Chapter V (4)

And then, somehow, it was lunch time. Where had the morning gone? She must needs go in now and sit down at one of the long tables, looking up and down the line of blind faces, watching the fumbling hands trying so hard to learn the lesson of self-reliance in the new blackness. She had acquired an almost automatic dexterity in turning a cup so that the handle will be in the right place for the groping hand, in cutting up a morsel of meat on the plate of the man beside her, while engaging him in lively conversation so that he shall not notice it, in slipping the glass under the water carafe which is being awkwardly tilted by one of those dreadful searching hands. Through some last prodigy of dexterity she ate her own lunch while she did this. There were four of the long tables, and every day she must sit at a different one, or the others will be jealous.

After lunch she stood for a few minutes in the big hall, laughing and talking with the men, helping them light their cigarettes, listening to their complaints or their accounts of the triumphs of the morning. As she went back into her office, she saw that one of them was following her, and her experienced eye saw by his shambling gait, by the listless way in which he handled his little bamboo cane, by every slack line of his body, what the trouble was. He had the "_cafard_"--the blues--and nobody could do anything for him but the Directrice. She was very tired herself, and for just a moment she reflected that if she had an instant's time, she would probably have the worst fit of "_cafard_" ever known to man. But she had _not_ an instant's time, so, without seeming to note the cloud on his face, she pulled open the drawer where she always kept some device against these evil hours. This time it was a new invention for writing Braille by hand. She told her "pensionnaire" that she was so glad he happened to come, because she had been wanting his opinion on the advisability of this. "See, it is intended to be used thus,"--she put it in his hands,--"and the little bar is made of such and such an alloy instead of the aluminum that is usually used, with such and such claimed benefits." Did he think, now, that it would be better than the standard one they were using, and what did he think about the advisability of giving the inventor a chance to make a few samples? With that she was launched upon a history of the inventor's life, what a hard time he had had, how eager he was to do something for the blind, and she wondered if perhaps her blind men there would be willing to give him an interview. The inventor would consider it such an honor. But in the meantime, of course, let him look carefully at the little invention, so that he can have the best judgment possible to give the inventor. The west wind of this new interest in another's life, this new importance for himself, blew away visibly before her eyes the black clouds of disheartenment. Her blind man was only a boy, after all. He took the little Braille plaque under his arm and, tapping briskly before him, felt his way to the door, saying, over his shoulder importantly, that he would try to find half an hour's time to give the inventor, although his days were really very much occupied. The Directrice looked after him with speculative eyes. "Now I have used up that device, what shall I do for the next one?"

Suddenly she realized that this was the visiting hour for the hospital where the blind man was being held in durance by the little plot against him. The fighting light came into her eyes again, she clapped on her hat--you will note it is the second time this day she has put on her hat without looking at herself in the glass--and swept out to do combat, all her firm, small, erect person animated by the same joy in battle which had sent her crusading forefathers into the fight singing and tossing their swords up into the air. She was gone an hour and a half, and when she came back, although she looked several degrees more tired even than before, a grim satisfaction sat upon her hard, small mouth. She had won her point. The blind man was to be allowed to come.

But there was Philippe, the man with whom she had begun the day. By looking out of the window, she could see him idling, as usual, in the garden, ostensibly taking a lesson in English from a volunteer professor, and in reality doing his best mildly to flirt with her. The Directrice frowned and smiled at the same time. What an absurd, lovable fellow he was! Thank Heaven, there was one of her "pensionnaires" whom it was impossible to take tragically. She gave a few orders for the disposition of the office work, wondered when she would ever have time really to go over her accounts thoroughly, and went out again to interview the head of a big wholesale groceries firm. In the old days, when she and hers lived in a chateau, they bought _en gros_ their supplies from this firm, and the head of it still had a respectful attention for any one of her name. This time she looked at herself when she put on her hat, looked very intently, rearranged her hair, noticed with impatience, quite impersonally, that the gray was beginning to show more every day, put on a little touch of powder and bit her lips to make them red. Then she took a fresh pair of gloves and put on a crisp veil. Thus accoutered, looking inimitably chic, the grande dame entirely in spite of her few inches, she went forth to triumph. After a long conversation with the big grocer, she extracted from him a promise to try Philippe as a traveling salesman. She felt very young and almost gay, as she brought back this news. "If Philippe cannot sell anything to anybody, whether he wants it or not, I am much mistaken," she thought, watching him out of the window, wheedle a would-be stern professor of typewriting into lounging there instead of going back for the lesson. Somehow, in the intervals of this day, which you will see to have been reasonably full, she had worked out all the details with what device in Braille Philippe could take down his orders, what kind of a typewriter he could carry about him to copy them, how he could be met at the station by such a volunteer to settle him in his hotel, and at the other station by another--our Directrice had a network of acquaintances all over France. Philippe came strolling into the room, very handsome, showing only by the unmoving brightness of his clear dark eyes that he was blind. "See here, Philippe," she said, pulling him into a chair beside her as though he were a child.

"Yes, yes." Philippe agreed to the new plan. "_There_ is something really sensible! That's a life that amounts to something! That is something that a man can do and take an interest in! Thank Heaven, I never need to take another English lesson as long as I live. I will go at once and work hard at my typewriter! How soon before I can begin? You know that I am engaged. I must earn enough to be married as soon as possible." Yes, she knew, although she knew also that it was the third time that Philippe had been engaged to be married since he was blinded! She reflected how curiously little a temperament like his is changed by any outward event.

Just at this moment of amused relaxation, when the Directrice was looking young and carefree, she glanced out of her window and saw a very handsomely dressed, tall woman descend from a very handsome limousine and make ready to enter. Have I said that our Directrice can look very cross and tired? She can also look terrifying, in spite of her small stature.

She went rapidly down the steps and across the courtyard, giving the impression of a very much determined mother-hen bristling in every feather to defend her brood. On her side, the woman who came to meet her gave the impression of a hawk, with a thin, white face, whitened to pallor by powder, and with shallow, black eyes.

"Madame," said the Directrice, "you are not to enter here to-day, nor any other day."

"You have no right to keep me out," said the other.

The Directrice did not deny this; but she repeated sternly: "You are not to enter here, nor to see Auguste Leveau anywhere at all. He has a wife and two children. He is not only blind, but as weak as water. But I am not. You are not to enter."

The woman in the sables broke out into a storm of vulgar language, at which the Directrice advanced upon her with so threatening an air that she literally turned tail and ran back to her car, although she was shouting over her shoulder as she fled. The small, erect figure stood tense and straight like a sentry on guard until the car moved away, the occupant shouting out of the window the direst threats of revenge.

A gleaming car came up from another direction, and another handsomely dressed woman descended, greeting the Directrice in an affectionate, confidential manner. She said: "Oh, my dear, I am so glad to find you here. I always come to you, you know, when I am in difficulties! What would happen to me without your good advice! A friend of mine from the provinces, an engineer by profession, wants so much to come and see your weaving workroom, because he is interested in machinery and thinks perhaps he may do something for the blind in that part of France--not _here_, you know, not the slightest idea of stealing your ideas and duplicating your work here. When will you allow us to come, when he can really look at the machinery without bothering the men?" That was what she said, but this was what the Directrice understood very distinctly: "My search for the Legion d'Honneur is getting on famously. If I can only just add a weaving-room to my outfit before the Minister of the Interior comes for his visit, I am sure I'll get the red ribbon, and then I won't have to bother any more about these tiresome war-blind."

The Directrice answered guardedly: "Why, yes; come into my office, and I will see what will be the best time."

As she walked across the courtyard with her visitor, chatting about the difficulties of war-time housekeeping in Paris, she was thinking: "Yes, she only wants it to make a temporary show in order to get the Legion of Honor. But what of that! Let her have it. But if she opens a weaving-room, she must have blind there to operate the looms, and if she takes them up only to drop them, what will become of them? Let me see what I can do about that. Perhaps this is the way to get her to pay for the installation of a new weaving-room. As soon as she gets what she wants out of it, we could perhaps take it over and add the men to the number we care for here. I wonder if the American Committee would be willing to send more money for that. Yes, it's worth taking the risk."

But nothing of this elaborate calculation appeared in her smooth, affable manner as, having come to her decision, she announced, after gravely looking through a card catalogue, that Thursday afternoon at a certain hour would be the best time to see the looms. "And if you don't mind, Mrs. Wangton," she said, "I am just going to treat you like an old friend of the institution and let you and your engineer wander about at your pleasure, without anybody bothering to escort you." That was what she said. What she thought was: "There, that will give them a chance to steal the names of the makers and the dimensions of the looms as much as they please."

Her visitor confounded herself in effusive expressions of gratitude and friendliness, which the Directrice received with a smile. She went away, sweeping her velvet gown over the stone steps and looking down with anticipatory eyes on that spot of her well-filled bosom where she hoped to pin the coveted red ribbon. The Directrice let her go with almost an audible sniff of contempt, and turned again to work.

This time it was a plan to be worked out whereby the blind could learn certain phases of the pottery trade at Sevres. It involved a number of formalities and administrative difficulties which only one who has been in contact with French bureaucratic methods can faintly imagine. Our Directrice plunged into it headlong, and did not stir from her desk until she saw with a start that it was dinner time. And she had not yet looked over her accounts, the complicated accounts of a big, expensive, many-arteried institution. However, long ago, all her friends had stopped asking her to go to dinner or to go to hear music. They had learned that she rarely spent the evening in any other way than finishing up what work she had not found time to do during the day. She was assured of several hours more of quiet.

She went out to dinner (one meal a day in the company of many mutilated and blinded men is as much as one woman can stand) and had a solitary meal in a quiet restaurant, turning her glass about meditatively between the courses and wondering if she dared ask enough from the philanthropic American manufacturer to settle Benoit in the country. With his tendency to tuberculosis, that was the only safe life for him and his family. She made a mental calculation of what his pension would come to, and how much he could earn by his trade. Then, if he kept chickens, and a garden, and rabbits, and if he could get a house for six thousand francs ... by the time she had finished her dinner she had thought out a plan and a definite and businesslike proposition to put to the well-disposed American. Out of the depth of her experience with philanthropic people, she said to herself as she walked out: "I think I'd better tell him that we will put a bronze plaque on the house announcing that it is his gift to one of the war-blind. _That_ ought to settle him."

At her office the evening passed very rapidly, between her account books and the sauntering in and out of one and another of the blind men. At ten o'clock, tired to the marrow of her bones, she stood up, dreading the effort to get home and get to bed, and yet looking forward to sleep as the one certain blessing of life. As she went out of the door she saw two shadowy forms standing in the summer starlight, and recognized two of her charges. "Come, come, children," she said; "it is bedtime. You must get to bed and sleep and get back your strength."

"But we _can't_ sleep," one of them told her. "We go to bed and lie awake and get the '_cafard_' worse and worse." The other one suggested timidly: "We thought that perhaps, before you went home, you might take us for a little turn about the lake in the park?" Our Directrice accomplished the last violent action of her violent day. There was not an instant's hesitation before she said cordially: "That's an excellent idea! Just what I would like to do myself. One always sleeps so much better for a bit of a walk in the fresh air."

Taking one on one arm and the other on the other, she set off, the two men towering above her little upright figure. At first they talked as they strolled beside the little lake. Then, as the Directrice had hoped, the enchantment of the hot, still night fell on them all. The men walked silently, breathing in the good smell of the stirred earth and watered paths. Their blind eyes looked steadily into the blackness, no blacker than their every day; their scarred, disfigured faces were hidden by the darkness.

The Directrice looked up at the stars, and, for the first time in all that long day, thought for an instant of herself. The night brought to her a sudden stabbing recollection of another night, before the war, before the end of the world, when the starlight had fallen white on the clear road leading her straight and sure to her heart's desire. The road before her feet now seemed as black as that before her blind men. But she stepped out bravely and held her head high.

The blind men leaned on her more and more. She could feel by the touch of their hands on her arms, that they were relaxing, that the softness of the night air had undone the bitter tension of their nerves. Now was the time to take them back. Now they would sleep well.

"Come, my friends," she said, and led them back to their door, through which, the next morning, she would enter early to another such day as the one she had just passed. And after that another, and then another....

* * * * *

In her bed, that hot night, in the stuffy little Paris bedroom, she was quite too tired to sleep, and so, knitting her forehead in the blackness, she wondered how she could best place Brousseau, he who had a weak heart, and three little children dependent on him.

THE FIRST TIME AFTER

The little newspaper in his home town put the matter thus: "Our young fellow-citizen Louis Vassard has returned from the hospital to his home. He received a bad head-wound in the battle of Verdun and unfortunately has lost his eyesight."

Of course the family meant to keep from him this casual method of announcing the end of his world, as they meant to keep everything from the newly blinded man, but he overheard the item being read aloud in the kitchen, and took a savage pleasure in its curt brevity. He liked it better, he told himself disdainfully, than the "sympathy" which had surrounded him since his return home. He cast about for an adjective hateful enough, and found it: "snivelling sympathy"--that was the word. He rejoiced in its ugliness, all his old sensitive responsiveness curdled into rage.

The hospital had been hell, nothing less, intolerable physical agony constantly renewed; and of course home, where he was petted and made much of and treated like a sick child, home was not hell; but sickened and embittered, resenting with a silent ferocity the commiserations of those about him, he felt sometimes that hell was the better place of the two.

The most galling of all his new humiliations was that he was never allowed to be alone. His ears, sharpened like all his other senses by the loss of his sight, heard the silly whispering voices at the door. "I can't stay any longer," whispered his aunt, who for an hour had been stupefying him with her dreary gabble; "come, it's your turn," and he heard the dragging step of his old cousin advancing with a stifled sigh to do his duty by their martyred hero. Or it was the light irregular step of his little sister, irritated at being forced to do what would have been a pleasure if she had been left free.

He dared not protest against this as hotly as he felt, because, his self-control hanging by a thread, he knew that if he let himself go at any point he would be lost, would be raving and shrieking to be killed like the man in the bed next him at the hospital. He swallowed down his rage and his humiliation and only said coldly: "You don't need to mount guard on me like that, all the time. I'm blind, I know, but I'm not an imbecile ... yet!" He shocked them by his brutal, outspoken use of the word, and they drove him frantic by beating about the bush to avoid it, always saying to others that he "had had a bad head-wound and his eyes were affected." He said once sternly: "Why should you think I'm ashamed to hear the word? You don't suppose it's any doings of mine, being blind!"

But no matter how brusquely or roughly he spoke he could never anger them. He felt often and often that if only he could hurt them, startle them into irritability, he would be relieved. But they never varied from the condescending amiability one shows to children and sick people. He sickened and shivered at the thought of the glances of pitying comprehension with which they probably accompanied those never-varying soft answers.

And always they stayed with him! Even when for a few moments they pretended to go away and leave him, he heard the breathing and the imperceptible stirrings of some one left on guard. Or he imagined that he heard them, and scorned to grope his way to see. Instead he sat motionless, his mask of pride grimmer and harder than ever.

Next after their always being there, he hated their efforts to cheer him up. That had been the phrase of the doctor at the hospital, when they went there to take him away: "Now he must be cheered up. He mustn't be left to brood. He needs cheerful company about him." Of course there was his mother ... and he was so young that only a few years of intense growth separated him from the time when he ran to his mother for consolation. Certainly his mother could not be accused of attempting too much to cheer him up, the poor mother who, try as she might, had not yet mastered herself so that she could command her voice when she looked into the tragic sightless face of her son. Himself poised on the brink of hysteria, he dreaded more than anything in the world the sound of that break in his mother's voice. Oh yes, he realized it perfectly, it was not their fault, it was not that they did the wrong things, it was only that he hated everything they did, if they spoke cheerfully or wept, were silent or laughed. He was like a man all one raw sore, to whom every touch is torture.

He often woke up in the morning feeling that he could not go on another day, that he _could_ not.... Every one about him commented on his remarkable quiet. "He never complains, he talks about all kinds of things, he has the newspaper read to him every morning," they reported to visitors. They did not see the sweat on his forehead as he listened.

* * * * *

One day they had taken him out of doors, on the bench at the end of the garden. It was his little sister's turn to "be with poor Louis," the little sister who would have been so unconsciously droll and diverting if she could have been natural. He said to her: "Oh, go and play, Celia! Why don't you bring your hoop out here? Or your jumping-rope?" But the conscientious, sensitive child, drugged by the thick fumes of self-sacrifice which filled the house, was incapable of being herself. She sat on the bench beside her big brother, holding his hand, talking affectedly, with an artificial vivacity, in as close an imitation as possible of her elders. The man to whom she chattered, winced, shrugged his shoulders, and fell into a morose silence.

But Celia, after all, was only eight years old, and at that age honest human nature is hard to stifle. Over across the road in the meadow was Jacques with his new net, hunting butterflies. And ... she stood on tiptoe to see ... yes, he seemed to have caught ... oh, could it be that blue and black variety they hadn't yet found? She darted away, ran back, caught her brother's hand: "Louis, just a minute! I won't be gone but just a moment!" she cried, and was off, her little feet pattering down the path to the road.

* * * * *

Why, he was alone! It was the very first time since ... he did not finish the sentence, shrinking away in terror from the word, now that there was no need for bravado.

He stood up wildly. He must get away at once, to find some hidden spot, to be more and yet more alone. He knew that from the house they could not see the bench ... oh, he knew every inch of the ground around the house from having played all over it from his childhood. He knew too that on the other side of the hedge there was an open field with a big clump of chestnut-trees, further along, opposite the hole in the hedge where you could scramble through.

He started down the path. It was the first time he had taken a step without having some one rush to lead him. His heart beat fast.

He followed the path, feeling his way with his cane. There was the hole in the hedge. Somehow, he was through, and walking on sod, soft, soft, under his feet; no, something round and hard was there. He fumbled, picked it up; a chestnut. He must be near the clump of trees. Alone he had found the way!

He turned to the left. In the old days there was a little hollow where the brook ran, a little hollow all thickly overgrown with ferns just large enough to hide a boy who was playing robbers. If he could only find that place and lie down in the ferns again! Scorning to put out his hands to grope, he stepped forward slowly into the black infinity about him. After a few steps, something brushed lightly against his hanging hand. He stooped and felt in his fingers the lace-like grace of a fern-stalk. The sensation brought back to him with shocking vividness all his boyhood, sun-flooded, gone forever.

He flung himself down in the midst of the ferns, the breaking-point come at last, beating his forehead on the ground.... It was the first time that he could throw aside the racking burden of his stoicism. At last he was alone, entirely alone in the abyss where henceforth he was to pass his days and nights. Dreadful tears ran down from his blind eyes upon the ferns. He was alone at last, he could weep. At last this was not rage, this was black, black sorrow.

* * * * *

Now they were shed, the tears, the great scalding flood of them had fallen. The man lay on his face in the ferns like a dead body on a battlefield, broken, drained dry of everything, of strength, of stoicism, of suffering, even of bitterness. For the moment there was nothing left ... nothing but the consciousness of being alone, empty and alone in the blackness.

And yet was he alone, quite alone? Something in the black gulf stirred and made a rustle of leaves high over his head. The little sound came clear to his ears. Then three clear whistling notes dropped down to him, a thrush trying his voice wistfully, dreaming of the summer past. The angel-pure perfection of those notes sounded across the black gulf with ineffable radiance. The prostrate man at the foot of the tree heard them ringing out in the echoing, empty rooms of his heart. They seemed the first sounds he had ever heard, the presage of something new, of everything new. He did not stir, but he held his breath to listen.

The bird did not sing again. And yet there was no silence as he had thought. Listening for the bird's note, he heard the delicate murmur of the leaves, light arpeggios accompanying the singing voice of the little brook, now suddenly quite loud in his ears. He felt the fern-stalks stirring against his cheek and divined their supple submission to the wind. The chestnut was still in his hand, unimaginably smooth, polished, flawless. The breeze lifted his hair in a movement gentler than anything human ... his blackened house was no longer empty of all things.

Presently his young body wearied of immobility. He found himself on his back, stretched out on the good earth, his arms crossed under his head, his eyes turned toward the sky he would never see again. His muscles were all relaxed as they had not been for months, every taut nerve was loosened. The wind blew softly among the leaves, across his forehead. On a sudden caprice, the thrush again sent down its three perfect notes, like an enchanted flute....

* * * * *

They ushered him into the moment he had inexpressibly longed for, inexpressibly feared, the moment when he must stop hating and raging, must stop pretending to be hard, when he must at last be honest with himself, must face what there was to face, must say out the word he had never dared to say in his heart, although his proud lips had brought it out so many times, when he must announce to his terrified heart: "I am a blind man. What does it mean to be blind?"

Above his body, infinitely tired, infinitely reposed by his paroxysm of sorrow, his mind soared, imperious, eagle-like, searching. What was the meaning of it? He looked squarely at it like a brave man, and knew that he had the courage to look at it. With an effort of all his being, he began to think; with all his force, with all his will, with all his energy, to think. With the action he felt a stirring of life in all those empty chambers of his being.

The moments passed. The thrush sang once, stirred in the trees, flew to another, sang again, and was not heard. The blind eyes staring up at the sky saw nothing material, and yet began to see. A dim ray glowed in the blackness.

After a time he said hurriedly to himself, nervously anxious lest he should let the clue out of his hand: "Our senses are not ourselves; we are not our senses. No; they are the instruments of our understanding. To be blind means that I have one less instrument than other men. But a man with a telescope has one more than other men, and is life worthless to them because of that?"

He paused breathless with the effort of the first thought of his own since, since.... "And our senses, even the best of them are like an earthworm's vague intuitions beside scientific instruments, a thermometer, a microscope, a photographic plate. And yet with what they give us, poor, imperfect as it is, we make our life, we make our life."

He took one more poor stumbling step along the path he divined open to him: "A man with understanding, without a telescope, without a microscope can see more than a fool with both instruments." Aloud he said gravely, as though it were a statement of great value: "The use one makes of what one has, that is the formula. That is my formula."

There was a pause, for him luminous. He told himself quietly, without despair: "And as for understanding, for really seeing what is, aren't we all groping our way in the dark? Am I blinder than before?" It seemed to him that something within him righted itself, balanced, poised. His sickness left him. He knew an instant's certainty ... of what? Of himself? Of life? If so it was the first he had ever known in all his life. Strange that it should come new, when....

Then all this fell away from him. He thought no more. He lay on the earth now, not like a dead man on a battlefield, but like a child on its mother's knees. He felt the earth take him in her arms, and he closed his eyes, abandoning himself to her embrace.

* * * * *

The sound of distant voices roused him from his dreaming doze. He turned on his elbow to listen. The old aunt, the old cousin were talking together: "Oh, the naughty little girl, off there in the meadow chasing butterflies! How heartless children are! To leave her poor brother all alone, when he needs so to be cheered!"

The blind man lying in the ferns broke out into a laugh, a ringing young laugh, without irony, without bitterness.

It was the first time he had laughed since ... since his blindness.

HATS

My attention was first attracted to him by the ring of his voice as he answered the question a woman near me put to him, amiably trying to start a conversation: "And may I ask, Mr. Williams, what are you in France for, Red Cross, or Y.M.C.A., or perhaps reconstruction work? I'm refugees, myself. It's always interesting to know other people's specialties. You often have so much in common. The only branches I _don't_ know anything about are orphans and the blind."

To this the distinguished-looking, gray-haired man responded gravely, "Madame, I am in France for hats."

"_Hats!_" exclaimed the war-worker.

"Hats," he reaffirmed quietly.

She looked at him wildly and moved to another part of the room towards a recognizably tagged young woman in a gray uniform.

The timbre of his voice struck curiously on my ear. I cannot express its quality other than to say it made the voices of the rest of us sound like those of college professors and school-teachers; and I don't pretend to know exactly what I mean by that.

He aroused my curiosity. I wanted to investigate, so I began looking vague, letting my eyes wander, and answering at random. Presently the earnest talker holding forth to me grew indignant at my lack of attention, broke off abruptly, and went away. I turned to the man with the different voice and asked, "What in the world makes you come to France for hats, _just now_ in the midst of the war?"

He answered with instant decision, "Because the only hats worth buying are made in Paris."

"_Now?_ with France bleeding to death, how _can_ they make hats, invent new fashions!"

His eye kindled. "Madame, a good French modiste on her deathbed could make a better hat than any one in New York ever could."

I pondered this. His accent was indubitably American, not to say New York. But there are cases of French people who have spent part of their childhood in the States who speak perfectly. "You must be at least partly of French extraction to be able so to understand and admire France," I ventured.

He opposed a rather startled and very emphatic negative. "Me? Not much! I'm as American as they make 'em. Born on lower Broadway and brought up in the New York public schools. I don't know anything about France, except that we have to come here to get the right styles in hats. I don't even speak any French except to say '_combien_' and enough to count."

I was put off the scent entirely. "Oh, I thought from the way you spoke that you knew France well. This is your first visit, then?"

He was silent a moment, making a mental calculation.

Then he said: "This is my fifty-first visit to Paris. I have come twice a year for a little more than twenty-five years."

"Always for hats?" I queried, my imagination reeling at this vista.

"Always for hats," he said seriously.

I tried to be facetious. "Dear me! You must know all there is to know about hats."

He shook his head. "Nobody knows anything about hats." He added, very much in earnest, "Style is one of the great obscure mysteries of life."

This had always been one of my observations, but one I have petulantly and impatiently deplored. I had never thought to hear it expressed with such heartfelt gravity and weight by a man of such evident vigor of personality.

I said, laughing uneasily, "It makes one very self-conscious about one's own hat, to know oneself in the presence of such a connoisseur."

He reassured me: "Oh, I never look at hats except in the way of business." In his turn he looked vague, and let his eyes wander, evidently much bored with my remarks. In another moment he would have turned away, but just then an acquaintance came up to me, addressing me by name, and my new interlocutor broke in with a quite human eagerness, "Oh, are you Mr. John P. Hulme's niece?"

"Why, do you know my Uncle John?" I cried astonished.

"He's one of the best business friends I have," he assured me, "and I have often seen the picture of you and the children he has on his desk. You must let me go to see them. I've got grown-up children of my own. It will be a real treat to me to know some American children here."

In this casual manner, slipping in on the good graces of my little son and daughter, I entered a world the very existence of which I had never suspected, long and frequent as had been my sojourns in Paris; the world of hat-buyers. And I had for guide the very dean and master of the guild, to whom the younger aspirants looked up, whose sure, trained instinct was their despair and inspiration.

It was perhaps his influence, dominating that circle, which made them all so serious and intent on mastering their profession, so respectful of their chosen occupation, so willing to give it the very best of their judgment and taste. This was the more remarkable as, with the exception of my new friend, they were quite the opposite of serious-minded men and women, and, in the intervals of the exercise of their profession, enjoyed rather more than was good for their health, morals, and pocketbooks, the multiple occasions offered by a great city to damage those possessions. I was not at all in sympathy with what seemed to me the indifference of their relaxations in a country so stricken as France; but I could not withhold my astonished admiration for the excellent seriousness with which they approached their business. I would have blushed to disclose to them the light shallow femininity of my careless, rather slighting attitude towards "la mode." Also I was amazed at the prodigious financial importance of their operations. The sums which, without a blink, they paid out for hats, and the number of hats they thus secured and the further sums which they looked forward to paying into the coffers of the United States Customs, sounded to me as unbelievable as those nightmare calculations as to the distance of the stars from the earth or how much it has cost to build the Panama Canal.

"All that for _hats_!" I cried, "and every year, twice a year!"

"Oh, this is only the smallest part of what goes into hats," the expert assured me. "What I'm buying now are only single models, you understand; the successful ones, the well-chosen ones, will be copied by the hundred dozen in the States and in Canada. That chenille toque you saw me buy the other day..."

"That little, plain, ugly scrap of a thing you paid a hundred dollars for?" I asked, giddy again with the remembered shock of that price.

"Yes. Well, probably that will be very widely copied, at first in New York and then everywhere. It's a fair guess to say, that being a model that's sure to be popular, there will be at least twenty thousand toques like it sold in different places in the States for five dollars apiece."

I was staggered. "A hundred thousand dollars spent in _one_ season, just for _one_ out of all the different models of women's hats!" My old superficial scorn for "the style" disappeared in an alarmed dismay at its unsuspected scope. "Why, that's _terrible_! It's appalling! When there isn't enough money to make the schools what they ought to be, nor to take care of the sick, nor to keep up the...."

He showed an unexpected humanity. "Yes, it is awful," he agreed gravely--"very, very awful. And still more awful is the way we live right along beside such an awful force and never have the slightest idea that it rules our lives and not what we wish or decide."

For all my consternation I found this excessive. "Oh, come, it's not so bad as _that_!" I cried.

"Yes, it is," he assured me with his formidable quiet certainty. "Yes, it is. It goes beyond anything we can imagine. It's the greatest force in the world, this desire, this absolute necessity to be in the style. Nothing else can stand up against it for a moment, not hunger, not fear, not love, not religion. They only exist so far as they don't get in the way of being in the style. The minute they interfere with that, over they go like a pack of cards in a tornado! What do you think a man is doing when he works all his life for his family? Is he earning their livings? Not much. He's enabling them to keep in style, and if he doesn't he is a failure. What do you really want for your children? That they may grow up to develop all the best they have in them ... yes, _if_ that doesn't prevent their being in style."

I found all this so outrageous that I could only stare a silent protest.

"I don't mean just my small part of it, hats," he explained, "although hats are always, so to speak, the crest of the tidal wave. It's everything. Style rules everything. Of course all material things, furniture, clothes, the way houses are built and gardens laid out and parks made and pictures painted. Everybody can _see_ with his own eyes how _they_ are all determined by whatever the style happens to be in that century or year, and not by anything we want or need. But more than that, too. Everything goes together. We talk and eat and act according to the kind of furniture we have; for instance, when rough-hewn Morris furniture was the rage and we all had to have it or dry up and blow away with envy, don't you remember how the athletic blowsy styles in clothes and manners came in too, and it was all the thing to go to a funeral in a striped shirt and yellow shoes and the girls' shirtwaists bloused over in front as though they had forgotten to tuck them in, and how bulging pompadours straggled down in every woman's eyes?"

"Do you mean," I was ready to laugh at him, "that you think that our Morris furniture influenced us so deeply as all that? Even Morris would be surprised to hear so much claimed for it."

He was scornful of my incapacity to grasp the scope of his idea. "No, Lord no! The Morris furniture hadn't anything more to do with it than a tree bent double with the storm has to do with making the wind blow. I mean that the same thing that _made_ us mortgage our souls to have Morris furniture just then, made us also talk slang and wear yellow shoes to funerals."

"Well, what _did_ make us?" I challenged him.

He answered monosyllabically, solemnly, with his redoubtable, arresting conviction, "The style did."

We were both silent a moment as if in the presence of Niagara or the ocean.

Then I said, in a feebler challenge, "Well, what _is_ 'the style'?"

He professed the admirable ignorance of a wise man in the face of mystery.

"I wish I knew. It looks to me like a big current that takes in everything, that is so big we don't know it's there, just the way people didn't use to know the world was round, because it is too big to see. And it carries us along like dry leaves and where it's going to, nobody knows. We know just as much about it, as we do about where water runs underground; which is to say, nothing. But when it comes to that part of style that makes hats and dresses, there are a few people who can hold a hazel-rod and have it point downwards, and they are oftener right than the rest of us. And every one of those few is French and lives in Paris. Don't ask me why! That's the way it is. And it would be enough sight more convenient for _me_, let me tell you, if it were otherwise."

I understood this exclamation, having learned by this time how great an affliction to Mr. Williams personally were these semi-annual trips to France. He knew nothing of Paris outside of the great modistes' shops, and he cared less. Since he knew no French the theaters were closed to him. Since he was mildly musical (he played the violin a little) concerts helped a little to allay his ennui; but only a little. Being a family man of very domestic tastes, he took slight part in the very cheerful proceedings with which the other buyers whiled away the hours between business operations, and although he was invited to their gay suppers in expensive restaurants, he struck an austere note there, drinking only water, not smoking, and eating sparingly of simple dishes, quite evidently counting the hours till he could get back to America and to his garden in Westchester County.

In spite of this lack of appreciation of what was offered him, he was very frequently invited to the nightly feasts of his young confreres, and they hung about him eagerly because of their superstitious reverence for what they called his "hunch." "Whatever Grandpa says is going to go, goes," was their expressed belief. They tried by ingenious devices to exploit his scent for the style, to be within earshot when he was making selections, to suborn the milliners into showing them the models he had selected. Such crude, outright efforts at getting the better of him he defeated with a wary dexterity, getting up and leaving a shop abruptly if one of his rivals began to loiter too near him, and letting it be known that he would buy no more from any milliner who reproduced "his" models for one of the other American buyers. This last precaution was not necessary, for the sense of professional honor and jealousy is not keener among doctors themselves than among Paris fashion-makers, nor was the capacity for darkly guarding secrets more developed in Renaissance Italian poisoners than in a twentieth-century modiste's shop on the Place Vendome. Also Mr. Williams, who had seen a whole generation of modistes grow up and disappear into old age, enjoyed the very high esteem of those quick-eyed, quick-fingered, quick-witted ladies with the wonderful simple coiffures and the wonderful simple hats. This was not solely because of the very large sums of money which were at his disposition and which he spent with Napoleonic decision and despatch. They respected his competence also. "There is one who can appreciate our work!" they said of him. "He always picks out the best. There is one who could have made hats, himself!" A characterization which the American would have repudiated with energy if he could have understood a word they were saying.

But although, as a matter of business acuteness, he refused to allow himself to be exploited in small ways by his young competitors, he was always ready to expound his philosophy to them and to lay down the general lines along which they might develop as he had. Not infrequently their elaborate dinners, where too much had been eaten and drunk by the elaborately dressed women and smooth-shaven, young-old men, ended by the question flung despairingly at Mr. Williams' impassive respectability, "Grandpa, how the dickens _do_ you _do_ it? Tell us!"

He always told them, at length, in detail, as long as they would listen, although they never understood one word of what he said. Hoping to catch him off his guard and to cull some valuable short-cut tip to success, they lent ears as attentive as their somewhat bemused condition would let them, as long as their patience held out.

"The trouble with most of you young people," he was wont to say, presenting as he went on the abhorrent spectacle of a man at the Cafe Riche taking occasional sips from a glass of water, "is that you don't realize that you are up against a _big thing_, the biggest thing there is. You think you can just josh along somehow, pick out what looks good to you, what you think would be pretty for your best girl to wear, and have it go. Nothing like that! What _you_ like, what _you_ think is pretty, hasn't a thing to do with what's going to happen. What's going to happen, _happens_, whether anybody likes it or not, and the only thing for us to do is to keep our ears to the ground _hard_ and try to guess three or four months sooner than most people. Nobody can guess further ahead than that and mighty few people even as far as that. Most people don't know what style is coming till it hits them in the eye. Now, to make a good guess you've got to keep your eyes open to everything, everything, and then sort of gather yourself together and listen, hold your breath and listen, as if you were eavesdropping folks who were trying to keep a secret from you; as if you had to catch a very faint A sounded way off that you could tune your own fiddle to. And you've got to get passive all over, the way the hypnotizers tell you to do, let yourself go, don't try to have any ideas of your own, don't try to swim against the current, don't try to hurry things up by swimming faster than the current. No power on earth can hurry that current, nor make it bring anything but what it's going to bring! And it's up to us, let me tell you, to take what it does bring! I've seen lots of styles that nobody liked, not the modistes who made them, not the buyers who took them to the States, not the hundreds of thousands of American women who paid out their husbands' good money to buy them. And yet those styles had just as big a vogue and lasted just as long as any others, and the buyers who tried to dodge them and who chose what looked prettier to them got everlastingly stung. And aren't there styles that everybody just hates to see disappear, comfortable, decent, becoming styles? But do they stay in, just because we'd like to have them? You know they don't.

"And it's no use trying to do anything on your own hook. There was old man Blackmar, head of the Blackmar and Jennings Ribbon Company; he could manufacture ribbons to beat any French factory going, _if_ he got the designs from France. Every time he tried to have one designed by a perfectly good American designer, the ribbon didn't sell. It didn't look so very different, but it wouldn't sell. You'd have thought he'd have learned something out of seeing that happen every time he tried it, wouldn't you? But he never did. Why, I was honestly sorry for him, five or six years ago when all of a sudden the styles went dead against ribbons or any other trimming for hats. It pretty near ruined him, coming after the modistes had been piling everything they could buy on top of their hats. But he didn't know enough to take his medicine without making a face. He couldn't get it through his head that he was up against a bigger proposition than _he_ was, than anybody is. He came to me and he said: 'Williams, I'll give you fifteen thousand dollars, cash, in your hand, if you'll steer things over in Paris so's to bring hat-trimmings back into style; ribbons of course if you can, but if not, most any kind of trimmings. I can alter our machines to do braids and such. This craze for just the naked hat-shapes with one little rag of an ornament, I tell you, it'll send me into the bankruptcy court.'

"I was very sorry for him and I said so, and I said I'd do anything to help him out except try to slap back the Hudson river with the flat of my hand. He said he was sick of hearing me always get off that same old guff, and if I really wanted to, I could. 'Why, they tell me every modiste in Paris calls you "uncle." With plenty of money you could get on the right side of them and get them to launch trimmed styles.'