Part 2
We climbed again to this eyrie and he wished me "bon soir." Again I was so glad for French because, as he was turning down my bed,--I told him that "je viens de venir d'Amérique," and that I did not wish "que l'on me réveille." He was quite genial and said good-night all over again.
My room is the queerest of the queer. There is a worn red carpet with rainbow figures, the paper is green and yellow striped--mild, but incontestably green and yellow. The ceiling is slanted and I have one dormer window. There is a marble mantelpiece and a huge bed; also a marble washstand, which I feel must be a bit of ornamentation looted from Napoleon's tomb. I looked out of the window, but it's perfectly black. There may be a blank wall six inches away, or a court or a forest of trees or almost anything for all I can see. I stood in the middle of the room with my hands on my hips and looked around and smiled. There was my own fur coat which is Northampton to me, and my black sweater which is Bailey's, and my suitcases and myself--all of us dropped into this garret room.
When I went to lay my weary--oh, so weary--bones between the sheets, I found the latter to be fashioned apparently out of heavy canvas. It was like nestling down between two jibs of the good swordfisher, "Edmund Black." The pillow is enormous and uncompromising--my own little baby pillow Mrs. Bigelow put in her trunk for me. Still, as I describe them, they look very good to me and I think I'll go back to them. It is getting light, I think, and pouring rain, I'll try looking out again.
Tuesday.
I have seen it! I have seen it! Paris is the most romantic place in the world. Talk about London! Oh, I never shall forget this afternoon. I went to sleep almost before I stopped writing the above in pencil and never woke up until twelve o'clock. I asked the femme de chambre whether or not any one had called for me, thinking Miss Curtis might have tried to find me, and she said that I had had two telephone calls, and that a young gentleman had been here in a taxi. It was Mr. Baxter, of course, because he said he would take me back to the Quai d'Orsay and help me with my trunk and customs and prefect of police; and there, they'd told him that I was asleep, and not to be waked up! I felt hopeless at the thought of having to go by myself without any idea of what to do! I suppose Mrs. Bigelow may have called me up. I had no idea of Miss Curtis's whereabouts and I knew that the Shurtleffs are at their headquarters all day long and I had no idea where that was, and I knew that Mrs. Bigelow was at the other end of Paris and couldn't help me even if I did see her.
I didn't feel like lunch, so I took the map of Paris and went out in the dripping streets with no umbrella. I was so confused and so embarrassed with my map, which I didn't dare open; I felt that people were staring at me, and my rubbers and umbrella were in my trunk and my coat and hat and feet were soaking. I just wandered along and finally came to a taxi. I decided to go to Mrs. Shurtleff's house, whether she was in or not. So I said, 6 Place Denfert-Rochereau, and got out at a big apartment house. I walked in, and there was no elevator boy or telephone girl or anything, so I rang at the first apartment and asked for Dr. Shurtleff. The maid said he wasn't there, and I asked if she could tell what apartment he lived in and she said she didn't know; finally her face lighted up and she showed me into a little parlor and said, "You come for a consultation! I'll go and get the doctor." Heavens and earth, I'd stumbled into a physician's office. I said, "No, no!" and went out. I thought I'd have to ring at all the apartments to find the Shurtleffs, but I found a concierge, tremendously en négligé, who pointed to a little elevator and said, "third floor." I got in expecting to be followed, but bang went the doors without apparently word or sign from any one and up I shot. Up and up; and I was scared to death. I felt sure I was going through the roof; but eventually we stopped and I got out and rang at the first bell to the left, as I'd been told. No answer; I rang and rang; still no answer. I gathered that they were at the headquarters, so I sat down on the top step of the stair and wrote on the back of my visiting card that I was at the Hôtel des St. Pères. I was a little discouraged, because it meant that I would have to wait at the hotel until some one could call or write. In the mean time the lift was standing inert and I couldn't make it go down--of course, I wouldn't have gone down in it myself for the gross receipts. I could hear people ringing wildly down below and pretty soon a man came leaping up the stairs. I asked in my prettiest French if he could make the thing go down, and he couldn't any more than I. He started to go into an opposite apartment, and as the door opened I heard some one greet him in English. I jumped up; it was the first English I'd heard since the others had left me. I rushed forward and almost put my foot in the door, for I was desperate. I asked the woman who had spoken, one of the most beautiful women I ever saw, if she knew where Dr. Shurtleff lived. She said, "I am Mrs. Shurtleff. Why, you must be Miss Root." And she threw both her arms around me and pulled me into their living-room. There were Miss Curtis and Dr. Shurtleff and a blazing wood-fire. If that wasn't heaven on earth to me, I should be ungrateful to admit it. We talked and talked, and oh, but I was glad to see them! They never had received my telegram and the Espagne had not been announced in Paris, the concierge had directed me to the wrong apartment, but now everything was straightened out. It just happened that they were taking an afternoon off, the Shurtleffs, that is; the others left very soon. I hadn't had anything to eat since on the train the night before, and I felt weak and horrid, and everything still rocked; so Mrs. Shurtleff gave me hot tea and nut bread and cold chicken, and warmed me through and through. She is an angel; she looks like one of the old Gibson drawings,--beautiful, and so charming and enthusiastic, and much younger, too, than I had thought, with light-brown hair and blue eyes and pink cheeks.
The first thing to decide was where I should live permanently, and Mrs. Shurtleff took me that afternoon to two pensions, the best and nearest to the work. One was very near, just across a little green square from the Shurtleffs'. The other was on an adorable little street in the old Latin Quarter, where all the painters from time immemorial have lived. It was dark, and no conveniences, no heat, no running water, and no bathtub in the whole house. But I peeped into one of the rooms and there was a wood-fire singing so adorably, and a lovely mantelpiece and gold mirror, and a piano with candles. That was nine francs a day, and although much more inconvenient and far-away, I wanted to go there. The cook showed us around and I promised to call on Wednesday and see the landlady.
After that Mrs. Shurtleff took me to do an errand--and I saw Paris for the first time. I think that the Seine, and the bridges, and lines of straight trees are the most beautiful things I've ever seen. We looked up the Champs Élysées as the sun was setting and the lights were beginning to twinkle through a violet haze. It was like a dream city. I sat on the extremest edge of the seat in the taxi gazing and gazing at everything. Mrs. Shurtleff delighted in my delight, and she said it made her live again the enthusiasm and wonder that she felt when she came here ten years ago. So many queer things I noticed that she grew used to years ago; the door-handles in the middle of the doors, the lamp-posts in the middle of the sidewalks, and funny quaint little things like that. We saw a trolley-car marked "Bastille," and I burst out laughing. Why, it seemed like marking the ugliest, most ordinary or modern thing "Guillotine" or "Robespierre"! Think of getting a transfer or "watching your step" going to the Bastille.
I went to the Vestiaire yesterday morning where I am to work. It is wonderfully interesting. All kinds of clothing are piled everywhere and there is an office where people apply, and everything is very business-like. The refugees are pathetic to the last degree, and already I have seen many, many people, and heard of cases, that I couldn't believe existed in the world. I haven't done any real work yet; but here is something I want to tell you. We need everything, particularly warm things, blankets; and big wide shoes above everything. I saw men turn away some people to-day, and I tell you I'd like to snatch these bedclothes out of the hotel and go find old people and give them to them. But any kind of clothes! I saw a pile of sticks, about a hundred, stored in the corner, and I asked Mrs. Shurtleff what they were for and she said for the blind. They can't afford to buy them. Think of being blinded and then not being able to afford a few pennies to buy a cane.
I find that Paris is much more alive and happy than I had expected, although the individual cases are so very hard.
I have decided on my pension, and I like Mme. H----. My room certainly is comfort itself, for Paris, with lovely sunlight and trees and a park below. I move in November 4th, and I am glad to have it settled. Living is so expensive that many of the best pensions have had to close, so I feel I am wonderfully lucky.
Yesterday afternoon I covered about twelve acres of streets and buildings in fulfilling various official formalities, and now call all the prefects of police by their first names. I had no trouble, but it is tedious to go from one place to another. My official title on the Paris register is now "Demoiselle de Vestiaire," and as that can refer both to relief work and to check girls in restaurants, I can give up one any time for the other.
I went to the station and brought my trunk here. I had dinner with Mrs. Bigelow, and we just fell on each other's necks and couldn't seem to let go. Those two days of separation have been pretty long. We went to church to the Wednesday evening meeting. We could hear them singing "Abide with Me" as we came up the street, and it was the first note of music that I had heard in many a long day, except what I played myself on the steamer. My heart just swelled up, and when we got in and sang the third verse, the tears were rolling down our cheeks. It was a wonderful service.
The sun shines to-day for the first time, and I have been out with my trusty map. You see such vital little scenes in the street--two girls poring over a letter from the front, and giggling and teasing each other; a little girl with tight black pig-tails, bare legs and socks, a full black cape, and a basket under her arm, standing on tippey-toes to ring an old bronze bell; a widow walking along with a little child, watching with an inscrutable expression a car full of soldiers starting for the front; a group of poor people, market-women, old men, and children, pressing closely around a sign-poster who is posting up a list, "Morts pour la Patrie." Many times you see the signs: "Don't talk, be careful, enemy ears are listening." Oh, this country is at war, but I can't tell you the inspiration that seems to be in the very streets. And it is so beautiful when I think that I am really to live here, to be chez moi, and have my own books and pictures and perhaps some plants, and be able to go about and see these things. I can't tell you how happy I am. If the Statue of Liberty ever wants to see me again, she will have to turn a complete back somersault.
I send love home in bushels. There have been moments in these last few days! But never for one breath have I wished that I hadn't set out, and now with my pension settled, my permis de séjour granted by the police, my trunk by my side, my work fairly started, the Shurtleffs perfectly wonderful, and Mrs. Bigelow at hand and happy, why, nothing could be happier than I am. And I never can thank you enough for letting me come. My one trouble now is writer's cramp, so I must stop before I am too paralyzed to address the envelope!
Do write me.
Love to you all. ESTHER.
III
FROM ESTHER
Paris, November 26, 1916.
DEAREST MOTHER:--
My literary style may be a trifle affected by Baedeker, but I hope the following details will not seem as dry as sawdust to you, for they are the very air I breathe daily.
At the beginning of the war the French Government declared a moratorium, which is the suspension of rent payments for every one in Paris paying a rent of less than two thousand francs or possibly three thousand francs. With practically all the men mobilized, many families would have starved but for this provision. The wives or widows of soldiers are given a regular income by the French Government called "allocation,"--one franc twenty-five centimes a day and seventy-five centimes for each child. The soldiers themselves get five sous a day (formerly three sous), which barely enables them to get necessities and soap and tobacco, etc.
"Chaumage" is money given to woman refugees if they have no men fighting. One franc twenty-five centimes a day for all over sixteen not working (mothers of little children, invalids, blind, etc.), and fifty centimes for children. There is a special old-age pension for men and women over sixty. In addition to these pensions there are committees--Comité Franco-Belge, Comité de la Marne, Secours des Meusiens, etc., who help refugees by giving money and clothes to special cases. They are so swamped with demands, however, that they cannot do much. It is a marvel to me what they and the French Government can do and what complication of financial adjustment is apparently carried on successfully. Where does the money come from to finance this war?
Perhaps it would seem that considering the chaumage, the refugees are nearly as well off as the Parisians, but I assure you it is not so: the moratorium makes a vast difference, and, above all, the strangeness of Paris, ignorance of where to find places to live and work, ill health often contracted from the hardships of the way down and the frightful shock of living through bombardment. Many of them, you see, were fairly well off in Rheims or Lille or Maubeuge, or wherever they came from, and had to flee with only the clothes they had on their backs. The people who try to do much with little and live up to their former way of living appeal to my sympathy more than the most squalid who really have the greatest misery.
We have found that people can get a furnished room for thirty centimes a day and up. Awful little rooms, dens of darkness and disease, can be found (only occasionally, praise be) for three francs a week; but I can't consider those. I saw one yesterday--a mother and two little girls live there, and it was about the size of the cabin in our motor-boat, but made the latter seem vast and airy by comparison. With the prices of food and coal high, and constantly soaring, the poor people can just make out their rent and food, but cannot buy clothes. Shoes are thirty francs and up. You can figure it out for yourself. With our help, however, many, many poor families can get along that would otherwise be destitute. Sometimes we can give a girl a suit which will enable her to present herself for a far better position than she could hope to obtain in rags. Sometimes boys can go to school if they have warm new shoes, a black apron, and an overcoat, when without them they would stay at home and shiver in idleness. Warm strong clothing not only gives a new lease to health, but to life as a whole. You should see the little girls when I give them a hair-ribbon or a dress for their doll, if they have one.
I have gathered a lot of old stuff that I found at the Vestiaire and have brought it home and ironed it out and cut it up fresh and given it away to all sorts of little "fillettes." I do believe in the trimmings even for the most wretched, especially if they're kids, and I am glad to say that Mrs. Shurtleff does, too. We have a box of tinsel favors filled with tiny bonbons that we give to the littlest, if they are restless while their parents are being accommodated. The other day we had a little angel of less than two, a small refugee from Rheims with its father and mother. Her ears were pierced and supported tiny earrings. When in this war-time any one had the time and inclination to pierce that child's ears is one on me! Her father left our part of the Vestiaire a few minutes to be fitted to an overcoat in the men's department, and the child began to howl. I took it in my arms and rushed it after its father as fast as I could go. Then all was serene again. In some cases we go so far as to move families from crowded, dirty, unsavory quarters to as clean and as airy a place as we can find in proportion to their income. We then guarantee their rent for three months and help them to furnish. This is all in the hands of the installation department, and I have nothing to do with that, so I cannot tell you as much as I would like to.
The field work is the visiting and investigation of applicants. The war work of the Students Atelier Reunions has become known by word of mouth among the refugees. Of course, the reports and results of our work travel like wildfire and we are inundated with requests. After receiving a letter from a refugee the case is looked up by two field workers and reported at a meeting of the committee the following Saturday morning. A vote is taken as to what to do and how much to give if it is decided to give anything. The people are then told to present themselves at the Vestiaire and we give them what they need. Every type of man, woman, and child has crossed our threshold even within my month of service. How I love them all!
I try to get each story as I measure the person and search the stock and try on and tie up and list. Mother would die to see me, who have never known anything more about children than that they belonged to the animal kingdom and were awful little monkeys and might better approach more nearly the vegetable kingdom, even if they were darlings--to see me tell some mother of ten that "her little Yvonne is large for eight," or that "Renaud has small feet for a boy of twelve." It is I who measure and mark children's clothes as they are sent to us, according to age, and in centimeters at that. I have been driven to ascertaining my own waist measure by the same rating and now go about heavily veiled.
My good fortune has been to be made one of the field workers and I go with either Miss Curtis or Miss Sturgis every Monday and Wednesday. Two always go together because, until we have been to a place once, we don't know what we are getting into, and it would be foolish to go alone way to the back of the top of these big dark buildings without knowing what sort of people lived there. In their homes you do see the people chez eux. We see the extremes of cleanliness and filth, thrift and abjectness. I shall not stop to describe individual homes now, but I can tell you some of them are rare. In one home of about the same stratum as the Russian family Mother and I visited last Christmas, I stepped gingerly among the rags, coal-dust, food, and so forth on the floor, and went and sat beside the dirtiest but the darlingest child you ever saw,--blue eyes with black lashes, which always get me, you know,--but its nose running fearfully. Miss Curtis did the questioning, but I interrupted every three minutes to beseech the mother to wipe the offending organ. I finally learned that the child ought to have an operation, but it is only twenty-five months old and the doctor will not operate until she is three. I showed her the buttons on my glove, fastening and unfastening them. She looked up to me with her dirty little mouth smiling radiantly and said, "Tiens!"
They are not the type we can do much for, but I begged some warm clothes for them and they came to the Vestiaire yesterday. The name is Pruvot, and there are a mother and daughter, three sons in the war, one of whom I am going to adopt as "filleul," a son and his wife and two little girls, and a little illegitimate child of a son who has disappeared and whose mother has abandoned it. He is the star child, Marcel Pruvot, two and a half years, and I am crazy to adopt him. What would you say if I brought him home with me? Think of what one could make of his life; but, of course, I shall not. We sent a layette to one little mother. (My mother should see the layette department, stocked up with the cutest things I ever saw.) And as a special luxury, we included some talcum powder, marked "poudre de riz" (rice powder). Mrs. Jackson went to look her up one day and found her boiling the talcum powder with water in a saucepan, just about to feed it to the little creature of three months. She had never heard of powder before.
The next big branch of work is fitting out the blind. There is more pathos, gayety, and inspiration on Tuesday and Friday afternoons than in all the rest of the week. After the men are wounded at the front they are brought back through a chain of relief stations, "postes de secours," to hospitals, and finally to a Paris hospital. The blind are allowed to recuperate here either at the Val de Grace or the Quinze-Vingt (big hospitals), and are then sent away, usually to the country to learn a trade or to rejoin their families, or both. They must give up their military clothes, underclothes, and shoes when they are discharged, and are given only the poorest kind of civilian clothes in exchange. This is where we step in to give them decent clothes. In many cases they are not given civilian clothes at all, although I don't understand the Government system enough to see how that is possible. So Miss Hodges, our representative in work for the blind, brings five or six of the most needy and touching cases to us and we fit them out.
The blind are the most childlike as a general rule of all the people we deal with, and the outfit we give them and the kindness and help they receive at the Vestiaire mean to them a new start in life, as we have learned from guards afterwards. Such brave fellows! It is an exception to see one downcast or morose, but when you do, your heart aches twice as much, not only for them, but for the many gay ones who have conquered despair. One boy twenty-four years old was wounded in the leg and dragged himself along the ground half conscious, to find he was dragging himself toward the German trenches. At this point he was struck again and his eyes put out. He lay between the trenches under fire for days, unconscious most of the time and feigning death the rest. By a miracle he escaped being killed. He was picked up and taken to a hospital; has been there six months, and is now starting out to learn a trade--in the dark. I love to do what I can for them, especially as this is my one chance to know the French poilu.
You would laugh to see me measuring and fitting, especially when it comes to holding up underwear to some dear blind giant. I remember all too well how at the age of eight I used to wriggle in Altman's when mother insisted on "getting an idea how they would go" by holding "them" up to me. Every saleswoman and floorwalker got the idea clearly. There are moments when blindness is not such a misfortune.