_September._
_Dearests:--_
Every day now we go out into the garden. We play ball and play tag in
the wind to get warm.
There is a private hospital at one end of our apartment house, supported
by a wealthy Polish woman. Two or three times a week she visits the
patients, young officers who go out into the garden with her and kiss
her hand and talk and flirt. She sits on a garden-bench surrounded by
her young men, a big woman in black, with a long black veil, talking
vivaciously, using her hands in quick, expressive gestures, patting
their cheeks, leaning forward to give their hands an impulsive squeeze.
When she laughs, which is often, the black line of a mustache on her
upper lip makes the white of her teeth whiter still. The days when she
isn't there, the convalescents flirt with the nurses. There is nothing
horrible about this hospital. The patients are only slightly wounded,
and wear becoming bathrobes when they lounge round.
The window-ledges of the rooms are gay with flowers. Almost always a
phonograph is going, "Carmen," or "Onégin," or "Pagliacci." Sometimes,
Peter and I one-step to the music on the pavement outside, and the
officers and nurses crowd to the windows and clap and cry, "Encore!"
Often, after sundown, when the children have gone indoors, and we go out
for a walk before dinner, we see a patient with a bandage around his
head, perhaps, but both arms well enough to be clasping a pretty nurse
in them. They laugh and we laugh. There is no cynicism about it. It's
bigger than that, it seems to me.
Into the garden come many street musicians. They play and sing, and
showers of kopecks rain down from the windows. Two little girls came a
few days ago. They were Tziganes, barefooted, with gay petticoats and
flowered shawls and dangling earrings. Their dark hair was short and
curly. One of the children played a _balalaika_ and sang in a broken,
mournful voice that did not at all belong to her age. The other--who
wore the prettiest dress, yellow, with a green and purple shawl--danced
like a little marionette on a string, not an expression in her pointed,
brown face, but every now and then accelerating the pace of her dance,
and giving sharp, high cries. Then, suddenly, they stopped in the middle
of a measure, and held out their aprons for money. A window on the
ground floor opened and a very pretty woman leaned out. I have seen her
many times. She is Polish, the daughter of a concierge, and now the
mistress of a young Cossack, who is leaving shortly for the front. She
has heavy, pale-yellow hair, wound around her head in thick braids, and
she wears pearls, opaque like her skin. She beckoned the little girls
into her room. They went eagerly. Soon I heard them singing there.
When we were with Dr. ----, from the Red Cross hospital this afternoon,
a soldier came up to us and saluted. He was a miserable-looking
creature, in a uniform too big for him. His face was unshaven, his beard
gray and sparse, and his eyes red and blinking and full of pain. He
slouched away again in a moment, his eyes staring down at the sidewalk
under his feet.
"What did he want?" I asked.
"He wants brandy. He's leaving for the front to-morrow, and he asked me
to write out a doctor's prescription so he could get a little brandy.
Poor fellow. It was impossible, of course, but I'd have done it gladly.
He said he'd been wounded and discharged, and had to go back to the
front and leave his family, helpless, again. The second time must be so
much worse than the first. You know what it's like out there."