Transcriber’s Note:
Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.

RAW MATERIAL

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE SQUIRREL-CAGE
A MONTESSORI MOTHER
MOTHERS AND CHILDREN
THE BENT TWIG
THE REAL MOTIVE
FELLOW CAPTAINS
(With Sarah N. Cleghorn)
UNDERSTOOD BETSY
HOME FIRES IN FRANCE
THE DAY OF GLORY
THE BRIMMING CUP
ROUGH-HEWN

RAW MATERIAL

BY

DOROTHY CANFIELD

NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. BY
The Quinn & Boden Company
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
RAHWAY NEW JERSEY

CONTENTS

RAW MATERIAL

RAW MATERIAL

I don’t know who is responsible for this rather odd book, but I lay it to the earlier generations of my family. My clergyman grandfather always said that he never enjoyed any sermons so much as the ones he preached to himself sitting under another clergyman’s pulpit. When the text was given out, his mind seized on it with a vivid fresh interest and, running rapidly away from the intrusive sound of the other preacher’s voice, wove a tissue of clear, strong, and fascinatingly interesting reasonings and exhortations. Grandfather used to say that such sermons preached to himself were in the nature of things much better than any he could ever deliver in church. “I don’t have to keep a wary eye out for stupid old Mrs. Ellsworth, who never understands anything light or fanciful; I don’t have to remember to thunder occasionally at stolid Mr. Peters to wake him up. I don’t have to remember to keep my voice raised so that deaf old Senator Peaseley can hear me. I am not obliged to hold the wandering attention of their muddled heads by a series of foolish little rhetorical tricks or by a prodigious effort of my personality. I can just make my sermon what it ought to be.”

My father, who did a great deal of public speaking, though not in pulpits, took up this habit in his turn. When a speaker began an address, he always fell into a trance-like condition, his eyes fixed steadily on the other orator, apparently giving him the most profound attention, but in reality making in his mind, on the theme suggested by the audible speaker, a fluent, impassioned address of his own. He used to say that he came to himself after one of these auto-addresses infinitely exhilarated and refreshed by the experience of having been speaking to an audience which instantly caught his every point, and which, although entirely sympathetic, was stimulatingly quick to find the weak spots in his argument and eager to keep him up to his best. Afterwards he dreaded an ordinary audience with its limping comprehension, its wandering attention, its ill-timed laughter and applause.

After I began to read for myself I found the same habit of mind familiar to many authors. The Stevensons walked up and down the porch at Saranac, talking at the tops of their voices, on fire with enthusiasm for their first conception of “The Wrecker.” There never was, there never could be (so they found out afterwards) a story half so fine as that tale seemed to them in those glorious moments when they saw it as they would have liked to make it. I nodded my head understandingly over this episode. Yes, that was what, in their plain way, my grandfather and father had done. I recognized the process. It was evidently a universal one. And when in “Cousine Bette” I encountered Wencelas Steinbock, I recognized him from afar. “To muse, to dream, to conceive of fine works, is a delightful occupation. The work then floats in all the grace of infancy, in the mad joy of conception, with the fragrant beauty of a flower, and the aromatic juice of a fruit enjoyed in anticipation.”

And upon my own arrival in adult life it seemed quite the expected and natural thing to find my own fancy constantly occupied in this way. The stories I told myself were infinitely superior to anything I ever got down on paper. Just as my father had been the ideal audience for himself, so I was my own best reader, a reader who needed no long explanations, who caught the idea at once, who brought to the tale all the experience which made it intelligible. Two words with the grocer’s boy, delivering soap and canned salmon at the back door, and I was off, author and reader galloping along side by side, on a story which made not only my own written tales, but other people’s as well, seem clumsy, obvious, and wordy. A look on an old cousin’s face was to me—like a text to my grandfather—a springboard from which author and reader plunged simultaneously into the sea of human relationships, sensing in human life significances pitiful, exalted, profound, beyond anything that can be drawn out with the loose-meshed net of words. Did I sit idling in a railway station, my great-uncle, who died before I was born, stood there beside me, expounding his life to me with a precision, a daring abandon, a zestful ardor which would wither and fade if it were transferred to the pages of a book.

At first I thought this habit of mind entirely universal—as it is certainly the most natural one possible; but in the course of much random talk about things in general, I have occasionally come across people whose eyes are too weak for the white brilliance of reality, who can only see life through the printed page, which is a very opaque object. Such people—and they are often cultivated, university-bred—will say, quite as if they were uttering a truism: “Of course characters in books—well-written books—are ever so much more interesting than men and women in real life.”

They perceive the fateful mixture of beast and angel in the human face only in a portrait gallery; for them the birds sing, the winds sigh, and human hearts cry out, only at a symphony concert; they depend on books to give them faintly, dully, dimly, at third-hand, what lies before them every day, bright-colored, throbbing, and alive. It is a mental attitude hard for me to understand but it does exist. I have seen them turn away from a stern and noble tragedy in the life of their washerwoman, to the cheap sentimentality of a poor novel, which guarantees (as a fake dentist promises to fill teeth without pain) to provide tears without emotion. I have seen women who might have been playing with a baby, laughing at his inimitable funniness, leave him to a nurse and go out to enliven their minds by the contemplation of custard-pies smeared over the human countenance.

We are so used to this phenomenon that it does not seem strange to us. But it is strange—strange and tragic. And I do not in the least believe that the tragedy is one of the inevitable ones. I think it is simply a bad habit which has grown up as the modern world has taken to reading.

Why did the habit ever start? Naturally enough. Because the new medium of cheap printing let loose on the world the innate loquacity of writers, unrepressed by the limitations of the human voice. Other people have not been able to hear themselves think since Gutenberg enabled writers to drown out the grave, silent, first-hand mental processes of people blessed by nature with taciturnity. The writer is not born (as is his boast) with more capacity than other people for seeing color and interest and meaning in life; he is born merely with an irrepressible desire to tell everybody what he sees and feels. We have been hypnotized by his formidable capacity for speech into thinking that he is the only human being on whom life makes an impression. This is not so. He is merely so made that he cannot rest till he has told everybody who will listen to him, the impression that life has made on him. This is the queer mainspring of creative literature. The writer cannot keep a shut mouth. To speak out seems to be the only useful thing he can do in life. And in its way it is a very useful occupation. But there is no reason why other people who have other useful things to do should miss the purity and vividness of a first-hand impression of life which they could enjoy without spoiling it, as an artist always does, by his instant anxiety about how much of it he can carry off with him for his art, by his instant mental fumbling with technical means, by his anguished mental questions: “What would be the best way to get that effect over in a book?” or “How could you convey that impression in a dialogue?”

It is a dog’s life, believe me, this absurd, pretentious carrying about of your little literary yardstick and holding it up against the magnificent hugeness of the world. I cannot believe that it is necessary to have that yardstick in hand before seeing the hugeness which it can never measure. One proof that it is not necessary is the fact that artists enjoy the raw materials of arts which they do not practise, much more freely and light-heartedly than the raw material of their own. I love the materials from which painters make pictures and musicians make music vastly more than the materials from which novelists make novels, because I feel no responsibility about them, because I know that they do not mean for me a struggle, foredoomed to failure, to get them down on canvas or between the five lines of the musical staff.

Do I seem to be advocating a habit of mind which would put an end to the writing of novels altogether? Personally I do not believe that the foundations of the world would move by a hair if that end were brought about. But, as a matter of fact, I do not in the least think that novel-writing would be anything but immensely benefited by a reading public which had acquired its own eyesight and did not depend on the writer’s. Such a body of creative-minded readers would lift the art of fiction up to levels we have none of us conceived. With such a public of trained, practised observers, fiction could cast off the encumbering paraphernalia of explanations and photographs which now weigh it down. There need be no fear for the future of fiction if every one takes to being his own novelist. For then readers will not look in novels for what is never there, reality itself. They will look for what is the only thing that ought to be there, the impression which reality has made on the writer, and they will have an impression of their own with which to compare that of the writer. This will free the author forever from attempting the impossible, bricks-without-straw undertaking of trying to get life itself between the covers of a book.

For never, never can fiction hope to attain myriads of effects which life effortlessly puts over wherever we look, if we will only see what is there. If we leave those inimitable natural effects of beauty, or fun, or tragedy, or farce entirely for the professional writer to see and enjoy and ponder on, we are showing the same sort of passive, closed imaginations which lead Persians to sit obesely at ease on cushions, and watch professional dancers have all the fun of dancing. The phrase which we traditionally ascribe to them is this, “Why bother to dance yourselves, when you can hire somebody to do it much better?” But that is our own unspoken phrase about the raw material of art and its monopoly by the professional artist. We Westerners dance, ourselves, not because we have any notion that we can dance better than the professionals, but because we have discovered by experience that to dance gives us a very different sort of pleasure from that given by looking at professionals. We have also discovered that it does not at all prevent us from hiring professionals and enjoying them as much as any Persians.

It is for the active-minded people who enjoy doing their own thinking as well as watching the author do his, that I have put this volume together. When life speaks to them, their hearts answer, as a friend to a friend. They are my brothers and my sisters. They practise the delight-giving art of being their own authors. They know the familiar, exquisite interest of trying to arrange in coherence the raw material which life constantly washes up to every one in great flooding masses. And they do this for their own high pleasure, with no idea of profiting by it in the eyes of the world. They work to create order out of chaos with a single-hearted effort, impossible to poor authors, tortured by the aching need to get the results of their efforts into words intelligible to others.

Being useful in other ways to the world, it is quite permissible for them to indulge in what was pernicious self-indulgence for an artist like Wencelas Steinbock. They are good children who, having nourished themselves on the substantial food of useful work, may eat candy without risking indigestion. The artist’s work is the fatiguing attempt to transform the wonder of life into art! Those other disinterested observers of life, those wise, deeply pondering, far-seeing men and women, driven by their own need to make something understandable out of our tangled life, struggle, just as the artist does, to piece together what they see into intelligible order. But they do this in their own hearts, for their own satisfaction. How singularly free-handed and open-hearted and generous their attitude seems, compared to the artist’s frugal, not to say penurious, not to say avaricious, anxiety to utilize every scrap of his life as raw material for his art.

Such people have, as the reward for their disinterested attitude of mind, all the pleasures of the creative artist’s life and none of its terrible pains. All the pleasure, that is, except the dubious one of seeing themselves in print. This is—for me at least—a pleasure deeply colored with humiliation. The stuff which I manage to get into a printed book is so tragically dry and lifeless compared to the vibrating, ordered, succulent life which goes on inside my head before I put pen to paper! For my part, I envy the clever, happy people who are content to let it stay in their heads, and never try to decant it into a book, only to find that the bouquet and aroma are all gone. I quite sympathize with them when they are impatient with the verbose literal-minded garrulity with which most writers of fiction spread out clumsily over two pages that which takes but a flash to think or to feel. They think, and quite rightly, that what is slowly written out in the inaccurate, halting system we call language, bears little relation to the arrow-swift movements of the thinking mind and feeling heart.

That which is written down in an attempt to make it intelligible to everybody is a rude approximation like that of ready-made clothing, manufactured to fit every one somewhat and no one exactly. That which springs into being in the brain at a contact with life, exactly fits the comprehension, background, and experience of the person who owns the brain. There are no waste motions, no paragraphs to skip, no compressions too bare, no descriptions too wordy, none of those sore, never-solved problems of the writer who addresses unknown readers, “How much can I leave out? How far can I suggest and not state? How far can I trust the reader’s attention not to flag, his intelligence to understand at a hint, rather than at a statement? What experience of life can I presuppose him to have had?”

When you are your own author, you know all about your reader, and need never think of his limitations. He is faithful to you, flies lightly when you rise into the air, plods steadily beside you at your own pace as you slowly work your way into unfamiliar country, flashes back into the past and selects exactly what is needed from his experience, sinks with you into a golden haze of contemplation over some surprising or puzzling phenomenon, is in no nagging hurry to “get on with the story.” After some experience of such a marriage of author and reader, don’t you find it hard to put up with the fumbling guesswork of a printed book?

And yet here I have written another book? No, this is not a written book in the usual sense. It is a book where nearly everything is left for the reader to do. I have only set down in it, just as if I were noting them down for my own use, a score of instances out of human life, which have long served me as pegs on which to hang the meditations of many different moods.

Note well that I have not set down those meditations ... or at most—for the flesh is weak!—only here and there a trace of them. But if I have occasionally back-slid from the strait neutral path of sacred Objectivity, at least let me here and now warn you to ignore whatever moralizings of mine have escaped excision. Pay no attention to them, if you run across one or two. I know for a certainty that my musings about the men and women who were the originals of these portraits would not serve you as they do me. I know you can make for yourselves infinitely better ones. I know that what you will do for yourselves will be like the living lacework of many-colored sea-weed floating free and quivering in quiet sunlit pools; and that what I could get down in a book would be a poor little faded collection of stiff dead tendrils, pasted on blotting paper.

In this unrelated, unorganized bundle of facts, I give you just the sort of thing from which a novelist makes principal or secondary characters, or episodes in a novel. I offer them to you for the novels you are writing inside your own heads, before I have spoiled them by the additions, cuttings, stretchings, or twistings necessary to make them fit into the fabric of a book. I give them to you, rounded and whole, just as they happened, without filing and smoothing truth down to the limits of possibility as all fiction-writers are forced to do. I spare you all the long-winded conventional devices, descriptions, transitions, exposition, eloquent passages and the like, by which writers try to divert the minds of their readers from the inherent improbability of their stories, devices which, to the suspicious mind, resemble the patter of thimbleriggers at a county fair. You know as well as I how inherently improbable life is. Why pretend that it is not? I have treated you just as though you were that other self in me who is my best reader. I have given you the fare I like best.

And I have faith to believe that you will enjoy for once being able to move about in a book without a clutter of explanations and sign-boards to show you the road the author wishes you to take. I do not wish you to take any road in particular, and rather hope you will try a good many different ones, as I do. I have only tried to loan you a little more to add to the raw material which life has brought you, out of which you are constructing your own attempt to understand.

I am only handing you from my shelves a few more curiosities to set among the oddities you have already collected, and which from time to time you take down as I do mine, turning them around in your hands, poring over them with a smile, or a somber gaze, or a puzzled look of surprise.

UNCLE GILES

There are few personalities which survive the blurring, dimming results of being the subject of family talk through several generations; but the personality of my Great-Uncle Giles has suffered no partial obliteration. It has come down to us with outlines keen and sharply etched into the family consciousness by the acid of exact recollection.

This is not at all because Uncle Giles ever disgraced the family or did any evil or wicked action. Quite the contrary! Uncle Giles thought that he was the only member of the entire tribe with any fineness or distinction of feeling, with any fitness for a higher sphere of activities than the grubby middle-class world of his kinsmen. Yes, that is what Uncle Giles thought, probably adding to himself that he often felt that he was a “gentleman among canaille.” To this day the family bristles rise at the mention of any one who openly professes to be a gentleman.

A gentleman should not be forced to the menial task of earning his living. Uncle Giles was never forced to the menial task of earning his living. None of the coarsely materialistic forces in human life ever succeeded in forcing him to it, not even the combined and violent efforts of a good many able-bodied and energetic kinspeople. The tales of how Uncle Giles blandly outwitted their stub-fingered attacks on his liberty and succeeded to the end of a very long life in living without work are endless in number and infinite in variety; and for three generations now have wrought the members of our family to wrath and laughter. He was incredible. You can’t imagine anything like him. Unless you have had him in your family too.

For many years Uncle Giles was “preparing for the ministry.” These were the candid years when his people did not know him so well as later, and still believed that with a little more help Giles would be able to get on his feet. He was a great favorite in the Theological Seminary where he was a student for so long, a handsome well-set-up blond young man, with beautiful large blue eyes. I know just how he looked, for we have an expensive miniature of him that was painted at the time. He paid for that miniature with the money my great-grandfather pried out of a Vermont farm. It had been sent to pay for his board. You can’t abandon a son just on the point of becoming a clergyman and being a credit to the entire family. Great-grandfather himself had no more money to send at that time, but his other sons, hard-working, energetic, successful men, clubbed together and made up the amount necessary to settle that board-bill. Uncle Giles thanked them and forwarded with his letter, to show them, in his own phrase, “that their bounty was not ill-advised,” a beautifully bound, high-priced, little red morocco note-book in which he had written down the flattering things said of him by his professors and others—especially others. He underlined certain passages, thus: “... a very worthy young man, most pleasing in society.” “A model to all in the decorum and grace of his manners.”

His board bill had to be paid a good many times before Uncle Giles finally gave up preparing himself for the ministry. The summer vacations of this period he spent in visiting first one and then another member of the family, a first-rate ornament on the front porch and at the table, admired by the ladies of the neighborhood, a prime favorite on picnics and on the croquet ground. He always seemed to have dropped from a higher world into the rough middle-class existence of his kin, but his courtesy was so exquisite that he refrained from commenting on this in any way. Still you could see that he felt it. Especially if you were one of the well-to-do neighbors on whom the distinguished young theological student paid evening calls, you admired his quiet tact and his steady loyalty to his commonplace family.

The effect which his quiet tact and steady loyalty had on his commonplace family was so great that it has persisted undiminished to this day. Any one of us, to the remotest cousin, can spot an Uncle Giles as far as we can see him. We know all about him, and it is not on our front porches that he comes to display his tact and loyalty, and the decorum and grace of his manners. As for allowing the faintest trace of Uncle-Gilesism to color our own lives, there is not one of us who would not rush out to earn his living by breaking stone by the road-side rather than accept even the most genuinely voluntary loan. We are, as Uncle Giles felt, a very commonplace family, of the most ordinary Anglo-Saxon stock, with no illuminating vein of imaginative Irish or Scotch or Welsh blood; and I think it very likely that if we had not experienced Uncle Giles we would have been the stodgiest of the stodgy as far as social injustice is concerned. But our imaginations seem to have been torn open by Uncle Giles as by a charge of dynamite; and, having once understood what he meant, we hang to that comprehension with all our dull Anglo-Saxon tenacity. We have a deep, unfailing sympathy with any one who is trying to secure a better and fairer adjustment of burdens in human life, because we see in our plain dull way that what he is trying to do is to eliminate the Uncle Gileses from society and force them to work. And we are always uneasily trying to make sure that we are not in the bigger scheme, without realizing it, Uncle Gilesing it ourselves.

After a while Uncle Giles stopped preparing for the ministry and became an invalid. He bore this affliction with the unaffected manly courage which was always one of his marked characteristics. He never complained: he “bore up” in all circumstances; even on busy wash-days when there was no time to prepare one of the dainty little dishes which the delicacy of his taste enabled him so greatly to appreciate. Uncle Giles always said of the rude, vigorous, hearty, undiscriminating men of the family, that they could “eat anything.” His accent in saying this was the wistful one of resigned envy of their health.

It has been a point of honor with us all, ever since, to be able to “eat anything.” Any one, even a legitimate invalid, who is inclined to be fastidious and make it difficult for the others, feels a united family glare concentrating on him, which makes him, in a panic, reach out eagerly for the boiled pork and cabbage.

Uncle Giles’s was a singular case, “one of those mysterious maladies which baffle even the wisest physicians,” as he used to say himself. A good many ladies in those days had mysterious maladies which baffled even the wisest physicians, and they used to enjoy Uncle Giles above everything. No other man had such an understanding of their symptoms and such sympathy for their sufferings. The easy chair beside Uncle Giles’s invalid couch was seldom vacant. Ladies going away after having left a vaseful of flowers for him, and a plateful of cake, and two or three jars of jelly, and some cold breasts of chicken, would say with shining, exalted countenances, “In spite of his terrible trials, what an inspiration our friend can be! An hour with that good man is like an hour on Pisgah.”

They would, as like as not, make such a remark to the brave invalid’s brother or cousin (or, in later years, nephew) who was earning the money to keep the household going. I am afraid we are no longer as a family very sure what or where Pisgah is, although we know it is in the Bible somewhere, but there is a fierce family tradition against fussing over your health which is as vivid this minute as on the day when the brother or cousin or nephew of Uncle Giles turned away with discourteous haste from the shining-faced lady and stamped rudely into another room. Doctors enter our homes for a broken leg or for a confinement, but seldom for anything else.

When the Civil War came on, and Uncle Giles was the only man in the family left at home, he rose splendidly to the occasion and devoted himself to the instruction of his kinswomen, ignorant of the technique of warfare. From his invalid couch he explained to them the strategy of the great battles in which their brothers and husbands and fathers were fighting; and when the letters from hospital came with news of the wounded, who but Uncle Giles was competent to understand and explain the symptoms reported. As a rule the women of his family were too frantically busy with their Martha-like concentration on the mere material problems of wartime life to give these lucid and intellectual discussions of strategy the attention and consideration they deserved. The war, however, though it seemed endless, lasted after all but four years. And when it was over, Uncle Giles was free to go back to discussions more congenial to his literary and esthetic tastes.

By this time he was past middle-age, “a butterfly broken on the wheel of life,” as he said; it was of course out of the question to expect him to think of earning his own living. He had become a family tradition by that time, too, firmly embedded in the solidly set cement of family habits. The older generation always had taken care of him, the younger saw no way out, and with an unsurprised resignation bent their shoulders to carry on. So, before any other plans could be made, Uncle Giles had to be thought of. Vacations were taken seriatim not to leave Uncle Giles alone. In buying or building a house, care had to be taken to have a room suitable for Uncle Giles when it was your turn to entertain him. If the children had measles, one of the first things to do was to get Uncle Giles into some other home so that he would not be quarantined. That strange law of family life which ordains that the person most difficult to please is always, in the long run, the one to please whom most efforts are made, worked out in its usual complete detail. The dishes Uncle Giles liked were the only ones served (since other men could “eat anything”); the songs Uncle Giles liked were the only ones sung; the houses were adjusted to him; the very color of the rugs and the pictures on the walls were selected to suit Uncle Giles’s fine and exacting taste.

Looking back, through the perspective of a generation-and-a-half, I can see the exact point of safely acknowledged middle-age when Uncle Giles’s health began cautiously to improve; but it must have been imperceptible to those around him, so gradual was the change. His kin grew used to each successive stage of his recovery before they realized it was there, and nobody seems to have been surprised to have Uncle Giles pass into a remarkably hale and vigorous old age.

“Invalids often are strong in their later years,” he said of himself. “It is God’s compensation for their earlier sufferings.”

He passed into the full rewards of the most rewarded old age. It was a period of apotheosis for him, and a very lengthy one at that, for he lived to be well past eighty. In any gathering Uncle Giles, erect and handsome, specklessly attired, his smooth old face neatly shaved, with a quaint, gentle, old-world courtesy and protecting chivalry in his manner to ladies, was a conspicuous and much-admired figure. People brought their visitors to call on him, and to hear him tell in his vivid, animated way of old times in the country. His great specialty was the Civil War. At any gathering where veterans of the War were to be honored, Uncle Giles held every one breathless with his descriptions of Gettysburg and Chancellorsville; and when he spoke of Mobile Bay and Sherman’s march, how his voice pealed, how his fine eyes lighted up! Strangers used to say to themselves that it was easy to see what an eloquent preacher he must have been when he was in the active ministry. The glum old men in worn blue coats used to gather in a knot in the farthest corner, and in low tones, not to interrupt his discourse, would chat to each other of crops, fishing, and politics.

Somewhere we have a scrapbook in which an ironic cousin of mine carefully pasted in all the newspaper articles that were written about Uncle Giles in his old age, and the many handsome obituary notices which appeared when he finally died. I can remember my father’s getting it out occasionally, and reading the clippings to himself with a very grim expression on his face; but it always moved my light-hearted, fun-loving mother to peals of laughter. After all, she was related to Uncle Giles only by marriage and felt no responsibility for him.

The other day, in looking over some old legal papers, I came across a yellowed letter, folded and sealed (as was the habit before envelopes were common) with three handsome pale-blue seals on its back. The seals were made with the crested cameo ring which Uncle Giles always wore, bearing what he insisted was the “coat of arms” of our family. The handwriting of the letter was beautiful, formed with an amorous pride in every letter. It was from Uncle Giles to one of his uncles, my great-grandfather’s brother. It had lain there lost for half a century or more, and of course I had never seen it before; but every word of it was familiar to me as I glanced it over. It began in a manner characteristic of Uncle Giles’s polished courtesy, with inquiries after every member of his uncle’s family, and a pleasant word for each one. He then detailed the state of his health, which, alas, left much to be desired, and seemed, so the doctors told him, to require urgently a summer in the mountains. Leaving this subject, he jumped to the local news of the town where he was then living, and told one or two amusing stories. In one of them I remember was this phrase, “I told her I might be poor, but that a gentleman of good birth did not recognize poverty as a member of the family.” Through a neat transition after this he led up again to the subject of his health and to the desirability of his passing some months in the mountains, “in the pure air of God’s great hills.” Then he entered upon a discreet, pleasant, whimsical reference to the fact that only a contribution from his uncle’s purse could make this possible. There never was anybody who could beat Uncle Giles on ease and grace, and pleasant, pungent humor when it came to asking for money. The only person embarrassed in that situation was the one of whom Uncle Giles was expecting the loan.

I read no more. With no conscious volition of mine, my hand had scrunched the letter into a ball, and my arm, without my bidding, had hurled the ball into the heart of the fire.

But as I reflected on the subject afterwards, and thought of the influence which Uncle Giles has always had on our family, it occurred to me that I was wrong. Uncle Giles ought not to be forgotten. I ought to have saved that letter to show to my children.

“WHAT GOES UP....”

Among the many agreeably arranged European lives which were roughly interrupted by the war, I know of none more snugly and compactly comfortable than that of Octavie Moreau. Indeed, for some years there had been in the back of my mind a faint notion of something almost indiscreet in the admirably competent way in which ’Tavie arranged her life precisely to her taste. I don’t mean that it was an easeful or elegant or self-indulgent life. She cared as little for dress as any other intellectual Frenchwoman, let herself get portly, did up her hair queerly, and the rigorously hearth-and-home matrons of Tourciennes pointed her out to their young daughters as a horrible example of what happens to the looks of a woman who acquires too much learning. As for ease and self-indulgence, ’Tavie’s vigorous personality and powerful, disciplined brain, as well as the need to earn her living, kept her from laying on intellectual fat. But all that vigorous personality, that powerful brain, as well as all the money which she competently earned, seemed more and more to be concentrated on her own comfort and on nothing else. Her excellent salary as professor of science in the girls’ Lycée was almost doubled by what she made by private lessons, for she was an inspired natural teacher, who can, as the saying goes, teach anybody anything. In the thirty years of her life in Tourciennes she has pulled innumerable despairing boys and girls through dreaded examinations in science and mathematics; and parents pay well, the world over, for having their boys and girls pulled through examinations. They respect the woman who can do it, even if, as in Octavie’s case, their respect is tempered with considerable disapprobation of eccentric dress, irreligious ideas, immense skepticism, and cigarette-smoking. And in this case the respect was heightened by Mlle. Moreau’s well-known ability to drive a hard bargain and to see through any one else’s attempt to do the same. Octavie had plenty of everything, brains, will-power and money; but as far as I could see, she never did anything with this plenty, except to feather her own nest. I mean this quite literally, for ’Tavie had a nest, a pretty, red-roofed, gray-walled, old villa, in the outskirts of Tourciennes, which she had bought years before at a great bargain, and which was the center of her life. Her younger sister, a weaker edition of Octavie, who lived with her, and kept house for her, and revolved about her, and adored her, and depended on her, joined with her in this, as in everything else. Those two women visibly existed for the purpose of bringing to perfection that house and the fine, walled garden about it. Long before anybody else in our circle in France thought of such a thing as having a real bathroom with hot and cold water, ’Tavie had one, tiled, and glazed, and gleaming. Octavie’s library was the best one (in science and economic history) in that part of France. Never were there such perfectly laid and kept floors as ’Tavie’s, nor such a kitchen garden, nor closets so convenient and ingeniously arranged, nor a kitchen of such perfection. All well-to-do kitchens in the north of France are works of art, but ’Tavie’s was several degrees more shining and copper-kettled and red-tiled and polished than any other, just as the food which was prepared there was several degrees more succulent, even than the superexcellent meals served elsewhere in that affluent industrial city of the North. As I finished one of ’Tavie’s wonderful dinners, and stepped with her into the ordered marvel of her great garden, I remember one day having on the tip of my tongue some half-baked remark about how far the same amount of intelligence and energy would have gone towards providing more decent homes for a few of the poor in her quarter—for the housing of the poor in Tourciennes was notorious for its wretchedness. But you may be sure I said nothing of the sort. Nobody ventured to make any such sanctimonious comment to caustic Octavie Moreau, fifty-four years old, weighty, powerful, utterly indifferent to other people’s opinions, her fine mind at the perfection of its maturity, her well-tempered personality like a splendid tool at the service of her will, her heart preserved from care about other people’s troubles by her biological conviction of the futility of trying to help any one not energetic enough to help himself. She was not unkind to people she happened to know personally, occasionally spilling over on the needy ones a little of her superabundant vigor, and some of the money she earned so easily. But in her heart she scorned people who were either materially or morally needy, as she scorned every one who was weak and ignorant and timorous, who was not strong enough to walk straight up to what he wanted and take it. She had always done that. Anybody who couldn’t ...!

Then the war began and well-planned lives became like grains of dust in a whirlwind. Tourciennes was at once taken by the Germans and held until the very last of the war, and for more than four years none of the rest of us had a word from ’Tavie and her sister. Beyond the trenches Tourciennes seemed more remote than the palest asteroid.

But after the armistice, what with letters and visits, we soon learned all about their life under the German occupation, in most ways like the lives of all our other friends in the North, the grinding round of petty and great vexations and extortions and oppressions, and slow, dirty starvation of body, mind, and soul which has been described so many times since Armistice Day—but with one notable exception. To Octavie life had brought something more than this.

Early in the third year of the war, the grimly enduring town was appalled by a decree, issued from German Headquarters. In reprisal for something said to have happened in far-away Alsace-Lorraine, forty of the leading women of Tourciennes were to be taken as hostages, conveyed to a prison-camp in the north of Germany, and left there indefinitely till the grievance (whatever it was) in Alsace-Lorraine had been adjusted to the satisfaction of the German government.

By the third year of the war, every one in Tourciennes knew very well what deportation to a German prison-camp meant: almost sure death, and certainly broken health for the most vigorous men. They had all at one time or another gone to the railway station to meet returned prisoners, ragged, demoralized groups of broken, tubercular skeletons, who had gone away from home elderly but powerful men, leaders in their professions. And these latest hostages were to be women, delicately reared, not in their first youth, many of them already half-ill after three years of war privations. In order to make the deepest possible impression on the public of the captive city the most respected and conspicuous women were chosen, prominent either for their husband’s standing and wealth or for the place they had made for themselves, by their own intelligence and energy: the Directress of the Hospital, a well known teacher of music, the Mayor’s wife, the daughter of a noted professor. Of course, our Octavie was among the number.

We knew some of the others, too, either by reputation or personally, and could imagine the heart-sick horror in which their families saw them make their few hasty preparations for departure. Here is a typical case. One of the names on the list was that of Mme. Orléanne, a woman of seventy. She was then so weak from malassimilation of war-food that she had not been out of doors for months! It was nothing less than a death-sentence for her. Her family did not even let her see the list. Her elder daughter, married to a wealthy manufacturer, went to the German officials and offered herself to be deported as a substitute, although she had two children, a girl of eight and a little boy of three! She was accepted, and, death in her heart, set about making up the tiny bundle of necessaries—all they were allowed to carry. Her little girl was old enough to take up the tradition of tragic stoicism of her elders and listened with a blanched face to the instructions of her desperate mother, who told her that there was now nothing but dignity left to Frenchwomen. When the German guard came to tell Mme. Baudoin that the truck which was to carry the hostages away to the railroad was waiting at the door, little Elise, rigid and gray, kissed her mother good-by silently, though after the truck had gone, she fainted and lay unconscious for hours. But Raoul, only a baby, screamed, and struck at the German soldier, clung wildly to his mother with hysteric strength, and after she had gone, broke away from his aunt, rushed out of the street door, shrieking, “Mother, Mother! don’t go away from Raoul!” and flung himself frantically upon his mother’s skirts. She said to me, as she told me of this, “dying will be easy compared to that moment!” But without weakening she did the intolerable thing, the only thing there was to do, she reached down, tore the little boy’s tense fingers from her dress, and climbed up into the truck. “As I looked away from Raoul I saw that tears were running down the cheeks of the German guard who stood at the back of the truck.”

Ah, this human race we belong to!

Shuddering with the anguish of such scenes of separation, the hostages were locked for three days into cattle-cars, cold, windowless, jolting prisons, where they lived over and over those unbearable last moments with children, or sisters, or parents, or husbands, whom they never expected to see again. At the end of this ordeal, the wretched women, numb, half-starved, limping along in their disordered garments, raging inwardly, inflamed with indignant hatred for the soldiers who marshaled them, were brought together in their prison and left alone, save for two bored guards who sat at the door and stared at them.

The prison camp was an enormous one in the north of Germany, a dreary clutter of rough wooden buildings thrown down on a flat, sandy plain, entangled and surrounded by miles of barbed-wire fencing. The prison-room allotted to the forty women from Tourciennes was a high, bare loft, like a part of an ill-built, hastily constructed barn. Around three walls were tiers of bunks, filled with damp, moldy straw, a couple of dirty blankets on each. In the middle of the room was a smallish stove, rather tall and thin in shape, with one hole in the top, closed by a flat lid. An iron kettle stood on the stove. Windows were set in one wall of the room. Under the windows ran a long bench, and before it stood a long table made of a wide board. There was nothing else to be seen, except grease and caked filth on the rough, unpainted boards of the floor and walls. The last of the women staggered into the room; the door was shut, and they faced each other in the gray winter light which filtered in through the smeared panes of the windows.

All during the black nightmare of the journey, every one of them had been quivering with suppressed anguish. Absorbed each in her own grief and despair, they had lain on the thin layer of straw on the floor of the freight car, at the end of their strength, undone by the ignominy of their utter defenselessness before brute force. The marks of tears showed on their gray, unwashed faces, but they had no more tears to shed now. They leaned against the walls and the bunks, their knees shaking with exhaustion, and looked about them at the dreary, dirty desolation of the room which from now on was to be their world. The guards stared at them indifferently, seeing nothing of any interest in that group of prisoners more than in any other, especially as these were women no longer young, disheveled, wrinkled, unappetizing, with uncombed, gray hair, and grimy hands.

A little stir among them, and there was Octavie, our ’Tavie, on her feet, haggard with fatigue, dowdy, crumpled, battered, but powerful and magnetic. She was speaking to them, speaking with the authority of her long years of directing others, with the weight and assurance of her puissant personality.

I can tell you almost exactly what she said, for the women who were there and who told me about it afterwards, had apparently not forgotten a word! She began by saying clearly and energetically, like an older sister, “Come, come, we are all Frenchwomen, and so we have courage; and we all have brains. People with brains and courage have nothing to fear anywhere, if they’ll use them. Now let’s get to work and use ours, all for one and one for all!”

Her bold, strong voice, her dauntless look, her masterful gesture, brought them out of their lassitude, brought them from all sides and corners of the room, where they had abandoned themselves, brought them in a compact group close about her. She went on, her steady eyes going from one to the other, “I think I know what is the first thing to do; to take a solemn vow to stick by each other loyally. You know it is said that women always quarrel among themselves, and that all French people do. We are in a desperate plight. If we quarrel ever, at all: if we are divided, we are undone. We’re of all sorts, Catholics, free-thinkers, aristocrats, radicals, housekeepers, business-women, and we don’t know each other very well. But we are all women, civilized women, Frenchwomen, sisters! Nobody can help us but ourselves. But if we give all we have, they can never conquer us!”

She stopped and looked at them deeply, her strong, ugly face, white with intensity. “A vow, my friends, a vow from every one of us, by what she holds most sacred, that she will summon all her strength to give of her very best for the common good. In the name of our love for those we have left—” her voice broke, and she could not go on. She lifted her hand silently and held it up, her eyes fixed on them. The other hands went up, the drawn faces steadied, the quivering hearts, centered each on its own suffering, calmed by taking thought for others. The very air in the barrack-room seemed less stifling. The two German guards looked on, astonished by the incomprehensible ceremony. These scattered, half-dead women, flung into the room like cattle, who had not seemed to know each other, all at once to be one unit!

Octavie drew a long breath. Then, homely, familiar, coherent as though she were giving a preliminary explanation to a class at the beginning of a school-year, “Now let us understand clearly what is happening to us, so that we can defend ourselves against it. What is it that is being done to us? An attempt is being made to break us down, physically and morally. But these people around us here are not the ones who wish this; they are not as intelligent as we; and they haven’t half the personal incentive to accomplish it, that we have to prevent it. We have a thousand resources of ingenuity that they can’t touch at all.

“We must begin by economizing every atom possible of our strength, moral and physical. And we can start on that right now by not wasting any more strength hating our guards as we have all been hating the Germans who have had to touch us, so far. We can think of them as demons and infernal forces of evil and make them into horrors that will shadow our every thought. Or we can look straight at them to see what they are, and disregard them, just leave them out of our moral lives, when we see that they are ordinary men, for the most part coarse and common men, and now forced to be abnormal, forced by others into a situation that develops every germ of brutality in them.”

At this, young Mme. Baudoin spoke out and told of the German guard who had wept when her little boy was dragged away; and, “I’d rather be in my shoes than his,” cried Octavie vigorously.

“So then we sweep them out of our world,” she went on, “and that leaves the decks cleared for real action. I should say,” she went on with a change of manner, including in one wide humorous glance her own dirty hands, the tangled hair of the others, and the grease and grime of the room, “that the next thing is to organize ourselves to get clean! It’s plain only a few of us can do it at a time; let’s draw lots to see who begins, and the others can lie down while they wait. Is there anybody here who speaks German enough to ask for soap and water? I see the broom here at hand.” A good many of the women proved to have studied German at school, and three of them spoke it. But this did not carry them far. The guards laughed at the idea of soap—nobody in Germany had had soap for months—prisoners were not given such luxuries as towels, and as for water, the tap was down the hall, and the pail was there, and they could carry it for themselves. Besides there was water in the kettle on the stove.

There and then they began their campaign. Lots were drawn, a certain number of tired women collapsed into the bunks to wait, while Octavie organized the others into squads, some to carry water; some to arrange a bathing-place in a corner of the room by hanging up their cloaks on strings stretched from nails; some to sweep out the worst of the dusty litter on the floor.

There was order and purpose in the air. The first woman who emerged from behind the curtain of cloaks, bathed, fresh linen next her clean skin (for they had been allowed to bring one change of linen in their little packages), her hair in order, was like a being from another world, the world they had left. Self-respect came back to the others, as they looked at her.

By night every woman was clean, had arranged her small belongings in her own bunk, and had washed out and hung up the body-linen which she had worn on the trip. One empty bunk had been set aside as the pharmacy, and all their little stock of medicine gathered there; another was the library, where a half-dozen books stood side by side; and a third was the storeroom for miscellaneous goods, the extra bars of soap they had brought from home, a little chocolate, thread, needles, scissors, and the like, communistically put together to be used for whatever proved to be the greatest need. They had taken stock of their material resources and agreed to share them. They had eaten what they could of the coarse, unpalatable food brought to them in the evening, and now sat on the long bench and on the floor, trying to plan out the struggle before them, the struggle to construct an endurable life out of the materials at hand. Octavie was saying, “Everything in order! That is the French way to go at things; classify them and take them up one by one. What are we? Bodies and minds; both equally in danger. Now, the body first. We must have exercise out of doors, more than we’re used to at home, if we are to digest this awful food. They say we’re to be allowed out an hour a day, but that is not enough. We must open the windows once an hour and do something active in here. Any volunteers to show us gymnastic exercises? Anybody who remembers them from school days? I don’t know one.”

Yes, there were several, and one whose sister was a woman doctor using curative gymnastics. The meeting voted to make them an athletic committee, to organize such activities.

“Now, our digestions. You know how all prisoners in Germany have always come home with ruined digestions. Is there anything we can do here? Is there anybody here experienced in cooking who could guess at the raw materials in that fearful mess we’ve just finished, and does she think it might be cooked more intelligently so that it would be better? It stands to reason that the prison cooks would naturally be incompetent, and indifferent to their results. Could we do better ourselves? It also stands to reason that we’d be allowed to, because it would mean less work for the prison kitchens.” A group of housewives was appointed to consider this, next day.

“Now, as to cleanliness. Any suggestions about how to get along with no soap? We don’t dare use soap on the floor, we have so little, but heaven knows it needs it!” All the practical housekeepers spoke at once now, crying out upon her lack of ingenuity in not thinking of sand. That sandy path outside the barracks, that would do excellently well as an abrasive. With plenty of water and energy, sand and some bricks for rubbing, everything in the room could be cleaned. As they spoke, their faces brightened at the prospect of having cleanliness about them, and of being active once more.

“Anything more for the body?” asked Octavie. “If we keep it exercised and clean, and as well-fed as we can manage it, it ought to last us. Now for the mind. We’re going to have hours and hours of leisure time such as we busy women never had before. It’s the chance of our lives to go on with our education. Let’s share each of us with the other, what we have in our minds. I’ll begin. I have chemistry thoroughly, economic history fairly, and the general theory of physics. I’ll give a course of lectures on those. Who can do something else?”

They were all appalled at this and protested that she was the only one who had any information to impart; but she scouted the idea and began a relentless person-to-person inquiry. The result was that a group of musicians were organized, under the guidance of the music teacher, to give lectures on the history of music, the lives and works of the composers, church music, ballads, songs, and operas. Three other women who had brought up great families were to dive deep into their memories and lecture to the others, as logically, coherently, and rationally as they could on proper care for children. A shy, thin, drab-colored woman was found to have been brought up in Indo-China, and was to lecture on the life and education of that country. The German-speaking ones were to give a course in German. Another, the daughter of a well-known professor of French literature, was to assemble and arrange what she knew, and be prepared to plan and lead literary discussions. Another, the distinguished founder and former head of the best hospital in Tourciennes, would lecture on the care of the sick—and so on. From one, from another, from them all, Octavie drew potential treasures of experience and information which lay almost visibly shimmering in a great heap before them—“Enough,” she cried triumphantly, “to last us for years!”

“And now because we’re not solemn Anglo-Saxons, but Frenchwomen, we must plan for some fun, if we’re to keep themselves alive,” she told them firmly, and at their sad-hearted wincing from the idea, she said, “Yes, we must. It’s part of our defensive campaign. Our task is to construct out of our brains and wills a little fortress of civilization, and to protect ourselves behind its walls against demoralization and barbarism! And you all know that amusement is needed for civilization!” A majority agreed to this, a dramatic committee was appointed, and another one on games (Octavie suggested drawing checker-boards on the tables, playing with bits of paper for men, and starting a free-for-all tournament); some one else thought of manufacturing balls and inventing games to be played with them, and there were two packs of cards, in the miscellaneous store. The musical group undertook to provide a weekly concert.

One of the subjects which had been canvassed and found no professor was the history of France; but like all French people, they had been soundly and carefully instructed in history and planned, by putting all their memories together, to reconstruct the story of their nation. The meeting was trailing off from serious, purposeful planning to a discursive attempt to get the list of French kings complete, when one of the older women spoke to Octavie in a low tone, the quality of which instantly made silence about them. She said, “But Mlle. Moreau, we have souls too, souls hard beset.”

Up to this moment Octavie had, as always, dominated the situation! Now she, who has not been inside a church since she was a child, and who considers herself thoroughly emancipated from what she calls, “all that theological nonsense,” was brought up short before the need to make just such a whole-hearted concession to other people’s ideas as she had urged on her comrades! She looked hard at the speaker. It was the foundress of the hospital, Mme. Rouart. From her eyes looked out a personality just as strong as Octavie’s, and tinctured to the core with faith. Octavie’s arrogant intellectualism humbled itself at the sight. She made a gesture of acquiescence and was silent. Mme. Rouart went on, “We’re of all sorts of belief, but we can all pray.”

Then, after an instant’s pause, she said in a low, trembling voice, “Let us pray.”

There was an interval of intense silence, during which, so Octavie told me afterwards, quite without any shade of irony, she “prayed as hard as any one ... and after that I prayed every evening when the others did.”

“How did you pray?” I asked her, incredulously.

Her definition of prayer was characteristic. “I set every ounce of will power to calling up all my strength and endurance. It was wonderful how I felt it rise, when I called,” she said gravely. She added that on that first evening after her silent plunge to the deep places of power in her soul, she put both arms around Mme. Rouart’s neck and kissed her. “I loved her,” she said simply, without attempting her usual skeptical, corrosive analysis of reasons.

Other kisses were exchanged, soberly, as the stiff, tired women stumbled to their feet to go to bed. They laid their exhausted bodies down heavily on the dirty blankets, but in their hearts which had seemed burned out to ashes with grief, indignation, and despair, there shone a living spark of purpose. Some time later, into the darkness came the voice of one of the younger women. “Oh, I’ve just remembered! That fourth son of Clovis was Charibert;” to which Octavie’s voice answered exultantly, “Ah, they never can beat us!”

The life which went on after this seems as real to me as though I had lived it with them, because when I first saw them, they were fresh from it, and could speak of little else. Every day was thrust at them full of the noisome poison of prison life, idleness, indifference, despair, bitterness, hatred, personal degeneration; and every day they poured out this poison resolutely and filled its place with intelligent occupation! Just to keep clean was a prodigious undertaking, which they attacked in squads, turn by turn. With sand, water, and bricks for rubbing, they kept the room immaculate, though it took hours to do it. Even the blankets were washed out after a fashion, one by one at intervals, by women who had never before so much as washed out a handkerchief. To prepare the food with the more than inadequate utensils and poor materials and the stove unsuited for cooking was a tremendous problem, but they all took turns at it, Octavie humbly acting as scullery-maid when her turn for service came; and the food, though poor, monotonous, and coarse, was infinitely superior, being prepared with brains and patience, to what was served all around them to the apathetic, healthless mobs of Russian and Polish women and men, sunk despairingly in degradation and disease, “giving up and lying down in their dirt,” Octavie told me, “to die like beasts.”

The older and weaker women among the Tourciennes group, who could not holystone the floor and carry water and wood, were set at the lighter tasks, the endless mending which kept their garments from becoming mere rags, peeling turnips, washing dishes, “making the beds” as they called the process of drying and airing the straw in the bunks.

Every day they went out in all weathers, and exercised and played ball with their home-made, straw-stuffed balls, and every evening they played games, checkers, guessing games, capped rimes, told stories and sang. They all “studied singing” and sang in twos, trios, quartets, or the whole forty in a chorus. They sang anything any one could remember, old folk-songs of which there are such an infinite variety in French, ballads, church-chants, songs from operas.

Octavie told me that one evening, when the false news which was constantly served to them was specially bad, when they had been told that half the French Army was taken prisoner, and the other half in retreat south of Paris, they sang with the tears running down their cheeks, but still sang, and kept their hearts from breaking.

Every day there were “lessons.” Octavie was the only trained teacher among them, so that her courses in general science and in economic history were the most professional of the instructions given; but she sedulously attended the “courses” given by the others, putting her disciplined mind on the matter they had to present, and by adroit questionings and summarizings, helped them to order it coherently and logically. Once a week they had dramatics, scenes out of Molière, or Labiche, or Shakespeare, or Courteline, farce, tragedy, drama, anything of which anybody had any recollection, with improvisations in the passages which nobody could remember. The German guards looked on astonished at the spirit and dash of the acting, and the laughter and applause from the bunks, where the audience was installed to leave the room clear for a stage. Mme. Baudoin told me that she had never begun to suck the marrow out of the meaty Molière comedies, as she did in the stifling days of midsummer when they were giving a series of his plays.

By midsummer they had learned that one of the younger married women had been pregnant when she left France, that a French child was to be born in that German prison. How they all yearned over the homesick young mother! How important old Mme. Rouart became with her medical and nurse’s lore! What anxious consultations about the preparations of the layette, manufactured out of spare undergarments and a pair of precious linen sheets brought from home. They were supposed to have medical attention furnished in the prison, but they had seen too much of the brutal roughness of the overworked and indifferent army-surgeons of the camp, not to feel a horror at the thought of their attending delicate little Mme. Larçonneur. She begged them desperately not to call in a doctor, but themselves to help her through her black hours. They were terrified at the responsibility, and as her time drew near, with the ups and downs of those last days, they were almost as frightened and tremulous as she.

But the night when she called out in a strangled voice that she needed help, found them all organized, each one with her work planned: some who sprang from their beds to heat water; Mme. Rouart prepared as far as her poor substitute for a nurse’s outfit would allow her; others ready to lift the shivering, groaning woman from her own bunk to the one which had been cleaned, sterilized with boiling water, and kept ready. The others, who could not help, lay in their beds, their hands clenched tightly in sympathy with the suffering of their comrade, shaken to the heart, as the old drama of human life opened solemnly there in that poor place.

When the baby came, his high-pitched cry was like a shout of triumph.

“All well,” announced the nurse to the anxious women, “a fine little boy. No! nobody must stir! Perfect quiet for Mme. Larçonneur.” She busied herself with the mother, while her two assistants oiled the baby and wrapped him in flannel, gloating over the perfections of his tiny finished body, and murmuring to the faces showing over the bunks, “Such a beauty! Such a darling! His little hands!—Oh, see how he fights us!”

The next morning they formed in line to worship him as he lay sleeping beside his mother, and although the sight brought a fierce stab of misery to all the mothers who had left their children behind, the little boy brought into their lives an element of tenderness and hopeful forward-looking which was curative medicine for their sick, women’s hearts.

For in spite of all Octavie’s moral and physical therapeutics, there were intolerable moments and hours and days for all of them. Women, loving women, used to a life-time of care for others, used to the most united family life, left for months at a time without the slightest news of those they had left, could not, valiantly as they might try, master the fury of longing and anxiety which sprang upon them in the midst of the courageously planned life which they led. They all came to recognize in others the sudden whiteness, the trembling hands, the fixed, unseeing eyes blinded by tears. As far as loving whole-hearted sympathy could ease human hearts, such moments of unendurable pain were tempered by a deep sense of the sharing by all of each one’s sorrow.

And then, of course, there were other bad moments and days, meaner, pettier enemies to fight, when it took all of one’s self-control to prevent explosions of irritability from overwrought nerves; quarrelsome bitterness, which comes from brooding on grievances; sudden captious hatred for other people’s mannerisms, which, in all prison-camps, almost as much as physical suffering, embittered and poisoned prison-life for the high-strung, finely organized, twentieth century prisoners of the Great War. Forty women, with lowered physical health, with heightened nervous sensibility, used to fastidious privacy, now shut up together in one room, with no chance ever to escape each other, crowded each other morally almost as much as physically. Octavie told me there were days when she would have liked to slap them, weak, wavering, superstitious souls that they seemed to her, and turn her face to the wall in her bunk to concentrate on hating the human race. And one of the devout Catholics told me that she often longed so intensely for her old atmosphere of belief and faith that she was almost ill. But they adopted as their battle-cry, “All together to defend our civilization!” and, clinging fiercely to this resolve, they fought away from everything that might have separated them and struggled out on ground common to them all.

Then Winter was there again, endless, empty, gray days. There was sickness in the camp, a terrible wave of influenza, carrying off hundreds all around them. They redoubled their cleanliness, boiled every drop of water, exercised, played, mended, studied, cooked, sang, kept steadily on with the ordered precision of their lives. But old Mme. Rouart, the one they loved the most of all, who led the silent prayer of every evening, fell ill, endured silently a few bitter days of suffering, died, and was borne out from among them to be buried in alien soil. Three others were desperately ill, lay near to death, and slowly recovered. Tragedy drew them more closely together than ever, as they realized how utterly they depended on each other, and after this there were fewer struggles against black days of bad temper. The little boy was seven months old now, laughed and crowed, and played with his fingers.

Time seemed to stand still for them, as they fought to protect their little shining taper of civilization, feeding it from their hearts and minds. When they went outdoors for the daily escape from their room to the sandy, hard-trodden desert of the prison yard, they seemed with their neat, threadbare, faded, well-mended garments, with their gray, carefully dressed hair, their pale faces, clean and quiet, with brave eyes and smiling lips, like another order of being from the shaggy, dirt-crusted, broken-down Polish and Russian soldiers, whose corrals were on each side of them, lying listlessly in the drizzling mist or quarreling among themselves. They were known by this time all over the camp, and the demoralized, desperate men watched the decent Frenchwomen with that most humanizing of emotions, respect.

Do you see them, those gaunt, heart-sick women, shoulder to shoulder, indomitable in the patient use of their intelligence, in their long triumphant battle against the weakness and evil in their own nature, which were, as they had known from the first, the only things in the world which could harm them?

What a race to belong to!

Well, then came the end, foreshadowed by weeks of excited rumor, a confused, bewildered period of guesses and half hopes, when nobody, not even the guards, knew what was happening at the front. The camp was all one crazy uproar, no newspaper, no certainty of anything. Our little group of women clung to each other, as the world rocked round them, till the evening when the guards came running to take them to the train. Not an instant to spare; the thousands of other prisoners were yelling in the riot which, the next day, tore the camp to pieces. They huddled on their clothes and fled into the wild confusion of the journey, standing up in locked cattle-cars, frantic to know what was happening, with no idea in the world where they were or where the train was taking them, until the moment when the jolting cars stopped, the locked doors were broken open and French voices out of the darkness cried, “Mesdames, vous êtes chez vous!”

They were at home, at their own station, a faint gray light showing the well-known pointed roofs of their own city, the massive tower of the old Town Hall black against the dawn. On the same platform, where they had seen so many deported prisoners return, vermin-ridden, filthy, half-imbecile, a burden to themselves and their families, there they were, lean and worn and pale, but stronger, better, finer human beings than they had been before. Half-awed by the greatness of their victory, they stood there, like ghosts who had fought their way back from the grave, peering out through the dim light at their own homes.

That’s where the story ought to end, oughtn’t it?

But you know as well as I do that five years have passed since that morning when they stood there, awe-struck and transfigured. And I cannot conceal the fact that I have seen them all again, a good many times since then.

What are they doing with themselves now? Well, the last time I made a round of visits among them, I found the housewives concerned about their preserves and the hang of their skirts; the business-women deep in calculations about how to get around the sinful rate of exchange. The mothers were bringing up their children very hard, as we all do, very much concerned about their knowing the children of the right people and no others. The teachers were grumbling about the delay in the promised raise of their pay and complaining about the tyranny of the Directrice of their Lycée. Young Mme. Baudoin, now that her children are old enough to go to school, often leaves them with the servants and runs off to Brussels or Paris for a few days of fun. All the returned hostages have grown quite stout, and they have taken up bridge whist with enthusiasm, once more.

As for Octavie, the last time I saw her, she was on fire with interest over a little green-house she was having built back of the kitchen, so that she might have fresh green vegetables the year around. It was very hard to achieve such a thing, what with the lack of workmen, the scarcity of bricks, and the high price of glass. But Octavie was sure she could manage it.

And so am I. Octavie can always manage anything she tries for.

OLD MAN WARNER

I must warn you at the outset that unless you or some of your folks came from Vermont, it is hardly worth your while to read about Old Man Warner. You will not be able to see anything in his story except, as we say in Vermont, a “gape and swallow” about nothing. Well, I don’t claim much dramatic action for the story of old man Warner, but I am setting it down on the chance that it may fall into the hands of some one brought up on Vermont stories as I was. I know that for him there will be something in Old Man Warner’s life, something of Vermont, something we feel and cannot express, as we feel the incommunicable aura of a personality.

The old man has been a weight on the collective mind of our town ever since I was a little girl, and that is a long time ago. He was an old man even then. Year after year, as our Board of Selectmen planned the year’s town budget they had this worry about Old Man Warner, and what to do with him. It was not that old Mr. Warner was a dangerous character, or anything but strictly honest and law-abiding. But he had his own way of bothering his fellow citizens.

In his young days he had inherited a farm from his father, back up in Arnold Hollow, where at that time, about 1850, there was a cozy little settlement of five or six farms with big families. He settled there, cultivated the farm, married, and brought up a family of three sons. When the Civil War came, he volunteered together with his oldest boy, and went off to fight in the second year of the war. He came back alone in 1864, the son having fallen in the Battle of the Wilderness. And he went back up to Arnold Hollow to live and there he stayed, although the rest of his world broke up and rearranged itself in a different pattern, mostly centering about the new railroad track in the main valley.

Only the older men returned to the Arnold Hollow settlement to go on cultivating their steep, rocky farms. The younger ones set off for the West, the two remaining Warner boys with the others. Their father and mother stayed, the man hardly ever leaving the farm now even to go to town. His wife said once he seemed to feel as though he never could get caught up on the years he had missed during the war. She said he always had thought the world of his own home.

The boys did pretty well out in Iowa, had the usual ups and downs of pioneer farmers, and by 1898, when their mother died, leaving their father alone at seventy-one, they were men of forty-eight and forty-six, who had comfortable homes to which to invite him to pass his old age.

Everybody in our town began to lay plans about what they would buy at the auction, when Old Man Warner would sell off his things, as the other Arnold Hollow families had. By this time, for one reason or another, the Warners were the only people left up there. The Selectmen planned to cut out the road up into Arnold Hollow, and put the tidy little sum saved from its upkeep into improvements on the main valley thoroughfare. But old Mr. Warner wrote his sons and told the Selectmen that he saw no reason for leaving his home to go and live in a strange place and be a burden to his children, with whom, having seen them at the rarest intervals during the last thirty years, he did not feel very well acquainted. And he always had liked his own home. Why should he leave it? It was pretty late in the day for him to get used to western ways. He’d just be a bother to his boys. He didn’t want to be a bother to anybody, and he didn’t propose to be!

There were a good many protests all round, but of course the Selectmen had not the faintest authority over him, and as quite probably his sons were at heart relieved, nothing was done. The town very grudgingly voted the money to keep up the Arnold Hollow road, but consoled itself by saying freely that the old cuss never had been so very bright and was worse now, evidently had no idea what he was trying to do, and would soon get tired of living alone and “doing for himself.”

That was twenty-two years ago. Selectmen who were then vigorous and middle-aged, grew old, decrepit, died, and were buried. Boys who were learning their letters then, grew up, married, had children, and became Selectmen in their turn. Old Man Warner’s sons grew old and died, and the names of most of his grand-children, scattered all over the West, were unknown to us. And still the old man lived alone in his home and “did for himself.”

Every spring, when road work began, the Selectmen groaned over having to keep up the Arnold Hollow road, and every autumn they tried their best to persuade the old man to come down to a settlement where he could be taken care of. Our town is very poor, and taxes are a heavy item in our calculations. It is just all we can do to keep our schools and roads going, and we grudge every penny we are forced to spend on tramps, paupers, or the indigent sick. Selectmen in whose régime town expenses were high, are not only never reëlected to town office, but their name is a by-word and a reproach for years afterwards. We elect them, among other things, to see to it that town expenses are not high, and to lay their plans accordingly.

Decades of Selectmen, heavy with this responsibility, tried to lay their plans accordingly in regard to Old Man Warner, and ran their heads into a stone wall. One Board of Selectmen after another knew exactly what would happen; the old dumb-head would get a stroke of paralysis, or palsy, or softening of the brain, or something, and the town Treasury would bleed at every pore for expensive medical service, maybe an operation at a hospital, and after that, somebody paid to take care of him. If they could only ship him off to his family! One of the granddaughters, now a middle-aged woman, kept up a tenuous connection with the old man, and answered, after long intervals, anxious communications from the Selectmen. Or if not that, if only they could get him down out of there in the winter, so they would not be saddled with the perpetual worry about what was happening to him, with the perpetual need to break out the snow in the road and go up there to see that he was all right.

But Old Man Warner was still not bright enough to see any reason why he should lie down on his own folks, or why he should not live in his own home. When gentle expostulations were tried, he always answered mildly that he guessed he’d rather go on living the way he was for a while longer; and when blustering was tried, he straightened up, looked the blusterer in the eye, and said he guessed there wasn’t no law in Vermont to turn a man off his own farm, s’long’s he paid his debts, and he didn’t owe any that he knew of.

That was the fact, too. He paid spot cash for what he bought in his semi-yearly trips to the village to “do trading,” as our phrase goes. He bought very little, a couple of pairs of overalls a year, a bag apiece of sugar, and coffee, and rice, and salt, and flour, some raisins, and pepper. And once or twice during the long period of his hermit life, an overcoat and a new pair of trousers. What he brought down from his farm was more than enough to pay for such purchases, for he continued to cultivate his land, less and less of it, of course, each year, but still enough to feed his horse and cow and pig and hens, and to provide him with corn and potatoes and onions. He salted down and smoked a hog every fall and ate his hens when they got too old to lay.

And, of course, as long as he was actually economically independent, the town, groaning with apprehension over the danger to its treasury though it was, could not lay a finger on the cranky old codger. And yet, of course, his economic independence couldn’t last! From one day to the next, something was bound to happen to him, something that would cost the town money.

Each year the Selectmen planning the town expenditures with the concentrated prudence born of hard necessity, cast an uneasy mental glance up Arnold Hollow way, and scringed at the thought that perhaps this was the year when money would have to be taken away from the road or the school fund to pay for Old Man Warner’s doctoring and nursing; and finally for his burial, because as the years went by, even the tenuous western granddaughter vanished: died, or moved, or something. Old Man Warner was now entirely alone in the world.

All during my childhood and youth he was a legendary figure of “sot” obstinacy and queerness. We children used to be sent up once in a while, to take our turn in seeing that the old man was all right. It was an expedition like no other. You turned off the main road and went up the steep, stony winding mountain road, dense with the shade of sugar-maples and oaks. At the top, when your blown horse stopped to rest, you saw before you the grassy lane leading across the little upland plateau where the Arnold Hollow settlement had been. The older people said they could almost hear faint echoes of whetting scythes, and barking dogs, and cheerful homely noises, as there had been in the old days. But for us children there was nothing but a breathlessly hushed, sunny glade of lush meadows, oppressively silent and spooky, with a few eyeless old wrecks of abandoned farm houses, drooping and gray. You went past the creepy place as fast as your horse could gallop, and clattered into the thicket of shivering white birches which grew close to the road like a screen; and then—there was no sensation in my childhood quite like the coming out into the ordered, inhabited, humanized little clearing, in front of Old Man Warner’s home. There were portly hens crooning around on the close-cropped grass, and a pig grunting sociably from his pen at you, and shining milk-pans lying in the sun tilted against the white birch sticks of the wood-pile, and Old Man Warner, himself, infinitely aged and stooped, in his faded, clean overalls, emerging from the barn-door to peer at you out of his bright old eyes and to give you a hearty, “Well, you’re quite a long ways from home, don’t you know it? Git off your horse, can’t ye? I’ve got a new calf in here.” Or perhaps if it were a Sunday, he sat in the sun on the front porch, with a clean shirt on, reading the weekly edition of the New York Tribune. He drove two miles every Saturday afternoon, down to his R. F. D. mail-box on the main road, to get this.

You heard so much talk about him down in the valley, so much fussing and stewing about his being so “sot,” and so queer, that it always surprised you when you saw him, to find he was just like anybody else. You saw his calf, and had a drink of milk in his clean, well-scrubbed kitchen, and played with the latest kitten, and then you said good-by for that time, and got on your horse and went back through the birch thicket into the ghostly decay of the abandoned farms, back down the long, stony road to the valley where everybody was so cross with the unreasonable old man for causing them so much worry.

“How could he expect to go along like that, when other old folks, so much younger than he, gave up and acted like other people, and settled down where you could take care of them! The house might burn down over his head, and he with it; or he might fall and break his hip and be there for days, yelling and fainting away till somebody happened to go by; or a cow might get ugly and hook him, and nobody to send for help.” All these frightening possibilities and many others had been repeatedly presented to the old man himself with the elaborations and detail which came from heart-felt alarm about him. But he continued to say mildly that he guessed he’d go on living the way he was for a while yet.

“A while!” He was ninety years old.

And then he was ninety-one, and then ninety-two; and we were surer and surer he would “come on the town,” before each fiscal year was over. At the beginning of last winter our Selectmen went up in a body to try to bully or coax the shrunken, wizened old man, now only half his former size, to go down to the valley. He remarked that he “guessed there wasn’t no law in Vermont” and so forth, just as he had to their fathers. He was so old, that he could no longer straighten up as he said it, for his back was helplessly bent with rheumatism, and for lack of teeth he whistled and clucked and lisped a good deal as he pronounced his formula. But his meaning was as clear as it had been thirty years ago. They came sulkily away without him, knowing that they would both be laughed at and blamed, in the valley, because the cussed old crab had got the best of them, again.

Last February, a couple of men, crossing over to a lumber-job on Hemlock Mountain, by way of the Arnold Hollow road, saw no smoke coming out of the chimney, knocked at the door, and, getting no answer, opened it and stepped in. There lay Old Man Warner, dead on his kitchen floor in front of his well-blacked cook-stove. The tiny, crooked, old body was fully dressed, even to a fur cap and mittens, and in one hand was his sharp, well-ground ax. One stove-lid was off, and a charred stick of wood lay half in and half out of the fire box. Evidently the old man had stepped to the fire to put in a stick of wood before he went out to split some more, and had been stricken instantly, before he could move a step. His cold, white old face was composed and quiet, just as it had always been in life.

The two lumbermen fed the half-starved pig and hens and turned back to the valley with the news, driving the old man’s cow and horse in front of them; and in a couple of hours we all knew that Old Man Warner had died, all alone, in his own kitchen.

Well, what do you think! We were as stirred up about it—! We turned out and gave him one of the best funerals the town ever saw. And we put up a good marble tombstone that told all about how he had lived. We found we were proud of him, as proud as could be, the darned old bull-dog, who had stuck it out all alone, in spite of us. We brag now about his single-handed victory over old age and loneliness, and we keep talking about him to the children, just as we brag about our grandfather’s victories in the Civil War, and talk to the children about the doings of the Green Mountain Boys. Old Man Warner has become history. We take as much satisfaction in the old fellow’s spunk, as though he had been our own grandfather, and we spare our listeners no detail of his story: “... And there he stuck year after year, with the whole town plaguing at him to quit. And he earned his own living, and chopped his own wood, and kept himself and the house just as decent, and never got queer and frowzy and half-cracked, but stayed just like anybody, as nice an old man as ever you saw—all alone, all stark alone—beholden to nobody—asking no odds of anybody—yes, sir, and died with his boots on, at ninety-three, on a kitchen floor you could have et off of, ’twas so clean.”

THE IDEAS OF M. BRODARD

During the first winter I spent in the boarding-school on the Rue de Vaugirard, the Brodard sisters were the mainstay of my life. It was not that I needed mainstaying in any of the regular classes, although we were driven like dogs by the grindingly thorough teachers, for lessons are lessons, wherever you find them, hard and tense though they may be in France, easy and loose in America. It was quite another part of our school life which routed me, the training in deportment and manners, carried on in three deadly sessions a week, by a wizened skipping old man, light and dry as a cork.

His little juiceless body was light, but everything else about him was heavy with the somber earnestness of his determination to teach us what he considered the manners of women of the world. Thrice a week we were obliged to begin those lessons by a ceremonious entry into the big salon, four by four, advancing in time to music across the bare shining desert of its waxed floors, counting furtively under our breaths, “one, two, three, four, glide, bend, recover, glide,” as we courtesied to the Directrice, “advance again, one, two, three, four, glide, bend, recover, glide,”—here we saluted the Sous-Directrice—“advance again” (I was always shaking partly with giggles at the absurdity of the whole business, partly with fear of the terrible eye of Professor Delacour), “one, two three, four, glide, bend ...” but usually at this point of my attempted bow to the Professor of Deportment I was harshly told to go back and start the whole agonizing ritual over.

That was before the Brodard girls took me in hand and, flanking me on either side, swept me forward on the crest of their perfect advance and genuflection to the coveted place of safety on the other side of the room where, in a black-robed line, the little girls who had made a correct entry awaited further instructions in the manners of the world.

The support of the three Brodard girls did not stop short when they had engineered me through the matter of getting into a room. The professor himself was not more steeped in a religious sense of the importance of his instruction than were Madeleine, Lucie, and Clotilde Brodard. The insensate inner laughter which constantly threatened to shake the lid of my decorum, was safely muffled by their whole-souled attention as we stood there, watching the elegant gestures and still more elegant immobilities of Professor Delacour, as he explained the lesson of the day.

One day we were taught how to put money into the contribution-box in church, “not with a preoccupied, bored air, nor yet with a complacent smirk, but thus, gravely, with a quiet dignified gesture.” Then he would pass the velvet contribution bag down the line, and forty little girls must each find the right expression, “not bored, or preoccupied, not yet with a complacent, self-conscious look, gravely—quietly—with dignity.”

I can still feel in the pit of my stomach the quiver of mingled terror and mirth with which at twelve years of age, I prepared to be, “not bored or preoccupied, nor yet smirking and complacent, but quiet—dignified—” I would never have lived through it if I had not been hypnotized by the Brodard girls.

Or perhaps we were required to be ladies stepping from a carriage and crossing a side-walk to enter a theater, keenly conscious of the eyes of the crowd on us; but required to seem unaware of spectators, “graceful, moving with a well-bred repose, and above all, unconscious, entirely natural and unconscious.” Then two by two, squirmingly the center of all the eyes in the salon, we crossed the imaginary sidewalk and entered the imaginary door, “quiet, graceful, above all unconscious, entirely natural and unconscious....” Do you suppose for a moment I could have escaped annihilation at the hands of our High-Priest, if Clotilde Brodard had not been my fellow acolyte, applying all her orthodox convictions to the problem set before us?

Yes, the Brodard girls were an example to us all, in and out of the class in deportment, for they were as scrupulously observant of all the rules of good behavior in daily school-life as under the eye of Professor Delacour. Any chance observer would have been sure that they were preparing to enter the wealthiest and most exclusive society, an impression by no means contradicted by the aspect of their mother, a quiet, distinguished, tailored person, who brought them to school at the beginning of the term, and once in a while made the tiresome trip from Morvilliers to Paris to see them. But the Brodards must have had some training in genuine good-breeding as well as the quaint instruction given by Professor Delacour, for they never made any pretensions to wealth or social standing—they said very little of any sort about their home life.

Two years later I spent my Christmas vacation with them, and at once I understood a good deal more about them. Young as I was—fourteen at the time—it was plain to me as it would have been to any observer, that they took their lessons in “society manners” so seriously because society manners and any occasions for using them were the only things lacking in the home where they were so comfortable, so much loved, and so well cared for. They lived on a shabby street in Morvilliers, in a small apartment, with one maid-of-all-work; and although their mother had a genius for keeping everything on a plane of strict gentility, their big, gay, roughly clad, unceremonious father was the ramping red editor of the most ramping red radical newspaper in that part of France, the center of all the anti-everything agitations going on in the region.

As used to happen in Europe, in the far-gone days, when I was fourteen years old (but not at all as it happens now-a-days) what they called ramping and redness looked very plain and obvious to an American. Most of what M. Brodard was making such a fuss about, seemed to me just what everybody at home took for granted: for instance his thesis that every man ought to earn his own living no matter how high his social position might be. I was astonished that anybody could consider that a revolutionary idea. Among other things, M. Brodard was what people would call now-a-days a feminist, expounding hotly his conviction that women should be trusted with the responsibility for the conduct of their own lives, and the earning of their own livings. These opinions found no echo at all in the serious-minded middle-class families of his town, nor indeed in his family, but they were an old story to me. I told him as much, informing him confidently from my wide experience as a child in the impecunious faculty of a western State-University, that everybody in America expected as a matter of course to earn his and her own living—everybody! He accepted this as unquestioningly as I advanced it, with the fresh faith and enthusiasm which upheld him in all the generous quixotism of his life. I believe, indeed, that on the strength of my testimony he actually wrote some editorials about America in his furiously convinced style.

Of course he was the champion of the working classes as against the bourgeoisie, adored by the first and hated by the second. It was an adventure to walk with him along the narrow, cobbled streets of the musty little town. Everywhere the lean, sinewy men in working clothes and the thin women in aprons and without hats, had a quick, flashing look of pleasure to see his great frame come striding vigorously along. Everywhere the artisans stopped their work to call a hearty greeting to him, or to step quickly to meet him, full of some grievance, sure of his sympathy, and comforted by the quick flame of his indignation. And everywhere the very sight of him put a taste of green apples into the mouths of all the well-dressed people. You could see that by the sour expression of their broad, florid faces. The prosperous merchant at the door of his shop frowned, cleared his throat, and turned hastily within doors, as he saw M. Brodard come marching along, humming a tune, his hat cocked light-heartedly over one ear. The lawyer in his black broadcloth coat passed us hurriedly; the women in expensive furs stepped high, drew their long skirts about them, and looked him straight in the eye, with an expression half fear, half horror. This last made him break out into the hearty, full-throated laugh, always close to the surface with him—the laugh that was as characteristic a part of him as the shape of his nose.

I understood now why Mme. Brodard sent the girls away to school. They would have been outcasts in any bourgeoise school in their own town. Yet M. Brodard was a great champion of the public schools and never lost an opportunity of defending against their bitter critics the public lycées for girls, then just struggling into being in France. I wondered a little that he should allow his daughters to go to such a boarding-school as ours. But it seemed that the angry resistance of the moneyed and pious families of Morvilliers had up to that time prevented the establishment of a public lycée for girls there. This enabled Mme. Brodard to steer past another dangerous headland in the complicated course of her life. Perhaps, also, warm-hearted M. Brodard was not inclined to be too hard on his girls, whom he fondly loved, after the adoring manner of French fathers, nor to expect too much from his devoted wife in the way of conforming to his ideas.

Even at that time, poor Mme. Brodard’s life was all one miracle of adroit achievement in reconciling irreconcilable elements and effecting impossible compromises. She had married her husband when they were both young (he must have been an irresistible suitor), and before his hot-headed sympathies for the under-dog had absorbed him. Like a good and devoted French wife, she never admitted that anything her Bernard did was other than what she would wish. But she remained exactly what she had been at the time of her marriage, and although she was deeply attached to her kind and faithful husband and made the best of homes for him, she had not the slightest intention of changing a hair or becoming anything but a good bourgeoise, a devoted believer in social distinctions, in the Church, in the laboring classes as such and in their places, and above all in the excellence of owning property and inheriting money.

On this last point M. Brodard went much further than anything I had heard discussed at home, and poured out incessantly in brilliant editorials a torrent of scorn, laughter, hatred, and denunciation, upon the sacred institution of inheritance, the very keystone of the French social edifice. “How ridiculous,” he used to write on mornings when no other forlorn hope stood in special need of a harebrained charge, “that the mere chance of birth, or a personal caprice, should put vast sums of unearned wealth into the hands of a man who has not had the slightest connection with its production. Property, the amassing of wealth by a man who has had the acumen and force to produce it ... we may have two opinions about that, about whether he should be allowed to keep for himself all he can lay his hands on. But there can be no two opinions about the hilarious idiocy of the theory that his grown-up son has any inherent right to possess that wealth, his son who has no more to do with it than the Emperor of China, save by a physiological accident. A hundred years from now, people will be laughing at our imbecile acquiescence in such a theory, as we now laugh at the imbecile acquiescence of whole provinces and kingdoms in the Middle Ages, passed from the hand of one master to another, because somebody had married somebody else.”

Mme. Brodard used to say resignedly, that she minded such editorials least of all. “That is a principle that will never touch our lives!” she said with melancholy conviction, for her modest dowry was the extent of their fortune and of their expectations. She herself had been an orphan and all the Brodard elders were dead, having left nothing to the family of such an enemy to society as they considered Bernard to be.

She did not complain; she never complained of anything her husband did; but it was plain to see that she thought it her obvious duty to protect her daughters from the consequences of their dear father’s ideas. The income from her dowry kept them at school and dressed them at home, and as the oldest began to approach the marriageable age Mme. Brodard cast about her with silent intensity for some possible means for stretching that dowry to enable Madeleine to make the right sort of match. She knew of course that this was an impossible undertaking; but all her married life had been an impossible undertaking carried through to success, and she did not despair, although there were times when she looked white and anxious.

But this was never when M. Brodard was at home. Indeed it was impossible for any one to be tense or distraught in the sunny gaiety of M. Brodard’s presence. His entrance into that neat, hushed, narrow, waxed, and polished interior was like the entrance of a military band playing a quick-step. He was always full of his latest crusade, fired with enthusiasms, hope, and certainty of success. He made you feel that he was the commanding officer of a devoted force, besieging an iniquitous old enemy, and every day advancing further toward victory. Yet another blast, down would tumble the flimsy walls of cowardly traditional injustice, and sunshine would stream into the dark places!

Full of faith in what he was doing, he was as light-hearted as a boy, electrifying the most stagnant air with the vibrant current of his conviction that life is highly worth the trouble it costs. Big girls as we were, he swept us off into hilarious games of hide-and-seek; and never in any later evenings of my life have I rocked in such gales of fun as on the evenings when we played charades. An impersonation of a fussy, clucking setting hen which he gave as part of the word, “ampoule” has remained with me as a high-water mark of sheer glorious foolery never surpassed by the highest-salaried clown. In the following charade we laughed so at his “creation” of a fateful Napoleon that we could not sit on our chairs; and after that, carried away by his own high spirits, he did the “strong man” at the village fair (he was a prodigiously powerful athlete) lifting a feather with a grotesque display of swelling muscles, clenched jaws, and widespread legs which all but finished me. The tears of mirth used to come to my eyes as I recalled that evening, and many a taut, high-strung moment of my adolescence in after years relaxed into healthy amusement at the remembered roar of M. Brodard’s laughter.

M. Brodard’s laughter ... alas!

And yet at the very time when his care-free, fearless laughter so filled my ears, he was standing out single-handed against the most poisonous hostility, to force an investigation of a framed-up law case, in which a workingman had been defrauded of his rights. Apparently there was always some such windmill against which he thought it necessary to charge. Apparently his zeal for forlorn hopes never diminished. We went back to school after that vacation leaving him the center of a pack of yelling vituperations from all the staid and solid citizens of the region ... “poor, dear Papa,” as the Brodard girls always said, imitating their mother’s accent.

To me, school and lessons in deportment seemed queerer than ever, after that great gust of stormy, ruffling wind, but the Brodard girls were used to such contrasts. They but plunged themselves deeper than ever, up to their very necks, into the atmosphere of gentility. They had caught more than their mother’s accent, they had caught her deep anxiety about their future, her passionate determination that the ideas of their father should not drag them into that impossible world of workingmen, radicals and badly dressed outcasts, which was the singular choice of their excellent poor dear Papa.

When Mme. Brodard came to Paris, in the well-cut tailored dress which I now knew to be the only one she possessed, she reported that Papa, by sheer capacity for shouting unpleasant truths at the top of his great voice, had obtained a re-trial and acquittal of that tiresome workingman, and was now off on a new tack, was antagonizing all the merchants of town by an exposé of their grinding meanness to their hapless employees. It seemed that libel-suits were thick in the air, and the influential members of society crossed to the other side of the street when they met M. Brodard. “But you know how poor dear Papa seems to thrive on all that!”

Well, he might thrive on all that, but Madeleine, Lucie, and Clotilde knew very well that nothing they wanted would thrive on “all that.” Their only salvation was in escape from it. In the effort to prepare themselves for that escape, they smeared themselves, poor things, from head to foot with good breeding. They had nothing but themselves, Maman, and her little dowry to count on; but at least no one should be able to guess from their manners that their home life had not been conventional. Mme. Brodard went on, that day, to consult with her banker about re-investing some of her little fortune, so that it would mean more income. When Madeleine left school, they would need more, Heaven knew, to piece out the plain living furnished by the head of the house. What could they do to rise to that crisis? When Madeleine left school ... an abyss before their feet! Could they perhaps go south, to a winter resort for a few months every year, where there were no Morvilliers people, where there might be eligible young men ... or even some not so young? They all looked anxious and stern, when they thought of it, for after Madeleine, there were Lucie and Clotilde!

I was sent home to America in June that year, before the end of the school-term. The good-bys were said at lunch-time, before my schoolmates went off to the lesson in deportment. The last I saw of the Brodards at the time, was through the door of the salon as I passed on my way to the street. They were learning how to handle a fan, how to open it—“not tearing it open with both hands like a peasant girl, but flirting it open with a sinuous bend of the wrist of one hand ... not so abrupt!... smooth, suave, with an aristocratic....” As I went down the hall, the voice of Professor Delacour died away on these words. I wondered what poor dear Papa was up to now.

Two years later when I was taken back to France and went to visit the Brodards, I found that he was still up to the same sort of thing. Just then he was making the echoes yell in the defense of a singularly unattractive, snuffy old man, who lived in a village six or seven kilometers away from Morvilliers. Old M. Duval, it seemed, had gone to South America in his youth, had accumulated some property there, and had lost his religion. Now, at sixty-nine, with so it was said, enough money to live on, he had come back to Fressy, had bought a comfortable little home there, and settled down to end his days in his birthplace. But Fressy, as it happened, had always been and still was noted for its piety and conservatism. The curé of the parish was a man of flaming zeal, and the Mayor was also a very devout ultramontane. Till then their influence had been unquestioned in the town. They had boasted that there was one loyal village left in France where none of the poisonous new ideas had come in to corrupt the working classes, and to wean them from their dutiful submission to the rule of their spiritual and secular betters. Apparently till then, M. Brodard had overlooked the existence of such a village near him.

His attention was now very much called to it by the persecution of old M. Duval. The persistent and ostentatious absence from Mass of the returned traveler was followed by a shower of stones which broke most of his windows. His easy-going advice given publicly in a café to some young workmen of the town to follow his example, to stand up for themselves, get higher wages or strike, was answered by the poisoning of his dog. The old fellow became indignant, and never dreaming of the heat of the feeling against him, walked straight up to M. le Curé one day in the street, and asked him—as if the priest had anything to do with what was happening!—whether the laws of France did or did not permit a man to live quietly in his own house, no matter what his opinions were! That night some anonymous defender of the status quo set fire to his chicken-house. It was at this time that M. Brodard began to be aware of the existence of Fressy.

Old M. Duval called on the police for protection. “The police.” That sounds very fine, but the police of Fressy meant a solitary old garde-champêtre whose wife was the most pious woman in town, and whose only daughter was the cook in the house of the fiercely legitimatist Mayor. It is not surprising that the next morning, the scoffing unbeliever from overseas found that somehow marauders had eluded “the police,” and laid waste his promising kitchen-garden. They intended (they proclaimed it openly) to drive out from their sanctified midst, the man who flaunted his prosperity as the result of a wicked and godless life.

But they had not counted on M. Brodard and on his unparalleled capacity for making a noise. He stormed out to Fressy to see the old man, thoroughly frightened by this time; heard his story, exploding at intervals into fiery rockets of indignation; clasped him in his arms, as though M. Duval had been his own kin; and swore that he would prove to him that justice and freedom existed in France to-day as always. The old man’s nerves were shaken by his troubled nights and his harried sense of invisible enemies all about him. Until that moment it had seemed to him that all the world was against him. His relief was immense. He returned M. Brodard’s embrace emotionally, his trembling old arms clasped hard about M. Brodard’s great neck, the tears in his scared old eyes.

Then M. Brodard hurried back to Morvilliers, tore the throttle open, and let her go ... to the great discomfort of Mme. Brodard and the girls, the two elder of whom were now very reluctantly preparing themselves to teach, for they had not been able to organize the longed-for escape. That was the situation when I visited them.

Of course in due time the intemperate publicity about the matter put an end to the attacks on M. Duval. The rattling crackle of M. Brodard’s quick-fire protests rose in the air, till they reached the ears of the Sous-Prefect, from whose exalted office orders to “see to that matter” were issued, and came with imperative urgence even to the royalist Mayor of Fressy. He very grudgingly issued certain unofficial orders, which meant quiet in old M. Duval’s life. There was even a victim sacrificed to shut M. Brodard’s too-articulate mouth. The garde-champêtre lost his position and his chance for a pension, which was very hard on an excellent, honest man whose only intention had been to do his duty as he saw it.

By the time that I was back in America in college, Clotilde wrote me that all that disturbance had died down, that M. Duval, horrid old thing, had come on his shaking old legs to make a visit to Papa, to thank him with deep emotion for the intense peace and comfort of his present life. I could read between the lines that Clotilde thought they might very well have a little more of those commodities in their own life.

After that I heard from some one else (for M. Brodard and his ideas were becoming famous) that the opposition had finally caught him in a legal technicality, something connected with his campaign for tearing down the miserable old disease-soaked medieval hovels where many poor people lived in Morvilliers. The proprietors of the threatened rookeries chipped in together, hired expensive expert legal advice, and finally, to their immense satisfaction, succeeded in getting a tiny sentence of imprisonment, for defamation of their characters, inflicted on M. Brodard. He was kept in jail for two weeks, I believe, which was a fortnight of pure glory. All his humble adherents, hundreds of them, came tramping in to see him from all the region round, bringing tribute. His “cell” was heaped with flowers, he fared on the finest game and fattest poultry, and ... what pleased him vastly more ... the fiery editorials which he sent out from his prison about the infamy of wretched lodgings for poor families were noticed and reprinted everywhere in France, where the circumstances of his grotesque imprisonment were known.

The condemnation which his opponents meant to be a crushing disgrace turned out an apotheosis. He enjoyed every moment of it and emerged from his two weeks vacation, ruddier, stronger, in higher spirits than ever, his name shining with the praise of generous-hearted men all over the country. He cocked his hat further over one ear than ever and strode off home. You could fairly see the sparks fly from beneath his feet.

* * * * * * *

The morning after his release from prison, news came from Fressy that old M. Duval had died of apoplexy.

Well, what of that? Ah, what of that ...?

He had willed his whole fortune to M. Brodard, and it seemed he was frightfully rich: it came to more than three million francs.

* * * * * * *

Oh, yes, he took it. Of course he did. You knew he would. What else would you have had him do? It’s all very well to have abstract ideas about the absurdity and iniquity of inheritance; but when your own daughters ... and your own wife ... expect so confidently....

Mme. Brodard, you see ... he was devoted to his wife who had so faithfully made the best of homes for him; and to his daughters whom he loved so dearly....

Can’t you see the astounded radiance of their faces at the news? And they’d already been sacrificed so many years for his ideas.... Ideas!

What do you suppose he could do but accept it?

* * * * * * *

I don’t know one thing about the inner history of this period when M. Brodard was bringing himself to a decision, and in the light of a glimpse, just one glimpse which I had later, I think the less I know about it the better for my peace of mind. The only information I had was contained in a very nice, conventional note from Mme. Brodard, giving me, in the pleasantly formal, well-turned phrases of French epistolatory style, the news of their great good fortune which, she said, was certainly sent by Providence to protect her dear husband from the suffering and hardship which would have been his without it; for M. Brodard was very ill, she wrote, oh, very ill indeed! He had gone through a phase of strange mental excitement; from that he had sunk into melancholia which had frightened them, and in the end had succumbed to a mysterious malady of the nervous system which made him half-blind and almost helpless. Helpless ... her wonderful, strong husband! What could she have done to care for him if it had not been for this financial windfall coming just when it was most needed?

You can imagine my stupefaction on reading this letter. It was caused as much by learning that M. Brodard was a hopeless invalid as by learning about that odd business of the fortune left them. How strange! M. Brodard with a nervous affection which left him in a wheel chair! It was incredible. I reread the beautifully written letter, trying hard to see if anything lay between the lines. But there was nothing more in it than I had already found. It was evidently written in the utmost good faith. Everything Mme. Brodard did was done with the utmost good faith.

Some years later I was in France again and found myself near the address on the Riviera where the Brodards had purchased an estate. I had not heard from them in some months, but on the chance that they might be there, I went over from Mentone on a slow way-train which, returning three hours later, would give me time to pay my call and get back the same afternoon. Everybody at the little white-stuccoed station knew where the Brodard villa was, and when he knew where I was going, the driver of the shabby cab tucked me into it with a respect for my destiny he had noticeably not shown to my very plain and rather dusty traveling-dress. We climbed a long hill-road to a high point, commanding a glorious view of the brilliant sea and yet more brilliant coast, and turned into a long manorial allée of fine cypress trees.

The house was as manorial and imposing as the avenue leading to it and I began to be uneasily aware of my plain garb. As I went up the steps to the great door I could feel the house thrilling rhythmically to excellent music, and to the delicate gliding of many finely-shod feet.

A servant led me to a small round salon hung with blue brocade, and in a moment Mme. Brodard came hurrying to meet me. She had bloomed herself luxuriantly open like a late rose, and from head to foot was a delight to the eye. Of course she was very much surprised to see me, but with never a glance at my garb she gave me the cordial welcome of an old friend. Her perfect good faith and good breeding still governed her life, it was plain to see. She was giving a thé dansant for the younger girls, she told me, adding that Madeleine had been married two months before to a silk manufacturer of Lyons. She was evidently glad to see me, but naturally enough, just for the moment, a little puzzled what to do with me! I suggested to her relief that I make a visit to M. Brodard first of all and wait to see the others till their guests had gone.

“Yes, that’s the very thing,” she said, ringing for a servant to show me the way, “he’ll remember you, of course. He will be so glad to see you. He always liked you so much.”

As the servant came to the door, she added with a note of caution. “But you must expect to find him sadly changed. His health does not improve, although we have a resident physician for him, and everything is done for him, poor dear Bernard!”

The servant in a quiet livery of the finest materials, led me upstairs over velvet carpets, and then upstairs again, to a superb room at the top of the house. It was all glass towards the miraculous living blue of the Mediterranean, and full of flowers, books, and harmoniously designed modern furniture. M. Brodard, clad in a picturesque, furred dressing-gown sat in a wheel chair, his bald head sunk on his breast, his eyes fixed and wide-open, lowered towards his great, wasted white hands lying empty on his knees. Until he raised his eyes to look at me, I could not believe that it was he ... no, it was not possible!

He remembered me, as Mme. Brodard had predicted, but the rest of her simple-hearted prophecy did not come true. He was not in the least glad to see me and made not the slightest pretense that he was. A look that was intolerable to see, had come into his eyes as he recognized me, and he had instantly turned his head as though he hated the sight of me.

I knew at once that I ought to get out of the room, no matter how; but I was so stricken with horror and pity that for a moment I could not collect myself, and stood there stupidly.

A faint distant sound of gay music hummed rhythmically in the silence. A professional-looking man who had been sitting with a book on the other side of the room got up now and, with the bored air of a man doing his duty, took hold of M. Brodard’s thin wrist to feel the pulse.

M. Brodard snatched away his hand and said to me over the doctor’s head, “Well, you see how it is with us now.” He corrected himself. “You see how it is with me.”

His accent, his aspect, his eyes added what he did not say. He had been trembling with impatience because I was there at all. Now he was trembling with impatience because I did not answer him! His terrible eyes dared me to answer.

I would have done better to hold my tongue altogether, but my agitation was so great that I lost my head. I felt that I was called upon to bring out something consoling, and heard myself murmuring in a foolish babble something or other about possible compensations for his illness, about his still being able to go on with his work, to write, to publish, in that way to propagate his ideas....

At that he burst into a laugh I would give anything in the world not to have heard.

“My ideas ... ha! ha! ha!” he cried.

Oh, I got myself out of the room then! I ran down the velvet carpets of the stairs, my hands over my ears.

As I hurried along to the outside door I passed the salon. I saw, across the bare, gleaming desert of its waxed floor, Clotilde standing with a well-dressed man. She had a fan in her hand, and, as I looked, she opened it deftly, with a sinuous bend of her flexible wrist ... “smoothly, suavely ... with an aristocratic ...”

FAIRFAX HUNTER

The erratic philanthropist of our family arrived from New York one spring day with a thin, sickly-looking, middle-aged, colored man, almost in rags. “This is Fairfax Hunter,” he announced with the professional cheeriness of the doer of good. “He’s pretty badly run down and needs country air. I thought maybe you could let him sleep in the barn, and work around enough for his board.”

There was nothing professionally or in any other way cheery about the colored man, who stood waiting indifferently for my decision, his knees sagging, his hollow chest sunken. As I glanced at him he raised his dark, blood-shot eyes and met my look. I decided hastily, on impulse, from something in the expression of his eyes, that we could not send him away.

I led him off to the barn and showed him the corner of the hay-mow where the children sometimes sleep when our tiny house overflows with guests. He sank down on it and closed his eyes. The lids were blue and livid as though bruised. He had nothing with him except the ragged clothes on his back.

When I returned to the house, the philanthropist explained that Fairfax was a Virginia negro—“You could tell that from his name, of course”—who had come to New York and fallen into bad ways, “drink, etc.... But there’s something about him....”

Yes, I agreed to that. There was something about him....

Fairfax lived with us after this for more than four years, the last years of his life. He was really very ill at first, the merest little flicker of life puffing uncertainly in and out of the bag of skin and bones which was his body. The doctor said that rest and food were the only medicines for him. He lay like a piece of sodden driftwood for long hours on the edge of the hay where the sun caught it.

The good-natured old Yankee woman who was cooking for me then, used to take him out big bowls of fresh milk, and slices of her home-baked bread, and stand chatting with him while he sat up listlessly and ate. At least, she being a great gossip, did the chattering, and Fairfax listened, once in a while murmuring the soft, slow, “Ye-e-s’m,” which came to be the speech he was known by, in our valley.

He seemed to have no interest in getting well, but little by little the sunshine, the quiet, the mountain air, and something else of which we did not dream till later, lifted him slowly up to health. He began to work a little in the garden, occasionally cut the grass around the house and, borrowing the carpentering tools, built himself a little room in the corner of the barn. One day I paid him a small sum for his services about the place, and my husband gave him some old clothes. The next afternoon he took his first walk to the village, and came back with a pipe and a bag of tobacco. That evening Nancy, our “help,” called me to the kitchen window and pointed out towards the barn. On a bench before the barn door sat Fairfax, smoking, his head tipped back, watching the moon sink behind the mountain. We agreed that it looked as though he were getting well.

Nancy had to go home to a sick sister that Fall, and Fairfax moved into the kitchen to occupy her place. It came out that he had once worked in a hotel kitchen in Virginia, so that thereafter our Vermont cookstove turned out Southern food, from hot biscuit to fried chicken.

There is very little caste feeling in our valley, and not a bit of color prejudice. Many of our people had never even seen a negro to speak to before they knew Fairfax, and they liked him very much.

He always was very thin, but he had filled out a little by this time; had gone to a dentist by my advice and had the blackened stumps of his teeth replaced by shining new ivories; had bought with his first wages a new suit of clothes, and was considered by our farmer families to be “quite a good-looking fellow.” He kept his curling gray hair cut short to his head, his thin cheeks scrupulously shaven, and was always presentable.

As a matter of course he was invited to all the country gatherings, like other people’s “hired help,” along with the rest of us. I remember the first of these invitations: some one telephoned from the village to announce a church supper, and I was urged, “Do bring down a good crowd. We’ve got a lot of food to dispose of.”

I stepped back into the kitchen and told Fairfax not to get supper that night, as we were all going to the village to a church supper.

“Yes’m,” said Fairfax.

“I want you to be ready to start at a quarter to six,” I added, glancing at the clock.

“Who, me?” said Fairfax, with a little start.

“Yes,” I answered, a little surprised. “Didn’t you hear me say I wanted us all to go?”

Fairfax looked at me searchingly, “Where’ll I get my supper?”

“Why, they usually have the church suppers out on the church green unless it rains, and then they go down to the basement rooms.”

Fairfax said apathetically, “No’m, they don’t want me.”

I saw now what was in his mind, and said, to set him right, “Oh, yes, they do. You know the people around here haven’t any of those notions. Come on.”

“No’m, they don’t want me,” he repeated.

I beckoned him to follow me, went back to the telephone and rang up the woman who was arranging for the supper. “Do you want me to bring Fairfax Hunter with us?” I asked her explicitly.

“Why, of course,” she said surprised. “I told you we want a crowd.”

After this Fairfax stood undecided, his sensitive face clouded and anxious. I had a glimpse then of the long years of brutal discrimination through which he had lived, and said, feeling very much ashamed of my civilization, “Now, Fairfax, don’t be so foolish. We want you to go. Get on your best clothes, so’s to do honor to the Ladies Aid.”

He went back to the room in the corner of the barn, and half an hour later came out, fresh and neat in his new suit, closely shaven, his slim yellow hands clean, his gray hair smooth. He looked almost eager, with a light in his eyes that was like a distant reflection of gaiety. But when we cranked up the Ford to go he was not in sight. We called him, and he answered from the barn that he was not ready, and would walk in. I was vexed, and shouted back as we rolled down the hill, “Now don’t fail to come.”

It rained on the way in, and the supper was served in the basement, with all the neighbors spruced up and fresh, while the busy women of the Ladies Aid rushed back and forth bringing us salmon loaf, pickles, Boston brown bread, creamed potatoes, and coffee and ice-cream as from the beginning of time they always have; but though I kept a chair at our table empty for Fairfax, and sat where I could watch the door, he did not appear.

After the supper I went across the street to see my aunt, house-ridden with a hard cold. She told me that from her windows she had seen Fairfax come down to the village street, halt in front of the church, go on, turn back, halt again. She said he had paced back and forth in this way for half an hour, and finally had gone home.

When we reached the house we found Fairfax there, his good clothes put away, his cook’s white apron tied around him, eating bread and butter and cold meat.

I sat down to scold him for not doing as I had said. When I had finished Fairfax looked at me, hesitated, and said, “If it had been out of doors, maybe I’d have tried it.” There was an expression on his thin somber face, which made me get up and go away without venturing any more comment.

As his health increased, his spirits rose somewhat. My little son was born that winter, and Fairfax was very fond of the baby, who soon developed the most extravagant fondness for his company. When spring came on, and gardening arrived, Fairfax took over a part of that work, and had a long-running feud with the woodchucks who live in the edge of the woods beyond our garden patch. It was a quaint sight to see Fairfax in his white jacket and apron, sitting outside the kitchen door, peeling potatoes, a rifle across his knees, or to see him emerge in a stealthy run from the kitchen door, gun in hand, and dart across the road to get a better sight on the little brown garden thieves. It did me good to see him stirred up enough to care about anything.

He turned out to be a great reader and worked his way through most of our library. I know you will not believe me when I tell you who his favorite author was. But I am not concerned with seeming probable, only with telling the truth. It was Thomas Hardy, whose philosophy of life fitted in exactly with Fairfax’s views and experience. He was no talker and rarely said anything to me beyond the gentle “no’m” and “yes’m” with which he received orders. But once he remarked to my husband that Thomas Hardy certainly did know what life was like. He went straight through that entire set of novels, once he had found them on the shelves, and all that winter my life was tinged with the consciousness of Fairfax sitting in the kitchen after his work was done, deep in communion with Hardy. Our visiting friends used to find the sight so curious as to be amusing. I did not find it so.

The neighbors grew very used to him, and being sociable, friendly people, with a great deal of Yankee curiosity about the rest of the world, they often tried to get Fairfax to tell about life in the south. When he went out for a stroll in the evening, they would call to him, from where they were weeding a bed in the garden, or giving the pigs their last meal, “Hello, there, Fairfax, come on in for a minute.” If they were in the yard, or on the porch, Fairfax often accepted the invitation. As we went by in the car we used to see him leaning up against the porch-railing, talking, or helping some busy woman set out her cabbage plants. But he never went indoors.

Our corner of the valley is a very cheerful one with a number of lively children to keep us from “shucking over” into middle age too soon, and the school-house is often the place where we gather for good times. The school-benches are pushed back, the lamps lighted, the fiddler tunes up, and we all dance, young and old, children and grown-ups. Fairfax was invited as a matter of course to these informal affairs, and some of the children who were very fond of the kind, gentle, silent man, used to pull at his coat, and say, “Do come on in, Mr. Hunter! Dance with me!” But Fairfax only grinned uneasily and shook his head. He used to stand outside, smoking his pipe and looking in wistfully at the brightly lighted room. As we skipped back and forth in the lively old-fashioned dances, we could see him, a dim shape outside the window, the little red glow of his pipe reflected once in a while from his dark, liquid eyes. Sometimes when the window was open, he came and leaned his elbows on the sill, nodding his head with the music, and beating time lightly with his fingers, his eyes following us about as we stepped back and forth in the complicated figures.

When we were ready to serve the “refreshments,” some of us went out into the entry-way, and Fairfax came in to help us with the uncomfortable work of digging out the ice and salt from the top of the freezers, and opening the cans. I used to say at first, “Fairfax, why don’t you go in and dance, too? Anybody can see you know just how to.” But his invariable answer, “No’m, I guess I won’t,” had in it a quality which ended by silencing me.

The older people called him Fairfax, as we did, but because he was a grown man, and a middle-aged man, they thought it not good manners for the children to call him by his first name, and taught the boys and girls to call him Mr. Hunter. We thought this perfectly natural, and none of us, entirely ignorant of Southern ways, had the slightest idea of what this meant to him.

Once a year, Fairfax took a two weeks’ vacation, and all his earnings for the year. He went off to the city, clean, and strong, and well-dressed; and he always came back without a cent, sick, and coughing, and shabby, with a strong smell of whiskey all over him. Of course, we took him severely to task for this inexcusable behavior, getting out for his benefit all the accepted axioms of conduct, prudence, ambition, self-interest, and so on, showing him how he could save his money, and put it in the bank, and be prosperous.

He always answered with his invariable soft, “Yes’m,” except on one occasion, the last year of his life, when he said somberly, with his soft, Southern accent, “I’ve got no use for money. I can’t buy what I want. I’m a colored man.”

We learned more about him ... a little ... that he had a sister now married to a sober, hard-working carpenter, living in Buffalo, that he had lived at home with his mother till long after he was grown up, working in the hotel, and supporting them both with his wages. That was the only time I ever saw him show emotion. His thin face suddenly twisted like a child’s, and tears shone in his eyes. “She was an awful good woman, my mother was. She had a terrible time to get along when my sister and I were little. She never had a husband to help her. My father was a white man.”

“Fairfax, why don’t you think of marrying and having a home of your own?” I said impulsively.

“To bring up children to be Jim-Crowed?” he asked, shortly.

On another occasion, when I was commenting on the singular excellence of his writing and figuring, I heard about his school taught by a northern Negro, who had gone down south as a volunteer teacher after the war. It was from him that Fairfax had learned his correct speech, without a trace of what we call the Negro dialect.

When the war in Europe came, and we decided to take the children and go to France we were confronted with the question of what to do with Fairfax. He wanted to go with us, and asked for it with more insistence than he ever showed, and I often now regret that I did not try to take him. But it seemed impossible to add to the responsibility of little children in a war-ridden country, the heavier responsibility in a country flowing with alcohol, for a man with a weakness for drink. Besides, we could not afford the extra expense.

There was no place for him in our region, where few people keep help in the kitchen. In the hurry and confusion of our preparations for departure I simply could not think of anything satisfactory to do in the United States of America for a proud sensitive colored man. The best I could devise was to find him a place with a friend, unfortunately in a city where there were plenty of saloons and plenty of race prejudice. I can’t see now why I did not think of Canada. But we knew no one in Canada.

When we separated, he kissed the children good-by, seriously, and shook the hand which I held heartily out to him. After our last words, I said, making a great effort to break through the wall of dignified reserve which his silence built around him, “Fairfax, do keep straight, won’t you?”

He looked at me with that passive, neutral look of his, which had to my eye an ironical color, and made a little gesture with his shoulders and eyebrows that might mean anything.

He drank himself to death inside six months. I read the news in a letter from his sister, the first and only letter I ever had from her. I had hurried back to the apartment in Paris one evening to be with the children during an air-raid, found the American mail arrived, and read it to the accompaniment of that anti-aircraft bombardment which was so familiar a part of the war to make the world safe for democracy. My letter from the country of democracy informed me that Fairfax had died, alone, before his sister could reach him. “He had been drinking again, I am afraid, from what they told me. I always felt so bad about Fairfax drinking, but he wouldn’t stop—he was just plain discouraged of life. He never touched a drop as long as our mother was living. He was always so sorry for our mother, and so good to her, though she was only a poor ignorant woman, who couldn’t read or write, and Fairfax was so smart. The teacher in our school wanted Fairfax to study to be a minister or a doctor, but he never would. He said he thought the more colored people try to raise themselves, the worse they get treated. He felt so bad, always, about the way colored people were treated. He said white folks wanted them to be low-down, so he was going to be. I used to tell him how wrong this was, and how the good white people weren’t like that, but he didn’t have any patience. Colored people have got to have patience. Our mother was always patient. And my husband and I manage pretty well. But Fairfax was proud. And colored people can’t be proud. I don’t believe he ever let you-all know how he liked the way the folks up your way treated him. He said their folks taught the white children to call him mister just like a white man, and that the white people used to ask him to parties and dances. He tried to go, he said, but at the door, he’d remember all the times when white people made a scene and called him a nigger and got mad if he even stood near them on the street, and looked at him that way white people do ... if you were colored you’d know what I mean. And then he just didn’t dare risk it. When he was a boy and something like that happened, it used to make him down sick so he couldn’t eat for days. And when he got up to where you live, it was too late. My husband and I had Fairfax taken to our old home town in Virginia and buried there beside our mother.”

The air-raid was over when I finished that letter. The noisy bombardment of hate and revenge was quiet. The night was as still there in France as in the graveyard in Virginia. I was very thankful to know that Fairfax was sleeping beside his mother.

We are back in Vermont now, the curtain lowered over air-raids and barrages. Everything goes on as before.

The other evening we were all down at the school-house for an entertainment. The children spoke pieces, and then we had a dance. About eleven o’clock some of us went out to the entry-room and began to serve the ice-cream. One of my neighbors said, after a while, “Do you remember how Fairfax used to get all dressed up so nice, and then always stayed around outside to watch?”

“Yes,” I remembered.

“Sometimes,” said another one of the women, “sometimes when we’re out here like this, it seems to me when I look up quick and glance out there in the dark, as though I could almost see him there now.”

After a time, some one else said, “’Twas a pity he never would come in.”

PROFESSOR PAUL MEYER

“Master of the Word.” I never could remember where I had read that phrase—perhaps as a child in an old story-book about enchanters; but I knew whom it described when I first saw Professor Meyer speaking to his class in the École des Chartes. Not in any metaphorical sense, but in the plain literal meaning of the phrase, was he Master of the Word. He made the title “Philologist” put on purple and gold.

The sallow young seminarists in their scant black gowns, keen, pale, young students who had come from Russia, Italy, Roumania, and Finland, sat motionless and intent, their eyes fixed on him unwaveringly for the two long hours of these daily lectures. Words were the living creatures in that room. They were born before our eyes in the remote childhood of the race, and swept down through the ages till there they were in our own language, issuing every day from our own lips, an ironic reminder that all the days of our lives were no more than an hour in the existence of those disembodied and deathless sounds.

From his youth the vigorous old man had transferred all his life to the world of words—and had found it an enchanted kingdom, something sure and lasting in the quicksands of human existence. From inside the walls of his safe refuge he watched the world outside suffer and despair and cry out and die. And he marveled at its folly. He himself knew none of these fitful moods. He was always of a steady, kind, and humorous cheerfulness, and always the most compelling of talkers. No impassioned orator declaiming on an emotional theme could hold more breathlessly attentive his listeners than this tall, stooping, plain old Jew, when in his rapid conversational staccato he traced out the life of a word, told the Odyssey of its wanderings in the mouths of men, so much less able to withstand death and time than this mere breath from out their mouths. He did this not with the straining effort of the orator, but as naturally as he breathed or thought. His mind was constantly revolving such cycles, and when he spoke he was but thinking aloud, always with the same zest, day after day, always alert, with never a flagging of interest, with never a moment of treacherous wonder about the value of anything. I knew him when I was passing through one of those passions of doubt which mark one’s entry into adult life, and I never could be done with marveling at him. I was grateful to him, too, for he showed the most amused sympathetic kindliness to the foreign girl, groping her way forward.