Wooden Crosses | Page 4

room with
light-coloured hangings.
"Here's what we want," said he, opening the wardrobe.
And flinging out linen and dresses pell-mell on to the carpeted floor,
rummaging in drawers, clearing the shelves, he took his choice.
"I'm going to get myself up like a girl, and you'll be a man. Do you
twig, donkey-face?"
Time to tear a few bodices in unsuccessful tryings-on, and they were
able to admire themselves in the long mirror, transformed to a Shrove
Tuesday bridal pair. When they made their appearance in the courtyard,
arm-in-arm, there was one brief moment of stupefied wonder, and then
a wild clamour greeted them.
"Hurrah for the wedding!" yelled Fouillard first of all.
The others yelled and shouted louder, and the whole squad, howling
with delight, surrounded the two figures of fun. Sulphart had pulled on
over his red trousers a pretty pair of lady's drawers trimmed with lace,
that showed his broad crimson behind through its opening. He had
donned a kind of white dressing-jacket, and on his bristling collier's
head he had set a bridal wreath all awry, made of slightly yellowing
orange-blossom--the wreath of the lawyer's wife, that had been
reposing under a glass shade. Lemoine, who was not laughing, but had
rather the careworn look of a soldier on duty, had been satisfied with a
Scotch kilt, a free-and-easy get-up whose regrettable lack of reticence
he subdued by a frock-coat with satin lapels, and an orthodox tall hat
that had been sedulously brushed the wrong way as a preliminary.
Little Broucke, in a state of happy amaze, was prancing behind them as

if he was at a village festival.
"I'm off to the wedding!" he cried.
Singing and shouting, everybody started to dance, accompanied by
Fouillard, who fancied he was providing music by banging on the black
bottom of his pot with a bayonet hilt.
"Hurrah for the bride!" we all repeated in chorus.
BrŽval's thin face was widened by a happy grin. All the same, he was
trying to quiet us down.
"Not so loud! Good Lord! one of the officers will hear you."
Vairon had taken Sulphart round the waist, and was dancing a java with
all the airs and graces of a village hop; while Lemoine, imagining
himself at the local fte, was cutting pigeon's-wings and clapping his
hobnailed heels together.
"And the feast goes on. Hurrah for the Mayor!" yelled the cook, who
was vainly trying to wash his black hands by rubbing them in his
perspiring forehead.
They were hopping one behind the other, like a farandole, and laughing
like urchins. The new chum followed at the tail, halting and tripping,
holding on to Lagny by the hood. Sulphart, with his mouth dry as ashes,
was the first to break away from the ring.
"Good lord, we're choking here! And that other joker who isn't coming
back with the wine. So long as he doesn't let Morache grab him."
The thought of such a catastrophe halted the dancers.
"And now would be just the moment for a cherry drink," mourned
Vairon.
"But someone else can go and buy more," said Demachy, producing
two further notes. "I've laughed too much, I could do very well with a

drink."
Respectfully or jealously, all the comrades looked on as the new chum
opened his purse of fine leather, and Broucke was so overcome that he
said, "Thank you," when he took the money.
Fouillard, who had forgotten all about his stew, had flung himself down
on all fours before his blackened fire, and was puffing and blowing
with might and main on the ashes, without raising a single spark out of
them.
"Go and get some paper," he begged; "this bitch of wet wood won't
catch."
Somebody made his way down into the cellar and brought up a pile of
many-coloured papers, which he flung down near the fireplace. Stray
leaves flew about, white and blue, mostly of the same shape and size.
They were the notary's papers. The flame as it flickered up made them
flutter, and for a moment it seemed as though there could be deciphered,
even in the fire itself, the fine round legal script and the insertions of
peasant handwriting.
"I think that's a bit thick, I do," said Lemoine in his simple voice.
"Those are things that should be kept.... Suppose somebody was
burning my old folk's bits of paper for their land; I'd have him behind
bars for it."
"Shut your jaw!" coughed Fouillard out of the smoke. "It was you
yourself that wouldn't let the door be burned, and made us go and hunt
for this filthy rubbish of green wood that won't catch. As if it wasn't
wartime!"
"For sure it's wartime," said little BŽlin approvingly. He had planned to
make himself a waistcoat out of a