“Eleanor,” said Mrs. Putnam, “bring back cards for a card-catalogue, hundreds of cards, thousands of cards.” She addressed Ellen with a respect which did honor to her native intelligence. “Miss Boardman, wouldn’t you better take off your hat? Couldn’t you work more at your ease? You could hang your things here.” With one sweep of her white, well-cared-for hand she snatched her own Parisian habiliments from the hanger and hook, and installed there the Marshallton wraps of Ellen Boardman. She set her down in front of the desk; she put in her hands the ridiculous little Russia leather-covered note-book of the “accounts”; she opened drawer after drawer crammed with letters; and with a happy sigh she went out to the room of the packing-cases, closing the door gently behind her, that she might not disturb the high-priestess of business-management who already bent over those abominably misused records, her eyes gleaming with the sacred fire of system.
There is practically nothing more to record about the four months spent by Ellen Boardman as far as her work at the vestiaire was concerned. Every day she arrived at number 27 rue Pharaon at eight o’clock and put in a good hour of quiet work before any of the more or less irregular volunteer ladies appeared. She worked there till noon, returned to the Y. W. C. A., lunched, was in the office again by one o’clock, had another hour of forceful concentration before any of the cosmopolitan great ladies finished their lengthy déjeuners, and she stayed there until six in the evening, when every one else had gone. She realized that her effort must be not only to create a rational system of records and accounts and correspondence which she herself could manage, but a fool-proof one which could be left in the hands of the elegant ladies who would remain in Paris after she had returned to Kansas.
And yet, not so fool-proof as she had thought at first. She was agreeably surprised to find both Mrs. Putnam and her pretty niece perfectly capable of understanding a system once it was invented, set in working order, and explained to them. She came to understand that what, on her first encounter with them, she had naturally enough taken for congenital imbecility, was merely the result of an ignorance and an inexperience which remained to the end astounding to her. Their good-will was as great as their native capacity. Eleanor set herself resolutely, if very awkwardly, to learn the use of the typewriter. Mrs. Putnam even developed the greatest interest in the ingenious methods of corraling and marshaling information and facts which were second nature to the business-woman. “I never saw anything more fascinating!” she cried the day when Ellen explained to her the workings of a system for cross-indexing the card-catalogues of refugees already aided. “How do you think of such things?”
Ellen did not explain that she generally thought of them in the two or three extra hours of work she put in every day, while Mrs. Putnam ate elaborate food.
It soon became apparent that there had been much “repeating” among the refugees. The number possible to clothe grew rapidly, far beyond what the “office force” could manage to investigate. Ellen set her face against miscellaneous giving without knowledge of conditions. She devised a system of visiting inspectors which kept track of all the families in their rapidly growing list. She even made out a sort of time-card for the visiting ladies which enabled the office to keep some track of what they did, and yet did not ruffle their leisure-class dignity ... and this was really an achievement. She suggested, made out, and had printed an orderly report of what they had done, what money had come in, how it had been spent, what clothes had been given and how distributed, the number of people aided, the most pressing needs. This she had put in every letter sent to America. The result was enough to justify Mrs. Putnam’s naïve astonishment and admiration of her brilliant idea. Packing-cases and checks flowed in by every American steamer.
Ellen’s various accounting systems and card-catalogues responded with elastic ease to the increased volume of facts, as she of course expected them to; but Mrs. Putnam could never be done marveling at the cool certainty with which all this immense increase was handled. She had a shudder as she thought of what would have happened if Miss Boardman had not dropped down from heaven upon them. Dining out, of an evening, she spent much time expatiating on the astonishing virtues of one of her volunteers.
Ellen conceived a considerable regard for Mrs. Putnam, but she did not talk of her in dining out, because she never dined anywhere. She left the “office” at six o’clock and proceeded to a nearby bakery where she bought four sizable rolls. An apple cart supplied a couple of apples, and even her ignorance of French was not too great an obstacle to the purchase of some cakes of sweet chocolate. With these decently hidden in a small black hand-bag, she proceeded to the waiting-room of the Gare de l’Est where, like any traveler waiting for his train she ate her frugal meal; ate as much of it, that is, as a painful tightness in her throat would let her. For the Gare de l’Est was where the majority of French soldiers took their trains to go back to the front after their occasional week’s furlough with their families.
No words of mine can convey any impression of what she saw there. No one who has not seen the Gare de l’Est night after night can ever imagine the sum of stifled human sorrow which filled it thickly, like a dreadful incense of pain going up before some cruel god. It was there that the mothers, the wives, the sweethearts, the sisters, the children brought their priceless all and once more laid it on the altar. It was there that those horrible silent farewells were said, the more unendurable because they were repeated and repeated till human nature reeled under the burden laid on it by the will. The great court outside, the noisy echoing waiting-room, the inner platform which was the uttermost limit for those accompanying the soldiers returning to hell,—they were not only always filled with living hearts broken on the wheel, but they were thronged with ghosts, ghosts of those whose farewell kiss had really been the last, with ghosts of those who had watched the dear face out of sight and who were never to see it again. Those last straining, wordless embraces, those last, hot, silent kisses, the last touch of the little child’s hand on the father’s cheek which it was never to touch again ... the nightmare place reeked of them!
The stenographer from Kansas had found it as simply as she had done everything else. “Which station do the families go to, to say good-bye to their soldiers?” she had asked, explaining apologetically that she thought maybe if she went there too she could help sometimes; there might be a heavy baby to carry, or somebody who had lost his ticket, or somebody who hadn’t any lunch for the train.
After the first evening spent there, she had shivered and wept all night in her bed; but she had gone back the next evening, with the money she saved by eating bread and apples for her dinner; for of course the sweet chocolate was for the soldiers. She sat there, armed with nothing but her immense ignorance, her immense sympathy. On that second evening she summoned enough courage to give some chocolate to an elderly shabby soldier, taking the train sadly, quite alone; and again to a white-faced young lad accompanied by his bent, poorly dressed grandmother. What happened in both those cases sent her back to the Y. W. C. A. to make up laboriously from her little pocket French dictionary and to learn by heart this sentence: “I am sorry that I cannot understand French. I am an American.” Thereafter the surprised and extremely articulate Gallic gratitude which greeted her timid overtures, did not leave her so helplessly swamped in confusion. She stammered out her little phrase with a shy, embarrassed smile and withdrew as soon as possible from the hearty handshake which was nearly always the substitute offered for the unintelligible thanks. How many such handshakes she had! Sometimes as she watched her right hand, tapping on the typewriter, she thought: “Those hands which it has touched, they may be dead now. They were heroes’ hands.” She looked at her own with awe, because it had touched them.