The Worn Doorstep

by Margaret Pollock Sherwood

For a week we had with us a little nun, who prayed and prayed, looking about her with big, frightened eyes. Luckily, my acquaintance with His Reverence, who officiated at Marie's wedding, solved the problem, and she went gladly to the shelter of a convent roof. Then for a few days we cared for an old, old man, who swore and swore, softly, constantly, but with an air of question, as if no oaths could quite meet the need of the present moment. It was most incongruous, for he was very evidently a gentleman, and he very evidently thought that he was expressing himself politely, even if inadequately. My knowledge of the French language was greatly extended, but this new vocabulary is, alas! as unavailable for the uses of ordinary life as that which I learned from Corneille! Our fugitive was a most pathetic old creature whose mind had been somewhat unsettled by suffering and exile. Fortunately a relative of his was discovered, a prosperous Belgian merchant living in the outskirts of London, and my guest bade me a profane but grateful farewell. A few days' care seems but little to offer these flitting guests on their sorrowful journey, but it is a great relief to me to do even this little, and as each one goes, I feel like saying "Thank you!" as the well-trained British waiter says when you deign to take something from the offered plate.

We really need Peter's advice,—think of that: Peter's advice, which I have scorned to take! In our zeal we became victims of one bit of imposture, which, however, did not involve us in irretrievable loss,—only spoons! Two dark-skinned folk presented themselves one cold, wintry day when all the desolation of the earth seemed dripping down in icy rain. They asked for food, telling us that they were Belgian refugees in need of help; evidently the habits of this household have been rumoured abroad. We were a bit suspicious, but resolved to err upon the right side. While Madge was cooking and I had gone to order fresh supplies, they decamped with my spoons and my purse, luckily a very lean purse. Don had simply absented himself; he no longer trusts his instincts, finding himself in a world whose standards he does not comprehend. The old order changes, giving place to new; old caste distinctions are ignored, and he has not as yet had time to learn new mental habits. He has found for himself a little agnostic den in a corner behind the kitchen range, and he goes there when he cannot make up his mind. When we discovered our loss and began our search, he came out wagging his tail with a self-congratulatory air to say, "I told you so!" But he had not told us so; he had only deserted us when we needed him most. Our light-fingered guests have been found in a gypsy tribe passing through to the north, but my spoons have not been found. Must I lap my supper from a saucer with Don and the Atom?

January 19. As I sit by the fire and toast my toes in my few minutes of blessed idleness, I cannot help living over old days and hours, and I see again the dusk of that evening when you and your family escorted me to Hinksey to hear the nightingales; the sunshine of that afternoon when you and I searched in vain the meadows beyond Iffley for pink-tipped English daisies. Often I find myself again arguing things out with you, even getting a bit angry now and then, forgetting that you cannot answer. Many and many a dispute we had, many and many a disagreement, with the invariable outcome of deeper understanding.

Sometimes the unshared jests hurt most of all; what has become of your humour, dear, that rare, dry humour that betrayed itself most plainly in your eyes? When first I knew you, I thought that you had no sense of humour; I soon found that it was deeper than my own, because of your insight into the irony of the human predicament. At times it touched the tragic. I learned to understand your quiet enjoyment in watching people, your wordless jests, and the silent drollery of your half smile. How you loved to tease me about the foibles of my countrymen.

"No other people," you would say, "would come dashing into the courtyard of a French hotel, with flags flying from the carriage, singing their national hymn at the top of their voices; no other people would motor swiftly to the entrance of a French cathedral, crying out: 'You do the inside, and we'll do the outside, and it won't take us more than five minutes!' And there is always the pleasing memory of the lady from Montana who deplored the inadequacy of the Louvre because the pictures couldn't compare with the exhibition that they had had in the winter at Wilkins Bluff. But of course this represents a class of Americans that you would not know."

That was the day we had tea by the river; I was hot with helping you get the boat past the lock, hot with making the tea, and I grew hotter still.

"I admit that we are vulgar, and loud-voiced, and ostentatious," I told you; "but we aren't selfish, and we aren't insolent. On the contrary, we are usually quixotically good-natured and generous. We do not look in blank surprise as the British do if any one questions their right to be served before all other people with the choicest of everything. You have little idea of what we suffer who meet many of the travelling English of to-day, with their quiet and total selfishness in securing and sitting upon all that is best. Of course, this represents a class of the English that you would not know." This you forgave, but you never quite forgave, I fear, my wicked suggestion that the moat about the Bishop's palace was preserved in order to keep out the poor and needy.

But the things about which we quarrelled were only surface things; I knew and loved my England more than I ever admitted to you; and you, for all your criticism of my countrymen (much of it was abundantly justified), had divined the spirit of idealism in our democracy. The development of the individual in righteous freedom for you, as for us, was the great hope of the world. Under all the crudeness of America, under the arrogance of England, lives, and has lived from earliest days, a something great and fine, shared by republican France,—a passion for liberty. The little things do not matter if the great convictions at the heart of nations are akin; have not people of late cared too much about little things? If our two peoples become aware of the greatness of their common destiny, will they not stop fussing about the American accent and English incivility? As I walk alone nowadays, I try to drive this haunting, insistent world-suffering from my mind by dreams of a great future wherein your country and mine go hand in hand, helping secure for all time liberty for the human race.

Each has something to contribute that the other lacks. I really think that we, in our sense of the dignity of the individual man, in willingness to forego shades and differences of taste for the sake of something greater, have outgrown you. You, with your keen insight, had divined the need of democracy, had accepted it in theory, but found the inevitable consequences hard to accept. Nothing is more agreeable than good taste; perhaps there are things more profoundly important. Dare I say that I think we have out-stripped you in generosity of act and of thought?

But you are greater than we, and your life runs in deeper channels than our own, in that you keep faith with the past, refusing to let the hard-won spiritual achievement of the race be swept away by the externalism of the present. To you, as to no other people, we look to save the world from the terrible material forces, without conscience, without insight, which threaten to dominate the whole of life. You who refuse to give up fine standards of an elder day are the influence that we of America greatly need, for in matters intellectual, we are all too prone to be led, and have been too much cowed by this later Germany—who forgets.