On the Edge of the War Zone | Page 9

and one change. I had not given it much thought, though I do remember her saying, when the subterranean passage was sealed up: "Let the Boches come! They'll find mighty little in my house."
Well--the clocks are rusted. They are soaking in kerosene now, and I imagine it is little good that will do them. All her linen is damp and smelly, and much of it is mildewed. As for the blankets and flannels-- ough!
I felt sympathetic, and tried to appear so. But I was in the condition of "L'homme qui rit." The smallest effort to express an emotion tended to make me grimace horribly. She was so funny. I was glad when she finished saying naughty words about herself, and declaring that "Madame was right not to upset her house," and that the next time the Boches thought of coming here they would be welcome to anything she had. "For," she ended, "I'll never get myself into this sort of a mess again, my word of honor!" And she marched out of the house, carrying the bottle of eau de Javelle with her. The whole hamlet smells of it this minute.
I had a small-sized fit of hysterics after she had gone, and it was not cured by opening up my waste-baskets and laying out the "treasures" she had saved for me. I laughed until I cried.
There were my bouillion cups, and no saucers. The saucers were piled in the buffet. There were half-a-dozen decorated plates which had stood on end in the buffet,--just as color notes--no value at all. There were bits of silver, and nearly all the plated stuff. There was an old painted fan, several strings of beads, a rosary which hung on a nail at the head of my bed, a few bits of jewelry--you know how little I care for jewelry,--and there were four brass candlesticks.
The only things I had missed at all were the plated things. I had not had teaspoons enough when the English were here--not that they cared. They were quite willing to stir their tea with each other's spoons, since there was plenty of tea,--and a "stick" went with it.
You cannot deny that it had its funny side.
I could not help asking myself, even while I wiped tears of laughter from my eyes, if most of the people I saw flying four weeks ago might not have found themselves in the same fix when it came to taking stock of what was saved and what was lost.
I remember so well being at Aix-les-Bains, in 1899, when the Hotel du Beau-Site was burned, and finding a woman in a wrapper sitting on a bench in the park in front of the burning hotel, with the lace waist of an evening frock in one hand, and a small bottle of alcohol in the other. She explained to me, with some emotion, that she had gone back, at the risk of her life, to get the bottle from her dressing-table, "for fear that it would explode!"
It did not take me half an hour to get my effects in order, but poor Am��lie's disgust seems to increase with time. You can't deny that if I had been drummed out and came back to find my house a ruin, my books and pictures destroyed, and only those worthless bits of china and plated ware to "start housekeeping again," it would have been humorous. Real humor is only exaggeration. That would surely have been a colossal exaggeration.
It is not the first time I have had to ask myself, seriously, "Why this mania for possession?" The ferryman on the Styx is as likely to take it across as our railroad is to "handle" it today. Yet nothing seems able to break a person born with that mania for collecting.
I stood looking round at it all when everything was in place, and I realized that if the disaster had come, I should have found it easy to reconcile myself to it in an epoch where millions were facing it with me. It is the law of Nature. Material things, like the friends we have lost, may be eternally regretted. They cannot be eternally grieved for. We must "--be up and doing, With a heart for any fate."
All the same, it was a queer twist in the order of my life, that, hunting in all directions for a quiet retreat in which to rest my weary spirit, I should have ended by deliberately sitting myself down on the edge of a battlefield,--even though it was on the safe edge,--and stranger still, that there I forgot that my spirit was weary.
We are beginning to pick up all sorts of odd little tales of the adventures of some of the people who had remained at Voisin. One old man there, a mason, who