“I may enter?”
“You may enter, mynheer.”
He thrust open the door without knocking. I stumbled into the dimly lighted room, hardly knowing what I expected to find. Peasants’ cottages were invariably interesting to me, and invariably they contained surprises. But this was older and more primitive than any I had yet visited—a relic of long-gone days. It was like opening an ancient tomb or a buried city. I entered expectantly, and lo! the centuries rolled backward, and I stood with people of Froissart’s day, with peasants who had scarcely altered since the Middle Ages, whose feet were hardly on the threshold of modernity.
The room was square. At one end was a brick fireplace, rude as if aborigines had built it, with an iron frame squatting in the ashes, a thick pot suspended by a chain, a broiling rack, a heavy iron fork, a charred stick for a poker, and a rude crane. In the smoke of a tiny turf fire on the hearth hung rows of drying vegetables and skins of meat. The floor was beaten earth, hard as brick. The walls were whitewashed. The ceiling was low and strung with onions and other roots and vegetables, and the only touch of modern things was a hanging lamp in the centre. In a corner hung a man’s suit of Sunday clothes, like a creature which has been hanged. A ladder beside it went up to the blind loft overhead. A picture of the Virgin hung on one wall, and a plaster statuette of Saint Anthony and Saint Joseph gleamed from a shelf over the fireplace, drawing one’s eye to a row of plates and dishes. An odour of smoke and cooking and manure heaps and the foul smells of unwashed human beings crowded the little room, and the air droned with the sleepy buzzing of innumerable flies.
A barefooted, prematurely aged woman, bent with too much child-bearing, gave me a chair, wiping it ceremoniously with her apron. The man spat on the floor behind us and scraped the spittle with his sabot. Three children were asleep in a recess on a pile of litter curtained from sight in the day-time. But the most striking person in the room was a young woman, sitting before the turf fire with a fourth child—evidently the youngest—in her lap. She wore stockings, leather shoes, and a simple, black bombazine dress. Her face was turned from me, but I saw that her hair was neatly coiled about her head and pinned with a shell comb.
The older woman sprang to the hanging lamp and turned it high until it smoked. “Good evening, mynheer,” she called in a panic of fear and pleasure. “Be seated, if it please your Excellency.”
She dragged the chair beside the lamp and the table in the centre of the room. During the next five minutes she was feverishly busy offering me beer, milk, and everything else that her mean little house afforded.
I stared at the woman beside the fireplace, and my host—who refused to seat himself in my presence—at last touched his head significantly. “Ah, monsieur,” he sighed. (He had been one of the franksmannen, migratory labourers who work for several months of the year in France, and he spoke tolerable French. Indeed he was much better informed and quicker of wit than his person or his home would indicate.) “She is mad: like all the world, she is mad. All the world is mad.”
“You mean the war?”