“But about eating?”
“I had a little food that I brought with me.”
“And drinking?”
“Nothing, till the second day. One could not move. But in the end we arrived. I was broken with fatigue. I was very ill. But I was home. The Boches drank everything in the cafe, everything; but the building was spared—it stood away from the firing. How long do you think the war will last?”
“I’m beginning to think it will last a long time.”
“So they say,” she murmured, glancing through the window at the prospect of roofs and chimney-cowls. “Provided that it finishes well...”
Except by the look in her eyes, and by the destruction of her once good complexion, it was impossible to divine that this woman’s habits had ever been disturbed in the slightest detail. But the gaze and the complexion told the tale.
Next: the Boulevard St. Germain. A majestic flat, heavily and sombrely furnished. The great drawing-room is shut and sheeted with holland. It has been shut for twenty years. The mistress of this home is an aged widow of inflexible will and astounding activity. She gets up at five a.m., and no cook has ever yet satisfied her. The master is her son, a bachelor of fifty. He is paralysed, and always perfectly dressed in the English taste, he passes his life in a wheeled chair. The home is centred in his study, full of books, engravings, a large safe, telephone, theatrophone, newspapers, cigarettes, easy-chairs. When I go in, an old friend, a stockbroker, is there, and “thees” and “thous” abound in the conversation, which runs on investments, the new English loan, banking accounts in London, the rent moratorium in Paris, and the war. It is said that every German is a critic of war. But so is every Frenchman a critic of war. The criticism I now hear is the best spoken criticism, utterly impartial, that I have heard.
“In sum,” says the grey-headed stockbroker, “there disengages itself from the totality of the facts an impression, tolerably clear, that all goes very well on the West front.”
Which is reassuring. But the old lady, invincible after seven-and-a- half decades spent in the hard acquirement of wisdom, will not be reassured. She is not alarmed, but she will not be reassured. She treats the two men with affectionate malice as children. She knows that “those birds”—that is to say, the Germans—will never be beaten, because they are for ever capable of inventing some new trick.