Small Town Far Off
Small Town Far Off
Monday, August 2nd, 1915
We thought we had to get away. But there is no getting away. One feels
it almost more in the country and in the little towns than in Paris,
where life, somehow or other, keeps on.
The country stands so empty.
The men are gone. They are gone from the cornfields and vineyards and
pastures. They are gone from thatched roofs and tiled roofs. From wide
white poplar-bordered roads, and steep cobbled streets, and hill paths
that are like the beds of mountain torrents, from the wide way of the
river, and from all the little ways of the streams.
The women are left, and the old people, and the children. The oxen are
left. The war has taken the horses and the mules.
The great tawny oxen are beautiful, dragging the plough through the red
fields, or the load of brushwood or green rushes along the Roman road.
The women trudge beside the oxen.
The old people had thought that they were come to the time of resting,
at the long end of it. They had thought to rest, at last, in their
doorways. But here they are, out in the fields of their sons and their
sons' sons, at work, only vaguely understanding why.
The Town
The town is the colour of honey and burnt bread, its walls and gates
and roofs, its castle and tour sarazine and the tall tower of the
cathedral.
The tower, a tall campanile, makes one think of Italy, as do the open
stone loggie, and garlands and trellises of vines.
Sometimes I think the town speaks to me in Italian. I try to
understand, and then I know that it is not Italian, nor yet quite
Latin, but the grand old tongue of the illumined pages of its princes'
Mass books. And then again it speaks to me in the patois its shepherd
saints spoke.
The Saint
The vines and fields come close about the town that for so long has
counted its years by vintages; the good year of the purple grapes, the
poor year of the white grapes.
The town has had its part in many wars, but that was long ago.
It has a patron saint, a shepherd boy, who saved it in three wars,
miraculously. But it does not ask him for help in this war. He is too
intimate and near. The town is too used to asking him that the spring
rains may not wash the vines, that a frost may not come to hurt them,
that a malady may not take the grapes.
The mountains shadow the town, with shadows less blue than they
themselves are, and scarcely more intangible than they are, as one
looks up to them.
The river passes quietly below the town, slowly along the wide, still
valley.
The River
I know why the river goes so slowly, lingering as much as ever she can,
and a little sadly.
It is because just here she leaves behind her youth and wildness of
great mountains, her mood of snows and rocks, cascade and woods and
high rough pastures, cow-bells and mountain-horn. Going down into
the classic countries, infinitely old, those deep, rich countries,
she passes here, between the high clear lift and lilt and thrill of
mountain music and the cadenced melody of Provence.
The old Estampe
There is an old print in the library of the castle, that shows the
town, her hill become a mighty mountain, the river a terrific flood,
the castle guns emitting huge neat clouds of smoke upon the army
of Savoy. You see the army of Savoy, in plumes and velvet cloaks,
withdrawing upon prancing steeds, and the lords of the town issuing
forth from the Roman gate with bugles and banners.
They were gorgeous, gallant little wars that the sons of the town rode
out to in those days.
The Dépôt d'Eclopés
I
The dépôt d'éclopés is just beyond the town, on the Roman road. The
building was once the Convent of the Poor Claires. When the Sisters
were sent away it was used as Communal Schools. There is a great plane
tree outside the door in the yellow wall, and a bench in the shade.
There is room for seven éclopés to sit crowded together on the bench.
They bring out some chairs also.
All day long, and every day, as many of the éclopés as can get about,
and do not mind that the road see them, and can find space in the shade
of the plane tree, sit there, and look up and down the sunshine and the
dust.
Some of them have one leg, and some of them have one arm. There is one
of them who is packed into a short box on wheels. He sits up straight
in the box, and he can run it about with his hands on the wheels. There
is another in such a little cart, but that one has to lie on his back,
and cannot manage the wheels himself. There is one who lies on a long
stretcher, that they fix on two hurdles. There are two who are blind.
The two blind men sit, and stare and stare.
Looking to the right, from the dépôt d'éclopés, you see the Roman
gate of the town and remains of the ancient walls, and the old poor
golden roof, heaped up about the square golden tower of the cathedral.
The many ages have been so golden and slow upon the town that their
sunshine has soaked into it. It is saturated with the sunshine of the
ages and become quite golden. You imagine it in dark winter weather
glowing with a gold of its own. To the left, from the gate of the dépôt
d'éclopés, the road leads between poplars and vineyards and cornfields
to the mountains. The mountains stand very still, one against the
other, one behind the other. They also are golden, having retained
ages and ages of sunshine. They stand splendid, cut out of gold
roughly, shadowed with purple and blue.
I often go and stay with the éclopés at the gate, they like to have
anybody come. It was a long time before I dared go in at the gate.
Inside the gate there is a courtyard that was once the nuns' garden,
with their well in the middle of it and their fruit trees trained along
the walls. And there, there move about all day, or keep to the shadow,
of first the east wall, then the west, those of the éclopés whom the
road must not see.
Some of them look up at you when you come in. But most of them turn
away from you.
The two blind men at the gate who stare and stare, they cannot see the
golden town or the golden mountains. They cannot see the compassion and
the kindness that there is for them in the faces of all those who look
upon them.
But these men in the courtyard, however will they learn to bear, down
all their lives, the looks that there will be for them in the most
kind, compassionate faces?
II
There are not ever enough chairs under the plane tree. There are more
éclopés than there are chairs. How they laugh! They think it very
droll to see a man who has only his left leg and a man who has only his
right leg sharing a chair.
The men who have no legs say that that is not nearly so bad as having
no arms. They say that the men with no arms are ashamed to be seen,
like the men wounded in the face. They say that the men with no arms
will never come out even to the gate.
III
They never will let you stand. It is a dreadful thing to do, to take
one of their chairs. But they like to talk to a stranger.
All of them, except the man whose spine has been hurt, love to talk.
The man whose spine has been hurt lies all day, the days he can be
brought out, on a stretcher, never stirring. He never speaks except to
say one thing. He is very young. He looks as if he were made of wax.
He keeps saying, "How long the days are at this season!"
He will ask, over and over again, "What time is it?" and say, "Only
eleven o'clock?" Or, "Only three o'clock?"
And then always, "How long the days are at this season!"
IV
They are taking out for a walk those of the éclopés who are fit for
it. There must be nearly a hundred of them. In every possible sort
of patched, discoloured uniform, here they come hopping and hobbling
along. They have more crutches and canes than feet among the lot of
them.
One of the men who has no legs goes so fast on his wooden stump and his
crutches that everybody stops to look, and all the éclopés laugh, and
the people stopping to look, laugh, and he laughs more than any of them.
If things are tragic enough, they are funny. I have come to know that,
with the éclopés at the gate. And inside the gate, with those of the
éclopés who keep back against the walls, I have come to know that the
only safety of life is death.
The Cathedral
I
The Place de la Cathédrale is full of hot red sunset, taken and held
there, like wine in the chalice of old golden walls. The old golden
walls of the houses that once were palaces lift up the shape of a cup
to the wine of the sunset, a vessel of silence and slow time.
Now every night at sunset the bells of the Cathedral are ringing, and
people are coming into the Place from the rue St. Réal and the rue
Croix d'Or and the tunnel street, under the first stories of the Palais
du Maréchal, that is called the rue Petite Lanterne.
They are coming to the Cathedral for the prayers and canticles for
France.
There are women and old people and children and soldiers, fine straight
young chasseurs alpins from the garrison, like chamois hunters, with
béret and mountain-horn, and wounded soldiers from the hospitals, and
from the dépôt d'éclopés, with crutches and canes and white bandages.
The swallows are flying low back and forth across the cobbles of the
Place and crying.
Behind the tower of the Cathedral, the great purple mass of the
mountains stands out against the sunset. The smell of the mountains,
of vineyards and cows and cool waters, comes down to the smells of the
town's living in the Place.
II
Inside the church there are no lights, except of so much of sunset as
comes in under the low arches, and of the red lamp, and of the candles,
burning for Our Lady of Victories, and for the new Saint Jeanne d'Arc.
Among the dusky figures, very still, in the church, you see white
things. Sometimes it is the white cap of an old crone and sometimes it
is a white bandage.
III
The church smells like a hospital. There is no more the smell of
incense in the church, that used to linger there from office to office
through the years. You wonder if really ever the church smelled of
incense and wax candles. The smell of hospital has so come to belong
there.
Americans
He did not seem so very ill. He had not that look of being made of wax.
And he talked all the time. Most of them die so silently.
He lay in the bright ward and talked all of the time.
He had enlisted in the Foreign Legion and fought since the beginning,
and was wounded last week in the Argonne.
He wanted me to sit beside him and listen. I hated the things he said.
He said he was a fool, they all were fools, and they all knew it now.
He said there was no glory. They had thought that war was glorious.
And it was hideous; sardine tins and broken bottles, mud or dust, never
a green thing left to live. There was no enemy. Just guns. When a man
fell, nobody had hit him, only a gun. If he was dead, lucky for him.
When they were wounded they made noises like animals. It killed you
to pick them up. He said they "went sorter every which way" in your
hands. If they fell between the trenches you couldn't get to them. It
seemed as if they'd never die. Sometimes they made noises like wolves
and sometimes like cats. That was the worst, the noises like cats. You
never knew if it weren't cruel to throw them bread. If you threw them
bread, they lived and lived. The trenches were full of rats. The rats
came and ate your boots and straps and things while you slept. The
smells were "something fierce." "Gee, what fools we were," he said.
He picked at the bedclothes and grinned at me and said, "Say, kid,
ain't you homesick for back over across the Duck Pond?"
I said, "Oh, no, no."
I looked out of the window to the sky of France that never has failed
me of dreams, and I said, "No, no, no."
Oh, why did I? Why didn't I pretend for him that I was homesick too?
An Altar
From the narrow deep old street you turn in under an arch to a vaulted
passage that is always dark and cold. It looks into a court that once
was very proud. Now a wholesale wine merchant has heaped his tuns one
upon another in one corner, and in another corner a carpenter has his
saws and benches and great logs of mountain oak and pine. There are the
smells of wine and fresh-cut wood together with the smell of stones and
ages in the court.
The houses about the court still keep something of their "grand air."
They are of all the colours that time in the south gives to stones,
saffron and amber and gold, as if the stone were soft for the sunshine
to sink into.
On the left of the court there is a wide high door under an escutcheon.
The sound of the bronze knocker is very stately.
The wine merchant has a blackbird that whistles all day in its osier
cage, and the children of the carpenter are always laughing and
calling, as they play with the fresh curled wood shavings.
But everybody seems to stop and listen when you lift the bronze knocker.
A lame man-servant comes to open the door. He fought through '70 with
his master and was wounded at Sedan, where his master was killed.
There is a wide stone stairway, with a wrought-iron railing, and with
walls discoloured where the tapestries have been taken away.
The tapestries are gone also from the corridor, and from the room to
which the man-servant opens the door.
The old portraits are left in the walls of that room, and the exquisite
wood-carving of the time of the Sun King, but the three or four chairs
and the table on the right by the great carved hearth, are such as one
would find at the Bazar of the Nouvelles Galeries.
The room is empty, except for these chairs and the table, and the
little altar.
The long side of the room, opposite the door, has four tall windows
that look across a garden, with untrimmed yew-trees and box edges,
over green paths, tangles of grass and flowers, to what used to be
conventual buildings and the nuns' orchard.
The little altar is at the end of the room on the left as you come in,
facing the windows.
There is a statue of Notre Dame des Victoires and a statue of Saint
Jeanne d'Arc, and there is the Cross between them. There are two
seven-branched old bronze candlesticks. The altar is spread with "a
fine white cloth."
On the floor before it is laid something covered with the flag of the
Republic.
I know what it is that the flag covers.
She had showed it to me.
One day, I don't know why, she took me there and lifted the flag, and
showed me a heap of toys.
She said, "They were babies when they died." "They died;" she said,
"the two of them in one week together, of a fever. It was in the year
that we called, till now, the 'Terrible Year.' It was in the month of
the battle in which their father was killed." She said, "Look at the
wooden soldiers of my babies, the Hussars and the Imperial Guards. How
long ago! And this was a little model of the cannon of those days. Look
at the bigger one's musket and the little one's trumpet and drum. And
the little uniforms of the Empire I had made for them, and they were so
proud of--My sons, to whom it was not given to die for France."
Hospital
One long side of the hospital looks from its rows of windows to
vineyards and the mountains. The smell of burning brushwood comes in,
to the smell of the hospital.
Through all the vineyards these days they are burning the refuse of the
vines. The smoke stays among the vines, lingering heavily. The purple
smoke and the red and purple wine colours of the vines, and the purple
mists of the distances, gathered away into the purple shadows of the
mountains, make one think at twilight of the music of a violin, or of a
flute.
The Number 18 is very bad. He does not know any one any more. He lies
against a heap of cushions, his knees drawn up almost to his chin, his
eyes wide open all the time, his hands picking at the covers.
The boy in the next bed keeps saying, "If my mother were here, she
would know what to do. If my mother were here, she would save him."
There is a boy who wants some grapes. His whole body is shot to pieces.
They do not dare give him even a sip of water. He keeps begging and
begging for grapes. Very shortly the hillside under the windows will be
heavy and purple with grapes.
There is a boy who talks about riding over everything. He keeps saying,
"We rode right over them, we rode right over them."
There is another who keeps crying, "Oh, no, not that! Oh, no, not that!"
There is the petit père, who is getting smaller and smaller. When they
are dying, they seem always to get smaller and smaller. He had a bullet
through one lung, but it was out and he was getting well. Only, he
caught cold.
He is from the north. His wife and his two little girls are somewhere
in the country from which no news comes. He has had no news of them
since he left them and went away to war, on the second day.
He used to talk of them all the time, and worry terribly.
But now he cannot talk at all, and he does not worry any more. He
smiles quite happily and has no more grief.
When they do the dressings of Number 26 he crams his handkerchief into
his mouth so that he may not scream. He shivers and trembles and the
tears roll down his cheeks, very big tears. But he never makes a sound.
Number 15 is not a boy at all, but just a little sick thing. He is so
very little in his bed. He is like a sparrow--the skeleton of a sparrow.
I feed him crumbs of bread, and sips of water, as if he were a sparrow.
How one loves a thing one has fed with a teaspoon.
I do not like No. 30. I am always so afraid that I shall in some way
show how I dislike him. It is hateful of me, but I cannot like him.
He screams at his dressings, and he is fat, and he sends out and buys
cheeses and eats them.
The little Zouave is better again. That is the most dreadful thing,
that it is so long. He takes so long to die. The days when he is better
are the most cruel days.
To-day in the middle of the morning, he was beckoning to me with a
feeble little thin brown hand.
I went over and bent down, for he can only whisper.
He said, "I said good morning to you when you first came in, and you
did not know."
Number 4 is not going to die. The shade of death is gone from his young
face.
He is going to lie for a long time on a rubber cushion that has a tube
hanging down, quite long, like a tail.
Every day, for a long time, at the dressings I shall have to pull back
the sheets and blankets and take away the hoop, and see that thing that
used to be a big fine man lying quite helpless and of so strange a
shape upon the rubber cushion with the tail.
The Omelet
The vine was red on the white old soft wall.
It was very beautiful. There were masses of purple asters under the red
vine, against the wall. There was a bowl of purple asters on the table
between the carafes of red and white vine.
We had an omelet and bread and butter and raspberries, and water, very
beautiful in the thick greenish glasses.
Under the yellow boughs of the lime tree we could see the misty valley
and the mountains.
The table had a red-and-white cloth.
The little old thin brown woman who served us wanted to talk all the
time with us. She wanted to talk about the omelet; she had made it and
was very proud of it. She wanted to talk about the war and to talk
about her son.
She said that there had been some horrible, strange mistake and that
people thought that he was dead. She had had a paper from the Ministry
of War telling her he was dead. It was very strange. She had had a
letter also from the Aumonier, telling her he was dead. But, of course,
she knew.
She said he would come home, and be so sorry she had had such dreadful
news, and so glad that she had not believed it.
They would laugh together. He had beautiful white teeth, she said, and
his eyes screwed tight up when he laughed.
She told us how she and he would laugh together.
Gentilhommière
The road, up through the vineyards and pastures and fields of maize and
of buckwheat, was like the bed of a mountain torrent, all tossed down,
and grey and stony, between the poplars. In other years it had been a
well enough kept little road, but in this year there was no one to care
for it. And surely it had been a mountain torrent, in the spring's last
melting of snows and in the heavy rains of the summer. Who was there
left to mend it? Or who, indeed, to travel it?
We climbed it slowly in the golden autumn afternoon.
The poplar trees that bordered it were almost bare, the rains and winds
of this most dreadful year had dismantled them already. They were tall
slim candles, tipped with yellow flame. They were candles lit in
sunshine, too early, before candle-light time.
Autumn was come too soon.
The vines had failed. And yet no one had ever seen the colour of the
vines so beautiful.
The road climbs up and up through the vineyards.
The house stands on a ridge, among chestnut trees that were turned
already golden and brown, high against the high wall of the mountains.
The mountains were of the colours of the vintage, purple and topaz and
red.
The clouds made snow peaks high behind the mountains.
The house has a heap of steep, old, uneven blue-tiled roofs. Its walls
are as yellow as the corn. There is a long terrace before it, with a
stone balustrade, worn and soft, and a pigeon tower at one end of the
terrace, and the tower of a great dark yew tree at the other end.
I thought what a withdrawn little place it was, held quite apart, like
a thing treasured and feared for.
The road passes under the pigeon-tower end of the terrace, and round
into a courtyard that the farm and service houses close in on two sides.
The courtyard smelled of clover and of cows. Multitudes of white
pigeons fluttered about the old thatched roofs of the grange, where
the hay was stored in the gable, and corn hung drying in golden
festoons, and the dust of the threshing floor was deeply fragrant. The
wine vats smelled of grapes. And odours of lavender and wild thyme came
close down from the mountain side.
The entrance door stood open, across the grass and cobbles of the
court, to whosoever might trouble to go in.
There was a great chestnut tree on either side of the door, and the
ground about the door was strewn with brown burrs and golden leaves.
A little old peasant woman, who must surely have been the Nounou long
ago, came to the door, in sabots and the white stiff winged cap of the
country.
She said that Madame had gone down to the black wheat fields.
The waxed, black, shining stairs came straight down into the red-tiled
hall.
Across the hall there was a fine carved and painted room, that lay all
along the length of the terrace. That room was closed because of the
war. "Madame had it closed," explained the little old nurse, "since the
day when Monsieur Xaxa went."
In the dining-room there was a big table pushed back to the wall, with
many chairs crowded out of the way against it. The old nurse said, "We
do not use this room, now that Monsieur Xaxa is gone."
She would show us the kitchen with its red-brick tiles, and dark, great
beams, and earthen jars and coppers, and its old stone hearth, like an
altar.
She said, "Nothing is kept as beautifully as it should be. Madame and I
are quite alone."
She would have us go up the shining stairs. "You must see the room
of Monsieur l'Abbé," she said, "it is all ready for him. He comes
to-night. We have been for days and days getting his room and all the
house, prepared for him."
There were purple and white asters in bowls and vases. The floor of the
room shone like a golden floor. The old green shadowy mirror reflected
the room as if it were a dream room, into which one might pass, just
stepping through the tarnished lovely frame. The bed was covered with
a very fine ancient green-and-white striped brocade. On the bed, under
the crucifix and the Holy Water basin and the spray of box, there were
laid out Monsieur l'Abbé's soutane and his soft hat with the tassel.
His embroidered worsted slippers stood on the golden floor beside the
bed.
"He is Madame's eldest son," said the old nurse, "and he is a great
and wonderful saint. A great and wonderful saint."
"But," she said, as we went out of his room to the stairs, "it was
always Monsieur Xaxa that Madame loved best."
As we went down the stairs she added, "He was a wild boy, but we adored
him. He was always wild, not like Monsieur l'Abbé. But how we adored
him!"
She said, "I thought Madame would die the day he went away. But yet it
is he who is dead, since seven months, and Madame and I, we live."
Château
The gates stand open. Some one has broken open the gates. Or perhaps no
one had troubled to close them.
The porter's lodge, under the limes, is empty.
The avenue of ancient, stately lime trees that leads to the château,
is overgrown, in this one year, deep with grass and moss. The trees,
that have not been trimmed, shade it too darkly. The leaves of the
lime-trees are falling. In another year it would seem strange if the
leaves fell so, before the end of August; but in this year no death
seems strange. The dead leaves lie deep in the avenue.
At the end of the avenue the château stands, helplessly. Through long
times and much history, its towers commanded the valley and the great
road of the river. Its name rang in high councils, and its banners knew
the winds of many wars.
Again its sons went out to battle. They were three of them. They went,
just more than a year ago, three gay young chasseurs alpins. They are
all three of them dead, on the field of honour.
The little aged orange trees are all dead in their green tubs in the
courtyard. The ivy has grown across the great barred entrance door. The
lantern over the door is full of swallows' nests.
The old Monsieur and the old Madame are gone away. How could they have
lived on in the house that was not to be for their sons?
We asked many people in the village, but no one knew where they had
gone.
Shopping
I
In the library of the Octagon I found some little etchings of these old
streets and courtyards and allées murées, steep roofs and balconies
and open loggie, carved windows and doorways, corners and turnings,
done beautifully by someone who had surely understood them. He had
known how the smell of old wood and stone strikes out from certain
shadows and stabs you in the heart; and the sudden sharp loneliness you
feel because of dead leaves driven against the tower stairs.
The librarian said, "He was indeed an artist."
The librarian was very old. He wore a little black skull cap and a grey
muffler about his throat. He was bent quite over, and could see what
I had taken only when he held the things close to his eyes. His hands
were twisted like old brown fagots, and they trembled and fumbled as he
held the etchings, one after the other, close to his eyes.
"We were very proud of him," said the librarian, "he was of this town.
He would have given the town fame throughout the world. His right arm
is shot away. And he is so young."
He kept on repeating that while he tied up my etchings.
"He is so young," kept saying the librarian, who is so old.
II
As I was leaving the antiquity shop in the rue Basse du Château,
standing a minute at the door with the antiquary's pretty young wife
and the two fat babies, there came along the street four fantassins,
two of them limping, one with his arm in a sling, carrying a funeral
wreath between them.
It was made of zinc palms and laurels, and the tricolour was laid
across it.
We stood, not saying anything.
The fantassins passed, going up toward the ramparts of the Porte du
Midi and the cemetery, carrying their comrade's wreath and the flag.
The antiquary's little young wife was crying.
She said, "I have a letter to-day from my husband. I have a letter
every ten days. He also is a fantassin. He is in the Argonne." She
threw back her head that the tears might stay back in her eyes, and
said, "He was very well when he wrote. He wrote that he was very well,
and that I was not to be afraid."
III
I went to scold the old woman of the fruit shop because she never
remembers my apricots.
The fruit shop in the rue des Ramparts is a low stone doorway, hung
with scarlet peppers and dried golden corn and yellow gourds, and
onions that are of opal and amethyst and pearl; and heaped about with
cabbages and lettuce and tomatoes and the few fruits of the season,
blackberries and plums and apricots.
The old woman sits in the doorway. She wears the white winged cap
and a blue apron and a brown silk fringed shawl and a big gold cross
on a gold chain. Her husband was killed in '70. She has no son. Her
daughter's three big sons were very kind to her. They are all three of
them chasseurs alpins. From one there has been no news since eleven
months ago.
She was sitting perfectly still in her place, her hands lying together,
hard-worked and tired, on her blue apron. She was looking straight
ahead of her and did not see me at all.
I stood and looked at her, and did not speak and saw far-off things,
and turned and went away.
Mountains
I
The inn, up in the rough stony town of the high mountains, was forlorn
enough. There were some dogs and chickens about the door of it, in the
wet street.
The woman who came to the door of the inn was one of those thin, dark
pale, quiet women about whom there is always something sympathetic and
sad. She said, she feared the inn could do us little honour; we must
forgive, because of the war.
The stone hall was narrow and cold, the stairs went straight up from
the farther end of it, and two doors opened from it on either side of
it.
The woman took our wraps, and put them down on a table that there was
by the entrance door.
Before the door to the right, down by the stairs, there was a small,
fat, blonde baby standing, a little round-headed boy baby, in a black
blouse, knocking on the door and crying and calling "Georgeot." He did
not turn to look at us at all, but went on always knocking and crying.
The woman said, "You see, we never expect any one now, but if Monsieur
and Madame will be indulgent--this is the dining-room, Madame," she
opened one of the doors on the left, and went ahead of us into the dark
room, and groped to the window to throw back the blinds.
We went to one of the bare tables, and she arranged it for us, not
talking to us any more. And after a while fetched us potatoes and
cheese, and sour bread and red wine which tasted of the roots and stems
of vines.
Whenever she left the door a little open behind her, we could hear the
baby in the hall sobbing and calling for "Georgeot." We asked her, "But
the poor little soul, what is the matter that he calls like that?"
She told us it was his father he was calling. She said he had been
hearing her call his father "Georgeot." His father had been home for
six days' leave, and was gone back just this morning. "You understand,"
she said, "my husband had not seen his baby in eleven months, and he
had him every minute in his arms; and since he is gone the baby will
not go away from his door, or stop calling for him."
She did not seem to want to talk any more about it, and we pretended to
find our lunch most excellent.
When we went out into the hall again she had picked the baby up, and
was standing with him in her arms, there by his father's door. She
patted his yellow head down against her shoulder, but he still went on
crying for "Georgeot."
It was raining hard out in the grey street.
In a shop under a vaulting, that the crook of a shepherd Saint had
blessed through hundreds of years, I bought a queer sort of woolly
beast for the baby.
But the baby did not care for it at all.
II
Going on yet higher up into the mountains, we met a dreary little
funeral, coming down under umbrellas. The coffin, under a black cloth,
was pushed along in a two-wheeled cart by a woman and a very old man.
Some women and two or three old people followed, and some children and
dogs.
It was not the funeral of a soldier, only of some one uselessly dead.
III
Rain, sunshine, wet black rock, great blue and black and purple clouds,
clear azure spaces, snows, lifted drifted crests of snow, like waves
arrested--all this as we went up, and up, with a rainbow like a bridge
across the valley we were leaving behind us.
Up and up and up, into the young joy of the mountains, young as at the
beginning of the world, joyous above all things. What do they care, the
great mountains? They stand quite still, and all things pass. They lift
their heads, and do not even know.
A baby cried because its father was gone away to war. Its mother did
not cry at all.
A stranger came by and cried, not because of those especial people, but
because of the world.
A little funeral straggled down the hill in the rain.
None of it mattered.
I thought, we went up high above all griefs.
Some children and a woman, from a hut up in the snow, came to beg of us.
I thought, for what did they need to beg, they, who had the everlasting
snows? I thought, how absurd to beg for bread to live, in a place
where death would be so pure and clear, would ring out so joyously. I
thought, how nice it is that all the roads of life lead up to death.
And that death, however come to, is so high a thing.
It was terribly cold. The snow was over us and under us, as the clouds
were.
IV
In the round basin circled with snows, the ancient hospice--that is
no more a hospice, from which its old possessors have been driven
away--stands white, beside the white road, in the close-cropped
pasture. The sheep and tawny rough cattle were the only things that
stirred. The smoke of the hospice chimneys stayed quite motionless in
the golden air.
The air rang like a golden bell.
The music of the cow-bells was no more distinct a music than that of
just the golden ringing of the air.
They lighted a fire in the stove of the long white refectory, and we
had tea and bread and butter and honey beside it.
There were no guests in the hospice. The little white stone rooms, that
used to be the monks' cells, had floors of red-brick tiles and thick
walls, and each cell had one deep narrow window.
The woman who built our fires, and fetched our tea, and showed us to
our little white stone rooms, was not old, but looked very old and sad.
She had a red knitted shawl and big gold ear-rings, and big brown dumb
eyes.
We went out into the music of the sunset, every mountain peak was
singing. It was utterly still, except for the sheep-bells and
cow-bells. The silence was a great music, joyous and grave.
V
I am sitting up in bed, writing by the light of two candles; it is a
golden light, in the pure white moonlight that fills the cell.
The slit of a window opposite the bed is wide open, and the moonlight
floods in.
I am so cold, I have put on my big travelling coat.
The moonlit air tastes of mountain tops. The stillness is immense in
the small room. All the silences of the world are in the room.
I cannot see the moon, nor the snow peaks; only the sky of sheer
moonlight, and a dark dim mountain, looming.
I am so glad to be awake and cold.
VI
While I was writing, something happened. An ugly sound broke the
spell. Some one was coming to the hospice. There was the sound of a
motor-bicycle, from a long way off, coming through the stillness. There
was the calling of its horn and then it was at the door.
I heard the door open, and a cry of delight; and a man's young voice,
joyous, high-keyed, intense, and a woman's voice, laughing and sobbing.
VII
I saw the sun come up out of the snow, I saw all the marvellous things
that there are between darkness and dawn.
I had made myself stay awake the whole night through, to not lose one
minute of the mountains. The mountains were mine, from sunset through
the dusk and the dark and the moonlight, to the dark again, and through
that other so different dusk that is before the dawn, to the sun's
great silent rising, and the full glory of the day.
VIII
It was the son of the woman of the gold ear-rings and the red shawl,
who had come home in the night, unexpected, for six days' leave.
He was out in the morning pastures, a tall lean mountain boy, with
gleaming white teeth, and brown eyes like his mother's, but laughing,
and with absurd dimples in his brown young face.
His mother was out with him in the dawn, the red shawl over her head,
keeping close beside him as he went swinging across the pastures, her
short step almost running by his long step.
The Little Maître d'Hotel
Our little worried grey butler is gone.
His class has been called out, the class of Quatre-vingt-douze.
It appears he was only forty-three.
I had thought he was sixty at least. It must be because he has been
anxious all his life that he seems so old.
He was terribly worried and anxious when he talked to me, the night
before he went, about the old father and mother he must leave. He
would be going probably only somewhere back of the lines to guard
a bridge or a railway, but for him it meant--who knows what darkly,
helplessly imagined things? He talked a great deal in a high-pitched
voice--standing there, very white in his proper livery--of bayonet
attacks, of the coal he had managed to get in for the old people, of
dying for France, and of his mother's rheumatism, and of the cow they
had had to sell.
The Garage
There are twelve convalescents installed after a fashion in the garage
half-way down the field path. They are so nearly well that they can
make up their beds and sweep out their rooms and wash at the pump and
go down to eat at the canteen of the hospital Sainte Barbe. They go
to the Clinique there every second or third or fourth day. An orderly
comes up from there once in a while with clean linen for them. And that
is all they need be troubled about. They are quite comfortable and very
forlorn.
They spend their days hanging out of the windows of the loft over the
garage or sitting about the big board table of the space underneath,
where the motors used to be kept.
Most of them are men from cities who do not know what to do with the
country, and the three or four who are country boys know so well what
to do with vines and fields, that the vines and fields they may not
labour, so close about them here, only worry them. They are the men who
get most cross and quarrelsome over the games of cards at the board
table.
They all quarrel more or less. Sometimes I wonder, how can men who
are so splendid, so simply, steadily, dumbly splendid, who have been
through so much, seen death so close, and life so close, quarrel like
this over nothing at all. But most times I understand.
The crickets trill all the hot noons in the grass, and the droning of
the bees sounds very hot. Like clouds of white butterflies drift over
the path, make little drifting butterfly shadows on the path. There is
a most wonderful smell of clover in the heat. Down under the fields
there are heaped together the crowded old rust-red and burnt umber and
golden roofs of the town. And all away beyond there is the valley,
opened out, long road and river, to high, far distances of mountains
and snows.
I go and sit with my friends about the big board table, in the place
where the motors used to be kept. I play cards with my friends, the
twelve convalescents. I play badly, for I hate cards, but they like
to have a guest. They try to arrange the game so that I may win. They
want me to win; they think that I will enjoy it better. If they knew
how bored I am they would be dreadfully upset. I wish I loved cards and
could play well, to please them.
Towards evening they are certain to be cross with one another.
One after the other they will soon be going back to the Front, all of
them. There is not one of them who will go unwillingly. They have been
there, they know what it is, but there is not one who will grumble when
he goes back, or fail when he faces _that_ again. Every one of them,
when he goes back, will say the same thing. "Of course I must go back,
all the comrades are there." "Tous les copains sont là-bas." But in the
meantime they quarrel.
From the doors of the garage, wide, one sees the sunset among the
mountains. The bats flit across and the owls call. The dusk comes,
velvet-thick and soft, with smells of fields and vineyards and of the
town's hearth fires, and with the myriad voices of cigale and frog and
sleepy bird, and with the small life noises of the town. Gathering up,
and folding in, the night comes.
There is electric light in the garage that my friends are very proud
of indeed. A huge naked bulb dangles from a cord over the table where
we sit playing cards.
Francine
The son of Francine is home on leave.
Francine comes every day to help in the kitchen. She was scrubbing the
kitchen's grey stone flags when her son came.
He came swinging up the path between the wheat and poppies and
cornflowers. He came up the terrace steps, in his leggings and his
béret, a fine young diable bleu.
Francine came, running, wiping her red hands in her apron, suddenly
beautiful and very proud.
Railway Station, The Days of the 25th
The trains of wounded arrive almost always at dawn, the late autumn
dawn.
The lamps of the station are still burning, but grow pale.
Beyond the open platform, across the tracks, you can see that dawn has
come to the sky, behind the mountains.
There is a star in the midst of the dawn, Hesper, star of both the
twilights, very big and bright and near, like a lamp.
It is very cold.
In the pale light of the dawn and the pale light of the station lamps
they wait for the train of wounded to come in.
The Red Cross has a cantine at the station in what used to be the
buffet. But these men will be past need of coffee and soup.
The cart of the buffet, that used to be pushed along the trains with
breakfasts under the carriage windows, is heaped now, in these days,
with very strange things. There is need of these things, always. There
is this, and that, that cannot wait.
The doctors from the Lycée Prince Victor, now the big military
hospital, are there by the chariot. They stand waiting and talking
together. They turn up their coat collars and sink their hands in their
pockets and stamp their feet in the cold of the dawn.
The orderlies wait with their stretchers, back against the wall, under
the gay posters of places where people used to go to be amused.
The Red Cross nurses keep back in the cantine, where it is warmer.
The train is late. It has been from three to six hours late each one
of these dreadful mornings.
Everything has been ready since long, long ago, in the deepest dark of
the night.
If only there are enough blankets.
The train is terribly, terribly late.
New Ones
It was for this that they evacuated last week all who could possibly be
moved, to fill the wards with other broken things. They gathered up all
the broken things that had lain here so long, and sent them away. And
now the wards are full of other broken things.
The old ones had grown accustomed to the rooms. They had suffered and
been unhappy in these rooms, and when they had to go away they did not
want to go. They had nothing left but the place and people of their
suffering, and they found, when they had to go, that they loved the
place and the people they had grown so used to. They seemed to be
afraid to go away. To all the weariness was added this new weariness.
And now the wards are full of new ones.
The new ones lie very still.
Deaths
It is quite simple.
If it can be that the priest comes, it is very well. All that the
priest does is beautiful. The feet and hands, the eyes, the lips have
sinned, and the touch of forgiveness upon them is exquisite. It is
exquisite, that last entering in of the Divine Body to the body that
is dying. But if for any reason no priest comes, if no one cares or
troubles to ask for him, or if there is no time, God is most surely
there and understands. And one is comforted to find that there is no
need to fear for them, as they die.
They die so quietly. I am glad to know how quiet a thing it is to die.
There was only one who was not quiet.
They bound ice about his head, and then he did not shriek and fling
himself about any more, but lay quite quietly until he died.
Another Winter, Thursday, October 7th
When the rain had gone over, in the late afternoon, and the clouds were
lifted and drifted a little, we saw that there was snow on all the
near mountains, through the pines, upon the pastures.
The cold wet street was full of excited swallows. Here was the cold.
The cold was come too soon. They never yet had gone south so early.
Dear me, dear me--where would they stop the night?
Up under all the old shaggy rusty eaves, that reach out over the narrow
streets, hundreds and hundreds of swallows were crowding each other in
and out of sheltered places, such a fluttering and twittering. Under
thatch and tiles, along the ledges of fine proud old stone windows, and
of wine-red wooden balconies, they pushed and crowded each other, and
in and out of the brown clayey nests that summer had abandoned.
People in the streets stopped to watch, laughing a little.
People in the cold, wet streets stopped to watch the swallows, women
and old people and children.
"They have seen the snow on the mountains," said the people to one
another, laughing a little.
And then always, every one said, each to the other, the same thing.
The one thought of all of them together, "Another winter."