I am sorry that, as you say in your letter of October 16, just received,
you are disappointed that I "do not write you more about the war."
Dear child, I am not seeing any of it. We are settled down here to a
life that is nearly normal--much more normal than I dreamed could be
possible forty miles from the front. We are still in the zone of military
operations, and probably shall be until spring, at least. Our
communications with the outside world are frequently cut. We get our
mail with great irregularity. Even our local mail goes to Meaux, and is
held there five days, as the simplest way of exercising the censorship.
It takes nearly ten days to get an answer to a letter to Paris.
All that I see which actually reminds me of the war--now that we are
used to the absence of the men--I see on the route nationale, when I
drive down to Couilly. Across the fields it is a short and pretty walk.
Amélie makes it in twenty minutes. I could, if it were not for climbing
that terrible hill to get back.
Besides, the mud is inches deep. I have a queer little four-wheeled
cart, covered, if I want to unroll the curtains. I call it my perambulator,
and really, with Ninette hitched in, I am like an overgrown baby in its
baby carriage, and any nurse I ever knew would push a perambulator
faster than that donkey drags mine. Yet it just suits my mood. I sit
comfortably in it, and travel slowly--time being non-existent--so slowly
that I can watch the wheat sprout, and gaze at the birds and the view
and the clouds. I do hold on to the reins--just for looks--though I have
no need to, and I doubt if Ninette suspects me of doing anything so
foolish. On the road I always meet officers riding along, military cars
flying along, army couriers spluttering along on motor-cycles, heavy
motor transports groaning up hill, or thundering down, and now and
then a long train of motor-ambulances. Almost any morning, at nine, I
can see the long line of camions carrying the revitaillement towards
the front, and the other afternoon, as I was driving up the hill, I met a
train of ambulances coming down. The big grey things slid, one after
another, around the curve of the Demi-Lune, and simply flew by me,
raising such a cloud of dust that after I had counted thirty, I found I
could not see them, and the continual tooting of the horns began to
make Ninette nervous--she had never seen anything like that before--
so, for fear she might do some trick she never had done in her life,
like shying, and also for fear that the drivers, who were rushing by
exactly in the middle of the road, might not see me in the dust, or a
car might skid, I slid out, and led my equipage the rest of the way. I
do assure you these are actually all the war signs we see, though, of
course, we still hear the cannon.
But, though we don't see it, we feel it in many ways. My neighbors
feel it more than I do! For one example--the fruit crop this year has
been an absolute loss. Luckily the cassis got away before the war
was declared, but we hear it was a loss to the buyers, and it was held
in the Channel ports, necessarily, and was spoiled. But apples and
pears had no market. In ordinary years purchasers come to buy the
trees, and send their own pickers and packers, and what was not
sold in that way went to the big Saturday market at Meaux. This year
there is no market at Meaux. The town is still partly empty, and the
railroad cannot carry produce now. This is a tragic loss to the small
cultivator, though, as yet, he is not suffering, and he usually puts all
such winnings into his stocking.
We still have no coal to speak of. I am burning wood in the salon--
and green wood at that. The big blaze--when I can get it--suits my
house better than the salamandre did. But I cannot get a temperature
above 42 Fahrenheit. I am used to sixty, and I remember you used to
find that too low in Paris. I blister my face, and freeze my back, just as
we used to in the old days of glorious October at the farm in New
Sharon, where my mother was born, and where I spent my summers
and part of the autumn in my school-days.
You might think it would be easy to get wood. It is not. The army
takes a lot of it, and those who, in ordinary winters, have wood to sell,
have to keep it for themselves this year. Père has cut down all the old
trees he could find--old prune trees, old apple trees, old chestnut
trees--and it is not the best of firewood. I hated to see even that done,
but he claimed that he wanted to clear a couple of pieces of land, and
I try to believe him. Did you ever burn green wood? If you have,
enough said!
Unluckily--since you expect me to write often--I am a creature of
habit.
I never could write as you can, with a pad on my knees, huddled over
the fire. I suppose that I could have acquired the habit if I had begun
my education at the Sorbonne, instead of polishing off there. I
remember when I first began to haunt that university, eighteen years
ago, how amazed I was to see the students huddled into a small
space with overcoats and hats on their knees, a note-book on top of
them, an ink-pot in one hand and a pen in the other, and, in spite of
obstacles, absorbed in the lecture. I used to wonder if they had ever
heard of "stylos," even while I understood, as I never had done
before, the real love of learning that marks the race. Alas! I have to
be halfway comfortable before I can half accomplish anything.
I am thankful to say that the temperature has been moderating a little,
and life about me has been active. One day it was the big threshing-
machine, and the work was largely done by women, and the air was
full of throbbing and dust. Yesterday it was the cider-press, and I
stood about, at Amélie's, in the sun, half the afternoon, watching the
motor hash the apples, and the press squeeze out the yellow juice,
which rushed foaming into big vats. Did you ever drink cider like that?
It is the only way I like it. It carried me back to my girlhood and the
summers in the Sandy River valley. I don't know why it is, of late, that
my mind turns so often back to those days, and with such affection.
Perhaps it is only because I find myself once more living in the
country. It may be true that life is a circle, and as one approaches the
end the beginning becomes visible, and associated with both the
beginning and end of mine there is a war. However it is to be
explained, there remains the fact that my middle distances are getting
wiped out.
In these still nights, when I cannot sleep, I think more often than of
anything else of the road running down the hill by the farm at New
Sharon, and of the sounds of the horses and wagons as they came
down and crossed the wooden bridge over the brook, and of the
voices--so strange in the night--as they passed. There were more
night sounds in those memories than I ever hear here--more crickets,
more turnings over of Nature, asleep or awake. I rarely hear many
night sounds here. From sundown, when people go clattering by in
their wooden shoes from the fields, to daylight, when the birds awake,
all is silence. I looked out into the moonlight before I closed my
shutters last night. I might have been alone in the world. Yet I like it.
The country is lovely here in winter--so different from what I
remember of it at home. My lawn is still green, so is the corbeille
d'argent in the garden border, which is still full of silvery bunches of
bloom, and will be all winter. The violets are still in bloom. Even the
trees here never get black as they do in New England, for the trunks
and branches are always covered with green moss. That is the
dampness. Of course, we never have the dry invigorating cold that
makes a New England winter so wonderful. I don't say that one is
more beautiful than the other, only that each is different in its charm.
After all, Life, wherever one sees it, is, if one has eyes, a wonderful
pageant, the greatest spectacular melodrama I can imagine. I'm glad
to have seen it. I have not always had an orchestra stall, but what of
that? One ought to see things at several angles and from several
elevations, you know.