Home Fires in France

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

I lost myself in horrified contemplation of the grotesque vision he had conjured up and forgot to refute him. Perhaps I couldn't.

Towards the end of his stay he was very much troubled by persistent rumors that the boat on which he was to sail would be torpedoed on the way to New York. He acknowledged, with the fatigued frankness of his sixty years past, that he was mortally afraid of the passage and that his fear would deprive him of sleep all the way over. "No sane man likes to be killed," he complained, "let alone be blown up and burned to death and drowned into the bargain! I'm a family man! I want to go on earning a living for my wife and children!"

The evening before he went away he was so fretful about this and so outspoken about his dread, that I asked him, "Why don't you wait over a boat?"

"Oh, what's the use? One boat's as likely to go down as another. And, anyhow, I've got to get home. And then come over again for the next season, curse the luck!"

I thought him again a little absurd. "Oh, come, the heavens wouldn't fall if you missed one or two seasons!"

He turned grave, and after a moment's hesitation, opened a door which I had thought locked and nailed up, and showed me that the room in his heart which I had thought was certainly empty and vacant was a queer, dimly lighted little chapel, with queer, dim little candles burning before what was recognizably an ideal.

"Oh, it's no time for anybody to lie down on the job," he said offhand. I did not dream that he was referring to the war. I had become convinced that his curious, specialized world held no place for the horror and apprehension which filled the lives of the rest of us. Nor had I ever seen him give any signs of the shocked pity which most people feel at the sight of the war-maimed men, the black-clad, white-faced war-orphans and the widows with blurred eyes. I had thought he saw in France, only and uniquely, hats. So I asked in genuine ignorance of his meaning: "How do you mean, this being no time to lie down on the job? What job?"

He sat back in his chair and looked at the ceiling; thereafter, as he talked, transferring his gaze to his finger-tips, joined with nicety. "Well, I guess I mean something about like this. If we humans are to get on at all, get any further away from having tails and living in trees, we've got to knock down the partitions and make one big room of the world, the same way each nation is one big room, with the blacksmith trading his horseshoes for clothes and not trying to be a tailor himself. Take farmers. Maybe you can't remember, but I can, when old farmers in Connecticut raised nearly every single thing they used all the year around, and were proud of being such idiots. Nowadays the Connecticut farmer don't waste his time trying to grow corn in a climate where you're liable to get frosts in early September; he leaves the farmer in Iowa to do that, and he raises the best apples in the world and with the money he makes that way, he buys him oranges that a Florida farmer has raised. It's my opinion that we've got to come to that on a big, big scale. And if we do come to it there won't be any more wars. Now, I don't know anything about anything but hats, and so I don't try to have an opinion about the League of Nations, nor how the trick is going to be turned by the statesmen—if there are any such—but if it is going to be turned, it's going to take everybody's shoulder to the wheel, you can be sure. And I've got a shoulder. What's got to be done is to get it through everybody's head that every nation ought not to learn to produce anything but what it can produce best, and that self-defense ought not to force it to make a botch of trying to do what another nation could do better. Now, one of the things that France can produce better than other people (and it happens to be the thing that I know about) is hats. I don't know whether it's because she's been at the business of running the styles so long, so much longer than anybody else so that she's got all her fibers settled together, just right to catch the note, the way the wood in an old violin trembles all over at sounds that leave the wood in the leg of a chair perfectly calm. Mind, I don't say the violin is any more important than a chair. As far as I'm concerned personally, if I had to choose I'd rather have the chair. What I'm trying to say is that they are different. And we've got to get used to the idea that because things are different it doesn't mean one is better than the other and they ought both to be like the best one. Now, maybe it's the other way around, that France has been at this business of setting styles so long because she's had the gift to begin with. Anyhow, what's sure is that they do it better, everything along that line, ribbons, braids, straws, hats, dresses, furniture, houses, parks—original designs don't come from anywhere but France. But France is at war and pretty nearly gone under. She's got to make her designs with one hand and fight for her life with the other."

He paused. "Well, I don't feel just like picking out that time to stop coming to France to get her designs and to do my part to keep up the taste for them, at home."

I found no sufficiently admiring comment to make on this, and kept a respectful silence.