In my updated biography of Dorothy Bowers there was mention of Bowers' only known short story. 'The Spy At Chateau Bas' was published in The English Review in the May 1927 issue (starting at page 619). The English Review was a literary magazine that ran from 1908 till 1937, publishing short stories and other forms by leading authors, but was never a financial success and was in decline from the end of World War One.
Advertisements for the May 1927 issue in British newspapers included a listing of contents, which were mainly essays of a political and current affairs nature, with only two stories (the other being by Roy Meldrum).
The Scotsman - Thursday 05 May 1927
I have transcribed the story below ; the first time the text has been made available on the web. My plan is to publish a small number of copies at some point to share with friends. Rather than share my opinion on this short story, I'd love to hear from others on what they think of the story.
As a girl Bowers attended "French convent school, where she acquired method, precision, and an abiding delight in the orderly and formal arrangement of ideas, and even of material objects - a sense of pattern and symmetry". We do not know where this school was, and there is undoubtedly some influence on this story. It is possible that Bowers herself re-visited her old stomping ground post-war as described in the story.
The story is set at a farmhouse called Chateau Bas about four miles from Rochefort in the Ardennes region of Belgium (and not the Rochefort located on south-west France). There is a 'Chateau Bas' in France, but it is the remains of a Roman temple located in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region.
The Spy at Château Bas
By Dorothy Bowers
The English Review, May 1927
IN the late summer of 1924 I revisited Château Bas, a hamlet some four miles east of Rochefort, in the Ardennes. I had last seen it ten years ago, touched to lurid life by the quickening glare of war, compelled, as it were, to unwonted activity by the clamour of guns, somewhat in the manner of a country wench drawn involuntarily into the vortex of city life.
For years Château Bas and its vivid memories slept, till the shackles of the old pre-war existence began to slip uneasily into place once more. Then it was, in the cramped confines of London business life, that I experienced a craving home-sickness for those blood-soaked fields where the youth of Europe had died. In reply to a letter tinged more heavily than I had suspected with regret for old times, a friend in Rochefort, who had lost an arm at Mulhouse, sent the necessary invitation. In September I trod once again a land whose very air had been thick with agony and passion.
It had been no preconcerted plan of mine to visit Château Bas itself, yet it seemed a matter of course that our steps should be bent in that direction one afternoon when my holiday was still little more than a week old.
It lay in a cup of the hills, placid and beautiful, as it must have looked in the autumn of 1913, only that charred, fragmentary ruins showed up at intervals like scars on the body of some quiet warrior. A young girl with dark, cloudy eyes and a mass of bronze hair passed us on the road, a basket of smooth, yellow pears on her arm, and a bunch of little children playing in the dust looked up at us with grave-, wide eyes that had never flinched from the horrors of war.
Mellow October sunlight washed the hedges, where delicate, dew-laden cobwebs still swung in shady recesses, or slid caressingly down whitewashed walls and mossy roofs. Above us a pale, clean sky arched, a little misty, cloudless and serene.
We had come within sight of a low, solitary farmhouse, obviously inhabited, but slatternly and decayed, with a sullen air about it and no one stirring. As we approached the weed-grown strip of garden in front, where dank coarse grass mingled with the flaunting courage of blue Michaelmas daisies and a great clump of Golden Rod, some memory stirred within me. A few belated honey bees buzzed in little eddies round the fading plumes of Golden Rod, and with a hand on the broken paling, I paused and looked at Dupont.
"Who lives here?" I asked, and only half-listened to his reply.
''Maximilien - a farmer, and his wife - careless, dirty folk."
I was thinking, thinking rapidly. A blazing, dustclogged day in September, ten years ago, passed effortlessly before my mental vision, and I saw again a straggling score or so of British soldiers, thirsty, disillusioned, who had tramped this road. There had been an old woman at the gate, beside the Michaelmas daisies and the Golden Rod, and the long, choking grass - a withered, immobile figure who had watched us with still, dark gaze and, as the foremost drew abreast, proffered a broken basket filled with ripe greengages, the while she nodded and smiled her wordless sympathy. Greengages for cracked and arid lips, more than enough to go round! A little thing to stick in one's memory for ten eventful years, you say? Yes, but it had been extraordinarily refreshing and pleasant. I turned to Dupont again.
"An old woman!” I said. "Wasn't there an old woman here then?''
"Ah, yes," he replied. "You mean Mère Maximilien." He gave his head an explanatory jerk in the direction of the lifeless windows. "His grandmother, you know. She died - rather odd circumstances, yet commonplace enough, God knows!”
On the way back to Rochefort he gave me the story, quietly, as such a story should be given.
. . . . . . .
In 1914 there were three people living on the farm Jean Maximilien, his wife Suzanne, and Jean's grandmother, known as Mère Maximilien.
Jean was a lazy ne'er-do-well, a little over thirty, with a paralysed arm which kept him out of the army. He sulked and slouched his way through life from dawn till dusk, with a savage, unformed desire to make himself comfortable at all costs, and a complete disregard of the welfare of the farm and of those around him. His wife, a stolid, placid creature, older than himself, silently acquiesced in the slovenliness of house, land, and husband, and increased Jean's natural irritability by the bovine attention she paid to his wants. They were childless, the only other person in the house being the central figure of my story, Mère Maximilien.
Mère Maximilien was seventy-six years old in 1914 and, though deaf and dumb from birth, had been a fine, healthy woman when Simon Maximilien married her, a half-century or more ago. One summer morning Simon fell from a hay-wagon and broke his spine. When he died the farm went to her eldest son, and while still worked with comparative care, seemed to lose, under the new regime, something of its old trim fecundity. Mère Maximilien's deafness increased with years, and though still strong and capable, she retired more and more into the background. In the winter of 1908 the son had succumbed to a severe bout of pneumonia, and land and house passed automatically into the negligent hands of the young, dissolute, unlovable Jean, his only child.
Dark years closed down on Mère Maximilien and the farm at Château Bas. Jean was no farmer, and he hated his grandmother. He loathed her helplessness, the abiding calm of her movements, the eternal silence of her slow approaches and withdrawals. Complete deafness had enclosed her like a vault before she was seventy, and a stroke a year or so later deprived her mentality of its once lissome alertness. "Half-witted," they said in the village, with a shrug of the shoulders, and it was indeed true that she had now lost the power of expressing herself by the conversation of the fingers, in the voiceless manner of the dumb.
Jean's hatred grew with the intensity only possible to a mind extraordinarily limited in its emotional range. He loathed with an indefinable fear the direct reproach of her level, dark gaze, the more piercing because wordless. He detested her immobility, the grave, attentive attitude of one completely detached from the world, yet always in it.
Most of her time was spent in the kitchen, beside the great hearth, her wrinkled hands in her lap, and a brindled cat, lean, with yellow eyes, at her feet. The stare of both was unwinking, hard to fathom. Sometimes Mère Maximilien would smile, a slow lift of the lips which seemed somehow to age her still more terribly, and in which the seething rancour of Jean detected a gleam of sardonic triumph. On sunny days she would walk as far as the garden gate, and stand there, like some guardian of dead relics. Passers-by went on, unheeding, with never a word and often no glance. A new generation had grown up to that which had known Mère Maximilien, a woman loved and honoured in Château Bas. She was nothing now to them but an old, mentally-deficient creature, scarcely a woman, deaf and dumb, and therefore beyond folks' reach by the ordinary channels of human intercourse.
So months slid by in Château Bas, and she who heard nothing, spoke no word, shared none of the squalid activities of the farm, dominated house and inhabitants alike. So, no doubt, things would have gone on till the quiet earth, as voiceless as herself, had claimed Mère Maximilien, had not the war laid a blood-smeared hand on lovely Ardennes, and one finger of it on the becalmed hush of Château Bas.
At first Jean Maximilien, out of savage perversity, welcomed news of war; at last this sleepy existence which he detested while acquiescing in it would receive a rude awakening. Then, gradually, he grew to hate it, not for obvious reasons, but because he could not share in it. The realization that he was to miss the zest and thrill of the most primitive of man's pastimes, the one chance of escape from the stifling atmosphere of Château Bas, his cow-like wife, and his detestable grandmother, soured him afresh. While others, even his own man-of-allwork, assumed the peculiar importance attached to the uniform and bearing of a poilu, he was doomed by a withered arm to stick for ever in the mud of Château Bas, among cows and pigs and oafish women. Fettered for ever to Château Bas, he grew to hate the war, soldiers, France itself. His sullen face would settle into a sneer whenever he heard remarks about la patrie. How could one be expected to serve the country, or take any interest in the country, when all one's time from bleak dawn to bleaker dusk was filled with feeding thankless pigs and hens, and keeping life in the unresponsive carcasses of two fools of women?
So Jean argued, tramping muddy acres in the winter of 1914, the while he dreamed incessantly of adventure and fine deeds and a Croix de Guerre never to be his.
With the New Year occurred events which were to break for a brief but glorious span the humdrum of Jean's life, and give significance to the neglected farm at Château Bas.
Late one gusty night in January, a French officer and three soldiers, riding up to the farm, billeted themselves on the Maximiliens, with vague remarks about rejoining their regiment in a week's time. Had the explanations been more lucid, they would have penetrated Jean's thick skull scarcely farther. All he grasped was that a gleam of Romance had shone upon the farm, which was to shelter for seven blissful days a French capitaine and three brave poilus. For the first time in his life Jean Maximilien became voluble, and seemed swayed by emotions other than hatred. Even his grandmother would be unable to mar the joy of that week, for she had retired to bed, as was her wont periodically, ailing and wasted, but still immobile. Jean always hoped she would die at one such time. Hasty explanations that there was only an old woman in the house, ill in bed, besides himself and Suzanne, and that they would do all in their power to make messieurs comfortable, sufficed. Jean prepared for an exciting week, and took stock of his guests.
Monsieur le Capitaine was a tall, blond man, with quiet, but alert eyes, and a mouth like steel. Jean understood his name was Hanchette. The other three were jolly enough fellows - one, a corporal, fair and rather stout, the others a pair of dark, lithe privates, typically French. Capt. Hanchette was not jolly, nor communicative, but an austere man, with decisive voice and manners. He proved coldly indifferent to Jean's ingratiating attempts at conversation, and was apparently bored by the farmer's generous information regarding the passage of French troops through the hamlet on their way to Namur last week, and the excitement of the admiring villagers. Jean soon abandoned his efforts to beat down the icy reserve of the captain and turned his attention to his less impregnable men. They proved companionable, jocose, eager to receive and impart news, and with an amazing store of anecdotes, some of doubtful flavour, but all related in a back-slapping, disarming manner. The walls of the farmhouse at Château Bas echoed unfamiliarly to reiterated bursts of masculine laughter. Was not Jean at last a link with those brave poilus who were safeguarding France and liberty in the red light of the guns a few miles away?
The week, however, drew too quickly to its close, and towards the end Jean grew irritable again. Perhaps it is true that familiarity breeds contempt, for he certainly sighed anew for fresh faces; or perhaps it was that Jean's old longing for uniform and gun took possession of him again. He began to feel acutely alien among these seasoned warriors; his civilian character assumed the proportions of a persistent demon, always at his side, silently mocking and thwarting him at every turn like Mère Maximilien.
His wife, who had remained curiously unaffected by these additions to her household, noted with growing dread the return of Jean's surliness, but her stony face betrayed nothing of the knowledge that was hers. Though she knew Jean would have liked to knock her down where she stood for no other reason than the annoyance her stupid presence gave him, she continued to move wearily and laboriously about her household duties, bovine resignation stamped upon her face. Upstairs lay an old woman oblivious to the world, knowing nothing of a French capitaine and three brave poilus in the house.
The last day came - a Tuesday, cold and still, with a rising fog; Jean would always remember every detail of that day. At the next dawn Capt. Hanchette and his men would depart, and blankness settle down once more on the farm of Château Bas. In the morning his wife had announced her intention of going to Rochefort for the day to see her dying mother, and had clung with so sudden and surprising an obstinacy to her resolution that Jean Maximilien had felt unable to combat it adequately, and let her go. The house, after all, he felt, could lose little by her absence, might even be slightly less depressing.
The morning dragged itself out, and in the afternoon Jean went off to the fields as usual. The capitaine and his men were out, too, he did not know where, but as he left the byre he met them returning to the house. He had not thought of his grandmother all day; the last meal she had had Suzanne gave her before leaving that morning.
Mère Maximilien herself moved a little on the hard bed in her ill-kept bedroom. Her bout of illness was temporarily in abeyance, and half-formed ideas of being dressed and sitting downstairs again flitted across her shaky mind. Suzanne seemed a long time downstairs. Was it yesterday she had last seen someone? She felt suddenly hungry and lonely. She got her trembling old limbs out of bed and groped for familiar garments.
Jean, busy with dismal visions of a life stretched out for ever amid the unenlivening surroundings of Château Bas, trudged his way in the direction of the fields. Halfway, groping mechanically for his pipe, he felt an empty pocket, swore an oath, and turning on his heel tramped stolidly back to the house. Thus, by an instrument so humble as a tobacco-pipe, did Fate take a hand in men's lives at Château Bas.
Passing through the yard on his way to the back door, his footsteps muffled in the straw, Jean suddenly heard a low exclamation which arrested him in his stride as one petrified.
"Gott in Himmel!" came a voice, low and guttural, from the direction of the parlour window, and then, after a quick note of impatience from somebody else, continued in French, "We have them then."
Jean dropped on hands and knees, silent as a log, below the level of the window. The gathering fog wrapped him about. He was within easy earshot of all that passed. Inside the room Capt. Hanchette was spreading on the table a map of the eastern frontier, marked copiously with red ink lines. Over it his men bent their heads, following with eager glance the captain's tracing finger.
One of them lifted his head sharply. "There is no risk?" he queried in French.
Hanchette's voice came, serene and curt: ''None. The woman has gone to Rochefort till tonight. Maximilien is hedging a mile away. The old woman, I understand, is bedridden." For safety's sake, however, the conversation was resumed in French.
Underneath the window Jean's heart was thumping horribly against his ribs, but there was a smile on his lips.
Mère Maximilien groped a quavering way downstairs. In the kitchen the remains of a fire burnt dully in the grate, in front of which sat the brindled cat, watching the embers with unblinking, yellow eyes. Mère Maximilien sat down in her familiar chair. From the adjacent parlour, separated from the kitchen by a door, came a voice, intent and regular, with brief interruptions at intervals from other voices. To anyone of normal hearing every word would have been audible, but Mère Maximilien was lapped about by the roar of eternal silence. Her dark eyes, wide and unfathomable, were fixed steadily on the parlour door.
For an hour Jean crouched below the window, a cramped, fog-wetted figure, absorbing and registering breathlessly each word and sentence from the room above. Slight, salient phrases burned themselves on his mind. "Les Vosges." " Yser." " Masses of troops on the 30th." '' The Passchendaele Road.''
There was coarse laughter once at some remark about the burning of Maximilien's ramshackle house when a certain great day arrived, an outburst speedily silenced by Hanchette's curt voice. Jean ground his teeth in voiceless passion.
Capt. Hanchette stood up, and began slowly to re-fold his map. "That's all," he said quietly; "a good week's work," and added carelessly, "thanks largely to the glib tongue of that dirty fool, Maximilien."
Outside "the dirty fool" squatted, half-frozen, rime on his coat, with a glow in eyes and heart.
From the kitchen came the slight sound of Mère Maximilien's chair scraped back, as she rose to explore the house and find that truant Suzanne. Four men in the parlour were instantly stricken to mute, expressive attitudes. In two strides Capt. Hanchette reached the kitchen door and flung it open, his men clustering at his back. He saw an old woman with enigmatical gaze, confronting him from the hearth.
Mère Maximilien's level eyes perceived, framed in the doorway, a tall, fair man in the brave uniform of France, bold, handsome, chivalrous, with ardent blue eyes that seemed to pierce her soul and wake her slumbering mentality to warm remembrance. Ah! was he not like Simon, the good Simon, her dear husband, when Simon was in the heyday of his health and strength? A friendly glow swept through her chilled old blood. She smiled, a slow lift of the lips, in which Hanchette detected a gleam of sardonic triumph.
"Mein Gott I" he said softly," a spy." A man behind him muttered something, and at the same moment Hanchette, snatching his revolver, aimed directly at Mère Maximilien's smiling face, and fired. The cat bounded sideways at the report, while a blue smoke hung, motionless for an instant, in the air. When it cleared Mere Maximilien, who had never heard nor uttered human word, might have been seen lying, a frail crumpled heap on the hearthstones, little more immobile and detached than in life.
After the first half-startled hush one of the men turned away with a foul expression.
Outside in the gathering darkness of the late January afternoon, under cover of the loud report, Jean Maximilien, regardless of his grandmother's fate, ran, despite stiff limbs, as he had never run before in his life, the half-mile which divided his farm from Château Bas.
. . . . .
By the time Dupont's tale reached its close we were entering the outskirts of Rochefort. Château Bas lay behind us, a white and green smudge in the blue lap of the hills.
"Hanchette was really Hackmann, the Prussian spy," added Dupont as an afterthought. "The Château Bas affair finished him, though. He was shot a week later. . . The corporal was German, too, but the others were Frenchmen right enough."
I scarcely listened. Looking over my shoulder, I perceived the stark outline of that shattered fortress which had given the hamlet its name, a mediæval fragment rearing its gaunt head out of the twentieth century, a grim guardian of decayed secrets.
"So Jean Maximilien lost his grandmother and gained something a little more substantial, I believe, than his coveted Croix de Guerre." Dupont's voice was cynical.
But I was not thinking of Jean Maximilien, nor of the reward he got for his work pour la patrie. I was seeing again a hot and dusty road in Ardennes, and a weary troop of British Tommies, refreshed by the greengages that an inarticulate and friendly old woman had given them.
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