We have found that people can get a furnished room for thirty centimes a day and up. Awful little rooms, dens of darkness and disease, can be found (only occasionally, praise be) for three francs a week; but I can’t consider those. I saw one yesterday—a mother and two little girls live there, and it was about the size of the cabin in our motor-boat, but made the latter seem vast and airy by comparison. With the prices of food and coal high, and constantly soaring, the poor people can just make out their rent and food, but cannot buy clothes. Shoes are thirty francs and up. You can figure it out for yourself. With our help, however, many, many poor families can get along that would otherwise be destitute. Sometimes we can give a girl a suit which will enable her to present herself for a far better position than she could hope to obtain in rags. Sometimes boys can go to school if they have warm new shoes, a black apron, and an overcoat, when without them they would stay at home and shiver in idleness. Warm strong clothing not only gives a new lease to health, but to life as a whole. You should see the little girls when I give them a hair-ribbon or a dress for their doll, if they have one.
I have gathered a lot of old stuff that I found at the Vestiaire and have brought it home and ironed it out and cut it up fresh and given it away to all sorts of little “fillettes.” I do believe in the trimmings even for the most wretched, especially if they’re kids, and I am glad to say that Mrs. Shurtleff does, too. We have a box of tinsel favors filled with tiny bonbons that we give to the littlest, if they are restless while their parents are being accommodated. The other day we had a little angel of less than two, a small refugee from Rheims with its father and mother. Her ears were pierced and supported tiny earrings. When in this war-time any one had the time and inclination to pierce that child’s ears is one on me! Her father left our part of the Vestiaire a few minutes to be fitted to an overcoat in the men’s department, and the child began to howl. I took it in my arms and rushed it after its father as fast as I could go. Then all was serene again. In some cases we go so far as to move families from crowded, dirty, unsavory quarters to as clean and as airy a place as we can find in proportion to their income. We then guarantee their rent for three months and help them to furnish. This is all in the hands of the installation department, and I have nothing to do with that, so I cannot tell you as much as I would like to.
The field work is the visiting and investigation of applicants. The war work of the Students Atelier Reunions has become known by word of mouth among the refugees. Of course, the reports and results of our work travel like wildfire and we are inundated with requests. After receiving a letter from a refugee the case is looked up by two field workers and reported at a meeting of the committee the following Saturday morning. A vote is taken as to what to do and how much to give if it is decided to give anything. The people are then told to present themselves at the Vestiaire and we give them what they need. Every type of man, woman, and child has crossed our threshold even within my month of service. How I love them all!
I try to get each story as I measure the person and search the stock and try on and tie up and list. Mother would die to see me, who have never known anything more about children than that they belonged to the animal kingdom and were awful little monkeys and might better approach more nearly the vegetable kingdom, even if they were darlings—to see me tell some mother of ten that “her little Yvonne is large for eight,” or that “Renaud has small feet for a boy of twelve.” It is I who measure and mark children’s clothes as they are sent to us, according to age, and in centimeters at that. I have been driven to ascertaining my own waist measure by the same rating and now go about heavily veiled.
My good fortune has been to be made one of the field workers and I go with either Miss Curtis or Miss Sturgis every Monday and Wednesday. Two always go together because, until we have been to a place once, we don’t know what we are getting into, and it would be foolish to go alone way to the back of the top of these big dark buildings without knowing what sort of people lived there. In their homes you do see the people chez eux. We see the extremes of cleanliness and filth, thrift and abjectness. I shall not stop to describe individual homes now, but I can tell you some of them are rare. In one home of about the same stratum as the Russian family Mother and I visited last Christmas, I stepped gingerly among the rags, coal-dust, food, and so forth on the floor, and went and sat beside the dirtiest but the darlingest child you ever saw,—blue eyes with black lashes, which always get me, you know,—but its nose running fearfully. Miss Curtis did the questioning, but I interrupted every three minutes to beseech the mother to wipe the offending organ. I finally learned that the child ought to have an operation, but it is only twenty-five months old and the doctor will not operate until she is three. I showed her the buttons on my glove, fastening and unfastening them. She looked up to me with her dirty little mouth smiling radiantly and said, “Tiens!”
They are not the type we can do much for, but I begged some warm clothes for them and they came to the Vestiaire yesterday. The name is Pruvot, and there are a mother and daughter, three sons in the war, one of whom I am going to adopt as “filleul,” a son and his wife and two little girls, and a little illegitimate child of a son who has disappeared and whose mother has abandoned it. He is the star child, Marcel Pruvot, two and a half years, and I am crazy to adopt him. What would you say if I brought him home with me? Think of what one could make of his life; but, of course, I shall not. We sent a layette to one little mother. (My mother should see the layette department, stocked up with the cutest things I ever saw.) And as a special luxury, we included some talcum powder, marked “poudre de riz” (rice powder). Mrs. Jackson went to look her up one day and found her boiling the talcum powder with water in a saucepan, just about to feed it to the little creature of three months. She had never heard of powder before.
The next big branch of work is fitting out the blind. There is more pathos, gayety, and inspiration on Tuesday and Friday afternoons than in all the rest of the week. After the men are wounded at the front they are brought back through a chain of relief stations, “postes de secours,” to hospitals, and finally to a Paris hospital. The blind are allowed to recuperate here either at the Val de Grace or the Quinze-Vingt (big hospitals), and are then sent away, usually to the country to learn a trade or to rejoin their families, or both. They must give up their military clothes, underclothes, and shoes when they are discharged, and are given only the poorest kind of civilian clothes in exchange. This is where we step in to give them decent clothes. In many cases they are not given civilian clothes at all, although I don’t understand the Government system enough to see how that is possible. So Miss Hodges, our representative in work for the blind, brings five or six of the most needy and touching cases to us and we fit them out.
The blind are the most childlike as a general rule of all the people we deal with, and the outfit we give them and the kindness and help they receive at the Vestiaire mean to them a new start in life, as we have learned from guards afterwards. Such brave fellows! It is an exception to see one downcast or morose, but when you do, your heart aches twice as much, not only for them, but for the many gay ones who have conquered despair. One boy twenty-four years old was wounded in the leg and dragged himself along the ground half conscious, to find he was dragging himself toward the German trenches. At this point he was struck again and his eyes put out. He lay between the trenches under fire for days, unconscious most of the time and feigning death the rest. By a miracle he escaped being killed. He was picked up and taken to a hospital; has been there six months, and is now starting out to learn a trade—in the dark. I love to do what I can for them, especially as this is my one chance to know the French poilu.
You would laugh to see me measuring and fitting, especially when it comes to holding up underwear to some dear blind giant. I remember all too well how at the age of eight I used to wriggle in Altman’s when mother insisted on “getting an idea how they would go” by holding “them” up to me. Every saleswoman and floorwalker got the idea clearly. There are moments when blindness is not such a misfortune.
The blind soldiers are always interested to know what their new clothes look like. “C’est de quel couleur, Mademoiselle?” “Dark brown,” I say, “and I will give you a brown and white tie.” “Ah que je serai chic, moi!” One of his comrades would nudge him and say, “Je voudrais bien avoir les yeux pour te voir, maintenant, mon vieux! C’est vrai que tu vais te marier?” (I would like to have eyes to see you now, old fellow; is it true you are just going to be married?) Then they laugh and thank me “mille fois” and shake hands and wish me good luck. Sometimes I walk down the street with them and guide them along. I admire their medals and tell them that the passers-by are looking at them, etc. We never say the word “aveugle” (blind), but “blessé” (wounded). Sometimes when we have to wait for their guards I sit on the table and tell them all about my crossing and about America, and, oh, a hundred things. We do have good times—for the moment.