Chapter II: Part 2

“So then we sweep them out of our world,” she went on, “and that leaves the decks cleared for real action. I should say,” she went on with a change of manner, including in one wide humorous glance her own dirty hands, the tangled hair of the others, and the grease and grime of the room, “that the next thing is to organize ourselves to get clean! It’s plain only a few of us can do it at a time; let’s draw lots to see who begins, and the others can lie down while they wait. Is there anybody here who speaks German enough to ask for soap and water? I see the broom here at hand.” A good many of the women proved to have studied German at school, and three of them spoke it. But this did not carry them far. The guards laughed at the idea of soap--nobody in Germany had had soap for months--prisoners were not given such luxuries as towels, and as for water, the tap was down the hall, and the pail was there, and they could carry it for themselves. Besides there was water in the kettle on the stove.

There and then they began their campaign. Lots were drawn, a certain number of tired women collapsed into the bunks to wait, while Octavie organized the others into squads, some to carry water; some to arrange a bathing-place in a corner of the room by hanging up their cloaks on strings stretched from nails; some to sweep out the worst of the dusty litter on the floor.

There was order and purpose in the air. The first woman who emerged from behind the curtain of cloaks, bathed, fresh linen next her clean skin (for they had been allowed to bring one change of linen in their little packages), her hair in order, was like a being from another world, the world they had left. Self-respect came back to the others, as they looked at her.

By night every woman was clean, had arranged her small belongings in her own bunk, and had washed out and hung up the body-linen which she had worn on the trip. One empty bunk had been set aside as the pharmacy, and all their little stock of medicine gathered there; another was the library, where a half-dozen books stood side by side; and a third was the storeroom for miscellaneous goods, the extra bars of soap they had brought from home, a little chocolate, thread, needles, scissors, and the like, communistically put together to be used for whatever proved to be the greatest need. They had taken stock of their material resources and agreed to share them. They had eaten what they could of the coarse, unpalatable food brought to them in the evening, and now sat on the long bench and on the floor, trying to plan out the struggle before them, the struggle to construct an endurable life out of the materials at hand. Octavie was saying, “Everything in order! That is the French way to go at things; classify them and take them up one by one. What are we? Bodies and minds; both equally in danger. Now, the body first. We must have exercise out of doors, more than we’re used to at home, if we are to digest this awful food. They say we’re to be allowed out an hour a day, but that is not enough. We must open the windows once an hour and do something active in here. Any volunteers to show us gymnastic exercises? Anybody who remembers them from school days? I don’t know one.”

Yes, there were several, and one whose sister was a woman doctor using curative gymnastics. The meeting voted to make them an athletic committee, to organize such activities.

“Now, our digestions. You know how all prisoners in Germany have always come home with ruined digestions. Is there anything we can do here? Is there anybody here experienced in cooking who could guess at the raw materials in that fearful mess we’ve just finished, and does she think it might be cooked more intelligently so that it would be better? It stands to reason that the prison cooks would naturally be incompetent, and indifferent to their results. Could we do better ourselves? It also stands to reason that we’d be allowed to, because it would mean less work for the prison kitchens.” A group of housewives was appointed to consider this, next day.

“Now, as to cleanliness. Any suggestions about how to get along with no soap? We don’t dare use soap on the floor, we have so little, but heaven knows it needs it!” All the practical housekeepers spoke at once now, crying out upon her lack of ingenuity in not thinking of sand. That sandy path outside the barracks, that would do excellently well as an abrasive. With plenty of water and energy, sand and some bricks for rubbing, everything in the room could be cleaned. As they spoke, their faces brightened at the prospect of having cleanliness about them, and of being active once more.

“Anything more for the body?” asked Octavie. “If we keep it exercised and clean, and as well-fed as we can manage it, it ought to last us. Now for the mind. We’re going to have hours and hours of leisure time such as we busy women never had before. It’s the chance of our lives to go on with our education. Let’s share each of us with the other, what we have in our minds. I’ll begin. I have chemistry thoroughly, economic history fairly, and the general theory of physics. I’ll give a course of lectures on those. Who can do something else?”

They were all appalled at this and protested that she was the only one who had any information to impart; but she scouted the idea and began a relentless person-to-person inquiry. The result was that a group of musicians were organized, under the guidance of the music teacher, to give lectures on the history of music, the lives and works of the composers, church music, ballads, songs, and operas. Three other women who had brought up great families were to dive deep into their memories and lecture to the others, as logically, coherently, and rationally as they could on proper care for children. A shy, thin, drab-colored woman was found to have been brought up in Indo-China, and was to lecture on the life and education of that country. The German-speaking ones were to give a course in German. Another, the daughter of a well-known professor of French literature, was to assemble and arrange what she knew, and be prepared to plan and lead literary discussions. Another, the distinguished founder and former head of the best hospital in Tourciennes, would lecture on the care of the sick--and so on. From one, from another, from them all, Octavie drew potential treasures of experience and information which lay almost visibly shimmering in a great heap before them--“Enough,” she cried triumphantly, “to last us for years!”

“And now because we’re not solemn Anglo-Saxons, but Frenchwomen, we must plan for some fun, if we’re to keep themselves alive,” she told them firmly, and at their sad-hearted wincing from the idea, she said, “Yes, we must. It’s part of our defensive campaign. Our task is to construct out of our brains and wills a little fortress of civilization, and to protect ourselves behind its walls against demoralization and barbarism! And you all know that amusement is needed for civilization!” A majority agreed to this, a dramatic committee was appointed, and another one on games (Octavie suggested drawing checker-boards on the tables, playing with bits of paper for men, and starting a free-for-all tournament); some one else thought of manufacturing balls and inventing games to be played with them, and there were two packs of cards, in the miscellaneous store. The musical group undertook to provide a weekly concert.

One of the subjects which had been canvassed and found no professor was the history of France; but like all French people, they had been soundly and carefully instructed in history and planned, by putting all their memories together, to reconstruct the story of their nation. The meeting was trailing off from serious, purposeful planning to a discursive attempt to get the list of French kings complete, when one of the older women spoke to Octavie in a low tone, the quality of which instantly made silence about them. She said, “But Mlle. Moreau, we have souls too, souls hard beset.”

Up to this moment Octavie had, as always, dominated the situation! Now she, who has not been inside a church since she was a child, and who considers herself thoroughly emancipated from what she calls, “all that theological nonsense,” was brought up short before the need to make just such a whole-hearted concession to other people’s ideas as she had urged on her comrades! She looked hard at the speaker. It was the foundress of the hospital, Mme. Rouart. From her eyes looked out a personality just as strong as Octavie’s, and tinctured to the core with faith. Octavie’s arrogant intellectualism humbled itself at the sight. She made a gesture of acquiescence and was silent. Mme. Rouart went on, “We’re of all sorts of belief, but we can all pray.”

Then, after an instant’s pause, she said in a low, trembling voice, “Let us pray.”

There was an interval of intense silence, during which, so Octavie told me afterwards, quite without any shade of irony, she “prayed as hard as any one ... and after that I prayed every evening when the others did.”

“How did _you_ pray?” I asked her, incredulously.

Her definition of prayer was characteristic. “I set every ounce of will power to calling up all my strength and endurance. It was wonderful how I felt it rise, when I called,” she said gravely. She added that on that first evening after her silent plunge to the deep places of power in her soul, she put both arms around Mme. Rouart’s neck and kissed her. “I loved her,” she said simply, without attempting her usual skeptical, corrosive analysis of reasons.

Other kisses were exchanged, soberly, as the stiff, tired women stumbled to their feet to go to bed. They laid their exhausted bodies down heavily on the dirty blankets, but in their hearts which had seemed burned out to ashes with grief, indignation, and despair, there shone a living spark of purpose. Some time later, into the darkness came the voice of one of the younger women. “Oh, I’ve just remembered! That fourth son of Clovis was Charibert;” to which Octavie’s voice answered exultantly, “Ah, they never can beat _us_!”

The life which went on after this seems as real to me as though I had lived it with them, because when I first saw them, they were fresh from it, and could speak of little else. Every day was thrust at them full of the noisome poison of prison life, idleness, indifference, despair, bitterness, hatred, personal degeneration; and every day they poured out this poison resolutely and filled its place with intelligent occupation! Just to keep clean was a prodigious undertaking, which they attacked in squads, turn by turn. With sand, water, and bricks for rubbing, they kept the room immaculate, though it took hours to do it. Even the blankets were washed out after a fashion, one by one at intervals, by women who had never before so much as washed out a handkerchief. To prepare the food with the more than inadequate utensils and poor materials and the stove unsuited for cooking was a tremendous problem, but they all took turns at it, Octavie humbly acting as scullery-maid when her turn for service came; and the food, though poor, monotonous, and coarse, was infinitely superior, being prepared with brains and patience, to what was served all around them to the apathetic, healthless mobs of Russian and Polish women and men, sunk despairingly in degradation and disease, “giving up and lying down in their dirt,” Octavie told me, “to die like beasts.”

The older and weaker women among the Tourciennes group, who could not holystone the floor and carry water and wood, were set at the lighter tasks, the endless mending which kept their garments from becoming mere rags, peeling turnips, washing dishes, “making the beds” as they called the process of drying and airing the straw in the bunks.

Every day they went out in all weathers, and exercised and played ball with their home-made, straw-stuffed balls, and every evening they played games, checkers, guessing games, capped rimes, told stories and sang. They all “studied singing” and sang in twos, trios, quartets, or the whole forty in a chorus. They sang anything any one could remember, old folk-songs of which there are such an infinite variety in French, ballads, church-chants, songs from operas.

Octavie told me that one evening, when the false news which was constantly served to them was specially bad, when they had been told that half the French Army was taken prisoner, and the other half in retreat south of Paris, they sang with the tears running down their cheeks, but still sang, and kept their hearts from breaking.

Every day there were “lessons.” Octavie was the only trained teacher among them, so that her courses in general science and in economic history were the most professional of the instructions given; but she sedulously attended the “courses” given by the others, putting her disciplined mind on the matter they had to present, and by adroit questionings and summarizings, helped them to order it coherently and logically. Once a week they had dramatics, scenes out of Molière, or Labiche, or Shakespeare, or Courteline, farce, tragedy, drama, anything of which anybody had any recollection, with improvisations in the passages which nobody could remember. The German guards looked on astonished at the spirit and dash of the acting, and the laughter and applause from the bunks, where the audience was installed to leave the room clear for a stage. Mme. Baudoin told me that she had never begun to suck the marrow out of the meaty Molière comedies, as she did in the stifling days of midsummer when they were giving a series of his plays.

By midsummer they had learned that one of the younger married women had been pregnant when she left France, that a French child was to be born in that German prison. How they all yearned over the homesick young mother! How important old Mme. Rouart became with her medical and nurse’s lore! What anxious consultations about the preparations of the layette, manufactured out of spare undergarments and a pair of precious linen sheets brought from home. They were supposed to have medical attention furnished in the prison, but they had seen too much of the brutal roughness of the overworked and indifferent army-surgeons of the camp, not to feel a horror at the thought of their attending delicate little Mme. Larçonneur. She begged them desperately not to call in a doctor, but themselves to help her through her black hours. They were terrified at the responsibility, and as her time drew near, with the ups and downs of those last days, they were almost as frightened and tremulous as she.

But the night when she called out in a strangled voice that she needed help, found them all organized, each one with her work planned: some who sprang from their beds to heat water; Mme. Rouart prepared as far as her poor substitute for a nurse’s outfit would allow her; others ready to lift the shivering, groaning woman from her own bunk to the one which had been cleaned, sterilized with boiling water, and kept ready. The others, who could not help, lay in their beds, their hands clenched tightly in sympathy with the suffering of their comrade, shaken to the heart, as the old drama of human life opened solemnly there in that poor place.

When the baby came, his high-pitched cry was like a shout of triumph.

“All well,” announced the nurse to the anxious women, “a fine little boy. No! nobody must stir! Perfect quiet for Mme. Larçonneur.” She busied herself with the mother, while her two assistants oiled the baby and wrapped him in flannel, gloating over the perfections of his tiny finished body, and murmuring to the faces showing over the bunks, “Such a beauty! Such a darling! His little hands!--Oh, see how he fights us!”

The next morning they formed in line to worship him as he lay sleeping beside his mother, and although the sight brought a fierce stab of misery to all the mothers who had left their children behind, the little boy brought into their lives an element of tenderness and hopeful forward-looking which was curative medicine for their sick, women’s hearts.

For in spite of all Octavie’s moral and physical therapeutics, there were intolerable moments and hours and days for all of them. Women, loving women, used to a life-time of care for others, used to the most united family life, left for months at a time without the slightest news of those they had left, could not, valiantly as they might try, master the fury of longing and anxiety which sprang upon them in the midst of the courageously planned life which they led. They all came to recognize in others the sudden whiteness, the trembling hands, the fixed, unseeing eyes blinded by tears. As far as loving whole-hearted sympathy could ease human hearts, such moments of unendurable pain were tempered by a deep sense of the sharing by all of each one’s sorrow.

And then, of course, there were other bad moments and days, meaner, pettier enemies to fight, when it took all of one’s self-control to prevent explosions of irritability from overwrought nerves; quarrelsome bitterness, which comes from brooding on grievances; sudden captious hatred for other people’s mannerisms, which, in all prison-camps, almost as much as physical suffering, embittered and poisoned prison-life for the high-strung, finely organized, twentieth century prisoners of the Great War. Forty women, with lowered physical health, with heightened nervous sensibility, used to fastidious privacy, now shut up together in one room, with no chance ever to escape each other, crowded each other morally almost as much as physically. Octavie told me there were days when she would have liked to slap them, weak, wavering, superstitious souls that they seemed to her, and turn her face to the wall in her bunk to concentrate on hating the human race. And one of the devout Catholics told me that she often longed so intensely for her old atmosphere of belief and faith that she was almost ill. But they adopted as their battle-cry, “All together to defend our civilization!” and, clinging fiercely to this resolve, they fought away from everything that might have separated them and struggled out on ground common to them all.

Then Winter was there again, endless, empty, gray days. There was sickness in the camp, a terrible wave of influenza, carrying off hundreds all around them. They redoubled their cleanliness, boiled every drop of water, exercised, played, mended, studied, cooked, sang, kept steadily on with the ordered precision of their lives. But old Mme. Rouart, the one they loved the most of all, who led the silent prayer of every evening, fell ill, endured silently a few bitter days of suffering, died, and was borne out from among them to be buried in alien soil. Three others were desperately ill, lay near to death, and slowly recovered. Tragedy drew them more closely together than ever, as they realized how utterly they depended on each other, and after this there were fewer struggles against black days of bad temper. The little boy was seven months old now, laughed and crowed, and played with his fingers.

Time seemed to stand still for them, as they fought to protect their little shining taper of civilization, feeding it from their hearts and minds. When they went outdoors for the daily escape from their room to the sandy, hard-trodden desert of the prison yard, they seemed with their neat, threadbare, faded, well-mended garments, with their gray, carefully dressed hair, their pale faces, clean and quiet, with brave eyes and smiling lips, like another order of being from the shaggy, dirt-crusted, broken-down Polish and Russian soldiers, whose corrals were on each side of them, lying listlessly in the drizzling mist or quarreling among themselves. They were known by this time all over the camp, and the demoralized, desperate men watched the decent Frenchwomen with that most humanizing of emotions, respect.

Do you see them, those gaunt, heart-sick women, shoulder to shoulder, indomitable in the patient use of their intelligence, in their long triumphant battle against the weakness and evil in their own nature, which were, as they had known from the first, the only things in the world which could harm them?

What a race to belong to!

Well, then came the end, foreshadowed by weeks of excited rumor, a confused, bewildered period of guesses and half hopes, when nobody, not even the guards, knew what was happening at the front. The camp was all one crazy uproar, no newspaper, no certainty of anything. Our little group of women clung to each other, as the world rocked round them, till the evening when the guards came running to take them to the train. Not an instant to spare; the thousands of other prisoners were yelling in the riot which, the next day, tore the camp to pieces. They huddled on their clothes and fled into the wild confusion of the journey, standing up in locked cattle-cars, frantic to know what was happening, with no idea in the world where they were or where the train was taking them, until the moment when the jolting cars stopped, the locked doors were broken open and French voices out of the darkness cried, “Mesdames, vous êtes chez vous!”

They were at home, at their own station, a faint gray light showing the well-known pointed roofs of their own city, the massive tower of the old Town Hall black against the dawn. On the same platform, where they had seen so many deported prisoners return, vermin-ridden, filthy, half-imbecile, a burden to themselves and their families, there they were, lean and worn and pale, but stronger, better, finer human beings than they had been before. Half-awed by the greatness of their victory, they stood there, like ghosts who had fought their way back from the grave, peering out through the dim light at their own homes.

That’s where the story ought to end, oughtn’t it?

But you know as well as I do that five years have passed since that morning when they stood there, awe-struck and transfigured. And I cannot conceal the fact that I have seen them all again, a good many times since then.

What are they doing with themselves now? Well, the last time I made a round of visits among them, I found the housewives concerned about their preserves and the hang of their skirts; the business-women deep in calculations about how to get around the sinful rate of exchange. The mothers were bringing up their children very hard, as we all do, very much concerned about their knowing the children of the right people and no others. The teachers were grumbling about the delay in the promised raise of their pay and complaining about the tyranny of the Directrice of their Lycée. Young Mme. Baudoin, now that her children are old enough to go to school, often leaves them with the servants and runs off to Brussels or Paris for a few days of fun. All the returned hostages have grown quite stout, and they have taken up bridge whist with enthusiasm, once more.

As for Octavie, the last time I saw her, she was on fire with interest over a little green-house she was having built back of the kitchen, so that she might have fresh green vegetables the year around. It was very hard to achieve such a thing, what with the lack of workmen, the scarcity of bricks, and the high price of glass. But Octavie was sure she could manage it.

And so am I. Octavie can always manage anything she tries for.

OLD MAN WARNER

I must warn you at the outset that unless you or some of your folks came from Vermont, it is hardly worth your while to read about Old Man Warner. You will not be able to see anything in his story except, as we say in Vermont, a “gape and swallow” about nothing. Well, I don’t claim much dramatic action for the story of old man Warner, but I am setting it down on the chance that it may fall into the hands of some one brought up on Vermont stories as I was. I know that for him there will be something in Old Man Warner’s life, something of Vermont, something we feel and cannot express, as we feel the incommunicable aura of a personality.

The old man has been a weight on the collective mind of our town ever since I was a little girl, and that is a long time ago. He was an old man even then. Year after year, as our Board of Selectmen planned the year’s town budget they had this worry about Old Man Warner, and what to do with him. It was not that old Mr. Warner was a dangerous character, or anything but strictly honest and law-abiding. But he had his own way of bothering his fellow citizens.

In his young days he had inherited a farm from his father, back up in Arnold Hollow, where at that time, about 1850, there was a cozy little settlement of five or six farms with big families. He settled there, cultivated the farm, married, and brought up a family of three sons. When the Civil War came, he volunteered together with his oldest boy, and went off to fight in the second year of the war. He came back alone in 1864, the son having fallen in the Battle of the Wilderness. And he went back up to Arnold Hollow to live and there he stayed, although the rest of his world broke up and rearranged itself in a different pattern, mostly centering about the new railroad track in the main valley.

Only the older men returned to the Arnold Hollow settlement to go on cultivating their steep, rocky farms. The younger ones set off for the West, the two remaining Warner boys with the others. Their father and mother stayed, the man hardly ever leaving the farm now even to go to town. His wife said once he seemed to feel as though he never could get caught up on the years he had missed during the war. She said he always had thought the world of his own home.

The boys did pretty well out in Iowa, had the usual ups and downs of pioneer farmers, and by 1898, when their mother died, leaving their father alone at seventy-one, they were men of forty-eight and forty-six, who had comfortable homes to which to invite him to pass his old age.

Everybody in our town began to lay plans about what they would buy at the auction, when Old Man Warner would sell off his things, as the other Arnold Hollow families had. By this time, for one reason or another, the Warners were the only people left up there. The Selectmen planned to cut out the road up into Arnold Hollow, and put the tidy little sum saved from its upkeep into improvements on the main valley thoroughfare. But old Mr. Warner wrote his sons and told the Selectmen that he saw no reason for leaving his home to go and live in a strange place and be a burden to his children, with whom, having seen them at the rarest intervals during the last thirty years, he did not feel very well acquainted. And he always had liked his own home. Why should he leave it? It was pretty late in the day for him to get used to western ways. He’d just be a bother to his boys. He didn’t want to be a bother to anybody, and he didn’t propose to be!

There were a good many protests all round, but of course the Selectmen had not the faintest authority over him, and as quite probably his sons were at heart relieved, nothing was done. The town very grudgingly voted the money to keep up the Arnold Hollow road, but consoled itself by saying freely that the old cuss never had been so very bright and was worse now, evidently had no idea what he was trying to do, and would soon get tired of living alone and “doing for himself.”

That was twenty-two years ago. Selectmen who were then vigorous and middle-aged, grew old, decrepit, died, and were buried. Boys who were learning their letters then, grew up, married, had children, and became Selectmen in their turn. Old Man Warner’s sons grew old and died, and the names of most of his grand-children, scattered all over the West, were unknown to us. And still the old man lived alone in his home and “did for himself.”

Every spring, when road work began, the Selectmen groaned over having to keep up the Arnold Hollow road, and every autumn they tried their best to persuade the old man to come down to a settlement where he could be taken care of. Our town is very poor, and taxes are a heavy item in our calculations. It is just all we can do to keep our schools and roads going, and we grudge every penny we are forced to spend on tramps, paupers, or the indigent sick. Selectmen in whose régime town expenses were high, are not only never reëlected to town office, but their name is a by-word and a reproach for years afterwards. We elect them, among other things, to see to it that town expenses are not high, and to lay their plans accordingly.

Decades of Selectmen, heavy with this responsibility, tried to lay their plans accordingly in regard to Old Man Warner, and ran their heads into a stone wall. One Board of Selectmen after another knew exactly what would happen; the old dumb-head would get a stroke of paralysis, or palsy, or softening of the brain, or something, and the town Treasury would bleed at every pore for expensive medical service, maybe an operation at a hospital, and after that, somebody paid to take care of him. If they could only ship him off to his family! One of the granddaughters, now a middle-aged woman, kept up a tenuous connection with the old man, and answered, after long intervals, anxious communications from the Selectmen. Or if not that, if only they could get him down out of there in the winter, so they would not be saddled with the perpetual worry about what was happening to him, with the perpetual need to break out the snow in the road and go up there to see that he was all right.

But Old Man Warner was still not bright enough to see any reason why he should lie down on his own folks, or why he should not live in his own home. When gentle expostulations were tried, he always answered mildly that he guessed he’d rather go on living the way he was for a while longer; and when blustering was tried, he straightened up, looked the blusterer in the eye, and said he guessed there wasn’t no law in Vermont to turn a man off his own farm, s’long’s he paid his debts, and he didn’t owe any that he knew of.

That was the fact, too. He paid spot cash for what he bought in his semi-yearly trips to the village to “do trading,” as our phrase goes. He bought very little, a couple of pairs of overalls a year, a bag apiece of sugar, and coffee, and rice, and salt, and flour, some raisins, and pepper. And once or twice during the long period of his hermit life, an overcoat and a new pair of trousers. What he brought down from his farm was more than enough to pay for such purchases, for he continued to cultivate his land, less and less of it, of course, each year, but still enough to feed his horse and cow and pig and hens, and to provide him with corn and potatoes and onions. He salted down and smoked a hog every fall and ate his hens when they got too old to lay.

And, of course, as long as he was actually economically independent, the town, groaning with apprehension over the danger to its treasury though it was, could not lay a finger on the cranky old codger. And yet, of course, his economic independence couldn’t last! From one day to the next, something was bound to happen to him, something that would cost the town money.

Each year the Selectmen planning the town expenditures with the concentrated prudence born of hard necessity, cast an uneasy mental glance up Arnold Hollow way, and scringed at the thought that perhaps this was the year when money would have to be taken away from the road or the school fund to pay for Old Man Warner’s doctoring and nursing; and finally for his burial, because as the years went by, even the tenuous western granddaughter vanished: died, or moved, or something. Old Man Warner was now entirely alone in the world.

All during my childhood and youth he was a legendary figure of “sot” obstinacy and queerness. We children used to be sent up once in a while, to take our turn in seeing that the old man was all right. It was an expedition like no other. You turned off the main road and went up the steep, stony winding mountain road, dense with the shade of sugar-maples and oaks. At the top, when your blown horse stopped to rest, you saw before you the grassy lane leading across the little upland plateau where the Arnold Hollow settlement had been. The older people said they could almost hear faint echoes of whetting scythes, and barking dogs, and cheerful homely noises, as there had been in the old days. But for us children there was nothing but a breathlessly hushed, sunny glade of lush meadows, oppressively silent and spooky, with a few eyeless old wrecks of abandoned farm houses, drooping and gray. You went past the creepy place as fast as your horse could gallop, and clattered into the thicket of shivering white birches which grew close to the road like a screen; and then--there was no sensation in my childhood quite like the coming out into the ordered, inhabited, humanized little clearing, in front of Old Man Warner’s home. There were portly hens crooning around on the close-cropped grass, and a pig grunting sociably from his pen at you, and shining milk-pans lying in the sun tilted against the white birch sticks of the wood-pile, and Old Man Warner, himself, infinitely aged and stooped, in his faded, clean overalls, emerging from the barn-door to peer at you out of his bright old eyes and to give you a hearty, “Well, you’re quite a long ways from home, don’t you know it? Git off your horse, can’t ye? I’ve got a new calf in here.” Or perhaps if it were a Sunday, he sat in the sun on the front porch, with a clean shirt on, reading the weekly edition of the _New York Tribune_. He drove two miles every Saturday afternoon, down to his R. F. D. mail-box on the main road, to get this.

You heard so much talk about him down in the valley, so much fussing and stewing about his being so “sot,” and so queer, that it always surprised you when you saw him, to find he was just like anybody else. You saw his calf, and had a drink of milk in his clean, well-scrubbed kitchen, and played with the latest kitten, and then you said good-by for that time, and got on your horse and went back through the birch thicket into the ghostly decay of the abandoned farms, back down the long, stony road to the valley where everybody was so cross with the unreasonable old man for causing them so much worry.

“How _could_ he expect to go along like that, when other old folks, so much younger than he, gave up and acted like other people, and settled down where you could take care of them! The house might burn down over his head, and he with it; or he might fall and break his hip and be there for days, yelling and fainting away till somebody happened to go by; or a cow might get ugly and hook him, and nobody to send for help.” All these frightening possibilities and many others had been repeatedly presented to the old man himself with the elaborations and detail which came from heart-felt alarm about him. But he continued to say mildly that he guessed he’d go on living the way he was for a while yet.

“A _while_!” He was ninety years old.

And then he was ninety-one, and then ninety-two; and we were surer and surer he would “come on the town,” before each fiscal year was over. At the beginning of last winter our Selectmen went up in a body to try to bully or coax the shrunken, wizened old man, now only half his former size, to go down to the valley. He remarked that he “guessed there wasn’t no law in Vermont” and so forth, just as he had to their fathers. He was so old, that he could no longer straighten up as he said it, for his back was helplessly bent with rheumatism, and for lack of teeth he whistled and clucked and lisped a good deal as he pronounced his formula. But his meaning was as clear as it had been thirty years ago. They came sulkily away without him, knowing that they would both be laughed at and blamed, in the valley, because the cussed old crab had got the best of them, again.

Last February, a couple of men, crossing over to a lumber-job on Hemlock Mountain, by way of the Arnold Hollow road, saw no smoke coming out of the chimney, knocked at the door, and, getting no answer, opened it and stepped in. There lay Old Man Warner, dead on his kitchen floor in front of his well-blacked cook-stove. The tiny, crooked, old body was fully dressed, even to a fur cap and mittens, and in one hand was his sharp, well-ground ax. One stove-lid was off, and a charred stick of wood lay half in and half out of the fire box. Evidently the old man had stepped to the fire to put in a stick of wood before he went out to split some more, and had been stricken instantly, before he could move a step. His cold, white old face was composed and quiet, just as it had always been in life.

The two lumbermen fed the half-starved pig and hens and turned back to the valley with the news, driving the old man’s cow and horse in front of them; and in a couple of hours we all knew that Old Man Warner had died, all alone, in his own kitchen.

Well, what do you think! We were as stirred up about it--! We turned out and gave him one of the best funerals the town ever saw. And we put up a good marble tombstone that told all about how he had lived. We found we were proud of him, as proud as could be, the darned old bull-dog, who had stuck it out all alone, in spite of us. We brag now about his single-handed victory over old age and loneliness, and we keep talking about him to the children, just as we brag about our grandfather’s victories in the Civil War, and talk to the children about the doings of the Green Mountain Boys. Old Man Warner has become history. We take as much satisfaction in the old fellow’s spunk, as though he had been our own grandfather, and we spare our listeners no detail of his story: “... And there he stuck year after year, with the whole town plaguing at him to quit. And he earned his own living, and chopped his own wood, and kept himself and the house just as decent, and never got queer and frowzy and half-cracked, but stayed just like anybody, as nice an old man as ever you saw--all alone, all stark alone--beholden to nobody--asking no odds of anybody--yes, sir, and died with his boots on, at ninety-three, on a kitchen floor you could have et off of, ’twas so clean.”

THE IDEAS OF M. BRODARD

During the first winter I spent in the boarding-school on the Rue de Vaugirard, the Brodard sisters were the mainstay of my life. It was not that I needed mainstaying in any of the regular classes, although we were driven like dogs by the grindingly thorough teachers, for lessons are lessons, wherever you find them, hard and tense though they may be in France, easy and loose in America. It was quite another part of our school life which routed me, the training in deportment and manners, carried on in three deadly sessions a week, by a wizened skipping old man, light and dry as a cork.

His little juiceless body was light, but everything else about him was heavy with the somber earnestness of his determination to teach us what he considered the manners of women of the world. Thrice a week we were obliged to begin those lessons by a ceremonious entry into the big salon, four by four, advancing in time to music across the bare shining desert of its waxed floors, counting furtively under our breaths, “one, two, three, four, glide, bend, recover, glide,” as we courtesied to the Directrice, “advance again, one, two, three, four, glide, bend, recover, glide,”--here we saluted the Sous-Directrice--“advance again” (I was always shaking partly with giggles at the absurdity of the whole business, partly with fear of the terrible eye of Professor Delacour), “one, two three, four, glide, bend ...” but usually at this point of my attempted bow to the Professor of Deportment I was harshly told to go back and start the whole agonizing ritual over.

That was before the Brodard girls took me in hand and, flanking me on either side, swept me forward on the crest of their perfect advance and genuflection to the coveted place of safety on the other side of the room where, in a black-robed line, the little girls who had made a correct entry awaited further instructions in the manners of the world.

The support of the three Brodard girls did not stop short when they had engineered me through the matter of getting into a room. The professor himself was not more steeped in a religious sense of the importance of his instruction than were Madeleine, Lucie, and Clotilde Brodard. The insensate inner laughter which constantly threatened to shake the lid of my decorum, was safely muffled by their whole-souled attention as we stood there, watching the elegant gestures and still more elegant immobilities of Professor Delacour, as he explained the lesson of the day.

One day we were taught how to put money into the contribution-box in church, “not with a preoccupied, bored air, nor yet with a complacent smirk, but thus, gravely, with a quiet dignified gesture.” Then he would pass the velvet contribution bag down the line, and forty little girls must each find the right expression, “not bored, or preoccupied, not yet with a complacent, self-conscious look, gravely--quietly--with dignity.”

I can still feel in the pit of my stomach the quiver of mingled terror and mirth with which at twelve years of age, I prepared to be, “not bored or preoccupied, nor yet smirking and complacent, but quiet--dignified--” I would never have lived through it if I had not been hypnotized by the Brodard girls.

Or perhaps we were required to be ladies stepping from a carriage and crossing a side-walk to enter a theater, keenly conscious of the eyes of the crowd on us; but required to seem unaware of spectators, “graceful, moving with a well-bred repose, and above all, unconscious, entirely natural and unconscious.” Then two by two, squirmingly the center of all the eyes in the salon, we crossed the imaginary sidewalk and entered the imaginary door, “quiet, graceful, above all unconscious, entirely natural and unconscious....” Do you suppose for a moment I could have escaped annihilation at the hands of our High-Priest, if Clotilde Brodard had not been my fellow acolyte, applying all her orthodox convictions to the problem set before us?

Yes, the Brodard girls were an example to us all, in and out of the class in deportment, for they were as scrupulously observant of all the rules of good behavior in daily school-life as under the eye of Professor Delacour. Any chance observer would have been sure that they were preparing to enter the wealthiest and most exclusive society, an impression by no means contradicted by the aspect of their mother, a quiet, distinguished, tailored person, who brought them to school at the beginning of the term, and once in a while made the tiresome trip from Morvilliers to Paris to see them. But the Brodards must have had some training in genuine good-breeding as well as the quaint instruction given by Professor Delacour, for they never made any pretensions to wealth or social standing--they said very little of any sort about their home life.

Two years later I spent my Christmas vacation with them, and at once I understood a good deal more about them. Young as I was--fourteen at the time--it was plain to me as it would have been to any observer, that they took their lessons in “society manners” so seriously because society manners and any occasions for using them were the only things lacking in the home where they were so comfortable, so much loved, and so well cared for. They lived on a shabby street in Morvilliers, in a small apartment, with one maid-of-all-work; and although their mother had a genius for keeping everything on a plane of strict gentility, their big, gay, roughly clad, unceremonious father was the ramping red editor of the most ramping red radical newspaper in that part of France, the center of all the anti-everything agitations going on in the region.

As used to happen in Europe, in the far-gone days, when I was fourteen years old (but not at all as it happens now-a-days) what they called ramping and redness looked very plain and obvious to an American. Most of what M. Brodard was making such a fuss about, seemed to me just what everybody at home took for granted: for instance his thesis that every man ought to earn his own living no matter how high his social position might be. I was astonished that anybody could consider that a revolutionary idea. Among other things, M. Brodard was what people would call now-a-days a feminist, expounding hotly his conviction that women should be trusted with the responsibility for the conduct of their own lives, and the earning of their own livings. These opinions found no echo at all in the serious-minded middle-class families of his town, nor indeed in his family, but they were an old story to me. I told him as much, informing him confidently from my wide experience as a child in the impecunious faculty of a western State-University, that everybody in America expected as a matter of course to earn his _and_ her own living--everybody! He accepted this as unquestioningly as I advanced it, with the fresh faith and enthusiasm which upheld him in all the generous quixotism of his life. I believe, indeed, that on the strength of my testimony he actually wrote some editorials about America in his furiously convinced style.

Of course he was the champion of the working classes as against the bourgeoisie, adored by the first and hated by the second. It was an adventure to walk with him along the narrow, cobbled streets of the musty little town. Everywhere the lean, sinewy men in working clothes and the thin women in aprons and without hats, had a quick, flashing look of pleasure to see his great frame come striding vigorously along. Everywhere the artisans stopped their work to call a hearty greeting to him, or to step quickly to meet him, full of some grievance, sure of his sympathy, and comforted by the quick flame of his indignation. And everywhere the very sight of him put a taste of green apples into the mouths of all the well-dressed people. You could see that by the sour expression of their broad, florid faces. The prosperous merchant at the door of his shop frowned, cleared his throat, and turned hastily within doors, as he saw M. Brodard come marching along, humming a tune, his hat cocked light-heartedly over one ear. The lawyer in his black broadcloth coat passed us hurriedly; the women in expensive furs stepped high, drew their long skirts about them, and looked him straight in the eye, with an expression half fear, half horror. This last made him break out into the hearty, full-throated laugh, always close to the surface with him--the laugh that was as characteristic a part of him as the shape of his nose.

I understood now why Mme. Brodard sent the girls away to school. They would have been outcasts in any bourgeoise school in their own town. Yet M. Brodard was a great champion of the public schools and never lost an opportunity of defending against their bitter critics the public lycées for girls, then just struggling into being in France. I wondered a little that he should allow his daughters to go to such a boarding-school as ours. But it seemed that the angry resistance of the moneyed and pious families of Morvilliers had up to that time prevented the establishment of a public lycée for girls there. This enabled Mme. Brodard to steer past another dangerous headland in the complicated course of her life. Perhaps, also, warm-hearted M. Brodard was not inclined to be too hard on his girls, whom he fondly loved, after the adoring manner of French fathers, nor to expect too much from his devoted wife in the way of conforming to his ideas.

Even at that time, poor Mme. Brodard’s life was all one miracle of adroit achievement in reconciling irreconcilable elements and effecting impossible compromises. She had married her husband when they were both young (he must have been an irresistible suitor), and before his hot-headed sympathies for the under-dog had absorbed him. Like a good and devoted French wife, she never admitted that anything her Bernard did was other than what she would wish. But she remained exactly what she had been at the time of her marriage, and although she was deeply attached to her kind and faithful husband and made the best of homes for him, she had not the slightest intention of changing a hair or becoming anything but a good bourgeoise, a devoted believer in social distinctions, in the Church, in the laboring classes _as such and in their places_, and above all in the excellence of owning property and inheriting money.

On this last point M. Brodard went much further than anything I had heard discussed at home, and poured out incessantly in brilliant editorials a torrent of scorn, laughter, hatred, and denunciation, upon the sacred institution of inheritance, the very keystone of the French social edifice. “How ridiculous,” he used to write on mornings when no other forlorn hope stood in special need of a harebrained charge, “that the mere chance of birth, or a personal caprice, should put vast sums of unearned wealth into the hands of a man who has not had the slightest connection with its production. Property, the amassing of wealth by a man who has had the acumen and force to produce it ... we may have two opinions about that, about whether he should be allowed to keep for himself all he can lay his hands on. But there can be no two opinions about the hilarious idiocy of the theory that his grown-up son has any inherent right to possess that wealth, his son who has no more to do with it than the Emperor of China, save by a physiological accident. A hundred years from now, people will be laughing at our imbecile acquiescence in such a theory, as we now laugh at the imbecile acquiescence of whole provinces and kingdoms in the Middle Ages, passed from the hand of one master to another, because somebody had married somebody else.”

Mme. Brodard used to say resignedly, that she minded such editorials least of all. “That is a principle that will never touch _our_ lives!” she said with melancholy conviction, for her modest dowry was the extent of their fortune and of their expectations. She herself had been an orphan and all the Brodard elders were dead, having left nothing to the family of such an enemy to society as they considered Bernard to be.