The Snow Girl

A Story

by WILLIAM R. SHELTON

THE woman behind the doll counter was looking at me with polite exasperation, her long fingers tapping nervously against the package she had just wrapped. I wanted to leave; I knew I had tried her patience.

“Something else for you, Captain?” she asked, glancing at the clock.

“No, thanks,” I replied, taking a step backward. “You’re sure it will get there all right?”

“Sir, I’ve done everything I can to help you. The package is properly stamped; you addressed it yourself. There is no reason why it shouldn’t get there. Would you like to test the wrappings again, sir?”

I smiled wryly and shook my head. She began putting away the dolls I had not taken.

“Just one more thing. You’re sure, you’re absolutely sure, that this is a child’s doll? I mean, it’s not one a grown woman would use just for decoration? It is a doll a little girl would like to play with, isn’t it?”

The woman didn’t look up from behind the counter. For a moment, I thought she wasn’t going to answer: Other clerks were covering their counters. The store was closing.

“Captain,” she said finally, “any little girl would adore a doll like that, and so would a lot of grown ones. I like her myself, and heaven knows I see enough of them. When it comes to pleasing us, perhaps you know better than I that the line between child and woman is hard to draw sometimes.”

I jumped — I couldn’t help it. She had never heard of Mireille. She couldn’t possibly know —

The clerk stood up and, seeing my face, smiled reassuringly. “If it’s for a child to play with, you haven’t a thing to worry about. She’ll love it!”

I thanked her and went out of the store. Dusk was falling, American dusk in an American city. I leaned against the front of the building, lit a cigarette, and filled my lungs with a great swell of relieving smoke. I felt free now; the simple act of mailing the doll had removed the last stubborn doubt. I watched the neon signs light up, the elevators flash up and down the buildings; for the first time in a great many months, I was home. There was my family. There was a train to catch. I could think about those things now. I started walking toward the station.

She would get the doll in about a month. It would probably go by boat to Naples; then by plane to the Corsican port of Bastia; then by Corsican mail bus to the village of Ghisoni. Perhaps she would see the bus struggling up the mountain, and watch it unload in front of the Romani Inn. Later she would open the package with small, quick fingers, and her face would glow with that radiant gratitude of hers which would be more eloquent, even, than the swift, delicately mouthed French words she would throw over her shoulder to Pierre, and Charly, and her mother. Once before, I had thought of her face like this.

Another pilot and I had flown some supplies from Corsica to our new base in Italy and had stopped for a few hours in Rome. We would be moving in a few days and I wanted to buy Mireille a present. In a small shop on a side street, I was shown a truly magnificent doll — a Swiss doll, the shopkeeper said. It had a plump, rosy face and wore a black satin dress with colorful, geometric embroidery across the front. There was no doubt in my mind that it was the perfect gift for Mireille.

The shopkeeper noticed my enthusiasm and asked me how old the child was. I stood before him, puzzled, unable to say, “She’s eight,” or “She’s fourteen,” or any other number of years. Finally, I shrugged and drew a mark across my chest, somewhere between my belt and shoulders. This satisfied him; I was satisfied with the doll, and the incident, for the time being, was forgotten. When we were once again in the air, headed toward Corsica, the doll was behind my seat. All the way across, I thought of Mireille’s face when she opened the package.

2

I FIRST saw Mireille one cold night when a jeepload of us, as was our custom, drove the twelve miles up to Ghisoni to spend a quiet evening eating and drinking with Monsieur Dominique, the proprietor of the Romani Inn. On this particular night, there had been no singing coming up, and almost no talking; that morning, for the first time in weeks, we had lost a ship. Two ME-109s had sneaked in over the Alps to shoot down Leatherwood’s plane, which was lagging after the violent turbulence above the Brenner had scattered our formation.

“Leather” was a quiet Texan, and I noticed it was the quiet ones who were missed the most. He used to drink with us for a while at the inn, then unobtrusively take his leave “to visit my family.” When he rejoined us about midnight, his face always showed a remarkable and somewhat inscrutable refreshment. We noticed this, of course, and questioned him about the family, but he said little except to mention that there were children, and once he had pointed out the house to me.

On this night it was my purpose to seek out the family and deliver the news of his death. I left the others at the inn and walked down the single dark street across a temporary bridge to a squarish, rather cold-looking stone house perched at the very edge of the rocky gorge around which the entire village was situated. Candles and lamps glowed within the house, and I could see two tiny heads peering at me, like dwarfs, from the corners of the windows. They must have been watching the door of the inn up the street, as ray approach in the darkness could not have been visible to them. Suddenly the two round silhouettes disappeared from the windows, and the next instant the door burst open.

Two figures raced down the shaft of light toward me. The leading one was a girl, with flying black hair and outstretched arms. I put out my arms to protect her, for it appeared her racing white legs would carry her forcefully against me. At the last moment she swerved, and her feet skidded to a halt in the gravel. The other, smaller figure, a boy, also stopped, then retreated into the darkness. The girl stood with her legs spread as they had halted, her arms clenched tightly across her chest, and her face turned toward me, so that it caught the full, yellow light from the open door. Large, unblinking eyes peered from behind hair that had fallen unheeded down her forehead. Her thin face was as still as a painting, and her mouth was parted, as if complete grief had struck her instantly and had frozen there on her face. It seemed incredible that a child could so quickly grasp the motive of my visit. To her, at least, my message had already been delivered.

Her small face had not collapsed in grief; something held that pale countenance in invisible support. For a moment the burden of my mission, and the simple subject and predicate by which I had planned to discharge it, were forgotten. Why is it that the face in the coffin is often more beautiful than anyone can remember seeing it in life? This girl’s face was as of death itself, yet was of a delicate fairness beyond that of the animated and volatile face of the living. When I finally turned, a woman stood in the doorway looking at me.

“Won’t you come in?” she invited, with an accent and tone that were both gentle.

As she stepped aside for me to enter, I wondered if she were old enough to be the mother here. She supplied the answer herself; for, disregarding what certainly was a very natural curiosity as to the identity of her caller, the instant I passed her, her face was turned solemnly and apprehensively to the walk behind me, where stood the girl.

I was shown into a rather bare living and dining room, in which I was immediately conscious of the four empty spaces of the walls, which appeared to be of the same cold, unfinished stone as the outside of the house. There was a very old woman in black, bending over a tiny fireplace in the corner, and a tall boy of about twelve, standing expressionless by the center table. The mother, with the smaller boy, followed me in and indicated my chair with a gracious gesture of her hand, which was in no way apologetic, but rather, together with her erect carriage, gave me the impression that the circumstances of the family had not always been so meager.

I was disconcerted for a moment. Somehow I had expected to deliver my message to a man, one of those swarthy, robust Corsicans who could stand before a giant. Then too, I hadn’t expected to deliver it in English. Just “Lieutenant mort,” and nod at the inevitable downward-spiraling interrogation the man would make with his hand.

I fumbled with my cap for a moment, and cleared my throat. They were all looking at me — the old lady, the mother, and the two boys. At that moment the front door clicked shut. The mother turned her head quickly. I glanced toward the hall and caught a glimpse of the girl who had met me on the walk. All I saw was a short skirt and a pair of white, slender legs that came together once, like crooked scissors, before they disappeared from view. Leatherwood might have compared the legs to those of a colt, long, bony, and fragile, but possessing, nevertheless, a transient grace.

There was a moment’s silence, then the sound of a light shoe on a stair, then another. The sound of her climb followed in slow cadence. No one moved. There were two short steps at a landing, then eight, nine more steps, a pause, then a door closed quietly above us.

Somehow I got out my message. The mother only moved her hand to the back of a chair and replied that she would not tell the others, just yet. She poured me a glass of Cap Corse, and the small boy, Pierre, dug a few chestnuts out of the fire and offered them to me. I took my leave as quickly as I could.

3

PUZZLED and vaguely disturbed I walked toward the inn. Once I glanced back at the upper rooms of the house, but the windows were all dark. The house, showing only a minimum of light about its lower regions, might have been a lonely ship one wonders about as it passes in the night.

When I stepped inside the inn, Monsieur Dominique, or Papa, as we called him, was explaining the virtues of his homemade pipes. His bushy, tobacco-stained mustache was the color of the fire. He walked over and gave me a pipe to smoke, and I knew by the way he pressed it into my hand that the others had told him. He was a simple, amiable man, trying his best to be entertaining. Later I questioned him about the family.

“They were originally from Lyons,” he said. “Julliard by name. The father was a French Embassy clerk in Belgium when the Germans attacked, and one of the few real Frenchmen who never ceased to fight for France. He went underground and trained his family to work with him. Ah, they made a name among the Maquis! The young one, the girl, have you seen her?”

I nodded.

“Then imagine her boarding a train alone, with a tag around her neck asking for help in getting to Paris, and a small bag in her hand — full of explosives. That is the way they worked, through the children. He told me she accounted for two trains, both over a bridge. He is a rare patriot who risks his family so.”

“They were lucky to escape to Corsica,” I said.

Monsieur Dominique lifted his mustache with the stem of his pipe and spat vigorously into the fire. “Escape? No, not escape. They were ordered here by none other than General de Gaulle himself. Some papers or something the General wanted removed from France. They walked to Cannes and crossed at night in a sailboat. They were all like reeds when they got here; the girl almost died in the crossing. Monsieur Julliard was a sick man, but fighting was in his blood. You knew he was killed when the Germans invaded Corsica? ”

“No — no, I didn’t. I have wondered—”

Monsieur Dominique looked into the fire and hesitated, as one does before imparting the bitterest part of a tragedy.

“We all saw him die,” he said slowly. “He was captured in the fighting on the plain where your field is. Later, with three other men, he was tied to the top of a German tank approaching our village on the road by the gorge. We were barricaded here, waiting. We held our rifle fire, but the bridge was mined. We were helpless, you understand; the mines were set delicately. To touch them would be the end. When the bridge exploded, the tank rolled into the gorge.”

“You mean the bridge beside their house?”

“Yes,” he answered. “They saw from the windows, la mère, la vieille, et les pauvres petits.”

“How does the family live, Monsieur Dominique?”

“Pension come at first, you understand, but now — ” He spread his hands. “Les Boches do not pay.”

“And the old woman, who is she?”

“That is difficult to say. She is no relation; I think she is a sort of tutor for the girl. She was with them through it all.”

Shortly after midnight we told Papa good night and climbed into the jeep. We rumbled over the temporary wooden bridge and sped past the Julliard house. It was as dark as the rest of the village. I glanced back at it, then settled down in my blankets. Had there really been a girl standing by the road, waving something in her hand?

“Wait! Stop!” I shouted.

I got out. I heard her feet racing down the uneven road, and then she was standing beside the jeep with only her white face and long, white legs showing at each end of a dark coat tucked in close under her chin. She hesitated, then stepped closer to the headlights.

Her lips were quivering from the cold, but her dark eyes were warm and lustrous. There was no trace of urgency in her manner, yet she seemed to implore us to some unnamed action. She made the barest attempt at a smile, thrust something into my hand, and stepped back into the darkness.

All the way down the gorge, in spite of the cold wind whipping in and out of our blankets, the scent of the lavender rose and wafted around the jeep. I had seen it growing behind the rocks on the southern slope of the gorge. Even in winter Corsica was, as Napoleon said, the isle of scent. The others smelled it too, of course. I wondered if they were thinking, as I was, that some forms of military ceremony had not quite caught up with the Air Corps. There was to be no rite such as the Navy or Infantry would hold if they had the time we did. In fact, there was never anything at all but an empty cot that didn’t stay empty very long.

“What are you going to do with them?”

We were on level ground again, when Fitzsimmons’s voice rose like a conscience from the back seat.

“What would you do with them?” I asked, turning.

“I’d throw them out next time we go up there.”

4

IT WAS two days later that we went back to the Brenner. They had had a big snow up there, and the clean white of the Alps had spilled all the way down to the river and the railroad, and had patched up all the black blemishes around the bridge. It would have been futile even to look for the wreckage. When we were directly over the pass, Grover, the navigator, launched the flowers in a paper sack as they do pigeons to keep the slip stream from tearing them up. The sack would rip open, and they would fall clear.

When we were about halfway home, he tapped me on the shoulder. “They’re just now landing.”

“What?”

“I say they are just landing. I figured it up on my slip stick. The tail gunner said the prop wash scattered them all over the sky. We were at twelve thousand angels. If they drifted down like paper, they’re just now hitting the snow.”

The next time we were going up to Ghisoni, I packed a few odds and ends in my pockets as I’d seen Leather do. When I rose to leave the Inn, Fitzsimmons said he’d like to go along. As it turned out, all five of us wanted to go.

The family had just finished dinner. Tho mother, a perfect hostess, took our wraps and dispatched Charly, the older boy, for the company wine. The old lady in black began bringing in wood, and Pierre busied himself digging after chestnuts. The girl, barefooted and dressed in a short blue and white checkered dress, came up from the cupboard with an armful of glasses.

It was the first time I had seen her in good light. There was nothing about her face to suggest the hardships Monsieur Dominique had spoken of. She was thin, but her cheeks were flushed with color, and her eyes had a fresh, warm vitality rather than the confused, hunted expression one might expect. As she walked around the table carefully distributing the glasses, a quiet smile of curiosity hovered about her lips, which broadened generously as she attended each of us who were seated. After she completed her circuit, she walked over and stood directly in front of Fitzsimmons and Grover, who were making warming motions with their arms in front of the fireplace. They both stopped swinging their arms and looked down at her quizzically tilted head. Suddenly she was laughing, a merry, lilting laugh that seemed to drive the cold out of the corners of the room, and brought an enigmatic smile to the old woman’s face as she dumped a load of wood.

It struck us all at once that the girl was laughing at the contrast between her light cotton frock and the heavy wool jackets and trousers that Fitzsimmons and Grover wore. She plainly was not cold at all.

As her laughter died away she stepped over to the table and pulled out two chairs. Her amused brown eyes went from one to another of us. We laughed and, in a simultaneous gesture of response, brought out chocolate, gum, and canned peanuts from our pockets, making an almost embarrassing pile of rations in the center of the table. We looked at each other sheepishly; everybody had brought something. Grover had even brought a loaf of white bread in a sack.

The family gathered around the table, and for a moment I thought we had made some serious breach of Corsican etiquette. Then the mother nodded, and the girl reached for the bread. Breaking it in her fingers, she passed it around, and we had to watch for a painful moment while they ate it as we would eat cake.

Afterwards, when we had been amply served with wine, Charly brought out a guitar. He played “Down Mexico Way” and “Lili Marlene.” Then Fitzsimmons asked Mireille if she would sing. Charly began “On the Bridge at Avignon.” Mireille, sitting on a stool at our feet, looked into the fire through the first verse; then, barely moving her lips, she started to sing. The voice that had rippled so clean and pliant in laughter became low and resonant.

She sang to the fire, and with the fire. She sang accompaniment to the licking of the orange flame around the coals, and the incandescent caverns beneath. She sang to the quiet blue that hovered in the grooves of cedar, and to the lazy spiral of smoke that rose up to the night, and to the snow above the village, and to the stars.

It didn’t matter, the title, “ Sur le Pont d’Avignon.” Throughout the first verse we stirred nervously in our chairs and looked at our knees. Avignon! The bridge at Avignon! We had a strike photo hanging in our bar that showed our “grands,” our thousand-pounders, plowing into the bridge and into the Rhone. We made jokes about that song when it came over the radio. But when she started to sing we forgot all that. It was only the girl, and the fire, and the voice that drifted up with the smoke.

5

AFTER that night our trips to Ghisoni became more frequent, and since there were always one or two new ones in our group, the family became well known around the squadron. We usually took bread and vegetables from our mess and had the evening meal with them. These occasions were always gay because of those invariable bilingual blunders which overcome even the most stringent reticence.

Mireille, in particular, took it in her head to teach us French. She was a tireless teacher. She could tell, as if by instinct, the meaning behind our faltering requests at the table, which at her insistence were always made in French, or what passed for it.

I suppose I saw more of her than the rest, and when I returned from Rome with the Swiss doll, it was I who made the arrangements to have the three children down as guests of the squadron. From the moment they arrived in the tent area, they were showered with gifts of every description. The circumstances of the flowers, of course, were common knowledge among us, and Mireille received awkward but unmistakable gratitude. She was perfectly at ease with the small crew of men who followed her around from tent to tent. Her eyes had a way of exclaiming over each new gift, and she thanked each man personally, by his name, or by his rank if she had not seen him before. Sergeants, Lieutenants, and Captains seemed to expand with the promotion her soft-spoken French gave to their titles, and responded with unheard-of words like “honored” and “privileged.” For once no one made a joke.

Occasionally we would go inside one of the tents, where Mireille’s wide eyes wandered over the helter-skelter of personal possessions, and I noticed that invariably they came to rest on the few books to be found in each tent. Sometimes she picked one up and ran her fingers caressingly over its cover as if it were a smoothly polished piece of wood.

When Grover offered to show them the airfield, I went to my tent, carefully wrapped the Swiss doll with red cellophane, then replaced it under my bunk. I planned to save it till last.

That night in our clubroom, which we had built in a near-by stone barn, the squadron gathered for a last celebration. The party was a success from the start. Mireille sang again with the same quiet sureness she had had in her own home, and with the same extraordinary effect on her audience. Afterwards, when Charly and Pierre settled down to look at comic books, Mireille walked around the room studying the photographs on the walls. I was relieved when she passed the one of the Avignon bridge, which fortunately was untitled. She stood before a group photograph of the squadron, and I realized with a start that she was looking for Leatherwood. No one had mentioned him to her, nor had she in any way indicated that she thought of him. But as her glance came to rest pensively on his likeness, I thought her eyes moistened for a second. I got the vaguely disconcerting impression that she regarded him with something more than fondness.

When she finally turned away, she walked over and took a chair near the radio. She sat very quietly, her long lashes almost concealing her eyes, her body swaying slightly in rhythm with the music. After a moment the Colonel walked over and, with a smile, asked her to dance. I was struck with the fact that he offered no condescension to her age. She rose eagerly, with instinctive decorum, as if she were indeed the lady his manner implied. They danced one number, then others were cutting in.

She danced with the quick, boxy step of the French and with a high amusement that rang out when she tossed her head and laughed. Her long, dark hair struck most of her partners just above the waist. That and her long, white legs were the only reminder that she was anything less than a woman. All eyes followed her movements. Remote and untouchable, she danced the eternal promise and expanded the tight hearts of those to whom she turned, as she often did, to bestow a radiant, guileless smile.

I stood to one side watching. I was very proud of the attention she was getting and pleased that I was responsible for her while she was with the squadron, but more than that, I looked forward to the moment when I would be alone with her and would give her the Swiss doll. I would drive her to the pink house where she was staying with the Red Cross girls, and give her the doll then. It would be the last time I would see her; we were flying at dawn to our new base — all but the rear echelon, who were taking the bombs and vehicles over by boat. The Executive had arranged to take the three guests back to Ghisoni after we left.

6

AS the evening wore on, Pierre and Charly began to doze over their comic books, and Fitzsimmons packed them off to his tent. Gradually the room emptied.

Mireille stopped dancing long enough to tell each group good-bye at the door. Her face grew sad for a moment; then, as she began dancing again, she apparently had eyes only for her partner. She seemed on her soul’s holiday of happiness.

There were only a few of us left when I went into the game room to get her coat. As I lifted the coat from the ping-pong table I saw that it was the same heavy black one she had worn that night she thrust the flowers into my hand. Involuntarily, I held it out before me.

What a small coat! It was the garment of a child!

I stared wide-eyed at the coat for a long moment, then quickly threw it over my arm and strode out into the light. She was still dancing.

Of course she was only a child!

When she saw the coat on my arm, she stopped dancing and, giving a low, contented sigh, pushed back her hair from her shoulders and walked toward me. “I dance with you now,” she said, holding out her arms.

I tried to smile casually, and shook my head. I still felt the impact of that enervating wave that had swept over me in the game room. I shook my head emphatically.

She dropped her arms, and a brief, unspeakable hurt welled up in her eyes. Then she smiled, and taking the coat from my arm, laid it on a chair.

I waited an agonizing moment while a war bulletin interrupted the music. Then we were dancing.

I held my head high, peering into the corners of the room as we turned, barely holding in my hands her small, warm figure. Everything I had seen her do, every English word I had heard her speak, everything Monsieur Dominique had said about her furtive life in France, flashed across my mind. The way she looked the night after Leatherwood went down, the way she looked at his picture, the way she danced. Everything followed a cascading pattern that belied, somehow, the modest dimensions of her coat. Vividly I remembered my hesitation, my inability to give an explicit answer when the shopkeeper in Rome asked me her age.

“Of course she is a child! Of course she is a child!” I repeated it again and again.

Driving in the jeep, I hardly dared look at her face; the night was too impenetrably strange, the stars too generous. She spoke not a word. Her head was thrown back against the seat, her hair playing like the shadow of leaves across the dim oval of her face. I drove fast. The jeep bounced crazily. Once I heard her laugh.

I skidded to a halt in front of the pink house. I had to touch her to help her to the ground. Her hand was not cold. As I leaped into the jeep, I barely saw her arms reaching for me. I jerked to a start. Above the sound of the spinning tires, I heard her voice: “Bon voyage,” it said, faint and uncomprehending.

When I pulled up at my tent, the doll fell to the floor of the jeep. I had forgotten it.

I carried it in with me, thinking I would give it to the Executive for her when the orderly woke us for the flight. But at five o’clock, after a night of fitful sleep, I couldn’t bring myself to believe she would be interested in this child’s gift, this doll; I had never seen her do anything that children do.

Logically, I had admitted during the night that I had never really understood her speech, and that immaturity is perhaps best established by the spoken word. I had admitted that children caught in a world catastrophe would mature quickly. But there was something else; these admissions had the frailty of logic. I packed the Swiss doll with my things. Perhaps in Italy I could send it by mail.

It was even worse in Italy. She seemed to have lived too much for a child, to have left unsaid the constant, meaningless chatter of children I had known. Finally, fearing someone might discover the doll and ask questions I could not answer, even to myself, I gave it to a little girl in Fano.

My orders came to go home. With another pilot, I was to fly a war-weary plane to the rotation depot in Naples and transship to the States. It occurred to me that we could go by Corsica and land, that I might go to Ghisoni and see her and convince myself once and for all that she was merely a child.

When we were airborne, I put it up to the other pilot, mentioning something about seeing the island for the last time. He was willing, but I knew I could never land without having to tell him the whole story. I decided to go anyway; I had to know.

Corsica was under a blanket of snow. We passed over the bleak, unbroken whiteness of our old field, then saw the snow-hooded village sitting like a cornice on the mountain ahead of us. We circled low over the cluster of dwellings, and on the second time around, I saw the family standing in the snow. To one side, beside the old lady in black, I saw Mireille. Her foreshortened figure looked like a tiny tree. I was glad she looked small. I could barely see her hand stretched out toward us from her dark coat, and her bare legs implanted in the snow. I changed the prop pitch several times, roaring the engines. Suddenly she was jumping up and down, waving both arms in recognition. I raised my eyes quickly; I had seen all I wanted to see. I looked across the Ligurian Sea. Squall patches feathered up its surface all the way to the distant mountains of France. To the east was the jagged coast of Italy. I headed the plane toward home.

Somewhere in Europe, there may be children who have lost their childhood to war, or by-passed it, leaping, as it were, full-blown to a form of maturity, but this girl below me was a child, a young girl hardly in her teens. I was free.