White Sand and Grey Sand Page 5

  The traffic and the crowds were becoming less, and, as they left the Ezel Straat behind and made their way along the narrow streets paved with small round cobblestones which go winding round and around the belfry, the church, and the cathedral into the medieval heart of the city, they felt the fresh, strong breeze which had blown along the ramparts with almost a breath of the sea, falter, fail, and die gradually away. The air became still. Twilight was falling. The clamour and murmur from the roads came muffled by distance, and although there were lights burning in the window of every house they passed, and signs and sounds showing that the occupants were busy, the ancient streets were empty. No-one was sitting on kitchen chairs outside the front doors this evening; that faint, faraway, terrible thundering towards the north-east had driven people indoors. The whole city was in the grip of silent terror; the warm, still, darkening air of the silent lanes seemed heavy with it.

  Down the Sint Jacob Straat and through Geldmunt and Zilver Straats they went, and when they came to the Sint Salvator Kirk and the beginning of Heilige Geest Straat, Sophie thrust Ydette back at Marie and announced that she must be off, auntie would be expecting her. In spite of the unnatural hush brooding over everything, their farewells were casual; somehow, Marie and Jakoba—who now turned back impatiently to nod to Sophie for the first time—did not believe that they would never see her again … Marieke, the cook at the big house, wouldn’t want much more than a bit of cabbage tomorrow, but Sophie, who was going to help with the clearing-up there, would most likely be across to buy it.

  The charcuterie kept by Sophie’s aunt, Mevrouw Bouckaerts, was still open, with all its lights burning, but the trays and porcelain shelves gleamed white and spotless and empty.

  “Been and bought up everything,” said Marie, watching Sophie cross the road. Good Lord, what a great lump, the figure of a woman of forty. Not that she was fat. You couldn’t say that Sophie Bouckaerts was exactly fat; no-one ever did say it.

  “Mother’ll be sold out, too.”

  “Sure to be. And it’ll be the same tomorrow.”

  Then they were both silent. Tomorrow?

  Deeper into the shadows they walked, over the cobbles damp with falling dew, leaving the shops and the cafés behind. A few ancient lamps were alight now, throwing their faint glow on some little statue of Our Lady standing in her niche high on a wall or at the corner where two winding alleys met, smiling her mild, gentle smile above her tribute of primroses or wallflowers or daffodils glimmering in their paleness against the rough brown surface of the bricks. Higher up, the stepped gables were nearly black against the blue, darkening, transparent sky.

  “Ah …” almost whispered Marie, on a satisfied note: the blessed sound; Our Lady’s bell.

  It was tolling so high, in the last of the fading day, that it seemed to come from a long way off, although in fact the church was now very near, and as always, since she had first become aware of it almost as she lay in her cradle in the little, dark, clean house in the church’s shadow, it sounded to Marie like a holy, comforting voice: deep, and touched by the immense height at which the bell clanged and swung, with unearthliness. The lonely and authoritative sound seemed to her to come down from heaven: it had always seemed to; and tonight it comforted her as only once before—on that evening in the summer of 1914, when her young husband had gone off to fight the enemy which, for the second time in her life, was coming down on her city. She was afraid, now, as she had not been that other time when she was young, but she was also comforted, as she had not been in those far-off days, by the familiar sights and sounds all about her; even a harmless breath of stagnant water drifting up from the canal, their own canal, that ran along the back of their house at the end of their bit of garden, assured her that they were nearly there. The reflection of dim lamp and fading sky in dark, unmoving water, the small, square plaats of old houses with stepped roofs and bands of white stone round door and window that glimmered softly through the twilight, the cobblestones drifted over with the grey sea-sand on which the foundations of Bruges are built—even the discomfort these gave to her tired and burning feet—all spoke to her of home.

  How the child slept. It was a mercy that so far Jakoba hadn’t said anything about her.

  And there, thank God, was the shop; not bombed, looking just as it had when they left it at dawn, and the light was on (them who saw to the black-out would be after Mother, it was getting near the time for all that fuss to start) and there was Mother herself, sitting safe and sound as if she hadn’t moved since morning.

  The vegetable shop was an archway, deep rather than shallow, and roofed by one of those ancient walls of brick, found throughout Bruges, which are probably part of some former nobleman’s or prosperous merchant’s dwelling, and have in course of centuries become through rebuilding and incorporation part of the ordinary houses of the city. These particular six hundred dark-red bricks, weathered and flaked by time, were attached to the little house—in spite of its smallness it was unmistakably a house and not a cottage—in the Sintkatelijnstraat which had belonged to the Maes family for nearly a hundred years, and through the left wall of the archway a stout door, with comely iron lock and bandings that could not have been less than four centuries old, led directly into Mevrouw Maes’ kitchen.

  The lamp was a single electric light, dim both from motives of economy and from obedience to recent instructions from the Government, and by its light the sisters could see that their mother, sitting directly beneath its weak glow, was surrounded by denuded baskets woven of withies, bare shelves and empty boxes that had held the day’s supply of fruit; there was not even a cabbage leaf on the floor; not a sellable thing was left; save for her own stout, small shape, and the stand on which her lace-making pillow was supported, the shop was cleared out. Her hands were clasped across the black apron covering the small mound of her stomach and she was staring down at the strip of worn carpet on the stone floor at her feet.

  “Sold out,” said Marie, on a satisfied note.

  Jakoba nodded. She wasn’t fool enough to be glad about that; tomorrow, money might be worth exactly nothing. It had been, before.

  When they got nearer they saw that Mother was crying. It was disturbing; she wasn’t one of the crying sort; and they looked at each other in silent dismay, two tall, strong, ageing women, feeling for the moment as if they were awkward girls again.

  The faint thundering in the air overhead seemed to fill the silent, twilit little plaats, pressing down into it, crushing it, and there sat Mother, with bent head, crying without a sound. They didn’t know what to do.

  Suddenly Ydette, perhaps aroused by the cessation of movement, stirred in Marie’s arms and began to cry too. Up came Mevrouw Maes’ head at once, and she demanded:

  “What’s that?” and pointed.

  “That’s Marie’s baby; she found her on the big dune,” and relief made Jakoba’s voice even deeper and more carrying than usual, so that the few last neighbours who were about, hurrying dejectedly homeward with food bought in terror and at monstrous prices, had to exchange faint smiles; whoever else might have run away, the Maes sisters hadn’t, and somehow that was comforting.

  Mevrouw Maes got up briskly, and at once a detailed inspection was carried out on the now howling Ydette; she was turned almost upside down for laundry-marks and birthmarks and hypothetical flea-bites, the decorations on her dress were held up to a pair of black eyes that could still see as clearly to embroider the traditional design of a lily in its pot on a background of net lace as they had for nearly seventy years and her little head was vigorously searched—“yes, she’s clean enough”—“But good Lord, Mother, she’s as clean all over as a new loaf,” from Marie—while throughout the business the old woman asked questions; not the idle and wonder-feeding questions of the pop-eyed gossip, but clear, sensible ones which you had to have your wits about you to answer.

  Unlike her daughters, Mevrouw Maes was round and plump, and in her sallow face a girl was imprisoned; a girl who sometimes
darted out a glance through the prison bars of weariness and the seventy-odd years of hard toil that shut her in; she was not a particularly pretty girl, nor even a sweet-seeming one; she was only irrepressibly alive, and young. A necklace of heavy silver links was worn round a neck so short as to be a mere memory, and higher up a pair of embossed silver ear-studs occasionally threw back a demure gleam at the light.

  “We’ll put her into your bed, Marie,” the old woman announced, when the inspection was concluded; Ydette, crying no longer, was now sitting upright, encircled by a pair of short, stout arms which already, after only seven minutes’ resumption of an almost forgotten posture, held her less awkwardly.

  “Yes, Mother.” Why, Marie wondered, had she troubled herself about what Jakoba would do with Ydette? She ought to have remembered that her mother liked children; didn’t she listen with interest to stories about the more troublesome ones who rode in the cart? Marie didn’t even trouble to ask if Ydette was to stay, now. She knew that she would.

  “Then I’m going down to Our Lady’s, later,” Mevrouw Maes went on.

  She set Ydette gently but firmly down, and kept an arm around her, so that she stood close against her knee, and Ydette was quiet, looking up steadily at the light burning high in the brown curve of the rough brick roof. “What do you think?” Mevrouw Maes went on; “an American tourist took my photo.”

  “A photo? At such a time? But they’re all mad, tourists,” Jakoba said resignedly; she was stacking the fragile, empty containers into neat piles, and thrusting boxes away under the trestle counter, while Marie had gone through into the kitchen, keeping the door between it and the shop open so that she could hear what was being said while she prepared supper.

  “Well, perhaps she wasn’t a tourist,” Mevrouw Maes shrugged. “She was young, and she had a painted face and”—with a swift movement she indicated the swell of a too-noticeable bosom—“all showing. The photo was for an American newspaper, she said.”

  “With coloured pictures,” called Marie, from the kitchen.

  “Yes, I daresay … so she made me sit on my stool here and sell a cabbage to Mevrouw Kamiel, and then she made all the others stand round and look at the vegetables; she wouldn’t tell us when she was taking the picture and we couldn’t see; it was a very little camera. She stood and looked at us all, and she told us to think about the war.”

  Marie came to the door and stared; Jakoba stopped sweeping, with her broom suspended, and stared too.

  “To think about the war?” she repeated in a dull voice; “why was that?”

  “I don’t know.” Mevrouw Maes shrugged again. Then she bent and said to Ydette, in a confidential undertone more soothing to a child than the slightly disturbing urgency of a whisper, “You watch, they’re putting the boxes to bed: look, that’s their bed, under there. And soon you’re going to bed too, all nice and cosy and warm, with a drink of milk.” She paused, studying the little face lifted to her own, “Does she understand French?” she asked.

  “Don’t know. I don’t think she can talk at all. Marie thought she said ‘merci’ when we told her to say thank-you when she had the milk at uncle’s, but I didn’t hear it. … We’ve asked her what her name is in Flemish and French and German and Italian and Swedish, and Marie said, ‘Whadda you call yourself?’, in English, like we say to the American children,” (the sisters had picked up the phrase in almost every European language during the more than a quarter of a century that they had been coaxing shy or rebellious or reluctant customers in and out of the blue-and-yellow cart), “but she doesn’t Seem to know.”

  “She might be Spanish,” Madame Maes said consideringly.

  “So she might be Walloon. Might be anything.” Jakoba yawned, throwing a last keen glance round the tidied shop.

  “Ydette …” said the old woman in the same confidential and calming tone, bending closer to the small, still, uplifted face, “Ydette?”

  Suddenly the mouth that was like a bud of apple-blossom parted, showing minute points that really were more like the pearls of the old poet’s rhyme, than anything else, and Ydette smiled. “Maatje,”3 she said, so softly that Mevrouw Maes was not sure she had heard the word.

  “What, darling?” She bent closer.

  The dark eyes looked at her, solemnly now. “Maatje?”

  “You come to me,” the old woman said, and lifted her up into her arms.

  She held her tightly, while her eyes wandered beyond the faint glow of light thrown by the lamp on the cobblestones, over to the big house across the plaats. No light was shining there. Marieke must have put up the blackout curtains … all by herself, in that great place. The branches of the tall chestnut tree growing outside threw soft clear shadows against the row of white stone shields, carved with birds and beasts and ancient letters, ranged along the wall above the front door. It all looked dim and shut away and sad in the gathering darkness.

  That morning, Madame van Roeslaere had come across to say ‘good-bye’. It had been a gracious act; Mevrouw Maes, resting comfortably enough between the twin pillars of the Roman Catholic church and a thousand-year-old feudal instinct, had been gratified by it. All that Madame van Roeslaere had said, in her soft, quick, sensible-sounding voice, as she stood there dressed in the coat and skirt made from cloth which came, Sophie said, from Scotland, and her small cap like an Englishwoman’s with the green and black feathers—all that she had said was, “Good-bye, Mevrouw Maes, and God in His mercy take care of you.”

  Mevrouw Maes had got up slowly and with some difficulty from her chair—unprevented by any gesture on the part of her visitor—and had inclined her stout, rheumatic body in a kind of bow. She had not said anything, because at the moment that she had seen Madame van Roeslaere coming quickly across the plaats she had been remembering how she had fainted as she stood in a bread-queue in 1916, and she had been swearing to herself ‘Never again’, in a rage and determination all the stronger because she knew that she would probably be just as helpless this time, too, and the memory had left her rather full of feelings; besides, there didn’t seem to be anything to say. So she had contented herself with the bow, and a silent nod of her head. There had been no expression at all on Madame van Roeslaere’s pale face and in the large pale hare’s eyes behind the thick lenses of her glasses, as they looked at one another. Her hair was quite white, although Sophie, that great lump who always knew everything that was not her business, said that she was only fifty; that wasn’t exactly young, but it was considerably younger than seventy, and some people—here Mevrouw Maes absently put up her hand, as she remembered the incident, to an intricately plaited and coiled mass of iron-grey—some people were not white-haired even at seventy.

  So they had looked at one another for a moment, and then Madame van Roeslaere had turned quickly and gone back across the plaats to the big house.

  Mijnheer Adriaan had not come to say ‘good-bye’. Well, Mevrouw Maes had not expected him to, although he had been a patron of the bathing-huts, under the care of those nannis of his who were always giving notice, almost since he was born, and had ridden many a time in the cart with Klaartje; and once he and Mevrouw Maes had had a joke together (that was when he had been a very little boy) about how old Klaartje was, Mevrouw Maes pretending that she knew, but would not tell. (Jakoba firmly kept the actual years of Klaartje a trade secret, for it was good for business, and attracted the children, to say that he had been there ever since the bathing-cabins had stood in their enclosure on the beach, and was as immensely old as he was large and strong. Klaas knew his age, of course, but Klaas never told anyone anything about anything; the tightest one Mevrouw Maes had ever known at keeping a secret, Klaas was.)

  Ydette made a weary, restless little movement, and the old woman looked down at her. She had already made up her mind that no-one was going to take her away. She should be kept as safe as they could keep her.

  She looked across at Jakoba, who was preparing to fasten the wooden barriers shutting the shop off from the street,
and stood up, with Ydette in her arms. The trestles, the barrels and stool and the shelves, were ready for the arrival tomorrow of Uncle Matthys’ van with the day’s supply of vegetables and fruit, but the scales, and the wooden box that they used as a till, were under Jakoba’s arm.

  “What right have they to go to England?” Marie said suddenly in a bitter voice; she had been staring across the now almost dark plaats at the big house, while she rolled up the bit of carpet.

  “Ah, they’ve got money, they’re rich; it’s all right for them,” said Jakoba in a muted, mocking tone.

  “I shouldn’t think it so lucky, going off to a strange country and leaving my linen to be looked after by Sophie Bouckaerts,” observed Mevrouw Maes, whose prejudices resembled those of Chesterton’s yokel, knowing no harm of Bonaparte but plenty of the Squire.

  “Marieke will be looking after it, not Sophie, Mother.”

  “That’s better, but it’s all the same. No-one looks after your things like you can yourself.”

  “Sophie says she’ll show us the house and all the things one day, Mother, when Marieke’s gone to her sister at Enghien,” said Marie.

  “That’s good; I should like to see that—if the Germans’ll let me.” Mevrouw Maes’s voice was pungent with the eloquent irony for which the citizens of Bruges are renowned.

  “Oh, everything’ll be locked up, sure to be, but Marieke’ll have the key.” Marie didn’t want to talk about the Germans … why couldn’t anybody ever say that they weren’t going to get to Brugge after all? Weren’t the British here, and the French and the Dutch too?—good heavens, were all those men and guns and aeroplanes going to fall down like sand when the tide comes in without doing anything at all? Why did everybody, even her own mother, seem to take it for granted that the Germans were going to get to Brugge?

  “I’d like to see the lace,” she said quickly.

  “The Germans’ll have the lace. Come on, I’m hungry.” Jakoba drew the wooden gates together, and fastened their un-intricate catch. The shop was almost in darkness now, but a faint light still came into it through that part of the arch above the barrier which was open to the sky. They groped their way across the dim place, Mevrouw Maes holding Ydette close, and reached the kitchen door, which Marie had shut and locked, because that was what they always did, before she returned to help tidy the shop. Now Jakoba groped about near the massive lock, and in a moment there came a small, ancient sound; the heavy iron key, with its decorations of scrollwork on the handle, was slowly turning in its wards.