Well, Amélie came back yesterday, and I can tell you it was a busy
day. I assure you that I was glad to see her about the house again. I
liked doing the work well enough,--for a little while. But I had quite
all I wanted of it before the fortnight was over. I felt like "giving
praise" when I saw her coming into the garden, looking just as
good as new, and, my word for it, she made things hum yesterday.
The first thing she did, after the house was in order, and lunch out of
the way, was to open up the cave in which she had stored her
household treasures a month ago, and I passed a rare afternoon. I
spent a good part of it getting behind something to conceal my silent
laughter. If you had been here you would have enjoyed it--and her.
I knew something was as it should not be when I saw her pushing the
little wheelbarrow on which were all my waste-baskets--I have needed
them. But when I got them back, it about finished my attempts at
sobriety. I told her to put them on the dining-room table and I would
unpack them and put the contents in place. But before that was done,
I had to listen to her "tale of woe."
She had hidden practically everything--clocks, bed and table linen, all
her mattresses, except the ones she and Père slept on, practically all
their clothes, except what they had on their backs and one change. I
had not given it much thought, though I do remember her saying,
when the subterranean passage was sealed up: "Let the Boches
come! They'll find mighty little in my house."
Well--the clocks are rusted. They are soaking in kerosene now, and I
imagine it is little good that will do them. All her linen is damp and
smelly, and much of it is mildewed. As for the blankets and flannels--
ough!
I felt sympathetic, and tried to appear so. But I was in the condition of
"L'homme qui rit." The smallest effort to express an emotion tended
to make me grimace horribly. She was so funny. I was glad when she
finished saying naughty words about herself, and declaring that
"Madame was right not to upset her house," and that the next time
the Boches thought of coming here they would be welcome to
anything she had. "For," she ended, "I'll never get myself into this sort
of a mess again, my word of honor!" And she marched out of the
house, carrying the bottle of eau de Javelle with her. The whole
hamlet smells of it this minute.
I had a small-sized fit of hysterics after she had gone, and it was not
cured by opening up my waste-baskets and laying out the "treasures"
she had saved for me. I laughed until I cried.
There were my bouillion cups, and no saucers. The saucers were
piled in the buffet. There were half-a-dozen decorated plates which
had stood on end in the buffet,--just as color notes--no value at all.
There were bits of silver, and nearly all the plated stuff. There was an
old painted fan, several strings of beads, a rosary which hung on a
nail at the head of my bed, a few bits of jewelry--you know how little I
care for jewelry,--and there were four brass candlesticks.
The only things I had missed at all were the plated things. I had not
had teaspoons enough when the English were here--not that they
cared. They were quite willing to stir their tea with each other's
spoons, since there was plenty of tea,--and a "stick" went with it.
You cannot deny that it had its funny side.
I could not help asking myself, even while I wiped tears of laughter
from my eyes, if most of the people I saw flying four weeks ago might
not have found themselves in the same fix when it came to taking
stock of what was saved and what was lost.
I remember so well being at Aix-les-Bains, in 1899, when the Hotel du
Beau-Site was burned, and finding a woman in a wrapper sitting on a
bench in the park in front of the burning hotel, with the lace waist of
an evening frock in one hand, and a small bottle of alcohol in the
other. She explained to me, with some emotion, that she had gone
back, at the risk of her life, to get the bottle from her dressing-table,
"for fear that it would explode!"
It did not take me half an hour to get my effects in order, but poor
Amélie's disgust seems to increase with time. You can't deny that if I
had been drummed out and came back to find my house a ruin, my
books and pictures destroyed, and only those worthless bits of china
and plated ware to "start housekeeping again," it would have been
humorous. Real humor is only exaggeration. That would surely have
been a colossal exaggeration.
It is not the first time I have had to ask myself, seriously, "Why this
mania for possession?" The ferryman on the Styx is as likely to take it
across as our railroad is to "handle" it today. Yet nothing seems able
to break a person born with that mania for collecting.
I stood looking round at it all when everything was in place, and I
realized that if the disaster had come, I should have found it easy to
reconcile myself to it in an epoch where millions were facing it with
me. It is the law of Nature. Material things, like the friends we have
lost, may be eternally regretted. They cannot be eternally grieved for.
We must "--be up and doing, With a heart for any fate."
All the same, it was a queer twist in the order of my life, that, hunting
in all directions for a quiet retreat in which to rest my weary spirit, I
should have ended by deliberately sitting myself down on the edge of
a battlefield,--even though it was on the safe edge,--and stranger still,
that there I forgot that my spirit was weary.
We are beginning to pick up all sorts of odd little tales of the
adventures of some of the people who had remained at Voisin. One
old man there, a mason, who had worked on my house, had a very
queer experience. Like all the rest of them, he went on working in the
fields all through the menacing days. I can't make out whether he had
no realization of actual danger, or whether that was his way of
meeting it. Anyway, he disappeared on the morning the battle began,
September 5, and did not return for several days. His old wife had
made up her mind that the Germans had got him, when one morning
he turned up, tired, pale, and hungry, and not in any state to explain
his absence.
It was some days before his wife could get the story out of him. He
owns a field about halfway between Voisins and Mareuil, close to the
route de Pavé du Roi, and on the morning that the battle began he
was digging potatoes there. Suddenly he saw a small group of
horsemen riding down from the canal, and by their spiked helmets he
knew them for Germans.
His first idea, naturally, was to escape. He dropped his hoe, but he
was too paralyzed with fear to run, and there was nothing to hide
behind. So he began walking across the field as well as his trembling
old legs would let him, with his hands in his pockets.
Of course the Uhlans overtook him in a few minutes, and called out to
him, in French, to stop. He stopped at once, expecting to be shot
instantly.
They ordered him to come out into the road. He managed to obey. By
the time he got there terror had made him quite speechless.
They began to question him. To all their questions he merely shook
his head. He understood well enough, but his tongue refused its
office, and by the time he could speak the idea had come to him to
pretend that he was not French--that he was a refugee--that he did
not know the country,--was lost,--in fact, that he did not know
anything. He managed to carry it off, and finally they gave him up as
a bad job, and rode away up the hill towards my house.
Then he had a new panic. He did not dare go home. He was afraid
he would find them in the village, and that they would find out he had
lied and harm his old wife, or perhaps destroy the town. So he had
hidden down by the canal until hunger drove him home. It is a simple
tale, but it was a rude experience for the old man, who has not got
over it yet.
I am afraid all this seems trivial to you, coming out of the midst of this
terrible war. But it is actually our life here. We listen to the cannon in
ignorance of what is happening. Where would be the sense of my
writing you that the battle-front has settled down to uncomfortable
trench work on the Aisne; that Manoury is holding the line in front of
us from Compiègne to Soissons, with Castelnau to the north of him,
with his left wing resting on the Somme; that Maud'huy was behind
Albert; and that Rheims cathedral had been persistently and brutally
shelled since September 18? We only get news of that sort
intermittently. Our railroad is in the hands of the Minister of War, and
every day or two our communications are cut off, from military
necessity. You know, I am sure, more about all this than we do, with
your cable men filling the newspapers.
But if I am seeing none of that, I am seeing the spirit of these people,
so sure of success in the end, and so convinced that, even if it takes
the whole world to do it, they will yet see the Hohenzollern dynasty go
up in the smoke of the conflagration it has lighted.
Of course, the vicious destruction of the great cathedral sends
shivers down my back. Every time I hear the big guns in that direction
I think of the last time we were there. Do you remember how we sat,
in the twilight of a rainy day, in our top-floor room, at the Lion d'Or, in
the wide window-seat, which brought us just at a level with that dear
tympanum, with its primitive stone carving of David and Goliath, and
all those wonderful animals sitting up so bravely on the lacework of
the parapet? Such a wave of pity goes over me when I think that not
only is it destroyed, but that future generations are deprived of seeing
it; that one of the greatest achievements of the hands of man, a work
which has withstood so many wars in what we called "savage times,"
before any claims were made for "Kultur," should have been
destroyed in our days. Men have come and men have gone
(apologies to Tennyson)--it is the law of living. But the wilful,
unnecessary destruction of the great works of man, the testimony
which one age has left as a heritage to all time--for that loss neither
Man nor Time has any consolation. It is a theft from future ages, and
for it Germany will merit the hatred of the world through the coming
generations.