The Sisters In Law Part 47

Kirkpatrick, who had started on one of the pa.s.senger s.h.i.+ps leaving New York for the International Socialist Congress, climbed ignominiously over the side and returned to the great ironic city on a tug.

III

Two letters came from Olive to Alexina and one to each of her other old friends, imploring them to come over and help. They could nurse. They could run canteens. Oeuvres. She wanted to show France what her friends, her countrywomen, could do.

But the war would be over in three months.... Only Judge Lawton believed it would be a long war. Others hardly comprehended there was a war at all.... Such things don't happen in these days. (Who in that wondrous smiling land could think upon war anywhere?) ... It would be too funny if it were not for those dreadful pictures of the Belgian refugees.... Poor things.... Maria and other good women immediately began knitting for them ... sat for hours on the verandahs, all in white, knitting, knitting ... but talking of anything of war.... It simply was a horrid dream and soon would be over.... Their husbands all said so ... three months.... German army irresistible ... modern implements of war must annihilate whole armies very quickly, and the Germans had the most and the best.... Rotten shame (said Burlingame) and the Germans not even good sportsmen.

James Kirkpatrick, who avoided his former pupils, consoled himself with the thought that at least Britain would be licked ... she'd get what was coming to her, all right, and Ireland would be free.... Anyhow it would soon be over.... When April nineteen-seventeen came he d.a.m.ned the socialist party for its att.i.tude and enlisted: "I was a man and an American first, wasn't I?" he wrote to Alexina. "I guess your flag ...

oh, h.e.l.l! (Excuse me.)"

IV

In December, nineteen-fourteen, Alexina and Alice Thornd.y.k.e (who grasped the entering wedge with both ruthless white little hands) went to France. Aileen was not strong enough to nurse so she bade a pa.s.sionate good-by to her friends and engaged herself to Bob Cheever.

Jimmie Thorne went to France as an ambulance driver, and Bascom Luning to join the Lafayette Escadrille. Gora sailed six months later to offer her services to England. In the case of a nurse there was much red tape to unravel.

A fair proportion of the women left behind continued to knit. As time went on branches of certain French war-relief organizations were formed, and run by such capable women as Mrs. Thornton and Mrs. Hunter, who had many friends among the American women living in France; now toiling day and night at their oeuvres.

Alexina and Olive de Morsigny, after a year of nursing, when what little flesh they had left could stand no more, founded an oeuvre of their own, and Sibyl Bascom and Aileen Cheever did fairly well with a branch in San Francisco, Alexina's relatives quite wonderfully in New York and Boston; although they were already interested in many others.

V

Certain interests in California, notably the orchards and canneries, were violently anti-British during the first years of the war, as the blockade shut off their immense exports to Germany, and those that failed, or closed temporarily, realized the incredible: that a war in Europe could affect California, even as the Civil War affected the textile factories of England. To them it was a matter of indifference, until nineteen-seventeen, who won the war so long as one side smashed the other and was quick about it.

Owners and directors of copper mines--but let us draw a veil over the sincere robust instincts of human nature.

The Club of Seven Arts was proudly and vociferously pro-German. Not that they cared a ha'penny d.a.m.n really for Germany, but it was a far more original att.i.tude than all this sobbing over France ... and then there was Reinhardt, the Secessionist School, the adorable jugendstyl.

And the atrocity stories were all lies anyway. The bourgeois president resigned, but no one else paid any attention to them.

In nineteen-seventeen a few declared themselves pacifists and conscientious objectors, and, little recking what they were in for, marched off triumphantly to a military prison, feeling like Christ and longing for a public cross.

The others, those that were young enough, shouldered a gun and went to the front with high hearts and hardened muscles. Democracy uber alles.

The women enlisted in the Red Cross and the Y.W.C.A., and worked with grim enthusiasm, either at home or in France.

VI

By this time California, almost on another planet as she was, with her abundance unchecked, and her skies smiling for at least three-fourths of the year, admitted there was a real war in the world, as bad (or worse) as any you could read about in history. The war films in the motion picture houses were quite wonderful, but too terrible.

They also discussed it, especially on those days when the streets echoed with the march of departing regiments in khaki, or one's own son, or one's friend's son enlisted or was drafted, or it was their day at Red Cross headquarters.

All the older women were at work now, and all but the most irreclaimably frivolous of the young ones. Even Tom and Maria Abbott made no protest against Joan's joining the Woman's Motor Corps; and, dressed in a smart, gray, boyish uniform, she drove her car at all hours of the day and night. She was not only sincerely anxious to serve, but she knew, and sheltered girls all over the land knew,--to say nothing of the younger married women--that this was the beginning of their real independence, the knell of the old order. They were freed. Even the reenforced concrete minds of the last generation imperceptibly crumbled and were as imperceptibly modernized in the rebuilding.

A good many of the women, old and young, continued to gamble furiously out of their hours of work; but the majority of the girls did not.

Those with naturally serious minds were absorbed, uplifted, keen, calculating. They did not even dance. They realized that they had wonderful futures in a changing world. It was "up to them."

VII

Mortimer was beyond the draft age, but, possibly owing to his gallant fearless appearance, it was rather expected that he would enlist. He did not, however, nor did he join the Red Cross or the Y.M.C.A., nor volunteer for some Government work, as so many of the men of his age and cla.s.s were doing as a matter of course.

War news bored him excessively. He was making two or three hundred dollars a month; he lived at the Club when Maria Abbott occupied Ballinger House--Tom went to Was.h.i.+ngton--and he was extremely comfortable. In the Club he always felt like a blood, forgot for the time being that he was not a rich man, like the majority of its members, and there was always a group of nice quiet contented fellows, glad to play bridge with him in the evening. On the whole, he congratulated himself, he had not done so badly, although he had resigned all hope of being a millionaire--unless he made a lucky strike.... But it did not make so much difference in California ... and when Alexina had had enough of horrors they would settle down again very comfortably to the old life.... There was very good dancing at the restaurants (upstairs) where one met nice girls of sorts who didn't care a hang about this infernal war ... one of them ... but he was extremely careful ... he would never be divorced; that was positive ...

as for society he did not miss it particularly ... the dancing at the restaurants was better and he didn't have to talk ... whether people stopped asking him or not, now that his wife was away, or whether they entertained or not, didn't so much matter. He had the Club. That was the all important pivot of his life, his altar, his fetish ... a lot he cared what went so long as he had that.

BOOK IV

CHAPTER I

I

The Emba.s.sy was a blinding glare of light from the ground floor to the upper story, visible above the wide staircase. After four years of legal tenebration it was obvious that the amba.s.sador's intention was to celebrate the Armistice as well as the visit of his King to Paris with an almost impish demonstration of the recaptured right to extravagance, obliterate the dry economical past. The amba.s.sador's country might be intolerably poor after the war, but like many other prudent n.o.bles he had invested money in North and South America, and was able to entertain his sovereign out of his private purse. He had made up his mind to give the first brilliant function following the sudden end of La Grande Guerre and one that it would be difficult for even Paris to eclipse.

All Paris had burst forth into illumination of street and shop after nightfall, but Alexina had seen no such concentrated blaze as this; and her eyes, long accustomed to a solitary globe high in the ceiling of her room, blinked a little, strong as they were. She had come with the Marquis and Marquise de Morsigny, and after they had pa.s.sed the long receiving line where the King in his simple worn uniform stood beside the resplendent amba.s.sador, her friends' attention had been diverted to a group of acquaintances chattering excitedly over the startling munificence that seemed to them prophetic of a swift renaissance.

They moved off unconsciously, and Alexina remained alone near one of the long windows behind the receiving line; but she felt secure in her insignificance and quite content to gaze uninterruptedly at the greatest function she had ever seen. After the bitter hard work, the long monotonies, the brief terrible excitements, of the past four years, and the depressed febrile atmosphere of Paris during the last year when avions dropped their bombs nearly every night, and Big Bertha struck terror to each quarter in turn, this gay and gorgeous scene recalled one's most extravagant dreams of fairy-land and Arabia; and Alexina felt like a very young girl. Even the almost constant sensation of fatigue, mental and bodily, fell from her as she forgot that she had worked from nine until six for three years in her oeuvre, often walking the miles to and from her hotel or pension to avoid the crowded trains; the distasteful food; the tremors that had shaken even her tempered soul when the flas.h.i.+ng of the German guns, drawing ever nearer, could be seen at night on the horizon.

And Paris had been so dark!

She reveled almost sensuously in the excessiveness of the contrast, quite unconcerned that her white gown was several years out of date.

For that matter there were few gowns, in these vast rooms, of this year's fas.h.i.+on. Although Paris had begun to dance wildly the day the Armistice was declared, not only in sheer reaction from a long devotion to its ideal of duty, but that the American officers should have the opportunity to discover the loveliness and charm of the French maiden, the women had not yet found time to renew their wardrobes, and the only gowns in the room less than four years old were worn by the newly arrived Americans of the Peace Commission and the ladies of the Emba.s.sy. The most striking figures were the French Generals in their horizon blue uniforms and rows of orders on their hardy chests.

Of jewels there were few. When the German drive in March seemed irresistible, jewels had been sent to distant estates, or to banks in Ma.r.s.eilles and Lyons, and there had been no time to retrieve them after the amba.s.sador sent out his sudden invitations. Alexina smiled as she recalled Olive de Morsigny's lament over the absence of her tiara.

European women of society take their jewels very seriously, and there was not a Frenchwoman present who did not possess a tiara, however old-fas.h.i.+oned.

But the cold luminosity of jewels would have been extinguished to-night under this really terrific down-pour of light. The tall candelabra against the tapestried or the white and gold walls were relieved of duty; Paris had had enough of candlelight; the four immense chandeliers of this reception room, either of which would have illuminated a restaurant, had been rewired and blazed like suns. Suspended from the ceiling, festooned between the candelabra and the chandeliers, were cl.u.s.ters and loops of gla.s.s tupils and roses, each concealing an electric bulb. Alexina reflected that the soft haze of candles might be more artistic and becoming, but was grateful nevertheless for this rather tasteless fury of light, symptomatic as it was; and understood the amba.s.sador's revolt against the enforced economies of a long war, his desire to do honor to his una.s.suming little sovereign.