Chapter 7

Up to now, as I have told you, the sauf-conduit matter, except on the last day I was at Meaux, was the thinnest sort of formality. I had to have one to leave the commune, but the blank forms were lying around everywhere. I had only to stop at the hotel at Couilly, step into the café, pick up a form and ask the proprietor to fill it out, and that was all that was necessary. I might have passed it on to anyone, for, although my name was written on it, no one ever took the trouble to fill out the description. The ticket-seller at the station merely glanced at the paper in my hand when I bought a ticket, and the gendarmes at the ticket window in Paris, when there were any,--often there were none--did no more. Of course, the possession of a sauf-conduit presupposes all one's papers en règle, but I never saw anyone examining to make sure of that.

All this is ended. We are evidently under a new régime.

I had my first intimation yesterday, when I had a domiciliary visit from the gendarmes at Esbly. It was a very formal, thorough affair, the two officers treating me, at the beginning of the interview, as if I were a very guilty person.

I was upstairs when I saw them arrive on their wheels. I put down my sewing, and went down to be ready to open the door when they knocked. They didn't knock. I waited a bit, then opened the door. There was no one on the terrace, but I heard their voices from the other side of the house. I went in search of them. They were examining the back of the house as if they had never seen one like it before. When they saw me, one of them said sharply, without the slightest salute: "There is no bell?"

I acknowledged the self-evident fact.

"How does one get in, since you keep your door locked?" he added.

"Well," I replied, with a smile, "as a rule, one knocks."

To that his only reply was: "Your name?"

I gave it to him.

He looked on his paper, repeated it--mispronouncing it, of course, and evidently sure that I did not know how to pronounce it myself.

"Foreigner," he stated.

I could not deny the charge. I merely volunteered "Américaine."

Then the inquiry continued like this. "Live here?"

"Evidently."

"How long have you lived here?"

"Since June, 1914."

That seemed to strike him as a very suspicious date, and he stared at me hard for a moment before he went on: "What for?"

"Principally because I leased the house."

"Why do you remain here in war-time?"

"Because I have nowhere else to go," and I tried not to smile.

"Why don't you go home?"

"This is my home."

"Haven't you any home in America?"

I resisted telling him that it was none of his business, and did my best to look pathetic--it was that, or laugh--as I answered: "Alas! I have not."

This seemed to strike both of them as unbelievable, and they only stared at me as if trying to put me out of countenance.

In the meantime, some of the people of Huiry, interested always in gendarmes, were standing at the top of the hill watching the scene, so I said: "Suppose you come inside and I will answer your questions there," and I opened the door of the salon, and went in.

They hesitated a moment, but decided to follow me. They stood, very stiffly, just inside the door, looking about with curiosity. I sat down at my desk, and made a motion to them to be seated. I did not know whether or not it was correct to ask gendarmes to sit down, but I ventured it. Evidently it was not correct, for they paid no attention to my gesture.

When they were done looking about, they asked me for my papers.

I produced my American passport. They looked at the huge steel- engraved document with great seriousness. I am sure they had never seen one before. It impressed them--as well it might, in comparison with the civil papers of the French government.

They satisfied themselves that the picture affixed was really I--that the name agreed with that on their books. Of course, they could not read a word of it, but they looked wise. Then they asked me for my French papers. I produced my permis de séjour--permitting me to stay in France provided I did not change my residence, and to which was affixed the same photograph as that on my passport; my declaration of my civil situation, duly stamped; and my "immatriculation," a leaf from the register on which all foreigners are written down, just as we would be if admitted to a hospital or an insane asylum.

The two men put their heads together over these documents-- examined the signatures and the seals with great gravity--with evident regret to find that I was quite en règle.

Finally they permitted me to put the documents all back in the case in which I carry them.

I thought the scene was over. Not at all. They waited until I shut the case, and replaced it in my bag--and then:

"You live alone?" one asked.

I owned that I did.

"But why?"

"Well," I replied, "because I have no family here."

"You have no domestic?"

I explained that I had a femme de ménage.

"Where is she?"

I said that at that moment she was probably at Couilly, but that ordinarily when she was not here, she was at her own home.

"Where is that?" was the next question.

So I took them out on to the terrace again, and showed them Amélie's house.

They stared solemnly at it, as if they had never seen it before, and then one of them turned on me quickly, as if to startle me. "Vous êtes une femme de lettres?"

"It is so written down in my papers," I replied.

"Journaliste?"

I denied my old calling without the quiver of an eyelash. I hadn't a scruple. Besides, my old profession many a time failed me, and it might have been dangerous to have been known as even an ex- journalist today within the zone of military operations.

Upon that followed a series of the most intimate questions anyone ever dared put to me,--my income, my resources, my expectations, my plans, etc.--and all sorts of questions I too rarely put to myself even, and never answer to myself. Practically the only question they did not ask was if I ever intended to marry. I was tempted to volunteer that information, but, as neither man had the smallest sense of humor, I decided it was wiser to let well enough alone.

It was only when they were stumped for another single question that they decided to go. They saluted me politely this time, a tribute I imagine to my having kept my temper under great provocation to lose it, went out of the gate, stood whispering together a few minutes, and gazing back at the house, as if afraid they would forget it, looked up at the plaque on the gate-post, made a note, mounted their wheels, and sprinted down the hill, still in earnest conversation.

I wondered what they were saying to one another. Whatever it was, I got an order early the next morning to present myself at the gendarmerie at Esbly before eleven o'clock.

Père was angry. He seemed to feel, that, for some reason, I was under suspicion, and that it was a man's business to defend me. So, when Ninette brought my perambulator to the gate, there was Père, in his veston and casquette, determined to go with me and see me through.

At Esbly I found a different sort of person--a gentleman--he told me he was not a gendarme by métier, but a volunteer--and, although he put me through practically the same paces, it was different. He was sympathetic, not averse to a joke, and, when it was over, he went out to help me into my baby cart, thanked me for troubling myself, assured me that I was absolutely en règle, and even went so very far as to say that he was pleased to have met me. So I suppose, until the commander at Esbly is changed, I shall be left in peace.

This will give you a little idea of what it is like here. I suppose I needed to be shaken up a bit to make me realize that I was near the war. It is easy to forget it sometimes.

Amélie came this morning with the tale that it was rumored that all foreigners were to be "expelled from the zone des armées." It might be. Still, I am not worrying. "Sufficient to the day," you know.

XVI

September 8, 1915

You have the date quite right.

It is a year ago today--this very 8th of September--since I saw the French soldiers march away across the hill, over what we call the "Champs Madame"--no one knows why--on their way to the battle behind Meaux.

By chance--you could not have planned it, since the time it takes a letter to reach me depends on how interesting the censor finds it-- your celebration of that event reached me on its anniversary.

You are absolutely wrong, however, to pull such a long face over my situation. You write as if I had passed through a year of misery. I have not. I am sure you never got that impression from my letters, and I assure you that I am writing exactly as I feel--I have no façade up for you.

I own it has been a year of tension. It has been three hundred and sixty-five days and a fourth, not one of which has been free from anxiety of some sort or other. Sometimes I have been cold. Sometimes I have been nervous. But all the same, it has been fifty- two weeks of growing respect for the people among whom I live, and of ever-mounting love of life, and never-failing conviction that the sum of it is beauty. I have had to fight for the faith in that, but I have kept it. Always "In the midst of life we are in Death," but not always is death so fine and beautiful a thing as in these days. No one would choose that such things as have come to pass in the last year should be, but since they are, don't be so foolish as to pity me, who have the chance to look on, near enough to feel and to understand, even though I am far enough off to be absolutely safe,--alas! eternally a mere spectator. And speaking of having been cold reminds me that it is beginning to get cold again. We have had heavy hailstorms already, hail as big and hard as dried peas, and I have not as yet been able to get fuel. So I am looking forward to another trying winter. In the spring my coal-dealer assured me that last winter's situation would not be repeated, and I told him that I would take all the coal he could get me. Having said that, I took no further thought of the matter. Up to date he has not been able to get any. The railroad is too busy carrying war material.

I was pained by the tone of your last letter. Evidently mine of the Fourth of July did not please you. Evidently you don't like my politics or my philosophy, or my "deadly parallels," or any of my thoughts about the present and future of my native land. Destroy the letter. Forget it, and we'll talk of other things, and, to take a big jump--

Did you ever keep cats?

There is a subject in which you can find no offence, and if it does not appeal to you it is your own fault.

If you never have kept cats, you have missed lots of fun, you are not half educated, you have not been disciplined at all. / A cat is a wonderful animal, but he is not a bit like what, on first making his acquaintance, you think he is going to be, and he never becomes it.

Now I have been living a year this September with one cat, and part of the time, with two. I am wiser than I used to be. By fits and starts I am more modest.

I used to think that a cat was a tame animal, who lapped milk, slept, rolled up ornamentally on a rug, now and then chased his tail, and now and then played gracefully with a ball, came and sat on your knee when you invited him, and caught mice, if mice came where he was.

All the cats I had seen in the homes of my friends surely did those things. I thought them "so pretty," "so graceful," "so soft," and I always said they "gave a cosy look to a room."

But I had never been intimate with a cat.

When the English soldiers were here a year ago, Amélie came one morning bringing a kitten in her apron. You remember I told you of this. He was probably three months old--so Amélie says, and she knows all about cats. She said off-hand: "C'est un chat du mois de juin." She seems to know what month well-behaved cats ought to be born. So far as I know, they might be born in any old month. He was like a little tiger, with a white face and shirt-front, white paws and lovely green eyes.

He had to have a name, so, as he had a lot of brown, the color of the English uniform, and came to me while the soldiers were here, I named him Khaki. He accepted it, and answered to his name at once. He got well rapidly. His fur began to grow, and so did he.

At first he lived up to my idea of what a kitten should be. He was always ready to play, but he had much more originality than I knew cats to have. He was so amusing that I gave lots of time to him. I had corks, tied to strings, hanging to all the door knobs and posts in the house, and, for hours at a time, he amused himself playing games like basket-ball and football with these corks. I lost hours of my life watching him, and calling Amélie to "come quick" and see him. His ingenuity was remarkable. He would take the cork in his front paws, turn over on his back, and try to rip it open with his hind paws. I suppose that was the way his tiger ancestors ripped open their prey. He would carry the cork, attached to the post at the foot of the staircase, as far up the stairs as the string would allow him, lay it down and touch it gently to make it roll down the stairs so that he could spring after it and catch it before it reached the bottom. All this was most satisfactory. That was what I expected a cat to do.

He lapped his milk all right. I did not know what else to give him. I asked Amélie what she gave hers. She said "soup made out of bread and drippings." That was a new idea. But Amélie's cats looked all right. So I made the same kind of soup for Khaki. Not he! He turned his back on it. Then Amélie suggested bread in his milk. I tried that. He lapped the milk, but left the bread. I was rather in despair. He looked too thin. Amélie suggested that he was a thin kind of a cat. I did not want a thin kind of a cat. I wanted a roly-poly cat.

One day I was eating a dry biscuit at tea time. He came and stood beside me, and I offered him a piece. He accepted it. So, after that, I gave him biscuit and milk. He used to sit beside his saucer, lap up his milk, and then pick up the pieces of biscuit with his paw and eat them. This got to be his first show trick. Everyone came to see Khaki eat "with his fingers."

All Amélie's efforts to induce him to adopt the diet of all the other cats in Huiry failed. Finally I said: "What does he want, Amélie? What do cats, who will not eat soup, eat?"

Reluctantly I got it--"Liver."

Well, I should think he did. He eats it twice a day.

Up to that time he had never talked even cat language. He had never meowed since the day he presented himself at Amélie's and asked for sanctuary.

But we have had, from the beginning, a few collisions of will-power. The first few weeks that he was a guest in my house, I was terribly flattered because he never wanted to sleep anywhere but on my knees. He did not squirm round as Amélie said kittens usually did. He never climbed on my shoulders and rubbed against my face. He simply jumped up in my lap, turned round once, lay down, and lay perfectly still. If I got up, I had to put him in my chair, soothe him a bit, as you would a baby, if I expected him to stay, but, even then, nine times out of ten, as soon as I was settled in another chair, he followed, and climbed into my lap.

Now things that are flattering finally pall. I began to guess that it was his comfort, not his love for me, that controlled him. Well--it is the old story.

But the night question was the hardest. He had a basket. He had a cushion. I have the country habit of going to bed with the chickens. The cat came near changing all that. I used to let him go to sleep in my lap. I used to put him in his basket by the table with all the care that you would put a baby. Then I made a dash for upstairs and closed the doors. Ha! ha! In two minutes he was scratching at the door. I let him scratch. "He must be disciplined," I said. There was a cushion at the door, and finally he would settle' down and in the morning he was there when I woke. "He will learn," I said. H'm!

One night, while I was in my dressing-room, I neglected to latch the bedroom door. When I was ready to get into bed, lo! there was Khaki on the foot of the bed, close against the footboard, fast asleep. Not only was he asleep, but he was lying on his back, with his two white paws folded over his eyes as if to keep the lamplight out of them. Well--I had not the heart to drive him away. He had won. He slept there. He never budged until I was dressed in the morning, when he got up, as if it were the usual thing, and followed, in his most dignified manner, down to breakfast.

Well, that was struggle number one. Khaki had scored.

But, no sooner had I got myself reconciled--I felt pretty shamefaced-- when he changed his plans. The very moment I was ready for bed he wanted to go out. He never meowed. He just tapped at the door, and if that did not succeed, he scratched on the window, and he was so one-idea-ed that nothing turned him from his purpose until he was let out.

For a time I used to sit up for him to come in. I was ashamed to let Amélie know. But, one night, after I had been out in the garden with a lantern hunting for him at midnight, I heard a gentle purring sound, and, after looking in every direction, I finally located him on the roof of the kitchen. Being a bit dull, I imagined that he could not get down. I stood up on a bench under the kitchen window, and called him. He came to the eaves, and I could just reach him, but, as I was about to take him by a leg and haul him down, he retreated just out of my reach, and said what I imagined to be a pathetic "meow." I talked to him. I tried to coax him to come within reach again, but he only went up the roof to the ridgepole and looked down the other side and said "meow." I was in despair, when it occurred to me to get the step- ladder. You may think me impossibly silly, but I never supposed that he could get down.

I went for the key to the grange, pulled out the ladder, and hauled it along the terrace, and was just putting it up, when the little devil leaped from the roof into the lilac bush, swayed there a minute, ran down, scampered across the garden, and dashed up a pear tree, and--well, I think he laughed at me.

Anyway, I was mad. I went in and told him that he might stop out all night for all I cared. Still, I could not sleep for thinking of him--used to comfort--out in the night, and it was chilly. But he had to be disciplined.

I had to laugh in the morning, for he was playing on the terrace when I opened the door, and he had a line of three first-class mice laid out for me. I said: "Why, good morning, Khaki, did mother make him stay out all night? Well, you know he was a naughty cat!"

He gave me a look--I fancied it was quizzical--rolled over, and showed his pretty white belly, then jumped up, gave one look up at the bedroom window, scampered up the salon shutter, crouched on the top, and, with one leap, was through the bedroom window. When I rushed upstairs--to see if he had hurt himself, I suppose,--he was sitting on the foot of the bed, and I think he was grinning.

So much for disciplining a cat.

However, I had learned something--and, evidently, he had also. I had learned that a cat can take care of himself, and has a right to live a cat's life, and he learned that I was dull. We treat each other accordingly. The truth is--he owns me, and the house, and he knows it.

Since then he asks for the door, and gets it when he asks. He goes and comes at his own sweet will. When he wants to come in, in the daytime, he looks in at all the windows until he finds me. Then he stands on his hind legs and beats the window with his paws until I open it for him. In the night, he climbs to the bedroom window, and taps until he wakens me. You see, it is his house, not mine, and he knows it. What is the drollest of all--he is never one minute late to his meals.

He is familiarly known to all my neighbors as "the Grand Duc de Huiry" and he looks the part. Still, from my point of view, he is not an ideal cat. He is not a bit caressing. He never fails to purr politely when he comes in. But he is no longer playful. He never climbs up to my shoulder and rubs against my face as some of Amélie's commoner cats will do. He is intelligent and handsome--just a miniature tiger, and growls like a new arrival from the jungle when he is displeased-- and he is a great ratter. Moreover Amélie has decided that he is an "intellectuel."

One morning, when he had been out all night, and did not return until almost breakfast-time, he was sitting on my knee, making his toilette, while I argued the matter with him. Amélie was dusting. I reproached him with becoming a rôdeur, and I told him that I should be happier about him if I knew where he was every night, and what he did.

He yawned as if bored, jumped off my knees and began walking round the library, and examining the books.

"Well," remarked Amélie, "I can tell you where he goes. He has a class in Maria's grange, where the wheat is stored--a class of mice. He goes every evening to give conferences on history and the war, and he eats up all the stupid pupils."

I had to laugh, but before I could ask her how she knew, Khaki jumped up on top of the lowest line of books, and disappeared behind.

Amélie shrugged her shoulders, and said: "Voila! He has gone to prepare his next conference." And he really had chosen a line of books on history.

You see Amélie knows beasties better than I do. There really is a sort of freemasonry between certain people and dumb animals. I have not a bit of it, though I love them. You would adore to see Amélie play with cats. She knows how. And as for her conversation with them, it is wonderful. I remarked the fact to her one day, when her morning salutations with the cats had been unusual. She replied, with her customary shrug: "Eh bien, Madame, toujours, entre eux, les bêtes se comprennent."

So much in brief for cat number one. Number two is a different matter.

In the spring, four kittens were born at Amélie's. They were all sorts of mongrels. There was a dear little fluffy, half angora, which I named Garibaldi, and Amélie, as usual, vulgarized it at once into "Didine." There was a long-legged blue kitten which I dubbed Roi Albert. There was a short-legged, sturdy little energetic striped one which I called General Joffre, and a yellow and black fellow, who was, of course, Nicolas. I regretted there weren't two more, or three.

Garibaldi was about the dearest kitten I ever saw. He attached himself to me at once. When he was only a round fluffy ball he would try to climb into my lap whenever I went to see the kittens. The result was that when he was still very young, he came to live with me, and I never saw so altogether loveable an animal. He has all the cat qualities I ever dreamed of. As Amélie says: "II a tout pour lui, et il ne manque que la parole." And it is true. He crawls up my back. He will lie for hours on my shoulder purring his little soft song into my ear. He will sit beside me on my desk, looking at me with his pretty yellow eyes, as if he and I were the whole of his world. If I walk in the garden, he is under my feet. If I go up to Amélie's he goes too.