Part 2
She thought this all out while flying to get him some food, to open the can of meat, preciously kept for just such a golden chance, to heat the potatoes which were left, to set Jacques to grinding some coffee, real coffee, such as they never used, to uncover the sacred little store of sugar, wide, to his hand! And at the same time to talk to the children. How unresponsive children are, she thought; how quickly they outgrow whatever is not immediately present. It is hard to remember that four years, so long in the life of a child, is all eternity to a young child; his utmost imagination cannot compass it. She said all this to André, to explain the children. How absurd to try to explain them to André, smiling his deep understanding of them and of her, far deeper than she could ever fathom!
Then she was driving them all upstairs to bed, leaving the kitchen to André, the big tin bathtub and the clean underclothes which she had always ready for the first ceremony of every return from the trenches. If only there were more hot water! But she always let the fire go down toward night, to save coal. For her there was no need of fire. She could put a blanket around her shoulders and wrap her legs in a rug of an evening as she sat writing her letter to André by the poor light of the one lamp, filled with war kerosene, which smoked and glimmered uncertainly.
She hardly knew what she was doing as she hurried the children into their beds in the cold rooms. Hurry as she might, there were six of them; and many, many, of the priceless, counted-out moments had passed before she ran down the stairs, as madly as any girl racing to meet her lover.
André was there, at table, washed, shaven, a little color in his lean, deeply lined cheeks under their warlike bronze. When he heard her step flying down the hall, he pushed back from the table and, his napkin across his knees, a good light of laughter in his eyes, he held out his arms to her again, crying like the traditional bridegroom, “Alone at last!”
So it began on the light note, that incredible good fortune of their evening together, she perching on his knee, watching him eat, filling his plate, pouring out more coffee, talking, laughing--yes, really laughing as she only did when André was there on permission. When he had finished she cleared the table, made up the fire, recklessly putting in lump after lump of the sticky resinous coal and opening all the drafts. They sat down together before the stove, beside the surly ill-conditioned lamp, and their tongues were loosened for much talk--light, deep, sad, hopeful, brave, depressed, casual, tragic. They poured out to each other all the thousand things which do not go into letters, even daily ones. She heard of the unreasonable irritability of his captain, and the plain, restoring good faith of the old colonel; the heroism of the men, the cowardly slinking back to a clerical position at the rear by young Montverdier, the son of their _député_. He heard of her struggles with the boys’ Latin and mathematics, and with the little ones’ alphabet. “Just think, André, Annette, the obstinate little thing, will not admit that B’s name is B. She says it is ‘loof’ and she knows it is because she dreamed it was--haven’t children the most absurd ideas?”
She spoke out with a Frenchwoman’s frankness of her moments of horror, of despair, of doubt of the war’s meaning, of revulsion from the industrial system which had made the war possible. There deep answered deep; he brought to her the envenomed hatred of war which fills the trenches to the brim. “It is not glorious; it is infamous. I am not a hero; I am a murderer. But there are worse things. It would be worse to have peace, with the German ideas ruling the world. No, every one of us would better die than allow that to happen. Yes, I have had too--who hasn’t?--moments of doubt, moments when the horror of our stupidity was too great, when I have thought that any other way would be better than war. But not since the Russian affair, not since the Germans marched into defenseless Russia. _Russian children will be brought up in German schools_ to form a new generation of Germans. I would kill my children with my own hands before having them added to those ranks. No, since Russia, there seems no other way but to go on to the end, and to make that end an end to war forever.” The worn phrases, dubious and tarnished on the facile tongues of public orators, repeated there in that dimly lighted room by that worn man and suffering woman, became new, became sacramental.
They clung to each other for a moment again, and gradually felt the tension of the spirit melt away in the old cure of simple bodily nearness. His cheek against hers--at the sensation she became just a woman again.
She stirred, she smiled; she told an amusing story of their queer old neighbor,--she interrupted herself to say reproachfully, “But I _do_ love little Maurice! I don’t love him _as_ I love the other children, but just because of that I love him more, because I pity him so.”
“That,” he said with conviction, “must be true because nobody but you would be capable of such mixed language and emotions.”
She had laughed at this and, remembering suddenly that she had a box of cigarettes for him, jumped up to get it. He was amazed. Where, in Heaven’s name, had she been able to get cigarettes in France in 1918? Ah, that was her little secret. She had her ways of doing things! She teased him for an instant and then said she had begged it for him from an American Red Cross camion driver who had stopped there to get water for his radiator. The recollection brought to mind something painful, which she poured out before him like all the rest. “Oh but, André, what do you think the woman in uniform sitting by him said? Of course she couldn’t have known that I understand English, but even so-- She looked at me hard, and she said, ‘These heroic Frenchwomen people make so much fuss about, I notice you don’t see any of _them_ turning out to run cars or distribute clothes to refugees. Much they bother themselves for France. They stay right inside their comfortable homes and do fancywork as usual.’ Yes, she said that. Oh, André, it _hurt_! I was ashamed that I could be hurt so cruelly by anything but the war.”
This led to talk of America. “All our hope is with them, Jeanne. You mustn’t mind what one woman said--very likely a tired woman too, fretted by being in a country where she doesn’t speak the language. All the future is in their hands, and, by God, Jeanne, I begin to believe they realize it! They are really coming, you know; they are really here. I see them with my own eyes, not just doctors and nurses and engineers and telegraphists, as at first, but real fighting men. They are in the sector next to ours now. They fight. They fight with a sort of exuberance, as though it were a game they were playing and meant to win. And they all say that their country is back of them as France is back of us, to the last man, woman, and child. They’re queer fellows. They remind me a little of our Normans and a little of our Gascons, if you can imagine the combination. Whenever there is a difficulty they have a whimsical, bragging little phrase, that they drawl out in their sharp, level voices, ‘Never you mind, the Yanks are coming.’ It made me smile at first, at their presumption, at their young ignorance. But there is something hypnotizing about the way they say that jerky, unlovely phrase, like the refrain of a popular song that sticks in your mind. It sticks in mine. ‘The Yanks are coming!’ The Russians have gone, or rather the Russians never were there, but ‘the Yanks are coming!’”
Jeanne had been looking at him hard, scarcely hearing what he said, drawing in a new conviction from his eyes, his accent, the carriage of his head. “Why, André! you are really hoping that it may end as it ought!” she interrupted him suddenly, “You are really hoping--” He nodded soberly. “Yes, my darling, I really hope.”
He was silent, smiled, drew her to him with a long breath, his arm strong and hard about her. They might have been eighteen and twenty again. “And I know,” he whispered, “that you are the loveliest and the best and the bravest woman in the world.”
The tears ran down her cheeks at this--happy tears which he kissed away. When she could speak she protested, saying brokenly that she was weak, she was helpless in the face of the despair which so often overcame her, that she was perilously poised on the edge of hysteria. “Ah, who isn’t near that edge?” he told her. “Not to go over the edge, that is the most that can be done by even the strongest in these days.” “No, no,” she told him. “You don’t know how weak I am, how cowardly, how I must struggle every day, every hour, not to give up altogether, to abandon the struggle and sink into the abyss with the children.” “But you don’t give it up,” he murmured, his lips on her cheek. “You do go on with the struggle. I always find the children alive, well, happy. _You_ weak! _You_ cowardly! You are the bravest of the brave.”
The clock struck ten.
They went upstairs hand in hand to look at the sleeping children and to try to plan some future for them. Jeanne told of her anxieties about Michel, the oldest, who had silent, morose fits of brooding. “He’s old enough to feel it all. The littler ones only suffer physically.” André put his father’s hand on the sleeping boy’s forehead and looked down at him silently, the deep look of strength and comprehension which was like the wine of life to his wife. She thought it was a benediction to the boy which no priest could better. André took his watch out of his pocket and laid it on the table. “See here,” he said, “I’m going to leave this here for Michel when he wakes in the morning. I only use the old wrist watch nowadays. It may please the little fellow to know I think him big enough to have my watch.”
“He’ll make it a talisman--it’s the very thing!” she agreed, touched by his divining sympathy for the boy’s nature.
They roamed then through the cold deserted rooms of the much-loved little home, unused because of lack of fuel, but the wan, clustering memories were too thick even for their tried and disciplined hearts. They went back into the smoky kitchen, shivering.
* * * * *
The clock struck eleven.
As it struck twelve, Jeanne turned back from the door, the lamp in her hand, the last echo of his footsteps faint in her ears. She stood for a moment, trance-like, staring at the yellow flame of the lamp, her eyes wide. Already it seemed impossible that he had been there.
She felt horribly, horribly tired, hardly any other sensation but that. She went upstairs, undressed rapidly, blew out the light, and lay down beside little Maurice. She slept with him, that she might be sure to watch over him carefully enough, fearing that she might not rise in the cold so readily for him as for the others. Almost at once she fell into a profound sleep.
She woke with a start, to find herself standing up in her nightgown in the darkness, on the cold floor, in the middle of the room, the cold, damp wind blowing in on her from the black opening of the window. And at once she knew what had happened--knew it as though some one had just finished telling her.
André had not been there at all that day. He had been killed, that was it, and her intense longing had brought his spirit straight to her for a moment, and all the rest she had imagined.
Staring into the darkness, she saw it all with perfect lucidity. That was why he had looked so dim and shadowy when she had first seen him in the hall; that was why his smile had been so strange. That was why the children had seemed so queer; she understood now, it was because they saw no one there and because they heard her talking to herself.
Did she, then, often talk to herself, that they should do no more than look sidelong and askance when she did it? Yes, she must have been slowly going near the edge of dementia during the last weeks, and quite over the edge into madness the last five days of suspense.
A deadly chill shook her, so that her teeth chattered loudly in the darkness, audible even to her ears. What did it matter? André had been killed. There was no meaning in anything any more.
The cold settled around her heart, an icy flood, and congealed in her veins. She felt herself to be dying and ran out to meet delivering death.
She heard Andre’s voice saying clearly, “Whoever else is responsible for the war, the children are not. They must not suffer if we can help it.”
There was a pause when the world seemed to be slowly shifting under her feet.
She knew what was coming. In an instant it came. In all that was left alive of her, she knew that she must try to go on living for the children.
She turned her back on escape, and in a spiritual agony like the physical anguish of child-birth, she put out her hands to grope her way back to the fiery ordeal of life.
* * * * *
Her hands, groping in the darkness, fell on something cold and metallic and round--Andre’s watch, which he had left for Michel!
But if his watch was there, _he had been there himself_.
She ran trembling to the match box, struck a light, and looked. Yes, there was the watch, and a burned-out cigarette beside it.
The match went out suddenly in the cold, damp breath from the window.
André had come, then! And she--she was in such a pass that she was incapable of believing that her husband had been with her for an hour. Stretched on the rack of long separation, her body and brain had lost the power to conceive of happiness as real. She felt now that she had not really believed in his presence any of the time. That was why she had fancied the children looked oddly at him. _She had not been able to believe it!_
But she did now! It had reached her very self, at last, the knowledge that he had been there, that he had been of good cheer, that he loved her, that he thought the war might yet be won for the right, that he had even laughed, had said--what was that quaint phrase?--“The Yanks are coming!”
She took the watch up in her hands, laid it against her cheek, and began to cry, sweet, weak, child-like tears.
She groped her way back to the bed, weeping silently, the watch clutched tightly in her hand.
She lay down beside the unloved little orphan, whom she loved through pity; she took him in her arms; she felt the watch cold and hard and actual against her heart, and, the tears still on her cheeks, she fell once more asleep, smiling.
FRANCE’S FIGHTING WOMAN DOCTOR
The American public has just heard of Dr. Nicole Girard-Mangin, the woman doctor who was mobilized and sent to the front by mistake, and who proved herself so fearless and useful that she was kept there for two years amid bursting shells and rattling mitrailleuses. She is being cited spectacularly as a dramatic proof that women can take men’s parts, and do men’s work, and know the man’s joy of being useful. But she is much more than a woman doing a man’s work. She is a human being of the highest type, giving to her country the highest sort of service, and remaining normal, sane, and well-balanced.
Long before the tornado of the war burst over the world, Paris knew her in many varying phases which now, as we look back, we see to have been the unconscious preparation for the hour of crisis. Personally I knew of her, casually, as the public-spirited young doctor who was attached to the Paris _lycée_ where my children go to school, and who was pushing the “fresh-air” movement for the city poor. People who met her in a social way knew her as an attractive woman with a well-proportioned figure, lovely hair, and clear brown eyes, whom one met once or twice a week at the theater or in the homes of mutual friends, and who enjoyed a hearty laugh and cheerful, chatting talk. Other people who saw her every morning in her laboratory garb, serious, intent, concentrated, knew her as one of those scientific investigators who can not rest while the horrible riddle of cancer is unsolved.
Those who saw her in the afternoon among the swarming sick and poor of the _clinique_ of the great Beaujon Hospital, knew her as one of those lovers of their kind who can not rest as long as the horrible apathy of public opinion about tuberculosis continues. People who investigated cures for city ills and who went to visit the model tenement house for the very poor, near the St. Ouen gate of Paris, knew her as the originator and planner of that admirable enterprise, whose energy and forcefulness saw it financed and brought to practical existence. Observers who knew her in the big international Feminist Conferences in European capitals, saw an alert, upright, quick-eyed Parisienne, whose pretty hats showed no sign of the erudition of the head under them. Friends knew her as the gently bred woman who, although driven by no material necessity, renounced the easy, sheltered, comfortable life of the home-keeping woman for an incessant, beneficent activity, the well-ordered regularity of which alone kept it from breaking down her none too robust health. And those intimates who saw her in her home, saw her the most loved of sisters and daughters, the most devoted of mothers, adored by the little son to whom she has been father and mother ever since he was four years old.
No one dreamed of war, but if the very day and hour had been known for years, Dr. Girard-Mangin could hardly have prepared herself more completely for the ordeal. Unconsciously she had “trained” for it, as the runner trains for his race. She was not very strong, slightly built, with some serious constitutional weakening, but she filled every day full to the brim with exacting and fatiguing work. She had two great factors in her favor. One of them was that enviable gift which Nature gives occasionally to remarkable people, the capacity to live with very little sleep. The other is even more noteworthy in a doctor--in whom close acquaintance with the laws of health seems often to breed contempt.
Dr. Girard-Mangin is that rare bird, a doctor who believes profoundly, seriously, in the advice which she gives to others, in the importance of those simple, humdrum laws of daily health which only very extraordinary people have the strength of mind to obey. Never, never, she says, as though it were a matter of course, has she allowed fatigue, or overoccupation, or inertia, or boredom to interfere with her early morning deep-breathing and physical exercises, and her tonic cold bath. Never, never, no matter how long or exhausting the day, has she rolled into bed, dead beat, too tired to go through the simple processes of the toilet, which make sleep so much more refreshing. No matter how absorbed in her work, she has always taken the time at regular intervals to relax, to chat sociably with quite ordinary people, to go to the theater, to hear music. She has always breakfasted and lunched with her little boy, has steered him through his spelling and arithmetic, has gone on walks with him, has been his comrade and “pal.” This has been as good for her as for him, naturally. Every summer she has had the courageous good sense to take a vacation in the country. In short, she is a doctor who takes to her own heart the advice about rational life which doctors so often reserve for their patients.
To this woman, tempered to a steel-like strength by self-imposed discipline and by a regular, well-ordered life, came the great summons. And it found her ready to the last nerve in her strong, delicate little hand. You have read, probably, how on that “Day of Doom” when France called out her men, a _concierge_ received, among mobilization papers for all the men in the big apartment house, one sending Dr. Girard-Mangin (presumably also a man, by the name) out to a military hospital in the Vosges mountains. The notice of mobilization was handed to a woman, a patriotic woman who long ago had heard the call to fight for France’s best interests. She had seen her brother go before her into the fighting ranks and she followed him, into danger and service. She said a quick good-by to her friends, to her parents, to her son, her only child, a fine boy of fourteen then, from whom she had never before been separated.
Will every mother who reads these lines stop here and think what this means?
There is no need to repeat in detail here what has already been told of the first three months of her service--her arrival at the field hospital, disorganized, submerged by the terrible, ever-renewed flood of wounded men, of the astonishment of the doctor in charge. “What, a woman! This is no place for a woman. But, good God! if you know anything about surgery, roll up your sleeves and stay!”
There she stayed for three months, those blasting first three months of the war, when French people put forth undreamed-of strength to meet a crisis of undreamed-of horror. Out there in that distant military hospital, toiling incessantly in great heat, with insufficient supplies, bearing the mental and moral shock of the first encounter with the incredible miseries of war, that modern, highly organized woman, separated for the first time from her family, from her child, fearing everything for them and for her country, had no word, no tidings whatever, till the 28th of August. Then no knowledge of her son, of her parents, only a notice that the Government had retreated from Paris to Bordeaux! Comforting news that, for the first! Next they knew that Rheims was taken. Then one of the men whose wounds she dressed told her that he had been able to see the Eiffel Tower from where he fell. This sounded as though the next news could be nothing but the German entry into Paris.
All France throbbed with straining, despairing effort, far beyond its normal strength, during those first three months; and to do the man’s part she took, the delicate woman doctor, laboring incessantly among the bleeding wrecks of human bodies, needed all her will-power to pull her through.
Then the wild period of fury and haste and nervous, emotional exaltation passed, and France faced another ordeal, harder for her temperament even than the first fierce onset of the unequal struggle--the long period of patient endurance of the unendurable. The miracle of the Marne had been wrought; Paris was saved; the sting and stimulant of immediate, deadly danger was past; the fatigue from the supernatural effort of those first months dimmed every eye, deadened all nerves. Then France tapped another reservoir of national strength and began patiently, constructively to “organize” the war. And that daughter of France bent her energies to help in this need, as in the first.
A rough rearrangement of competences was attempted everywhere on the front. Dentists no longer dug trenches, bakers were set to baking instead of currying horses, and expert telegraphers stopped making ineffectual efforts to cook. It came out then that the real specialty of the valiant little woman doctor who had been doing such fine work in the operating-room was not surgery at all. “I’m no surgeon, you know!” she says, and leaves it to her friends to tell you of the extraordinary record of her efficiency in that field, the low percentage of losses in her surgical cases. If you mention this, she says, “Ah, that’s just because I’m _not_ a born surgeon. I have to take very special care of my cases to be equal to the job.” It was discovered that her great specialty was contagious diseases. There was great need for a specialist of that sort out at Verdun, where, alas! a typhoid epidemic had broken out. This was before the extra precautions about inoculations, which were taken later.