It was because I tarried on and on amid tumultuous scenes for another twenty-four hours, awaiting the taking of proper steps by Mr. Bryan, that more precious time was lost. Hour after hour, within the refuge of our hotel parlour, itself a most depressing chamber, I sat, my hands clasped, my charges clustered about me, our trunks packed, our lesser belongings bestowed for travel, awaiting word from him. None came. I am loath to make the accusation direct, but I must tell you that I never had from Mr. Bryan any acknowledgment of this original cablegram or of the other and even more insistently appealing telegrams I filed in rapid sequence; nor, so far as I have been able to ascertain, did he in the least bestir himself on behalf of Fernbridge Seminary for Young Ladies.
Regarding this callous indifference, this official slothfulness, this inability to rise to the needs of a most pressing emergency, I refrain absolutely from comment, leaving it for you, sir, to judge. It would be of no avail for Mr. Bryan to deny having received my messages, because in each and every instance I insisted on leaving the money to pay for transmission.
I shall not harrow your sensibilities by a complete and detailed recital of the nerve-racking adventures that immediately succeeded. I may only liken my state of mind to that so graphically described in the well-known and popular story of the uxoricide, Bluebeard, wherein it is told how the vigilant Anne stood on the outer ramparts straining her eyes in the direction whither succour might reasonably be expected to materialise, being deceived at least once by the dust cloud created by a flock of sheep, and tortured meantime by the melancholy accents of her sister, the present wife of the monster, who continually entreated to be told whether she, Anne, saw any one coming.
The tale is probably imaginary in character to a very considerable degree, though based, I believe, on fact; but assuredly the author depicted my own emotions in this interim. One moment I felt as one of the sisters must have felt, the next as the other sister must have felt; and, again, I shared the composite emotions of both at once, not to mention the feelings probably inherent in the shepherd of the flock, since my wards might well be likened, I thought, to helpless young sheep. By this comparison I mean no disrespect; the simile is employed because of its aptness and for no other reason. It would ill become me, of all men, to refer slightingly to any of our student-body, we at Fernbridge making it our policy ever to receive only the daughters of families having undoubted social standing in their respective communities. I trust this explanation is entirely satisfactory to all concerned.
Let us go forward, Mister President, to the moment when, after many false alarms, many alternations of hope, of doubt, of despair, then hope again, we finally found ourselves aboard a train ostensibly destined for Boulogne or Calais; albeit a train of the most inferior accommodations conceivable and crowded to the utmost by unhappy travellers, among whom fleeing Americans vastly predominated. Our heavy luggage was left behind us, abandoned to unsympathetic hands. Of food seemly to allay the natural cravings of the human appetite there was little or none to be had, even at augmented prices. Actually one might not procure so small a thing as a cup of tea.
My trunk, my neatly strapped steamer rug, my large yellow valise, and sundry smaller articles, were gone, I knew not whither. I did but know they had vanished utterly; wherefore I adhered with the clutch of desperation to my umbrella and my small black portmanteau. Even my collection of assorted souvenir postcards of European views, whereof I had contemplated making an albumed gift to my Great-Aunt Paulina, on my return to my beloved native land, was irretrievably lost to me forever.
Still, we moved—haltingly and slowly, it is true, and with frequent stoppages. None the less, we moved; progress was definitely being made in the direction of the seaboard, and in contemplation of this fact one found an infinitesimal measure of consolation, gleaming, so to speak, against a dark cloud of forebodings, like one lone starry orb in a storm-envisaged firmament. During the early part of our journey I could not fail to give heed to the amazing attitude maintained by the young ladies. Repeatedly, as we paused on a siding to permit the passage of a laden troop train, I detected them in the act of waving hand or kerchief at the soldiery.
And once I actually overheard Miss Marble remark to Miss Canbee that she, for one, was sorry we were going away from hostilities rather than toward them. One could scarce credit one's ears! Could it be true, as students of psychology have repeatedly affirmed, that the spirit of youth is unquenchable, even in the presence of impending peril? Or, had my own precept and example stimulated these young women into a display of seeming light-heartedness? Perhaps both—certainly the latter. As for me, my one consuming thought now was to bid farewell forever to the shores of a land where war is permitted to eventuate with such abruptness and with so little consideration for visiting noncombatants. To those about me I made no secret of my desire in this regard, speaking with such intensity as to produce a quavering of the voice.
Certain decided views, entirely in accordance with my own, were so succinctly expressed by a gentleman who shared the compartment into which I was huddled with some eight or nine others that I cannot forbear from repeating them here.
This gentleman, a Mr. John K. Botts, of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and evidently a person of much wealth and no small importance in his home city, said things had come to a pretty pass when a freeborn American citizen who had been coming to Europe every summer for years, always spending his money like water and never asking the price of anything in advance, but just planking down whatever the grafters wanted for it, should have his motor car confiscated and his trunks held up on him and his plans all disarranged, just because a lot of these foreigners thought they wanted to fight one another over something. He said that he had actually been threatened with arrest by a measly army captain whom he, Mr. Botts, could buy and sell a hundred times over without ever feeling it. He was strongly in favour of wiring our Government to order the warring nations to suspend hostilities until all the Americans in Europe could get back home, and mentioned thirty days as a suitable time for this purpose.