What a struggle to get wood for that fire? Coal wouldn't burn in the open hearth. She had begged a little wood from the cook in the garage, but it was wet and hissed, and all her fire died down. Wood hadn't proved so abundant on the hills as she had hoped. Either it was cut and had been taken by the Germans, or grew in solid and forbidding branches. All the small broken branches and twigs of winter had been collected by the shivering population of the town and drawn down from the mountains on trays slung on ropes.
Stooping over her two wet logs she drenched them with paraffin, then, when she had used the last drop in her tin, got down her petrol bottle. "I shall lose all my hair one day doing this...."
The white flame licked hungrily out towards her, but it too, died down, leaving the wet wood as angrily cold as ever.
Going downstairs she searched the courtyard and the hayloft, but the Bulgarians and Turks of the past had burnt every bit, and any twigs in the garden were as wet as those which spluttered in the hearth. Then--up to the attics again.
"I _must_ have wood," she exclaimed angrily, and picked up a piece of broken white wood from the floor.
It had "Philippe Seret" scrawled across it in pencil. "Why, it's your name!" she said wonderingly, and held the piece of wood in her hand. The place was all wood. There was wood here to last her weeks. Mouse cages--white mouse cages and dormouse cages, a wooden ruler with idle scratches all over it and "P.S." in the corner--boxes and boxes of things he wouldn't want; he'd say if he saw them now: "Throw it away"--boxes of glass tubes he had blown when he was fifteen, boxes of dried modelling clay....
"I must have wood," she said aloud, and picked up another useless fragment. It mocked her, it wouldn't listen to her need of wood; it had "P.S." in clumsy, inserted wires at the back. His home-made stamp.
Under it was a grey book called "Grammaire Allemande." "It wasn't any use your learning German, was it, Philippe?" she said, then stood still in a frozen conjecture as to the use and goal of all that bright treasure in his mind--his glass-blowing, his modelling, the cast head of a man she had found stamped with his initial, the things he had written and read, on slates, in books. "It was as much use his learning German as anything else," she said slowly, and her mind reeled at the edge of difficult questions.