On the Edge of the War Zone | Page 9

you had
been here you would have enjoyed it--and her.
I knew something was as it should not be when I saw her pushing the
little wheelbarrow on which were all my waste-baskets--I have needed
them. But when I got them back, it about finished my attempts at
sobriety. I told her to put them on the dining-room table and I would
unpack them and put the contents in place. But before that was done, I
had to listen to her "tale of woe."
She had hidden practically everything--clocks, bed and table linen, all
her mattresses, except the ones she and Père slept on, practically all
their clothes, except what they had on their backs and one change. I had
not given it much thought, though I do remember her saying, when the
subterranean passage was sealed up: "Let the Boches come! They'll
find mighty little in my house."
Well--the clocks are rusted. They are soaking in kerosene now, and I
imagine it is little good that will do them. All her linen is damp and
smelly, and much of it is mildewed. As for the blankets and flannels--
ough!
I felt sympathetic, and tried to appear so. But I was in the condition of
"L'homme qui rit." The smallest effort to express an emotion tended to
make me grimace horribly. She was so funny. I was glad when she
finished saying naughty words about herself, and declaring that
"Madame was right not to upset her house," and that the next time the
Boches thought of coming here they would be welcome to anything she
had. "For," she ended, "I'll never get myself into this sort of a mess
again, my word of honor!" And she marched out of the house, carrying
the bottle of eau de Javelle with her. The whole hamlet smells of it this

minute.
I had a small-sized fit of hysterics after she had gone, and it was not
cured by opening up my waste-baskets and laying out the "treasures"
she had saved for me. I laughed until I cried.
There were my bouillion cups, and no saucers. The saucers were piled
in the buffet. There were half-a-dozen decorated plates which had stood
on end in the buffet,--just as color notes--no value at all. There were
bits of silver, and nearly all the plated stuff. There was an old painted
fan, several strings of beads, a rosary which hung on a nail at the head
of my bed, a few bits of jewelry--you know how little I care for
jewelry,--and there were four brass candlesticks.
The only things I had missed at all were the plated things. I had not had
teaspoons enough when the English were here--not that they cared.
They were quite willing to stir their tea with each other's spoons, since
there was plenty of tea,--and a "stick" went with it.
You cannot deny that it had its funny side.
I could not help asking myself, even while I wiped tears of laughter
from my eyes, if most of the people I saw flying four weeks ago might
not have found themselves in the same fix when it came to taking stock
of what was saved and what was lost.
I remember so well being at Aix-les-Bains, in 1899, when the Hotel du
Beau-Site was burned, and finding a woman in a wrapper sitting on a
bench in the park in front of the burning hotel, with the lace waist of an
evening frock in one hand, and a small bottle of alcohol in the other.
She explained to me, with some emotion, that she had gone back, at the
risk of her life, to get the bottle from her dressing-table, "for fear that it
would explode!"
It did not take me half an hour to get my effects in order, but poor
Amélie's disgust seems to increase with time. You can't deny that if I
had been drummed out and came back to find my house a ruin, my
books and pictures destroyed, and only those worthless bits of china
and plated ware to "start housekeeping again," it would have been
humorous. Real humor is only exaggeration. That would surely have
been a colossal exaggeration.
It is not the first time I have had to ask myself, seriously, "Why this
mania for possession?" The ferryman on the Styx is as likely to take it
across as our railroad is to "handle" it today. Yet nothing seems able to

break a person born with that mania for collecting.
I stood looking round at it all when everything was in place, and I
realized that if the disaster had come, I should have found it easy to
reconcile myself to it in an epoch where millions were facing it with
me. It is the law of