endure, but before I could put this idea into words we were deep in a
discussion of ways and means, what clothes to wear, whether cameras
would be permitted, what to do about food. The date for the expedition
was set. My call was over. Dazed, their check still clutched tightly in
my hand, I was emerging from the hotel entrance into the street. I think
I must have staggered a little as I walked, but the resplendent
doorkeeper did not seem to notice. He was probably quite used to this
phenomenon as a feature of the departure of visitors to the Halls.
* * * * *
This is not the place to tell you of that phantasmagoric trip to the
front, the nightmare of the dynamited villages, the carefully and
expertly murdered fruit-trees and vines, the ravaged gardens and fields,
the grimly enduring women and old men who toiled feebly with an
invincible determination to bring a beginning of order out of the
hideous chaos which had been their homes. For me the recollection of all
that horror of desolation is shot through with the incredible presence
of the Halls, resplendent in health and good looks and wealth and good
will, brightly interested in everything, cut off by their untouched
prosperity from any grinding comprehension of what they saw, but somehow
not needing to be ground into comprehension like the rest of us, somehow
not needing to put on the sackcloth of bitterness and passion in order
to feel fellowship.
They kept vaguely reminding me of something ... and on the last night
out I learned what it was.
Everywhere the gesture was the same. The car rolled into a new set of
ruins, as like the ones we had just left as one part of hell must be
like another. Mrs. Hall always began at once to take photographs,
methodically noting down the name of the village which had stood there.
Mr. Hall got out from his pocket the wallet containing more cash than I
had ever seen together in my life, and I went off with the French
officer escorting me to find the mayor of the ruined town. For the most
part, the real mayor had been carried off by the Germans for forced
labor, and we found some substitute, chosen by the remnant of the
citizens left. Usually it was a white-haired man, once it was a woman,
lean, energetic, stern, who had lost one eye through the explosion of a
dynamite petard. Always we found a worker at his work ... ah, the noble
procession of valiant old men we saw in their shirt-sleeves, in worn,
faded, patched overalls, hammer or mason's trowel in their knotted
hands, sweating and toiling among the ruins.
The same thing always happened. I explained the Halls' mission. The
mayor opposed to my account the prompt defense of a total incredulity.
Things didn't happen that way, he always explained to me, as we walked
towards the car, he wiping his hands on his overalls. He told me that
nobody gave help at once, that people came and looked and exclaimed and
said how awful and said they would write articles, and others came and
took notes and said they would report to a committee in Paris, and
others said that if a report were written by the mayor and viseed by the
_sous-prefet_ and signed by the _Depute_ and sent through the Ministry
of the Interior ... by this time we were beside the car, where the
mayor's eyes were always instantly fascinated by Mrs. Hall's tall
beauty.
Mr. Hall shook him by the hand and left in it big, crisp, crackling
French banknotes, at which the old man gazed hypnotized, while I tried
to express to him something of the kindliness in the hearts of the two
shining messengers from another world. During this time Mrs. Hall always
took our photographs again.
Then we shook hands all around. The mayor tried convulsively to express
his thanks, and failed. The automobile moved forward. We were off to a
repetition of the scene.
When our time-limit was up, we scurried back towards Paris in order to
reach the city before the hour set in our _sauf-conduits_. The car
rushed forward over the long, level road, dimly shining in the
starlight, the flanking poplars shadowy, the cold, pure air blowing hard
in our faces. Mrs. Hall and I were in the tonneau, looking up at the
stars, incredibly steady above our world of meaningless misery. Then it
was that I learned of what they had reminded me. Mrs. Hall said to me,
evidently thinking it the simplest and most matter-of-fact explanation
of their being in France, of their life there, "You see, we haven't been
married so very long, only three months ago. And we were awfully happy
to be married. Of course all newly married folks are, but we had special
reasons. And we wanted to have a very special kind of honeymoon, the
nicest kind anybody ever had. It seemed silly to go to Florida, or to
the Yellowstone, or yachting, or to Hawaii, or to Japan for
cherry-blossom time, or any of the things you usually do. We'd done all
those anyhow, but more than that, when you read the newspapers about the
war and think that our country isn't taking any part in it you don't get
much good out of cherry-blossoms or surf-riding, do you? We wanted to do
what would give us the very best time we ever had, to celebrate our
being married. That's what honeymoons are for, of course. And we decided
that what we would like best, seeing that our Government isn't doing
anything, would be to come to France and help out. So we did."
She was silent for a moment, while I slowly took in the significance of
what she had said. Then she went on: "And we like it even better than we
thought. We are happier even than we expected. It has been perfectly,
perfectly lovely."
Then I knew of what they had reminded me. They had reminded me of
America, they _were_ America incarnate, one side of her, the dear,
tender-hearted, uncomprehending America which did not need to understand
the dark old secrets of hate and misery in order to stretch out her
generous hand and ease her too happy heart by the making of many gifts.
Of course, such an extraordinary phenomenon did not go unheeded by the
sharp eyes of the elegant and cosmopolitan circle in Paris war-relief
work. That circle had as well trained a predatory capacity for emptying
fat pocketbooks as the prettiest girl who ever sold ten-cent bouquets
for five dollars at a church fair. It was with something of the same
smiling security in levying philanthropic blackmail that they began to
close in on the Halls. I heard excited talk of them everywhere.
Everybody's mouth watered at the stories of their "easiness" and plots
to entrap them were laid by every cosmopolitan mondaine who now felt
about her own pet "war-work" the same competitive pride she had had (and
would have again as soon as the new fad was no longer new) for her
collection of pet dogs, or Egyptian rings.
A scouting party from another charitable institution, one of the very
"chic" _oeuvres_, nosing around our institution to make sure they were
losing no points in the game, stumbled on our new press and were as
awestruck as I had been by its costliness and speed. After this, all the
information which I had about the Halls, scanty and highly improbable as
you will see it to have been, was repeatedly pumped from me by one past
mistress after another in the art of pumping.
I became so curious as to what the reaction of the Halls to this world
would be, and as to what this world would make of the Halls, that one
afternoon I took the time off to go to one of those horribly dull
afternoon teas in which fashionably disposed charitable ladies made up
for the absence of their usual pre-war distractions. I did not see the
guests of honor at first, and stood dismally taking my tea, submerged in
the talk customary at such affairs, for the most part complaints of war
inconveniences ... the hardship it was to have so few taxis in Paris,
how inconsiderate the Government had been to forbid cakes and candy on
two days a week, how the tailors and dressmakers were profiting by the
high prices to ask preposterous ones, "even of their old clients," how
hard it was to get coal enough to have a fire in one's _cabinet de
toilette_ ... it was one of the days when we had heard of the failure of
a great French offensive, and of the terrible shortage of hospital
supplies at the front! My tea and sandwiches were ashes in my mouth!
Through the window I saw a one-armed soldier with his head in bandages
hobbling by the house, and I found myself bitterly longing for a bolt
from heaven to descend and consume the whole worthless lot of us. Then
I caught sight of the Halls.
They towered above the crowd and above the very small but very important
person who was monopolizing them, none other than the Duchesse de
Sazarat-Begonine, who was obviously engaged in opening upon them, one
after another, her redoubtable batteries of persuasion. Do not let this
casual mention of so well known a title lead you to the very erroneous
idea that I move in the aristocratic society which she adorns. Nothing
could be further from the truth. The very fact that I know the Duchesse
de Sazarat-Begonine is a startling proof of the extent to which, in the
pursuit of her war-relief work, she has wandered from her original
circle! It shows, as nothing else could, what a thorough sport she was
in the pursuit of her new game, stopping at nothing, not even at
promiscuous mingling with the obscure. She was, if you will allow me the
expression, the _as des as_ of the fashionable war-relief world in
Paris. As in the case of Guynemer, when she mounted her aerial steed in
pursuit of big cash donations to her _oeuvre_, all lesser lights
abandoned hopes for theirs.
She had so many different weapons in her arsenal that she was
irresistible; her chateau full of the memories of those distinguished
thieves, intriguers, and murderers, the illustrious ancestors of her
husband; her far-renowned collection of historic snuffboxes, her
wonderful Paris house with its rigorously select circle, to enter which
any woman there would have given her ears; her astonishing and
beautiful jewelry; the reputation of having been in her youth the _bonne
amie_ of one of the best-known of the Bourbon pretenders (or was it a
Napoleonic) ... ah, when the Duchesse started out to bring down a
wealthy philanthropist for her Home for One-armed and Tubercular
Soldiers, she never missed her aim. It was not to be doubted that people
who had succumbed without a struggle to the snuffy old parish priest
with his war-orphans, would put up no resistance to this brilliant
onslaught.
When I perceived the Halls corraled by this well-known personage, I
shamelessly moved closer so that I could overhear what was being said.
This was little enough on the part of the two Halls. Mrs. Hall smiled
silently down on her short and majestic interlocutor. Mr. Hall's
strongly marked face was inscrutable. However, the great lady was quite
used to respectful attention from those of her excompatriots with whom
she deigned to converse, and she continued to talk with her habitual
certainty of herself. At the moment when I came within earshot, she was
retailing to them exactly how many hundreds of wounded heroes had passed
through "her" hands to their eternal benefit; exactly the praises the
Minister of War had given her when her red ribbon was bestowed; exactly
how she had attacked and driven from the field a Spanish lady of wealth
who had had the presumption also to attempt to aid one-armed and
tubercular soldiers; how imitators had tried to "steal" her methods of
outdoor work for the tubercular, and how she had defeated their fell
purpose by allowing no more visitors to that institution without a card
from her personally....
At this point my attention was called away by an acquaintance who asked
me in a whisper if those people whom the Duchesse had so ruthlessly
grabbed were really the extravagantly rich and queer Americans everybody
was talking about, attached to no institution, who gave as they pleased,
dodging recognition and decorations, mavericks of the fashionable
war-relief world, breaking all the time-honored traditions of that
society.
When I could resume my eavesdropping, the Duchesse was embarked upon her
snuffboxes, graciously dropping down from the pinnacle of her lofty
exclusiveness an actual invitation to the two nobodies before her to
call on her and see that world-famed collection, comprising snuffboxes
used by the Duc de Talleyrand, the Duc de St. Simon, the Marquis de la
Rochefoucauld....
About this time I detected an inward glow in Mr. Hall's steady eyes. He
said grimly, "I don't happen to be acquainted with any of those
gentlemen, but in our country snuff-taking is accounted a rather low
form of amusing yourself."
The Duchesse was brought up short, not in the least by any intimation
that she might not be extracting her usual due of admiration, but by a
great desire to laugh at the unsophistication of the barbarians. For my
part I went warm all over with cheerfulness, and stepped forward to
present my cordial greetings to the Halls. Mrs. Hall soon fell back a
step or two with me, leaving Mr. Hall looking down severely on the
jewel-covered woman before him. There was a shade of anxiety on Mrs.
Hall's usually clear face. "You don't suppose," she murmured to me,
"that Robert will be taken in by that horrid, common old woman and give
some money to her? Men are so blind, even the best of them!"
I must have laughed out at this, for the Duchesse turned and came
towards us, carrying off Mrs. Hall the moment thereafter, with her
wonderful irresistible assurance of conferring a distinction. I said to
Mr. Hall, moved by the most genuine curiosity: "What do you think of the
celebrated Duchesse de Sazarat-Begonine? You know she is accounted
perhaps the most chic of all chic Parisiennes. Is there any other city
where a woman of her age could set the style for the most exclusive
society?"
Mr. Hall did not seem interested in the chic-ness of the great lady. He
was silent for a moment, watching over the heads of the crowd his wife
listening to the Duchesse, her kind eyes bent attentively downward. Then
he said, with decision, "If that bragging old harridan gets a cent out
of my wife, I'll ... I'll spank Margaret."
I thought then that my cup of diverted satisfaction, was quite full; but
it ran over splashingly when, half an hour later, separated by the crowd
from the Halls, I heard the Duchesse near me, announcing confidently to
a friend: "Oh, no difficulty whatever. The simplest fish who ever
swallowed down the bait in one gulp. Hooked? My dear, they are in my
basket already!"
I went away on that, full of threadbare meditations on the little child
who had been the only one to see that the Emperor had really nothing on.
* * * * *
Although, after this, our Braille printing establishment continued to
benefit by casual visits from the Halls, visits followed usually by some
sound suggestion for improvement, accompanied by a check, they were
strictly Scriptural as regards the ignorance of the right hands of the
doings of the left, and I had little idea of what were their occupations
in other directions. Once in a while they carried me off to dinner in
some famous restaurant where otherwise I would never have set foot, and
where my war-tired and gloomy spirits received a lesson in the art of
cheer. There was in those delicate and costly repasts a sort of robust
confidence in the ultimate rightness of things ... or at least I used to
have this fancy to explain to myself the renewed courage which came to
me after such evenings, and which may have been simply the result of a
really hearty meal after a good deal of penitential and meager fare.
I needed all the courage and calmness I could extract from any source
during those days, for it was at that time that my old school friend,
Marguerite Moysset, was notified that her husband was killed in a
skirmish on the Champagne front. Marguerite had already lost, almost at
the beginning of the war, her only child, a boy of nineteen. The death
of her husband left her desperately poor and inexpressibly alone. She
had not wept for her boy's death nor did she shed a tear now for her
husband whom she had almost extravagantly adored. She shut herself up in
a white, stern horror which frightened us, all her well-meaning friends
who hovered about her in those clumsy ministrations which often do more
harm than good but which nevertheless one dares not omit.
Paradoxically enough it was the much-dreaded moving out of the old
apartment, full of memories of the twenty happy years passed there, and
the moving into the two little rooms on the fifth floor of a dingy old
tenement house in a poor quarter of the city, which did more for
Marguerite than all our foolish efforts. At least it aroused her to a
sort of shocked and horrified life, and carried her out of her own
misery.
Not long after she had gone there to live I found her with four,
pale-faced, dirty little children in one of her two rooms. She was
heating water on her charcoal stove. "I'm going to give them a bath,"
she said to me, pronouncing the commonplace words with a strange wild
accent. "Do you know they have never had a bath, all over their bodies,
in their lives?" I stayed to help her, wondering at the curious
expression on her face. She was, as she had been ever since the blow had
fallen, still very white, but now that pallor was like white heat. After
the children were clean, Marguerite dressed them in coarse, clean, new
clothes, which she told me she had sold her watch to buy, "the
church-bell strikes so near that I don't need a watch any more," and
gave them each a piece of bread and jam. They took their departure then,
stricken into an astonished silence, and Marguerite turned to me with an
angry toss of her head, "Do you know what the war is?" she asked me
fiercely. "_I_ know! It is the punishment we have called down on
ourselves. I see now that the war has only intensified everything that
existed before, it has _changed_ nothing fundamentally. We were living
as hideously in a state of war before as now, except that it was not
physically bloody. There were children in this awful house then as now,
without baths, without food, without decency, while I was giving all my
energy that one little boy might have everything, everything that he
could wish."
At this I could not repress a protest, calling up the very modest
comforts of her simple home. She brushed me aside. "It was luxurious,
sinfully, wickedly luxurious to live so while other human beings were
living as they were in this house. Oh, I see it so plainly, we were all
living with all our might according to the horrible Prussian maxim that
you have a right to anything you're strong enough to keep other people
from sharing. All the Germans did was to carry it to its logical,
murdering conclusion, and show us what we really were."
I could not, Heaven knows, deny this, but I ventured a palliative
murmur. "But at least we are ashamed of it. We tried to hide it. We
never gloried in it, as the Prussians do."
"I am ashamed of it _now_," she told me somberly, "now when I have
nothing, nothing to use as help but my two hands. I am ashamed of it now
when it is too late."
The black misery on her face was such that I brought out the foolish
phrase I had been repressing all during the weeks since the news had
come: "Marguerite dearest, why do you keep such a dreadful calm?
Wouldn't it do you _good_ to cry?"
"_I?_" she said bitterly. "I haven't the right to cry! Look at my
neighbors!"
The next time I went back I found her two little rooms full of children,
three small babies on the bed, and a dozen or more of different ages
playing together, while Marguerite, in a long black apron, stirred a
soup-pot on the charcoal fire.
"Their mothers are working!" She gave me this as all-sufficient
explanation, adding: "But there are so many, many more that I can't
help! If only I had more room to take them in ... and more soup ... and
more bread! But with children it's wicked to start more than you can
carry on, and ... I've made the calculation.... I can't possibly help
any more than there are here!"
I noticed that the feverish, wild look had gone from her eyes, that she
looked steadied--infinitely tragic--but quiet, purposeful. The children
had brought her back into real life again.
On a sudden impulse I left her, and went to telephone the Halls, asking
them to meet me near there. While I waited for them, I found myself very
much agitated, my head whirling with possibilities for Marguerite's
future, my legs a little unsteady under me. I revolved the best way to
"approach" them, the most tactful manner of presenting the matter to
them; I brought to mind all the painfully acquired war-relief lore about
"managing" people with money, I tried to recall what I knew of them so
that I might guess at some weakness of theirs to exploit. Perhaps I
could promise to get recognition for them from the French Ministry of
the Interior ... what _was_ the exact name of that medal they give to
foreign philanthropists, of course not the red ribbon, but still....
In the midst of these cheap calculations, their taxi drove up to the
curb, they stepped out, and I perceived that I had forgotten what they
were. It was not surprising. I lived in a world where there were few
reminders of such as they. Mr. Hall looked at me out of his honest eyes,
and said with his honest American accent, "Well, what's doing?" and I
found myself without preamble giving them the facts, naked facts,
without an adjective to qualify them, without a single picturesque
arrangement. I did not even make an appeal to them. I simply told them
all that had happened since the death of Marguerite's husband. I even
hid nothing of what Marguerite had said which might seem a criticism of
their way of life and of mine. I told them all. When I finished, they
glanced at each other, their good look of deep understanding which, in
the cold, ill-smelling city street was like a gust of warm,
country-scented air across my face. Mrs. Hall said, "I wonder if she'd
mind our going to see her?" Mr. Hall qualified: "Of course if you think
best not to ... we're not acquainted with her. We don't want to seem to
butt in."
We found her giving those little people their noonday meal, hot soup and
bread. Having only her small kitchen table and four bowls, the children
came in relays. The fear of those who waited, lest the soup should give
out before their turn, was painful to see. Marguerite glanced at my
companions, surprised, and gave me a questioning, half-challenging look.
The Halls stood quietly in one corner of the dark little kitchen and
watched the white-faced clean little mites, all their ineffably clear
child's eyes turned on the tall, pale foster-mother, bending over them,
serving them, stooping to catch a timidly murmured request, smoothing a
little cheek, tying and untying their bibs, wiping their lips ... every
gesture pregnant with passionate motherliness. To me she wore the look
of a mother who returns to her brood after an absence and, finding them
ill-cared for and unhappy, strives burningly and remorsefully to give
them their lost due of love and care.
With the last relay of four occurred a tragedy. Scrape as she might,
Marguerite could not bring out of the kettle more than enough for three
bowls. For a moment, there was silent consternation. Then, sighing,
without any suggestion from Marguerite, these children of the poor,
began dipping from their portions into the empty bowl. There was on
their thin little faces a patient and unsurprised resignation. When all
the bowls were equally full, they set to eagerly, a natural childlike
greediness coming at last into their eyes. I glanced at Mr. Hall and saw
that his lips were moving as though in some exclamation, but I could not
catch what it was.
When the last drop had been scraped up from the last bowl and
Marguerite's long white fingers were once more immersed in dishwater, I
ventured to bring my visitors to her and introduce them. They asked a
few questions which Marguerite answered in her careful book-English,
astonished and a little nettled, I could see by their directness and
lack of ceremony.
Yes, she said, turning a second glance of interrogation on me ... who
_were_ these strangers in her house?... yes, there were other lodgings
to be had in the house where she could care for more children, the whole
top floor was a big, deserted factory loft with skylights letting in the
sun and with windows opening on a flat-roof terrace where the children
could play. But of course that was out of the question. The rent was
very high, it would cost a great deal to heat the room, and where could
she get money to feed any more?... "Even with the number I have, you
saw...."
"Yes," they said hastily, they had seen! I took it from their accent
that they would not soon forget what they had seen.