CHAPTER XXVIII
THE DARKEST DAYS
PROBLEMS of war time housekeeping in France did not go back to 1914. The learned political economists who demonstrated to their own satisfaction that a general European war would not last a year were dead wrong. Millions were mobilized. Nations were at each other's throats. The Germans were able to retaliate against the naval blockade by submarine warfare that threatened to decrease seriously our own communications with the outside world. But somehow we managed to go through year after year without feeling the pinch of decreased productivity. And somehow we accepted the inflation of currency and continued to subscribe cheerfully to successive war loans with money that came from God knows where. One hears now much about how we suffered in 1915 and 1916. Morally speaking, I suppose we did suffer and that we were aware of the strain as time went on. But from a material point of view the war did not make itself felt much until 1917. It was only in the spring of that year that a cartoonist was inspired to draw a necklace of anthracite, tipped off with an egg for a pendant, over the caption, "Her Jewels." Coal cards, sugar cards, and bread cards were to us the signs of Germany's weakness.
Successive Cabinets realized well enough the prudence of anticipatory restrictions. In the autumn of 1916 the newspapers put forth a ballon d'essai. Every day they published a homily on the virtue of practicing economy. It had no effect on my servants, this constant warning of a shortage to come. No restaurants obeyed the voluntary rationing measures. The Government did not dare to introduce obligatory rationing. Public opinion rebels against restrictions of individual liberty. We had to feel the pinch before rationing measures were tolerated.
Sugar cards came first. They were "put over" on the public during the rejoicing over the intervention of the United States. Coal cards were instituted only after the bitter lesson of the late winter months of 1917 bid fair to repeat itself. Not until October, 1917, did I have to put my signature as chef de famille (my husband was so often away) on an application for bread cards handed me by the concierge. A fourth New Year of war came and went before we experienced what we had read about in other countries—real lack of necessities. The reserves of everything gave out suddenly. For the first time ability to spend money freely did not solve household problems.
Some difficulties were insoluble. They were the difficulties centering around a shortage of coal supply. I never realized before that in our modern civilization coal is really a dominating factor in making tolerable existence in the city. The winter before the sudden giving out of coal affected only our heating. In the first months of 1918 coal rationing led to cutting down on gas, electricity and water. In modern apartments, just as there is no way to heat them except by radiators, there is no way to light them except by electricity and no way to have hot water except by turning on the spigot. We were in what the French call a cercle vicieux. We had a fox-and-geese-and-corn problem. For instance, when a municipal ordinance forbade giving hot water except on Saturdays and Sundays, your first thought was to heat water on the kitchen gas-stove. But your allowance for gas was insufficient for cooking. Nor could you use gas for lighting to save electricity. Petroleum for lamps or cooking was unobtainable. Everyone made a rush for candles and wood alcohol. They gave out. When you thought of honey and jams to make up to the children what they lacked in sugar, everyone else thought of honey and jams at the same time. We lived on the sixth floor. The electricity rationing made possible running the elevator only at certain hours. And when the elevator broke down, all the steel was going into cannon and all the workers were turning out munitions. You just walked up six flights of stairs all the time.
Aside from cooking and baths and heat and light, the coal shortage affected your laundry. So you couldn't change linen more frequently to compensate for lost baths. In the old days the laundress would cast her eyes around for more stuff to pack into her bundle, and if you gave her a free hand, would gather up things that had never been soiled. Now she picked out of the basket what she saw fit to take. In the same way, I used to struggle to keep my milk supply down. It was a common trick for the dairy people to load you up with milk and butter and eggs and cheese in collusion with your cook. Now you had to beg for enough milk to give the babies a cup apiece a day; butter arrived in exchange for a heavy tip; and eggs appeared not when you ordered them but when the dairy chose to send them—which was rarely.
To have the laundress acting like that, and other people acting like that, was living in Alice's Looking-Glass House. Things were contrariwise. One day the laundress came to tell me that she could take no more work. The wash house where the work used to be done had shut down. My poor woman was dissolved in tears to think that a business that she had spent twenty-three years in building up had to drop its customers. I did the best I could by getting in a scrub woman for the day to wash the most important things in cold water in the bath-room. That was hard enough. But how dry them? Old tricks would not go: there was no heat in the radiators. You see, as I said, all the troubles came at once and were due primarily to coal shortage. There was no remedy. Insufficient food supply because of lack of means of transportation. Insufficient lack of means of transportation because of shortage of coal for freight engines.
I bought dark jersey dresses for the babies, and lived in dark things myself.
I was fortunate in having a good cook and nurse who stayed with me through thick and thin. But when I came to get a femme de ménage for chamber work I realized how justified were the complaints of most of my friends. Women could make big money in munition factories. The large country element, scared away in 1914 or called home to take the place of men at the front, did not feed Paris with help as in peace time. I had a succession of giggling sixteen-year-olds, pottering grandmothers, and useless loafers. One femme de ménage I called "Toothless." She thought it was an English pet name, and beamed under it. She was a farm hand from the Marne district. The family fled before the Germans. She was left in charge until the soldiers drove her out. "Toothless" put the chickens in a little hay wagon, tied the cows to the back of it, and, with her employer's silver on her lap, drove alone through the night to safety. She was herded with other evacuated peasants on a steamer bound for Bordeaux. The ship was torpedoed and she lost her teeth by the explosion. I felt very sorry, and regarded her somewhat as a heroine until the truth dawned on me that she was speaking of a plate. I didn't think of this myself. She asked me for an advance one day, explaining that she had to pay it down to a dentist when she ordered more teeth. A stranded Russian student followed "Toothless." She held out until her prosperous father sent money from Petrograd through the Russian Embassy. Try as hard as I could and offer more than I wanted to pay, I could not get a regular third servant. I used to be amazed at the letters from American friends, asking me to send them servants. It must have been the popular notion in the United States that France was full of women eager for the chance to work.
In the fourth year of the war, we began to feel the drain on the nation's manhood. The constant killing and crippling and calling to the colors of older men and boys made it almost impossible to get any work done. Bells or lights or plumbing out of order—you waited for months. Where in 1915 I had found half a dozen paper-hangers and painters eager to bid against each other for the job of renovating my studio, I had to beg and bribe men to come in 1918. It took me four months to get what I wanted done. Herbert became expert in carrying trunks and boxes: but that did him no harm. There is a bright side to everything.