Home Fires in France

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

As she walked across the courtyard with her visitor, chatting about the difficulties of war-time housekeeping in Paris, she was thinking: "Yes, she only wants it to make a temporary show in order to get the Légion of Honor. But what of that! Let her have it. But if she opens a weaving-room, she must have blind there to operate the looms, and if she takes them up only to drop them, what will become of them? Let me see what I can do about that. Perhaps this is the way to get her to pay for the installation of a new weaving-room. As soon as she gets what she wants out of it, we could perhaps take it over and add the men to the number we care for here. I wonder if the American Committee would be willing to send more money for that. Yes, it's worth taking the risk."

But nothing of this elaborate calculation appeared in her smooth, affable manner as, having come to her decision, she announced, after gravely looking through a card catalogue, that Thursday afternoon at a certain hour would be the best time to see the looms. "And if you don't mind, Mrs. Wangton," she said, "I am just going to treat you like an old friend of the institution and let you and your engineer wander about at your pleasure, without anybody bothering to escort you." That was what she said. What she thought was: "There, that will give them a chance to steal the names of the makers and the dimensions of the looms as much as they please."

Her visitor confounded herself in effusive expressions of gratitude and friendliness, which the Directrice received with a smile. She went away, sweeping her velvet gown over the stone steps and looking down with anticipatory eyes on that spot of her well-filled bosom where she hoped to pin the coveted red ribbon. The Directrice let her go with almost an audible sniff of contempt, and turned again to work.

This time it was a plan to be worked out whereby the blind could learn certain phases of the pottery trade at Sèvres. It involved a number of formalities and administrative difficulties which only one who has been in contact with French bureaucratic methods can faintly imagine. Our Directrice plunged into it headlong, and did not stir from her desk until she saw with a start that it was dinner time. And she had not yet looked over her accounts, the complicated accounts of a big, expensive, many-arteried institution. However, long ago, all her friends had stopped asking her to go to dinner or to go to hear music. They had learned that she rarely spent the evening in any other way than finishing up what work she had not found time to do during the day. She was assured of several hours more of quiet.

She went out to dinner (one meal a day in the company of many mutilated and blinded men is as much as one woman can stand) and had a solitary meal in a quiet restaurant, turning her glass about meditatively between the courses and wondering if she dared ask enough from the philanthropic American manufacturer to settle Benoit in the country. With his tendency to tuberculosis, that was the only safe life for him and his family. She made a mental calculation of what his pension would come to, and how much he could earn by his trade. Then, if he kept chickens, and a garden, and rabbits, and if he could get a house for six thousand francs ... by the time she had finished her dinner she had thought out a plan and a definite and businesslike proposition to put to the well-disposed American. Out of the depth of her experience with philanthropic people, she said to herself as she walked out: "I think I'd better tell him that we will put a bronze plaque on the house announcing that it is his gift to one of the war-blind. That ought to settle him."

At her office the evening passed very rapidly, between her account books and the sauntering in and out of one and another of the blind men. At ten o'clock, tired to the marrow of her bones, she stood up, dreading the effort to get home and get to bed, and yet looking forward to sleep as the one certain blessing of life. As she went out of the door she saw two shadowy forms standing in the summer starlight, and recognized two of her charges. "Come, come, children," she said; "it is bedtime. You must get to bed and sleep and get back your strength."

"But we can't sleep," one of them told her. "We go to bed and lie awake and get the 'cafard' worse and worse." The other one suggested timidly: "We thought that perhaps, before you went home, you might take us for a little turn about the lake in the park?" Our Directrice accomplished the last violent action of her violent day. There was not an instant's hesitation before she said cordially: "That's an excellent idea! Just what I would like to do myself. One always sleeps so much better for a bit of a walk in the fresh air."

Taking one on one arm and the other on the other, she set off, the two men towering above her little upright figure. At first they talked as they strolled beside the little lake. Then, as the Directrice had hoped, the enchantment of the hot, still night fell on them all. The men walked silently, breathing in the good smell of the stirred earth and watered paths. Their blind eyes looked steadily into the blackness, no blacker than their every day; their scarred, disfigured faces were hidden by the darkness.

The Directrice looked up at the stars, and, for the first time in all that long day, thought for an instant of herself. The night brought to her a sudden stabbing recollection of another night, before the war, before the end of the world, when the starlight had fallen white on the clear road leading her straight and sure to her heart's desire. The road before her feet now seemed as black as that before her blind men. But she stepped out bravely and held her head high.

The blind men leaned on her more and more. She could feel by the touch of their hands on her arms, that they were relaxing, that the softness of the night air had undone the bitter tension of their nerves. Now was the time to take them back. Now they would sleep well.