Pied Piper (9 page)

They bought a few more sweets, and went back to the hotel. Already the hall was thronged with seedy-looking French officials, querulous from their journey and disputing over offices. The girl from the desk met Howard as he went upstairs. He could keep his room for one more night, she said; after that he must get out. She would try and arrange for meals to be sent to the room, but he would understand—it would not be as she would wish the service.

He thanked her and went up upstairs.
La petite
Rose was reading about Babar to Sheila from the picture-book; she was curled up in a heap on the bed and they were looking at the pictures together. Sheila looked up at Howard, bright and vivacious, as he remembered her at Cidoton.

‘Regardez
,’ she said, ‘
voici Jacko
climbing right up the
queue de
Babar on to his back!’ She wriggled in exquisite amusement. ‘Isn’t he
naughty!’

He stopped and looked at the picture with them. ‘He is a naughty monkey, isn’t he?’ he said.

Sheila said:
‘Drefully
naughty.’

Rose said very softly:
‘Qu’est-ce que monsieur a dit?’

Ronnie explained to her in French, and the bilingual children went on in the language of the country. To
Howard they always spoke in English, but French came naturally to them when playing with other children. It was not easy for the old man to determine in which language they were most at home. On the whole, Ronnie seemed to prefer to speak in English. Sheila slipped more naturally into French, perhaps because she was younger and more recently in charge of nurses.

The children were quite happy by themselves. Howard got out the attaché case and looked at it; it was very small to hold necessities for three of them. He decided that Ronnie might carry that one, and he would get a rather larger case to carry himself, to supplement it. Fired by this idea, he went out of the bedroom to go to buy a cheap fibre case.

On the landing he met the
femme de chambre
. She hesitated, then stopped him.

‘Monsieur is leaving to-morrow?’ she said.

‘I have to go away, because they want the room,’ he replied. ‘But I think the little girl is well enough to travel. I shall get her up for
déjeuner
, and then this afternoon she can come out for a little walk with us.’

‘Ah, that will be good for her. A little walk, in the sun.’ She hesitated again, and then she said: ‘Monsieur is travelling direct to England?’

He nodded. ‘I shall not stay in Paris. I shall take the first train to St. Malo.’

She turned her face up to him, lined and prematurely old, beseechingly. ‘Monsieur—it is terrible to ask. Would you take
la petite
Rose with you, to England?’

He was silent; he did not quite know what to say to that. She went on hurriedly.

‘I have the money for the fare, monsieur. And Rose
is a good little girl—oh, she is so good, that one. She would not trouble monsieur, no more than a little mouse.’

Every instinct warned the old man that he must kill this thing stone dead—quick. Though he would not admit it to himself, he knew that to win through to England would take all his energy, burdened as he was with two little children. In the background of his mind lurked fear, fear of impending, absolute disaster.

He stared down at the tear-stained, anxious face, and temporised. ‘But why do you want to send her to England?’ he asked. ‘The war will never come to Dijon. She will be quite safe here.’

The woman said: ‘I have no money, monsieur. Her father is in England, but he cannot send money to us here. It is better that she should go to England, now.’

He said: ‘Perhaps I could arrange to help him to send money.’ There was still a substantial balance on his letter of credit. ‘You do not want her to leave you, do you?’

She said: ‘Monsieur, things are happening in France that you English do not understand. We are afraid of what is coming, all of us …’

They were silent for a moment.

‘I know things are very bad,’ he said quietly. ‘It may be difficult for me, an Englishman, to get to England now. I don’t think it will be—but it may. Suppose I could not get her out of the country for some reason?’

She wrinkled her face up and lifted the corner of her apron to her eyes. ‘In England she would be safe,’ she muttered. ‘I do not know what is going to happen to us, here in Dijon. I am afraid.’ She began to cry again.

He patted her awkwardly upon the shoulder. ‘There,’
he said. ‘I will think about it this afternoon. It’s not a thing to be decided in a hurry.’ He made his escape from her, and went down to the street.

Once out in the street, he quite forgot what he had come for. Absent-mindedly he walked towards the centre of the town, wondering how he could evade the charge of another child. Presently, he sat down in a café and ordered himself a
bock
.

It was not that he had anything against
la petite
Rose. On the contrary, he liked the child; she was a quiet, motherly little thing. But she would be another drag on him at a time when he knew with every instinct of his being that he could tolerate no further drags. He knew himself to be in danger. The sweep and drive of Germany down in France was no secret any longer; it was like the rush through Belgium had been in the last war, only more intense. If he delayed a moment longer than was necessary, he would be engulfed by the invading army. For an Englishman that meant a concentration camp, for a man of his age that probably meant death.

From his chair upon the pavement he stared out upon the quiet, sunlit
Place
. Bad times were coming for the French; he and his children must get out of it, damn quick. If the Germans conquered they would bring with them, inevitably, their trail of pillage and starvation, gradually mounting towards anarchy as they faced the inevitable defeat. He must not let his children be caught in that. Children in France, if she were beaten down, would have a terrible time.

It was bad luck on little Rose. He had nothing against her; indeed, she had helped him in the last two days. He would have found it difficult to manage Sheila if Rose had
not been there. She had kept the little girl, hardly more than a baby, happy and amused in a way that Howard himself could never have managed alone.

It was a pity that it was impossible to take her. In normal times he might have been glad of her; he had tried in Cidoton to find a young girl who would travel with them to Calais. True, Rose was only ten years old, but she was peasant-French; they grew up very quickly …

Was it impossible to take her?

Now it seemed desperately cruel, impossible to leave her behind.

He sat there miserably irresolute for half an hour. In the end he got up and walked slowly back to the hotel, desperately worried. In his appearance he had aged five years.

He met the
femme de chambre
upon the landing. ‘I have made up my mind,’ he said heavily.
‘La petite
Rose may come with us to England; I will take her to her father. She must be ready to start to-morrow morning, at seven o’clock.’

That night Howard slept very little. He lay on his bed upon the floor, revolving in his mind the things he had to do, the various alternative plans he must make if things should go awry. He had no fear that they would not reach Paris. They would get there all right; there was a train every three or four hours. But after that—what then? Would he be able to get out of Paris again, to St. Malo for the boat to England? That was the knotty point. Paris had stood a siege before, in 1870; it might well be that she was going to stand another one. With three children on his hands he could not let himself be caught in a besieged city. Somehow or other he must find out about the journey to England before they got to Paris.

He got up at about half-past five, and shaved and dressed. Then he awoke the children; they were fretful at being roused and Sheila cried a little, so that he had to stop and take her on his lap and wipe her eyes and make a fuss of her. In spite of the tears she was cool and well, and after a time submitted to be washed and dressed.

Ronnie said, sleepily: ‘Are we going in the motor-car?’

‘No,’ said the old man, ‘not to-day, I couldn’t get a car to go in.’

‘Are we going in a
char de combat?’

‘No. We’re going in a train.’

‘Is that the train we’re going to sleep in?’

Howard shook his head patiently. ‘I couldn’t manage that, either. We may have to sleep in it, but I hope that we’ll be on the sea to-night.’

‘On a ship?’

‘Yes. Go on and clean your teeth; I’ve put the toothpaste on the brush for you.’

There was a thunderous roar above the hotel, and an aeroplane swept low over the station. It flew away directly in a line with their window, a twin-engined, low-wing monoplane, dark green in colour. In the distance there was a little, desultory rattle, like musketry fire upon a distant range.

The old man sat upon the bed, staring at it as it receded in the distance. It couldn’t possibly …

Ronnie said: ‘Wasn’t that one
low
, Mr. Howard?’

They’d never have the nerve to fly so low as that. It must have been a French one. ‘Very low,’ he said, a little unsteadily. ‘Go on and clean your teeth.’

Presently there was a tap upon the door, and the
femme de chambre
was there bearing a tray of coffee and rolls. Behind her came
la petite
Rose, dressed in her Sunday best, with a large black straw hat, a tight black overcoat, and white socks. She looked very uncomfortable.

Howard said kindly in French: ‘Good morning, Rose. Are you coming with us to England?’

She said: ‘
Oui, monsieur.’

The
femme de chambre
said: ‘All night she has been talking about going in the train, and going to England, and going to live with her father. She has hardly slept at all, that one.’ There was a twist in her smile as she spoke; it seemed to Howard that she was not far from tears again.

‘That’s fine,’ he said. He turned to the
femme de chambre
. ‘Sit down and have a cup of coffee with us. Rose will, won’t you, Rose?’

The woman said:
‘Merci, monsieur
. But I have the sandwiches to prepare, and I have had my coffee.’ She rubbed the little girl’s shoulder. ‘Would you like another cup of coffee,
ma petite?’

She left Rose with them and went out. In the bedroom Howard sat the children down, each with a buttered roll to eat and a cup full of weak coffee to drink. The children ate very slowly; he had finished his own meal by the time they were only half-way through. He pottered about and packed up their small luggage; Rose had her own things in a little attaché case upon the floor beside her.

The children ate on industriously. The
femme de chambre
came back with several large, badly-wrapped parcels of food for the journey, and a very large wine bottle full of milk. ‘There,’ she said unsteadily. ‘Nobody will starve to-day!’

The children laughed merrily at the poor joke. Rose had finished, and Ronnie was engulfing the last mouthful, but Sheila was still eating steadily. There was nothing now to wait for, and the old man was anxious to get to the station for fear that they might miss a train. ‘You don’t want that,’ he said to Sheila, indicating her half-eaten roll. ‘You’d better leave it. We’ve got to go now.’

‘I want it,’ she said mutinously.

‘But we’ve got to go now.’

‘I want it.’

He was not going to waste energy over that. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘you can bring it along with you.’ He picked up
their bags and shepherded them all out into the corridor and down the stairs.

At the door of the hotel he turned to the
femme de chambre. ‘
If there is any difficulty I shall come back here,’ he said. ‘Otherwise, as I said, I will send a telegram when we reach England, and Rose is with her father.’

She said quickly: ‘But monsieur must not pay for that, Henri will send the telegram.’

He was touched. ‘Anyway, it will be sent directly we arrive in London.
Au revoir, mademoiselle.’

‘Au revoir, monsieur. Bonne chance.’
She stood and watched them as he guided the three children across the road in the thin morning sunlight, the tears running all unheeded down the furrows of her face.

In the station there was great confusion. It was quite impossible to find out the times or likelihood of trains, or whether, amongst all the thronging soldiers, there would be seats for children. The most that he could learn was that trains for Paris came in at
Quai
4 and that there had been two since midnight. He went to the booking-office to get a ticket for Rose, but it was closed.

‘One does not take tickets any more,’ a bystander said. ‘It is not necessary.’

The old man stared at him. ‘One pays, then, on the train, perhaps?’

The man shrugged his shoulders. ‘Perhaps.’

There was nobody to check tickets as they passed on to the platform. He led the children through the crowd, Sheila still chewing her half-eaten roll of bread, clutched firmly in a hand already hot.
Quai
4 was practically deserted, rather to his surprise. There did not seem to
be great competition to get to Paris; all the traffic seemed to be the other way.

He saw an engine-driver, and approached him: ‘It is here that the train for Paris will arrive?’

‘But certainly.’

The statement was not reassuring. The empty spaces of the platform oppressed the old man; they were unnatural, ominous. He walked along to a seat and put down all the parcels and attaché cases on it, then settled down to wait until a train should come.

The children began running up and down the platform, playing games of their own making. Presently, mindful of the chill that had delayed him, he called Ronnie and Sheila to him and took off their coats, thinking to put them on when they were in the train. As an afterthought he turned to Rose.

‘You also,’ he said. ‘You will be better playing without your coat, and the hat.’

He took them off and put them on the seat beside him. Then he lit his pipe, and settled down to wait in patience for the train.