Home Fires in France Part 7

That was what was sounding in my ears. But what I heard was a m.u.f.fled voice saying scornfully: "Re-education ... courage, taking up our lives again ... oh yes, whatever you please to imagine to distract our attention! But we are finished men, done for ... lost!"

My children played before me in the suns.h.i.+ne, but what I saw were the scarred, mutilated, sightless faces of young men in their prime, with long lives of darkness before them. And as I sat there, then, that instant, other young men in their prime were being blinded, were being mutilated for life.

My fatigue deepened till it was like lead upon me. Under it I was cold.

The sun did not warm me. It fell like a mockery upon a race gone mad, upon a world bankrupt in hope. Yes, what we suffered was not the worst, not even what _they_ suffered, the men at the front; what was worst was the fact that the meaning of it all was hopelessness, was the end, a black end to all we had looked forward to, striven for ... paralysis, death in life. And an indifferent sun s.h.i.+ning down on it, as it had on our illusions.

After a time the children tired of sand. "Mother, mayn't we go in the big church? You never have taken us inside. What does it look like?"

Their restless upspringing life thrust my paralysis aside as an upspringing young tree cleaves the boulder which would hamper it. We pushed open the heavy leather door and stepped into the huge cavern, our eyes so full of the glare of the suns.h.i.+ne that, as we walked forward up the nave, we could see nothing but velvety darkness, faintly scented with mold and incense.

The silence was so intense that I could hear my sore, angry heart beating furiously in my breast....

Further along before us, where rich-colored patches lay, on the stone pavement, there was the light from the great rose-windows.... We stood there now, our eyes slowly clearing, the blackness slowly fading out into twilight, to a sweet, clear translucent dimness which hid nothing.

Silence, long, shadowy veiled aisles, hushed immensity ...

A great calm hand seemed laid on my shoulder, so that my fever sank, my pulses were quieted. I stood motionless, feeling slowly pulsating through me a vaster rhythm than the throbbing irregularity of my own doubting heart. A great soundless benediction was breathed upon me out of the man-wrought beauty around and above me.

Up, up, up, I raised my eyes, following the soaring of the many-columned pillars, and something in my heart burst its leaden bonds and soared up out of my breast....

Yes, here was beauty, here was that beauty I had forgotten and denied ... _and men had made it_! It had nothing to do with the glare of the indifferent sun, with the callous face of our calamity. Men had made this beauty, imperfect, warring, doubting, suffering, sinning men had upreared this perfect creation. They had created this beauty out of their faith in righteousness, and they would again create other beauty, out of other manifestations of righteousness, long after this war was a forgotten nightmare....

"What is that s.h.i.+ning on your face, mother?"

I put my hand up. My cheeks are wet. "Tears, dear."

"O mother, why do you cry?"

"Because I am very happy, my darling."

A FAIR EXCHANGE

The energetic, well-dressed man who walked so quickly in spite of his gray hair was quite out of breath from the unusual experience of mounting stairs on foot, when he stepped into the anteroom. There he looked about him with a keenly observant eye. The room had obviously not been intended as the entrance to modern offices. Its dingy, paneled walls and darkened carved ceiling dated at least from the time when the ancestors of the newcomer were hunting Indians in the untracked forests of Ma.s.sachusetts. It was a forlorn cheerless apology for a convenient, well-equipped business waiting-room. And yet the intelligent, keen eyes now looking at it saw in it ... what? Something he could not a.n.a.lyze, something he tried to express. "What the devil is it about their little old holes...?" he asked himself with the fresh vivid curiosity which was his habit about phenomena new to him.

A one-armed young soldier, in a worn blue uniform, with a patch over one eye, rose up from the cane-bottomed chair, took from the white-pine table a small pad of paper and held it out to the newcomer sketching a bow. The older man looked the other way sedulously. He was a very tender-hearted person (except of course for his business compet.i.tors) and the constant sight of the maimed wreckage of young manhood made him sick.

On the pad of paper was printed "Nom du Visiteur," with a blank following it, and, underneath, "Objet du la visite." Mr. Hale's French was limited, but he made out that he was to write down who he was and what his business was, and generously he admired the little detail of office administration which he had never happened to see in an American business office. "That beats sending in a message by the office-boy, all right!" he thought to himself as he wrote. "They are funny people! Just when you get absolute proof that they can't do business any more than a sick cat, you run into something that makes you wonder."

He had written on the pad "Randolph Metcalf Hale, President of the Illinois a.s.sociation of Druggists," and, underneath that, "On business connected with closer commercial relations of France and the United States." As he handed the slip of paper back to the young soldier he thought, "I might about as well get a rubber stamp for that last, and save writing it over so often."

The uniformed messenger limped out of the room. "Oh Lord! and a wooden leg, along with only one eye and one arm," thought Mr. Hale, wincing at the too familiar sound of the halting gait. He thrust his hands deep into his pockets and stood meditatively looking down at his own vigorous, well-clad legs.

The soldier came back and motioned the visitor to follow him. They went along a narrow corridor with occasional steps up and other steps down, with large old windows looking out through time-dimmed panes upon a stone-paved court with an old gray stone fountain. The American shook his head. "Never anything new! Always cutting their clothes out of their grand-father's left-overs and sewing them up by hand; that's it, everything hand-made!"

He was ushered into an office where a man of about his own age, with a black beard, streaked with white, rose up and came towards him with outstretched hand.

"Ninth to-day," noted the American mentally. He amused himself by keeping statistics on the fabulous amount of handshaking accomplished in French business life.

Then he explained his presence. Partly because he accounted it a crime to take longer than necessary to state your business, and partly because he had stated it so many times, he packed a succinct account of himself into comparatively few phrases.

"Like almost everybody else in America, Monsieur Portier, I want to help make up to France for the way she's been having the rough end of all this war. But everybody does best at his own sort of help; and I didn't come over for reconstructing villages or taking care of refugees. That sort of work's got to be done, of course, but there are a lot of our own folks at that already. Anyhow, not knowing your language, or your folks, I'd make a poor job of trying to fix up their personal lives. That's not my specialty. But I _have_ a specialty, and that's the American toilet preparations business. And it occurred to me out there in Evanston that perhaps getting American business along my line joined up closer with French business would be as good a turn as I could do for France. After all, though it does give you the horrors to see the poor boys with their legs and arms shot off, that doesn't last but one generation. But _business_ now ... all the future is there!" His eye kindled. He had evidently p.r.o.nounced his _credo_. The attentive Frenchman behind the desk nodded, acquiescing in carefully accurate English: "Precisely, Mr.

Hale. You had the very same idea which induced my Government to organize this committee of which I am secretary. I am more than at your disposition."

"I know it," said the American without further expression of grat.i.tude than this recognition, "and that's why I'm here. I've got to a place where I need some help. It's this way. I've done a lot of straight business, I mean paying business. And I've managed that all right. I've got the rails laid for our sending over drug specialties you don't have here and for s.h.i.+pping to the States the toilet preparations specialties I find here. But now I'm here I want to do _more_ than just regular business. Now that I _see_ your country and take in what the war's been, and think what you've been up against ... well, Monsieur Portier, I tell you I want to _do_ something for France!"

He said this with a simple, heartfelt sincerity which moved the Frenchman to lean from his chair and give him a silent handshake of appreciation. The American forgot to add this to his total for the day, going on earnestly with his story: "And so, I keep my eyes open all the time for little good turns I can do. I don't mean charity ... honestly, I think that does about as much harm as good, though of course we have to go through the motions in a time like this. I mean business good turns, such as I'd like to have anybody do me, look at my concern with a fresh eye and tell me how I could make it better, or else tell me where I could find a bigger market. You understand? Like that. Now I've been doing business with a big chemical factory out in the country near Paris. The nearest place to it, for me, is Versailles ... maybe you happen to know Versailles?"

The Frenchman nodded gravely. Yes, he had a married sister living in Versailles. "Well, there's a little drug-store out there, one of these peaceful, sleepy-looking, home-and-mother French drug-stores, with a big cat dozing in the window, and somebody in a white ap.r.o.n putting up pills behind the counter, and so far as anybody from _my_ part of the world can see, not enough business doing from one week's end to another, to buy a postage-stamp."

The Frenchman laughed. "Oh, it's a very good business in France being a _pharmacien_."

"That's what everybody tells me, and that's what gets me. _One_ of the things that gets me! In _our_ country when there is any business being done you hear the wheels going 'round.' I can't get used to this smooth European way of doing it and not letting on. Well, my main interest in life being the toilet preparations business I hardly ever go by one without stopping in. You never know when you're going to run onto something worthwhile. Well, out there in Versailles, I certainly did. I ran onto a genius. Yes, sir, that's not too much to say; a genius! Any man who can make a cold cream like that ..."

He interrupted himself to ask: "You don't happen to be up on cold cream?

No? It's a pity, because you can't appreciate what that man is doing. By George, I never saw anything like it, and I've dealt in cold creams for thirty years! It's got anything in America beaten a mile! The two great faults of cold cream, you see, are being greasy and being crumbly. This isn't either. And it keeps! He showed me some he'd had for four years in a pot, with just a flat earthenware lid laid on top, and you wouldn't believe it, Monsieur Portier, but it hadn't changed an atom, not an _atom_! And the fineness of it! The least little pinch between your fingers, and it just sinks right into your pores before your eyes! It's _like_ cream, thick, rich cream off a three-days-set pan of milk, and yet it don't run! And the perfume! Monsieur Portier, I give you my word for it, and I know what I'm talking about, the perfume that little old druggist out in his d.i.n.ky little old shop has got into his cold cream is the only _refined_ cold cream perfume I ever smelled! It makes all the others smell like a third-rate actress. It's got a ... it's got a ..."

He hesitated, searching for exactly the right word and brought it out with enthusiasm, "it's got a _clean_ smell, if you get me, like a nice girl after a bath! I've got daughters of my own," he added in whimsical justification of his metaphor.

The Frenchman had been watching him with appreciative eyes. "Mr. Hale, I see that, like so many of your countrymen, you are a real artist in your line, and you have the artist's flavor."

The American was disconcerted by this characterization. "Who? Me? I know a good thing when I see it, that's all, and that's _business_, that's not art."

The Frenchman smiled with the amused, respectful sympathy which men of his race so often feel for their American contemporaries. "Well, and what did you do when you discovered this miraculous cold cream?"

Mr. Hale laughed, a young, vigorous laugh which made his gray hair seem a paradox. "Well, you've guessed it. I threw a fit, first of all. I was taken off my feet, and I wouldn't be surprised if I acted like a cat over catnip. So I decided I'd better go away and cool off before I did anything rash. I bought a couple of pots and went back to the hotel to sleep on it. That's something I always try to do, Monsieur Portier, before I let myself in for a _big_ proposition; and I meant this to be big, all right. I wanted to see if that cold cream seemed as good after twenty-four hours as it did at first. Well, it did, and _then_ some! So I got the Swede porter at my hotel, who can talk some English, to go back with me. And I started in to ask the old fellow all about it.

Right there I struck a difference. After the way I'd gone on, an American, when I went back the next day, would have been wondering what I was trying to take away from him; but my old friend was just as pleased as a mother is when you tell her she's got a pretty baby. In fact he reminded me of that, the way he talked. So glad to tell me all about it. I got the impression before he got through that it was a member of the family. I don't mean, of course, that he told me how he made it. I wouldn't have let him if he'd started to. But he told me everything else. To begin with, he told me that his folks have been pharmacists right there for more than a hundred years! _A hundred years_ in that little shop in that little street in that little town! I tell you, Monsieur Portier, I never can get used to the way your people stay put."

The Frenchman looked grave. "Perhaps too much so, Mr. Hale."

"Anyhow, he said they had the recipe, the first recipe for that cold cream in his great-grandfather's handwriting. He said there'd been some talk always in the family about its having come from his great-grandfather's father, who had sold toilet specialties to Marie Antoinette, the queen, you know. He said he himself didn't take much stock in that story because everybody in France, more or less, claimed to have a great-grandfather who'd had dealings with Marie Antoinette, but I just thought to myself what a good smart advertis.e.m.e.nt agency could do with that item ... you could see it on every billboard between New York and San Francisco ... 'Marie Antoinette's own cold cream, rediscovered recipe.' If you've been in America, you can imagine."

"Yes," said the Frenchman, "I can imagine."

"He said, of course, they had not stuck absolutely to that recipe just as it stood. His grandfather had made some changes, experimented with it all his life, and his father had changed the proportions, just little shadings, with years in between, to think them over and to be sure they were right. But he himself had changed it the most, because modern chemistry had let him subst.i.tute for one ingredient that had never been just right, something else that exactly filled the bill. Do you know, Monsieur Portier, as he stood there telling me how, for a hundred years, three generations of his folks had concentrated on that, I said to myself: 'By George, there's a _reason_! No wonder it's better than any of our get-there-quick products. They've certainly got us beat.'"

To this handsome tribute the Frenchman replied dubiously: "It is very generous, Mr. Hale, to say such a thing. But since taking over the work on this committee I have had periods of great depression when it has seemed to me that no power on earth, not even American energy from which I hope a great deal, could ever move our trades-people from their century-old habits of business inertia and lack of enterprise."

"Well, I understand that, too," agreed the American sympathetically; "I certainly do, because that's just what I've come to see you about. We went on with our confab, my old friend and I, and he showed me his books to show how the sale of the cold cream had grown since they began on it.

It seems they've had quite a lot of their customers for sixty or seventy years. Not Versailles people at all, you know, people from all over, people who had tried it once and never would have another, and I don't blame them. He's got quite a lot of aristocrats on his list. He showed me names on his account book that made it look like a history of France.

Well, the sum-total of it came to this. His grandfather sold on an average three hundred pots a year, which was good for those days; in his father's time it went up, so he said, astonis.h.i.+ngly, to fifteen hundred pots a year; but he had done even better, and in his little factory-laboratory that he'd had to enlarge, he made four thousand pots a year and sold them all. 'More than _ten times_ what his grandfather had done.'"

In repeating these statistics he reproduced with an ironical exactness the tone of self-congratulation of the pharmacist. The man before him fell into the little trap, remarking innocently: "That is indeed making a remarkable enlargement."

The American sat up straight in his chair so suddenly that he gave the effect of having leaped to his feet. "_Remarkable!_ Why, it was all I could do to keep from sitting right down and crying. Remarkable! Why, with the article he has there, the family ought to have been millionaires a generation ago! Anybody with a particle of business imagination would have put it on the bathroom shelf of every family in Christendom." He went on, more quietly: "I said something of that to the old fellow and I tried, through that hotel porter, to make him understand what my proposition was, to take up his cold cream. To take it up strong. I outlined my plan for the advertising campaign, I told him some of the figures of our toilet preparations market, and I told him I'd guarantee him in less than six months' time to have a demand for fifteen hundred gross pots and by the end of the first year it would pa.s.s the four thousand gross mark. I told him just how I could get him credit on the easiest terms for the enlargement of his plant ... one of our Merchants' a.s.sociations is prepared to give credit to French and Belgian firms, and I was just starting in to explain how it wouldn't be any risk for him at all, and absolute certain big profits for him and his son ... he's got a son at the front now who's pa.s.sed his pharmacist's examination and is ready to go on with his father's business...."