Chapter VI: Part TWO: Certain Interiors (1)

The old houses of Flanders,
They watch by the high cathedrals;
They overtop the high town halls;
They have eyes, mournful, tolerant and sardonic for the ways of men
In the high, white, tiled gables.

The rain and the night have settled down on Flanders;
It is all wet darkness, you can see nothing.

Then those old eyes, mournful, tolerant and sardonic,
Look at great sudden red lights,
Look upon the shades of the cathedrals,
And the golden rods of the illuminated rain.

And those old eyes,
Very old eyes that have watched the ways of men for generations,
Close for ever.
The high, white shoulders of the gables
Slouch together for a consultation,
Slant drunkenly over in the lea of the flaming cathedrals.

They are no more the old houses of Flanders.

VIII

_“Maisie”_

[It has occurred to the writer--or let us rather say, “the compiler,” that, as concerns this section of this work, it would be safe to let Gringoire speak for himself. The paraphernalia of inverted commas interspersed with indirect speech is apt to be wearisome to a reader. It is difficult--nay, it might even prove dangerous--to the compiler. For who shall say what powerful enemies the present writer might not make by omitting inverted commas and appearing to speak for himself? So it seems more just to let the rather testy poet speak for himself.

For undoubtedly, when speaking of certain matters, Gringoire was--nay, he is!--apt to become testy. Let us excuse him by saying that he bore a good deal of strain during the late war--as was apt to be the position of any public, or quasi-public man, caught between the attentions of the cheap press and what he considered to be his duty to the State.

Of course, this section is a rendering. It does not pretend to record words exactly as Gringoire spoke. It is, rather, a résumé of conversations of an evening when the writer--or rather the compiler--was privileged to be housed by Gringoire. It was, by then, late summer or early autumn.

The Gingerbread Cottage by that date resembled less one of the ruins of the Flanders front that Gringoire so feelingly describes. For to tell the truth, that was what it had very nearly resembled at the time of our Easter visit. When Gringoire had entered it in the early spring, there had been certainly the wave-marks of inundations and half-inches of mud on the brick floors. He had come down with his valise contents, his camp-bed, a knife and fork, a paraffin stove, and a gallon of oil, determined, as he puts it, to dig himself in in the face of destiny. At Easter we had seen him a little too early in the process for people who had not for the last four or five years lived with furniture made of bully-beef cases or whatever they are called.

But by mid-September, when the greater portion of the following section was compiled, either Gringoire’s views as to the æsthetic value of bully-beef chairs and tables had changed as he got further from the atmosphere of camps, or Mme. Sélysette had softened the asperities of his nature in the matter of preference of dugouts to drawing rooms--or else, truly, he was acting up to his ideals. That one hesitates to believe: for who can believe that any human soul can act up to his professed ideals--or that the ideals which he professes have any relation to his motives?

Still, Gringoire was a poet. And the writer remembers remonstrating with him as to the amount of work he was putting into the Gingerbread Cottage and the garden. Said the writer: Gringoire should remember that all this whitewashing, papering, glazing the windows, digging out of foundations, and fertilizing an abandoned and ill-treated garden would, in the end, profit only the landlord--who was a very bad landlord, even as bad landlords go. For, as would be the case with poets, Gringoire had no lease of any kind....

But Gringoire only looked at the writer with that vague and unseeing glance that is one of the properties of some poets. And he answered: though of course it was not an answer: He was not a small hatter, a market-gardener, a farmer, a tradesman, or any sort of profit-and-loss person. He was intent simply on making his sanctuary smile a little in the sunlight and on comforting an old building that had been very shabbily used by evil sorts of men....

At any rate, they had scrambled together some old and rather attractive “bits,” a grandfather’s chair or so, carpets for the sitting room, colored rush mats for the floor of the sleeping apartments. They had painted and polished with beeswax and turpentine, and there would, as like as not, be some flowers on the dining table which was of rough oak--and coffee after a full dinner.

The primitive “note” remained, of course, about the establishment, and it was hardly the place to which you would have asked for a week-end a delicate city madam; a Guards’ Major; or a young actress about to become famous. But on bright days the garden smiles in the sun, and the Gingerbread Cottage has a colored and--as Gringoire would say--a _soigné_ aspect. Yes, certainly it appeared to be cared for, poor battered old thing, as old people sometimes appear to be cared for in almshouses.

So Gringoire affronts the winter. And, if during that season the wolf does not get him; or if his patience does not give out--as is the case with poets; or if the bad landlord does not eject him in order to reap the profits of his improvements--for he has no lease!--he will continue his patchings, his experiments with unusual manures, and his attempts to ameliorate the breed of potatoes. And that is all the writer will say about him.

For the rest, he speaks for himself, much as he spoke of an evening, with his mild but occasionally bitter and furious eyes; with his usually tranquil, but occasionally furiously gesticulating hands. For, the writer, or rather the compiler, having compared notes with Mme. Sélysette, who has heard Gringoire’s stories very, very often, the compiler is satisfied that it is a fair rendering of the poet-warrior’s conversation. It will be found to be disfigured, even in this, as it were, censored version, by unfortunate attacks on many persons and institutions that are usually considered exempt from--or at any rate dangerous to--assault. But what it contains is not half as violent as what Gringoire wished the compiler to set down as his opinions. The compiler, however, has friends who can be grieved; a pocket that can be affected by the law of libel; a position with reviewers that is his stock in trade. So Gringoire, who could not write prose but wished to air his opinions, and the compiler, who wished to air the poet’s opinions but did not wish to lose friends, money, or position in the process, agreed upon the autobiographical passages that follow.]

* * * * *

Gringoire speaks:

At some period of the war, I found myself in a certain interior. It was August--hushed by the presence at the doors of functionaries, elderly, gray, like bishops, wearing evening dress. And one had the sense that, standing at ease, on the steps of great portals, opening onto immense staircases, that one had ascended in stony twilights, past bistre-blue frescoes. Suisses, in cocked hats with great white gloves and silver swords, symbolized the military ideals of Ministries, just as, in the Vatican, obsolete artillerymen, hussars, pikemen, symbolize a vanished temporal power. For, what would the Suisses do if the Enemy or a Revolution should chance to pay a call on them?

I presume they would extend enormous, cotton-gloved fingers for visiting cards, which they would hand to commissionaires in glass boxes; the cards would be sent by pages, upstairs to the episcopal butlers, who, after meditating for forty minutes, would warily convey them, over the soft State carpets, past the decorous but rich, State-purchased pictures suspended over the blue-gray, State-woven tapestries, to the high door of polished mahogany. There the bishop-butlers would pause, with the air of priests listening outside shrines, with a hand on the engraved, polished, mounted, ormolu door-handles....

But what, during those sixty-four minutes would be the proceedings of the lieutenant of Uhlans, with his twenty men behind him; or the leader of the sans-culottes, communards, syndicalists...? The lances might be dripping with blood; bread, dripping too, might be decorating the points of pikes, or paraffin from the oil cans. Probably they would not wait until the blood or the oil dried on the sarcophagus-tiles of the Ministerial Salle des Pas Perdus or until the great hotel slowly and resignedly disappeared in flames with that curious air of weary acquiescence that buildings have when, having borne for many years with human follies, wisdoms, or labors, they fall to the ground before human madness. Probably they would not wait--the Uhlans, the sans-culottes, or the Pétroleuses. They are an impatient people.

But, of course, the reader will say, in the great courtyard before the Ministry, are many, many gendarmes, standing about with their hands behind their backs and slightly protuberant bellies. (Otherwise they would be _là bas!_) But they have good eyes. They would know a Lieutenant of Uhlans by his uniform, and they know how to use their revolvers. And amongst the gendarmes lounge several civilian men of queer, specialized miens. Their pockets bulge just slightly, in odd ways, and brushing their legs are the _chiens de bergers Alsaciens_ (it used to be _Allemands_) the large, elegant dogs with brown fur, like ladies’ sable coats and the intelligent pointed ears.... It is the business of these apparently civilian agents to know the leaders of sans-culottes, syndicalists, communards, and _Actions_ this or that. The pretty, friendly, high-stepping dogs with their sable coats would be at the sans-culottes’ throats at the merest chirrup of their masters’ lips, and from the so very slightly bulging pockets light handcuffs would whip out. The revolvers also would go off....

And, still more, the reader will say, in the little, painted, upright boxes stand little men with red trousers and blue coats and tricolored worsted galloons, and long, dull-looking rifles, and very, very long Rosalies.... They are probably just the very newest recruits with sad, boyish faces. But they know enough to say the French for “Halt, who are you?” in Breton accents, and to let off the old, long guns, and to stick Rosalie, with a grunt, through the entrails of a Uhlan lieutenant, and to call out the Guard.... And, too, there is a half-battalion of the 101st Regiment, whose accent reeks of garlic, olive oil, and the meridional sun, passing along the boulevard before the tricolor that droops over the porte-cochère....

So--like the very heart of an onion, under many, many wrappings, in sanctuary, how very, very far from the mud of the onion-trench, bearded, in a dark coat, with a bright spot of a button; with sharp, apprehending nods coming as quickly as winks and silences as quickly as either; behind the polished mahogany door with the gilt handle and the ormolu finger-plates; at a Buhl table, with a glass vase full of Malmaison carnations, a bronze reproduction of the Winged Victory, and two great pictures of Norman peasants, the one by Bastien Lepage and the other by Jean François Millet--sits the Minister whose mere wink to some one, whose whisper to some one else, whose instruction to another, whose order--and so on--has brought one from green fields littered with bully beef-tins, wire, mud-trodden cartridge cases, rat runs--and the rest of it! He will thank you for past services; tactfully suggest that it might reinforce some department of the _moral_ of some department or other of humanity if M. le Capitaine would suspend his military ardors in order to write so and so and so and so in such and such an organ or to say this and that in a certain quarter. And one can also produce not truly a great effect but some, by talking in a certain way, in the mess of one’s regiment even. Certainly in Quartiers Généraux ...

He will listen deferentially whilst you voice certain objections: to write so and so one must have leave--leave in both the English and the French sense of “permission.” And leaves are difficult things to obtain. Besides, one does not want leave. For certain reasons!... One is like that. _L’on est poète_: cranky, unreasonable. An all-powerful Minister cannot get into the soul of a crank. Not his Seneschals, or the Suisses, or the Gendarmes, or the Agents, or the Sentinels can help him to that. _Quand on est poète_ one requires--one requires a little reëntrant, with water--a little stream, indicated by a wavy line in blue pencil; copses, indicated by dotted-in round o’s with tails to them; rushes, indicated by hieroglyphs like the section of a hairbrush; a gingerbread cottage, for which the symbol is a hatched in square.--One requires those. And also one requires a temporary respite from the attentions of one’s friends and of destiny. For that, as far as I know, military topography has no symbol--unless it be a white handkerchief on the end of Rosalie.

His Excellency remains polite--deferential even. Still, it could no doubt be arranged, he will remark. It is important to get certain things said.... And who could say it better than ...

For myself--on the occasion which I am adumbrating, I was thinking of ferrets. So that, by a concentration of ideas, at a given point I once said to such a Minister: Of course there is the First Line Transport.... And, in my mind’s eye, against the gilt frame of the immense Bastien Lepage--or it may have been on this occasion a Marie Bashkirtseff--arose the image of a Connaught Hut, with the rain beating on the roof and the autumn wind reaching the flames of candles stuck in bottles and bearing in the odor of stable hartshorn from the long horse standings. And the Welsh Rabbit made of cheese, onions, Flemish beer, and herrings straight from Bailleul--though God knows when they came from the autumnal sea. And hooch. And several obese, tranquil, entirely capable officers with feet for the moment in carpet slippers. And the table utensils borrowed from the Y.M.C.A. pushed aside on a corner of the trestle table; and a cheap pad of letter paper, a copying ink pencil, and the mind of the poet functioning in the flicker of the guttering candles at the dictates of the Minister seated beneath the Jean François Millet picture at the Buhl table with the Malmaison carnations in a smoked glass vase and the miniature reproduction of the Winged Victory in bronze with a delicate, artificially produced patina. And the lower part of the poet is wedged into a bully-beef case that has had one side taken out and that has been wire-nailed into an egg-box to form an armchair. And, in the dim gloom, at one elbow stands a dripping Divisional runner with a buff memo from ordnance to say that Mills Bombs for the ---- Battalion are on the Scherpenberg and must be taken down to Kemmel Château by four ack emma; and at the other elbow stands a Divisional Orderly with a copy of orders on which in red ink is marked the information that Division will move down the line by the road by Dranoutre--Neuve Eglise--Westoutre-Plugstreet--Pont-de-Nieppe--Armentières. In full sight of the Hun trenches, by God!--beginning with one’s own battalion, of which A. Company will march from such and such a spot at 5:30 to be followed by D, C, and B boys at half-hour intervals. And to be shelled to Hell!

And the transport officer, whose business it is to manage these matters, is away for thirty-six hours to arrange for a Divisional Horse Show in the field behind the Convent! And your poet is A. O. I. C. (Acting Officer in Charge of) Transport, and Billeting officer for the Battalion and O. I. C. (Officer in Charge of) Divisional Canteen and God knows what all. And Officer in Charge of _moral_ of a certain section of humanity to whom it would be a good thing if certain things would be said in polished prose! And when the poet springing up exclaims to the night:

“To H---- with the b----y Mills Bombs and the bumph and the b----rs and all the whole execrable show,” the Battalion Orderly, a fair, cheeky boy who knows one, exclaims:

“Ker wooly woo, sir, say la Gair!”

And indeed, the interiors of _la guerre_ were much like that. But how is His Excellency the Minister of this or that department to know what is passing in your mind? He will just write on a note pad, look up, exclaim, “Que dîtes-vous? First Line?... But is it tranquil, that?”[6]

I don’t know what I answered. I believe I must have screamed with laughter--because I really wanted some ferrets very badly, and because, in the vestibule of an immense hotel I had left my publisher in charge of a little girl with dark curls tied with pale blue ribbons, singularly self-possessed manners, and rather prominent underclothing that appeared to be an inverted bouquet of lace. That is to say I had left my publisher--who is deaf--with the little girl. And I was in charge of the little girl, who, just before my having to hurry to the Ministry, had devoured thirteen oysters, half a cantaloupe melon with a quarter of a pound of sugar, and a _Coupe Jacques_. So I was, really, wondering what Maisie would be like when I returned to the Hotel de l’Opéra. It sounds mad--but it is just the true truth.

I know that, at that stage, I did not please His Excellency. He frowned twice. Once when I laughed because he asked if a Connaught hut at the base of the Salient was a tranquil place in which to write poems. He also frowned when--as I have, I know, elsewhere related, but I do not know where--he having asked me, “_En quoi il me pouvait être utile?_” I answered, “_Si Votre Excellence me pourrait trouver des furets!_”

You see, I had been carefully instructed by friends with one eye to my commercial future. The Minister was sure to ask in what way he could be of service to me. I was to reply--to hint ever so delicately--that if I had a ribbon to stick on my coat, writing poems, even in a Connaught hut, would be easy. But I couldn’t do it. Even if I had not been concerned with ferrets that I couldn’t get and with Maisie, who had been far too easy to come by, I couldn’t have done it. I had been instructed that the ribbon awaited me; I had only to stretch out a hand to become an Officer of Something or Other. I don’t know whether I ever have. I suppose not.

Anyhow, His Excellency frowned when I asked for ferrets. He might have been more sympathetic if I had asked him to take off my hands a little girl of eight, with the American manners appropriate to the age of thirteen, who, half an hour before had eaten thirteen oysters, half a melon, and a quarter of a pound of sugar that had come from Geneva in her _malles_, and a _Coupe Jacques_; who had been kidnapped by the lake in a carriage and pair, the night before, or perhaps two nights before; and whose father, the kidnapper, had left her in my charge just after breakfast and had then disappeared. There was also a very French maid--in hysterics. And I didn’t even know their names.

Yes; H. E. might have been more sympathetic if I had mentioned the child alone in the vestibule--or possibly with the publisher. But at the mention of the ferrets, he became positively glacial: “_Quoi_,” he asked. “What is a ferret?”

I said that _ferrets sont des petits animaux qui mangent les rats_. But his face remained like a dead wall. I _know_ he thought I was drunk. I was so certain of it, then, that I stammered, and the interview dissolved in the embarrassed emotions passing from him to me and from me to him. He touched a button and said he would telephone to the Jardin des Plantes. But I don’t suppose he did.

You see: it was almost a drop too much in my cup--to be plunged straight into “What Maisie Knew,” which is a book by Henry James. It was too much bewilderment.... Supposing the--as I understood--too brilliant and vociferous mother who was understood to like a “violinist fellow”, should be bursting, with wide gestures, through the aperture frailly closed by glass hotel-doors that whirled bewilderingly whilst I was at the Ministry.... And it might, I understood, well be like that.

How the incident ended, however, I cannot say, since, upon my return to the hotel, the child and her companion had disappeared. That is to say, they had left in the hotel bus for the _Gare du Nord_. So I hope they got safely to England. I never heard: and, since I have forgotten even the names, I suppose I never shall.

It was, no doubt, the sort of thing that was happening all over the world just as usual, but it was queer--and intensely worrying--to be brought so violently and so much against one’s poor will into an atmosphere of international passions, excursions, lawsuits for the possession of children, and the like. And anyhow, the worry of it probably spoilt my career; which was no doubt a good thing. Anyhow, I hope that Maisie, in the custody of kind old aunts, somewhere in Sussex, is prattling to a benevolent but bewildered butler about Mamma, who went to heaven by the cog-wheel railway, via Montreux. Or I suppose it would be better for her if she had forgotten Mamma.

Yes: I suppose it was all going on. And I rather fancy I found the going-on-ness of it all a little appalling. Paris, indeed, was so much more just Paris out of the season, than London, in those days, appeared to be London, either during or out of the season. It was in a way touching; it was also, in a way, disheartening. I remember--and I say “I remember” advisedly, since such an immense number of things blotted themselves out and only crop up in suddenly vivid pictures like that of Maisie whom I had completely forgotten until the day before yesterday, and who now again exists extraordinarily brightly in the hotel vestibule saying: “_Ils me disent que Maman est partie pour le ciel._ It is very droll. But what tram do I take _pour le ciel?_” I remember, then, being on a balcony with an immense stone balustrade, in the black night with a number of French officers who were all polite--but cold. It was, certainly, during the _entr’acte_ of Délibes’ _Lakme_. I fancy the theater was the Comédie Française, but I don’t know, because I had been taken there by a staff officer, and in those days in France one was moved about so without volition of one’s own that one didn’t, necessarily, much notice where one went or how one got there. Where it was a duty to notice, one noticed--railway stations in their sequence, streams, contours. But it was rather a toss-up whether anything more than little bits, like etchings or vignettes, got through to one’s private psychology. I take this to have been the case with most men in our army. We were, as soldiers, both naïf and engrossed.

With the French, it was different. They appeared to be so much older, in their work as in their leisures. They seemed to go to war, as they went to _Lakme_, so much more as connoisseurs. So, on that balcony, I had the feeling of a very definite frigidity. I could have talked rather floridly about _les gloires de la France_, the ultimate aims of the war. I doubt if the French officers could. They had exhausted the topic during forty menaced years.

So they talked, as it happens, mostly of the fine work that had been done by their territorials--old men, fathers of families, and grandfathers who were patching away at the trenches, making roads under fire, laboriously laboring amidst great dangers and beyond their strength that the years had sapped.

The balcony of the theater was a cube of blackness; down below there appeared to be an old, small, square market-place. Paris, of course, was in darkness, out of deference to Zeppelins and airplanes, so that it was all a heavy, velvety black beneath a pallid sky. Houses, squares, rose up on three sides; the immense black bulk of the theater seemed to press on one’s back as one is pressed upon, on narrow paths, by the walls of precipices in the night. One had a sense that the inside of this building was flooded with translucent rays, in which, over the light parquet of long floors, in the _salons de réception_, men moved quietly, with slightly outstretched hands emphasizing points in their discourse to the women on their arms. Theaters function with a sense of style in Paris. But the old, tall houses round the market gave the idea that they were solidly black throughout; only in the old empty rooms, over the creaking floors, mice would rustle in the pallid gleams from the old windows.

I do not mean to say that the houses were really like that inside: for houses are queer things, and queerer still when they grow old, with malices, obstinacies, benevolences of their own. And, as is the case with men, their physiognomies are misleading. So, though one had the sense that below there was a market-place with carts and tilted hoods awaiting the day and that the houses were old and empty, it may have been all untrue to fact, though it is likely enough in Paris where there are so many old, moldering, and damp-streaked façades and courtyards.

I wonder if most people have as strongly as I the feeling that houses have, not so much immortal souls, as tempers, queernesses, and the power to be malicious or benevolent. I daresay most people have that sense up to a point, for it is common enough to walk with a friend, more particularly at dawn, where there are few human beings about to detract from the spell, past, say, a terrace of houses not all alike. A blind will be up; another and another, half drawn down; four or five others, all green, will be at various heights behind the closed window-glasses. And your friend will say:

“That house appears to be winking; that other is gnashing green teeth!” So that your friend will be attributing faces at least to the houses. No doubt he will also connote individualities.

The effect of the coming of the war, for me, was to enhance the feeling until it became almost an obsession. Just as trees and fields appeared to dread the contamination of alien presences, so with buildings. Only with buildings--and more particularly with houses--the feeling was very much enhanced. They seemed to dread not only contaminations, but pains, violations, physical shames, and dissolution in fire.

I do not mean that this feeling was new to me or came with the coming of the war. On the contrary, it was a feeling familiar enough in France. Long before the war it was difficult to go to Northern France--and it was impossible to visit Paris--without seeing, or having the attention drawn to, buildings that have been struck by shells, that have solid cannon balls embedded in their walls, to façades riddled by musketry or charred by one incendiarism or another. In Paris, there were mostly relics of 1870–71; elsewhere the solid cannon balls, as like as not, were once our own. But somehow that seemed normal: those were the danger zones of a race. If members of a civilized people, like the French, choose to occupy marches--zones set against barbarians, like ourselves and the Huns--the buildings they set up in those regions must suffer. They must suffer as children do who are taken into perils aboard ship; or like dogs whose masters adventure with them into fields of fire.

It was, therefore, in the southern and central regions of France that, before the war, I had most strangely the feeling--that feeling of affrighted buildings. It came to me one day in a broad French landscape, somewhere, I imagine, just south of Lyons. Perhaps it was in Orange--or possibly in Tarascon. At any rate, it was just after the close of the Agadir “incident”.

I don’t know that I had taken the Agadir incident very seriously. In fact, I hadn’t taken it seriously at all. The Prime Minister of today had made at the Guildhall a speech that one regarded as one regarded any other flamboyant speech--and that was the end of it. I never imagined that we should do our duty to civilization if it came to the point. I never imagined, indeed, that France herself would stand up.

We came, at that date, of a generation that lived in the shadow of the ghosts of Bismarck, Moltke, and William I--in the shadow of memories of the siege of Paris. Prussia appeared no doubt detestable--but she was so omnipotent that we hardly cared to think about her even for the purpose of detesting her. Will you remember, oh Gringoire _fils_ that shall be?

Probably Gringoire _fils_ will not remember: that is why I find it necessary to recapitulate at this point. Prussia, then, was there, like something ominous but irremovable. One might say that the world, like some stout old garment, was a good world--but it had upon it a grease-stain that neither petrol nor spirits would eradicate; just as you might say that your postal service or train system were good, ignoring the fact that officials were brutal in manner; or that your God was a good God, although He insisted on being fed with babies roasted alive. Something like that.

On the day after Agadir, then, I had come through Lorraine--the two Lorraines, of which one was bubbling like a pot with men all in gray, the other pullulating like an over-ripe cheese with men all in blue, with baggy, scarlet breeches. One had been lost in an immense, pushing, silent crowd at the _Gare de l’Ouest_--an immense, silent, rather grim crowd in blue, with worsted adornments, long rifles slung over the backs, untidy haversacks. At the bureaux of the station were innumerable women. They gesticulated, waved to unseen units in that tired crowd; they cried out; they wept for joy.

But that produced no particular effect. The French are an impressionable and a noisy people. So the women called out. The silent soldiery were no doubt tired after the autumn manoeuvres. That was perhaps why they were so grim.

But somewhere, just after that, in some view near a Southern or Central town--as I have said, it may have been Lyons or Orange; no town that particularly mattered, near the Loire, perhaps, or the Rhone--amidst rolling country where the harvest was already in and there were stubble fields and new straw thatching--suddenly, out of all those hundreds of thousands of soldiery, I remembered one. He was a little recruit--“joining up” as we learned to say later. He was shoved into a first-class carriage somewhere near Meaux because the train was so full, and there, in a corner seat, with the blue-gray landscape going past, he sat, as if lifeless, the tears dropping down his cheeks. His rifle, haversack, packages, tin cans, slings, and things of which, then, one didn’t recognize the importance, had been thrown in after him by a guard, and, in among them, he sat desolate.

In the carriage there had been besides myself two old French people--an old gentleman with a white Napoleon, and an old, feeble lady, in a rather queer black bonnet. I have an idea that they were French Protestants. There were also other people: but they formed only a chorus.

For the old man, in kindly, but very thin tones, began to talk to the little recruit, the old lady echoing each of his speeches:

“The beds for a poor little recruit are hard?”--“The beds are hard!”--“The haricot soup is thin?”--“Ah, yes, a very watery potage.”--“Ah! Ah! Yes,” said the listeners.--“The marchings are long; the drills difficult; the rifles heavy.”--“Yes: heavy are the rifles!”--“Ah! Ah! Yes ...”--“And the little recruit is away from home for three long years!”--“Yes, three years!”--“Ah! Ah! Ah! Three so very long years!”--“The little recruit comes from the Midi--the South!”--“The Midi! The South!”--“Ah! Ah! The South with sun and cypress hedges and the _champs d’oliviers_ and the Mistral.”--“From Orange! From quite near Orange ... Ah! Ah! Orange ...” And there he was, going to Lille.... In the northwest: over against the frontier....

Being then “quite near Orange” a few days later--yes, it was Orange!--and looking out from the heights of the Roman Theater over the little town and the flat, commonplace country, I remembered suddenly the little recruit. I think that is how the mind really works, linking life together, for, later I shall tell you how, on the balcony of the Comédie Française, I remembered suddenly Private ----, an old, nearly toothless Tommy of a Kitchener’s battalion of the Lincolnshires in the baths which had been established in the old mill at Albert--and also Lt. Morgan of my own regiment, an officer who had spent a very hard life in Canada, and who was killed walking up a communication trench on his first day in the line.

So, at Orange, before the war, I remembered suddenly the little recruit in his blue, with his worsted adornments, sitting like a statue of utter grief whilst the green-gray country, of northwest France, swept past behind him. The country over which his image suddenly superimposed itself was browner; in flat fields, the queer twigs of the vineyards appeared untidy. I fancy the Alps were in the distance. But there were stacks and roofs. And, it was, for me, just country. That is to say, I attached to that countryside no particular legends, traditions, or fables of story. It might be Provence--or it might not. But when I saw, as it were, through the image of the recruit, the stacks, the roofs, of the little farm buildings or of the little town, it seemed to me that they were all crouching down, motionless, but ready to tremble, as partridges crouch amid the stubble when beaten away over the ridge.

I don’t want unduly to labor the point--but I am not yet certain that I have made it. You see, that queer and sinister feeling came to me just because of that carriageful of French people. It was not so much because the little recruit had wept. I daresay that, as a conscript, he was bad material. But it was because the old gentleman and all the others in the carriage had known the hard beds, the thin soups, the heavy rifles, and the drag of the pack-straps on the shoulders ... and the long absences from the little homes that seemed now to cower among the stubble fields. For there was no house in all that landscape whose women hadn’t known the suspense of absences; there was no stack whose builder hadn’t at one time gone, or come back. And there was not one, of all those objects, that did not dread--that, for forty long years had not dreaded--the hard footsteps, the shames, the violations, or the incendiary fires of conquerors who should come from “beyond Lille on the frontier”.

And it was at that moment that, suddenly, it became a conscious proposition in my mind--definite and formulated--that, first and before everything else, we must have in the world assured nooks and houses that never cowered and trembled--houses of which one could never by any possibility think that they would cower and tremble.

That, of course, is militarism. I am sorry that it has crept in.

[Footnotes]

[6] For the benefit of those curious in these matters, I ask our compiler to print in the Envoi some prose in my own original French. It will serve for a curiosity. It appeared in a Swiss Review during the war and was part of somewhat considerable, and generally agitated, labors. Some poems which I wrote in almost exactly the circumstances given above, for recitation to French troops, have been lost either by our own or the French ministry of propaganda. An article about Alsace-Lorraine was “lost in the post”; another, repeating it, was suppressed by our own Ministry of Information as being too favorable to the claims of one of our Allies. It is, of course, difficult to be a poet in times of war.

IX

_The Water Mill_

Said Gringoire on another day:

During one of the innumerable periods of long waiting that seemed inseparable from our advances whether on the Somme or elsewhere, it occurred to me that that would be a good opportunity to see what books really would bear reading--would, that is to say, stand up against the facts of a life that was engrossing and perilous. I wrote, therefore, on the spur of the moment, a postcard, to a bookseller, since I had no friends on whose generosity I cared to trespass. I asked him to send me: Turgeniev’s “Fathers and Children”, Flaubert’s “Trois Contes”, Mallarmé’s “Après-Midi d’un Faune”, Anatole France’s “Histoire Comique”, or “Thaïs”, “Youth”, by Joseph Conrad, “What Maisie Knew”, by Henry James, and “Nature in Downland”, by W. H. Hudson. I received them all except the last, which was out of print, and I found that I could read them all with great engrossment except the book, whichever it was, by Anatole France. That one was so frail and tenuous in its appeal that it failed to hold my attention at all, and I have forgotten its name.--I hasten to add that I regarded M. France at that date as a Pro-German, so my impatience may not have been altogether because of its literary qualities.

It was whilst I was reading “What Maisie Knew” that I got leave to go with another officer and have a bath in Albert. So I took the volume under my arm. It wasn’t really a coincidence--that I should be reading that book. I suppose it wasn’t really a coincidence that I should meet Maisie in the flesh.

For, if one was to meet Maisie anywhere, it would be precisely in the white vestibule of a Paris hotel--and, if any one was to be confided in by one or other of her distracted parents, the episode being international, and the parent in possession British, the person to be confided in _would_ be one in the uniform of His Britannic Majesty, and of substantial appearance. “What Maisie Knew,” again, happened to be the first book by the late Mr. James that I ever read--and, if it hadn’t happened to be the first, it would still have remained--and it does still remain for me--the book by that very great writer that most “matters”. For your benefit, if you “don’t know your James,” I may as well say that this is the story of a child moving amongst elemental passions that are veiled. But, of course, elemental passions can never be veiled enough not to get through to the consciousness, if not to the intelligence of the child in the house. So, in an atmosphere of intrigues, divorces, prides, jealousies, litigations, conducted as these things are conducted in this country, by what it is convenient to call “the best people”, Maisie always “knows”. She knows all about concealed relationships, as she knows all about intrigues, processes, and the points of view of old family servants. It is, of course, a horrible book, but it is very triumphantly true....

The Tommies’ bathing place at Albert was in an old mill under the shadow of a tall factory chimney at which the Huns were perpetually firing shells. As far as I know, they never hit it--but they made a nice desolation in the immediately adjacent houses. The mill, at the fork of a road, had been turned into a series of sheds and compartments, in which there were shower baths and baths with hot and cold water in very wet cubicles where you had duckboards underfoot. There were Neissen or other boilers somewhere under the ramshackle building, so that steam always filtered through and hung over the old tiles of the roof. The other ranks of various battalions had their bathing parades there at stated hours, so that officers could only get a bath in between whiles or after hours.

It was a hot day, very dusty, with the clouds from the white rubble, which was all that there was of the center of the town, and after we had wandered, I and another officer, round about the rubbish heaps, and past long-closed shops that offered us, on metal placards, bicycles, chocolates, and furniture polish, by makers well-known in France, we decided to wait in the bath itself till the battalion in possession, which was the last of the day, should have finished its ablutions. In a tiny, shuttered shop we had bought, for A Company’s mess, a small melon, five lemons, and half a bushel of windfall apples. The shop was just to the east of the Cathedral, and we went over the empty Presbytery. One of the floors was a great litter of books--Latin texts mostly. One I noticed was a 17th century edition of Livy--1652, I think. Another was a copy of Voragine’s recension of the “Golden Legend”--but whether or no it was a valuable edition, I don’t know. We left the books on the floor--out of indifference, so as not to commit sacrilege and because we had already to carry a small, netted melon, six lemons, and half a bushel of apples between us. Under my arm, moreover, I had “What Maisie Knew” in the expensive, collected edition, and we had also towels and soap. So there, in the long, dark, but not cool room, just as they had been tumbled out of the shelves, probably by the Germans, the books lay with rays of sunlight from the closed _persiennes_ falling across broken backs, exposed leaves, half-turned title-pages....

Whilst we were passing under the immense Madonna and Child that hung over the Cathedral steps, a Hun plane dropped a couple of bombs right into the body of the church. They made pretty loud pops, and overhead our own Archies were popping away too. But what was really interesting to hear was the sifting tinkle of broken stained-glass of the windows that went on rustling, tinkling, sifting, and rustling down into the rubble in the body of the church until we were out of earshot.

I don’t mean to say that we hurried away. There was nowhere to hurry to. But the German heavy battery that had the town under its especial care was beginning to send in its evening group of shells. As far as I can remember, at that time they let off six 5–2’s at about 10:15 A.M.; six at 1:15 P.M., and six more just after 6:00 P.M. with an apparently unimaginative regularity, and usually at the same localities--the morning six falling about the desolated Place in front of the church, the lunchtime contribution in the houses along the main street. Our Second Battalion had thirty-two casualties in one room from one shell of the midday group. The evening six usually fell in the fields on the Ancre side of the town.

So we desired to get under a roof--not that a roof is any particular protection against high-explosive shells, but simply to get something between one’s self and the sky. For at times, of an evening, when one was tired, a pellucid sky would be a disagreeable thing. You didn’t know what sort of iron shard would not be coming between the light bars of blue and the bars of light dove color. Your flesh, too, felt very soft to set itself up against iron shards. And, at the moment, we were tired with the walk over the thistles of the downland and the thin air and the heat and the chalk dust. And one wanted a read in one’s book!

The by-streets were amazingly quiet; closed houses, shuttered shops, mostly unhurt; not a soul was in the blazing sunlight; not a cloud was in the sky; only, in the dust of the road three cats were motionlessly intent on love. We knocked on a closed door of the old mill. I found myself, having passed several darkish, steaming rooms in which the white nudity of many men showed against the blue-gray of flannel shirts, and the drab colors of steam-damped khaki in the shadow--I found myself in an armchair, in a very tall, quiet room. I had a sense that there was a tall, slim bookcase, a great table covered with dirty copies of English funny periodicals, and empty, cardboard fag-packets.... But I was sitting, really, in Kensington Gardens in the broad, open turfed way that slopes from the Round Point to the Serpentine. And there was a murmuring couple, by a tree trunk, upon green penny chairs. (I don’t know that I wasn’t one-half of the couple.) And Maisie was playing with Mrs. Wicks, three trees off, and Beale Farange, a little too florid, flaming and bearded, to be really one of the best people, was bearing down upon them--or was it us?--in the shadow of the well-behaved foliage under the polite skies.

I was vaguely conscious of voices. My companion was talking to some one else--about some battalion of some regiment; about some division, not ours; about the nature of the trenches in front of _Bazentin-le-Petit_. But, at any rate, for the moment, the fictitious-real had got so much the upper hand of the real-real that I was as engrossed as any schoolboy reading Ivanhoe in the twilight. It is a good tribute to pay the master. He was dying then.

But I was vaguely unhappy too--unhappy about it all. I don’t mean that I was unhappy with the ire of the moralist--for I never set up to be a moralist. Only I felt the queer uneasiness that, in those days, one was beginning to feel when one came in contact with civilians.

One began to hear hollow voices, sounding portentous through closed shutters.

“Fall in there! A Company on the right. Towels on the left arm. Number off!”--voices coming from the roadway. And one looked up from one’s book, thinking the time had come for one’s bath. There existed again the tall room, with grayish wallpaper; the atmosphere of steam; the tall window; the tall bookcase, whose panes, behind thin, curved mahogany divisions showed a faded, stretched curtain of torn green silk. The table was less littered than it had been. It had a dusty, red baize cover, much stained with ink. I suppose this was the miller’s office. I don’t know what had become of my companion. He was a restless, energetic boy, always on the jump. Whilst I had been in the broad avenue in Kensington, he had probably pressed until they had got him a bath-cubicle cleaned and ready. At any rate, a very old Tommy of the Lincolns, toothless, whitehaired, with tunic undone and tarnished buttons, told me I must still wait whilst my bath was preparing.

He said I was mistaken in thinking that he was a noncombatant permanently in charge of the baths. He was just a Tommy of the Lincolns; he had come straight out of the trenches in front of _Bazentin-le-Petit_ the night before. Five days before that they had relieved us in the same trenches. Now another division had gone in. He had been put in charge of the baths that morning, so he hadn’t had time to clean his buttons, or even his rifle. He supposed he might get _strafed_ for that. Yes; it was trying, the life of the trenches for a man of his age. He was sixty-two--sixty-four--over sixty, at any rate.

I told him to stand easy, and he sat down on the other side of the large table and reached for an old pipe. Then he folded his wrinkled hands before him on the cloth, looked at me hopefully, and exclaimed: “I suppose you know the firm of Bolsover & Jupp of Golden Square. The great solicitors.”

I did not know them; but when I said I did not, he appeared so distressed: “What? Not the great solicitors? To the Mansion House, the Common Council, the Tilbury and Southend Railway!”--so distressed that I had to pretend at last that I did.

“Well!” he said. “I was clerk in their office for twenty-four years!”

Twenty----four----years! He seemed to think that the statement entitled him to feel an enormous pride. No doubt it did.

He must have had a streak of the adventurous in his composition--but no one could have seemed less adventurous or more static. As he sat there, his hands, whitened by dabbling all that day in bath water, and folded before him on the dirty red baize, he looked as if he had sat there all his life and as if he would never move. He was so faded that you would not have given him credit even for the amount of sharpness necessary to a solicitor’s clerk; you would have said that he was an aged shepherd on a bench outside the workhouse door. I think he was the most memorable figure of the war, for me.

Of course, one’s mind is capricious in these things--but this was his biography, of which I have forgotten nothing--though I have, of course, forgotten most of his exact words. For twenty-four years clerk to Messrs. Bolsover & Jupp, this man who now was mostly preoccupied with the fact that he would be “_strafed_” for not “cleanin’ ’is ’ipe ... I mean rifle, sir!” had gone at the age of forty-eight--to Canada, to make his fortune, nothing less! He had left two sons, both married, in London. He and his “missus” worked in a factory--a “notions” factory, which was then engaged in adding to the beauty of the world by manufacturing colored and embossed tin-lids; later it made fancy brass buttons and can-openers. “_Et comme il était très fort, hardi, courageux et avisé_”--he soon obtained, not like St. Julian the Hospitalier, the command of a battalion--but a wage sufficient to let him save money. They saved money, he and his missus, and after eight years, they built themselves a frame house--“a proper, warm ’aouse for them frosty winters and we had one of those ’ere proper iron stoves. Proper!”

On the first morning of the new house--I presume his missus had lit the proper stove--he was jest a-puttin’ on his collar, when he heard a crackling. He thought it was the frost in the apple trees, cracking the boughs. But, in forty minutes the house was gone.

He had meant to insure that afternoon. So he and his missus--he never described her, but I think she must have been a gallant soul--aged fifty-six a-piece, went back to boarding-house life and work in the “notion” factory. Next autumn, coming back from work one evening, he noticed in a neighbor’s lot, a fine apple tree. Proper, with apples on it, these ’ere large coddlins! He offered the neighbor two dollars for the apples on the tree and peddled them round the town.

In five years, at that trade, he had made enough to think of “retiring”. Then he see in the pipers that Hengland needed men. So he ses to his missus: “We’ve got money enough to do as we please. Let’s go and see what we can do to ’elp the ol’ gal....” As if Victoria had been still on the throne. They came to London, and he went to see the ol’ firm. His sons said to him: No, they were married men with families. “So I says to the missus: ‘I ain’t got no family, I ain’t.’” And he bought her an ’aouse at ’Endon and an annuity, through the ol’ firm. That had taken till February, 1916. He was apologetic over the delay, but he had wanted to see the ol’ woman settled comfortable.

February, 1916--it was then July. Thirteen weeks training, you see, and he had been two months in France, “mostly on this ’ere ol’ Somme.” He was sixty-one years and four months of age. And he said he felt tired.

There was about his narration nothing of the “narquois” humor of the cockney; but, colorlessly, as tired farm-laborers talk, he went on talking--as if it was just the Will of God. I met some of his officers a couple of weeks later and asked about him, but his story grew rather hazy. They found a Company Sergeant-Major who said he had thought the old man was a bit too old for his job in the trenches. I daresay the old man had found rough gentlenesses and kindly helping hands from his mate and the noncommissioned officers of his battalion. He would have, of course. So the C.S.M. had detailed him for caretaker at the baths. The old man had enlisted as being thirty years and six months of age--just half his years. The C.S.M. remembered that; but he didn’t know what had become of the man. He rather thought he had been killed on the 24/7/’16 by a shell pitched in the battle, but perhaps he hadn’t.