She gave fifty dollars to the mother of baby Jacques (that was why she had so very little left) and she promised to send her ten dollars every month as soon as she herself should be again a wage-earner. Mrs. Putnam and her niece, inconsolable at her loss, went down to the Gare du Quai d’Orsay to see her off, looking more in keeping with the elegant travelers starting for the Midi, than Ellen did. Her place, after all, had been at the Gare de l’Est. As they shook hands warmly with her, they gave her a beautiful bouquet, the evident cost of which stabbed her to the heart. What she could have done with that money!
“You have simply transformed the vestiaire, Miss Boardman,” said Mrs. Putnam with generous but by no means exaggerating ardor. “It would certainly have sunk under the waves if you hadn’t come to the rescue. I wish you could have stayed, but thanks to your teaching we’ll be able to manage anything now.”
After the train had moved off, Mrs. Putnam said to her niece in a shocked voice: “Third class! That long trip to Bordeaux! She’ll die of fatigue. You don’t suppose she is going back because she didn’t have money enough to stay! Why, I would have paid anything to keep her.” The belated nature of this reflection shows that Ellen’s teachings had never gone more than skin deep and that there was still something lacking in Mrs. Putnam’s grasp on the realities of contemporary life.
Ellen was again too horribly seasick to suffer much apprehension about submarines. This time she had as cabin-mate in the unventilated second-class cabin the “companion” of a great lady traveling of course in a suite in first-class. This great personage, when informed by her satellites’ nimble and malicious tongues of Ellen’s personality and recent errand in France, remarked with authority to the group of people about her at dinner, embarking upon the game which was the seventh course of the meal: “I disapprove wholly of these foolish American volunteers ... ignorant, awkward, provincial boors, for the most part, knowing nothing of all the exquisite old traditions of France, who thrust themselves forward. They make America a laughing-stock.”
Luckily, Ellen, pecking feebly at the chilly, boiled potato brought her by an impatient stewardess, could not know this characterization.
She arrived in Marshallton, and was astonished to find herself a personage. Her departure had made her much more a figure in the town life than she had ever been when she was still walking its streets. The day after her departure the young reporter had written her up in the Herald in a lengthy paragraph, and not a humorous one either. The Sunday which she passed on the ocean after she left New York, Mr. Wentworth in one of his prayers implored the Divine blessing on “one of our number who has left home and safety to fulfil a high moral obligation and who even now is risking death in the pursuance of her duty as she conceives it.” Every one knew that he meant Ellen Boardman, about whom they had all read in the Herald. Mr. Pennypacker took, then and there, a decision which inexplicably lightened his heart. Being a good businessman, he did not keep it to himself, but allowed it to leak out the next time the reporter from the Herald dropped around for chance items of news. The reporter made the most of it, and Marshallton, already spending much of its time in discussing Ellen, read that “Mr. John S. Pennypacker, in view of the high humanitarian principles animating Miss Boardman in quitting his employ, has decided not to fill her position but to keep it open for her on her return from her errand of mercy to those in foreign parts stricken by the awful war now devastating Europe.”
Then Ellen’s letters began to arrive, mostly to Maggie, who read them aloud to the deeply interested boarding-house circle. The members of this, basking in reflected importance, repeated their contents to every one who would listen. In addition the young reporter published extracts from them in the Herald, editing them artfully, choosing the rare plums of anecdote or description in Ellen’s arid epistolary style. When her letter to him came, he was plunged into despair because she had learned that he would have to pay part of his expenses if he drove an ambulance on the French front. By that time his sense of humor was in such total eclipse that he saw nothing ridiculous in the fact that he could not breathe freely another hour in the easy good-cheer of his care-free life. He revolved one scheme after another for getting money; and in the meantime let no week go by without giving some news from their “heroic fellow-townswoman in France.” Highland Springs, the traditional rival and enemy of Marshallton, felt outraged by the tone of proprietorship with which Marshallton people bragged of their delegate in France.
So it happened that when Ellen, fearfully tired, fearfully dusty after the long ride in the day-coach, and fearfully shabby in exactly the same clothes she had worn away, stepped wearily off the train at the well-remembered little wooden station, she found not only Maggie, to whom she had telegraphed from New York, but a large group of other people advancing upon her with outstretched hands, crowding around her with more respectful consideration than she had ever dreamed of seeing addressed to her obscure person. She was too tired, too deeply moved to find herself at home again, too confused, to recognize them all. Indeed a number of them knew her only by her fame since her departure. Ellen made out Maggie, who embraced her, weeping as loudly as when she had gone away; she saw Mrs. Wilson who kissed her very hard and said she was proud to know her; she saw with astonishment that Mr. Pennypacker himself had left business in office hours! He shook her hand with energy and said: “Well, Miss Boardman, very glad to see you safe back. We’ll be expecting you back at the old stand just as soon as you’ve rested up from the trip.” The intention of the poilu who had taken her in his arms and kissed her, had not been more cordial. Ellen knew this and was touched to tears.
There was the reporter from the Herald, too, she saw him dimly through the mist before her eyes, as he carried the satchel, the same he had carried five months before with the same things in it. And as they put her in the “hack” (she had never ridden in the hack before) there was Mr. Wentworth, the young minister, who leaned through the window and said earnestly: “I am counting on you to speak to our people in the church parlors. You must tell us about things over there.”
Well, she did speak to them! She was not the same person, you see, she had been before she had spent those evenings in the Gare de l’Est. She wanted them to know about what she had seen, and because there was no one else to tell them, she rose up in her shabby suit and told them herself. The first thing that came into her mind as she stood before them, her heart suffocating her, her knees shaking under her, was the strangeness of seeing so many able-bodied men not in uniform, and so many women not in mourning. She told them this as a beginning and got their startled attention at once, the men vaguely uneasy, the women divining with frightened sympathy what it meant to see all women in black.