Needless to say, there weren't nearly enough cellars to go round, and direful things might have happened but for a lucky accident. Hidden in the woods about a mile from the town was an old Hydropathic Establishment, known as La Source, which had escaped the general destruction. Into it, regardless of its dirt and its bleak, excessive discomfort swarmed some three hundred of the sinistrés, there to huddle the long winter away.
As an example of its special attractions, let me tell you of one woman who lived with her two children in a tiny room, the walls of which streamed with damp, which had no fireplace, no heating possibilities of any kind, and whose sole furniture consisted of a barrow and one thin blanket.
From the point of view of the Relief worker an ideal case. Beautiful misery, you know. It could hardly be surpassed.
A Society—a very modest Society; it has repeatedly warned me that it dislikes publicity, so I heroically refrain from mentioning its name[1]—swept down upon the ruins early in 1915, and taking possession of one of the buildings at La Source, made the theatre its Common-room, the billiard-room its bedroom, and a top-loft a general dumping-ground, whose contents included a camp bed but no sheets, a tin basin and jug, an apologetic towel and, let me think—I can't remember a dressing-table or a mirror. It was a very modest Society, you remember, and the sum of its vanity——? Well, it perpetrated the uniform. Let it rest in peace.
Wherefore and because of which things a grey-clad apparition, moving through the moonlight like some hideous spectre of woe, arrived that warm June night at La Source, and was ushered into a room where innumerable people were drinking cocoa, rushing about, talking—ye gods, how they talked!—smoking.... I was more frightened than I have ever been in my life. I am not used to crowds, and to my fevered imagination every unit was a battalion. Then because I was hotter and thirstier than a grain of sand in a sun-scorched desert, cocoa was thrust upon me—cocoa! I drank it, loathing it, and wondered why everybody seemed to be drinking out of the same mug.
Then a young man seized my kit-bag. "Come along." My hair began to rise. I had been prepared for a great deal, but this.... I looked at the young man, he looked at me. The situation, at all events, did not lack piquancy! It was indeed a Sentimental Journey that I was making, and Sterne.... But the inimitable episode was not to repeat itself. My only room-mate was a bat.
[CHAPTER III]
FIRST IMPRESSIONS