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Digitized by the Internet Archive
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https://archive.org/details/harpersnew138various
HARPER'S MONTHLY MAGAZINE
VOLUME CXXXVlll \ 3 f DECEMBER, 1918— MAY, 1919
NEW YORK AND LONDON
HARPER y BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
1919
CONTENTS OF VOLUME CXXXVIII
DECEMBER, 1918— MAY, 1919
About Writing Poetry 219
Annapolis and Annapolitans.
Harrison Rhodes 641 Illustrations in Tint by Vernon Howe Bailey.
"As One Lady to Another." A Story.
Beatrice Ravenel 494 Illustrations by E. L. Chase. Blue Star, The. A Story,
Katharine Fullerton Gerould 678
Boy Power. A Story.
Howard Brubaker 519 Illustrations by Rollin McNeil Cramp- ton.
Bridgeport and Democracy.
Mary Heaton Vorse 145
Broken Soldier and the Maidsof France,
The. A Story. Henry Van Dyke I Illustrations in Color by Frank E. Schoonover.
Business and Patriotism. Carter Glass 817
Called to Service. A Story.
Charles Caldwell Dobie 256 Illustrations by T. K. Hanna.
Centenarian, The. A Story.
Will E. Ingersoll 811 Illustration by William Hurd Lawrence.
Changing America. .Robert W. Bruere 289
Chemists of the Future, The.
Ellwood Hendrick 705 Choice, The. A Story.
Charles Caldwell Dobie 775 Illustration by Walter Biggs.
Christmas in a Y. M. C. A. Hut on the Russian Front.
Richard Orland Atkinson 53 Illustrated with Photographs.
"Contact" Wilbur Daniel Steele 485
Crater's Gold. A Novel— Parts II, III,
IV, V.Philip Curtiss, 94, 203, 358, 528 Illustrations by Wilson C. Dexter.
Dinner-Tables of the Nation.
Elizabeth Miner King 38 Each After Its Kind .... John Burroughs 690
Editor's Drawer. . 137, 281, 425, 569, 717, 857
INTRODUCTORY STORIES
"The Rime of the Lady May," by Carolyn Wells (illustrations by Peter
Newell), 137; "The First and Only Cruise of the Caoutchouc " by Anthony F. "Moitoret (illustrations by Peter Newell), 281; "A Knight of the Table- Cloth," by B urges Johnson (illustrations by Peter Newell), 425; "What the Pug Knew," by Frances Hodgson Burnett (illustrations by F. Strothmann), 569; "The Great Roundtop Vegetable Drive," by Albert Bigelow Paine (illus- trated by F. Strothmann), 857.
Editor's Easy Chair W. D. Howells
134,278, 422, 566,714,854
Education and Self-Government in Rus- sia. .. .Manya Gordon Strunsky 270
Education by Violence.
Henry Seidel Canby 558
First and Second Battles of the Marne, The.
Maj.-Gen. Sir Frederick Maurice 195 Illustrated with Maps.
Flight from the Fireside, A. A Story.
Arthur Johnson 408 111 ustrations by Edward L. Chase.
Friendship of Men, The. A Story.
M aria Moravsky 333
Golden Mountain, The. A Story.
Elsie Singmaster 46 Illustrations by Frank Stick.
Goodfellow. A Story.
Wilbur Daniel Steele 655 Illustrations by D. C. Hutchison.
Gray Socks. A Story.
Charles Caldwell Dobie 591 Illustration by C. E. Chambers.
Heart of a Woman, The. A Story.
Wilbur Daniel Steele 384 Illustrations by F. Walter Taylor.
"Help Wanted, Female."
Simeon Strunsky 402
High Cost of Conscience, The. A Story.
Beatrice Ravenel 235 Illustration by C. E. Chambers.
His Hour. A Story.
Mary Esther Mitchell 176 Illustrations by W. H. D. Koerner.
CONTENTS
111
Hotel Guest, The. .. .Harrison Rhodes 753 Illustrations in Tint by George Wright.
How the War Was Won. — Parts I, II.
General Malleterre, 433, 598 Illustrations in Tint by Lester G. Hornby.
Huns of the Air.
Walter Prichard Eaton 224 Illustrations in Tint by Walter King Stone.
Hunting with the Lords of the Dezertas.
Charles W. Furlong 542 Illustrated with Photographs.
Inland Waters. .Walter Prichard Eaton 834 Illustrations in Tint by Walter King Stone.
Importance of Being Mrs. Cooper, The.
A Story Harrison Rhodes 295
Illustrations by May Wilson Preston.
Korea — An Experiment in Denationali- zation Walter E. Weyl 392
Illustrated with Photographs by E. M. Newman.
Labor and the New Nationalism.
Robert W. Bruere 746
Laocoon of the Shoe-Lacings, The.
Robert P. Utter 123
Letters of Riley and Bill Nye. Ar- ranged, with Comment, by Ed- mund H. Eitel 473
Illustrated with Photographs.
Little Folks that Gnaw.
Walter Prichard Eaton 345 Illustrations in Tint by Walter King Stone.
Lost-Lady Trail. A Story.
Sarah Comstock ill Illustrations by Denman Fink.
Magnificent Suarez, The. A Story.
Mary Heaton Vorse 696 Illustrations by Howard Giles.
Majestic Movies, The.
Harrison Rhodes 183 Illustrations by George Wright.
Man's Son, A. A Story.
Mary Heaton Vorse 463 Illustrations by W. H. D. Koerner.
Marigolds. A Story . .Mary Ellen Chase 819 Illustrations by John Frost.
Mary and the Man. A Story.
Leila Burton Wells 155 Illustrations by A. D. Rahn.
Men of Bohemia Olive Gilbreath 247
Misunderstood Rhythms.
Fleta Campbell Springer 304
Monkey with the Green Pea-jacket,
The. A Story. Laura Spencer Portor 736
New Form of Matter, A.
J. D. Beresford 803
New Nationalism and Business, The.
Robert W. Bruere 511
New Simplicity, The. Katharine Ful-
lerton Gerould 14
Old Venetian Friend, An.
W. D. Howells 634
On the Beliefs and Convictions of Gui-
nea-Pigs . .Laura Spencer Portor 667
Other Folks' Harbors.
Mary Heaton Vorse 64 Illustrations in Color and Tint by W. J. Aylward.
Overnight. A Story.
Charles Caldwell Dobie 78
Pollen. A Story Susan Glaspell 446
Illustrations by W. H. D. Koerner.
"Portrait of My Daughter," by Frank
W. Benson. \ Comment by W. Stanton Howard 826 Engraved on Wood by Henry Wolf from
the Original Painting.
Praying Sally. A Story. .Alice Brown 310 Illustration by Walter Biggs.
Relic, A Max Beerbohm. 834
Savannah Twice Visited.
W. D. Howells 319 Illustrations by lohn M. Howells.
Side Shows in Armageddon.
Sir John Foster Fraser 264
Society Woman, The.
Harrison Rhodes 452 Illustrations by George Wright.
Solving the Problem of the Arctic. Parts
I, II. .Vilhjalmur Stefansson, 577, 721 Illustrated with Photographs.
Sports in the Zero Zone.
T. Morris Longstreth 374 Illustrated with Photographs by I. L. Stedman.
Spree d'Esprit, A. A Story. . Sophie Kerr 25 Illustrations by Arthur William Brown
Success and Artie Cherry. A Story.
Zona Gale 791 Illustrations by Denman Fink.
Through Sheffield Smoke.
Mary Heaton Vorse 766
IV
CONTENTS
"Transport 106". .Henry Seidel Canby 87 Women and Uniforms.
Fleta Campbell Springer 167 Voices of the Universe. .Buckner Speed 613 Wonderful Night, The.
. Ralph Henry Barbour 849
White Horse, The. A Story Illustrations bv Worth Brehm.
Armistead C. Gordon 128 „, . r TT . .
Word tor Hypocrisy, A.
Willum's Vanilla. A Story. Fleta Campbell Springer 786
Edwina Stanton Babcock 616 Young Venetian Friend, A. Illustrations by E. L. Chase. W. D. Howells 827
VERSE
After Battle Beatrice Ravenel 318
America's Burdens. . . .Virginia Watson 615
Bird-Call, The... Robert Nichols 421
Call, The Edward J. O'Brien 666
Cana Virginia Watson 202
Compensation. .Ruth Comfort Mitchell 654
Debutante, The.
Charles Hanson Towne 713 Garland of Memories, The.
Hesper Le Gallienne 695 "I Have*. Loved Hours at Sea."
Sara Teasdale 451 Joyous Gard. , . .Richard Le Gallienne 689
Lover with Wings. . . .Ethel M. Hewitt 166
March ..E. B. Dewing 640
Ocean Sunsets George Sterling 765
Old Song.. David Lang 527
One I Have Yet to Meet. .Don C. Seitz 853
Our Land Florence Earle Coates 597
Panacea Amanda Benjamin Hall 557
Path of the Stars, The.
Thomas S. Jones, Jr. 332
Poppies Grace Hazard Conkling 309
Prayer, A Clinton Scollard 825
Presence Jessie B. Rittenhouse 785
Robin in Wall Street, A. .Edwin Curran 704
Rondeau of Any Soldier.
Sergeant Lyon Mearson 218
Sleepers, The J. J. Kennealy 810
Sparrow, The. .Mary Coles Carrington 401
Their Victory Won.
Florence Earle Coates 77
To Eyes that See.
Elizabeth J. Coatsworth 234
Tryst, The John Allan Wyeth 818
Visual Beauty George Sterling 565
Wind in the Hemlock, The. Sara Teas- dale 303
Would that I Knew Harold Cook 802
Your Despair' and My Despair.
Rose O'Neill 752
Painting by Frank E. Schoonover Illustration for " The Broken Soldier and the Maid of France "
"GOD COMMANDS YOU," SHE CRIED. "IT IS FOR FRANCE"
HARPEPJS Monthly Magazine
Vol. cxxxviii December, 1918 No. dcccxxiii
The Broken Soldier and the Maid
of France
BY HENRY VAN DYKE
I
THE MEETING AT THE SPRING
LONG the old Roman road that crosses the rolling hills from the upper waters of the Marne to the Meuse a soldier of France was passing in the night.
In the broader pools of summer moon- light he showed as a hale and husky- fellow of about thirty years, with dark hair and eyes and a handsome, down- cast face. His uniform was faded and dusty; not a trace of the horizon blue was left; only a gray shadow. He had
Copyright, 191 8, by Harper &
no knapsack on his back, no gun on his shoulder. Wearily and doggedly he plodded his way without eyes for the veiled beauty of the sleeping country. The quick, firm military step was gone. He trudged like a tramp, choosing al- ways the darker side of the road.
He was a figure of flight, a broken soldier.
Presently the road led him into a thick forest of oaks and beeches, and so to the crest of a hill overlooking a long open valley with wooded heights beyond. Be- low him was the pointed spire of some temple or shrine, lying at the edge of the wood, with no houses near it. Farther down he could see a cluster of white houses with the tower of a church in the
Brothers. All Rights Reserved.
2
HARPER'S MONTHLY MAGAZINE
center. Other villages were dimly visible up and down the valley on either slope. The cattle were lowing from the barn- yards. The cocks crowed for the dawn. Already the moon had sunk behind the western trees. But the valley was still bathed in its misty, vanishing light. Over the eastern ridge the gray glimmer of the little day was rising, faintly tinged with rose. It was time for the broken soldier to seek his covert and rest till night returned.
So he stepped aside from the road and found a little dell thick with underwoods, and in it a clear spring gurgling among the ferns and mosses. Around the open- ing grew wild gooseberries and golden broom and a few tall spires of purple foxglove. He drew off his dusty boots and socks and bathed his feet in a small pool, drying them with fern leaves. Then he took a slice of bread and a piece of cheese from his pocket and made his breakfast. Going to the edge of the thicket, he parted the branches and peered out over the vale.
Its eaves sloped gently to the level floor where the river loitered in loops and curves. The sun was just topping the eastern hills; the heads of the trees were dark against a primrose sky.
In the fields the hay had been cut and gathered. The aftermath was already greening the moist places. Cattle and sheep sauntered out to pasture. A thin silvery mist floated here and there, spreading in broad sheets over the wet ground and shredding into filmy scarves and ribbons as the breeze caught it among the pollard willows and poplars on the border of the stream. Far away the water glittered where the river made a sudden bend or a long smooth reach. It was like the flashing of distant shields. Overhead a few white clouds climbed up from the north. The rolling ridges, one after another, enfolded the valley as far as eye could see; pale green set in dark green, with here and there an arm of forest running down on a sharp promon- tory to meet and turn the meandering stream.
"It must be the valley of the Meuse," said the soldier. "My faith, but France is beautiful and tranquil here!"
The northerly wind was rising. The clouds climbed more swiftly. The pop-
lars shimmered, the willows glistened, the veils of mist vanished. From very far away there came a rumbling thunder, heavy, insistent, continuous, punctuated with louder crashes.
"It is the guns," muttered the soldier, shivering. "It is the guns around Ver- dun! Those damned boches!"
He turned back into the thicket and dropped among the ferns beside the spring. Stretching himself with a gesture of abandon, he pillowed his face on his crossed arms to sleep.
A rustling in the bushes roused him. He sprang to his feet quickly. It was a priest, clad in a dusty cassock, his long black beard streaked with gray. He came slowly treading up beside the trickling rivulet, carrying a bag on a stick over his shoulder.
"Good morning, my son," he said. " You have chosen a pleasant spot to rest."
The soldier, startled, but not forget- ting his manners learned from boyhood, stood up and lifted his hand to take off his cap. It was already lying on the ground. "Good morning, Father," he answered. "I did not choose the place, but stumbled on it by chance. It is pleasant enough, for I am very tired and have need of sleep."
"No doubt," said the priest. "I can see that you look weary, and I beg you to pardon me if I have interrupted your repose. But why do you say you came here 'by chance'? If you are a good Christian you know that nothing is by chance. All is ordered and designed by Providence."
"So they told me in church long ago," said the soldier, coldly; "but now it does not seem so true — at least not with me."
The first feeling of friendliness and respect into which he had been surprised was passing. He had fallen back into the mood of his journey — mistrust, secrecy, resentment.
The priest caught the tone. His gray eyes under their bushy brows looked kindly but searchingly at the soldier and smiled a little. He set down his bag and leaned on his stick. "Well," he said, "I can tell you one thing, my son. At all events it was not chance that brought me here. I came with a purpose."
The soldier started a little, stung by
THE BROKEN SOLDIER AND THE MAID OF FRANCE 3
suspicion. "What then," he cried, roughly, "were you looking for me? What do you know of me? What is this talk of chance and purpose?"
"Come, come," said the priest, his smile spreading from his eyes to his lips, "do not be angry. I assure you that I know nothing of you whatever, not even your name nor why you are here. When I said that I came with a purpose I meant only that a certain thought, a wish, led me to this spot. Let us sit together awhile beside the spring and make better acquaintance."
"I do not desire it," said the soldier, with a frown.
"But you will not refuse it?" queried the priest, gently. "It is not good to refuse the request of one old enough to be your father. Look, I have here some excellent tobacco and cigarette-papers. Let us sit down and smoke together. I will tell you who I am and the purpose that brought me here."
The soldier yielded grudgingly, not knowing what else to do. They sat down on a mossy bank beside the spring, and while the blue smoke of their cigarettes went drifting under the little trees the priest began:
"My name is Antoine Courcy. I am the cure of Darney, a village among the Reaping Hook Hills, a few leagues south from here. For twenty-five years I have reaped the harvest of heaven in that blessed little field. I am sorry to leave it. But now this war, this great battle for freedom and the life of France, calls me. It is a divine vocation. France has need of all her sons to-day, even the old ones. I cannot keep the love of God in my heart unless I follow the love of country in my life. My younger brother, who used to be the priest of the next parish to mine, was in the army. He has fallen. I am going to replace him. I am on my way to join the troops — as a chaplain, if they will; if not, then as a private. I must get into the army of France or be left out of the host of heaven."
The soldier had turned his face away and was plucking the lobes from a frond of fern. "A brave resolve, Father," he said, with an ironic note. " But you have not yet told me what brings you off your road, to this place."
"I will tell you," replied the priest, eagerly; "it is the love of Jeanne d'Arc, the Maid who saved France long ago. You know about her?"
"A little," nodded the soldier. "I have learned in the school. She was a famous saint."
"Not yet a saint," said the priest, earnestly; "the Pope has not yet pro- nounced her a saint. But it will be done soon. Already he has declared her among the Blessed Ones. To me she is the most blessed of all. She never thought of herself or of a saint's crown. She gave her life entire for France. And this is the place that she came from! Think of that — right here!"
"I did not know that," said the sol- dier.
" But yes," the priest went on, kin- dling. "I tell you it was here that the Maitl of France received her visions and set out to her work. You see that vil- lage below us — look out through the branches — that is Domremy, where she was born. That spire just at the edge of the wood — you saw that? It is the basilica they have built to her memory. It is full of pictures of her. It stands where the old beech-tree, 'Fair May/ used to grow. There she heard the voices and saw the saints who sent her on her mission. And this is the Goose- berry Spring, the Well of the Good Fairies. Here she came with the other children, at the festival of the well- dressing, to spread their garlands around it, and sing, and eat their supper on the green. Heavenly voices spoke to her, but the others did not hear them. Often did she drink of this water. It became a fountain of life springing up in her heart. I have come to drink at the same source. It will strengthen me as a sacra- ment. Come, son, let us take it together as we go to our duty in battle!"
Father Courcy stood up and opened his old black bag. He took out a small metal cup. He filled it carefully at the spring. He made the sign of the cross over it.
"In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit," he murmured, "blessed and holy is this water." Then he held the cup toward the soldier. "Come, let us share it and make our vows together."
4
HARPER'S MONTHLY MAGAZINE
The bright drops trembled and fell from the bottom of the cup. The sol- dier sat still, his head in his hands.
"No," he answered, heavily, "I can- not take it. I am not worthy. Can a man take a sacrament without confess- ing his sins?"
Father Courcy looked at him with pitying eyes. "I see," he said, slowly; "I see, my son. You have a burden on your heart. Well, I will stay with you and try to lift it. But first I shall make my own vow."
He raised the cup toward the sky. A tiny brown wren sang canticles of rapt- ure in the thicket. A great light came into the priest's face — a sun-ray from the east, far beyond the treetops.
"Blessed Jeanne d'Arc, I drink from thy fountain in thy name. I vow my life to thy cause. Aid me, aid this my son, to fight valiantly for freedom and for France. In the name of God, Amen."
The soldier looked up at him. Won- der, admiration, and shame were strug- gling in the look. Father Courcy wiped the empty cup carefully and put it back in his bag. Then he sat down beside the soldier, laying a fatherly hand on his shoulder.
"Now, my son, you shall tell me what is on your heart."
II
THE GREEN CONFESSIONAL
^^^^^^^^^^ ling with himself" "No," he cried, at last, "I cannot, I dare not tell you. Unless, perhaps" - — his voice faltered — "you could receive it under the seal of confession ? But no. How could you do that? Here in the green woods? In the open air, beside a spring? Here is no confessional."
"Why not?" asked Father Courcy. "It is a good place, a holy place. Heaven is over our heads and very near. I will receive your confession here."
The soldier knelt among the flowers.
The priest pronounced the sacred words. The soldier began his confession:
"I, Pierre Duval, a great sinner, con- fess my fault, my most grievous fault, and pray for pardon." He stopped for a moment and then continued, "But first I must tell you, Father, just who I am and where I come from and what brings me here."
"Go on, Pierre Duval, go on. That is what I am waiting to hear. Be simple and very frank."
"Well, then, I am from the parish of Laucourt, in the pleasant country of the Barrois not far from Bar-sur-Aube. My word, but that is a pretty land, full of orchards and berry-gardens! Our old farm there is one of the prettiest and one of the best, though it is small. It was hard to leave it when the call to the colors came, two years ago. But I was glad to go. My heart was high and strong for France. I was in the Nth Infantry. We were in the center divi- sion under General Foch at the bat- tle of the Marne. Fichtre! but that was fierce fighting! And what a general! He did not know how to spell ' defeat/ He wrote it 'victory/ Four times we went across that cursed Marsh of St.-Gond. The dried mud was trampled full of dead bodies. The trickling streams of water ran red. Four times we were thrown back by the boches. You would have thought that was enough. But the gen- eral did not think so. We went over again on the fifth day, and that time we stayed. The Germans could not stand against us. They broke and ran. The roads where we chased them were full of empty wine-bottles. In one village we caught three officers and a dozen men dead drunk. Bigre! what a fine joke!"
Pierre, leaning back upon his heels, was losing himself in his recital. His face lighted up, his hands were waving. Father Courcy bent forward with shin- ing eyes.
"Continue," he cried. "This is a beautiful confession — no sin yet. Con- tinue, Pierre."
"Well, then, after that we were fight- ing here and there, on the Aisne, on the Ailette, everywhere. Always the same story — Germans rolling down on us in flood, green-gray waves. But the foam on them was fire and steel. The shells
THE BROKEN SOLDIER AND THE MAID OF FRANCE 5
of the barrage swept us like hailstones. We waited, waited in our trenches, till the green-gray mob was near enough. Then the word came. Sapristi! We let loose with mitrailleuse, rifle, field-gun, everything that would throw death. It did not seem like fighting with men. It was like trying to stop a monstrous thing, a huge, terrible mass that was rushing on to overwhelm us. The waves tumbled and broke before they reached us. Sometimes they fell flat. Sometimes they turned and rushed the other way. It was wild, wild, like a change of the wind and tide in a storm, everything torn and confused. Then perhaps the word came to go over the top and at them. That was furious. That was fighting with men, for sure — bayonet, revolver, rifle-butt, knife, anything that would kill. Often I sickened at the blood and the horror of it. But something in- side of me shouted: 'Fight on! It is for France. It is for " U Alouette" thy farm; for thy wife, thy little ones. Will you let them be ruined by those beasts of Germans? What are they doing here on French soil? Brigands, butchers, apaches! Drive them out; and if they will not go, kill them so they can do no more shameful deeds. Fight on!' So I killed all I could."
The priest nodded his head grimly. "You were right, Pierre; your voice spoke true. It was a dreadful duty that you were doing. The Gospel tells us, if we are smitten on one cheek we must turn the other. But it does not tell us to turn the cheek of a little child, of the woman we love, the country we belong to. No! that would be disgraceful, wicked, un-Christian. It would be to betray the innocent! Continue, my son."
"Well, then," Pierre went on, his voice deepening and his face growing more tense, "then we were sent to Ver- dun. That was the hottest place of all. It was at the top of the big German drive. The whole sea rushed and fell on us — big guns, little guns, poison-gas, hand-grenades, liquid fire, bayonets, knives, and trench-clubs. Fort after fort went down. The whole pack of hell was loose and raging. I thought of that crazy, chinless Crown Prince sitting in his safe little cottage hidden in the woods
somewhere — they say he had flowers and vines planted around it — drinking stolen champagne and sicking on his dogs of death. He was in no danger. I cursed him in my heart, that blood-lord! The shells rained on Verdun. The houses were riddled; the cathedral was pierced in a dozen places; a hundred fires broke out. The old citadel held good. The outer forts to the north and east were taken. Only the last ring was left. We common soldiers did not know much about what was happening. The big battle was beyond our horizon. But that General Petain, he knew it all. Ah, that is a wise man, I can tell you! He sent us to this place or that place where the defense was most needed. We went gladly, without fear or holding back. We were resolute that those mad dogs should not get through. They shall not passl And they did not pass!"
"Glorious!" cried the priest, drinking the story in. "And you, Pierre? Where were you, what were you doing?"
"I was at Douaumont, that fort on the highest hill of all. The Germans took it. It cost them ten thousand men. The ground around it was like a wood-yard piled with logs. The big shell-holes were full of corpses. There were a few of us that got away. Then our company was sent to hold the third redoubt on the slope in front of Fort de Vaux. Perhaps you have heard of that redoubt. That was a bitter job. But we held it many days and nights. The boches pounded us from Douaumont and from the village of Vaux. They sent wave after wave up the slope to drive us out. But we stuck to it. That ravine of La Caillette was a boiling caldron of men. It bubbled over with smoke and fire. Once, when their second wave had broken just in front of us, we went out to hurry the fragments down the hill. Then the guns from Douaumont and the village of Vaux hammered us. Our men fell like nine- pins. Our lieutenant called to us to turn back. Just then a shell tore away his right leg at the knee. It hung by the skin and tendons. He was a brave lad. I could not leave him to die there. So I hoisted him on my back. Three shots struck me. They felt just like hard blows from a heavy fist. One of them made my left arm powerless. I sank
6
HARPER'S MONTHLY MAGAZINE
my teeth in the sleeve of my lieutenant's coat as it hung over my shoulder. I must not let him fall off my back. Some- how — God knows how — I gritted through to our redoubt. They took my lieutenant from my shoulders. And then the light went out."
The priest leaned forward, his hands stretched out around the soldier. "But vou are a hero," he cried. "Let me em- brace you!
The soldier drew back, shaking his head sadly. "No," he said, his voice breaking — "no, my father, you must not embrace me now. I may have been a brave man once. But now I am a coward. Let me tell you everything. My wounds were bad, but not desperate. The brancardiers carried me down to Verdun, at night I suppose, but I was unconscious; and so to the hospital at Vaudelaincourt. There were days and nights of blankness mixed with pain. Then I came to my senses and had rest. It was wonderful. I thought that I had died and gone to heaven. Would God it had been so! Then I should have been with my lieutenant. They told me he had passed away in the redoubt. But that hospital was beautiful, so clean and quiet and friendly. Those white nurses were angels. They handled me like a baby. I would have liked to stay there. I had no desire to get better. But I did. One day several officers visited the hos- pital. They came to my cot, where I was sitting up. The highest of them brought out a Cross of War and pinned it on the breast of my nightshirt. 'There/ he said, ' you are decorated, Pierre Duval! You are one of the heroes of France. You are soon going to be per- fectly well and to fight again bravely for your country/ I thanked him, but I knew better. My body might get per- fectly well, but something in my soul was broken. It was worn out. The thin spring had snapped. I could never fight again. Any loud noise made me shake all over. I knew that I could never face a battle — impossible! I should certainly lose my nerve and run away. It is a damned feeling, that broken something inside of one. I can't describe it."
Pierre stopped for a moment and moistened his dry lips with the tip of his tongue.
"I know," said Father Courcy. "I understand perfectly what you want to say. It was like being lost and thinking that nothing could save you; a feeling that is piercing and dull at the same time, like a heavy weight pressing on you with sharp stabs in it. It was what they call shell-shock, a terrible thing. Sometimes it drives men crazy For a while. But the doctors know what to do for that malady. It passes. You got over it."
"No," answered Pierre, "the doctors may not have known that I had it. At all events, they did not know what to do for it. It did not pass. It grew worse. But I hid it, talking very little, never telling anybody how I felt. They said I was depressed and needed cheering up. All the while there was that black snake coiled around my heart, squeezing tighter and tighter. But my body grew stronger every day. The wounds were all healed. I was walking around. In July the doctor-in-chief sent for me to his office. He said: 'You are cured, Pierre Duval, but you are not yet fit to fight. You are low in your mind. You need cheering up. You are to have a month's furlough and repose. You shall go home to your farm. How is it that you call it?' I suppose I had been bab- bling about it in my sleep and one of the nurses had told him. He was always that way, that little Doctor Roselly, taking an interest in the men, talking with them and acting Jriendly. I said the farm was called 'UAlouette9 — rather a foolish name. 'Not at all/ he answered; 'it is a fine name, with the song of a bird in it. Well, you are going back to ' V Alouette9 to hear the lark sing for a month, to kiss your wife and your children, to pick gooseberries and currants. Eh, my boy, what do you think of that? Then, when the month is over, you will be a new man. You will be ready to fight again at Verdun. Remember they have not passed and they shall not pass! Good luck to you, Pierre Duval.' So I went back to the farm as fast as I could go."
He was silent for a few moments, let- ting his thoughts wander through the pleasant paths of that little garden of repose. His eyes were dreaming, his lips almost smiled.
"It was sweet at iV Alouette9 very
THE BROKEN SOLDIER AND THE MAID OF FRANCE 7
sweet, Father. The farm was in pretty good order and the kitchen garden was all right, though the flowers had been a little neglected. You see, my wife, Josephine, she is a very clever woman. She had kept up the things that were the most necessary. She had hired one of the old neighbors and a couple of boys to help her with the plowing and plant- ing. The harvest she sold as it stood. Our yoke of cream-colored oxen and the roan horse were in good condition. Little Pierrot, who is five, and little Josette, who is three, were as brown as berries. They hugged me almost to death. But it was Josephine herself who was the best of all. She is only twenty-six, Father, and so beautiful still, with her long chestnut hair and her eyes like stones shining under the waters of a brook. I tell you it was good to get her in my arms again and feel her lips on mine. And to wake in the early morning, while the birds were singing, and see her face beside me on the white pillow, sleeping like a child, that was a little bit of Paradise. But I do wrong to tell you of all this, Father."
"Proceed, my big boy," nodded the
Friest. "You are saying nothing wrong, was a man before I was a priest. It is all natural, what you are saying, and all according to God's law — no sin in it. Proceed. Did your happiness do you good?"
Pierre shook his head doubtfully. The look of dejection came back to his face. He frowned as if something puzzled and hurt him. "Yes and no! That is the strange thing. It made me thankful — that goes without saying. But it did not make me any stronger in my heart. Perhaps it was too sweet. I thought too much of it. I could not bear to think of anything else. The idea of the war was hateful, horrible, disgusting. The noise and the dirt of it, the mud in the autumn and the bitter cold in the winter, the rats and the lice in the dugouts! And then the fury of the charge, and the everlasting killing, killing, or being killed! The danger had seemed little or nothing to me when I was there. But at a distance it was frightful, unendurable. I knew that I could never stand up to it again. Besides, already I had done my share — enough for two or three men.
Why must I go back into that hell? It was not fair. Life was too dear to be risking it all the time. I could not en- dure it. France? France? Of course I love France. But my farm and my life with Josephine and the children mean more to me. The thing that made me a good soldier is broken inside me. It is beyond mending.,,
His voice sank lower and lower. Father Courcy looked at him gravely.
"But your farm is a part of France. You belong to France. He that saveth his life shall lose it!"
"Yes, yes, I know. But my farm is such a small part of France. I am only one man. What difference does one man make, except to himself? Moreover, I had done my part, that was certain. Twenty times, really, my life had been lost. Why must I throw it away again? Listen, Father. There is a village in the Vosges, near the Swiss border, where a relative of mine lives. If I could get to him he would take me in and give me some other clothes and help me over the frontier into Switzerland. There I could change my name and find work until the war is over. That was my plan. So I set out on my journey, following the less- traveled roads, tramping by night and sleeping by day. Thus I came to this spring at the same time as you by chance, by pure chance. Do you see?"
Father Courcy looked very stern and seemed about to speak in anger. Then he shook his head, and said, quietly: "No, I do not see that at all. It remains to be seen whether it was by chance. But tell me more about your sin. Did you let your wife, Josephine, know what you were going to do? Did you tell her good-by, parting for Switzerland?"
"Why, no! I did not dare. She would never have forgiven me. So I slipped down to the post-office at Bar-sur-Aube and stole a telegraph blank. It was ten days before my furlough was out. I wrote a message to myself calling me back to the colors at once. I showed it to her. Then I said good-by. I wept. She did not cry one tear. Her eyes were stars. She embraced me a dozen times. She lifted up each of the children to hug me. Then she cried: * Go now, my brave man. Fight well. Drive the damned boches out. It is for us and for France.
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God protect you. Au revoir!' I went down the road silent. I felt like a dog. But I could not help it."
"And you were a dog/' said the priest, sternly. "That is what you were, and what you remain unless you can learn to help it. You lied to your wife. You forged ; you tricked her who trusted you. You have done the thing which you yourself say she would never forgive. If she loves you and prays for you now, you have stolen that love and that prayer. You are a thief. A true daughter of France could never love a coward to- day."
"I know, I know," sobbed Pierre, burying his face in the weeds. "Yet I did it partly for her, and I could not do otherwise."
"Very little for her and a hundred times for yourself," said the priest, in- dignantly. "Be honest. If there was a little bit of love for her, it was the kind of love she did not want. She would spit upon it. If you are going to Swit- zerland now you are leaving her forever. You can never go back to Josephine again. You are a deserter. She would cast you out, coward!"
The broken soldier lay very still, al- as most if he were dead. Then he rose slowly to his feet, with a pale, set face. He put his hand behind his back and drew out a revolver. "It is true," he said, slowly, "I am a coward. But not altogether such a coward as you think, Father. It is not merely death that I fear. I could face that, I think. Here, take this pistol and shoot me now! No one will know. You can say you shot a deserter, or that I attacked you. Shoot me now, Father, and let me out of this trouble."
Father Courcy looked at him with amazement. Then he took the pistol, uncocked it cautiously, and dropped it behind him. He turned to Pierre and regarded him curiously. "Go on with your confession, Pierre. Tell me about this strange kind of cowardice which can face death."
The soldier dropped on his knees again, and went on in a low, shaken voice: "It is this, Father. By my broken soul, this is the very root of it. I am afraid of fear."
The priest thought for an instant.
"But that is not reasonable, Pierre. It is nonsense. Fear cannot hurt you. If you fight it you can conquer it. At least you can disregard it, march through it, as if it were not there."
"Not this fear," argued the soldier, with a peasant's obstinacy. "This is something very big and dreadful. It has no shape, but a dead-white face and red, blazing eyes full of hate and scorn. I have seen it in the dark. It is stronger than I am. Since something is broken inside of me, I know I can never conquer it. No, it would wrap its shapeless arms around me and stab me to the heart with its fiery eyes. I should turn and run in the middle of the battle. I should trample on my wounded comrades. I should be shot in the back and die in disgrace. O my God ! my God ! who can save me from this? It is horrible. I cannot bear it."
The priest laid his hand gently on Pierre's quivering shoulder. "Courage, my son !"
"I have none."
"Then say to yourself that fear is nothing."
"It would be a lie. This fear is real."
"Then cease to tremble at it; kill it."
"Impossible. I am afraid of fear."
"Then carry it as your burden, your cross. Take it back to Verdun with you."
"I dare not. It would poison the others. It would bring me to dishonor."
" Pray to God for help."
"He will not answer me. I am a wicked man. Father, I have made my confession. Will you give me a penance and absolve me?"
"Promise to go back to the army and fight as well as you can."
"Alas! that is what I cannot do. My mind is shaken to pieces. Whither shall I turn? I can decide nothing. I am broken. I repent of my great sin. Father, for the love of God, speak the word of absolution."
Pierre lay on his face, motionless, his arms stretched out. The priest rose and went to the spring. He scooped up a few drops in the hollow of his hando He sprinkled it like holy water upon the soldier's head. A couple of tears fell with it.
"God have pity on you, my son, and bring you back to yourself. The word of
Fainting by Frank E. Schoonover
THEY ALSO WERE PILGRIMS DRAWN BY THE LOVE OF JEANNE D'ARC TO DOMREMY
THE BROKEN SOLDIER AND THE MAID OF FRANCE 9
absolution is not for me to speak while you think of forsaking France. Put that thought away from you, do penance for it, and you will be absolved from your great sin."
Pierre turned over and lay looking up at the priest's face and at the blue sky with white clouds drifting across it. He sighed. "Ah, if that could only be! But I have not the strength. It is impossi-
ble<"
"All things are possible to him that believeth. Strength will come. Perhaps Jeanne d'Arc herself will help you."
"She would never speak to a man like me. She is a great saint, very high in heaven."
"She was a farmer's lass, a peasant like yourself. She would speak to you, gladly and kindly, if you saw her, and in your own language, too. Trust her."
"But I do not know enough about her."
"Listen, Pierre. I have thought for you. I will appoint the first part of your penance. You shall take the risk of being recognized and caught. You shall go down to the village and visit the places that belong to her — her basilica, her house, her church. Then you shall come back here and wait until you know — until you surely know what you must do. Will you promise this ?"
Pierre had risen and looked up at the priest with tear-stained face. But his eyes were quieter. "Yes, Father, I can promise you this much faithfully."
"Now I must go my way. Farewell, my son. Peace in war be with you." He held out his hand.
Pierre took it reverently. "And with you, Father," he murmured.
Ill
THE ABSOLVING DREAM
NTONINE Courcy was one of those who are fitted and trained by nature for the cure of souls. If you had spoken to him of psychiatry he would not have un- derstood you. The long word would have been Greek to him. But the thing itself he knew well. The preliminary
Vol. CXXXVIII — No. 823.-2
penance which he laid upon Pierre Duval was remedial. It belonged to the true healing art which works first in the spirit.
When the broken soldier went down the hill, in the blaze of the mid-morning sunlight, toward Domremy, there was much misgiving and confusion in his thoughts. He did not comprehend why he was going, except that he had prom- ised. He was not sure that some one might not know him, or perhaps out of mere curiosity stop him and question him. It was a reluctant journey.
Yet it was in effect an unconscious pil- grimage to the one health-resort that his soul needed. For Domremy and the region round about are saturated with the most beautiful story of France. The life of Jeanne d'Arc, simple and mys- terious, humble and glorious, most hu- man and most heavenly, flows under that place like a hidden stream, rising at every turn in springs and fountains. The poor little village lives in and for her memory. Her presence haunts the ridges and the woods, treads the green past- ures, follows the white road beside the river, and breathes in the never-resting valley-wind that marries the flowers in June and spreads their seed in August.
At the small basilica built to her mem- ory on the place where her old beech- tree, "Fair May," used to stand, there was an ancient caretaker who explained to Pierre the pictures from the life of the Maid with which the walls are decorated. They are stiff and conventional, but the old man found them wonderful and told with zest the story of La Pucelle — how she saw her first vision; how she recog- nized the Dauphin in his palace at Chinon; how she broke the siege of Orleans; how she saw Charles crowned in the cathedral at Rheims; how she was burned at the stake in Rouen. But they could not kill her soul. She saved France.
In the village church there was a priest from the border of Alsace, also a pilgrim like Pierre, but one who knew the shrine better. He showed the dif- ference between the new and the old parts of the building. Certain things the Maid herself had seen and touched.
"Here is the old holy-water basin, an antique, broken column hollowed out on top. Here her fingers must have
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rested often. Before this ancient statue of St. Michel she must have often knelt to say her prayers. Thecureoftheparish was a friend of hers and loved to talk with her. She was a good girl, devout and obedient, not learned, but a holy and great soul. She saved France."
In the house where she was born and passed her childhood a crippled old woman was custodian. It was a humble dwell- ing of plastered stone standing between two tall fir-trees, with ivy growing over the walls, lilies and hollyhocks blooming in the garden. Pierre found it not half so good a house as " IJ Alouette." But to the custodian it was more precious than a palace. In this upper room with its low mullioned window the Maid began her life. Here, in the larger room below, is the kneeling statue which the Princess Marie d'Orleans made of her. Here, to the right, under the sloping roof, with its worm-eaten beams, she slept and prayed and worked.
"See, here is the bread-board between two timbers where she cut the bread for the croute au pot. From this small win- dow she looked at night and saw the sanctuary light burning in the church. Here, also, as well as in the garden and in the woods, her heavenly voices spoke to her and told her what she must do for her king and her country. She was not afraid or ashamed, though she lived in so small a house. Here in this very room she braided her hair and put on her red dress, and set forth on foot for her visit to Robert de Baudricourt at Vaucouleurs. He was a rough man and at first he received her roughly. But at last she convinced him. He gave her a horse and arms and sent her to the king. She saved France."
At the rustic inn Pierre ate thick slices of dark bread and drank a stoup of thin red wine at noon. He sat at a bare table in the corner of the room. Behind him, at a table covered with a white cloth, two captains on furlough had al- ready made their breakfast. They also were pilgrims, drawn by the love ot Jeanne d'Arc to Domremy. They talked of nothing else but of her. Yet their points of view were absolutely different.
One of them, the younger, was short and swarthy, a Savoyard, the son of an Italian doctor at St. -Jean de Maurienne.
He was a skeptic; he believed in Jeanne, but not in the legends about her.
"I tell you," said he, eagerly, "she was one of the greatest among women. But all that about her Voices' was illu- sion. The priests suggested it. She had hallucinations. Remember her age when they began — just thirteen. She was clever and strong; doubtless she was pretty; certainly she was very coura- geous. She was only a girl. But she had a big, brave idea which possessed her — the liberation of her country. Pure? Yes. I am sure she was virtuous. Other- wise the troops would not have followed and obeyed her as they did. Soldiers are very quick about those things. They recognize and respect an honest woman. Several men were in love with her, I think. But she was une nature Jroide. The only thing that moved her was her big, brave idea — to save France. The Maid was a mother, but not of a mortal child. Her offspring was the patriotism of France."
The other captain was a man of mid- dle age, from Lyons, the son of an archi- tect. He was tall and pale and his large brown eyes had the tranquillity of a devout faith in them. He argued with quiet tenacity for his convictions.
"You are right to believe in her," said he, "but I think you are mistaken to deny her 'voices.' They were as real as anything in her life. You credit her when she says that she was born here, that she went to Chinon and saw the king, that she delivered Orleans. Why not credit her when she says she heard God and the saints speaking to her? The proof of it was in what she did. Have you read the story of her trial? How clear and steady her answers were! The judges could not shake her. Yet at any moment she could have saved her life by denying the voices. It was because she knew, because she was sure, that she could not deny. Her vision was a part of her real life. She was the mother of French patriotism — yes. But she was also the daughter of true faith. That was her power."
"Well," said the younger man, "she sacrificed herself and she saved France. That was the great thing."
"Yes," said the elder man, stretching his hand across the table to clasp the
THE BROKEN SOLDIER AND THE MAID OF FRANCE 11
hand of his companion, " there is nothing greater than that. If we do that, God will forgive us all."
They put on their caps to go. Pierre rose and stood at attention. They re- turned his salute with a friendly smile and passed out.
After a few moments he finished his bread and wine, paid his score, and fol- lowed them. He watched them going down the village street toward the rail- way station. Then he turned and walked slowly back to the spring in the dell.
The afternoon was hot, in spite of the steady breeze which came out of the north. The air felt as if it had passed through a furnace. The low, continuous thunder of the guns rolled up from Ver- dun, with now and then a sharper clap from St.-Mihiel.
Pierre was very tired. His head was heavy, his heart troubled. He lay down among the ferns, looking idly at the foxglove spires above him and turning over in his mind the things he had heard and seen at Domremy. Presently he fell into a profound sleep.
How long it was he could not tell, but suddenly he became aware of some one near him. He sprang up. A girl was standing beside the spring.
She wore a bright-red dress and her feet were bare. Her black hair hung down her back. Her eyes were the color of a topaz. Her form was tall and straight. She carried a distaff under her arm and looked as if she had just come from following the sheep.
"Good day, shepherdess," said Pierre. Then a strange thought struck him, and he fell on his knees. "Pardon, lady," he stammered. "Forgive my rudeness. You are of the high society of heaven, a saint. You are called Jeanne d'Arc?"
She nodded and smiled. "That is my name," said she. "Sometimes they call me La Pucelle, or the Maid of France. But you were right, I am a shepherdess, too. I have kept my father's sheep in the fields down there, and spun from the distaff while I watched them. I knew how to sew and spin as well as any girl in the Barrois or Lorraine. Will you not stand up and talk with me?"
Pierre rose, still abashed and confused. He did not quite understand how to take
this strange experience — too simple for a heavenly apparition, too real for a com- mon dream. "Well, then," said he, "if you are a shepherdess why are you here? There are no sheep here."
"But yes. You are one of mine. I have come here to seek you."
"Do you know me, then? How can I be one of yours ?"
"Because you are a soldier of France and you are in trouble."
Pierre's head drooped. "A broken sol- dier," he muttered, "not fit to speak to you. I am running away because I am afraid of fear."
She threw back her head and laughed. "You speak very bad French. There is no such thing as being afraid of fear. For if you are afraid of it, you hate it. If you hate it, you will have nothing to do with it. And if you have nothing to do with it, it cannot touch you; it is nothing."
"But for you, a saint, it is easy to say that. You had no fear when you fought. You knew you would not be killed."
"I was no more sure of that than the other soldiers. Besides, when they bound me to the stake at Rouen and kindled the fire around me I knew very well that I should be killed. But there was no fear in it. Only peace."
"Ah, you were strong, a warrior born. You were not wounded and broken."
"Four times I was wounded," she an- swered, gravely. "At Orleans a bolt went through my shoulder. At Paris a lance tore my thigh. I never saw the blood of Frenchmen flow without feeling my heart stand still. I was not a warrior born. I knew not how to ride or fight. But I did it. What we must needs do that we can do. Soldier, do not look on the ground. Look up."
Then a strange thing took place before his eyes. A wondrous radiance, a mist of light, enveloped and hid the shep- herdess. When it melted she was clad in shining armor, sitting on a white horse, and lifting a bare sword in her left hand.
"God commands you," she cried. "It is for France. Be of good cheer. Do not retreat. The fort will soon be yours!"
How should Pierre know that this was the cry with which the Maid had rallied
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her broken men at Orleans when the fort of Les Tourelles fell? What he did know was that something seemed to spring up within him to answer that call. He felt that he would rather die than desert such a leader.
The figure on the horse turned away as if to go.
"Do not leave me," he cried, stretch- ing out his hands to her. "Stay with me. I will obey you joyfully."
She turned again and looked at him very earnestly. Her eyes shone deep into his heart. "Here I cannot stay," an- swered a low, sweet, womanly voice. "It is late, and my other children need me."
"But forgiveness? Can you give that to me — a coward ?"
"You are no coward. Your only fault was to doubt a brave man."
"And my wife? May I go back and tell her?"
"No, surely. Would you make her hear slander of the man she loves? Be what she believes you and she will be satisfied."
"And the absolution, the word of peace? Will you speak that to me?"
Her eyes shone more clearly; the voice sounded sweeter and steadier than ever. "After the penance comes the absolution. You will find peace only at the lance's point. Son of France, go, go, go! I will help you. Go hardily to Ver- dun."
Pierre sprang forward after the reced- ing figure, tried to clasp the knee, the foot of the Maid. As he fell to the ground something sharp pierced his hand. It must be her spur, thought he.
Then he was aware that his eyes were shut. He opened them and looked at his hand carefully. There was only a scratch on it, and a tiny drop of blood. He had torn it on the thorns of the wild goose- berry-bushes.
His head lay close to the clear pool of the spring. He buried his face in it and drank deep. Then he sprang up, shak- ing the drops from his mustache, found his cap and pistol, and hurried up the glen toward the old Roman road.
"No more of that damned foolishness about Switzerland," he said, aloud. "I belong to France. I am going with the other boys to save her. I was born for that." He took off his cap and stood
still for a moment. He spoke as if he were taking an oath. "By Jeanne d'Arc!"
IV
THE VICTORIOUS PENANCE
^T never occurred to Pierre Duval, as he trudged those long kilometers toward the front, that he was do- ing a penance.
The joy of a mind made up is a potent cordial.
The greetings of comrades on the road put gladness into his heart and strength into his legs.
It was a hot and dusty journey, and a sober one. But it was not a sad one. He was going toward that for which he was born. He was doing that which France asked of him, that which God told him to do. Josephine would be glad and proud of him. He would never be ashamed to meet her eyes. As he went, alone or in company with others, he whistled and sang a bit. He thought of " Ly Alouette" a good deal. But not too much. He thought also of the forts of Douaumont and Vaux.
"Dame!" he cried to himself. "If I could help to win them back again! That would be fine! How sick that would make those cursed boches and their knock-kneed Crown Prince!"
At the little village of the headquar- ters behind Verdun he found many old friends and companions. They greeted him with cheerful irony.
"Behold the prodigal! You took your time about coming back, didn't you? Was the hospital to your taste, the nurses pretty? How is the wife? Any more children? How goes, it, old man?"
"No more children yet," he answered, grinning; "but all goes well. I have come back from a far country, but I find the pigs are still grunting. What have you done to our old cook ?"
"Nothing at all," was the joyous re- ply. "He tried to swim in his own soup and he was drowned."
When Pierre reported to the officer of the day, that busy functionary consulted the record.
"You are a day ahead of your time, Pierre Duval," he said, frowning slightly.
THE BROKEN SOLDIER AND THE MAID OF FRANCE 13
"Yes, sir," answered the soldier. "It costs less to be a day ahead than a day too late."
"That is well," said the officer, smiling in his red beard. "You will report to- morrow to your regiment at the citadel. You have a new colonel, but the regi- ment is busy in the old way."
As Pierre saluted and turned to go out his eye caught the look of a general officer who stood near, watching. He was a square, alert, vigorous man, his face bronzed by the suns of many African campaigns, his eyes full of intelligence, humor, and courage. It was Guillaumat, the new commander of the Army of Ver- dun.
"You are prompt, my son," said he, pleasantly, "but you must remember not to be in a hurry. You have been in hospital. Are you well again? Nothing broken ?"
"Something was broken, my Gen- eral," responded the soldier, gravely, "but it is mended."
"Good!" said the general. "Now for the front, to beat the Germans at their own game. We shall get them. It may be long, but we shall get them!"
That was the autumn of the offensive of 191 6, by which the French retook, in ten days, what it had cost the Germans many months to gain.
Pierre was there in that glorious charge in the end of October which car- ried the heights of Douaumont and took six thousand prisoners. He was there at the recapture of the Fort de Vaux which the Germans evacuated in the first week of November. In the last rush up the slope, where he had fought long ago, a stray shell, an inscrutable messenger of
fate, coming from far away, no one knows whence, caught him and ripped him horribly across the body.
It was a desperate mass of wounds. But the men of his squad loved their corporal. He still breathed. They saw to it that he was carried back to the little transit hospital just behind the Fort de Souville.
It was a rude hut of logs, covered with sand-bags, on the slope of the hill. The ruined woods around it were still falling to the crash of far-thrown shells. In the close, dim shelter of the inner room Pierre came to himself.
He looked up into the face of Father Courcy. A light of recognition and grati- tude flickered in his eyes. It was like finding an old friend in the dark.
"Welcome! — But the fort ?" he gasped.
"It is ours," said the priest.
Something like a smile passed over the face of Pierre. He could not speak for a long time. The blood in his throat choked him. At last he whispered:
"Tell Josephine — love."
Father Courcy bowed his head and took Pierre's hand. "Surely," he said. "But now, my dear son Pierre, I must prepare you — "
The struggling voice from the cot broke in, whispering slowly, with long in- tervals: "Not necessary. ... I know already. . . . The penance. . . . France. . . . Jeanne d'Arc. . . . It is done."
A few drops of blood gushed from the corner of his mouth. The look of peace that often comes to those who die of gunshot wounds settled on his face. His eyes grew still as the priest laid the sacred wafer on his lips. The broken soldier was made whole.
The New Simplicity
BY KATHARINE FULLERTON GEROULD
Y first caption was "Democracy, Plumb- ing, and the War." That will hardly do as a title, for it does not hint the heart of the matter; though the war has precipitated conditions which our special form of democracy has long been preparing us for, and plumbing is per- haps as symbolic as it is ubiquitous in the American domestic scene. All three, with all their implications, are factors, certainly, in our present problem of liv- ing, and if war has brought that problem to acuteness, democracy and plumbing (and what they may be taken to stand for) have made us ripe for upheaval. Edison and his like are as responsible, in their way, as Thomas Jefferson or Will- iam Haywood. All three have, without doubt, contributed to the present and future dilemma of educated people in moderate circumstances. War has, of necessity, turned moderate, circum- stances to actual poverty; but democ- racy and plumbing were already prepar- ing the debacle for this group. All of us — the educated classes as well as the un- educated— are guilty together, that is, of pampering ourselves with physical comforts; and democracy always makes for materialism, because the only kind of equality that you can guarantee to a whole people is, broadly speaking, physical. Democracy and plumbing, as well as war, make the problem of our immediate future a rather special one. We do not share all phases of it with our Allies. Let me explain, a little, what I mean.
If America has led the world in labor- saving devices, it is because America is democratic on a bigger scale than any other country. The person who profits by the labor-saving device is the person who does the work. The fact that France and England have not kept pace with us in plumbing and tiled
kitchens and electrical appliances does not mean — as we have sometimes fatu- ously taken it to mean — that they are less civilized than we. It means only that personal service has been, with them, cheaper and more a matter of course. Where prosperous Americans multiply vacuum cleaners and electric washing-machines and garbage-incinera- tors, prosperous Europeans multiply their number of servants. The English- man really prefers a huge tin tub in his bedroom of a morning. We prefer to walk into the bathroom and turn on the tap. That preference may well have become so natural that we cannot ex- plain it. But the origin of the American preference is surely that in America only the very rich could afford a per- sonal servant whose duty it was to set up the tub, fetch in huge cans of water, and remove all traces of the bath as soon as it was done with. Even a few years ago, I remember having great difficulty in a London hotel of the better sort (but very English and almost totally unfre- quented by Americans) in getting the chambermaid to procure me a slop-jar. The hotel was much too British to run to numbers of private baths. Hence the cry- ing need of a slop-jar. The maid finally stole one for me from a room across the corridor, and assured me that the gen- tleman from whom she stole would not miss it. Nothing would induce her to resume, in his behalf, the treasure. I am informed, by friends who have more British social experience than I, that slop-jars are not in the best English tradition — because, theoretically, in the opulent old-fashioned household, as soon as you have washed your hands, the water in which you washed them, the towel on which you wiped them, mys- teriously and gracefully disappear. Per- fection of service lies in having plenty of dexterous servants lying in wait to discover your needs; so many servants, and such well-trained ones, that you
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cannot wash your hands without their becoming aware of it and, with the least possible impinging on your notice, re- moving the traces of your ablutions. Perfection of service does not involve your emptying your own wash-bacin, even into a slop-jar. Hence, no slop-jar.
Now there are very few of us who would take the trouble to invent a tiled bathroom if our tubs were automatically fetched, filled, and removed for us, all at the proper instant; or if a hot-water can miraculously sprang into being as soon as the desire for hot water seized us. There is no labor-saving device so perfectly convenient as ringing a bell and having some one else do the thing for you with complete competence. It is by no means strange that well-to-do Europeans have been content to be supremely waited upon, instead of mak- ing practical tasks mechanically easier for themselves. The goddess of the labor-saving invention is the woman who does all, or a good share, of "her own work." Old-fashioned English and French houses are cold; but (climate apart) nothing like so cold as American houses would be if Americans depended on open fires. For in England or France there are ten people to make the fires, to one in America. We simply dare not — again, climate apart — depend, as our British cousins have been wont to, on open fires. The average household can- not afford the servants to do incessant fire-making all over the house.
So we have multiplied devices, from the modest kitchen cabinet up; because that majority which advertisers and in- ventors are always trying to reach does a lot of things for itself. Even those Americans who always have had, and perhaps still will have, plenty of ser- vants, have indulged in these devices. For pure philanthropy's sake? Well, I am afraid not quite. Rather, because the standard having been set by the mistress who is also the servant, the standard must be lived up to, or bona fide ser- vants would complain. The interesting point is that in America the standard is set by the woman who does her own work or a part of it, or who may, at any given moment, have to occupy herself thus. We are, you see, a democracy beyond the democracies of other lands.
For it is not simply a question of money; it is a question of our all being in the same boat.
I am not going into the servant ques- tion, for that is a question as trite as it is tragic. But, as we all know, even before the war it was growing acute. The best servants we had in the old days came from the countries where personal service was a tradition — chiefly from the territories of Great Britain. But north- ern Europe is ceasing to enter domestic service; rather, it seeks to employ. One has only to read the pathetic testimony in the daily press, in the "women's magazines," even sometimes in philan- thropic periodicals. What they all say is that the only way you can keep your cook in your kitchen is to treat her as if she were the governess, or to give her factory hours and factory freedom— to put her on a level, that is, with the more independent worker. At that, they do not give us much hope of keeping her. But I fancy that, before we turn the whole house over to the cook, we shall dispense with her and get out meals from co-operative kitchens.
I have noticed of late years in the magazines that deal with architectural and decorative problems increasing stress on the absurdity of having a dining- room. Why absurd? For only one reason: that here is a room which must be cleaned, which, therefore, means more service. If you have your meals in the "living- room," you dispense with so much floor- and-wall space to be gone over. In only that sense is it absurd. For most of us will agree that while English lodgings are all very well, especially for a solitary creature, it is a painful business for a large family to eat three meals a day in a room which has to be lived in other- wise. All people may not have the preju- dice known to some of us against social consumption of food; but any one will agree that the best dinner in the world leaves a smell behind it. A dining-room may be a luxury, but it is not an ab- surdity, so long as you can by any means afford it. If the esthetic and pseudo- esthetic experts in domesticity are tell- ing us that a dining-room is ridiculous, it is only because they wish to prepare us for an inevitable contraction of our com- fort, an unavoidable mitigation of de-
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cency. The one most aristocratic ele- ment in life, physically speaking, is spa- ciousness; it has always been in the best tradition to be frugal to starvation in a corner of a palace. But we have come nowadays to care more for what we eat (I fear) than for how or where we eat it. The abolition of the dining-room is only a further step on the road we entered when we moved en masse out of houses into flats. It has been hard to get service; and meanwhile we have grown soft and would rather do without those amenities which are not conveniences than to furnish them for ourselves.
It must in fairness be admitted that two things have combined to bring us to this pass. The most obvious fact is this of the labor situation, which is now immensely accentuated by the war. But another force has always been at work. Except in that part of the country which imported slaves early and kept them as long as it could, more or less pioneer standards prevailed. We were a new country; we dispensed perforce (as in other colonies) with many of the inher- ited comforts. Our love of personal (I do not mean political) independence was a kind of protective coloring. The en- forced simplicity of the pioneer scene bred in us a distaste for being waited on too importunately. Because we had to do certain things for ourselves, we de- veloped a preference for doing them, a distaste for the constant interposition of another human being among the more private processes of existence. Even in the South, some modification of the tradition must' have been necessary, for the South must always have been badly, though exuberantly, served. Here and there a butler, a lady's maid, may, after years of struggle, have been highly trained; and the colored race has a gift for cooking. But in many ways South- erners must have contended with the disheartening conditions faced by all English households in the outposts of empire, dependent on another and a stupid race for the satisfaction of their needs. Southern luxury lay in having a score of inadequate menials to keep the masters as comfortable as three or four really good servants would have done. It was slave labor, and slave labor reaches competence only by sheer force
of numbers. There was never an ideal of domestic service there, because there was never the rounded conception of civilized domestic comfort in any slave's mind. And nothing is more slovenly or incompetent in domestic service- than the younger generation of free-born negroes. I do not think the colored race is going to prove our domestic salvation.
We welcomed the labor-saving device, in the first place, for the reasons I have given. By the labor-saving device we have been brought insensibly to an al- most animal dependence on creature comforts. With all our theoretical glori- fication of simplicity, we have really prided ourselves supremely on our phys- ical luxuries, and most of all, it must be said, on those physical luxuries which have no esthetic value. Our plumbing has been our civilization. The European aristocracy is for the most part not so "comfortable" as the American middle class; and therefore we have considered ourselves the greatest nation in the world. We have been snobbish about many things, but about nothing so much as our electrical appliances and our sky- scrapers. We have sinned; all of us to- gether, as I said before; and now we are paying. Simplicity, austerity, even, are forced upon us; and it behooves those of us who really care, in spite of temporary apostasies, about real values, to take thought and to plan. The vital question is not whether we shall simplify, but how. On that depends our civilization.
Neither the* new war millionaires nor skilled labor can teach us that. We shall have need of all our trained perceptions, of all our first-hand and all our book knowledge, of what money has been most wisely spent for in the past, to make our choice intelligently. The new millionaires and the enriched laboring- man will not, for the most part, be able to help us; for, by and large, having no experience of the finer things of civiliza- tion, they will not know. For ourselves, it does not much matter — for us who have seen a world in ruin and can never "care" for anything in the same way again — but this is perhaps our first duty to our children. They cannot have all the things we were brought up to crave and expect; but they must have the
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essentials. What, in a practical sense, are those going to be ?
The Pennsylvania miner, making from forty to seventy-five dollars a week, buys an automobile — not necessarily a Ford — ■ which waits for him at the entrance to the mine. His wife buys finery. Both buy the best food they can get. It has been publicly said, I understand, by a distinguished representative of the Food Administration, that almost every class of the community was doing its duty in the way of food conservation, except skilled labor. That is the class which cannot be reached by appeal. The very poorest are still very poor, and they have neither the money nor the knowledge to enable them to indulge in forbidden gas- tronomic luxuries. The rich are appar- ently— in most cases — making it a point of honor to help out. But skilled labor, which is so necessary to the prosecution of the war, which has never in its life been so pampered, so flattered, so kow- towed to, So overpaid (yes, I mean that; it is overpaid, and I will explain what I mean presently), has lost its head. It probably believes the things the politi- cians and its own leaders have been say- ing to it. It will work, and consider itself patriotic for working — but it will exact from the rest of us, the public, a price it has no right to, and, lest the honor of our country and the ideals we fight for be lost, we shall pay it. It may be that the reckoning will come later; or it may be that we are so sunk in ma- terialism that skilled labor will continue to rule the earth. Just so long as we feel our greatest need to be of the things it furnishes us with, and its greatest need is for the things we cannot furnish it with, our necks will be bowed under labor's yoke. Our only chance of eman- cipation lies in finding some of our greatest goods in fields not under labor's control. In other words, to live at all, in any peace, in any equanimity and longanimity, we must be as little materi- alistic in temper and desire as possible. We must teach our children that the greatest goods are not the things that skilled labor produces. That is not only truth; it is self-preservation. Labor will have the motor-cars and the delicacies of the table, the jewels and the joy- rides; we must see to it that we keep
Vol. CXXXVIII.— No. 823.-3
something else, and learn to feel the importance of our treasure. If we can maintain a prestige value for the things of our choice (frankly, I doubt if we can) "the lords of their hands" may come to desire the things we have chosen, and help to make them acces- sible. But we must be careful to make no concessions; we must not. take one step, ourselves, in the materialistic direc- tion.
This is not snobbishness; it is a mat- ter of life and death. No one is going to have leisure, any more, to be a snob or any such non-essential thing. At least, if any one has the time, it will not be the educated classes. We shall have to work as we have never worked before, phys- ically as well as mentally. We shall have to learn to co-operate with one another, too; to make an almost relig- ious brotherhood. For it is our children who matter, and we cannot begin too soon to prepare them for a world which has nothing in common with the world we knew. Only by joining in utmost effort with the like-minded can we hope to protect them.
I know there are Utopians who see in the socialization of Anglo-Saxon govern- ments hope, along Marxian lines, for Anglo-Saxondom. They foresee, I sup- pose, the kind of Paradise that the Admirable Crichton (in Barrie's im- moral and delightful play) must have experienced on the desert island. There is going to be only one party in England, Mr. Arthur Henderson has recently said — the Labor party. It may be. Let us hope that some of the "unattached leaders" will at least preserve logic if they do not preserve majorities. Mr. Henderson's own argument is about as convincing as though one should say: in certain abnormal conditions martial law is the only regime that will work; there- fore, since civil law has been found in- adequate to conditions of riot and pesti- lence and famine, we must give it up altogether, and make martial law per- petual.
The real arguments against private, and for public, ownership are, of course, quite other than those Mr. Henderson offers. The point is that Mr. Henderson evidently does not know bad logic when he sees it. Let Mr. Henderson and his
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followers keep the motor-cars, one is in- clined to say, and we will keep the logic he discards. Private perception of the laws of logic is something we shall not be taxed for; though — let us not deceive ourselves — we shall have to make sacri- fices to keep it. If we can acquire logic, we may have it. It may be increasingly difficult to maintain the methods of acquiring it: the best education, moral and intellectual, was becoming endan- gered before the war, and there is. no telling what may become of it afterward.
I seem to have wandered far afield from plumbing; and yet plumbing (as a symbol of materialistic comfort) is more than germane to the question. The group whose problem I am concerned with is a very large one, though always, anywhere, a minority: the professional man, the man in the smaller business positions, the man on a salary, who has been decently bred, and who can never look forward to any real financial fort- une. I do not include every one who has to economize strictly, for a large propor- tion of the people who have to econo- mize strictly are totally uneducated as to real values. But distinctly I include any of the last mentioned who are alive to something besides materialistic needs. I do not include the people who want intellectual and esthetic goods only for social and snobbish reasons or out of blind jealousy. That group, in any case, will cease to exist if intellectual and esthetic goods cease to have a social value — as is more and more definitely coming to be the case. They were never anything but paid mercenaries in the struggle.
How are we going to save, for our children and our children's children, the real amenities of life? Hitherto the new millionaires, for reasons of social pres- tige, have tended to link themselves to the group of the civilized. But the new millionaire has always been an individual case, and has, therefore, had to make concessions to the group already estab- lished. What we have never had before is the proletariat suddenly becoming, overnight, in its vast numbers, at once richer and more powerful politically than the little "educated" aristocracy. We all know what happens when that happens; if we had forgotten the French
Revolution (and since 1914 a good many of us have) we have the Russian Revo- lution to remind us. In this morning's newspaper I saw that the daily bread ration in Petrograd was one-half a pound for the proletariat, one-eighth of a pound for the bourgeoisie. That may or may not be true, but there is nothing in known facts to make it in- credible. Even granting that skilled labor is not going to Bolshevikize itself completely, there is no doubt that the minority of which I speak is going to be virtually, if not theoretically, discrim- inated against. Labor is not going to draw distinctions between employers of labor; the college professor is going to have to pay the plumber, the carpenter, at as exorbitant rates as the great manu- facturer. Any one who employs labor at all — even if it is only to repair a leak — is going to be gouged. All along the line, the producers of every necessary element in civilized physical existence are going to rob the ultimate consumer. It is labor that is responsible for the high cost of living. Labor may say that the high cost of living is responsible for its increased demands. In point of fact, there is every evidence that labor at present is demanding money, not for the necessities of life, but for the luxuries — just like the capitalists they have so inveighed against. One would have to be a professional reformer to be shocked. Any knowledge of human nature leaves one perfectly unsurprised by this phe- nomenon. Most men have alwaj^s wanted as much as they could get; and possession has always blunted the fine edge of their altruism. That is what labor has always said about the employ- ers of labor; and the employers can say it quite as truly of the employed. So long as you make the basis of life materialistic this law will prevail.
What, then, are we going to do about it? We shall not be able to afford many of the luxuries we once thought necessi- ties, and we must decide, with the ut- most possible wisdom, what are necessi- ties and what are not. We had better make our list as short as possible, at that. Obvious luxuries we shall not have: motor-cars, fine clothing, plenty of do- mestic service, the joys of travel. It is costing us more, all the time, to provide
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the hygienic necessities for our children; pure milk, nourishing food, good air, healthful recreation, seasonable cloth- ing. I do not mean complicated food, or extravagant amusements, or elaborate clothing; I mean the irreducible mini- mum required for health and simple comfort and decency. And we cannot all — especially the professional people — go back to the farm and live on our own produce. We have to struggle along as best we can in the communities to which our work has called us.
In some ways the life of the spirit and the life of the intellect have always been expensive. The more obvious material comforts — rich food, for example — have not been necessary to either. Neither, in a sense, has fine clothing or expensive furniture. Yet it must be remembered that both the life of the spirit and the life of the intellect tend, in most cases, to develop the sense of beauty; and that too much ugliness can become a pain and an obstacle to calm. There is a simplicity that is pleasing, and a sim- plicity that is hideous. Leaving aside the social importance of good clothes and good furniture, there is, in down- right ugliness, a power to fret the soul, a power to lessen the power to work. But we will neglect, for the moment, the esthetic side of it. In the matter of food we will willingly simplify. In the mat- ter of adornment, whether of our persons or of our houses, we shall have to sim- plify, and we can only hope that our simplification can be conducted more along quantitative than along qualita- tive lines. We shall try to omit rather than commit; to be austere rather than cheap.
The matter of servants is going to hit us harder; for only with "help" — in the quite literal sense — can we manage to get any peace or any time, in the hours left free by our wage-earning, for read- ing, for contemplation, for conversation. The "general houseworker" has tended to disappear; which is an acknowledg- ment that when a great many different things have to be done, one human .being cannot stand the strain. Only by her being helped out by the family, only by some features of household service being scanted or ill done, could the general houseworker ever manage to keep out-
side her job. The good cook could not also be the perfect parlor-maid and the perfect child's nurse. Neither can the good physician, the good lawyer, the good clergyman, also be the perfect choreman, the perfect gardener, and the perfect butler — with hours of casual bookkeeping, plumbing, and carpenter- ing. Even if he had the talent, he would not have the time; for the physician, the lawyer, and the clergyman are not safeguarded by an "eight-hour day." His wife, moreover, even if she has no private intellectual interests, cannot suf- fice to all the modern domestic tasks any more than can the general houseworker, who has faded out of existence precisely because she could not. We shall modify as we can; shall have our food sent in from outside where that is possible; shall buy vacuum cleaners (on the in- stalment plan); shall win occasional hours of freedom by hiring some safe person to come in and watch over the children while they sleep. Hospitality will, of necessity, be much curtailed. Our personal freedom — in any familiar sense of the term — will be almost nil. We might defy our house, our garden, our table, our door-bell, to shackle us; but we cannot defy our children to shackle us.
In these ways, we shall probably in- trigue for the life of the spirit, the life of the intellect. But, still, they are expen- sive. Education — good education — is, in the first place, expensive. I do not know how much it costs to make a man a good plumber or a good coal-miner or a good carpenter; but I am sure it does not cost so much as it does to make him a good doctor or a good clergyman. It takes seven years after the "prep." school or the high school to start the profes- sional man on his road, costing fairly heavily all the time. That is why I said that skilled labor is overpaid — it gets an exorbitant return for its expenditure. Most of us hope to have college for our boys, even if they do not take up a pro- fession— just because we think that edu- cation is going to matter to a man, all his life, no matter in what field he works. The joys of travel, as I intimated, are going to be cut out for most of us; the opera and the play will become infre- quent blessings. But we shall have to
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have some books — even if we do not start the furnace until December. In- deed, the books we have ourselves are perhaps going to be our best guarantee of our children's being educated at all. To be sure, we shall be taxed on them, with increasing heaviness; but then, the coal-miner will (let us hope) be taxed on his motor-car.
It may be that we shall come to state- endowed motherhood, and all the rest. But the trouble is that all these social- istic schemes are based on a lower-class demand on life. State endowment of motherhood will perhaps have to come; but what does it guarantee except the child born under decent conditions? The health of the mother, and through her of the child, is to be safeguarded. Very well. Et apres? Pure milk may be provided at municipal stations; there will be a day nursery and then a public kindergarten. There will follow — if mod- ern " educators" have their way — the whole desolating career in the public schools, where real education is reduced to a minimum, and "vocational" train- ing is substituted. The child will, in time, be graduated into the ranks of skilled labor, and perhaps will eventually have his motor-car and his tiled bath- room and his "movie" every night.
Yet for some of us this is not a su- premely cheering prospect, because it is a wholly materialistic vision. Certainly it is a good thing to start with health as a requisite. Certainly everything that can be done to insure a healthy child- hood, in every case where it is physically possible, should be done. But the great mistake of the reformers is to believe that life begins and ends with health, and that happiness begins and ends with a full stomach and the power to enjoy physical pleasures, even of the finer kind. It may be that the enormous expense of guaranteeing health to all children born in our vast American community will take all the money that the com- munity has. It may be that no one will ever be free to devote his health to pur- suing the life of the mind and the spirit — to the purposes, that is, of civilization not purely physical. But we have not come co that yet; and the war is there to remind us that we really do not know precisely what will come. If real social-
ism— as distinguished from our tempo- rary utilization of certain socialistic methods — comes, we shall inevitably turn our backs on civilization for a time. Successful socialism depends on the per- fectibility of man. Unless all, or nearly all, men are high-minded and clear- sighted, it is bound to be a rotten failure in any but a physical sense. Even though it is altruism, socialism means materialism. You can guarantee the things of the body to every one, but you cannot guarantee the things of the spirit to every one; you can guarantee only that the opportunity to seek them shall not be denied to any one who chooses to seek them. And socialism, believing as it must (to hold its head high) in the spiritual as well as the political equality of men, is not going to create special opportunities for the special case.* "To hell with the special case" is implicit in the socialist slogan. Do you see any majority, anywhere, in this imperfect and irreligious world, admitting that the minority is precious? That any minority is precious ? Is there any evidence what- ever that the socialist is less avid of per- sonal political power, less averse to demagogic methods, than the other per- son? Does he himself go far to prove his perfectionism? A good many social- ists are calling other socialists names be- cause they put nationality before inter- nationality; though any one with any sense could have told them beforehand that they would, because human beings are — fortunately or unfortunately — like that. Lenine and Trotzky are disap- pointed because the German socialists do not rise to betray their rulers; and some socialists are disappointed because Le- nine and Trotzky appear to be selling Russia out to Germany in order to keep themselves— two individuals — in places of power. Every one is calling names all round; and if socialism were anything in particular, it would (one would think) be very sorry for itself.
What is clear is this: that the sociali- zation of governments places vast power in the hands of the skilled laborer. It is oniy in order that labor shall produce as fast and as furiously as possible that we have socialized our national organi- zation. We need, chiefly for war's sake, certain physical things — food, muni-
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tions, coal, khaki clothing, and trans- portation for the same. We are calling for Y. M. C. A. men, and K. of C, and chaplains; but what we really expect of them, more than anything else, is to go under lire, if necessary, to give the sol- diers tobacco and hot chocolate. The newspapers lay eager and delighted stress on the unclerical nature of the ser- vices these gentlemen find themselves cheerfully performing. War, you see, is a physical business. Of the spiritual side of it I am not going to speak. No one really can speak of it in terms of actual achievement until the armies have come home and we see what manner of men they are. You cannot tell from the straws you see which way the great last wind of all is going to blow. Some wise people doubt whether the veterans of this war are going to spiritualize the world. Many of them will have had, at this or that supreme moment, something akin to a spiritual revelation. But the spiritual adventure is a desperately and exclusively personal thing; you cannot socialize it. It is incommunicable, and for the most part inexpressible. The attempt to socialize a spiritual experi- ence ends in the camp-meeting; it goes no farther. Like all mental ecstasies, it cannot be felt simultaneously by mill- ions of people. I fancy that the opinions the veterans are going to express at the polls are quite unforeknowable. We are all willingly kow-towing to the material- ists for the sake of the armies. Whether the armies will wish to kow-tow to them when the war is over is a question more difficult of present solution than the Balkan boundaries. Certainly, if the armies have developed an esprit de corps and a philosophy of their own, they will be listened to. We shall inevitably be very sentimental about them. Whether we shall continue to be sentimental about the man who selected this mo- ment to hold up his country and his compatriots for exorbitant pay, and demonstrated his patriotism by earning it, I do not know. We can deal only with the present situation.
What, the present outlook being what it is, can we count on for our children? We shall be practically aided, in time, as I have said, by all sorts of co-opera- tive schemes — invented for the use of
the very poor, and adapted and ex- panded, of necessity, for the not quite so poor. Some of the amenities of life, some of the space and the privacy, will have gone irretrievably. After consid- erations of health come considerations of education. We shall not be able, prob- ably, to afford private schools for our children; and our sole comfort must be that most private schools are not much good, anyhow. They are a little safer gamble, in most communities, than the public schools. That is all. We, the parents, must supplement the bad teaching as best we can, must keep at least some spark of intelligent interest in the universe alive by the gas-log. It may well become our painful and sub- versive duty to inform our children, from the beginning, that what is being offered them by the state as education is not really education at all; and that teaching a boy how to make bookshelves is in no sense a substitute for teaching him to read and appreciate Latin. (Bet- ter not mention Greek!) It is very de- sirable, if not absolutely necessary, for our daughter to know how to cook; but we must not permit her to consider that domestic science is education, in the proper sense. We must keep the fact before ourselves and before the next gen- eration that the training of the mind does not mean quite the same thing as the training of the muscles. Time was when a cobbler — and I do not mean anything so remote and legendary as Hans Sachs — found philosophy a very natural complement to cobbling. I knew a cobbler in my childhood who was much in demand among the intellectu- als, as being one of the few people who could expound Emerson's transcenden- talism in a completely satisfactory way. He went about — I can still recall the spun snow of his hair, the canny saintla- ness of his much-modeled face, the thin figure under the long black cloak — to philosophical conferences to discuss metaphysics with the metaphysicians; and returned to sit in his little shop and cobble shoes. But one has yet to hear of philosophy's coming from a member of the lasters' union. Machinery means specialization; and it is an old story that there is no mental comfort or develop- ment in repeating the same gesture for
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eight hours a day, even if one has time and a half for overtime. The single gesture is not educative. When you saw the shoe as an entity, when it grew under your hands and you built up the whole consciously from the related parts; even when you were a mere cobbler, a physi- cian to sick shoes, and had to know the whole shoe-organism — there was some- thing in that humblest, most physical of tasks which demanded a conception in the brain. That time is gone, and if William Morris in the flesh could not bring it back, certainly his ghost will not. But if you think for a moment of the difference in mental attitude and mental grasp, it shows up skilled labor for what it is.
I am far from saying that, in this much simpler world which the increas- ing complication of life is going, para- doxically, to create for some of us, it is a bad thing that children should be "vocationally" trained. (You cannot say "vocationally educated, " for that is virtually a contradiction in terms.) Even so, it is only to a very limited degree that our sons can be, in the intervals, their own plumbers or their own carpenters or their own masons, for the unions will never allow it. It is a very minor tinker- ing that is permitted to the private per- son. You cannot help to paint your own woodwork in your own house, for the union painter will leave his job if you touch your private paint-brush in his presence. What good, after all, is this famous vocational training, except as you definitely choose to follow through life some one of the trades they teach you? It will not really make the whole man more efficient; for he will not be allowed to use his potential efficiency. It may teach him whether he prefers to be a steamfitter or a bricklayer; but it cannot guarantee him any power to practise either steamfitting or bricklay- ing, unless he is willing to forsake all else and cling only to that. Never was such nonsense talked by any one as by the new "educators." Labor frankly uses the argument of might and the big stick; but labor, as far as I know, does not pretend that it is something else. It rests its case cynically on our own pam- pered inability to get on without it.
" Philosophy can bake no bread," re-
plied some philosopher to his critics, "but it can give us God. freedom, and immortality." Those are the last things, I take it, that modern philosophy is really concerned with giving us; but the perversity of one generation need not obscure all history. It is possible for the contemplation of great ideas, of great art, of great poetry, of the epic motions of the human race as revealed in history, to mitigate physical depriva- tion. It is possible to have plain living and high thinking together — though it is not easy, and never has been, and some of the best-known exponents of that theory have been pitiful failures. Certainly we of the minority must ac- cept for ourselves austerities we were not bred to in our easy-going, materialistic generation. Without taking, like St. Simeon, to the wilful discomfort of a pillar, we must learn to do without a hundred "necessities" that Dante and Shakespeare never dreamed of. We must keep it possible for our children to delight in Dante and Shakespeare; we must not let the authentic intellectual thrill disappear from the world.* And, for that, we must insist that the past be not closed to them, and that learning shall not be an unknown good. They will have to do it on bread and milk, not on caviare; but it can be done on bread and milk. That is the point.
I confess that as I look forth in these distressed times on the vast American scene, I find myself pinning my hope to two things — the self-consciousness of this minority, and the older Eastern uni- versities. For unless we plan our sim- plicities cannily, the other people will have won out; and unless the older universities keep up a standard of learn- ing, hold the door open, by main force, to the past, the garnered lore of the world will fail us. We shall progress — but blindly, as the brute creation. The fact is that we are living in an obscurant- ist epoch. For surely it is obscurantism to deny the legitimacy of any field of knowledge or of virtue, and those folk who would reduce everything to a phys- ical basis are as deadly foes of light as their ancestors who saw in physical ex- periments nothing but the black art. Every sane person wants science left free to accomplish its marvelous work;
THE NEW SIMPLICITY
23
but no sane person past early youth would say, as a young woman fresh from her college laboratories said to me a few days since, that chemistry is the root of all knowledge. The Protestants, when they were on top, were as given to ob- scurantism, and its accompaniment of persecution, as the Catholics.
In the matter of education, as I have suggested, we shall have to rely on the older colleges of the East. We cannot count on the West to help us, for the West is cursed with state universities. It is by no means my intention or my • private inclination to minimize the value of the state universities. The point is that they are uncertain; they are not free; they are dependent, in the last analysis, on public favor, which means public funds, on a kind of initiative and referendum. They may have good luck and become great schools of learning; they may have bad luck and become indifferent and negligible places. They are not really allowed to set their own standards; they must ever be compro- mising with the personnel of state legis- latures. The private colleges and uni- versities of the East at least are not dependent on politics. Their funds are for the most part inadequate, but they do not have to change their curricula to please people who know nothing about what a curriculum should be. As long as their private fortunes last, they can afford to say the thing which they be- lieve to be true. One of the most heart- ening things that have happened since 1914 is the acquisition of great wealth by Yale University. It means — one hopes — that one at least of our old aca- demic foundations can snap its fingers at ignorance enthroned; that it can send out its thousands endowed with some sense of intellectual values. Intellectual values are not the only ones; but most sane people believe that only by the rigid training of the mind can human beings be taught wise living and moral values. There is no morality by instinct, though there can be morality by in- herited inhibitions. There is no social salvation — in the end — without taking thought; without mastery of logic and application of logic to human experi- ence. These things, because they are not the natural man, are not carelessly
come by; they must be deliberately achieved. You will not learn them from the Bolsheviki, or from the I. W. W., or even from Mr. Arthur Henderson. A great deal is said nowadays about prac- tical politics and the role of the practical man in building the social structure. Before you can carry out an idea you must have the idea. You cannot get rid of the world of abstract thought. One after the other, leaders of the Church are laying more and more stress on re- ligion's being a strictly social matter. Perhaps it is, though I do not believe it. I should have said that social regenera- tion was a by-prcduct of religion, not religion itself. But even the folk who think that Christianity means no slums, and means little else, derive their sanc- tion— or think they do — from Christ, who dealt in abstract ideas more exclu- sively than any other religious teacher the world has had.
We must, then, seriously facing the moral, political, and physical conditions of our time, be frankly ascetic. We must make our children healthy, first of all — if only because specialists will be beyond our pocketbooks. I have im- plied that the combination of plain living and high thinking is a difficult one; I fancy it is the most difficult in the world. "The hand of less employment hath the daintier sense." We shall obliterate the coarser contacts, as far as possible, not by engaging other people to take the burden of those coarser con- tacts, but by buying, as we can, the machinery that will suffice to them im- personally. We shall "co-operate" to the limit of our incomes, losing thereby, I repeat, many of the amenities which tend to civilize. We shall not sleep soft, we shall not live high, and we shall do without external beauty to a painful extent. We shall exist in cramped quar- ters, and if we achieve the dignity of one spacious room, that will be a great deal. We cannot hope to furnish it fit- tingly. But if we have a dollar to spend on some wild excess, we shall spend it on a book, not on asparagus out of season. If we have a holiday, we shall not go to Europe or Asia, which would be beyond our means; but we shall find some quiet spot where there will at least be trees and sky and no motor-cars or aero-
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planes. We shall, I hope, ameliorate our lack of space and privacy by a very perfectly developed courtesy and by the capacity for silence. It sounds monastic, and, at its best, monastic it will be. Certain things we shall have given up at the start; certain ambitions will have been erased from our tablets. We shall not compete with, or interfere with, the lords of this world. We shall do our modest work, and receive our modest pay, and by a corresponding modesty of life and temper we shall disarm, we hope, the unsympathetic and uncomprehend- ing. Our kingdom cannot be of this world; and instead of complaining and criticizing, we must apply ourselves to realizing that our compensations can be made greater than our losses. We shall be passionately concerned with human- ity; the more so, that we shall endeavor to be aware of the voice of God as v/ell as of the voice of the people. We shall not be snobs in any sense; for we shall have the same charity for other people's choices that we beg them to have for ours. Besides, snobbishness dies out quickly — in America, at least — among the impoverished.
Even those who find all this an intol- erable idea will dub it Utopian. A coun- sel of perfection it certainly is. But the higher the standard we set for ourselves the less likely we are to put up with a low one. And if we merely drift, I fear we shall find ourselves getting nothing — wearing ourselves out in the unequal, familiar race for physical privileges, and leaving to one side the intangible goods. We can guarantee our children nothing except that they shall be armored against certain kinds of suffering; the lust of non-essentials, for example. I do not say that we shall not lose much
that our best interest would suggest our having; but we shall not lose everything. And with the new simplicity will come some of the compensations of earlier simplicity. The man who has three things gets more pleasure out of one than does the man who has a hundred. Perhaps we shall capture the "joy in widest commonalty spread." A rose will always be cheaper than an alligator pear, and it is quite possible to enjoy it as much and as vividly. We shall be very grateful, I have no doubt, to Thomas Edison and the other genii of democracy. In some ways we shall fare better than folk of our clan in Europe. We must thank our stars for plumbing — • itself a "joy in widest commonalty spread." But we shall value it chiefly as it releases time for better things, and those better things not physical pleas- ures.
Not only shall we not glorify our plumbing with marble; we shall see that there is really no sense in marble when porcelain will do as well — that marble has better uses and should be kept for them. Not only shall we have no ermine to shield us from the cold; we shall see that ermine was more beautiful when rarely and ritually worn. We shall learn to take pleasure in beautiful things that do not and never can belong to us; and we shall purge ourselves of the ignoble passion of envy. But the power to discriminate between the truth and a lie — which is the foundation of all moral and intellectual enjoyment — we shall cling to with greed. For in keeping that we rob no one, and insult no law. I am far from believing that any group cf people can achieve all this with com- pleteness. But I believe we shall do well to set it before us as a goal.
A Spree D'Esprit
BY SOPHIE KERR
^^^^^^^^^O begin, this story ^^^^^^^^^3 happened in those in- x r ■ > §|L credible, hardly-to-be- fjg Wm remembered days
ft 1 4JI before the great war,
^^^^^^^Jk wnen women did not ^^^ff^^^^^ carry knitting - bags, when fires and floods and murder trials were still to be seen on the front page of our metropolitan press, when sugar and coal were negligible necessities, and when the prancings in shining armor of William II were smiled at as a mere harm- less personal idiosyncracy. It is diffi- cult indeed to recall those days, and to none perhaps is it more difficult than to the two chief personages of this story. Victor, erstwhile chief captain of the Rose Room of the Hotel Palais, is now the greatly beloved and greatly daring captain of a company of bearded, fierce, fighting poilus, and Count Leopold, true to his tradition, has voluntarily followed into exile one Nicholas Nicholaievitch, once a royal grand duke and generalis- simo of Russia. Neither of them is likely to chance upon this pleasant tale, but if they should, I know that each will smile a smile of hilarious memory.
He was aged, yet ageless, Count Leo- pold. Looking at him, it was impossible to think that he had ever been a wee, cuddlesome baby, a skinny-legged, shrill- voiced school-boy, or even a young man- about-town, with little mustache and cigarette. He seemed always to have been old. Yet he was not decrepit. His physician saw to that. He did not sug- gest decay or senility. But he did sug- gest, to a superlative degree, entire sophistication, decades of experience and a calm indifference to all save his appe- tite.
Count Leopold was short and thick. His head was bald and pink and round, and he had long white side whiskers, cut knowingly in a foreign fashion. His clothes were du monde, oh, very much
Vol. CXXXVIII— No. 823.-4
so. The dullest eye might comprehend that he employed a superlative tailor. He had a monocle, had Count Leopold, and he managed it without difficulty.
When he came to live at the Hotel Palais, in one of the best suites, it was whispered about that he was a Russian nobleman, here on a diplomatic mission of the greatest delicacy. His tips were princely. Also constant. On holidays he double-tipped — every one — the bell- boys, the housekeeper, the maids, the floor clerks, the elevator men, the cloak- room attendants, the doorman, the cab- starter — all experienced his bounty.
In the dining-room he tipped most lavishly of all. There was a reason for this — namely, the count was a gourmet. He adored food. He spent hours over each meal, and solemnly ordered and counter-ordered and consulted with the waiter and the captain and sent careful messages (and more tips) to the chefs, A new flavor was to him as blessed as sunshine and blue sky, or even more so.
Yet, though Count Leopold was a gourmet, he was no gourmand. His doc- tor forbade it. Of the array of dishes he ordered, he frequently took no more than the merest nibble. He might select three vintages and take only one swallow of each. But he extracted ecstasy from his tastings and sippings and playings with his food — greater than a hungry man who eats a steak for the first time in a month. A true epicure, Count Leopold.
By all the rights of the dining-room, he should have been served by Victor, chief captain of the Rose Room, and a very great man indeed in his knowledge of food and how to serve it and how to manage the captious public who eats. Yet it so chanced that when Count Leopold came to the Palais he chose a week when Victor was at home, sick with grippe. Judge of Victor's annoy- ance when he returned, still a little feverish and inclined to be peevish, to
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find that this lavish new-comer, a per- manent guest, had fallen into the clutches of Christakos, one of the under- captains, a Greek, and a wily one.
Victor, a true Frenchman, had long watched with dismay the intrusion of the Greek waiters into the Hotel Palais and the city's restaurant life generally.
He had most reluctantly taken them on his force, because, forsooth, there were no French or Swiss to be had, but he hated to do it. Christakos, he grudg- ingly admitted, was clever, and had the head with him, and finally he had made Christakos an under-captain, simply be- cause he had to have another under- captain and there was no other eligible candidate. But he disciplined Christa- kos severely and kept him very much in check.
And now, in his absence, Christakos
had bagged Count Leopold, and the count, not realizing that he was dis- carding real gold for spurious, had told the management — also before Victor's return — that he wanted this particular place in the Rose Room and this par- ticular captain, and the waiter that this particular captain had chosen for him, and that he wanted no others, and if they were changed without his knowledge, he, the count, would simply depart to some other hotel. He would not stay to argue. It was particularly galling because Victor needed the money. There was his young brother Al- bert, a real student, a youth of possibilities, who must be sent to the Sorbonne. And Victor's father, for- merly a hale and hearty old bourgeois of Rennes, was now sorely crippled by rheumatics, — always prefaced by " cet di- able" in the old chap's speech. There were other brothers and sis- ters, besides Albert, who in the way of youth needed continu- ally clothes, food, shel- ter. It was distinctly Victor's part to supply them. And so he did, willingly. But it made dents in his bank- account and caused him to desire greatly all extra money that might be acquirable. Alas, that the count was not available as a negotiable asset.
The Hotel Palais, through one Will- iam Percy, third assistant manager, a slim youth in a cutaway, had told Victor that the count desired the service of Christakos alone, thereby causing Victor to wave agitated hands.
"Name of a name!" he exclaimed. "For w'at should this fat ole White- w'iskaire think he is rule in my Rose
A SPREE
Room! Me, I will change waiter an' capitaine, an' glass an' knife an' fork on him, tout entiere, if it seem propaire. He has some nerves, Monsieur le Conte."
"All I have to say is this," said Will- iam Percy, who was a peaceable soul, but to whom business was always busi- ness, "that if you try any funny busi- ness with the count, as sure as shooting you'll get fired, Victor. That old boy is ready money and mustn't be trifled with. Leave him in peace and let Christakos wait on him. Take it from me, you'll regret it otherwise."
The nonchalant William Percy saun- tered away, then, pausing by the flower- stand and regarding the orchids and roses and carnations for a moment thoughtfully, he sauntered back. Pos- sibly those innocent flowers inspired him. At any rate, he observed Victor knowingly, and remarked, sotto voce:
"If you can't put something over on Christakos without rough stuff, Victor, why, then you don't deserve to win out. Get me?"
With a slight motion of the eyelid, which might or might not have been a wink, he sauntered away again. Victor watched his retreating back and was strangely consoled.
"'Ow I 'ave misjudge' that Monsieur Percy," he meditated. "I 'ave said, more times as once, zat he is no better to look at as one monkey on a stick, an* now he throws zose fire coals on me wiz a kindness. I mus' not be so quick a judge, me. Eh, bien — I will not try ze stuff rough on zat perfide Christakos. But I will put it over, I swear, for I mus' not leave him ze triomphe."
Yes, but this was much easier to say than to do. It was not pleasant to see one's under-captain, a man over whom one holds power to hire and fire, a man with too much white in the eye, thereby clearly indicating his base nature, a man who regards catering to patrons as a sordid commercial thing and not as a fine art — it was, I say, not pleasant to see such a one in chief control of a needed gold-mine that should have been yours by all the right of authority and superiority. Christakos, forsooth, cater- ing to an epicure! It was to laugh. And, though outwardly Victor was calm and suave, at heart he raged.
D'ESPRIT 27
He could not but see, however, that Christakos was artful in handling the count. Artful, yes — and perfidious. Vic- tor was unobtrusively alert these days. He gave Christakos just one week to weary and disgust the count. But it did not happen. When he saw Christakos fixing things in the chafing-dish with his own hands, he began to suspect. He watched, more alert than ever. At last Jules, whom Victor had trained from sniveling 'bus-boy to peerless waiter, discovered the secret and brought it to his master.
"Figure to yourself, monsieur," he whispered excitedly to Victor, as the captain stood grandly at the door of the Rose Room and gave and withheld tables as an emperor might give or with- hold a royal order. "Figure to yourself, mon maitrel Christakos, ce nom d'un nom d'un nom — 'e has thieved to him- self your recipes! He feed to the count as his own invent your dishes, si mag- nifiques, si originels! Ah, quel perfide, quel horreur/"
"W'at!" asked Victor, paling under the shock. "'As 'e gave to ze count my spaghetti wiz chicken livaires, Jules? An- swer me! An' my divine filet pique a la Richelieu?19
Jules nodded. "Oui. An' ze cotelettes a la Soubise."
''Zis is terrible!" exclaimed Victor. "Zis is tragedie, my good Jules. Go, you 'ave serve me well. Go — I mus' furi- ously to think. It is up to me to catch zis rascal Christakos dead to ze right. An' zen some of it. Ah, mon Dieu, one who will steal ze brain childs of anozzer is one gr-r-ran' viper, Jules."
"You spik ze earfuls," murmured Jules, fervently, as he departed.
Indeed, was it not a situation which rightly gave Victor furiously to think? Here was the wicked and unworthy Christakos reaping the benefit of all his, Victor's, years of careful experimenta- tion in the culinary art! And when Vic- tor cooked he could outchef any chef who ever flourished a saucepan. His recipes were his greatest secret. He never told them. How, then, had Chris- takos obtained them? Victor gave grudging admiration to one who could watch a recipe like his and then repeat it — rrerely from observation.
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"But," he added to himself, suspi- ciously, "I will bet ze good round iron man zat he took notes on his villain shirt-cuff! He could not remember zem, so. Zey are too subtle — too complicate. Bah! W'y for do I waste ze time in fig- uring to myself ow 'e got zem, w'en ze fact is zat 'e 9 as got zem. It is 'igh time pour un coup de theatre."
But what to do! Christakos watched the count like a hawk. He was always there when the count's square body, pink head, and white side-whiskers ap- peared in the door of the Rose Room. He refused altogether to take his day off, and when Victor remarked to him solicitously that he would thus under- mine his health, he had replied that he would soon have plenty of money to go to a health resort, and, hence, should worry. The insolence! Moreover, this success of Christakos's was an encour- agement to the other under-captains of the Rose Room to be covertly swagger- ing and independent and flout Victor's rule. Now I ask you — could this be endured ?
Nevertheless, as long as Christakos remained sound in wind and limb and
attended to his duties, it seemed as if the situation could not be changed.
Of course, Victor knew that if he could once get hold of the count's atten- tion, for a single meal, all would be over with Christakos. He had supreme confidence in his own abilities — Victor. He knew that his conversation and man- ner were both superior to Christakos's. He knew that he could originate ten de- lightful new epicurean delights while Christakos was merely copying one. All he needed was the chance to let the count know this also.
Let it never be said that true merit is slighted while false gains the laurel. Let it never be said that Fortuna, that fickle dame, does not stand ever ready to guard her chosen ones, even though for a moment she seems to have turned her face from them. Behold! here is the proof of it. On this one night a careless 'bus-boy let fall a small pat of butter on the top step of the flight of, stairs which leads from the kitchens and pantries below to the service door of the Rose Room. And the first person to pass by after this small unobserved happening was Christakos! He slipped — he slid —
THE COUNT WATCHED HIM, NOT LOSING A MOVEMENT
"I AM PERFECTLY WELL," SAID THE COUNT, ANGRILY. " I AM NO BABY FOR YOU TO NURSE "
he waved his arms and made a wild contortion of his body to escape falling, but it was in vain. His feet flew from under him, and he went down, rolling, bumping, clutching, and likewise swear- ing a most blasphemous purple mixture of Greek, bad French, and worse Eng- lish.
When they had picked him up at the bottom of the stairs he was covered with contusions and he had, in addition, one broken arm, one sprained ankle, and a terrible gash over his left eye.
As they were putting him in the am- bulance to take him to the hospital, Count Leopold was entering the Rose Room for dinner. Victor, hurrying in from the service door — he had been called out by the accident to Christakos — observed him and realized that For- tuna had given him over into his hands.
He came forward swiftly, but without flurry. Count Leopold was looking about him for the absent one.
Victor bowed, composing his features to the right degree of concern. "Mon- sieur le Conte," he began, "'ow I am grieve to tell you! Christakos 'e is smash to himself on ze so hard stone steps. It will be many days he is in ze 'ospital, I fear it. But come, monsieur, I, Victor, will serve you. Firs' of all, I will change your table. Zere is ze bad draught w'ere you 'ave been sitting. I insist to Christakos zat your seat be change' — but 'e will not listen. 'Ere, monsieur — try zis."
Bowing, he waved the count to a table that was perfection — not too near the door, yet giving an admirable view of every newcomer; not too near the music; not too near a service-table; out
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of the way of passing waiters and 'bus- boys; secluded from draughts, but not in a stuffy corner; well lighted, yet not in a glare; placed properly as regards heat. Oh, a jewel of a table! Once sit- ting at it, the practised eyes of the count observed its every charm. He smiled. He adjusted his monocle. Victor knew that the first part of the battle was won.
"You are comfor'able, yes?" he asked, sweetly. "Ah — good! And now, mon- sieur— to choose ze dinner. First of all — ze puree de petits pois, wiz a little spinach add to ze fresh peas. Aha! A new sensation, I promise you."
He looked sharply at the count. It was evident that the old man was lis- tening with interest. "An' zen hure d9un saumon a la Cambaceres — ze sauce of drawn butter an' paprika an' lemon juices — yes?"
"Yes, yes," said the count, with en- thusiasm.
"An' zen," went on Victor, gathering speed, "w'at say you to ze poulet saute a V Hongroise — wiz ze sauce Bechamel?"
" It must be done by a master's hand," interposed the count, his little eyes sparkling in anticipation.
"Have no fears to yourself," soothed Victor. "I — I will myself sauter ce poulet — I swear it. Tomatoes Provencal wiz zis. An' after, a salad — plain, cool, crisp green alone, a French dressing wiz a suspicion of tarragon, per'aps one wink of garlic."
"If it but tastes as it sounds!" mur- mured the count. His words were de- vout— a prayer.
"No stupid 'eavy dessert," continued Victor, the joy of creation upon him. "A macedoine meringuee is ze ticket. I will bring you Chambertin to drink, monsieur, an' Turkish coffee, an' at ze las', one so little glass of cognac, clear. Is it agreed?"
It was agreed amid suppressed excite- ment of Victor and greatly unsuppressed excitement of the count. He gazed after Victor with admiring, wondering eyes — at least, with one admiring eye and with an admiring monocle.
"Little angels of heaven!" he sighed. "In this accursed country I did not be- lieve there was one man who knew so much of the art of ordering a dinner. Now — if what he brings me is fit to
eat — " A long life had taught M. le Conte Leopold that very few dinners are as good in reality as in expectation. And he was a man who lived to dine! 'Twas a tragedy.
But this time he was doomed to blessed disappointment. When the soup came, Count Leopold tasted it cau- tiously, and then, contrary to his cus- tom, he ate every drop of it.
With the salmon he was equally greedy. He ate the truffles and the mushrooms that garnished it. He dipped a bit of his toasted roll into the sauce and ate that.
But it was not until the chicken and tomatoes appeared and he had taken his first delicious mouthfuls of them that he spoke. He chewed with delicate ecstasy. Then, laying down his knife and fork, he beckoned Victor himself to him. He grasped his hand.
"It is sublime," murmured Count Leopold, hoarsely.
Victor received the tribute modestly, as one who knows his worth, but is not puffed up thereby. "I am some joy zat you are please'," he said, in his own special argot, which contained many adaptations of American slangisms. Then he went away and busied himself with other patrons of the Rose Room, but he had a contented heart. He knew that Christakos's goose was cooked at the same time as the chicken the count was so rapturously eating.
He returned, however, to make the salad dressing and serve the salad. He made the dressing with his own special white-wine vinegar, his own pure Italian oil. He flavored it with a dash of tarra- gon, and to the ordinary condiments he added a touch of cayenne. With a clove of bruised garlic he rubbed the bowl. Generously he "fatigued" the crisp green leaves of romaine with the dress- ing, turning them over and over and over again. The count watched him, not losing a movement — as enraptured ladies watch the hands of a great pianist playing Chopin.
And the result — ah, Victor could not suppress a smile of triumph at the beatific expression that spread itself over the count's pink-cheeked face as he ate. His very side-whiskers curled with pleasure.
A SPREE D'ESPRIT
31
Then came the macedoine meringuee, and the Turkish coffee, and at the last the thimbleful of clear cognac, as prom- ised. With this the count became thoughtful. It was evident that some great idea was forming in his head.
Remember, the count had eaten everything — he whose custom it was but to nibble and to taste. Ke had likewise drunk far more than his customary half-glassful. Hence he was mellow — mellow, yet not merry. He beckoned to Victor.
"You have made me do what I never expected to do again," he said, "eat a perfect dinner — - a perfect dinner, throughout. Ah, little angels of heaven! I feel that you have given me back my youth! I am as a young man again — in Paris or Vienna. I do not want to go to my room and read the matchless
novels of Sacher-Masoch, though such is my custom — and he is the greatest writer who ever lived — peace to his ashes." He piously drank off his cognac to the memory of the novelist. "But to-night, I am restless, distrait. I have good reason for it, alas! And yet, I do not know what to do. I am not ac- quainted with the city. Could you — would you, a young man, act as courier for a night of harmless pleasure for an old man ? If you are one-half as resource- ful as an entertainer as you are a caterer — But, yes, it must be so. Come, what time are you free here?"
The prospect this presented was as delightful as it was unexpected, and Victor's thoughts played nimbly round it. It was assuredly an adventure not to be lost. Although he did not have the slightest idea of where they would
SHE SEEMED TO BE BECKONING TO THEM — OH, HOW IRRESISTIBLY
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go, or how he would divert the count, that is another story.) And while he did he let a triviality like that take care of all these things, he was frantically plan-
am
said "I my my
itself. He bowed. He smiled.
"Monsieur le Conte," he said, "I am at your sairvice w'en you wish an' for as long as you wish. To search an' find pleasure for you —behor— I on ze job."
"Good," the count, will go to rooms for coat and hat, and I will have my valet order a car for us. I will be down again in fifteen minutes. Can you be ready ?"
"You can bet of your life," said Victor. "But order no car, monsieur. No adventure in zis city is com- plete wizout rid- ing in ze taxi- cabs — ze worse ze better."
It was so agreed, and the count, beaming with expectancy, retired, leaving such largess for Jules, who had assisted Victor in attending him throughout the dinner, as made
that true son of France almost dance the can-can right in the middle of the Rose Room.
As for Victor, he flew first to speak to the assistant manager of the hotel and explain his absence. Then he returned to put the affairs of the Rose Room un- der the direction of the best of his sub- captains. Then he sought his own coat and hat, thanking Heaven that he had seen fit to wear his best silk hat and light overcoat that day. (He had expected to have a little diversion of his own after the hour of the Rose Room closing. But
WHEN HE COULD MARCH NO LONGER, HE SEIZED THE BASS-DRUM AND MARKED TIME
ning what he would do with this strange companion, so oddly and so suddenly thrust upon him. He bought an evening paper and ran his eye over the list of
amusements, for it seemed inev- itable that the first part of their evening should, be spent in a theater, though it was now far too late to see the opening of any show. But there were plenty of them, reflected Victor, where it made little difference to the sense at what part of it one began.
At this mo- ment Count Leo- pold stepped off the elevator, fol- lowed by a much perplexed and solicitous valet. He was expostu- lating — the valet:
"But, Mon- sieur le Conte, you are not well — you are not strong — you never go out — it is against the doctor's orders—" "Chut, Maas," said the count, an- grily. "I am perfectly well. I am no baby for you to nurse. Don't be an old fool, an old dotard. Go back up-stairs and do your work and wait for me to go to bed. I don't know when I shall return."
"Then let me go with you," pleaded Maas, darting a venomous glance at Victor. "I who know your ways, who know what is best for you."
"No, no, no!" shouted the count. "Little angels in heaven! must a man be pestered to death by his servants?
A SPREE D'ESPRIT
33
Be silent, instantly, and go up-stairs, or I shall discharge you, here and now. I am sick of your long face and your nurs-
Maas fell back, wringing his hands, and the count went debonairly on. "Oh, if it had not been for that magical dinner," he said to Victor, "I should never have had the strength to with- stand Maas. He is a tyrant. Come, where do we go first?"
Victor beckoned to a rakish-looking pirate taxi with a young thug for chauf- feur. "To ze Gaities," he commanded. He settled himself comfortably beside the count and said, as the taxi leaped from its moorings and broke the speed limit even in its first ten yards:
"Now we shall see what we shall see. I tell you, moi, Victor, zis is ze life!"
And, believe me, it was the life. The first episode was at the theater, where they were finally landed in safety after being warned by no less than three policemen and scraping a little varnish off several slow-going limousines. An unimpressed, morose youth gazed upon Victor and the count as they approached the box-office and remarked, indiffer- ently :
" Nothindoinhousesoldout."
The count's hand went to his breast pocket and he automatically brought out a bulging roll of bills which he attempted to slip unobtrusively to Victor. But Victor's native thrift revolted at paying good money to such a person.
" But wait," he whispered, " biffbre we try finance, let us try finesse"
Behind the shoulder of the ticket- seller he had seen the rotund outline of one who was evidently a higher author- ity. He approached the window again and, ignoring the underling, tried the power of the human eye on his chief.
"Approach me," said Victor's eye. "There is something doing."
The chief approached and dented his plump figure with the shelf behind the window.
" Foyez, mon ami" whispered Victor. "You zee zat ole man out zere? Aha — you start! You know him, zen? It is Count Leopold Parchewski, secret emis- sary of ze so great Russian government, bosom frien' of his Excellence ze Russian
Vol. CXXXVIII.— No. 823.-5
ambassador an' all zose high-up gink. He is 'ere wiz me, an' he is consume wiz ze great desire to go behine ze scene to see your show from ze wing. It would not be ze bad business for you to let him have his so petit wish — no? You see a daylights — yes ? But wait — you are not to call him by ze name — vous comprenei? He is here incognito. But to-morrow — w'at a story for ze papers! You can give ze tippings to ze newspaper boys to-night, if you wish it. Hist — not a words!"
The manager saw the daylights, de- cidedly. He hurried round through the office and joined them in the lobby. With obsequious bows he bade them ac- company him, and, shortly after, they were treading the maze of the back- stage. The count regarded Victor with open admiration.
"I knew you could do wonderful things," he said, "but I cannot under- stand why they let us get in without money."
"Zere are sings bigger as money," declared Victor. "Even in America, monsieur." And further than that he would not divulge.
At the Gaieties there is a jolly little corner in the wings, R. u. E., just big enough for two to stand and not be in the way of the passing in and out of the hundred or so performers. It was here that the manager installed Victor and the count, and after slavishly urging them to stay as long as they liked and to do what they pleased, short of burn- ing down the theater, left them. They gazed about them with interest.
The usual disorderly mess of ropes, props, tackle, and all the grimy mechan- ism that makes back-stage look more like a carpenter's shop than any adjunct of the drama did not allure them. But as they looked out on the stage itself, where the performance was going on, there was something of exceeding in- terest.
The leading lady, slim, demure, and large-eyed, was just beginning her big song, "Follow Me, Boys," that half the world has since been humming. Behind her was a double row of chorus folk, the front layer of girls in airy, rufrly rose color and mauve, and the back layer of men in pearl-gray suits, white spats,
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HARPER'S MONTHLY MAGAZINE
pearl-gray " toppers" — oh, a delicious, shifting kaleidoscope of color.
Back and forth in a swaying, weaving, slow step went the singer, her slender white figure picked out and held by the spot-light. She was singing — and the audience was humming with her in delight —
"Follow me, boys, won't you follow me — Follow me, boys, won't you follow me — Look at the moonlight out on the sea — Listen to my heart, for it's buzzin' like a bee —
It's the proper time for lovin' and it's just
for you and me — O-o-oh — won't you follow me!"
The chorus danced softly, alluringly, behind her as she sang, and when they took up the refrain, she, too, broke into a quicker, lighter step, her arms out- stretched, her little hands beckoning.
The count clutched Victor's arm. "She is like a little white butterfly," he murmured, poetically. "It has been years since I was in a theater — and longer yet since I was behind the scenes. Ah — how can I thank you ? I am young again — " He broke ofF suddenly. The singer, dancing toward their side of the stage, saw them and looked straight at them. She seemed to be beckoning to them — oh, how irresistibly — ■
"Follow me, boys, won't you follow me — O-o-oh—"
Madness fell upon Victor and the count. They seized each other by the arm with a common impulse, they went forward seemingly without their own volition, and as the singer started back across the stage the audience was sur- prised by a bit of new business. She was followed by two men — one young and blond and handsome and tall; one short and square, with flowing white side- whiskers and a monocle. Their silk hats were on the backs of their heads, they wore evening dress, and they danced a little clumsily, perhaps, but determined- ly, in step with the music, behind the singer. At the moment of getting out into the footlight glare the count's cour- age had wavered, he had faltered. But Victor clutched his arm.
"Pssst!" hissed Victor. "Do not be ze boob, now. Keep on. We will make ze grran' hit, I tell you. Use ze head,
display some esprit, I pray — ah — 'ave I not say so?"
This last was because the audience showed a willingness to applaud the two new actors. The star, surprised for a moment, but catching her cue, danced back to them and sang her song directly to them. The count, now fully in the spirit of the affair, danced manfully, in- troducing strange, old-fashioned pirou- ettes and antique pigeon-wings which brought forth more applause. Victor was nimble also — but more sedate. The star, still singing, danced up to them, deftly separated them, and, taking a hand of each, pranced them magnifi- cently the full width of the stage and back, singing her sentimental appeal, first to one and then to the other of them. She was too clever to let herself be cheated out of the center of the stage by these two amateurs. But when they reached their own corner she dropped their hands and let them go. An aston- ished stage-manager rang down the cur- tain and there was an indescribable back-stage melee, while in front the au- dience howled for more.
The two culprits did not wait to take their curtain call. They seized each other's hands and fled for the outer air, while the whole back-stage resounded with mingled mirth and rage. They found the stage door, escaped up a damp, vaultlike alley, and fell into the nearest taxi, half dead with haste and laughter. They smote each other upon the back and rocked back and forth in school-boy- like hilarity.
"Ho-ho-ho!" cried the count. "If Maas could have seen me! He would not have summoned the doctor — no — he would have clapped me into an asy- lum for the hopeless insane, I know it." m "Ha-ha-ha!" laughed Victor. "Mon- sieur le Conte, we 'ave made ze put-it- over an' ze get-away all to ze once! We are some fellows regular — yes?"
"And that smart little singer," went on the count. "She was not greatly put about. Very clever she was to handle it that way. Little angels of heaven! I have not kicked my legs so much for over forty years." He was thoughtful for a moment. "I should do it oftener," he said. "It felt quite good."
"Zey was mos' wonderful to behoF,
A SPREE D'ESPRIT
35
your dancing," complimented Victor, tactfully. "But wait — were shall we go now, I demand ?"
"I leave it all to you," declared the count. "So far, the evening is a perfect success." He chuckled reminiscently.
"Zen we go to skating," declared Vic- tor, and forthwith gave the taxi-driver directions to go to the largest and best appointed rink he knew of.
The evening had progressed to the time just before the earliest theaters close, and hence the rink was not crowded and there was good choice of the little tables that surrounded it.
"We do not want to eat," Victor told the head waiter, "but we will pay."
And pay they did, so royally, that the head waiter himself took them to their seats and gave orders that they were not to be disturbed by any underling. They sat quietly a few minutes, observing the scene and listening to the orchestra. But this would not do for Victor.
"W'at for did we then come — to sit about like ze dead ones? But no, Monsieur le Conte. Nevaire! Leave us to start somesing. Wait."
He hurried off and reappeared in a few minutes, wearing skates and pushing before him a large chair with runners. It was gilded and plush-upholstered, thronelike. He drew it up beside the table.
"Look, look!" he said. "Ze queen of ze carnival use' it in ze grran' spectacle. Well, now — w'at say you to make ze carnival wizout zat queen? Seat your- self, monsieur, an' leave us to start zat somesing."
The count by this time was catching some of Victor's infectious idiom. He leaped to his feet and seated himself in the queen's chair, waving his stick. "Go to it," he commanded.
Then began such an hour of revelry as the Richmore Rink has never known before or since. First the count and Victor made a round of the rink at full speed, the count singing in a majestic voice a strange song which he declared was a Russian peasant drinking-song. It sounded the part.
Then, incited by Victor, other skaters, every one who was on the rink, at- tached themselves, one behind the other, holding on to coat-tails or sashes and
mufflers, hastily arranged as reins, and with this prancing, shouting queue be- hind them, they played a mad game of "follow your leader." The news that something rich was going on in the rink was circulated through the crowd down- stairs, and with the closing of the thea- ters the regular evening patrons were coming in, so that soon the Richmore Rink was packed to capacity, while with- out a great mob clamored to get in. More and more people put on skates and came to join the fun, and as fast as they came the resourceful Victor found some new means of entertainment.
He organized a "madman's hockey- match," with toy balloons and walking- sticks, and when this began the count could not longer bear to remain seated. He rose and called loudly for skates, and, once on them, the impromptu cir- cus found its clown. He bought all the favors that the Richmore could supply and gave them away with a lavish hand and infinite drollery. Soon all the skaters and most of the spectators were wearing fancy paper caps, and a wild game of tag inextricably mixed with "puss-in-the-corner" (played without corners) was going on. The count was "It." The crowd cheered him, howled "Ataboy," "Good old scout," "Three cheers for Santa Claus," and similar affectionate ribaldries at him, and he loved it. He led a grand march, per- forming all the evolutions of the most accomplished drum-major with his walk- ing-stick, while the marchers following him sang, "For he's a jolly good fellow," and "Hail, hail, the gang's all here." When he could march no longer he seized the bass drum from the orchestra and marked time with it for the skaters. His silk hat got smashed and so did Victor's, but it only made them both happier. As Victor still continued to remark, at intervals:
" Zis is ze life!"
But after a while the count's energy flagged, though not his merriment. He turned to Victor. "Let us go now," he said shrewdly, "while it is all at its best. That is always the moment to leave."
They had to slip out the back way to avoid the count's throng of admirers, who would have followed him. They came out into the cool night air, still
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flushed and panting, but they were not laughing now; this had been too glorious for mere mirth. They hailed another taxi and got in slowly.
"It is unbelievable/' remarked the count, "but I am hungry. It is the first time that I have had the sensation of actual hunger for longer years than I can remember. Shall we go out and eat somewhere? Alas! I know we shall get nothing, anywhere, like the dinner you ordered for me this evening."
"Monsieur," said Victor, after a mo- ment's earnest thought, "if you will be my guest, I will serve to you a supper zat shall be so good as your dinner. But I warn you, my apartment is of a 'umble- ness.
"I accept your invitation," said the count, with infinite courtesy. "It is an honor to be the guest of a man of genius like yourself, no matter how he lives."
The taxi sped quickly to a more obscure part of the city and finally stopped before a tall old house in a quiet street.
"It is 'ere zat I reside in," said Victor. "Enter, Monsieur le Conte, I beg. You are mos' welcome."
He ushered his guest with ceremony into a narrow hallway where a tiny point of gas flickered discouragingly, and up a narrow stair. He fumbled with a key, flung the door open, and stepped inside.
"But a moment, until I make it ze light," he said, and struck a match. Presently the mellow light from a shaded lamp cast a hospitable glow over the room.
It was a pleasantly large room, with shabby, deep-cushioned chairs and a big table on which were, besides the lamp, smoking-things and a pile of worn books. A sideboard and a cupboard balanced the opposite walls; big, old-fashioned windows took up the front; and at the back was a folding-door, half opened, which partly concealed the bed and bath that made the rest of Victor's small apartment. It was the second floor of an old house, so there was a fireplace and high ceilings.
Victor waved the count to a chair and lit the fire, which quickly flamed, adding warmth and cheeriness to the room. Then he cleared the books from the
end of the table, spread a square of white linen, and set forth a chafing-dish, a little gas-stove, plates and dishes of gay blue and yellow, silver forks and knives (battered but solid), condiments, serviettes, glasses, sweet butter, a loaf of long French bread. The count watched these preparations with eager- ness. His nose quivered, like a hungry bunny. After that dinner, what might he not expect?
"Monsieur," said Victor, with a grave dignity befitting the importance of the announcement, "I shall make for you my very own ceufs aux saucissons."
"Make a great many," said the count, imploringly. "My hunger is increasing with every second of time."
So presently the mellow lamplight fell on a strange sight. A table, unconven- tionally spread, with a smoking chafing- dish thereon, from which came odors like unto Araby the blest, a cofFee-pot bubbling on a little gas-stove beside it, and two men eating ravenously in good- fellowship — old Count Leopold, many times millionaire and a nobleman wel- come at all foreign courts, and Victor, captain of the Rose Room, which is, after all, but to be a sort of super- servant.
After the ceufs aux saucissons came cheese, Port du Salut, and little crisped crackers, and they drank coffee with hot milk and cream, as at breakfast. They did not talk, because the count was too busy eating and Victor was too busy thinking;.
But all nights of pleasure must end sometime, and as the clock struck one the count put down his knife and fork with a contented sigh.
"I must be getting back," he said, "or Maas will have out the police to search for me. Can you call a cab, do you think? One of those delightful taxis which I knew nothing about before to-night? But no — I will not let you go back to the Palais with me. I have already taken up a great deal of your time. But, oh, my boy — what a night! I did not think it was in me. You have given me back my youth. Yes, truly. My youth. I thank you. I thank you."
He made an involuntary motion tow- ard that pocket which contained the so- corpulent roll of bills. But his hand
A SPREE
stopped. Something in Victor's manner forbade it. Here he was guest and Vic- tor his host — to offer one's host money is a crass insult.
Victor, who was gazing at him, knew well what was in the count's mind and did not regret it, for he saw before him a long, long future of limitless possibili- ties, wherein he ordered marvelous meals for the count and served them to him in his own inimitable way, while Chris- takos, forever relegated to his proper place, glowered with hopeless, helpless malevolence in the background. Oh, how fair a vision this was! And, unlike so many visions, this one would be real- ized to the uttermost. Victor sighed with contentment! And with his sigh smiled again in blissful expectation.
The count sighed, too, but he did not smile. He put his hand on Victor's shoulder and an intense and sudden shadow fell on his round face. "Alas!" he said. "Alas!" And then, again, "Alas! Little angels of heaven! I swear I had forgotten. You had made me forget! My boy, to-morrow I leave for Russia! My work here is over. I have been sent for. The rare delights of this memorable night have made me to for- get it! And I had been dreaming of days to come when I should enjoy to the uttermost the perfect meals that your genius would provide for me, And a plunge of gaieties the like of which I had well-nigh forgotten, but which your in- spiration should ever devise afresh ! But it is not to be! Alas! Alas!"
He was almost weeping now, but at the reminder of the taxi's impatient honk he threw his short arms impetu- ously around Victor and kissed him, Russian fashion, on each cheek. "If you should ever come to Petrograd, seek first for me!" he cried. "I will never forget you — never!" He rushed madly out to the taxi, flung himself into it, and the last Victor saw of him he was wiping his eyes with one hand and waving his battered hat with the other!
Victor waved back to him mechanic- ally! He watched the taxi out of sight as one who is dazed, devastated! Then he came slowly back to his rooms and the scanty remnants of the feast. He stared about him unseeingly, incredu-
D'ESPRIT 37
lous, stunned at the utter wreck of his great expectations. Figure to yourself! There would be no future in which he would arrange endless gustatory tri- umphs for the count's insatiable appe- tite— and the Count's plethoric roll! There would be no golden harvest to be gathered day after day, and day after day after that! There would be no dramatic triumph over Christakos. All was gone, smashed, utterly smithereened — in the twinkling of an eyelash! It was well-nigh inconceivable! The smiles of Fortuna had been false, after all. Cold- hearted, capricious jade! Victor raised both hands above his head in a gesture of fine tragedy. He was prepared to curse Fortuna in words of a stinging, swinging acridity. But the curse never was uttered.
Instead, quite suddenly, he fell to laughing. Regardless of the hour and possible sleepers only a thin partition away, he flung back his head in a most sincere and unrestrained shout of mirth. He laughed till he could laugh no more! He clutched his sides and choked for breath. At last he fell upon a chair, quite spent.
" Mon Dieu!" he gurgled, between the last irresistible chuckles, "but zis is one giant jokes on Victor! To sink of all ze care I give to zat dinner — to sink I gambolade myself onto ze stage — to sink of ze foolery on ze skatings — to sink of le petit souper — an' 'e 'as ate all my sausages — an' now he is go back to Russia to-morrow! Eh, ma foil I s'all laugh at zis so long as I live."
He stopped and reflected long. At last he pulled himself out of the chair. "A lions, mon vieux" he said, cheerfully. "Ze count, he is one fellow regular, un gran' ole sport, comme qal An' we had one spifFy night, par exemple! Un vrai spree a" esprit! I would not 'ave miss it for all ze argent I 'ad expec' to gain. Mais non! I should sink not! An' I will manage some'ow for Albert an* my fazzer an' zose ozzer chil'rens, — I am not yet of a down-an'-outs, vraiment. I will make it ze proverbe Americain zat a high ole time in ze han' is worth beaucoup de gold in ze bush! Not so worse, I sink it! To live in zis New York one mus' be always philosopher always sage. Zis is ze life!"
Dinner-Tables of the Nation
BY ELIZABETH MINER KING
>.NE of the most onerous forms of self-restraint to the average Amer- ican has been that which has had to do with food. How insist- ent we have been upon just what we wanted to eat! How far out of our way we would go for pleasures of palate! And how much we despised a dictated diet! Men with the wisdom of seventy years submitted hardly more gracefully to suddenly imposed food re- strictions, prompted, perhaps, by high- est medical authority, than the Amer- ican child who is denied dessert. There always has been food. Our supply has been of such variety and quantity that apples could rot and bread grow stale, yet there would be more to take their places, with cider and bread pudding, besides. Plenty to eat, plenty to drink — it has been a happy time. One used to hear of how many pounds of beefsteak a certain man could eat at one meal. To be a large eater was to uphold tradi- tion.
Sometimes I think that the country would not have been true to form if its plunge into the war had not been pre- ceded by this surfeit — this boasting about the amount of food consumed, or rushing pell-mell to get it, strutting with weight, incessantly talking about it and paying for it dearly — a national worship of the smack of things — and then had not suddenly turned to the other ex- treme, in which the food consumption of every man, woman, and child became a matter of national concern — a frank, un- selfish recognition of the principle that we must all cut down or even go without. The real awakening of the public to the actuality of the food problem dated from the moment American boys landed in France. The land still flowed with milk and honey, but when American troops began to move, an empty place appeared at the dinner-tables of the nation. Sav-
ing food for him seemed not only logical, but necessary, and prompted by the love of the family. Then carrying out the entire food program for the sake of those who were fighting with him was the only human thing to do. But it was not easy. Every progression in the food propaganda was a trial of the spirit, a test of how far we could reverse our in- grained attitude toward food and be content. Whoever heretofore would have thought of believing a shopkeeper when he held out something different from that asked for, and said, blandly, "Just as good"? We believe, now, that some of the substitutes are just as good, that they contain all the vital properties of the more "fancy" article; that others look exactly like the pre-war staple and will do; and in still other cases we ac- cept an entirely new line of food as a substitute. To adapt these changes to the family's way of cooking and eating requires new skill. It is a game to pro- duce the best from the materials avail- able. Cooks vie with one another. The good Americans on the next block have dinners from war recipes, the ingredients of which I defy any one to name upon sight or taste of the finished product. The roasts might have been concocted on some heathen island where grew curi- ous nuts and roots. The greens are familiar only in their greenness. The sugarless desserts have the flavor of the Orient, with honey and syrup and the bouquet of honeysuckle.
War conservation has sent out many a culinary and epicurean explorer whose findings may never be lost when normal times come. Who can tell but that there are certain greens upon which corn-oil, peanut-oil, or even cotton-seed- oil, exert an exotic influence bringing out a zest which olive-oil only seared? So far the domestic oils seem only lubrica- tors, but enough . . . the war must be won! It must be won on oleomargarine, too, if necessary. "Oleo" before the war
DINNER-TABLES OF THE NATION
39
was considered in disgrace, a poor, cheap, thin, good-for-nothing that no- body wanted. It has been spruced up, raised in price, and made popular, hav- ing taken on the final stage of complete rehabilitation, a change of name to ap- pellations of aristocracy.
At first, the household admitted that it seemed wiser to use "oleo" than "cooking butter.', Then somehow the "oleo" was placed on the dining-table by mistake, and the most fastidious mem- ber of the family ate plentifully of it, remarking that at last the cook had obtained some good butter. And as Mrs. Jenkens, "who has been on the parlor floor for ten years," said, before every- body, "As long as I have been assured that it comes from a cow, although not from the milk-producing part, it does very well. Although, of course, it never would have been served on the Jen- kenses' table where there was only country food."
What a difference between the atti- tudes of city and country toward food, and, consequently, toward food control. City people have eyes forever larger than their stomachs. They imagine tables loaded with fatness, always seek- ing, seldom finding; for they eat "por- tions" of things, pieces doled out trimmed of all fragments. They are perpetually ready for more. Country families are surrounded by eatables, great piles of sameness, seasons of this and seasons of that, until it seems, in- deed, as if nature gave up nothing but green peas for weeks, or nothing but sweet corn for another spell, with long weeks of pork and pumpkins in the win- ter. If there is any time when a man's hunger is tempered, it is when he is surfeited by the sight of the things. I do not say for a moment that the coun- try man does not consume a larger quantity of food, but he certainly ap- praises it differently. He knows nothing of the pleasurable sensation of ordering a portion of fish and having it served with a cucumber relish, unannounced and gratis. Nor of the anticipation when forced to buy just enough green vegetables "to serve six people" once, or perhaps twice, around. Exhalation to appreciate flavor in a tidbit is bosh to him, for he sniffs bushels and barrels of
his garden truck when it is picked at sunrise, gets a decided whiff at dinner- time when he hangs his blue jumper on the kitchen wall, and finally makes a meal of five or six helpings from the day's main dish.
When war-time called for conserva- tion and abstinence, country persons were in a mental condition exactly de- scribed by a latter-day poet.
"No sugar! It is inconceivable. We have always haa sugar."
So have they always had white bread and cake! Recently it was gray, and the good housekeepers were sad. Bread and cake that were off color were a disgrace to family traditions and unfit provender for weddings, funerals, and christenings, which, in spite of war, must have at least a little ceremonial cooking. Then there were the caravans of city persons, domestic scientists, who came to the slumbering villages, claiming to have the latest knowledge about canning and pre- serving, which they desired to impart to housekeepers who had stayed at home, making no pretense of other professions for generations. There was actual strife in one canning-kitchen, set up with sin- cere patriotic intention, between the home and visiting elements. When the "city people" were present, the others retired, mainly because of the fact that the visitors used a thermometer in cook- ing-
"Who'd ever heerd: A thermometer! My grandmother never used no ther- mometer to tell when her beans was cooked, and I guess I ain't likely to come to being that dumb, neither!" said one of the village housekeepers.
It was due, no doubt, to country isola- tion that rural people sometimes thought they were the only group made to live up to the letter of the food regulations. For one thing, the difference in prices of some commodities incited such a pre- sumption. Bananas, for instance, could be procured in the cities for twenty cents a dozen, and a penny each on the carts, while the country price rose to sixty cents. There was always some malicious wayfarer who came to town telling the great advantages in prices elsewhere; and then traveled on, relating the mar-
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velous conditions in the place he had just visited.
Let us consider now the city's reaction to self-governing food control. The city had its traditions to uphold. Business, pleasure, and ceremony were dependent not only upon food as such, but upon different degrees and quantities of food. A fig for the sugar and wheat consumed for afternoon tea in the country! A re- versal of long custom, high comfort, business income — the whole social cycle of a certain ring — occurred when sugar and wheat were shut out of afternoon tea or four-o'clock cofFee in cities.
"No little cakes! But, monsieur, we have always had little cakes with our tea. Impossible!"
"Oui, madame, but we are not al- lowed. Sorry. Will madame have some- thing else — some graham toast or ice- cream, maybe?"
How autocratic city persons have been! They ordered the menu, an over- loaded thing, and expected it carried out. And they were no less merciless of them- selves, if the mistress were the cook with an apron tied over her dinner dress, and a tea-wagon for a waitress. A dinner had to meet the prescribed standards of long progression. Times have changed. Salad and dessert now are interchange- able; and when the soup is heavy there is likely to be no meat; or only when there is no soup may the dessert be heavy. •
Intuition in adapting ingredients — in other words, being a "born cook" — helped the feminized tea-rooms to work out the food regulations with facility. These tidbit places are so numerous in this country now that, as one American recently remarked, "You step on them." A pair of white curtains, a peacock or a kettle on a swinging sign, and you have a tea-room. If it were not for their everlastingly warped ideas of the size of a piece of pie, one might fear for the fate of the eating-houses that men call "regular places." Nevertheless, the in- timate, small shops have a hold and their quick adoption of war foods in their most palatable form won cus- tomers. Tea-rooms managed somehow to continue to manufacture their incom- parable scones and white breads and still avoid using any wheat. Like rare house-
wives, their proprietors told no man that he was about to consume delicious cake, but made entirely of potato flour. He ate the cake first.
It has become necessary to change the ingredients of a "perfect dish," which was made in restaurant quantities to serve a thousand people and cooked in sections that would mature at mid- morning and at every successive hour during the day; so that it would taste the same as if the substitutions on ac- count of war-time regulations had not been made. Anybody who has been the mistress or master of a fine home meal can appreciate something of the re- sultant state of mind of the restaura- teurs and chefs. Restaurants capitalize flavor. "Johnny Duck's," on Long Island, is famous for the flavor of the ducks and their accompaniments. To go further, Long Island itself is known throughout a certain remote sec- tion of the country merely as a place where duck dinners abound. So to decree that there shall be less wheat, or none, possibly, in the ambrosial dressing within the cavernous ducks might mean the end of a perfect culinary career and commercial success. The situation had to be met scientifically.
Opposing policies developed among the restaurant men. The question was, which would the public prefer — higher prices and the same-sized portions, or less food and no changes in the estab- lished rates? One course or the other had become necessary. The dear public was experimented upon. Here and there it arose to protest against smaller por- tions, and occasionally there was a mur- mur about the rise in prices. But busi- ness men soon found that there was no comparison between the deeply hurt feelings of the American public when served with less than a superabundance of food, and the slight sensation of hav- ing to pay a little more. To pay a high price and receive a liberal return; that suited the big hungry eyes of the hard worker and cheerful spender. But to pay a medium price and receive a tidbit. Ah no! Americans never stint when they have the money. No American man ever crossed Broadway with the intention of having a small good time. It is not his nature.
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After notice had been served upon the restaurants, the proprietors had to reckon with the infinite varieties of the human reaction. What manifestations are concerned with food — traditions, patriotism, religion; loves, hates, greed and generosity! A young man, prosper- ous and pleasant, came in with his best girl.
"Let us have a planked steak, rare!" he said, proudly.
This was the choicest, the most ex- pensive dish in their cycle of menus.
"Sorry, sir, but this is beefless day. Will you select something else?" said the waiter.
The young man frowned, and the servitor retreated, overcome by a scowl- ing patron. In a moment he returned.
"It is all right, sir. You may have it."
"Of course not!" spoke up the Amer- ican girl. "I couldn't eat it. I like chicken better, anyway. Chicken, by all means."
The price of broiled chicken in this luxurious eating-place had been ad- vanced, but the portions were as large and juicy as ever. Down in the sections of the city where money was more scarce were the restaurants and itinerant stands with prices the same as they ever were. But, alas! the size of a dime's worth had diminished. A slice of watermelon, compared with its forerunner before the war, was a mere sample. The bags of peanuts had shrunk to forlorn propor- tions. Two cents and three cents, the common tender of the old days, bought little when the picturesque portable ovens came around with their steaming green corn, baked apples, and cornuco- pias of boiled beans.
The care of the grizzled venders in trying to observe the regulations was the glorification of the push-carts. The old men had an official air and an under- current of sincerity no less precious than the allegiance of the greatest chef. They belonged to the large company of under- officers of the great Hoover, commis- sioned to carry out his directions. The haughtiest subaltern of the Food Admin- istration was serving on one bleak night at the counter in a railway station. Rich men, poor men, merchants, and chiefs were leaning on the rail, munching what
Vol. CXXXVIII— No. 823.-6
the food administrator thought was good for them.
"Give me a ham sandwich and a cup of coffee," sang out a banker in a hurry. The attendant was cold. He appeared not to understand a syllable of the order.
"A ham sandwich and a . . . " began the customer again, only to be arrested by the fierceness of the look which spread over the countenance of the man behind the counter. Only chicken sandwiches were permissible that day. Chicken, chicken, chicken! And his ex- pression plainly said: "Poor imbecile! Hasn't your mother told you about the war:
It was a cruel weapon which the Federal authorities placed in the hands of waiters and Pullman dish-men, with which they could even more successfully cower and reform their humble servants, the hungry public. I take it from keen observation that not a corn muffin was served from New York to San Francisco but some dining-car dusky "angel" silently rejoiced over another sinner saved. Every little heavy muffin was proffered as an "I told you so," with the compliments of the South, which long has been contending for the recognition of corn meal. Hear any Southern gen- tleman in New York tell how Northern- ers miss the delights of the true corn flavor because they do not know how to grind the kernels. Corn muffins are among the things that will have to be decided after the war — whether they re- main on sufferance in the North "valued for associations only," or go south of Mason and Dixon's line and stay there as the mascots of Southern cookery.
Monarchical autocracy of waiters and shopkeepers was needed in this matter of persuading people to eat things they did not like. We have a national phe- nomenon of thousands of men and wom- en who have grown up repeating that they "don't like" this or that, although admitting that the food in question never had been tasted. "Can't eat," "Don't like," and the old boarding- house platitude, "I don't eat thus and so," are mainly psychological matters.
In industries, the restrictions some- times were equivalent to telling a chauf- feur that war conditions made it neces- sary that he run his engine without
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gasolene. Bakers, for instance, were completely upset and put their chemists at work to study the problem of doing without wheat. Proprietors of delicates- sen-shops were confronted with trying situations affecting mighty things to them — cold meats, sandwiches, and their hours of opening and closing. Anybody knows that half of the significance of a delicatessen is its traditional open-door at the time when all other food-shops are closed. Where are the delicatessens of yester-year, the "automats" for lazy cooks? Where the imported cheeses, all the old-country bolognas, and pale- gray and ruddy wursts? Pickle-dishes and cans of tunny from the placid Pacific coast have taken their places. The Hohenzollern subjects mourn their loss and eat sausages from New England. Sunday night delicatessen supper, or "bag" supper, as East Side children often called it, has lost some of its flavors. In the old days before the war the top layer of the bag was covered with dessert of ice-cream cones in a variety of colors named after well-known fruits. The flavors have dwindled to vanilla and chocolate, with less sugar than ever. At the soda-fountains the little ice- cream towers of picturesque composi- tions, beginning with a banana and pass- ing through five or six incarnations before the top cherry was reached, have been reduced in rank. Plain ice-cream itself has become neither ice nor cream, but a harsh substance, saponaceous and neutral, filled with particles like bits of broken glass placed there by the enemy.
"What have we here?" said a digni- fied old bachelor with a sweet tooth, as he slowly tasted his "sundae" minus the usual sweetness.
"That's the new rule of the Food Administration you's biting into, Mr. Foggerty. They has changed hit again," quickly answered Sambo, who has been serving at the "fountain" for years.
Storekeepers sometimes had the im- pression that the rules were often changed. They made an adjustment, they said; then came a revision almost directly after the original order. Some of them, out of temper because of the ways of pampered cooks and cringing housewives, allowed themselves to be
coaxed into selling more wheat or more sugar, and then were caught red-handed. Dealers had more trouble with the sugar restrictions than with the regulation of any other commodity. Of course, the universal rule of wanting something un- obtainable played its part; nevertheless, the psychological effect of enforced abstinence was only the culmination of a sugar lust. Gradually the country had been turning to sweets as substitutes for alcoholic drinks. Candy has been taking the place of whisky. Women experts, as well as manufacturers, experimented with other saccharine materials to pro- duce sweets that would not offend against the sugar rules, and yet meet this demand.
There is a great spirit of freedom and hilarious effrontery in American food signs. One wonders sometimes what the newly arrived foreigner really thinks about them. He sees an expanse of printing and color labeled, "Eat Corn Muffins and Win the War!" — to say nothing of the multitudinous tinned din- ners, tomato catchup, and red-cheeked apples which Americans are besought to use to "win the war." After all, the for- eigner knows little of America but that which he finds in the street. These signs which he sees while on his way to and from work to him are among the most obvious manifestations of American life. And we take it for granted that he will perceive that the true American spirit does not always take seriously some of the effusiveness of American advertising. Corn muffins will not win the war; nor will spaghetti, chicken wings, chop suey, sauerkraut, or beer, with which foreign- ers are much more familiar. They have their tastes. We had ours. But they like their flavors better than we liked ours because we have borrowed with high satisfaction from the cookery of nearly every nation represented in the United States. Therefore, the advantage in food regulation was with Americans, for it was on home territory, where we had our old American ways to fall back upon if restrictions hampered our enjoy- ment of foreign foods. Foreigners had to accept our rules or go without.
We take credit for our docility in adapting ourselves to requirements, the meaning of which has been clear to us.
DINNER-TABLES OF THE NATION
Thousands of the foreign-born have accepted the gospel of food regulation merely upon faith in the word " Amer- ica. " Many of them did not understand at all, and had few facilities for reversing their food customs. Yet they not only willingly complied with the material features of the requests, but attempted to adopt the spirit, at the same time re- taining personal traditional memories. Cold mutton to an Englishman is a sub- stantial symbol of a lifetime. The Irish- man's nose is keen for his pork and po- tatoes, and corned beef and cabbage. Just now there is a platter of home-made tomato paste sunning in the window of nearly every Italian tenement home. The Jewish people have their kosher chicken; the Bohemians roast pork, sauerkraut, and dumplings; Syrians their sweets — and Americans a thick beefsteak with occasional side dishes from all the others. Our nature is to crave culinary adventures. Thus, in a small way, we show our heritage from many countries.
Propagandists for the Americaniza- tion of foreigners have pointed to the American food program as a potent fac- tor in bringing about the ideal condi- tion— namely, "One flag, one language, one country . . . one food!" As if this ever could be, except in some small abso- lute monarchy surrounded by a high wall! Food regulation has been a great Americanizing agent, but its power has been not to condemn everybody who refused American beefsteak or Boston pork and beans, but to promote a spir- itual unity in which every contributing group in American society made sacri- fices for the same principle.
Let us get down on the street. No more colorful and picturesque regime was ever instituted than this good regu- lation, affecting the home life of foreign- ers. The restrictions in the use of meat were a matter of no moment to the Jew, particularly to the orthodox Jew who never eats beefsteak or many of the other heavy meats. In fact, much of the food propaganda had to do with commodities unknown to foreign households. It seems hardly comprehensible that a Jewish family that had lived in a large city for ten years did not know what canned peas and string beans were, nor whether to
43
eat them cold for dessert with sugar and milk or as a relish with vinegar. Many of the recipes of the food administration had to be translated into Yiddish by foreign experts, who also advised the administration regarding religious viola- tions which the rules might entail.
A Jewish mother buys no "seconds." The food is of the best quality. She must have prime eggs, and then only the white-shelled ones. The higher prices restrict merely the quantity of her pur- chases to five cents' worth of the best sweet butter, one egg, and a quarter of a pound of rice. One chicken wing, or a leg, is a common sale to the Jewish housewife. Due perhaps to the lack of household regularity, the neighborhood women were accustomed to trading at the grocer's from early morning until nearly midnight. The regulations re- quired the grocers to close at eight o'clock, which was a blessing to neigh- borhood orderliness, and a physical relief to the shopkeepers — although they were loath to admit it. A little grocer with his accounts chalked on the door, and a lift for every one who is down and out, is a bundle of philosophy. That a man cannot pay seems to him no fault of his own; and it never occurs to the pro- prietor to deny him what he needs. It was a hard day in the dark shop when the supply of rye bread with caraway seeds, the Jewish staple, began to feel the hand of the regulator, and customers wore a calamitous air.
"Vy is there not no more bread? Shall I tell you a hundred times already that they had to have it to vin the var? Now vill you understand again?" said the tired merchant, as he turned to put a limp salted fish on the scales for the next customer.
There had been a tremendous change in the neighborhood within a year. It had been almost impossible to awaken an interest in substitutes and conserva- tion. "We know how to feed our fami- lies," was the answer of the women. Now they are on tiptoe with a desire for help. Their boys have gone away. Jew- ish mothers have formed organizations to promote food regulations with a spirit that has brought them into the sister- hood of many tongues with one message. When these women opened their hearts,
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those who came to them as missionaries of the Food Administration stepped back. No such economy and versatility as ordinarily practised in the foreign quarter had ever been heard of in the homes of the American women who went out to spread the new gospel. No lecture upon the discoveries in the garbage-can could apply to some foreign women, who know how to extract every particle of flavor from the very marrow in a bone.
When the Italians received the con- servation agents in their homes they showed the teachers new ways of using greens and salads, and the advantage of high flavoring. A light rub of garlic or a few dried mushrooms created an enticing aroma in the steaming pot. Their superb minestrone soup was a whole meal. Of course, their chief problem was due to the restrictions on spaghetti, of which they formerly imported about $4,000,- 000 worth a year. Washington sent out the new formula for wheat-conserving paste, and interpreters helped in making the adjustment. To cut down their meat consumption was little hardship, except, perhaps, to Italian laborers who swung the pickax.
Italians are fond of small fish and, in lieu of sardines from their Sardinia, they have accepted those packed on our own coast and dressed with cotton-seed-oil instead of the incomparable olive-oil. Venders of Italian commodities held out this oil substitute with a hopeless look; olive-oil had been indispensable.
Down in the Armenian and Syr- ian quarter, Turks, Greeks, Armenians, and bands of roving gipsies are cramped into the low, overhanging brick build- ings which were the real New York of a hundred years ago. A family of gipsies are sitting in a semicircle on the floor of a tenement, with fire in their eyes and gay laughter. The wrinkled hand of the cook stirs a great kettle filled with a traditional concoc- tion. The room is flaming with motley colors — ■ red, peacock blue; bronzed skins, black hair, brassy ear-rings and bangles. The forest is there, and the crackling camp-fire near a brook; the earth is soft and children are chasing the hares as they scamper across the en- campment. But you and I do not see them. Our senses are not in tune with
the overwhelming romance which makes the blue-painted, smirched, and chalked walls of a tumble-down building, sunless and airless, but a momentary displace- ment of the real, which is a camp home in the woods or on waysides. How pror saic to say "corn muffins \" to these people! And how wonderful for them to answer, "Ay, America, corn muffins I" Ordinarily men and their families could live ten lives here without speaking or hearing the English language. The strings of food hung in the windows of strange streets are as queer to us as Damascus would be to a Rocky Moun- tain rail-splitter. How all this curious food ever got into the country, and kept coming year after year without being discovered before, is our first thought!
At the beginning of the war, when the foreign populations were in a quandary as to how to obtain products from their old homes, manufactories were estab- lished in the United States to produce them. The Syrians, for instance, use a wheat food called kibbe as a staple diet. It was formerly made from Damascus wheat. A factory was obtained at Worcester, Massachusetts, where Amer- ican wheat was cooked, dried, and then cracked to form the staple kernels used at nearly every meal. When the Syrian gentlemen talked about the Damascus wheat, no longer procurable, its flavor was reminiscently dear. "The large full grains have a greater sweetness and a more nutritious taste," he said. To ask him to relinquish his memory of it would be equal to requesting New- Englanders to banish thoughts of the gingerbread men, Thanksgiving Indian puddings, and pulled molasses candy. Syrians have such a sweet tooth that the regulations regarding sugar were a hard- ship, but they responded with a vim. Shipping restrictions imposed a complete change in their diet, as nearly all of their ordinary foods, as well as those of the Greeks, formerly had come from Europe. Olive-oil, nuts, flavors, fruits, kibbe, and lentils were constantly arriving. Syrians eat little beef, but think highly of these more delicate things, which seem almost like extras. Cornmeal before the war was as odd to them as their eternal chick- peas are to us.
The most dramatic picture of the en-
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45
forcement of the regulations lies in the heart of Chinatown. Sam Hop — "he can no more do," as one restaurant man said. No more "bamboo shoots extraordi- nary"? No more honorable water chest- nuts? And Chinese mushrooms with dried oysters ? Some Chinese merchants have been forced to retire. The "au- gust" War Trade Board has allowed so few of their staple commodities to come that there will soon hardly be a square meal left in Chinatown. A Chinese res- taurant man, with the help of his son, who he says has a "big Merican head," recently made out a large order to go to his wholesaler in China. It was con- servative and war-conditioned. The honorable board would allow but two items, the peanut-oil and the old tea, from the long list. Sam Hop says he caters to Americans; they demand these things.
Chinamen have been using little red meat, but mostly chicken and pork; pork served as chicken, maybe, as well as suckling pig roasted supremely, a costly dish. So Chinatown had to do something to circumvent the American public. Proprietors decided to cut down the portions instead of increasing prices. The new policy they inaugurated one New- Year's night. All Chinatown re- members the American uproar. There- fore prices were increased, the servings left as usual, and night life under the lanterns was gay! But there is gloom now. The reserve supply is about gone.
Sam has turned himself almost inside out inventing substitutes — flour made from water chestnuts and his own noo- dles made of rice flour for the chop suey. He appeared before the board with the startlingly pleasing information that he had cut his American customers to an allowance of two teaspoonfuls of sugar for each cup of tea. He was told to make it one hereafter; then, if com- plaints were made, to add molasses! Molasses in a cup of tea celestial! China- men had been importing their own sugar, in small brown cakes. The Food Administration commandeered it. Not being Orientals, they whacked and pounded the rocklike little cakes and, deciding that they had no use for them, they gave them back. Sam and the others thought it was a good joke.
Foreign men and women have pre- sented themselves to the food officials, answering summonses, who never had heard that a Food Administration ex- isted! In this class were some who other- wise might have been branded as enemy violators. In a sense, it was a man's own fault if he did not know; then, again, there were shopkeepers who labored, ate, and slept, seldom breaking the round. If there were alien enemies who hindered the Food Administration on general principles, they were brought to notice by their objections and prop- erly disposed of. The number was rela- tively small; and there were some sad undiscovered cases of good New England housewives who secretly filled their at- tics with forbidden food . . . their mouths with patriotic good English, and quaked only on Sunday when the preacher read that "stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleas- ant"— for him that wanteth understand- ing. And that Joseph became a food administrator who must be obeyed when he commandeered the surplus food in Egypt in the fat years to provide for the lean ones.
It is unfair, however, to hold up to public view the half a dozen curmud- geons here and there, in the face of the overwhelming response to one of the greatest self-denials the country has made. Men and women, at extraordi- nary personal sacrifice, have given their services to the food work, and the re- sults have shown it. When something is begun here, there is little question but that men will stand by and see it through. America has been aroused to a pitch that will go through fire and water ... or death. It is more alive to-day to the work of the hour than any other country in the world, said a gen- tleman who has just completed a circum- navigator's tour. But let us face the facts: Although we are composite, there is an overwhelming unity. And we have little of that geographical separation of dialect which makes such definite divi- sions in many countries. Every facility the country affords has been brought into play to spread the food gospel in the way that would bring it nearest home, emphasizing that it is not only for our- selves.
The Golden Mountain
BY ELSIE
OR twenty years Haz- lett had had almost no intercourse with his kind. He was by birth an American and by vocation a missionary to the Congo. Once in
fifty years a white man enters that re- gion of intense heat and perilous damp- ness, of enervating malaria and deadly fever, and survives for a long period without illness and without furlough. In most cases the term of service is three years, at the end of which time, ema- ciated and weak, the missionary must return to his own country, there slowly to recover his strength.
Hazlett entered the African jungle when a missionary was still to most men a curiosity and to many men a fool. Young, talented, well-educated, he was in the opinion of his friends ruining him- self. He was associating himself for life with a low order of creatures, blacks, of whose humanity the world was not at that time entirely convinced. He was not going even to a great mission station where he would have companions of his own kind, but into the interior, where he would be alone. There were those among Hazlett's acquaintances who be- lieved that only some strange and secret depravity could endure the loneliness and horror of the situation to which he condemned himself.
Of the motive which sent Hazlett into the jungle his friends knew nothing. In his youth he had committed a wrong of which he had bitterly repented. His sin had been forgiven, he felt, by God, but he had not forgiven himself. The wrong could not be repaired, since the girl who had suffered at his hands was dead, and only by devoting himself to some work of charity or mercy could he atone. He went into the African jungle because it seemed to him that there ignorance was most dense and iniquity most appalling.
In ten years he saw the faces of four
SI NGM ASTER
white men. The first and second were English hunters, one traveling with a large company of native porters, the other, a madman, traveling alone. Him Hazlett buried, a victim to fever and his own lunacy. The third and fourth were English merchants in search of rubber.
At the end of ten years Hazlett came down to the coast. Hitherto he had attended to necessary business by mes- sengers who carried his orders two hun- dred miles through the bush, and who brought back his supplies, his clothing, tools, writing-paper, and the mail which grew each year scantier. What he saw on his journey horrified him. The na- tions which moved so slowly toward the illuminating of that continent which they called dark were moving rapidly toward her ruin. Even into the interior the seller of gin was penetrating, and all about Hazlett saw the dastardly trail of the rubber merchant. He had meant to stay in the coast town for a week in order to confer with a physician about some medical discoveries of his own, but he returned to his station the next day and set about its removal farther into the bush.
In the next ten years he had other visitors. Other rubber merchants came and departed; other hunters of wild beasts came and pressed a little farther into the bush and retired again toward the coast. The country beyond Hazlett was practically impenetrable. The jun- gle opposed progress like a blank wall, and from behind it and through it invis- ible defenders shot deadly vapors.
There came also a scientist, formidable in his white helmet and great goggles, but gentle and friendly when, that armor removed, he sat with Hazlett in the evenings, absorbing like a sponge all that Hazlett could tell him. For him Hazlett got out his note-books in which he kept unassorted but valuable records of all sorts of phenomena, the progress of African diseases, facts of meterological,
THE GOLDEN MOUNTAIN
47
botanical, biological interest, descrip- tions of marriage customs and accounts of primitive religions. All he had he gave to the stranger, who stayed with him, eager and interested, for a month.
There came to Hazlett at the end of twenty years a helper who gave no ex- planation of himself and who had, Hazlett imagined, some reason like his own for being in Africa. Hazlett gave him work and asked him no questions. Gradually the stranger's eyes assumed a less agonized expression, gradually his brow smoothed. Then Hazlett deter- mined that he would come home.
He was suddenly sick for home. He felt himself, moreover, to be stale; he must have, if he were to go on with his work, a complete change; he must see and talk to other men — white men. He had confidence in Newton and even greater confidence in the natives whom he had trained. He left his work in February, expecting to be back by Octo- ber, and found himself sailing with a light heart and eager anticipation.
It would be difficult to find, except in the periods of America's wars, changes equal to those of the twenty years which Hazlett had spent in Africa. When he had left, the application of electricity to problems of transportation, lighting, and heat was in its experimental stage; auto- mobiles had only been dreamed of, and there were few buildings in the country higher than ten stories. Hazlett stood in the bow of the ship which brought him home and blinked at the sky-line of New York and did not believe. Then he laughed at himself and looked again, and shook his head as though he were ridding himself of a hundred old impres- sions and convictions. It was early morning and the rising sun turned the towers to opals, their windows to crys- tals. Hazlett thought, as was to be ex- pected, of the heavenly city; he felt an extraordinary, beneficent peace, a sense of adjustment, a satisfaction with him- self for what he had done. Wistful tears filled his eyes.
But a greater surprise awaited Hazlett than could be imparted by the material and scientific progress of his country.
Missions, he learned, had become a matter of popular interest. China, typi- fied for centuries by the figure of a sleep-
ing dragon, had assumed for the moment in the minds of men the aspect of a child stretching out beseeching hands to Occi- dental nations. Marvelous stories of martyr islands and of savages trans- formed were in the air, the names of Adoniram Judson, William Carey, and David Livingstone had become house- hold names; even government officials were giving praise to missions. The mis- sionary had ceased to be a man set apart from other men by the foolishness of his devotion; he had become an important figure. He had been in these latter years an eye-witness of events which inter- ested the world; from him one could gain political, scientific, and historical information which one could find no- where else. The meek seemed to be gaining his promised inheritance.
Hazlett discovered — and here was a fact more difficult to believe than that men should be selling bonds and teach- ing music in rooms forty stories from the ground — that he, Hazlett, had become famous. The newspapers brought out by the quarantine officer announced that among the passengers on the Athena was Daniel Hazlett, the noted missionary to the Congo. Hazlett blinked stupidly, read the head-lines again, and then pro- ceeded with the article itself. It was, he discovered, his scientist friend, Hough- ton, who had given an account of him to the world. He had created, according to Houghton, a veritable Utopia where the unspoiled virtues of a primitive peo- ple, fortified and exalted by the princi- ples of Christianity, made a Paradise.
Hazlett, at this point, sat weakly down on a bench in the saloon and chuckled. Twenty years of missionary work had not dulled a keen sense of humor. It was true that he had not opened to Houghton the darkest pages in the history of his African work; he would no more do that than a father would tell to a stranger the failings of his son. But whatever Houghton's abil- ity to discover new forms of plant or animal life or interesting variations of those of which the world knew, his judg- ment of human life could not be keen. A Paradise, a Utopia! Hazlett laughed again.
Hazlett was compelled, in spite of his amusement, to accept his fame. He
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had returned to observe, to rest, to be inspired; he found that he must submit to observation, he must give inspiration. Rest he had none.
He was invited, within an hour of his landing, to lecture before a learned so- ciety, and he accepted, half afraid, but with boyish pleasure. He wanted to talk about Africa, and he must correct, he felt, at once, the absurd misconcep- tion of his accomplishment.
His lecture was, he realized, a suc- cess. Hazlett was an attractive person. He was tall, he had a fine head and beau- tiful eyes, and, except for the bronzing of his skin, the African climate had put few marks upon him. He had never lost a fondness for good clothes, and he slipped back into the apparel of civiliza- tion with conscious pleasure. He was startled to receive, the day after he had spoken to his first audience, a check for two hundred dollars for his services. The society, it seemed, was liberally endowed and it had seldom, according to its sec- retary, bestowed an honorarium with so much satisfaction to itself.
Hazlett was visited shortly at his hotel in New York by a representative of a magazine who offered him five hun- dred dollars for an account of his mis- sion, either written by himself or dic- tated to a stenographer. At this Hazlett gasped, not only because of the size of the sum offered, but at the recollection of the great amount of marketable stuff in his mind. He had amused himself on the long journey by writing down primi- tive songs and stories which began al- ready to seem strange. Away from the country which gave them birth, he saw their uncanny charm to a civilized and sophisticated mind. His note-books lay under his hand as he talked to the agent of the magazine, and his fingers tight- ened about them. There was one ex- perience recorded therein which seemed suddenly to have enormous literary and dramatic value. He had thought once of writing to Kipling about it, as an experience which he of all men could understand — the story of the Golden Mountain. Now he said, jealously, the thing was his, his own personal, market- able property, to be for the present hoarded.
If Hazlett had gone to Africa as the
representative of any denomination, his experience upon his return would have been different. He would have been taken in hand by his missionary board and would have been given a regular schedule of work after an allotted period of rest. He would have met with the board, he would then have gone through the church, lecturing now in cities, now in small villages, and always to members of his own denomination who knew already a good deal about the scope and the result of his labor. But Hazlett had gone out independently and was there- fore accountable to no one for his time.
After he had appeared once or twice on lecture platforms, Hazlett was offered large prices by lecture bureaus, and put himself promptly into the hands of the best known. He saw the possibility of a great extension of his mission work; he might, after a while, hire other mis- sionaries and build schools and churches. In a month he had earned two thousand dollars, which sum was exactly equal to his private income for a year.
For his lectures crowds gathered. His style improved; men liked to hear him because of the information presented directly and simply, women because of his eyes and his deep, smooth voice. He made his audience see the dark wet green of the jungle, the glaring light of the open,