Home Fires in France

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Paradoxically enough it was the much-dreaded moving out of the old apartment, full of memories of the twenty happy years passed there, and the moving into the two little rooms on the fifth floor of a dingy old tenement house in a poor quarter of the city, which did more for Marguerite than all our foolish efforts. At least it aroused her to a sort of shocked and horrified life, and carried her out of her own misery.

Not long after she had gone there to live I found her with four, pale-faced, dirty little children in one of her two rooms. She was heating water on her charcoal stove. "I'm going to give them a bath," she said to me, pronouncing the commonplace words with a strange wild accent. "Do you know they have never had a bath, all over their bodies, in their lives?" I stayed to help her, wondering at the curious expression on her face. She was, as she had been ever since the blow had fallen, still very white, but now that pallor was like white heat. After the children were clean, Marguerite dressed them in coarse, clean, new clothes, which she told me she had sold her watch to buy, "the church-bell strikes so near that I don't need a watch any more," and gave them each a piece of bread and jam. They took their departure then, stricken into an astonished silence, and Marguerite turned to me with an angry toss of her head, "Do you know what the war is?" she asked me fiercely. "I know! It is the punishment we have called down on ourselves. I see now that the war has only intensified everything that existed before, it has changed nothing fundamentally. We were living as hideously in a state of war before as now, except that it was not physically bloody. There were children in this awful house then as now, without baths, without food, without decency, while I was giving all my energy that one little boy might have everything, everything that he could wish."

At this I could not repress a protest, calling up the very modest comforts of her simple home. She brushed me aside. "It was luxurious, sinfully, wickedly luxurious to live so while other human beings were living as they were in this house. Oh, I see it so plainly, we were all living with all our might according to the horrible Prussian maxim that you have a right to anything you're strong enough to keep other people from sharing. All the Germans did was to carry it to its logical, murdering conclusion, and show us what we really were."

I could not, Heaven knows, deny this, but I ventured a palliative murmur. "But at least we are ashamed of it. We tried to hide it. We never gloried in it, as the Prussians do."

"I am ashamed of it now," she told me somberly, "now when I have nothing, nothing to use as help but my two hands. I am ashamed of it now when it is too late."

The black misery on her face was such that I brought out the foolish phrase I had been repressing all during the weeks since the news had come: "Marguerite dearest, why do you keep such a dreadful calm? Wouldn't it do you good to cry?"

"I?" she said bitterly. "I haven't the right to cry! Look at my neighbors!"

The next time I went back I found her two little rooms full of children, three small babies on the bed, and a dozen or more of different ages playing together, while Marguerite, in a long black apron, stirred a soup-pot on the charcoal fire.

"Their mothers are working!" She gave me this as all-sufficient explanation, adding: "But there are so many, many more that I can't help! If only I had more room to take them in ... and more soup ... and more bread! But with children it's wicked to start more than you can carry on, and ... I've made the calculation.... I can't possibly help any more than there are here!"

I noticed that the feverish, wild look had gone from her eyes, that she looked steadied—infinitely tragic—but quiet, purposeful. The children had brought her back into real life again.