promised everybody that they wouldn't let anybody go across their land
to pick on France that way. They kept their promise and the Germans
didn't. It makes me _mad_! I wish to goodness our country would help
them!"
Maggie was horrified. "_Ellen Boardman_, would you want _Americans_ to
commit murder? You'd better go to church with me next Sunday and hear
Mr. Wentworth preach one of his fine sermons."
Ellen did this, and heard a sermon on passive resistance as the best
answer to violence. She was accustomed to accepting without question any
statement she found in a printed book, or what any speaker said in any
lecture. Also her mind, having been uniquely devoted for many years to
the problems of office administration, moved with more readiness among
letter-files and card-catalogues of customers than among the abstract
ideas where now, rather to her dismay, she began to find her thoughts
centering. More than a week passed after hearing that sermon before she
said, one night as she was brushing her hair: "About the Belgians--if a
robber wanted us to let him go through this room so he could get into
Mrs. Wilson's room and take all her money and maybe kill her, would you
feel all right just to snuggle down in bed and let him? Especially if
you had told Mrs. Wilson that she needn't ever lock the door that leads
into our room, because you'd see to it that nobody came through?"
"Oh, but," said Maggie, "Mr. Wentworth says it is only the German
_Government_ that wanted to invade Belgium, that the German soldiers
just hated to do it. If you could fight the German Kaiser, it'd be all
right."
Ellen jumped at this admission. "Oh, Mr. Wentworth does think there are
_some_ cases where it isn't enough just to stand by, and say you don't
like it?"
Maggie ignored this. "He says the people who really get killed are only
the poor soldiers that aren't to blame."
Ellen stood for a moment by the gas, her hair up in curl-papers, the
light full on her plain, serious face, sallow above the crude white of
her straight, unornamented nightgown. She said, and to her own surprise
her voice shook as she spoke: "Well, suppose the real robber stayed down
in the street and only sent up here to rob and kill Mrs. Wilson some men
who just hated to do it, but were too afraid of him not to. Would you
think it was all right for us to open our door and let them go through
without trying to stop them?"
Maggie did not follow this reasoning, but she received a disagreeable,
rather daunting impression from the eyes which looked at her so hard,
from the stern, quivering voice. She flounced back on her pillow, saying
impatiently: "I don't know what's got into you, Ellen Boardman. You look
actually _queer_, these days! What do _you_ care so much about the
Belgians for? You never heard of them before all this began! And
everybody knows how immoral French people are."
Ellen turned out the gas and got into bed silently.
Maggie felt uncomfortable and aggrieved. The next time she saw Mr.
Wentworth she repeated the conversation to him. She hoped and expected
that the young minister would immediately furnish her with a crushing
argument to lay Ellen low, but instead he was silent for a moment, and
then said: "That's rather an interesting illustration, about the
burglars going through your room. Where does she get such ideas?"
Maggie disavowed with some heat any knowledge of the source of her
cousin's eccentricities. "I don't _know_ where! She's a stenographer
downtown."
Mr. Wentworth looked thoughtful and walked away, evidently having
forgotten Maggie.
In the days which followed, the office-manager of the wholesale hardware
house more and more justified the accusation of looking "queer." It came
to be so noticeable that one day her employer, Mr. Pennypacker, asked
her if she didn't feel well. "You've been looking sort of under the
weather," he said.
She answered, "I'm just _sick_ because the United States won't do
anything to help Belgium and France."
Mr. Pennypacker had never received a more violent shock of pure
astonishment. "Great Scotland!" he ejaculated, "what's that to _you_?"
"Well, I live in the United States," she advanced, as though it were an
argument.
Mr. Pennypacker looked at her hard. It was the same plain, serious,
rather sallow face he had seen for years bent over his typewriter and
his letter-files. But the eyes were different--anxious, troubled.
"It makes me sick," she repeated, "to see a great big nation picking on
a little one that was only keeping its promise."
Her employer cast about for a conceivable reason for the aberration.
"Any of your folks come here from there?" he ventured.
"Gracious, _no_!" cried Ellen, almost as much shocked as Maggie would
have been at the idea that there might be "foreigners" in her family.
She added: "But you don't have to be related to a little boy, do you, to
get mad at a man that's beating him up, especially if the boy hasn't
done anything he oughtn't to?"
Mr. Pennypacker stared. "I don't know that I ever looked at it that
way." He added: "I've been so taken up with that lost shipment of nails,
to tell the truth, that I haven't read much about the war. There's
always _some_ sort of a war going on over there in Europe, seems to me."
He stared for a moment into space, and came back with a jerk to the
letter he was dictating.
That evening, over the supper-table, he repeated to his wife what his
stenographer had said. His wife asked, "That little sallow Miss Boardman
that never has a word to say for herself?" and upon being told that it
was the same, said wonderingly, "Well, what ever started _her_ up, I
wonder?" After a time she said: "_Is_ Germany so much bigger than
Belgium as all that? Pete, go get your geography." She and her husband
and their High School son gazed at the map. "It looks that way," said
the father. "Gee! They must have had their nerve with them! Gimme the
paper." He read with care the war-news and the editorial which he had
skipped in the morning, and as he read he looked very grave, and rather
cross. When he laid the paper down he said, impatiently: "Oh, damn the
war! Damn Europe, anyhow!" His wife took the paper out of his hand and
read in her turn the news of the advance into Northern France.
Just before they fell asleep his wife remarked out of the darkness, "Mr.
Scheidemann, down at the grocery, said to-day the war was because the
other nations were jealous of Germany."
"Well, I don't know," said Mr. Pennypacker heavily, "that I'd have any
call to take an ax to a man because I thought he was jealous of me."
"That's so," admitted his wife.
* * * * *
During that autumn Ellen read the papers, and from time to time broke
her silence and unburdened her mind to the people in the boarding-house.
They considered her unbalanced on the subject. The young reporter on the
Marshallton _Herald_ liked to lead her on to "get her going," as he
said--but the others dodged whenever the war was mentioned and looked
apprehensively in her direction.
The law of association of ideas works, naturally enough, in Marshallton,
Kansas, quite as much at its ease as in any psychological laboratory. In
fact Marshallton was a psychological laboratory with Ellen Boardman, an
undefined element of transmutation. Without knowing why, scarcely
realizing that the little drab figure had crossed his field of vision,
Mr. Pennypacker found the war recurring to his thoughts every time he
saw her. He did not at all enjoy this, and each time that it happened he
thrust the disagreeable subject out of his mind with impatience. The
constant recurrence of the necessity for this effort brought upon his
usually alert, good-humored face an occasional clouded expression like
that which darkened his stenographer's eyes. When Ellen came into the
dining-room of the boarding-house, even though she did not say a word,
every one there was aware of an unpleasant interruption to the habitual,
pleasant current of their thoughts directed upon their own affairs. In
self-defense some of the women took to knitting polo-caps for Belgian
children. With those in their hands they could listen, with more
reassuring certainty that she was "queer," to Miss Boardman's comments
on what she read in the newspaper. Every time Mr. Wentworth, preaching
one of his excellent, civic-minded sermons on caring for the babies of
the poor, or organizing a playground for the children of the factory
workers, or extending the work of the Ladies' Guild to neighborhood
visits, caught sight of that plain, very serious face looking up at him
searchingly, expectantly, he wondered if he had been right in announcing
that he would not speak on the war because it would certainly cause
dissension among his congregation.
One day, in the middle of winter, he found Miss Boardman waiting for him
in the church vestibule after every one else had gone. She said, with
her usual directness: "Mr. Wentworth, do you think the French ought to
have just let the Germans walk right in and take Paris? Would you let
them walk right in and take Washington?"
The minister was a young man, with a good deal of natural heat in his
composition, and he found himself answering this bald question with a
simplicity as bald: "No, I wouldn't."
"Well, if they did right, why don't we help them?" Ellen's homely,
monosyllabic words had a ring of despairing sincerity.
Mr. Wentworth dodged them hastily. "We _are_ helping them. The
charitable effort of the United States in the war is something
astounding. The statistics show that we have helped...." He was going on
to repeat some statistics of American war-relief just then current, when
Mr. Scheidemann, the prosperous German grocer, a most influential member
of the First Congregational Church, came back into the vestibule to look
for his umbrella, which he had forgotten after the service. By a reflex
action beyond his control, the minister stopped talking about the war.
He and Miss Boardman had, for just long enough so that he realized it,
the appearance of people "caught" discussing something they ought not to
mention. The instant after, when Ellen had turned away, he felt the
liveliest astonishment and annoyance at having done this. He feared that
Miss Boardman might have the preposterous notion that he was _afraid_ to
talk about the war before a German. This idea nettled him intolerably.
Just before he fell asleep that night he had a most disagreeable moment,
half awake, half asleep, when he himself entertained the preposterous
idea which he had attributed to Miss Boardman. It woke him up, broad
awake, and very much vexed. The little wound he had inflicted on his
own vanity smarted. Thereafter at any mention of the war he
straightened his back to a conscious stiffness, and raised his voice if
a German were within hearing. And every time he saw that plain, dull
face of the stenographer, he winced.
On the 8th of May, 1915, when Ellen went down to breakfast, the
boarding-house dining-room was excited. Ellen heard the sinking of the
_Lusitania_ read out aloud by the young reporter. To every one's
surprise, she added nothing to the exclamations of horror with which the
others greeted the news. She looked very white and left the room without
touching her breakfast. She went directly down to the office and when
Mr. Pennypacker came in at nine o'clock she asked him for a leave of
absence, "maybe three months, maybe more," depending on how long her
money held out. She explained that she had in the savings-bank five
hundred dollars, the entire savings of a lifetime, which she intended to
use now.
It was the first time in eleven years that she had ever asked for more
than her regular yearly fortnight, but Mr. Pennypacker was not
surprised. "You've been looking awfully run-down lately. It'll do you
good to get a real rest. But it won't cost you all _that_! Where are you
going? To Battle Creek?"
"I'm not going to rest," said Miss Boardman, in a queer voice. "I'm
going to work, in France."
The first among the clashing and violent ideas which this announcement
aroused in Mr. Pennypacker's mind was the instant certainty that she
could not have seen the morning paper. "Great Scotland--not much you're
not! This is no time to be taking ocean trips. The submarines have just
got one of the big ocean ships, hundreds of women and children drowned."
"I heard about that," she said, looking at him very earnestly, with a
dumb emotion struggling in her eyes. "That's why I'm going."
Something about the look in her eyes silenced the business man for a
moment. He thought uneasily that she had certainly gone a little dippy
over the war. Then he drew a long breath and started in confidently to
dissuade her.
At ten o'clock, informed that if she went she need not expect to come
back, she went out to the savings-bank, drew out her five hundred
dollars, went down to the station and bought a ticket to Washington, one
of Mr. Pennypacker's arguments having been the great difficulty of
getting a passport.
Then she went back to the boarding-house and began to pack two-thirds of
her things into her trunk, and put the other third into her satchel, all
she intended to take with her.
At noon Maggie came back from her work, found her thus, and burst into
shocked and horrified tears. At two o'clock Maggie went to find the
young reporter, and, her eyes swollen, her face between anger and alarm,
she begged him to come and "talk to Ellen. She's gone off her head."
The reporter asked what form her mania took.
"She's going to France to work for the French and Belgians as long as
her money holds out ... all the money she's saved in all her life!"
The first among the clashing ideas which this awakened in the reporter's
mind was the most heartfelt and gorgeous amusement. The idea of that
dumb, back-woods, pie-faced stenographer carrying her valuable services
to the war in Europe seemed to him the richest thing that had happened
in years! He burst into laughter. "Yes, sure I'll come and talk to her,"
he agreed. He found her lifting a tray into her trunk. "See here, Miss
Boardman," he remarked reasonably, "do you know what you need? You need
a sense of humor! You take things too much in dead earnest. The sense of
humor keeps you from doing ridiculous things, don't you know it does?"
Ellen faced him, seriously considering this. "Do you think all
ridiculous things are bad?" she asked him, not as an argument, but as a
genuine question.
He evaded this and went on. "Just look at yourself now ... just look at
what you're planning to do. Here is the biggest war in the history of
the world; all the great nations involved; millions and millions of
dollars being poured out; the United States sending hundreds and
thousands of packages and hospital supplies by the million; and nurses
and doctors and Lord knows how many trained people ... and, look! who
comes here?--a stenographer from Walker and Pennypacker's, in
Marshallton, Kansas, setting out to the war!"
Ellen looked long at this picture of herself, and while she considered
it the young man looked long at her. As he looked, he stopped laughing.
She said finally, very simply, in a declarative sentence devoid of any
but its obvious meaning, "No, I can't see that that is so very funny."
At six o'clock that evening she was boarding the train for Washington,
her cousin Maggie weeping by her side, Mrs. Wilson herself escorting
her, very much excited by the momentousness of the event taking place
under her roof, her satchel carried by none other than the young
reporter, who, oddly enough, was not laughing at all. He bought her a
box of chocolates and a magazine, and shook hands with her vigorously as
the train started to pull out of the station. He heard himself saying,
"Say, Miss Boardman, if you see anything for me to do over there, you
might let me know," and found that he must run to get himself off the
train before it carried him away from Marshallton altogether.
A fortnight from that day (passports were not so difficult to get in
those distant days when war-relief work was the eccentricity of only an
occasional individual) she was lying in her second-class cabin, as the
steamer rolled in the Atlantic swells beyond Sandy Hook. She was
horribly seasick, but her plans were all quite clear. Of course she
belonged to the Young Women's Christian Association in Marshallton, so
she knew all about it. At Washington she had found shelter at the
Y.W.C.A. quarters. In New York she had done the same thing, and when she
arrived in Paris (if she ever did) she could of course go there to stay.
Her roommate, a very sophisticated, much-traveled art student, was
immensely amused by the artlessness of this plan. "I've got the _dernier
cri_ in greenhorns in my cabin," she told her group on deck. "She's
expecting to find a Y.W.C.A. in _Paris_!"
But the wisdom of the simple was justified once more. There was a
Y.W.C.A. in Paris, run by an energetic, well-informed American spinster.
Ellen crawled into the rather hard bed in the very small room (the
cheapest offered her) and slept twelve hours at a stretch, utterly worn
out with the devastating excitement of her first travels in a foreign
land. Then she rose up, comparatively refreshed, and with her foolish,
ignorant simplicity inquired where in Paris her services could be of
use. The energetic woman managing the Y.W.C.A. looked at her very
dubiously.
"Well, there might be something for you over on the rue Pharaon, number
27. I hear there's a bunch of society dames trying to get up a
_vestiaire_ for refugees, there."
As Ellen noted down the address she said warningly, her eyes running
over Ellen's worn blue serge suit: "They don't pay anything. It's work
for volunteers, you know."
Ellen was astonished that any one should think of getting pay for work
done in France. "Oh, gracious, no!" she said, turning away.
The directress of the Y.W.C.A. murmured to herself: "Well, you certainly
never can tell by _looks_!"
At the rue Pharaon, number 27, Ellen was motioned across a stony gray
courtyard littered with wooden packing-cases, into an immense, draughty
dark room, that looked as though it might have been originally the coach
and harness-room of a big stable. This also was strewed and heaped with
packing-cases in indescribable confusion, some opened and disgorging
innumerable garments of all colors and materials, others still tightly
nailed up. A couple of elderly workmen in blouses were opening one of
these. Before others knelt or stood distracted-looking, elegantly
dressed women, their arms full of parti-colored bundles, their eyes full
of confusion. In one corner, on a bench, sat a row of wretchedly poor
women and white-faced, silent children, the latter shod more miserably
than the poorest negro child in Marshallton. Against a packing-case near
the entrance leaned a beautifully dressed, handsome, middle-aged woman,
a hammer in one hand. Before her at ease stood a pretty girl, the
fineness of whose tightly drawn silk stockings, the perfection of whose
gleaming coiffure, the exquisite hang and fit of whose silken dress
filled Ellen Boardman with awe. In an instant her own stout cotton hose
hung wrinkled about her ankles, she felt on her neck every stringy wisp
of her badly dressed hair, the dip of her skirt at the back was a
physical discomfort. The older woman was speaking. Ellen could not help
overhearing. She said forcibly: "No, Miss Parton, you will not come in
contact with a single heroic poilu here. We have nothing to offer you
but hard, uninteresting work for the benefit of ungrateful,
uninteresting refugee women, many of whom will try to cheat and get
double their share. You will not lay your hand on a single fevered
masculine brow...." She broke off, made an effort for self-control and
went on with a resolutely reasonable air: "You'd better go out to the
hospital at Neuilly. You can wear a uniform there from the first day,
and be in contact with the men. I wouldn't have bothered you to come
here, except that you wrote from Detroit that you would be willing to do
_any_thing, scrub floors or wash dishes."
The other received all this with the indestructible good humor of a girl
who knows herself very pretty and as well dressed as any one in the
world. "I know I did, Mrs. Putnam," she said, amused at her own
absurdity. "But now I'm here I'd be _too_ disappointed to go back if I
hadn't been working for the soldiers. All the girls expect me to have
stories about the work, you know. And I can't stay very long, only four
months, because my coming-out party is in October. I guess I _will_ go
to Neuilly. They take you for three months there, you know." She smiled
pleasantly, turned with athletic grace and picked her way among the
packing-cases back to the door.
Ellen advanced in her turn.
"Well?" said the middle-aged woman, rather grimly. Her intelligent eyes
took in relentlessly every detail of Ellen's costume and Ellen felt them
at their work.
"I came to see if I couldn't help," said Ellen.
"Don't you want direct contact with the wounded soldiers?" asked the
older woman ironically.
"No," said Ellen with her habitual simplicity. "I wouldn't know how to
do anything for them. I'm not a nurse."
"You don't suppose _that's_ any obstacle!" ejaculated the other woman.
"But I never had _any_thing to do with sick people," said Ellen. "I'm
the office-manager of a big hardware firm in Kansas."
Mrs. Putnam gasped like a drowning person coming to the surface. "You
_are_!" she cried. "You don't happen to know short-hand, do you?"
"Gracious! of course I know short-hand!" cried Ellen, her astonishment
proving her competence.
Mrs. Putnam laid down her hammer and drew another long breath. "How much
time can you give us?" she asked. "Two afternoons a week? Three?"
"Oh, _my_!" said Ellen, "I can give you all my time, from eight in the
morning till six at night. That's what I came for."
Mrs. Putnam looked at her a moment as though to assure herself that she
was not dreaming, and then, seizing her by the arm, she propelled her
rapidly towards the back of the room, and through a small door into a
dingy little room with two desks in it. Among the heaped-up papers on
one of these a blond young woman with inky fingers sought wildly
something which she did not find. She said without looking up: "Oh, Aunt
Maria, I've just discovered that that shipment of clothes from
Louisville got acknowledged to the people in Seattle! And I can't find
that letter from the woman in Indianapolis who offered to send
children's shirts from her husband's factory. You said you laid it on
your desk, last night, but I _cannot_ find it. And do you remember what
you wrote Mrs. Worthington? Did you say anything about the shoes?"
Ellen heard this but dimly, her gaze fixed on the confusion of the desks
which made her physically dizzy to contemplate. Never had she dreamed
that papers, sacred records of fact, could be so maltreated. In a reflex
response to the last question of the lovely, distressed young lady she
said: "Why don't you look at the carbon copy of the letter to Mrs.
Worthington?"
"_Copy!_" cried the young lady, aghast. "Why, we don't begin to have
time to write the letters _once_, let alone _copy_ them!"
Ellen gazed horrified into an abyss of ignorance which went beyond her
utmost imaginings. She said feebly, "If you kept your letters in a
letter-file, you wouldn't ever lose them."
"There," said Mrs. Putnam, in the tone of one unexpectedly upheld in a
rather bizarre opinion, "I've been saying all the time we ought to have
a letter-file. But do you suppose you could _buy_ one in Paris?" She
spoke dubiously from the point of view of one who had bought nothing but
gloves and laces and old prints in Paris.
Ellen answered with the certainty of one who had found the Y.W.C.A. in
Paris: "I'm sure you can. Why, they could not do business a _minute_
without letter-files."
Mrs. Putnam sank into a chair with a sigh of bewilderment and fatigue,
and showed herself to be as truly a superior person as she looked by
making the following speech to the newcomer: "The truth is, Miss ..."
"Boardman," supplied Ellen.