salt of daily life; and if, as it sometimes happens, one’s own thoughts
are expanded, brightened, and returned to one, it is indeed delectable
above all things, the true salt to be used in quantities (if you can
get it). For, alas! the majority of people have no ideas, when you come
down to it, or, having a few, they are pig-headed and look but into
the converging point of the angle, knowing nothing of the splendor of
diverging lines where self is swallowed up in unself. And there are
the close-headed, whose minds work slowly in a cramped way, or not at
all, and they are forever complaining that they only think of things to
say when they get home and the lights are out. They might just as well
not think of them (one sometimes doubts if they really do) for all the
good they are to their neighbors. And there are those very thin-skinned
ones who immediately get contentious, and think the arrow is meant for
them instead of the universe at large, and one could go on indefinitely
through the list of impenetrable heads, to whom the blow of an ax is as
the brush of a feather, or cushiony heads that once dented, however,
never regain their contours, and many, many others. These all need
material sauces, good, rich sauces to their food, or they would find
it tasteless, not having even a pinch of this other salt to season it
with. And they are mostly those who do not work, but whose fathers
worked—sometimes even their mothers—and _oh, là là_, the subject is
endless, for everybody talks—even those who have nothing to say.
V
THE BALLON D’ALSACE
_Sunday afternoon._—At two o’clock I started out with Captain Bernard
and Captain Antoni for the great mountain known as the Ballon[7]
d’Alsace, sometimes called, too, “the knot of Europe,” in an especially
high-powered motor (I never know the mark of any of them, distinguishing
a Ford from a Rolls-Royce only by the generally pampered feeling
pervading me when in the latter).
The Ballon rises like a wall at the very end of the valley of the Doller,
and we passed through many villages, shining pinkly in the prismatic
November afternoon, where there was much going into church for vespers,
of blue- or black-clad figures. The thirteenth century-towered church
of Sewen is on a slight eminence in the heart of the village, and the
cemetery around it was crowded with the faithful, regretting their dead,
or some, perhaps, for one reason or another (What know I?), feeling,
“’Tis better they lie there.” “Live long, but not too long for others,”
is an excellent device.
The charming lake of Sewen, though far from the village, seen from a
certain angle, reflects the tower of the church and is, they told me,
of Moorish origin. These valleys and hills seem everywhere like open
books concerning the dim, dim youth of the earth; I had a sense of my
transitories, with those lessons written everywhere. And it is autumn,
too.
We got out at the immense reservoir of Alfelt which dams up dangerous
springtime floods with its giant wall of masonry, for from the “knot of
Europe” loosened waters flow to the North Sea and to the Mediterranean.
Climbing to the top of the rocky elevation, we read on the monument the
date of the inauguration of the reservoir, 1884, and the name, Prince
Hohenlohe Schillingfurst, Statthalter.
And, looking down, the shining villages through which we had just passed,
Sewen, Oberbruck, Niederbruck, Masevaux, are like beads on the thread of
the lovely valley, lying between the breasts of the hills.
The mountain-ringed lake of the reservoir reflects the rich coloring
of the hills in which it is set; white-stemmed, yellow-leaved birches,
blood-red cherry trees; rust-colored beeches, larch trees shining like
torches borne by wanderers, on black pine slopes; all is seen twice—once
on the hills and once in the mirror of the lake.
Then we mount up, up, up, twisting and turning over the magnificent
military road, made like so many others since the war, to become some day
the joy of tourists, when, thousands upon ten thousands, nay, millions
upon millions, they shall come from over ocean and mountain to see what
it all looks like and get the belated thrill.
Violet hills become black, outlined against a copper-colored band of
western horizon. Captain Bernard points out some English airplanes just
over our heads, tiny, tiny specks hanging in a high waste of heaven, and
I wonder if in one of them sits my friend, the chartered accountant of
the Belfort train, fulfilling his destiny in the air.
We leave the motor at the highest point of the road, where trees no
longer grow, and start to climb the grassy crest, patterned with great
brown patches of barbed-wire defenses. Captain Bernard’s sharp eyes
soon discerned the _chicanes_, intricate, almost indistinguishable
pathways through the wire, and if one knew them one could get through
without leaving one’s clothes. Breathless, we arrived at the _table
d’orientation_ and find ourselves looking out over what seemed the edge
of the universe. In front of us lay the gorgeous panorama of the Alps
and behind it the wide band of copper-colored sky, with here and there
a burnishing of glaciers by the dipping sun. To our left stretched the
immense and splendid valley of the Rhine, behind it the Black Forest,
clearly yet softly outlined against a paler horizon. One could have
rolled the whole earth like a ball from the feet. I felt as if suddenly
freed from any heaviness of the flesh, and Goethe’s soaring words brushed
against my mind, and beckoned me on—those words he cried after he had
reached the Brocken and was looking down on a cloud-covered Germany.
_Dem Geier gleich_
_Der auf schweren Morgenwolken_
_Mit sanftem Fittig ruhend,_
_Nach Beute schaut,_
_Schwebe mein Lied._[8]
I knew those vast expanses for material out of which a new earth, if
not a new heaven, must be formed, on some eighth day of creation. And
the new earth was to be made out of old and conflicting desires, worn,
yet persistent passions, small, yet greedy thoughts, the whole about as
facile as the weighing of the winds, making one almost feel that He who
worked with new materials those first seven days had the easier part.
I was filled, too, with a great longing for an improbable wisdom and
strength to be breathed into the men who are to reharness the plunging,
escaping destinies of the nations. Each man that has his hands on the
reins seems like some one clinging to a runaway horse, trying to dominate
a relentless, unreasoning, reckless course.
Reverberating through the eternal hills was the sound of heavy cannon;
and before my mind came a vision of the great forges wherein they were
formed, men working day and night in hot, dim, noisy spaces—Creusot and
Krupp and Skoda, and all the rest....
Some near summit hid the dread Hartmannswillerkopf, the “Verdun” of
Alsace, and one of the officers spoke of that winter of 1916, when its
snow was always pink with blood and black with death—“tens of thousands
sleep there.” I thought of the souls breathed out into that pure, high
ether, like to this, but cold, cold, almost as tenuous as the immortal
stuff commingling with it.
Then we started to the other edge of the summit, whence we might look
into _l’élégante et douloureuse Lorraine_, for one side of the Ballon
slopes toward Alsace and the other toward Lorraine.
As we threaded our way carefully through more _chicanes_ of barbed-wire
defenses “that you had to have your nose in before they could be
distinguished,” I discerned on the crag three familiar silhouettes,
outlined against the heavens toward the Lorraine slope. And as things are
rarely in their proper setting nowadays, there on the Ballon d’Alsace
were three dusty Y.M.C.A. men who had come from their _cantine_ at
Belfort. We spoke to them and gave our names, and the brightest one,
Tallant was his name, asked if I were the wife of my husband—and said
he’d been on the Mexican border.
Then we told them where the _table d’orientation_ was, but forgot to
point out the _chicanes_, and we saw them from a distance entangled in
barbed wire. Their souls were safe, I hope, but heaven help those khaki
clothes!
And looking down into Lorraine from my splendid height was as if looking
into another world, for its distances were bronze and silver and pale
green.
Great black spots of shadow cast by wasteful masses of white clouds were
lying heavily over those new and ancient battle-fields. Forever obliged
to protect themselves from some invader, the villages hide rather than
display themselves, and are barely detached from the silvery brown of
the plain, crossed here and there by the bosky lines of the Meuse, or
those of the great canal joining the French river to the Rhine. And each
tiny hill has been an altar or a fortress, often both at once. Over the
majestic, melancholy stretch Romans have passed, the hosts of Attila,
Normans, Germans, Burgundians, Swedes, English, and many others. Now its
white roads sound to the tramp of American armies, are encumbered by
giant quantities of war material brought from over the seas. And of all
who have passed over it, of the most ancient even, much remains. Close
against one another are Roman encampments, feudal castles, the two-sided,
two-faced bastion defenses of Vauban, the great, mined earthworks of
modern times, and now in leafy darknesses are the cement emplacements of
the big guns of the twentieth century.
But alas! as I turned to go, pulling my gaze from the wide horizon (a
pale, pale pink where it covered the western way to the city that is the
heart of France), I saw on that slope, directly under me, a cruel statue
of Jeanne d’Arc. A stiff yet boneless Pucelle sat astride an equally
stiff yet boneless steed; both seemed about to drop into space, the
mountain falling away from them, and both were of a dreadful superfluity!
However, one isn’t so plagued with horrid modern statues in Alsace as
in other places I have been, for they run rather to fountains and living
waters. At St.-Amarin, for instance, I don’t remember anything later or
more personal than the fiery Gallic cock, “_der spuckende Welschhahn_,”
surmounting a sphere, borne in turn by the column of the 1830 fountain;
and the fountain in the Place du Chapitre at Masevaux, bearing the date
1768, has a single, lovely column, too, on whose top burns a stone flame
in an urn. And the shaft of the fountain of the wine-growers at Thann is
a mass of rich yet noble carving, surmounted by a helmeted figure bearing
a shield on his back. Furthermore, crystal water flows into its six-sided
emblazoned basin.
I think of the statue of Thiers, _Libérateur du Territoire_, in that
dusty, begonia-planted, iron-railed plot in front of the station at
Nancy, and I could weep.
But hereabout I haven’t found a single nineteenth-century statesman
in frock-coat and top-hat, done in granite, nor any bronze female
pointing him the way to a dubious heaven, with a long finger and a heavy
palm-branch—and so may it remain.
Certainly the _très chic chef_ of the Military Mission will be well
punished for _his_ good works in Alsace if they ever raise a statue to
him. For they will make him, too, out of either bronze or marble with a
_plaque de commissaire_ on his frock-coated breast, and heaven knows what
kind of a hat they’ll put on him, or how the fancy will seize them to do
his hair! And the statue won’t be of lapis lazuli, as it should be, nor
of pale sapphire, nor of dull turquoise, nor of any of the lovely blue
stones of the earth, alone fit to perpetuate the beauty of the blue-clad
men who have written France’s greatest epic. Blue-clad men splashed about
fountains at twilight, blue-clad men taking form and substance as they
emerge out of gray mountain mists, blue-clad men weaving their cerulean
patterns through the woof of long-trunked pine forests, blue-clad men
like bits of turquoise embedded in the matrix of white roads, and what
know I besides?
As I gave a sigh for Art and a prayer for the serried ranks of her
erring devotees, I found myself looking into another splendid valley,
toward Giromagny, near where is a height known as La Planche des Belles
Filles, after a story of the Thirty Years’ War, when men with blue eyes
and very light hair and skin were for a while masters of the domains of
Belfort and Ferrette. After the best manner of invading armies, ’tis
recorded that these Swedes committed many excesses, and dark-eyed girls
lay concealed in the forest, and when they feared their hiding-place had
been discovered they fled to the mountains, but even there they were
pursued by the hosts of fair-haired, fair-skinned, blue-eyed men, bent
on the most elemental of errands. And again they fled precipitately,
scarcely knowing their direction. When they got to the top they found
themselves on a great ledge of rock and in their distress they tumbled
from the height onto other rocks below, and the blue-eyed, fair-skinned,
fair-haired men from the North knew them not. Hence the “Ledge of the
Beautiful Girls.”
And then we took a last look at the vast heaping of the Alps; to the
left, the Jungfrau and the Mönsch, to the right, Mont Blanc, the whole
great mass outlined against that persistent dark-red band. The glacier of
the Jungfrau was as if in conflagration; Mont Blanc was soft and roseate,
yet its beauty left me cold.
Captain Bernard said he had climbed the Ballon many times and only twice
before had he seen the great panorama; but as, alack! to him who does not
want shall be given, except for their gorgeousness, I would have turned
from them indifferently, had not my beloved mother been dwelling almost
in the shadow of Mont Blanc.
But one[9] has written, as men of genius write of things in times of
peace, of this Ballon d’Alsace. He who brought out from his Gallo-British
mind new things and old has said in one of the most charming of books:
“Then on the left you have all the Germanies, a great sea of confused and
dreaming people, lost in philosophies and creating music, frozen for the
moment under a foreign rigidity, but some day to thaw again and to give a
word to us others. They cannot remain long apart from visions.” I thought
they have, indeed, given a “word.” But when again the “visions”?
I turned and followed my two blue-clad officers down the Alsatian
slope, over the gray grass, threading neatly through the _chicanes_ of
the brown, barbed-wire defenses, and got into the motor waiting on the
roadway once known as that of the Dukes of Lorraine.
We were silent as we started down the great mountain. I was again wrapped
in thoughts of the New Day to be created out of old and rotting stuffs,
and of the death of heroes. The hills were velvet-palled against the
deepening crimson band of light.
Later, a _panne_, and we waited in a violet-valleyed world, illumined
only by white candelabraed torches of strangely luminous larch and birch,
while the prudent yet daring chauffeur changed the tire.
A great khaki-colored motor passed us, marked with two stars, filled with
khaki-clad men of my race, going up, up, whence we had come.
Then we stopped at the little restaurant of Alfeld. The lake of many
colors was dark and mysterious. Its high tints had been dipped in
something deep in the hours since last I saw it, though strange blues
and purples and rust colors were still reflected in it, and the light of
a single, very yellow birch had not yet been snuffed. At the restaurant
four glasses of white liqueur were poured for us (one, of course, for
the chauffeur), distilled from raspberries, the odor of the berry very
strong, and long afterward the taste, the _arrière-goût_, remains in the
mouth, as if one had just eaten the fruit. But one of the officers said,
“All the same, it doesn’t equal a good _quetsch_ or _kirsch_ or, above
all, a good _mirabelle_.”
And then we dipped into the darkening valley of the Doller and through
dim villages found the way to Masevaux and the house on the Place du
Chapitre, where the Demoiselles Braun had tea awaiting us, and there
were stories told that made us laugh. And one was of the renowned 15th
Dragoons, so long quartered there, which, briefly—and humanly—is this:
At intervals after their departure little dragoons saw the light of
a war-world, and, to be exact, fifty in all saw it. The curé was
broken-hearted at the ravages among his sheep, but he was also a
practical, long-sighted curé, so he wrote, presenting his idea of the
matter before the colonel of the regiment, with the result that from
the savings-box of that same regiment a sum was subtracted to provide
ten years later for the first communion and confirmation clothes of the
fifty! (Would you have thought of it?) Then, casting about in his mind
how he could further improve the general situation, this time not so much
from the temporal point of view as from that of eternity, he decided upon
a pilgrimage—a pilgrimage of reparation to Huppach, where is the shrine
known as that of the Virgin of Klein Einsiedeln, near Sewen, through
which we had just passed. He announced the pilgrimage from the pulpit,
then took the further precaution of rounding up his strayed sheep in
person, and in person conducting them to Huppach to offer up prayers and
tears to the Virgin of Klein Einsiedeln. There were so many of them,
however, and they were mostly so young, that history does not record the
pilgrimage as being entirely without smiles—and God have mercy on us all!
But the curé was not yet (so to speak) out of the woods, for fate
replaced the Dragoons by another regiment, having, as it happened, a
colonel possessed of a boundless love for his men and who couldn’t do
enough for them (or rather have the inhabitants of Masevaux do enough for
them).
“The inhabitants of Masevaux are very nice, very nice indeed,” quoth he,
“but the happiness of my men above everything. We left three thousand on
the battlefield last week, and the others need distraction—of a pleasant
sort. My men above everything.”
So the colonel who loved his men with a boundless love and, furthermore,
was not one to waste time in vain endeavors to portray the eternal
feminine as undesirable, nor to render the chase unpopular, caused dances
to be organized on this very Place du Chapitre, under these very linden
trees, then heavy-scented, and every evening. The curé, foreseeing
trouble, with the aid of Heaven and his own undiscourageable will, had
them suppressed after eight days (eight days is a long time) of wrestling
with leagued powers both civil and military. And again God have mercy on
us all!
Now the virtuous, I mean the truly virtuous (that is, the untried,
untempted virtuous), mustn’t throw stones at Masevaux nor at this book,
but rather remember that anything could have happened to anybody had
everything been different. And even so, hasn’t a lot happened to many of
you? You know a good deal better than I do just how much.
To the _popote_ at seven-thirty, and before I’m an hour older I’m going
to tell you about the _popote_. And you’ll wish you had been there
instead of hearing about it—as runs the classic expression, “_Regarder
manger des glaces_,” and I give the translation, “Watch others eat
ice-cream,” partly because I want you all to know just what I mean, and
partly because some one in the United States wrote to my publishers that
_My Lorraine Journal_ was a nice book, but couldn’t they suggest to me
that I write my books either in French or English.
MRS. O’S.: “But, my dear Mr. Graham” (his name is Graham, and this may be
his chance of immortality), “I couldn’t write one entirely in French to
save my soul, and to save my soul I’d find it impossible when everything
I’m writing about takes place in France not to slip into _la belle
langue_ occasionally.”
MR. GRAHAM (from a distance): “Occasionally! There you’re at it again.
Occasionally!” (It does get on his nerves.)
MRS. O’S.: “And there is another saying to the effect that ‘_On ne
peut pas contenter tout le monde et son père_.’ That is to say, dear
Mr. Graham, that you can’t please everybody and your father as well,
and this, of course, mostly applies to young men (are you a son or are
you a father?) trying to win smiles outside family circles—and father
ultimately paying the bills. But as it occurs to me here, there must be
some connection.”
MR. GRAHAM: “I don’t see it. And while I’m about it, I’d like to tell you
a thing or two concerning those Mexican books of yours. The Spanish was
awful—even _The Yale Review_ and _The Nation_ noticed it.”
MRS. O’S. (getting a bit nasty): “It’s about all either of them did
notice, especially _The Yale Review_; and nobody loves me on _The
Nation_, but it was entirely the printer’s fault. He received them
immaculate. I turned my face to the wall for three days after a glance at
_A Diplomat’s Wife_. But then you probably don’t remember how perfectly
sweet about these very books _The North American Review_ was (a man with
the most perceptive of souls and a neat flair for the imponderabilities,
named Lawrence Gilman, does _their_ book reviews), also _The New
Republic_, which possesses a man named Alvin Johnson, inexorably sure
about the humanities, separating with a single, infallible gesture the
goats of letters from the sheep (but he still thinks, alas! that all men
are born free and equal). And _The New York Sun_ was kind, kind, and _The
New York Evening Post_, too, and they do say this latter rarely says
anything nice about people till they’re dead and can’t enjoy it, and _The
New York Tribune_, which has the reputation of being very particular
about itself, and _The New York Times_, which never jokes and is known as
a searcher after truth.”
Mr. Graham, dreadfully bored with me, mumbles something like “this is
what you get when you try to do somebody a good turn.” I couldn’t catch
it all, as he’d doubtless continued farther on his journey through the
great Northwest. He wrote from one of a chain of “Grand Trunk Pacific
Hotels,” and all I can think of to call after him is _Bon voyage_, though
he won’t like it.
And now back to Masevaux in the valley of the Doller—Masevaux smelling a
bit like nice leather things in expensive shops, with a hint of falling
leaves.
VI
LA POPOTE
And how shall he who has not dined be strong? And how shall he who is
not girded fight? And how shall he who has not wept laugh? And how shall
he who hath not made a free offering of his life find it? And many other
things occur to me, but enough for the wise of heart.
And now for _la popote_, which is in what was once the house of the
Oberforster, in a street doubtless always muddy, looking out on the
church, and it is square, of gray stucco, and red brick with a hall
running through the center, like many and many a house.
The woodwork is everywhere painted brown and the wall-paper, too,
is brown, a lighter, depressing brown. Above the dining-table is a
ponderous, imitation-bronze chandelier, but its cruel light now shines on
blue-clad men who have fought the good fight, agreeable, cultivated men
of the world, and it touches strongly scar and galloon and decoration of
these, selected _ex millibus et ex millibus_, by hidden powers, to return
from battlefield and trench....
It’s the Oberforster’s glass that we use; it’s his imitation-bronze
fruit-dish that is now filled with dark, rich grapes of victory. It’s
his imitation-tin and real-glass punch-bowl that is on the table by the
window. On the porcelain stove that heats well, too well (I sit with my
back close to it), is a _dégagé_ marble bibelot, the heads of a man and a
woman in _basso-rilievo_ cut in an obtrusively chance bit of marble, and
it bears the motto, “_Amor condusse noi_.” Perhaps on their honeymoon,
the Oberforster and his bride had made the classic _Italienische Reise_,
and had pressed closely, so closely against each other in the railway
carriage, that the apprehensive fellow-voyagers shut their eyes or sought
another compartment. The Teutonic “will to live” is irresistible, and
when it’s at work there’s nothing to be done except get out of the way.
Theirs were the lithographs representing beings of the Biedermayer epoch,
theirs the many-tiered machine-turned, walnut sideboard. Theirs was
(I know not how it got into that company of _ersatz_ and imitation) a
beautiful old glass carafe, a shepherd and a sacrificial lamb engraved
upon it (perhaps once a church vessel), but in it was a stopper, half
cork and half tin, with an imitation turquoise in the middle.