PRIESTS AND PEOPLE
I
Having tasted the delights of a mild vagabondage, we now turned our
thoughts to other villages, modestly supposing that by degrees we could
"do" the Meuse. (Had we but known it the whole of France lay before us,
refugees everywhere, and every refugee in need). Having requisitioned a
motor-car we planned tours, but first we investigated Behonne on foot.
It lies on the hill above the aviation ground, so let no man ask why it
came first in our affections.
I suppose it would be impolitic to say how many sheds there were, or
how many aeroplanes we used to see squatting like great winged beetles
on the ground, and then rising so lightly, so delicately, spiralling
higher and higher, and then darting away with swift wing far into the
shimmering blue.
Although Behonne is at the top of a hill, it has managed to tuck
itself into a hollow--so many French villages have this burrowing
tendency--and all you can see of it as you approach is the top of the
church spire rising like a funny candle-extinguisher above the ridge
of the hill. The village itself is dull and uninteresting, but the
surrounding country beautiful beyond measure, especially when the corn
is ripening in the sun; the refugees for the most part not necessitous,
having driven from home in their farm carts, magnificently throned on
feather beds and _duvets_, with other household goods.
Two houses, however, made a lasting impression. In one, in a room in
the centre of which was a well (boarded over of course), lived a woman,
her two children, and an old man in no way related to them. The walls
were rotting, in many places straw had been stuffed in to fill fissures
and holes, the ceiling was broken, enterprising chunks of it making
occasional excursions to the floor below, and one window was "glazed"
with paper. The doors, through which rats gnawed an occasional way,
were ill-fitting; in bad weather the place was a funnel through which
the wind whistled and tore. The woman had one blanket and some old
clothes with which to cover herself and her children at night, the old
man had a strip of carpet given him by the Curé, a kindly old man of
peasant stock and very narrow means. The room was exceedingly dirty,
the children looked neglected, the woman was ill.
In the other house was a cheery individual whose husband had been
a cripple since childhood. She told us she had four children, the
youngest being three years old. He came running in from the street,
a great fat lusty thing, demanding to be fed, and we learned to our
astonishment that he was not yet weaned. Eugenically interesting, this
habit of nursing children up to the age of two or even three years of
age is not uncommon, and it throws a strong light upon the psychology
of French Motherhood.
A few miles beyond Behonne lies Vavincourt, sacred to the omelette of
immortal memory--but oh, what a day it was that saw us there! A fierce
wind that seemed to tear all the clothes from our bodies blew from the
north, there were some inches of snow on the ground, light powdery
snow fell incessantly. We were frozen as we drove out, we froze still
harder as we made our way from house to house, slipping and sliding on
the treacherous snow, absorbing moisture through our boots, staggering
like wooden-legged icicles into rooms whose temperature sensibly
declined with our advent. A day of supreme physical discomfort; a day
that would surely have been our last had not the Mayor's wife overtaken
us in the street and swept us into her kitchen, there to revive like
flies in sunshine, under the mellifluous influence of hot coffee and
omelette, _confitures_ and cheese.
It was in Vavincourt that we first saw women embroidering silk gowns
for the Paris shops. The panels in pale pink were stretched on a frame
(_métier_), at which they worked one on either side; a common method,
as we discovered during the winter. In Bar-le-Duc we had come upon a
few women who worked without a _métier_, but as time went on more and
more _brodeuses_ of every description came upon our books, and so an
industry was started which lived at first more or less by taking in its
own washing, but later blossomed out into more ambitious ways. Orders
came to us from England, and a consignment of dainty things was sent to
America, but with what result I cannot say, as I left Bar before its
fate was decided.
The Verdun and Nancy districts appear to be the chief centres of the
_broderie_ industry, the latter being so famous that girls are sent
there to be apprenticed to the trade, which, however, is wretchedly
paid, the rate being four sous, or rather less than twopence, an
hour, the women finding their own cotton. We gave six sous and cotton
free--gilded luxury in the workers' eyes, though sweating in ours, and
trusted to their honesty in the matter of time, a trust which was
amply repaid, as with one or two exceptions they were scrupulous to
a degree. The most amusing delinquent was a voluble lady from Resson
who glibly replied, "Oh, at least sixty hours, Mademoiselle," to every
question.
"What, sixty hours to do THAT?" we would remonstrate, looking at a
small tray-cloth with a _motif_ in each corner.
"Well, à peu près, one does not count exactly; but it was long, long,
vous savez." A steely eye searched ours, read incredulity, wavered;
"Six francs fifty? Eh, mon Dieu, on acceptera bien cela." And off she
would go, to come back in faith with the same outrageous story on the
next market day. Perhaps there is excuse for a debt of six francs
swelling to eighteen when one walks ten miles to collect it.
Quite a hundred women inscribed their names on our _broderie_
wages-sheet, the war having dislocated their connection with their
old markets. The trade itself was languishing, the workers scattered
and unable to get into touch with former employers, for Paris shops
do not deal direct as a rule, they work through _entrepreneuses_, or
middlewomen, who now being themselves refugees were unable to carry on
their old trade. It was almost pitiable to see how the women snatched
at an opportunity of working, only a very few, and these chiefly
_métier_ workers, being still in receipt of orders from Paris. Some
whom we found difficulty in employing were only _festonneuses_, earning
at the best miserable pay and doing coarse, rough work, quite unfit for
our purpose--buttonholing round the necks and arms of cheap chemises,
for instance. Others were _belles brodeuses_, turning out the most
exquisitely dainty things, fairy garments or house-linen of the most
beautiful kind.
Of all ways of helping the refugees there was none better than this.
How they longed for work! The old people would come begging for
knitting or sewing. "Ça change les idées," they would say. Anything
rather than sit day after day brooding, thinking, going back over the
tragic past, looking out upon the uncertain future. Every franc earned
was a franc in the stocking, the _bas de laine_ whose contents were to
help to make a home for them once more when the war was over. And what
could be better than working at one's own trade, at the thing which
one loved and which lay in one's fingers? When the needle was busy
the mind was at rest, and despair, that devourer of endurance, slunk
abashed out of sight. For they find the time of waiting long, these
refugees. Can you wonder? Wherever we went we heard the same story; in
village or town we were asked the same question. Each stroke of good
fortune, every "push," every fresh batch of prisoners brought the sun
through the low-hanging clouds; every reverse, the forced inactivity
of winter, drew darkness once more across the sky. In the villages
the people who owned horses were fairly well off, they could earn
their four francs a day, but the others found little comfort. Work was
scarce, their neighbours often as poor as themselves. There are few, if
any, big country houses ruled by wealthy, kind-hearted despots in these
districts of France. In all our wanderings we found only one village
basking in manorial smiles, and enjoying the generosity of a "lady of
the house." The needy had to fend for themselves, and work out their
own salvation as best they might. The reception given to the Belgians
in England read to them like a fairy tale, and fostered wild ideas of
England's wealth in their minds. "All the English are rich," they would
cry; "have we not heard of les milords anglais?" They received accounts
of the poverty in our big cities with polite incredulity; if our own
people were starving or naked, why succour foreigners?
Sometimes they smiled a little pityingly. "The English gaspillent
tout." Spendthrifts. And they would nod sapient heads, murmuring things
it is not expedient to set down. It may even be indiscretion to add
that between the French and the Belgians no love is set, some racial
hatred having thrust its roots in deep.
It is in the winter that vitality and resistance-power run lowest,
especially in the villages, for though work may be found in the fields
during the summer, the long dark winter months drag heavily by.
_Brodeuses_ would walk eight miles in and eight out again in the most
inclement weather to ask for work, others would come as many weary
miles to get a hank or two of wool with which to knit socks and shawls.
Sometimes one woman would take back work for half a dozen, and always
our field of operations spread as village after village was visited and
the Society became known.
They came in their tens, they came in their hundreds, I am tempted to
swear that they came in their thousands. Madame soon ceased to announce
them, they lined the hall, they blocked the staircase, they swirled
in the Common-room. There were days when all the resources of the
establishment failed, when _broderie_ ran short and wool ran short,
when there were no more chemises or matinées waiting to be made up, and
when our hair, metaphorically speaking, lay in tufts over the house,
plucked from our heads by our distracted fingers. They came for work,
they came for clothes, they came for medicine and medical attendance,
they came for food--only the very poorest these--they came for
condensed milk for their babies, or for _farine lactée_, or for orders
for admission to the Society's hospitals at Châlons and Sermaize, or to
ask us to send their children to the _Colonies des Vacances_, or for
paper and packing to make up parcels for husbands at the Front. They
came to buy beds and pillows and bolsters at reduced prices and on the
instalment plan, paying so much per month according to their means;
they came for chairs and cupboards, or for the "trousseau," a gift--it
may be reckoned as such, as they only contributed one franc fifty
towards the entire cost--of three sheets, four pillow-cases and six
towels, each of which had to be hand-stitched or hemmed, and marked or
embroidered with the owner's name. They came to ask for white dresses
and veils--which they did not get--for candidates for confirmation,
they came for sabots and boots, and sometimes they came for the whole
lot.
"Well, Madame, ça va bien?" Thus we greeted a hardy old campaigner in
the street one day.
"Eh bien, ça va tout doucement." Then with an engaging smile, "I am
coming to see you to-morrow."
"Indeed? And what do you want now?" This looks crude, but we laboured
under no delusions where Madame Morge was concerned. It was not for the
sake of our _beaux yeux_ that she visited us.
"Eh, ma fois, un peu de tout," she replied audaciously, and we shot
at her a mendacious, "Don't you know that distributions have ceased?"
which left her calling heaven and her gods to witness that the earth
was crumbling.
Villagers who lived too far away for personal visits wrote, or their
Mayor or their priest wrote for them. We had by this time organised our
system, and knew that the person who could supply us with a complete
and detailed list was the Mayor, or his secretary the schoolmaster.
Sometimes these worthies were hard of heart, assuring us that no one
in the commune was necessitous, but we knew from experience that the
official mind is sometimes a superficial mind, judging by externals
only, so we persisted in our demand, and were invariably satisfied in
the end. Others, and they were in a large majority, met us with open
arms, cheerfully placed their time and their knowledge at our disposal,
were hospitable, helpful and kind, and careful to draw our attention to
specially deserving cases. Once when on a tour of inquiry we stumbled
into a village during the luncheon hour. A regiment was resting there,
and, as the first English who presumably had set foot in it, we
were immediately surrounded by an admiring and critical crowd, some
imaginative members of which murmured the ominous word Spy. The Mayor's
house indicated, we rapped at the door, and in response to a gruff
_Entrez_ found ourselves in a small and very crowded kitchen, where
a good _pot-au-feu_ was being discussed at a large round table. The
situation was sufficiently embarrassing, especially as the Mayor, being
deaf, heard only a few words of our introductory speech, and promptly
wished all refugees at the devil. A list? He was weary of lists. Every
one wanted lists, the Préfet wanted lists, the Ministre de l'Intérieur
wanted lists. And now we came and demanded them. Who the--well, who
were we that he should set his quill a-driving on our behalf?
"Shout 'Anglaises' at him." It was a ticklish moment. He was on the
point of throwing us out neck and crop. The advice was taken, the roar
might have been heard in Bar.
"English? You are English?"
Have you ever seen a raging lion suddenly transform itself into a nice
brown-eyed dog? We have, in that little kitchen in a remote village of
the Meuse. Our hands were grasped, the Mayor was beaming. A list? He
would give us twenty lists. English? Our hands were shaken till our
fingers nearly dropped off, and if we had eaten up all the _pot-au-feu_
Monsieur would have deemed it an honour. However, we didn't eat it.
Monsieur's family was gazing at it with hungry eyes, and even the best
of Ententes may be strained too far.
When we reached the street again the crowd had fraternised with our
chauffeur, and we drove away under a pyrotechnical display of smiles.
Another day a soldier suddenly sprang off the pavement, jumped on the
step of the motor-car, thrust some freshly-roasted chestnuts into my
hand and was gone before I could cry, "Thank you."
We met many priests in these peripatetic adventures, the stout,
practical and pompous, the autocratic, the negligent (there was one who
regretted he could tell us nothing: "I have only been fifteen months
here, so I don't yet know the people"), the old--I remember a visit
to a presbytery in the Aube, and finding there a charming, gentle,
diffident creature, a lover of books, poor, spiritual, half-detached
from this world, very close to the next. He had a fine church, pure
Gothic, a joy to the eye of the connoisseur, but no congregation. Only
a wee handful of people who met each Sunday in a side chapel, the great
unfilled vault of the church telling its own tale of changed thought
and agnostic days.
But most intimately of all we came to know the Abbé B. who lived in our
own town of Bar, because, greatly daring, we rang one evening at his
door and asked him to teach us French.
We had heard of him from Eugénie, and knew that he taught at the École
St Louis, that he was a refugee--he escaped from M. on his bicycle a
few minutes before the Germans entered it--and that his church and his
village were in ruins. But we had never seen him, and when, having rung
his bell, escape was no longer possible, an awful thought shattered us.
Suppose he were fat and greasy and dull? Could any ingenuity extract
us from the situation into which we had thrust ourselves? We felt sure
it could not, so we followed Eugénie with quaking hearts, followed her
to the garden where we found a short, dark man with a humorous mouth
and an ugly, attractive face, busily planting peas. We nodded our
satisfaction to one another, and before we left the arrangement was
made.
Our first lesson was devastating. The Abbé credited us with the
intelligence of children, telling us how to make a plural, and how
by adding "e" a masculine word can be changed into a feminine; fort,
forte; grand, grande; and so on. Then he gave us a _devoir_ (home
work), and we came away feeling like naughty children who have been put
into the corner. His parlour was stifling, and how we rejoiced when the
weather was fine, and we could hold our class in the garden. I can see
him now standing by the low wall under the arbour, his gaze turned far
away out across the hills. "It is there," he pointed, "the village. Out
there near St Mihiel."
For twenty-seven years he had ministered there, he had seen the
children he baptised grow to manhood and womanhood, and had gathered
their children, too, into the fold of Christ. He had beautified and
adorned the church--how he loved it!--year after year with tireless
energy and care, making it more and more perfect, more and more fit
for the service of the God he worshipped. And now it is a ruin blown
to fragments by the guns of friend and foe alike, and his people are
scattered, many of them dead. He came to Bar penniless, owning just the
clothes he stood up in, and he told me once that his income, including
his salary at the school and a grant from some special fund, was just
one hundred francs a month. Scarcely a pound a week.
Once hearing me say that I was not rich, he asked me the amount of my
income, adding naïvely, "I do not ask out of curiosity," and I felt
mean as I dodged the question, for an income that is "not riches" in
England looks wonderfully like wealth in a refugee's parlour in Bar.
All his dream, all his desire is to go back to M. and build his
church again. The church the central, the focussing point, then the
schoolhouse, then homes for the people, that is his plan; but he has
no money, his congregation is destitute--or nearly so--he cannot look
to the Government. Whence, then, will help come? So he would question,
filling us with intense desire to rush back to England and plead for
him and his cause in every market square in the land. He would go back
to M. now if they would allow him to, he will go back with or without
permission when the slaughter ends.
"The valley is so fertile," he would say; "watered by the Meuse, it is
one of the richest in France. Such grass, such a _prairie_. And after
the war we must cultivate, cultivate quickly; they cannot allow land
like ours to be idle, and so we shall go back at once."
"But," we said, "will you be able to cultivate? Surely heavy and
constant shell-fire makes the land unfit for the plough?"
We knew what the ground is like all along the blood-stained Front,
hundreds of miles of it fought over for four interminable years, its
soil enriched by the hallowed dead, torn and lacerated by shells,
incalculable tons of iron piercing its breast, and knew, too, that
Death lurks cunningly in many an unexploded bomb or mortar or shell,
and that prolonged and costly sanitation will be necessary before man
dare live on it again. Yes, the Abbé knew it too, but knew that a strip
of his richest land lay between two hills, the French on one, the
Germans on the other, and not a trench dug in all the length between.
No wonder hope rode gallantly in his breast, no wonder he saw his
people going quietly to their labour, and heard his church bell ringing
again its call to peaceful prayer. And then he would revert again to
the ever-present problem, the problem of ways and means.
Ah, we in England do not know how that question tortures the heart
of stricken France. Shall I tell you of it, leaving the Abbé for the
moment to look out across the hills, the reverberant thunder in his ear
and infinite longing in his loyal heart?
II
A little poem of Padraic Colum's springs to my mind as I ask myself how
to make you realise, how bring the truth home to those who have never
seen the eternal question shadow the eyes of homeless men. One verse
of it runs--
"I am praying to God on high,
I am praying Him night and day,
For a little home, a home of my own,
Out of the wind and the rain's way."
and it just sums up the refugee desire.
You--if you are a refugee--had a home once, you earned a livelihood;
but the home is laid waste and bare, your livelihood has vanished, and
in all probability your savings with it.
You buried what money you had in the cellar before you left, because
you thought you were only going away for a few weeks, and now the
Germans have found it. You know that they pour water over cellar
floors, watching carefully to see whether any percolates through. If it
does it is clear that the earth has recently been disturbed, so away
they go for shovels and dig; if it doesn't they try elsewhere. There
is the well, for instance. A carefully-made-up packet might lie safely
at the bottom for years, so what more suitable as a hiding-place?
What, indeed, says the wily Hun as he is cautiously lowered into the
darkness, there to probe and pry and fish, and if he is lucky to drag
treasure from the deeps. Or you may have hidden your all under that
white rock at the end of the garden. The rock is overturned to-day, and
a hole shows where the robber has found your gold.
A gnarled tree-trunk, a post, a cross-road, anything that might serve
as a mark lures him as sugar lures the ant; he has dug and delved, and
searched the surface of France as an intensive culturist digs over
his patch of ground. He has cut down the communal forests, the famous
cherry and walnut trees of Les Éparges have all been levelled and the
timber sent into Germany; he has ripped up floors, torn out window
frames; he falls on copper and steel and iron with shrieks of joy; he
is the locust of war, with the digestion of an ostrich; he literally
"licks the platter clean," and what he cannot gorge he destroys.
So if you are a refugee you ask yourself daily, "What shall we find
when we go back? How shall we start life afresh? Who will rebuild our
houses, restock our farms and our shops, and indemnify us for all we
have lost? France? She will have no money after the war, and Germany
will be bankrupt."
What can we, sheltered and safe in England, know of such sorrow as
this? To say we have never known invasion is to say we have never known
the real meaning of war. It may and does press hardly on us, but it
does not grind us under foot. It does not set its iron heel upon our
hearts and laugh when the red blood spurts upon the ground; it does
not take our chastity in its filthy hands and batten upon it in the
market-place; it doesn't rob us of liberty, nor of honour, nor does
it break our altars, spuming its bestialities over the sacred flame.
Our inner sanctuaries are still holy and undefiled. Those whom we have
given have gone clear-eyed and pure-hearted to the White Temple of
Sacrifice, there to lay their gift upon the outstretched hand of God:
not one has died in shame.
Whatever the war may have in store for us--and that it has much
of suffering, of hardship, of privation and bitter sorrow who can
doubt?--if it spares us the violation of our homes and of our
sanctuaries, if it leaves our frontiers unbroken, if it leaves us FREE,
then, indeed, we shall have incurred a debt which it will be difficult
to pay. A debt of gratitude which must become a debt of honour to be
paid in full measure, pressed down, and running over to those, less
fortunate than ourselves, who will turn to us in their need.
And in the longed-for days to come France will need us as she needs
us now. She will need our sympathy, our money, our very selves. She
will no longer call on us to destroy in order to save, she will call
on us to regenerate, redeem, to roll away the Stone from her House of
Death, and touching the crucified with our hand, bid them come forth,
revivified, strong and free.
Yes, there will be fine work to do in France when the war is over!
Constructive work, the building up of all that has been broken down;
work much of which she will be too exhausted to undertake herself, work
of such magnitude that generations yet unborn may not see it completed.
A new world to make! What possibilities that suggests. Rolling away
the Stone, watching the dead limbs stir, the flush of health coming
back into the grey, shrivelled faces, and light springing again into
the eyes. Seeing Joy light her lamps, and Hope break into blossom,
seeing human hearts and human souls cast off the cerecloths and come
forth into the fruitful garden. Surely we can await the end with such a
Vision Beautiful as that before us, and--who knows?--it may be that in
healing the wounds of others we shall find balm for our own.
The Return. If the French visualise it at all, do they see it as a
concrete thing, a long procession of worn, exhausted, but eager men
and women winding its way from every quarter of France, from the far
Pyrenees, from the Midi, from the snow-clad Alps, from the fertile
plains, winding, with many a pitiful gap in its ranks, back over
the thorn-strewn road? Is that their dream? Yet it may be that the
reality is only the beginning of another exile, as long, as patient, as
difficult to endure.
Hard-headed, practical, unimaginative reformers of the world's woes
sometimes blame the refugees who have remained so near the Front.
In Bar house-rent is high, living exceedingly dear. Legends such as
"_Le sucre manque_: _Pas de tabac_: no matches; no paraffin," are
constantly displayed in the shop windows, wood has more than doubled
in price, coal is simply _hors de prix_. Milk, butter and eggs are
frequently unobtainable, and generally bad; gas is an uncertain
quantity as coal is scarce, and has a diabolic knack of going out just
when you need it most. All of which things do not lend to the gaiety
of nations, still less to that of the _allocation_-supported refugee.
If troops are being moved from one part of the Front to another, the
_Petite Vitesse_ ceases from its labours and supplies are cut off from
the town. Farther south these lamentable things do not happen, but
farther south is farther from home. And there's the rub! For home is a
magnet and would draw the refugee to the actual Front itself, there to
cower in any rude shelter did common sense and _l'autorité compétente
militaire_ not intervene.
So as many as possible have stayed as near the barrier as possible.
And--this is a secret, you mustn't divulge it--these wicked, wily,
homeless ones are plotting. They are afraid that after the war the
Government will bar the road now swept by German guns; that orders
will go forth forbidding return; that railway station _guichets_ will
be barred and roads watched by lynx-eyed policemen whom no bribe can
corrupt--they will be very special policemen, you know--no tears
cajole.
And so they plan to slip back unobserved. If one is at the very door,
not more than the proverbial hop, skip and jump away--well, the magnet
is very powerful, and even Jove and Governments nod sometimes. And
just as the head drops forward and the eyes close, _hey presto_! they
will be over the border, and when the barrier closes down they will be
inside, and all the gendarmes in France will not be able to put them
out again. If they can't GO home, they will SNEAK home. They will get
there if they have to invent an entirely new mode of locomotion, even
if they have to live in cellars or shell-holes and eat grass--but there
may not be any grass. Didn't Sermaize live in cellars and exist on
nothing at all?--live in cellars and grow fond of them? There is one
old lady in a jolly little wooden house to-day, who suffers from so
acute a nostalgia for her cellar she is afraid to walk past the ruins
that cover it. If she did, she declares, the beautiful little wooden
house would know her no more. The cellar was as dark and as damp as the
inside of a whale, and it gave her a rheumatism of the devil in all
her bones, but she lived in it for three years, and in three years one
attaches oneself, _ma foi_, one forms _des liaisons_. So she sits and
sighs while the house-builders meditate on the eternal irony of things,
and their pride is as a worm that daws have pecked.
So be sure the refugees will go back just as soon as ever they can go,
as the Abbé plans to go, caring little if it is unwise, perhaps not
realising that even if Peace were declared to-morrow, many years must
pass before the earth can become fruitful again, many years must set
behind the hills of Time before new villages, new towns, new cities can
spring from the graves of the old.
Personally, I hope that some of these graves will be left just as
Germany has made them, that a few villages, an historic town or two
will be carefully guarded and preserved, partly because ruin-loving
America will pay vast sums to see them, and so help to rebuild others,
and partly because--am I a vindictive beast?--I want them to remain,
silent, inexorable witnesses of the true inwardness of the German
method and the German soul, if anything so degraded as she is can be
said to have a soul. "Lest we forget," these ghosts of towns should
haunt us for ever, stirring the memory and quickening the imagination,
a reproach to conscience, an incorruptible judge of blood-guiltiness,
which we should neither pardon nor forget till the fullest reparation
has been made, the utmost contrition has been shown. And it must be no
lip-service either. By its deeds we must know it. I want to see Germany
humbled to the very dust; I want to see Germany in sackcloth and ashes
rebuilding what she has destroyed, sending new legions into France, but
armed this time with shovel and with pick, with brick and with mortar;
I want to see those legions labouring to efface the imprints of the
old; I want to see Germany feeding them and paying them--they must
not cost France one sou; I want to see her in the white shroud of the
penitent, candle in hand, barefoot and bareheaded before the Tribunal
of the World, confessing her sins, and expiating them every one in an
agony not one whit less poignant than that which she has inflicted upon
others. Yes, let the destroyer turn builder. And until she does so let
us ostracise her, cut her out of our Book of Life. Who are we that we
should associate with the Judas who has betrayed civilisation?
A refugee rarely spoke of the Germans without prefixing the adjective
dirty--_ces sales Boches_--and the Abbé was no exception to the
rule; indeed, he was plain-spoken to bluntness on most occasions. His
criticisms of our French compositions would have withered the vanity of
a Narcissus, and proved altogether too much for one timid soul, who,
having endured a martyrdom through two lessons, stubbornly refused to
go back any more. Which was regrettable, as on closer acquaintance he
proved to be rather a lovable person, with a simplicity of soul that
was as rare as it was childlike.
Like the Curé of N., he presumed us Roman Catholic, asked us if
England were not rapidly coming into the light, and commented upon
the "conversion" of Queen Victoria shortly before her death. Though
it shook him, I think he never quite believed our denial of this
remarkable story, and have sometimes reproached myself for having
deprived him of the obvious comfort it brought him; but he took it all
in good part, and subsequently showed us that he could be broad-minded,
and tolerant as well.
"Charity knows no creed," he cried, and it was impossible to avoid
contrasting his implicit faith in our honesty, his steady confidence
that we would never use our exceptional opportunities for winning the
confidence and even the affection of the people for any illegitimate
purpose, with the deep distrust of the average Irish priest. The
hag-ridden fear of Proselytism which clouds every Irish sky dares not
show its evil face in France, nor did we ever find even a breath of
intolerance tainting our relations with priests or with people.
But then perhaps they, like the Abbé, realise that our error of faith
is a misfortune rather than a fault. Having been born that way, we were
not wholly responsible. Indeed the Abbé went so far as to assure me
that I was not responsible at all.
"Then who is, M. l'Abbé?" I questioned, reading condemnation of some
one in his eye.
"Henry the Eighth," he replied, with exquisite conviction, and I
gasped. Henry the Eighth!
"Assurement." Had he not a quarrel with his Holiness the Pope, and
being greedy for temporal power renounced Catholicism in a fit of rage,
and so flung the English people into the profundities of spiritual
darkness? We--we other Protestants--are his victims; our error of faith
is one for which we shall neither be judged nor punished, but he ... I
realised that Henry deserved all my sympathy; he is not having too good
a time of it _là bas_. Of course it was comforting to know that we were
blameless, but privately I thought it was rather unfair to poor old
Hal, who surely has enough sins of his own to expiate without having
those of an obscure bog-trotting Irishwoman foisted upon him as well.
"Yours," went on the Abbé, "is natural religion, the heritage of your
parents; ours is revealed. Some day I will explain it to you, not--this
very naïvely--with any desire to convert you, but in order to help you
to understand why truth is to be found only in the arms of the Roman
Church."
It puzzled him a little that we should be Protestant, it was so
austere, so comfortless, so cold. "La scène-froide" was the expression
he used in describing our services, "les mystères" when talking of his
own. He denounced as the grossest superstition the pathetic belief of
many an Irish peasant in the infallibility, the almost-divine power of
the priesthood, and, unlike his colleagues in that tormented land, he
is an advocate of education even on the broadest basis. "Let people
think for themselves; if you keep too tight a rein they will only
revolt."
That he detests the present form of Government goes without saying,
his condemnation being so sweeping the big pine tree in the garden
positively trembled before the winds of his rage. "Anything but this,"
he cried, "even a monarchy, même un Protestant, même le Roi Albert.
Atheists, self-seekers all, they are ruining France," and then he
repeated the oft-heard conviction that the war has been sent as a
punishment for agnosticism and unbelief.
For Prefêts and Sous-Prefêts he entertains the profoundest contempt,
even going as far as to designate one of the former, whom I heroically
refuse to name, a _gros, gras paresseux_,[8] and the Sous-Prefêts the
_âmes damnées_ of the Minister of the Interieur. How he hates the whole
breed of them! And how joyfully he would depose them every one! The
feud between Church and State has ploughed deep furrows in his soul,
and I gather that brotherly love did not continue long--supposing that
it ever existed--in M. when its waves swept the village into rival
factions. The Mayor, needless to say, was agnostic, and loyal to his
Government; the Abbé furious, but trying hard to be impartial, to
eschew politics, and serve his God. He might have succeeded had not the
spirit of mischief that lurks in his eye betrayed him and dragged him
from his precarious fence. He plunged into the controversy, but--oh, M.
l'Abbé! M. l'Abbé!--in patois and in the columns of the local Press.
Now his knowledge of patois, gathered as a boy, had been carefully
hidden under a bushel, and so the authorship of the fierce, sarcastic,
ironical letters was never known, nor did M. le Maire ever guess why
the priest's eyes twinkled so wickedly when he passed him in the street.
[8] A big, fat, lazy thing.
They twinkled as he told the story, thoroughly enjoying his little
ruse, but grew fierce again when he talked of Freemasons. To say
that he thinks Freemasonry an incarnation of the devil is to put his
feelings mildly. They are, he declares, the enemy of all virtue,
purity and truth; criminal atheists, hotbeds of everything evil, their
"tendency" resolutely set against good. They are insidious, corrupt;
defilers of public morals and public taste.
"But, M. l'Abbé," I cried, "that is not so. In England----" I gave him
a few facts. It shook him somewhat to hear that the late King Edward,
whom he profoundly admires, was a Mason, but he recovered himself
quickly.
"Perhaps in England they may seem good, there may even be good people
among them, poor dupes who do not see below the surface. THERE all is
corruption, the goodness is only a mask worn to deceive the ignorant
and the credulous. Ah, the evil they have wrought in the world! It was
they who brought about the war (its Divine origin was for the moment
forgotten), they were undermining Europe, they would drag her down into
the pit, to filth and decay."
It was odd to hear such words from the lips of so kindly, so wise a
man, and one with so profound a knowledge of human nature. He told me
that in all his years of ministry at M. there was only one illegitimate
birth in the village--a statement which students of De Maupassant will
find it difficult to believe.
We were talking of certain moral problems intensified by the war, the
perpetually recurring "sex-question," not any more insistent perhaps
in France than elsewhere, but obtruding itself less ashamedly upon
the notice. It was the acceptance, the toleration of certain things
that puzzled me, an acceptance which I am sometimes tempted to believe
is due to some deep, wise understanding of human frailty, of the
fierceness of human passions, the weakness of human will when Love has
taken over the citadel of the heart. Or is it due to fatalism, the
conviction that it is useless to strive against what cannot be altered,
absurd to fight Nature in her unbridled moods?
The priest, needless to say, neither accepted nor condoned. He blamed
public opinion, above all he blamed the unbelief of the people, and
then he told me of M. and the purity of the life there. Only one girl
in all those years, and she, after her baby was born, led so exemplary,
so modest a life that its father subsequently married her, and together
they built up one of the happiest homes in the village. (You will
gather that the Abbé was not above entertaining at least one popular
superstition in that he insinuated that all the blame rested on the
shoulders of the woman.)
One other story he told me which flashed a white light upon his soul.
A certain atheist, one of his bitterest enemies, came to him one day
in deep distress of mind. His wife, an unbeliever like himself, was
dying, and, dying, was afraid. The man was rich, and thought he could
buy his way and hers into the Kingdom of Heaven. But the Abbé refused
his gold. "You cannot buy salvation nor ease of conscience," he said
sternly. "Keep your money; God wants your heart, and not your purse."
He attended the woman, gave her Christian burial, and asked exactly
the legal fee. Not one penny more would he take, nor could all the
atheist's prayers move him.
He told me that he would not bury a man or a woman living in what he
called _le concubinage civile_, people married by the State only and
not by Church and State. For these, he said, there could only be the
burial of a dog, for they lived in sin, knowing their error as do the
contractors of mixed marriages if they do not ask for and receive a
dispensation. The rules governing these latter appear to be much the
same as those which hold good in Ireland. No service in a Protestant
church is permitted, and the Protestant must promise that all children
born of the union shall be baptised and brought up in the Catholic
faith. There is no written contract, and the promise may, of course, be
broken, but if the Catholic is a party to it he is guilty of mortal sin.
You will see that as our classes ran their course--and circumstances
decreed that I should take the final lessons alone--we got very far
away from "s" for plural and "e" for feminine. Exercises corrected,
many an interesting half-hour we passed in the little parlour, and
many a tale of the trenches the Abbé gathered up for us, and many a
"well-founded, authentic" prophecy of the speedy termination of the
war. Ah, he was so sure he would be in his beloved M. this winter.
Did not his friend the Editor of--he mentioned a leading Paris
journal--tell him so?
But this is the war of the unforeseen. Perhaps that is why some of us
dare to believe that when the end comes it will come suddenly, swiftly,
like thunder pealing through the heavy stillness of a breathless,
sullen night.