widows and orphans.
The number of young girls and women in mourning, in the heavy
mourning affected by the Latin race, is enormous. This crape is the sole
casualty list permitted by the French War Office. It suffices. Supreme
grief is omnipresent; but it is calm, cheerful, smiling. Widows glance at
each other with understanding, like initiates of a secret and powerful
society.
Never was Paris so disconcertingly odd. And yet never was it more
profoundly itself. Between the slow realisation of a monstrous peril
escaped and the equally slow realisation of its power to punish, the
French spirit, angered and cold, knows at last what the French spirit is.
And to watch and share its mood is positively ennobling to the stranger.
Paris is revealed under an enchantment, On the surface of the
enchantment the pettinesses of daily existence persist queerly.
Two small rooms and a kitchen on a sixth floor. You could put the
kitchen, of which the cooking apparatus consists of two gas-rings, in
the roots of the orange-tree in the Tuileries gardens. Everything is plain,
and stringently tidy; everything is a special item, separately acquired,
treasured. I see again a water-colour that I did years ago and had
forgotten; it lives, protected by a glazed frame and by the pride of
possession. The solitary mistress of this immaculate home is a spinster
sempstress in the thirties. She earns three francs a day, and is rich
because she does not spend it all, and has never spent it all.
Inexpressibly neat, smiling, philosophic, helpful, she has within her a
contentious and formidable tiger which two contingencies, and two
only, will arouse. The first contingency springs from any threat of
marriage. You must not seek a husband for her; she is alone in the
world, and she wants to be. The second springs from any attempt to
alter her habits, which in her sight are as sacredly immutable as the
ritual of an Asiatic pagoda.
Last summer she went to a small town, to which is attached a very
large military camp, to help her sister-in-law in the running of a cafe.
The excursion was to be partly in the nature of a holiday; but,
indefatigable on a chair with a needle, she could not stand for hours on
her feet, ministering to a sex of which she knew almost nothing. She
had the nostalgia of the Parisian garret. She must go home to her
neglected habits. The war was waging. She delayed, from a sense of
duty. But at last her habits were irresistible. Officers had said lightly
that there was no danger, that the Germans could not possibly reach
that small town. Nevertheless, the train that the spinster-sempstress
took was the last train to leave. And as the spinster-sempstress departed
by the train, so the sister-in-law departed in a pony-cart, with a son and
a grandmother in the pony- cart, together with such goods as the cart
would hold; and, through staggering adventures, reached safety at
Troyes.
"And how did you yourself get on?" I asked the spinster-sempstress.
She answered:
"It was terrible. Ordinarily it is a journey of three or four hours. But
that time it lasted three days and two nights. The train was crammed
with refugees and with wounded. One was obliged to stand up. One
could not move."
"But where did you sleep?"
"I did not sleep. Do I not tell you one was obliged to stand up? I stood
up all the first night. The floor was thirty centimetres deep in filth. The
second night one had settled down somewhat. I could sit."
"But about eating?"
"I had a little food that I brought with me."
"And drinking?"
"Nothing, till the second day. One could not move. But in the end we
arrived. I was broken with fatigue. I was very ill. But I was home. The
Boches drank everything in the cafe, everything; but the building was
spared--it stood away from the firing. How long do you think the war
will last?"
"I'm beginning to think it will last a long time."
"So they say," she murmured, glancing through the window at the
prospect of roofs and chimney-cowls. "Provided that it finishes well..."
Except by the look in her eyes, and by the destruction of her once good
complexion, it was impossible to divine that this woman's habits had
ever been disturbed in the slightest detail. But the gaze and the
complexion told the tale.
Next: the Boulevard St. Germain. A majestic flat, heavily and sombrely
furnished. The great drawing-room is shut and sheeted with holland. It
has been shut for twenty years. The mistress of this home is an aged
widow of inflexible will and astounding activity. She gets up at five
a.m., and no cook has ever yet satisfied her. The
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