It was a great shock to us all to learn that the incident of the town of V—— had thus been made public, and that there was a moving picture of our being decorated, et cetera, going about the country. It is, I believe, quite usual to kiss the persons receiving the Croix de Guerre, even when of the masculine sex, and I know positively that Tish never saw that French general again.
However, in view of the unfortunate publicity I have decided to make this record of the actual incident of the French town of V——. For the story has got into the papers, and only yesterday Tish discovered that the pleasant young man who had been trying to sell her a washing machine was really a newspaper reporter in disguise.
Certain things are not true. We did not see or have any conversation with the former Emperor of the Germans; nor were any of us wounded, though Aggie got a piece of plaster in her right eye when a shell hit the church roof, and I was badly scratched by barbed wire. It is not true, either, that Aggie had her teeth knocked out by a German sentry. She unfortunately fell in the darkness and lost her upper set, and it was impossible to light a match in order to search for them.
It was, as I have said, in July of the first year of the war that both Aggie and I noticed the change in Tish. She grew moody and abstracted, and on two Sundays in succession she turned over her Sunday-school class to me and went for long walks into the country. Also, going to her apartment for Sunday dinner on, I believe, the second Sunday of the month we were startled to see the Andersons, very nice people who occupy the lower floor of the building, running out wildly into the street. They said that the janitor had been quarreling with some one in the furnace cellar, and that from high words, which they could plainly hear, they had got to shooting, and a bullet had come up through the floor and hit the phonograph.
I had a strange feeling at once, and I caught Aggie’s agonized eyes on me. We remained for some time in the street, and then, everything seeming to be quiet, we ventured in, with two policemen leading the way, and the Anderson baby left outside in its perambulator for fear of accident. All was quiet, however, and we made our way upstairs to Tish’s apartment. She was waiting for us, and reading the Presbyterian Banner, but I thought she was almost too calm when we told her of the Andersons’ terrible experience.
“It’s a good riddance,” she said, referring to the phonograph. “Besides, what right have people over here to fuss about one bullet? Think of our boys in the trenches.”
After a time she looked up suddenly and said: “It didn’t go anywhere near the baby, I suppose?”
We said it had not, and she then observed that the building was a mere shell, and that people with small children should raise them in the country anyhow.
It was during dinner—Tish had been reading Horace Fletcher for some time, and meals lasted almost from one to the next—that Hannah came in and said the janitor wanted to see Tish. She went out and came back somewhat later, looking as irritated as our dear Tish ever looks, and got her pocketbook from behind the china closet and went out again.
“I expected as much,” Hannah said. Hannah is Tish’s maid. “She’s paying blackmail. Like as not that janitor will collect a hundred dollars from her, and that phonograph never cost more than thirty-five. They’re paying for it on the installment plan, and the man only gets a dollar a week.”