Of the halting places on this pilgrimage along the British front, I should best have liked to be with Brian and Father Beckett at Arras. Brian and I were there together you know, Padre, on that happy-go-lucky tramping tour of ours--not long before I met Jim. We both loved Arras, Brian and I, and spent a week there in the most fascinating of ancient hotels. It had been a palace; and I had a huge room, big enough for the bedchamber of a princess (princesses should always have bedchambers, never mere bedrooms!) with long windows draped like the walls and stiff old furniture, in yellow satin. I was frightened when an aged servant with the air of a pontiff ushered me in; for Brian and I were travelling "on the cheap." But Arras, though delicious in its quaint charm, never attracted hordes of ordinary tourists. Consequently one could have yellow satin hangings without being beggared.
Oh, how happy we were in that hotel, and in the adorable old town! While Brian painted in the Grande Place and the Petite Place, and sketched the Abbey of St. Waast (who brought Christianity to that part of the world) I wandered alone. I used to stand every evening till my neck ached, staring up at the beautiful belfry, to watch the swallows chase each other back and forth among the bells, whose peal was music of fairyland. And I never tired of wandering through the arcades under the tall old Flemish houses with their overhanging upper storeys, or peeping into the arcades' cool shadows, from the middle of the sunlit squares.
There were some delightful shops in those arcades, where they sold antique Flemish furniture, queer old pictures showing Arras in her proud, treaty-making days (you know what a great place she was for treaty-making!) and lovely faded tapestries said to be "genuinely" of the time when no one mentioned a piece of tapestry save as an "arras." But the shop I haunted was a cake-shop. It was called "_Au Coeur d'Arras_," because the famous speciality of Arras was a heart-shaped cake; but I wasn't lured there so much by the charm of _les coeurs_ as by that of the person who sold them.
I dare say I described her to you in letters, or when I got back to England after that trip. The most wonderful old lady who ever lived! She didn't welcome her customers at all. She just sat and knitted. She had an architectural sort of face, framed with a crust of snow--I mean, a frilled cap! And if one furtively stared, she looked at one down her nose, and made one feel cheap and small as if one had snored, or hiccupped out aloud in a cathedral! But it seems I won her esteem by enquiring if "_les coeurs d'Arras_" had a history. Nobody else had ever shown enough intelligence to care! So she gave me the history of the cakes, and of everything else in Arras; also, before we went away, she escorted Brian and me into a marvellous cellar beneath her shop. It went down three storeys and had fireplaces and a well! The earth under La Grande Place was honeycombed with such _souterrains_, she said. They'd once been quarries, in days so old as to be forgotten--quarries of "tender stone" (what a nice expression!), and the people of Arras had cemented and made them habitable in case of bombardment. They must have been useful in 1914!