nodded, cleared his throat, and took out his wallet, that famous wallet!
I remember exactly what he said, it being of the most masterly brevity,
and I mean to set it down textually as he said it. What I cannot set
down is the inimitable, straight, clear gaze out of his eyes, as he
looked at Marguerite, everything but their common humanity forgotten. He
said: "Madame, my wife and I want to help you help these children. I am
going to leave five thousand francs with you to-day, for you to rent
anything, buy anything, do anything you think best for the children. And
there will always be plenty more where that came from, for you to go
on."
Having said all that he had to say, he was silent, laying down on the
table with his card, the five big banknotes, and putting on them one of
the children's soup-bowls. I noted especially the gentleness with which
he touched the coarse, yellow earthenware, as though it were of great
value. I wondered intensely how Marguerite could thank them. I did not
venture to look at her face.
Marguerite did not thank them at all. She stood perfectly motionless for
a moment, and then, putting her hands over her face, she broke into a
storm of loud sobs. The tears ran down between her thin fingers and
fell on the coarse yellow bowl and on the banknotes....
Mrs. Hall pulled at my arm. Mr. Hall opened the door, and I found myself
stumbling down the steep, dark stairs, holding desperately to the greasy
railing. We groped our way down, step by step, in darkness and in
silence, until, nearly at the bottom, I called back, with a quavering
attempt at a jest, "But how about the necessity of a sound business
basis?"
From the fetid darkness above me, dropped down Mr. Hall's clarion
American accent, "Oh, damn a sound business basis!"
I found myself obliged to wink back the tears which came along with my
laughter.
Emerging into the gray light of the narrow street, I turned to wait for
my companions, but when I saw the expression of their faces I knew I
should not be missed, and while they stood to hail a cab I made hasty
farewells and betook myself to the nearest Metro station, my ears
ringing as though I had been hearing the loud, triumphant note of
trumpets.
I was about to dive into the anthole of the subway entrance when I heard
my name called and saw Mrs. Hall's chic little toque thrust out of a cab
window. "We forgot to tell you," she called across the street to me,
"that we are very much obliged to you indeed for telephoning us."
With this inimitable farewell they vanished again from my view until
months after this I ran across them, for the last time. I was at the
Gare de Lyon, seeing off a blind soldier whom, with his family, we had
been able to place in a home in the country. As usual with the poor, to
whom journeys are considerable events, we had been fearfully ahead of
time because they were in a panic for fear of losing their train. I had
settled our proteges with all the innumerable valises, baskets,
packages, roll-ups, and wraps which are the accompaniment of a French
family, even the humblest, _en voyage_, had bidden them godspeed, and
was going back along the platform to the exit when I was confronted by a
familiar royal effect in furs, followed by a mountain of magnificent
baggage on a truck.
"Hello!" said Mr. Hall. "You on the move too?"
I explained my presence and turned back to walk with them to their
train. "We are going to Italy," explained Mrs. Hall, "and for once we
are going to try and _take_ Italy something, instead of just getting the
most out of her the way we have done and everybody else has done all
these tourist years."
(I had some reflections of my own about what Italian hotel keepers and
guides had taken from me, but I kept them to myself, recognizing that as
usual I was on a very different plane from the Golden Age of my
companions.)
"You see," explained Mr. Hall in their astonishing, matter-of-fact
manner, "you see one of our enterprises at home in the States is making
a lot more money than ever before because of the war-manufacturing ...
now that the Government is in the war, at last, thank the Lord! Of
course, that money's got to go somehow to make up for some of the harm
the war is doing. And it's such a lot that it can swing a big
proposition. We've thought it over a lot, Margaret and I, and we've
decided to put it into helping the reforestation movement in Italy." I
had only a blank glare to greet this idea, so totally unexpected was it
to me. They hastened to expand, both of them talking at once, with a
fresh, eager interest. I gleaned the idea in broken bits of phrases,
"... terrible floods in Italy every few years ... tops of the mountains
bare and eroded ... campaign of education needed ... a thousand young
pines to the acre ... forty millions needed ... a fine Italian forestry
society already existing to direct the work, but without funds since the
war ... hundreds of thousands of acres to be reclaimed...." My head
whirled, but the main outlines were clear.
"_En voiture!_" shouted an employee running down the _quai_.
They scrambled into their car hastily, but turned at the door for last
remarks. "We've left a deposit in the bank for your friend with the
tenement-house children," they suddenly remembered to assure me, "enough
for a couple of years, and then, whenever she needs it, we're right
here."
Mrs. Hall, on a sudden impulse, stooped low to give me a good-bye kiss.
"I _do_ hope your husband gets back all right from the front!" she said
earnestly, divining the constant anxiety of my every moment, and then,
her eyes shining, "Oh, my dear, I wonder if anybody ever was so lucky as
to have such a perfectly, perfectly lovely honeymoon as Robert and I!"
The train began very slowly to move. I walked along beside it, dreading
to see the last of those clear eyes. They smiled and waved their hands.
They looked like super-people, the last inhabitants of the world before
the war, the only happy human beings left.
I looked after them longingly. The smooth, oily movement of the train de
luxe was accelerated. They were gone.
I went soberly back into the big echoing station and out into the dingy
winter Paris street.
I had not gone ten steps before I was quite sure again that I had made
them up, out of my head.
LA PHARMACIENNE
When the war broke out, Madeleine Brismantier was the very type and
epitome of all which up to that time had been considered "normal" for a
modern woman, a _nice_, modern woman. She had been put through the
severe and excellent system of French public education in her native
town of Amiens, and had done so well with her classes that when she was
nineteen her family were thinking of feeding her into the hopper of the
system of training for primary teachers. But just then, when on a visit
in a smallish Seine-et-Marne town, she met the fine, upstanding young
fellow who was to be her husband. He was young too, not then quite
through the long formidable course of study for pharmacists, so that it
was not until two years later, when Madeleine was twenty-one and he
twenty-five, that they were married, and Madeleine left Amiens to live
in Mandrine, the town where they had met.
Jules Brismantier's father had been the principal pharmacist there all
his life, and Jules stepped comfortably into his father's shoes, his
business, and the lodgings over the pharmacy. If this sounds common and
"working-class" to your American ears, disabuse yourself; the habitation
over the pharmacy was as well ordered and well furnished a little
apartment as ever existed in a "strictly residential portion" of any
American suburb. The beds were heir-looms, and were of mahogany, there
were several bits of excellent furniture in the small, white-paneled
salon, and three pretty, brocade-covered chairs which had come down from
Madeleine's great-grandmother; there was a piano on which Madeleine, who
had received a good substantial musical training, played the best music
there is in the world, which is to say, German (Jules, like many modern
young Frenchmen, had a special cult for Beethoven); and there was a
kitchen--oh, you should have seen that kitchen, white tiles on the walls
and red tiles on the floor and all around such an array of copper and
enamel utensils as can only be found in well-kept kitchens in the French
provinces where one of the main amusements and occupations of the
excellent housewives is elaborate cooking. Furthermore, there was in the
big oaken chests and tall cupboards a supply of bedding which would have
made us open our eyes, used as we are to our (relatively speaking)
hand-to-mouth American methods. Madeleine had no more than the usual
number of sheets, partly laid aside for her, piece by piece, when the
various inheritances from provincial aunts and cousins came in, partly
left there in the house, in which her mother-in-law had died the year
before Madeleine's marriage, partly bought for her (as if there were not
already enough!) to make up the traditional wedding trousseau without
which no daughter of a respectable bourgeois provincial family can be
married. So that, taking them all together, she had two hundred and
twenty sheets, every one linen, varying from the delightfully rough old
homespun and home-woven ones, dating from nobody knew when, down to the
smooth, fine, glossy ones with deep hemstitching on the top and bottom,
and Madeleine's initials set in a delicately embroidered wreath. Of
course she had pillow-slips to go with them, and piles of woolen
blankets, fluffy, soft and white, and a big puffy eiderdown covered with
bright satin as the finishing touch for each well-furnished bed.
Madeleine pretended to be modern sometimes, and to say it was absurd to
have so many, but in her heart, inherited from long generations of
passionately home-keeping women, she took immense satisfaction in all
the ample furnishings of her pretty little home. What woman would not?
Now, although all this has a great deal to do with what happened to
Madeleine, I am afraid you will think that I am making too long an
inventory of her house, so I will not tell you about the shining silver
in the buffet drawers, nor even about the beautiful old walled garden,
full of flowers and vines and fruit-trees, which lay at the back of the
pharmacy. The back windows of the new bride's habitation looked down
into the tree-tops of this garden, and along its graveled walks her
children were to run and play.
For very soon the new family began to grow: first, a little blue-eyed
girl like Madeleine; then, two years later, a dark-eyed boy like
Jules--all very suitable and as it should be, like everything else that
happened to Madeleine. She herself, happily absorbed in her happy life
and in the care of all her treasures, reverted rapidly to type, forgot
most of her modern education, and became a model wife and mother on the
pattern of all the other innumerable model wives and mothers in the
history of her provincial family. She lived well within their rather
small income, and no year passed without their adding to the modest
store of savings which had come down to them because all their
grandmothers had lived well within _their_ incomes. They kept the titles
relative to this little fortune, together with what cash they had, and
all their family papers, in a safe in the pharmacy, sunk in the wall and
ingeniously hidden behind a set of false shelves. They never passed this
hiding-place without the warm, _sheltered_ feeling which a comfortable
little fortune gives,--the feeling which poor people go all their lives
without knowing.
You must not think, because I speak so much of the comfortableness of
the life of this typical French provincial family, that there was the
least suspicion of laziness about them. Indeed, such intelligent comfort
as theirs is only to be had at the price of diligent and well-directed
effort. Jules worked hard all day in the pharmacy, and made less money
than would have contented an American ten years his junior. Madeleine
planned her busy day the evening before, and was up early to begin it.
The house was always immaculate, the meals always on time (this was
difficult to manage with Madeleine cooking everything and only a
rattle-headed young girl to help) and always delicious and varied.
Jules mounted the stairs from the pharmacy at noon and in the evening,
his mouth literally watering in anticipation. The children were always
as exquisitely fresh and well-cared for as only French children of the
better classes can be, with their hair curled in shining ringlets and
their hands clean, as those of our children are only on Sunday mornings.
Madeleine's religion was to keep them spotless and healthful and
smiling; to keep Jules' mouth always watering in anticipation; to help
him with his accounts in the evenings, and to be on hand during the day
to take his place during occasional absences; to know all about the
business end of their affairs and to have their success as much at heart
as he; to keep her lovely old garden flowering and luxuriant; to keep
her lovely old home dainty and well ordered; and, of course, to keep
herself invariably neat with the miraculous neatness of French women,
her pretty, soft chestnut hair carefully dressed, her hands white and
all her attractive person as alluring as in her girlhood.
Madeleine saw nothing lacking in this religion. It seemed to her all
that life could demand of one woman.
In the spring of 1914, when Raoul was five years old and Sylvie eight,
Madeleine was once more joyfully sorting over the tiny clothes left from
their babyhood. All that summer her quick fingers were busy with fine
white flannel and finer white nainsook, setting tiny stitches in small
garments. Every detail of the great event was provided for in advance.
As usual in French families, in all good families everywhere, the
mother-to-be was lapped around with tenderness and indulgence. Madeleine
was a little queen-regnant whose every whim was law. Of course she
wanted her mother to be with her, as she had been for the arrival of
Sylvie and Raoul, although her mother was not very well, and detested
traveling in hot weather; and she wanted the same nurse she had had
before, although that one had now moved away to a distant city. But
Madeleine did not like the voice of the nurse who was available in
Mandrine, and what French daughter could think of going through her
great, dreadful hour without her mother by her to comfort and reassure
her and to take the responsibility of everything! So of course the nurse
was engaged and her railway fare paid in advance, and of course
Madeleine's mother promised to come. She was to arrive considerably in
advance of the date, somewhere about the middle of August. All this was
not so unreasonable from a money point of view as it sounds, for when
they made up the weekly accounts together they found that the business
was doing unusually well.
All through the golden July heats Madeleine sewed and waited. Sometimes
in the pharmacy near Jules, sometimes in the garden where Raoul and
Sylvie, in white dresses, ran and played gently up and down the paths.
They played together mostly and had few little friends, because there
were not many "nice" families living near them, and a good many that
weren't nice. Of course Madeleine kept her children rigorously separated
from these children, who were never in white but in the plainest of
cheap gingham aprons, changed only once a week, and who never wore
shapely, well-cut little shoes, but slumped about heavily in the
wooden-soled, leather-topped "galoches" which are the national foot-gear
for poor French children. Like many good mothers in France (are there
any like that elsewhere?) Madeleine looked at other people's children
chiefly to see if they were or were not "desirable" playmates for her
own; and Sylvie and Raoul were not three years old before they had also
learned the art of telling at a glance whether another child was a nice
child or not, the question being settled of course by the kind of
clothes he wore.
July was a beautiful month of glorious sun and ripening weather. For
hours at a time in her lovely green nest, Madeleine sat happily, resting
or embroidering, the peaches pleached against the high stone walls
swelling and reddening visibly from one day to the next, the lilies
opening flaming petals day by day, the children growing vigorously.
Jules told his pretty wife fondly that she looked not a day older than
on the day of their marriage, ten years before. This was quite true, but
I am not so sure as Jules that it was the highest of compliments to
Madeleine.
The last week of July came, the high-tide moment of lush growth.
Madeleine was bathed in the golden, dreamy content which comes to happy,
much-loved women in her condition. It was the best possible of worlds,
she had the best possible of husbands and children, and she was sure
that nobody could say that she had not cultivated her garden to be the
best possible of its kind. The world seemed to stand still in a sunny
haze, centered about their happiness.
Drenched in sunshine and peace, their little barque was carried rapidly
along by the Niagara river of history over the last stretch of smooth,
shining water which separated them from the abyss.
* * * * *
I dare not tell you a single word about those first four days in August,
of the utter incredulity which swiftly, from one dreadful hour to the
next, changed to black horror. Their barque had shot over the edge, and
in a wild tumult of ravening waters they were all falling together down
into the fathomless gulf. And there are not words to describe to you the
day of mobilization, when Jules, in his wrinkled uniform, smelling of
moth-balls, said good-bye to his young wife and little children and
marched away to do his best to defend them.
There are many things in real life too horrible to be spoken of, and
that farewell is one.
* * * * *
There was Madeleine in the empty house, heavy with her time of trial
close upon her; with two little children depending on her for safety and
care and cheer; with only a foolish little young maid to help her; with
such a terrible anxiety about her husband that the mere thought of him
sent her reeling against the nearest support.
Almost at once came the Mayor in person, venerable and white-bearded, to
gather up the weapons in all the houses. To Madeleine, wondering at
this, he explained that he did it, so that _if_ the Germans came to
Mandrine he could give his word of honor there were no concealed arms in
the town.
It was as though thunder had burst there in the little room. Madeleine
stared at him, deathly white. "You don't think ... you don't think it
possible that the Germans will get as far as _this_!" The idea that she
and the children might be in danger was inconceivable to her. Monsieur
le Maire hastened to reassure her, remembering her condition, and
annoyed that he should have spoken out. "No, no, this is only a measure
of precaution, to leave nothing undone." He went away, after having
taken Jules' shotgun, her little revolver, and even a lockless,
flintless old musket which had belonged to some of the kin who had
followed Napoleon to Russia. As he left, he said, "Personally I have not
the faintest idea they will penetrate as far as Mandrine--not the
_faintest_!"
Of course when Jules left, _no_ one had the faintest idea that his
peaceful home town would see anything of the war. That horror, at least,
was spared the young husband and father. But during the fortnight after
his departure, although there were no newspapers, practically no trains,
and no information except a brief, brief announcement, written by hand,
in ink, posted every day on the door of the Town Hall, the air began to
be unbreathable, because of rumors, sickening rumors, unbelievable
ones ... that Belgium was invaded, although not in the war at all, and
that Belgian cities and villages were being sacked and burned; that the
whole north country was one great bonfire of burning villages and farms;
then that the Germans were near! Were nearer! And then all at once,
quite definitely, that they were within two days' march.
Every one who could, got out of Mandrine, but the only conveyances left
were big jolting farm-wagons piled high with household gear; wagons
which went rumbling off, drawn by sweating horses lashed into a gallop
by panic-stricken boys, wagons which took you, nobody knew where, away!
away! which might break down and leave you anywhere, beside the road, in
a barn, in a wood, in the hands of the Germans ... for nobody knew where
they were. The frightened neighbors, clutching their belongings into
bundles, offered repeatedly to take Madeleine and the children with
them. Should she go or not? There was nobody to help her decide. The
little fluttering maid was worse than nothing, the children were only
babies to be taken care of. After her charges were all in bed, that last
night, Madeleine wrung her hands, walking up and down the room,
literally sick with indecision. What ought she to do? It was the first
great decision she had ever been forced to make alone.
The last of the fleeing carts went without her. During the night she had
come to know that the first, the most vital of all the innumerable and
tragic needs of the hour was the life of the unborn baby. She was forced
to cling to the refuge she had. She did not dare fare forth into the
unknown until she had her baby safely in her arms.
And perhaps the Germans would not come to Mandrine.
* * * * *
For two days the few people left in town lived in a sultry suspense,
with no news, with every fear. M. le Cure had stayed with his church; M.
le Maire stayed with the town records, and his white-haired old wife
stayed to be with her husband (they had never been separated during the
forty years of their marriage); good fresh-faced Sister Ste. Lucie, the
old nun in charge of the little Hospice, stayed with some bedridden
invalids who could not be moved; and there were poor people who had
stayed for the reason which makes poor people do so many other things,
because they could not help it, because they did not own a cart, nor a
wheelbarrow, nor even a child's perambulator in which to take along the
old grandfather or the sick mother who could not walk. Soeur Ste.
Lucie promised to come to be with Madeleine whenever she should send the
little maid with the summons.
Madeleine sickened and shivered and paled during these two endless days
and sleepless nights of suspense. There were times when she felt she
must die of sheer horror at the situation in which she found herself,
that it was asking too much of her to make her go on living. At such
moments she shook as though in a palsy and her voice trembled so that
she could not speak aloud. There were other times when she was in an
unnatural calm, because she was absolutely certain that she was dreaming
and must soon wake up to find Jules beside her.
The children played in the garden. They discovered a toad there, during
that time, and Madeleine often heard them shouting with laughter over
its antics. The silly little maid came every few moments to tell her
mistress a new rumor ... she had heard the Germans were cannibals and
ate little children, was that true? And was it true that they had a
special technique for burning down whole towns at once, with kerosene
pumps and dynamite petards? One story seemed as foolish as the other to
Madeleine, who hushed her angrily and told her not to listen to such
lies. Once the little maid began to tell her in a terrified whisper what
she had heard the Germans did to women in Madeleine's condition ... but
the recital was cut short by a terrible attack of nausea which lasted
for hours and left Madeleine so weak that she could not raise her head
from the pillow. She lay there, tasting the bitterness of utter
necessity. Weak as she was, she was the strongest of their little band.
Presently she rose and resumed the occupations of the day, but she was
stooped forward for very feebleness like an old woman.
She told herself that she did not believe a single word the
terror-stricken little maid had told her; but the truth was that she
was half dead with fear, age-old, terrible, physical fear, which had
been as far from her life before as a desire to eat raw meat or to do
murder. It was almost like a stroke of paralysis to this modern woman.