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RAW MATERIAL
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
THE SQUIRREL-CAGE
A MONTESSORI MOTHER
MOTHERS AND CHILDREN
THE BENT TWIG
THE REAL MOTIVE
FELLOW CAPTAINS (With SARAH N. CLEGHORN)
UNDERSTOOD BETSY
HOME FIRES IN FRANCE
THE DAY OF GLORY
THE BRIMMING CUP
ROUGH-HEWN
RAW MATERIAL
BY
DOROTHY CANFIELD
[Illustration: Logo]
NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. BY
The Quinn & Boden Company
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
RAHWAY NEW JERSEY
CONTENTS
PAGE
RAW MATERIAL 9
UNCLE GILES 25
“WHAT GOES UP...” 37
OLD MAN WARNER 69
THE IDEAS OF M. BRODARD 83
FAIRFAX HUNTER 111
PROFESSOR PAUL MEYER 127
“WHILE ALL THE GODS...” 143
SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS 151
ART ATMOSPHERE 167
COLONEL SHAYS 175
A GREAT LOVE 187
SUPPLY AND DEMAND 197
UNCLE ELLIS 211
GOD’S COUNTRY 215
INHERITANCE 227
THIRTY YEARS AFTER 233
“THE OLD NEW ENGLAND STOCK” 239
OCTOBER, 1918 255
A BRETON AMONG HSÜ HSI 265
ALMERA HAWLEY CANFIELD 273
RAW MATERIAL
I don’t know who is responsible for this rather odd book, but I lay
it to the earlier generations of my family. My clergyman grandfather
always said that he never enjoyed any sermons so much as the ones he
preached to himself sitting under another clergyman’s pulpit. When the
text was given out, his mind seized on it with a vivid fresh interest
and, running rapidly away from the intrusive sound of the other
preacher’s voice, wove a tissue of clear, strong, and fascinatingly
interesting reasonings and exhortations. Grandfather used to say that
such sermons preached to himself were in the nature of things much
better than any he could ever deliver in church. “I don’t have to keep
a wary eye out for stupid old Mrs. Ellsworth, who never understands
anything light or fanciful; I don’t have to remember to thunder
occasionally at stolid Mr. Peters to wake him up. I don’t have to
remember to keep my voice raised so that deaf old Senator Peaseley can
hear me. I am not obliged to hold the wandering attention of their
muddled heads by a series of foolish little rhetorical tricks or by a
prodigious effort of my personality. I can just make my sermon what it
ought to be.”
My father, who did a great deal of public speaking, though not in
pulpits, took up this habit in his turn. When a speaker began an
address, he always fell into a trance-like condition, his eyes fixed
steadily on the other orator, apparently giving him the most profound
attention, but in reality making in his mind, on the theme suggested
by the audible speaker, a fluent, impassioned address of his own. He
used to say that he came to himself after one of these auto-addresses
infinitely exhilarated and refreshed by the experience of having
been speaking to an audience which instantly caught his every point,
and which, although entirely sympathetic, was stimulatingly quick to
find the weak spots in his argument and eager to keep him up to his
best. Afterwards he dreaded an ordinary audience with its limping
comprehension, its wandering attention, its ill-timed laughter and
applause.
After I began to read for myself I found the same habit of mind
familiar to many authors. The Stevensons walked up and down the
porch at Saranac, talking at the tops of their voices, on fire with
enthusiasm for their first conception of “The Wrecker.” There never
was, there never could be (so they found out afterwards) a story half
so fine as that tale seemed to them in those glorious moments when
they saw it as they would have liked to make it. I nodded my head
understandingly over this episode. Yes, that was what, in their plain
way, my grandfather and father had done. I recognized the process.
It was evidently a universal one. And when in “Cousine Bette” I
encountered Wencelas Steinbock, I recognized him from afar. “To muse,
to dream, to conceive of fine works, is a delightful occupation.
The work then floats in all the grace of infancy, in the mad joy of
conception, with the fragrant beauty of a flower, and the aromatic
juice of a fruit enjoyed in anticipation.”
And upon my own arrival in adult life it seemed quite the expected
and natural thing to find my own fancy constantly occupied in this
way. The stories I told myself were infinitely superior to anything I
ever got down on paper. Just as my father had been the ideal audience
for himself, so I was my own best reader, a reader who needed no long
explanations, who caught the idea at once, who brought to the tale
all the experience which made it intelligible. Two words with the
grocer’s boy, delivering soap and canned salmon at the back door, and
I was off, author and reader galloping along side by side, on a story
which made not only my own written tales, but other people’s as well,
seem clumsy, obvious, and wordy. A look on an old cousin’s face was
to me--like a text to my grandfather--a springboard from which author
and reader plunged simultaneously into the sea of human relationships,
sensing in human life significances pitiful, exalted, profound, beyond
anything that can be drawn out with the loose-meshed net of words. Did
I sit idling in a railway station, my great-uncle, who died before
I was born, stood there beside me, expounding his life to me with a
precision, a daring abandon, a zestful ardor which would wither and
fade if it were transferred to the pages of a book.
At first I thought this habit of mind entirely universal--as it
is certainly the most natural one possible; but in the course of
much random talk about things in general, I have occasionally come
across people whose eyes are too weak for the white brilliance of
reality, who can only see life through the printed page, which is
a very opaque object. Such people--and they are often cultivated,
university-bred--will say, quite as if they were uttering a truism: “Of
course characters in books--well-written books--are ever so much more
interesting than men and women in real life.”
They perceive the fateful mixture of beast and angel in the human face
only in a portrait gallery; for them the birds sing, the winds sigh,
and human hearts cry out, only at a symphony concert; they depend on
books to give them faintly, dully, dimly, at third-hand, what lies
before them every day, bright-colored, throbbing, and alive. It is a
mental attitude hard for me to understand but it does exist. I have
seen them turn away from a stern and noble tragedy in the life of
their washerwoman, to the cheap sentimentality of a poor novel, which
guarantees (as a fake dentist promises to fill teeth without pain) to
provide tears without emotion. I have seen women who might have been
playing with a baby, laughing at his inimitable funniness, leave him
to a nurse and go out to enliven their minds by the contemplation of
custard-pies smeared over the human countenance.
We are so used to this phenomenon that it does not seem strange to
us. But it is strange--strange and tragic. And I do not in the least
believe that the tragedy is one of the inevitable ones. I think it is
simply a bad habit which has grown up as the modern world has taken to
reading.
Why did the habit ever start? Naturally enough. Because the new medium
of cheap printing let loose on the world the innate loquacity of
writers, unrepressed by the limitations of the human voice. Other
people have not been able to hear themselves think since Gutenberg
enabled writers to drown out the grave, silent, first-hand mental
processes of people blessed by nature with taciturnity. The writer
is not born (as is his boast) with more capacity than other people
for seeing color and interest and meaning in life; he is born merely
with an irrepressible desire to tell everybody what he sees and
feels. We have been hypnotized by his formidable capacity for speech
into thinking that he is the only human being on whom life makes an
impression. This is not so. He is merely so made that he cannot rest
till he has told everybody who will listen to him, the impression
that life has made on him. This is the queer mainspring of creative
literature. The writer cannot keep a shut mouth. To speak out seems to
be the only useful thing he can do in life. And in its way it is a very
useful occupation. But there is no reason why other people who have
other useful things to do should miss the purity and vividness of a
first-hand impression of life which they could enjoy without spoiling
it, as an artist always does, by his instant anxiety about how much
of it he can carry off with him for his art, by his instant mental
fumbling with technical means, by his anguished mental questions: “What
would be the best way to get that effect over in a book?” or “How could
you convey that impression in a dialogue?”
It is a dog’s life, believe me, this absurd, pretentious carrying
about of your little literary yardstick and holding it up against
the magnificent hugeness of the world. I cannot believe that it is
necessary to have that yardstick in hand before seeing the hugeness
which it can never measure. One proof that it is not necessary is the
fact that artists enjoy the raw materials of arts which they do not
practise, much more freely and light-heartedly than the raw material
of their own. I love the materials from which painters make pictures
and musicians make music vastly more than the materials from which
novelists make novels, because I feel no responsibility about them,
because I know that they do not mean for me a struggle, foredoomed to
failure, to get them down on canvas or between the five lines of the
musical staff.
Do I seem to be advocating a habit of mind which would put an end to
the writing of novels altogether? Personally I do not believe that the
foundations of the world would move by a hair if that end were brought
about. But, as a matter of fact, I do not in the least think that
novel-writing would be anything but immensely benefited by a reading
public which had acquired its own eyesight and did not depend on the
writer’s. Such a body of creative-minded readers would lift the art of
fiction up to levels we have none of us conceived. With such a public
of trained, practised observers, fiction could cast off the encumbering
paraphernalia of explanations and photographs which now weigh it down.
There need be no fear for the future of fiction if every one takes to
being his own novelist. For then readers will not look in novels for
what is never there, reality itself. They will look for what is the
only thing that ought to be there, the impression which reality has
made on the writer, and they will have an impression of their own with
which to compare that of the writer. This will free the author forever
from attempting the impossible, bricks-without-straw undertaking of
trying to get life itself between the covers of a book.
For never, never can fiction hope to attain myriads of effects which
life effortlessly puts over wherever we look, if we will only see what
is there. If we leave those inimitable natural effects of beauty, or
fun, or tragedy, or farce entirely for the professional writer to see
and enjoy and ponder on, we are showing the same sort of passive,
closed imaginations which lead Persians to sit obesely at ease on
cushions, and watch professional dancers have all the fun of dancing.
The phrase which we traditionally ascribe to them is this, “Why bother
to dance yourselves, when you can hire somebody to do it much better?”
But that is our own unspoken phrase about the raw material of art
and its monopoly by the professional artist. We Westerners dance,
ourselves, not because we have any notion that we can dance better than
the professionals, but because we have discovered by experience that
to dance gives us a very different sort of pleasure from that given by
looking at professionals. We have also discovered that it does not at
all prevent us from hiring professionals and enjoying them as much as
any Persians.
It is for the active-minded people who enjoy doing their own thinking
as well as watching the author do his, that I have put this volume
together. When life speaks to them, their hearts answer, as a friend
to a friend. They are my brothers and my sisters. They practise the
delight-giving art of being their own authors. They know the familiar,
exquisite interest of trying to arrange in coherence the raw material
which life constantly washes up to every one in great flooding masses.
And they do this for their own high pleasure, with no idea of profiting
by it in the eyes of the world. They work to create order out of chaos
with a single-hearted effort, impossible to poor authors, tortured
by the aching need to get the results of their efforts into words
intelligible to others.
Being useful in other ways to the world, it is quite permissible for
them to indulge in what was pernicious self-indulgence for an artist
like Wencelas Steinbock. They are good children who, having nourished
themselves on the substantial food of useful work, may eat candy
without risking indigestion. The artist’s work is the fatiguing attempt
to transform the wonder of life into art! Those other disinterested
observers of life, those wise, deeply pondering, far-seeing men and
women, driven by their own need to make something understandable out of
our tangled life, struggle, just as the artist does, to piece together
what they see into intelligible order. But they do this in their
own hearts, for their own satisfaction. How singularly free-handed
and open-hearted and generous their attitude seems, compared to the
artist’s frugal, not to say penurious, not to say avaricious, anxiety
to utilize every scrap of his life as raw material for his art.
Such people have, as the reward for their disinterested attitude of
mind, all the pleasures of the creative artist’s life and none of its
terrible pains. All the pleasure, that is, except the dubious one
of seeing themselves in print. This is--for me at least--a pleasure
deeply colored with humiliation. The stuff which I manage to get into
a printed book is so tragically dry and lifeless compared to the
vibrating, ordered, succulent life which goes on inside my head before
I put pen to paper! For my part, I envy the clever, happy people who
are content to let it stay in their heads, and never try to decant it
into a book, only to find that the bouquet and aroma are all gone. I
quite sympathize with them when they are impatient with the verbose
literal-minded garrulity with which most writers of fiction spread out
clumsily over two pages that which takes but a flash to think or to
feel. They think, and quite rightly, that what is slowly written out in
the inaccurate, halting system we call language, bears little relation
to the arrow-swift movements of the thinking mind and feeling heart.
That which is written down in an attempt to make it intelligible to
everybody is a rude approximation like that of ready-made clothing,
manufactured to fit every one somewhat and no one exactly. That
which springs into being in the brain at a contact with life, exactly
fits the comprehension, background, and experience of the person who
owns the brain. There are no waste motions, no paragraphs to skip, no
compressions too bare, no descriptions too wordy, none of those sore,
never-solved problems of the writer who addresses unknown readers, “How
much can I leave out? How far can I suggest and not state? How far
can I trust the reader’s attention not to flag, his intelligence to
understand at a hint, rather than at a statement? What experience of
life can I presuppose him to have had?”
When you are your own author, you know all about your reader, and need
never think of his limitations. He is faithful to you, flies lightly
when you rise into the air, plods steadily beside you at your own pace
as you slowly work your way into unfamiliar country, flashes back into
the past and selects exactly what is needed from his experience, sinks
with you into a golden haze of contemplation over some surprising or
puzzling phenomenon, is in no nagging hurry to “get on with the story.”
After some experience of such a marriage of author and reader, don’t
you find it hard to put up with the fumbling guesswork of a printed
book?
And yet here I have written another book? No, this is not a written
book in the usual sense. It is a book where nearly everything is
left for the reader to do. I have only set down in it, just as if I
were noting them down for my own use, a score of instances out of
human life, which have long served me as pegs on which to hang the
meditations of many different moods.
Note well that I have not set down those meditations ... or at
most--for the flesh is weak!--only here and there a trace of them. But
if I have occasionally back-slid from the strait neutral path of sacred
Objectivity, at least let me here and now warn you to ignore whatever
moralizings of mine have escaped excision. Pay no attention to them,
if you run across one or two. I know for a certainty that my musings
about the men and women who were the originals of these portraits
would not serve you as they do me. I know you can make for yourselves
infinitely better ones. I know that what you will do for yourselves
will be like the living lacework of many-colored sea-weed floating free
and quivering in quiet sunlit pools; and that what I could get down in
a book would be a poor little faded collection of stiff dead tendrils,
pasted on blotting paper.
In this unrelated, unorganized bundle of facts, I give you just the
sort of thing from which a novelist makes principal or secondary
characters, or episodes in a novel. I offer them to you for the novels
you are writing inside your own heads, before I have spoiled them by
the additions, cuttings, stretchings, or twistings necessary to make
them fit into the fabric of a book. I give them to you, rounded and
whole, just as they happened, without filing and smoothing truth down
to the limits of possibility as all fiction-writers are forced to do.
I spare you all the long-winded conventional devices, descriptions,
transitions, exposition, eloquent passages and the like, by which
writers try to divert the minds of their readers from the inherent
improbability of their stories, devices which, to the suspicious mind,
resemble the patter of thimbleriggers at a county fair. You know as
well as I how inherently improbable life is. Why pretend that it is
not? I have treated you just as though you were that other self in me
who is my best reader. I have given you the fare I like best.
And I have faith to believe that you will enjoy for once being able to
move about in a book without a clutter of explanations and sign-boards
to show you the road the author wishes you to take. I do not wish you
to take any road in particular, and rather hope you will try a good
many different ones, as I do. I have only tried to loan you a little
more to add to the raw material which life has brought you, out of
which you are constructing your own attempt to understand.
I am only handing you from my shelves a few more curiosities to set
among the oddities you have already collected, and which from time to
time you take down as I do mine, turning them around in your hands,
poring over them with a smile, or a somber gaze, or a puzzled look of
surprise.
UNCLE GILES
There are few personalities which survive the blurring, dimming results
of being the subject of family talk through several generations;
but the personality of my Great-Uncle Giles has suffered no partial
obliteration. It has come down to us with outlines keen and sharply
etched into the family consciousness by the acid of exact recollection.
This is not at all because Uncle Giles ever disgraced the family or
did any evil or wicked action. Quite the contrary! Uncle Giles thought
that he was the only member of the entire tribe with any fineness
or distinction of feeling, with any fitness for a higher sphere of
activities than the grubby middle-class world of his kinsmen. Yes, that
is what Uncle Giles thought, probably adding to himself that he often
felt that he was a “gentleman among canaille.” To this day the family
bristles rise at the mention of any one who openly professes to be a
gentleman.
A gentleman should not be forced to the menial task of earning his
living. Uncle Giles was never forced to the menial task of earning
his living. None of the coarsely materialistic forces in human life
ever succeeded in forcing him to it, not even the combined and violent
efforts of a good many able-bodied and energetic kinspeople. The tales
of how Uncle Giles blandly outwitted their stub-fingered attacks on
his liberty and succeeded to the end of a very long life in living
without work are endless in number and infinite in variety; and for
three generations now have wrought the members of our family to wrath
and laughter. He was incredible. You can’t imagine anything like him.
Unless you have had him in your family too.
For many years Uncle Giles was “preparing for the ministry.” These were
the candid years when his people did not know him so well as later, and
still believed that with a little more help Giles would be able to get
on his feet. He was a great favorite in the Theological Seminary where
he was a student for so long, a handsome well-set-up blond young man,
with beautiful large blue eyes. I know just how he looked, for we have
an expensive miniature of him that was painted at the time. He paid
for that miniature with the money my great-grandfather pried out of a
Vermont farm. It had been sent to pay for his board. You can’t abandon
a son just on the point of becoming a clergyman and being a credit to
the entire family. Great-grandfather himself had no more money to send
at that time, but his other sons, hard-working, energetic, successful
men, clubbed together and made up the amount necessary to settle that
board-bill. Uncle Giles thanked them and forwarded with his letter, to
show them, in his own phrase, “that their bounty was not ill-advised,”
a beautifully bound, high-priced, little red morocco note-book in which
he had written down the flattering things said of him by his professors
and others--especially others. He underlined certain passages, thus:
“... a very worthy young man, _most pleasing in society_.” “A model to
all _in the decorum and grace of his manners_.”
His board bill had to be paid a good many times before Uncle Giles
finally gave up preparing himself for the ministry. The summer
vacations of this period he spent in visiting first one and then
another member of the family, a first-rate ornament on the front porch
and at the table, admired by the ladies of the neighborhood, a prime
favorite on picnics and on the croquet ground. He always seemed to
have dropped from a higher world into the rough middle-class existence
of his kin, but his courtesy was so exquisite that he refrained from
commenting on this in any way. Still you could see that he felt it.
Especially if you were one of the well-to-do neighbors on whom the
distinguished young theological student paid evening calls, you admired
his quiet tact and his steady loyalty to his commonplace family.
The effect which his quiet tact and steady loyalty had on his
commonplace family was so great that it has persisted undiminished to
this day. Any one of us, to the remotest cousin, can spot an Uncle
Giles as far as we can see him. We know all about him, and it is not
on our front porches that he comes to display his tact and loyalty,
and the decorum and grace of his manners. As for allowing the faintest
trace of Uncle-Gilesism to color our own lives, there is not one of
us who would not rush out to earn his living by breaking stone by the
road-side rather than accept even the most genuinely voluntary loan.
We are, as Uncle Giles felt, a very commonplace family, of the most
ordinary Anglo-Saxon stock, with no illuminating vein of imaginative
Irish or Scotch or Welsh blood; and I think it very likely that if we
had not experienced Uncle Giles we would have been the stodgiest of the
stodgy as far as social injustice is concerned. But our imaginations
seem to have been torn open by Uncle Giles as by a charge of
dynamite; and, having once understood what he meant, we hang to that
comprehension with all our dull Anglo-Saxon tenacity. We have a deep,
unfailing sympathy with any one who is trying to secure a better and
fairer adjustment of burdens in human life, because we see in our plain
dull way that what he is trying to do is to eliminate the Uncle Gileses
from society and force them to work. And we are always uneasily trying
to make sure that we are not in the bigger scheme, without realizing
it, Uncle Gilesing it ourselves.
After a while Uncle Giles stopped preparing for the ministry and
became an invalid. He bore this affliction with the unaffected manly
courage which was always one of his marked characteristics. He never
complained: he “bore up” in all circumstances; even on busy wash-days
when there was no time to prepare one of the dainty little dishes which
the delicacy of his taste enabled him so greatly to appreciate. Uncle
Giles always said of the rude, vigorous, hearty, undiscriminating men
of the family, that they could “eat anything.” His accent in saying
this was the wistful one of resigned envy of their health.
It has been a point of honor with us all, ever since, to be able to
“eat anything.” Any one, even a legitimate invalid, who is inclined
to be fastidious and make it difficult for the others, feels a united
family glare concentrating on him, which makes him, in a panic, reach
out eagerly for the boiled pork and cabbage.
Uncle Giles’s was a singular case, “one of those mysterious maladies
which baffle even the wisest physicians,” as he used to say himself. A
good many ladies in those days had mysterious maladies which baffled
even the wisest physicians, and they used to enjoy Uncle Giles above
everything. No other man had such an understanding of their symptoms
and such sympathy for their sufferings. The easy chair beside Uncle
Giles’s invalid couch was seldom vacant. Ladies going away after having
left a vaseful of flowers for him, and a plateful of cake, and two or
three jars of jelly, and some cold breasts of chicken, would say with
shining, exalted countenances, “In spite of his terrible trials, what
an inspiration our friend can be! An hour with that good man is like an
hour on Pisgah.”
They would, as like as not, make such a remark to the brave invalid’s
brother or cousin (or, in later years, nephew) who was earning the
money to keep the household going. I am afraid we are no longer as a
family very sure what or where Pisgah is, although we know it is in
the Bible somewhere, but there is a fierce family tradition against
fussing over your health which is as vivid this minute as on the day
when the brother or cousin or nephew of Uncle Giles turned away with
discourteous haste from the shining-faced lady and stamped rudely
into another room. Doctors enter our homes for a broken leg or for a
confinement, but seldom for anything else.
When the Civil War came on, and Uncle Giles was the only man in the
family left at home, he rose splendidly to the occasion and devoted
himself to the instruction of his kinswomen, ignorant of the technique
of warfare. From his invalid couch he explained to them the strategy
of the great battles in which their brothers and husbands and fathers
were fighting; and when the letters from hospital came with news of
the wounded, who but Uncle Giles was competent to understand and
explain the symptoms reported. As a rule the women of his family were
too frantically busy with their Martha-like concentration on the mere
material problems of wartime life to give these lucid and intellectual
discussions of strategy the attention and consideration they deserved.
The war, however, though it seemed endless, lasted after all but four
years. And when it was over, Uncle Giles was free to go back to
discussions more congenial to his literary and esthetic tastes.
By this time he was past middle-age, “a butterfly broken on the
wheel of life,” as he said; it was of course out of the question to
expect him to think of earning his own living. He had become a family
tradition by that time, too, firmly embedded in the solidly set cement
of family habits. The older generation always had taken care of him,
the younger saw no way out, and with an unsurprised resignation bent
their shoulders to carry on. So, before any other plans could be made,
Uncle Giles had to be thought of. Vacations were taken seriatim not to
leave Uncle Giles alone. In buying or building a house, care had to be
taken to have a room suitable for Uncle Giles when it was your turn to
entertain him. If the children had measles, one of the first things to
do was to get Uncle Giles into some other home so that he would not be
quarantined. That strange law of family life which ordains that the
person most difficult to please is always, in the long run, the one to
please whom most efforts are made, worked out in its usual complete
detail. The dishes Uncle Giles liked were the only ones served (since
other men could “eat anything”); the songs Uncle Giles liked were the
only ones sung; the houses were adjusted to him; the very color of the
rugs and the pictures on the walls were selected to suit Uncle Giles’s
fine and exacting taste.
Looking back, through the perspective of a generation-and-a-half, I
can see the exact point of safely acknowledged middle-age when Uncle
Giles’s health began cautiously to improve; but it must have been
imperceptible to those around him, so gradual was the change. His kin
grew used to each successive stage of his recovery before they realized
it was there, and nobody seems to have been surprised to have Uncle
Giles pass into a remarkably hale and vigorous old age.
“Invalids often are strong in their later years,” he said of himself.
“It is God’s compensation for their earlier sufferings.”
He passed into the full rewards of the most rewarded old age. It was a
period of apotheosis for him, and a very lengthy one at that, for he
lived to be well past eighty. In any gathering Uncle Giles, erect and
handsome, specklessly attired, his smooth old face neatly shaved, with
a quaint, gentle, old-world courtesy and protecting chivalry in his
manner to ladies, was a conspicuous and much-admired figure. People
brought their visitors to call on him, and to hear him tell in his
vivid, animated way of old times in the country. His great specialty
was the Civil War. At any gathering where veterans of the War were to
be honored, Uncle Giles held every one breathless with his descriptions
of Gettysburg and Chancellorsville; and when he spoke of Mobile Bay and
Sherman’s march, how his voice pealed, how his fine eyes lighted up!
Strangers used to say to themselves that it was easy to see what an
eloquent preacher he must have been when he was in the active ministry.
The glum old men in worn blue coats used to gather in a knot in the
farthest corner, and in low tones, not to interrupt his discourse,
would chat to each other of crops, fishing, and politics.
Somewhere we have a scrapbook in which an ironic cousin of mine
carefully pasted in all the newspaper articles that were written about
Uncle Giles in his old age, and the many handsome obituary notices
which appeared when he finally died. I can remember my father’s getting
it out occasionally, and reading the clippings to himself with a very
grim expression on his face; but it always moved my light-hearted,
fun-loving mother to peals of laughter. After all, she was related to
Uncle Giles only by marriage and felt no responsibility for him.
The other day, in looking over some old legal papers, I came across a
yellowed letter, folded and sealed (as was the habit before envelopes
were common) with three handsome pale-blue seals on its back. The
seals were made with the crested cameo ring which Uncle Giles always
wore, bearing what he insisted was the “coat of arms” of our family.
The handwriting of the letter was beautiful, formed with an amorous
pride in every letter. It was from Uncle Giles to one of his uncles, my
great-grandfather’s brother. It had lain there lost for half a century
or more, and of course I had never seen it before; but every word
of it was familiar to me as I glanced it over. It began in a manner
characteristic of Uncle Giles’s polished courtesy, with inquiries after
every member of his uncle’s family, and a pleasant word for each one.
He then detailed the state of his health, which, alas, left much to be
desired, and seemed, so the doctors told him, to require urgently a
summer in the mountains. Leaving this subject, he jumped to the local
news of the town where he was then living, and told one or two amusing
stories. In one of them I remember was this phrase, “I told her I might
be poor, but that a gentleman of good birth did not recognize poverty
as a member of the family.” Through a neat transition after this he
led up again to the subject of his health and to the desirability of
his passing some months in the mountains, “in the pure air of God’s
great hills.” Then he entered upon a discreet, pleasant, whimsical
reference to the fact that only a contribution from his uncle’s purse
could make this possible. There never was anybody who could beat Uncle
Giles on ease and grace, and pleasant, pungent humor when it came to
asking for money. The only person embarrassed in that situation was the
one of whom Uncle Giles was expecting the loan.
I read no more. With no conscious volition of mine, my hand had
scrunched the letter into a ball, and my arm, without my bidding, had
hurled the ball into the heart of the fire.
But as I reflected on the subject afterwards, and thought of the
influence which Uncle Giles has always had on our family, it occurred
to me that I was wrong. Uncle Giles ought not to be forgotten. I ought
to have saved that letter to show to my children.
“WHAT GOES UP....”
Among the many agreeably arranged European lives which were roughly
interrupted by the war, I know of none more snugly and compactly
comfortable than that of Octavie Moreau. Indeed, for some years there
had been in the back of my mind a faint notion of something almost
indiscreet in the admirably competent way in which ’Tavie arranged
her life precisely to her taste. I don’t mean that it was an easeful
or elegant or self-indulgent life. She cared as little for dress
as any other intellectual Frenchwoman, let herself get portly, did
up her hair queerly, and the rigorously hearth-and-home matrons of
Tourciennes pointed her out to their young daughters as a horrible
example of what happens to the looks of a woman who acquires too
much learning. As for ease and self-indulgence, ’Tavie’s vigorous
personality and powerful, disciplined brain, as well as the need
to earn her living, kept her from laying on intellectual fat. But
all that vigorous personality, that powerful brain, as well as all
the money which she competently earned, seemed more and more to be
concentrated on her own comfort and on nothing else. Her excellent
salary as professor of science in the girls’ Lycée was almost doubled
by what she made by private lessons, for she was an inspired natural
teacher, who can, as the saying goes, teach anybody anything. In the
thirty years of her life in Tourciennes she has pulled innumerable
despairing boys and girls through dreaded examinations in science and
mathematics; and parents pay well, the world over, for having their
boys and girls pulled through examinations. They respect the woman who
can do it, even if, as in Octavie’s case, their respect is tempered
with considerable disapprobation of eccentric dress, irreligious ideas,
immense skepticism, and cigarette-smoking. And in this case the respect
was heightened by Mlle. Moreau’s well-known ability to drive a hard
bargain and to see through any one else’s attempt to do the same.
Octavie had plenty of everything, brains, will-power and money; but as
far as I could see, she never did anything with this plenty, except to
feather her own nest. I mean this quite literally, for ’Tavie had a
nest, a pretty, red-roofed, gray-walled, old villa, in the outskirts
of Tourciennes, which she had bought years before at a great bargain,
and which was the center of her life. Her younger sister, a weaker
edition of Octavie, who lived with her, and kept house for her, and
revolved about her, and adored her, and depended on her, joined with
her in this, as in everything else. Those two women visibly existed
for the purpose of bringing to perfection that house and the fine,
walled garden about it. Long before anybody else in our circle in
France thought of such a thing as having a real bathroom with hot and
cold water, ’Tavie had one, tiled, and glazed, and gleaming. Octavie’s
library was the best one (in science and economic history) in that
part of France. Never were there such perfectly laid and kept floors
as ’Tavie’s, nor such a kitchen garden, nor closets so convenient and
ingeniously arranged, nor a kitchen of such perfection. All well-to-do
kitchens in the north of France are works of art, but ’Tavie’s was
several degrees more shining and copper-kettled and red-tiled and
polished than any other, just as the food which was prepared there was
several degrees more succulent, even than the superexcellent meals
served elsewhere in that affluent industrial city of the North. As I
finished one of ’Tavie’s wonderful dinners, and stepped with her into
the ordered marvel of her great garden, I remember one day having on
the tip of my tongue some half-baked remark about how far the same
amount of intelligence and energy would have gone towards providing
more decent homes for a few of the poor in her quarter--for the housing
of the poor in Tourciennes was notorious for its wretchedness. But you
may be sure I said nothing of the sort. Nobody ventured to make any
such sanctimonious comment to caustic Octavie Moreau, fifty-four years
old, weighty, powerful, utterly indifferent to other people’s opinions,
her fine mind at the perfection of its maturity, her well-tempered
personality like a splendid tool at the service of her will, her heart
preserved from care about other people’s troubles by her biological
conviction of the futility of trying to help any one not energetic
enough to help himself. She was not unkind to people she happened
to know personally, occasionally spilling over on the needy ones a
little of her superabundant vigor, and some of the money she earned so
easily. But in her heart she scorned people who were either materially
or morally needy, as she scorned every one who was weak and ignorant
and timorous, who was not strong enough to walk straight up to what he
wanted and take it. She had always done that. Anybody who couldn’t ...!
Then the war began and well-planned lives became like grains of dust
in a whirlwind. Tourciennes was at once taken by the Germans and held
until the very last of the war, and for more than four years none
of the rest of us had a word from ’Tavie and her sister. Beyond the
trenches Tourciennes seemed more remote than the palest asteroid.
But after the armistice, what with letters and visits, we soon learned
all about their life under the German occupation, in most ways like
the lives of all our other friends in the North, the grinding round of
petty and great vexations and extortions and oppressions, and slow,
dirty starvation of body, mind, and soul which has been described so
many times since Armistice Day--but with one notable exception. To
Octavie life had brought something more than this.
Early in the third year of the war, the grimly enduring town was
appalled by a decree, issued from German Headquarters. In reprisal for
something said to have happened in far-away Alsace-Lorraine, forty of
the leading women of Tourciennes were to be taken as hostages, conveyed
to a prison-camp in the north of Germany, and left there indefinitely
till the grievance (whatever it was) in Alsace-Lorraine had been
adjusted to the satisfaction of the German government.
By the third year of the war, every one in Tourciennes knew very well
what deportation to a German prison-camp meant: almost sure death,
and certainly broken health for the most vigorous men. They had all
at one time or another gone to the railway station to meet returned
prisoners, ragged, demoralized groups of broken, tubercular skeletons,
who had gone away from home elderly but powerful men, leaders in their
professions. And these latest hostages were to be women, delicately
reared, not in their first youth, many of them already half-ill after
three years of war privations. In order to make the deepest possible
impression on the public of the captive city the most respected and
conspicuous women were chosen, prominent either for their husband’s
standing and wealth or for the place they had made for themselves, by
their own intelligence and energy: the Directress of the Hospital, a
well known teacher of music, the Mayor’s wife, the daughter of a noted
professor. Of course, our Octavie was among the number.
We knew some of the others, too, either by reputation or personally,
and could imagine the heart-sick horror in which their families saw
them make their few hasty preparations for departure. Here is a typical
case. One of the names on the list was that of Mme. Orléanne, a woman
of seventy. She was then so weak from malassimilation of war-food that
she had not been out of doors for months! It was nothing less than a
death-sentence for her. Her family did not even let her see the list.
Her elder daughter, married to a wealthy manufacturer, went to the
German officials and offered herself to be deported as a substitute,
although she had two children, a girl of eight and a little boy of
three! She was accepted, and, death in her heart, set about making up
the tiny bundle of necessaries--all they were allowed to carry. Her
little girl was old enough to take up the tradition of tragic stoicism
of her elders and listened with a blanched face to the instructions
of her desperate mother, who told her that there was now nothing
but dignity left to Frenchwomen. When the German guard came to tell
Mme. Baudoin that the truck which was to carry the hostages away to
the railroad was waiting at the door, little Elise, rigid and gray,
kissed her mother good-by silently, though after the truck had gone,
she fainted and lay unconscious for hours. But Raoul, only a baby,
screamed, and struck at the German soldier, clung wildly to his mother
with hysteric strength, and after she had gone, broke away from his
aunt, rushed out of the street door, shrieking, “Mother, Mother! don’t
go away from Raoul!” and flung himself frantically upon his mother’s
skirts. She said to me, as she told me of this, “dying will be easy
compared to that moment!” But without weakening she did the intolerable
thing, the only thing there was to do, she reached down, tore the
little boy’s tense fingers from her dress, and climbed up into the
truck. “As I looked away from Raoul I saw that tears were running down
the cheeks of the German guard who stood at the back of the truck.”
Ah, this human race we belong to!
Shuddering with the anguish of such scenes of separation, the hostages
were locked for three days into cattle-cars, cold, windowless, jolting
prisons, where they lived over and over those unbearable last moments
with children, or sisters, or parents, or husbands, whom they never
expected to see again. At the end of this ordeal, the wretched women,
numb, half-starved, limping along in their disordered garments, raging
inwardly, inflamed with indignant hatred for the soldiers who marshaled
them, were brought together in their prison and left alone, save for
two bored guards who sat at the door and stared at them.
The prison camp was an enormous one in the north of Germany, a dreary
clutter of rough wooden buildings thrown down on a flat, sandy
plain, entangled and surrounded by miles of barbed-wire fencing.
The prison-room allotted to the forty women from Tourciennes was a
high, bare loft, like a part of an ill-built, hastily constructed
barn. Around three walls were tiers of bunks, filled with damp, moldy
straw, a couple of dirty blankets on each. In the middle of the room
was a smallish stove, rather tall and thin in shape, with one hole
in the top, closed by a flat lid. An iron kettle stood on the stove.
Windows were set in one wall of the room. Under the windows ran a long
bench, and before it stood a long table made of a wide board. There
was nothing else to be seen, except grease and caked filth on the
rough, unpainted boards of the floor and walls. The last of the women
staggered into the room; the door was shut, and they faced each other
in the gray winter light which filtered in through the smeared panes of
the windows.
All during the black nightmare of the journey, every one of them had
been quivering with suppressed anguish. Absorbed each in her own grief
and despair, they had lain on the thin layer of straw on the floor of
the freight car, at the end of their strength, undone by the ignominy
of their utter defenselessness before brute force. The marks of tears
showed on their gray, unwashed faces, but they had no more tears to
shed now. They leaned against the walls and the bunks, their knees
shaking with exhaustion, and looked about them at the dreary, dirty
desolation of the room which from now on was to be their world. The
guards stared at them indifferently, seeing nothing of any interest in
that group of prisoners more than in any other, especially as these
were women no longer young, disheveled, wrinkled, unappetizing, with
uncombed, gray hair, and grimy hands.
A little stir among them, and there was Octavie, our ’Tavie, on her
feet, haggard with fatigue, dowdy, crumpled, battered, but powerful and
magnetic. She was speaking to them, speaking with the authority of her
long years of directing others, with the weight and assurance of her
puissant personality.
I can tell you almost exactly what she said, for the women who were
there and who told me about it afterwards, had apparently not forgotten
a word! She began by saying clearly and energetically, like an older
sister, “Come, come, we are all Frenchwomen, and so we have courage;
and we all have brains. People with brains and courage have nothing
to fear anywhere, _if they’ll use them_. Now let’s get to work and use
ours, all for one and one for all!”
Her bold, strong voice, her dauntless look, her masterful gesture,
brought them out of their lassitude, brought them from all sides and
corners of the room, where they had abandoned themselves, brought
them in a compact group close about her. She went on, her steady eyes
going from one to the other, “I think I know what is the first thing
to do; to take a solemn vow to stick by each other loyally. You know
it is said that women always quarrel among themselves, and that all
French people do. We are in a desperate plight. If we quarrel ever, at
all: if we are divided, we are undone. We’re of all sorts, Catholics,
free-thinkers, aristocrats, radicals, housekeepers, business-women, and
we don’t know each other very well. But we are all women, civilized
women, Frenchwomen, sisters! Nobody can help us but ourselves. But if
we give all we have, they can never conquer us!”
She stopped and looked at them deeply, her strong, ugly face, white
with intensity. “A vow, my friends, a vow from every one of us, by what
she holds most sacred, that she will summon all her strength to give of
her very best for the common good. In the name of our love for those
we have left--” her voice broke, and she could not go on. She lifted
her hand silently and held it up, her eyes fixed on them. The other
hands went up, the drawn faces steadied, the quivering hearts, centered
each on its own suffering, calmed by taking thought for others. The
very air in the barrack-room seemed less stifling. The two German
guards looked on, astonished by the incomprehensible ceremony. These
scattered, half-dead women, flung into the room like cattle, who had
not seemed to know each other, all at once to be one unit!