Chapter V (5)

"I just threw up my hands at that. I saw he didn't know any more about the innerds of his business than a babe unborn. I said to him: 'Why, old man, you don't suppose for a minute that the modistes in Paris _invent_ the styles, make 'em up out of their heads? They haven't got any more to say about what it's to be than you or me. All they can do is to take the style that's going to arrive in six months, and put it into silk and felt and straw. They can't have it the way they _want_ it any more than the priestess of something-or-other could say what she wanted, when they put her over the oracle-hole, filled her up with gas, and told her to make an oracle.'

"Blackmar was sore as a boil at me, and said if I wouldn't do it he'd give the job to Pierce. Pierce was buying for Condit and Vergary in those days. I said he could throw away all the money he wanted to, but _I_ wouldn't help him spill it.

"Well, Pierce tried to swing the deal, bucking the universe all alone, and so proud to have the chance to. He went to all the best modistes in Paris and said he'd give--well, I'm ashamed to tell you what he gave--if they would make him models all trimmed up, heavy and expensive with handsome trimmings. Of course, at first they said they couldn't do it, the hats wouldn't be in style. And he said if they made the hats that way and sent them out with their names in gilt letters in the lining, they would be in style, would _be_ the style. Didn't everything they made set the fashion? They tried to explain to him that that was because they took the greatest pains to make things that were in fashion, but Lord! he couldn't talk their language. He just kept on insisting and holding out those banknotes, and by and by they said, well, to get rid of him they _would_. And he came to my hotel and bragged all over me like a man who's cornered the wheat-market.

"They did make him trimmed models: and as they were the best modistes in the world they were as pretty hats as ever you saw. They were all trimmed up as per agreement with ribbons that would make a dead woman sit up and reach out her hand. Pierce took me into his office before they were packed, to show them to me, and he said, '_Now_, Grandpa, what you got to say?' And I said, 'You let me know four months from now how much money you've made on them.'

"About six weeks after that, back in New York, I went into his office and there, by George, were all but two of his fifteen models. None of the American manufacturers would have them, not at any price. They'd send their head milliner to see them and she'd say, 'Oh, what perfectly lovely ribbon,'--but no, thanks, she didn't want to buy the model, because they wouldn't sell. They weren't what were being worn that season. Pierce said: 'Great Scott! look at the labels. They come from all the best modistes in Paris'; and she'd say she couldn't help that; if they weren't what was being worn they wouldn't sell. And before three months were up he'd given them to the janitor's little girl for dolls' clothes. There you are."

There were evident signs of inattention from his audience by this time, but he went on: "And young Hammond, he tried to tear the teeth off the buzz-saw with his fingers, too. And _he_ got what was coming to him. He had a great idea, regular perpetual motion scheme for economy, of how he could beat the game and he hypnotized old John Harbine into standing for it. It was as simple as bread and milk. Hammond would take up a Paris modiste, somebody on a back-street somewhere, get her under contract to be 'Harbine's,' and Harbine's alone. Then they'd put her name in the hands of the best advertising agency in New York and let things rip. Well, they started out as though they were going to a fire. You couldn't see the spokes, the wheels went around so fast. The advertising people delivered the goods, put the best people on their force on the job. I remember they had one college-graduate woman that could write ads that would make you pay five dollars for a strawberry basket--_once_! She wrote up their great find in Paris, wrote it up like a magazine short-story--modiste who up to the time Hammond had spotted her had been so exclusive you couldn't find her with a microscope, had only worked for the pure-bloods among the French aristocracy, no mere Americans had ever known her name (you can bet your life they hadn't)--you can imagine the kind of patter, the sort of thing women suck up by the barrelful. And then, owing to unheard-of prices offered by Harbine's out of that disinterested devotion to American womanhood which is Harbine's great quality, she had finally consented to send a few hats, never more than a dozen a season, to Harbine's, where the first collection would be on exhibition March 21st, and which would be exactly copied to order in imported materials with all the inimitable _chic_ of the original models, for such low prices as from fifteen dollars up.

"It was well done. I'm bound to admit that ad.-writer got just the right esthetic, superior tone into it. And as for Hammond, he ought to have been a stage-manager. He got some of the people back of me sort of worried. They came to me, 'Look-y here, Grandpa, sure you're not missing a point in the game? How _about_ this Suzette Rellot person?'

"I said: 'Her real name is Marie Duval and she used to sew in linings at Reboux', that's who _she_ is. If she _could_ have trimmed hats you can bet your life Reboux would have developed her years ago. Reboux has candles burning in every church in Paris, praying Heaven to send her apprentices that she can do something with! And if she _can't_ trim hats you can bet your life old man Harbine is going to lose some money, a lot of it in one clip, and he and Jimmy Hammond will part company with a bang.'

"Well, I was over here in Paris when their great opening came off. But I heard about it. Nothing lacked. They all but served free champagne. But when I went back only a month later, the talk was already going around among folks on the ins, that there was something the matter with the Rellot collection. The women weren't just crazy about the hats and the modistes wouldn't look at them. Later on, what was left of them were sent down to South America--Colombia, I think. Women just hatching out from mantillas will stand for anything with a French label on it! And that summer Jimmy Hammond decided he'd go in for life-insurance."

When he had talked as long as this I was usually the only person left listening, the rest having yawned, turned to each other, or melted away. But I listened, always, open-mouthed with astonishment and wonder. Before putting on my hats in those days I used to look at them hard, with respect, almost with alarm, feeling heavy on my head the weight of their unsuspected significance. Wondering what the great expert's opinion would be about the plain, everyday hats of ordinary women I asked him one day: "Tell me, can you descend to small beer? What do you think of the hats you see, not in those wonderful, silk-hung studios, but those you see on the heads of the women in the streets, on mine? Is this hat I have on stylish? I warn you I bought it off a counter for less than four dollars."

He answered instantly, without giving a glance at my headgear: "You are a healthy, normal woman and you're wearing it. Of course it's in style. If it weren't, and you had to wear it, you'd be sick abed."

"You exaggerate, you are always exaggerating," I protested. "You only know women who _care_ about the styles. I never bother my head about my hats! I just walk into almost any shop and buy the first hat that doesn't make me look too queer."

"You don't have to bother yourself about it," he told me, his accent tinged with weary bitterness. "_We_ do the bothering! Months beforehand. An army of us, able-bodied men, smart women, pretty young girls, we all of us give up our lives to fixing things so you can walk into most any shop and pick up most any hat and find it doesn't make you look too 'queer,' which is your way of saying that it doesn't make you look out of style."

"There are moments," I told him, in a half-serious indignation, "when I find you too absurd for words, the victim of the most absurd hallucinations! All this portentous talk about the world-wide conspiracy to make people keep up with the style. As if the style had any importance for sensible people!"

"If you knew more about the capital and brains that are invested in that conspiracy, you'd take it seriously, all right," he assured me with melancholy, "and as for not taking the styles seriously, how many thousand dollars would it take to pay you to go around in the street one day, just one day, in the big bustle your mother used to be ashamed to go outdoors without?"

I lost myself in horrified contemplation of the grotesque vision he had conjured up and forgot to refute him. Perhaps I couldn't.

Towards the end of his stay he was very much troubled by persistent rumors that the boat on which he was to sail would be torpedoed on the way to New York. He acknowledged, with the fatigued frankness of his sixty years past, that he was mortally afraid of the passage and that his fear would deprive him of sleep all the way over. "No sane man likes to be killed," he complained, "let alone be blown up and burned to death and drowned into the bargain! I'm a family man! I want to go on earning a living for my wife and children!"

The evening before he went away he was so fretful about this and so outspoken about his dread, that I asked him, "Why don't you wait over a boat?"

"Oh, what's the use? One boat's as likely to go down as another. And, anyhow, I've got to get home. And then come over again for the next season, curse the luck!"

I thought him again a little absurd. "Oh, come, the heavens wouldn't fall if you missed one or two seasons!"

He turned grave, and after a moment's hesitation, opened a door which I had thought locked and nailed up, and showed me that the room in his heart which I had thought was certainly empty and vacant was a queer, dimly lighted little chapel, with queer, dim little candles burning before what was recognizably an ideal.

"Oh, it's no time for anybody to lie down on the job," he said offhand. I did not dream that he was referring to the war. I had become convinced that his curious, specialized world held no place for the horror and apprehension which filled the lives of the rest of us. Nor had I ever seen him give any signs of the shocked pity which most people feel at the sight of the war-maimed men, the black-clad, white-faced war-orphans and the widows with blurred eyes. I had thought he saw in France, only and uniquely, hats. So I asked in genuine ignorance of his meaning: "How do you mean, this being no time to lie down on the job? What job?"

He sat back in his chair and looked at the ceiling; thereafter, as he talked, transferring his gaze to his finger-tips, joined with nicety. "Well, I guess I mean something about like this. If we humans are to get on at all, get any further away from having tails and living in trees, we've got to knock down the partitions and make one big room of the world, the same way each nation is one big room, with the blacksmith trading his horseshoes for clothes and not trying to be a tailor himself. Take farmers. Maybe you can't remember, but _I_ can, when old farmers in Connecticut raised nearly every single thing they used all the year around, and were proud of being such idiots. Nowadays the Connecticut farmer don't waste his time trying to grow corn in a climate where you're liable to get frosts in early September; he leaves the farmer in Iowa to do that, and he raises the best apples in the world and with the money he makes that way, he buys him oranges that a Florida farmer has raised. It's my opinion that we've got to come to that on a big, big scale. And if we do come to it there won't be any more wars. Now, I don't know anything about anything but hats, and so I don't try to have an opinion about the League of Nations, nor how the trick is going to be turned by the statesmen--if there are any such--but if it _is_ going to be turned, it's going to take everybody's shoulder to the wheel, you can be sure. And I've got a shoulder. What's got to be done is to get it through everybody's head that every nation ought not to learn to produce anything but what it can produce best, and that self-defense ought not to force it to make a botch of trying to do what another nation could do better. Now, _one_ of the things that France can produce better than other people (and it happens to be the thing that I know about) is hats. I don't know whether it's because she's been at the business of running the styles so long, so much longer than anybody else so that she's got all her fibers settled together, just right to catch the note, the way the wood in an old violin trembles all over at sounds that leave the wood in the leg of a chair perfectly calm. Mind, I don't say the violin is any more important than a chair. As far as I'm concerned personally, if I had to choose I'd rather have the chair. What I'm trying to say is that they are _different_. And we've got to get used to the idea that _because things are different it doesn't mean one is better than the other and they ought both to be like the best one_. Now, maybe it's the other way around, that France has been at this business of setting styles so long because she's had the gift to begin with. Anyhow, what's sure is that they do it better, everything along that line, ribbons, braids, straws, hats, dresses, furniture, houses, parks--original designs don't come from anywhere but France. But France is at war and pretty nearly gone under. She's got to make her designs with one hand and fight for her life with the other."

He paused. "Well, I don't feel just like picking out that time to stop coming to France to get her designs and to do my part to keep up the taste for them, at home."

I found no sufficiently admiring comment to make on this, and kept a respectful silence.

He went on, rubbing his hand back and forth over his gray hair: "But all that is only my guess at it. What's my guess worth? Nothing. But it's all I've got to go by, and so I _do_ go by it. I don't _know_ anything about anything but hats, and I can't but just make a guess at them."

He folded his hands before him and sighed. "There is a lot too much in hats for any one man to understand."

A HONEYMOON ... VIVE L'AMERIQUE!

I never knew many of the mere facts of their existence; where all their money came from, nor the extraordinary romance which must have lain back of them. Nor did I care to. They were too epic a pair for realism to touch. I find on thinking them over that I never quite came to believe in their actual existence; and yet, whatever value this slight sketch of them may have will be due to its literal truthfulness to fact.

My first sight of them was on a very cold day in the second year of the war when they suddenly filled with their resplendent presence the dreary room which was known as my "office." For several difficult months, against all the obstacles which made up everyday life in war-time France, I had been laboring to organize and get into shape a Braille printing establishment which would provide books for those most tragic of war-victims, the blind. Together with a crew of devoted volunteers I had tugged at the task, struggling like everybody else in France with a universal shortage of supplies, which began with able-bodied men and ran down to tacks and cheesecloth. There was also the difficulty of getting the "Authorization from the Government" before drawing your breath; but unless you have experienced this potent brake on enterprise, there is no use trying to describe it to you.

And yet, somehow, we had managed to get along, had added to our two plaque-making machines a couple of presses (very poor, both of them), had scrambled together a home-made device for wetting and drying the paper, had hunted down enough men to run the machines, had trained enough proof-readers and assembled enough voluntary editors, so that after a fashion we were really printing. The magazine, liberally bedewed with our blood and sweat, came out once a month; and although the two presses broke down with great frequency, we managed, by dint of incessant repairing, to keep at least one in shape to do tolerable work. We really had something patched-up, ungainly, but reasonably valid to show the sightseers who came through on the weekly visiting day, when all the rest of the institution was open to visitors.

I took my two Olympian guests for the usual idle, visiting-day couple. I went the rounds with them, pointing out with a weary satisfaction our various makeshifts. When I found that they listened receptively, I indulged in considerable self-pity over our difficulties, past and present. On their part they asked a good many pointed questions about the business end of our enterprise, about the financial status of the institution, about the probability of permanence for the venture. They came back to the "office" with me, the goddess in sables taking the solitary chair, while her mate sat down on the edge of my little table, stretching out before him legs clad in cloth of a fineness I had forgotten could exist. Quite casually, like the diamonds and pearls of the fairy-tales, amazing words now issued from their lips. "See here," said he of the broadcloth overcoat, "this is no way to do business. You can't get good work done with any such junk as those two presses! Why, I wouldn't take them as a gift, not for old iron! And turned by hand-power! Isn't that Europe for you? Why, for twenty-five cents a day of electric current, you could do ten times the work you are doing now, and have women run the presses! Go find a modern electric press that a man can look at and not think he's Benjamin Franklin come to life again, and let us know how much it costs."

He handed me his card as he spoke.

The goddess quitted my rickety, cane-bottomed chair and from her superb height dropped down on me, "You know, the kind that opens and shuts its jaws like a whale; perhaps you've seen them in printing establishments at home." She tempered her assumption of my ignorance by a smile out of the loveliest eyes imaginable and added: "My father was a printer out West. I used to play 'round in his shop. That's how I happen to know."

Gazing up at her fascinated, I noted how deep the little lines of kindliness were at the corners of her smiling gray eyes, and how, beyond the usual conventional coating of powder, no effort had been made to hide the fact that the beautiful face was not in its first youth. The consequent effect of honesty and good faith was ineffable, and had its perfect counterpart in the extraordinary simplicity and directness of her gentle manner. She drew her regal fur up around her long neck and her husband put his hat back on his thick white hair. "While you're about it, you'd better get those two plaque-making machines electrified," he remarked. "Any electrician could do it for you. There's no sense in having your operators push down that pedal for every letter they make. Man-power again! Europe!"

I realized that they were moving towards the door and shook myself out of my entranced silence. "But you _can't_ buy a press of that kind in Paris!" I called after them, all the bitterness of my past struggles in my voice. "You can't buy anything in war-time France. There hasn't been a press or anything else manufactured in France for two years! Don't you know that all the factories are making munitions?"

Mr. Robert J. Hall--that was the name on the card--came back to me and said earnestly: "Money can't _do_ everything, but I tell you that it can buy anything buyable if you've got enough of it. Now we'll give you money enough to buy that press. It's up to you to find it." From the doorway his wife smiled to mitigate his intense seriousness and said again, "It's the kind that opens and shuts its jaws, you know." The door swung shut behind them to a last call-to-arms, "Go to it!" from Mr. Hall.

Five minutes later a proof-reader coming found me still standing, staring at their card.

"What's the matter?" she asked.

I took her by the arm. "Look here," I said, "did I just show two visitors around the place?"

"Do you mean that awfully good-looking man with the white hair and the royal-princess-effect in sables and eyes like Trilby's?"

I nodded, reassured. I had not dreamed them!

* * * * *

Of course I went to it. Of course I found the press. After such a galvanic shock, I could have found, if that had been my need, a featherbed on the Arc de l'Etoile. I have too many other things to tell you about the Halls to describe the hunt after the press, although in its way that was epic, too. Enough to say that after three weeks of impassioned concentration on the subject during which I ate, drank, slept, and lived printing-press, it was located, a second-hand one in excellent condition, in a loft in the remotest corner of a remote industrial region of Paris. It was quite exactly what we needed, a thousand times better than anything we had dreamed of having. I felt almost a reverent admiration to see it opening and shutting its great jaw, and spewing out perfect raised-type pages, at least twelve times faster than our wretched hand press; doing in one day the work of two weeks!

But the price! Like all war prices it was five times what it was worth when new. I hadn't the least idea that my extraordinary visitors would buy it for us. Why in the world should they? In fact, by that time I had gone back to thinking that I had dreamed them.

However, I betook myself to their hotel, into their private sitting-room, bright with chintz and copper and flowers. I found Mrs. Hall without her hat even lovelier than before, a little gray in her thick soft hair as honestly shown as the faint, fine lines of simple kindness in her clear skin. She wore a dark-blue satin dress richly embroidered, evidently a creation from one of the great Paris houses. She assured me cordially that she was awfully glad to see me.

Sitting on the edge of the Beauvais tapestry chair like the poor relation on a begging expedition which I felt myself to be, I timidly told of my search, trying to be amusing about it. Now that I was there I dared not mention the price. Finally, however, having run out of expedients to put off that dangerous moment, I brought out haltingly the sum needed, and began to say, excusingly, that I thought I might get _part_ of that from....

Mr. Robert J. Hall moved to the writing-table and took out a check-book. "I'll tack another thousand francs on to that," he said over his shoulder as he wrote, "I haven't been able to sleep nights for thinking of those operators punching down the pedals by main strength and awkwardness."

There was a silence as he wrote. Mrs. Robert J. Hall examined her glistening nails, looked out of the window, and, with a tact for which I was grateful, did not once glance at my face. I fancy that my expression, instead of gratitude, must have been stupefaction. Mr. Hall blotted his check, detached it, and handed it to me--the little bit of blue paper through which I saw as in a vision hundreds of the terribly needed raised-type books put into those terribly empty hands. I could find no words at all. "It's ... it's just like a miracle!" I was stammering, when some one knocked at the door, a timid, hesitating knock, such as mine had been.

The sound seemed to alarm the Halls. "Good Lord, I bet it's the abbe!" said Mr. Hall.

"You don't happen to speak French, do you?" asked his wife hastily. "Oh, you do? It's all right then. It's the cure of a town in the war-zone and we want to help him with some war-orphans, but we have the most awful time trying to make him understand about business details. It's perfectly terrible, not speaking the languages."

We turned to meet a short, elderly, double-chinned ecclesiastic who carried his bulky body with the impersonal professional dignity of his calling, but was not otherwise in the least impressive. The conversation began.

It consisted of an attempt on the part of Mr. Hall to get the cure to "come to the point," as he expressed it, and name a sum, and of terror-stricken evasions on the part of the cure to do any such thing for fear of losing their interest. This fencing centered about a large house which the cure needed to fit up for the reception of a number of war-orphans. "How much will it cost?" asked Mr. Hall patiently, over and over, evidently seeing no reason for his not receiving a direct answer. Upon my pressing the abbe hard, he finally brought out the sum, miserably, in a faltering voice which made me want to shake his hand. I knew how he felt.

The Halls consulted each other with a look of intimate understanding. "All right," said the husband, "all right, _on condition_ that he can get the funds from his diocese to keep the thing going if we set it on foot." To me, he added: "The more we see of this sort of thing, the more we see you've got to go slow at times. These Europeans are so impractical that first thing you know they've used the money you give them to get themselves into some fool scheme, without half seeing their way through. We make it a rule not to give anything to a concern which isn't on a good, sound, business basis. What's the use?"

I turned to the waiting priest, who had been wildly trying to guess from our faces what we were saying, and translated Mr. Hall's philosophy of philanthropy. I found a little difficulty in hitting on the exact French phrase to express "a good, sound, business basis" but evidently I made myself understood, because the old man's lips began to tremble eagerly. "Oh yes, yes, madame, tell them that I can bring a letter to-morrow from my bishop guaranteeing the support ... if only the house can be secured and fitted up."

Mr. Hall sent back through me: "Well, you tell him that the minute he shows me that letter from his bishop, I'll give him a check for the house, and some over for extras."

I translated this exactly as it was said.

For an instant the cure kept a solemn silence, his eyes looking through us and beyond. I knew what he was seeing, a big sheltering house with happy, rescued children playing in the garden. The graceless, stout old man looked very touching to me.

Then he came back to a sense of the inherent probabilities of things, and appealed to me in a trembling voice, as to one who at least spoke his language and to this degree was more of the real world than these amazing strangers: "Are you sure you told them correctly? It is such a great sum! And nobody else has been willing to ... Madame, do you ... _do you really think they will do it_?"

I showed him the check still in my hand. "They have just given me this for the war-blind," I said. I found my own voice not entirely steady.

Then it was my turn to look out of the window while he took his agitated departure. I tried not to listen, but I could not help hearing that he gave them his blessing. I wondered how he managed it, being but half their height.

I was still at the window when he emerged from the hotel entrance into the open square below. He stood looking up and down wildly, forgetting to put his broad-brimmed, flat-crowned hat on his head although it was raining. Then, as though at random, he crossed the wet asphalt and vanished down a side street. He staggered a little as he walked. I knew just how he felt.

When I turned back from the window, the Halls asked, offhand and as though it would be doing them a favor, to accompany them on an automobile trip out to the front, near St. Quentin. (I had been trying vainly for three months to get a _sauf-conduit_ which would let me get to the front.) "We want to take some money out to the villages the Germans blew up when they retreated last month; and seeing how quick we got the cure fixed up with somebody to talk French, we thought it would be nice if you could go with us." This from Mrs. Hall. Her husband continued, as if in explanation of a slightly eccentric taste: "You see, we like to dodge the committee-and-report effect in war-relief. It takes so long for those big shebangs to get into action, don't you think?

"And we like to manage so that the spending of the money we give isn't in the hands of one of these self-satisfied young women in uniform who know all about Elmira, New York, but do they about the Department of the Aisne? It's unscientific, I know, but in such cases as these people who have been cleaned out by the Germans, we like to put the money right in the fists of the people who need it; and then go away and leave them to spend it the way they want to. If my house burned down, I don't believe I'd enjoy having a foreigner tell me how to build it over, and you needn't tell me they like our ideas any better."

I was by this time in the state of silent stupor which was the effect not infrequently produced on me by the Halls. I found no words to tell them how precisely their invitation fell in with my wishes, and they took my momentary hesitation for doubt. "We've got a _very_ comfortable car," urged Mrs. Hall. "I don't think it would tire you much!"

And Mr. Hall added: "Honestly, it would make me a lot more satisfied if you would. You haven't any idea what a fool you feel just to poke money under people's noses and not be able to say anything to them!"

I thought to myself it was a sort of "foolishness" which I could well endure, but before I could put this idea into words we were deep in a discussion of ways and means, what clothes to wear, whether cameras would be permitted, what to do about food. The date for the expedition was set. My call was over. Dazed, their check still clutched tightly in my hand, I was emerging from the hotel entrance into the street. I think I must have staggered a little as I walked, but the resplendent doorkeeper did not seem to notice. He was probably quite used to this phenomenon as a feature of the departure of visitors to the Halls.

* * * * *

This is not the place to tell you of that phantasmagoric trip to the front, the nightmare of the dynamited villages, the carefully and expertly murdered fruit-trees and vines, the ravaged gardens and fields, the grimly enduring women and old men who toiled feebly with an invincible determination to bring a beginning of order out of the hideous chaos which had been their homes. For me the recollection of all that horror of desolation is shot through with the incredible presence of the Halls, resplendent in health and good looks and wealth and good will, brightly interested in everything, cut off by their untouched prosperity from any grinding comprehension of what they saw, but somehow not needing to be ground into comprehension like the rest of us, somehow not needing to put on the sackcloth of bitterness and passion in order to feel fellowship.

They kept vaguely reminding me of something ... and on the last night out I learned what it was.

Everywhere the gesture was the same. The car rolled into a new set of ruins, as like the ones we had just left as one part of hell must be like another. Mrs. Hall always began at once to take photographs, methodically noting down the name of the village which had stood there. Mr. Hall got out from his pocket the wallet containing more cash than I had ever seen together in my life, and I went off with the French officer escorting me to find the mayor of the ruined town. For the most part, the real mayor had been carried off by the Germans for forced labor, and we found some substitute, chosen by the remnant of the citizens left. Usually it was a white-haired man, once it was a woman, lean, energetic, stern, who had lost one eye through the explosion of a dynamite petard. Always we found a worker at his work ... ah, the noble procession of valiant old men we saw in their shirt-sleeves, in worn, faded, patched overalls, hammer or mason's trowel in their knotted hands, sweating and toiling among the ruins.

The same thing always happened. I explained the Halls' mission. The mayor opposed to my account the prompt defense of a total incredulity. Things didn't happen that way, he always explained to me, as we walked towards the car, he wiping his hands on his overalls. He told me that nobody gave help at once, that people came and looked and exclaimed and said how awful and said they would write articles, and others came and took notes and said they would report to a committee in Paris, and others said that if a report were written by the mayor and viseed by the _sous-prefet_ and signed by the _Depute_ and sent through the Ministry of the Interior ... by this time we were beside the car, where the mayor's eyes were always instantly fascinated by Mrs. Hall's tall beauty.

Mr. Hall shook him by the hand and left in it big, crisp, crackling French banknotes, at which the old man gazed hypnotized, while I tried to express to him something of the kindliness in the hearts of the two shining messengers from another world. During this time Mrs. Hall always took our photographs again.

Then we shook hands all around. The mayor tried convulsively to express his thanks, and failed. The automobile moved forward. We were off to a repetition of the scene.

When our time-limit was up, we scurried back towards Paris in order to reach the city before the hour set in our _sauf-conduits_. The car rushed forward over the long, level road, dimly shining in the starlight, the flanking poplars shadowy, the cold, pure air blowing hard in our faces. Mrs. Hall and I were in the tonneau, looking up at the stars, incredibly steady above our world of meaningless misery. Then it was that I learned of what they had reminded me. Mrs. Hall said to me, evidently thinking it the simplest and most matter-of-fact explanation of their being in France, of their life there, "You see, we haven't been married so very long, only three months ago. And we were awfully happy to be married. Of course all newly married folks are, but we had special reasons. And we wanted to have a very special kind of honeymoon, the nicest kind anybody ever had. It seemed silly to go to Florida, or to the Yellowstone, or yachting, or to Hawaii, or to Japan for cherry-blossom time, or any of the things you usually do. We'd done all those anyhow, but more than that, when you read the newspapers about the war and think that our country isn't taking any part in it you don't get much good out of cherry-blossoms or surf-riding, do you? We wanted to do what would give us the very best time we ever had, to celebrate our being married. That's what honeymoons are for, of course. And we decided that what we would like best, seeing that our Government isn't doing anything, would be to come to France and help out. So we did."

She was silent for a moment, while I slowly took in the significance of what she had said. Then she went on: "And we like it even better than we thought. We are happier even than we expected. It has been perfectly, perfectly lovely."

Then I knew of what they had reminded me. They had reminded me of America, they _were_ America incarnate, one side of her, the dear, tender-hearted, uncomprehending America which did not need to understand the dark old secrets of hate and misery in order to stretch out her generous hand and ease her too happy heart by the making of many gifts.

Of course, such an extraordinary phenomenon did not go unheeded by the sharp eyes of the elegant and cosmopolitan circle in Paris war-relief work. That circle had as well trained a predatory capacity for emptying fat pocketbooks as the prettiest girl who ever sold ten-cent bouquets for five dollars at a church fair. It was with something of the same smiling security in levying philanthropic blackmail that they began to close in on the Halls. I heard excited talk of them everywhere. Everybody's mouth watered at the stories of their "easiness" and plots to entrap them were laid by every cosmopolitan mondaine who now felt about her own pet "war-work" the same competitive pride she had had (and would have again as soon as the new fad was no longer new) for her collection of pet dogs, or Egyptian rings.

A scouting party from another charitable institution, one of the very "chic" _oeuvres_, nosing around our institution to make sure they were losing no points in the game, stumbled on our new press and were as awestruck as I had been by its costliness and speed. After this, all the information which I had about the Halls, scanty and highly improbable as you will see it to have been, was repeatedly pumped from me by one past mistress after another in the art of pumping.

I became so curious as to what the reaction of the Halls to this world would be, and as to what this world would make of the Halls, that one afternoon I took the time off to go to one of those horribly dull afternoon teas in which fashionably disposed charitable ladies made up for the absence of their usual pre-war distractions. I did not see the guests of honor at first, and stood dismally taking my tea, submerged in the talk customary at such affairs, for the most part complaints of war inconveniences ... the hardship it was to have so few taxis in Paris, how inconsiderate the Government had been to forbid cakes and candy on two days a week, how the tailors and dressmakers were profiting by the high prices to ask preposterous ones, "even of their old clients," how hard it was to get coal enough to have a fire in one's _cabinet de toilette_ ... it was one of the days when we had heard of the failure of a great French offensive, and of the terrible shortage of hospital supplies at the front! My tea and sandwiches were ashes in my mouth! Through the window I saw a one-armed soldier with his head in bandages hobbling by the house, and I found myself bitterly longing for a bolt from heaven to descend and consume the whole worthless lot of us. Then I caught sight of the Halls.

They towered above the crowd and above the very small but very important person who was monopolizing them, none other than the Duchesse de Sazarat-Begonine, who was obviously engaged in opening upon them, one after another, her redoubtable batteries of persuasion. Do not let this casual mention of so well known a title lead you to the very erroneous idea that I move in the aristocratic society which she adorns. Nothing could be further from the truth. The very fact that I know the Duchesse de Sazarat-Begonine is a startling proof of the extent to which, in the pursuit of her war-relief work, she has wandered from her original circle! It shows, as nothing else could, what a thorough sport she was in the pursuit of her new game, stopping at nothing, not even at promiscuous mingling with the obscure. She was, if you will allow me the expression, the _as des as_ of the fashionable war-relief world in Paris. As in the case of Guynemer, when she mounted her aerial steed in pursuit of big cash donations to her _oeuvre_, all lesser lights abandoned hopes for theirs.

She had so many different weapons in her arsenal that she was irresistible; her chateau full of the memories of those distinguished thieves, intriguers, and murderers, the illustrious ancestors of her husband; her far-renowned collection of historic snuffboxes, her wonderful Paris house with its rigorously select circle, to enter which any woman there would have given her ears; her astonishing and beautiful jewelry; the reputation of having been in her youth the _bonne amie_ of one of the best-known of the Bourbon pretenders (or was it a Napoleonic) ... ah, when the Duchesse started out to bring down a wealthy philanthropist for her Home for One-armed and Tubercular Soldiers, she never missed her aim. It was not to be doubted that people who had succumbed without a struggle to the snuffy old parish priest with his war-orphans, would put up no resistance to this brilliant onslaught.

When I perceived the Halls corraled by this well-known personage, I shamelessly moved closer so that I could overhear what was being said. This was little enough on the part of the two Halls. Mrs. Hall smiled silently down on her short and majestic interlocutor. Mr. Hall's strongly marked face was inscrutable. However, the great lady was quite used to respectful attention from those of her excompatriots with whom she deigned to converse, and she continued to talk with her habitual certainty of herself. At the moment when I came within earshot, she was retailing to them exactly how many hundreds of wounded heroes had passed through "her" hands to their eternal benefit; exactly the praises the Minister of War had given her when her red ribbon was bestowed; exactly how she had attacked and driven from the field a Spanish lady of wealth who had had the presumption also to attempt to aid one-armed and tubercular soldiers; how imitators had tried to "steal" her methods of outdoor work for the tubercular, and how she had defeated their fell purpose by allowing no more visitors to that institution without a card from her personally....

At this point my attention was called away by an acquaintance who asked me in a whisper if those people whom the Duchesse had so ruthlessly grabbed were really the extravagantly rich and queer Americans everybody was talking about, attached to no institution, who gave as they pleased, dodging recognition and decorations, mavericks of the fashionable war-relief world, breaking all the time-honored traditions of that society.

When I could resume my eavesdropping, the Duchesse was embarked upon her snuffboxes, graciously dropping down from the pinnacle of her lofty exclusiveness an actual invitation to the two nobodies before her to call on her and see that world-famed collection, comprising snuffboxes used by the Duc de Talleyrand, the Duc de St. Simon, the Marquis de la Rochefoucauld....

About this time I detected an inward glow in Mr. Hall's steady eyes. He said grimly, "I don't happen to be acquainted with any of those gentlemen, but in our country snuff-taking is accounted a rather low form of amusing yourself."

The Duchesse was brought up short, not in the least by any intimation that she might not be extracting her usual due of admiration, but by a great desire to laugh at the unsophistication of the barbarians. For my part I went warm all over with cheerfulness, and stepped forward to present my cordial greetings to the Halls. Mrs. Hall soon fell back a step or two with me, leaving Mr. Hall looking down severely on the jewel-covered woman before him. There was a shade of anxiety on Mrs. Hall's usually clear face. "You don't suppose," she murmured to me, "that Robert will be taken in by that horrid, common old woman and give some money to her? Men are so blind, even the best of them!"

I must have laughed out at this, for the Duchesse turned and came towards us, carrying off Mrs. Hall the moment thereafter, with her wonderful irresistible assurance of conferring a distinction. I said to Mr. Hall, moved by the most genuine curiosity: "What do you think of the celebrated Duchesse de Sazarat-Begonine? You know she is accounted perhaps the most chic of all chic Parisiennes. Is there any other city where a woman of her age could set the style for the most exclusive society?"

Mr. Hall did not seem interested in the chic-ness of the great lady. He was silent for a moment, watching over the heads of the crowd his wife listening to the Duchesse, her kind eyes bent attentively downward. Then he said, with decision, "If that bragging old harridan gets a cent out of my wife, I'll ... I'll spank Margaret."

I thought then that my cup of diverted satisfaction, was quite full; but it ran over splashingly when, half an hour later, separated by the crowd from the Halls, I heard the Duchesse near me, announcing confidently to a friend: "Oh, no difficulty whatever. The simplest fish who ever swallowed down the bait in one gulp. Hooked? My dear, they are in my basket already!"

I went away on that, full of threadbare meditations on the little child who had been the only one to see that the Emperor had really nothing on.

* * * * *

Although, after this, our Braille printing establishment continued to benefit by casual visits from the Halls, visits followed usually by some sound suggestion for improvement, accompanied by a check, they were strictly Scriptural as regards the ignorance of the right hands of the doings of the left, and I had little idea of what were their occupations in other directions. Once in a while they carried me off to dinner in some famous restaurant where otherwise I would never have set foot, and where my war-tired and gloomy spirits received a lesson in the art of cheer. There was in those delicate and costly repasts a sort of robust confidence in the ultimate rightness of things ... or at least I used to have this fancy to explain to myself the renewed courage which came to me after such evenings, and which may have been simply the result of a really hearty meal after a good deal of penitential and meager fare.

I needed all the courage and calmness I could extract from any source during those days, for it was at that time that my old school friend, Marguerite Moysset, was notified that her husband was killed in a skirmish on the Champagne front. Marguerite had already lost, almost at the beginning of the war, her only child, a boy of nineteen. The death of her husband left her desperately poor and inexpressibly alone. She had not wept for her boy's death nor did she shed a tear now for her husband whom she had almost extravagantly adored. She shut herself up in a white, stern horror which frightened us, all her well-meaning friends who hovered about her in those clumsy ministrations which often do more harm than good but which nevertheless one dares not omit.

Paradoxically enough it was the much-dreaded moving out of the old apartment, full of memories of the twenty happy years passed there, and the moving into the two little rooms on the fifth floor of a dingy old tenement house in a poor quarter of the city, which did more for Marguerite than all our foolish efforts. At least it aroused her to a sort of shocked and horrified life, and carried her out of her own misery.

Not long after she had gone there to live I found her with four, pale-faced, dirty little children in one of her two rooms. She was heating water on her charcoal stove. "I'm going to give them a bath," she said to me, pronouncing the commonplace words with a strange wild accent. "Do you know they have never had a bath, all over their bodies, in their lives?" I stayed to help her, wondering at the curious expression on her face. She was, as she had been ever since the blow had fallen, still very white, but now that pallor was like white heat. After the children were clean, Marguerite dressed them in coarse, clean, new clothes, which she told me she had sold her watch to buy, "the church-bell strikes so near that I don't need a watch any more," and gave them each a piece of bread and jam. They took their departure then, stricken into an astonished silence, and Marguerite turned to me with an angry toss of her head, "Do you know what the war is?" she asked me fiercely. "_I_ know! It is the punishment we have called down on ourselves. I see now that the war has only intensified everything that existed before, it has _changed_ nothing fundamentally. We were living as hideously in a state of war before as now, except that it was not physically bloody. There were children in this awful house then as now, without baths, without food, without decency, while I was giving all my energy that one little boy might have everything, everything that he could wish."

At this I could not repress a protest, calling up the very modest comforts of her simple home. She brushed me aside. "It was luxurious, sinfully, wickedly luxurious to live so while other human beings were living as they were in this house. Oh, I see it so plainly, we were all living with all our might according to the horrible Prussian maxim that you have a right to anything you're strong enough to keep other people from sharing. All the Germans did was to carry it to its logical, murdering conclusion, and show us what we really were."

I could not, Heaven knows, deny this, but I ventured a palliative murmur. "But at least we are ashamed of it. We tried to hide it. We never gloried in it, as the Prussians do."

"I am ashamed of it _now_," she told me somberly, "now when I have nothing, nothing to use as help but my two hands. I am ashamed of it now when it is too late."

The black misery on her face was such that I brought out the foolish phrase I had been repressing all during the weeks since the news had come: "Marguerite dearest, why do you keep such a dreadful calm? Wouldn't it do you _good_ to cry?"

"_I?_" she said bitterly. "I haven't the right to cry! Look at my neighbors!"

The next time I went back I found her two little rooms full of children, three small babies on the bed, and a dozen or more of different ages playing together, while Marguerite, in a long black apron, stirred a soup-pot on the charcoal fire.