The Frontier. Leblanc Maurice
formed by the great granite rocks and dying away to right and left, as though stifled by the shadow of the forests.
He whispered, excitedly:
"The French bugle…"
"Are you sure?"
"Yes, there are troops of Alpines manoeuvring … a company from Noirmont… Listen … listen… What gaiety!.. What swagger!.. I tell you, close to the frontier like this, it takes such an air…"
She listened too, seized with the same excitement, and asked, anxiously:
"Do you really think that war is possible?"
"Yes," he replied, "I do."
They were silent for a moment. And Morestal continued:
"It's a presentiment with me… We shall have it all over again, as in 1870… And, mark you, I hope that this time …"
She put down her breakfast-cup, which she had found in a cupboard, and, leaning on her husband's arm:
"I say, the boy's coming … with his wife. She's a dear girl and we're very fond of her… I want the house to look nice for them, bright and full of flowers… Go and pick the best you have in your garden."
He smiled:
"That's another way of saying that I'm boring you, eh? I can't help it. I shall be just the same to my dying day. The wound is too deep ever to heal."
They looked at each other for a while with a great gentleness, like two old travelling-companions, who, from time to time, for no particular reason, stop, exchange glances or thoughts and then resume their journey.
He asked:
"Must I cut my roses? My Gloires de Dijon?"
"Yes."
"Come along then! I'll be a hero!"
Morestal, the son and grandson of well-to-do farmers, had increased his fathers' fortune tenfold by setting up a mechanical saw-yard at Saint-Élophe, the big neighbouring village. He was a plain, blunt man, as he himself used to say, "with no false bottom, nothing in my hands, nothing up my sleeves;" just a few moral ideas to guide his course through life, ideas as old and simple as could be. And those few ideas themselves were subject to a principle that governed his whole existence and ruled all his actions, the love of his country, which, in Morestal, stood for regret for the past, hatred of the present and, especially, the bitter recollection of defeat.
Elected Mayor of Saint-Élophe and a district-councillor, he sold his works and built, within view of the frontier, on the site of a ruined mill, a large house designed after his own plans and constructed, so to speak, under his own eyes. The Morestals had lived here for the last ten years, with their two servants: Victor, a decent, stout, jolly-faced man, and Catherine, a Breton woman who had nursed Philippe as a baby.
They saw but few people, outside a small number of friends, of whom the most frequent visitors were the special commissary of the government, Jorancé, and his daughter Suzanne.
The Old Mill occupied the round summit of a hill with slopes shelving down in a series of fairly large gardens, which Morestal cultivated with genuine enthusiasm. The property was surrounded by a high wall, the top of which was finished off with an iron trellis bristling with spikes. A spring leapt from place to place and fell in cascades to the bottom of the rocks decked with wild flowers, moss, lichen and maiden-hair ferns.
Morestal picked a great armful of flowers, laid waste his rose-garden, sacrificed all the Gloires de Dijon of which he was so proud and returned to the drawing-room, where he himself arranged the bunches in large glass vases.
The room, a sort of hall occupying the centre of the house, with beams of timber showing and a huge chimney covered with gleaming brasses, the room was bright and cheerful and open at both fronts: to the east, on the terrace, by a long bay; to the west, by two windows, on the garden, which it overlooked from the height of a first floor.
The walls were covered with War Office maps, Home Office maps, district maps. There was an oak gun-rack with twelve rifles, all alike and of the latest pattern. Beside it, nailed flat to the wall and roughly stitched together, were three dirty, worn, tattered strips of bunting, blue, white and red.
"They look very well: what do you say?" he asked, when he had finished arranging the flowers, as though his wife had been in the room. "And now, I think, a good pipe …"
He took out his tobacco-pouch and matches and, crossing the terrace, went and leant against the stone balustrade that edged it.
Hills and valleys mingled in harmonious curves, all green, in places, with the glad green of the meadows, all dark, in others, with the melancholy green of the firs and larches.
At thirty or forty feet below him ran the road that leads from Saint-Élophe up to the Old Mill. It skirted the walls and then dipped down again to the Étang-des-Moines, or Monks' Pool, of which it followed the left bank. Breaking off suddenly, it narrowed into a rugged path which could be seen in the distance, standing like a ladder against a rampart, and which plunged into a narrow pass between two mountains wilder in appearance and rougher in outline than the ordinary Vosges landscape. This was the Col du Diable, or Devil's Pass, situated at a distance of sixteen hundred yards from the Old Mill, on the same level.
A few buildings clung to one of the sides of the pass: these belonged to Saboureux's Farm. From Saboureux's Farm to the Butte-aux-Loups, or Wolves' Knoll, which you saw on the left, you could make out or imagine the frontier by following a line of which Morestal knew every guiding-mark, every turn, every acclivity and every descent.
"The frontier!" he muttered. "The frontier here … at twenty-five miles from the Rhine … the frontier in the very heart of France!"
Every day and ten times a day, he tortured himself in this manner, gazing at that painful and relentless line; and, beyond it, through vistas which his imagination contrived as it were to carve out of the Vosges, he conjured up a vision of the German plain on the misty horizon.
And this too he repeated to himself; and he did so this time as at every other time, with a bitterness which the years that passed did nothing to allay:
"The German plain … the German hills … all that land of Alsace in which I used to wander as a boy… The French Rhine, which was my river and the river of my fathers… And now Deutschland … Deutsches Rhein…"
A faint whistle made him start. He leant over towards the staircase that climbed the terrace, a staircase cut out of the rock, by which people coming from the side of the frontier often entered his grounds so as to avoid the bend of the road. There was nobody there nor anybody opposite, on the roadside slope all tangled with shrubs and ferns.
And the sound was renewed, discreetly, stealthily, with the same modulations as before.
"It's he … it's he …" thought M. Morestal, with an uncomfortable feeling of embarrassment.
A head popped from between the bushes, a head in which all the bones stood out, joined by prominent muscles, which gave it the look of the head of an anatomical model. On the bridge of the nose, a pair of copper-rimmed spectacles. Across the face, like a gash, the toothless, grinning mouth.
"You again, Dourlowski…"
"Can I come?" asked the man.
"No … no … you're mad…"
"It's urgent."
"Impossible… And besides, you know, I don't want any more of it. I've told you so before…"
But the man insisted:
"It's for this evening, for to-night… It's a soldier of the Börsweilen garrison… He says he's sick of wearing the German uniform."
"A deserter… I've had enough of them… Shut up and clear out!"
"Now don't be nasty, M. Morestal… Just think it over… Look here, let's meet at four o'clock, in the pass, near Saboureux's Farm … like last time… I shall expect you… We'll have a talk … and I shall be surprised if …"
"Hold your tongue!" said Morestal.
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