The Fortnight

Old Tregre read the lists every noon.

They came in the paper a column at a time, the names, as the line in New York got them from Ireland and sent them down the wire, and L’Abeille printed them in both its halves, the French pages and the English, in small type, in alphabetical order, with the place each person had been going home to after the name. Old Tregre read them all. He read them standing up at the end of the wharf by the ice house with his finger under each one and his spectacles on the end of his nose, the whole column, every day, slowly, and the men stood round him with their hats in their hands and listened to a list of strangers.

Abernathy, Mrs Clara, of Baltimore. Abernathy, Miss Ruth, of Baltimore. Ackerman, Mr Joseph, of Chicago.

Nobody had asked him to. Nobody asked him to stop. The fishermen came in off the lake at noon and tied up and came along the wharf and stood, and the old men got up off the bench by the ice house and stood, and old Tregre read, and when he had finished the day’s column he folded the paper and put it under his arm and said voilà, and they went home.

On the Friday there was a name from the city.

He read it in the same voice as all the others. Fortier, Sœur Marie-Thérèse, des Ursulines, de La Nouvelle-Orléans. A nun from the Ursuline convent, going home from a retreat in Ireland to teach. And the men on the wharf, who had stood and listened to three days of Abernathys and Ackermans from Baltimore and Chicago with their hats in their hands, did not move, and old Tregre stopped, with his finger on the name, and looked up over his spectacles, and said, my sister’s girl was taught by her, and went on.

Lucien had been taught by the Ursulines too, for two years, before his mother died. He did not remember a Sœur Marie-Thérèse. He tried, standing on the wharf, and could not, and that seemed to him a worse thing than if he had.

---

There was a crowd on Royal Street on the Saturday.

He saw it from the streetcar. He had gone into the city with his father to the chandler’s on Decatur Street for twine and a new block for the halyard, and they had taken the streetcar along the shore and in, and at the corner of Royal Street the car stopped, because there was a crowd across the road, and the motorman leaned out and swore.

It was outside a building with a flag on it. A tall pale building with iron balconies, three storeys, with a brass plate by the door, and over the door, on a staff, the tricolour, the blue and the white and the red, hanging straight down in the still afternoon. The consulate of the French Republic. There were two or three hundred people in the street in front of it. Not doing anything. Standing. Looking at the flag. And in front of the door, on the step, a policeman of the city with his hands behind his back and his face like a wall, and beside him, a little behind, a small man in a dark suit with a grey beard who must have been the consul, standing on his own step in front of his own door and looking at the crowd.

Nobody threw anything. Lucien watched for it, from the streetcar window, and nobody did. Somebody shouted something, in English, short. Somebody else shouted something back, in French, longer. The policeman on the step did not move. The consul did not move. The flag hung straight down.

Then a woman in the crowd, an old woman in black, began to say the rosary.

She said it out loud, in French, in the middle of the street, with her beads in her hands, Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâce, and the people near her took it up, and then more of them, until half the crowd outside the consulate of the French Republic was saying the rosary for the dead of the Chesapeake in French, in the street, with their heads down, and the other half stood and listened, and the consul on his step took his hat off.

The streetcar moved on. His father, beside him, had watched all of it through the window without saying anything. When they were past, he crossed himself.

---

L’Abeille had an editorial on the Monday.

Old Tregre read that too, on the wharf, before the list. He did not usually read the editorials, which he said were written by young men from the university who had never been on a boat; but he read this one, in full, the French page, slowly, and when he had finished he read it again.

Lucien heard parts of it the way you hear the parts of a sermon that are said looking at you.

There are those in this Realm who have looked at us these seven days and seen Frenchmen. Let us be plain with them, since they have been plain with us. We are not French. We have not been French for a hundred and twelve years. We were sold, which is not a thing a people forgets, and we were received, which is not a thing a people forgets either. Our Grand-Duc renounced the throne of France in 1848 and every Grand-Duc since has renounced it again. Our Code is our own. Our French is our own, and a Frenchman of Paris will tell you so, and not kindly.

We speak the language of the men who sank the Chesapeake. So did Sœur Marie-Thérèse Fortier, who drowned in it.

Nous-autres, on est Louisianais. We are Louisianais. And when this Realm asks us what we are, that is the answer it will get, in French, which is our right, and in English, which is our courtesy.

Old Tregre folded the paper.

“Young men from the university,” he said, to the lake. “Mais ça c’est bien dit.” But that’s well said.

---

He noticed it on the streetcar.

He had always taken the streetcar into the city and back, along the shore, with his father or on his own, two or three times a week, and he had always talked French on it, to his father, to the fishermen going in to the market, to the motorman, who was a Robichaux from the river parishes and talked French to everybody. He had never thought about it. Half the streetcar talked French and half of it talked English and some of it talked both in the same sentence, the way you did in the city, passe-moi le, pass me the, ticket, and nobody thought about it.

On the Tuesday, going in, he was talking to old Bazile’s grandson about the price of ice, in French, and a man across the car in a collar and a straw hat got up and changed his seat.

He did not say anything. He got up, quite slowly, the way you get up when you want it to be seen that you are getting up, and went to the other end of the car, and sat down again, facing the other way.

Lucien stopped talking.

Old Bazile’s grandson, who was fifteen, looked at the man’s back, and then at Lucien, and went red, and said, very loudly, in French, what’s the matter with him, has he got fleas?, and two of the fishermen at the back laughed, and the motorman Robichaux, at the front, said, without turning round, in French, no, Ti-Paul, he’s got opinions, and they itch worse, and the whole French half of the car laughed, and the man in the straw hat did not turn round.

Lucien did not laugh. He sat with his hands between his knees and looked at the floor of the car, and the streetcar went along the shore towards the city, and he thought that he had spoken French on this streetcar every week of his life and never once known that he was doing it.

---

The Commons voted on the Monday night, the nineteenth.

They knew it on the Tuesday at noon. Old Tregre did not read the list that day. He read the front page, the English half of it, because the English half had it first and fullest, with the numbers: the House of Commons in New Westminster had divided on the Prime Minister’s motion, and the Ayes had it by a figure so large that old Tregre read it twice to be sure; and the members who had opposed entry for two years, the paper said, had walked through the same lobby as the members who had argued for it, and some of them had said afterwards that they had known since the lists were printed.

And under it, in larger type than Lucien had ever seen in L’Abeille:

LA GUERRE EST DÉCLARÉE.

The men on the wharf did not say anything for a long moment.

Then everybody did. Not shouting. Talking, all at once, low, in French and English, the fishermen and the old men and the boys, the way men talk on a wharf when a storm is coming and they have seen it and are working out what to do. Against France. With the English. With the Germans. Will they take us. Will they take the boats. Will there be a draft. There’s no draft, there’s never been a draft. They’ll want men. They’ll want volunteers. They’ll want French. They’ll want boats.

Old Bazile, ninety, on the bench by the ice house, took his pipe out of his mouth.

“J’ai vu la dernière,” he said.

I saw the last one.

Everybody stopped and looked at him. He was the only man on the lake shore who had. He had been a man of thirty-five in the rebellion of 1861, the winter the Grand-Duc refused to let the Grand Duchy go with the rebels, and had carried a musket for the Crown on the river afterwards, and he did not talk about it, ever; he sat on the bench by the ice house and smoked his pipe and watched the lake.

He did not talk about it now. He looked at the lake for a moment. Then he put his pipe back in his mouth and said, round it, to nobody:

“C’est les jeunes qui y vont. C’est toujours les jeunes.”

It’s the young ones who go. It’s always the young ones.

---

His father mended a net that evening.

He sat on the gallery of the camp in the last of the light, on the old cane chair, with the net across his knees and the netting needle in his hand and the twine from the chandler’s on Decatur Street, and mended it, the way he mended a net every evening, without looking, his hands going in and out of the mesh like a woman’s knitting, and the lake in front of him going from blue to gold to grey.

Lucien sat on the step below him with his back against the post.

His grandmother was inside, at the window, in the dark. She had not sung. She had not sung all day, not when the boat came in, not at all; it was the first day Lucien could remember that she had not.

Achille came along the gallery at seven.

He came from his own camp, the Daigles’, three along, across the planks between the galleries that the families had laid down years ago so that you could walk the length of the row without getting into a boat, and he came fast, the way he always came, the way he had come along those planks since he was six and Lucien was five and they had met on them for the first time and fought, for no reason, and both fallen in the lake. He was twenty-two. He was small and dark and quick, with black hair that would not lie down and a laugh you could hear from the shore, and he had worked his uncle’s boat since he was twelve and hated it, and said so, and had read every book in the parish library twice, and said that too.

He stopped at the top of the step. He looked at Lucien’s father on the cane chair, mending. He looked at Lucien.

“Bonsoir, Monsieur Octave.”

His father nodded, without looking up from the net.

Achille sat down on the step beside Lucien. He did not say anything for a minute. He looked at the lake going grey. Then he said, in French, very quietly, so that it was almost only to Lucien:

“Moi, j’y vais.”

I’m going.

Lucien did not say anything.

“They’re making up the Louisiane,” said Achille. “The First. The old militia regiment, the one with the pelican on the colours. They’re making it up to war strength, volunteers, and it’s going as a regiment, with its name. Its own name. In French. The colonel’s a Villeré. They’re taking names at the Cabildo from Thursday.” He was talking fast now, the way he did. “I’m going to put mine down on Thursday morning. First thing. Before my uncle’s up.”

He looked at Lucien.

“Toi?”

You?

Lucien looked at the lake.

Behind him, above him, on the cane chair, his father’s hands had not stopped. In and out of the mesh. The needle and the twine. He did not look up. He did not say anything. He had heard every word, Lucien knew; his father heard everything on the lake shore, the way his grandmother saw everything from the window. He mended the net.

“Je sais pas,” said Lucien.

I don’t know.

Achille looked at him for a long moment in the dusk. Then he looked up, past him, at Lucien’s father on the cane chair with the net across his knees, and at the Marie-Ange tied under the gallery below them, black and low on the grey water with her sail furled on her yard; and something went over Achille’s quick dark face that Lucien did not see often on it, and it was not disappointment. It was the other thing. It was understanding.

“Bon,” said Achille. “C’est correct.”

That’s all right.

He got up. He put his hand on Lucien’s shoulder, once, hard, and took it away. Then he went back along the planks between the galleries to his uncle’s camp, fast, the way he had come, and Lucien heard him laughing at something on the next gallery, and then the door of the Daigles’ camp, and then nothing.

His father mended the net until it was too dark to see. Then he went on mending it in the dark, by feel, for a while longer. Then he put it down, and got up, and went in.

Through the window, as the door closed, Lucien heard his grandmother say, very quietly, to his father, in the dark:

“Et le petit?”

And the boy?

He did not hear what his father answered. He did not think his father answered at all.