THE BASKET-MAKERS OF VAUX-LES-PALAMIES
The long hot days of summer pursued their stifling way, yet were all
too short for the work we had in hand. There were families to be
visited, case-papers to be written up, card-indexes to be filled in,
and bales to be unpacked. There were clothes to be sorted, there were
people in their hundreds to be fitted with coats and trousers and
shirts and underlinen and skirts and blouses, and the thousand and one
things to be coped with in the Clothes-room. When Satan visits Relief
workers he always lives in the Clothes-room. And there he takes a
malicious delight in turning the contents of the shelves upside down
and in hiding from view the outfit you chose so carefully yesterday
evening for Madame Hougelot, or Madame Collignon, so that when you come
to look for it in the morning, lo! it is gone. And Madame is waiting
with her six children on the stairs, and the hall is a whirlpool of
slowly-circling humanity, who want everything under the sun and much
that is above it.
Truly the way of the Relief worker is hard. But it has its
compensations. You live for a month, for instance, on one exquisite
episode. You are giving a party; you have invited some fifteen hundred
guests. You spread them out over several days, _bien entendu_, and
in the generosity of your heart you decide that each shall have a
present. You sit at the receipt of custom, issuing your cards with the
name of each guest written thereon, and to you comes Madame Ponnain.
(That is not her real name, but it serves.) Yes, she is a refugee and
she has two children. She would like three cards. _Bon._ You inscribe
her name, you gaze at her questioningly.
"There is Georgette, she has two years."
_Bon._ Georgette is inscribed.
And then?
Madame hesitates. There is the baby.
_Bon._ His are?
"Eh bien, il n'est pas encore au monde."
You suggest that the unborn cannot ...
"Mais mademoiselle--si il y a des étrennes (gifts)?"
Perhaps, perhaps; one doesn't know. The Ponnains were a people of much
discrimination. He might arrive in time. _Quel dommage_, then, if he
had no ticket!
He discriminated.
He gets his ticket, and you register anew your homage to French
foresightfulness and thrift.
And then you go back to the Clothes-room. You climb over mountains of
petticoats and chemises, all of the same size and all made to fit a
child of three. There are thousands of them, they obsess you. You dream
at night that you are smothering under a hill of petticoats while irate
refugees, whose children are all over five and half-naked, hurl the
chemises and--other things at you, uttering round French maledictions
in ear-splitting tones. You wade through the wretched things, you eat
them, sleep them; your brain reels, you say things about work-parties
which, if published, would cause an explosion, and the Pope would
excommunicate you and the Foreign Office hand you your passports. You
write frantic letters to headquarters, then you grow cold, waxing
sarcastic. You hint that marriage as an institution existed in France
before 1912, and that the first baby was not born in that year of
blindfold peace. And you add a rider to the effect that many, indeed
most, of your cherished _émigrées_ are not slum-dwellers fighting for
rags at a jumble sale, but respectable people who don't go about in
ragged trousers or with splashes of brown or yellow paint on a blue
serge dress. Then you are conscience-stricken, for some of the bales
have been packed by Sanity, and the contents collected by Reason. There
are many white crows in the flock.
A ring at the door interrupts, perhaps happily, your epistolary
labours. It is the Service de Ville, a surly person but faithful. He
has six bales. They are immense. You go down, you try to roll one up
the stairs. Your comrade in labour is four feet six and weighs seven
stone. The bale weighs--or seems to weigh--a ton. Sisyphus is not
more impotent than you. Then an angel appears. It is Madame. "I heard
the efforts," she remarks, and indeed our puffings and pantings and
blowings and swearings must have been audible almost at the Front.
She puts her solid shoulder under the bale. It floats lightly up the
stairs. Then you begin to unpack. It is dirty work, and destroys the
whiteness of your hands. Never mind. Remember _les pauvres émigrées_,
and that we are _si devouée_, you know.
Everything under heaven has, I verily believe, come at one time or
another out of our bales--except live stock and joints of beef.
Concertinas in senile decay, mandolines without keys, guitars without
strings, jam leaking over a velvet gown, tons of old newspapers
and magazines--all English, of course, and subsequently sold as
waste-paper, hats that have braved many a battle and breeze, boots
without soles, ball dresses, satin slippers (what DO people think
refugees need in the War Zone?), greasy articles of apparel, the mere
handling of which makes our fingers shine, dirty underlinen, single
socks and stockings, married socks that are like the Irishman's
shirt--made of holes, another hundred dozen of petticoats for children
aged three, and once--how we laughed over it!--a red velvet dress that
I swear had been filched from an organ-grinder's monkey, and with it a
pair of-of--well, you know. They were made of blue serge, and when held
out at width stretched all across the Common-room. The biggest Mynheer
that ever smoked a pipe by the Zuyder Zee would have been lost in them,
and as they were neither male nor female, only some sort "of giddy
harumphrodite" could have worn them.
Sometimes we fell upon stale cough lozenges, on mouldering biscuits,
on dried fruits, on chocolate, on chewing-gum, on moth-eaten bearskin
rugs, or on a brilliant yellow satin coverlet with LOVE in large green
capitals on it. The tale is unending, but it was not all tragic. There
were many days when our hearts sang in gladness, when good, useful,
sensible things emerged from the bales and we fitted our people out in
style.
But all the rubbish in the world must have been dumped upon France
in the last two years. Never has there been such a sweeping out of
cupboards, such a rummaging of dust-bins. The hobble skirts that
submerged us at one period nearly drove us into an early grave. Picture
us, with a skirt in hand. It is twenty-seven inches round the tail,
perhaps twenty-three round the waist. And Madame, who waits with such
touching confidence in the discrimination of Les Anglaises, tells you
that she is _forte_. As you look at her you believe it. It is half a
day's journey to walk round her. You pace the wide circle thoughtfully,
you make rapid calculations, you give it up. The thing simply cannot
be done. And you send up a wild prayer that before ever there comes
another war French women of the fields will take to artificial means
of restraining their figures. As it is, like Marguerite, many of them
occupy vast continents of space when they take their walks abroad. And
when they stand on the staircase, smiling deprecatingly at you, and you
have nothing that will fit....
And when it does fit it is blue, or green, and they have a passion for
black. Something discreet. Something they can go to Mass in. I often
wonder why they worship their God in such dolorous guise. Something,
too, they can mourn in. So many are _en deuil_. Once a woman who came
for clothes demanded black, refusing a good coat because it was blue.
The cousin of her husband had died five months before, and never had
she been able to mourn him. If the English would give her _un peu de
deuil_? She waited weeks. She got it and went forth smiling happily
upon an appreciative world, ready to mourn at last.
The weather is stifling, the Clothes-room an inferno. The last visitor
for the morning has been sent contentedly away--she may come back
to-morrow, though, and tell us that the dress of Madeleine does not
fit, and may she have one the same as that which Madame Charton got?
Now the dress of Madame Charton's Marie was new and of good serge,
whereas that of Madeleine was slightly worn and of light summer
material. But then Marie had an old petticoat, whereas Madeleine had a
new one. But this concession to equality finds no favour in the eyes
of Madeleine's mother. She has looked upon the serge and lusted after
it. We suggest that a tuck, a little arrangement.... She goes away. And
in the house in rue Paradis there is lamentation, and Marie, I grieve
to say, lifts up her shrill treble and crows. It is one of the minor
tragedies of life. Alas, that there are so many!
But as Madame the mother of Madeleine departs, we know nothing of the
reckoning that waits us on the morrow. We only know that we promised
to go and see the Basket-makers to-day, that time is flying, and haste
suicidal with the thermometer at steaming-point.
"Madame, we are going out. We cannot see any one else."
_Bon._ Madame is a Cerberus. She will write down the names of callers
and so ease our minds while we are away.
We fling on our hats, we arm ourselves with pencil and notebook, and
wend our way up the Avenue du Château to the rue des Ducs de Bar. It is
well to choose this route sometimes, though it is longer than that of
the rue St. Jean, for it goes past the old gateway and shows you the
view over the rue de Véel. It is wise to look down on the rue de Véel;
it is rather foolhardy to walk in it. For motor-lorries whiz through it
at a murderous speed, garbage makes meteoric flights from windows, the
drainage screams to Heaven, every house is a tenement house, most of
them are foul and vermin-ridden, and all are packed with refugees.
Well, perhaps not quite all. Even the rue de Véel has its bright
particular spots, one of them being the house, set a little back from
the street, in which Pétain, "On-les-aura Pétain," lived during the
battle of Verdun. The street lies in a deep hollow, with cultivated
hills rising steeply above it. Higher up there are woods on the far
side, while above the sweeping Avenue du Château the houses are piled
one above the other in tumbled, picturesque confusion.
Once in the rue des Ducs we go straight to No. 49, through a
double-winged door into a courtyard, up a flight of worn steps into a
wee narrow lobby, rather dark and noisome, and then, if any one cries
_Entrez_! in response to our knock, into a great wide room.
That some one would cry it is certain, for the room is a human hive.
It swarms with people. Short, thickset, sturdy, rather heavily-built
people, whose beauty is not their strong point, but whose honesty is.
And another, for they have many, is their industry; and yet another,
dear to the heart of the Relief worker, is their gratitude for any
little help or sympathy that may be given them.
And, poor souls, they did need help. Think of it! One room the factory,
dining-room, bedroom, smoking-room, sitting-room of forty people. Some
old, some young. Women, girls and men.
It appalled you as you went in. On one side, down all its length, and
also along the top palliasses were laid on the floor, so close they
almost touched. Piled neatly on these were scanty rugs or blankets.
No sheets or linen of any kind until our Society provided them. There
was only one bed--a gift from the Society--and in that sat a little
old woman bolt upright. Her skin was the colour of old parchment, it
was seamed and lined and criss-crossed with wrinkles, for she was over
eighty years of age. But her spirit was still young. She could enjoy a
little joke.
"Yes, I remember the war of Soixante-dix," she said, "but it was not
like this. Ma fois, non! Les Prussiens--oh, they were good to us." Her
eyes twinkled. "They lived in our house. They were like children."
"Madame, Madame! Confess now that 'vous avez fait la coquette' with
those Prussians."
Whereupon she cackled a big, "Ho, ho! Écoutez ce qu'elle dit!" and a
shrivelled finger poked me facetiously in the ribs.
But if the Basket-makers made friends with the Germans in those far-off
days, they hate them now. Hate them with bitter, deadly hatred. "Ah,
les barbares! les sauvages! les rosses!" Madame Walfard would cry, her
face inflamed with anger. Her mother, badly wounded by a shell, had
become paralysed, so there is perhaps some excuse for her venom.
But for the most part they are too busy to waste time in revilings. The
little old woman is the only idle person in the room. Squatting on low
stools under the windows--there are four or five set in the length of
the wall--the rest work unceasingly, small basins of water, sheaves
of osier, tools, finished baskets, and piles of osier-ends strewn all
about them. Down the middle of the room runs a long table, littered
with mugs, bowls, cooking utensils, odds and ends of every description.
There is only one stove, a small one, utterly inadequate for the size
of the room. On it all their cooking has to be done. I used to wonder
if they ever quarrelled.
As time went on and I came to know them better, Madame Malhomme
and Madame Jacquemot told me many a tale of their life in
Vaux-les-Palamies, of the opening days of war and of their subsequent
flight from their village. Madame Malhomme, daughter of the little old
lady who had once dared to flirt with a Prussian, lived in the big room
in the rue Des Ducs for nearly a year. Then Madame B. established her
and her family in a little house about half a mile from the town, where
they had nothing to trouble them save the depredations of an occasional
rat, a negligible nuisance compared with the (in more senses than one)
overcrowded condition of No. 49. For that historic mansion had gathered
innumerable inmates to its breast during the long years of emptiness
and decay. And these inmates made the Basket-makers' lives a burden to
them.
The cold, too, was penetrating, it ate through their scanty clothes,
it bit through flesh to the very bone. The stove was an irony, a tiny
flame in a frozen desert. Every one was perished, Madame Malhomme not
least of all, for, seeing her daughter shivering, she stripped off her
only petticoat and forced her to put it on.
At night they lay in their clothes under their miserable blankets.
(Bar-le-Duc is not a very large nor a very rich town, and in giving
what it did to such numbers of people it showed itself generous indeed.
In ordinary times its population is not more, and is probably less,
than 17,000, so an influx of 4000 destitute refugees taxed it heavily.)
The unavoidable publicities of their existence filled the women with
shame and dismay. Sleeping "comme des bêtes sur la paille,"[4] or, more
often still, lying awake staring out into the unfriendly dark, what
dreams, what memories must have been theirs! How often they must have
seen the village, its cosy little homes, each with its garden basking
in the sun, the river flowing by, and the great osier beds that were
the pride of them all.
[4] Like beasts, on straw.
They seem to have lived very much to themselves, these sturdy artisans,
rarely leaving their valley, and intermarrying to an unusual extent.
You find the same names cropping up again and again: Jacquemot, Riot,
or Malhomme. Like Quakers, every one seemed to be the cousin of every
one else. And they were well-to-do. It is safe to presume that there
was no poverty in the village. Their baskets were justly famous
throughout France, and the average family wage was about £3 a week.
In addition they had the produce of their garden, the inevitable pig
being fattened for the high destiny of the _soupe au lard_, rabbits and
poultry. If Heaven denied them the gift of physical beauty it had not
been niggardly in other respects. Best of all, it gave them the gift
of labour. In the spring pruning and tending the osier, then cutting
it, and piling it into great stacks which had to be saturated with
water every day during the hot weather, planting and digging in their
gardens, looking after the rabbits and the pig, and in winter plying
their trade. Life moved serenely and contentedly in Vaux-les-Palamies
until the dark angel of destruction passed over it and brushed it with
his wings.
The Basket-makers don't like the Boche; indeed, they entertain a
reasonable prejudice against him. He foisted himself upon them, making
their lives a burden to them; he was coarse, brutal and overbearing,
he no more considered their feelings than he would those of a rotten
cabbage-stalk thrown out upon the refuse-heap of a German town. He
stayed with them for a week. When he went away he bequeathed them a
prolific legacy. Madame Malhomme will tell you of it if you ask her--at
least she will when she knows you well. She is not proud of it.
"Ah, qu'ils sont sales, ces Boches," she says with a shudder. She
bought insecticide, she was afraid to look her neighbours in the face.
It did not occur to her at first that her troubles were not personal
and individual. Then one day she screwed up her courage and asked the
question. The answers were all in the affirmative. No one was without.
So when news came that the Boche was returning, Vaux-les-Palamies
girded up its loins and fled. Shells were falling on the village, so
they dared not spend time in extensive packings; in fact, they made
little if any attempt to pack at all. Madame's sister-in-law was
wounded in the shoulder, and the wound, untended for days, began to
crawl. Her description of it does not remind you of a rose-scented
garden. It was thrust on me as a privilege. So was a view of the
shoulder. The latter was no longer crawling. It was exquisitely white
and clean, but it had a hole in it into which a child might drive its
fist.
And so after much tribulation they found themselves in Bar-le-Duc, and
theirs was the only instance that came under our notice of a village
emigrating _en masse_, and settling itself tribally into its new
quarters. Even the Mayor came with them, and it was he who eventually
succeeded in getting a supply of osier and putting them into touch with
a market again. But their activities are sadly restricted, and they
make none of their famous baskets _de fantaisie_ now, the osier being
dear and much of it bad, so their profit is very, very small.
I was in Bar for some months before I met Madame Jacquemot. And then
it was Madame B. who introduced me to her. Her mother, an old lady
of eighty-two, had been in hospital; was now rather better, and back
again with her family in the rue Maréchale. Would the Society give her
sheets? As the dispenser of other people's bounty I graciously opined
that it would, and calling on Madame Jacquemot, told her so. Her mother
was startlingly like the old lady at No. 49, small, thin, wiry, and
bird-like in her movements. She had had shingles, poor soul, and talked
of the _ceinture de feu_ which had scorched her weary little body.
She talked of the Germans too. Ah, then you should have seen her! How
her eyes flashed! She would straighten herself and all her tiny frame
would become infused with a majesty, a dignity that transfigured her.
Once a German soldier demanded something of her, and when she told
him quite truthfully that she had not got it, he doubled his fist and
dealt her a staggering blow on the breast. And she was such a little
scrap of humanity, just an old, old woman with a brave, tender heart
and the cleanest and honestest of souls. She got her sheets and a
good warm shawl--I am afraid we took very special trouble with that
_paquet_, choosing the best of our little gifts for her--and soon
afterwards I went to see her again. As we sat in the dusky room while
Madame Jacquemot told stories, describing the method of cultivating
the osier, showing how the baskets are made, the old lady began to
cough and "hem" and make fluttering movements with her hands. Madame
Jacquemot, thickset and broad-beamed like most of her people--she had
a fleshy nose and blue eyes, I remember, hair turning grey, a pallid,
rather unhealthy complexion and a humorous mouth--got up, and going to
an inner room returned almost immediately with a quaintly-shaped basket
in her hands. The old lady took it from her and held it out to me.
"It is for you," she said. "And when you go home to England you will
tell people that it was made for you by an old woman of eighty-two,
a refugee, who was ill and in hospital for months. I chose the osier
specially, there is not a bad bit in the basket. And it is long, long
since I have made a basket. I haven't made one since we left home. But
I wanted to make one for you because you have been kind to us."
I have that basket now; I shall keep it always and think of the feeble
fingers that twined the osier, fingers that were never to twine it
again, for the gallant spirit that fought so gamely was growing more
and more weary. The old bear transplanting badly, they yearn for their
chimney corner and the familiar things that are all their world. The
long exile from her beloved village told upon her heart, joy fell from
her and, saddened and desolate, she slipped quietly away.
"She just fluttered away like a little bird," her daughter said, and I
was glad to know she had not suffered at the last.
"Ah, if only I could see the village again," she would often say. "If
only I might be buried there. To die here, among strangers.... Ah,
mademoiselle, do you think the war will soon be over? Si seulement...."
To die and be buried among her own people. To die at home. It was
all she asked for, all she had left to wish for in the world. She
would look at me with imploring, trustful eyes. Les Anglaises, they
must know. Surely I could tell her? And in the autumn one would say,
"It will be over in the spring," and in the winter cry, "Ah yes, in
the summer." But spring came and summer followed, and still the guns
reverberated across the hills, and winter came and the Harvest of Death
was still in the reaping.
Surely God must have His own Roll of Honour for those who have fallen
in the war, and many a humble name that the world has never heard of
will be written on it in letters of gold.