Shortly before I came to the Hostel a very young wife arrived to see her husband, who lay desperately ill in one of the hospitals. When he died she became as a thing distraught and could not be left, and the Superintendent even had to have her to sleep in her room with her all the time she was there. Others, again, are aloof in their sorrow, though it is none the less tragic for that. The first question on the lips of the Staff when the chauffeuse comes back from taking the relatives to the hospital is, "Was it good news?"
It was good news for the couple who arrived on the same evening that I did, the mother and father of a young officer who was very badly injured. I saw them next morning in the lounge, sitting quietly on either side of the centre-stove, a business man and his wife, as neat, he in his serge suit, she in her satin blouse and carefully folded lace and smooth grey hair, as if they had not been travelling for a day and a night on end, racked by anxiety, though you could see the deep lines that the strain had left. He looked at me with those patient eyes of the elderly which hold the same unconscious pathos as those of animals, and talked in a low quiet voice, and it seemed almost an impertinence of a total stranger to assure these gentle, dignified people of her gladness that their only son was safe, yet how glad one is that any one of these brief contacts in passing should be of happiness! It is so impossible not to weep with them that weep that it is a keen joy to be able to rejoice with them that do rejoice.
"It's so free here ..." he told me, "that's what the wife and I like so. No rules and regulations, you can do just what you like as though you were in your own home ... no feeling that as you don't pay you've got to do what you're told." And there was expressed the spirit of the Hostel as I discovered it.
There are no rules, and it is always impressed upon the Superintendents that the relations are not obliged to go there, that they do so because they choose to, and must be treated as honoured guests. In the dining-room there are little tables as at an hotel, so that the different parties can keep to themselves if they prefer it; there are no times for going out or coming in, no times for "lights out," no need to have a meal in if the visitor mentions he is going out for it. The relations who stay at these hostels are guests in every sense of the word, and there is not one trace of red tape or the faintest feeling of obligation about the whole thing.
And that must have been what I had felt in the very air of the place when I arrived, what stole with so precious a balm over me who had been in camp after camp, institution after institution. This place, with its quiet walls and its grey shutters wing-wide upon its grey walls, was not only beautiful and rich with that richness only age can give, it was instinct as well with freedom and with peace.
CHAPTER XIII
GENERAL SERVANTS AND A GENERAL QUESTION
I have left till the last what to some people will be the dullest and what is certainly the least spectacular of all the work done by the women in France, but what is to me perhaps the most wonderful and admirable of all. I mean that of the Domestic Staffs.