beyond us, something we ought never to have undertaken. But we didn't
know we were undertaking it, you see. And now that it is begun, it must
not fail. All the wonderful American good-will which has materialized in
that room full of packing-cases must not be wasted, must get to the
people who need it so direly. It began this way. We had no notion that
we would have so great an affair to direct. My niece and I were living
here when the war broke out. Of course we gave all our own clothes we
could spare and all the money we could for the refugees. Then we wrote
home to our American friends. One of my letters was published by chance
in a New York paper and copied in a number of others. Everybody who
happened to know my name"--(Ellen heard afterwards that she was of the
holy of holies of New England families)--"began sending me money and
boxes of clothing. It all arrived so suddenly, so unexpectedly. We had
to rent this place to put the things in. The refugees came in swarms. We
found ourselves overwhelmed. It is impossible to find a single
English-speaking stenographer who is not already more than overworked.
The only help we get is from volunteers, a good many of them American
society girls like that one you ..." she paused to invent a sufficiently
savage characterization and hesitated to pronounce it. "Well, most of
them are not quite so absurd as that. But none of them know any more
than we do about keeping accounts, letters ..."
Ellen broke in: "How do you keep your accounts, anyhow? Bound ledger, or
the loose-leaf system?"
They stared. "I have been careful to set down everything I could
_remember_ in a little note-book," said Mrs. Putnam.
Ellen looked about for a chair and sat down on it hastily. When she
could speak again, after a moment of silent collecting of her forces she
said: "Well, I guess the first thing to do is to get a letter-file. I
don't know any French, so I probably couldn't get it. If one of you
could go ..."
The pretty young lady sprang for her hat. "I'll go! I'll go, Auntie."
"And," continued Ellen, "you can't do anything till you keep copies of
your letters and you can't make copies unless you have a typewriter.
Don't you suppose you could rent one?"
"I'll rent one before I come back," said Eleanor, who evidently lacked
neither energy nor good-will. She said to Mrs. Putnam: "I'm going,
instead of you, so that you can superintend opening those boxes. They
are making a most horrible mess of it, I know."
"Before a single one is opened, you ought to take down the name and
address of the sender, and then note the contents," said Ellen, speaking
with authority. "A card-catalogue would be a good system for keeping
that record, I should think, with dates of the arrival of the cases. And
why couldn't you keep track of your refugees that way, too? A card for
each family, with a record on it of the number in the family and of
everything given. You could refer to it in a moment, and carry it out to
the room where the refugees are received."
They gazed at her plain, sallow countenance in rapt admiration.
"Eleanor," said Mrs. Putnam, "bring back cards for a card-catalogue,
hundreds of cards, thousands of cards." She addressed Ellen with a
respect which did honor to her native intelligence. "Miss Boardman,
wouldn't you better take off your hat? Couldn't you work more at your
ease? You could hang your things here." With one sweep of her white,
well-cared-for hand she snatched her own Parisian habiliments from the
hanger and hook, and installed there the Marshallton wraps of Ellen
Boardman. She set her down in front of the desk; she put in her hands
the ridiculous little Russia leather-covered note-book of the
"accounts"; she opened drawer after drawer crammed with letters; and
with a happy sigh she went out to the room of the packing-cases, closing
the door gently behind her, that she might not disturb the
high-priestess of business-management who already bent over those
abominably mis-used records, her eyes gleaming with the sacred fire of
system.
There is practically nothing more to record about the four months spent
by Ellen Boardman as far as her work at the _vestiaire_ was concerned.
Every day she arrived at number 27 rue Pharaon at eight o'clock and put
in a good hour of quiet work before any of the more or less irregular
volunteer ladies appeared. She worked there till noon, returned to the
Y.W.C.A., lunched, was in the office again by one o'clock, had another
hour of forceful concentration before any of the cosmopolitan great
ladies finished their lengthy _dejeuners_, and she stayed there until
six in the evening, when every one else had gone. She realized that her
effort must be not only to create a rational system of records and
accounts and correspondence which she herself could manage, but a
fool-proof one which could be left in the hands of the elegant ladies
who would remain in Paris after she had returned to Kansas.
And yet, not so fool-proof as she had thought at first. She was
agreeably surprised to find both Mrs. Putnam and her pretty niece
perfectly capable of understanding a system once it was invented, set in
working order, and explained to them. She came to understand that what,
on her first encounter with them, she had naturally enough taken for
congenital imbecility, was merely the result of an ignorance and an
inexperience which remained to the end astounding to her. Their
good-will was as great as their native capacity. Eleanor set herself
resolutely, if very awkwardly, to learn the use of the typewriter. Mrs.
Putnam even developed the greatest interest in the ingenious methods of
corraling and marshaling information and facts which were second nature
to the business-woman. "I never saw anything more fascinating!" she
cried the day when Ellen explained to her the workings of a system for
cross-indexing the card-catalogues of refugees already aided. "How _do_
you think of such things?"
Ellen did not explain that she generally thought of them in the two or
three extra hours of work she put in every day, while Mrs. Putnam ate
elaborate food.
It soon became apparent that there had been much "repeating" among the
refugees. The number possible to clothe grew rapidly, far beyond what
the "office force" could manage to investigate. Ellen set her face
against miscellaneous giving without knowledge of conditions. She
devised a system of visiting inspectors which kept track of all the
families in their rapidly growing list. She even made out a sort of
time-card for the visiting ladies which enabled the office to keep some
track of what they did, and yet did not ruffle their leisure-class
dignity ... and this was really an achievement. She suggested, made out,
and had printed an orderly report of what they had done, what money had
come in, how it had been spent, what clothes had been given and how
distributed, the number of people aided, the most pressing needs. This
she had put in every letter sent to America. The result was enough to
justify Mrs. Putnam's naive astonishment and admiration of her brilliant
idea. Packing-cases and checks flowed in by every American steamer.
Ellen's various accounting systems and card-catalogues responded with
elastic ease to the increased volume of facts, as she of course expected
them to; but Mrs. Putnam could never be done marveling at the cool
certainty with which all this immense increase was handled. She had a
shudder as she thought of what would have happened if Miss Boardman had
not dropped down from heaven upon them. Dining out, of an evening, she
spent much time expatiating on the astonishing virtues of one of her
volunteers.
Ellen conceived a considerable regard for Mrs. Putnam, but she did not
talk of her in dining out, because she never dined anywhere. She left
the "office" at six o'clock and proceeded to a nearby bakery where she
bought four sizable rolls. An apple cart supplied a couple of apples,
and even her ignorance of French was not too great an obstacle to the
purchase of some cakes of sweet chocolate. With these decently hidden in
a small black hand-bag, she proceeded to the waiting-room of the Gare de
l'Est where, like any traveler waiting for his train she ate her frugal
meal; ate as much of it, that is, as a painful tightness in her throat
would let her. For the Gare de l'Est was where the majority of French
soldiers took their trains to go back to the front after their
occasional week's furlough with their families.
No words of mine can convey any impression of what she saw there. No one
who has not seen the Gare de l'Est night after night can ever imagine
the sum of stifled human sorrow which filled it thickly, like a dreadful
incense of pain going up before some cruel god. It was there that the
mothers, the wives, the sweethearts, the sisters, the children brought
their priceless all and once more laid it on the altar. It was there
that those horrible silent farewells were said, the more unendurable
because they were repeated and repeated till human nature reeled under
the burden laid on it by the will. The great court outside, the noisy
echoing waiting-room, the inner platform which was the uttermost limit
for those accompanying the soldiers returning to hell,--they were not
only always filled with living hearts broken on the wheel, but they were
thronged with ghosts, ghosts of those whose farewell kiss had really
been the last, with ghosts of those who had watched the dear face out of
sight and who were never to see it again. Those last straining, wordless
embraces, those last, hot, silent kisses, the last touch of the little
child's hand on the father's cheek which it was never to touch again ...
the nightmare place reeked of them!
The stenographer from Kansas had found it as simply as she had done
everything else. "Which station do the families go to say good-bye to
their soldiers?" she had asked, explaining apologetically that she
thought maybe if she went there too she could help sometimes; there
might be a heavy baby to carry, or somebody who had lost his ticket, or
somebody who hadn't any lunch for the train.
After the first evening spent there, she had shivered and wept all night
in her bed; but she had gone back the next evening, with the money she
saved by eating bread and apples for her dinner; for of course the sweet
chocolate was for the soldiers. She sat there, armed with nothing but
her immense ignorance, her immense sympathy. On that second evening she
summoned enough courage to give some chocolate to an elderly shabby
soldier, taking the train sadly, quite alone; and again to a white-faced
young lad accompanied by his bent, poorly dressed grandmother. What
happened in both those cases sent her back to the Y.W.C.A. to make up
laboriously from her little pocket French dictionary and to learn by
heart this sentence: "I am sorry that I cannot understand French. I am
an American." Thereafter the surprised and extremely articulate Gallic
gratitude which greeted her timid overtures, did not leave her so
helplessly swamped in confusion. She stammered out her little phrase
with a shy, embarrassed smile and withdrew as soon as possible from the
hearty handshake which was nearly always the substitute offered for the
unintelligible thanks. How many such handshakes she had! Sometimes as
she watched her right hand, tapping on the typewriter, she thought:
"Those hands which it has touched, they may be dead now. They were
heroes' hands." She looked at her own with awe, because it had touched
them.
Once her little phrase brought out an unexpected response from a
rough-looking man who sat beside her on the bench waiting for his train,
his eyes fixed gloomily on his great soldier's shoes. She offered him,
shame-facedly, a little sewing-kit which she herself had manufactured, a
pad of writing-paper and some envelopes. He started, came out of his
bitter brooding, looked at her astonished, and, as they all did without
exception, read in her plain, earnest face what she was. He touched his
battered trench helmet in a sketched salute and thanked her. She
answered as usual that she was sorry she could not understand French,
being an American. To her amazement he answered in fluent English, with
an unmistakable New York twang: "Oh, you are, are you? Well, so'm I.
Brought up there from the time I was a kid. But all my folks are French
and my wife's French and I couldn't give the old country the go-by when
trouble came."
In the conversation which followed Ellen learned that his wife was
expecting their first child in a few weeks ... "that's why she didn't
come to see me off. She said it would just about kill her to watch me
getting on the train ... and anyhow she's not fit to walk. Maybe you
think it's easy to leave her all alone ... the poor kid!" The tears
rose frankly to his eyes. He blew his nose.
"Maybe I could do something for her," suggested Ellen, her heart beating
fast at the idea.
"Gee! Yes! If you'd go to see her! She talks a little English!" he
cried. He gave her the name and address, and when that poilu went back
to the front it was Ellen Boardman from Marshallton, Kansas, who walked
with him to the gate, who shook hands with him, who waved him a last
salute as he boarded his train.
The next night she did not go to the station. She went to see the wife.
The night after that she was sewing on a baby's wrapper as she sat in
the Gare de l'Est, turning her eyes away in shame from the intolerable
sorrow of those with families, watching for those occasional solitary or
very poor ones whom alone she ventured to approach with her timidly
proffered tokens of sympathy.
At the Y.W.C.A. opinions varied about her. She was patently to every eye
respectable to her last drop of pale blood. And yet _was_ it quite
respectable to go offering chocolate and writing-paper to soldiers you'd
never seen before? Everybody knew what soldiers were! Some one finally
decided smartly that her hat was a sufficient protection. It is true
that her hat was not becoming, but I do not think it was what saved her
from misunderstanding.
She did not always go to the Gare de l'Est every evening now. Sometimes
she spent them in the little dormer-windowed room where the wife of the
New York poilu waited for her baby. Several evenings she spent chasing
elusive information from the American Ambulance Corps as to exactly the
conditions in which a young man without money could come to drive an
ambulance in France ... the young man without money being of course the
reporter on the Marshallton _Herald_.
It chanced to be on one of the evenings when she was with the young wife
that the need came, that she went flying to get the mid-wife. She sat on
the stairs outside, after this, till nearly morning, shaken to her soul
by the cries within. When it was quiet, when the mid-wife let her in to
see the baby, she took the little new citizen of the Republic in her
arms, tears of mingled thanksgiving and dreadful fear raining down her
face, because another man-child had been born into the world. Would _he_
grow up only to say farewell at the Gare de l'Est? Oh, she was not sorry
that she had come to France to help in that war. She understood now, she
understood.
It was Ellen who wrote to the father the letter announcing the birth of
a child which gave him the right to another precious short furlough. It
was Ellen who went down to the Gare de l'Est, this time to the joyful
wait on the muddy street outside the side door from which the returning
_permissionnaires_ issued forth, caked with mud to their eyes. It was
Ellen who had never before "been kissed by a man" who was caught in a
pair of dingy, horizon-blue arms and soundly saluted on each sallow
cheek by the exultant father. It was Ellen who was made as much of a
godmother as her Protestant affiliations permitted ... and oh, it was
Ellen who made the fourth at the end of the furlough when (the first
time the new mother had left her room) they went back to the Gare de
l'Est. At the last it was Ellen who held the sleeping baby when the
husband took his wife in that long, bitter embrace; it was Ellen who was
not surprised or hurt that he turned away without a word to her ... she
understood that ... it was Ellen whose arm was around the trembling
young wife as they stood, their faces pressed against the barrier to see
him for the last time; it was Ellen who went back with her to the silent
desolation of the little room, who put the baby into the slackly hanging
arms, and watched, her eyes burning with unshed tears, those arms close
about the little new inheritor of humanity's woes....
* * * * *
Four months from the time she landed in Paris her money was almost gone
and she was quitting the city with barely enough in her pocket to take
her back to Marshallton. As simply as she had come to Paris, she now
went home. She _belonged_ to Marshallton. It was a very good thing for
Marshallton that she did.
She gave fifty dollars to the mother of baby Jacques (that was why she
had so very little left) and she promised to send her ten dollars every
month as soon as she herself should be again a wage-earner. Mrs. Putnam
and her niece, inconsolable at her loss, went down to the Gare du Quai
d'Orsay to see her off, looking more in keeping with the elegant
travelers starting for the Midi, than Ellen did. Her place, after all,
had been at the Gare de l'Est. As they shook hands warmly with her, they
gave her a beautiful bouquet, the evident cost of which stabbed her to
the heart. What she could have done with that money!
"You have simply transformed the _vestiaire_, Miss Boardman," said Mrs.
Putnam with generous but by no means exaggerating ardor. "It would
certainly have sunk under the waves if you hadn't come to the rescue. I
wish you _could_ have stayed, but thanks to your teaching we'll be able
to manage anything now."
After the train had moved off, Mrs. Putnam said to her niece in a
shocked voice: "Third class! That long trip to Bordeaux! She'll die of
fatigue. You don't suppose she is going back because she didn't have
_money_ enough to stay! Why, I would have paid anything to keep her."
The belated nature of this reflection shows that Ellen's teachings had
never gone more than skin deep and that there was still something
lacking in Mrs. Putnam's grasp on the realities of contemporary life.
* * * * *
Ellen was again too horribly seasick to suffer much apprehension about
submarines. This time she had as cabin-mate in the unventilated
second-class cabin the "companion" of a great lady traveling of course
in a suite in first-class. This great personage, when informed by her
satellites' nimble and malicious tongues of Ellen's personality and
recent errand in France, remarked with authority to the group of people
about her at dinner, embarking upon the game which was the seventh
course of the meal: "I disapprove wholly of these foolish American
volunteers ... ignorant, awkward, provincial boors, for the most part,
knowing nothing of all the exquisite old traditions of France, who
thrust themselves forward. They make America a laughing-stock."
Luckily, Ellen, pecking feebly at the chilly boiled potato brought her
by an impatient stewardess, could not know this characterization.
* * * * *
She arrived in Marshallton, and was astonished to find herself a
personage. Her departure had made her much more a figure in the town
life than she had ever been when she was still walking its streets. The
day after her departure the young reporter had written her up in the
_Herald_ in a lengthy paragraph, and not a humorous one either. The
Sunday which she passed on the ocean after she left New York Mr.
Wentworth in one of his prayers implored the Divine blessing on "one of
our number who has left home and safety to fulfil a high moral
obligation and who even now is risking death in the pursuance of her
duty as she conceives it." Every one knew that he meant Ellen Boardman,
about whom they had all read in the _Herald_. Mr. Pennypacker took, then
and there, a decision which inexplicably lightened his heart. Being a
good business-man, he did not keep it to himself, but allowed it to leak
out the next time the reporter from the _Herald_ dropped around for
chance items of news. The reporter made the most of it, and Marshallton,
already spending much of its time in discussing Ellen, read that "Mr.
John S. Pennypacker, in view of the high humanitarian principles
animating Miss Boardman in quitting his employ, has decided not to fill
her position but to keep it open for her on her return from her errand
of mercy to those in foreign parts stricken by the awful war now
devastating Europe."
Then Ellen's letters began to arrive, mostly to Maggie, who read them
aloud to the deeply interested boarding-house circle. The members of
this, basking in reflected importance, repeated their contents to every
one who would listen. In addition the young reporter published extracts
from them in the _Herald_, editing them artfully, choosing the rare
plums of anecdote or description in Ellen's arid epistolary style. When
her letter to him came, he was plunged into despair because she had
learned that he would have to pay part of his expenses if he drove an
ambulance on the French front. By that time his sense of humor was in
such total eclipse that he saw nothing ridiculous in the fact that he
could not breathe freely another hour in the easy good-cheer of his
carefree life. He revolved one scheme after another for getting money;
and in the meantime let no week go by without giving some news from
their "heroic fellow-townswoman in France." Highland Springs, the
traditional rival and enemy of Marshallton, felt outraged by the tone of
proprietorship with which Marshallton people bragged of their delegate
in France.
So it happened that when Ellen, fearfully tired, fearfully dusty after
the long ride in the day-coach, and fearfully shabby in exactly the same
clothes she had worn away, stepped wearily off the train at the
well-remembered little wooden station, she found not only Maggie, to
whom she had telegraphed from New York, but a large group of other
people advancing upon her with outstretched hands, crowding around her
with more respectful consideration than she had ever dreamed of seeing
addressed to her obscure person. She was too tired, too deeply moved to
find herself at home again, too confused, to recognize them all. Indeed
a number of them knew her only by her fame since her departure. Ellen
made out Maggie, who embraced her, weeping as loudly as when she had
gone away; she saw Mrs. Wilson who kissed her very hard and said she was
proud to know her; she saw with astonishment that Mr. Pennypacker
himself had left business in office hours! He shook her hand with energy
and said: "Well, Miss Boardman, very glad to see you safe back. We'll be
expecting you back at the old stand just as soon as you've rested up
from the trip." The intention of the poilu who had taken her in his arms
and kissed her, had not been more cordial. Ellen knew this and was
touched to tears.
There was the reporter from the _Herald_, too, she saw him dimly through
the mist before her eyes, as he carried the satchel, the same he had
carried five months before with the same things in it. And as they put
her in the "hack" (she had never ridden in the hack before) there was
Mr. Wentworth, the young minister, who leaned through the window and
said earnestly: "I am counting on you to speak to our people in the
church parlors. You must tell us about things over there."
* * * * *
Well, she did speak to them! She was not the same person, you see, she
had been before she had spent those evenings in the Gare de l'Est. She
wanted them to know about what she had seen, and because there was no
one else to tell them, she rose up in her shabby suit and told them
herself. The first thing that came into her mind as she stood before
them, her heart suffocating her, her knees shaking under her, was the
strangeness of seeing so many able-bodied men not in uniform, and so
many women not in mourning. She told them this as a beginning and got
their startled attention at once, the men vaguely uneasy, the women
divining with frightened sympathy what it meant to see all women in
black.