They were all appalled at this and protested that she was the only one who had any information to impart; but she scouted the idea and began a relentless person-to-person inquiry. The result was that a group of musicians were organized, under the guidance of the music teacher, to give lectures on the history of music, the lives and works of the composers, church music, ballads, songs, and operas. Three other women who had brought up great families were to dive deep into their memories and lecture to the others, as logically, coherently, and rationally as they could on proper care for children. A shy, thin, drab-colored woman was found to have been brought up in Indo-China, and was to lecture on the life and education of that country. The German-speaking ones were to give a course in German. Another, the daughter of a well-known professor of French literature, was to assemble and arrange what she knew, and be prepared to plan and lead literary discussions. Another, the distinguished founder and former head of the best hospital in Tourciennes, would lecture on the care of the sick—and so on. From one, from another, from them all, Octavie drew potential treasures of experience and information which lay almost visibly shimmering in a great heap before them—“Enough,” she cried triumphantly, “to last us for years!”
“And now because we’re not solemn Anglo-Saxons, but Frenchwomen, we must plan for some fun, if we’re to keep themselves alive,” she told them firmly, and at their sad-hearted wincing from the idea, she said, “Yes, we must. It’s part of our defensive campaign. Our task is to construct out of our brains and wills a little fortress of civilization, and to protect ourselves behind its walls against demoralization and barbarism! And you all know that amusement is needed for civilization!” A majority agreed to this, a dramatic committee was appointed, and another one on games (Octavie suggested drawing checker-boards on the tables, playing with bits of paper for men, and starting a free-for-all tournament); some one else thought of manufacturing balls and inventing games to be played with them, and there were two packs of cards, in the miscellaneous store. The musical group undertook to provide a weekly concert.
One of the subjects which had been canvassed and found no professor was the history of France; but like all French people, they had been soundly and carefully instructed in history and planned, by putting all their memories together, to reconstruct the story of their nation. The meeting was trailing off from serious, purposeful planning to a discursive attempt to get the list of French kings complete, when one of the older women spoke to Octavie in a low tone, the quality of which instantly made silence about them. She said, “But Mlle. Moreau, we have souls too, souls hard beset.”
Up to this moment Octavie had, as always, dominated the situation! Now she, who has not been inside a church since she was a child, and who considers herself thoroughly emancipated from what she calls, “all that theological nonsense,” was brought up short before the need to make just such a whole-hearted concession to other people’s ideas as she had urged on her comrades! She looked hard at the speaker. It was the foundress of the hospital, Mme. Rouart. From her eyes looked out a personality just as strong as Octavie’s, and tinctured to the core with faith. Octavie’s arrogant intellectualism humbled itself at the sight. She made a gesture of acquiescence and was silent. Mme. Rouart went on, “We’re of all sorts of belief, but we can all pray.”
Then, after an instant’s pause, she said in a low, trembling voice, “Let us pray.”
There was an interval of intense silence, during which, so Octavie told me afterwards, quite without any shade of irony, she “prayed as hard as any one ... and after that I prayed every evening when the others did.”
“How did you pray?” I asked her, incredulously.
Her definition of prayer was characteristic. “I set every ounce of will power to calling up all my strength and endurance. It was wonderful how I felt it rise, when I called,” she said gravely. She added that on that first evening after her silent plunge to the deep places of power in her soul, she put both arms around Mme. Rouart’s neck and kissed her. “I loved her,” she said simply, without attempting her usual skeptical, corrosive analysis of reasons.
Other kisses were exchanged, soberly, as the stiff, tired women stumbled to their feet to go to bed. They laid their exhausted bodies down heavily on the dirty blankets, but in their hearts which had seemed burned out to ashes with grief, indignation, and despair, there shone a living spark of purpose. Some time later, into the darkness came the voice of one of the younger women. “Oh, I’ve just remembered! That fourth son of Clovis was Charibert;” to which Octavie’s voice answered exultantly, “Ah, they never can beat us!”
The life which went on after this seems as real to me as though I had lived it with them, because when I first saw them, they were fresh from it, and could speak of little else. Every day was thrust at them full of the noisome poison of prison life, idleness, indifference, despair, bitterness, hatred, personal degeneration; and every day they poured out this poison resolutely and filled its place with intelligent occupation! Just to keep clean was a prodigious undertaking, which they attacked in squads, turn by turn. With sand, water, and bricks for rubbing, they kept the room immaculate, though it took hours to do it. Even the blankets were washed out after a fashion, one by one at intervals, by women who had never before so much as washed out a handkerchief. To prepare the food with the more than inadequate utensils and poor materials and the stove unsuited for cooking was a tremendous problem, but they all took turns at it, Octavie humbly acting as scullery-maid when her turn for service came; and the food, though poor, monotonous, and coarse, was infinitely superior, being prepared with brains and patience, to what was served all around them to the apathetic, healthless mobs of Russian and Polish women and men, sunk despairingly in degradation and disease, “giving up and lying down in their dirt,” Octavie told me, “to die like beasts.”