The Children of Alsace Part 27

"You stand for something in this generation, Xavier; but you must not be unjust. This man you refuse, because he is not like us, is not the less valiant for that."

"That has to be seen."

"Has he not declared that he will not enter the Government employ?"

"Because the country pleases him better--and my daughter pleases him also!"

"No; firstly because he is Alsatian."

"Not like us, I will answer for that!"

"In a new way. They are obliged to live in the midst of Germans.

Their education is carried out in German schools, and their way of loving France leaves room for more honour and more strength of mind than was necessary in our time. Think, it is thirty years ago!"

"Alas!"

"They saw nothing of those times, they have only a traditional love, or a love which is of the imagination, or of family, and examples of forgetfulness are frequent around them!"

"Jean has had, in truth, examples of that sort."

"That is why you ought to be more just to him. Think that your daughter in marrying him will found here an Alsatian family--very powerful, very wealthy. The officer will not live in Alsheim, nor even long in Alsace. He will soon be only a name."

M. Bastian placed his heavy hand on M. Ulrich's shoulder, and spoke in a tone which did not allow the discussion to be continued.

"Listen, my friend, I have only one word. It cannot be, because I will not have that marriage: because all those of my generation, dead and living, would reproach me. And then, even if I yielded, Ulrich, there is a will near me stronger than mine, who will never say yes, do you understand, never!"

M. Bastian slipped down among the ferns, and shrugging his shoulders, and shaking his head--like some one who will hear no more--went downwards to his day workers. When he had pa.s.sed between the rows of the cut hops and reprimanded each of the workers, there was no more laughing, and the girls of Alsheim, and the farmer's sons, and the farmer himself, stooping under the burning sun, went on in silence with their work, which had been so joyously begun.

Already M. Ulrich was going up to his hermitage on Sainte Odile, distressed, asking himself what serious effect the refusal of M.

Bastian was going to have on Jean's destiny, and anxious to tell his nephew the news. Without hoping, without believing that there was any chance of it, he would try to make Odile's father give way, and plans hummed round him, like the gadflies in the pine woods, drunk with the sun, and following the traveller in his lonely climb. The streams were singing. There were flocks of thrushes, harbingers crossing the ravines, darting through the blue air to get to the vines and fruits of the plain. It was in vain--he was utterly downcast. He could think of nothing but of his nephew, so badly rewarded for his return to Alsheim. Between the trees and round the branches he gazed at the house of the Oberles.

Any one going into that house just then would have found it extraordinarily quiet. Every one there was suffering. M. Philippe Oberle, as usual had lunched in his room. Madame Oberle, at the express wish of her husband, had consented to come out of her room when M. von Ka.s.sewitz should be announced.

"All the same, I repeat," she said, "that I shall not go out of my way to entertain him. I will be there because by your orders I am bound to receive this person. But I shall not go beyond what is strictly necessary."

"Right," said M. Oberle, "Lucienne, Jean, and I will talk to him.

That will suffice."

And after his meal he had gone at once to his workroom, at the end of the park. Jean, who had shown no enthusiasm, had gone out, for his part, promising to return before three o'clock. Lucienne was alone in the big yellow drawing-room. Very well dressed in a grey princess dress, which had for its only ornament a belt buckle of two shades of gold, like the decorations in the dining-room; she was placing roses in crystal gla.s.ses and slender vases of transparent porcelain, which contrasted well with the hard, definite colour of the velvet furniture. Lucienne had the collectedness of a gambler who sees a game coming to an end, and knows she has won. She had herself, in two recent soirees at Strasburg carried the business through, which now wanted only the signatures of the contracting parties; the official candidature promised to M. Joseph Oberle in the first vacant district.

The visit of M. von Ka.s.sewitz was equivalent to the signing of the treaty. The opposing parties held their tongues, as Madame Oberle held hers, or stood aside in silent sulkiness, like the grandfather.

The young girl went from the mantelpiece to the gilt console, surmounted by a mirror, in which she saw herself reflected, and she thought the movement of her lips very pretty when she made them say "Monsieur the Prefect!" One thing irritated her, and checked the pride she felt in her victory: the absolute emptiness which was making itself felt around her.

Even the servants seemed to have made up their minds not to be there when they were wanted. They did not answer the bell. After lunch M.

Joseph Oberle had been obliged to go into the servants' hall to find his father's valet, that good-tempered big Alsatian who looked upon himself as being at the beck and call of every one.

"Victor, you will put on your livery to receive the gentleman who will come about three o'clock!"

Victor had grown red and answered with difficulty:

"Yes, sir!"

"You must be careful to watch for the carriage, and to be at the bottom of the steps----"

"Yes, sir."

Since this promise had been given, which no doubt went very much against Victor's feelings--he had hid himself, and only came at the third or fourth call, quite fl.u.s.tered and pretending that he had not heard.

The Prefect of Strasburg is coming. These words which Lucienne had spoken, Madame Oberle thought over shut up in her room. They weighed, like a storm cloud, on the mind of the old protesting representative of Alsace--that old forester, Philippe Oberle, who had given orders that he was to be left alone; they agitated the nervous fingers of M. Joseph Oberle, who was writing in his room at the saw mills, and he left off writing in order to listen; they rang sadly, like the pa.s.sing bell of something n.o.ble in Jean's heart taking refuge with the Bastians' farmer. They were the theme--the _leitmotiv_ which recurred in twenty different ways, in the animated and sarcastic conversation of the hop-pickers.

For these women and girls of the farm, and the day labourers who had worked in the morning in the hop-field, had a.s.sembled, since the mid-day meal in the narrow, long yard of the Rams.p.a.chers' farm.

Seated on chairs or stools, each one having on their right a hamper or a basket and on their left a heap of hops, they picked off the flowers and threw away the stripped stalks. They formed two lines--one along the stable walls and the other the length of the house. This made an avenue of fair heads and bodies in movement among the piles of leaves, which stretched from one woman to another and bound them together as it were with a garland. At the end, the cart door opened wide on to the square of the town of Alsheim, and allowed the gables of several houses situated opposite to be seen--with their wooden balconies and the flat tiles of their roofings. By this road every half hour fresh loads of hops arrived drawn by one of the farm horses. Old Rams.p.a.cher, the farmer, was at his post, in the enormous barn in front of the dwelling-house, and before which sat the first pickers, at work on the little hop cones.

In this building, whose vast roof was supported by a wall on one side, on the other by Vosges pines, the greater part of the work of the farm was done, and much wealth was stored here. Here they trod the grapes; in the autumn and winter months they threshed corn. They kept all the implements of labour in the corner--the covered carts, planks and building materials, empty barrels, and a little hay.

There were also many great wooden cases piled up, tiers of screens, on which they put the hops to dry every year. The farmer never allowed others to do this delicate work. So he was at his place, in front of the drying-room, where the first shelves were already full, and standing on a ladder he spread equal layers of the gathered hops, which his sons brought him in hampers.

The heat of the afternoon, at the end of August, the odour of crushed leaves and flowers, which clung to their hands intoxicated the women slightly. The laughter rose louder than in the hop-fields in the morning, and questions were asked and remarks made which called forth twenty answers. Sometimes it was the work which furnished a pretext for this fusillade of words. Sometimes it was a neighbour pa.s.sing across the square all white with dust and suns.h.i.+ne; but mostly the talk was about two things: the visit of the Prefect and the probable marriage of Lucienne.

The beautiful Juliette, the sacristan's daughter, had begun the conversation saying:

"I tell you Victor told it to the mason's son: the Prefect is to arrive in half an hour. Do you think I shall move when he comes?"

"He would see a very pretty girl," said Augustine Rams.p.a.cher, lifting up two hampers of hops. "It is only the ugly ones who will let themselves be seen."

Ida, who had lifted up her blue-and-white-spotted dress, and then Octavie the cow-woman, who wore her hair plaited and rolled like a golden halo round her head, and Reine the daughter of the poor tailor, and others answered together laughing:

"I shall not be seen then. Nor I, nor I!"

And an old woman's voice, the only old woman among them, muttered:

"I know I am as poor as Peter and Paul, but I would rather that he went to other folk's houses than to mine--the Prefect!"

"Certainly."

They were all speaking freely. Words re-echoed from the walls and were lost amid bursts of laughter and the rustling of the broken and crushed leaves. In the barn in the half light, seated on a pile of beams, his chin in his hands, there was a witness who heard, and that witness was Jean Oberle. But the inhabitants of Alsheim began to know the young man, who had lived among them for five months.

They knew he was a good Alsatian. On the present occasion they guessed that Jean had taken refuge there with the Bastians' tenant farmer because he disapproved the ambition to which his father was sacrificing so many things and so many persons. He had come in, under the pretext of resting and taking shelter from the sun; in reality because the triumphant presence of Lucienne was torture to him. And yet he knew nothing of the conversation which his uncle had had in the morning with M. Bastian. The thought of Odile returned to his unhappy mind and he drove it out that he might remain master of himself, for soon he would require all his powers of judgment and all his strength. At other moments he gazed vaguely at the hop-pickers and tried to interest himself in their work and their talk; often he thought he heard the sound of a carriage, and half rising, he remembered the promise he had made, to be at home when M.

von Ka.s.sewitz arrived.

Juliette's voice rose in decidedly spirited tones.

"What does this Prefect of Strasburg want to come to Alsheim for? We get on so well without the Germans."

"They have sworn to make themselves hated," quickly added the farmer's elder son, who was giving out the hops to the women who had no more. "It seems that they are prohibiting the speaking of French as much as they possibly can."

"A proof--my cousin, Francois Joseph Steiger," said little Reine, the tailor's daughter. "A gendarme said he had heard him shout 'Vive la France!' in the inn. Those were, I believe, the only French words my cousin knew. That was enough--my cousin got two months in prison."

"Your cousin called out more! But at Alberschweiler they have forbidden a singing society to execute anything in the French tongue."

"And the French conjurer who came the other day to Strasburg? Do you know? It was in the newspaper. They let him pay the tax, hire the hall, print his advertis.e.m.e.nts, and then they said: 'You will do it in German, my good friend--or you will go!'"