astonished that you propose it. For nothing in all the world would I
enter upon such a life as you depict, owing great sums of money to begin
with, for no matter how 'easy' your business credit may be made in the
modern world, the fact remains that I should lie down at night and rise
up in the morning conscious that thousands of men had intrusted their
money to me, that I might easily, by one false step or piece of bad
judgment, lose forever money which means life to poor women or old men.
Such a fiery trial would shrivel me up. It would be my death, I who have
never owed a penny in my life. And then what? Even with the utmost
success which you hold out, I should have a life which, compared with
what I now have, would be infernal; rushing to and fro over the face of
the earth, away from home, my wife, my children, homeless for half the
time, constantly employed in the most momentous and important decisions
where in order to succeed I must give all of myself, all, _all_, my
brain, my personality, my will power, my soul ... what would be left of
me for leisure moments? Nothing! I should be an empty husk, drained of
everything that makes me a living and a human being. But of course there
would not be any leisure moments.... I see from what you so eloquently
say that I would have become the slave and not the master of that
invention which has come down to me from my fathers; that instead of its
furnishing me and my work-people with a quiet, orderly, contented life,
I should only exist to furnish it means for a wild, fantastic growth,
like something in a nightmare, because a real growth is never like that,
never!
"Mr. Hale, do you know what I do of an evening, in the summer? I leave
the shop at half-past five or six, and I step into my garden, where I
work till half-past seven, when I am most exquisitely hungry. We dine
here under this vine, my wife, my daughters, and my son (he who is now
at the front). Afterwards we sit and chat and exchange impressions of
the day, as the moon comes up or the stars come out. Perhaps some of the
young friends of the children drop in for a game of cards. My wife and I
sit down at the other end of the garden on the stone bench where we sat
when she came here as a bride, where my father and mother sat when they
were bride and groom. The stars come out. I smoke my pipe and watch
them. Mr. Hale, it is very surprising, the things which come into your
head, if you sit quietly and watch the stars come out. I would not miss
thinking them for anything in the world. We talk a little, my wife
knits. We meditate a great deal. We hear the gay voices of our children
coming to us mingled with the breath of the roses. We have finished
another day, and we are very glad to be there, alive, with each other,
in our garden. When we come in, my wife makes me a cup of tisane and
while I sip that I read, sometimes a little of Montaigne, sometimes a
little of Horace, sometimes something modern. And all that while, Mr.
Hale, there is in our home, in our hearts, the most precious
distillation of peace, the ..."
For some moments the American had been surging inwardly, and he now
boiled over with a great wave of words. "Will you just let me tell you
what you've been describing to me, Monsieur Requine? The life of an old,
old man ... and you're younger than I am! And will you let me tell you
what I'd call your 'peace'? I'd call it laziness! Why, that's the kind
of life that would suit an oyster right down to the ground! And, by
George, that's the kind of life that gave the Boches their strangle-hold
on French commerce before the war. They _weren't_ afraid of good credit
when it was held out to them! They had it _too_ easy, with nobody to
stand up against them but able-bodied men willing to sit down in their
gardens in the evenings and meditate on the stars, instead of thinking
how to enlarge their business! I'll bet they didn't read Horace instead
of a good technical magazine that would keep them up to date. Why,
Monsieur Requine, I give you my word, I have never looked inside my
Horace since the day I took the final exam in it! I wouldn't _dream_ of
doing it! What would business come to if everybody sagged back like
that? You don't seem to realize what business is, modern business. It's
not just soulless materialistic money-making, it's the great, big, wide
road that leads human beings to progress! It's what lets humanity get a
chance to satisfy its wants, and get more wants, and satisfy them, and
get more, and conquer the world from pole to pole. It's what gives men,
grown men, with big muscles, obstacles of their size to get through. It
gives them problems that take all their strength and brain power to
solve, that keeps them fit and pink and tiptoe with ambition and zip,
and prevents them from lying down and giving up when they see a hard
proposition coming their way, such as changing a small factory into a
big one and keeping the product up to standard. Business, modern
business keeps a man _alive_ so that when he sees a problem like that he
doesn't give a groan and go and prune his roses, he just tears right in
and _does_ it!"
Monsieur Requine listened to the translation of this impassioned _credo_
with the expression of judicial consideration which was evidently the
habitual one upon his face. At the end he stroked his beard meditatively
and looked into space for a time before answering. When he spoke, it was
with a mildness and quiet which made him indeed seem much the older of
the two, a certain patient good humor which would have been impossible
to the other man. "Mr. Hale, you say that my conception of life looks
like laziness to you. Do you know how yours looks to me? Like a circle
of frenzied worshipers around a fiery Moloch, into whose maw they cast
everything that makes life sweet and livable, leisure, love, affection,
appreciation of things rare and fine. My friend, humanity as a whole
will never be worth more than the lives of its individuals are worth,
and it takes many, many things to make individual lives worth while. It
takes a mixture, and it needs, among other elements, some quiet, some
peace, some leisure, some occupation with things of pure beauty like my
roses, some fellowship with great minds of the past...." His eyes took
on a dreamy deepening glow. "Sometimes as I dig the earth among my
fruit-trees, the old, old earth, a sentence from Epictetus, or from
Montaigne comes into my head, all at once luminous as I never saw it
before. I have a vision of things very wide, very free, very fine.
Almost, for a moment, Mr. Hale, almost for a moment I feel that I
understand life."
The American stood up to go with a gesture of finality. He put his hat
firmly on his head and said in pitying valedictory: "Monsieur Requine,
you're on the wrong track. Take it from me that nobody can understand
life. The best thing to do with life is to live it!"
The Frenchman, still seated, still philosophic, made a humorous gesture.
"Ah, there are as many different opinions as there are men about what
that means, to 'live life'!"
* * * * *
In the cab going back to Paris the American said little. Once he
remarked almost to himself, "The thing I can't get over is that his
damned cream _is_ better than anything we make."
The French official emerged from a thoughtful silence of his own to
comment: "Mr. Hale, the generosity of that remark is only equaled by its
perspicacity! It makes me more than ever concerned for the future of
French commerce."
* * * * *
That evening Monsieur Requine was stooping over a dwarf-apple tree,
string in one hand, pruning shears in the other. He was clipping away
all except one of the vigorous young shoots. That one he then laid along
a wire, strung about a foot from the ground and tied it fast at several
points so that in growing it would follow the exact line traced by the
horizontal wire. When he finished he gathered up all the clipped shoots,
put them under his arm, and stood looking at the severely disciplined
little tree, which did not look in the least like a tree any more. The
sight apparently suggested an analogy to his mind, for he said in the
tone of one who makes an admission: "It's true one does it for
apple-trees and vines." After considering this for a moment, he shook
his head with decision, "But not for human beings, no."
And yet his brow was far from clear as he betook himself to the stone
bench at the end of the garden.
When his wife went out later to join him, she missed the glow of his
pipe and inquired, a little troubled, "Why, Rene, you've forgotten to
light your pipe! what's the matter?"
"Adele, do you remember, just before the order for mobilization came,
how Robert wanted to travel a year in America to study American business
and to see something of other conditions? Perhaps I was wrong not to
consent. I've been sitting here thinking it over. Perhaps when he comes
back [they always forced themselves to say "when" and never "if"]
perhaps we would better let him go, before he settles down to take my
place." He took her hand and held it for a moment. "Do you know, Adele,
after all, the world changes, perhaps more than we realize, here in
Versailles."
That evening Mr. Hale sat in his hotel bedroom with all the electric
lights blazing, and filled sheet after sheet with elaborate
calculations. He was concerned with an important detail of transatlantic
transportation to which he did not believe half enough attention had
been paid: the question as to what form of carrier is the best for
certain breakable objects which he was arranging to send in large
quantities into the States. The quantities were so large that if he
could effect a small saving of space, with no increase of the breakage
per cent., the sum-total would be considerable.
He figured out the relative cubic contents in boxes of a given dimension
and in barrels, having always had a leaning towards barrels himself. He
looked up technical tables as to the relative weight of sawdust,
powdered cork, and excelsior, together with the statistics as to the
relative amount of breakage with each sort of packing. His days were so
filled with "seeing people" that he often thought the evenings were the
only times he had to do "real work," the careful, minute, infinitely
patient, and long-headed calculations which had made him the wealthy man
he was.
The room was very hot and close, with all its windows and shutters
closed and its curtains drawn to keep the light from showing in the
street, a recent air-raid having tightened up the regulations about
lights. The American's face was flushed, his eyes hot and smarting, his
collar first wilted, and then laid aside. But he was accustomed to pay
small heed to discomforts when there was work to be done, and continued
obstinately struggling with the problems of cubic feet contained in a
compartment of a ship's hold of given dimensions with given curves to
the sides. The curve of the sides gave him a great deal of trouble, as
he had quite forgotten the formulae of abstract mathematics which would
have solved the question, never having concerned himself with abstract
mathematics since the day he had taken the final examination in that
subject.
He sat up, wiping his forehead, rubbing his eyes. Behind the lids, for
an instant shut, there swam before his eyes the garden in which he had
sat that afternoon, green and hidden and golden. The perfume from the
roses floated again about him.
He opened his eyes on the gaudy, banal hotel bedroom, cruelly lighted
with the hard gaze of the unveiled electric bulbs. He felt very tired.
"I've half a notion to call that enough for to-night," he said to
himself, standing up from the table.
He snapped off the electric lights and opened the shutters. A clear,
cool breath of outdoor air came in silently, filling the room and his
lungs. The moonlight lay in a wide pool at his feet and on the balcony
before his window. He hesitated a moment, glanced out at the sky, and
pulled an armchair out on the balcony.
There was a long silence while he puffed at a cigar and while the moon
dropped lower. At first he went on thinking of cubic feet and relative
weights, but presently his cigar began to glow less redly. After a time
it went out unheeded. The hand which held it dropped on the arm of the
chair, loosely.
The man stirred, relaxed all his muscles, and stretched himself out in
the chair, tipping his head back to see the stars.
He sat thus for a long, long time, while the constellations wheeled
slowly over his head. Once he murmured meditatively, "Maybe we _do_ hit
it up a little too fast."
He continued looking up at the stars, and presently drew from the
contemplation of those vast spaces another remark. It was one which had
often casually passed his lips before, but never with the accent of
conviction. For never before had he believed it. He said it earnestly,
now, in the tone of one who states with respect a profound and pregnant
truth: "Well, it takes all kinds of people to make a world."
THE REFUGEE
When we had seen her last, just before the war, she could have stood for
the very type and symbol of the intelligent, modern woman; an energetic
leader for good in her native town (a bustling industrial center in the
north of France); unsentimental, beneficent; looking at life with clear,
brightly observant, disillusioned eyes; rather quick to laugh at
old-fashioned narrowness; a little inclined to scoff at too fervently
expressed enthusiasms, such as patriotism; very broad in her sympathies,
very catholic in her tastes, tolerant as to the beliefs of others,
radical as to her own, above all, a thoroughgoing internationalist;
physically in the prime of her life, with a splendid, bold vigor in all
her movements.
Now, after less than three years of separation, she sat before us,
white-haired, gaunt, shabby, her thin face of a curious grayish brown
which none of us had ever seen before, her thin hands tightly clasped,
her eyes burning and dry--the only dry eyes in the room as she talked.
* * * * *
Much of what she told us I may not repeat, for she said, with a quick
gesture of terror, dreadful to see in one who for forty years had faced
life so indomitably: "No, no, don't publish what I say--or at least be
very careful; choose only those things that can't hurt the people who
are up there, still in 'their' power."
"Why not publish what you say?" I asked her, rather challengingly. "I
don't think people in general understand half enough what the life of
the invaded provinces is. One never sees any really detailed
descriptions of it."
She answered bitterly, "Doesn't the reason for that silence occur to
you?"
"No, it doesn't. I never have understood why so little is given to the
public about the sufferings of the invaded populations."
She looked at me strangely, the half-exasperated, half-patient look one
gives to a child who asks a foolish, ignorant question, and explained
wearily: "If those who escape tell what they have seen up there, those
who are left suffer even worse torments. 'They' have spies everywhere,
you know; no, that's not melodramatic nonsense, as I would have thought
it three years ago, it's a literal fact. Very probably that little
messenger-boy who brought the letter in here a moment ago is one. Very
probably your baker is one. Anywhere in the world whatever is printed
about what 'they' do to our people in their power is instantly read by
some German eyes, and is instantly sent to German headquarters in the
invaded regions. And it's the same with our poor, little, persistent
attempts to express a little bit of what we feel for France. For
instance, one of my friends who escaped at the risk of her life told
about how we tried in our orphan asylum to keep the children mindful of
France, how after closing hours, when the doors were shut, we took out
the French flag from its hiding-place and told the children about France
and whatever news of the war we had managed to hear. That article
appeared, a half-column, in an obscure provincial newspaper with no
indication as to which town was meant. In less than two weeks, from
German headquarters in Brussels, went out a sweeping order to search to
the last corner of the cellar every orphan asylum in the invaded
regions. It was two o'clock in the morning when the searching squad in
our town knocked at the doors. The flag was found, and our little
collection of patriotic French recitations; and before dawn the
superintendent, a splendid woman of fifty-seven, the salt of the earth,
had disappeared. She was sent to a prison camp in Germany. Three months
later we heard she was dead. Do you understand now why you must not
repeat most of what I tell you, must give no clue as to how we hide our
letters, how we get news from France; above all, say nothing that could
give any idea of who I am? 'They' would do such dreadful things to
Marguerite and little Julien and old Uncle Henri if 'they' knew that I
have talked of the life there, of what 'they' have done to our people."
No, until the world turns over and we have awakened from the hideous
nightmare no one may speak aloud of certain matters up there in Belgium
and in the invaded provinces of France. But there are some things she
told us which I may pass on to you, and I think you ought to know them.
I think we all ought to know more than we do of what life is to the
people who are awaiting deliverance at our hands. There are certain
portions of her narration, certain detached pictures, brief dialogues
and scenes, which may be set down in her own words. Your imagination
must fill in the gaps.
"The first months were the worst--and the best. The worst because we
could not believe at first that war was there, the stupid, imbecile
anachronism we had thought buried with astrology and feudalism. For me
it was like an unimaginably huge roller advancing slowly, heavily,
steadily, to crush out our lives. During the day, as I worked with the
wounded, I threw all my will power into the effort to disbelieve in that
inexorable advance. I said to myself: 'No, it's not possible! They
_can't_ have invaded Belgium after their promises! Modern peoples don't
do that sort of thing. No, it's not possible that Louvain is burned!
Wild rumors are always afloat in such times. I must keep my head and not
be credulous. The Germans are a highly civilized people who would not
dream of such infamies as those they are being accused of.' All that I
said to myself, naively, by day. At night, every hour, every half-hour,
I started up from sleep, drenched in cold sweat, dreaming that the
crushing roller was about to pass over us. Then it came, it passed, it
crushed.
"But there were other, better things about those first months. For one
thing, we had hope still. We hoped constantly for deliverance. Every
morning I said to the girl who brought the milk, 'Are they here yet?'
'They' meant the French troops coming to deliver us. Yes, at first we
expected them from one day to the next. Then from one week to the next,
then from one month to the next. Finally, now, we have no strength left
for anything but silent endurance. Besides that hope, which kept us
alive those first months, we were not yet in that windowless prison
which 'they' have succeeded in making our own country to us. We had news
of France and of the outside world through the French and English
prisoners. They were brought into our improvised hospital to have their
wounds dressed before they were put on the train to be sent forward to
their German prisons. As we cared for them we could get news of the
battles; sometimes we heard through them of the men of our families;
always they were a link with the world outside. We did not know what a
priceless boon that was.
"But even this slight contact was soon forbidden us. We showed too
openly the comfort it brought us. Free people, as we had always been, we
were not then trained, as tyranny since has trained us, to the wretched
arts of secrecy. We did too much for those prisoners. The people in the
streets crowded about them too eagerly, showed them too many kindnesses.
'They' decided that our one link with the outside world must be broken.
Fewer and fewer prisoners were sent; finally we saw none--for weeks and
weeks none at all. We knew nothing but what 'they' told us, saw no other
world, were hypnotized almost into believing that no other world
existed.
"The last ones who came through--that is one of my memories. We never
knew by what chance they were sent through our town. One day we looked,
and there in our street were half a dozen French soldiers, with bloody
heads and arms, limping along between Boche guards on their way to the
hospital. All our people rose like a great wave and swept towards them.
The guards reversed their rifles and began clubbing with their butt
ends--clubbing the old women who tried to toss food to the prisoners,
clubbing the little children who stretched out handfuls of chocolate,
clubbing the white-haired men who thrust cigarettes into the pockets of
the torn, stained French uniforms.
"We were beginning to practise some of the humiliating arts of a captive
people then; we remembered that shouting in the streets is not allowed,
that no French voice must be heard in that French town, and in all that
straining, pressing, yearning crowd there was not a sound, not even a
murmur of joy, when the Boche guards occasionally relaxed their
vigilance for a moment and some of our presents reached the prisoners.
"Then they came to the hospital--it was a great mansion before the
war--and went limping painfully through the broad doors and up the long
stone staircase. Outside the doors stood the military car which was to
take them to the station--stood the Boche guards--and the crowd, silent,
motionless, waiting for the moment when those soldiers who stood for
France should reappear. All demonstrations of feeling were forbidden by
the invaders, yes, but there was no demonstration--only a great silent
crowd waiting. The Boche guards looked about them uneasily, but there
was no violation of any order to report. Every one waited silently.
Twilight fell, darkness fell, the crowd grew larger and larger, filled
the street, but gave no further sign of life. Not one of 'their' rules
was broken, but as far as we could see there were upturned faces, white
in the dusk. An hour passed, two hours passed, and then the moment was
there. The lights flared up in the great hall of the hospital--all the
lights at once, as if to do justice to a grand fete, an occasion of
supreme honor. At the top of the stairway, very pale in that great
light, with bandaged heads and arms, appeared those soldiers who stood
for France.
"From all that silent, rigidly self-controlled crowd went up a sigh like
a great stir of the ocean. The prisoners came limping down the stairway.
France was passing there before our eyes, perhaps for the last time.
A thousand handkerchiefs fluttered as silent salute to France, a
thousand heads were bared to her. The weary soldiers stood very erect
and returned a silent military salute. In their prison car they passed
slowly along between the dense ranks of their fellow-countrymen, looking
deeply, as though they too thought it might be for the last time, into
those French eyes. Then they were gone. We had not broken one of 'their'
rules--not one. But 'they' never allowed another French soldier to pass
through our town.
"Once after that we had a passing glimpse of English soldiers, a group
of wretchedly ill men, with their wounds uncared for, stumbling along to
the station. They were not taken to the hospital to be cared for; 'they'
are always much harder on the English prisoners than on any others.
Those were the days early in the war, when there were still things to
buy in the shops, when we still had money to spend. How we all rushed to
buy good chocolate, cigarettes! How desperately we tried to throw them
to the prisoners! But there was no relaxation, that time, of the guard.
Not once did we succeed. There was a double line of guards that day, and
they held us far, far at a distance with their rifle butts. It was
horrible--the silence of the crowd, rigorously observing the rule
against demonstrations of any sort; not a sound except the thud of rifle
butts on human flesh. Old M. B---- had his arm broken that day.