I went, apprehensive of trouble, and found her house (save for a total absence of window-glass) in its customary speckless and shining order. She took me upstairs to what had been a bedroom and was now an office in the Quartermaster’s department. It was filled with packing-case improvised desks and with serious-faced, youngish American officers who, in their astonishment at seeing me, forgot to take their long black cigars out of their mouths.
“There!” said the woman-with-a-grievance, pointing to the floor. “Just look at that. Just look! I tell them and I tell them, not to put their horrid boxes on the floor but to keep them on the linoleum, but they are so stupid, they can’t understand language that any child could take in! And they drag those boxes just full of nails all over the floor. I’m sick of them and their scratches!”
A big gun boomed solemnly off on the horizon as accompaniment to this speech.
I explained in a neutral tone to the officers looking expectantly at me, what was at issue. I made no comment. None was needed evidently, for they said with a gravity which I found lovable that they would endeavor to be more careful about the floor, that indeed they had not understood what their landlady had been trying to tell them. I gave her their assurance and she went away satisfied.
As the door closed on her, they broke into broad grins and pungent exclamations. “Well, how about that! Wouldn’t that get you? With the town bombarded every night, to think the old lady was working herself up to a froth about her floor-varnish! And we thinking that every French person is breaking his heart over the invaded regions!”
One of them said, “I never thought of it before, but I bet you my Aunt Selina would do just that! I just bet if her town was bombarded she’d go right on shooing the flies out of her kitchen and mopping up her pantry floor with skim-milk. Why, the French are just like anybody, aren’t they? Just like our own folks!”
“They are,” I assured him, “so exactly like our own folks, like everybody’s own folks that it’s quite impossible to tell the difference.”
When I went away, the owner of the house was sweeping the garden-path clear of broken-glass. “This bombardment is such a nuisance!” she said disapprovingly. “I’d like to know what the place would be like if I didn’t stay to look after it.”
I looked at her enviously, securely shut away as she was by the rigid littleness of her outlook from any blighting comprehension of what was going on about her. But then, I reflected, there are instants when the comprehension of what is going on is not blighting. No, on the whole I did not envy her.
Outside the gate I fell in at once with a group of American soldiers. It was impossible to take a step in any direction in the town without doing this. After the invariable expressions of surprise and pleasure over seeing an American woman, came the invariable burst of eager narration of where they had been and what had been happening to them. They seemed to me touchingly like children, who have had an absorbing, exciting adventure and must tumble it all out to the first person they meet. Their haste, their speaking all at once, gave me only an incoherent idea of what they wished to say. I caught odd phrases, disconnected sentences, glimpses through pin-holes.