Short Stories of the New America Part 3

"You don't suppose _that's_ any obstacle!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the other woman.

"But I never had _any_thing to do with sick people," said Ellen. "I'm the office-manager of a big hardware firm in Kansas."

Mrs. Putnam gasped like a drowning person coming to the surface. "You _are!_" she cried. "You don't happen to know shorthand, do you?"

"Gracious! of course I know shorthand!" said Ellen, her astonishment proving her competence.

Mrs. Putnam laid down her hammer and drew another long breath. "How much time can you give us?" she asked. "Two afternoons a week? Three?"

"Oh, _my!_" said Ellen, "I can give you all my time, from eight in the morning till six at night. That's what I came for."

Mrs. Putnam looked at her a moment as though to a.s.sure herself that she was not dreaming, and then, seizing her by the arm, she propelled her rapidly towards the back of the room, and through a small door into a dingy little room with two desks in it. Among the heaped-up papers on one of these a blond young woman with inky fingers sought wildly something which she did not find. She said without looking up: "Oh, Aunt Maria, I've just discovered that that s.h.i.+pment of clothes from Louisville got acknowledged to the people in Seattle! And I can't find that letter from the woman in Indianapolis who offered to send children's s.h.i.+rts from her husband's factory. You said you laid it on your desk, last night, but I _cannot_ find it. And do you remember what you wrote Mrs. Worthington? Did you say anything about the shoes?"

Ellen heard this but dimly, her gaze fixed on the confusion of the desks which made her physically dizzy to contemplate. Never had she dreamed that papers, sacred records of fact, could be so maltreated. In a reflex response to the last question of the lovely, distressed young lady she said: "Why don't you look at the carbon copy of the letter to Mrs.

Worthington?"

"_Copy!_" cried the young lady, aghast. "Why, we don't begin to have time to write the letters _once_, let alone _copy_ them!"

Ellen gazed horrified into an abyss of ignorance which went beyond her utmost imaginings. She said feebly, "If you kept your letters in a letter-file, you wouldn't ever lose them."

"There," said Mrs. Putnam, in the tone of one unexpectedly upheld in a rather bizarre opinion, "I've been saying all the time we ought to have a letter-file. But do you suppose you could _buy_ one in Paris?" She spoke dubiously from the point of view of one who had bought nothing but gloves and laces and old prints in Paris.

Ellen answered with the certainty of one who had found the Y. W. C. A.

in Paris: "I'm sure you can. Why, they could not do business a _minute_ without letter-files."

Mrs. Putnam sank into a chair with a sigh of bewilderment and fatigue, and showed herself to be as truly a superior person as she looked by making the following speech to the newcomer: "The truth is, Miss...."

"Boardman," supplied Ellen.

"Miss Boardman, the fact is that we are trying to do something which is beyond us, something we ought never to have undertaken. But we didn't know we were undertaking it, you see. And now that it is begun, it must not fail. All the wonderful American good-will which has materialized in that room full of packing-cases must not be wasted, must get to the people who need it so direly. It began this way. We had no notion that we would have so great an affair to direct. My niece and I were living here when the war broke out. Of course we gave all our own clothes we could spare and all the money we could for the refugees. Then we wrote home to our American friends. One of my letters was published by chance in a New York paper and copied in a number of others. Everybody who happened to know my name"-(Ellen heard afterwards that she was of the holy of holies of New England families)-"began sending me money and boxes of clothing. It all arrived so suddenly, so unexpectedly. We had to rent this place to put the things in. The refugees came in swarms. We found ourselves overwhelmed. It is impossible to find an English-speaking stenographer who is not already more than overworked.

The only help we get is from volunteers, a good many of them American society girls like that one you...." she paused to invent a sufficiently savage characterization and hesitated to p.r.o.nounce it. "Well, most of them are not quite so absurd as that. But none of them know any more than we do about keeping accounts, letters...."

Ellen broke in: "How do you keep your accounts, anyhow? Bound ledger, or the loose-leaf system?"

They stared. "I have been careful to set down everything I could _remember_ in a little note-book," said Mrs. Putnam.

Ellen looked about for a chair and sat down on it hastily. When she could speak again, after a moment of silent collecting of her forces she said: "Well, I guess the first thing to do is to get a letter-file. I don't know any French, so I probably couldn't get it. If one of you could go...."

The pretty young lady sprang for her hat. "I'll go! I'll go, Auntie."

"And," continued Ellen, "you can't do anything till you keep copies of your letters and you can't make copies unless you have a typewriter.

Don't you suppose you could rent one?"

"I'll rent one before I come back," said Eleanor, who evidently lacked neither energy nor good-will. She said to Mrs. Putnam: "I'm going, instead of you, so that you can superintend opening those boxes. They are making a most horrible mess of it, I know."

"Before a single one is opened, you ought to take down the name and address of the sender, and then note the contents," said Ellen, speaking with authority. "A card-catalogue would be a good system for keeping that record, I should think, with dates of the arrival of the cases. And why couldn't you keep track of your refugees that way, too? A card for each family, with a record on it of the number in the family and of everything given. You could refer to it in a moment, and carry it out to the room where the refugees are received."

They gazed at her plain, sallow countenance in rapt admiration.

"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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 _dejeuners_, 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-cla.s.s 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 nave 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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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 G.o.d. 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 h.e.l.l,-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 s.h.i.+vered 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 grat.i.tude which greeted her timid overtures, did not leave her so helplessly swamped in confusion. She stammered out her little phrase with a shy, embarra.s.sed smile and withdrew as soon as possible from the hearty handshake which was nearly always the subst.i.tute 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.

Once her little phrase brought out an unexpected response from a rough-looking man who sat beside her on the bench waiting for his train, his eyes fixed gloomily on his great soldier's shoes. She offered him, shamefacedly, a little sewing-kit which she herself had manufactured, a pad of writing-paper and some envelopes. He started, came out of his bitter brooding, looked at her astonished, and, as they all did without exception, read in her plain, earnest face what she was. He touched his battered trench helmet in a sketched salute and thanked her. She answered as usual that she was sorry she could not understand French, being an American. To her amazement he answered in fluent English, with an unmistakable New York tw.a.n.g: "Oh, you are, are you? Well, so'm I.

Brought up there from the time I was a kid. But all my folks are French and my wife's French and I couldn't give the old country the go-by when trouble came."

In the conversation which followed Ellen learned that his wife was expecting their first child in a few weeks ... "that's why she didn't come to see me off. She said it would just about kill her to watch me getting on the train.... Maybe you think it's easy to leave her all alone ... the poor kid!" The tears rose frankly to his eyes. He blew his nose.

"Maybe I could do something for her," suggested Ellen, her heart beating fast at the idea.

"Gee! Yes! If you'd go to see her! She talks a little Englis.h.!.+" he cried. He gave her the name and address, and when that poilu went back to the front it was Ellen Boardman from Marshallton, Kansas, who walked with him to the gate, who shook hands with him, who waved him a last salute as he boarded his train.

The next night she did not go to the station. She went to see the wife.

The night after that she was sewing on a baby's wrapper as she sat in the Gare de l'Est, turning her eyes away in shame from the intolerable sorrow of those with families, watching for those occasional solitary or very poor ones whom alone she ventured to approach with her timidly proffered tokens of sympathy.

At the Y. W. C. A. opinions varied about her. She was patently to every eye respectable to her last drop of pale blood. And yet _was_ it quite respectable to go offering chocolate and writing-paper to soldiers you'd never seen before? Everybody knew what soldiers were! Some one finally decided smartly that her hat was a sufficient protection. It is true that her hat was not becoming, but I do not think it was what saved her from misunderstanding.

She did not always go to the Gare de l'Est every evening now. Sometimes she spent them in the little dormer-windowed room where the wife of the New York poilu waited for her baby. Several evenings she spent chasing elusive information from the American Ambulance Corps as to exactly the conditions in which a young man without money could come to drive an ambulance in France ... the young man without money being of course the reporter on the Marshallton _Herald_.

It chanced to be on one of the evenings when she was with the young wife that the need came. She sat on the stairs outside till nearly morning.

When it was quiet, she took the little new citizen of the Republic in her arms, tears of mingled thanksgiving and dreadful fear raining down her face, because another man-child had been born into the world. Would _he_ grow up only to say farewell at the Gare de l'Est? Oh, she was not sorry that she had come to France to help in that war. She understood now, she understood.

It was Ellen who wrote to the father the letter announcing the birth of a child which gave him the right to another precious short furlough. It was Ellen who went down to the Gare de l'Est, this time to the joyful wait on the muddy street outside the side door from which the returning _permissionnaires_ issued forth, caked with mud to their eyes. It was Ellen who had never before "been kissed by a man" who was caught in a pair of dingy, horizon-blue arms and soundly saluted on each sallow cheek by the exultant father. It was Ellen who was made as much of a G.o.dmother as her Protestant affiliations permitted ... and oh, it was Ellen who made the fourth at the end of the furlough when (the first time the new mother had left her room) they went back to the Gare de l'Est. At the last it was Ellen who held the sleeping baby when the husband took his wife in that long, bitter embrace; it was Ellen who was not surprised or hurt that he turned away without a word to her ... she understood that ... it was Ellen whose arm was around the trembling young wife as they stood, their faces pressed against the barrier to see him for the last time; it was Ellen who went back with her to the silent desolation of the little room, who put the baby into the slackly hanging arms, and watched, her eyes burning with unshed tears, those arms close about the little new inheritor of humanity's woes....

Four months from the time she landed in Paris her money was almost gone and she was quitting the city with barely enough in her pocket to take her back to Marshallton. As simply as she had come to Paris, she now went home. She _belonged_ to Marshallton. It was a very good thing for Marshallton that she did.

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.