That some one would cry it is certain, for the room is a human hive. It swarms with people. Short, thickset, sturdy, rather heavily-built people, whose beauty is not their strong point, but whose honesty is. And another, for they have many, is their industry; and yet another, dear to the heart of the Relief worker, is their gratitude for any little help or sympathy that may be given them.
And, poor souls, they did need help. Think of it! One room the factory, dining-room, bedroom, smoking-room, sitting-room of forty people. Some old, some young. Women, girls and men.
It appalled you as you went in. On one side, down all its length, and also along the top palliasses were laid on the floor, so close they almost touched. Piled neatly on these were scanty rugs or blankets. No sheets or linen of any kind until our Society provided them. There was only one bed—a gift from the Society—and in that sat a little old woman bolt upright. Her skin was the colour of old parchment, it was seamed and lined and criss-crossed with wrinkles, for she was over eighty years of age. But her spirit was still young. She could enjoy a little joke.
"Yes, I remember the war of Soixante-dix," she said, "but it was not like this. Ma fois, non! Les Prussiens—oh, they were good to us." Her eyes twinkled. "They lived in our house. They were like children."
"Madame, Madame! Confess now that 'vous avez fait la coquette' with those Prussians."
Whereupon she cackled a big, "Ho, ho! Écoutez ce qu'elle dit!" and a shrivelled finger poked me facetiously in the ribs.
But if the Basket-makers made friends with the Germans in those far-off days, they hate them now. Hate them with bitter, deadly hatred. "Ah, les barbares! les sauvages! les rosses!" Madame Walfard would cry, her face inflamed with anger. Her mother, badly wounded by a shell, had become paralysed, so there is perhaps some excuse for her venom.
But for the most part they are too busy to waste time in revilings. The little old woman is the only idle person in the room. Squatting on low stools under the windows—there are four or five set in the length of the wall—the rest work unceasingly, small basins of water, sheaves of osier, tools, finished baskets, and piles of osier-ends strewn all about them. Down the middle of the room runs a long table, littered with mugs, bowls, cooking utensils, odds and ends of every description. There is only one stove, a small one, utterly inadequate for the size of the room. On it all their cooking has to be done. I used to wonder if they ever quarrelled.
As time went on and I came to know them better, Madame Malhomme and Madame Jacquemot told me many a tale of their life in Vaux-les-Palamies, of the opening days of war and of their subsequent flight from their village. Madame Malhomme, daughter of the little old lady who had once dared to flirt with a Prussian, lived in the big room in the rue Des Ducs for nearly a year. Then Madame B. established her and her family in a little house about half a mile from the town, where they had nothing to trouble them save the depredations of an occasional rat, a negligible nuisance compared with the (in more senses than one) overcrowded condition of No. 49. For that historic mansion had gathered innumerable inmates to its breast during the long years of emptiness and decay. And these inmates made the Basket-makers' lives a burden to them.