REST
The snow danced in a fine white mist over the ploughed fields, and drove
perpetually against the northerly sides of the tall bare tree-trunks
that lined the way for miles, hardly finding a hold upon the smooth
flanks of the planes, but sinking into the rough-barked limes till they
looked dappled with their brown ridges and the white veining, and oddly
as though covered with the pelt of some strange animal. High in the web
of bare branches, the clumps of mistletoe showed as filigree nests for
some race of fairy birds.
Gracious country this, for all the desolate whiteness; it lay in great
rolling slopes with drifts of purplish elms in the folds, and on the
levels winding steel-dark streams along whose banks the upward-springing
willows burned an ardent rust colour. And as the car rocked and bounded
along and the wind screen first starred in one place, then in another,
then fell out altogether, one got a better and better view of it all.
What a wonderful people the French are for agriculture.... Hardly a man
did I see all the days I motored about and about, but I saw mile after
mile of cultivated land, the sombrely-clad women or boys guiding the
slow ploughs, the rough-coated horses pulling patiently--white horses
that looked pale against the bare earth, but a dark yellow when the snow
came to show up the tarnishing that the service of man brings upon
beasts. Several times I saw English soldiers ploughing, and rejoiced.
We came into the town that was our bourn in the grey of the evening,
passed the grey glimmer of the river between its grey stone quays,
passed the grey miracle of the cathedral, and then, in the rapidly
deepening dusk, turned in through great wrought iron gates into a grey
courtyard.
It may have been gathered that, much as I admire both their practical
perfection and their spiritual significance, I am no lover of camps,
which seem to me among all things man-created upon God's earth about the
most depressing. I had lived and moved and had my being in camps it
seemed to me for countless ages, the edges of my soul were frayed with
camps. From the moment of walking into the old house at R---- a
wonderful sense of rest that brooded over the place enveloped me. The
thing had an atmosphere, impossible to exaggerate, though very difficult
to convey, but I shall never forget the miracle that house was to me.
It was a Hostel for the Relations of Wounded, and there are in France
at present some half-dozen of these houses, supported by the Joint War
Committee of the Red Cross and the Order of St. John, and staffed by
V.A.D.'s. At all of them the relations of badly wounded are lodged and
fed free of charge, while cars meet them and also convey them to and
from the hospital. This much I knew as plain facts, what I had not been
prepared for was the breath of exquisite pleasure that emanated from
this house.
The house was originally a butter market, and the entrance room, set
about with little tables where the relations have their meals, has one
side entirely of glass; the lounge beyond, which is for the staff, is
glass-roofed, while that opening on the right hand of the dining-place,
the lounge for the relations, has long windows all down the side; so it
will be seen that light and air are abundant on the ground floor of the
Hostel in spite of the fact that it looks on to a courtyard.
From the relations' lounge, with its slim vermilion pillars ringed about
with seats like those round tree-trunks, there goes up a curving
staircase of red tiles, with a carved baluster of oak greyish with age,
a griffon sitting upright upon the newel. Up this staircase I was taken
to my room, and there the completion of peace came upon me.
One could see at a glance it would be quiet, beautifully quiet. Its
window gave on to the sloping grey flanks of pointed roofs and showed a
filigree spire pricking the pale bubble of the wintry sky, its walls
were panelled from floor to ceiling, its hangings were of white and
vermilion, its floor dark and polished, and on the wide stone hearth
burned a wood fire. And, to crown all, after tiny huts, it was so big a
room that the corners were filled with gracious shadow; and the
firelight flickered up and down on the panelling and glimmered in the
polished floor and set the shadows quivering. I lay back in a
vermilion-painted chair and felt steeped in the bath of restfulness that
the place was.
The whole house was very perfectly "got-up," the maximum of effect
having been attained with the minimum of expense, though not of labour;
it all having been achieved under the direction of a former
superintendent with a genius for decoration, who is now V.A.D. Area
Commandant and still lives at the Hostel. The evening I arrived there,
she and the staff were busy stenciling a buff bedspread with blue
galleons in full sail, varied by gulls. Everything is exceedingly
simple, there is no fussy detail, nothing to catch dirt. The walls are
all panelled, and painted either ivory or dark brown; the furniture is
of wicker and plain wood, painted in gay colours--rich blues and
vermilion; the tablecloths are of red or blue checks. In the spacious
bedrooms are simple colour schemes--in one there are thick, straight
curtains of flaming orange, in another of a deep blue, in another of
red and white checked material. The floors are of polished wood or red
tiles strewn with rugs; vivid-coloured cushions lie in the easy chairs;
and set about in earthen jars are great branches of mimosa and lilac
from the South, boughs of pussy-willow, the tender velvety grey ovals
blossoming into fragile yellow dust; all along the sills are indoor
window-boxes filled with hyacinths of pink and white and a cold faint
blue.
On the walls the only decoration is that of posters, and these create an
extraordinary effect as of a series of windows, opening upon different
climes and strange worlds, windows set in ivory walls. Here is an old
Norman castle, grey against a sky of luminous yellow, there a stream in
Brittany which you can almost hear brawling past the plane-trees with
their freckled trunks, while beyond it, through another window, you see
a pergola of roses whose deep red has turned wine-coloured under the
moonlight, and beyond that again, the white cliffs of England go down
into a peacock sea. And, in the Red Cross dining-room, a poilu, his
mouth open on a yell of encouragement, charges with uplifted hands,
looking over his shoulder at you with bright daring eyes, and you do not
need the inscription underneath of "_On les aura!_" to guess what spirit
urges him.
This, then, is the setting for one of the most merciful of the works of
the Red Cross. That it is appreciated is shown by the fact that at
Christmas, at this house, with its staff of Superintendent, cook,
parlourmaid, housemaid and "tweeny," with one chauffeuse, there were
forty relations of wounded staying. The average number of people for
whom Army and Red Cross rations are drawn three times a week is
twenty-five, but for these rations as for fifteen are drawn, as the food
supply is too generously proportioned for a household consisting so
largely of women. But it will be seen that with a constantly fluctuating
population the task of housekeeping is no easy one, though it is tackled
by the voluntary staff with gaiety and courage.
They have troubles of their own, too, the members of that staff, and in
the big kitchen, where among the dishes on the table a pink hyacinth
bloomed, the fair-haired cook I saw so busily working was back from a
leave in England that was to have been her marriage-leave, had not her
fiance been killed the day before he was to join her. Now she is amongst
her pots and pans again and smiling still, as I can testify. The
"tweeny," who also describes herself as a boot-boy, is a young
war-widow. Things like these are almost beyond the admiration of mortals
less severely tested.
The material difficulties are not the worst in a hostel of this kind,
which in its very nature presupposes grief. The relations, of course,
are of all kinds, after every pattern of humanity, and each makes his or
her emotional demand, if not in active appeal to sympathy, yet in the
strain that it entails on the sensitively organised to see others in
sorrow--and unless you are sensitive you are no good for work such as
this. This hostel is blessed in its Superintendent, an American V.A.D.
worker of a personality so _simpatica_--there is no adequate English for
what I mean--that you are aware of it at first meeting with her; and she
is a woman of the world, which is not always the case with women
workers, however excellent.
Shortly before I came to the Hostel a very young wife arrived to see her
husband, who lay desperately ill in one of the hospitals. When he died
she became as a thing distraught and could not be left, and the
Superintendent even had to have her to sleep in her room with her all
the time she was there. Others, again, are aloof in their sorrow, though
it is none the less tragic for that. The first question on the lips of
the Staff when the chauffeuse comes back from taking the relatives to
the hospital is, "Was it good news?"
It was good news for the couple who arrived on the same evening that I
did, the mother and father of a young officer who was very badly
injured. I saw them next morning in the lounge, sitting quietly on
either side of the centre-stove, a business man and his wife, as neat,
he in his serge suit, she in her satin blouse and carefully folded lace
and smooth grey hair, as if they had not been travelling for a day and a
night on end, racked by anxiety, though you could see the deep lines
that the strain had left. He looked at me with those patient eyes of the
elderly which hold the same unconscious pathos as those of animals, and
talked in a low quiet voice, and it seemed almost an impertinence of a
total stranger to assure these gentle, dignified people of her gladness
that their only son was safe, yet how glad one is that any one of these
brief contacts in passing should be of happiness! It is so impossible
not to weep with them that weep that it is a keen joy to be able to
rejoice with them that do rejoice.
"It's so free here ..." he told me, "that's what the wife and I like so.
No rules and regulations, you can do just what you like as though you
were in your own home ... no feeling that as you don't pay you've got to
do what you're told." And there was expressed the spirit of the Hostel
as I discovered it.
There are no rules, and it is always impressed upon the Superintendents
that the relations are not obliged to go there, that they do so because
they choose to, and must be treated as honoured guests. In the
dining-room there are little tables as at an hotel, so that the
different parties can keep to themselves if they prefer it; there are
no times for going out or coming in, no times for "lights out," no need
to have a meal in if the visitor mentions he is going out for it. The
relations who stay at these hostels are guests in every sense of the
word, and there is not one trace of red tape or the faintest feeling of
obligation about the whole thing.
And that must have been what I had felt in the very air of the place
when I arrived, what stole with so precious a balm over me who had been
in camp after camp, institution after institution. This place, with its
quiet walls and its grey shutters wing-wide upon its grey walls, was not
only beautiful and rich with that richness only age can give, it was
instinct as well with freedom and with peace.