Bon. His are?
"Eh bien, il n'est pas encore au monde."
You suggest that the unborn cannot ...
"Mais mademoiselle—si il y a des étrennes (gifts)?"
Perhaps, perhaps; one doesn't know. The Ponnains were a people of much discrimination. He might arrive in time. Quel dommage, then, if he had no ticket!
He discriminated.
He gets his ticket, and you register anew your homage to French foresightfulness and thrift.
And then you go back to the Clothes-room. You climb over mountains of petticoats and chemises, all of the same size and all made to fit a child of three. There are thousands of them, they obsess you. You dream at night that you are smothering under a hill of petticoats while irate refugees, whose children are all over five and half-naked, hurl the chemises and—other things at you, uttering round French maledictions in ear-splitting tones. You wade through the wretched things, you eat them, sleep them; your brain reels, you say things about work-parties which, if published, would cause an explosion, and the Pope would excommunicate you and the Foreign Office hand you your passports. You write frantic letters to headquarters, then you grow cold, waxing sarcastic. You hint that marriage as an institution existed in France before 1912, and that the first baby was not born in that year of blindfold peace. And you add a rider to the effect that many, indeed most, of your cherished émigrées are not slum-dwellers fighting for rags at a jumble sale, but respectable people who don't go about in ragged trousers or with splashes of brown or yellow paint on a blue serge dress. Then you are conscience-stricken, for some of the bales have been packed by Sanity, and the contents collected by Reason. There are many white crows in the flock.
A ring at the door interrupts, perhaps happily, your epistolary labours. It is the Service de Ville, a surly person but faithful. He has six bales. They are immense. You go down, you try to roll one up the stairs. Your comrade in labour is four feet six and weighs seven stone. The bale weighs—or seems to weigh—a ton. Sisyphus is not more impotent than you. Then an angel appears. It is Madame. "I heard the efforts," she remarks, and indeed our puffings and pantings and blowings and swearings must have been audible almost at the Front. She puts her solid shoulder under the bale. It floats lightly up the stairs. Then you begin to unpack. It is dirty work, and destroys the whiteness of your hands. Never mind. Remember les pauvres émigrées, and that we are si devouée, you know.
Everything under heaven has, I verily believe, come at one time or another out of our bales—except live stock and joints of beef. Concertinas in senile decay, mandolines without keys, guitars without strings, jam leaking over a velvet gown, tons of old newspapers and magazines—all English, of course, and subsequently sold as waste-paper, hats that have braved many a battle and breeze, boots without soles, ball dresses, satin slippers (what do people think refugees need in the War Zone?), greasy articles of apparel, the mere handling of which makes our fingers shine, dirty underlinen, single socks and stockings, married socks that are like the Irishman's shirt—made of holes, another hundred dozen of petticoats for children aged three, and once—how we laughed over it!—a red velvet dress that I swear had been filched from an organ-grinder's monkey, and with it a pair of-of—well, you know. They were made of blue serge, and when held out at width stretched all across the Common-room. The biggest Mynheer that ever smoked a pipe by the Zuyder Zee would have been lost in them, and as they were neither male nor female, only some sort "of giddy harumphrodite" could have worn them.