Part 4

If he had been commissioned by the government to help in giving first aid, he could not have acted with more sense of responsibility than he did in helping me take her home, standing motionless while she climbed into the cart, so weak with hunger, she confessed, that she could hardly move,--then speeding fast where the road was smooth, and going very slowly where the carters' wheels have left deep ruts in the mossy soil. He really has more than human sense at times! Don, of his own accord, leaped in beside the fugitive; at times I think that his spirit is really becoming more catholic, and that he demands less in the way of credentials and introductions than of old. The girl's pluck interested me, for, though she could hardly hold herself upright, she refused my help. Suddenly, from nowhere, a phrase flashed into my mind, "L'Independence Beige", and I knew--what afterward proved to be true--that she was one of the many Belgian refugees in England, though why she was wandering about by herself in this remote corner of England I did not know until afterward. As we jogged on, over the meadows and through the village street, she held herself so bravely that nobody stared, though she was white to the lips. She even managed to walk into the house, but, once inside, sank down on the couch and fainted quite away. Madge and I worked over her, giving her drops of warm milk with a wee bit of brandy, taking the shoes from her poor blistered feet, and bathing them. You should have heard Madge when I told her that I thought the girl was one of the fugitive Belgians; to take a red-hot poker to the Kaiser seemed to be her lightest wish for vengeance.

When our guest was in bed, all fresh and clean, with her hair brushed smoothly from her forehead, I could see that she was a sweet and wholesome maiden, with a comely, housewifely air, and my heart ached for her sufferings. She ate a little, then lay with her eyes full of tears that she would not let fall; she kept winking her long lashes to keep them back. Don jumped up beside her and snuggled close; she smiled, lifted her hand to his head for a minute, then she went to sleep. Such sleep I never saw,--deep, long, dreamless; hour by hour she lay there, not moving all night long, for I crept in now and then: I could not sleep. Don kept watch until morning.

She did not waken until after ten; there was a flush in her cheeks, and her eyes were starry, but in her face, young as she seemed, was a foreshadowing of the worn look of age and sorrow that the years should bring, not the German army! She wore an air of wistful questioning to which there is no answer, as she lay twisting weakly a simple ring about her third finger.

We had a funny time trying to talk; La Fontaine's fables and Racine's _Athalie_, as taught in a young ladies' finishing school, are not the best basis for a conversation on the practical needs of life. I wanted to ask her if she liked sugar and cream in her coffee; all I could think of was

"C'était pendant l'horreur d'une profonde nuit, Ma mère Jézebel devant moi s'est montrée."

I did succeed in telling her that this was probably not as good as Belgian coffee; she sipped it gratefully and nibbled her toast, putting her hand on mine and saying that it was "delicious, Mademoiselle, but delicious."

My fugitive is still here; she was in bed two days, and then I let her get up. She is wearing one of my gowns, and she spends much of her time in the garden in the grapevine arbour, sitting very still, with the shadow of the leaves upon her face. Don stays with her much of the time, and she seems to like this; and the country smell of the garden comforts her a little, I think,--the odour of the red apples ripening in the sun and of grapes that will not quite ripen. She rarely moves, except when a drifting autumn leaf falls on lap or shoulder; it is as if body, mind, and soul were exhausted by the awful shock of her experience, and she could not gather up her vital forces. I can only dumbly wonder what terrors she has gone through, what unspeakable things she has seen.

Her name is Marie Lepont; father and mother she has not, but she lived with an aunt in a little villa near Brussels,--with a garden like this, only _plus grand_, and she had a lover; oh, yes, for two years she had been betrothed. I could not understand all that she said, but she told of their awful suspense in waiting for the Germans and of their taking refuge in the cellar,--the French for cellar I had never learned, so she showed me my own. Then came the flight, of old men, women, children, and pitiful animals; sickness, and falling by the way. Her aunt died from sheer exhaustion in a peasant's hut and was hastily buried at night. She could hardly tell what had happened, only that she was quite lost and separated from everybody she had ever known. Her lover was not in Brussels when the crisis came, and she had had no tidings from him. Evidently she had been swept over in a great wave of terrified humanity and had found herself on a steamer crowded with refugees. She can remember very little about the voyage, but with many others she reached a receiving camp near London, half ill and quite dazed. She searched vainly for her lover, and, not being able to discover any trace of him, stole away from the camp in a state of mental bewilderment to try to find him. For days she walked, growing more and more spent and hungry, for she was shy about asking for food, and the country people did not understand her, evidently mistook her for a gypsy, and treated her somewhat churlishly. When she reached the forest she was happy, it was so cool and shady there, but she had little to eat save mushrooms. If I had tried to pluck mushrooms for my sustenance, it would have ended all my troubles! When I found her, she had had nothing to eat for more than twenty-four hours.

I watch her as she sits in the sunshine, and I multiply her by hundreds and thousands, innocent people, old folk and babies, old men and women lying down by the roadside to die, and the horror comes like a great tidal wave, sweeping all things before it, drowning all the joy of life and the old sweet ways of living. It breaks on the brick wall of my garden and is driven back; I will not be overwhelmed by any anguish of human fate, my own, or that of any one else. Until some wandering star strikes the earth and shivers it to atoms, there is hope somewhere, and there are things to do! And Marie Lepont shall not be overwhelmed either, in spite of the terrible things she sees, waking or sleeping, for she starts up and cries out in the night; Don gives a little comforting, reassuring bark, and she goes to sleep again. I've got to find her lover for her, and how shall I begin?

I'll go and ask the pony!

October 14. My fugitive fits quietly into our life in the little red house, saying little, trying to do much, and smiling more and more. I do not talk to her, but now and then I sit and sew with her; I know that she is most domestic, and that this will make her feel at home, but I should hate to have her examine my seams and hems, for I am no seamstress. I leave her much alone with the animals, and that seems to help more than anything else; the Atom spends much of its time on her shoulder. She has begged to be allowed to feed the chickens, for Madge has insisted on our having chickens, and Peter has constructed a yard for them, with a little house for winter, a bit down the stream. Sea gulls come sailing on wide beautiful white wings and descend to the chicken yard, walk about and steal food, to the helpless wrath of our fowls. Even Hengist and Horsa retreat; they are two twin stately cocks, and William the Conqueror is a bigger one, with spurs. He is quite the greatest coward in the yard, and entirely in awe of his Matildas. It is thus that I am making history concrete for Madge; my long line of British queens does credit to the dynasty, though they are a bit miscellaneous in ancestry. Boadicea is a dark beauty, wild and fierce; my vainest, long-necked, red-brown hen is Queen Elizabeth; oh, the cackling when she lays an egg! The large, fat, rather stupid one is Queen Anne; I let Madge choose and name Queen Victoria herself, and she selected a plump and comely grey fowl, rather diminutive, with an imperative and yet appealing cluck, who will make, I know, an excellent wife and mother. It is all very well to keep hens and to eat their eggs, but I have given notice to Madge that not one of these companions of my daily life shall be sold to the butcher or served upon my table. The gingerbread baby comes giggling through the gate at least once a day, and it has taken a great fancy to Marie. It proves to be the eleventh and youngest child of my friend the blacksmith, and it has early developed, probably from constant association with so many swift feet, an abnormal talent for running away.

From morning until night I am busy with a thousand and one things, commonplace things mostly, in the house, or the village, or beyond. And wherever I go, you seem near, with your long, thin stride, and your preoccupied face, as if your feet had a bit of difficulty in keeping up with your mind. There is a strange sense always, when I walk in the forest, or along the highway, even when I go to Farmer Wilde's to see about butter and vegetables, that you are walking by my side.

Peter is very solicitous about the welfare of my guest, and I have seen him looking at her with vast pity in his eyes.

"Peter," I reminded him, "you can no longer say that you have not seen a Belgian refugee."

"No, Miss," was his only answer. He digs and prunes, still arguing his country's lack of need of him in this pretence of war.

"There's the British fleet, 'm," he observed, with fine scorn. "It was hordered out at the beginning of this so-called war, and told to sink the henemy's fleet. Wot 'ave we 'eard of it since, 'm? Nothing, nothing at all. It's just bluff, 'm; the fleet is out on the 'igh seas for pleasure, junketing at our expense. Doubtless all the gentlemen enjoy a cruise."

"Peter," I say solemnly, "don't you really know that a German submarine sank three British cruisers on the twenty-second of September, the _Hague_, the _Cressy_, and the _Aboukir_? Do you think that the gallant men upon them went to the bottom for pleasure?"

Peter turned a trifle pale under the red of his forehead and cheeks.

"I heard that rumour," he remarked, with an attempt at airy skepticism, "and I dessay you believe it. I dessay you think it actually happened. But I refuse to believe it; when was the British fleet ever defeated?"

There was a tentative something, a touch of question, in the bravado of his denial.

"Peter," I suggest, "our fall gardening is not a national necessity; there is greater need of you elsewhere. Why not be a bomb-sweeper; you like the sea, I believe?" Madge listens, her broom suspended in mid-air, as if it were listening too. A look of embarrassment crosses Peter's face, as he rubs his cheek.

"The bombs are very explosive, I've 'eard, 'm."

"Peter," I say, "if this is an imaginary war, those are imaginary bombs and do not explode."

"I'm not so sure of that, Miss," says Peter shrewdly.

Another British cruiser, the _Hawke_, sunk October 16. There is wakening fear in the hearts of the English people, and there is deepening courage. The faces that I see here and in the near-by towns, the letters that I get, have one expression. Party differences have almost ceased to exist in the political world, and in other ways, I think, the nation is being welded into one, as it has never been. Even the voice of the Vicar's lady has lost something of its condescension in speaking to common folk; I saw her at the blacksmith's as I took the gingerbread baby home for the eighth time, and she spoke with less of an air of coming down to the level of her audience than I should have believed possible. The gentry are behaving a bit less as if the earth were their private monopoly, and the subgentry, like our Vicaress, are taking the cue.

A few days ago I went to London, chiefly to get clothing for Marie and to set on foot inquiries about her betrothed. Nothing seemed greatly changed, save that there were fewer people in the streets and the restaurants, and that many uniforms are in evidence. The theatres are open, and people are going about their work and their play in quite usual fashion, but their faces wear a different expression, an impersonal look, and a certain quiet exaltation. Oh, if the real England, that England that I know chiefly through the expression of her inmost self in her matchless literature, and through you, could only win over that other of high, excluding walls and ancient entailed rights of selfishness and of belittling snobbishness! You will admit that something needs righting in a social condition represented by the tale of the two sisters at Oxford,--one married to a tailor, one married to a University professor,--who did not dare speak to each other in the street for fear of consequences. I am hopelessly democratic; the wonderfully good manners of the perfectly trained English servant seem to me vastly higher, as human achievement, than the manner of the superior who speaks brutally to him. The surprised gratitude of many of the maids and scrub-women here when one addresses them as if they really were human beings is piteous.

Yet I know that though these things be true, they reflect but the surface, not the depths. Something in this crisis, something even in Peter's crude attacks, has roused a deep race instinct in me, long dormant. Though my forebears set sail for America in the 1630's, my sense of the identity of our destiny with that of England deepens every day. I am ceasing to say "your", and unconsciously slipping into "our"; perhaps I have been trying to criticize, to point out the things that are wrong, partly as a measure of self-protection, for I am growing sorry that the Revolutionary War ever happened! I long for England's victory in this war, knowing that she is right; I dimly suspect that I should long for it were she right or wrong; and I feel a little thrill of pride that my home is in this England of yours, of ours.

Even I, who am often indignant in watching the Englishman's manner toward those other Englishmen whom he considers his social inferiors, can discern his profound sense of responsibility toward them. Forgetting the mistakes of to-day, and thinking of the long development, one can but be aware in England of a stable, enduring spirituality, a practical idealism, unlike that of the earlier, idealistic Germany,--a something tangential, disassociated with life,--in that it is a constant sense of inner values working out in everyday ways and habits. Those mystical habits of dreaming fine things that are never done will not save the world. In my growing love for England, I am more and more aware of its disciplined, mellow civilization, treasuring the old and sacred in beliefs, in institutions, in buildings; its right, controlling habits; its thousand and one wise departures from the measure of rule and thumb; its uncodified, unformulated truth of action; its conduct far more logically right than its laws. In the very reproach oftenest brought against England I find the deepest reason for trusting her, that she allows human instinct a larger place and mere intellectual theory a smaller place than does any other nation in working out its destiny. I am deeply puzzled by my sense of the Englishman's wrong attitude toward his supposed inferior while I recognize that inner instinctive sense of necessary adjustments, that genius for living that makes them the best colonizers in the world and makes their rule the most lasting anywhere.

I consulted some of the chief authorities in the Belgian relief work in regard to Marie,--your England shows the real humanity at the heart of her in this magnificent hospitality to an outraged nation,--and I put advertisements into several papers. At home all was well, save that William the Conqueror had choked, trying to swallow a piece of English bacon too large for him, and was dead. So perish all who lust for conquest!

October 24. Two days ago came a domestic, not to say a social crisis. Two of the county ladies called on me, accompanied by the Vicaress; they must have been told, I think, of my uncle the banker! Forgive this gibe,--I could not resist making it; we always disputed, you remember, as to whether your countrymen or mine were the more devout worshippers of gold. To say truth, I have met these ladies at one or two committee meetings in our relief work, and I feel duly honoured by the call. I ring for Madge; Madge does not appear; going to the kitchen, I find it empty, the fire out, water dripping forlornly from the faucet. The coal in the sitting room grate I replenish myself and face the horror of the situation: three English ladies and no tea! No one knows better than I what blasphemy it would be to omit the sacred British rite of tea, which is even more established than the Established Church. Rising to the occasion, I heat water in a little copper kettle on the coals in the sitting room,--"So resourceful, as all Americans are," murmurs one lady. I concoct tea, and it proves very good tea indeed, served with appetizing little cakes from yesterday's baking. My guests go away mollified; not so am I! One of them had so many scathing things to say about England's policies at home and abroad, the political friendship with Russia, the desertion of Persia, the treatment of Ireland, the mismanagement of the present war, that I was driven to an attitude of defence. Surely there is something greater for English men and English women to do now than to stand aloof and criticize! When I told her that I thought it was a pity to confuse the soul of the English people with mistakes of contemporary statesmen, she looked at me blankly, nor could I make her understand. It is odd for me, who have so derided our Anglomaniacs and superficial imitators of the English, to come so hotly to the defence of England. I hardly know myself what is going on within me. It is the England-in-the-long-run that I reverence, the England of the great poetry, that soul of England full of "high-erected thoughts", of sunny faiths, and sweet humanities. And of course, through you too, I know its very best,--the breeding that makes no boast; its fine reserve; its self-control; its matchless, silent courage.

It is a chilly day; Don and the Atom cuddle side by side at the hearth; they are great friends now. Marie returns with bright eyes and red cheeks from a walk. Presently home comes Peter, who has been away on some errand of his own, to a fireless hearth and an empty room. Home and garden and adjacent field he searches in vain.

"She will 'ave gone to one of her friends, Miss," says Peter stoutly, proceeding to lay a fire.

I assent, but with misgiving. Madge had never failed before, nor had she even gone away for half an hour without telling me. As Peter helps me prepare a simple meal to serve instead of dinner, I turn the conversation toward military training and matters of war. My own contributions to the conversation, in regard to cavalry, infantry, and manoeuvering I should not care to have Lord Kitchener hear. Very casually I remark that, if I were a man, I should like to be a soldier.

"Would you now, Miss?" Peter responds amiably, as he takes up the toasting-fork.

"There's a recruiting station at Shepperton," I suggest, as I cut the bread. "There are five thousand men encamped for training in Wellington Park; and I've been told that there are several hundred in the nearest village,--what is it, Silverlea? I hardly see how you can go about so much without seeing them."

"It is odd, isn't it?" Peter answers wonderingly. I found out afterward that the villain had spent that very day at Wellington Park, watching the recruits drill.

As it grew later, more chilly and darker on that autumn night, I could see the British husband's awful wrath growing within Peter; he evidently thought that his wife had run away with some one. Naturally I had no idea what had happened, but I had my doubts of this. In the first place, she was fundamentally good; in the second place, one Briton was, I felt sure, enough for Madge.

Don and the Atom were the only members of the family who really enjoyed their evening meal that day. They lapped from the same saucer, though not at the same moment, each politely waiting a turn, the closest of allies, and doing a bit after in the way of washing each other up. Marie watched me with big, sympathetic brown eyes, and said nothing. When nine o'clock came, I was as worried as was Peter, though I did not admit it. We had decided that he should go to the Inn for the pony, and that we would begin a systematic search. He went to his room to get ready and presently appeared, alternately red with wrath and pale with anxiety.

"My clothes, 'm, my Sunday clothes are gone. Boots and all, 'm. And my 'at, my Sunday 'at."

Despair could go no further than this intonation of Peter's Sunday 'at; would that any 'at had ever meant so much to me!

"She 'as given them to 'im, Miss."

"To whom?"

"That's just what I don't know, 'm."

What could one think? Had Madge, the admirable, indeed a lover? That was unthinkable; there must have been some accident. At least, there was nothing to do but to notify mine host of the Inn, and to present the case to the local Dogberry.

We were ready to start, when I heard a little click of my garden gate, and soft footsteps came up the brick walk, down which streamed the light of the porch lamp. Red rage mounted to Peter's eyes. "It's that man," he cried, "in my clothes!" I kept a detaining arm on Peter's sleeve,--his second-best sleeve. Where had his best been intriguing?

The kitchen door opened softly, very softly; we stood breathless in the corner. If it were a burglar, we were ready; were not all the massive British kitchen utensils near? The lamplight fell full upon the face and form of a strange man, a very strange man, the strangest I ever saw, plump, round of face, with straggling, irregular locks of hair that had been newly shorn,--a decidedly strange man, in Peter's clothes.

"You--you hussy!" said Peter, but the sorry epithet expressed a world of relief, even, I thought, of endearment.

One would have supposed that Madge could not grow redder; yet her face became even more a flame.

"You, a respectable British female," said Peter, advancing with slow heaviness of tread, as if Madge's end would really come when he reached her and the Sunday clothes; "You, a British female, and the wife of an honest man, out on the highway in a man's clothes, _my_ clothes." He took hold of her arm, but gently; he would not have dared do otherwise. His wife looked at him steadily; he could not meet her glance, and his eyes fell.

"You're little better than a suffragette," he said weakly.

"That may be," said Madge, not without a certain loftiness, touching her hair with a novel feminine gesture, "that may be; but I _am_ better than an able-bodied man that doesn't hoffer himself to his country. The suffragettes are fighting for theirs."

Peter was stricken; he had nothing to say. Don, arriving and unable to understand, barked wildly at Madge, and she seemed to mind his remarks much more than she had Peter's. I could help it no longer, and I burst out laughing.

"Madge," I asked, "where have you been?"

"I've been to the recruiting station at Shepperton, 'm," said Madge, with one look at Peter. "I could bear it no longer; not a finger raised for King or Country."

Peter hung his head.