Pied Piper (12 page)

For a moment Howard stood in perplexity; then he stooped and took his hand. In that hot afternoon it was a chilly, damp hand that he felt.
‘Allons, mon vieux,’
he said, with gentle firmness, ‘we’re going to Montargis.’ He turned to the road; the boy in grey stirred and trotted docilely beside him. Leading one child with either hand, the old man strolled down the long road, the other children followed behind, each with a case.

More traffic overtook them, and now there was noticeable a greater proportion of military lorries mingled with the cars. Not only the civilians streamed towards the west; a good number of soldiers seemed to be going that way too. The lorries crashed and clattered on their old-fashioned solid rubber tyres, grinding their ancient gears. Half of them had acetylene headlamps garnishing the radiators, relics of the armies of 1918, stored twenty years in transport sheds behind the barracks in quiet country
towns. Now they were out upon the road again, but going in the other direction.

The dust they made was very trying to the children. With the heat and the long road they soon began to flag; Ronnie complained that the case he was carrying hurt his arm, and Sheila wanted a drink, but all the milk was gone. Rose said her feet were hurting her. Only the limp little boy in grey walked on without complaint.

Howard did what he could to cheer them on, but they were obviously tiring. There was a farm not very far ahead; he turned into it, and asked the haggard old woman at the door if she would sell some milk. She said there was none, upon which he asked for water for the children. She led them to the well in the court-yard, not very distant from the midden, and pulled up a bucket for them; Howard conquered his scruples and his apprehensions and they all had a drink.

They rested a little by the well. In a barn, open to the court-yard, was an old farm cart with a broken wheel, evidently long disused. Piled into this was a miscellaneous assortment of odd rubbish, and amongst this rubbish was what looked like a perambulator.

He strolled across to look more closely, the old woman watching him, hawk-eyed. It was a perambulator in fact, forty or fifty years old, covered in filth, and with one broken spring. But it was a perambulator, all the same. He went back to the old lady and commenced to haggle for it.

Ten minutes later it was his, for a hundred and fifty francs. She threw in with that a frayed piece of old rope with which he made shift to lash the broken spring. Hens had been roosting on it, covering it with their droppings;
he set Ronnie and Rose to pull up handfuls of grass to wipe it down with. When they had finished he surveyed it with some satisfaction. It was a filthy object still, and grossly expensive, but it solved a great many of his problems.

He bought a little bread from the old woman and put it with the cases in the pram. Rather to his surprise nobody wanted to ride, but they all wanted to push it; he found it necessary to arrange turns. ‘The youngest first,’ he said. ‘Sheila can push it first.’

Rose said: ‘May I take off my shoes? They hurt my feet.’

He was uncertain, revolving this idea in his head. ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ he said. ‘The road will not be nice to walk on.’

She said: ‘But monsieur, one does not wear shoes at all, except in Dijon.’

It seemed that she was genuinely used to going without shoes. After some hesitation he agreed to let her try it, and found that she moved freely and easily over the roughest parts of the road. He put her shoes and stockings in the pram, and spent the next quarter of an hour refusing urgent applications from the English children to copy her example.

Presently Sheila tired of pushing. Rose said: ‘Now it is the turn of Pierre.’ In motherly fashion she turned to the little boy in grey. ‘Now, Pierre. Like this.’ She brought him to the pram, still white-faced and listless, put his hands on the cracked china handles and began to push it with him.

Howard said to her: ‘How do you know his name is Pierre?’

She stared at him. ‘He said so—at the farm.’

The old man had not heard a word from the little boy; indeed, he had been secretly afraid that he had lost the power of speech. Not for the first time he was reminded of the gulf that separated him from the children, the great gulf that stretches between youth and age. It was better to leave the little boy to the care of the other children, rather than to terrify him with awkward, foreign sympathy and questions.

He watched the two children carefully as they pushed the pram. Rose seemed to have made some contact with the little fellow already, sufficient to encourage her. She chatted to him as they pushed the pram together, having fun with him in childish, baby French. When she trotted with the pram he trotted with her; when she walked he walked, but otherwise he seemed completely unresponsive. The blank look never left his face.

Ronnie said: ‘Why doesn’t he say anything, Mr. Howard? He is funny.’

Sheila echoed: ‘Why doesn’t he say anything?’

Howard said: ‘He’s been very unhappy. You must be as nice and as kind to him as ever you can.’

They digested this in silence for a minute. Then Sheila said: ‘Have you got to be nice to him, too, Monsieur Howard?’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Everybody’s got to be as nice as ever they can be to him.’

She said directly, in French: ‘Then why don’t you make him a whistle, like you did for us?’

Rose looked up.
‘Un sifflet?’

Ronnie said in French: ‘He can make whistles ever so well out of a bit of wood. He made some for us at Cidoton.’

She jumped up and down with pleasure.
‘Ecoute
Pierre,’ she said. ‘
Monsieur va te fabriquer un sifflet!’

They all beamed up at him in expectation. It was clear that in their minds a whistle was the panacea for all ills, the cure for all diseases of the spirit. They seemed to be completely in agreement on that point.

‘I don’t mind making him a whistle,’ he said placidly. He doubted if it would be any good to Pierre, but it would please the other children. ‘We’ll have to find the right sort of bush. A hazel bush.’

‘Un coudrier,’
said Ronnie.
‘Cherchons un coudrier.’

They strolled along the road in the warm evening, pushing the pram and looking for a hazel bush. Presently Howard saw one. They had been walking for three-quarters of an hour since they had left the farm, and it was time the children had a rest; he crossed to the bush and cut a straight twig with his pocket-knife. Then he took them into the field a little way back from the traffic of the road and made them sit down upon the grass, and gave them an orange to eat between them. The three children sat watching him entranced as he began his work upon the twig, hardly attending to the orange. Rose sat with her arm round the little boy in grey; he did not seem to be capable of concentrating upon anything. Even the sections of the orange had to be put into his mouth.

The old man finished cutting, bound the bark back into place and lifted the whistle to his lips. It blew a little low note, pure and clear.

‘There you are,’ he said. ‘That’s for Pierre.’

Rose took it.
‘Regarde
, Pierre,’ she said,
‘ce que monsieur t’a fait.’
She blew a note on it for him.

Then, gently, she put it to his lips.
‘Siffle
, Pierre,’ she said.

There was a little woody note above the rumble of the lorries on the road.

Presently they got back to the road and went on towards Montargis.

Evening was coming upon them; out of a cloudless sky the sun was dropping down to the horizon. It was the time of evening when in England birds begin to sing after a long, hot day. In the middle France there are few birds because the peasant Frenchman sees to that on Sundays, but instinctively the old man listened for their song. He heard a different sort of song. He heard the distant hum of aeroplanes; in the far distance he heard the sharp crack of gunfire and some heavier explosions that perhaps were bombs. Upon the road the lorries of French troops, all making for the west, were thicker than ever.

Clearly it was impossible for them to reach Montargis. The road went on and on; by his reckoning they had come about five miles from where they had left the bus. There were still ten miles or so ahead of them, and night was coming on. The children were weary. Ronnie and Sheila were inclined to quarrel with each other; the old man felt that Sheila would burst into tears of temper and fatigue before so very long. Rose was not so buoyant as she had been and her flow of chatter to the little boy had ceased; she slipped along on her bare feet in silence, leading him by the hand. The little boy, Pierre, went on with her, white-faced and silent, stumbling a little now and then, the whistle held tight in his other hand.

It was time for them to find a lodging for the night.

The choice was limited. There was a farm on the right of the road, and half a mile farther on he could see a farm on the left of the road; farther than that the children could not walk. He turned into the first one. A placard nailed upon a post,
CHIEN MECHANT
, warned him, but did not warn the children. The dog, an enormous brindled creature, leaped out at them to the limit of his chain, raising a terrific clamour. The children scattered back, Sheila let out a roar of fright and tears, and Rose began to whimper. It was in the din of dog and children competing with each other that Howard presented himself at the door of the farm and asked for a bed for the children.

The gnarled old woman said: ‘There are no beds here. Do you take this for a hotel?’

A buxom, younger woman behind her said: ‘They could sleep in the barn,
ma mère.’

The old dame said: ‘Eh? the barn?’ She looked Howard up and down. ‘The soldiers sleep in the barn when we billet them. Have you any money?’

He said: ‘I have enough to pay for a good bed for these children, madame.’

‘Ten francs.’

‘I have ten francs. May I see the barn?’

She led him through the cow-house to the barn behind. It was a large, bare apartment with a threshing floor at one end, empty and comfortless. The younger woman followed behind them.

He shook his head. ‘I am desolated, madame, but the children must have a bed. I must look somewhere else.’

He heard the younger woman whisper something about the hay-loft. He heard the older woman protest angrily.
He heard the young one say:
‘Ils sont fatigués, les petits …’
Then they turned aside and conferred together.

The hay-loft proved to be quite possible. It was a shelter, anyway, and somewhere where the children could sleep. He made a bargain for them to sleep there for fifteen francs. He found that the women had milk to spare, but little food. He left the children in the loft and went and brought the pram in past the dog; he broke his bread in two and gave half of it to the younger woman, who would make bread and milk for the children.

Half an hour later he was doing what he could to make the children comfortable upon the hay. The younger woman came in and stood watching for a moment. ‘You have no blankets, then?’ she said.

He shook his head, bitterly regretful that he had left his blanket in the bus. ‘It was necessary to leave everything, madame,’ he said quietly.

She did not speak, but presently she went away. Ten minutes later she returned with two coarse blankets of the sort used for horses. ‘Do not tell
ma mère,’
she said gruffly.

He thanked her, and busied himself making a bed for the children. She stood there watching him, silent and bovine. Presently the children were comfortable and settled for the night. He left them and walked to the door of the barn and stood looking out.

The woman by him said: ‘You are tired yourself, monsieur.’

He was deadly tired. Now that his responsibilities were over for a while, he had suddenly become slack and faint. ‘A little tired,’ he said. ‘I shall have supper and then I shall sleep with the children.
Bonne nuit
, madame.’

She went back to the farmhouse, and he turned to the
pram, to find the other portion of the loaf of bread. Behind him the old woman called sharply from the door across the yard.

‘You can come and have a bowl of soup with us, if you like.’

He went into the kitchen gratefully. They had a stockpot simmering upon a charcoal stove; the old woman helped him to a large bowl of steaming broth and gave him a spoon. He sat down gratefully at the bare, scrubbed table to consume it with his bread.

The woman said suddenly: ‘Are you from Alsace? You speak like a German.’

He shook his head. ‘I’m an Englishman.’

‘Ah—an Englishman!’ They looked at him with renewed interest. ‘But the children, they are not English.’

The younger woman said: ‘The bigger boy and the smaller girl are English. They were not talking French.’

With some difficulty he explained the position to them. They listened to him in silence, only half believing what he said. In all her life the old woman had never had a holiday; only very occasionally had she been beyond the market town. It was difficult for them to comprehend a world where people travelled to another country, far away from home, merely to catch fish. And as for an old man who took care of other people’s children for them, it simply did not make sense at all.

Presently they stopped bothering him with their questions, and he finished the soup in silence.

He felt better after that, much better. He thanked them with grave courtesy and went out into the yard. Already it was dusk. On the road the lorries still rumbled past at intervals, but firing seemed to have ceased altogether.

The old woman followed him to the door. ‘They do not stop to-night,’ she said, indicating the road. ‘The night before last the barn was full. Twenty-two francs for sleeping soldiers—all in one night.’ She turned and went indoors again.

He went up to the loft. The children were all asleep, curled up together in odd attitudes; the little boy Pierre twitched and whimpered in his sleep. He still had the whistle clutched in one hand. Howard withdrew it gently and put it on the chopping machine, then spread the blanket more evenly over the sleeping forms. Finally he trod down a little of the hay into a bed and lay down himself, pulling his jacket round him.