Frederick Palmer

“ When Madame Ribot heard the plan she smiled and nodded approval, reminding Henriette that she must wear gloves in order not to blister her hands. She herself, under her parasol, walked out to see them begin.
Madame Pigou, with deep wrinkles around her kindly mouth and hands already stiffened by labour at forty, protested at first.
"Such work is not for you," she said to Henriette. "Nothing takes it out of your back more than sickling, unless it's hoeing."
"Oh, none of us expects to be as adept as you," replied Henriette, "or as Helen, who has a natural talent for such things." ”

“ Helen shook her head.
"Oh, please, that's a good mouse!" urged Heinriette.
"No!" said Helen, a sharpness in her voice unlike Heinriette's now and a flash of what seemed pent-up irritation in her eyes.
It was not an agreeable exhibition, Phil thought. But Henriette smiled as if accustomed to such outbreaks, explaining in an aside:
"Train-riding always tires her. You mustn't mind her abruptness. She has more fire, is more French, than I am." ”

“ Madame Ribot replied promptly, for her decision was made that Helen should remain at Mervaux during the war. "And shan't we go out of doors?"
"You feel very deeply," said Phil to Helen as they passed into the grounds where, in utter stillness, the trees cast long shadows from the light of the half moon.
"Every one does," she replied, "only I forget and blurt out my feelings. Perhaps—oh, that is the great hope—the war will do good in its way—good to those who survive!" ”

“ He was thinking that he should not mind sitting again for his portrait on the terrace, with Henriette smiling at her easel and Helen laughing over her cartoons of his proud career.
Spring not only came to Flanders, but the mud dried; the fields were carpeted with the tender green of young grain, and the canopies of foliage gave better cover for the "hows." Green, yes, but flat that vista from the gun-positions, while the graceful slopes of the Berkshires might be dripping and glistening as they had on the afternoon that he returned from the Southwest. ”

“ Phil drew back startled after a first glance, to look into Helen's eyes expressive of her intense enjoyment of the situation; and then irresistibly he looked again in the mirror. Two and a half centuries stood between the two Sanfords. Add thirty years to those of the man sitting at the table and dress him in the same garb as the man in the portrait and it would be difficult to tell them apart. Phil was not more thrilled than confused. And then another face appeared beside his in the mirror. It was Henriette's, peeping in at the edge, her lips parted in a teasing smile. ”

“ Henriette made a leisurely business of her toilet before the mirror. Why shouldn't she? It was merely a fit expression of sincere gratitude for nature's kindness. She might enjoy the grace of the movement of her fingers in caressing expertness around the face that she saw as she arranged her hair.
Helen come up from the kitchen with a blistered finger and her cheeks hot from the oven heat, saw that same face looking back at her. Often she had wished for some magic that would show a new one. Plain people, she thought, ought at least to have a change of plain faces for variety's sake. ”

“ Henriette smiling from her easel at him—how good she was to look at! Helen with her quips as she was drawing the cartoons! Helen in her intensity as she made the real drawing! Henriette silent, smiling, her lips parted as if she were speaking and Helen's words seeming to be here! Oh, afternoon of afternoons! Air sweet to the nostrils and genial sunlight! All the senses in tranquil enjoyment!...
And Henriette! Oh, he had been hard hit that day. It was enough for any woman to be as beautiful as she was! But how little he realised her worth then! Her beauty had dimmed her other qualities. ”

“ The morning train from Paris to Mervaux had been taken off and the afternoon train was late. Henriette had met Phil at the station and Helen was away from the house when they arrived. After his glimpse of armed Europe rushing to conflict, after seeing and feeling the straining effort of the nations with every human being drawn into the maelstrom of one emotion, he had hardly conceived it possible that nature could have tucked away any three people in a spot so completely sequestered from the war. ”

“ Henriette had enjoyed the visits, but not more than Madame Ribot who, looking on, lived over her own successes.
"Henriette does not know yet what it means to fall in love," thought her mother. "I hope that she will not for a few years more. A woman may do that only once. And Helen had not fallen in love, either. Poor Helen!" At intervals she could be sorry for herself by being sorry for Helen.
It was no surprise to her that the war did not keep the seventeenth cousin away from Mervaux or that his note was addressed to Henriette. ”

“ Enveloping horror, the horror of war personified, drove Henriette out of the ward, on with mechanical steps toward a deserted part of the beach, where she could be alone and think before she faced Lady Truckleford's lot.
Her gospel of life had been a gospel of beauty: a delight in her own beauty as a source of power; a dislike of all things that were not comely; a choice of surroundings in the fashioning of a beautiful world, selected and detached in a charming egoism, where she was supreme. Phil had come from afar and played a knightly part ”

“ The steady thunder of the guns became suddenly audible and against the green background of distant woods little puffs of smoke that seemed born of nothing were breaking and spreading into a mist which was as innocent-looking as a fleecy cloud on a summer day.
"One cannot realise what is going on there," remarked Phil, "though we shall if it comes to us."
"Then we go into the cellar, don't we, and wait?"
"I believe that is the rule," he said. "You've a good spirit."
"That is easy when a woman has a man along whom she can rely upon," she replied cheerfully. ”

“ When Helen and Phil came out into the village street not a soul was in sight. The little community of peasants' houses with its old church was as dead as Pompeii. They went into Mère Perigord's living-room and looked into the bedroom without finding her. When Helen called down into the cellar a quavering voice answered:
"Of course, you goose, and do you go right back to your own cellar or come down here. What do you think we are—fools? Why, one goes to a cellar as naturally as one puts up an umbrella in a rain!" ”

“ One cause alone had sent Henriette back to Mervaux: the man who was returning there in order that Helen should not be alone. After all the chances she had had and played with, Henriette, too, had acted without reason when the impulse came. Helen was to blame. It was partly jealousy with Henriette, as it had been with Madame Ribot; the desire for conquest baffled by some humbler person. Her daughter was "running after" this cousin from America who had nothing to offer except America; but so had she herself run after a man who, at least, was not poor. ”

“ Those finely-chiselled features which she had painted, which had been the security of masculine strength in her fright as he carried her to the cover of the gully, their elation when she spoke of the woman who waited when the man went out to fight—and that monstrous fact against a pillow in the hospital!
War had made its test in kind. All the soft, pampered years were in reckoning for her, as the suffering years were for Helen. Her instinct was to fly to her quiet studio in Paris, as a child flies indoors to its mother from a storm dragon ”

“ In a race with death, the battery horses galloped up and away went the guns, with the German shells smashing the emplacements which had just been vacated. But the tenacious, skilful gunners did not go far—only behind the next ridge, where they began again to pour death into the advancing German infantry.
"I thought so!" came a voice breaking in upon the little group. "Nobody is so foolhardy as a woman!" said General Rousseau, shaking his finger at Helen and Henriette. "When I heard that you were staying behind I came at once to warn you. That is not fireworks out there; it's death. ”

“ Phil, who knew only that Helen had stopped to speak with some one, had no means of knowing who. She was the same to him as any other person of millions in his silent night, unseen, unheard. His circle of actual human beings consisted of Helen, or Henriette, as he thought, Bricktop, the nurses, the specialists, and now his parents and Peter. They were the visible stars in the darkness. ”

“ Phil had had a glimpse of an English home and now he was to have one of a home in France, an intimacy which seldom falls to the lot of the tourist. Smiling as she knew how, a hostess with the charm of French manner, Madame Ribot received him, taking in, without seeming to do so, every detail, from the state of his nails to the cut of his clothes. Her judgment of people was that of appearance and manner and position. There were Americans who were nice and who were not nice and Englishmen and Frenchmen who were nice and who were not nice. ”

“ It hardly seemed possible that death could lurk in the soft puffs of shrapnel smoke playing around the planes. Death should have no part in such a day. It was a day of life. Soft air to breathe, gentle breezes, kindly sunshine, and youth. Phil enjoyed the fact of existence as some superb privilege which deserved gratitude to earth and sky, and particularly to the sky, which was all that he could see as he entered the winding communication trench. ”

“ Most of the harvesters started toward the road and with them went Henriette and Helen and Phil. But not Madame Pigou. She stood watching the figures all of a pattern in their uniforms, moving like automatons sharp cut against the skyline, and then bent to her work. Her son could not be among these battalions. She knew that he was in Alsace. Buxom peasant girls and toothless old men and women standing by the roadside called out the joyful God-speed of their hearts to the soldiers of France. ”

“ It was an axiom of the circle in which she had been trained that no one was more susceptible to old world charm of her kind than self-made American millionaires.
"A good-looking woman," thought Peter, "and lots of style."
He was delighted to be better acquainted with her, as he must become in that five hours' ride. The car was a limousine, the cushions soft, the autumn day fair, and Madame Ribot was spinning webs as the rubber tires spun over the road.
"America must be wonderful," she said.
"It's a growing country," Peter replied. ”

“ Human specks dotted the fields, women, old men, and boys who had been at work since dawn harvesting the grain, since the able-bodied men were away at war. A figure which he recognised approached a nearby group. The bent backs straightened. Faintly he could hear their voices as they passed the time of day, and then a laugh all round as Helen became one of them in effort as well as in spirit, raking and binding the sheaves.
For the time being he said nothing about it to Henriette, but occasionally his glance stole away from her toward Helen, who kept on with her labour. ”

“ With the brilliant light of Henriette departed, smaller lights became visible. Helen also was his cousin. But he felt a peculiar awkwardness in speaking to her. He was even afraid that one of her tempers might break on him. He hesitated, as he thought of something to say, and his glance fell on the pile of charcoal drawings on the side table.
"Are those your drawings?" he asked.
"I plead guilty," she responded equivocally.
"May I look?"
"Of course. Please do, if you would like to," she said. "They explain themselves," she added, without rising, "and it's at your own risk." ”

“ Braisted, the autumn sunlight which kissed the tree-tops and cathedral spires and gave the Channel, which was calm that day, a gossamery sheen, was soft to Phil's irises in its caressing promise that next time the bandages were removed he should see even better.
People were now dim moving shadows to him; the windows of the ward bright squares in faintly perceptible walls. His hearing was good enough to differentiate in tones but not to make out words unless they were shouted. His pride still refused to let him speak and kept him not unhappily to his pad ”

“ Nothing in Old England is quite as old as New England. Not even the pyramids are as old as a New England elm. Europe may repair and renovate cathedrals; New England repairs and renovates elms. The Puritan Fathers planted trees on such broad main streets as that of Longfield, with stretches of green border of old turf now curving around the massive trunks that supported their stately plumes—a street which Phil saw in its age, its serenity and its spring freshness with the appreciation of one come from the Southwest, plus the call of old association which absence strengthens. ”