Helen Mackay

“ Rain, sunshine, wet black rock, great blue and black and purple clouds, clear azure spaces, snows, lifted drifted crests of snow, like waves arrested—all this as we went up, and up, with a rainbow like a bridge across the valley we were leaving behind us.
Up and up and up, into the young joy of the mountains, young as at the beginning of the world, joyous above all things. What do they care, the great mountains? They stand quite still, and all things pass. They lift their heads, and do not even know.
A baby cried because its father was gone away to war. ”

“ The sunsets are like the reflection of great battlefields beyond the world. One is frightened because of the sunsets, more than because of the storms. Every day while the sun shines there is the rumble of thunder about all the horizon. It is like the cannon of my dreams. All the time, while the sun shines, great thunder-clouds are gathering upon the horizon, mounting up from the horizon, white and yellow, and purple and black. The sunshine is heavy, and thick; you do not know if the sky is dark blue or purple, and at sunset the dark cloud-shapes threaten and menace. ”

“ The crickets trill all the hot noons in the grass, and the droning of the bees sounds very hot. Like clouds of white butterflies drift over the path, make little drifting butterfly shadows on the path. There is a most wonderful smell of clover in the heat. Down under the fields there are heaped together the crowded old rust-red and burnt umber and golden roofs of the town. And all away beyond there is the valley, opened out, long road and river, to high, far distances of mountains and snows.
I go and sit with my friends about the big board table, in the place where the motors used to be kept. ”

“ Madelon sat twisted round in her chair to look straight up at him and adore, her hands in their Sunday gloves clasped intensely upon her blueprint lap.
It was cool in the church after the last day's rain, and dark, except where bars of sunshine and dancing sun motes struck across, and where the altar candles were little stars.
One heard the chickens cackling in the curé's garden, and the locusts shrilling close at the windows in the acacia trees of the cemetery, and the children calling and laughing in the street. ”

“ There is a certain special peculiar château smell, that trails down long galleries, and lingers on the stairs, that lurks in far corners of the rooms, and abides in all the cupboards, and behind the [7] tapestries, and in the big carved chests, that clings to wood and waxed floors and stone, and stirs along the heavy sombre walls, and that means France, like the smell of old gardens of box and yew. It stabs one—always the arrowy perfume—and makes one feel France with an odd intensity. ”

“ Suddenly the room seemed to swim about Paule, there was a surging in her ears. She said, "May I sit down?"
"But I beg you! I am sorry, I can't seem to think of things. Here in the window?"
Paule dragged the chair out of the light of the sunshiny June morning into the shadow of the curtain. She was wearing a heavy white lace veil, but she did not want to face the sunshine.
Giselle threw herself into the chair where she had been sitting before. Her crape and the traces of many tears upon her face only made her look the more pathetically young. ”

“ Suddenly a wonderful idea and daring came to Anne Marie. She stopped and stood still there in the little gravel path, between the box edges and beds of roses and heliotrope and petunias that were so sweet in the sunshine. She found herself possessed of a great courage. She would stand there, and Raoul would stand there, and they would be quiet, quite alone together. And she would dare to talk to him. She would dare to tell him things. There were so many things for her to tell and ask. Everything of life and of loving. She thought the droning of the bees was a hot and golden sound. ”

“ The night was full of great bells booming, Verdun, Verdun, Verdun. And yet there were no bells.
I never saw a darker morning come to Paris. The darkness came into the room, thick and wet and cold.
I had my breakfast by firelight.
The crows are back already in the garden; the bare black treetops were full of them this dark morning, and not one of them stirred or made a sound.
The lamps of the trams were lighted, and the lamps of the streets and quays and bridges.
The river is very high, the trees of the margins stand drowning. ”

“ I thought, how absurd to beg for bread to live, in a place where death would be so pure and clear, would ring out so joyously. I thought, how nice it is that all the roads of life lead up to death. And that death, however come to, is so high a thing. ”

“ And things are not said. When there is not too much suffering, it is rough. And when the suffering is great, it is all very dumb.
Here there is no one who knows how to word things. The men do not know, and the nurses do not know how to tell them. They all only just go on.
The nurses are poor women, of the people. They come, each one of them, from her own small [98] desperate struggle for life, each from her own crushing deadening small miseries and cares, without any help of dream and vision, callously—one, just looking on, might think—to their work in the hospital. ”

“ The heaped-up town at the edge of the sea, with its old roofs and chimneys, was black, in a livid, cold, desolate sky, that made one think of the dead. The fields of France were dark as we came through them. The towns had few lights, one felt them to be in grief, and lonely. In each town there was the same pleading at the windows of the train, "Pour nos blessés, pour nos refugiés." We came in the small hours to Paris. ”

“ Every sound had been part of the stillness; [280] all the lines and colours of things belonged together in that soft harmony which is so especially of France. I had thought, how it was France! And I had not known.
I had gone to Mass in the little ancient, dusky church of the village. I had gone down across the parterres, and along the avenue of limes, through the summer woods that were so happy and alive, out at the little green gate in the rampart walls, and down the street of big square old cobbles, between the nestling houses. ”

“ Sometimes the crows talk together from the top of the trees where their nests are, above the old low roofs my window looks across. There has been for days now, in all the rain and cold, a drift of green about the trees, the fine green mesh of a veil that seems to float, it is so bright and frail, about the black wintry tree-trunks and boughs and branches. ”

“ We went along the terrace and around between the south tower and the moat to the entrance court, and across the moat bridge, where the watch-dogs were chained one on either side, to the green court, and out of the big wrought-iron, vine-covered gates, to the Place aux Armes.
All the village was there in its Sunday dress, under the lime trees.
The swallows were flying, high about the Dungeon Tower and low across the big old grassy cobbles of the Place. They were crying their strange little cry. I thought, "They are calling for storm." And yet the sky was blue and gold behind the Dungeon Tower. ”

“ I want to remember all the things of the way back into the country; every thing of the fields, red warm ploughed earth and fresh-cut grass and tall clover; every thing of the forests, lights and mists and shadows, depths of moss and fern; every thing of the villages, stone stairways and hearth fires, the pot-au-feu, cows and people's living. ”

“ The mountains were of the colours of the vintage, purple and topaz and red.
The clouds made snow peaks high behind the mountains.
The house has a heap of steep, old, uneven blue-tiled roofs. Its walls are as yellow as the corn. There is a long terrace before it, with a stone balustrade, worn and soft, and a pigeon tower at one end of the terrace, and the tower of a great dark yew tree at the other end. ”

“ It is odd how beautiful any woman is with a baby in her arms. Especially if she has only a shawl to wrap around herself and the baby, where it lies in the hollow of her arm. The faded, stained, worn shawl, drawn close about her head, falls in long lines down over her shoulders, and is gathered up in new folds around the nestling baby, the little soft shape of it, the little head, round, against her throat. ”

“ Whatever one does, one has the feeling of doing it before the storm, in the teeth of the storm. When the storm does come, with its crashing and blinding, it brings no relief. It is as if these midsummer [9] storms meant something for which the whole world waited.
And that feeling of the end of things grows always stronger. There is no reason. Nobody, here at least, troubles about war.
This morning we were caught by a wonderful thunderstorm out in the fields.
Now from the terrace we are watching the sunset, all of thunder-clouds, purple and blue and black, and of fire. ”

“ The streets are full of bandages and crutches, pinned-up trouser-legs and pinned-up coat-sleeves, steps that halt along with tap of canes, and shuffling, uncertain steps that must be led.
One is always coming in the streets upon an especial type of little group of people, one might indeed think each time that it was the same little group over again, so much each different one of them resembles all the others—four or five women, an old man, a young sick-looking man, and quite a tagging on of children. One knows that they are refugees. ”

“ The curé cannot make out what they are. He had not known that there was iron in the church. Queer iron things are twisted and tortured. The new bright window he had thought so beautiful is all broken, the reds and blues and yellows sparkle among the stones.
There are men's boots. What are men's boots doing here, sticking up straight out of the ruins of altars?
They are the boots of the dead men. Those things among the stones are dead men. You go to see what the boots are doing here, and you find that the blue-and-red heaps are dead men. ”

“ Most of them are very humble people. There is a smell of poverty always in the little dark church. They are people to whom "home" can mean only some small poor place and things, a thatched cabin, a vineyard, a mansarde over a cobbled street.
They kneel in the little dark church and sing—
Sauvez, sauvez la France
Au nom du Sacré Cœur—
while alien feet tread hearts down into the stains and bruises of the roads between shattered poplar trees and thatched roofs burning.
Paris, just before Christmas
I try not to write. The only things worth saying are the things I do not know how to say. ”

“ In the round basin circled with snows, the ancient hospice—that is no more a hospice, from which its old possessors have been driven away—stands white, beside the white road, in the close-cropped pasture. The sheep and tawny rough cattle were the only things that stirred. The smoke of the hospice chimneys stayed quite motionless in the golden air. ”

“ The smell of burning brushwood comes in, to the smell of the hospital.
[53]
Through all the vineyards these days they are burning the refuse of the vines. The smoke stays among the vines, lingering heavily. The purple smoke and the red and purple wine colours of the vines, and the purple mists of the distances, gathered away into the purple shadows of the mountains, make one think at twilight of the music of a violin, or of a flute. ”

“ Two trains are side-tracked in the fields, beyond the little country station, where the wheat is already bronzed and heavy-headed, and the poppies flame through it, and where there is all the music of grasshoppers and crickets and birds.
One is a train of men coming back from the Front on leave, and very gay. They are all laughing and singing in the carriages. They are all getting themselves tidied up, for shortly they will be in Paris. ”

“ It must be just like that the smoke is rising in the sunshine over the high edge of a field I used to know. They say that field is laid across everywhere with railroad tracks, along which monster grey cannon crawl up to their [254] positions, and crawl back across again when their work is done. Hundreds of horses are corralled in the field, and everywhere there are dotted little white tents. Sometimes black faces come to the openings of the tents, and one would think of the Village Nègre people went to see in Magic City, ages and ages ago. ”

“ The hideous, huge restaurant is a hospital. The paths and the road to it, and the lawns and garden beds about it are corded off that people may not go and look. From the distance, you see vague, white shapes of things, and figures all in white, moving about inside the great plateglass windows! ”

“ All day long there has been sunshine, and the sky has been blue. There were great white clouds that mounted up over the city, and that one kept imagining was the smoke of battle. The blue of the sky was wonderful, infinite and near, like something of music or of religion, and the sunshine was like golden wine. ”

“ The old woman passed her, and was beside Valérie. "God and the saints! It has came again!" she cried. She put her arms about Valérie and the girl fell stiffly against her shoulder. "Oh, my lamb, my little lamb!"
"Is she dead?" implored Nanette. "Jeanne-Marie, is she dead?"
"No, no, it has happened before. Go call Francine, quick."
The maid was already at the door; she must have heard the excited voices.
The old nurse said to the maid, "Help me get her to the sofa." To Nanette she said, "Go away, mademoiselle; you must go away." ”