"Mais rien, Mademoiselle. Je vous assure, rien du tout, du tout, du tout. Pas ça," and with the familiar gesture a forefinger nail would catch behind a front tooth and then click sharply outwards. When talking to an excited Meusienne, it is well to be wary. One must not stand too near, for she is sure to thrust her face close to your own, and when the finger flies out it no longer answers to the helm. It may end its unbridled career anywhere, and commit awful havoc in the ending, for the nail of the Meusienne is not a nail, it is a talon.
No wonder the poor souls needed help. No wonder they besieged our door when the news went forth that "Les Anglaises" had come to town and were distributing clothes and utensils, chairs, garde-mangers (small safes in which to keep their food, the fly pest being sheerly horrible), sheets, blankets—anything and everything that destitute humanity needs and is grateful for. Their faith in us, after a few months of work, became profound. They believed we could evolve anything, anywhere and at a moment's notice. If stern necessity obliged us to refuse, they had a touching way of saying, "Eh bien, ce sera pour une autre fois"[3]—a politeness which extricated them gracefully from a difficult position, but left us struggling in the net of circumstance and unaccountably convinced that when they called again "our purse, our person, our extremest means would lie all unlocked to their occasion."
III
But these little amenities of relief only thrust themselves upon me by degrees. At first, during the torrid summer weeks, everything was so new and so strange there were no clean-cut outlines at all. Before one impression had focused itself upon the mind another was claiming place. My brain—if you could have examined it—must have looked like a photographic plate exposed some dozens of times by a careless amateur. From the general mistiness and blur only a few things stand out. The stifling heat, the awful smells, the unending succession of weeping and hysterical women, and last, but not least, les puces.
Did you ever hear the story of the Irish farmer who said he "did not grudge them their bite and their sup, but what he could not stand was the continule thramping"? Well, the thramping was maddening. I believe I never paid a visit to a refugee in those days without becoming the exercising ground for light cavalry. People sitting quietly in our Common-room working at case-papers would suddenly dash away, to come back some minutes later in rage and exasperation. The cavalry still manœuvred. A mere patrol of two or three could be dealt with, but the poor wretch who had a regiment nearly qualified for a lunatic asylum.
Every visit we paid renewed our afflictions, and the houses, old and long untenanted, being so disgustingly dirty, we endured mental agonies—in addition to physical ones—when we thought of the filth from which the plague had come. Oddly enough, we did not suffer so much the next summer, and we were mercifully spared the attentions of other less active but even more horrible forms of entomological life.
You see, it was a rule—and as experience proved a very wise rule—of our Society that no help should be given unless the applicant had been visited and full particulars of his, or her, condition ascertained. Roughly speaking, we found out where he had come from, his previous occupation and station in life, the size of his farm if he had one and the amount of his stock, horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, poultry, rabbits, etc.; we made notes on his housing conditions, tabulated the members of his family, their ages and sex, their present employment and the amount of wages earned. All of which took time.
Armed with a notebook and pencil, we would sally forth, to grope our way up pitch-dark staircases, knock at innumerable doors, dash past the murky corner where the cesspool lay—I know houses in which it is under the stairs—and at last run the refugee to earth.
Then followed the usual routine. A chair—generally broken or minus a back—or a stool dragged forth with an apology for its poverty: "Quand on est émigrée, vous savez, Madame—ou Mademoiselle, je ne sais pas?" and then the torrent. A word sufficed to unloose it. Only a fool would try to stem it.