The Project Gutenberg eBook ofRaw MaterialThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Raw MaterialAuthor: Dorothy Canfield FisherRelease date: September 10, 2021 [eBook #66258]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: D A Alexander, Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RAW MATERIAL ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Raw MaterialAuthor: Dorothy Canfield FisherRelease date: September 10, 2021 [eBook #66258]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: D A Alexander, Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
Title: Raw Material
Author: Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Author: Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Release date: September 10, 2021 [eBook #66258]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024
Language: English
Credits: D A Alexander, Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RAW MATERIAL ***
Transcriber’s Note:Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.
Transcriber’s Note:Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.
front
THE SQUIRREL-CAGEA MONTESSORI MOTHERMOTHERS AND CHILDRENTHE BENT TWIGTHE REAL MOTIVEFELLOW CAPTAINS(WithSarah N. Cleghorn)UNDERSTOOD BETSYHOME FIRES IN FRANCETHE DAY OF GLORYTHE BRIMMING CUPROUGH-HEWN
THE SQUIRREL-CAGEA MONTESSORI MOTHERMOTHERS AND CHILDRENTHE BENT TWIGTHE REAL MOTIVEFELLOW CAPTAINS(WithSarah N. Cleghorn)UNDERSTOOD BETSYHOME FIRES IN FRANCETHE DAY OF GLORYTHE BRIMMING CUPROUGH-HEWN
title page
RAW MATERIAL
BY
DOROTHY CANFIELD
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NEW YORKHARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1923, BYHARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. BYThe Quinn & Boden CompanyBOOK MANUFACTURERSRAHWAY NEW JERSEY
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 aprodigious 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 astory 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 looseon 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 hisinstant 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, Ido 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 areshowing 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 everyone 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. Thatwhich 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 donot 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.
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 beinga 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 allin 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 fromcommenting 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 bya 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 alegitimate 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 itwas 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 UncleGiles 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 neattransition 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.
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 andon 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, wholived 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 energywould 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 inTourciennes 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. Shewas 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 fromRaoul!” 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 theirstrength, 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 havenothing 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 commongood. 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 atompossible 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 downwhile 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 hadleft. 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, ifwe 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 usesoap 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 thata 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 themfirmly, 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 silenceabout 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 didyoupray?” I asked her, incredulously.
Her definition of prayer was characteristic. “Iset 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 beatus!”
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 garmentsfrom 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 matterthey 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 theyhad 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.