II
THE HOMELESS
We are a nomadic race, thriving on change. Apartment houses are our tents: many of us preempt a new flat every moving day. This is in part an inheritance from our pioneer readiness to strike camp and go further. It is the adaptability of a restless seeking. It is also the gift made by limitless supplies of immigrants, who, having torn up their roots from places where their family line had lived for a thousand years, pass from street to street, and from city to city, of the new country, with no heavy investment of affection in the local habitation. Once the silver cord of ancestral memory is loosened, there is little in the new life to bind it together. The wanderer flows on with the flowing life about him. To many of us it would be an effort of memory to tell where we were living ten years ago. The outline of the building is already dim.
The peasant of France has found a truth of life in planting himself solidly in one place, with an abiding love for his own people, for the house and the village where he was born. Four centuries ago the French poet wrote:
Heureux qui comme Ulysse a fait un beau voyage
Ou comme cestuy-là qui conquit la Toison
Et puis est retourné plein d'usage et raison
Vivre entre ses parents le reste de son âge.
Quand revoiray-je hélas! de mon petit village
Fumer la cheminée, et en quelle saison
Revoiray-je le clos de ma pauvre maison
Qui m'est une province, et beaucoup davantage.
Plus me plaist le sejour qu'out basty mes ayeux
Que des palais romains le front audacieux
Plus que le marbre dur me plaist l'ardoise fine.
Plus mon Loyre gaulois que le Tybre latin
Plus mon petit Liré que le mont Palatin
Et plus que l'air marin la douceur Angevine.
Happy the man who like Ulysses has traveled far and wide,
Or like that other who won the Golden Fleece,
And then wended home full worn and full wise,
To spend among his own folk the remainder of his days.
When shall I see once more alack! above my little hamlet
Rise the chimney smoke, and in what season of the year
Shall I see once more the garden of my humble home,
Which is a wide province in my eyes, and even more.
Dearer to my heart is the home my forefathers built
Than the cloud-capped tops of haughty Roman palaces.
Dearer than hardest marble the fine slate of my roof.
Dearer my Gaulish Loire than Tiber's Latin stream.
Dearer my little hill of Liré than Mount Palatinus,
And than sea-airs the sweet air of Anjou.
Till yesterday that voice still spoke for the unchanging life of France. The peasant remained where his forefathers had broken the fields and loaded the wains. Why should he be seeking strange lands, like the troubled races? He found his place of peace long ago. To what country can he travel where the sun is pleasanter on happy fields? What people can he visit who have the dignity and simplicity of his neighbors?
Then the hordes from the north came down, eager to win this sunny quietness, curious to surprise the secret of this Latin race, with its sense of form and style, its charm, its sweet reasonableness. Why are these Southerners loved? Why do their accomplishments conquer the world so gently, so irresistibly? Surely this hidden beauty will yield to violence. So it came, that dark flood from the north, pouring over the fertile provinces, breaking the peace of these peasants. Something was destroyed where the human spirit had made its home for a longer time than the individual life: a channel for the generations. Their fields are still red with the poppy, but their young men who reaped are busy on redder fields. Their village street is crumbled stone, through which the thistle thrusts. The altar of their church is sour with rain water, and the goodness of life is a legend that was slain in a moment of time. A modern city can be rebuilt. An ancient village can never be rebuilt. That soft rhythm of its days was caught from old buildings and a slowly ripening tradition. Something distinguished has passed out of life. What perished at Rheims in the matchless unreturning light of its windows was only a larger loss. A quiet radiance was on these villages, too.
Still the peasants return to the place they know. Even their dead are more living than the faces of strangers in cities. The rocks in the gutter once held their home. There is sadness in a place where people have lived and been happy, and now count their dead. It is desolate in a way wild nature never is, for the raw wilderness groups itself into beauty and order. It would have been better to let the forest thicken through centuries, than to inherit the home where one day the roof-tree is razed by the invader. These peasants are not hysterical. They are only broken-hearted. They tell their story in a quiet key, in simple words, with a kind of grayness of recital. There are certain experiences so appalling to the consciousness that it can never reveal the elements of its distress, because what was done killed what could tell. But the light of the day is never seen again with the same eyes after the moment that witnessed a child tortured, or one's dearest shot down like a clay pigeon. The girl, who was made for happiness, when she is wife and mother, will pass on a consciousness of pain which had never been in her line before. The thing that happened in a moment will echo in the troubled voices of her children, and a familiar music is broken.