Part 11
* * * * *
Four months from the time she landed in Paris her money was almost gone and she was quitting the city with barely enough in her pocket to take her back to Marshallton. As simply as she had come to Paris, she now went home. She _belonged_ to Marshallton. It was a very good thing for Marshallton that she did.
She gave fifty dollars to the mother of baby Jacques (that was why she had so very little left) and she promised to send her ten dollars every month as soon as she herself should be again a wage-earner. Mrs. Putnam and her niece, inconsolable at her loss, went down to the Gare du Quai d'Orsay to see her off, looking more in keeping with the elegant travelers starting for the Midi, than Ellen did. Her place, after all, had been at the Gare de l'Est. As they shook hands warmly with her, they gave her a beautiful bouquet, the evident cost of which stabbed her to the heart. What she could have done with that money!
"You have simply transformed the _vestiaire_, Miss Boardman," said Mrs. Putnam with generous but by no means exaggerating ardor. "It would certainly have sunk under the waves if you hadn't come to the rescue. I wish you _could_ have stayed, but thanks to your teaching we'll be able to manage anything now."
After the train had moved off, Mrs. Putnam said to her niece in a shocked voice: "Third class! That long trip to Bordeaux! She'll die of fatigue. You don't suppose she is going back because she didn't have _money_ enough to stay! Why, I would have paid anything to keep her." The belated nature of this reflection shows that Ellen's teachings had never gone more than skin deep and that there was still something lacking in Mrs. Putnam's grasp on the realities of contemporary life.
* * * * *
Ellen was again too horribly seasick to suffer much apprehension about submarines. This time she had as cabin-mate in the unventilated second-class cabin the "companion" of a great lady traveling of course in a suite in first-class. This great personage, when informed by her satellites' nimble and malicious tongues of Ellen's personality and recent errand in France, remarked with authority to the group of people about her at dinner, embarking upon the game which was the seventh course of the meal: "I disapprove wholly of these foolish American volunteers ... ignorant, awkward, provincial boors, for the most part, knowing nothing of all the exquisite old traditions of France, who thrust themselves forward. They make America a laughing-stock."
Luckily, Ellen, pecking feebly at the chilly boiled potato brought her by an impatient stewardess, could not know this characterization.
* * * * *
She arrived in Marshallton, and was astonished to find herself a personage. Her departure had made her much more a figure in the town life than she had ever been when she was still walking its streets. The day after her departure the young reporter had written her up in the _Herald_ in a lengthy paragraph, and not a humorous one either. The Sunday which she passed on the ocean after she left New York Mr. Wentworth in one of his prayers implored the Divine blessing on "one of our number who has left home and safety to fulfil a high moral obligation and who even now is risking death in the pursuance of her duty as she conceives it." Every one knew that he meant Ellen Boardman, about whom they had all read in the _Herald_. Mr. Pennypacker took, then and there, a decision which inexplicably lightened his heart. Being a good business-man, he did not keep it to himself, but allowed it to leak out the next time the reporter from the _Herald_ dropped around for chance items of news. The reporter made the most of it, and Marshallton, already spending much of its time in discussing Ellen, read that "Mr. John S. Pennypacker, in view of the high humanitarian principles animating Miss Boardman in quitting his employ, has decided not to fill her position but to keep it open for her on her return from her errand of mercy to those in foreign parts stricken by the awful war now devastating Europe."
Then Ellen's letters began to arrive, mostly to Maggie, who read them aloud to the deeply interested boarding-house circle. The members of this, basking in reflected importance, repeated their contents to every one who would listen. In addition the young reporter published extracts from them in the _Herald_, editing them artfully, choosing the rare plums of anecdote or description in Ellen's arid epistolary style. When her letter to him came, he was plunged into despair because she had learned that he would have to pay part of his expenses if he drove an ambulance on the French front. By that time his sense of humor was in such total eclipse that he saw nothing ridiculous in the fact that he could not breathe freely another hour in the easy good-cheer of his carefree life. He revolved one scheme after another for getting money; and in the meantime let no week go by without giving some news from their "heroic fellow-townswoman in France." Highland Springs, the traditional rival and enemy of Marshallton, felt outraged by the tone of proprietorship with which Marshallton people bragged of their delegate in France.
So it happened that when Ellen, fearfully tired, fearfully dusty after the long ride in the day-coach, and fearfully shabby in exactly the same clothes she had worn away, stepped wearily off the train at the well-remembered little wooden station, she found not only Maggie, to whom she had telegraphed from New York, but a large group of other people advancing upon her with outstretched hands, crowding around her with more respectful consideration than she had ever dreamed of seeing addressed to her obscure person. She was too tired, too deeply moved to find herself at home again, too confused, to recognize them all. Indeed a number of them knew her only by her fame since her departure. Ellen made out Maggie, who embraced her, weeping as loudly as when she had gone away; she saw Mrs. Wilson who kissed her very hard and said she was proud to know her; she saw with astonishment that Mr. Pennypacker himself had left business in office hours! He shook her hand with energy and said: "Well, Miss Boardman, very glad to see you safe back. We'll be expecting you back at the old stand just as soon as you've rested up from the trip." The intention of the poilu who had taken her in his arms and kissed her, had not been more cordial. Ellen knew this and was touched to tears.
There was the reporter from the _Herald_, too, she saw him dimly through the mist before her eyes, as he carried the satchel, the same he had carried five months before with the same things in it. And as they put her in the "hack" (she had never ridden in the hack before) there was Mr. Wentworth, the young minister, who leaned through the window and said earnestly: "I am counting on you to speak to our people in the church parlors. You must tell us about things over there."
* * * * *
Well, she did speak to them! She was not the same person, you see, she had been before she had spent those evenings in the Gare de l'Est. She wanted them to know about what she had seen, and because there was no one else to tell them, she rose up in her shabby suit and told them herself. The first thing that came into her mind as she stood before them, her heart suffocating her, her knees shaking under her, was the strangeness of seeing so many able-bodied men not in uniform, and so many women not in mourning. She told them this as a beginning and got their startled attention at once, the men vaguely uneasy, the women divining with frightened sympathy what it meant to see all women in black.
Then she went on to tell them about the work for the refugees ... not for nothing had she made out the card-catalogue accounts of those life-histories. "There was one old woman we helped ... she looked some like Mrs. Wilson's mother. She had lost three sons and two sons-in-law in the war. Both of her daughters, widows, had been sent off into Germany to do forced labor. One of them had been a music-teacher and the other a dressmaker. She had three of the grandchildren with her. Two of them had disappeared ... just lost somewhere. She didn't have a cent left, the Germans had taken everything. She was sixty-seven years old and she was earning the children's living by doing scrub-woman's work in a slaughter-house. She had been a school-teacher when she was young.
"There were five little children in one family. The mother was sort of out of her mind, though the doctors said maybe she would get over it. They had been under shell-fire for five days, and she had seen three members of her family die there. After that they wandered around in the woods for ten days, living on grass and roots. The youngest child died then. The oldest girl was only ten years old, but she took care of them all somehow and used to get up nights when her mother got crazy thinking the shells were falling again."
Ellen spoke badly, awkwardly, haltingly. She told nothing which they might not have read, perhaps had read in some American magazine. But it was a different matter to hear such stories from the lips of Ellen Boardman, born and brought up among them. Ellen Boardman had _seen_ those people, and through her eyes Marshallton looked aghast and for the first time believed that what it saw was real, that such things were happening to real men and women like themselves.
When she began to tell them about the Gare de l'Est she began helplessly to cry, but she would not stop for that. She smeared away the tears with her handkerchief wadded into a ball, she was obliged to stop frequently to blow her nose and catch her breath, but she had so much to say that she struggled on, saying it in a shaking, uncertain voice, quite out of her control. Standing there before those well-fed, well-meaning, prosperous, _safe_ countrymen of hers, it all rose before her with burning vividness, and burningly she strove to set it before them. It had all been said far better than she said it, eloquently described in many highly paid newspaper articles, but it had never before been said so that Marshallton understood it. Ellen Boardman, graceless, stammering, inarticulate, yet spoke to them with the tongues of men and angels because she spoke their own language. In the very real, very literal and wholly miraculous sense of the words, she brought the war--_home_--to them.
* * * * *
When she sat down no one applauded. The women were pale. Some of them had been crying. The men's faces were set and inexpressive. Mr. Wentworth stood up and cleared his throat. He said that a young citizen of their town (he named him, the young reporter) desired greatly to go to the French front as an ambulance driver, but being obliged to earn his living, he could not go unless helped out on his expenses. Miss Boardman had been able to get exact information about that. Four hundred dollars would keep him at the front for a year. He proposed that a contribution should be taken up to that end.
He himself went among them, gathering the contributions which were given in silence. While he counted them afterwards, the young reporter, waiting with an anxious face, swallowed repeatedly and crossed and uncrossed his legs a great many times. Before he had finished counting the minister stopped, reached over and gave the other young man a handclasp. "I envy you," he said.
He turned to the audience and announced that he had counted almost enough for their purpose when he had come upon a note from Mr. Pennypacker saying that he would make up any deficit. Hence they could consider the matter settled. "Very soon, therefore, our town will again be represented on the French front."
The audience stirred, drew a long breath, and broke into applause.
Whatever the rest of the Union might decide to do, Marshallton, Kansas, had come into the war.
EYES FOR THE BLIND
She woke in the morning to the sound of her alarm clock, an instrument of torture which, before the war, she had never heard. At once there descended upon her two overpowering sensations, one an intense desire to stay in bed and rest, the other the realization that she had no time to lose if she was to be at her office on time. She was up at once, and began making a hasty toilet with cold water. It was so hasty that she had no time to think, even in passing, of the old days when waking up meant ringing for some one to open shutters, close windows and bring hot water, breakfast, and the mails. By the time she had finished her Spartan toilet, her _concierge_, very sleepy-eyed and frowsy, rang at the door and handed in a bowl of _cafe au lait_ and a piece of bread, with the morning paper folded across the tray. The Directrice sat down in her cheerless dining-room and ate her breakfast, reading, eagerly at first, and then grimly, the communique of the day. "No advance anywhere along the lines; a few _coups-de-main_ here and there--indecisive results." Another day like all the others had begun, a day when hope was forbidden, when the only thing left was to endure and do the task at hand. For her, personally, there was nothing to fear in the lists of the dead, because she had found there, two long years before, the name which alone gave meaning to her life.
She put on her hat without looking in the mirror. This is a strange action in a Frenchwoman, but the Directrice was already preoccupied by the work awaiting her in her office. As she walked rapidly along through the rain, she was turning over in her mind the possibilities for one of her charges, Philippe, the childlike one who was perfectly willing to sit down there in the comfortable home provided for him and allow himself to be forever supported. It was not, Heaven knows, that our Directrice would not have liked forever and ever to have him supported and cared for like any child. But she had the instinctive grasp on the exigencies of human nature which is characteristic of her nation, and she knew that if he were to be again a normal human being, he must be roused to a sense of responsibility for his own life, in spite of the dreadful calamity which war had brought him. But how could he _be_ aroused? He had shown no interest in learning how to be a professional knitter; he had only dabbled in clay-modeling; his typewriting continued indifferent--what could there be which she had not yet tried?
Never before, until the war took away not only the meaning of her life but all her goods, had she known what it was to walk at that dismally early hour in the morning through a dismally rainy street. But now she was so absorbed with the needs of another that she did not at all feel the rain in her face or see the mud on her shoes, and had not even the most passing pang of pity for herself, losing her youth from one day to another, with very little to hope for and,--alas!--nothing left to fear.
As she turned into the door of her institution, she had an inspiration. The only thing to do for Philippe was to turn to account the inimitable charm of his personality, since that was about all the equipment he seemed to have. Why could not he be a traveling salesman? But how _could_ a blind man be a traveling salesman? Ah, that was the thing for the Directrice to contrive! That was why she was there!
* * * * *
She was, as usual, the first person to arrive at her office, although the blind men, just coming out from breakfast, were already standing idling about the hall before going to their classes, lighting cigarettes and chatting. They recognized her quick, light, steady step, and all their blind and mutilated faces lit up with welcome. Hers also. Although they could not see it, she gave to every one the smile, the animated look, the pretty, sideways toss of her head, the coquettish poise of her upright little figure, which she would have given to him seeing. It was strange to see her there, all those blind faces turned towards her, and hers irradiating a light and warmth--Well, perhaps, they saw it, after all.... Then she dismissed them to their work, with peremptory affection. "Off with you now, boys; don't stand fooling around here. There isn't a minute to lose, with all you have to do." They nodded, saluted, and dispersed like obedient children.
She went into her office to begin the day's work. The light which had transformed her face died out into fatigue, as she sat opening one after another of the innumerable letters which lay on her desk, most of them pitiful, some of them very foolish, all from people who were clamoring for help. The stenographers came in; the professors began to arrive; the telephone bell rang tyrannically over and over; one of the men came groping his way back from his class to complain fretfully that his teacher had treated him with insufficient respect; another arrived, his cane tapping in front of him, beaming with pride, and held out a perfectly typewritten page to show his progress; a third one limped to the door to say he had a sore throat, and please would the Directrice take care of it herself and not turn him over to the nurse, who did not understand him? The minutes passed,--an hour, a precious hour was gone, and nothing yet accomplished!
The telephone rang again, the Directrice was called and received over the wire a communication from a lady who announced herself as the Marquise de Rabat-Sigur, _nee_ Elizabeth Watkins. That considerable personage said she would like to do something for the war-blind ("everybody in my set has an _aveugle de guerre_") and on being questioned as to her competence, stated squarely that all she could do was to take them out for walks, and please, if she did, she would like a good-looking one, not one of those with the dreadfully mutilated faces. The Directrice turned away from the telephone, a hard line of scorn at the corner of her lips, her eyes very tired and old. She had not as yet been able to attend to any of her letters.
She now began dictating rapidly the answer to one of them when the bare-kneed boy-scout page came hurriedly to say that Pigier, the one who had the bad face-wounds, was worse, was in one of his "spells," and the nurse could do nothing with him. Blindness always comes of course from head-wounds, and head-wounds mean the disorganization of all the nervous centers. The Directrice left her work and went upstairs into the sick man's room and sat down by his bed. The great-shouldered, massively muscled fellow clutched at her like a scared child, and began in a rapid, hysteric whisper to tell her of the awful things he saw in his eternity of blackness. For he was not really blind, he told her, he saw, yes he saw, but only not what was really there ... dreadful things, horrible things, dead men in the trenches after an attack, corpses rotting in the rain, artillery wagons driving headlong over men only half-dead--he told all these visions to her, all, and as he spoke he felt them grow faded, harmless, unreal. But she grew pale as she listened, and turned rather sick.
When he had poured out all his terrors and she had assured him--as she had forty times before--that they were all imaginary, just the result of his nerves not being settled yet; that as soon as he got back his appetite and could take more exercise out of doors, and learn to roller skate in the gymnasium, he would find they would all disappear. Having transferred to her all his horrors, he felt himself immensely lightened and comforted. He promised her that if she went with him to the gymnasium, he would get up and dress and see if he could learn to stand up on the roller skates. She left him, her imagination full of new nightmare images to beset her next sleepless night, and hurried down to her office again, making a hopeful calculation that while he was dressing--this is a lengthy process with a newly blinded man--she could certainly have time to answer some letters.
As she entered her office, a pretty young girl, richly dressed, with a sweet, child's face, flushed with emotion, sprang up, grasped her arm and said, in a trembling voice of nervous determination: "Madame, you do not know me, but I have come to you at a critical moment in my life. I have decided that I will either go into a convent, or marry a blind man. I have plenty of money, I can support a blind man." At the expression which came into the face of the Directrice, her voice rose hysterically. "Don't laugh at me! Don't try to dissuade me. I detest the life at home. My family do not understand me. I have run away from home this morning to tell you this. My decision is irrevocable."
The Directrice, feeling herself a thousand years old in worldly wisdom, summoned all her patience and sat down to tell her what she had told all the other pretty, child-faced young ladies who had come with such fixed determination. She said clearly and firmly that it was not to be thought of; that her visitor was far too young to make any such decision; that it would be unfair to any blind man to put him in a position where he would certainly soon feel himself a terrible drag on a young life; that she would not go into a convent, either, but would stay at home with her parents, like a sensible girl, until she married a man like herself. These were the words she pronounced, very simple, common-sense, conversational words, which would have had no effect in any one's else mouth. But what she was spoke more loudly than what she said. The Directrice did not wear the black and penitential garb of a Mother Superior, but she had acquired, through intensive experience, all of a Mother Superior's firm, penetrating authority and calm manner. Not a trace of the amused scorn she felt for the silly child penetrated to the surface of her quiet manner. In ten minutes, the girl was crying, quite relieved that her visit had come to nothing, and the Directrice was calling for a cab to take her home. She herself put the weeping child into the carriage, and stood looking after it with a tolerant smile on her firm lips. "Was I ever as young as that?" she asked herself as she went back to her office.
As she turned again to the letter from the important members of the American colony who wanted to be put on the Governing Committee of the institution because of the other distinguished names there, her blind man, the one who had had the horrors, appeared at the door, dressed, still animated with the new energy given him by his Directrice, and held out his hand to her. She jumped up laughing--how could she manage that laugh!--and told him he looked as though he were leading her out to dance. By this device she managed so that, while in reality leading him, he seemed to be leading her down the steps and across the courtyard, to the gymnasium.
While the instructor put on his roller skates and he started on his first round, she stayed, her face all a-sparkle with fun and interest, calling out joking encouragements to him, and making such merry fun of his awkwardness that he laughed back at her. One quite forgot for the moment that he had not only no eyes, but very little face left.
Then, seeing him well started, already taking an interest in the new sport, she turned back across the courtyard. Now that it was no longer needed, the sparkle and animation had all gone from her face again. She looked very old and tired, and cross and severe; and one of the volunteer teachers (a wealthy woman, coming in to give a half-hour of English in the intervals of her shopping and dressmaking expeditions) thought what a disagreeable-looking woman the Directrice was.