Part 6

In spite of the sound of cannon and the smarting of my eyes from the strain of the tiny Gothic print, for a moment within myself an almost equal feeling of harmony arose, taking a form of Peace, like an antique statue, free yet restrained, noble yet persuasive; bearing no one’s mark, nor any signs of workmanship, except that stamped by its own beauty. Then it vanished, leaving the little book to throb between my hands to the beat of my own times. Though generations had passed on and other wars were being fought, and the word “freedom” was again on every lip, as always, the women, the children, the old, were paying the heaviest tithes of invasion. Had I not seen like streams of fugitive populations flooding into Paris that hideous spring of 1918, heard the cries of anguish from those fleeing before an enemy army? Then also death and birth waited not on circumstance, and love and hate, fear and hope, hurry and exhaustion, were at work in strange commingling. I had seen deeds of succor, too, like unto those of the lovers, proffered in boundless devotion, by nameless, uncounted men and women, coming from the world’s ends to minister to its woe.

A vision of _toux ceux qui ont bu à la coupe amère de cette époque_ passed before me. Deeply sighing, I at last put out my light, thinking “war is war,” needing no adjectives, and of the changelessness of the human heart, however the formulas may be multiplied and renewed; and forever _Væ victis_!

VII

THE HOUSES OF THE CHANOINESSES

THE COMMANDANT TRACES THE RECONQUERED TRIANGLE ON MY MAP. THE MILITARY MISSION

_Monday, November 4th._—Dreamed of old griefs and awakened with the heavy taste their memory can even now distil. Raining. The yellow-and-brown carpet under the lindens of the Place du Chapitre is wet and dull and the few leaves still on the trees are soft and heavy, the houses damp and shabby. “The old wounds burn,” even here, where all is new and bright, and fancy flings itself delicately, amorously, consolingly about the pleasant happenings of each day.... Fortunately my breakfast is brought early by a smiling maid, who enters, bringing with her the aroma of fresh tea and the delicately scented, dark-green, liquid honey of these pine forests. There is that blessed volatilization of night-grief, and I arise to another pleasant day, knowing once again, however, that everywhere the old ghosts find one....

The rainy light coming in seems but to darken the oak-paneled room. What there is of wall-paper is a darkish blue with a narrow frieze of red. The curtains are stripes of red-and-blue cloth. Even the daytime cover of the very comfortable eider-downed bed is of the same red-and-blue-striped stuff. It was because they were the colors of the French uniform that the young man once living herein, under German rule, chose them.

But he himself is gone, gone the hope of his house. One of his sisters was saying to me last night as I tarried for a few minutes in the little sitting-room, where I had first found them all rehanging the portraits of their ancestors:

“The price for peace is so high and terrifying that one can’t yet rejoice in it. Rather one says to oneself in desolation, ‘and all that was so precious is gone, that in the end one may sit around deserted fireplaces, or try to find shelter under bombarded roofs, and be at grips with the terrible _après-guerre_!’” And of her brother:

“At least he fell for the cause that is so dear to us;” she added after a moment’s silence, “it might so easily have been otherwise.”

I have noticed everywhere a great pride tempering grief over fallen beloved dead. Even in mothers’ hearts this pride is strong enough to console. They know why their sons were born, and to many a death of glory has been as a second birth; he whom they lost is, in some way, laid a second time, bright, beautiful, complete, in their arms, and _safe_ from life. And they are blessed who so mourn.

Sometimes there are further griefs. I knew a mother of twin sons; one had fallen far away, a gentle, young, musician son, in a fierce, unequal conflict, whose details she was not spared; the other had been brought back to her on his twenty-first birthday a sightless stump. I cannot forget her as she stood, tall, black-veiled, by a pillared door, like an antique statue of grief, her eyes as dry as marble eyes. And though she, too, said:

“At least I know why I bore them, and it was for something more than myself,” the obsession of a further grief was in her eyes as she added, “_I must not die first_—and he is so young!”

Here on the borderland I find there is often an additional reason for pride, where Fate, which could so easily have willed it otherwise, sometimes has allowed the beloved to die for the beloved cause, as did the brother whose room is now mine. And this is his story, or rather the end of it. Those first four days of August, 1914, he had gone about the mountain heights and passes with his field-glass continually at his eyes to see if help were not coming from the hills in the guise of the _pantalons rouges_. But on the fourth day he was obliged to accompany his regiment into Germany, where he stayed three months. On hearing of the battle of the Marne through a French prisoner, he cried, “_Nous avons eu là une belle victoire!_” (“We have had a great victory!”) and he was put under arrest. His one idea being to desert, he asked to go into the lines again, knowing there would be no opportunity, if he remained in prison, training recruits. His chance came when he was fighting against the English in the north. His chiefs being killed or wounded, he, as under-officer, found himself in command of a company of a hundred and fifty men. With him deserted ninety-seven others. Later, he fell fighting in the French lines near Tahure. And this (it is perhaps much) is all I know of him or ever shall; if he were beloved of a woman or had loved many, I know not. He, the last of his race, took his name with him to the grave.

All that surrounds me as I write was his. His the full bookshelves, with an elaborate set of a _Geschichte der Literatur_, and a _Welt-Geschichte_ in many volumes, his the books of early boyhood, of travel, the many old, little books of prayer in tooled and beveled bindings of a generation or two ago, and the piles of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. Two eighteenth-century maps hang on the walls, one of “Alsatia,” with queer German names for familiar places, and another of “Gallia,” and there is an incomparable, white, porcelain stove which heats quickly and gives out its pleasant heat during long hours.

On a little corner shelf is an old engraving of the last _chanoinesse_ of the Chapter of Masevaux, Xavière de Ferrette. She is dressed in full canonicals, with a large ruched coif and ermine-trimmed mantle; some high order in a Maltese-cross design is suspended from the broad ribbon worn across her breast, and in her hands is a richly embossed prayer-book.

The long face with its immensely high forehead has a full-lipped, very human mouth, and in the right, upper corner is her sixteen-quartered coat of arms.

The story of the Chapter would make good, though long, reading, for, like many other things in this part of the world, it begins with Charlemagne and ends with the French Revolution. Of both France seems equally proud, and certainly _il y en a pour tous les goûts_.

Women always seem to have had great influence on the life of their times in Alsace. Not even those with the vote and all the rights, together with all the privileges of our times, can pretend to half the influence of certain holy women of the so-called dark ages. They built on hilltops and in valleys those many citadels of peace whose traces still are to be seen, where life was free from violence, and, like sweet odors uncorked, their good deeds have perfumed the ages. Saint-Odile, _Vierge Candide et Forte_, daughter of Duke Atalric, is patroness of Alsace, and in her many have sought the feminine ideal of the Alsatian soul; and there are Saint-Richarde, tried by fire for a guiltless love, wife of Louis the Fat, and Herrade, Abbess of Hohenburg, author of the famous _Hortus Deliciarum_, preserved through seven centuries and destroyed in the siege of Strasbourg in 1870. These are but a few, and the histories of the secular dwellers in the Rhine Valley, spectacular though they were, seem often quite colorless contrasted with those of these saints of the Holy Roman Empire.

The first monks and pilgrims to come to Alsace were from Ireland (the last of these before the very end of the world will doubtless also come from Erin). It would appear that even in those days it could not be said of the Irish that they were neither hot nor cold, which is probably one of the reasons “why God loves them.” In the lovely rivered plains and great forests of the Rhine Valley it was they who built the first chapels and traced the first paths. It was an Irish monk whom Atalric, hoping for a son, consulted before the birth of his daughter; but of Saint-Odile another time.

The house next the one wherein I dwell was that of the abbess, and now belongs to Madame Auguste Lauth.

It, too, has a beautiful stairway, with a time-polished oaken balustrade, and it contains the great room of noble proportions and lovely panelings (still heated by the celebrated porcelain stove, fit only for a museum), where the ladies of the Chapter assembled in their rich toilets and great coifs to go to the church, reached by a two-storied gallery, which old prints show as having a most distinguished air, with its sloping roof pierced with oval windows and its pleasant proportions. But the upper story and the roof were done away with in the nineteenth century, which has demolished so much (not always in heat of battle), and it is now but a long, formless building used for some sort of storehouse connected with the Koechlin manufactories. And the way the six houses came to be constructed was this:

The Abbess Xavière de Ferrette, a woman of resolution and energy, as one can easily see by the high forehead and long jaw, becoming alarmed at the increasing expenses of the Chapter and the equally decreasing revenues, decided on some radical remedies. Through the Middle Ages, down to her time, the _chanoinesses_ had lived under one roof, and, according to the holy rule, ate together. But with them fared so many outsiders, their friends and their friends’ friends, with their domestics, that they found themselves being literally eaten out of house and home. The abbess called a solemn meeting wherein they arranged for the building of separate houses, whose construction was given into the hands of Kléber, then architect and inspector of the royal buildings at Belfort. Pictures of Kléber, known rather impersonally to Americans by the Parisian avenue that bears his name, abound in Alsace, and show a sensitive, artistic face, with a pleasure-loving mouth above a short chin, and a halo of light, curly hair. He met an early death in Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign. “_Il avait six pieds en tout_,” his contemporaries were wont admiringly to say of him.

In these separate houses, with garden attached, each _chanoinesse_ was to live alone with her _demoiselle_, who at her death would step into her very comfortable shoes, and the abbess only was to receive guests in the name of the Chapter.

The house I lodged in was that of the Chanoinesse von Reutner. These dames had to make their titles very clear to their earthly mansions, each having to possess sixteen quarterings evenly balanced, eight on her father’s side and eight on her mother’s side. Gentlemen were chosen to give their word on this somewhat elusive subject, and methought ’twas well they didn’t have to put their hand in the fire at the same time, for what can be sworn to with certainty of those things which have their origin on the mysterious borderland of the emotions? However....

The _chanoinesses_ belonged mostly to the great families of Alsace, the Masevaux, the Ferrettes, though the records show many German names like Furstenburg and Seckingen, or French like Beauffrémont and Fontenoy.

Sometimes the Abbey and Chapter were under French domination, sometimes under Austrian, sometimes they would be ceded to noble families like those of the Counts of Bollwiller and of Fugger, and in many ways their history had been checkered since their foundation in the eighth century.

And as for the Thirty Years’ War, they could have told tales of the Swedish invasion scarcely to be beaten by certain tales of our days. Indeed, so complicated is the history of those times, every shade and branch of combatant having fought against every other shade and branch, in kaleidoscopic changes, that when Turenne, allied with the Spaniards, revolted against the king, Louis XIV, it was a Swede, Rosen by name, who helped the Maréchal du Plessis Praslin to conquer him at Réthel. Rosen, who with his brothers had come originally from Livonia with the armies of Gustavus Adolphus, then promptly put on his standard a tower falling on a rose-bush in full bloom, with the device, _Malgré la Tour les Roses fleuriront_.[11]

In turning over pages concerning the involved chronicles of this borderland, I feel once again that history is, of all things, the most difficult to write, because of having to do with facts, and what more elusive than facts, eternally subjective? Even this simplest record of historic days is as different from one that another might have written about the same things as if it dealt, instead, let us say, with the genial suggestion of letting the Hottentots and the Zulus have their own government. It is that fantasy-awakening thing called temperament that is forever at work with facts, one thing always suggestive of another, rather than explanatory of itself, and I frankly rejoice that the “primrose by the river’s brim” _is_ to me something more than a primrose.

I am now such a long way from the history of the Chapter that there is scarcely time to get back, and so I will finish quickly by saying that in the epoch preceding the Revolution it found itself entangled in various temporal affairs, especially lawsuits with the inhabitants concerning their convenient but disappearing feudal rights. Otherwise life was probably not too strenuous for the _chanoinesses_. As nothing escapes the influence of its hour and age, why should one think the Chapter entirely escaped those of that light, pervading, charming, inconsequent, rich thing known as the eighteenth century, where everything seems to have finished by a song, or a witty quatrain, or by delicious angels holding up holy-water founts in the shape of lovely shells.

_To the popote at 12.15._—Its windows look out on the unmistakably plain timepiece in the church tower, and everybody knows when anybody is late, and just how late, and there’s a nice little green box on the table designed for fines, but only intermittently insisted on.

Commandant Poulet greets me with the words, “At three o’clock to-day Austria ceases hostilities.” Something cruel and red seemed suddenly rolled away.

In a flash I saw that Viennese pre-war world I had known so well, partaking tranquilly of the pleasant things of life, public events making little noise, intellectual passion absent—or discouraged, and things easy, easy—except for those dying of hunger. But that world has been burned to ashes, and the winds of destiny are about to scatter even them.

Then, as usual, some one read the American _communiqué_.

And to the deeds of the First Army must be added those of the National Guard, for the words Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Colorado, New Mexico, New York, New Jersey, are stamped in fadeless red upon the villages and banks of the Meuse.

We talked long, and at two o’clock, as we arose from table, I knew that those others to the east had already arisen from the bitter meal of defeat, and after the manner of human hearts were adjusting themselves to the things that _are_. And perhaps there in Vienna they may not find it so difficult. They’ve been defeated before and they’re far enough east to have a touch of fatalism.

_Later._—Through mist and low-hanging clouds and rain with Captain Bernard to Sewen, where we visited first the school. Neat rows of sabots were in the hallway, all alike to _me_, but it appears some spirit in the feet leads each unmistakably to his or her own pair. A dozen children only were in the schoolroom, the others ill with grippe.

The school-teacher, a tall, horizon-blue-clad Frenchman, with kind eyes and a decoration on his breast, had just finished the dictation. Its subject was _de la viande_ (concerning meat). Looking at the copy-book of the nearest little boy, very blue-eyed, I read _de la fiande_, and his dictation was further embellished by sounds reminiscent of German rule. “_Chez le bourgé, le tinton, le charcoutier, le boutin, le zocisse_,” but as I said, that’s their German ear—and little by little it will be done away with and “French as she is spoke” will take its place. One small boy who wrote a beautiful, copper-plate hand was stone-deaf, but he had dear, questioning eyes and something patient in his being. I asked, when we came out, if nothing could be done for him. But the master said, with a terrible finality, “His father is an alcoholic.”

It is evidently not without result that they distil their _quetsch_ and their _kirsch_, their rose haws and their gentian, and everything else that has the merest embryo of a fruit or a berry or leaf in these pleasant valleys; as to which the bright-eyed, Italian-looking curé initiated us further, as you will see.

Leaving the school, we went to the church, beautifully familiar to me against the sky, but completely and, from our point of view, hopelessly modernized within; though I couldn’t help feeling that for those who come from dingy farms and dung-heaps the crude splendor of that house of God must be greatly comforting.

The old ossuary chapel nearby, with its fifteenth-century vaulting, was crowded with beautiful things from the church at Thann. The carvings on the choir stalls, of the most delicate workmanship, were amusing to boot, nothing human being foreign to the artists that made them. One figure forming an arm-rest had a swollen cheek bound up in a cloth, and, furthermore, he evidently had an ache in the center of his being, for he was doubled up, his hands pressed close to his person in the classic position of one so suffering. Another showed a man leaning over, with delicately modeled back, his head in his hands, but _his_ ache was very manifestly spiritual. Another had a goiter, and monkeys and parrots abounded, the native fancy of the fifteenth century evidently being out on a loose snaffle. A celebrated row of musical angels were so delicately carved, with cymbal and harp and bugle and lyre and flute, that they would be well placed in some vitrine rather than high on a choir stall in a dim Gothic church. The celebrated statue in stone of Saint-Théobald from the column of his fountain at Thann had been brought here for safety, too, and I fingered it as well as many another thing generally beyond reach.

As we came out, the clock in the tower of the church struck three. The great and disastrous Austrian war-act was finished.

It was a moment beyond words, and as we walked silently over to the curé’s house I thought of the cruel, interminable lists of dead and wounded and missing in the Vienna newspapers that winter of 1915, when the Russians were flooding Galicia and spilling over the ridges of the Carpathians. The curé, however, young, with fine, Italian face-bones, and frayed and spotted cassock, somewhat changed our thoughts by bringing out various of the thirty-four specimens of distilled liqueurs which are the pride and playthings of these valleys, explaining to us with snapping eyes special variations of his distillings. Holding a bottle and a glass up against the light in his long, thin _primitif_ hands, he poured me slowly something wrested from the mountain-ash (I had thought I might as well have a completely new sensation), and I went about the rest of the afternoon feeling as if a hot stone were lodged in my breast.

Arrived at Masevaux, we drove to a house on the Place du Chapitre, where I found another interior of the kind I am now familiar with—that of the high and comfortable Alsatian bourgeoisie.

Madame Chagué, large, white-haired, energetic, intelligent, agreeable, received us flanked by an amiable married daughter and a thin, upstanding veteran, his ribbon of honor in his buttonhole. But, to be perfectly frank, the veterans get on my nerves. It’s the picture of what the gorgeous young heroes of our great war will be one day, _sans_ eyes, _sans_ teeth, _sans_ hair, _sans_ everything, and _toutes les fins sont tristes_.

“Now,” said Madame Chagué when once started and tea had been poured (accompanied by cakes you don’t get a chance to serve unless you are _délivré_, and you have to be well delivered, or else never in bondage, to get the chance to eat them), “the government must proceed with a good deal of caution as well as consideration. The Alsatians aren’t like anybody but themselves. They mustn’t lay hands on our little ideas and ways, ‘_ces Messieurs de l’Administration ont compris cela_’ [with an appreciative look at Bernard]. We held on all these years, awaiting the day of deliverance. _Enfin_, for two generations we have looked on the reconquest of Alsace as the coming of heaven upon earth, as if that once come to pass, there would be nothing more to desire.”

She said all these things with an appraising light in her eye; being a clever old lady, in the four years since she had been “delivered,” she had doubtless found that life is life—even though there is a great choice as to whom one wants to live it out with, and how.