Dorothy Canfield Fisher

“ Even with the utmost success which you hold out, I should have a life which, compared with what I now have, would be infernal; rushing to and fro over the face of the earth, away from home, my wife, my children, homeless for half the time, constantly employed in the most momentous and important decisions where in order to succeed I must give all of myself, all, all, my brain, my personality, my will power, my soul ... what would be left of me for leisure moments? Nothing! I should be an empty husk, drained of everything that makes me a living and a human being. ”

“ Madeleine saw nothing lacking in this religion. It seemed to her all that life could demand of one woman.
In the spring of 1914, when Raoul was five years old and Sylvie eight, Madeleine was once more joyfully sorting over the tiny clothes left from their babyhood. All that summer her quick fingers were busy with fine white flannel and finer white nainsook, setting tiny stitches in small garments. Every detail of the great event was provided for in advance. As usual in French families, in all good families everywhere, the mother-to-be was lapped around with tenderness and indulgence. ”

“ One day we looked, and there in our street were half a dozen French soldiers, with bloody heads and arms, limping along between Boche guards on their way to the hospital. All our people rose like a great wave and swept towards them. The guards reversed their rifles and began clubbing with their butt ends—clubbing the old women who tried to toss food to the prisoners, clubbing the little children who stretched out handfuls of chocolate, clubbing the white-haired men who thrust cigarettes into the pockets of the torn, stained French uniforms. ”

“ On the morning of the third day the sound of clumsily clattering hoofs in the deserted street brought Madeleine rushing downstairs to the door of the pharmacy. An old farmer, mounted on a sweating plow horse, drew rein for an instant in the sun and, breathing hard, gave the news to the little cluster of white-faced women and old men who gathered about him. Madeleine pressed in beside her poorer neighbors, closer to them than at any time in her life, straining up to the messenger, like them, to hear the stroke of fate. ”

“ Madeleine stopped short, her hands full of bandages. "Are they German wounded? Are we getting these things for German soldiers?"
Sœur Ste. Lucie nodded gravely. "Yes, I felt just so, too, at first. But when I saw them wounded, bleeding, so sick, worn out.... How would you like German women to treat your husband if he should be wounded in Germany? We are all nothing but wretched sinners in the sight of God. And are we not taught to do good to our enemies?" ”

“ Why, Monsieur Réquine, I give you my word, I have never looked inside my Horace since the day I took the final exam in it! I wouldn't dream of doing it! What would business come to if everybody sagged back like that? You don't seem to realize what business is, modern business. It's not just soulless materialistic money-making, it's the great, big, wide road that leads human beings to progress! It's what lets humanity get a chance to satisfy its wants, and get more wants, and satisfy them, and get more, and conquer the world from pole to pole. ”

“ One unused shop is transformed into the regimental infirmary, and hangs out the Red Cross flag; another sees the quartermaster and his secretaries installed at desks improvised from pine boards; a sentry stands before the Town Hall where the colonel has his headquarters, and another guards the fine old house which has the honor of sheltering the regimental flag.
The street, our quiet, sleepy street, is like an artery pulsing with rapid vibrations; despatch-riders dash up and down; camions rumble by; a staff-car full of officers looking seriously at maps halts for a moment and passes on ”

“ It is often a lively expedition, with the children skipping and shouting beside their grandmother, or one of the bigger boys pushing the wheelbarrow, cherished and indispensable accessory of French country life. They take what with us would be a "walk in the country," and as they pass they levy toll on every sod beside the road, or in a corner of a wall; on the fresh green leaves and twigs of neglected thickets; on brambles and weeds—rabbits adore weeds!—on underbrush and vines. ”

“ I never bother my head about my hats! I just walk into almost any shop and buy the first hat that doesn't make me look too queer."
"You don't have to bother yourself about it," he told me, his accent tinged with weary bitterness. "We do the bothering! Months beforehand. An army of us, able-bodied men, smart women, pretty young girls, we all of us give up our lives to fixing things so you can walk into most any shop and pick up most any hat and find it doesn't make you look too 'queer,' which is your way of saying that it doesn't make you look out of style." ”

“ They are here, the splendid, splendid soldiers who are the French poilus. Everybody's brother, cousin, husband, friend, son, is there.
All Crouy leans from its windows to welcome them back from death—one more respite. They glance up at the windows as they pass; the younger ones smile at the girls' faces; the older ones, fathers certainly, look wistfully at the children's bright heads. There are certain ones who look at nothing, staring straight ahead at immaterial sights which will not leave their eyes. ”

“ For the Gare de l'Est was where the majority of French soldiers took their trains to go back to the front after their occasional week's furlough with their families.
No words of mine can convey any impression of what she saw there. No one who has not seen the Gare de l'Est night after night can ever imagine the sum of stifled human sorrow which filled it thickly, like a dreadful incense of pain going up before some cruel god. ”

“ In one corner, on a bench, sat a row of wretchedly poor women and white-faced, silent children, the latter shod more miserably than the poorest negro child in Marshallton. Against a packing-case near the entrance leaned a beautifully dressed, handsome, middle-aged woman, a hammer in one hand. Before her at ease stood a pretty girl, the fineness of whose tightly drawn silk stockings, the perfection of whose gleaming coiffure, the exquisite hang and fit of whose silken dress filled Ellen Boardman with awe. ”

“ The cooks fill them up at the kitchen at the rear, quite out of range, you know, where there's no danger of a shell upsetting the pots, and then the men bring the big fireless cookers up on mitrailleuse carriages that can go anywhere. They worm their way clear up to us in the first-line trenches, and our ragoût is piping hot. It's like sitting down to the table at the farm at home. There's nothing so good for the spirit of an army as hot rasta. And your packages, the packages madame sends with the money from her American friends ... ”

“ Then came the inevitable American challenge, the brave new note from the New World which I always rejoiced to hear:
"But what's the point of shutting yourself up that way from your neighbors and making such a secret of your lovely garden that nobody gets any good of it but yourself? Why not open up and let everybody who goes by take pleasure in your flowers and your lawn and see the kids playing and hear them laughing?" ”

“ What do you think a man is doing when he works all his life for his family? Is he earning their livings? Not much. He's enabling them to keep in style, and if he doesn't he is a failure. What do you really want for your children? That they may grow up to develop all the best they have in them ... yes, if that doesn't prevent their being in style."
I found all this so outrageous that I could only stare a silent protest.
"I don't mean just my small part of it, hats," he explained, "although hats are always, so to speak, the crest of the tidal wave. It's everything. Style rules everything. ”

“ In the street door, with her basket of bandages on her arm, Sœur Ste. Lucie stood looking around her at the desolate filth-strewn shop, the million pieces of glass which had been its big windows covering the floor, its counter hacked and broken with axes. She said: "We haven't any mayor and the priest is dead, and we haven't any pharmacy and the baker is mobilized, and there isn't one strong, well man left in town. How are we going to live?"
Madeleine took another step, hesitating, along the new road. ”

“ Jules mounted the stairs from the pharmacy at noon and in the evening, his mouth literally watering in anticipation. The children were always as exquisitely fresh and well-cared for as only French children of the better classes can be, with their hair curled in shining ringlets and their hands clean, as those of our children are only on Sunday mornings. Madeleine's religion was to keep them spotless and healthful and smiling; to keep Jules' mouth always watering in anticipation ”

“ Simone shrieked from the kitchen, "Oh, madame! The garden! The garden!"
Madeleine ran to a window, looked down, and saw long rows of horses picketed in the garden. Two German soldiers were throwing down hay from the gable end of the Mandriné livery-stable which overlooked the wall. The horses ate with hungry zest, stamping vigorously in the flowerbeds to keep off the flies. When they had finished on the hay, they began on the vines, the little, carefully tended fruit-trees, the bushes, the flowers. A swarm of locusts could not have done the work more thoroughly. ”

“ It goes beyond anything we can imagine. It's the greatest force in the world, this desire, this absolute necessity to be in the style. Nothing else can stand up against it for a moment, not hunger, not fear, not love, not religion. They only exist so far as they don't get in the way of being in the style. The minute they interfere with that, over they go like a pack of cards in a tornado! ”

“ Maggie did not follow this reasoning, but she received a disagreeable, rather daunting impression from the eyes which looked at her so hard, from the stern, quivering voice. She flounced back on her pillow, saying impatiently: "I don't know what's got into you, Ellen Boardman. You look actually queer, these days! What do you care so much about the Belgians for? You never heard of them before all this began! And everybody knows how immoral French people are." ”

“ For some moments the American had been surging inwardly, and he now boiled over with a great wave of words. "Will you just let me tell you what you've been describing to me, Monsieur Réquine? The life of an old, old man ... and you're younger than I am! And will you let me tell you what I'd call your 'peace'? I'd call it laziness! Why, that's the kind of life that would suit an oyster right down to the ground! And, by George, that's the kind of life that gave the Boches their strangle-hold on French commerce before the war. ”

“ My friend, humanity as a whole will never be worth more than the lives of its individuals are worth, and it takes many, many things to make individual lives worth while. It takes a mixture, and it needs, among other elements, some quiet, some peace, some leisure, some occupation with things of pure beauty like my roses, some fellowship with great minds of the past...." His eyes took on a dreamy deepening glow. "Sometimes as I dig the earth among my fruit-trees, the old, old earth, a sentence from Epictetus, or from Montaigne comes into my head, all at once luminous as I never saw it before. ”

“ Hale, it is not all. We put into our cold cream beside the recipe, patience, conscience, and pride, and that deftness of hand that only comes after years of training. You cannot buy those qualities on the market, not for any price. To think of my recipe put into the hands of money-making factory superintendents and a rabble horde of riffraff workmen!... Mr. Hale, you must excuse me for saying that I am astonished at your proposing it, you who have shown by your generous appreciation of its qualities that you are so worthy a member of our guild. ”

“ I've got grown-up children of my own. It will be a real treat to me to know some American children here."
In this casual manner, slipping in on the good graces of my little son and daughter, I entered a world the very existence of which I had never suspected, long and frequent as had been my sojourns in Paris; the world of hat-buyers. And I had for guide the very dean and master of the guild, to whom the younger aspirants looked up, whose sure, trained instinct was their despair and inspiration. ”

“ He was back by ten o'clock, exhausted, but aroused from his waking nightmare—for that time! But it came again and again.
On the day he began to spade up the field he noticed that two of his murdered fruit-trees, attached by a rag of bark to the stumps, were breaking out into leaf. The sight turned him sick with sorrow, as though one of his children had smiled at him from her deathbed. He bent over the tree, his eyes burning, and saw that all the buds were opening trustfully. His heart was suffocating. He said to himself: "They have been killed! They are dead! ”

“ The first thing that came into her mind as she stood before them, her heart suffocating her, her knees shaking under her, was the strangeness of seeing so many able-bodied men not in uniform, and so many women not in mourning. She told them this as a beginning and got their startled attention at once, the men vaguely uneasy, the women divining with frightened sympathy what it meant to see all women in black.
Then she went on to tell them about the work for the refugees ... not for nothing had she made out the card-catalogue accounts of those life-histories. ”

“ I see from what you so eloquently say that I would have become the slave and not the master of that invention which has come down to me from my fathers; that instead of its furnishing me and my work-people with a quiet, orderly, contented life, I should only exist to furnish it means for a wild, fantastic growth, like something in a nightmare, because a real growth is never like that, never!
"Mr. Hale, do you know what I do of an evening, in the summer? I leave the shop at half-past five or six, and I step into my garden, where I work till half-past seven, when I am most exquisitely hungry. ”

“ Besides that hope, which kept us alive those first months, we were not yet in that windowless prison which 'they' have succeeded in making our own country to us. We had news of France and of the outside world through the French and English prisoners. They were brought into our improvised hospital to have their wounds dressed before they were put on the train to be sent forward to their German prisons. As we cared for them we could get news of the battles; sometimes we heard through them of the men of our families; always they were a link with the world outside. ”

“ Never forget what you are seeing to-day," as they watched the soldiers drive into the cattle cars the old men, women, and adolescents torn from their homes in such haste that they had no change of clothing, no food, often not even their hats and wraps. "We stood there, those who were not 'taken,' the great helpless crowd of women and children, agonizing in that dreadful silence which is the last refuge of our poor battered human dignity up there. I was suffocating, literally unable to breathe. You do not know what hate and pity and horror you can feel and still live! ”

“ When the war broke out, Madeleine Brismantier was the very type and epitome of all which up to that time had been considered "normal" for a modern woman, a nice, modern woman. She had been put through the severe and excellent system of French public education in her native town of Amiens, and had done so well with her classes that when she was nineteen her family were thinking of feeding her into the hopper of the system of training for primary teachers. ”

“ The French country housekeeper who does her own washing brings around to the street door her faithful steed, the wheelbarrow, and loads it up; first the big galvanized boiler full of soiled clothes, then a wooden box open at one side, filled with clean straw, then the soap, a flat, short-handled wooden paddle, and a stiff scrubbing-brush. Leaving the children not yet at school in the charge of a neighbor—for whom she will perform the same service another day of the week—her head done up in a kerchief, her skirts kilted high to let her step free, she sets off down the road for the lavoir. ”