mama Chignole? If it’s not too much trouble, cut them very thin; they’re crisper that way.— Well! — Where’s your mother?’

‘Mama Chignole’ kept her eyes lowered on the potatoes, while Sophie hid the red in her cheeks by leaning out of doors.

‘Gadding about the neighborhood! If I had known it, I should n’t have hurried. Ah, these women! Their tongues! Their tongues!’

He was launched upon his great monologue on feminine garrulity, its causes and effects, when Madame Bassinet came in like a whirlwind, but stood transfixed at sight of her husband, whose presence she had not suspected.

‘Here already?’

‘Yes. But what does that mean?’

His large forefinger pointed at her elaborate costume.

Madame Bassinet had not worn a wedding ring thirty years, not to know that the way to prove yourself in the right is to bluster.

‘Yes; I am dressed up to-day! And what of it? Have n’t I the right? Must I always be looking like a scrubwoman ? ’

She awaited the good smack which would permit her to close the incident in tears; but M. Bassinet was content to ask very gently, —

‘Where have you been?’

She threw her umbrella and handbag on the table, took off her bonnet, and thrust the pins into it as if she were stabbing the stronger sex.

‘You might as well know. I have been to see Vermilion.’

‘Has anything happened to our Chignole ? ’

‘That’s not what I went for. You remember, Chignole was apprenticed to a bicycle manufacturer? Well, the man has made money off the war. He’s working now on airplanes and he has called Chignole back to his factory. I flew up there; Vermilion waggled his thumb, and the release from military duty was dispatched!’

‘Vermilion is no longer minister.’

‘That doesn’t make him any less powerful. In eight days, your son-inlaw, once more a civilian — do you understand that? — a civilian — will be taking his cocktail with you.’

Sophie kissed her mother. ‘Mama Chignole’s ’ eyes lighted up with unspeakable joy. M. Bassinet chewed the ends of his moustache.

‘You seem annoyed! What are you shaking your head about?’

‘No—but—’

‘But what? I know what’s the matter with you — stupid! You’re afraid they’ll call him a slacker! — Slacker! — Who would dare? Hasn’t he done his duty — that boy — and more? Infantry, aviation, wounded, medal! If everybody had done as well as he, we’d be in Berlin by now. Ah! And, if you don’t approve, who cares? Go take his place, then!’

M. Bassinet submitted to the insult, shrugged his shoulders, and said with a wry smile, ‘I beg your pardon, Mârne Bassinet. It is true, I have nothing to say. I am no longer good for anything.’

Whereupon, Madame Bassinet was seized with remorse. Realizing that she had gone a little too far, she went to him and laid her head upon his breast.

‘ Give me a big blowing up. But yes, my poor old dear, you are still fit to be a grandfather.’

‘ Chignole and Frangipane, the cap’n is asking for you.’

They left the mess, where they had been smoking as they watched the rainstorm, and went to the captain’s office.

He invited them to sit down on the petrol case which served as a sofa; then, vainly trying to soften his harsh voice, —

‘I wanted to tell you first, before the news spread, that your friend — that our friend has been killed within the German lines. Headquarters has sent me last night’s German wireless. They announce a bombing-plane brought down by their guns in exactly the region where our artillery observers saw Papa Charles go down. The pilot was killed. There’s no doubt about it.’

He rammed his pipe to keep his countenance. Chignole and Frangipane said nothing, and the silence was filled with the noise of the rain on the roof.

‘There’s no need to say anything. You understand me. — The Country — The Flag — For France — I’ve said the words twenty times over the tomb or to the memory of all those children who were given into my care, and whom Fate has taken from me. But I would like you to know how much I regret them. They have died of their own free will, as an example; to show their comrades, by their heroic suicides, what a Frenchman will do. War, like religion, has its martyrs. These are they.

’I sent for you also to say good-bye to you, or rather to receive your farewells. Yes; you are to leave me. I have received two messages concerning you. One releases Chignole from military service and sends him into a factory; the other sends Frangipane to the school at Pau, to learn to be a pilot.’

Their eyes went instinctively to the map on the wall, where the bombarded objectives are marked with a red circle; then to the pennant of the squadron, adorned with the fourragère. They were on the point of breaking down, but they stiffened and saluted.

The captain held out his hand. ‘Au revoir, Frangipane — come back to us soon. There will always be a place for you here. Adieu, Chignole.’

The door slammed. The two friends were gone. The captain stood musing, his imagination filled with the vision of all this youth mowed down before its tune. Then, shaking off his sad mood, he called through the telephone in a dry monotonous voice, ‘Six machines ready for three o’clock — one hundred litres of petrol, twelve bombs.’

At mess, where, through an indiscretion of the secretary, the two transfers were already known, bottles of champagne were stripped of their straw, and the Head of the Mess had taxed his wits to arrange the bill of fare for a farewell breakfast — rather a heavy one.

In the train they seemed to take a lively interest in the landscape; in reality each was following his own thoughts.

For Frangipane, this was the supreme reward: he was to be a pilot, his own master, the brain of the machine, the tamer of the beast; he was to take the responsibilities, no longer to be a piece of luggage. Nevertheless, a great sadness filled his heart. Only a few months ago, they had come to the front, four friends, so congenial, so closely identified, that they were like one man. Death had taken two, and would life spare the third?

Since the news of his return to the rear, Chignole had been an enigma. At t he breakfast he had spoken only when he was obliged to, and now, sunk in his corner, he pretended to watch the smoke of the engine as it floated alongside the train.

Frangipane wanted to be certain, though certainty might mean pain.

‘Chignole, I have a proposal to make. To-morrow I shall go to the department, and I’m not boasting when I say that at my suggestion they will give you an appointment as pilot-pupil. Should you like that?’

The eager, enthusiastic, noisy Chignole was now quiet, reasonable, cool.

‘I should like it — if you think it possible —’

His eyes gave the lie to his lips, Frangipane took pity on him and did not prolong his torment.

‘After all — well — go back to the factory — as they’ve asked for you.’

Chignole felt keenly the mute reproach in what this last one of his old friends had left unsaid. He wished that he had sufficient control of himself to cry out, ‘Well, yes; I’ll go with you — I’ll break my neck — or be an ace!’

But no, he could not. He no longer had his nerves under good control. He had seen too many of his companions die. The deaths of Flagada and Papa Charles, coming so close one upon the other, had shocked him, depressed him, overwhelmed him. Was he to be condemned without excuse? Since chance put off the fatal moment, should he not take advantage of it? Life was offered him, and was he to reject it? There was Sophie, his wife, his very soul and his own flesh, awaiting him at the end of the journey. There was love, family life, the future; there was workaday Paris and the Paris of holidays; there was money to buy happiness; finally, there was his mother, whose old age he could smooth. Should he refuse Paradise, now that the way back to it was made easy? It was not as if he had asked this favor. It had been offered him, and he would take it. He was not a saint, he was a man who wanted to live. War had educated him, had opened up to him horizons hitherto shut away. Now, he knew joys in which he longed to share; and why should he not, indeed, since he had already done all his duty?

Still, Frangipane, too, had done his duty, and instead of going back to the rear, to safety, he was deliberately turning his face to new dangers.

If Papa Charles had been there, with his unwearying kindness, his contagious vitality, he would very soon have convinced Chignole, who changed his mind at a word; he would have given him back his faith in himself. But Frangipane, with his unresponsive face, his elusive manner, seemed to him already hostile.

Paris. — They separated with a foolish excuse, and said good-bye, feeling that they should never see each other again. They were already strangers.

V. CHIGNOLE GETS FAT

It was the end of November, and seven o’clock in the evening. Chignole came up out of the station of the ‘Métro Blanche,’ and went toward rue Lepic. He turned up his collar, for the rain was fine, invisible, but penetrating.

Yellow gleams from the shops streaked the sticky asphalt and lighted the pushcarts standing at the edge of the sidewalk with their wheels in the refuse of the gutter. The houses exhaled a stale damp smell that mingled with the city’s stench, for the wind was bringing the reeks from Aubervilliers. Housewives, with shopping-bags in their hands, hurried to the street-hawkers’ baskets, and chatted and made jokes under their bumping, mixed-up umbrellas. Little women, unwashed but painted, with dogs tucked under their arms, went down toward the bar-rooms of the Boulevard de Clichy, stumbling along on their absurdly high heels. Sewing-girls, going back up the hill to Montmartre, were buying pork sausage and vegetables ‘ ready cooked ’ for their dinner.

Chignole, crossing the street to make short a cut, saw someone approaching who looked like him. It was merely his image reflected in the glass of a shopwindow. He stopped to look at himself, but the examination did not satisfy him, for he sighed. Here was no longer the elegant silhouette of the aviator, with his English jacket, his laced boots, his shoulder-belt, and the jewels of his decoration. This was the image of an ordinary, everyday civilian. Only the boutonnière, with its edge of colored ribbons, recalled a glorious past.

In this street, where once men and women had turned to look at him as he passed, the best he could expect now was not to be jostled. In the military uniform he had been anyone’s equal; now he was once more the workman with hands soiled by work, with broken nails — he who, in the escadrille, had polished his nails, like Flagada. He suffered from the promiscuousness of the factory. Where were the repartees of Papa Charles, the conversations at mess which had meant so much to him? Where were those unforgettable days of aerial warfare: the raid on Germany, the battle in the sky, the anguish over encompassing danger; the fighting against elements and men unchained; the triumphant returns, and the wedding procession across Nancy, winked at by benevolent authority?

He had nothing to complain of, for his work on the motors interested him; he was earning high wages; and he was prolonging his honeymoon with Sophie, to the delight of the old mothers. Still, he was not happy. He did not breathe easily here at the rear, where everything, even himself, seemed too narrow. The outlook of his wife, his mother, the Bassinets, was not his own. He had to force himself, to bore himself, to keep in tune with them.

Once he had gone into a bar where he knew he should meet comrades on leave.

‘How fat you’re getting!’ they had said meaning it as a compliment. But he never went back.

He bought the Liberté which a ragged boy was hawking in the corner of a doorway, and he ran through the bulletin mechanically, under a gas-jet. His eyes went to the news of the war in the air: ‘Adjutant de La Guérynière has brought down his fifth airplane.’

‘La Guérynière— La Guérynière,’ he stammered. ‘Why, that’s Frangipane!’

A flush of pride mounted to his face, but at the same time he was stirred by painful agitation.

‘That’s what I might have been — an ace. I too might have been cited in the bulletin. My name might have been in the newspapers — in history; my photograph on the covers of the illustrated magazines. But — I needed Papa Charles; by myself, I had n’t the sand.’

It is easy to see what we might do, but we make so many things our excuse for clinging to life; a thousand little rootlets issuing from our hearts tie us to earth and prevent our flight.

At the corner of rue Durantin, he heard himself hailed by M. Fondu, who was also returning to the bosom of the family. M. Fondu was a changed man. All of a sudden he had felt warlike appetites arise in him. At the City Hall he was now nicknamed ‘the General,’ and privately he was flattered. He could not go to the front, but his combative instincts overflowed into numerous extraordinary memorials which he addressed to competent ministers, ‘To be used where they will do the most good.’

‘My boy, I have just put the last touch to a report on aviation. I’ve been looking a long time for a title. You know the title is everything. Bui. I’ve found it. How To Make Her Hum! What do you think of it?’

The ramblings of ‘the General,’ which Chignole was careful not to interrupt, led them to rue des Saules. M. Bassinet, on the doorstep, beckoned them to hasten their steps. ‘ Hurry up! Come on! We want time to sip our lemon and gentian cocktail quietly before we sit down to the table.’

The first thing which struck Chignole as he entered the lodge was his picture as a soldier, ‘an enlargement very highly finished and resembling him exactly,’ according to his father-in-law. The soldier in the frame seemed to mock the civilian. He was genuinely unhappy and it was with an absent minded ‘Good-evening’ that he replied to his family’s noisy demonstrations of affection.

‘A penny for your thoughts, Chignole.’

‘Oh, not Chignole — Arthur — Chignole ’s a back number — Chignole — that’s over and done with.’

Tired out, he went to the window and leaned his head heavily against the cold pane of glass.

The women were troubled, but M. Bassinet quieted them. ‘Pshaw! A cloud which will vanish — when he knows about the surprise’; and with a wink, ‘Go to it, Mâme Bassinet.’

Madame Bassinet hesitated coyly; but her husband, assuming a little of his forgotten authority, insisted: ‘Go to it, Mâme Bassinet. Go ahead! Out with it! It’s high time to tell him.’

Madame Bassinet wiped her eyes with a duster; ‘Mama Chignole’ was knitting baby-socks harder than ever; M. Bassinet murmured a broad joke to M. Fondu, who had abandoned his grandiose dreams for the moment. Sophie lowered her eyes.

Chignole started up! — Father! — He was to be a father! —A child! — His name, his blood perpetuated. The future, which had escaped him hitherto, belonged to him now. His mortifications, his regrets, his disappointments, his fears, were to melt away beneath the white curtains of a cradle.

‘If it’s a girl,’ clamored M. Bassinet, ‘we’ll call her Victoria. And if it’s a boy — well — what shall we name it if it’s a boy?’

Then, in the silence caused by the general emotion, ‘Mama Chignole’s’ voice arose, very clear: —

‘If it’s a boy, we’ll call it Papa Charles!’

(The End)