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Cornell University Library 
 PS 3525.A1799A7 
 
 Accidentals, 
 
 3 1924 021 771 260 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tiiis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924021771260 
 
OTHER BOOKS Br THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 THE COBWEB CLOAK 
 HALF LOAVES 
 HOUSES OF GLASS 
 STORIES FOR PICTURES 
 
ACCIDENTALS 
 
ACCIDENTALS 
 
 BY 
 
 HELEN MACKAY 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 'HOUSES OF OLASS," "HALF LOAVES," "THE COBWEB CLOAK," 
 
 ETC., ETC. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 DUFFIELD & COMPANY 
 
 1915 
 
Copyright, 191 5 
 By DUFFIELD & COMPANY 
 
APOLOGIA 
 
 I HAD written these things in Prance during the 
 past two or three years. They were already made'' 
 into a book. Now they seem to me quite unfamiliar. 
 They are things written ages and ages ago, in times 
 almost forgotten, of a country that will never again 
 be the same country, and of a people whose life will 
 never again be the same life. Something has hap- 
 pened to the roads and streets and rivers; and to 
 the people who pass along them ; and to the forests 
 and cities and fields ; and to the people in thatched 
 cabins, and to the people in castles. Nothing will 
 ever any more be as it was. People who love France 
 with a certain special love, know now why always 
 she seemed to them sad, and so touchingly beau- 
 tiful ; and for what it was that, always, everything 
 waited. There has shone out the high, clear, keen, 
 pure flame that is the soul of France. Whatever 
 happens, there is the flame shining. I am half 
 ashamed of these stories because they are small and 
 pale. And I am fond of them, because, though the 
 things about which they were written do not matter, 
 and the mood of their writing I do not even remem- 
 ber, still, they were written in the country of the 
 beautiful flame. H. M. 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 FAOE 
 
 Place Louia XV 1 
 
 The House of the Gabden Window ... 3 
 
 The Window oveb the Gabden .... 4 
 
 Waiting 6 
 
 Seobet Gabden 7 
 
 The Empty Joubnai 8 
 
 The White Cat 10 
 
 A Man and His Wife and a Woman Who was Dead 13 
 
 A FiACBK 22 
 
 Late July 23 
 
 The Stbbbt of the Bbown Room .... 24 
 
 EvEBY One's Houb 39 
 
 Medicis Fountain 42 
 
 Ghosts 44 
 
 The Sand Babge . . . r. . . .45 
 
 Twenty Fbancs ....... 46 
 
 Miss ......... 49 
 
 Little Bbides 64 
 
 Flaying Soldiebs 65 
 
 Potatoes AND Wab 57 
 
 Little Soldieb without Name .... 59 
 
 NovEMBEB Second 62 
 
Table of Contents 
 
 FAOE 
 
 Two GBIEFS ........ 6i 
 
 The Risk 67 
 
 Christmas Cbowd 68 
 
 The Ghttbch by the Eiveb . . ... 69 
 
 The Tots in the Chapel . . . -. ■• 74 
 
 The Ebmine Mttff and Stole . [.< . . .77 
 
 The Staibs Up 84 
 
 The Childben's Nubsb . . -.- . . .86 
 
 The Milestone 90 
 
 The Blue Bibds 95 
 
 The Little Chaibs 103 
 
 AittDtE'a SUPFEB 117 
 
 The Secret of Motheb and Son .... 135 
 
 To Die a Little 143 
 
 The BntD in the Heabt 148 
 
 The Weatheb 175 
 
 The Swans 185 
 
 The Mibbob . . . v . . . .191 
 
 Wab Sttnsets 195 
 
 Fapeb Ropes 198 
 
 FOTJB Tapebs 201 
 
 Sodth Road 203 
 
 The Moon Fatjn 207 
 
 The Halp-oods and the Little Chapel . . . 208 
 
 North Road 211 
 
 Night and the Bells 213 
 
 Sea Bells .......... 214 
 
Table of Contents 
 
 FAOE 
 
 Sea Unbeb Mtjsio 216 
 
 A Silence 217 
 
 White Sunset 222 
 
 HfililNE WAS FlPTEBN 225 
 
 Janet AND ANN^a 229 
 
 Annais 233 
 
 Thbee People 234 
 
 Annais Dancing 235 
 
 The Cut Grass 239 
 
 The Window or the Coubtyaed .... 240 
 
 Place du Cabbousel 243 
 
 Gbeen Ribbon and Red Feathee .... 245 
 
 Saints in a Cellab and a Red and Gold Cboss . 247 
 
 Bbeakfast 253 
 
 Clocks and the Wind 254 
 
 The Gibl Who was Hungbt and the Gibl Who was 
 
 Tibed 256 
 
 Neighboubs 257 
 
 The Dbeam ._ 258 
 
 As It Happened 261 
 
 The Violin in the Cbowd 274 
 
 Buying a Hat 275 
 
 Secbet .....•••• 280 
 
 The Stabs fob the Fibst Time .... 282 
 
 Bbidge of the Toubnelle 284 
 
 The Pet Name 286 
 
 Little Gibl in Black 286 
 
Table of Contents 
 
 FAOE 
 
 Tebey 287 
 
 One of Two Womeit 289 
 
 To A Cebtain Little Gibl 292 
 
 A Jealousy 293 
 
 The Gbaveyabd oveb the Race Tbace . . . 296 
 
 The Big One and the P'tiot op Ivonnb - . . 297 
 
 The Kitchen Garden 300 
 
 Gibl Dbinking Teabs 305 
 
 Gibl with Handbag 306 
 
 Letib fils Andb£ 307 
 
 Top of a Letteb 316 
 
 "Demain nous sebons au feu" .... 317 
 
 The Otheb Doob 317 
 
 Railway Station 318 
 
 The Sunshine of the Beginning .... 320 
 
ACCIDENTALS 
 
ACCIDENTALS 
 
 Place Louis XV 
 
 IN the wet November twilight, across the Place 
 that is the burial ground of kiags and king- 
 doms, very many people from very many ways 
 were going home. 
 
 It was a lonely thing to do, to stand by the gate 
 of the Tuileries Gardens and watch the passing. 
 
 It was as if the great oval of so many comings 
 and goings, of ages and of days, of kings and 
 courtesans and travellers and labourers and vaga- 
 bonds, of pageants and death, of all the world and 
 the years, of each day's business and desire, were 
 some great waiting-room of lost footsteps, a Salle 
 des Pas Perdus, to which the footsteps came, from 
 which the footsteps went, leaving no mark, and all 
 lost, all of them, so quickly out of it. 
 
 It seemed as if the whole world were crossing 
 the Place in that little black and white hour of 
 
 I 
 
Accidentals 
 
 going home, when all lonely people are more lonely 
 than at other hours. 
 
 The cities of France sat and looked at one an- 
 other across the Place in the chill white light. The 
 black fountains tossed up their white water on 
 either side of the white obelisk. The trees along 
 the white parapet of the garden were bare and 
 black. And the walls of trees along the Avenue 
 of the Champs Elysees were black behind the 
 white horses of Marly. 
 
 There had been some glow of sunset, but 
 it was gone. The wide, long, straight road 
 of the Champs Elysees led to the end of the world. 
 The Arc de Triomphe, with infinite space of 
 shadow beyond it, was a door at the edge of the 
 world, open to the coming and going through of 
 lost footsteps. One heard the echo of lost footsteps 
 with all the hour's passing to and fro about the 
 obelisk. And the obelisk, there in the midst of 
 the footsteps, stood up tall and white and very 
 lonely, to the glory of a buried land and of un- 
 known gods and of a Pharaoh forgotten since hun- 
 dreds and hundreds of years. 
 
 The ages were a background for the loneliness 
 of the hour, and the world's events for its least 
 comings and goings. In and out of the room of 
 lost footsteps people came and went, and the loneli- 
 ness of each one came with him and went with him. 
 
The House of the Garden Window 
 
 So many people, so many infinitely different 
 people, coming and going, so many infinitely dif- 
 ferent ways, — there was a certain comfort in the 
 thought of being together with so many other peo- 
 ple in loneliness. 
 
 The House of the Garden Window 
 
 There was a window under a blue mansard, to 
 which church-bells rang across quiet streets and 
 gardens. 
 
 To come to that window from the Place of the 
 King in whose time the house had been built, for 
 some great noble's pleasure, in the country, there 
 was a bridge to cross, and a street to pass that 
 used to be called the Path of the Cows, and an- 
 other street, of the "garenne, un terrain inculte, 
 fertile en gibier, ' ' and the street once of the Eveque 
 de Babylone. And then there was the street of 
 the house of that window. There were treetops 
 over the walls on either side the street, in places; 
 and where the houses had their fagades on the 
 street, there were gardens beyond again. All the 
 street in spring was fragrant of lilacs, and one 
 there heard blackbirds and thrushes singing, and 
 in winter the crows came out to the street from 
 
 3 
 
Accidentals 
 
 the gardens, in their priestly dress, to walk sol- 
 emnly about on the big, old, green-stained cobbles. 
 There was a high, wide, heavy carved black door 
 in a wall that was green velvet with moss, and 
 one had to ring many times, always, before any 
 one came to open the door. 
 
 The Window over the Garden 
 
 The window was wide and tall; its white-cur- 
 tained doors opened from a faded, worn, almost 
 empty room, to the east, and to one of those many, 
 old, broken-up gardens of Paris. The garden had 
 once been part of the vineyard of a convent, and 
 then, in the time of Louis the Bien Aime, it had 
 been part of the splendid great garden of a cer- 
 tain Cardinal and Minister; and now what was 
 left of it, walled-in, closed, sealed, seemed to be- 
 long to nobody so much as to a stranger who waked 
 every morning to look from the wide, tall window 
 out to it. 
 
 Always at dawn the bells of many churches 
 were ringing up and down the pathways, and the 
 sounds of the city came across the garden, and in 
 at the window with the lingering voices of the 
 
 4 
 
The Window over the Garden 
 
 bells, and with the garden's own special sounds, 
 and with all the good smells of it. 
 
 Something of old-time stateliness was left to the 
 garden, in the "vista" of clipped yews ending 
 blankly now in waU and ivy, and in the formal 
 starting out of box-edged paths, four ways, from 
 the square stone basin. In summer dawns it seemed 
 as if one could hear light footfalls along the paths, 
 delicate treading of those who went satin-shod 
 away after the night's fete, when phantom lanterns 
 and torches paled in the sunrise. 
 
 In winter there were the voices of sparrows and 
 crows in the garden, and there were the smells of 
 wet, cold earth, and of tree stems and fungus 
 and moss and dead leaves. 
 
 In summer a nightingale lived and sang there, 
 and in spring there were masses of lilacs, and in 
 autumn the garden had a golden floor, but it was 
 in winter that one who was sad loved it best. 
 
 The winter days were always rainy, but almost 
 always their dawns were beautiful. 
 
 In tense winter dawns, the trees against the 
 window stood outlined, very dark and velvet, etched 
 in dry point, upon the great glow that covered 
 all the east. The glow would have its touch on 
 every stem and branch and twig, so that every 
 branch and twig seemed to be translucent, as if 
 cut from topaz. Across the high garden wall the 
 
 5 
 
Accidentals 
 
 roofs and chimneys of the houses in the street 
 would be massed dark and purple as smoke against 
 the glow. And the garden would be sunk deep in 
 shadow. 
 
 There had once been statues at the four comers 
 of the square, stone-rimmed basin in the middle 
 of the garden. One of the statues was still there, 
 a poor little foolish god of love. The bow and 
 the arm that had held it were gone. The arm 
 that had drawn the arrow was left in an empty 
 gesture. 
 
 Waiting 
 
 There was a woman who often used to watch 
 the dawns come over the garden. At the end of 
 long nights she would stand at the window and 
 wait. All the garden waited. 
 
 The Present, that had broken the garden and 
 forsaken it, never had touch upon it. In those 
 moments of waiting, the garden's long Past would 
 seem to be gone from it. 
 
 The woman at the window loved the garden be- 
 cause it was forgotten, and the little god because 
 he was broken. Sometimes, as she stood there and 
 everything waited, she would find herself saying 
 just the word "France," over and over. 
 
 6 
 
Secret Garden 
 
 Secret Garden 
 
 The trees of the garden were beautiful all win- 
 ter — even more beautiful then, when one could see 
 the outlines of them, the exquisite shapes of them, 
 than they were in summer. 
 
 It seemed always as if Paris trees were a little 
 different from other trees, and a little more lovely 
 in their architecture. 
 
 All the trees of the garden were stained with 
 moss and lichen. In spring-time, when the drift 
 of young, fragile leaf was exquisite as lace-work 
 across the tree stems and branches, one did not 
 realise how beautiful the stems and branches were, 
 stained with colours of rust and copper and green 
 and orange and bronze and gold. 
 
 Spring and Summer and autumn hid the garden 
 from the window — ^the little frivolous, tragic god of 
 love, and the jade green water of the basin, and 
 the yellow, old houses over the wall in the street, 
 the blue roofs and the chimney-pots, that had so 
 curiously and intimately to do with the treetops 
 and the drifting by of clouds. 
 
 In summer the garden was a lovely secret hid- 
 den thing; but in winter it was the locked en- 
 closure of sad secrets, and of dreams there was 
 small hope for. 
 
 7 
 
Accidentals 
 
 In winter one could see through the trees just 
 enough distinctly and just enough vaguely for it 
 to be possible to imagine anything about the gar- 
 den, about people in velvet and ermine coming 
 there, and nuns, before that, with white hands and 
 white faces and white-winged cornettes. One could 
 imagine the vineyard that the nuns helped to tend, 
 and afterwards the bosquet where Madame gave 
 rendezvous to Monsieur. 
 
 And then a curious special happiness belonged 
 to the garden. In spring there were chestnut trees 
 with deep pink torches, and there were deep pink 
 flaming rhododendrons, massed against the walls. 
 But in winter it was as if one could see very far 
 through the bare trees, down the long perspective 
 of the past. One knew then the special beauty of 
 forsaken things. And it was the happiness of 
 winter to be able to feel sadness so intensely. 
 
 The Empty Journal 
 
 Among a lot of valueless odds and ends that 
 had been put away and forgotten since no one 
 knew how long, ribbons and fans and slippers and 
 laces, sad with the special sadness of little forgot- 
 
 8 
 
The Empty Journal 
 
 ten frivolous futile things, Ursule one day came 
 across a small book bound in parchment the colour 
 of ancient ivories. The parchment binding folded 
 over with a flap like an envelope, and was tied 
 round the flap with a white leather string. The 
 back of the book was sewn with rough cord in two 
 long stitches. At the top of the front cover of the 
 book was written in ink, very faded, in a man's 
 writing, Le dimanche 13 Septembre 1711. And 
 at the bottom of the back cover was written m a 
 woman's delicate fragile writing, 13 Septembre 
 1755. 
 
 Ursule untied the leather string and opened the 
 book. It was full of rough thick pages, as yellow 
 as the parchment, with edges unevenly cut and 
 curled over, and eaten and stained by time. It 
 smelled of darkness and dust and mould and 
 years and things faintly, delicately sad. All the 
 pages were blank, except the first page where a 
 few words were written at the top, and the last 
 page where a few words were written at the bottom. 
 
 At the top of the first page the man had written, 
 in a fine, distinguished, old-time writing, that had 
 lasted curiously strong and eager, kept curiously 
 young through all the years, "Sois toujours bonne, 
 fidele, modeste, douce et sage." 
 
 And the pages were all empty. And at the bot- 
 tom of the last page the woman had written, after 
 
 9 
 
Accidentals 
 
 two score years, when she was old and her pretty 
 hand was grown tremulous, "Bt je fus legere." 
 
 The White Cat 
 
 The blaek cat went with them all along the paths, 
 up and down, of the cemetery above the race-track. 
 He kept close to the forlorn skirt of the old woman 
 as she led the way. He stepped delicately through 
 the wet, yellow network of vines and grass and 
 roots that had woven the paths and the graves all 
 in together, and arched his back and held his tail 
 up straight out of the tangle. 
 
 The paths were so overgrown that it seemed as 
 if it must be difficult for the old woman who was 
 the caretaker of the graveyard to trace their ways 
 in the autumn twilight. The little ancient grave- 
 yard of the nuns of Longchamps seemed the most 
 abandoned place in the world. There had been 
 races that day on the great green oval, down under 
 the graveyard wall and across the road. But that 
 was all over in the twilight, and everything was 
 very still. 
 
 It was the month of September. The leaves were 
 quite fallen in the graveyard. There were the sad- 
 nesses of the fallen leaves and the dusk, of the end 
 of summer and of the day. 
 lo 
 
The White Cat 
 
 The tall, thin, old woman led the way through 
 the wildernesses of wet, autumn, alive things, and 
 marble and iron things that were all falling into 
 ruin. She told the two strangers odd, broken bits 
 of stories as they went. She had been unwilling 
 to let them in at the gate in the old, yellow, soft, 
 stained wall. She had told them how no one was 
 admitted any more to the cemetery, except mem- 
 bers of the few families who still kept up graves 
 there. She said the Government wanted the ceme- 
 tery to be forgotten, because when there was no 
 longer even one grave entretenu it would revert 
 by old law to the city of Paris. That would be 
 soon, she said, for no one ever came there any more. 
 
 Perhaps it was because she was lonely that she 
 let the strangers in. Hers was a lonely little house 
 at the gate of the place of still more lonely, little, 
 marble houses. In at the door of her house one 
 could see that there was a fire burning, and there 
 was a blackbird in a cage by the door. 
 
 Almost all the tombs and crosses in the grave- 
 yard were broken. With the graves of the nuns 
 there was one great mound that was the grave of 
 many soldiers. They were soldiers who had fallen 
 in sorties of the year when Paris was twice be- 
 sieged. There was the grave of an actress, who had 
 been young when she died, long ago. 
 
 Over the low wall at the bottom of the grave- 
 II 
 
Accidentals 
 
 yard one could see the race-track through the bare 
 acacias and the bare lilac bushes, — the broad sweep 
 of grass, the white railings, the tribune buildings 
 with their empty, white tiers of seats. The grave- 
 yard was the more lonely a place because all that 
 was so close to it. 
 
 The old woman's voice dragged like her slow 
 step as she told of her dead to the strangers, of this 
 one who lay here and that one who lay there. 
 
 But when she spoke to the black cat her voice 
 was quite different. One knew by her voice 
 that she loved it. And that she had not much else, 
 of things or people, to love. 
 
 The black cat kept always close to her and 
 rubbed against her skirts and purred to her. 
 Often she stooped to pet it. 
 
 At the end she caught it up, and held it against 
 her shoulder. "Oh, mon amour," she said to the 
 black cat, in that voice so different from the voice 
 she had for telling her stories, "mon tout petit, 
 comme je t'aime!" She clutched the black cat 
 close, and it rubbed its head against her chin, 
 purring cosily. ' ' Que tu es sage ! ' ' she said, ' ' que 
 tu es beau !" She was searching words for it. She 
 wanted to say to it the most beautiful thing she 
 knew. She said, ' ' Mon amour, comme tu es blanc ! ' ' 
 
 12 
 
A Man and His Wife and a 
 Woman Who was Dead 
 
 A Man and His Wife and a Woman 
 Who was Dead 
 
 "When he came out to where she sat with the 
 books she had not been reading, in the garden, she, 
 Therese, his wife — saw, surprised, how really un- 
 happy and ill he looked. The woman who had been 
 having tea with her had told her, " 'Dora la 
 Blonde,' don't you know, is dead." And she had 
 wondered how Pierre would feel about it. She 
 had thought, surely it must be something of a blow 
 to him. 
 
 She herself had felt somewhat oddly about it, 
 though she had only raised her eyebrows and 
 shrugged her shoulders, when Clothilde de Meur 
 had told her of the thing at tea. 
 
 "Yes?" she had said, as if she had no notion 
 why Clothilde told her. 
 
 When Clpthilde was gone she had come out into 
 her garden — that always seemed to her to be her 
 secret place, unknown of and walled in, as was all 
 that she felt in her life — and had sat there for 
 quite a long time, not reading. 
 
 The garden was deep sunk in spring, in blossom- 
 ing of lilac and acacia, full of Easter lilies, and 
 little fragrances of fresh cut grass and box edges 
 
 13 
 
Accidentals 
 
 that had just been watered and earth that had 
 been warmed all day in the new sunshine, and full 
 of the voices of birds, sparrow and thrush and 
 blackbird, — and there was a nightingale, — and of 
 the voices of bells, all the church bells of the quar- 
 ter, in their especially much and especially sweet 
 ringing for the month of Mary. It was indeed a 
 most lonely little garden. The fine rooms of the 
 old hotel all gave on the courtyard that Pierre 
 Lemuet had built two centuries and a half ago, and 
 on the street that was a proud street in its proud 
 quarter. Only the unused upper rooms, that would 
 have been the nurseries if there had been children, 
 and her own rooms on the ground floor, gave upon 
 the garden, to which the sounds of the city came 
 strangely, and from which it always seemed 
 strange to look up through the trees to city roofs 
 and chimneys. 
 
 She had sat there thinking how odd it seemed 
 that a creature so utterly of life as Dora la Blonde, 
 the famous, could be dead; and wondering what 
 the death of a woman like that would mean to 
 a man like Pierre. She had been wondering how 
 men of the world felt about those things, and 
 thinking that, after all, there had been so many 
 years of it, it must mean something of grief, surely, 
 to even so of-the-world-worldly a man as Pierre. 
 
 Then Pierre came out to her in her garden, 
 14 
 
A Man and His Wife and a 
 Woman Who was Dead 
 
 where, in all their ten years together, he never had 
 
 troubled to come before. 
 
 She had thought, "At least it will be a shock to 
 him." But she had had no idea it would be a 
 grief to him such as that she saw now in his face. 
 For an instant it angered her that he should bring 
 his grief — or anything of his — into her garden. 
 
 It was so especially her garden. In it had so 
 especially dwelt, through ten years, all of her that 
 was most her own. His unhappiness — of all peo- 
 ple's — ^had no right there. Why should he bring 
 his unhappiness there, to this place of hers, the 
 garden that had kept hers enclosed? When she, 
 unhappy^ would have wanted him, he had not 
 come. When she had had loneliness she would 
 have given the world to tell him of, he had not 
 come. He had no right to come now. 
 
 Now it was different. All day it had been dif- 
 ferent. Because of one person, last night, at Clo- 
 thilde's "White Ball," it was all become, suddenly, 
 different. She had amused herself extremely well 
 at the ball. She had felt herself, as she never had 
 before, really to be one of the gay, charming peo- 
 ple, who were Pierre's people. She had been glad 
 that she was only twenty-eight and slim and quick, 
 and that she was pretty. There was one, especially, 
 among all the people, because of whom she was 
 glad that she was pretty. It was that one who had 
 
 IS 
 
Accidentals 
 
 made her feel that she could take things carelessly, 
 as other women did. It was as if he had brought 
 her out from the quiet and shadow of her garden 
 into gay rooms. He had seemed to be taking her 
 away from all that she knew. She had been glad 
 of that aU day. A ballroom was better than a 
 closed garden. 
 
 And now Pierre came to her out in her garden. 
 
 He came over and sat down in the other chair, 
 by her table of books. 
 
 He had always had a way of — just for an in- 
 stance — coming toward one and sitting down by 
 one, that gave the effect of his having always pos- 
 sessed all desirable things, of his knowing his right 
 to them, and accepting them, as his right, indif- 
 ferently. But now he came to her like one who 
 was dull and had nowhere to go. It was as if, in 
 all Paris, he, the man perhaps most in demand 
 there, had nowhere to go, and no one to whom to 
 turn — ^he, whom always every one had sought out. 
 It was as if he, always sufficient to himself, could 
 not be alone now in this thing, and came to her — 
 of all the world. It was as if he were quite another 
 person than Pierre, who was brilliant, and for 
 whose pleasure the world was made. 
 
 "Tou care — ^like that?" she asked, without any 
 pretence, pretences fallen somehow quite away from 
 the terribly real thing it was. 
 
 i6 
 
A Man and His Wife and a 
 Woman Who was Dead 
 
 He answered her only with a motion of his head, 
 dully, not looking at her. 
 
 She said, ' ' You have come from — ^there ? ' ' 
 
 He only moved his head again in that stupid 
 sort of way. 
 
 "And you were with her last night, you were 
 with her— then?" 
 
 Suddenly it seemed to her strange that a man's 
 wife should be at a dance when the woman he loved 
 was dying, if he cared like that. 
 
 For ten years — ^she had very soon come to know 
 of it — "Dora la Blonde" had been the reason of 
 her loneliness. If she could have stooped to it, she 
 would have hated her. But she had not known 
 that his love for her had been like this. Suddenly 
 it seemed cruel that she had not known. It seemed 
 cruel that she had danced while the woman, who 
 meant to him what she saw now in his face, was 
 dying. 
 
 "You were with her, then?" she asked of 
 Pierre. 
 
 "Yes," he said. 
 
 She found herself saying in this strange thing, 
 all those things people say when it is not strange. 
 
 "It was very sudden?" 
 
 "Yes," he said. 
 
 "You had had no idea?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 17 
 
Accidentals 
 
 "Nor had she?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 After a minute he said, "She suffered horribly, 
 and she was horribly afraid." 
 
 His wife said, "Poor thing. Oh, the poor, poor 
 thing." 
 
 Then he began to tell her about it, looking stu- 
 pidly at her, his face all marred with pain, and 
 speaking stupidly. 
 
 "She suffered so," he said, his eyes fuU of suffer- 
 ing, "and she was so afraid," and he shivered as 
 if he were afraid too. "In the morning she had 
 been well, I had seen her. In the afternoon they 
 sent for me. But I had the message too late, and 
 when I got there she was dying. She was con- 
 scious all night. She knew she was dying. And 
 she was afraid. She was afraid of the dark. She 
 died while it was still dark. It was so dark," he 
 said, as if that were an important part of it. He 
 stopped speaking and just sat there. 
 
 It seemed a long time. The garden was very 
 still. She did not speak to him. Anything she 
 could have said would have been unbearable. 
 
 For years they had scarcely spoken except be- 
 fore people and the servants, and never once in all 
 their life together had they spoken intimately. 
 
 And now he told her of this, he who had never 
 come to her before, came to her with this. The 
 i8 
 
A Man and His Wife and a 
 Woman Who was Dead 
 
 men, the other women, his msmy friends, he had 
 
 not gone with this to them, not to any of them. 
 
 And he had not been able to bear it alone. He had 
 
 come to her. 
 
 He had not come to her because he thought she 
 would understand; she knew he had not thought 
 at all about it. He had just come instinctively 
 to her, as one is so strangely sure to go when one 
 is unhappy to that very person whom most one has 
 made unhappy. 
 
 She had not thought he knew she was unhappy. 
 Perhaps he had not known, and did not, now ; and 
 yet it was because of that, that he came to her. 
 
 It was because he had left her lonely, that he 
 came to her when he had something he could not 
 bear in loneliness. It was as if she had just stayed 
 still there, in her place, and waited for him to come 
 to her when he should be unhappy, knowing where 
 to find her and how he should find her. 
 
 He sat looking at her stupidly, and she sat silent 
 there with him. 
 
 She would have liked to say to him, "Talk to 
 me, tell me." But she could not. She would have 
 liked to go to him and touch his shoulder and say 
 "I am sorry." But she could not. She wanted to 
 say to him, "Need me, need me now, however odd 
 it seems, need me in this. And need me afterwards 
 in everything," 
 
 19 
 
Accidentals 
 
 She had been proud to stay alone and need no 
 one. She had been very proud, and she had de- . 
 spised her unhappiness. Because of her pride she 
 had prisoned herself in with it. There had seemed 
 to her to be no escape with pride from it. She had 
 walled herself in with her unhappiness that no one 
 might see it. She had been proud to stay alone 
 and need no one. Then last night, because of a man 
 in a ballroom, she had known that she could not 
 stay alone any longer in a closed place. She knew 
 that the man, who for the first time counted in it, 
 would come to count for too much in it, as it always 
 is with such thiugs, and she did not care. It had 
 come to her, suddenly, as a new pride, that she did 
 not care. There was for her, a choosing between 
 her garden and a ballroom, between loneliness and 
 the sort of thing one takes, like that,- to fill one's 
 hours with. 
 
 But suddenly now she was afraid of choosing 
 and all her pride fell away and left only need. 
 She wanted to say to him, "I need so desperately 
 that you should need me." She wanted to tell 
 him, "It makes aU the difference if you need me." 
 She wanted to say to him, "Let me help you, and 
 so help me." She wanted very much to go to him 
 as if they had always understood one another, as 
 if they had loved one another, or yet might. But 
 she could not. 
 
 20 
 
A Man and His Wife and a 
 Woman Who was Dead 
 
 The swallows flew low across the garden, back 
 and forth, back and forth. Dusk was gathering 
 there. The bells of Sainte Clothilde, across streets 
 and other gardens, broke into their sunset ringing, 
 and then all the May church bells of the quarter 
 followed them, 
 
 Pierre sat motionless, as she did. Not the Pierre 
 she had always known, erect and careless of every- 
 thing, and brilliant, and hard as are all brilliant 
 things. 
 
 She wondered if, after a while, he would be that 
 brilliant Pierre again, going away from her to 
 worlds of his pleasure. She wondered if after a 
 while again, he would be without need of her. And 
 if that were so, she wondered, would she ever think 
 of him as he was now, the Pierre who needed her, — 
 and would thinking of him so make a difference to 
 her in her life. 
 
 It might be for the moment only, and it might 
 be for a very odd reason, but she knew that, then, 
 and no matter why, and even if it were not to 
 last, she was more to him than any one in all the 
 world. 
 
 21 
 
Accidentals 
 
 A Fiacre 
 
 The fiacre was turning the corner from the Place 
 de la Concorde up the quais of the right bank. 
 The man in the fiacre wore the white blouse of a 
 mason, and he had no hat. He was big and young 
 and blonde. There was a pink and blue bandbox 
 in the open hood of the fiacre. The girl had a smart 
 little hat and smartly done dark hair. The man's 
 hands lay on his knees. They were bare, and her 
 hands, clutching his, as she sat swung round to him 
 in the fiacre, were smartly gloved. 
 
 It was a May afternoon and sunshiny. The 
 green Louvre-St. Cloud tram, that waited by the 
 bridge, was filling up with cheery people. The 
 guard's brass horn was sounding. There was a 
 string of six big grey Normandy horses hauling a 
 load of stone past the lady Marseilles. There were 
 some red and orange election bills posted along 
 the wall of the gardens, under the lion. The gar- 
 dens were green over the terrace wall, and the sky 
 and the roofs and all the shadows and the river 
 were blue. There was much traffic along the quai. 
 
 The fiacre with the man and the girl in it was 
 blocked for a moment behind the statue of Mar- 
 seilles. 
 
 The man was sitting very straight, perfectly mo- 
 
 22 
 
Late July 
 
 tionless, his hands on his knees, stiff and rigid. He 
 was staring straight before him, with fixed, utterly 
 expressionless eyes. It was as if he had put all 
 life out of his eyes, and made them empty as glass 
 eyes, and fastened his mouth in that line as hard 
 as anything cut in stone. 
 
 The girl lifted her face to his and did not care 
 who might see. She did not trouble to wipe away 
 the tears that seamed and seared her face. Her 
 face was cut and torn with tears, marked and 
 stained. It was dreadful to see. 
 
 But his face was more dreadful yet, with no ex- 
 pression whatever of life in it. 
 
 And people passing and seeing it could never 
 know what it meant at all. 
 
 Late July 
 
 In late July, and the late, long, burning sunsets, 
 the Paris streets were full of swallows. 
 
 The swallows flew low down into the streets, 
 through the crimson lights and the gold lights and 
 the purple shadows. They flew their sailing still- 
 winged swooping flight low over the pavements, 
 and their strange little cry had its part in all the 
 sounds of the streets. 
 
 23 
 
Accidentals 
 
 The swallows came down from their homes, 
 among old soft blue roofs and black-hooded 
 chimneys, to sweep and cry through the sunset 
 streets. 
 
 The poor people came out to the streets. 
 
 The city was theirs, now that the rich people 
 were all gone away. 
 
 A poor, sad people now came out into the streets, 
 where there were the swallows in the sunset. 
 
 One wondered, what would the streets be for 
 one, if it were not that one had sadness. If, by 
 some chance, one came, somehow, to be happy, 
 might not one actually miss one's unhappiness, be 
 lonely without it, there in the streets? 
 
 The Street of the Brown Room 
 
 The Ferenays were away for quite two years 
 after their marriage, and in that time Marise de 
 Geslin knew only of Constant what she heard 
 through others. 
 
 She had gone to the contract and the marriage. 
 
 Her husband had said to her, "You must be 
 proud, and not let anyone see. You owe me that. 
 All these years I have saved you in the eyes of 
 24 
 
The Street of the Brown Room 
 
 the world. I suffered, and because I was proud 
 I would let no one see. Had I not kept up appear- 
 ances you would have gone down, under, like many 
 another woman. I suffered, and would not let any- 
 one see. Now it is you who suffer. You owe it to 
 me not to let anyone see." 
 
 She had always thought him stupid, and had felt 
 contempt for him. But now it was she who was 
 stupid, and he who had contempt. She realised 
 now that it is always the one who suffers who is 
 stupid, and the other who has contempt. 
 
 She went to the contract and the marriage, and 
 was very beautiful and very brilliant, and after- 
 wards had no memory of the little bride, or of 
 him, in all that. 
 
 The memory of him, Constant de F^r^nay, that 
 never left her for a moment of those two years, — 
 so terribly real that everything else of all her life 
 was made unreal by it, — ^was of his coming to her 
 that last time to tell her of his definitely arranged 
 marriage. Fascinating as always, in his every tone 
 and gesture and look, he came to tell her the thing 
 that killed her, cool and reasonable about it, ex- 
 pecting her to "take it" as he "took it," saying 
 she should have known that some day it would have 
 to be. There must be, of course, — he told her, 
 shrugging his shoulders as if in contempt of the 
 necessity, — an heir to such a title, to such an estate, 
 
 25 
 
Accidentals 
 
 as his was J surely she'd known it all along, and 
 now that the thing was arranged for — ^it was the 
 little Margenteuil, Esmee, the one not yet out — 
 she, Marise, must be, as he was, "good sport" 
 about it. 
 
 She had the memory of his watching her closely 
 as he told her — ^there where they had been so happy 
 through five years, in a certain odd little brown 
 room, one May evening. No man in Paris was so 
 gentle as he, or so hard, so caressing and tender 
 and intimate, and so hopelessly not to be ap- 
 proached. She had the memory of him with his 
 dark eyes looking into hers, yet showing nothing 
 to her. And of his holding her hands while he told 
 her ; and of how beautiful his hands were ; and of 
 how intensely she had felt the touch of them. And 
 then she had the memory of him as he had been 
 after her wild outbreak, — ^her sobbing things out, 
 imploring him, — rwhen he stood up and looked at 
 her, and had no word for her. 
 
 She had given him all she had, for five years. 
 She was not yet thirty, and she had nothing left. 
 He had taken it all. She had thought that she 
 was all he had cared to have, ever, in the world. 
 She had thought that it was all for always, and 
 beautiful so, and sacred so, and divine. 
 
 Now he showed her what it had been to him. 
 26 
 
The Street of the Brown Room 
 
 And when she had showed him what it had 
 been to her, he had stood up and looked at her, 
 without a word for her, and turned and gone out 
 of the brown room. 
 
 It always seemed strange to her that she went 
 on seeming to be alive after that. It seemed strange 
 that she should get up in the mornings, and that 
 she should move and speak. It seemed strange 
 that she should dress and eat. And it went on 
 every day for two years. And every day that it 
 could be so was just as strange a thing to her. 
 She did not understand it at aU. 
 
 It was her husband, somehow, who made that it 
 should be so. Louis de Geslin, who had seemed so 
 stupid in his love for her, who had never possessed 
 of her more than her cool contempt, took complete 
 possession of her life now, and ordered and ar- 
 ranged it, and kept her going on in it. It was like 
 a stage manager keeping a dull actress up in her 
 part, making her go through her lines and her 
 business with decent appearance. "With a curious 
 strength he kept her up to her part, for the sake 
 of the audience that was, indeed, all agape at them. 
 She understood now how all the time the audience 
 had been agape at them, and how, through all the 
 years of it, he had not been weak but in his own 
 way strong, keeping up appearances. He said now, 
 
 27 
 
Accidentals 
 
 rather as Constant had said, "Keep up appear- 
 ances ; whatever happens, in the eyes of the world, 
 we must keep up appearances." 
 
 So she would get up in the morning and go out, 
 and be beautiful and brilliant, and at night she 
 would go to bed. She would even sleep. She did 
 not cry out at all when once, driving with Louis, 
 the carriage passed the house of the brown room. 
 And when people spoke of the Ferenays, she came 
 to feel about the pain that was hers, as one does 
 who hears of some unknown person in some far 
 place being horribly hurt. 
 
 After two years like that, one of the two older 
 Margenteuil girls, Beatrice it was, told her that, 
 very shortly, Constant and Esmee would be back 
 in Paris. Beatrice de Margenteuil watched her 
 curiously as she said it. Of course everyone knew. 
 It was, as Louis had said, only his attitude in it 
 all that had saved her, — if it was saving, — ^kept her 
 with a right to stay on in the world where she 
 could meet, constantly and amicably, the sisters of 
 the girl who had married Constant. 
 
 "Esm^e is a shy, plain little thing," said Esmee 's 
 sister, "poor darling, — and he is just the sort of 
 
 man, — sometimes I fear " She left it in the 
 
 vague. 
 
 "They must be very happy together," said 
 Marise, wording the thing that had been to her 
 28 
 
The Street of the Brown Room 
 
 the worst of it all, all the time, "they must be very 
 happy, to have kept away, alone together, for two 
 whole years." 
 
 "Oh," said the sister of Esmde, "that is what I 
 fear, that after so long a time of the solitude of 
 
 two, he will " Her trick of dropping a thing 
 
 into space like that left it singularly clear. 
 
 They came back. Marise heard of them through 
 several people. It was just before a baU of which 
 people were all talking. Of course they would be 
 at the ball. 
 
 Her husband said to her that day, "To-night 
 you must be very beautiful, and you must be very 
 briUiant, and whatever you feel, you must not let 
 anyone see." 
 
 When she was dressed, and the carriage was 
 waiting, and his man had come already twice to 
 tell her maid that Monsieur le Comte was ready, 
 she still stood in the middle of her room, on the 
 little dim, old blue carpet, which she had succeeded 
 with some difficulty in reaching, and beyond which, 
 it seemed, she could not go. It was a wonderful 
 carpet that had come from a mosque of Ispahan, 
 and that had been woven in the time of Shah 
 Abbas. As she stood there, somehow, it came to 
 her to think of people who had knelt upon that 
 carpet, and looked toward the East, and prayed 
 out of despair. She thought she could not get to 
 
 29 
 
Accidentals 
 
 the door even of her room. The man came to say 
 a third time that Monsieur le Comte was waiting. 
 
 It was odd how quite irrelevant thoughts came 
 to her. 
 
 Once, in the midst of those five years, she had 
 happened on a book of her husband's — she thought 
 it was Marcus Aurelius — ^in which he had marked 
 some words, and evidently, from the opening of 
 the book at once to the place, turned often to them. 
 At the time she had not thought much of the 
 words, and it was strange that they should come 
 back to her now, as she stood on the carpet of 
 ancient prayers, "Pain that lasts can be borne." 
 She knew now what these words must have meant 
 to her husband. And from her knowledge, now, 
 they came to have meaning for her. It was a pain 
 that was going to last. And, just because it was 
 going to last, it could be borne. It must be borne. 
 She told herself that she could bear it — just because 
 it was a pain that would last, it was bearable. She 
 could get to the door, and down the stairs and to 
 the carriage. 
 
 ' ' Pain that lasts can be borne. ' ' She kept saying 
 it to herself while she drove with her husband 
 through the stately, quiet, dark streets of the quar- 
 ter. He kept up a very courteous, unflagging con- 
 versation, as he always did, while they drove. He 
 talked about the projected widening of some street, 
 30 
 
The Street of the Brown Room 
 
 and about a Chardin someone had bought some- 
 where. And she could listen and could even answer 
 him. "Pain that lasts can be borne," so she could 
 say, "I suppose it is inevitable, with the increase 
 of traffic, but those fine old houses, it seems a pity." 
 Because "Pain that lasts can be borne," she could 
 say, "That's not much, is it, to give for a Char- 
 din?" AU the way she was telling herself, "Pain 
 that lasts can be borne." 
 
 She could bear it in the great lighted, crowded 
 rooms while she talked to people. 
 
 It would be just as it had always been. She 
 would know the moment he came into the room, 
 as always she had known. And she could bear it. 
 
 She would know the instant he caught sight of 
 her, and her eyes would meet his, and she could 
 bear it. / 
 
 He would come then at once to her. He would 
 know just how charmingly to greet her in the 
 crowd, and she could bear it. He would introduce 
 to her the little Esmee, who was not pretty at all, 
 and she could bear it. She could see him turn 
 away from her, quite carelessly, to some other 
 woman. She could see him turn to some other 
 woman, eagerly as once he had turned to her, and 
 she could bear it. Or perhaps he would even turn 
 like that, — in the way he had once turned to her, — 
 now, to the little Esmee, and she could bear it. 
 
 31 
 
Accidentals 
 
 There would be all the days, and the months, 
 and the years, and she could bear it. 
 
 While she drove to the dance with Louis, and he 
 talked, and she answered, she knew just what the 
 pain would be, and how unceasing, and that she 
 could bear it. * 
 
 But suddenly there came a thought to her, that 
 never had come before. Every other thought was 
 gone before it, driven out by it, blotted away. And 
 it left her with no sense of anything else in the 
 whole of the world. 
 
 It was that, perhaps, there, come to her after all 
 the endless days again, in the glare, in the crowd, 
 with Esmee there, quite close, and Louis there, 
 quite close, and the love, that, through the five 
 years, had been starlight and rainbow clad in illu- 
 sion, now there was no illusion left — ^turned hor- 
 rible, he would, with a look and a word, change all 
 the pain to happiness. Perhaps, when he should 
 smile down at her, his eyes would have all the beau- 
 tiful, dear, false meanings for her, that she would 
 again believe in. Perhaps, when he should speak 
 to her, his voice would be the beautiful lie that 
 would mean more to her than ever could any truth. 
 Perhaps the touch of his hand, in the instant he 
 should be holding hers, would have for her its same 
 old mastery. Perhaps, in an instant, all the pain 
 would be turned into happiness. 
 32 
 
The Street of the Brown Room 
 
 And as she drove with her courteous, correct 
 husband to the ball, where she must keep up ap- 
 pearances, she knew, horribly well, how that one 
 thing — ^happiness, she could not bear. 
 
 Esmee, in the carriage, driving to the ball, sat 
 silent beside Constant. He did not speak at all to 
 her, or even look down at her. 
 
 They had a long drive from their own place near 
 the Pare Monceau to the hotel de Navarreux in the 
 rue de Varenne. She sat huddled in her swan's- 
 down cloak, silent, not moving. 
 
 In that drive it was as it was always with them, 
 in all their life. That silence was like the silence 
 of all their life together. In the two years since 
 their marriage she had felt that no word they either 
 of them spoke ever broke the silence. Just as in 
 all their nearness, alone together, they never 
 touched. 
 
 Now, as they drove, he was close to her. She 
 was intensely conscious, as she always was, of their 
 not touching. So close to him, it was always for 
 her as if there were some delicate musical instru- 
 ment that was keyed too high, over toned, and that 
 must break in such silence. 
 
 Theirs were such cruel silences, never the silences 
 of intimacy. Before their marriage, he had taken 
 more or less pains to talk to her. "What a charm- 
 
 33 
 
Accidentals 
 
 ing dress ! You like to dance ? And do you ride ? 
 The shooting is excellent, is it not, about Grange 
 au Bois?" She had thought, "When we know 
 one another better, he will talk of real things." 
 And in their silences, then, she had thought,- "It is 
 because he is not, any more than I, interested in 
 these trivial things. By and by, when we talk of 
 things that mean much to us, it will be different." 
 Even of her own little short, uneventful life she 
 had so much to tell him. She wanted to tell him 
 of aE the things she had loved; of her big, old 
 room at Grange au Bois in the tower, its windows 
 that looked four ways, the wonder of dawns and 
 sunsets that came to it ; of moonlight on the tapes- 
 tries; of the chateau gardens, the Bosquet de la 
 Beine, the statues, that glimmered white in the 
 dusk of the yew trees, the pond with water like 
 jade, so green and still ; the pierced allee, that was 
 dark even in summer noons ; she wanted to tell him 
 of her days and hours ; and of her bullfinch that 
 whistled seven tunes; she wanted to tell him of 
 Miss, who had been kind to her, and had let her 
 do lessons out of doors ; and of the cure who had 
 been kind to her also, and who had never been 
 farther away from his little white, square-towered 
 church than to St. Ouen, across the forest. She 
 wanted to tell him of the mystery life seemed to 
 her, the glorious, utter mystery ; of her love of it, 
 34 
 
The Street of the Brown Room 
 
 and her fear of it, her sense of being so small in it, 
 and so much at a loss, and so in need of guidance. 
 She wanted to talk to him of her loneliness. She 
 wanted him to know how she knew of everyone's 
 loneliness ; she wanted to come, so, to him, in the 
 loneliness that must have been his, as it had been 
 hers, as it was, she knew, all the world's, till love 
 came. 
 
 And she wanted to tell him of her dreams. Pas- 
 sionately she had wanted to tell him of aU the won- 
 derful beautiful things she longed for and be- 
 lieved in. 
 
 But he had never cared to hear. 
 
 She had imagined how one would talk of every- 
 thing, all one's dearest, loveliest things, when the 
 time came, with the one that one loved, who would 
 care and understand. 
 
 And what would have been so happy in all the 
 world, as to have had Constant care and under- 
 stand ? 
 
 She had actually thought it would be like that. 
 It had taken her quite long to realise that he and 
 she, however close they were together, — in all their 
 life, just as in the half-hour here in the carriage, 
 driving to the Navarreux ball, — ^however terribly 
 close they were, could never talk of things, and un- 
 derstand. 
 
 It seemed to her that this silent drive side by 
 35 
 
Accidentals 
 
 side typified the whole of it. In his bored, im- 
 patient silence she kept silence. The harp, the 
 violin, the music thing, whatever it was, that she 
 always felt, too tensely strung, to-night seemed 
 strained nearer to breaking point even than usual. 
 She did not know why. 
 
 Perhaps it was because to-night at the ball she 
 was for the first time to be among people who had 
 shared in the years of his life that she had had 
 no part in. 
 
 Perhaps there would be beautiful women at the 
 ball whom he had known when she was a little girl 
 with Miss, at her lessons and her play. 
 
 Any one of these women whom she might meet, 
 or only pass in the crowd, might have meant much 
 to him, have been loved by him, been a part of the 
 life that he had lived without her. 
 
 She wanted to ask him about those other 
 women. 
 
 She would not have asked curiously, only she 
 wanted to be brought into some nearness to that 
 part of his life which was to her so unknown and 
 far away. 
 
 He had lived so much without her. 
 
 She would not have asked jealously. She knew 
 
 he had been the loved of many women. Even as 
 
 a little girl she had heard him named by older 
 
 people, talking "over her head," as the man, per- 
 
 36 
 
The Street of the Brown Room 
 
 haps, the most fascinating in Paris, the hero of 
 many stories. But she knew none of the stories. 
 
 Any one of the women she met, in this, her first 
 going into the world, might know that part of his 
 life she did not know, might be nearer to him than 
 she. 
 
 It hurt her cruelly to know that. 
 
 And yet she had it in her heart to feel very 
 kindly towards those other women. If he had 
 talked to her, there in the carriage, he might have 
 told her anything, she would have understood. He 
 might have said to her, "I loved this one, or that 
 one." Even he might have said, "I love her yet." 
 And she would have borne it better than she could 
 bear the silence. 
 
 It seemed to her, even, that after the first pain, 
 she could come to understand and to be sorry for 
 him, and tender to him, and to try to make up to 
 him for the loss of a happiness that the queer ways 
 of life had denied him. She could have emptied 
 her heart of all but pity and tenderness for any 
 woman who had meant much to him. 
 
 She had it in her heart to say to him, "I've 
 come, in this time, to understand. I know that 
 things have to be as they have to be in the world. 
 And I know the hardness of it. And I'm sorry. 
 And, I beg of you, let me help to make it less 
 hard." 
 
 37 
 
Accidentals 
 
 It was so in her heart to say that, that it seemed 
 as if she must say it. She must cry it out, break- 
 ing the endless silence. 
 
 It seemed to her then, as always, so, that she 
 must break, with a cry, with a clutch, perhaps, 
 somehow, anyhow, this terrible silence, his and 
 hers, the silence of all their life. She must break 
 the silence that was between them as they drove 
 so close together in the cafriage, and she must 
 break the silence that was there between them in 
 all their lives. 
 
 She turned to him suddenly, looking up at him 
 in the light of the carriage lamp. ' ' Constant, please 
 listen. I love you enough to understand anything, 
 eve'ry thing ' ' 
 
 He looked down at her with that quick, sharp 
 look he sometimes had, as of expecting one to be 
 hiding something, to have some deeper meaning in 
 one's words. He did not speak to her. 
 
 Very timidly she went on, "It would so comfort 
 me — ^if there were any small way in which I could 
 help you." 
 
 "I don't know what you are talking about," he 
 said. 
 
 She saw his brows draw together. She knew he 
 saw the tears that came to her eyes, and that he was 
 annoyed. 
 
 "What is the matter?" he said sharply. 
 38 
 
Every One's Hour 
 
 She said, ' ' I — I— never mind. What a long drive 
 it is!" 
 
 She leaned forward, turning her face from him, 
 as if to look out of the window, that he might not 
 see any more tears. "Where are we?" she said, 
 just to say something, fearing he'd go back to that, 
 her poor little venture that had failed. "Where 
 are we?" she asked. 
 
 He glanced out of his window. "The street of 
 the brown room," he said, laughiag. 
 
 Every One's Hour 
 
 She was always making little jests that no one 
 ever laughed at, and bringing in little gifts that 
 no one ever wanted, flinging her enthusiasm against 
 blank walls, and lavishing her infinite sympathy 
 on people who did not care. 
 
 Her emotions were such misfits, the finest and 
 highest and most beautiful of them were made to 
 amuse one by her shyness of their wearing. It 
 was as if she, little and stooping and pale, should 
 put on trailing court robes of gold and velvet and 
 ermine. It was to fancy a queen's crown on her 
 timidly hung, little, rather grey head. 
 
 39 
 
Accidentals 
 
 A 
 
 Her world was very small, and her dreams were 
 too great for it. Her dreams were without limit, 
 and she never ceased dreaming them, and always 
 was confused by them, bewildered by them, in her 
 life's so narrow spaces. It was as if always she 
 stood not knowing what to do with her dreams. 
 As if, because of far visions, she could not see real 
 things clearly. The light was too beautiful. 
 
 She was colourless, and she saw all things in the 
 colours of dreams, colours that never were. 
 
 She saw love, as it passed by, and loved it — and 
 one couldn't help being amused. It was so quaint 
 to think of her reading the poetry of love, dream- 
 ing over it. She tried to tell her sister's and 
 brother's children, stories of fair ladies and knights 
 without fear, but the children were never in- 
 terested. 
 
 She marked things in books for people to read, 
 and then did not dare to show them. In her little 
 books of devotion she marked all the things about 
 strength, the right hand that upholds, and about 
 those who shall mount up with wings as eagles, 
 run and not be weary, and walk and not faint. 
 It frightened her, and she confessed it to the abbe, 
 that she loved the splendid, old outcryings of the 
 prophets better than the lives of the blessed saints. 
 The abbe murmured something suitable for any 
 occasion, not having quite caught what she said. 
 40 
 
Every One's Hour 
 
 Just once she showed the marked passages of her 
 prophet Isaiah to someone — who wondered why, 
 for an instant, and never thought of it again. 
 
 She never had anything to say to anyone, ex- 
 cept in the moments when she forgot her poor, 
 little, shy self, and said too much, and said it to 
 quite the wrong people. Then she might have been 
 rather wonderful, had she been someone else, but, 
 because she was herself, no one thought of it. 
 
 When people heard she was dead, they said, 
 "Poor little thing — we never asked her to dinner !" 
 or, "Poor little thing — I was always meaning to 
 go and see her!" And the whole world went to 
 the old hotel, now that its shabby door was mag- 
 nificent in black and silver and that the grand 
 black catafalque was there, between the candles; 
 and now that she, who so had loved flowers, could 
 not see or smell or touch them, all people sent them, 
 crosses of violets and wreaths of white roses. No- 
 body knew that it had been red roses she always 
 loved best. Everyone who had forgotten her re- 
 membered her. 
 
 Motors crowded the old narrow street, and great 
 names were scrawled in pencil in the pad in the 
 porter's lodge. 
 
 And she, lying dressed in white, in a long, black 
 box, with the flowers heaped about, in the light of 
 many candles, and in all the pomp and circum- 
 
 41 
 
Accidentals 
 
 stance and ceremony of death, with the abbe most 
 attentive, and everybody who had laughed grown 
 solemn, had her little hour of greatness. 
 
 Medicis Fountain 
 
 The special melancholy that there is always in 
 that garden seemed to hang like a heavy thing in 
 the soft, thick, yellow autumn afternoon, and to 
 be gathered densely about the fountain. "Wet yel- 
 low leaves were falling softly all the time about the 
 fountain and lay on the dark water and deep in 
 the paths. There was much fluttering of pigeons 
 and sparrows about the fountain, and people came 
 and went. 
 
 It was a Thursday afternoon, and the band was 
 playing under the trees by the gate of the Boule- 
 vard Saint Michel. 
 
 The beds of the parterre down below were full 
 of scarlet salvia, and the children's toy ships sailed 
 the basin. 
 
 And yet the melancholy was there. 
 
 It seemed as if it were a thing left over from 
 times long ago and people long dead. It was as 
 if it were something that remained behind always, 
 42 
 
Medicis Fountain 
 
 of whatever of melancholy had been in the hearts 
 of people who had passed through the garden since 
 the days when Marie de Medicis gave such fine 
 fetes. It was a melancholy of great names that 
 everyone knows, and of great memories. And it 
 was that other melancholy which is of fanciful 
 names and light footfall, of Harlequin and Colum- 
 bine and Pierrot, of out-in-the-heel dancing and of 
 laughter at all things, "de peur d'gtre oblige d'en 
 pleurer," the poor, little; wistful, gay melancholy, 
 the special lightness of tragedy, of those travellers 
 of the road to Prague whose footsteps leave no 
 mark. 
 
 It was the melancholy that is so curiously special 
 to Prance, that comes to Paris from the fields and 
 the hills, from ancient towns, half-forsaken, and 
 forests that belong no more to kings; from blue 
 sails of fishing boats and old grey harbours, from 
 calls of seabirds on desolate beaches, and night- 
 ingales' songs in olive groves; and little odd things, 
 the jester's bauble, the fans of Watteau's time, 
 and wooden shoes, and high-heeled satin slippers. 
 It was the melancholy of France that has no tragic 
 gesture, that only laughs and sings to the moon, 
 that is in the rhythm of dances and the refrain of 
 ballads, "Mironton, mironton, mirontaine." 
 
 43 
 
Accidentals 
 
 Ghosts 
 
 The drum was sounding through the garden, 
 where the autumn night was come already, and 
 where there were but few people left to pass out, 
 through the dusk, before the closing of the gates. 
 
 The lamps of the Boulevard Saint Michel were 
 lighted, and of the street under the dome of the 
 Pantheon. But by the gate there, away somewhat 
 from the lamps, and in the mistiness of the bare 
 trees, there was s6 little light that the people 
 passing out seemed mysterious, shadow people, part 
 of the deepening sense of its all being haunted. 
 
 Mothers and grandmothers, with gathered-up 
 knitting, shepherded the children out ; the children 
 ran and called; people passed on their way from 
 work, girls with bare heads, men in blouses, the 
 glow of a man's pipe lighting his face out from the 
 shadows, the patter of a girl's high-heeled little 
 shoes coming through the shadows and going on to 
 the sounds of the street; a girl's laugh, a boy's 
 laugh; the crying of a child; a scolding voice; 
 quick figures and slow figures ; erect figures, stoop- 
 ing figures ; footsteps of youth, old tired footsteps ; 
 so many footsteps and so many figures, all with 
 something of mystery about them in the shadows. 
 44 
 
The Sand Barge 
 
 The footsteps passed out to the lights of the 
 Boulevard Saint Michel, on the going of various 
 ways. They came through the shadows, and went 
 those same old roads by which so many people for 
 so long had gone. To-night's footsteps died away 
 after all the others in the shadows. 
 
 And the haunting of it had no more to do with 
 the ages ago than with the moment, and one's own 
 standing there. 
 
 The Sand Barge 
 
 In the black thick winter night, that was come 
 early to Paris, at the hour when the world was 
 going hom-e to and fro across the bridges, there 
 was passing under the Bridge of the Concorde a 
 string of broad flat black sand barges towed by 
 a little tug, and trailing a wide long wake in the 
 black water. 
 
 In one of the last of the barges there was a 
 hollow scooped out in the sand and a huge fire 
 blazing. The flames soared up red and gold and 
 clear and high, and the black figures of the men 
 moved against the glow; and their great black 
 shadows moved with them where the firelight was 
 red on the sand. The red flames struck magnifi- 
 
 45 
 
Accidentals 
 
 cently out of the black night, and the men's black 
 figures moved against the light of the fire with 
 something of splendour that they got from the clash 
 of black and red. 
 
 It was a thing shown, as if with blare of trum- 
 pets, to hurried tired people who could not see it. 
 
 Twenty Francs 
 
 The little girl who brought the hat from the 
 milliner's in the rue de la Paix was a very little 
 girl. She might have been twelve, but she did not 
 look it, as she stood in the bright anteroom of the 
 apartment at the Eitz. 
 
 The anteroom was full of boxes that the maid 
 was packing. Beautiful things were thrown about 
 everywhere, dresses and wraps and hats. 
 
 The little girl stood stupidly in the midst of it. 
 Her eyes looked stupidly out from under a mat of 
 brown hair and the rim of a dreary brown hat. 
 She had a black worsted scarf around her neck — 
 the ends of it were not long enough to cover her 
 hollow chest — and her jacket was very thin. She 
 held the carton, almost as big as herself, in a hand 
 that was bare, and very small, and quite blue 
 with the cold. 
 
 46 
 
Twenty Francs 
 
 It was a horribly cold night out of doors. Even 
 in a charming apartment at the Ritz one could 
 hear the rage of the February wind. 
 
 The little girl gave the carton to the maid, and 
 the maid took it to the room beyond, to her mistress. 
 The maid was English. She was a very good 
 woman, and she was sorry for the little girl who 
 looked so forlorn. She told her mistress about the 
 little girl. The mistress was a very good woman 
 too. The maid came back with a twenty-franc gold 
 piece. The little girl stood waiting, stupidly star- 
 ing at nothing. 
 
 The maid gave her the twenty-franc gold piece. 
 "That is for you," she said in English. The little 
 girl looked stupidly at it. She held it, and looked 
 at it, and then looked up at the maid. "That's for 
 you," said the maid again, always in English. The 
 little girl still did not seem to understand. 
 
 The maid opened the door of the anteroom and 
 spoke to one of the hotel men-servants in the cor- 
 ridor. "Gustavo, tell the little girl that the twenty 
 francs are for her." 
 
 He was a very correct, smart-looking servant. 
 He spoke kindly enough to the little girl. 
 
 She looked from the maid to him, and then at 
 the gold piece again. Then she said things in a 
 stupid little voice, as dull and cold and tired as 
 her way of standing there. 
 
 47 
 
Accidentals 
 
 While she spoke, the man's face came to be a 
 quite dijBferent face, not a smart servant's face 
 any more. The maid thought he was angry for 
 some reason. 
 
 She said to him, "What is it? It's no use ex- 
 pecting gratitude. What does she say?" 
 
 The servant said, "Gratitude!" after her, in a 
 tone as sharp as a gentleman's. "Gratitude!" 
 then he laughed. ' ' Gratitude ! She says that four 
 francs is the most her sister ever gets from any 
 man in the Boulevard Sebastopol. She says her 
 sister told her so the night their mother was dying, 
 and she had to get twenty francs for the doctor." 
 
 "Oh," said the maid, "how horrible! Run 
 away, little girl!" 
 
 The little girl half stopped in the door. The 
 man spoke to her in that voice that was not like a 
 smart, correct servant's voice. 
 
 "What was it?" asked the maid. "What did 
 you say to her?" 
 
 "She was going to be grateful," answered the 
 man-servant, shrugging his shoulders, "and I said 
 to her, 'that — no.' " 
 
 48 
 
Miss 
 
 Miss 
 
 When Stefanie was twenty-three, she had been 
 married for nearly five years, and had, in those five 
 years, been given all the pleasant things that are 
 the due of such pretty, clever, little, young, gay, 
 fine ladies as she, in the "beautiful world" of 
 Paris. 
 
 She had been taken into the beautiful world by 
 one step, as it were, out of her childhood. It was 
 as if she had been led through the green baize 
 door of the nursery passage, directly into a ball- 
 room, where the lights never went out and the 
 music never stopped, and the flowers never faded, 
 and all the people danced always. They had opened 
 the green baize door to a ballroom, and she had 
 entered delightedly in, straight, so, from the dull, 
 shabby blue room where she had done lessons with 
 Miss. 
 
 She had had bread and chocolate there with 
 Miss, for the last time, that last afternoon. She 
 had been very pleased that she was to be married 
 at Sainte Clothilde to-morrow. She wondered why 
 dear, plain, elderly, good English Miss — ^who had 
 been with her since she could remember, a part 
 of her life as much as the bread and chocolate — 
 
 49 
 
Accidentals 
 
 should be so odd about it. Her mother and father 
 were very pleased. 
 
 It was five years before she understood why 
 Miss had cried. 
 
 For five years she herself had stayed, the whole 
 of the time, just very pleased, as her father and 
 mother had always been. 
 
 Then there happened to Stdfanie, at twenty- 
 three, to understand the thing of which it was that 
 Miss had wept in prophecy. It was alj in one 
 moment. 
 
 She and the tall, nice boy of the brown eyes were 
 having the five o'clock, quite by themselves. They 
 had known one another so long — all the five years — 
 and so beautifully well, so exquisitely and wonder- 
 fully well. However could she have dreamed it 
 was a thing to weep over ? However could she have 
 known that a thing so right could be wrong, that 
 so happy a thing could be sad? 
 
 They sat in the salon of the dragons, where was 
 all the priceless chinoiserie that Stefanie's husband 
 had spent more than half his fifty years collecting. 
 Stefanie was always afterwards to be afraid of the 
 two great green-and-yellow dragons by the hearth, 
 and of the little deformed, gorgeous-coloured old 
 men on the chimney-shelf, and the white dogs with 
 their flat faces, as if they had been live, alien 
 things that had heard and seen and might tell. 
 SO 
 
Miss 
 
 There was a great white vase on an ebony stand 
 close to the tea-table, that had always pleased her 
 for the repetition it held, in its irised curves, of the 
 room and of people. Last night she had been 
 watching the firelight in the vase, and had sud- 
 denly seen there that her husband in the firelight 
 was not reading at all the book he sat huddled over, 
 but was just looking and looking at her, under 
 his heavy brows. His eyes had met her eyes in 
 the white vase. 
 
 Now it amused her to make the boy lean for- 
 ward and look at her there, and their eyes meet, 
 laughing. 
 
 Afterwards she was to be afraid of the vase al- 
 ways, for those two faces it had shown her so. 
 
 But in that minute, while she and the boy looked 
 at one another there, she was not afraid, and she 
 laughed. 
 
 It was so nice having tea with him. She had 
 buttered his brown bread for him. 
 
 He moved in the white vase, and leaned toward 
 her. 
 
 ' ' Stef anie ! " he said. ' ' Stef anie 1 ' ' 
 
 She had read books in which men had told their 
 love in many words. He told his in just the way 
 he said her name. 
 
 "Stef anie!" he said, and her heart leaped. 
 
 Her heart— it was no more her heart; it was a 
 51 
 
Accidentals 
 
 wild, mad thing, that his saying of her name, just 
 his saying of her name, had made alive. That 
 new, that wild heart, not hers, his, of his making, 
 leaped to her throat and stayed there, and throbbed 
 and struggled there. 
 
 "Stefanie!" 
 
 She had read of happiness. It had taken many 
 words, in the books she had read, to tell of happi- 
 ness. But he told of it, all of it, in the one word 
 that was her name, * ' Stefanie ! ' ' 
 
 She leaned toward him in the light of the fire. 
 He put his hands out, and she put her hands in 
 them. 
 
 With her hands in his, she knew things. She 
 knew that it was because of him she had been 
 happy for five years. He had been all the reason 
 of her happiness. He had been her reason lot 
 everything. 
 
 Because of him she had been pretty, and had 
 laughed and danced, and had pleased people. Be- 
 cause of him she had thought that the world was 
 good, and had tried to be good in it. Because of 
 him she had thought that life was a beautiful thing, 
 and had dreamed beautiful dreams of it. All that 
 was best of her had been because of him, and he 
 had been her happiness. 
 
 "Stefaniel"hesaid. 
 
 52 
 
Miss 
 
 The beating of that wild, new heart ; that he had 
 made to live, that was for him, was in her throat 
 and in her eyes. She was dumb with it, and blind. 
 It was in her hands. She thought that he must 
 feel it in her hands. Everything she had was 
 going out to him through the tips of her fingers. 
 Her self was passing to him. If they had drawn 
 all her blood away through the tips of her fingers, 
 it could not have hurt more. And if some drawing 
 away of her life-blood had left her soul free in 
 heaven, it could not have been more beautiful, 
 happier. 
 
 His hands that held hers were burning. Through 
 the beating and the blindness she felt his look. 
 His eyes must be lighted with the light her soul 
 would pass into. 
 
 Her soul was passing. 
 
 He said, "Stefanie!" 
 
 She thought that she was dying, and it was to 
 cease without regret. 
 
 He said, "Stefanie!" 
 
 She threw her head back and he kissed her 
 throat, where the heart had been struggling that 
 was now escaped to him. 
 
 Her throat was quiet when he kissed it. 
 
 All that had ever been was fallen quite away. 
 There was a new heaven and a new earth. It was 
 
 S3 
 
Accidentals 
 
 the end, and it was the beginning. It was wonder- 
 fully and gloriously right. It was the happiest thing 
 in the world. 
 
 But she thought, for a minute, of the old, faded 
 blue nursery, and knew, for a minute, why Miss 
 had cried. 
 
 Little Brides 
 
 The streets around Sainte Clothilde were full of 
 little white brides, their veils and ribbons and full 
 stiff skirts winging in the breeze of the chilly, grey 
 morning. Mass was just over at Sainte Clothilde. 
 The day before had been First Communion there. 
 
 The mid-May morning was so cold that all the 
 mothers had brought white wraps for bundling up 
 the little brides. Little white brides were being 
 taken away in cabs, and auto-taxis, and in beautiful 
 big automobiles, and in shabby, old-fashioned car- 
 riages, and by the Grenelle-St. Lazare omnibus. 
 
 Little delicate brides, going home to old beauti- 
 ful rooms between court and garden, daughters of 
 a race that can be fanatic, that has need of a dream ; 
 little daughters of the bourgeoisie, round and rosy, 
 very serious, thinking of comfortable things ; little 
 brides of poverty, clumsy boots at the edge of cheap 
 54 
 
Playing Soldiers 
 
 white skirts, little brides all of them so prettily 
 important — ^why was one sad, and almost afraid, 
 watching them? Saints and martyrs, visions and 
 dreams and sacrifices and renunciations, chatter of 
 everybody crowding into the taxi, splashing of mud 
 from the omnibus, quiet closing of carriage door — 
 it was not only that one felt the loneliness of the 
 ideal, so curiously a thing of every day, and of 
 such utter mystery. 
 
 Perhaps it was that life opened too vast and dim 
 a country for the little brides to travel. It was as 
 if the shadow of things to come to them out of life, 
 were cast before, dark, upon the grey morning. 
 Perhaps it was because of unknown things, coming, 
 that one was sad, and afraid, for the little brides. 
 Or perhaps it was only because they were so very 
 young, and their dresses were so white. 
 
 Playing Soldiers 
 
 In the garden of the Invalides, where already the 
 leaves were falling, the little brother and sister, 
 in their black school pinafores, played "soldiers" 
 together, while the mother and the grandmother 
 sat by on a bench, the young woman knitting a grey 
 
 55 
 
Accidentals 
 
 sock, the old woman, with her hands quiet in her 
 nice black lap, looking away at nothing. 
 
 The little brother and sister marched up and 
 down the path, from the tree with the bushes round 
 it to the tree that was covered with yellow vine, 
 and back again, he with a toy gun, she with her 
 hoop stick over her shoulder. "Eight foot, left 
 foot, right foot, left foot." 
 
 As they passed the bench the mother looked up 
 from her knitting. "Eh, Mariette, out of step, I 
 declare! How's that now? If father saw, what 
 would he say?" She marked time with the knit- 
 ting needles and the grey sock. "Eight foot, left 
 foot." 
 
 "Halt!" ordered the little brother. "Present 
 arms. Arms right, arms left, — ^left, Mariette, I tell 
 thee! Carry arms. Forward — ^march." 
 
 "Forward — ^march," suddenly echoed the grand- 
 mother. Suddenly she was sitting up brave and 
 proud on the bench. Her old, deep-sunk eyes, 
 vague and blue, were lighted suddenly. For a 
 moment it was as if her eyes shone with the light 
 of some great glory that she looked to. "Vive la 
 France!" she cried out in her shrill high voice, a 
 thrill in it of old, unhappy, far-off things and bat- 
 tles long ago. It was as if her eyes that had seen 
 France live through defeat, shone with knowledge 
 of victory. It was the soul of France that shone in 
 S6 
 
Potatoes and War 
 
 her eyes. "Forward— march!" she cried to the 
 children. 
 
 Her daughter on the bench beside her said to 
 her gently, "There now, dear, there," patting her 
 knee to quiet her. 
 
 The old woman fell silent again. Her hands lay 
 together in her lap, and her eyes were dim again. 
 She did not see the children as they marched up 
 and down the path, from the tree of the bushes to 
 the tree of the vine. She looked away into nothing 
 and waited patiently. 
 
 Potatoes and War 
 
 All morning in the fire zone of Paris the young 
 lieutenant had watched the old woman who was 
 digging potatoes. 
 
 It was a day of the season of market gardens in 
 the year of desolation. Paris was breached with 
 cannon and burned with petrol. One was growing 
 used to the lightning and thunder of war. The 
 storms of two sieges had kept Death so close to 
 Paris and for so long, that it had come to be part 
 of life, accepted as of every day and common- 
 place. 
 
 57 
 
Accidentals 
 
 There, where the young lieutenant was on picket 
 duty and the old woman was digging potatoes, 
 shells had, for months, been coming and coming 
 again, to blaze black trails through the silver stems 
 of the poplars or to smoke up the good earth of 
 the fields. 
 
 In the fields someone was burning brushwood, 
 and the smell of its smoke mingled with the smell 
 of the gunpowder smoke. The two smokes together 
 hung in the mist that lay along the river. It was a 
 misty blue day, and the smoke of cannon made 
 beautiful little sudden white clouds in the soft 
 veiled sunshine. 
 
 The young lieutenant walked up and down past 
 the rows of the old woman's potatoes, and would 
 have given anything in the world, except the one 
 thing it would have cost him, to be able to get 
 away to where the smeU of fields was not all min- 
 gled with the smell of war. 
 
 Once a shell burst so close to the old woman and 
 to him that the broken black hot bits of it were all 
 about them. 
 
 Then he said to her almost angrily, "My God, 
 granny, why don't you get away out of this?" 
 
 She was a little thin doubled-up old woman with 
 a face like a nutcracker ; one imagined her nose and 
 chin snapping together. She lifted her head and 
 looked at him out of sunken vague old eyes. 
 58 
 
Little Soldier without Name 
 
 "Why don't you get away?" he asked her again. 
 
 "Why don't you?" she asked him. 
 
 "I?" he said. "I? I cannot. I must stay." 
 He was so young that he added proudly, "I must 
 do my duty." 
 
 She said, "Eh? B'en, what will you? I also 
 must do mine." She went back to her digging of 
 potatoes. 
 
 Little Soldier without Name 
 
 This happened on the 24th of May, 1871, when 
 Paris, shattered and charred, had been for the 
 most part retaken by the army of Versailles, and 
 the Communards, driven back upon the heights of 
 P^re Lachaise and Belleville and Montmartre, 
 fighting to frenzy in their lost cause, were still 
 holding as their supreme citadel the Fort of Ivry, 
 and pouring fire from it upon the Fort of Bicltre, 
 that at last the Government troops occupied. 
 
 The young lieutenant, coming from Sceaux, was 
 carrying important messages to the Commandant 
 of the fort of the Bicitre. 
 
 He had an escort of six hussards. He was very 
 splendid with the new hongroise of his uniform 
 and the two bright galons of his kepi. 
 
 59 
 
Accidentals 
 
 At the edge of the trenches a little soldier 
 stopped him. It was a very French little soldier, 
 intimate and friendly with an officer, no more 
 afraid of rank than of war. 
 
 "Where do you go, my lieutenant, with your six 
 hussards?" 
 
 "To the Fort of Bicetre carrying orders." 
 
 "You will never get there like that, my lieuten- 
 ant. From the left, from the roofs of Gentilly, the 
 Communards beat your way with fire, and from the 
 right their cannons cover it from the Fort of Ivry." 
 
 "I must get there," said the lieutenant. 
 
 Afterwards, in the years, he went back to that 
 place and realised how pitiful the thing was that 
 had happened there, but at the time he scarcely 
 thought of it. 
 
 He was only thinking what in the world to do, 
 and he said again, "I must get there." 
 
 The little soldier said, "Very well, then, my 
 lieutenant, we will go together. Possibly I can 
 take you. You know nothing of the trenches, but I 
 have been two months in them. You must do 
 exactly as I say." 
 
 The lieutenant looked over the way he had to 
 go, and he said to the little soldier, "Tell me what 
 to do." 
 
 The little soldier said, "Leave your escort and 
 leave your horse." 
 
 60 
 
Little Soldier without Name 
 
 The lieutenant dismounted his six hussards in 
 the shelter of a hollow of the land there, and or- 
 dered them to wait, keeping his horse. 
 
 The little soldier said, "Now follow close behind 
 me. When I say 'Eun,' then nin. And when I 
 say, 'Drop down on your hands and knees and 
 crawl, ' then do so. When I say, ' Get up, ' you may 
 get up. Whatever I tell you, you must do in- 
 stantly. And do not speak tome." 
 
 Then they began their journey. The cannon 
 always belched and thundered from the right, and 
 the bullets came always whistling from the house- 
 tops and windows on the left. There would be the 
 hiss of a shell, and the world would shake with its 
 explosion. Sometimes they could run for a little 
 way, but most of the time they had to crawl on 
 their hands and knees. Sometimes they had to lie 
 flat and wait. It was running and dropping down 
 and crawling and springing up and dashing for it 
 and dropping again, absurdly, like that, in succes- 
 sive bounds, that they got over the ground through 
 the fall of hot, red rain. Once the little soldier got 
 a chance — one knee on the ground, sitting on his 
 other heel — ^to draw on a group on a housetop that 
 had been potting at them as if at rabbits. "En 
 voilS, un degot6," he said as a man fell. It took 
 them terribly long to get to the fortress. They 
 had to make their way all around the Bicetre to 
 
 6i 
 
Accidentals 
 
 get to the entrance of it that was on the side of 
 the ramparts of Paris, opposite where they were 
 come up from the direction of Sceaux. And it 
 was only when they were at the drawbridge that 
 the young lieutenant dared to speak. 
 
 He was turning to thank the little soldier, and 
 then he had that stunned sense people came in 
 those days to know so well, of somebody's being 
 shot, oneself, the man beside one. 
 
 For an instant he did not know if it were not 
 he himself who was shot. 
 
 But it was the little soldier's body that fell, with 
 a bullet through the head. 
 
 The lieutenant spread his handkerchief over the 
 little soldier's face, and got iato the fort with the 
 messages. 
 
 At the time it was just part of everything. 
 
 But afterwards he was to wish he had known 
 the little soldier's name. 
 
 November Second 
 
 AiiL the flowers of Paris that day, with the florists 
 and in the markets, in the stalls at the street cor- 
 ners and in the piush-carts, everywhere, were white 
 and purple flowers, sad in the sad grey day, white 
 62 
 
November Second 
 
 chrysanthemums and white and purple asters 
 and violets and white roses that lived to die on 
 graves. The streets about the cemeteries were lined 
 with imitation flowers of tin and zinc, wreaths and 
 anchors and crosses, that when one was young one 
 had not liked to think of as being given to those 
 who in death were gone so far from tawdriness. 
 When one was grown older and had come to be 
 better able to understand sorrow, there was some- 
 thing that touched one in the very tawdriness and 
 ignorance of those little offerings to the dead, some- 
 thing of attempt and failure. The offering of such 
 ignorant things to the dead, of whom the humblest 
 are so very strangely great and beautiful, was 
 touching, as are all mistaken little poor efforts of 
 love. The dead, coming there and seeing, must feel 
 about it, "They thought to give us pleasure." 
 
 The streets were full of people in deep mourning. 
 It was a soft, still day. One fancied the dead came 
 back for a little, in the grey, soft stillness, that one 
 so intensely felt, for all the confusion of people's 
 coming and going. 
 
 Up and down the white and purple streets the 
 people in black came and went. 
 
 And one thought of the dead as being very sorry 
 for them, as being touched by the father's shining, 
 stiff black gloves, that were too long in the fingers, 
 and by the grandmother's having trudged aU the 
 
 63 
 
Accidentals 
 
 way, and by the mother's having put so much 
 crepe on her bonnet, and by the band of crSpe on 
 the sleeve of the man's white blouse, and by the 
 baby's not noticing any of it. 
 
 Two Griefs 
 
 In the florist's shop two women stood looking 
 at one another among the white and purple flowers. 
 All the flowers of Paris that day were white and 
 purple, for it was the day of the dead. It was a 
 still, soft, dark day, heavy with pent-up rain, as 
 that day always is, for the taking of flowers to the 
 cemeteries. 
 
 The older woman was dressed in deep mourn- 
 ing, her veil over her face. She was tall and slight. 
 The girl, looking up at her, could make out, through 
 the veil, that there was a wave of grey in her dark 
 hair, drawn back from her forehead, and that the 
 outline of her face was very clear-cut and white. 
 She was a great lady; the painted and tawdry 
 little girl had seen that from the first glance at her 
 as she came into the shop. 
 
 The girl did not wear mourning. Her dress was 
 so poor that it made her seem oddly out of place 
 64 
 
Two Griefs 
 
 in a grand shop like the florist's. The lady, look- 
 ing down at her, saw that she was quite beautiful. 
 There was something in her eyes that the painting 
 of them did not take away, and there was some- 
 thing about her mouth that the scarlet did not 
 hurt at all. 
 
 There was a heap of white violets on the table 
 by which the two women stood. 
 
 The man of the shop had been about to wrap up 
 the violets for the girl, but when the lady came 
 and asked for white violets he hesitated, with 
 the three-cornered folds of wrapping paper in his 
 hands. The lady had said that it was only white 
 violets she wanted — ^nothing else would do. And 
 those the girl had bought were all he had or could 
 get anywhere that day. And it was the fine lady, 
 of course, he desired to please. He hesitated, and 
 looked from one woman to the other. He said, 
 "Madame, I regret it infinitely, but infinitely. 
 These are all the white violets I have, Madame, 
 that this moment Mademoiselle has taken. What 
 can I do, Madame? Unless Mademoiselle were 
 to " 
 
 The lady said to the girl, "Mademoiselle, there 
 must be other flowers you could take. It is that 
 for me there are only these." 
 
 The girl said, "I have searched all Paris to find 
 them. There are none to be had in the markets or 
 
 65 
 
Accidentals 
 
 the booths or the push-carts, or with the other 
 grand florists, anywhere." 
 
 The woman said, "If I cannot find them — ^if I 
 cannot find them anywhere — ■. — " It was odd the 
 way she said it. She put up one hand in its black 
 glove and pushed the veil back from her face, as 
 if not caring at all, in her wish to see the girl's 
 face, that the girl should see what was in hers. 
 
 Anyone could have seen in her face, that death 
 had had for her both sting and bitterness in it. 
 
 She said to the girl, "I want them for someone 
 who used to love them best of all flowers." 
 
 The girl said, "They were the flowers the one 
 I want them for loved best too." 
 
 The man of the shop was folding the paper 
 round the violets and fastening down the corners 
 with gilt pins. 
 
 "I want them for my mother," the girl said; 
 "she used to look at them in the florists' windows. 
 She never had any. She never had anything that 
 was beautiful." 
 
 "You loved her?" asked the lady. 
 
 "Oh, yes," said the girl. 
 
 "And she knew it?" 
 
 "Oh, yes," said the girl again. 
 
 "She had that," said the lady— "you gave her 
 that." She stood looking down closely into the 
 little painted face. Anyone could have seen in 
 66 
 
The Risk 
 
 the girl's face that, for her, death had no sting or 
 bitterness. "I envy you," Said the lady, and drew 
 her veil down again to hide her face. 
 
 The girl came nearer to her with a sudden, swift 
 movement. "Oh, Madame, the one you loved, who 
 
 is dead, did not know :" She stopped herself 
 
 short, realising what she had said. 
 
 The lady turned and would have left the shop. 
 
 But the girl went past her, pushing her aside 
 rudely, and was at the door, and was out of it. 
 
 The Risk 
 
 She was more lonely even than usual, that No- 
 vember afternoon, in the wet Paris streets, when 
 she came away from the two of them and their 
 happiness. 
 
 All the way home, in the motor, with the black, 
 wet, thick, soft night, and the blur of lights, and 
 the blur of sounds pressing in about her, close, in 
 the wet, she had been envying them. 
 
 But, as she went over it, alone, in her long hours 
 by the fire, she came, slowly, to be glad that she 
 did not have to run the risk of it, of the great 
 danger of happiness. 
 
 67 
 
Accidentals 
 
 Christmas Crowd 
 
 Theeb was a mist folded round Paris, the bare 
 trees stood up out of it, and the noises of the city 
 came through it blurred and softened, dim as 
 through folds of velvet. The low, wet sky sagged 
 down along the dark massing of the roofs. On the 
 Grands Boulevards the advertising signs of electric 
 lights threw down colour after colour on the con- 
 fusion of the world's comings and goings. 
 
 Those words written in gold upon the sky ought 
 to have been beautiful words — ^what words could 
 have been beautiful enough to warrant being 
 shown so to a people ? Love, pain, eternity, death. 
 It was strange that those were not the words 
 shown in golden lights to the crowds of the Boule- 
 vards. 
 
 The mist made little halos round the tables on 
 the cafe terraces, where the braziers smouldered 
 in red and blue. The mist got into the booths that 
 lined the pavements, and made their oil lamps shine 
 yellower than gold. The tawdry little affairs for 
 sale in the baraques got quite a magnificence from 
 the gold light. And the faces of the people passed 
 and passed in the gold light. 
 
 Some of them were quite dreadful faces, miser- 
 able and sinister. 
 
 68 
 
The Church by the River 
 
 It was not a beautiful world at all, nor a good 
 world. But it was a great, wonderful, close, touch- 
 ing, intimate thing, infinite and near, that one 
 needed, that had need of one, in whose whole one 
 had part, intensely. It was a beautiful, terrible 
 thing, that was there, always, to be turned to, 
 one's sense of it never to be in any words told of, 
 a refuge in its great sadness from all the little sad- 
 ness of oneself. 
 
 The Church by the River 
 
 It was as if the winter mood of the city outside 
 had been drawn into the church and was held there, 
 gathered, accumulated and intensified, a mood in 
 which fear had curiously a part. The mood of 
 the river close under the church was not stranger 
 or more sad. Indeed it was the same mood. The 
 river and the church together meant Paris. 
 
 Perhaps already, in the winter afternoon, the 
 Boulevards were lighted. But they did not mean 
 Paris. 
 
 Some people say it is a gay city, but how utterly 
 sad it is. 
 
 Always and always the motif of it is the river. 
 It is as if every street led there, and every life. 
 
 69 
 
Accidentals 
 
 And how closely the church belongs with the 
 river, inseparably. 
 
 That day the river was very dark and sad and 
 sinister. And it was very dark in the church. 
 
 The columns of the aisles and nave rose into 
 darkness, and the high lift of the arches was lost 
 in darkness. One scarcely discerned the windows 
 against the dark sky. Only to the left, by the 
 door of the north aisle, there was a great blur of 
 light. 
 
 One could not at all see the crib, nor Mary and 
 Joseph and the child in the straw, nor the ox and 
 the grey ass, only the denseness of the candle- 
 light about it, like a glory for it, and some strange 
 dim figures that knelt against the starry haze of 
 tapers. 
 
 The figures seemed not to be of real people at 
 all. It was as if they were some shaping into stone 
 of prayers that through ages had been prayed 
 before the child in the crib. It was as if the dim 
 passing of prayers, the drift and breath and 
 shadow, and the loneliness, and the hopelessness, 
 and the yet sadder hopefulness, had been arrested 
 and fixed, made part of the church's stone, as hard 
 and cold as the stone was, and eternally so, before 
 the child in the crib. 
 
 There was the figure of a young man with 
 hunched shoulders and sunken head; and of a 
 
 70 
 
The Church by the River 
 
 woman, kneeling but with her head lifted as she 
 looked straight at the crib; an old man's bent 
 figure standing up as straight as it could; a child's 
 figure, a little girl, tiptoeing to look ; and there was 
 the crouched figure of a very old woman huddled 
 in her chair. They seemed to be all perfectly still. 
 
 Never had there been a place so still as the 
 church. It was silent with a silence that belonged 
 to the dark. The darkness and the stillness be- 
 longed absolutely together. 
 
 There was a sound that belonged to them both ; it 
 was so much a part of the stillness and the dark- 
 ness, and of the something very strange there was 
 there, that, somehow, it did not seem strange at all. 
 
 It was the crying of a very little baby. It 
 seemed to come out of the haze of light. It was 
 not strange; of course, he would have cried like 
 that before the kneeling wise men, under the star 
 of the East. Of course, he would have been crying 
 in the manger, between the ox and the grey ass. 
 
 But it was not the baby in the manger that was 
 crying. 
 
 It was another baby, and it was crying in the 
 chapel beyond the crib. 
 
 Beyond the crib, and beyond the haze of light, 
 and past the old woman who sold candles on the 
 edge of the light, asleep, huddled in her shawl, 
 there was the chapel of the baptisms. 
 
 71 
 
Accidentals 
 
 It was there that the baby was crying. 
 
 In the dark depths of the chapel one could not 
 make out any figures at all. 
 
 There was a sound of steps down the aisle, and 
 there was a light coming — coming very strangely 
 through the darkness. 
 
 It was a little choir boy carrying a taper before 
 the priest down the long aisle to the chapel of the 
 fountain. The two of them came through the 
 shadows with the taper, and went into the chapel. 
 The light of the taper showed the dark stone and 
 dark wood carving of the chapel, and showed that 
 there were waiting there an old woman in a white 
 cap and a young man who held the baby in his 
 arms. 
 
 The woman and the man stood up and the baby 
 stopped crying. The little choir boy — reaching up 
 with diiBculty, he was so little — fixed the taper on 
 the stand at the fountain, and the priest spoke to 
 the grandmother and the father, and went about 
 getting out a heavy large book from some stand 
 or cupboard against the chapel wall behind the 
 fountain. 
 
 The baby had stopped crying to stare at the 
 light of the taper. It stared at the light with its 
 little vague unblinking eyes. The father had 
 brought it nearer to the light and was holding it 
 to look. The grandmother had come nearer, too, 
 
 72 
 
The Church by the River 
 
 to watch the baby. The light of the taper in the 
 dark chapel showed quite wonderfully the woman's 
 old wrinkled face, and the man's young face, and 
 the funny little face of the baby, and the priest's 
 face that was old too. 
 
 Farther on, in the darkness of the aisle, there 
 was a little group of people, all in black, gathered 
 silently and motionless together. They might have 
 been carved figures of stone also, part of the 
 church, grouped, a thing that had always been 
 there, except for a sound that had seemed at first 
 to be a part of the dark silence, even as the baby's 
 crying had been. 
 
 It was the sound of the difficult breathing of 
 one who could not sob. There was something white 
 and small that moved up and down, a handker- 
 chief, carried from eyes to lips, and from lips to 
 eyes again. There, in the dark silence, the black 
 figures were gathered around a black coffin, wait- 
 ing before an unlighted chapel for the priest to 
 come. 
 
 The priest was putting out the baptismal taper 
 in the chapel of the fountain; and the grand- 
 mother and the father were bundling up the baby 
 in all manner of wraps, whispering together. 
 
 It would have been hard to tell what it all had 
 to do with the river, why the mood of the dark 
 cold river, with its many cargoes, should have so 
 
 73 
 
Accidentals 
 
 intensely a part in the mood of the church. Yet 
 how they belonged together! 
 
 Before the crib, a flock of little girls in black 
 uniform had settled down for a minute to twitter 
 their prayers, while the Sister in charge hovered 
 over them, the starry light on her plain good face, 
 and the white wings of her cornette fluttering 
 against the shadow. 
 
 The Toys in the Chapel 
 
 In the classrooms, there were the desks and 
 benches of the little charity girls, the blackboards 
 with their sums worked out, their copy-books and 
 sewing. In the dining-room, the long tables were 
 already set, soup bowls and goblets and slices of 
 bread, for the noon dinner, and in the courtyard, 
 the little girls in black aprons and black shoulder 
 capes were playing Colin Maillard. 
 
 The chapel across the courtyard was pleasantly 
 full of the morning, the glass in the windows was 
 so slightly stained that the grey day came into the 
 chapel as simply as into any room. And the chapel 
 was more like a friendly, intimate little room than 
 the place of the worship of a Great High Priest. 
 74 
 
The Toys in the Chapel 
 
 It was just a place that people loved and lived in. 
 The nuns' benches were pushed about, and their 
 books of devotion lay on the chairs; in one chair 
 there was a woollen shawl tossed down, and in an- 
 other a bit of sewing left, some grey flannel thing 
 with the needle thrust into it. It was as if there 
 had been built a little altar in the room of the 
 everyday 's living, to the intimate everyday glory 
 of a dear God. The few flowers on the altar were 
 flowers from the street corner, four sous' worth 
 of violets, five sous' worth of tuberoses. 
 
 It was in the Christmas days, and there was the 
 crib, in the centre of the little room, down on the 
 floor, where the nuns and the charity children 
 would be close about it at the offices. 
 
 It was a poor crib. Mary and Joseph and the 
 wise men, the baby, the ox and the grey ass, the 
 paper rocks and flowers, the cotton-wool snow were 
 not fine at all for the charity children. And all 
 aroTind the crib, on the fioor before its low stand, 
 and in it, quite inside it, among the sacred things 
 of the stable under the star, there were arranged 
 about, carefully, the charity children's toys. 
 
 The big dolls sat on the fioor before the crib. 
 Several of them had once been quite grand dolls, 
 but now they were all shabby, and most of them 
 were broken. There was a hobby horse with a 
 fine scarlet saddle and its head broken off, and 
 
 75 
 
Accidentals 
 
 there was a much worn, once fine, woolly dog as 
 big as the horse. They stood behind the big dolls. 
 The little animals from the Noah's Ark, and the 
 little dolls — all broken too — ^had been found place 
 for in the crib itself, the dolls close against Mary 
 and Joseph and the wise men, the Noah's Ark 
 animals ranged on each side of the ox and the 
 grey ass. 
 
 Sister Veronique, very serious and humble and 
 sweet in her white-winged cornette, explained to 
 the visitor, "We let the children put them there, 
 it gives them so much pleasure. They think the 
 toys so honoured. They leave them there all the 
 week," 
 
 She bent down and straightened in its place a 
 doll that had tumbled over. It had only one arm 
 and was difficult to balance. "All our toys are 
 broken," she said. "Of course the rich children 
 only send to our children the toys they do not 
 themselves want any more." 
 
 76 
 
The Ermine Muff and Stole 
 
 The Ermine MufF and Stole 
 
 It was odd in a way, when one thinks of it, that 
 a little girl who went home at night to a miserable 
 hole of a room, in a miserable hole of a street, 
 should spend her days in a house that had been 
 famous for its beauty in the days of the Sun King. 
 The house that Louise came to at eight o'clock of 
 the morning and left often enough after eight 
 o'clock of the night, was really more full of beau- 
 tiful things, now that a great costumier made a 
 fad of it, than it had been in the days when the 
 people who built it dwelt in it. In days when the 
 Champs Blys6es were a swampy market garden, 
 and that house was the country house of princes, 
 nobody who came there could have worn velvets 
 and brocades and laces more beautiful than those 
 it was the duty of Louise to pick up from where 
 haughty vendeuses, and yet more haughty beau- 
 tiful mannequins, tossed them carelessly down on 
 the floor. 
 
 All her life Louise had been picking up beautiful 
 things from where they were thrown down, indif- 
 ferently, on magic Persian carpets and against 
 panels that had been painted to please a king. 
 
 Since ever she was big enough to be trusted with 
 huge cardboard boxes, all over purple and amber 
 
 11 
 
Accidentals 
 
 and jade green roses, out in the streets of Paris, 
 she had been carrying beautiful things home to 
 other people. 
 
 Louise was thirteen years old, and ugly, and she 
 worshipped beautiful things. She had never 
 owned a beautiful thing in her life, and she lived 
 all her days among the most beautiful things that 
 Paris could make of silk and lace and velvet and 
 satin and fur. 
 
 One afternoon in December, when at half-past 
 five it was as dark as midnight, and cold and wet 
 as only Paris winter afternoons and midnights can 
 be, Louise was taking home an ermine muff and 
 stole, in the dark, down the Champs Elysees 
 across the Place de la Concorde, across the river 
 and round behind the Bourbon Palace, through 
 the dim quiet streets of the Faubourg, to one of 
 the greatest hotels of the Faubourg, and to a lady 
 of one of the Faubourg's greatest names. 
 
 If she had been a pretty girl she probably would 
 not have loved the ermine muff and stole in the 
 way she did. Pretty girls, however poor the holes 
 of rooms they may have to go home to, have their 
 own faces to love in cracked little green mirrors, 
 and in the curious mirrors of men's eyes. But 
 Louise had not a pretty face that she herself could 
 love. A pretty girl would have wanted the ermine 
 for the decking out it might have been of her 
 78 
 
The Ermine Muff and Stole 
 
 prettiness, but Louise wanted only to look at it 
 and hold it and pat it, and make believe that it 
 was hers, so beautiful and soft and warm that 
 winter night. 
 
 There was a very silent empty dark street. The 
 blank walls on either side of the street enclosed 
 courts and gardens, and there were no windows 
 opening on the street, and the great doors, that 
 were far apart from one another, were all closed. 
 There was no traffic at all in the street. The gas 
 lamps were few, and their thick yellow heavy light 
 travelled from each of them toward the other only 
 a little way along the wet cobbles of the old pave- 
 ment and along the blank walls. There was no one 
 to see Louise put down the box and take out the 
 muff and the stole and put them on. 
 
 If she had been a pretty girl, she would have 
 wanted to wear the ermine muff and stole where 
 people could see her in them, in bright lights and 
 crowds. As it was, she was happy just alone with 
 them. 
 
 She was happy for a really quite long, time, per- 
 haps an hour, wearing the ermine muff and stole, 
 walking up and down the lifeless street, before she 
 realised what she had done. 
 
 The door that had the Prince's arms carved above 
 it was set back in a very deeply recessed great arch- 
 way, full of shadow. There was a balcony over 
 
 79 
 
Accidentals 
 
 the archway that projected with its carving of 
 masks and garlands quite far over the street, and 
 the shadow was deep under it, where Louise stood 
 to ring the bell of the door. 
 
 Not ringing the bell, she stood there in the 
 shadow for some minutes, and knew how dreadful 
 the thing was that she had done. There was no 
 need to go to the lamp and look. She could feel 
 how wet the fur was. The muff was wet where 
 she had been hugging it under her chin, and where 
 her hands had clutched the lining, and the ends of 
 the long ermine stole were wet where they had been 
 dragged in the wet of the stones. There could not 
 possibly be any hiding of the thing that she had 
 done. 
 
 Louise stood in the street before the house of the 
 lady of the ermine muff and stole, and knew what 
 she had done, and knew what would come of it. 
 If she had not been such a frightened little mouse 
 of a girl, perhaps she could have managed some lie 
 about an accident, to tell when they questioned her 
 at the shop to-morrow, about having been knocked 
 down by a motor in the street, perhaps. But as 
 she was, she could not have dared it. She could 
 not even have thought it out. She could never 
 plan things or manage things, as pretty girls who 
 were not frightened, could. She could only im- 
 agine, helplessly. She stood before the door of the 
 80 
 
The Ermine Muff and Stole 
 
 Princess, and looked upon the ruin of the ermine 
 muff and stole. 
 
 She knew just what life would be like when it 
 was all discovered, and she was dismissed and 
 disgraced, and the old man she lived with, who 
 said he was her father, found it out. She knew 
 just what would happen to her in the hole of a 
 room when she went back there afterwards; she 
 knew that there was in all the world only one way 
 of escape from it. She knew in an instant very 
 much about that one way. As she stood there in 
 the Princess's doorway, Louise knew the way of 
 death, down, quite close, to the edge of it. She 
 really did know, as she stood there, very much 
 about what it would be like to kill oneself. It was 
 an enormous knowledge, and she possessed it, rather 
 completely. 
 
 She stood in the Princess's great doorway for 
 very long minutes, and knew as much of death as 
 one can who does not go over the edge. And 
 afterwards things that happened showed it really 
 odd that it should have been so, a really odd coin- 
 cidence. 
 
 After all, she did not throw herself into the 
 river. There was no reason why she did not, ex- 
 cept that she could not. Perhaps for many people 
 that is the only reason. Unless one has been 
 extremely near to throwing oneself into the river 
 
 8i 
 
Accidentals 
 
 one may not quite know how hopelessly, if one 
 can't, one can't. As the little girl stood there 
 in the Princess's doorway, for minutes that were 
 quite hopeless, she knew rather terribly well what 
 it is not to be able to kill oneself. 
 
 There were only a few minutes. Then she threw 
 the ruined furs down under the arch of the great 
 entrance and ran away. 
 
 She went back to the hole of a street and the 
 hole of a room where the man who said he was her 
 father let her live as long as she gave him her 
 wages. She waited, all night awake, for the horror 
 of the day. And she went to the shop in the 
 morning, and waited all morning for the horror of 
 what was to happen, and all the afternoon. And 
 nothing happened . , . 
 
 Then, that night, when they called the Paris 
 papers through the streets, she knew, as all Paris 
 knew, that Madame the Princess of the great name 
 was dead. 
 
 She never knew what became of the muff and 
 stole. As far as that was concerned, then, she had 
 no need whatever to kill herself. 
 
 In those dreadful minutes when she had been 
 standing at the door that had the Prince's arms 
 carved above it, something had been happening, it 
 appeared, that had really made the whole thing a 
 very odd coincidence, 
 
 82 
 
The Ermine Muflf and Stole 
 
 In those same minutes the Princess who had 
 commanded the ermine muff and stole had, it ap- 
 peared, come nearer to the point of knowing what 
 it is to kill oneself, than the little girl who had 
 worn the ermine muff and stole in the rain, and 
 brought them home all ruined. 
 
 It had been worse for the little girl because she 
 had been afraid. 
 
 The Princess, it is true, had not been afraid. 
 She had done what Louise had been afraid to do, 
 the only thing to do, indeed, for the ending of 
 their stories. The Princess had put an end to her 
 story, that all Paris had for some time been telling, 
 in the way that Louise had been afraid to take for 
 the ending of her story, a story that nobody knew 
 about. The Princess had taken the way which 
 Louise had been afraid to take, and that was why 
 nothing ever happened to Louise about the ermine 
 muff and stole. 
 
 All Paris talked of the death of the Princess, as 
 all Paris had talked of her life. In the beautiful 
 house where she used to buy such beautiful things 
 of silk and lace and velvet and satin and fur, they 
 talked and talked of it. Great people, when they 
 came there to buy things, for days afterwards, 
 spoke of it, to one another, and to the shop people, 
 in a really frightened way. The pretty girls of the 
 shop, who all of them had lovers, could not see why 
 
 83 
 
Accidentals 
 
 the Princess had done it — just for that. They 
 thought she was very stupid. 
 
 Louise never spoke of it at all. She listened to 
 the talk of the others and wondered at them. She 
 understood, as they did not understand, any of 
 them. And she felt something very intense and 
 very strange, at once a pity and an envy, that 
 surely nobody else in all Paris quite felt, for the 
 Princess who was to have had the ermine muff and 
 stole, and who had done the thing that she, the 
 girl Louise, had been afraid to do. 
 
 The Stairs Up 
 
 There was a little old stairs to be seen through 
 the always open door of a house the poet used to 
 pass, in a poor, once very proud street, which were 
 so beautiful that always he fancied they must lead 
 up to some quite marvellously beautiful thing. 
 
 A cold, damp smell of old stone and wood, that 
 lonely smell of all old houses, came out always to 
 the street from the dark-vaulted, red-tiled vestibule 
 of the house of the stairs. 
 
 What once had been the porter's lodge, on the 
 left of the door, was now a cobbler's shop, and the 
 84 
 
The Stairs Up 
 
 smell of beeswax and of leather was there, with 
 the smell of ages, at the door. 
 
 The cobbler kept a lamp almost always burning 
 in his shop, for the street was narrow and the 
 window was low, and the light of the lamp would 
 shine out to the vestibule and on the wine colours 
 of the old brick tiles and of the woodwork. 
 
 In the wet Paris winters, the light of the lamp 
 made a golden glow of the damp that there was 
 in the vestibule. 
 
 The stairs opposite the door, went up, and 
 turned, and turned, and turned again, leaving a 
 well square to the top of the old, low-built, little 
 house. 
 
 The railing and banister of the stairs and the 
 edges of the steps were of dark wood, rubbed and 
 worn and trodden to wine colours, and the steps 
 were of red brick tiles like the pavement of the 
 vestibule. There was a window at the top of the 
 stairs, so that each turn led higher up into light 
 out of the shadows of the turn below. 
 
 It was such a beautiful, little, old stairway that 
 it was mysterious and sad — as all beautiful things 
 are sad. It was a stairway to imagine things about, 
 to hear lost footsteps going up and down. 
 
 With the smell of the long past and its ghosts, 
 of ages and of story, the always lonely smeU of 
 
 85 
 
Accidentals 
 
 places that have been much lived in, there was also 
 the smell of poverty on the stairs. 
 
 What the house was, what the stairway led to, 
 the poet was careful never to ask. Not knowing 
 anything about it, he thought it could lead for him 
 and for anyone and everyone to whatever thing 
 most was desired and dreamed of. 
 
 The poet was often hungry and often cold, but 
 he had dreams. He was a real poet, who would 
 have starved and frozen to death for his dreams. 
 
 The only thing in the world he did not dream 
 of, was that the people did not have dreams, only 
 hunger and cold, whose doors opened to the smell 
 of poverty that there was on the stairs. 
 
 The Children's Nurse 
 
 The children's nurse was leaving. The children 
 were so big now that they had to have a Miss. 
 Mimi was five and Ella was seven. They must have 
 someone who would teach them things. Agla6 
 had been with them too long as it was. 
 
 Poor Agla6, she could neither read nor write. 
 She had been the nounou of EUa. Her husband, 
 a fisherman of some little harbour of the Brittany 
 86 
 
The Children's Nurse 
 
 coast, had been lost at sea before their child was 
 born. The child had died where she had put it 
 out to nurse. So she had no one. She had stayed 
 on with Ella and then the little Mimi. But now 
 she must go. 
 
 The children's mother hated to tell her, but what 
 was there to do ? She told her while they were still 
 in the country, at the chateau, and said that, when 
 they came up to Paris after the New Year, she 
 would help her to find a good place. 
 
 She, the children's mother, was really sad to 
 think, when she did think of it, of Aglae's going 
 away. It would be a tragedy for the children. 
 They adored Aglae. The children's mother did 
 not know what a tragedy it was for Agla6 until 
 she found the three sous on the mantelshelf. Then 
 — ^though what on earth had the three sous to do 
 with it? — she suddenly thought of Agla6 as she 
 never had thought of her before. She had been 
 glad to think how quickly the children would for- 
 get her, but after the three sous she was, somehow, 
 sorry for that. 
 
 She did not have to find another place for AglaS. 
 Aglae did not want her to. She said she could 
 never take another place, that she would go back 
 to the little port on the Brittany coast where her 
 child was buried, and the sea could tell her of her 
 man's grave. 
 
 87 
 
Accidentals 
 
 The children's mother thought she must have 
 plenty of money put by, and did not trouble about 
 that. It was only afterwards that her maid told 
 her Aglae never had saved any money at all, had 
 sent all her wages until the very last to the woman 
 who had taken care of her child when she came 
 to nurse Ella. But then it weis too late to do any- 
 thing about it. 
 
 The children's mother and Aglae both were glad 
 not to tell the children that Agla6 was going away. 
 
 The day she was to go — she would be leaving 
 about nine o'clock of the evening — she took the 
 children to the Bois, and when they came back, at 
 supper, they were talking of how she was to take 
 them there again to-morrow. 
 
 They had been to the little lake of Longchamps, 
 and the two swans had come sailing up to the bank, 
 quite close, to see them. Aglae had said they might 
 go there again to-morrow and take bread to feed 
 the swans. 
 
 Mimi said she was going to buy cakes for the 
 swans. But Ella said she, for her part, would 
 have to save her cakes from luncheon; she couldn't 
 buy any because she was keeping all her money to 
 get a present for Aglae. 
 
 They were talking about it at supper when 
 their mother came in. 
 
 The children's mother could not look at Agla6 
 88 
 
The Children's Nurse 
 
 at all. She did not stop with the children that 
 night, but left them, that Aglae might have them 
 all for herself, to play with and pet and put to 
 bed. 
 
 By eight o'clock the children were asleep. 
 
 Their mother did not go to see them. She was 
 dining at home that night and alone. She was 
 going afterwards to the Opera, and she dressed 
 early that she might have time to say good-bye to 
 Aglae. She had her dinner brought to her room, 
 and had finished it by half -past eight. At a quar- 
 ter before nine she sent for Aglae. 
 
 But Aglae had gone. 
 
 She had gone as soon as the children were asleep, 
 without saying good-bye to anyone. 
 
 The children's mother was sad at the Opera. 
 She thought how strangely all music makes one 
 feel as if one were saying good-bye. There was 
 in the opera she heard that night one of the great- 
 est songs of the world of lovers and their saying 
 good-bye. It was absurd that it should make her 
 want to cry because the children's nurse had gone. 
 
 Next morning in the children's room she found 
 the three sous on the mantelshelf. Aglae evidently 
 had taken them out of her purse to have ready for 
 her fare on the top of the omnibus, and had put 
 them there, and forgotten. 
 
 89 
 
Accidentals 
 
 It was nothing, but it made the children's mother 
 want to cry. 
 
 The children cried for Aglae all morning. 
 
 In the afternoon the new Miss took them to feed 
 the swans. 
 
 ' Ella still refused to buy cakes, because she would 
 send her present to Aglae. 
 
 The children's mother thought it would be a 
 beautiful idea for them all together to send a really 
 big present to Aglae, 
 
 But it seemed that Aglae had forgotten to leave 
 any address, and no one knew the name of the 
 little harbour on the Brittany coast. 
 
 The Milestone 
 
 EvEETWHEBE about the castle, with its towers 
 and courts, its moat and drawbridge and ramparts, 
 one felt memories of war, but most intensely, some- 
 how, just there by the Roman milestone. 
 
 It was there that the children — the castle chil- 
 dren and the porter's children from the lodge in 
 the entrance tower — ^liked best to play their war 
 games. Nearly all their games were of war, for 
 the little Monsieur was to be a great warrior. Also, 
 ■90 
 
The Milestone 
 
 always little Mademoiselle Anne Marie would have 
 the children come to sit on the grass by the mile- 
 stone when she told them her war stories. 
 
 The milestone was a shaft of granite, tall above 
 even the head of big Jean the porter, and so wide 
 around that the other Jean, the porter's son, could 
 barely clasp his arms about it. It was worn and 
 stained by time and weathers to numberless, name- 
 less, lovely colours. There was an inscription that 
 the hundreds of years had not eaten away, of 
 which people who knew could make out that the 
 milestone had been set there, in that place, on the 
 great road across France, by the army conquering 
 Gaul when Caracalla was Emperor in Eome. It 
 stood in the centre of the outer court of the castle. 
 The great road passed through the court. In old 
 days the castle people had had the right to levy 
 toll. 
 
 The castle, with the entrance court and the court 
 of honour, was separated from the outer court by 
 the moat and the drawbridge. 
 
 The moat was dry now, but Anne Marie used to 
 tell the children how, long ago, it had been full of 
 thick green water, and how it had been a corvee 
 of the townpeople to keep the water stirred with 
 long poles all the summer nights through, that the 
 frogs might not sing there to disturb the castle 
 slumbers. Anne Marie was a very grand little 
 
 91 
 
Accidentals 
 
 lady, who would have liked to have people stay 
 awake at nights that she might sleep. 
 
 The court of the milestone was squared in by 
 the moat and the trimmed lime trees on the castle 
 side, and by the very beautiful old service houses 
 on north and south, and on the side opposite the 
 castle by a mellow brick wall with a gate that led 
 to the basse-cour, where the white doves lived, and 
 to the potager, with the sweet peas and the sun- 
 dial. 
 
 The Boman road crossed the court from south 
 to north, and on the south was arched over by a 
 tall, ancient tower. 
 
 The tower over the Eoman road was called the 
 King's Tower, though it was big Jean the porter 
 who lived there. 
 
 On either side of the road, where it came through 
 under the tower, there was a dog-kennel. The two 
 great Danes, to whom the kennels belonged, were 
 savage beasts, kept chained all day, and loosed at 
 night to guard the castle. Their names were Olga 
 and Oder. Anne Marie had heard someone speak 
 once of letting loose the "dogs of war," and for 
 a long time, till she was quite a big girl, she 
 thought that meant Olga and Oder. 
 
 One night the "dogs of war" got into the basse- 
 cour and killed all the white doves. That fright- 
 ened Anne Marie. She said it meant that some- 
 92 
 
The Milestone 
 
 thing dreadful was going to happen, she did not 
 know what. 
 
 After that, for some time, she was afraid of the 
 war stories that she told. 
 
 All the stories were about the castle and its peo- 
 ple. The castle, with its town crowded close about 
 it, had seen the rise and fall of many wars, and 
 had withstood sieges of its own. It had been forti- 
 fied against the Normans, and then the kings had 
 taken it from the nobles, and the nobles again 
 from the kings, and Calvinists and Leaguers had 
 held it turn and turn about. Afterwards a certain 
 favourite of the Sun King had tried to make a 
 gay place of it, and could not. Anne Marie loved 
 the stories of that time. The Eevolution and Na- 
 poleon's wars sent stories crowding to be told. But 
 the time of which Monsieur Armel loved best to 
 hear, was the time it made Anne Marie cry to 
 tell of. 
 
 Armel would beg her to tell stories of that time, 
 and when she told them, often crying over them, 
 he would be furious, — ^but furious, against the ene- 
 mies of France, that made his sister cry. He would 
 fall into white rages that were rather terrible. 
 He was a delicate little boy, the flame of his life 
 burned too strongly for the fragile vessel it was 
 lit in. He would grow white as porcelain when he 
 
 93 
 
Accidentals 
 
 was angry, and the blue veins in his temples would 
 stand out throbbing. 
 
 The porter's boy was of just his age, but much 
 taller and much stronger. When he saw the little 
 master white and trembling like that, with rage 
 against the long-ago enemy, he would grow very 
 quiet. He was rather a silent boy usually, but 
 sometimes then he would talk to the children in a 
 way that made them all listen. 
 
 He would say that one day it would come. He 
 said it would surely come, he only hoped it would 
 not come before they were grown up. He would 
 say, "Monsieur Armel and I will stand together in 
 the front of the battle. We will keep always to- 
 gether. Monsieur Armel will lead the battle, but 
 through it all I will be close to him. I will take 
 care of him all the time. Perhaps I may die for 
 him." He would say that very proudly, the por- 
 ter's boy, who was so big and strong. He would 
 say to Anne Marie, "And you. Mademoiselle, it will 
 be more sad for you, for you must stay here, to take 
 care of my little sisters and the people." 
 
 "Oh yes," Anne Marie would cry, standing up 
 straight by the milestone, "I must stay with my 
 people." She would be picturing herself if the 
 enemy came, how she would gather all her people 
 together, there by the milestone, and stand between 
 94 
 
The Blue Birds 
 
 them and the enemy. She would wear a blue and 
 gold dress, she thought, and do her hair up very 
 high indeed on the top of her head, and have very, 
 very high-heeled slippers, that she might look as 
 tall as possible. She would have no fear at all, in 
 the blue and gold dress; and she would let the 
 enemy take her life to save the lives of the little 
 sisters of Jean. 
 
 The Blue Birds 
 
 When Simone was seven years old someone gave 
 her a cage of little blue birds. There were five of 
 the birds in the pretty Japanese cage. They were 
 those tiny birds that are called "cordons bleus." 
 They came from some tropical country, and were 
 as blue as the hottest skies of noon and the south. 
 One of them had some red feathers on his breast, 
 like a stain of blood. They sang in the summer, 
 little very sweet songs that Simone delighted in. 
 
 It was in summer, in June, that they were given 
 to her. 
 
 The friend of her father who gave them to her 
 told her how hot was the country the birds came 
 from, and how delicate they were, and how she 
 
 95 
 
Accidentals 
 
 must be careful of them that they did not take 
 cold when winter came to Calvados and to the 
 draughty great stone pile of the Chateau de Pont- 
 de-Vire. 
 
 Even in summer nights Simone used to wake 
 with agony of grief from dreaming that it was 
 winter, and that the blue birds had got cold and 
 died. 
 
 They were the only live things that had ever 
 really been her own. Of course she had always had 
 a pony, one pony or another; but the ponies had 
 never seemed to belong to her. Her father got rid 
 of the one she was fondest of, because it wasn't 
 quite fine enough for his fine stables ; and he made 
 her ride the black one she was afraid of, though 
 it threw her again and again. There were various 
 dogs, too, but they all lived in the stables and 
 thought they belonged to the grooms. There was 
 her mother's dog, the white poodle, Pierrot, the 
 only pet allowed in the chateau. But he hated 
 Simone. She was sure he told her mother tales 
 about her. 
 
 Not that there was much to tell, ever. At seven 
 years old, Simone was so sad a little girl already 
 that she was very good. She was too lifeless ever 
 to do anything but the things she was told to do. 
 Her father thought she was stupid, and her mother 
 never thought about her at all, and her governesses 
 96 
 
The Blue Birds 
 
 found there was no need to pay much attention to 
 her. 
 
 Once she had an English Miss who called her 
 "darling," and kissed her good-night, and whom 
 she adored. But her mother found that Miss not 
 Men stylee, and dismissed her after two weeks. 
 
 The Miss of the time of the little blue birds was 
 something like the poodle, Pierrot, licking the boots 
 of Simone's mother. 
 
 It was wonderful to Simone that she was allowed 
 to keep the blue birds in her room. 
 
 Her room was away up among the roofs of the 
 chateau. To get to it one had to go up stairs that 
 only the servants used, and then part way along 
 a corridor that led only to the servants' rooms. 
 It was a north room, so that all the cold came to it, 
 and it was a big room, so that the fire never at all 
 warmed it. 
 
 Simone knew that in winter the blue birds could 
 not possibly live there; but she thought that she 
 would keep them, then, in the corridor at the foot 
 of the stairs, for there they would get something 
 of the warmth of the rest of the chateau, which was 
 well heated. 
 
 When the first cold came she carried the blue 
 birds' cage down to the foot of the stairs and put 
 it on a small table she brought down from her 
 
 97 
 
Accidentals 
 
 room, close behind the curtain that hid the stairs 
 from the other people's corridor. 
 
 She was afraid, dreadfully, that Miss would tell 
 her mother about the blue birds being there. But 
 somehow or other Miss didn't. And as Simone 
 always took all the care of the birds herself, and 
 brushed up, always, the seed and sand she couldn't 
 help their throwing about a little, the servants did 
 not tell either. 
 
 Through November and one week of December 
 the birds were quite well there at the foot of the 
 stairs. 
 
 Simone missed them very much in her room, but 
 she could get away from Miss and go and sit with 
 them on the stairs. 
 
 In the nights of great wind, that brought all the 
 fury of the sea into her room, when the carpet 
 lifted along the floor, and the hangings stirred on 
 the walls, and the water in her ewer froze hard, 
 and she shivered in her big bed, she was glad to 
 think of the warmth the blue birds got from the 
 heating of the other people's part of the chlteau. 
 And always, the first thing in the mornings, when 
 the white frost lay in the window rims, she would 
 have the happiness of finding the little blue birds 
 quite well in their cage in the warm comer. 
 
 But one day, in the second week of December, 
 her mother came to the stairs of the blue birds. 
 98 
 
The Blue Birds 
 
 It was her custom from time to time to go up to 
 the servants' rooms and see if something there 
 dared be out of order. 
 
 She found the blue birds in the corner at the 
 foot of the stairs. 
 
 She was very much annoyed about it. 
 
 She said that, if Simone wished to keep the birds, 
 she ]fiust keep them in her own room. 
 
 She had Miss carry the blue birds up to the room 
 where they could not possibly be kept alive. 
 
 Simone had never said anything to her mother 
 before in all her life, but she told her everything 
 then — ^how the little blue birds had to have warmth, 
 and would die without it ; and how she loved them, 
 how she loved them better than anything in the 
 world ; and how she could not bear it if they died. 
 She never cried ; she did not cry then, in that mo- 
 ment of a despair than which she was to know 
 nothing more terrible, ever, in all her life. She 
 could not cry at all, only stand, very white and 
 trembling all over, and implore her mother, "It is 
 so cold in my room, they will die there, they will 
 die there!" 
 
 She kept repeating that, "They will die there." 
 
 And they did die there. 
 
 It took them days and days to die, and she had 
 to watch them die. 
 
 There was only a certain amount of wood per- 
 
 99 
 
Accidentals 
 
 mitted for her room each day, not possibly enough 
 for keeping the fire up at night. Then began for 
 her a time of trying desperately not to waste the 
 wood, to save it up, treasuring every log, that 
 she might have some left at night. She made 
 desperate excuses to Miss for staying in her room 
 and for minding the fire. And in the nights she 
 sat up in bed trying desperately to keep awake 
 to watch it. All the moments that she dared 
 leave, the room she spent gathering brushwood in 
 the pines, and driftwood along the sands and stones 
 of the shore. But Miss would not let her bring it 
 into the chateau. No child of the poorest fisher 
 people knew more terribly the fight for warmth 
 than Simone knew it. 
 
 There was one half -hour every afternoon when 
 — ^if by rare chance there was sunlight — the sun- 
 light came to Simone 's room. There would be a 
 small oblong of it under one of the windows. 
 Simone had to invent all sorts of reasons for being 
 in her room just at that half -hour to move the blue 
 birds' cage into the oblong. It was a half -hour in 
 quite the middle of the afternoon, just when Miss 
 wished her to go out. She had a great dread each 
 day that she might have to be out then, and that 
 her birds might miss the sunlight. 
 
 And all the time the little blue birds were dying. 
 
 After only one night in the cold room they all 
 
 lOO 
 
The Blue Birds 
 
 were drooping little roughened huddled blue balls. 
 One of them was worse than the others, and made 
 a queer little noise all the time, like a tiny cough. 
 He coughed all one day and all one night, and 
 then he was dead. And he was so blue and small. 
 The day he died another was so bad that it could 
 not keep on its bar, and sat dying on the floor of 
 the cage in the corner under the pretty crystal 
 seed basin. It died the day after. And in the 
 night of that day a third little bird died. 
 
 Then came milder weather, and the two birds 
 that were left grew better, and seemed quite gay. 
 The one with the red stain on his throat took a bath 
 in the half -hour when there was sunlight. 
 
 Simone prayed and prayed that the weather 
 might remain like that. She had always said her 
 prayers, of course, but she had never before really 
 prayed. Now she prayed with all her strength, 
 "Let it stay warm, let it stay warm; please, God, 
 let it stay warm." 
 
 It stayed warm for six days and six nights. 
 And there was sunlight for the little birds every 
 afternoon. Simone began to love God. 
 , Then the weather changed in a night, and in the 
 morning the two blue birds were very bad. Simone 
 had been awake all night, sitting most of the time 
 beside the cage. There was no sun that day. One 
 
 lOI 
 
Accidentals 
 
 of the two birds died before night. Only the one 
 with the red stain was left. 
 
 Simone thought that if only she could keep him 
 alive she could bear anything. 
 
 She sat up all that night holding him in her 
 hands for warmth. 
 
 She thought that if only she could keep awake 
 like that every night and hold him all of the time 
 he might not die. 
 
 She dared to sleep only in the morning, in the 
 little time between the maid's lighting of her fire 
 and the coming of Miss to make her get up for 
 lessons. 
 
 She actually did manage to get through a whole 
 week like that. 
 
 She kept the little blue bird of the red stain 
 alive for a whole week. 
 
 Some of the days of that week were so stormy 
 that the wind put out the fire in the chimney. 
 Then Miss would go down and sit in a corner of 
 one of the salons where it was warm. 
 
 There were some especially important people 
 stopping that week at the chateau, and every day 
 Simone had to go down to the salon after tea. 
 
 She had to leave the little blue bird and go down 
 to the salon. 
 
 The people who had come in from shooting would 
 all be there, in the warm room, by the great fire. 
 
 102 
 
The Little Chairs 
 
 Simone hated them, hated them, all of them, 
 because they were warm. 
 
 She used to look at her mother and think, "If 
 you would die, if only you would die, then I could 
 bring the little blue bird down here to the warm 
 room, and he might get well and live." She used 
 to look at her mother, and hate her, and wish that 
 she would die. She wished it as she was never 
 to wish for anything, afterwards, in all her life. 
 "Die, die, die," she would think, as she watched 
 her mother at tea by the great fire. 
 
 But of course it was not her mother, only the 
 little blue bird, with the red stain on its throat, 
 that died. 
 
 The Little Chairs 
 
 The American girl who had married Etienne de 
 Kernac used, in those many bad enough moments 
 when it seemed as if she could not stand it, to look 
 at his mother and wonder if it was possible that 
 she, in any way, felt things. 
 
 How could it be possible for one who felt, who 
 
 felt at all, to go through what the mother of 
 
 Etienne had gone through, the very sort of thing 
 
 that she herself was going through now, and never 
 
 103 
 
Accidentals 
 
 have rebelled, and never have complained, and in 
 no way show the mark of it. 
 
 She knew that her father-in-law had been an 
 even more brilliant man than his son, and harder, 
 more autocratic, tyrannical; even more neglectful 
 of his wife, her mother-in-law, than Etienne was 
 of her ; even more cruel in his demands and in his 
 indifference. Her mother-in-law had lived all the 
 years as she, Marian, was asked to live, shut away, 
 unconsidered, in the solitary old chateau, to which 
 the master of those days had come even more rarely 
 than did their present master; she had been good 
 to the poor, and seen to it that the great house was 
 kept up as properly as possible with the scant 
 money allowed for it, and that Miss treated the 
 children like the little great people they were ; had 
 religion for what comfort it might be to her, and 
 had embroidered all those marvellous coverlets for 
 the beds in the state chambers that were never 
 used. 
 
 For a few weeks of every year Etienne 's mother 
 had come up to Paris, as Marian came now; had 
 received formally, one evening a week, in the old 
 hotel near the church of Sainte Clothilde, as was 
 expected of Marian ; and had gone out formally, as 
 Marian was supposed to, when others of her very 
 high-placed, small little world as formally received. 
 Marian, being taken about by her in those seasons 
 104 
 
The Little Chairs 
 
 in town, used to watch her, stately and charming 
 among stately charming people, who had talked of 
 Etienne's father, in his time, just as now they 
 talked of Etienne, and wonder, out of sheer depths 
 of loneliness, how she had stood it, why had she 
 stood it ? Or was she just a gracious figure, made 
 up of little gestures and phrases, little formulae 
 and standards and measurings, content to live by 
 etiquette and detail and tradition, for whom there 
 really had not been anything to stand? 
 
 She used to look at her husband's mother when 
 they sat together, morning after morning, in the 
 vast "little salon" at the chateau, each with her 
 embroidery or some gentle dull book, and wonder, 
 while the ceaseless threatening of the sea came 
 in at the windows, could one have felt, and have 
 endured it? 
 
 In their close solitude together the answer to 
 that question came to be of morbid, desperate im- 
 portance to Marian. If only she could know. It 
 seemed to her that she could bear it if only she 
 knew that the woman who had borne it had suffered 
 as she did, had felt things as she felt them. 
 
 She was so good, Etienne's mother — ^how terribly 
 good she was — ^but was she good through grief and 
 pain, or was she good because she knew nothing of 
 grief and pain, and so, quite easily and correctly, 
 just went on? 
 
Accidentals 
 
 To know that would have made all the differ- 
 ence of her life to Marian. 
 
 She had ceased hoping anything about Etienne ; 
 that was all quite hopeless. She had thought he 
 loved her, but he had not loved her. She had 
 thought she could love his home and his people, 
 but she could not. It was all so utterly his. She 
 had thought her children would mean everything 
 to her, and that they did not was very terrible to 
 her. Perhaps that was, for her, the most terrible 
 part of it. When they were babies and quite her 
 own, how she had loved them! She had thought 
 all her life was in them, and happiness. But as 
 they grew bigger they came to have so little need 
 of her. They did not seem to care at all for any- 
 thing she could give them. They were so unlike 
 her, she could not understand. She watched them 
 from day to day growing more and more unlike 
 her. Sometimes they seemed to be quite stranger 
 children. Sometimes they seemed even to be little 
 enemies, they so perfectly belonged to the life that 
 she almost could not bear. Sometimes she was 
 afraid of them ; they, like all the rest of it, were so 
 utterly Etienne 's. She wanted terribly to give 
 them happiness, but they did not seem to want it 
 from her; so they gave none to her, and she had 
 ceased hoping for it from them. 
 
 And yet she had not ceased to want happiness. 
 io6 
 
The Little Chairs 
 
 She was so young, and she had so long to live. 
 There must be happiness somewhere, and why- 
 should she not go to it? Why should she stay on 
 where it was not? Why should she stay on in the 
 life that gave no happiness to her, and made no use 
 of her ? The world was so wide. 
 
 And then she would turn to Etienne's mother. 
 
 Had Etienne's mother ever felt how wide the 
 world was? And how full it was of chances for 
 happiness? Had she known what she lost? And 
 had she stayed on because of some right that there 
 was in it? If she had felt the burden of it, if it 
 had been to her such a burden as it was to Marian, 
 must she not then have had some reason for bear- 
 ing it, and might not that reason be Marian's rea- 
 son for bearing it too ? Might not her just having 
 borne it, be proof of a reason and a right? 
 
 That was what, it seemed to Marian, she must 
 know. More and more, as the endless time passed 
 to no end whatever, everything, as it seemed, came 
 to hinge on it. 
 
 She used to look at her mother-in-law as they 
 drove together through the Paris streets, — behind 
 the plump old horses that must always be exer- 
 cised, taken out and yet must never be given too 
 much work, — to leave cards at stately doorways, 
 watch her write charming little, quite untrue 
 messages on the cards, and mark off the name on 
 107 
 
Accidentals 
 
 her list as having been got through, and wonder, 
 till it came to be an obsession, had she ever felt 
 things other than that? Or was that all that 
 life meant to her ? "Was that the size of it, by her 
 measurings, for her, between two eternities? And 
 was that what it ought to be, always, for every 
 one? 
 
 She used to look at her mother-in-law as they 
 walked together in the paths of the chateau gar- 
 den, where some few flowers struggled for life 
 against rock and sand and sea wind, and torment 
 herself with wondering. 
 
 And she used to look at her wonderingly and 
 most of all when they were together in the room 
 of the little chairs. 
 
 That was her mother-in-law's special sitting- 
 room, which opened from her bedroom, in the wide 
 north gallery of the chateau. Marian went there 
 rarely, and only by special invitation, if perhaps 
 her mother-in-law had a chill or a migraine, or for 
 any reason was obliged to keep to her apartment. 
 
 The little brocade-covered chairs, seven of them, 
 stood around in a circle in the centre of the big, 
 quiet, deep-coloured old room. They were beautiful 
 little chairs. They had been the baby chairs of 
 Etienne and his brothers and sisters. Etienne's 
 was the gold and dark green one. The pale blue 
 and silver one had belonged to the sister, who was 
 io8 
 
The Little Chairs 
 
 married now, and came back but for brief visits in 
 odd years to the chateau. The crimson one and 
 the sapphire blue one had belonged to the two 
 younger brothers of Btienne, who were out in the 
 world, in brilliant ways, very far from the chateau. 
 And the rose and grey one had belonged to the 
 eldest little brother, who died when a child. They 
 all stood together in their empty, formal, quiet 
 circle. And Marian, whose correct, unresponsive, 
 indifferent boy and girl were being well brought up 
 as befitted their importance, used to look across 
 the little empty chairs at the mother of her hus- 
 band, and wonder. 
 
 The courteous, remote, great lady, why did she 
 keep them there, the little chairs? Did she feel — 
 feel — anything when she looked at them? Was it 
 a comfort to her to look at them, and remember 
 baby figures sitting in them ? Was it an unceasing 
 pain to see them empty ? Was there special mean- 
 ing for her in the rose and grey chair of the child 
 that had never grown up, that had never outgrown 
 her, that was gone from her, not in life, but in 
 death, whose ways are kinder, more sparing of 
 illusion ? Or did she keep them there just because 
 it is rather a custom to leave in their old places 
 the little chairs of the children, who, in life or 
 death, have gone away? 
 
 It seemed to Marian that, if only she could 
 109 
 
Accidentals 
 
 know what the little chairs meant to the woman 
 at whom she looked across them, she would know 
 something because of which she never need be so 
 desolately alone again. 
 
 If only she could know that Etienne's mother, 
 in her stately, formal life, haid loved the children 
 to whom the little chairs had belonged, loved them 
 not just correctly, conventionally, but with rapture 
 and with pain ; had suffered because the boys were 
 so very like their father, who made her suffer ; had 
 longed that the little girls should grow up gentle, 
 and should love her; had broken her heart with 
 caring for them in all those ways that may mean 
 so much happiness, — ^if only she, Marian, could 
 know that, just that, then, in the life she was going 
 through, as Etienne's mother had gone through it, 
 it seemed to her, she might come to know the thing 
 because of which it was, all of it, worth while. 
 
 Across the little chairs she would look at her 
 mother-in-law, invariably charming and gentle and 
 courteous and sweet, and would wonder, and could 
 come to no conclusion. 
 
 If it was winter, the fire would be lighted in 
 the room of the little chairs, and the wind would 
 howl in the chimney, and th^^ anger of the sea 
 would be roared in, through the rattling cracks of 
 the windows, from where the waves beat their fury 
 out on the rocks under the castle walls, 
 no 
 
The Little Chairs 
 
 It was then, of all times, that Marian most felt 
 that she must know. 
 
 And always by the little chairs she felt that there 
 must be some conclusion, and that there, by them, 
 she was nearest coming to it. 
 
 And always when the sadness of winter added 
 to the room's sadness, it seemed to her that she 
 must get, somehow, to it. The sound of the wind 
 and the sea was all an undertone for her deep need 
 of getting to it. 
 
 There was one morning when she came unex- 
 pected to the room of the little chairs. She had ' 
 never, in all the five years, gone there without being 
 asked to, but now she did not even send word that 
 she was coming. 
 
 It was a very dark morning of January, and the 
 wind and the sea menaced even more savagely than 
 usual, and the smell of the sea was in all the stony 
 old chateau, strong and salt, and wet and cold. 
 
 Etienne had been down for some days at the 
 chateau; he had to occupy himself about things 
 there sometimes; and they had been bad days; he 
 had spent in them a long accumulation of temper. 
 
 Marian, who did not care any more, had looked 
 at his mother and wondered if she cared. 
 
 His father had been just like that, the people 
 had dreaded him just as they dreaded Etienne. 
 She knew by many tokens how it had been. Did 
 III 
 
Accidentals 
 
 Etienne's mother get a double hurt from his voice 
 and his gestures and his eyes? Or did not she 
 even know ? "Was it because she was brave that she 
 gave no sign ? Was it because she was fine of soul 
 that she endured? Or was it because she had no 
 soul, and did not feel, and so could, just tradition- 
 ally, insensibly, go on? 
 
 At dinner last night, for some small thing, he 
 had turned on Marian with an anger that made the 
 lines in his young face as deep and as ineradicable 
 as the lines in the face of his father's portrait 
 above him on the wall. Had it meant nothing to 
 his mother, Marian wondered? 
 
 It meant very little to her, herself, now, only a 
 vague wonder why, when that was all she got out 
 of it, she should keep on with it. 
 
 She went to sleep that night a little more wearied 
 than ever by the uselessness of the going on. And 
 the going on seemed more desolate even than usual 
 when she waked to it that morning. 
 
 Etienne would have gone back, she knew, in the 
 night train to Paris. She was glad of that. 
 
 The maid came and drew the curtains back from 
 the window and let in the wild dark morning. It ^ 
 was with much difficulty that she could light the 
 fire. The wind put it out again and again in the 
 chimney. At last it burned, but badly, and the 
 smoke hung in the dampness of the room, with 
 
 112 
 
The Little Chairs 
 
 the smell of the sea, and the sounds of the sea and 
 the storm. The maid brought in her bath and 
 arranged things, and brought coffee and rolls, and 
 put the tray on the table by the bed and went 
 away. 
 
 Marian sat up in the big, dark bed and looked 
 about the room. 
 
 The room seemed as if it had grown strange to 
 her. She wondered what had happened. 
 
 Nothing had happened. 
 
 But suddenly it seemed to her that she had come 
 to the end. She thought, suddenly, and for no 
 especial reason, that she had come to the end of 
 endurance. It was all curiously vivid like that, as 
 if she had been coming to a place for a long time, 
 and now, there she was, round the turn of the road, 
 upon it. 
 
 She saw quite plainly. There was only to go 
 away: what was there to keep her? Not the re- 
 ligion of Etienne's people, nor inheritance of their 
 traditions, nor fear of losing things of their world, 
 nor any dependence on them. Nothing of theirs 
 hindered her. There would be things to be done, 
 of course, but they were things that did not mat- 
 ter. AU that mattered had been over when she 
 looked about the room and saw it become strange 
 to her. 
 
 She remembered how unhappy she had been in 
 "3 
 
Accidentals 
 
 that room. She thought that she would never be 
 unhappy there any more. 
 
 Other women went away out of their lives be- 
 cause of someone, or of something. 
 
 For her there was no one, and it was because of 
 all the things; because suddenly it seemed to her 
 that she never again could sleep in the huge dark 
 bed of tapestry and oak carving. She thought she 
 never again could warm herself at fires of sea- 
 twisted pine branches and driftwood from his deso- 
 late beaches. She never could eat his bread again. 
 She could never again see the little red and gold 
 lacquer breakfast tray, or the green dragon cup, or 
 the old silver coffee pot with the ebony handle. 
 
 She dressed quickly. 
 
 It was a relief to put on her travelling things. 
 
 She would go away, it did not matter where. 
 
 She looked back at her room as she left it, and 
 already it seemed a place left behind. She seemed 
 to be not seeing it, really, but only remembering it. 
 
 She ran along the corridors of the red brick tiles. 
 
 The cold and the dark and the wet were already 
 things she was only remembering. 
 
 As she passed the door of the nursery passage, 
 she could catch the sound of the children's voices 
 quarrelling in their alien tongue. 
 
 Her little French son and daughter, they would 
 not miss her, they would vaguely wonder, when 
 114 
 
The Little Chairs 
 
 they were told that she was gone, if that meant 
 that they need not be taken to the casement-room 
 any more to repeat their English lessons after tea. 
 
 She ran on down the north gallery, where the 
 sea and wind sounded like voices grown unfamiliar 
 to her. 
 
 She knocked at the door of the room of the little 
 chairs in the north gallery, and opened it, not 
 realising at all that she had done so without wait- 
 ing for an answer. 
 
 The winter morning pressed close upon the win- 
 dows of the room of the little chairs, and the wind 
 and the sea cried through it, and the fire in the por- 
 celain stove seemed to give no warmth to it. 
 
 Etienne's mother was sitting, where she always 
 sat in winter, near the stove. 
 
 Her beautiful white hair was carefully arranged 
 as always, even at that early hour. She had the 
 white shawl round her shoulders. As she sat, her 
 back was turned to Marian, and she did not hear 
 her at the door. 
 
 Marian stood quite still at the doorway and 
 looked, for there was an odd thing to look at. 
 
 Etienne would have laughed, but his wife did 
 not laugh. 
 
 The whole thing was there for her to see in one 
 moment's looking, and to make what she could of 
 through the rest of her life. 
 
Accidentals 
 
 So that was how it was. The children who were 
 gone away had been less near, perhaps, — surely 
 they had been less near, — in the real way of things, 
 when really they had been there, brought in by 
 Miss, and left for some formal, studied hour, than 
 they were now, dreamed over, brought close by the 
 dream that perhaps had been a whole life 's dream, 
 as life had never brought them. 
 
 And the child that was dead was nearer than 
 were the children who had lived and gone away. 
 
 Of a sudden the sad old room, that wind and 
 sea cried through, seemed beautiful to Marian, and 
 the woman who sat there alone, where she had 
 stayed through all her life's enduring, had a beau- 
 tiful right to dreams. 
 
 It seemed to Marian that there was nothing for 
 her to do but to draw back noiselessly before the 
 woman by the fire knew that she had seen. 
 
 Her mother-in-law must never know that she 
 had seen. 
 
 It was so secret and sacred and tragic and funny 
 a thing. 
 
 It was that all the little chairs had been moved 
 out of their stiff empty circle in the centre of the 
 room, and brought over to the warmth of the stove, 
 and gathered, all close together, around the chair 
 in which sat the mother of the children who were 
 gone away, all of them. 
 
 ii6 
 
Amedee's Supper 
 
 The little chairs were drawn together, in the 
 warmth, cosily, as if there were sitting in them little 
 figures that had dragged them up and put them so, 
 close, to listen to a story. 
 
 And closest of all of them to the mother's chair, 
 so close that the foot of the child sitting in it 
 would have certainly been kicking against her fine 
 stiff skirts, so close that the hand, reached down to 
 it, would have held the hand of a child sitting 
 in it, was the rose and grey baby chair of the child 
 that had died. 
 
 Amedee's Supper 
 
 AMfo^E and his mother and Mister Jack, the 
 Englishman, were following a little path through 
 the forest. It was a path outside the park wall, 
 and Amedee did not remember having ever been 
 in it before. It was all yellow-carpeted with the 
 leaves of the beech trees. Amedee shuffled his feet 
 through the leaves and loved to feel them wet and 
 cool against his little bare legs. There were leaves 
 too, always falling softly down into the path 
 against the black stems of the trees. They shone 
 bright gold in the sunshine that they fell through. 
 117 
 
Accidentals 
 
 Amedee kept calling his mother's attention to 
 their brightness, and to the brightness of the sky 
 over the tops of the beech trees. It was partly 
 because he loved all that, and partly because he 
 wanted his mother to see that it was yet quite 
 early, and that there was no need to think for ever 
 so long of his having to go home to supper. 
 
 His mother walked fast in the path with 
 Amedee and their friend, the Englishman. Yet 
 she had not on walking-boots, only little fine shoes 
 with silver buckles. She had on a hat instead of 
 the scarlet Tam-o'-Shanter. She did not look as 
 if she had meant to come just walking in the forest. 
 She sang when Am6dee asked her to, as they went. 
 
 She sang whatever he asked her for, as he ran 
 along, sometimes ahead of her and Mister Jack in 
 the path, sometimes beside them, sometimes behind 
 them among the roots of the trees and in the moss. 
 He always asked for the songs her old black 
 mammy she had often told him of, used to sing to 
 her when she had been a little girl, "way down 
 south in Dixey." He especially liked one that 
 began — 
 
 "Down de sun am gone, Brudder Wild Goose, 
 Down along, down along " 
 
 He thought that the "down along, down along" 
 rang exactly like a bell. 
 
 ii8 
 
Amedee's Supper 
 
 Big, kind, English Mister Jack sang the refrain 
 when Amedee asked him, too — ; 
 
 "Down along, down along " 
 
 and Amedee liked to hear his voice coming in, 
 deep-sounding, behind his mother's voice that was 
 silver-clear. 
 
 "You, all the two, go very well together," said 
 Amedee, in his odd English, back to them over his 
 shoulder. 
 
 He kept ahead of them most of the time, hoping 
 that they would always follow without thinking. 
 He would have liked to go on and on and on for 
 ever, like that. He would have liked to go on and on 
 through all the world so, with just the two of them. 
 
 "Me also, I go very well together with you, 
 too," he said, "but — but my father he would not 
 go well with us at all." He had been going to say 
 "Miss," but then he had thought in time that that 
 might remind his mother of his supper-hour, and 
 he changed it quickly, and said, "My father." He 
 went on as fast as he could, talking to Mister Jack, 
 so that they might not notice the change. "You 
 know maman is not the same at all when my 
 father is there. She is more afraid of him even 
 than I am." 
 
 Then for the first time their silence troubled him. 
 
 "Maman, why dost thou not talk at all? Thou 
 119 
 
Accidentals 
 
 hast not said one word to Mister Jack, not even 
 'How do you do,' when he met us at the King's 
 Bassin. It was I alone who told him how glad we 
 were to see him." He turned round in the path 
 to explain quite clearly to Mister Jack. 
 
 "She is not silent with you in the same way 
 she is silent with my father. This is an altogether 
 different silence. With you it is because she is 
 happy that you are near. How came you to be 
 here. Mister Jack? They said you were gone 
 back to Paris this morning. Are you not going 
 away ? ' ' 
 
 "Yes, I am going away," said Mister Jack. 
 
 "And when you come back again to the chateau," 
 said Amedee, "you will finish helping me to build 
 my cabane? And when we are in Paris you will 
 take me to see those lions of which you told me? 
 Please, will you not sing more about the Wild 
 Goose?" 
 
 "'Pears like you'd follow de Sun, Brudder Wild GooBe," 
 
 sang Amedee 's mother. 
 
 "Down along, down along, ^ 
 
 Dar, whar de edge ob de world am darkenin', 
 Dar, whar de hush oh de night am harkenin', 
 Down along, down along " 
 
 Then Am6d6e ran ahead after a rabbit. 
 1 20 
 
Amedee's Supper 
 
 The path went up steeply for a way through a 
 darker part of the forest, where there were pine 
 trees. And then it came out suddenly to the beet 
 fields, that were stained all red and purple and 
 green and blue. Looking back over the yellow 
 forest Amedee could see the blue roofs and towers 
 of the chateau. He hoped his mother would not 
 look back. 
 
 The path went across the wide fields. One could 
 see far away over the fields to where all the stains 
 of red and purple and green and blue were blurred 
 in together. 
 
 The sun was quite low over the edge of the 
 fields. Amedee hoped his mother would not notice 
 that. 
 
 There were people working in the fields. 
 
 Close to the road they passed a woman picking 
 over a pile of beets. She had a white cap with 
 wings like a bird's, and a dress of the blue that 
 was the blue of all the distances. 
 
 Amedee said, "Maman, it is old Lazarette!" 
 
 But his mother did not stop to speak with 
 Lazarette. 
 
 In a field quite near there were a big brown 
 horse and a man ploughing. The big brown horse 
 and the man's brown clothes were all part of the 
 colour of the upturned earth of the field. 
 
 121 
 
Accidentals 
 
 "Maman, maman, that is the husband of Marthe- 
 Jeanettel" 
 
 But his mother did not seem to care. 
 
 She had stopped singing, and so had Mister Jack, 
 and neither of them noticed when Amedee asked 
 them to sing. 
 
 It was very odd, the Way they went on and on. 
 Even if they turned back now they could not pos- 
 sibly reach the chateau before dark. 
 
 Amedee had never been out walking after dark 
 before. He thought it would be wonderful. It was 
 becoming wonderful already. Already there were 
 white mists gathering over the fields. 
 
 They came from the beet fields to a field full of 
 tall peaked hayricks. The hayricks were very dark 
 against the low sun, and their dark, peaked shad- 
 ows reached far out from them upon the stubble. 
 
 There was a misty pasture with some sheep in 
 it. The sheep were huddled together, knee-deep in 
 mist. 
 
 Everywhere there were quantities of crows. 
 They flew over all the fields, cawing. And they 
 perched on the hayricks and on the backs and 
 heads of the sheep. 
 
 Am6dee remembered all these things afterwards, 
 because his mother said to Mister Jack suddenly, 
 when she had not been even singing for a quite 
 long way, "We shall have need to remember every- 
 
 122 
 
Amedee's Supper 
 
 thing, everything, of this afternoon, always, all our 
 lives long." 
 
 And Mister Jack said, "All our lives long" after 
 her, like the refrain of the Wild Goose song, and 
 with a ring of bells in the way he said it, Amedee 
 thought, somehow, too. 
 
 "All our lives long," said Mister Jack, walking 
 beside Amedee 's mother in the little path. 
 
 "Down along, down along," sang Am6dee, ahead 
 of them; "it's like a bell ringing at the end, at 
 quite the end, a tolling, like the 'glas,' you know." 
 
 The path had come out into a wide white road. 
 
 They turned to the right along the road. The 
 road lay away across the fields, long and straight. 
 At the end one could see a village, grey, shaggy 
 low roofs huddled close around a grey, square 
 church tower. 
 
 The mist was deep on the road. 
 
 The sun, that had been quite in front of them 
 as they crossed the fields, was beside them now. 
 
 It was very big and round and crimson. And 
 the mist, over the fields and along the road, was 
 crimson too. 
 
 The sun balanced on the very edge of the world. 
 The edge of the world was black under it. A great 
 black crow flapped up from beside the road across 
 the red sun. 
 
 Amedee felt afraid a little, suddenly. He 
 123 
 
Accidentals 
 
 dropped back in the road, and slipped in between 
 his mother and Mister Jack, and took a hand of 
 each. 
 
 His mother's hand was trembling, and Mister 
 Jack's hand was very cold. It was then that his 
 mother began to say things. She spoke so quickly 
 Amedee could hardly understand her. 
 
 She said, "I thought I could do it. Until the 
 last minute, until I was coming out of the door, 
 I thought I could. I thought it was right. I 
 thought it was for us only the taking of our own. 
 I thought that happiness was for us, and that we 
 had a right to take it. That our lives were 
 ours " 
 
 She stopped. 
 
 Mister Jack said, "Elinor, Elinor, Elinor!" 
 
 Amedee thought it was funny he should say her 
 little name like that, three times over. 
 
 She said, "I thought that the dream was com- 
 ing true. You and I, and the world forgotten. And 
 I came out of the door. And then he was there, 
 coming in with his little wheelbarrow full of yellow 
 leaves he'd been sweeping up " 
 
 "Jean Grotin had let me," said Amed6e, "with 
 his broom of brown twigs." 
 
 He thought that, if he could only make his 
 mother interested in talking, she might forget his 
 supper-time until they had quite got to the village 
 124 
 
Amedee's Supper 
 
 ahead down the misty road. Already there was 
 a light in the window of one of the little houses 
 there. 
 
 He said to his mother, "I had found for thee a 
 beautiful piece of yellow fungus, hadn't I? I gave 
 it to thee there at the door, didn't I?" 
 
 His mother said to Mister Jack, "Don't you see, 
 oh, don't you see?" 
 
 Her voice sounded £is if she were begging some- 
 thing of him. 
 
 Mister Jack said to Amedee's mother, "I under- 
 stood, when I saw you coming, there to the Bassin 
 du Eoi, not alone." 
 
 She said, "I was afraid to come alone. I had 
 to come. I had to see you, this one time. And I 
 was afraid of myself, of what I'd do, of not being 
 able to bear it. Without him here, close, I couldn't 
 have borne it. I could not have borne the going 
 back alone." 
 
 "Then it is a good thing I am here," said 
 Amedee. 
 
 His mother said, holding his hand very fast, 
 "My baby, my little baby ! " 
 
 "I'm not really a baby," said Amedee to Mister 
 Jack. 
 
 His mother said to Mister Jack, her voice still 
 begging, "He isn't like them at all, and they don't 
 understand. They will punish him for things he 
 125 
 
Accidentals 
 
 didn't mean. He gets unhappy, and they wouldn't 
 care. He isn't very strong, and he sometimes is 
 frightened " 
 
 "Never when maman is there," said Amedee to 
 Mister Jack. 
 
 And she said to him again, "Oh, don't you see, 
 don't you see?" 
 
 Mister Jack said, "If I did not understand so 
 well, could I walk like this by you, to-night, quietly ? 
 Why is it that I have not said one word, not one 
 word ? It is not because I do not feel. Feel — feel — 
 oh, Elinor — ^there is that of me which is mad with 
 it. But there is some other thing of me which un- 
 derstands." 
 
 His voice was different too, somehow. Am6d6e 
 never would have known it for his voice. It 
 sounded very quiet. 
 
 The sun had gone "down along" over the edge 
 of the world. There was come to the world that 
 strange short space between lights, when the light 
 of the day is gone and the lights of the night are 
 not yet come. 
 
 There was no more shadow, because it all of it 
 was shadow. 
 
 There were more lights now in the village at the 
 end of the road. And the village was so near now 
 that Amedee could tell which of the lights were 
 candle lights and which were fire lights. 
 126 
 
Amedee's Supper 
 
 The bells of the church tower began to ring the 
 Ave Maria of sunset. 
 
 Amedee's mother said, "Oh, there'll be every 
 day— every day, every day— all life long, to be got 
 through — ^f rom morning until evening, from even- 
 ing untU morniag " 
 
 "Down along, down along," sang Amed^e, with 
 the sunset bells, shuffling his feet through the mist 
 that was on the road, just as he'd shuffled them 
 through the yellow leaves in the beech-tree path, 
 and scarcely more noiselessly. 
 
 They came nearer and nearer to the village. 
 
 Even though his mother and Mister Jack were 
 not talking, he was not afraid any more of his 
 mother's remembering his supper-time. 
 
 They passed more peasants in the road — dark, 
 slow, always bent figures, going home to supper. 
 
 Even in the half light Amedee could see that 
 they were not the people his mother and he knew. 
 He wondered what village it was they were coming 
 to. Somehow he did not like to ask. He was sure 
 it was not one of their own villages. That made it 
 all the more wonderful, he thought, to be going 
 there after dark. 
 
 It was quite dark when they came to the first 
 houses of the village. 
 
 There was a candle in the window of one of the 
 houses ; and the door of a house that had no win- 
 127 
 
Accidentals 
 
 dow stood open, and there was a red firelight com- 
 ing out from it. 
 
 The houses were all crowded close together upon 
 the narrow, cobbled street. 
 
 Then the street opened a little wider, and there 
 was the duck-pond, and the church with the graves 
 about it. 
 
 There was a lamp over the door of a house that 
 faced the church across the duck-pond. 
 
 The light of the lamp showed a signboard at the 
 door, that had some words on it Amedee could not 
 make out, and a stag's head painted under the 
 words. 
 
 When Mister Jack turned to the door under the 
 sign Am6dee cried out, "Oh, now we shall have 
 supper!" and took his hands away from his 
 mother's and Mister Jack's to clap them together. 
 
 Mister Jack knocked the doe's foot at the door, 
 and a woman, who was old and had a white cap, 
 opened the door. 
 
 There was a room with a fire burning in a big 
 black chimney on one side of it, and stairs going 
 up, narrow and steep like a ladder, out of it, oppo- 
 site the door. There was a wooden table in the 
 middle of the room with a basket of bread and a 
 bottle of wine upon it. It was a very heavy black 
 table, and it had no cover. There was a lamp on 
 it, and the light shone yellow on the black wood, 
 128 
 
Amedee's Supper 
 
 Three chairs were drawn up to the table. Under 
 the stairs there was a wood pile upon which were 
 some chickens that had gone to sleep. There was 
 a candle on the stone shelf of the chimney, stuck 
 in its own melted tallow on the stone. Amedee 
 thought it was the most beautiful way to arrange 
 a candle. 
 
 The room smelled of earth and stone and trees, 
 almost like out-of-doors. 
 
 It was cold in the room, colder than out of doors. 
 
 Amedee went to see what there was in a big 
 earthen crock that stood in the far corner. He 
 thought there might be goldfish in it. But instead, 
 there was a lot of linen soaking in water and 
 pressed down by a big stone. 
 
 The old woman came to Amedee and said she 
 would make an omelette for him. He went to the 
 fire to watch her make it. 
 
 His mother and Mister Jack went and sat at the 
 table a little way oflf. 
 
 Amedee did not notice whether or not they 
 talked. He was so interested in watching the old 
 woman prepare his supper. 
 
 She unhooked the marmite from the iron crane 
 on which it hung over the fire, and put it down on 
 the stone hearth, close to the ashes, to keep hot. 
 
 There was something good in it, she said, that 
 Amedee was to have for his supper. 
 129 
 
Accidentals 
 
 She lifted the lid of the marmite a little and let 
 him see the steam pour out and smell the good 
 soup of lard and cabbage. She fastened the rondin 
 on the chains with the hooks that had held the mar- 
 mite, and set the poSle into the iron circle. 
 
 She fetched two eggs from a basket by the wood 
 pile, and broke them into an earthen bowl and beat 
 them, yellow and white together. Then she put 
 butter into the pogle, and it sizzled and steamed, 
 and she poured the eggs into it. 
 
 "Watch how the omelette makes itself," she said 
 to Amedee, and scarcely touched it with the fork. 
 
 Amedee watched breathlessly. 
 
 She gave him a thick brown plate to hold. Then 
 she took the poele off the crane again and slipped 
 the omelette from it to Amedee 's plate. 
 
 She let him carry it himself to the table, and 
 she helped him up on one of the high black chairs, 
 and gave him a spoon to eat with. 
 
 She brought him a bowl of soup from the mar- 
 mite, and told him to dip his bread in it, a thing 
 Miss never would have permitted him to do. 
 
 He had never in his life had such a good supper. 
 
 Suddenly it grieved him that his mother and 
 Mister Jack were not eating anything. 
 
 "Maman, thou didst have no tea," he said. 
 
 The old woman had gone out of the room by a 
 door near the stairs and the wood pile. She had 
 130 
 
Amedee's Supper 
 
 said something to Mister Jack and Amedee's 
 mother about going to see if her son were yet come 
 back with the cart. 
 
 Mister Jack and Amedee's mother were sitting at 
 the other end of the table from Am6dee,, 
 
 Mister Jack got up and found two glasses some- 
 where, and poured red wine iato them from the 
 bottle on the black table. He made Amedee's 
 mother drink it and eat a piece of bread that he 
 broke for her. 
 
 "You are not hungry?" Amedee asked her. 
 
 She said to Mister Jack, "I can't realise it at 
 all, that it is the end, the very end. It doesn't 
 seem possible. Never to hope any more." 
 
 Mister Jack stood looking at her. 
 
 She was sitting with her elbow on the table and 
 her forehead in her hand. Her hand across her 
 forehead shadowed her eyes from the light of the 
 lamp on the table. Her other hand lay on the 
 table, by the glass of wine she had scarcely tasted. 
 Her hand looked very white on the black table. 
 It made Amedee think of a little dead bird he had 
 found once in the percee. That was curious, for 
 the bird had not been a white bird. The light of 
 the lamp shone on the white hand of Amedee's 
 mother, that lay so still on the black table, and on 
 the red of the wine in the glass. 
 
 Suddenly she spoke, with her hand covering 
 131 
 
Accidentals 
 
 her eyes. "If only he were to stay always my 
 little baby, with a wheelbarrow full of yellow 
 leaves, and a present for me of a broken bit of 
 fungus." 
 
 Amedee had loved the yellow fungus very much, 
 because of its queer wet smell and because of its 
 yellowness, so bright against the wet black tree- 
 trunk he had torn it from. He was glad his mother 
 talked about it to Mister Jack. 
 
 "But soon he'll be big," she said, "and not need 
 me. He'll want other people, and love them, and 
 not love me much, nor want me much, nor need 
 me at all. And then I shall have nothing, nothing, 
 nothing." 
 
 Mister Jack just stood there looking at her. 
 
 "I think she is talking about me," Amedee said 
 to him. 
 
 Then it was to him, Amed6e, that Mister Jack 
 spoke. 
 
 "Amedee," he said, across the table, "stay loving 
 her, and wanting her, and needing her, always, 
 won't you?" 
 
 "Oh yes," said Amedee, from the depths of his 
 bowl of cabbage soup. 
 
 "Promise me, Amedee," said Mister Jack across 
 the black table. 
 
 Amedee ran his fingers all around inside- the 
 bowl and sucked them. "But, yes," he said, won,- 
 132 
 
Amedee's Supper 
 
 dering why nobody scolded him for his bad man- 
 ners. 
 
 The old woman came back into the room and 
 said to Mister Jack that the cart was at the door 
 ready. 
 
 She said, "It will not be very fine for Madame, 
 but it is the best we have. My son has put in it 
 some cushions that the schoolmistress has lent, and 
 he is a good man, and will drive carefully. The 
 little monsieur will enjoy it, ' ' she said to Amedee. 
 
 Amedee said, "I don't want to go home." He 
 scrambled down from his chair and went to his 
 mother. "Nor dost thou want to go home," he 
 said. 
 
 She did not seem to hear him. 
 
 The old woman stood for a minute looking at 
 Amedee 's mother. Then she turned away and 
 crossed to the hearth and took the candle from 
 the chimney-shelf, and went to the stairs, and be- 
 gan to climb them, lighting her way with the can- 
 dle, slowly, for she was a little lame. 
 
 Amedee ran after her to thank her for his 
 supper. 
 
 "It was the nicest supper I have ever had," he 
 said; "I did so much enjoy it." 
 
 The old woman went up the stairs with her 
 candle into the shadows. 
 
 Mister Jack was bending over Amedee 's mother. 
 133 
 
Accidentals 
 
 He took up her hand that lay so white on the black 
 table and kissed it. And he took her other hand, 
 that hid her eyes, and kissed it. 
 
 Amedee wanted to see the cart they were to 
 be driven home in. He went to the door and 
 opened it. 
 
 Outside it was quite, quite night, and very cold. 
 There was a two-wheeled cart with a hood over it 
 waiting at the door. The lantern, hung under it, 
 lighted up the big wheels of the cart and the legs 
 of the rough country horse that was harnessed to 
 it. They were white legs with long fetlocks. 
 
 The light that came out from the door Am6dee 
 had opened showed the driver standing by the 
 white horse, and several dark figures of people who 
 had come to see what was happening at the inn of 
 the Stag's Head. 
 
 " Oh, I do love that ! ' ' said Amedee. "What fun 
 to drive home in the cart ! Maman, if we have to 
 go, let's go." 
 
 His mother came out of the door. She did not 
 speak to anybody. Mister Jack helped her into 
 the cart, and then lifted Am6dee up beside her on 
 the high seat, and the driver got in with them. 
 
 Amedee thought that the drive home in the 
 peasant's cart through the night would be the best 
 part of it all. 
 
 Only, when the driver picked up the reins and 
 134 
 
The Secret of Mother and Son 
 
 called to the white horse he realised how sorry he 
 was that Mister Jack was going away; and he 
 leaned out, round the hood of the cart, to wave to 
 him, standing there in the village street in the 
 night, and say, "Good-bye, good-bye. I did have 
 the nicest supper ! ' ' 
 
 The Secret of Mother and Son 
 
 Evert morning — ^finished for the time being 
 with baths and douches and piqures and massage — ■ 
 punctually at 11.30, month in, year out, the mother 
 and son met in the reading-room of the Grand 
 Hotel de I'Etablissement des Bains, this being at 
 Touson-les-Bains in the department of the Vosges. 
 
 Those who know Touson-les-Bains — and the 
 knowledge were better not admitted — ^know that it 
 is there the great doctors of the moment send such 
 of their patients as have lived too hard and too 
 fast, and are come, too soon for their fancy, to the 
 end of things. It is the last hope — ^if the word 
 can have at all to do with the place — of those who 
 are frightened. And how frightened they are, 
 there at Touson. How they cling to life, with 
 hands; all crooked and shaking, that never will hold 
 135 
 
Accidentals 
 
 cigarette or card or wineglass any more. And how 
 quaint is the one look that all their faces have, the 
 look, one might imagine, of drowning people, who 
 clutch at things as they go down. 
 
 They are all going down at Touson. The doctors 
 and the bath people and the hotel people help them 
 in their clinging to straws. The dining-room mas- 
 ter attends them, with care for medicine bottles 
 and cachet boxes and glass tubes and measuring 
 spoons; and the hall porter, with care for canes 
 and crutches and cushions and wheel chairs; and 
 the housemaid, with care for more pillows and less 
 pillows, and heavy covers and light covers, and 
 windows open and windows shut. They are regaled 
 while they may be, on extract of beef and puree 
 of brown beans, and compote of prunes and lait 
 caille, and allowed, as long as it is possible to them, 
 to mingle with one another, for an hour before the 
 second breakfast, on the terrace or in the reading- 
 room. Also they are allowed, blessed privilege, 
 after the second breakfast, two hours of rest in 
 their rooms, and solitude, freedom from piqures, 
 massage, bath, and douche. 
 
 So it was, through many long seasons, that at 
 11.30 of the mornings, promptly, Madame la Mar- 
 quise de Saint Ouen-Trois-Chateaux, and Monsieur 
 le Marquis, her only son, and she a widow — God 
 rest the poor soul she had given no rest to — ^met 
 136 
 
The Secret of Mother and Son 
 
 by the newspaper-heaped table in the reading- 
 room. 
 
 Tap-tap of her cane down the parquet of the hall 
 from the east corridor ; tap-tap, tap-tap of his two 
 canes from the west corridor. 
 
 "Good-day, my mother." 
 
 "Good-day, my son." 
 
 All the people in the reading-room would look 
 up. They would raise — from yesterday's journals 
 at the table, from their variously coroneted note- 
 papers at the writing-desks against the walls, from 
 the books of their various tastes — faces in which 
 there could yet, with the drowning look, be some 
 curiosity. 
 
 All her life people had looked up from what- 
 ever they were doing, whenever Madame de Saint 
 Ouen appeared. They had stared at her always, 
 because of two possessions of hers, which, of course, 
 took a great deal of staring at, beauty and wick- 
 edness. She was beautiful still. Her beautifully 
 shaped old face was so beautifully done that, be- 
 cause of it, one scarcely noticed how beautiful 
 were her silks and muslins and laces. Leaning, 
 she only knew how heavily, with one hand on her 
 cane, she would lift the other hand in its black lace 
 mitt, so gracefully that no one noticed its trembling, 
 and brush it just faintly across the little pointed 
 moustache of monsieur, her son, who was unable 
 137 
 
Accidentals 
 
 — each hand being occupied with its stick — ^to so 
 raise it himself. 
 
 All his life, wherever he went, people had looked 
 up also to stare at Gigi de Saint Ouen. They had 
 stared at him always because he was bad. Heaven 
 knows why they stared at him now, when he could 
 not be bad any more, leaning on his two sticks. 
 "Hast thou slept well, my mother?" 
 " To a marvel. And hast thou, my son ? ' ' 
 And side by side, with their three canes, labori- 
 ously, they would cross the parquet together and 
 go to the seat in the window that has the view of 
 the lake, the best seat in the room, which, of 
 course, was always left vacant for them. "Who 
 would have dared usurp the chosen place of 
 Madame de Saint Ouen, the famous and infamous ? 
 "While the wicked old sick woman got herself into 
 her chair, a task by no means easy of accomplish- 
 ment, the wicked young sick man would stand be- 
 fore her, most insecurely, between his two canes. 
 She once seated, he would proceed, with great diffi- 
 culty, to seat himself beside her. And there they 
 would sit, side by side, and talk of their three 
 topics, the weather, their healths, and the manage- 
 ment of the hotel. 
 
 "What other topic of conversation was there that 
 was safe between them 1 "What scandal could they 
 discuss that did not bear resemblance to some 
 138 
 
The Secret of Mother and Son 
 
 scandal of one or the other of them? How could 
 he talk to her of poor Madame de Chose, whose 
 husband absolutely refused to be got rid of, for all 
 the puree? or she to him of the loves and the 
 gambling of Monsieur Tel et Tel? No scandal but 
 reflected something from her life or his. And how 
 could either of them know what this name or that 
 might not painfully mean to the other? They 
 would talk of their three topics, and each of them 
 the while would be counting the brown stripes in 
 the wallpaper, from the hall door to the chimney, 
 and from the chimney to the window, from the 
 window to the terrace door, and from that to their 
 own window with the view of the lake, and so on, 
 all round the room, to the hall door again. Also 
 they would count the brown fleur-de-lis in the 
 white stripes that there were between the brown 
 stripes, from the ceiling down to the floor along one 
 stripe, and from the floor up to the ceiling along 
 the next, then down again, and then up again, and 
 so on, all the room round. Madame-his-mother 
 looked at the people occasionally, when the stripes 
 and the fleur-de-lis had been counted times beyond 
 bearing, and noted how this old man appeared each 
 day a little older, and that white young woman 
 each day a shade more white. But Monsieur-her- 
 son could not bring himself to look at the people. 
 When the stripes and the fleur-de-lis failed him, 
 139 
 
Accidentals 
 
 he would count the little narrow shining squares 
 of wood in the parquet, a very difficult thing to do 
 when one's head shakes as his did. This for an 
 hour. 
 
 Half -past twelve would bring breakfast, and the 
 procession into the dining-room, and never did 
 slower, more halting, sadder pilgrimage wend its 
 way to miracle-working grotto than this, to extract 
 of beef and puree of brown beans and compote of 
 prunes and lait caill6. Mother and son had, of 
 course, the best table in the room, and at it they 
 would sit together for one hour, talking of extract 
 of beef hot or cold, and puree of brown beans thick 
 or thin, of compote of prunes with sugar or with- 
 out, and lait caille with or without cream. 
 
 And all the while they were hating one another. 
 How they hated one another, through their polite- 
 ness. They hated one another when they met at 
 half-past eleven precisely by the newspaper table 
 in the reading-room, and the hatred increased, 
 augmented, while they conversed so courteously in 
 the best seats by the window with the view of the 
 lake, and at the best table in the dining-room 
 corner. How could it be otherwise, when all their 
 time together, through their conversing on safe 
 topics and counting of stripes and fleur-de-lis and 
 parquet squares, they were looking at one another ! 
 140 
 
The Secret of Mother and Son 
 
 He looked at her and knew that it was for her 
 past youth he was paying with his youth, now. 
 And she knew how his youth, like this, now she was 
 old, was to her witness of her youth, reproach and 
 insult to her. She looked at him, and he looked at 
 her, and what wonder that the hatred of each for 
 the other was as a red-hot, seething, muttering 
 thing, under the thin layer of their mutual polite- 
 ness, and that the volume of it increased through 
 their two hours of careful, laborious covering up of 
 it, until, every day, it had almost reached an out- 
 break by the time the dining-room clock chimed 
 half-past one. 
 
 The doctors insist that at half-past one Touson 
 goes to its rooms, has its servants pull down the 
 shutters and quiet its next-door neighbours, and 
 rests for two hours before its baths and doctors 
 and massage and piqures begin again. So, from 
 the last sip of camomile tea, mother and son would 
 arise, and would be diverted from some outbreak. 
 They would get out of their chairs, and cross the 
 room, and go along the corridor with the pil- 
 grimage. They would part at the door of the 
 reading-room. 
 
 "Good rest, my mother." 
 
 "Good rest, my son." 
 
 Tap-tap, one way; tap-tap, tap-tap, the other 
 141 
 
Accidentals 
 
 way. And each would go, she into her room and 
 he into his, to a secret closely guarded. Doors 
 must be locked against inaid and valet. 
 Mother would think — "If my son knew!" 
 And son would think — "If my mother knew !" 
 And each, more than ever each day, passionately 
 would hate the other. 
 
 The secret of each was to each so vital a thing, 
 that just that it could not be shared by either with 
 the other — that the greatest horror of each was of 
 the other's possibly spying it out, dragging it forth, 
 and laying it bare, and sneering at it — ^marked for 
 each the distance between them and gave room 
 therein, horribly, for hatred. 
 
 Each would have told the maitre d 'hotel or the 
 concierge rather than the other. 
 
 And it was the hatred of each for the other that, 
 of all the bad things they each of them had in the 
 world, most came between each one of them and the 
 secret — ^between her and her secret, and between 
 him and his. For each of them, the other turned 
 the secret to a torturing thing, and each made for 
 the other an agony of a thing that should have 
 been beautiful. It was because of her hatred of 
 him that her secret could not help or comfort her. 
 And it was because of his hatred of her that his 
 secret could not help or comfort him. In the hour 
 in the reading-room and the hour in the dining- 
 142 
 
To Die a Little 
 
 room, it had been all that she could do to keep 
 her shaking old hands, and all that he could do 
 to keep his shaking young hands, from some ges- 
 ture of hatred. And it was as if hands, fuU of 
 the impulse of hate, could not have touched on, 
 could not be lifted to, a secret such as was her 
 secret and such as was his. 
 
 This is a thing really quite droll, for who 
 tfouldn't have been amused to know that the secret 
 of each poor, disreputable, dying, frightened thing 
 was a little dark bound book? His a book of the 
 devotions of Mary, Mother of Christ, hers a book 
 of the devotions of Christ, Son of Mary, to be 
 pored over by each, with twitching head bowed; 
 he before a little blue-and-white valueless plaster 
 image of the Mother of Seven Sorrows ; she before 
 a little, not at all fine print, coloured in crude 
 colours, like the prints one's maid's priest gives 
 her, of the Son of the Sacred Heart. 
 
 To Die a Little 
 
 Mabie Ella sat up in her narrow, rose and 
 white, little girl's bed, and pushed her hair back 
 out of her eyes. 
 
 She saw all the dear familiar detail of the room, 
 143 
 
Accidentals 
 
 shadowless and colourless in the dawn light, — and 
 knew that never, never, never would she wake in 
 this room again, that never, never, never would the 
 old, poor, lovely chateau any more be her home, 
 or its life her life, or the sweet country of grain 
 and vine her country, or herself the careless, happy 
 little Marie Ella that had been. 
 
 For this day she was to be married. 
 
 The dawn light was clear, with its pure, still 
 clearness in her room. She had had the blinds 
 left open that the dawn might wake her. Sitting 
 up in bed she could see everything, — ^the roses of 
 the dim ancient linen that hung the walls, the 
 carved rose garlands of the chairs and dressing- 
 table and armoire, and the roses that many-times- 
 great-aunt Marie Ella had her arms full of, in the 
 portrait over the chimney. The dawn light allowed 
 no colour to the roses of the walls, or of that other 
 Marie Ella's charming armful, showed them only 
 dark and dimly outlined. 
 
 But the room was full of the fragrance of roses. 
 
 And the fragrance took on colour, was itself rose 
 and gold and cream and saffron and deep red. 
 
 It gave pain to the heart of Marie Ella. 
 
 The man she was to marry to-day had sent her 
 yesterday the wonderful, long-stemmed, heavy- 
 headed roses that filled every vase and bowl in the 
 room. 
 
 144 
 
To Die a Little 
 
 They were wonderful roses, he must have had 
 all Paris searched for them, with their infinite 
 variety of colour and of fragrance. 
 
 But they seemed to her alien and hostile in the 
 room. 
 
 It was autumn, and there were no roses on the 
 terrace under the windows of Marie Ella's room. 
 
 From the wide open windows, came to her and 
 to the fragrance of Amaury's hothouse roses, the 
 wild, free autumn odour of the country, of ripe, 
 golden, sunburned grain-fields, with the night 
 shadows yet blue and wet upon them, and of ripe 
 red and purple vineyards, dewy, the grapes 
 crushed a little where they were fallen, heavy with 
 their ripeness, giving the air a taste of wine. There 
 was the smoke of smouldering fires from the huts 
 of the charcoal burners in the fringe of woods; 
 and there was the smell of the woods with it, of 
 their half-wet, half-sunny leaves and stems and 
 chestnut tassels. There was even some just 
 guessed at smell of the farm, of stacked hay and 
 the cows, and of the wet cabbages of the kitchen 
 garden. It all meant to her a nostalgia that she 
 was to take away with her from this day of her 
 marriage, and to keep, an ache and a longing, close 
 with her, all along the years. 
 
 The fragrance of Amaury's hothouse roses was 
 145 
 
Accidentals 
 
 strange to her, and frightened her, in this waking 
 for the last time to intimate, old, dear things. 
 
 She and Amaury would come back. Of course 
 they would come back, occasionally, for visits. 
 They would be given the guest rooms in the south 
 wing, the "new apartment" that was so old. She 
 would be a visitor in the house that had been her 
 home. Her father would tell her that she must 
 always order whichever horse she chose, saddled 
 and up from the stables, and that the motor was 
 quite at her disposition. Her mother would ask, 
 did she mind breakfasting at noon, and should she 
 care to have the St. Hugons invited over to tea. 
 She must never any more tease old Pierre, the 
 butler; and old Madame Pierre of the linen room 
 would never scold her again. She would be asked 
 to visit the village school, and the children would 
 be shy before her. She might go of course to see 
 the village people, — but not to beg to be let stop 
 to supper, and stir the marmite, and cut the black 
 loaf. She would have to walk quietly in the vil- 
 lage street instead of running, and in the chateau 
 she would be a courteous guest, not naughty little 
 Marie Ella any more. She would be always home- 
 sick for the house that was no more hers, and 
 most of all homesick for it when she was in it, 
 come back to it sometimes, for short times. 
 
 And by and by, when all this, that had always 
 146 
 
To Die a Little 
 
 been so utterly hers, should have passed to her 
 brother Louis, she would no more come back at all. 
 Amaury would not allow her to recognise in any 
 way Louis' wife, whose great wealth made the 
 whole thing sordid and ugly. 
 
 Louis' noisy, smart wife would have this for her 
 home, and would care nothing for it. She would 
 come to it as rarely as she could, and then only 
 to fill it with noisy, smart people, who would never 
 feel its loveliness, or have thought for the memo- 
 ries it held, its long tradition, the stories it was 
 so full of, never would take its offering of poetry 
 and dreams. 
 
 Louis' wife would leave the old place all for- 
 saken: and it would be most forsaken when she 
 was living in it, and not caring. 
 
 But perhaps Louis' little daughter, when she 
 came driving of a twilight from St. Hugon en 
 Haut, or from the Vieux Moulins, or the Pools of 
 the Dranse, and saw the gates, and the avenue 
 between the poplars, and the old, grey stone steps 
 and the old, red brick doorway at the end, and the 
 vnndow of the swallows' nests over the door, and 
 the grey roofs where moss was yellow and green, 
 would say to herself, — as Marie Ella, whom she 
 did not know, had used to say, — rapturously, "I'm 
 coming home." 
 
 Perhaps she would say, as rapturously as always 
 147 
 
Accidentals 
 
 Marie Ella had used to say it, "I am at home," in 
 the hall of the worn-out rugs and beautiful, dark 
 shining floor, the stained, dim old walls, and the 
 green knight tapestry. 
 
 Perhaps to her, as to Marie Ella, the smell of 
 grain-fields and vineyards in the chateau, with the 
 smell of the old cupboards and waxed floors, might 
 mean home, — to her, whom Marie Ella hated to 
 think of there. And she might love it, as Marie 
 Ella had loved it. It might be the one home of 
 her life to her. 
 
 And she too would have to leave it ; would have 
 also to wake, after years, one day, to a wedding 
 morning in this room, and to the little dying of 
 good-bye. 
 
 The Bird in the Heart 
 
 There was a quiet, white, almost empty little 
 room that Theresa, — Tessa, Sister Marie Ange 
 always called her, — ^was to look back to from all 
 along in her life afterwards. She was to stop 
 and turn to it often; standing still, as it were, 
 wherever in the way of her life she happened to 
 be, and see it always as a secret, quite sacred place, 
 wherein was something for her that she might not 
 speak of, the less, for the more it meant to her. It 
 148 
 
The Bird in the Heart 
 
 was to seem to her always that she opened the 
 door of the little white room to a most treasured 
 thing, and looked, and closed the door quietly 
 again, in the way of her life, and went on. When 
 people questioned her, — of course, because of the 
 pearls they questioned her closely, — she had noth- 
 ing to tell of it. And when, as she grew older, 
 various things made her understand how odd an 
 episode the white room might have been in the life 
 of a little girl, its being so sacred had nothing to 
 do with the question of who Sister Marie Ange 
 was, and of how she came there. 
 
 The white room was always sweet with garden 
 smells, and had the murmur of the distant sea in 
 it, and was very softly lighted, either by the gold 
 of sunshine that filtered in all day through the 
 closed jalousies and made a floating ladder down 
 the dusk, or by the gold of the lamp that in its 
 turn was placed on the table behind the top of the 
 bed, under the big black crucifix. 
 
 There were several people who came and went 
 in and out of the room, and there was always 
 Sister Marie Ange. In the worst of the fever, 
 Tessa always knew her and wanted her. For a 
 long time, everything was pain and confusion, ex- 
 cept the presence of Sister Marie Ange. Then 
 gradually the little white .room came to be a safe 
 place, from which all fear and trouble were shut 
 149 
 
Accidentals 
 
 out, wherein one rested ; and the people who came 
 and went — ^the doctor, who had had her, Tessa, 
 brought to the convent when she had fallen ill in 
 the big hotel down on the promenade in the town, 
 the Mother Superior, with her calm face framed 
 in bands of black and white, and her gold crucifix 
 on her breast, the Sisters who came to help, — all 
 grew dear, and Sister Marie Ange was more dear 
 than all the world. 
 
 Aunt Agnes and Cousin Agnes came up to the 
 convent to see Tessa several times before they went 
 away. Afterwards she realised that they had been 
 awfully good to stay on in the town down by the 
 sea, under the convent hill, so long after the season 
 was over, waiting until she was out of danger, and 
 even longer than that, until she was quite getting 
 well. Of course, then, they absolutely had had to 
 go to Paris, because Cousin Agnes simply hadn't a 
 rag, and Aunt Agnes must get in her month at 
 Carlsbad before they all went back in August to 
 America. 
 
 Tessa said good-bye to them very nicely. They 
 had come to seem to her like quite strange people, 
 who had nothing whatever to do with her and 
 Sister Marie Ange. And when they talked of how 
 she was to be brought to join them as soon as she 
 was well enough, to Paris or to Carlsbad, she 
 listened without interest. 
 ISO 
 
The Bird in the Heart 
 
 She had lived all her thirteen years with Aunt 
 Agnes and Cousin Agnes, her nearer people were 
 dead since before she could remember, but they 
 had never been to her what Sister Marie Ange had 
 come to be in the few weeks ; and the places where 
 she had lived with them had meant to her nothing, 
 ever, of what the little white room had come to 
 mean. 
 
 There was a time, after they had gone, that was 
 perfectly happy. AU day Sister Marie Ange was 
 there, in the room's special gathering of dusk and 
 coolness and fragrance and gentle sounds. The 
 chapel bells rang for the ofiSces. The voices of the 
 nuns drifted up at certain hours, with the fra- 
 grance of their flowers that they tended, from the 
 garden. The murmur of the sea was deep and 
 near sometimes, and sometimes one could scarcely 
 hear it. The nightingales sang at dawn and at 
 dusk in the garden, and the frogs sang, and the 
 grasshoppers, and the bees. When Tessa slept, 
 Sister Marie Ange would be sitting close beside 
 her, in her white dress, against the white wall ; and 
 when she waked. Sister Marie Ange would lift the 
 pillows and bring her cool milk to drink and sit by 
 her and siag to her very softly in some language 
 that Tessa, used though she was to many tongues, 
 did not know. At twilight. Sister Marie Ange 
 would open the jalousies, and Tessa from the bed 
 
Accidentals 
 
 could see the gold cross on the chapel gable, over 
 the garden, and the three cypress trees and the 
 eastern sky where night would be deepening, and 
 the soft outline of the farther hills. When the 
 lamp was lighted, the shadow of Sister Marie 
 Ange, tall and slight as she was, would move with 
 her, noiseless, like her, about the room, all black, 
 as Sister Marie Ange was all white. And when 
 Tessa waked in the nights, the silent nights, she 
 would have only to whisper, "I want you," and 
 always Sister Marie Ange would be there. 
 
 Tessa waked always when the birds stirred in 
 the dawn, and always Sister Marie Ange was 
 awake too, and at the window in the strange dawn 
 light. 
 
 It was a long, narrow, deep-recessed window, 
 like all in the convent, full of climbing roses, and 
 of the east. 
 
 One morning, something in the attitude of Sister 
 Marie Ange as she stood there, her face, that Tessa 
 saw in profile, lifted to the dawn light, frightened 
 the little girl, who waked to see her so, in a way 
 she couldn't possibly have explained. It was as if 
 she got a quick stab of pain from some pain she 
 never had dreamed of, that was the pain of Sister 
 Marie Ange. 
 
 The face of Sister Marie Ange was haggard and 
 hard with pain, with no gentle sorrow, no sadness 
 152 
 
The Bird in the Heart 
 
 of calm, holy places, no grief that had been blessed 
 to her, but a wild pain, a pain that could never 
 know rest, that could never bear sympathy or 
 know comforting. Her white dress, — like the dress 
 of the novices, though she was not young as they 
 were, — ^her white veil, pinned back, the white bands 
 of the cornette about her face, seemed all so much 
 to belong to peace, to the white walls and the roses 
 at the window and the chapel cross against the 
 dawn, that the pain her face told, that her very 
 way of standing there told, frightened Tessa the 
 more in contrast. 
 
 She sat up among the pillows, and the Sister 
 heard even the little sound she made, and turned 
 to her. 
 
 She turned with a movement quick and violent, 
 and stood a moment so. It was as if she were 
 come back from a long way off; she seemed to be 
 trying to realise where she was and what she must 
 do. It was as if she were trying to make herself 
 Sister Marie Ange again, when she had been some- 
 one else. It was only for a moment. 
 
 Then she said, "Good morning, little girl," in 
 the English she always used with Tessa. "You 
 did sleep well?" 
 
 "But you," said Tessa, "you have not slept at 
 all. Oh, what is it, Sister Marie Ange!" 
 153 
 
Accidentals 
 
 The Sister did not come to her, but still stood 
 there. 
 
 The little girl, huddled among the pillows, felt 
 the distance of the narrow room between them as 
 though it had been world-wide. All her love for 
 the woman who had been to her what no one else 
 in her small life had ever been, all the love that 
 she never before had given to anyone, cried out 
 across the distance. 
 
 "Sister Marie Ange, it is terrible, I cannot bear 
 it. You are so far away. Come near, I am fright- 
 ened, and I want you near." 
 
 The Sister came to her. 
 
 ' ' Frightened ? But why, my Tessa ? ' ' 
 
 She moved and spoke as if with an effort. It 
 seemed difficult for her to come near. She stood 
 tall by the bed, not bending over it. 
 
 Tessa caught her hands that were quite cold, 
 and looked up at her. 
 
 The eyes of Marie Ange were dark as if with a 
 shadow of something that was in her heart, some- 
 thing that was black, and that beat itself about in 
 her heart, like a caged, wild bird. 
 
 "Of what are you afraid?" asked Sister Marie 
 Ange. 
 
 "I am afraid of that which hurts you," Tessa 
 said. "Oh, Sister Marie Ange, what is it? I did 
 not know there were things that hurt one like that. 
 154 
 
The Bird in the Heart 
 
 I am afraid, because of the thing in your eyes. I 
 am afraid of it for you. It is so black and wild. 
 And it cannot get away. Sister Marie Ange, what 
 is it?" 
 
 "Hush, dear, hush," said the Sister, trying to 
 draw her hands away from Tessa's, "there is 
 nothing." 
 
 "Sister Marie Ange, there is somethiug that you 
 cannot bear." 
 
 The Sister said, "You fancy things, my Tessa. 
 In the dawn light you saw that your Sister Marie 
 Ange was not beautiful, as you had thought her, 
 not young, and without the loveliaess you had 
 imagined in her face. SiUy little Tessa, there — 
 there." She put Tessa's hands away and stood not 
 touching her, or looking at her. 
 
 She did not seem to hear Tessa begging, "What 
 is it, oh what is it, Sister Marie Ange? TeU me 
 what it is that makes you be like that. I love 
 you so. And I thought that you were happy, and 
 you are not ; and I thought that I was happy, but 
 I am not; for I have no one but you, no one, 
 and they will take me away from you. And I 
 shall never see you again. And the thing is so 
 terrible in your eyes. And you wiU die. I know 
 you will die." 
 
 Sister Marie Ange did not try to comfort her at 
 all. She turned and sat down ia a chair that there 
 iSS' 
 
Accidentals 
 
 was by the bed, and leaned sideways against the 
 wall and shut her eyes. Her face was very white 
 and worn, and had no youth at all in it. She did 
 not speak to Tessa, and for some reason Tessa did 
 not speak any more to her. They stayed like that 
 quite a long time. 
 
 After a while Sister Marie Ange spoke to Tessa, 
 still not looking at her, leaning against the wall 
 like that, with her eyes shut. 
 
 "My Tessa, all the people who have ever loved 
 me I have made unhappy; make me think that it 
 is not so with you. Leave me to think, always, 
 afterwards, remembering, that you were happier 
 because of me. I ought not to let you love me, 
 but I want you to love me. If ever again I make 
 you unhappy, as I did to-day, forgive me, Tessa; 
 and never ask me questions, and never try to un- 
 derstand, and oh, my Tessa, let us not think of sad 
 things any more." 
 
 And they had put all unhappiness away from 
 them, as much as ever it can be put away. 
 
 They may pretend that there was no world at 
 all outside the white room, that there would be no 
 going away for either of them from it, ever. And 
 the first day Tessa was carried out into the garden, 
 it was only a beautiful opening wider of white 
 walls. 
 
 156 
 
The Bird in the Heart 
 
 The convent walls were covered with rose vines, 
 as red as coral, from which the roses had long 
 fallen, for June was passed, and it was very hot 
 along the azure coast. 
 
 The nuns kept their garden watered from the 
 well in the middle of it, and shaded it where they 
 could, with bamboo screens and awnings, so that 
 there were always some flowers, and the grass was 
 green and sweet. 
 
 They put a chair for Tessa in the shade of the 
 high, vine-covered wall. She was the only little 
 girl in the convent then, for it was the season when 
 the pensionnaires were all away. 
 
 The widened world let in all sorts of colours, the 
 many different greens of grass and shrubbery and 
 trees, the darkness of the cypresses against the 
 many differing blues and purples of the sky, the 
 deep old chrome and umber of the convent build- 
 ings, and dim, lichen-stained rust of their tiles, the 
 scarlet and yellow of begonias round the well ; and 
 many lights and shadows, always changing, on 
 walls and grass and paths; the little life of bird 
 and butterfly and lizard and cigale, the little stir 
 of them in their places, the little sounds of them ; 
 and the sound of the far-off sea one had no glimpse 
 of, and the sound of the chapel bells, in their times, 
 and of the town's bells, following the convent 
 bells. 
 
 157 
 
Accidentals 
 
 The nuns spent a great part of their lives in the 
 garden, they of the black veils and they of the white 
 veils, at their quiet labour of tending it, watering 
 it from the great copper jars, weeding it, clipping 
 its borders, training its vines and fruit trees ; pac- 
 ing its paths, faces wrapt in meditation, heads bent 
 over books of devotion; hastening across it to the 
 chapel, lingering their few spare moments in it, 
 bringing their endless needlework out to it. 
 
 Tessa loved to watch themy as her walled-in 
 world included them. She loved the little young 
 white ones, the novices, whose dress was like that 
 of Sister Marie Ange. 
 
 Among the white ones there were some who did 
 not belong to the convent, who were not nuns at 
 all, older women, most of them women from the 
 world outside, who came there to "retreat," to find 
 a place of refuge for as long as they would, or as 
 long as they might, from some life out beyond; 
 and to gain there, in the convent's age-long accu- 
 mulation of both, something of peace and strength 
 to take back to the world with them. They were 
 the Sisters to whom was usually given the nursing 
 of the sick, and, though Tessa never asked, she 
 took it for granted that Sister Marie Ange was one 
 of them. 
 
 And yet Sister Marie Ange seemed curiously 
 apart from them, and different from them. Even 
 iS8 
 
The Bird in the Heart 
 
 Tessa saw that her place in the convent was unlike 
 anyone else's. In a way, she had more privileges 
 than any of the others, and yet, in a way, her 
 place among them was of the most lowly. She 
 did rough work, now that there was little to be 
 done for Tessa, with the lay Sisters, serving at 
 table, mending the linen, cleaning the copper and 
 earthen vessels of the kitchens. And yet she 
 seemed to be exempt from many of the strictest 
 rules. She took less part than any of the others 
 in the offices, often stayed unreproved in the gar- 
 den when the others trooped into the chapel, and 
 never talked as the others did of religion, or was 
 ordered to do so, as any of the others would have 
 been. 
 
 Yet she seemed to belong to the convent far 
 more intensely than any other of them all, and 
 Tessa could not have told what it was that made 
 her wonder. Only afterwards, looking back, she 
 knew that she had felt it about Sister Marie Ange, 
 that the quiet and security and apartness of the 
 convent meant more to her than it did to any of 
 the others. In a way, one couldn't imagine her 
 outside in the world that the others in retreat 
 would go back to; and yet, again in a way, she 
 belonged less than any of them to the convent's re- 
 straint. That something of wild restlessness and 
 rebellion which there was about her, — ^that the 
 IS9 
 
Accidentals 
 
 little girl felt then, even, and was to know, for 
 what it was, afterwards, — made it impossible for 
 one to think of her belonging within walls. Some- 
 times, among the nuns, she seemed utterly alien, 
 and there was something of impatience, even of 
 scorn, even of hatred, in her look at them. She 
 seemed to be afraid of the chapel that the others 
 entered so easily. And yet, when the sound of the 
 nuns' sweet, strange chanting came to her from it, 
 out to the garden, her face would light as Tessa 
 never saw their faces light, as if with reflection of 
 a glory greater than they knew. 
 
 Tessa loved the dim little chapel, fragrant of 
 ages of incense and candle burning, of old crum- 
 bling stone and damp and rust and prayers and 
 dust. In the chapel there was perpetual exposition 
 of the Sacrament, and there was always a Sister 
 of the Contemplation kneeling behind the grating 
 at vigil. Tessa thought that it would be a most 
 wonderful thing to be one of the Sisters who might 
 do that, stay so near. 
 
 She asked Sister Marie Ange once, "Is it not 
 beautiful?" 
 
 And Sister Marie Ange said, as if she were 
 speaking to some grown-up person, "Perhaps, for 
 those who can feel it so. ' ' And a strange mingling 
 of contempt and envy was in her voice as she 
 said it. 
 
 1 60 
 
The Bird in the Heart 
 
 "One could not do it, could one," asked Tessa, 
 "if one had the black wild bird in one's heart?" 
 
 It was the first time she spoke of the black bird 
 to Sister Marie Ange. She spoke of it then, be- 
 cause the shadow had come suddenly dark to the 
 eyes of Sister Marie Ange, looking at the nun of 
 the Contemplation. The shadow was in the eyes 
 of Sister Marie Ange, as she turned then to Tessa, 
 and somehow Tessa felt that Sister Marie Ange, 
 looking down at her, was glad she knew about the 
 black bird. 
 
 For a minute they two looked at one another, 
 the woman who was sad in knowledge of life, and 
 the little girl who was sad in ignorance. And 
 Tessa knew that Sister Marie Ange and she would 
 always have between them, after that, the secret of 
 the black bird. 
 
 Sister Marie Ange did not speak of it then. 
 "Poor Tessa," she only said, and Tessa then did 
 not know why. 
 
 Of the many things she puzzled over afterwards, 
 there was one that seemed most strange. 
 
 It was one afternoon, when she and Sister Marie 
 Ange were sitting in the garden. The Mother 
 Superior came in haste and whispered something 
 to Sister Marie Ange. And Sister Marie Ange 
 rose and went away, quickly, as if to escape, before 
 there came out into the garden a most beautiful 
 i6i 
 
Accidentals 
 
 and gracious lady, whom all the Sisters hastened to 
 honour, of course, first because she was good, — as 
 the Mother Superior beautifully told them, — ^but 
 also because she was a queen. 
 
 When people afterwards questioned Tessa about 
 the Queen's speaking to her, the little foreigner 
 who had been so ill, she never could remember 
 clearly, as she would have wanted to, for all the 
 time she had been troubled, and anxious to get 
 away and run and follow Sister Marie Ange. 
 
 As soon as she could, she went to find her, and 
 found her in the little white room, standing up in 
 the centre of it, as though she had been pacing its 
 small length up and down. The black beating was 
 in her eyes. And Tessa did not know what better 
 to do for her than to pretend that she herself was 
 tired and wanted to be sung to sleep. 
 
 There was always a curious reserve between the 
 two, that kept them closer together than any con- 
 fidence could have done. Of course it was for- 
 bidden the Sisters ever to speak of themselves, but 
 the silence of Sister Marie Ange was not a ruled 
 and ordered silence. It was a silence more intense 
 than that. Because of it, Tessa said nothing to 
 Sister Marie Ange of the Queen's visit. And, be- 
 cause of it, she never asked her, even, what was the 
 language in which she sang. 
 162 
 
The Bird in the Heart 
 
 But one day Sister Marie Ange did speak to her 
 of the black bird. 
 
 In the long, narrow, dark old stone refectory, 
 that was, after the chapel, the oldest part of the 
 convent, all the nuns would gather at meal times 
 to eat their very scanty fare, while the voice of 
 the reader droned on, in gentle, sweet monotone, 
 over the lives of the saints. The Mother Superior 
 sat at the top of the long, narrow, wooden table, 
 and Tessa, by special permission, because she was 
 the only pensionnaire, sat by her, under the carved 
 balcony of the reader. 
 
 Sister Marie Ange always helped the lay Sisters 
 to serve the nuns, setting before them their rough 
 bowls of broth and herbs, their long coarse loaves 
 of bread, and their water and country wine. 
 
 One day, at the noon meal, an odd thing hap- 
 pened. 
 
 It was a day of storm. There had been great 
 heat, and thunder in the air for days, and light- 
 ning, and the sound of the sea had been very loud 
 and near. Since half-way through the last night, 
 there had been a breaking of wave after wave of 
 storm, a sweeping up and over of wind and rain, 
 receding only to gather and break again, ^ Tessa 
 knew that all through the storm's raging, Sister 
 Marie Ange had stood at the open, wild window. 
 163 
 
Accidentals 
 
 She was there when day came to the world that 
 was rent and shaken. At noon it was more quiet, 
 but the nuns were yet frightened, and huddled to- 
 gether in the refectory. 
 
 All the morning, in the fury of the storm, Sister 
 Marie Ange had stayed in the garden, walking 
 fast, so fast, up and down, up and down. The 
 Mother Superior had sent for her, but she would 
 not come in, and at last had gone herself to her, 
 out in all the rain. 
 
 The nuns all knew. 
 
 Sister Marie Ange had come in with the Mother. 
 
 At noon in the refectory her eyes were black as 
 Tessa never before had seen them. 
 
 There was a huge, dark, old wooden crucifix on 
 the refectory wall. The nuns always bowed their 
 heads as they passed before it. Often Sister Marie 
 Ange forgot to bow her head and the Mother Su- 
 perior would reprove her, but not as severely as 
 she would have reproved any of the others. 
 
 This day, Sister Marie Ange, passing with a 
 great two-lipped copper jar of water, forgot to bow 
 her head. And this day the Mother Superior spoke 
 to her as she never had before, as Tessa never 
 had imagined she could speak to anyone. 
 
 The Mother stood up, the lectrice stopped her 
 reading, the nuns sat breathless. The Mother stood, 
 164 
 
The Bird in the Heart 
 
 rigid with anger, pointing before them all at Sister 
 Marie Ange. 
 
 "Shame to you, Sister Marie Ange," she cried, 
 "shame to you that you forget your Sovereign 
 Lord in your wild mood, shame to you for your 
 lawless, rebellious spirit that you do not control, 
 the evil spirit of your pride that makes you for- 
 get. Go kneel there before the cross, and bow your 
 head upon the ground, and remain so on your 
 knees in all abasement, with your lips on the stones 
 at your Lord's feet, until there may come to you 
 such humbling and submission that you forget Him 
 not again." 
 
 Sister Marie Ange looked at the Mother for an 
 instant, as though she did not understand. For an 
 instant she stood amazed. And then it was as if 
 a great fury possessed her. An empress of olden 
 times with death at her command could not have 
 been more splendid and dreadful in anger. It 
 was for only an instant, and then it all changed 
 suddenly. 
 
 "Yes, my Mother," she answered, and she put 
 down the water jar, and turned to the cross and 
 knelt, and bowed her head down so that her fore- 
 head and her lips touched the stones. 
 
 The Mother sat down in her place again, the 
 voice of the reader droned on, the nuns ate their 
 i6s 
 
Accidentals 
 
 broth and bread. And through all the meal, not 
 once moving, Sister Marie Ange remained so, hu- 
 miliating herself before them all as they sat at the 
 refectory table. 
 
 Tessa could not bear it. She stood up in her 
 place at the table, and said, "My Mother, permit 
 that I kneel also." 
 
 "No," said the Mother, "keep your seat, my 
 child." 
 
 But when the nuns had gone out, passing Sister 
 Marie Ange as she knelt, their skirts brushing her 
 face in the narrow space between the table and the 
 wall, the Mother let Tessa delay a moment to go 
 and kneel by her before the crucifix. 
 
 Sister Marie Ange did not move. 
 
 Tessa begged to be allowed to stay with her, 
 there, on the stones, but the Mother made her come 
 away. 
 
 It was dreadful to her all the afternoon to think 
 of Sister Marie Ange kneeling there. 
 
 Yet, when she came to Tessa hours after in the 
 white room, there was still in her face the light 
 that had come to it when she had turned to the 
 cross. 
 
 "It is quiet in your heart," said Tessa, and 
 added, "the black bird, you know." 
 
 "Poor little Tessa," said the sister, as she had 
 said it before. 
 
 i66 
 
The Bird in the Heart 
 
 "Why do you say that?" asked Tessa. "Why 
 do you say 'poor' of me?" 
 
 "Because of the black bird," said Sister Marie 
 Ange, "because you too have it in your heart." 
 
 Her face was all illumined ; it made Tessa think 
 of something she had read somewhere, or heard, 
 about alabaster and a lamp. She seemed to be 
 standing far apart from Tessa, yet loving her very 
 closely. 
 
 "It is so strange a birthright," she said, "the 
 black bird in one's heart." 
 
 Tessa said, "And people who have not it, they 
 are quite different. I have no one who has it but 
 you. Sister Marie Ange." 
 
 "And I have no one who has it but you, my 
 Tessa." 
 
 Tessa was thinking, in utter desolation, "And 
 they will take me away from you." But she did 
 not speak. She did not want to bring the shadow 
 back to the eyes of Sister Marie Ange. 
 
 The life of the convent went through days of 
 summer. Some god worked great miracles in the 
 garden, and some god was worshipped in the 
 chapel, with many mysteries. 
 
 It seemed to Tessa that there could be no life, 
 ever, anywhere, for her, other than this. But she 
 grew stronger. 
 
 When the time came near that she must go, the 
 167 
 
Accidentals 
 
 sense of going was upon her terribly; each hour 
 was a cruel loss, and each moment. There would 
 be the last luncheon in the refectory, the last sun- 
 set in the garden, the last twilight in the white 
 room, the last bowl of bread and milk for supper, 
 the last lighting of the lamp on the table by the 
 bed, and the last putting out of it to the darkness 
 of the last night. Only so many more days to wake 
 to the odour of heliotrope and petunias in the gar- 
 den. There would be the last breakfast. Then all 
 the dear familiar things of the room would be 
 there, and she would be gone. 
 
 Poor little Tessa, she did not speak of it, she 
 only suffered, utterly, as the time came near for 
 the end, the very end, of -it. She kept up very 
 bravely. And Sister Marie Ange spoke no more 
 than she did of the last time that was drawing 
 near. 
 
 Only the last night, coming with Sister Marie 
 Ange into the white room, Tessa stood, as the door 
 closed after them, and cried out, "I can't bear 
 it— I can't— I can't!" 
 
 She did not touch Sister Marie Ange; she just 
 stood with her hands clenched, and said, "I will 
 not bear it, I will not go! I will die, but I will 
 not go away from you. I will not, for anything 
 but death, go away from you." 
 
 The August sunset was like melting, pouring, 
 i68 
 
The Bird in the Heart 
 
 red-hot bronze upon the world all outside the 
 white room. Inside there was dimness and cool- 
 ness in the shade of the green jalousies. The grass- 
 hoppers had not stopped their sounding of brass. 
 
 Sister Marie Ange sat down on the edge of the 
 little white bed, and drew Tessa down beside her. 
 It was the whitest little bed in all the world under 
 the black crucifix. It seemed to Tessa impossible 
 that she was never to sleep in the little white bed, 
 after to-night, again. 
 
 "My Tessa, ' ' said the Sister, "now I will tell you 
 a thing. It is that neither can I stay here any 
 longer." Her voice was very sad, sadder than 
 anything Tessa had ever heard, than any sound of 
 music or of waves or of wind in the trees. "I also 
 must go away. I also have a life I must go back 
 to. And I also am most unhappy to go back. 
 Tessa, you are not any more unhappy than I am to 
 go away. You are a little child, and I am quite, 
 quite old, and in our lives there is no likeness at 
 all; but we have something that has made us 
 mean very much each to the other, and that even 
 if we never see one another again, will make us 
 mean much, each to the other, always. My Tessa," 
 she said, with the shadow in her eyes, "in your 
 heart that is young and in mine that is not young 
 any more, there is the same capacity for sorrow. 
 We were born each of us with the black bird in 
 169 
 
Accidentals 
 
 the heart. We shall both of us always be lonely. 
 It is for that that we have meant so much to one 
 another, and been so close together. And, Tessa, 
 it is that that will keep us always close together — 
 close together in a way you will afterwards come, 
 when you are older, to understand — even though 
 we never see one another again." 
 
 Her last words were all that stood clear to Tessa 
 then. Afterwards she understood the rest, but 
 then she could only feel, ' ' Though we never see one 
 another again." "Oh," she besought, "must it be 
 that I am never to see you again?" 
 
 Sister Marie Ange said, very strangely, "Those 
 who see me can never come near to me, Tessa. No 
 one, ever, of those who see me in my life comes 
 near to me. It is only to one away from me I can 
 be near." 
 
 "I may never come to where you live, Sister 
 Marie Ange?" 
 
 "If you came, you would but feel yourself far- 
 ther away from me." 
 
 "Sister Marie Ange, I do not understand." 
 
 "My Tessa," said the Sister, "understand this. 
 The circumstance of my life keeps all that I love 
 
 from me, and leaves me quite alone " As it 
 
 had been often before, she seemed to be speaking 
 
 to someone older than Tessa, and she spoke with 
 
 the intensity of one who has rarely spoken of her- 
 
 170 
 
The Bird in the Heart 
 
 self. "The circumstance of my life is cruel " 
 
 She said it, not as if alone to Tessa, but to all the 
 world and to whatever God there was. "The cir- 
 cumstance of my life is cruel " She stopped, 
 
 and went on again more quietly, "Perhaps any 
 life is like that," she said, "to one who has the 
 black bird in the heart." She changed again and 
 said to Tessa, "My poor little one, it is so sad that 
 you too should have the black bird in your heart." 
 
 "I am glad I have what you have," said Tessa, 
 "even if it hurts." 
 
 "My Tessa," said the Sister, "because of you, I 
 shall never in my life be so lonely again, never 
 quite so lonely any more. And that is what I 
 want for you, that perhaps you, in your life, will 
 be less lonely because 0|f me." 
 
 "You will not even tell me where you go to, 
 away from here?" said Tessa, that being still the 
 thing she most felt in the strangeness. 
 
 "I cannot," said Sister Marie Ange. 
 
 "It is a sad place where you live?" asked Tessa. 
 
 "It is a gay and brilliant place; I think all gay 
 and brilliant places are sad to one who has the 
 black bird in the heart." 
 
 Tessa said, "Do people there not know of the 
 black bird? Do they not see it, as I do, when it 
 comes to your eyes?" 
 
 "I have to hold my head so very high there," 
 171 
 
Accidentals 
 
 said Sister Marie Ange, "that no one, even if there 
 were one who understood, could see." Then she 
 said, "Tessa, you remember that day in the refec- 
 tory when I forgot to bow my head as I passed the 
 cross ? The day of the storm, that meant to me all 
 things of rage and flight? And the Mother made 
 me kneel before the cross? I was so happy as I 
 knelt there. I kissed not only the stones, but the 
 hems of the nuns' skirts that brushed past me. 
 I was laid so low. I was so proud to be laid, like 
 that, quite low; the bird in my heart, against the 
 stones, folded its wings and was still." 
 "Sister Marie Ange, why, why is it all so sad?" 
 Sister Marie Ange said, "My Tessa, you will not 
 be sadder for the having known me ? ' ' 
 
 "Oh, so much happier," cried Tessa, "all my life 
 I shall be happier because of you, even if I never 
 see you again. And what is sad of it is better 
 than any joy. I would rather have sadness with 
 you than joy with all the world else." She did 
 not cry at all. Because it would have hurt Sister 
 Marie Ange, she would not cry. She uttered the 
 great dread, that had been all the time in her heart, 
 without crying over it at all. "Sister Marie Ange, 
 suppose anything ever happened to you ? Suppose 
 you were ill, or — or — oh. Sister Marie Ange, and 
 I should never know." 
 
 172 
 
The Bird in the Heart 
 
 "You will know," said Sister Marie Ange. 
 
 Then she said a very puzzling thing. She said, 
 "Some day all the world will know of the death 
 of a woman who had a black bird in her heart, 
 but you will be the only one who ever knew of 
 the black bird. It will be a swift death — I don't 
 know how I know, but I do know — and all people 
 will say it was cruel. But you will know that it 
 was merciful. And then you will understand many 
 things. And I want you to know, my Tessa, that 
 the woman who had the black bird in her heart 
 always loved you, even to the end, and that perhaps 
 the dead are nearer to us than the living, and per- 
 haps the dead can love more perfectly." 
 
 Tessa could not speak for fear of sobbing, and 
 they sat silent together, as they had so often sat, 
 in the white room. 
 
 After a while it came to the hour of the Angelus. 
 Sister Marie Ange opened the jalousies. The bells 
 were ringing, the nuns fluttered across the garden 
 to the chapel through the dusk. Stars came out 
 over the curve of the mountains. Sister Marie 
 Ange lit the lamp. It was the last time Tessa 
 would ever see her light it. 
 
 They did not go down to supper in the refectory. 
 The Mother sent bread and milk and fruit. Sister 
 Marie Ange made Tessa eat, as she had made her 
 173 
 
Accidentals 
 
 eat when she was ill, and put her to bed like a 
 little sick girl, as she had done then, and sat by 
 her in the lamplight. 
 
 She gave Tessa a gift then, that Tessa loved be- 
 cause she gave it. It was a white necklace that 
 Tessa's people, when she went back to their ques- 
 tioning, found to be of very beautiful big pearls. 
 
 Her people marvelled over it and asked her 
 endless questions, to none of which she would 
 answer. Aunt Agnes even wrote, unknown at the 
 time to Tessa, to ask things of the Mother Superior, 
 who, Tessa learned afterwards, in courteously re- 
 sponding, had only said that of the many women 
 who came to retreat at the convent nothing ever 
 was known to anyone but to herself, or ever was 
 told by her regarding their identities. 
 
 But after years, when the swift, tragic death 
 of a woman in whose heart had dwelt the black 
 bird made mourning for all the courts of Europe, 
 Tessa wondered if it could be possible that she 
 understood. 
 
 174 
 
The Weather 
 
 The Weather 
 
 Evert year the three sons and their wives and 
 the wife of the eldest son who was dead came to 
 the chateau for the second of November. 
 
 It was on the second of November that the eldest 
 son, Arnaud, had been killed. 
 
 He had come home for the Day of the Dead, as 
 they all did, always, and after Mass in the chateau 
 chapel he had gone down to the fields by the river 
 to try a new mare over some hurdles he had had 
 set up there. The mare had fallen with him, and 
 they had brought him home dead to the chateau. 
 
 His wife, Evelyn, had not been there. He and 
 she had not been together then for nearly a year. 
 She had spent most of the time with her people 
 in their home in England. It was said in the 
 world that a separation had been about to be ar- 
 ranged. People wondered at the depths of her 
 mourning, and that she did not marry again, and 
 that when he had been dead for nearly six years 
 she still was coming back to the chateau for the 
 second of November. 
 
 It was always dark, sad weather for the second 
 
 of November. Everyone arrived the night before 
 
 by the Sud Express from Paris, and a complication 
 
 of small ways from Bordeaux to Saint Andre, and 
 
 ^75 
 
Accidentals 
 
 from there over by barouche and wagonette — there 
 was no motor — ^to the chateau. 
 
 "Wet wraps were taken off. How those old car- 
 riages leaked and were draughty ! And how slow ! 
 What a journey ! How cold it was ! 
 
 The old Monsieur would be angry. The chateau 
 cold indeed, after Paris and the north! And if 
 the carriages had been good enough for him all 
 his life, they were good enough for his sons surely ! 
 Each year he was more angry. Guests' servants, 
 castle servants, quantities of luggage. The old 
 Madame was each time sure such boxes couldn't be 
 got up the stairs, — old Louis and poor little Jean 
 couldn't possibly. She was each year the more 
 nervous. 
 
 The Comtesse Felix must have this, the Comtesse 
 Jacques must have that, the Comtesse Frangois the 
 other thing; Fflix scolded, Jacques grumbled, 
 Frangois sulked. There were only lamps and can- 
 dles in the chateau, only open fires in the rooms 
 and oil stoves in the corridors; hot water had to 
 be fetched from Heaven knows how far, up stone 
 stairs and along dark passages. 
 
 The old Madame cried, always, before dinner 
 
 was got through. Evelyn knew it was because 
 
 none of them ever was glad to see her that she 
 
 cried. Curiously enough, it was the English 
 
 176 
 
The Weather 
 
 daughter-in-law, the one who scarcely belonged to 
 them any more, who understood how, each year, 
 with the stupid trick of hoping that some women 
 never get rid of, she had made sure they would be 
 glad. Once the boys had been little boys, and had 
 had need of her. She cou^d not understand that 
 they had no need of her any more. Once they had 
 used to rush in at that door calling for her. She 
 always thought, each year, surely it would be like 
 that, this time. 
 
 The old Monsieur was made angry always by 
 the things that made her cry. He was angry, each 
 year afresh, that his sons did not appreciate "all 
 he had done for them," did not see how much bet- 
 ter all his ways were than their ways. He was 
 angry that he could not punish them any more. 
 He was angry because they were young and he 
 was old, they were well and he was ill, of the 
 world that would have no more of him, that they 
 were bad when he had to be good. 
 
 The guests always came down late for dinner, 
 with some excuse that was a complaint ; there had 
 not been enough light to dress by, and the water 
 had been quite cold, or the fire had smoked, and 
 there hadn't been anywhere to put anything. 
 
 Dinner, candlelight, curtains of shadow that 
 hung unstirred in the distances of the room, old 
 177 
 
Accidentals 
 
 Sevres candlesticks and fruit baskets full of grapes, 
 and four old S&vres swans floating on the long 
 mirror like a pool on the table. 
 
 One hour and a half in the salon. In the fire- 
 light the portraits of Amaud's people looked down 
 from shadowy walls upon soft old colours, and 
 lovely old shapes, and carvings of things. Since 
 Evelyn remembered, every chair had had its same 
 place. The same chairs had always been grouped 
 before the fire, and about the table of the lamp, 
 and the day-bef ore-yesterday's papers, and the 
 albums of faded photographs, and about the old 
 Madame 's tapestry frame. 
 
 The father of Arnaud, grown old and ill, would 
 sit in his special chair by the great fire and try to 
 keep awake before the young people, that they 
 might not laugh at him. He would sit up very 
 straight. He was still a handsome man. One 
 could see very well yet why women had loved him. 
 And why his wife had loved him. She had loved 
 him just as much as had any of the other women, 
 all the years. Not as this one had, or as that one 
 had, for a year, for a week or two, but all, the whole 
 of the time. When he was young and splendid, 
 with the world for his, he had not been kind to her. 
 Now he was old and ill, and the world forgot him. 
 And he had need of her. And how good she was to 
 him. 
 
 178 
 
The Weather 
 
 She tried to keep up his dignity before his sons. 
 "Your father made such and such an arrangement 
 about the river farm, see how well it has succeeded ! 
 He knew from the first how it would be. He 
 knew so much better than the regisseur. And 
 have you heard what he said to the Mayor at the 
 opening of the schools ? The Paris papers quoted 
 it." She would try to bring him into the talk, 
 that it was she herself who so unflaggingly kept 
 up. "Do you not think so?" she would ask him, 
 and she would repeat to him what Felix had said 
 that he hadn't caught, and drag him into the dis- 
 cussions of Mesdames Jacques and Frangois. 
 
 She was a little, very thin, straight woman, quick 
 as a bird. In her stiff dresses of long-ago fashions, 
 she always made Evelyn think of a little nervous 
 brown bird, afraid of things. She talked nervously 
 much and fast, afraid that the children and their 
 father might have time to quarrel. 
 
 In that hour in the salon Evelyn thought it was 
 because it all amused her that she tried as she did 
 to help her mother-in-law. She would pretend in- 
 terest in the tapestries, conversation would be kept 
 up indefinitely about the blues and greens of the 
 parrots' tails that were too long. She would pre- 
 tend that the old man understood her when she 
 talked to him, and never seem to see when he fell to 
 nodding. And when he waked suddenly, and said 
 179 
 
Accidentals 
 
 something that had something to do with the talk 
 of half an hour ago, she always knew what he 
 meant, and took it up, and answered him. 
 
 At last old Louis and little Jean brought in 
 siphons and syrops and biscuits. 
 
 After that there was escape. 
 
 They all trooped up the stairs together. 
 
 It was always cold on the stairs. Mesdames 
 Jacques and Frangois had wraps brought them to 
 put on as they went up. The old Madame was al- 
 ways hurt and offended by that. 
 
 The corridor of most of the bedrooms was en- 
 tered by a green baize door on the right, as one 
 went up the stairs. The corridor was heated along 
 its long length by little oil stoves, and there was 
 always a peculiar smell of the stoves that came out 
 through the green baize door to the stairs. 
 
 All the family turned that way, through the 
 green baize door, except Evelyn. 
 
 That way was the "petit appartement," that 
 would have been hers and Arnaud's. 
 
 The menage Felix had it. 
 
 She remembered Arnaud's first bringing her 
 there; he had opened the heavy old carved black 
 door for her, and had trod on her dress, — ^the long 
 skirt of those days, — clumsily; and she had 
 laughed, and he had laughed. 
 
 They had laughed at everything then. 
 i8o 
 
The Weather 
 
 Afterwards all the laughter, — except a cruel, 
 dreadful laughter, — ^had gone out of it ; and the bad 
 times, that were very bad, had come to be more 
 and more frequent, and each one to last longer than 
 the one before, till finally it had been all one bad 
 time, cruelly, bitterly laughable. 
 
 In the world she remembered the bad time. And 
 downstairs in the chateau, in the entrance hall and 
 in the dining-hall and in the salons, it was only the 
 bad time she thought of. 
 
 She would bid good-night to the others, and turn 
 from the green baize door and go on alone up the 
 stairs. 
 
 Once, when » he and she were playing hide-and- 
 seek, she had been very long not finding him, and 
 suddenly, for no reason, she had wanted him quite 
 dreadfully; and, for no reason in the world, had 
 got into a panic of fear. It had been almost dark 
 on the stairs. She had been crying as she called 
 him. He had come running down the stairs to her. 
 
 There was an oil lamp set in the old torch irons 
 beside the door that opened from the stairs to her 
 corridor. She never knew why it was, but always 
 there she had some vague thought of the lamp- 
 light shining on his bright hair and in his eyes. 
 
 The rooms that were hers now were the rooms 
 that had been his before their marriage. He had 
 been twenty when they married, and she had been 
 i8i 
 
Accidentals 
 
 eighteen. He had showed her where the peacocks 
 lived in the cedars close against the windows of 
 his room, that was hers now. He had told her how, 
 when he was very little, he had thought a dragon 
 lived in the great black armoire. He had showed 
 her where he used to hide from the abbe, outside 
 the window on the stone coping. 
 
 In that room it seemed to her that their mood 
 of boy and girl was the only thing left to her of 
 reality. It seemed to her that all the people who 
 had crowded in between them in their life were 
 unreal. "Why had they ever let such unreal things 
 matter ? 
 
 She did not know if his death had been a great 
 grief to her. There had been so much grief before 
 it. She did not know if her life was empty because 
 he was gone out of it. Or if it were because he and 
 she had begun so well, that she could not seem, 
 without him, to take hold and begin again. 
 
 In those nights in his room, she felt her heart as 
 heavy as a stone. She used to think, — ^how much 
 all the world must know of grief, how usual a thing 
 grief must be, to have had it become a world's com- 
 mon-place that hearts are like stones. 
 
 When the late dawns came to her window she 
 was always tired. 
 
 Her maid would bring in her coffee early, about 
 seven o'clock. 
 
 182 
 
The Weather 
 
 The Mass would be at half-past nine. 
 
 At half-past eight, always, her mother-in-law 
 would come up to her room. 
 
 "May one come in, Evelyn?" 
 
 "But I pray you to, my mother." 
 
 The old Madame would have been out already 
 for perhaps an hour attending to things about the 
 estate. She would be wearing the extraordiuary 
 hat and coat she had worn, it seemed to Evelyn, 
 always. Little and quick, probably her skirts wet 
 and her shoulders and the brim of her hat, her 
 thick boots sure to be muddy, she brought some- 
 thing very sane and good of out-of-doors into the 
 room with her. 
 
 She would say that it was rainy or foggy, and 
 cold. 
 
 Evelyn would draw a chair close to the fire for 
 her. She would sit down herself, opposite, across 
 the dim old rug. And the two of them would stay 
 so for half an hour. 
 
 Sometimes they would talk, a little, of how the 
 vines had been, or of the wheat, or of something 
 that had happened in one of the villages or about 
 the place ; but more often they would sit not speak- 
 ing at all. 
 
 Evelyn knew quite well, always, why she came. 
 It was because she wanted her son's wife to speak 
 of him. But Evelyn could not speak of him. She 
 183 
 
Accidentals 
 
 would sit opposite Arnaud's mother and look at her, 
 and she would be thinMng, "She stayed, she 
 waited. And now she has the old Monsieur's need 
 of her to live for. She has her giving of comfort 
 to him. After all of it, they have got back to some- 
 thing of the beginning." 
 
 At the end of the half -hour, her mother-in-law 
 would say, "Well, it is nine o'clock! We must be 
 getting ready for the Mass." 
 
 And she would go. 
 
 At Mass, she, the old Madame, cried behind a 
 heavy veil. Her thin, little, erect shoulders shook 
 as she cried. She sat in the big chair to the right, 
 facing the altar under the statue of Our Lady of 
 Lourdes. 
 
 Madame Felix had the chair on the left, under 
 the statue of Saint Anthony of Padua. Mesdames 
 Jacques and Frangois had places also close to the 
 altar. They all three of them always cried. 
 
 One or another of the boys usually cried too. 
 They sat near to the door on the right. 
 
 The servants and the farmers and the game- 
 keepers and the villagers had their places on the 
 left. 
 
 The old Monsieur sat inside the altar rail, to 
 the right of the altar, where the purple and red 
 and blue lights of the altar window slanted down 
 184 
 
The Swans 
 
 the grey walls and the black oak carving. He 
 cried, of course. 
 
 The abbe and the choir child moved about before 
 the altar, and their voices sounded before it. 
 
 Evelyn never could foUow what passed at the 
 altar. She was thinking of out-of-doors. Arnaud 
 had wanted always to be out-of-doors. She thought 
 of him fidgeting through the Mass beside her. He 
 had been impatient always to get out with his dog 
 and his gun. The Day of the Dead had meant 
 very little to him, who had no dead, and who was 
 to be dead so soon. It seemed very strange to 
 Evelyn at Mass in the chapel that he should be 
 become part of the day, part of its sorrow and its 
 worship. She could not think of him as the others 
 did, in far, high places. She could only think of 
 him as the boy who would have been cross because 
 it rained. 
 
 The Swans 
 
 AuDE used to go down to the gold pool and make 
 friends with the swans, only because they were 
 beautiful. She hated them. She had been afraid 
 of them ever since she was a little child. Now she 
 was seventeen. There was a black swan with a red 
 i8s 
 
Accidentals 
 
 bill and red eyes. He was the one she was most 
 afraid of. 
 
 The gold pool was at quite a distance from the 
 chateau. One went down from the south of the 
 court by five terraces, by steps that were stained 
 green and grey and orange and blood-red with 
 moss and lichen, broken and sunken down, deep 
 into the uncared-for grass. 
 
 The rough, overgrown, wide road into the forest 
 had been a splendid avenue in the days of the 
 Grand Monarch. In books it was called ' ' The Way 
 of the Dead Favourite," as the gold pool was called 
 her pool, "L'Etang de la Favorite Morte." 
 
 Her name also had been Aude. 
 
 It was told in books how she had followed the 
 percee and come to the pool and drowned herself 
 in it, before the Sun King's favour left her. She 
 had been too beautiful. She had been loved too 
 gorgeously. It had wearied her. She had been 
 given too much. She had had to die when too much 
 of the gold of life had been given her. 
 
 This Aude was sure that, out where the swans 
 floated in the midst of gold autumn sunsets, the 
 seven white ones and the one black one, there 
 must be floating the other, the beautiful Aude, so 
 light, like swan's down, with slender arms out- 
 stretched, white as the seven white swans' throate, 
 and hair as black as the black swan's breast, all 
 i86 
 
The Swans 
 
 tragically clouding. The gold of autumn sunsets 
 lay on her closed eyes. 
 
 This Aude knew how the soul of the Dead Fa- 
 vourite had passed out like a little flame from be- 
 tween her lips, a little gold flame, into the great 
 gold of the sunset. 
 
 She liked best to go to the pool in autumn sun- 
 sets, when the swans would be drifting in gold. She 
 would go close to the edge and kneel and call to 
 them, and they would come sailing over to her 
 across the pool ; lovely ships, white-winged, and the 
 black one, so strange and sinister. 
 
 They would come quite close to the edge of the 
 pool when she called them. 
 
 She would feed them with bits of bread. 
 
 Sometimes her father would come and meet her 
 at the gold pool, when she went to feed the swans. 
 
 He could not come often, and he and she never 
 could come out from the chateau together. 
 
 If the mother of Aude had known of it, she 
 would have been angry. She never could bear it 
 that they were together, that they had together a 
 moment, a look, a word, a thought that left her 
 out. It was not that they meant to leave her out. 
 But there was a thing that was like a golden thread 
 between them, that they held the ends of, that she 
 could see, and that was not for her. She could 
 not touch it. She knew this and was angry. And, 
 187 
 
Accidentals 
 
 when she was angry, always she had an attack of 
 the heart. And she might die in any one of these 
 attacks. 
 
 Aude was afraid of death, just as she was afraid 
 of the swans, the black one especially. At the end 
 of a too long race, she had been born with a sense 
 of death. 
 
 Everything of the life of the chateau belonged 
 to death, and the finishings and endings of things, 
 to all wearings out and passings away. The steep, 
 narrow stone stairs of the chateau were cold even 
 in summer, and dark even at noon. 
 
 In feudal days the fortress chateau had been 
 built there, on the lift of a hill, to -dominate the 
 wide lands of forest. It had walled in the four 
 sides of the court, to which yet the old drawbridge 
 admitted, and where the well was. Entrance to 
 the chateau in old times was only possible from the 
 drawbridge. Even if that failed, a dozen men 
 could have held the one narrow door of the north 
 tower, the chateau's only opening, and the narrow, 
 steep, winding stone stairs inside, against a host. 
 Aude was always afraid on the stairs. 
 
 Afterwards, all the buildings on the south of the 
 court, the hill's edge, had been torn down by some 
 ancestor of Aude's whohad loved south winds and 
 the sun. But all the winds, even the south wind, 
 that came to the chateau sang dirges. 
 i88 
 
The Swans 
 
 The winds all sang dirges in the forest with harp 
 and lyre, and in the long corridors of the chateau. 
 And always mists came to lie along the stone floors 
 of the corridors, and of the great empty rooms. 
 
 The flight of. the bats that had their abode in 
 the unused parts of the chateau, the cry of the owls 
 in the cedar trees against the north windows, the 
 smell of the ragged, faded tapestries that the winds 
 stirred along the walls of the Guards' Room, the 
 menace of the broken ancient armour in the cor- 
 ners, the wearing down, by years of treading, of 
 the steps of the stairs, the smell of mould and 
 mildew and rust that there was everywhere, all had 
 intimately to do with the sense of death that there 
 was with Aude always. 
 
 Her father and mother and she were always 
 alone together. There were no neighbours near 
 enough to be reached by people who could not have 
 a motor, or even keep up the stables. Aude re- 
 membered that when she was very little, her father 
 and mother had gone away sometimes. And peo- 
 ple had come sometimes to the chateau. But now 
 there was no more going away or having people 
 come. There was poverty, real poverty, in the 
 chateau that was falling to ruin. And there was 
 pride that would hide poverty. Poverty and pride 
 must close themselves in away together. There 
 were odours of mildew and rust, and there was the 
 189 
 
Accidentals 
 
 dirge of the winds, and there was the shadow of 
 the end upon everything. 
 
 Aude never remembered a time when she had 
 not felt the shadow. 
 
 She knew that her father felt it. They never 
 spoke of it to one another. But she knew. 
 
 They were very careful, her father and she, be- 
 cause they knew how their understanding of one 
 another, and their content together, quite left out 
 Aude's mother ; and how she felt that, and hated it. 
 
 Only, sometimes, when Aude was kneeling at the 
 ston« rim of the pool, feeding bits of bread to the 
 swans and talking to them, her father would come 
 to her ; she would see him in the gold water of the 
 pool, his tall, stooping figure and his grey hair and 
 his saint's face, as he stood watching. 
 
 Once, in the autumn, when she was seventeen, 
 her father said to her, "I wonder, was she happier 
 than thou, that other Aude, who lived too much, 
 and died of life?" 
 
 "Was she happier than I?" wondered Aude, 
 who had no life at all, and would die of the weari- 
 ness of never having lived, "I do not know," she 
 said, giving the best bits of bread to the black 
 swan, that she was most afraid of, and that came 
 
 190 
 
The Mirror 
 
 The Mirror 
 
 What she felt, when she came in from the 
 autumn woods and the dusk to the lamplight and 
 shadows of the stately old hall, and saw the tele- 
 gram there on the table under the mirror, was that 
 she did not want him to come back. 
 
 She stood and looked at the blue telegram, and 
 knew, in one instant, after all the long time, that 
 she did not want him to come back. 
 
 She had wanted it too long. 
 
 Every day, through the months of nearly three 
 years, she had waked in the morning with aU her 
 youth and strength put into the intensity of hoping 
 that this day she would hear from him. And every 
 night she had gone to sleep with the hope to bum 
 on in her dreams, that word of him might come to- 
 morrow. 
 
 She had eaten her bread with tears, and grief 
 had been her bedfellow. 
 
 At dawn she had said — would God it were even- 
 ing. And at night — ^would God it were morning. 
 
 But all the time she had hoped. 
 
 That was why she had gone on living. 
 
 Often she had thought that hope was the most 
 cruel thing, the most cruel of all the deadly cruel 
 things of the world, because it is the thing that 
 keeps from there ever being an end. 
 191 
 
Accidentals 
 
 If it had not been for hope, she could so simply 
 have ended it. 
 
 But she had had to hope, from day to day, since 
 the day when she had come in and found the 
 letter that told her he was gone away with the 
 other woman. 
 
 She had not been able to believe it. She had 
 thought it could not be possible. They had been 
 so young together and happy. Then they had been 
 such good comrades. There had been so many 
 little things. 
 
 Through all the time, she had kept thinking of 
 the most absurd little things, the way he had had 
 of slouching, one shoulder hitched up, the way he 
 used his fine hands, a little clumsily. She had so 
 loved all the little finenesses that there were about 
 him, and the little absurdities. She had loved, 
 with an amused tenderness, this little way of his 
 and that. He had been so systematically untidy. 
 She had loved the absurd rows of boots lined against 
 the wall of his dressing-room. 
 
 That the boots were gone had been terrible. 
 
 How absurd it all was ! 
 
 And it was so much the more tragic because it 
 was absurd. The most tragic love is surely that 
 which knows how absurd it is, by what absurd 
 things it lives, and does not care. 
 
 She had not cared if it were without dignity 
 192 
 
The Mirror 
 
 or self-respect of her to take it as she did, to do 
 nothing, and say nothing and wait. She had not 
 eared if people knew, or what they thought. She 
 had told herself that he was gone away on a jour- 
 ney, and that he would come back, and she would 
 wait for him. 
 
 When it had seemed to her she could not bear it, 
 she had thought how surely some day he would 
 need her. 
 
 He had always needed her in absurd little ways. 
 
 It killed her to think how always he had called 
 to her the minute he had come in at the door. 
 And yet it was for things like that she had stayed 
 alive. 
 
 Often she had thought she heard him call to 
 her, and had answered, or had come quickly. Once 
 in the night she had been so sure he was there 
 that she had stood with her candle on the stairs, 
 listening, till daylight came. 
 
 Every morning old Margarie brought the post 
 up from the village. There would be the slow 
 heavy step down the passage and the clumsy knock 
 at the door. Each time she did not know if it was 
 worse to open the door quickly and be sure the 
 letter was not there, or to rtiove slowly, to say, 
 "Wait, Margarie," and put off knowing. 
 
 She never came into the house without wonder- 
 ing, — dared she look for a telegram on the table 
 193 
 
Accidentals 
 
 under the mirror? And now the blue telegram 
 was there on the table. 
 
 It was a huge carved black table of the time of 
 the thirteenth Louis. The mirror over it was a 
 dim vague blur of little square panes, one saw 
 oneself in it with the queerest distortions. 
 
 She knew, as she looked at the telegram on the 
 table under the mirror, what it would say. And 
 she knew that it had come too late. She did not 
 even care to open it. She was so tired. Suddenly 
 she knew that she was tired out with hoping. 
 She had put everything into hope, and there was 
 nothing left. That which she had hoped for had 
 come, and she did not care. She never could care 
 again. 
 
 It was as if something were worn out and had 
 stopped. 
 
 She had lived for a word from him. And when 
 it came, she was dead. 
 
 She could not even open the telegram that lay 
 on the table under the mirror. 
 
 As she stood there, she saw her face dim and 
 distorted in the old glass. And it seemed to her 
 that in all the years after, however she got through 
 life, she would have to remember that moment as 
 the moment when she died. 
 
 194 
 
War Sunsets 
 
 War Sunsets 
 
 All through the spring and summer of the year 
 when little old Madame had to be taken away, 
 there were the most strange sunsets. Even the 
 men in the Place des Grands Seigneurs used to 
 talk of those sunsets as they stood about the door of 
 the cafe of Jean Louis. 
 
 The Place des Grands Seigneurs was a humble 
 cobbled square to which the market came on Thurs- 
 days, charming with field things and village things 
 and red umbrellas and old women's white caps and 
 sabots ; and where, on all days, the children played 
 under the lime trees, and the girls lingered by the 
 moat wall to laugh with the boys at sunset. The 
 lime trees closed in all one side of the square, the 
 castle side, over the moat and under the ancient 
 dungeon tower. The village boys used to come 
 when school was out to play f oUow-my-leader along 
 the top of the ivy-hung wall. Across the moat, the 
 outer court of the chateau was so deep-set in lime 
 trees that from the market-place one could not see 
 the chateau at all, only the tall, grey, battlemented 
 dungeon tower. On all sides the chateau was 
 crowded in closely by its ancient bourg, steep- 
 pitched, age-stained roofs, poor and beautiful, hud- 
 dled against its ramparts, cobbled streets leading 
 195 
 
Accidentals 
 
 all of them up to it. The towers of defence still 
 stood on either side of the great wrought-iron gate, 
 with its fers de lance and panaches dores and her- 
 aldic lions. The market-place, close at the gate, 
 had always felt itself to be part of the castle, an 
 entrance-court for it. Indeed the whole village 
 felt itself to be part of the castle, as if the poorest 
 house belonged to the building of its strength. 
 
 No one was left of the long line of castle people 
 but young Monsieur le Vicomte and the old 
 Madame, his mother, who was a little mad, and who 
 was terribly afraid of the sunsets that year. 
 
 In April, at the end of exquisite. Madonna-blue, 
 pale days, those flaming sunsets came, flinging 
 their mad banners out, crimson, over the valley, 
 over the roofs of the little town, setting the win- 
 dows on fire. Black and purple clouds heaped up 
 the horizon over the fields and the river. 
 
 Little, fragile, dainty old Madame came out to 
 the market-place one April night with a black 
 lace scarf over her head, and told the people that 
 the red of the sky over them all, reflected a red 
 there was to be in their fields, and that the fires 
 of their windows told of flames to burn there, 
 and that the smoke along the hills meant clouds 
 of battle. 
 
 One night in May, when there had been rain, and 
 the cobbles of the market-place, and all the valley 
 196 
 
War Sunsets 
 
 roads, were wet, and reflected the sunset, she told 
 everyone who would listen to her how it was with 
 blood that the land was wet and shining. "It is 
 the blood of your hearts, ' ' said little old Madame 
 whom all the people of the village pitied. 
 
 In June it was very hot and there was often 
 the sound of thunder in the air, and Madame told 
 the people in the Place des Grands Seigneurs that 
 the thunder was part of the battle music of the 
 sunset. 
 
 Towards the end of June, Monsieur le Vicomte 
 had a great doctor come down from Paris, and 
 after that there were sick nurses at the chateau, 
 and the old lady did not cOme out any more to the 
 market-place. 
 
 Only in the evening of the 14th July, when the 
 market-place was making ready for the dance — a 
 floor of boards spread over the cobbles, and lanterns 
 strung through the lime trees, and the tricolour 
 drooping from the gilded poles — ^Madame came and 
 stood at the gate between her ancestors' proud 
 lions. One of the nurses was with her. 
 
 The round red sun went down behind the tiles 
 of Jean Louis' roof, the shadows gathered under 
 the lime trees; Madame stood silently. 
 
 She watched the men and girls putting the last 
 touches to the preparation of their fete, and the 
 children already dancing about, and the mothers 
 197 
 
Accidentals 
 
 who had brouglit their babies out to look. She 
 seemed smaller and whiter and more strange even 
 than usual that night. 
 
 When the sunset was gone and it was growing 
 chilly, and Jean Louis lighted his cafe, the nurse 
 made little old Madame come back to the chateau. 
 Only she cried out before they could stop her, so 
 loud and strong that all the market-place heard 
 and understood, ' ' They can't kill the soul of France 
 — they can't — they can't!" 
 
 The nurse made her come back to the chateau, 
 and the people of the market-place thought how 
 sad it was, and some of them were quite frightened 
 for a moment. 
 
 Paper Ropes 
 
 One day, when she was a very little girl, she 
 and her nurse Fanchon were down in the village, 
 where they had gone with the pony-cart to fetch 
 something, and in the market-place she saw a thing 
 that she was to remember always, and that was to 
 comei to have always more and more meaning for 
 her. 
 
 It was a September day, and noon, and the 
 market-place of the old Provengal town was full 
 198 
 
Paper Ropes 
 
 of a sunny gauze of heat. The platanes, with their 
 shadow close beneath them, made a very blaok 
 square frame that held the heat and sunshine. 
 Two or three men were dozing at the cafe tables, 
 and there were some dogs asleep. The taU Romaine 
 tower of the church swam in the sky's hot blue. 
 There was not a swallow stirring. Under the ar- 
 cades of the round pink arches one could see noth- 
 ing, the shade was so deep, and no sound came 
 from there. It was not a market day, so the old 
 cobbled square was left to possession of anyone 
 who wanted it. And the boys of the village had 
 taken possession of it. 
 
 There was a crowd of them, shrieking with 
 laughter, out in the middle of it. They had got 
 the village fool there, lashed down with strips of 
 paper, on his back on the cobbles. 
 
 The cretin thought he could not break the paper 
 ropes. He thought he was a prisoner. He did not 
 struggle at all, but lay with the paper ropes wound 
 around and around him, weeping helplessly and 
 hopelessly. 
 
 Fanchon stopped the pony-cart, and stood up in 
 it and laughed. 
 
 She thought it was the most droll of all droll 
 things in the world, to see the cretin helplessly, 
 hopelessly weeping, bound with paper ropes. 
 
 Little Alix, from the high-swung pony-cart, 
 199 
 
Accidentals 
 
 looked down among the boys in black blouses and 
 sabots, at the emaciated, ill-shapen body and 
 shaggy white head of the fool, and saw his face, 
 ugly as a gargoyle's, distorted with tears. 
 
 The boys danced about him, howling with laugh- 
 ter. Their sabots set the dust dancing; it whitened 
 the fool's rags. 
 
 The lazy grey pony switched off the flies with his 
 long, beautiful tail, and stamped his polished hoofs 
 on the cobbles. 
 
 Panchon stood with the reins over her arm and 
 her hands on her hips, and laughed, delighted. 
 
 Alix was to remember the thing always, the 
 quiver of heat and sunshine over the cobbles, the 
 smell of the church that came out from its open 
 door, a red earthen water- jar that someone had 
 left on the rim of the old stone fountain. There 
 was to stay with her always the sense of the care- 
 lessness of the men at the cafe tables, of the mirth 
 of the boys in the dust and sunshine, and of Fan- 
 chon standing up in the pony-cart. 
 
 200 
 
Four Tapers 
 
 Four Tapers 
 
 The little ancient town on the top of the hill 
 was sunburned and wind-beaten, all of it the colour 
 of poor people's old straw hats. It was a town of 
 Dauphin6, of the Drome, named from a favourite 
 saint of the south. It seemed to be as old as the 
 hills about it, and to belong to its place as if it 
 were part of the hills and the mistral and the sun- 
 shine. The tiles of its flat, overhanging roofs and 
 the cobbles of its narrow streets, the walls of its 
 houses, the crumbling Roman walls that still en- 
 circled it, the high-lifted square church tower, the 
 arcades of its Grande Place, were all beaten to- 
 gether by mistral, and melted and moulded together 
 in the heat of the sun, and stained by weathers 
 to ochre and umber and saffron, and worn to soft 
 edges by long passing over of Time. At the end of 
 all its streets one saw hills olive laden, or spaces of 
 vine, opened away to crimson and blue. and gold 
 and purple distances. The stony bed of the river, 
 the Aifgue, that ran under the ancient walls, was 
 sunburned and sunsoaked as yellow as the town. 
 
 The market-place of old arcades and of the Ro- 
 man fountain was densely shaded by those great 
 platanes of the Midi. There were rose laurels, 
 blossoming through autumn, set in green tubs be- 
 
 201 
 
Accidentals 
 
 fore the door of the cafe. The rasping of an ac- 
 cordion and the shuffle of dancing feet came out 
 from the cafe on market days to the busy market- 
 place. 
 
 On a certain October market day, the Grande 
 Place was full of most beautiful things. There 
 were baskets heaped with white and purple grapes, 
 and there were piles of lettuces and cabbages and 
 aubergines and tomatoes, strings of amethyst and 
 opal onions, heaps of orange gourds, and baskets 
 full of green beans, and of citrons and of pome- 
 granates. The market women were busy in their 
 white caps and wooden shoes. The market-place 
 was full of footsteps and voices. The wooden 
 shoes and the soft Provengal words sang through 
 it. The beasts on their side of the market-place, 
 the sheep and calves and the big white velvet 
 oxen, waited patiently. The men stood about 
 together there. In the booths about the fountain 
 there were shoes and cotton stuffs for sale, and the 
 straw hats, and there were copper pots and jugs, 
 and things of hammered iron, cranes and cauldrons, 
 and coarse, dull green and yellow earthen jars of 
 antique shapes. The cur dogs and the children 
 played in and out, through the buying and selling. 
 There were many pretty girls in the market-place, 
 and some of the young men kept following them 
 about, liEiughing over nothing at all. 
 202 
 
South Road 
 
 The market-place was intensely, violently, alive. 
 How terribly one felt the life that there was in it. 
 
 But there was a door under the arcades on the 
 most sunny side of the market-place that was 
 drapeS. in black. Inside the door everything was 
 black except the four tiny white points that were 
 the flames of the tapers. Unless one troubled to go 
 close, one could not see what there was between the 
 tapers. The sunshine of the market-place was so 
 gloriously strong that the light of the tapers meant 
 nothing in it. 
 
 And what was there that the thought of death 
 need mean in the fullness of life of the piazza? 
 No more than the pale small lights of the tapers 
 meant in the glory of the sunshine. 
 
 South Road 
 
 The road, out beyond the Eoman bridge and the 
 wide, yellow stony bed of the river, lifted itself up 
 through the hills, passed the cemetery, with its 
 cypress trees as tall and slim and straight as lance 
 blades, passed a few yellow-brown farms, and a 
 roofless house with a pigeon tower, across maize 
 fields of carrot, vineyards, and groves of olive and 
 203 
 
Accidentals 
 
 mulberry, always hedged on the north against the 
 mistral, through woods of green oak, through pas- 
 tures wonderful with smells of lavender and wild 
 thyme, up and up, through mountains to moun- 
 tains, through golden lights and blue and purple 
 shadows to lights and shadows always more intense 
 and sadder. 
 
 There was some travel at first, on the road. 
 One would meet a two-wheeled cart going in to 
 the old market-town, the peasant and his wife, in 
 festa dress, behind their little red-tasselled horse. 
 One would meet a pedlar's cart, gaily painted, with 
 tinkling bells, and forlorn mule, hobbling so slowly 
 that the pedlar's wild-haired ohildren had time to 
 stop, as they ran with the cart, where it pleased 
 them to gather poppies and chase butterflies. One 
 would meet little flocks of sheep or of goats being 
 driven along the road, managed less by the master 
 than by the rough shaggy dog who had such 
 anxious eyes. One would ' meet market carts 
 heaped with country green, and dusty stone-cartS, 
 and carts loaded with meal sacks or wine barrels 
 or oil jars, the driver perhaps asleep on his bench 
 under the weather-coloured canvas hood, or walk- 
 ing beside his big cream-white oxen. 
 
 But, as one went, the passing on the road grew 
 less and less, the road turned out of ways that led 
 to alive, remembered places, into solitudes where 
 204 
 
South Road 
 
 there was a deep and still, an unstirred, an ages- 
 old abiding of a mood which was the land's very 
 own. 
 
 Everywhere along the road one felt the south, 
 the midi, the noon. 
 
 One felt it because of some special quality, some 
 texture, of the lights and shadows, as if the gold 
 and the black were tangible; and because of the 
 lines and shapes of things; the line of the moun- 
 tains on the sky, and of the nearer hills against 
 the mountains ; the shape of a hill town, heaped up, 
 walls and roofs and church tower and perhaps 
 castle battlements, against the sky's blue; the tow- 
 ering up of cypresses ; the way the stone pines had of 
 taking on the shapes of the rocks they stood against ; 
 the special fitness and belonging that fig tree and 
 live oak and olive had at the edge of the road in 
 their places, and that the towns had on the hill- 
 tops, and the mountains had in the sky. The neg- 
 lect and carelessness and abandon of the south were 
 upon everything. In the north, a field or a pasture 
 would have some boundary, a hedge would enclose 
 something, a road would lead somewhere. But in 
 the south the reasons for everything were so old 
 that they had ceased to be reasons, except for peo- 
 ple who dreamed. There was a stately avenue of 
 platanes that ended at a heap of stones. There was 
 a strong old wall that shut in a tangle of blue 
 
 205 
 
Accidentals 
 
 thistles. There were four cypresses planted regu- 
 larly, as if about a tomb or an altar, standing alone 
 in a field of wild carrot. The indescribable smell 
 of the south was there. The hot, brass shrilling 
 of grasshoppers came from the fields, and the sing- 
 ing of frogs came from all damp places, and of 
 nightingales from the groves. If there were mis- 
 tral, or if there were deep stillness, all the sounds, 
 even the sounds that belonged to the stillness, were 
 those of the south. 
 
 Because it was the south, everywhere along the 
 road, there was for one that ache of beauty and 
 sorrow, that something which makes one feel beauty 
 always with a sense of the word fatal. 
 
 All along the road there would come to one 
 those swift stabs of pain, or of pleasure, that make 
 one catch one's breath suddenly, and think of 
 death, and love life the more intensely, because 
 what is most beautiful of it is so absolutely a part 
 of sorrow. 
 
 206 
 
The Moon Faun 
 
 r 
 
 The Moon Faun 
 
 One night, in the vineyards and olive groves of 
 September and of Provence, when the whole land 
 was full of moonlight, and utterly beautiful and 
 strange, and with all moon madness in it, there was 
 a little, young, white faun who went quite wild. 
 
 Upon all the land there lay the spell that the 
 moon draws out of the sea as she draws the tides, 
 and out of the forests as she draws from them 
 their cool dewy wet and their silences, and out of 
 the gardens as she draws from them their most in- 
 tense fragrances, and out of the fields as she draws 
 from them the mystery of their yielding of life to 
 men. 
 
 The whole land, deep-sunk in the moon's en- 
 chantment, lay wrapt and marvellous, hill and val- 
 ley and grove and stream. 
 
 It was that wonderful, pure, cool, white moon 
 which comes next before the golden moon of har- 
 vest, and is made of frost and silver and magic. 
 The world under its magic was as beautiful as any 
 radiance of the old joyous gods, or as the deep dusk 
 of the new god, who gave to all glad beauty that 
 other beauty of tears. 
 
 The little, young, white faun went mad with the 
 moon, through the vineyards and olive groves, 
 207 
 
Accidentals 
 
 through fields of maize and carrot, up the hillside 
 of pine and lavender and wild thyme, down along 
 the stony river bed, mad with the moonlight's 
 giving of joy and its giving of grief. 
 
 He tossed his white horns and stamped his white 
 hoofs, and laughed to the moon. He tore up great 
 trails of white moon flowers that were not there at 
 all, and ran, dragging them after him through the 
 moonlight, ran, ran, trailing after him, riotously, 
 those haunting, moon-white flowers of the ecstasy 
 and agony of madness. 
 
 The Half-gods and the Little Chapel 
 
 THEii;E was a little, half -ruined, ancient chapel 
 high up on the ProvenQal hillside, above the vine- 
 yards and above the olives, above even the grass 
 slopes where the flocks were pastured in summer, 
 above the wild thyme and lavender, far up where 
 there were only grass and cactus and stone pine. 
 
 No one knew how the chapel had come to be 
 built there; perhaps in fulfilment of some vow of 
 a people gone long ago ; perhaps to the memory of 
 some event, ages ago forgotten. 
 
 No one ever went to the chapel, except once a 
 year, on the day of its name saint, when the priest 
 208 
 
The Half -gods and the Little Chapel 
 
 from the nearest village, which was far away, led 
 a little procession trudging slowly up there, and 
 said Mass for the dozen, perhaps, of peasants who 
 had followed him, with all due homage of bell and 
 incense and book and candle. For the rest of the 
 year, the chapel was forgotten, no one ever had 
 troubled so much as to fasten its door. 
 
 So perhaps the little old gods of the hills used 
 to go there, — those little half -gods from whom men 
 have taken away the groves and fountains and 
 streams. The half-gods of the old days, who once 
 had been so blithe and fearless, would perhaps come 
 timidly to the chapel, and open its rusty, cobwebby 
 door, and peer in with their anxious wild eyes, 
 and finding it always empty would creep in to the 
 place that was almost as forsaken and lonely as 
 they. 
 
 The great gods of ancient days had gone away 
 far from the world, with their lightning and 
 thunder, and lust and riot, and splendour and 
 pride ; but perhaps the little half -gods had been left 
 behind, forgotten and afraid, to hide as they might, 
 among the vines, and in the groves of green oak and 
 olive, and by the fountains, and along the streams 
 that once had been their own. They would have 
 been afraid, hiding in the land that men had taken 
 from them. But they would not have been afraid 
 in the old, forsaken little chapel, 
 209 
 
Accidentals 
 
 Everything in the chapel was hurt with mildew 
 and rust and dust. The stone floor was broken, 
 and pierced through all along its cracks by weeds 
 and grasses, and stained with moss and lichen and 
 growth of fungus, and the window over the altar 
 was curtained with cobwebs. There was a black 
 iron cross in a deep niche over the altar, and the 
 opening of the niche was covered with a netting of 
 wire. Lizards crept in and out through the mesh 
 of the netting, and hornets had crawled through 
 and built a beautiful, neat, big grey nest behind 
 the cross. There were two stone vases on the altar, 
 always empty of flowers. On the walls there was 
 something left yet of the painting, that time and 
 weather had taken for their own long ago. There 
 were to be made out dimly, the figures of Our 
 Lady of Seven Sorrows and of the Man on the 
 cross, the ages-old newcomers who had driven the 
 old gods out of their world, and who had known 
 one thing that the old gods, in their splendour and 
 their revelling, had not known. 
 
 2IO 
 
North Road 
 
 North Road 
 
 The road lay for a distance along the crest of 
 the drifted dunes, following up and down the rise 
 and fall of the dunes, that were like the waves of 
 the sea when there was wind, and that had been 
 made by all the sea winds blowing upon France 
 through ages. 
 
 There was no wind that autumn afternoon, and 
 the sea was quite smooth, and of a blue as dark 
 and as irised as the blue that lines a crow's wing. 
 There were dark blue clouds heaped on the rim of 
 the sea, and the sun was gone down into them, and 
 their shadow and darkness lay upon nearly all the 
 sea, though the sky overhead was clear yet. At 
 the edge of the cloud-masses, the sky had a golden 
 shining from the sun that the clouds hid, and that 
 was repeated in the sea again, towards the shore, 
 where the waves were breaking. The waves broke 
 softly, in the golden shining. 
 
 Away from the sea, the land was bright, out of 
 the shadow. The salt marshes were stained black 
 and blue and purple by the storm that there had 
 been yesterday, but the water of the marshes, 
 through the wind and rain-trampled grass, had a 
 golden shining like the sky. The fields beyond the 
 marshes were some of them red-brown with the 
 
 211 
 
Accidentals 
 
 autumn ploughing, and some of them live green 
 with winter wheat. The green of the pastures was 
 dull and blurred, almost a grey. Some of the fields 
 were bordered by pollard willows. There were 
 people working in one of the fields. The faded 
 rust-red brown of a man's blouse, the faded indigo 
 blue of a woman's skirts, the white, wide wings of 
 an old woman's cap, seemed to belong with all the 
 colours of sky and fields and dunes and sea. In 
 another field there were six big, soft cream-white 
 oxen, made of velvet, dragging a plough. The dim 
 green turf curled over in the wake of the plough 
 into warm, alive, red-brown. In the pastures there 
 were sheep and red cattle. There were multitudes 
 of great black crows. They sat on the backs of the 
 sheep in the pastures, and followed after the plough 
 in the red field. 
 
 After a while, the road turned from the dunes 
 inland. 
 
 There was a village, off across the fields, that 
 looked like a flock of grey sea-birds settled down. 
 It was a grey little village, but the faces of its old, 
 poor houses caught something bright from the sky's 
 clear shining, something that was like the white- 
 ness of grey sea-birds when they give their breasts 
 and tip-tilted under-wings to the sun. 
 
 Some of the people who lived in the houses were 
 going home to them already in the road, with the 
 
 212 
 
Night and the Bells 
 
 tools of their work in the fields over their shoulders. 
 
 The road was wet from the rain that there had 
 been, and the sunset light from over the top of the 
 clouds shone in the wet, and the road was gold, a 
 royal road. 
 
 There was an old woman, bent under a bundle 
 of driftwood, as twisted and deformed and sea- 
 worn as the driftwood, going, a black figure, down 
 the gold of the royal road. 
 
 Night and the Bells 
 
 Out at sea, where night was gathering, there was 
 a flock of dark-winged sail-boats coming in slowly. 
 
 Closer in, there were many seagulls, circling low 
 over the dark depths and pale edges of the waves. 
 The wings of the seagulls were dark like the sails 
 of the boats against the twilight. 
 
 Little long-legged snipe ran through the shallow 
 widespreading of the waves, where they came in 
 and receded on the sands. 
 
 The wet of the sands still glistened a little. 
 
 The bells of the village inland were tolling to 
 the sounds of the sea and the voices of the seabirds. 
 
 Someone was dead in the village. 
 213 
 
Accidentals 
 
 The bells were ringing, as night came, drawing 
 its folds in close, "Have pity of him! Give him 
 rest eternally!" Out of the dark into the dark 
 the bells urged desolately, "And that the perpetual 
 light shine for him!" 
 
 Sea Bells 
 
 There was a fishing village, away off to the 
 south. Its cabins lay low along the crest of the 
 dunes. Many of them were the overturned hulls 
 of old fishing-boats, and had so a special belonging 
 of their own to the sea. 
 
 It was after sunset, and there was mist inland. 
 The sea was clear of mist. The fishing-boats were 
 coming in, on their wings of seabirds. Some of 
 them were already drawn up along the sands, and 
 the figures of the fishermen moved about them, 
 toiling at the ropes and unloading the baskets of 
 fish. The figures of the women, bent under heavy 
 baskets, plodded across the sands and up the dune 
 path to the cabins. The boats on the sands and 
 the figures of the people were all very strange and 
 dim in the mist, as one saw them from far off. 
 
 In the village of old wrecked boats, there would 
 214 
 
Sea Bells 
 
 be going on all the brown and rust colour and grey 
 and black life of the sea people, smells of fish and 
 seaweed and salt and tar, light of the hearth fire 
 and of the candle, smell of the steaming soup. 
 
 But aU that was far off, not real at all. The 
 whole world, land and sea and sky, was unreal in 
 the white mist. And it was very silent. If one 
 stood quite still and listened, one could hear the 
 sea bells ringing. One could hear the sea bells 
 ringing through the soft wash of the waves and 
 the calling of the goelands. 
 
 Some of the fisher people said that the bells 
 were the cathedral bells of a city that once was 
 off the coast, now sunk deep down under the sea. 
 They said that once in that place there had been 
 a splendid city, and that the sea had taken it, and 
 that its bells still rang and rang, far down below. 
 Others of the fisher people could not believe in the 
 great city, but thought that the bells were the bells 
 of the flocks and herds of the mer king. And 
 there was an old woman — ^mad since her taan and 
 her two sons had been lost at sea — who said that 
 the bells were just the sea bells, that never had had 
 to do at all with touch of men or mer creatures: 
 that the sea was tolling all alone for her man and 
 the two boys, down in the deep repose there was 
 for them under its ebb and flow. 
 
 215 
 
Accidentals 
 
 Sea Under Music 
 
 Down by the sea the marshes caught the red of 
 the sunset, and the sea was red. 
 
 The fisher-boats of dark wings came home out of 
 marvellous spaces that were filled with music. 
 
 Along the dune path black figures, bent under 
 heavy loads, went home, after the day's labour, 
 wearily, not keeping step at all to the triumphant 
 music of the sky, the march that seemed to call to 
 battle, gorgeously. Down on the beach, black 
 figures strained at the ropes to haul the nets in, 
 and it seemed strange that they should have to 
 toil so in the midst of glory. All the people in the 
 dune path, and the people on the wide, level beach, 
 seemed to be black things in the red sunset, bent, 
 twisted, distorted things, things that the sea had 
 taken and played with. 
 
 The bells of the Ave Maria of sunset, from the 
 village over the sandhills, ringing golden and pur- 
 ple through the red of the sunset, had a strange 
 part in the triumphant music. 
 
 The tide came ia very quietly, though it seemed 
 as if there should come wild-maned horses, gallop- 
 ing, out of that sunset, and thunder of surf or can- 
 non, with the red war music of trumpet and fife 
 and drum. 
 
 216 
 
A Silence 
 
 A Silence 
 
 The painter and the lovely tall Comtesse Louis 
 went down to the sea together in the wild morning, 
 very eai-ly. 
 
 It was the storm that comes to Finisterre with 
 the great August tides. 
 
 They went across the marshes by the path that 
 he had taken very many times alone. 
 
 He had been annoyed when he arrived the night 
 before, to find another guest stopping in the fisher- 
 man's cabin, that he and Pierre de Sainte Anne had 
 always called their Castle of the Sea. Since 
 Pierre's marriage, his sweet, little, shy wife had 
 scarcely disturbed the mood of the place, but her 
 friend brought the world there. Her charming 
 dress last night had seemed to the Englishman to 
 spoil the rooms, their candlelight and whitewashed 
 walls and old black rafters. He had always had 
 pleasure in the shadows the candlelight threw very 
 black upon the wide, bare white spaces of the walls 
 — Pierre's big fine shadow, and his own in splendid 
 contrast, hunchbacked, grotesque. The pretty 
 shadow of Pierre's wife had taken its place quietly 
 among the shadows of the rude, old peasant furni- 
 ture. But her friend's restless shadow, with its 
 217 
 
Accidentals 
 
 outline of the moment's exact fashion, annoyed 
 him there, as did the tap of her high-heeled slip- 
 pers on the rough brick floor. He had been an- 
 noyed, in the stormy morning, when she called 
 down to him over the stairs just as he was going 
 out. 
 
 The steep narrow stairs came down straight into 
 the living-room from which the door opened to the 
 road and the marshes. He had been at the door 
 with his hand on the latch. The storm was raging 
 against the door, and he had delayed a moment for 
 the pleasure of listening to it. 
 
 He had heard her voice, "Wait, I am coming 
 with you." 
 
 He called back, "No, no, it is too bad a storm." 
 
 She came running down the stairs. She wore a 
 long grey cloak and had a grey veil over her face. 
 He could not see her face at all. 
 
 She came to him at the door and said, "I must 
 go, let me come with you." She said it in a very 
 odd way. Her voice was strained and intense. 
 "I must go," she said, "I must, and I can't go 
 alone." 
 
 It was all very hurried and odd. She said, 
 "Open the door quickly." He got it open to the 
 wild light and the great salt wet wind. She 
 passed him, out through the door. He had some 
 difficulty in getting the door shut again, and she 
 218 
 
A Silence 
 
 did not wait for him. She went on across the 
 road and through the pines to the marsh. He 
 followed her, but he did not come up with her. 
 He did not speak to her. 
 
 He felt that she could not have borne to have 
 him speak to her or see her face. He knew it, as 
 if there were something that came from her to 
 him, that she allowed to go to him, because she 
 was afraid of facing the storm alone with it. Fear 
 came to him from her, and that unhappiness which 
 makes fear, because the only step beyond it is into 
 death. The thought of death came from her to 
 him. It was as if it came to him along strange 
 spirit threads that she let go, out with the winds, 
 and of which he caught up the ends. He knew 
 nothing of her, except that she was one of the most 
 talked-of women iu the great world of Paris, but 
 he knew then, with a sense of taking up tangible 
 threads, that she had some unhappiness so great 
 that it drove her out iuto the storm, and made her 
 afraid of beiug alone with the storm. She had had 
 to come, and she had not dared to come alone. She 
 had had to have someone. He had never had a 
 place in her life, and never would have again, and 
 she let him come into it in this hour. 
 
 When she found he did not try to come up with 
 her, she threw her veil back. She had no hat, and 
 her dark hair blew across her eyes. There was 
 219 
 
Accidentals 
 
 no rain for the moment ; the world was full of wild 
 storm lights, sudden lights, that came and went 
 with the wind's driving of clouds. The marshes 
 were trampled by the storm, the tall marsh grass 
 laid low, bruised darkly. The pools of the marshes 
 were wild mirrors of the sky. Between the dunes, 
 the sea showed, trodden by storm like the marshes, 
 swept over with great wind streaks, lashed with 
 foam, as where a whip had cut. The sound of the 
 sea came thundering in with the wind over the 
 marshes. 
 
 The flying figure in the long grey cloak seemed 
 to belong to the storm, to have part in it, like a 
 seabird. He had an odd notion that something of 
 her had always been there with him in the marsh 
 path, some mood that was desperate and most lonely 
 and afraid. It seemed to him very terrible that 
 anyone so young as she should have to know de- 
 spair and loneliness and fear. 
 
 Afterwards he wondered how he had known that 
 she knew such things, why he had been so sure. 
 But at the time it was not strange at all. He felt 
 it, and knew. 
 
 They went across the marshes and climbed the 
 dunes and came to wide full sight of the sea. The 
 tide was out. The beach from the edge of the 
 dunes to the edge of the sea was strewn with foam 
 and seaweed and driftwood. It was storm-trodden 
 
 220 
 
A Silence 
 
 and trampled, as the marshes were and as the sea 
 was. The wild white-maned horses came in rushing, 
 leaping, and rearing, sweeping up in their long 
 lines. The waves had all the wide, long, empty- 
 beach for their own. Their long high lines swept 
 up, lifting, towering, rearing, out of the great space 
 of sea and sky. 
 
 He was always afterwards glad that he had 
 not spoken to her as they stood there together. 
 He stood quite still beside her, and did not look 
 at her. 
 
 The thought of death came to him from her 
 terribly, as they stood there together. 
 
 He wondered, would she ever dare that? He 
 was terribly afraid of it for her. And then some 
 even more great a fear of life for her came to him. 
 Suddenly, life seemed to him a thing far more to 
 be feared for her than death. Death was one great 
 thing. Life was an infinity of little things. 
 He was afraid of life, terribly, for her, in those 
 minutes. 
 
 When she turned from the sea and the storm, 
 to the marsh path again, that he never was any 
 more to take without thought of her, he followed, 
 still not speaking to her. He saw her go in at the 
 low dark door of the Castle of the Sea. And then 
 he turned away and tramped the marshes and the 
 beach for a long time. 
 
 221 
 
Accidentals 
 
 He never could tell afterwards what the thought 
 of her had meant to him in those hours. 
 
 When he came home to the Castle of the Sea he 
 found a gay little Comtesse Louis, who meant noth- 
 ing at all to him. 
 
 He was always to wonder if that morning really 
 could have been true. He was to hear of the Com- 
 tesse Louis in the world and he was to wonder — 
 was it true, could she really ever have been like 
 that, a desperate, utterly lonely, storm-driven 
 thing, that had had need of his silence, not of any 
 word he might have said, not of any touch, not 
 even of his understanding? 
 
 White Sunset 
 
 Towards the end of the soft autumn day, two 
 people were walking together on a wide, long, 
 empty beach, where the distances were lost in mist, 
 and from which the tide had drawn far out. 
 
 The sand dunes towards the east lay in a mist 
 that deepened and darkened, and the sun was going 
 down through mist into the sea. There was no 
 colour of sunset anywhere, it was aU white, like 
 
 222 
 
White Sunset 
 
 moonlight. The quiet sea under the sunset was 
 like the sea under the moon, as mysterious; and it 
 might have been indeed the moon, great and round 
 and silver-white, going down into the sea, at the 
 end of a path of silver. 
 
 The young master and mistress from the Manoir 
 had been playing like children on the beach all the 
 afternoon. They were almost children, though they 
 had been married for two years. And they were 
 very happy. She wore no hat, and her hair was 
 soft, fine gold like a child's. She had taken ofE her 
 shoes and stockings, and he had thought her feet 
 were like little white birds. She had danced in 
 the foam, in and out after the waves, down close 
 at the edge of the tide. And she had been sing- 
 ing all the time. But when the mists gathered she 
 stopped singing. She put on her stockings and 
 shoes and walked soberly, and was very silent. 
 
 Everything had come to be silent. One scarcely 
 heard the sound of the waves or the voices of the 
 seabirds. 
 
 The young master and mistress walked very 
 close together, her shoulder touching his arm, 
 through the white sunset that was so strange. He 
 thought how strange the sunset was, as if it were 
 an enchanted sunset and the whole world were 
 under its spell. Nothing seemed real any more, 
 223 
 
Accidentals 
 
 except, for him, that she was near. In the silent 
 loneliness, the great white, still loneliness of the 
 world, he thought he was very near her. That was 
 the only thing he was thinking of. He knew that 
 it was a strange sunset, and it was beautiful, but 
 the only thing he really felt was the touch of her 
 shoulder against his arm. Because of that, he 
 thought she was his. 
 
 But suddenly, close beside him, she said, "I am 
 afraid." 
 
 "Afraid?" he repeated. 
 
 She said, "It is too beautiful." 
 
 Suddenly she was walking very fast, looking 
 straight before her. It was as if she were going 
 away from him. 
 
 "It is too beautiful," she said. 
 
 He kept up with her. "What is too beautiful?" 
 he said, "of what are you afraid?" He got hold 
 of her hand and held it. But that did not seem to 
 make any difference, she did not seem even to know. 
 "Of what are you afraid?" he said. 
 
 She said, "We are too happy." 
 
 If she had turned to him and clung to him he 
 would have thought — what a pretty little child she 
 was. But it was not like that. 
 
 Going away from him somehow into the white 
 depths of the sunset, she said, "We are too happy. 
 It is too beautiful, all of it. Too close to the edge 
 224 
 
Helene was Fifteen 
 
 of things. The sunset and our life. We are come 
 too near." 
 
 He felt somehow as if he were losing her, though 
 he was keeping her hand. 
 
 H6lene was Fifteen 
 
 "When Helene was yet an almost little girl, 
 she planned her life quite distinctly — ^never to be 
 good, never to be kind, never to be trusting or 
 faithful or self-sacrificing, and never, never, never 
 to love a man. 
 
 A tall, thin, ugly little girl, with hair in thick 
 brown plaits, she used to look at her handsome, 
 charming father, and tell herself that, whatever 
 happened, she would never love a man as her 
 mother had loved him. 
 
 She was fifteen years old on the day her mother 
 died. They had not known her mother was ill. 
 In the morning, she, Helene, had been a little sad, 
 because nobody had remembered that it was her 
 birthday. Her mother, naturally, wouldn't have 
 thought of it. She loved Helene 's father so absorb- 
 ingly, so unhappily, that she could not have much 
 thought left for Helene. 
 
 It was the 15th November. Helene went out 
 
 225 
 
Accidentals 
 
 into the woods, in the very early morning, alone, 
 as usual, with her dog and her gun. She was a 
 very good shot. Her mother had never been able 
 to bring herself to kill things. But it rather 
 amused Helene. She got back to the chateau at 
 noon, and there was somebody's motor in the court. 
 It was that of the doctor whom the servants had 
 sent for, into Reims. 
 
 The Reims doctor told Helene that it was very 
 bad. He said her mother must have been ill for 
 months, suffering terribly. He could not under- 
 stand their not having known. He had telephoned 
 to Paris for nurses, and for another doctor, a great 
 man who was a specialist for that malady. But he 
 feared it was too late. He kept always repeating, 
 however, however in the world was it that they 
 had not known? 
 
 Helene knew why they had not known. There 
 was no need of her mother's saying it. Her saying 
 it was the first confidence she had ever given to 
 Helene. Her mother said to her, death, even the 
 girl knew then, in her voice and in her face, "It 
 would have so annoyed him." 
 
 He had gone to Paris for the day. They tele- 
 phoned — ^her mother did not know of that, it would 
 have worried her dreadfully — ^to the hotel in the 
 rue St. Dominique, and to his clubs and every- 
 where, but they could not find him. 
 226 
 
Helene was Fifteen 
 
 Helene stayed all day in her motlier's room. 
 All day long her mother worried and worried for 
 fear he should be annoyed. Not for fear of death 
 — death was, to the woman who was dying, only a 
 thing that might by its dark intrusion upon his 
 bright life, annoy him. For her the thing that is 
 the greatest thing in the world was just a thing 
 that might annoy him. She made Helene promise, 
 again and again, to explain to him that she had 
 never meant to annoy him. She had never meant 
 that he should know. It was not her fault, truly 
 not, and she was so sorry. The only thing she 
 seemed to care for in Helene 's being there, was that 
 Helene might explain to him that it hadn't been 
 her fault. 
 
 The other doctor and the nurses arrived by motor 
 from Paris quite early in the afternoon. But there 
 was no hope at all. 
 
 They got the priest ; it was one of the servants 
 who thought to send for him. Helene 's mother had 
 always been devout, but it was not of her soul she 
 was thinking when she died. 
 
 Helene 's father came in the late afternoon by 
 train. He telephoned from somewhere, and they 
 could not intercept him, that the motor was to meet 
 him at the station. 
 
 But Helene had to send it to Eeims for things 
 the doctor wanted. She did not care how he got 
 227 
 
Accidentals 
 
 himself up from the station. She met him at the 
 door and told him, "Mother is dying." 
 
 He went to her room, up the cold damp old 
 stone stairs, that she, never daring to put on a 
 wrap, had always gone so shiveringly up and down, 
 and along the corridor where she had never dared, 
 without his permission, have the little oil-stoves 
 lighted. 
 
 She was sitting up in the bed of the tapestries, 
 the green knight and the lady with the monkey 
 and the cat. Everything of the room seemed 
 strange in the light of so many lamps and candles. 
 The lamp on the night table by the bed showed 
 the dying figure of the Christ, ivory on an ebony 
 cross, over the top of the bed, and the bit of bone 
 in the reliquaire under the crucifix, and the branch 
 of palm over it, and the little silver basin of Holy- 
 water. Helene's mother sat up very erect in the 
 sad old bed, her cheeks scarlet and her eyes very 
 bright. 
 
 The priest and the doctors and nurses stood back 
 that Hellne's father might speak to the woman 
 who had loved him through so many things and 
 years. 
 
 He asked her, what was all this fuss about ? And 
 why the devil hadn't they sent the motor to the 
 station ? 
 
 That was the thing that was the worst of it, that 
 228 
 
Janet and Annais 
 
 the motor had not been sent to the station. That 
 was what Helene was always to remember about 
 it. Life and love and death were always to mean 
 to her that her father had had to come up from 
 the station in a hack. 
 
 Janet and Annais 
 
 One evening Annais did not come down to tea, 
 and the servants could not find her, and Philippe, 
 her husband, was annoyed, because there were quite 
 a lot of people come over from the Chateau 
 d'Ecquin. 
 
 Janet went to fetch her. She Ijnew where she 
 would find her, but she did not tell the others. 
 
 The two of them had been little girls together 
 at the convent. They had thought they were such 
 friends that nothing could ever come between them. 
 The marriage of Annais two years ago had come 
 between them, however, for Annais loved her hus- 
 band. 
 
 She loved him all the short little time she was to 
 be with him. She was eighteen when they were 
 married, and she was just more than twenty when 
 she died. 
 
 When she died, something that was part of Janet 
 229 
 
Accidentals 
 
 died too. Something that had been very deep in 
 her heart was torn from it, and died, and was laid 
 away, in the dark, with Annais. 
 
 The husband of Annais had been fond of her, 
 and good to her, and he grieved for her, but it was 
 not he who knew death in her death. He would 
 have been annoyed to know how Janet knew it. 
 But he never could have known. It was a deeper 
 thing than ever he had time for, in his passing 
 over of life. He saw so many glittering things, that 
 he never knew there could be things that, for their 
 very beauty, were hidden away. 
 
 All that was most beautiful of the soul of Annais, 
 since he had not troubled to see it, had come to be 
 hidden away. She would not let even Janet see 
 what was hidden from him. 
 
 It was that that came between them, between 
 her and Janet, and made them both lonely. 
 
 Janet was hurt a little, that Annais should be 
 gone away alone, that afternoon. 
 
 She went to fetch her. 
 
 She ran across the great hall, that was yet called 
 the Banquet Hall, and up the steep, narrow en- 
 closed stone stairs of the west tower to the room 
 that she and Annais called the secret chamber. 
 
 It was very dark on the stairs. 
 
 The door of the secret chamber opened directly 
 from the stairs. 
 
 230 
 
Janet and Anna'is 
 
 Janet knocked, but Anna'is did not answer, and 
 she opened the door. 
 
 For a moment she thought the room was on fire, 
 it was so full of sunset. 
 
 It was a small, round, stone room with four tall, 
 narrow slits of windows set deep in its ancient 
 walls. There was never anything in the room but 
 heaps of rough cushions on the stone floor, and 
 books, and writing things on the floor too. 
 
 Now the room was just a stone vessel to hold the 
 sunset. It was like a chalice holding red wine. 
 
 Annais stood at the west window. She stood 
 quite still with her head thrown back and her 
 hands clasped behind her. She must have been 
 standing like that for quite long. She did not 
 hear Janet at the door. 
 
 Janet said, "Annais, Annais." She had to say 
 it several times over before Annais turned to her. 
 
 Annais' face was lighted with all the wonder of 
 the sunset. Her eyes shone with it. It made a 
 sort of halo about her, as she stood there, 
 
 Janet said, "There are people come to tea." 
 
 "To tea?" said Annais after her, as if she were 
 trying to understand. 
 
 "Annais, they have all come over from the 
 Chateau d'Ecquin, and Philippe wants you to 
 come." 
 
 "Oh no, Janet." 
 
 231 
 
Accidentals 
 
 "Yes, yes, you must come. He is annoyed. 
 Hurry, Annais." 
 
 "But, Janet " 
 
 "Hurry, tidy your hair." 
 
 Suddenly it seemed to her dreadful. 
 
 To take away from this anyone who had love 
 of it, to have it left aU behind, because of people 
 come to tea. 
 
 Janet had a sudden sense of the people, what 
 they were, brilliant, glittering people, hard and cold 
 and sharp. And of what they offered of life to 
 Annais, things so different from this. 
 
 The thought of Annais taking of those other 
 things was terrible to Janet, suddenly. 
 
 She caught Annais ' two hands in her two hands 
 as they stood a last instant in the tower-room, and 
 begged her, "Annais, Annais, I know you've got to 
 have those things in your life too, but don't ever 
 come to love them best. Don't ever change, Annais. 
 Promise me you'll never be different, that always 
 and always you'll stay true to these things, our 
 things, Annais." 
 
 She said, "Always and always." She wondered 
 afterwards, however it was possible that she had 
 not known. There was to be so little more time 
 for Annais. They were so close together, and yet 
 she had not known. 
 
 232 
 
Annais 
 
 "You will never change!" she had begged of 
 Annais, that simset in the tower-room, and had not 
 known. 
 
 Annais 
 
 The husband of little Annais had been fond of 
 her, and when she died he grieved for her, and it 
 was three years before he married again. 
 
 Janet never had another friend like that. She 
 kept all her memories of Annais, and of the little 
 things, the least little things they had done to- 
 gether, treasured, always, close with her. 
 
 The laughter of Annais was like a child's 
 laughter. Little dark Annais, with the great eyes 
 and the curly hair, could play like a child with 
 children. And how she could dance! And how 
 she could run! 
 
 Janet always loved to remember her running, 
 slim and swift. 
 
 Everything of her seemed to belong to motion. 
 Her dark, soft, wild, curly hair belonged to the sea 
 wind and to all things of it, waves and wings. 
 Sometimes her great dark, wide eyes were the eyes 
 of a child, questioning. And then sometimes they 
 233 
 
Accidentals 
 
 were the eyes of a dreamer, who looks v^ery far 
 beyond. And somehow she seemed to belong be- 
 yond things of the world, in far, lonely places. Her 
 happinesses were as lonely as griefs. 
 
 Three People 
 
 Once she and Philippe and Janet were riding 
 home together to the chateau from a paper-chase at 
 some people's place in the woods, away inland. 
 Janet was riding one of the polo ponies and Annais 
 her own bay mare. 
 
 It was at sunset, when the marshes were full of 
 gold and crimson, and the sea-swallows flew low 
 over, and through the dips in the line of the sand- 
 dunes one had glimpses of the sunset, the sunset 
 sea and the sunset sky. It was so beautiful that 
 it hurt one. One almost could not bear it. The 
 beauty made one feel too desperately, one's need 
 of happiness. It was very lonely. 
 
 Janet wanted to let her pony come close to the 
 bay, and to put her hand out and touch Annais' 
 hand, that lay holding the reins on her knee. The 
 touch would have been very sweet. But they were 
 not any more little convent girls together. 
 234 
 
Annals Dancing 
 
 Annais was thinking what a beautiful thing it 
 would be if she could ride close to Philippe and 
 put her hand out and have his hand meet it, and 
 they could ride like that for a moment. It would 
 be siUy. Sometimes at first she had been silly. At 
 first she had been silly in little things like that, 
 and had annoyed him. Now she had learned not 
 to, any more. 
 
 He rode, not talking, rather bored by the two 
 little convent girls, his wife and her friend. He 
 liked brilliant women of the world, to whom one 
 could talk brilliantly. He could have been saying 
 clever things to some clever woman, who did not 
 go down, under, in the depths of the beauty that 
 was loneliness. 
 
 Annais Dancing 
 
 From her ivory room in Paris, Annais could step 
 out to the garden, the gravel paths and box borders, 
 the formal grass plots and little clipped yew trees, 
 the basin of amber water, and the laurel mound 
 with the old broken mossy urn on top of it. The 
 wall that shut in the garden was very high, and 
 tall trees stood close together against it, so that the 
 235 
 
Accidentals 
 
 garden was quite hidden from the houses about; 
 one saw only their steep blue roofs and hooded 
 chimneys when one looked up over the wall and 
 through the branches. There were many birds who 
 lived in the garden, and there was a nightingale. 
 
 He always sang there, always in the same place, 
 where the lilac bushes were, across from Annaiis' 
 window, under the acacias, in just the hour before 
 dawn. 
 
 In the wonderful silence of that hour he would 
 sing and sing. And the instant the other birds 
 waked, the moment they began their smaller sing- 
 ing, he would be silent. 
 
 Annais never could see him. In that strange 
 light which there is in the hour before dawn, she 
 would watch for himj in the colourlessness and 
 shadowlessness of things that were staying so still, 
 she would watch to see him, where he sang alone. 
 But she never did. 
 
 She could see every leaf and twig of his acacia 
 against the dawn, and every blade of grass dressed 
 in jewels, but not the nightingale. 
 
 She would be coming from dances often at that 
 hour, and she would never want to sleep. 
 
 She would stay at her window and watch and 
 listen. Sometimes she would go out into the garden 
 and tiptoe over the wet grass. 
 
 The city was quite, quite silent all about the 
 236 
 
Anna'is Dancing 
 
 garden. It was an enchanted city, asleep, under 
 a spell. There was only the nightingale awake, 
 singing, and Annais, holding her breath, lest the 
 mood should vanish away. 
 
 In one dawn, she danced, noiselessly, over the 
 grass, her little white satin slippers in the wet 
 grass. And her dancing seemed to her to be part 
 of the spell. She was dancing under a spell. 
 
 She had been dancing in a great bright, hot 
 room, full of flowers and lovely people. 
 
 She had worn a dress of the time of the Sun 
 King, in whose day her garden had been a great 
 garden, covering what now were streets and ave- 
 nues. Four courtiers in velvet and brocade and 
 lace had carried her painted chaise a porteur into 
 the ballroom, and four tiny negro pages had fol- 
 lowed her, carrying, two of them each a live pea- 
 cock, — and one peacock had spread its tail, — and 
 two of them each a gorgeous live parrot. All the 
 people had stood back, and the courtiers and the 
 pages had walled in the clear space about her, and 
 she had danced in stately measure over the wide, 
 shining floor. Then there had come a scarlet 
 domino with a big crystal ball in his hands. He 
 had danced before her, holding the ball up in both 
 hands over her head, and she had danced looking 
 up into the ball. It had been that he was showing 
 her her future in the crystal ball, and that it was 
 237 
 
Accidentals 
 
 his face she was to see. She had danced as if she 
 were afraid to look, and then at last had been 
 persuaded, and had looked, and met his eyes in it. 
 Seeing his face in the crystal ball she had caught 
 the ball from him and kissed it. And then she 
 had danced away from him, holding the crystal ball 
 against her heart, the masque and the courtiers and 
 the little black pages following her out of the ball- 
 room. 
 
 The whole baUroom had applauded and ap- 
 plauded, and when she had gone back people aU 
 had said lovely things to her. 
 
 She had come home gaily to her garden. 
 
 And she thought she was quite happy when she 
 danced in the garden, over the dewy grass, at dawn, 
 while the nightingale sang. 
 
 She was glad that everybody had liked her 
 dancing. 
 
 But the man for whom she had danced had not 
 even seen her. He had been off in one of the draw- 
 ing-rooms talking to another woman. He was her 
 husband, and she would never dare to tell him how 
 it was for him she had danced. 
 
 238 
 
The Cut Grass 
 
 The Cut Grass 
 
 In Annais' city garden, the gardener was cutting 
 the grass of the formal plots. It smeUed awfully 
 good in the noon sunshine. 
 
 Annais came to her window and said to the gar- 
 dener, "How good it smells!" 
 
 The gardener looked at her in blank surprise. 
 
 It was when Annais was quite ill and not able 
 to be much out of her room. She asked the gar- 
 dener to leave a pile of the cut grass close to her 
 window so that she could smell it in her room. 
 
 But the grass seemed to have lost all its odour. 
 
 Annais thought that was because the sky clouded 
 over and there was no sun, all the rest of the day, 
 to draw the odour out. 
 
 Next noon, the sunshine was hot and bright 
 again, and Annais was able to go out for a little 
 into the garden. 
 
 She thought that, perhaps, if she spread the cut 
 grass from her heap of it out wide in the sunshine, 
 the heat of the sunshine would draw out from it 
 again the good odour of yesterday. 
 
 She took the cut grass up in handfuls, and tossed 
 it about over the velvet of the lawns. 
 
 She made a funny little dance with it, throwing 
 239 
 
Accidentals 
 
 it about this way and that way, in the stately, 
 formal order of the garden. 
 
 And of course it was just then that her husband 
 came out through the salon window. 
 
 ' ' What are you doing ?" he said. " What absurd 
 thing are you doing now?" 
 
 The Window of the Courtyard 
 
 The window was so high that it had view — over 
 the lower roofs on the other side of the courtyard — 
 of the quai and the river, and the beautiful curve 
 of the houses across on the edge of the lie St. Louis. 
 There were four flights of stairs to climb up from 
 the court to that room of the window. 
 
 The court was entered by an archway that had, 
 very long ago, been built high and wide enough for 
 pageants with torch and banner to stream through. 
 
 It was a proud court, with walls of red brick and 
 grey stone, and sculptured doorway, and windows 
 of carved fronton, a dragon's mouth fountain op- 
 posite the entrance, and a stair tower in one corner. 
 It was full of poor little commerces, the mender of 
 old chairs littered his corner with straw and wood 
 curlings, there was a d6p6t of handcarts on the 
 left, there were copper pots and cauldrons hung out 
 240 ' 
 
The Window of the Courtyard 
 
 from a window carved with salamander and cres- 
 cent, the cobbler had pitched his booth, — so dark 
 that, all the winter days, a lamp would be kept 
 burning in the depths of it, — against the curve of 
 the stair tower. The ragged, faded laundry of the 
 house always swung drying, on cords stretched 
 from window to window. There were chickens 
 pecking about the cobbles, that used to ring to the 
 masters' spurs, and women came, in camisole, with' 
 hair tumbling across their eyes, to draw water at 
 the dragon's mouth fountain, and crowds of noisy 
 children played everywhere about. 
 
 The door, by which one who wanted to hide from 
 his own life might have gone in, stood open to a 
 wide deep stone stairway, up which lost footsteps 
 seemed to be always echoing. 
 
 Many people lived in the house; it was full of 
 to-day's footsteps and voices. Ragged people came 
 to the windows and called across to one another 
 and down to one another in the court. There were 
 canaries in most of the windows, and they sang to 
 the people's voices. There was a blackbird outside 
 the door of the mender of old chairs, and it could 
 be heard whistling above the shouts of the children 
 at play in the straw. 
 
 The court was never quiet. In its confusion no 
 one would ever trouble about lost footsteps, or even 
 catch the sound of them, through the hurrying and 
 241 
 
Accidentals 
 
 weariness, the coming and going, in and out, to 
 and fro. 
 
 The little old poor streets of the quarter were of 
 the most haunted streets of Paris, and of the most 
 echoing, full of the ghosts of very old-time people, 
 grand ghosts, of bishops and cardinals and altesses, 
 and of the very long ago kings and queens, of 
 courtesans, and of the nuns of the Ave Maria and 
 the priests of St. Paul, full — for anyone who 
 listened — through all the everyday noises, of foot- 
 falls that had been lost there since long ago. They 
 were most of them streets that took their names 
 from the days of the long gone Royal Palace, the 
 street of St. Paul, and the street of the King's 
 Gardens, the street of his Lions, the street of the 
 Falconer, the street of the Beautiful Trellis, — ^that 
 golden trellis of Charles V,, — and the street of his 
 AUee of Cherry Trees. 
 
 And through all those old poor streets one might 
 go, a ghost, shabby, with muddy boots, to some 
 work or other, that was hard and dull, that brought 
 one out early of a morning, and kept one till late, 
 and made one carry heavy bundles, shoulder to 
 shoulder with real people, shabby, muddy-booted 
 people, tired too. 
 
 In winter especially, when the wet and cold 
 hung in the streets, and all the figures of the streets 
 and all their noises seemed blurred and darkened, 
 242 
 
Place du Carrousel 
 
 the passing through such ways as those, to such a 
 place of one's own, as — it seemed — ^might be the 
 room behind the window of the courtyard, would 
 have been as kindly as the solitude of mouutain 
 tops to one who for any reason had need to hide. 
 
 Place du Carrousel 
 
 At three o'clock one morning in winter, Claire 
 was coming home from a dance, and her motor 
 crossed the great open moonlit square of the 
 Louvre, and she saw this: 
 
 There was a man sitting on one of the stone 
 benches that there are between the street and the 
 Arc du Triomphe du Carrousel. 
 
 He sat crouched quite over, with his knees 
 hunched up and his arms upon them, and his head 
 upon his arms. 
 
 She could not see if he was a young or an old 
 man. She could not see if his clothes were fine, 
 or of rags. 
 
 The moonlight was biting bitter white in the 
 Place du Carrousel, and everything menaced black 
 in it, the mass of the Louvre, the Arch, the statues 
 and shrubbery, the man's figure, and all the 
 shadows. 
 
 243 
 
Accidentals 
 
 Claire could not have told what it was about the 
 man sitting there that so especially frightened her. 
 So many sit through winter nights on the stone 
 benches of Paris. He was only one of them. 
 
 But in that instant of passing she felt — perhaps 
 he was a poet, starving. It was as if someone had 
 pricked her heart, suddenly, with a fine dagger, 
 and said to her, "There is a poet who is starving." 
 Her sense of it was so swift and sharp and per- 
 fectly clear that, before she knew, she had leaned 
 forward and tapped on the glass to stop the car. 
 
 The footman was o& the box, and had opened the 
 door of the car. 
 
 She did not know what to say to him. She was 
 afraid to tell him to go back to the man on the 
 bench. She wanted to get out of the car and go 
 herself to the man. But she was afraid. What 
 should she say to him ? What might he not answer 
 her? She was afraid, because she was ashamed of 
 her velvet cloak and her sables and the pearls in 
 her hair. 
 
 The footman was looking at her, surprised, wait- 
 ing for her to give some order. 
 
 She was ashamed because of the footman. 
 
 And there might be people coming up who would 
 stare. 
 
 She said to the footman, "It is nothing, go on." 
 
 Some years after, she read, in a book of which 
 244 
 
Green Ribbon and Red Feather 
 
 everyone was talking, a poem that made her re- 
 member that thing very strangely. 
 
 It was a little poem, like a cry of just one of the 
 many people who are starving. He had hunger 
 for bread and hunger for kindness. He was with- 
 out bread, without any dream, without a place to 
 rest in. Men had driven him out, and taught him 
 that life was bitter. He had felt the calm of the 
 hour when men are tired with pleasure. The touch 
 of the moonlight had been to him as a Pentecost. 
 He had seen dawn come to the forest of shadows. 
 He had asked that he might be forgiven because 
 men passed and did not know. 
 
 The book in which she found the poem was that 
 of a young man who had killed himself, thrown 
 himself into the Seine, it was said, because he was 
 starving. 
 
 The poem was dated, three o'clock of the morn- 
 ing. Place du Carrousel. 
 
 Green Ribbon and Red Feather 
 
 It was already night, winter, rain and cold, and 
 the rue de la Paix was empty; the going to the 
 Boulevards was not yet begun and the great shops 
 had been shut for an hour. 
 
 245 
 
Accidentals 
 
 The two girls who stood together against the 
 barred doors of a shop, that was famous even 
 among the famous shops, must have been having 
 a desolate long wait there. 
 
 It was a very bad night. There Was a cold, wet 
 wind that swept along the street, from the Op6ra 
 to the Place Vendome, and set the wet of the 
 pavements shivering in the light of the street 
 lamps. 
 
 One of the girls stood quite motionless in the 
 light of the street lamp, her face hard set like a 
 pale little mask. The other was imploring some- 
 thing of her, with hold on her arm and face urgent. 
 Both of them, the rigid girl with the green ribbon 
 in her hat and the beseeching girl with the red 
 feather, would have been tawdry enough and banal, 
 valueless, if it had not been for something about 
 them, of really great tragedy, that made eternal 
 types of them ; something about Green Ribbon that 
 was ages and ages old — all the lives of all the 
 women of the world old — in hoping, and some- 
 thing about Eed Feather that was ages and ages 
 old, in knowledge of hopelessness. 
 
 Eed Feather was saying, "Faut que je me 
 debine, tu sais, viens, viens, mon chou. Ecoute, 
 mon chou, i'n'y a plus d'espoir, ce soir sera comme 
 tons les soirs, i'n'y viendra pas davantage. Viens 
 j'te dis." She was tugging at Green Eibbon's 
 246 
 
Saints in a Cellar 
 
 hand. ' * Viens, ' ' she said, * ' ma vieille, f aut 1 'avaler. 
 Y t'a plaqu^e. Sont tous comme ga. Que 
 veux-tu?" 
 
 Saints in a Cellar and a Red and 
 Gold Cross 
 
 Sister ThSrese du Saint Esprit let Big Marthe 
 follow her down to the cellars, when she went to 
 see to the furnace in the January afternoon. 
 
 Big Marthe had been at the asile of the Petites 
 iPreservees since she was ten and now she was 
 eighteen. She had been brought there a starved, 
 beaten, half-dead little creature, straight from a 
 hideous thing. Her mother had been murdered, 
 and she had seen the thing done. The man with 
 whom her mother lived had come in crazy with 
 absinthe. He had crashed a chair to pieces and 
 killed the woman, beating her head with a bar of it. 
 He had not seen the child hidden under the bed. 
 He had sat down by the table and wept and fallen 
 asleep. After a whUe, some neighbours had come. 
 The neighbours had brought the child that night to 
 the good little Sisters. Now she was the strongest 
 and prettiest of all the sixty girls at the asile. But 
 her mind had never developed. She had no more 
 247 
 
Accidentals 
 
 intelligence than a child of ten. She had known 
 too much of horror, even more than the other little 
 girls who were brought to the Sisters. Horror had 
 driven something of her away ; something had been 
 lost from her, as if a bird were gone out of a cage. 
 She was very sweet and docile, and everyone loved 
 her. The big girls and the little girls all were 
 kind to her. Sister Therese of the Saint Esprit 
 thought they learned how to be kind through their 
 pity for her. 
 
 This week it was the turn of Sister Thdrese of 
 the Saint Esprit to take the humble work of the 
 asile, and late in the afternoon she went down to 
 the cellars to attend to the furnace. 
 
 Big Marthe followed her, as she followed her 
 everywhere about. 
 
 They went down the outside stairs from the gar- 
 den, that was all dusty and frozen, and through 
 the passage to the cellar. 
 
 It was almost dark out of doors and quite dark 
 in the passage, but in the cellar there was a dim 
 red glow from the furnace. 
 
 Sister Therese du Saint Esprit opened the door 
 of the furnace and found the fire too hot. She shut 
 the draughts and threw on some ashes. She used 
 her hands for much work, but they had somehow 
 always remained beautiful and fragile, not the sort 
 of hands ever meant for tending the furnace in the 
 248 
 
Saints in a Cellar 
 
 cellar of the asile of the Petites Preservees. She 
 was rather afraid of the furnace, and though its 
 red glow died down somewhat under the ashes she 
 threw on, she said to Marthe that she would go and 
 get the porter to help her. She had to go down 
 through the garden to fetch him from the lodge at 
 the gate, and she told Marthe to wait there in the 
 cellar until she came back, because it was cold in 
 the garden. 
 
 No one ever knew how it happened. Everyone 
 remembered afterwards that Big Marthe had 
 always loved the story of Sainte Jeanne d'Arc, 
 and how she had often said that she would like to 
 be burned at the stake like her, so that her soul 
 might go straight to God. She had been telling 
 some of the smaller girls only that morning how 
 she wanted to be a saint like Jeanne d'Arc. 
 
 She must have been very quick about piling all 
 there was of kindling wood in the middle of the 
 cellar floor, and getting it lighted with hot coals 
 from the furnace. 
 
 She must have been standing for two or three 
 minutes in the midst of her burning pile. She 
 stood with her arms stretched out. Her blue cot- 
 ton apron was in flames from hem to shoulders, the 
 flames soared up above her head, and the sleeves of 
 it were burning along her outstretched arms. She 
 stood perfectly motionless, not making a sound. 
 249 
 
Accidentals 
 
 Sister Th6rese, come back, saw from the cellar 
 door a cross of red and gold flaming out of the 
 darkness of the cellar, and Marthe upon it. For 
 an instant she thought it was a miracle, that a 
 great glory was shining about the girl Marthe, 
 there in the cellar. Then suddenly she knew. 
 
 She rushed to the girl and threw her arms about 
 her, trying to smother the flames in the wool folds 
 of her dress. She crushed the girl against her, 
 beating the flames with her hands. She wrapped 
 the wide folds of her skirts around the burning 
 cotton skirts and her full sleeves around the burn- 
 ing cotton sleeves. Her skirts caught fire from 
 the pile of burning kindling wood before she could 
 drag the girl from it. The wings of her cornette 
 caught fire about her face. 
 
 The porter, Louis, was close behind her. He got 
 water from the spiggot — ^there was a pail under the 
 spiggot. He got the pail full of water and threw 
 it upon the two burning figures. He dragged them 
 nearer to where the water was, and threw water 
 upon them, and more, and more, shouting all the 
 time for help. 
 
 The Sisters came. They were wild with fright, 
 but they fought the fire desperately, with more 
 water and with the thick stuff of their dresses. 
 They did not, any of them, scream, or make a 
 sound, they had so completely the habit of silence. 
 250 
 
Saints in a Cellar 
 
 There were only two minutes, three minutes of it. 
 Then the flames were out. 
 
 It seemed very dark in the cellar when there 
 was no longer there the light of the red and gold 
 cross. There was no more glow from the furnace 
 under the ashes. The black and white figures of 
 the Sisters moved in the gloom. Now they spoke 
 to one another, always quietly, though the thing 
 was so horrible. Marthe lay as if she were dead 
 on the floor. Sister TMrese du Saint Esprit stood 
 against the wall. All the confusion was about 
 Marthe. Someone brought candles and in the 
 candle-light it was all dreadful. Marthe was be- 
 ginning to be conscious and to moan. 
 
 When they had carried her away there was time 
 to think of Sister Therese, who stood against the 
 wall, not moving or speaking. They realised how 
 strange it was that she stood like that. They 
 begged her, "Speak to us, Sister Therese, you seem 
 so strange, what is it, Sister Therese?" 
 
 She said, "I am blind." 
 
 In the gloom of the cellar they could not see her 
 face. 
 
 Afterwards they all told her always^ the poor 
 little merciful Sisters, that there was no mark of 
 burning in her face. They told her that it must 
 have been the shock, or the glare of the flames so 
 close to her eyes when the shoulders of Marthe 's 
 251 
 
Accidentals 
 
 apron were burning, and when the edge of her 
 comette was burning. 
 
 Big Marthe died in the hospital after some days. 
 She was conscious for one day, suffering terribly, 
 and calling all the time for Sister Therese. They 
 could not tell her why the Sister did not come to 
 her. However, the last day she was radiant be- 
 cause she thought she was Sainte Jeanne d'Arc. 
 
 At first Sister Therese was unhappy, terribly, 
 because she thought that she was of no more use 
 among the good Sisters and the little girls they 
 saved from cruel lives. But, after a time, they 
 managed to make her know that she was of use 
 just in staying among' them and letting them love 
 her. 
 
 And after a while, again, she came to be happy, 
 the most happy of them all, for an odd reason. It 
 was because sometimes, if she were especially tired, 
 or a little ill, as she often was, or if it came to her 
 to feel a little sad, she would see a cross of red and 
 gold shining out of the darkness before her eyes. 
 
 She would speak of it sometimes to the others, 
 and tell them she thought the sight of it was a 
 special message of God to her. She said she did 
 not know what it meant, but some day she would 
 know. She thought that some day she would 
 know, they all would know, why little creatures 
 such as Marthe had to be born out of the misery 
 252 
 
Breakfast 
 
 of the world. And why a high vision, a gleam of 
 martyrdom, a glory, should have to seem only 
 grotesque, atrocious, and absurd, and leave behind 
 only pain. 
 
 Big Marthe had thought she would die as Jeanne 
 d'Arc died, and be a saint like her. And Sister 
 Therese of the Saint Esprit thought her God meant 
 some special promise to her in leaving her the red 
 and gold cross to see, when she could see no other 
 thing. 
 
 Breakfast 
 
 The old man and woman of the flower-stall at the 
 angle of a street and an avenue of very grand shops 
 and of the passing of very grand people, it being 
 noon, were breakfasting. The day was very cold, 
 there was a high wet wind, and they had set their 
 table close in the shelter of the booth. The booth 
 was radiant with winter flowers, violets and mimosa 
 and narcissus and those little tight-shut pale yel- 
 low roses of winter streets, and there were heaps of 
 green and copper-red foliage. The old woman had 
 made the soup in a copper dish over a lamp, and 
 there were also bread and cheese and white wine. 
 The old woman was fat and ugly, and the old man 
 253 
 
Accidentals 
 
 was thin and ugly, but they ate their breakfast 
 under the winter flowers, talking and laughing to- 
 gether as merrily as if they had been young and 
 good to look at. 
 
 Clocks and the Wind 
 
 There was a clock in every room of the grim, 
 old, proud house, on every splendid mantel-shelf. 
 And all the clocks kept time exactly, to the second, 
 together, ticking in the silent rooms. It was like the 
 telling off by fate of minutes that counted on to 
 death. 
 
 The ticking of the clocks had come for Veronica 
 in the years of her marriage to be an unbearable 
 thing. At last she could not any more bear it in 
 the big, silent rooms. 
 
 People said that she went away with someone. 
 
 The man who had been her husband knew that 
 there was no one. 
 
 He was very clever. He was brilliant above 
 troubling to understand things. He would never 
 have troubled to understand that it was because of 
 the ticking of the clocks that his wife went away. 
 
 That night the wind was gone quite mad. It 
 did not care how it cried its madness out, in the 
 254 
 
The Girl Who was Hungry and 
 the Girl Who was Tired 
 
 streets of Paris. It cried out its madness to any- 
 one in the streets who would hear. It told its great 
 wildness of space and freedom to the narrow con- 
 fines of the streets. 
 
 The wild wind cried through the streets, in its 
 uncounted voices. It made one think of great wild 
 waters, and of packs of wolves, and of the dead 
 crying. It got into carved and painted rooms and 
 told there its secret of limitless spaces. It cried 
 freedom through sealed places. 
 
 And to stately rooms where clocks ticked out 
 ordered minutes, it told something that, even to 
 one who would not listen, meant — ^perhaps death, 
 perhaps life, at least a getting away. 
 
 The Girl Who was Hungry and the 
 Girl Who was Tired 
 
 Two girls came and sat down at the next table, 
 there on the terrace of the cafe on the boulevard 
 that winter night. They were very young girls. 
 Neither of them could have been twenty, and they 
 were both rather pretty. They made a fine show 
 with their little tight skirts and high heels and their 
 absurd hats. They sat down together, and one or- 
 dered black coffee and the other cognac. They 
 255 
 
Accidentals 
 
 leaned back in their chairs and did not speak at all 
 to one another. It was the hour of dinner. Other 
 people in the caf6 were eating soup and sole and 
 cutlet and salad and tart. The girls looked at the 
 things that people were eating. 
 
 After a while one said to the other, "I have the 
 hunger of a wolf to-night." 
 
 The other said, "I am too tired to have any 
 hunger." 
 
 After a while again, the girl who was hungry 
 said, "Well, I must go on. And you?" 
 
 "I can't go on," said the tired girl — "that's all, 
 I can't." 
 
 "Name of a dog, you'll have to," said the hungry 
 girl, as she plumed her finery. She started out. 
 
 The tired girl sat there. 
 
 After a little the hungry girl came back. She 
 had a man with her. She was laughing and talk- 
 ing. She did not look at the tired girl, and the tired 
 girl did not expect it. 
 
 The hungry girl and the man went into the caf6 
 to order dinner. 
 
 The tired girl sat for yet a while at the terrace 
 table. And then she got up and went on also. 
 
 256 
 
Neighbours 
 
 Neighbours 
 
 The windows across the street were so near that 
 one could look into the rooms over there and see 
 the opposite people. There were three people, a 
 man who never wore a coat, a woman who always 
 wore a red flannel wrapper, and a little girl who 
 always had a fat yellow puppy in her arms. They 
 had a bare wooden table on which there were heaps 
 of coloured tissue paper, and coils of wire and pots 
 of glue, and by which the woman seemed always to 
 be seated making gay paper flowers. Also, they 
 had a table with a red and white cover, on which 
 there were always standing plates and glasses ; and 
 there were pots of geraniums that bloomed cheerily 
 in the windows; and there was a wardrobe, from 
 which all sorts of things were always untidily over- 
 flowing, and a large grand red velvet chair, in 
 which none of them ever sat ; and they aU three of 
 them were always laughing and chattering to- 
 gether. 
 
 One day there was a forlorn little funeral taking 
 place from th^house of the opposite people. There 
 was the man, scarcely to be recognised, in a black 
 coat and black gloves and black tall shiny hat ; and 
 there was the woman, more unrecognisable still, 
 in black crape that replaced her red flannel wrap- 
 2S7 
 
Accidentals 
 
 per. They came out of the house together, and 
 quite alone, and followed behind a grand big black 
 and white hearse, that was all plumes and black and 
 white draping and pomp and ceremony, and that 
 seemed a quite impossible carriage for a little girl, 
 who always had a fat yellow puppy in her arms, to 
 ride in. The street was alive with spring, push- 
 carts blossoming, and caged birds singing. The 
 big black and white hearse and the two black 
 figures went down the street in a glory of azure 
 and opal and gold. 
 
 The yellow puppy was whining, left behind in 
 the room of the closed blinds, where there would 
 be all those everyday things, the grand red velvet 
 chair and the rest of it, for the man and woman to 
 come back to. 
 
 The Dream 
 
 They had kept the thing in the dream haze as 
 long as they could. It had been beautiful in its 
 rainbow colours. They had wrapped it round with 
 white samite. They had looked at it through pure 
 crystal, not touching it at all. They had thought 
 it was as cold and calm and pure as starlight. They 
 had thought they bore the Host through fields of 
 asphodel. 
 
 258 
 
The Dream 
 
 Then suddenly, one day, in one instant, they 
 knew that it was not like thit at all. 
 
 There had been months in Paris when they saw 
 one another every day. They would meet in the 
 world, with other people moving close about them, 
 very far off through the rainbow haze. And they 
 would meet alone, in lonely places at lonely hours. 
 They would walk in old, forsaken streets. 
 
 There are so many streets of Paris to which peo- 
 ple may take things they would hide. 
 
 Down streets of convent walls and closed gar- 
 dens, where church bells rang that no one listened 
 to any more, and great doors closed in secrets, their 
 footsteps would pass into possession of silence, 
 away out of the world, leaving no sound or echo. 
 And in crowded, poor streets, in the midst of noise, 
 pushed about, jostled, elbowing, they would pass 
 as dimly as shadows among shadows. 
 
 They had been together sometimes in the country, 
 in places beautiful enough even for the dream, and 
 they had thought that their love was a winged 
 thing, belonging to dawns and fields, like the song 
 of the larks. The wind had made organ music for 
 it along the aisles of forests. They had seen the 
 glory of it in sunsets down beautiful distances. 
 
 Sometimes there were weeks when they did not 
 see one another. They had thought that they could 
 live for the dream, that the ideal was enough. 
 259 
 
Accidentals 
 
 But one day, in Paris, in the moment of the 
 year when the beautiful world was very gay, and 
 they had been laughing with its music, suddenly, 
 everything was different. 
 
 He came upon her where she stood in a sunny 
 window, by a bowl of daffodils. 
 
 She turned, and they stood and looked at one 
 another. 
 
 It was as if they never had known before. 
 
 He said, "And you are unhappy, like that?" 
 
 She did not answer him. 
 
 He repeated, "Are you unhappy — ^Uke that — 
 too? I thought it was only I " 
 
 And she said, standing there fragile and slim 
 against the sunshine, the sunshine in her hair and 
 her eyes full of shadow, "I would go away with 
 you. I would have all the world know. I would 
 have disgrace and shame. Don't you understand? 
 I want a thing that is real even if it is pain, even 
 if it is sin. I want to die all the deaths for you." 
 She held her head up very high and met his eyes 
 and said, "There, that is the dream." 
 
 260 
 
As It Happened 
 
 As It Happened 
 
 Claiee sat in her loge at the opera, very lovely, 
 like a fragile white orchid, and prayed, savagely 
 hard, "God, — stop them, stop them! Make some- 
 thing happen, anything, to come between them, to 
 take her from him, to send Mm back to me ! Stop 
 their looking at each other like that, their talking 
 together like that, their being together, stop it, 
 stop it!" 
 
 The music went on, and the chatter of the people 
 in the next box, and of the people with her, and 
 the whispering to her of the man behind her. And 
 her prayer went on, "Make something happen, 
 make something happen!" 
 
 In her white dress, with her white roses and 
 her pearls and her big feather fan, she sat, ex- 
 quisitely removed, it would have seemed, from all 
 violent things, and watched him, over there across 
 the house, with the woman, the girl, he was going 
 to marry. She knew he loved that little young 
 girl as he never had loved her, Claire. He had 
 loved her, but it had been different. Now, this 
 night at the opera, she realised, absolutely, how 
 different it had been. She seemed to realise every- 
 thing, to know and feel everything. And yet she 
 could not think about anjrthiag at all. She could 
 261 
 
Accidentals 
 
 only pray her crazy prayer, sitting quietly there 
 in sight of everyone. 
 
 Everyone was at the opera that night. There 
 was an important ball afterwards, and people were 
 going on to it. The women's dresses and jewels 
 were more beautiful than was usual at the opera. 
 The women in their loges were beautifully ar- 
 ranged for showing; an exhibition of orchids, fine 
 rare things, result of much labour, well placed for 
 the world to see, and yet held delicately apart from 
 any touch of it. That night, the opera house, 
 heaped up, curve upon curve, with colours soft in 
 the soft light, was a background, with the music 
 adding to its pageant, for the loveliness of orchid 
 things like Claire. 
 
 In the midst of it, all the time, Claire was pray- 
 ing to any god that would listen, "Make something 
 happen, anything, to come between them." 
 
 It seemed to her she must be crying her prayer 
 out aloud, against the music, for everyone to hear. 
 It seemed strange that the people were not stand- 
 ing up to stare at her. How could one suffer as 
 she suffered, and people, so close about, not know ? 
 She had an odd consciousness, even then, of the 
 loneliness of it. She wondered, even then, were 
 any of the other women mad with pain, as she was, 
 where they sat prettily? 
 
 She sat with her head high, her eyes wide open 
 262 
 
As It Happened 
 
 and her hands holding the white feather fan, and 
 prayed, as violently as if she had been a ragged 
 woman beating her breast at a cross of the way- 
 side, that something might happen to keep the man 
 she loved from the woman he loved. 
 
 She prayed that something, anything, might come 
 between them. She did not know then what thing 
 it might be that she called for in her prayer. 
 
 And afterwards it was to seem to her that there 
 had been warning of it, all along, in the music she 
 scarcely listened to. She never remembered after- 
 wards what opera it was, but through it all there 
 had been a foreboding that she was afterwards to 
 hear in all music. There was a march toward the 
 end of the last act, that she thought she could not 
 bear. It was like some bearing down upon one of 
 fate, treading heavily, some steady tramp of fate. 
 It meant for her, unbearably, something inevitable, 
 relentless, drawing nearer. 
 
 Until the measure of that march trod it out, she 
 had clung to, as she sat there, a hope that had no 
 dignity and no right, an intense stupid unworthy 
 hope that he might come to speak to her there in 
 the opera box, that he might come and say just 
 anjrthing to her, in his quiet voice. But she gave 
 up hope of it, to the tread of the march. 
 
 She was always to remember, ridiculously, as if 
 in her poor tragedy no attainment of height could 
 263 
 
Accidentals 
 
 be allowed her, how, in the midst of it, somebody 
 in the next box leaned over and whispered to her 
 that she was looking quite lovely. 
 
 "Shan't we go?" she said then to the people 
 with her in the box, "now, ahead of the crowd?" 
 
 She could not, it seemed to her, have lived 
 through waiting in the vestibule, perhaps quite 
 close to him and that little girl, who was less beau- 
 tiful than she, Claire. It seemed to her that what 
 she could not bear to see was the little girl's fear- 
 lessness. The little girl was safe to love him. In 
 the unsparing glare of the lobby, she could look 
 up at him and not care who saw. She need not 
 hide it. Her eyes might answer him anything 
 he asked, fearlessly, before all people, and in the 
 bright light. 
 
 For Claire's love of him there had been need of 
 darkness. 
 
 When she was alone in the motor, it seemed to 
 her she could not bear the darkness. She was 
 afraid of the darkness. There had been rain, the 
 pavements were very black, the lights of the rue 
 de la Paix were reflected in them, and in the wet 
 black surfaces of motors and carriages passing. 
 The wet low sky reflected the glow of the light 
 from the under side of its infinite blackness. The 
 Column Vendome stood up dark out of a blur 
 of light and of mist. The mist was thick under 
 264 
 
As It Happened 
 
 the arcades of the rue Castiglione. The trees of 
 the Tuileries Gardens were delicate with March 
 budding ; the freshness of them was sweet in the 
 rue de Rivoli and the Place de la Concorde. 
 
 Claire, huddled in the corner of the motor, went 
 on praying, "Make something happen, to take her 
 from him, to leave him with me. Make him need 
 me, make him need me, as I need him." 
 
 What atrocious need she had of him! She 
 realised it terribly and quite stupidly. She knew 
 that night the hopelessness of all the years that 
 there would be. She felt the pain of all the years. 
 The years pressed in, pressed down, upon her, and 
 crushed her, hard and black, like iron and crepe. 
 She could not think at all. There was nothing left 
 but pain. 
 
 Crossing the Pont de la Concorde, she tried to see 
 the lights in the river and could not ; it was as if 
 she were gone blind. When the motor stopped in 
 the old dark street, it was difficult for her to move. 
 
 The footman rang the bell by the great door 
 in the wall, and one battant of the door opened. 
 She had to step over the lower unopened part of 
 the frame of the door. In the oval courtyard one 
 smelled the wet earth and trees of the gardens 
 that lay behind the old hotel. The court was dim 
 with mist, the cobbles were wet, but the roofs and 
 chimneys were massed against a starry sky. 
 265 
 
Accidentals 
 
 Claire went up the five steps and in at the door. 
 
 The butler opened the door, and the old Bretonne 
 who had been her nurse was waiting at the bottom 
 of the stairs for her. But she was afraid, as she 
 always was, every time she came in at the door of 
 her home. It was a grim secret old house, things 
 of its long past haunted it. It was full of hidden 
 things. But that was not why she was afraid. 
 
 Annie said, "Monsieur has come in, I think he 
 sleeps." 
 
 They went up the stairs. 
 
 They passed his door together in the close inti- 
 macy of unhappiness. 
 
 In her own room she let herself be undressed and 
 did not talk at all. Her room was big and beau- 
 tiful. The firelight was beautiful in it. There were 
 bowls full of violets and tall vases of daffodils and 
 narcissus. Nobody could have asked a more beau- 
 tiful room to be unhappy in. All the time she went 
 on praying. 
 
 In her kimono, huddled before the fire in a deep 
 chair she went on praying, stupidly, quite without 
 thought, just on and on, as if the words were a 
 spell, as if she had grown so used to her prayer 
 that its reiteration was become as constant as the 
 clock's ticking in the room, — "Make something 
 happen, make something happen. I don't even ask 
 to keep his love any more, only that no one else 
 266 
 
As It Happened 
 
 shall Lave it. Make something happen, anything, 
 to keep her from having his love. Make something 
 happen, make something happen." 
 
 Annie came and stood a little way off from her 
 mistress. She was old, her hair was grey and her 
 thin shoulders stooped. Her eyes had come to have 
 the vague wistfulness of growing old. There was 
 in them that look that especially belongs to the 
 eyes of people who belong to the sea. Her people 
 through generations had gazed out over the sea, 
 that was their life and their death. And her blue 
 eyes, old and wistful, had the look of seeing very 
 far away. She seemed always to be looking be- 
 yond. She stood with her hands behind her. She 
 
 said to her mistress, "Little child " and then 
 
 began to say things quickly, where she stood. She 
 kept her hands behind her, as though she had some- 
 thing in them and would hide it. She rocked her- 
 self a little as she stood, backwards and forwards. 
 She said to her mistress, "Little one, be not angry. 
 It is because I love thee. I have done it for thee, 
 against one who steals from thee." She came 
 nearer. "My little one, thou must not be angry 
 that I know. What have I not known of thee since 
 thou wast a child ? I made thy first tiny frocks and 
 stitched tears in the black thou didst need to wear 
 when yet thou wast so little, and in the white dress 
 of thy First Communion. God of gods, what tears 
 267 
 
Accidentals 
 
 I stitched, all too soon, in thy wedding dress." 
 
 She stopped for an instant. Claire sat looking 
 at her. 
 
 The old woman went on, "I can no longer keep 
 still while my little one has sorrow." With a sud- 
 den quick gesture she brought her hands from be- 
 hind her, and showed Claire what she held in them. 
 
 It was a roughly made wax figure of a woman. 
 
 "I made it," Annie said. She came close to her 
 mistress with it. She said, "I have not given it a 
 name. I do not know what name to give it. I do 
 not know what name is that of the one who stands 
 between my mistress and all she has of happiness. 
 But my figure has the name of that one. ' ' 
 
 She went down on her stiff old knees by the 
 hearth, and fi:xed the little wax figure there. 
 
 "Annie, what are you doing?" 
 
 "Little lamb, I am doing that which my people 
 have done through all the ages. It is a thing that 
 I myself have seen done." 
 
 The wax figure stood quite firmly on the tiles 
 before the fire. 
 
 The old woman, kneeling there, said, "It is a 
 thing I saw done when I was a child. There was 
 a woman to whom my father gave our bread. Be- 
 cause of that woman we often went hungry, my 
 mother and the little sisters and I. Because of 
 that woman he beat us, us children, and my mother. 
 268 
 
As It Happened 
 
 My mother made a little image, like this that I 
 have made, of wax, and in our kitchen she set it 
 by the hearth, as I have set this, here." 
 
 She drew a long bodkin from the pocket of her 
 apron. Claire saw the firelight glint on it. 
 
 "My mother called the little image by a name," 
 went on Annie, "by the name of the woman who 
 was taking her man from her. I saw her do this 
 thing. My mother was a little, gentle, sad woman, 
 who had never hurt any living thing. She called 
 us, us children, to the fire, and she told us that, as 
 the little wax figure melted away in the heat, so 
 would melt away the life of the woman who had 
 hurt us all, who had so cruelly hurt us all, who was 
 taking her husband and our father from us. Who 
 was taking all our life from us, his sin and our sor- 
 row melting away, as that woman's life melted." 
 
 Then Annie leaned forward and stabbed the 
 bodkin into where would have been the heart of 
 the little wax figure. ' ' There, it is done, ' ' she said. 
 Without rising from her knees she leaned back 
 swaying a little and she made the sign of. the cross 
 upon her forehead and heart, and then stayed 
 motionless. 
 
 The fire kept up its soft sound of burning, and 
 
 the clock ticked, and the sound of Paris outside, 
 
 all round about, came to the room. It seemed to 
 
 Claire that the sounds of the city, all the sounds 
 
 269 
 
Accidentals 
 
 of it, came to the room together, curiously as one 
 sound, that was as the sound of the sea, of an un- 
 ceasing, never-resting sea. 
 
 "The sounding of the sea was very loud that 
 night," said Annie, strangely, as if following her 
 thoughts. "I remember that it seemed to me, even 
 as a child, I never had heard it so loud. It was as 
 if the sea were bearing in lupon our house. Ours 
 was the last house on the quay. All the storms of 
 the sea beat upon it. It is as if I hear it now, 
 that sounding of the sea. My eyes watch yet my 
 mother, where she knelt the night through, while 
 the sea sounded, and my little sisters, on the bench, 
 the three of them, nodding, poor sleepy little things, 
 who, though they did not understand, must watch 
 the night out. I can see their shadows nodding 
 upon the floor behind them. I can see my father's 
 fish nets spread to dry, the tall old black presses 
 against the wall, the copper pots, the statue of Our 
 Lady on the shelf, and the patches of damp stain 
 on the walls, and the shadows of the firelight mov- 
 ing through the little room." 
 
 It seemed to Claire that she could see it too. 
 And, as if she were in that room, she had a feeling 
 of strangeness ; something unknown was there, and 
 she was afraid of it, by the stone hearth of the 
 fisherman's cabin, or by her own hearth. 
 
 Annie went on, "Our table was laid for supper. 
 270 
 
As It Happened 
 
 There was a bowl of broth and the loaf all ready, 
 but my mother would not let us eat until the thing 
 was done. My smallest sister cried because she 
 smeUed the broth and there were cloves in it. But 
 we who understood, we older ones, we did not cry." 
 She got up from her knees, and stood looking down 
 at the figure on the hearth. She looked down at 
 it, with strange sea eyes. Then she said, "My lamb, 
 there is nothing to do, there is not even to say the 
 name. There is only that the figure on the hearth 
 with the bodkin stuck in it, will melt away with the 
 fire's heat." 
 
 "But your mother had something of right," said 
 Claire stupidly. "He was her man, she had a right. 
 If it had been just the man she loved without a 
 right to love :" 
 
 That was what she kept thinking all the night 
 through. "The fisherwoman had a right, she had 
 a right. And I, I have no right." 
 
 Sometimes she told herself how absurd it all 
 was, what utter, arrant nonsense. And then again 
 she would find herself thinking, "That woman had 
 a right." And then she would be thinking how all 
 that, all of a thing's being right or being wrong, 
 was only just as it happened, how all the things of 
 life were only just as they, by whatever chance it 
 might be, senselessly happened. She told herself 
 that she left the little wax figure melting by the 
 271 
 
Accidentals 
 
 hearth because it would have been too absurd to 
 bother about it, even to take it away. And then 
 again she would tell herself in the queer stupidity 
 of her unhappiness, that she had a right to leave it 
 there, quite as if the whole thing were not absurd. 
 All night through, before the fire, the little wax 
 figure melted slowly, slowly. The fire burned the 
 whole night through. Annie came twice to put 
 logs on it, and the whole night through the little 
 wax figure with the bodkin stuck through it melted 
 down and down, dripping and dripping, slowly. 
 The sound of the city outside kept always on and 
 on, like the unceasing sound of the sea, about the 
 house, low and monotonous and inevitable. It 
 seemed to Claire that, if she should go to the win- 
 dow and draw the curtains, she would look out to 
 some wild, dark waste of waters, catch a white glint 
 of foam, a white rift of clouds. It even seemed to 
 her that her window would not be the window that 
 she knew, but a window set low over a cobbled quai 
 where the water lodged in pools, and that it would 
 look to a tilt of masts beyond the sea-wall. It 
 seemed to her that in the room there was a smell of 
 salt and sea wind, and of fish, and tar, and of the 
 nets drying. It seemed to her that things of times 
 far away and long past were present in the room. 
 Only towards dawn she thought of the sound as 
 272 
 
As It Happened 
 
 being the sound of the city, and she thought then 
 that it was sadder than ever could be any sound of 
 the sea. It meant much weariness. 
 
 Early, Annie came and opened the blinds wide, 
 and the day was there, as dreadful as the day be- 
 fore, and as the next day would be, and all the 
 days. 
 
 Annie brought coffee and built up the fire and 
 scraped away the wax that was a little melted 
 lump on the hearth, and took the bodkin, and did 
 not say anything. 
 
 Claire felt dull and stupid, as if none of it had 
 really been. She realised then that she had been 
 sitting up all night, but it had not mattered. What 
 was the use of sleeping? One would have only to 
 wake afterwards. 
 
 She could not drink her coffee. Annie did not 
 speak to her, but went out and left her alone again, 
 with the morning grey in the room. 
 
 She had a feeling that some strange thing had 
 happened. But she did not know that anything 
 had happened, until, oddly enough, it W£is her hus- 
 band who told her. 
 
 He came to her room to tell her. It was about 
 noon then. 
 
 He said, "Horrid thing that was last night. 
 Don't you know? Thought you kept up with 
 273 
 
Accidentals 
 
 everything that concerned him. Last night, com- 
 ing home from the opera, that little girl he was to 
 have married, you know, was killed, an accident, 
 the motor, the streets were wet." 
 
 The Violin in the Crowd 
 
 In the soft June night, in the gay restaurant of 
 the woods on the edge of the city, the music of the 
 violin seemed unbearably sad. 
 
 The little white supper-tables of the restaurant 
 were arranged outside in the garden, where the 
 light of the electric lamps, big and round as moons, 
 was almost beautiful and almost mysterious. The 
 fragrance of the flowers of the garden-beds was 
 close about the fragrances of the women's lovely 
 dresses, and blossoms of acacia came drifting slowly 
 down into goblets of champagne. All the people 
 were gay, talking and laughing. 
 
 The music of the violin was the more sad because 
 it was gay music, dance music that was as sad as 
 any music of death, De Profundis or Dies Irse. 
 
 The violin was not an old violin ; the sadness of 
 time was not in its depths. It was not that it 
 was giving out again the sadness of ages of melo- 
 dies that had passed over its strings. It was not 
 274 
 
Buying a Hat 
 
 that ages of sadness had left in it their echo, like 
 the sounding of storms in a sea-shell. 
 
 The player of it, standing a little apart from the 
 others of the orchestra, was young and successful. 
 One could not tell at aU what it was of his playing 
 that was so sad, iu the white shining of the electric 
 moons, and among the June colours. 
 
 Perhaps the voice of the violin was the sadder 
 for that — that one could not tell why it was sad; 
 that perhaps no one, of all the people there in the 
 crowd, knew how sad it was. 
 
 Buying a Hat 
 
 They were passing through Paris, and had just 
 the day there on the way from the chateau to Deau- 
 viUe, where they always went for the month of 
 August. Tibi's mother had not time to go with her 
 about the hat, and had told her she might go with 
 Fraulein and choose it herself. They were to go to 
 one of the big milliners in the rue de la Paix, for it 
 was to be Tibi's best hat, and she was now nearly 
 sixteen. 
 
 It was noon, and very hot in the rue de la Paix. 
 How hot and stuffy Frauleiu's feather boa looked. 
 The glare of the sunshine was red ia the gilt let- 
 275 
 
Accidentals 
 
 tering over the doors of shops, and the heat 
 throbbed and quivered all along the street, from the 
 Place Vendome to the Op6ra. The street was 
 empty. There was only a fiacre drawn up at the 
 curb near a lamp-post, the driver nowhere about, 
 the horse with crooked knees and hanging head. 
 
 Tibi was a shy little girl, and she was afraid of 
 Fraulein. If she had not been afraid of Praulein 
 she might have done something about the thing 
 that happened that day when she went to buy a 
 hat, and it might have made a difference. She 
 never knew. But Fraulein was young and pretty, 
 and Tibi's father made much of her, and so she 
 made much of Tibi's mother, and so Tibi's mother 
 did what she wanted, and Tibi had to also. 
 
 The heat had got into the milliner's shop; the 
 white panels and long gold mirrors and the big 
 crystal chandeliers reflected the glare of the mid- 
 summer noon. There were not many hats on the 
 tall stands, the chairs and tables were carelessly 
 pushed back against the walls, and there were only 
 a few knots of velvet and ribbon and sprays of imi- 
 tation flowers lying about on the tables. There was 
 one broad band of imitation diamonds that shone 
 red in the heat. 
 
 A woman who sat writing at a table near the 
 door got up as Tibi and Fraulein cam^ in. She 
 was a tall, thin woman in a long, black dress that 
 276 
 
Buying a Hat 
 
 would have been smart if it had not been so care- 
 lessly put on. Her face was carelessly painted. 
 Her hair had been blonded, but was darkening 
 again. She looked at pretty little plump pink-and- 
 white Frauleia in the feather boa, and then at Tibi, 
 and said, "Mademoiselle desires — ^-=" 
 
 "A white hat," said Tibi, "big, with ribbons on 
 it." 
 
 "I have quite what you want, Mademoiselle," 
 said the woman, "but it is in the workroom. One 
 moment. Mademoiselle." 
 
 Tibi sat down in the only chair about, the one 
 by the table where the woman had been sitting. 
 The pen stood up as the woman had left it, in the 
 ink-bottle, and the interrupted letter lay open. - 
 
 Until Tibi had read the words scrawled big and 
 black at the top of the page she did not even know 
 she was looking at it. "I have suffered until I can 
 suffer no more. I cannot bear it any longer. When 
 you get this I shall be dead." 
 
 "Something fluffy and soft," said the woman, 
 coming back. "These two are of the most chic, 
 Mademoiselle." She came across the red carpet, 
 holding out the hats one in each hand. 
 
 Tibi had not moved. The woman stopped half- 
 way across the room and stood quite still. Tibi 
 knew that the woman knew that she had seen. 
 Fraulein came to them, and began to say some- 
 277 
 
Accidentals 
 
 thing. Tibi and the woman stayed like that^ where 
 they were, looking at each other. 
 
 It seemed a long time. A fly somewhere in the 
 heat kept up an intolerable buzzing. Fraulein went 
 on always talking. It was Tibi who moved first. 
 
 It was as if something broke, suddenly, and she 
 could move. She started up and went to the 
 woman quickly. She was going to say something. 
 Her two hands went out, as if they were saying it 
 for her already. 
 
 The woman moveji too, but only to draw back 
 a little from Tibi, and to hold her head up very 
 high. She was very tall. She stood taU above 
 little Fraulein. Something about her made it im- 
 possible for Tibi to speak. 
 
 It was the woman who spoke. Her eyes looked 
 down straight into Tibi's. She said, "Either of 
 these hats I am sure will become Mademoiselle to a 
 marvel." 
 
 Fraulein said it must be the flat one with the 
 cherries. 
 
 Tibi could not speak at all. 
 
 The woman said, ' ' Come to the mirror, Mademoi- 
 selle, and let us try them on." 
 
 She made Tibi come to the mirror and sit down 
 before it. She took the pins out of her hat and 
 took it off, and patted her curls, and tried the hats 
 one after the other. 
 
 278 
 
Buying a Hat 
 
 Tibi did not see either of them, 
 
 Fraulein talked about them with the woman of 
 the shop, and they decided something, and Fraulein 
 gave the address to the woman, who wrote it down 
 and thanked them. 
 
 She went with them to the door saying that it 
 was terribly hot. She opened the door. The white 
 glare of the street came in, and the strange quiet. 
 
 Tibi looked up at the woman of the shop, and 
 the woman of the shop looked down at Tibi, and 
 said, "I hope Mademoiselle will be satisfied with 
 the hats." 
 
 She stood holding the door open. 
 
 When Tibi was again in Paris, only in the late 
 winter, it was still some time before she could find 
 an excuse for going to the shop. Then the woman 
 was not there. Tibi asked for her, the tall woman 
 with the yellow hair and black eyes. But no one in 
 the shop seemed to know anything about her. 
 
 It was always to be to Tibi rather dreadful to 
 remember the polite, smiling face of the woman, as 
 she had held open for her and Fraulein the door 
 into the white, hot street, and how she had gone 
 out, not knowing what to do. 
 
 279 
 
Accidentals 
 
 Secret 
 
 Thet had been happy from the first of the year 
 until the end of July. Afterwards she knew that 
 that was very long for happiness to have lasted. 
 One winter day in the great house of her husband's 
 people, where she had so long been lonely, it had 
 come to her and to the man who loved her to know 
 they could not help it, there was nothing they could 
 do. So they had taken happiness all the way along, 
 through the days and hours until that last after- 
 noon. 
 
 The secret old streets they had come to know so 
 well were full of summer, red sunset and swallows 
 and odours of acacia. The room over the desolate 
 garden was hot and full of the red sunset. There 
 was a floor of worn, uneven, red brick tiles, and 
 the painted walls were stained and faded. It was 
 a desolate old room, like the garden it looked over 
 and the street by which one came to it. It was all 
 secret and hopeless, as are so many streets and gar- 
 dens and rooms and sacred things of Paris. 
 
 They came to it for the last time. She was 
 always to remember. It was in the midst of the 
 late, long, midsummer sunset. The happiness had 
 come to its end. 
 
 It was all over. He was going away. His life 
 280 
 
Secret 
 
 was taking him away from her. Far away in his 
 life he might be able to forget that room. She 
 must go on living near it, and never seeing it, and 
 always thinking of it. 
 
 Poor little room, how tragically much it had held 
 of happiness. 
 
 They did not open the blinds. They could not 
 have borne to see for the last time the shabby little 
 detail of the room. 
 
 The swallows cried past the windows. The gar- 
 den smeUed sick in the heat. 
 
 It was a quarter of Paris where there used to 
 be many convents, and church bells ring desolately, 
 
 They were ringing the Angelus of sunset in 
 deadly monotone. The man and the woman listened 
 for the last time together. 
 
 It was the end. And at the end they knew how 
 happy they had been, and how long a time it was 
 for happiness to have lasted, and how far more 
 happy than other happinesses, is that which is 
 snatched back, red, from the teeth of pain. 
 
 281 
 
Accidentals 
 
 The Stars for the First Time 
 
 Philip must have been about four years old when 
 he saw the stars for the first time. He had been 
 asleep always before there were any stars, and no- 
 body had ever told him anything about them. He 
 knew night only in rooms with curtains drawn. 
 
 He never in all his life forgot that first time he 
 saw the stars. 
 
 It was in Paris. His father was taking him to 
 see someone who was dying. It was a thick, hot 
 night of midsummer. He never knew how they 
 had happened to be in Paris in midsummer. ' He 
 never remembered at all who it was that his father 
 had taken him to see. Most probably it had been 
 one of the old French aunts, his father's aunts. It 
 was the aunts who had left his father the money 
 that afterwards was his, and he thought, remem- 
 bering, that that would have explained his being 
 taken out so late in the summer night. 
 
 That the person he was taken to see was dying 
 came afterwards in his memory of it, to be wonder- 
 fully a part of the heat and dark, of the soft, dense 
 pressure of the night down upon all things, and of 
 the strangeness of the lighted city, wrapped closely 
 round in the night, and with such utter depth of 
 282 
 
The Stars for the First Time 
 
 night beyond, and the stars, so far away, and so 
 near. 
 
 At first he did not see the stars at all, because of 
 the city lights. The city was so wonderful with 
 its lamps all lighted, and its windows, and its traf- 
 fic, the dragon eyes of cabs, the fireflies of cigar- 
 ettes, that he felt those things only. 
 
 It was before motors came to Paris, and they, 
 his father and he, went in an open fiacre. It was a 
 yellow basket fiacre, and the horse, that was grey, 
 had bells on his collar. The little bells sang, and 
 the driver's whip sang, and the wheels of the fiacre 
 sang, and all the streets and all the city sang, in 
 the soft, thick, hot dark. 
 
 The Champs Elysees, where his nurse had taken 
 him to see Guignol and buy suore d'orge, would 
 always afterwards be a place where he must tip- 
 toe, breathlessly, seeking again the marvel of that 
 night. The Place de la Concorde would always be 
 a great oval lake of light, that he had nearly been 
 drowned in. The Pont de la Concorde hung in 
 the blue night over the river road that fairies 
 travelled. 
 
 But it was when they turned into an old, dark, 
 narrow, empty, silent street that Philip for the first 
 time saw the stars. And then he forgot aU the 
 ciiy's lights. 
 
 Over the dark, round roofs, the stars hung, golden 
 283 
 
Accidentals 
 
 in the blue night; big and near, some of them, like 
 the lamps of the nursery in the coiintry ; and some 
 of them far away, like the altar candles of nurse's 
 church; and some of them like gold dust, like the 
 dust of roads in the country when sunset lights 
 were on it, — only wonderful — ^powdering trails 
 across the dark. The little boy in the fiacre saw 
 paths of stars, star-dusty, leading straight away 
 from the top of the street, on and on. He knew 
 afterwards how far the star paths led, farther on 
 than the end of dreams, farther on than the dead 
 go in their starry dresses. And it was to seem to 
 him always, that he had seen the whole way marked 
 out with stars that night. It was as marking out 
 roads the streets led to, that he was to think of the 
 stars always from that first time he saw them, as 
 he drove with his father in a yellow basket fiacre 
 through the streets to a house where there was 
 Death. 
 
 Bridge of the Tournelle 
 
 There was a hearse standing at the door of the 
 
 Morgue. There was no carriage to follow it, and 
 
 there was no mourner. Two men carried a black 
 
 box out from the Morgue, and the driver of the 
 
 284 
 
Bridge of the Toumelle 
 
 hearse helped them to put it into the hearse. 
 Some people passing had stopped to look, and some 
 people had come over from the little garden behind 
 the church to stand looking also. None of them 
 knew anything about the person, man or woman, 
 young or old, found dead, who was in the black 
 box. 
 
 A motor passed just as the hearse was driving 
 off. There were a man and a woman in the motor. 
 They both looked at the hearse with the black box 
 in it. The man went on with what he had been 
 saying. It was some quite commonplace courteous 
 thing that he was saying. He thought he was being 
 Very good to the woman because he was taking the 
 trouble to talk to her. She leaned back in her cor- 
 ner of the motor as they went on across the bridge. 
 She was thinking that if it were not that she was 
 such a coward it might have been she who lay in the 
 black box which was being taken away from the 
 Morgue. She was thinking, "If I were not such a 
 coward, I should not be carrying my dead heart 
 like this about, through the days and the years." 
 And the man knew no more of her, as she sat there 
 close beside him, than the people gaping on the 
 curbstone knew of the one found dead who was 
 being taken away in the black box. 
 
 28s 
 
Accidentals 
 
 The Pet Name 
 
 He never showed, even to himself, how much he 
 cared, until one day, so long after her death that 
 he could think of her, he happened on a pair of 
 little half -worn gloves, fragrant of the orris she 
 had used, lying where she must have tossed them 
 down some time among the books and papers of 
 the learned disorder of his study. Then, because 
 suddenly she seemed so near and so alive, so actual 
 a presence in the room, he called her by the absurd 
 little pet name that she had loved, and that he had 
 rarely used. 
 
 Little Girl in Black 
 
 Hee father had died when she was a child in 
 America, in a house with a white columned portico 
 in a street lined with elms. 
 
 She remembered how the house had smeUed of 
 beeswax and pot-pourri, how the attic had hummed 
 with wasps, and how one could slide down the ban- 
 isters of the broad, shining stairs. She remembered 
 the nursery to which her father used to come to 
 stand before the fire if it were winter or by the 
 286 
 
Terry 
 
 wide window if it were summer, pjid look down, 
 laughing at her. 
 
 Ske had no faintest memory of her father, of 
 his face or his voice, and yet she would always 
 see, so plainly, the paper dolls he had drawn for 
 her, the little boats he had made out of walnut 
 shells, the dog's head on the handle of his cane. 
 
 She could remember of that day no sorrow, but, 
 so well, the smell of white and purple flowers 
 through all the house, the opening and closing of 
 doors, whispering, strangers in black on the stairs, 
 her new black dress that was stiff and smelled 
 black, and the sun motes, between the slats of closed 
 blinds, dancing in the golden ladder down the dusk 
 of his silent room. 
 
 Terry 
 
 The only time ever Terry saw Madame de St.. 
 Aure was the day someone dressed him in white 
 satin things that he hated, and sent him with some- 
 one who talked the English he had almost forgot- 
 ten, to a big house of big rooms where there were 
 many people, and where there was his mother; 
 and where there was the Due de Verelac whom, it 
 appeared, his mother had married that morning j 
 and where there was a little girl named Jacc^ueliiie,. 
 287 
 
Accidentals 
 
 who had a white lace dress and long black hair and 
 long black legs. 
 
 He hated it because all the people stared so at 
 him. 
 
 They did not stare in that way at Jacqueline. 
 She said it was because they, all of them, knew all 
 about her, while none of them had ever seen him 
 before, and he was now to be the son of the Due de 
 Verelac. She thought he ought to be pleased about 
 that. 
 
 But he was not pleased. He was a very shy 
 little boy. He had seen a great many people in 
 his ten years of life in big hotels, and they had 
 always stared at him because of his mother, who 
 required for all her possessions a great deal of 
 staring at. He was used to strangers, and to the 
 feeling of being an object of curiosity, and to a 
 vague feeling that something was always wrong. 
 But it had never made him so wretched as on that 
 day. 
 
 He tried to hold up his head and to look back 
 at people who looked at him. 
 
 One of the people was Madame de St. Aure. 
 
 She did not look at him as the others did. It 
 was in a quite different way. 
 
 Afterwards, long after Madame de St. Aure was 
 dead from just having neglected a cold, Terry 
 came to understand what the difference had been. 
 288 
 
One of Two Women 
 
 It was that the eyes of Madame de St. Aure were 
 sad. They were terribly unhappy eyes, as they 
 looked at him, a most unhappy little boy, going 
 about with Jacqueline. 
 
 It was as if Madame de St. Aure, there among 
 all the people, had said to him, "You are unhappy, 
 and I am unhappy too." It was as if she had put 
 her arms around him and kissed him. 
 
 She looked at him, and then he did not feel 
 friendless any more. 
 
 Jacquelia said, whispering, "You know she is 
 the great love of your new papa. He could not 
 marry her because of her other husband." Jacque- 
 line was twelve years old. "Monsieur de St. Aure 
 is very bad," she said; "nobody wonders that she 
 hates him and loves your new papa. They say 
 that very likely she will kill herself, now that her 
 lover has married. I would not kill myself for any- 
 thing, would you?" 
 
 One of Two Women 
 
 If only she could have looked at it from the con- 
 ventional standpoint, and felt herself outraged, 
 cared for the insult, imagined nothing but that all 
 the right was on her side, and that it was for her, 
 289 
 
Accidentals 
 
 as a matter of course, to draw her skirts baek, clear 
 of the whole thing, and have no more thought for 
 him — ^how simple it would have been. But what 
 made it so terribly hard for her was that she un- 
 derstood. 
 
 No woman ever ought to understand. One can- 
 not understand and be happy. Because if one un- 
 derstands, one cannot ever blame, or have pride. 
 There can be no sense of dignity and na care for 
 humiliation, and there can be no anger at aU, if 
 one understands. All small things are lost in one 
 great thing. 
 
 She understood how it had been comiug about 
 through the years — the fifteen years since their 
 marriage,: — slowly with the passing of all the mo- 
 ments and the days. It seemed to her, when the 
 crisis came, that she had felt it coming, its shadow 
 cast before, all the way along ; and that aU the way 
 she had been going to meet it, and preparing her- 
 self for it. When the crisis came, it seemed curi- 
 ously familiar to her, as if she had gone through 
 it all often and often, really, before, and knew just 
 what she had to do and just how she was to do it. 
 Nothing of it came from books to her, or from what 
 people had told her, or from any thought of what 
 people would say, any care for standard or tra- 
 dition. There was no help for hex in it, because 
 she understood. 
 
 2go 
 
One of Two Women 
 
 And because she understood she could not stop 
 loving him. She envied women who can proudly 
 condemn and stop loving. "With the years, her love 
 for him had gone beyond the love of a woman for 
 the man who is her happiness, and had come to be 
 the love of one who cares, before all else, for the 
 other's happiaess. She cared for his happiness so 
 much that she had come to understand how, per- 
 haps, it mighf be away from her. 
 
 And something of her that was free, that soared, 
 that he had never possessed, or even known of, 
 that had kept her apart even from him, and lonely 
 always, made her wonder, now, in the crisis of 
 three lives, if it might not be that it was the other 
 woman who best could make him happy. Perhaps 
 the other woman had not got the bird in her heart, 
 — ^the blue bird, or the black bird, that soared away 
 into skies of sunshine and into storms, — and so 
 ccrtild be completely his. 
 
 Perhaps that was what he wanted of a woman, 
 that she should be completely his, having no bird 
 to fly out of her heart and far from him. "La 
 cage est a vous, mais I'oiseau n'est a personne." 
 Perhaps he had been lonely too. Perhaps he had 
 been lonely with her because there was something 
 of her that could not belong to anyone. 
 
 It seemed to her, when the end came, that she 
 had known all along wherein the fault was hers, 
 291 
 
Accidentals 
 
 and had not been able to help it. She had loved 
 him with the passion of tenderness and the passion 
 of loyalty and the passion of defence. She would 
 have followed him into exile, and been proud of 
 allegiance had all the world abandoned him. But 
 she had not been able to give him the bird of her 
 heart. She had always wanted to give the bird to 
 him, and had tried, but could not. And so she was 
 sorry, and ashamed, and could have no anger 
 against him. 
 
 Perhaps it was the other woman who could 
 make him happiest, but she, just because her soul 
 belonged to nobody, would always have to go on 
 loving him, and understanding as he did not 
 understand. 
 
 To a Certain Little Girl 
 
 There was a woman who was glad she had no 
 child. Life had never been so kind to her that she 
 would have wanted it for another. 
 
 One day when the child of a woman who was her 
 friend was ill, she happened to go into the little sick 
 girl's room. 
 
 The little girl's gold hair had been cut ofiE 
 roughly, cropped close to her head. In the fever 
 292 
 
A Jealousy 
 
 it had bothered her. Her blue eyes were dull, and 
 stained around with weariness after the fever, and 
 her baby mouth was twisted and drawn into lines 
 of pain. She was not beautiful any more. 
 
 When the little girl had been beautiful, the 
 woman who had no little girl had never in the least 
 envied her friend possession of her. 
 
 But that day she was envious, terribly. 
 
 A Jealousy 
 
 She had never been jealous of his wife — ^he had 
 been hers, her own, so absolutely, all the years. 
 Once she had pitied the woman who had not his 
 love, and then had quite forgotten her, as she came 
 to forget all things he did not think of. He loved 
 her, who had been the loved of many men; and 
 she, who had loved no other, loved him. And that 
 was all. For ten years he and she were happy in 
 every hour that they had together. She lived for 
 those hours. The rest of the time was just a happy 
 waiting for him to come. 
 
 Then, three days ago, she had waited, and he had 
 
 not come. She had thought only that something 
 
 had detained him. She had slept that June night. 
 
 What a thing to remember, that she had slept that 
 
 293 
 
Accidentals 
 
 night — what a hideous thing. In the sunshiny- 
 morning it was in the papers that he was dead. 
 
 There was nothing she could do. Suddenly she, 
 who had been everything to him, could be nothing 
 to him. 
 
 It was as if she — ^who had known him, all the 
 best of him, as no one of his world had — had never 
 been known by him. 
 
 Su:ddenly he was no more hers. She could not 
 even know. 
 
 Perhaps the woman he did not love had been 
 with him when he died. Perhaps he had had some 
 last word or look or touch for her. 
 
 Perhaps she, his wife, had loved him — she also. 
 
 Suddenly it came to his mistress that his wife 
 also might have loved him. 
 
 He had not loved her ; but she might have loved 
 him. 
 
 Whether or not she had loved him, in life he 
 had not been hers; and yet in death he was hers, 
 and there was no question of it. For her, his wife, 
 surely, if she chose, there was the doing of all the 
 last things, that are so terrible and so sacred, and 
 that' one would put all one's hopelessness and all 
 one's hope into the doing of. 
 
 It was she, the woman he had not loved, his 
 wife, who could be with him now. Now he was 
 hers. 
 
 294 
 
A Jealousy 
 
 Now he was hers alone. She was with him surely, 
 in the room, where the woman he had loved might 
 not come. She would be with him, closest to him, 
 in the church of Our Lady of Victories, where the 
 woman he had loved might not come. She would 
 journey with him through the young summer coun- 
 try that he was not seeing, tilled field and pasture 
 and forest, river sunk in osier, long roads poplar- 
 bordered. She would come to the house of his peo- 
 ple, with him, for the last and endless time. She 
 would be with him when they laid him in the last 
 place of his people, where the woman he had loved 
 might not come. 
 
 She would see, and have right to see it, the place 
 where they left him. She would know how it 
 looked, that place where he would stay so long. 
 
 She could go back there when she chose — ^if ever 
 she chose. 
 
 It seemed to the woman he had loved, that all 
 the comfort of life would be in the being allowed 
 to go to that strange chamber where he waited, to 
 feel oneself somehow a little nearer there to him 
 than in the utter emptiness elsewhere of the world 
 — there, where she, the woman he had loved, might 
 not come. 
 
 And the thing that was terrible, to the edge of 
 bearing, was that, one day, by and by, the woman 
 to whom he had so little belonged in the time of 
 295 
 
Accidentals 
 
 his living would be carried there, and laid beside 
 him, in the place of his people, to be with him 
 through all that time of death, which is so much 
 longer than life, while the woman he had loved 
 must be alone, lying, she did not know where. 
 
 The Graveyard over the Race Track 
 
 In the little, old, abandoned cen;ietery of the 
 Abbaye of Longchamp, close above the race track, 
 there was always a great peace, walled in. The 
 graveyard always was utterly quiet, with its grass 
 grown tall over the tombs, and its vines tangled 
 about them, and its trees almost hiding their crum- 
 bling, grey, old, moss-stained stones. Down at the 
 bottom of the graveyard, by the wall, close over the 
 race track, where the soldiers of '70 are buried, 
 nameless, and with one big mound to cover them, 
 there was always a strange mood waiting for one. 
 
 In it, it seemed as if the thing most worth while 
 about life was the dying a good death. 
 
 Always there, by the soldiers' grave, however 
 gay and crowded the race track might be on its 
 famous days, there was a great silence — ^the peace 
 of death, and its very good forgetting. 
 
 Always one who went in, by the gate in the yel- 
 low wall, to the uncared-for little wilderness of 
 296 
 
The Big One and the P'tiot of Ivonne 
 
 growing green things, and stone and iron things, 
 of acacia and lilac and wistaria and crosses and 
 little, broken, fallen, marble houses, felt a curious 
 wonder at the race track, down under the wall, at 
 its crowds and its renown and its importance, — a 
 curious pity for its bravery. 
 
 The Big One and the P'tiot of Ivonne 
 
 Ivonne came to work by the day at the chateau. 
 She was thirteen years old, a very earnest little girl. 
 Her father was dead ; he had been killed three years 
 before by a falling of stone in the quarries, down 
 under the hill, and her mother had been ill ever 
 since the baby was born, the day its father died. 
 There were four little brothers and sisters between 
 Ivonne and the baby. It was not easy even for an 
 earnest little girl to take care of a sick woman and 
 four babies. The neighbours helped; and they had 
 something from the Mairie, and they managed after 
 a fashion. 
 
 The village was quite a large, prosperous village 
 in the golden valley, and it took thought quite well 
 for its poor. 
 
 But it meant a great deal when Ivonne got work 
 at the chateau. 
 
 The chateau people were strangers. When 
 297 
 
Accidentals 
 
 Madame la Comtesse went away she had cried 
 very much, because no people but hers had lived 
 in the chateau since so long, and she told the village 
 people that the strangers would be good to them, 
 and that they must learn to love and trust them 
 as they always had loved and trusted the "family" 
 of the chateau. 
 
 The strangers were good, as far as they knew 
 how to be, to the village people. 
 
 The village, at the end of the long avenue of lime 
 trees, was a gentle, sleepy, yeUow-brown place, with 
 cobbled streets, all tumbling down the hillside and 
 to the woods and the river. 
 
 The guardian's house at the gate was built in 
 what had been the ancient pigeon tower, so it was 
 a round, tall house, with a high-peaked blue roof. 
 
 The guardian's wife was young and pretty. 
 
 Ivonne loved her. When she came to the chateau 
 at six o'clock of the morning to light the cook's 
 fire, and when she left it at ten of the night, having 
 washed the servants' dinner dishes, she would al- 
 ways stop at the guardian's house to talk for a 
 minute with Madame Pierre. 
 
 One afternoon the butler had asked her to run 
 down to the post, in the Street of the Marble Quar- 
 ries, and change a fifty-franc note for him. 
 
 As she came back she stopped at the guardian's 
 house to show the gold pieces to Madame Pierre. 
 298 
 
The Big One and the P'tiot of Ivonne 
 
 "You know," she said, "at the end of the month 
 I will have for myself one big one like that," — she 
 held it in the grimy little brown palm of her left 
 hand and pointed with her right forefinger to one 
 of the two pieces of twenty francs, — "and a little 
 one like that," touching the ten-franc piece ador- 
 ingly, for it was that one she liked best, it was so 
 shining — "Un p'tiot eomme qa,." 
 
 She would have it, she told Madame Pierre, at 
 the end of the month. 
 
 But when the end of that month, that July, came, 
 there was no gold to be had. 
 
 The strangers were fleeing from the chateau 
 that they had no roots of tradition and race and 
 faith in, and there was only paper money for pay- 
 ing Ivonne. 
 
 They paid her five times her wages, and would 
 have wondered, if they had known of it, why a 
 little girl, through many days to come of terror 
 — when destruction wasted at noonday the land 
 of bright river and golden harvest fields, when 
 the chateau was a heap of ruins, and the village, 
 fought over, and again and again fought over, a 
 place of slaughter — should be such a childish little 
 girl as to mourn the gold shiaing of the big one 
 and the p 'tiot. 
 
 299 
 
Accidentals 
 
 The Kitchen Garden 
 
 Through all that strange sunmier the kitchen 
 garden was full of the iris that is the symbol of 
 France. The iris grew tall, purple and white 
 against the almost golden, sun-soaked, old stone 
 walls of the garden, and made proud, fragrant 
 walls of its own along all the paths, up and down, 
 behind the box edges. The garden beds were full 
 of homely things — ^lettuce and spinach and aspar- 
 agus and oseille, beans and peas standing up tall, 
 raspberries and strawberries fragrant in the sun. 
 Quantities of cuttings and bulbs and seed things, 
 being raised and nursed for the chateau, were set 
 out for shade or sunshine, as they needed, in rows 
 of beautifully old, dull-red, earthen pots. The 
 fruit trees trained against the wall traced lovely 
 patterns on it, and the shadows of the grape vines 
 were lovely on the old mossy stones of the pergola 
 floor. 
 
 One came to the potager by a long quite straight 
 path through the grove of beeches, where there 
 were always silvery lights and shadows, and where 
 there seemed to be always a little soft whispering 
 of wind. If one turned at the gate of the potager 
 and looked back along the path, one seemed always 
 to see sunshine on the steps of the terrace at the 
 300 
 
The Kitchen Garden 
 
 end, so golden was the old stone, and on the beauti- 
 ful balustrade, where heliotrope and begonia 
 climbed, and the peacocks spread their tails. 
 
 The gardener's house, just inside the gate, was a 
 very old house with beautifully worn tile roofs 
 and stained walls, and exquisite travel of moss and 
 vine upon it. The two steps down from it into 
 the garden were worn all soft and mellow, and 
 were stained with moss. 
 
 In that summer, when the garden was especially 
 full of purple iris, the mother of Seguin, the 
 gardener, would sit the days through at the door 
 of the house, waiting for something that was to 
 happen. The oldest child of the gardener ' would 
 come out to sit on the step beside her. Margot was 
 a very busy little girl, who helped her mother in 
 the house, and had a little brother and sister to take 
 care of, but that summer she found much time to 
 sit on the doorstep beside her grandmother in the 
 sunshine, waiting for the something which was to 
 happen. 
 
 It would be wonderfully still in the garden. The 
 old woman and the little girl would sit so still that 
 the lithe, quick, gold-eyed lizards, and the crickets 
 with exquisite little black and gold Japanese de- 
 signs on their backs, stayed motionless there too on 
 the doorstep in the sunshine. 
 
 The gardener and the garden boy would be 
 301 
 
Accidentals 
 
 going about their work, and the sounds of their 
 work, of the spade in the earth and the rake, and 
 the knife on the twig, were part of the stillness, 
 acutely; and their voices, as they called to one 
 another, seemed to deepen the hush that was laid, 
 heavy and thick, upon the garden. 
 
 The yellow dog, stretched to a surprising length 
 on the doorstep, would sleep all the day, for he 
 was a very old yellow dog. 
 
 Margot would be sitting with her doll in her 
 arms. The doll was named sometimes Melusine, 
 because of the fairy, and sometimes Jeanne, be- 
 cause of Sainte Jeanne d'Arc, whom Margot loved. 
 
 One day, it was the 31st of July, 1914 — the 
 Friday — ^Margot, rocking the doll Sainte Jeanne 
 d'Arc, was all day repeating over the canticles she 
 was to sing on Sunday in church before all the 
 world and the family from the chateau, at the 
 grand fete for benediction of the harvest. "Merci, 
 mon Dieu, c'est pour notre recolte que nous vous 
 prions au pied de cet autel — ^nos pr6s, nos 
 champs " 
 
 The harvest was golden in the fields of the valley. 
 The especially red, strange sunshine of that summer 
 found reflection in the burnished gold of the fields, 
 as if in a mirror, almost. The strange red sunsets 
 seemed to fill the world with blood. 
 
 "Nos pres, nos champs," sang little Margot in 
 302 
 
The Kitchen Garden 
 
 the kitchen garden that last sunset. The grand- 
 mother beside her sat nodding, and kept murmur- 
 ing after her, as if the words had great importance, 
 "Nos pres, nos champs." 
 
 Neither of them understood what it was that 
 the men of the village talked of, gathering in groups 
 in the market-place. It was five days since, on the 
 Sunday, Louis Crety had sold every one of the 
 Paris papers by the time Mass was over. "Wars 
 and rumours of war, and nation to rise against 
 nation, but what did these things mean to an old 
 woman and a little girl with a doll in a kitchen 
 garden ? 
 
 The sunset shone red on the little polished backs 
 of the crickets and in the water of the fountain, 
 that was drifted over with the white duck's 
 feathers. 
 
 At dusk the mother of Margot came to stand in 
 the doorway. She had the smallest baby in her 
 arms. She did not talk, as she usually did, with 
 Margot or the old grandmother. 
 
 When her husband came up from the garden and 
 stopped, lounging with his pipe in the doorway, 
 she moved over so close to him that their elbows 
 touched as they stood. 
 
 She said, "They took note of everything, the 
 chateau motors, our horses, the number of guns, 
 the men's names?" 
 
 303 
 
Accidentals 
 
 He said, "Yes, dear." 
 
 Margot had never heard him call her mother 
 "dear" before. 
 
 That night there came through the village one 
 who read the proclamation of war. He went about 
 the village with a lantern, reading out, in a voice 
 like the cure's voice chanting in church, things 
 that at the time seemed unreal. 
 
 Margot, in the warm, soft night on the doorstep, 
 was still going over her canticle, "Nos pr6s, nos 
 champs." 
 
 The gardener went down to the village to follow 
 the herald who was reading his exhortation to war. 
 His old mother sat mumbling in her place at the 
 door. His wife stood at the door and listened to 
 the night voices of the garden, and to the voice of 
 the herald, crying of war, up and down the village 
 street under the garden walls, and to the voice of 
 her little eldest daughter repeating over her can- 
 ticle for Sunday. The nightingale of the rose gar- 
 den was singing, and the incense of the garden was 
 as a lifting up of hands at evening sacrifice ; the old 
 yellow dog on the doorstep thumped the floor with 
 a contented tail. 
 
 Margot sang about the fields and the harvest and 
 the altar. She thought she was to wear her new 
 white dress on Sunday and sing her songs proudly 
 304 
 
Girl Drinking Tears 
 
 in the church before all the world and the family 
 from the chateau. She thought the harvest was to 
 be of golden grain, and that God would bless it. 
 
 Girl Drinking Tears 
 
 Early August, 1914. When she wanted to cry, 
 in those days of his leaving, she learned that if she 
 held her head up very high the tears that were in 
 her eyes, but that she must not let fall, would flow 
 back; she would feel them hot in her throat, and 
 she would drink them. How they hurt in her 
 throat! They hurt in her eyes. She would open 
 her eyes very wide and the tears would scald them, 
 but not fall. The tears scalded her eyes and her 
 throat as she drank them. When they dined to- 
 gether that last time, she would take up her glass 
 and let the water, that was cool and sweet, drown 
 down the hot and bitter tears as they choked her, 
 scalding her throat. She could open her eyes very 
 wide, staring, stupid, wide, over the rim of her 
 glass, that he might not have to grieve because of 
 tears in them. Because she understood war as he 
 could not understand it. 
 
 30s 
 
Accidentals 
 
 Girl with Handbag 
 
 Deuxieme jour de la mobilisation. It was in 
 those days that the last classes went, the young 
 men and boys. They went off laughing, "AUer et 
 retour pour Berlin." They had, most of them, to 
 walk to the railway stations, because motors and 
 buses and carts and taxi-cabs all belonged to the 
 war. 
 
 The streets were full of boys carrying bundles. 
 The women were helping them. None of the 
 women cried as they helped their boys oif. One 
 saw them laughing over the joke of it. They 
 laughed as they helped with the bundles. 
 
 How lovely Paris was in the soft, veiled sun- 
 shine, and how its women laughed as they helped 
 their boys go off to the war. 
 
 But as they came home from seeing their boys 
 off, they no more laughed. 
 
 Claude especially remembered a woman coming 
 home in the late afternoon along the Cours de la 
 Eeine, a young woman, crying and crying. The 
 tears streamed down her young face. Her face 
 was pretty, but she had no thought of wiping away 
 the tears that streamed down. She walked blindly, 
 306 
 
Leur fils Andre 
 
 straight ahead. Claude told me that she carried a 
 little black handbag, and that she swung it as she 
 walked. Her arm along her side swung and swung 
 the little black bag. I do not know why it was 
 especially sad, her swinging and swinging of the 
 little black bag, as she walked and cried. 
 
 Leur fils Andr6 
 
 Thet were terribly happy. She knew that such 
 happiness as theirs was a terrible thing. Some- 
 times it seemed to her that she could not bear it. 
 
 Once she said to him, "Something will have to 
 happen." 
 
 They were walking in the soft June twilight 
 along the Boulevard Montparnasse. 
 
 When he got home from his work at the bank 
 he would always make her come out and walk a 
 little. She would have been all the day at the 
 shady window that looked on the Square du Croisic, 
 dreaming, and making things for their son Andr6. 
 Their son Andre was to be born after the middle of 
 July. His coming was to make their happiness a 
 thing high beyond all touch of thought. 
 
 That night, as she walked with Xavier in the 
 307 
 
Accidentals 
 
 twiliglit along the Boulevard Montpamasse, she 
 was looking up to a happiness so high that clouds 
 hid it, and she felt it could not be. 
 
 She said, "Something will have to happen," 
 and then wished she had not said it, Xavier's tired, 
 happy eyes filled suddenly with such pain and 
 fear. 
 
 "Oh, I just mean that the world will come to 
 an end," she said, laughing, "that it will all have 
 to float off into rainbows and become part of heaven, 
 because, lovely as it is, it is not lovely enough to 
 hold our son Andre." 
 
 She slipped her hand through Xavier's arm and 
 they laughed together, and went to Lavenue's and 
 had each a green menthe in the twilight at a terrace 
 table, while the lamps of Paris shone out. 
 
 She was to remember that green menthe always 
 and always. They had been so happy as they 
 sipped it. 
 
 That was the 15th of June, She was always 
 to remember the date, because it was the day after 
 that that he began his pilgrimage to the church of 
 Notre Dame des Victoires. 
 
 He would start every morning at six, because it 
 was long to walk across Paris, and he must be at 
 the bank at 8.30, and he wanted to have time to 
 pray very much in the church for the future of 
 their son Andre. 
 
 308 
 
Leur fils Andre 
 
 The little AndrS Marie Jean d'Audiene was born 
 on the Sunday, 11th July of this year 1914. He 
 was the ehUd of a fine old race, that kept its fineness 
 through loss of everything else. 
 
 Pernande was very ill. She would not have a 
 doctor, because it would have cost so much, and 
 the sage-femme did not take care of her especially 
 well. But she did not die, and the boy was beauti- 
 ful — their son Andre; and above the clouds she 
 floated in golden spaces few people even know of. 
 
 Xavier's mother came, a gentle, exquisite old 
 lady, always burdened by her fallen fortunes and 
 past greatness, too confused to complain, quite help- 
 less and very sweet. 
 
 She sat with Fernande in the room over the 
 Square du Croisic, and was troubled vaguely be- 
 cause the little Andr6 did not have fine laces and 
 gold and ivory toys as his father had had. She 
 missed for him the huge, dark, old room of the 
 Brittany chateau, where now strangers lived, and 
 grieved for it gently. 
 
 But Fernande and Xavier had no grief for any- 
 thing. She was glad to have suffered so much, it 
 was like having passed through fire and coming out 
 with every sense exquisitely, marvellously, refined 
 and purified. She felt all the little fine lines and 
 colours of happiness. There were a myriad hap- 
 pinesses, rare and clear. She was conscious of each 
 309 
 
Accidentals 
 
 one, separately and especially, some very small and 
 some very great, and all of them beautiful. Hap- 
 pinesses came crowding to her, the more closely 
 when she was the more ill. All the little subtle 
 wonderful happinesses of her life came to her ; she 
 saw them, and felt that they were hers, and touched 
 them. 
 
 To Xavier came the ecstasy of worship. He wor- 
 shipped her with the baby in her arms, and knew 
 that the Madonna was not jealous of his worship. 
 He knew that Our Lady of Victory, holding in her 
 arms the King of Kings, saw and understood and 
 was glad. 
 
 There were two weeks that were happy, every 
 day, from morning till night and from night till 
 morning. 
 
 The day, the Sunday, that their son Andr6 was 
 two weeks old, Xavier was troubled by a thing he 
 noticed in the Matin, as he glanced through it, 
 sitting by Fernande after his coffee and crescent 
 roll. For days he had scarcely read the papers. 
 Even that morning he did not at all take in what 
 the thing meant. It could not be. He had a mo- 
 ment's dreadful sight of it, as he sat there by Fer- 
 nande, and then he turned away from it. He did 
 not speak of it to her. 
 
 Next day, Monday, it seemed more than ever 
 that it could not be. He read the Matin in the 
 310 
 
Leur fils Andre 
 
 metro on his way to the bank, and came home in 
 the evening humming a thing that he did not 
 realise was the "Marseillaise." 
 
 Tuesday, "Wednesday, Thursday — one could not 
 believe it, but one knew it. One felt it. It was 
 coming. The air was thick and dark with it. It 
 closed down, and pressed in, and gripped and 
 tightened. 
 
 He went on with his work in the bank. He had 
 done his three years' service in the artillery. If it 
 were to be, he would be called out on the third day. 
 
 Friday — Friday, 31st July — Fernande said to 
 him when he came home that night, "I've discov- 
 ered such a nice thing. You see I've had the tall 
 mirror moved over there opposite the bed, and 
 from the bed I can see the window in it, and the 
 corner of the Square by the gate. And if you will 
 go over to that corner as you start out in the morn- 
 ings, and stand there and wave to me, I can see 
 you from here in the bed. You'll not see me, but 
 I'll see you, and you must do that every morning, 
 Xavier." It had worried her, since she was ill, 
 that she could not go to the window, as she always 
 had, and see him off. She said, "You must go there 
 every morning — every morning." 
 
 And he thought, "How many mornings?" 
 
 So next morning, Saturday, as he went, he 
 stopped on the corner by the gate and waved to 
 3" 
 
Accidentals 
 
 Fernande, where she lay with their son Andr6 up 
 in the shabby room. 
 
 Saturday, and it was come. 
 
 The little man in the bank had it written in hiis 
 livret to go out on the third day. He could not tell 
 the mother of their son Andr^. 
 
 Sunday she heard the declaration of war cried in 
 the Boulevard outside the gates of the Square. 
 
 Sunday — ^that day their boy was three weeks 
 old. 
 
 Fernande was happy in the morning, and he 
 made her think he was happy too, while he was 
 wondering how to tell her. He had no need to 
 tell her — she heard it cried in the street. 
 
 All afternoon the people in the Boulevard Mont- 
 pamasse, tramping up and down, set their feet to 
 the time of marching and sang the "Marseillaise." 
 
 Fernande knew just what it meant, but she was 
 very quiet. 
 
 Xavier sat all day by her and held her hand. 
 
 His mother cried very much but very quietly. 
 She said that he would go away and die, and that 
 Fernande would be ill and not able to nurse little 
 Andre, and he would die, and then Fernanda 
 would die, and she, the old lady, would be left all 
 alone. 
 
 Fernande knew that she must be quiet, or it 
 would harm Andre. 
 
 312 
 
Leur fils Andre 
 
 She knew just what war meant. Xavier did not 
 know what war meant as she knew. Something 
 relentless made her see it. She saw it in smoke 
 and flame, marching of thousands upon thousands, 
 alien feet on one 's dear roads. She saw the roads, 
 poplar bordered, in sunshine, black with enemy 
 hosts, and the fields where the golden harvest was 
 trodden, and there was taken a harvest of death. 
 She heard cannon, and galloping horses, and cries. 
 Something pitiless made her hear the cries of 
 horses and of women and little children — ^babies 
 like Andr4. She saw dead men in the fields. They 
 looked very strange. They seemed to be melted into 
 the earth they had come from. She saw magpies 
 in the roads that were rutted by passing of guns, 
 and heard larks siaging over fields stained with 
 blood. And she saw her Xavier go away. She did 
 not see anything for him beyond his going. In the 
 battles she saw, she did not see him. She did not 
 find him among the dead men in the fields — she 
 only saw him going. She saw him go out of the 
 door of the shabby room. And then she saw him 
 in the mirror, where he could stand to wave to her, 
 over in the corner by the gate. He could not see 
 her from there, and she could not get up to go to 
 the window and wave him off. Because of their son 
 Andr4 she would have to let him go like that — go, 
 to what? 
 
 313 
 
Accidentals 
 
 That night he cried terribly, alone in the poor 
 little sitting-room where he had been sleeping on a 
 sofa since Fernande was ill. 
 
 The next day, Monday, he must do so many 
 things. He must arrange everything for her and 
 for his mother. He must try to pretend to them 
 that he did not think it would be for long. He 
 must do everything with a half-jesting air, as 
 though soon he'd be back and laughing at it. It 
 was dreadful, that part of it, trying to arrange that 
 the two women might have something on which to 
 live. 
 
 Fernande was not troubled at all about what 
 they were to do, his mother and she, but only about 
 his having to get some sort of a kit together — 
 two pairs of boots, food for twenty-four hours, a 
 grey blanket. 
 
 Monday, 3rd August 1914, 5« jour de la mohilisa- 
 tion. Fernande did not have to see the women's 
 faces in the streets that day. Perhaps it was better 
 for her- to be spared that, or perhaps she might 
 have got a sympathy from it, some sense of the 
 being in sorrow together of the women of the world. 
 
 The night of Monday, the last night. They 
 neither of them dared to word anything. After- 
 wards, what she remembered of it was that she 
 had told him he was a messy, clumsy boy because 
 he knocked over the vase of yellow roses he had 
 314 
 
Leur JBls Andre 
 
 brought her home when he came in on Tuesday 
 night — and he had said she was an old fuss, — ^they 
 had quite quarrelled. She was so glad afterwards 
 that they had said really quite cross things to 
 each other. Otherwise how could they have 
 borne it? 
 
 Tuesday, 4th August. He had to be at the Gare 
 de Lyon at ten o'clock. The m6tro was not run- 
 ning, or any trams or buses. He would have to 
 walk. He must leave the Square du Croisic at 
 least at seven. 
 
 The maid-of -all-work came in time to make his 
 coffee. She was crying. The sage-femme, with 
 her hair in bigoudis, came crying also to say good- 
 bye to him. His mother cried quietly in her pur- 
 ple wrapper. 
 
 Fernande did not cry at all. She made him 
 promise to sew his medal of Notre Dame des 
 Victoires in the breast pocket of his uniform, and 
 to eat enough, and not to take cold. And then she 
 laughed and hugged him, and hugged him, and told 
 him that now he'd have to stand up straight, he 
 was no more a banker's clerk who might hunch 
 his shoulders, but a soldier of France. She made 
 him take the other croissant with him in his pocket, 
 and when he kissed their son Andre she shut her 
 
 Her hands were cold as ice in his hands when he 
 31S 
 
Accidentals 
 
 kissed her the last time, and she kept her eyes 
 shut. 
 
 "I won't see you go out of the door," she said, 
 speaking with difiBculty, in a thick, heavy sort of 
 way, "but when you are at the gate, go to the 
 comer and turn and wave, and I will see you." 
 
 Top of a Letter 
 
 Deuxieme jour de la mobilisation. I was writ- 
 ing a telegram in the bureau de poste, and a boy 
 of perhaps twenty years old was writing, labori- 
 ously, a letter on the shelf beside me before the 
 guichet. 
 
 It was the Monday, that terrible day when the 
 last classes went. 
 
 I did not mean to see, but I did see what the boy 
 had written at the top of the page. 
 
 He was a clumsy boy in the white blouse of a 
 mason. He wrote with great effort, his head on 
 one side, his tongue between his lips, his eyes 
 screwed up. His hand was not at all clean. 
 
 He had begun his letter, "Mon amour, je pars, 
 je t'^cris " 
 
 316 
 
"Demain nous serons au feu** 
 
 "Demain nous serons au feu" 
 
 Neuvi^me jour de la mobilisation. Her boy had 
 written, "Little Mother, don't worry, we are so gay. 
 In the train we were packed like sardines — ^how we 
 laughed ! We marched through wheatfields, and I 
 thought of you because of the poppies and bluets. 
 Quantities of partridges. In some woods we saw 
 a splendid stag. We men are all the best of friends. 
 We sing all the time. ' Sambre et Meuse' makes me 
 think of thee. My little Mother, — ^be proud of thy 
 son. When again thou seest him, he will be 
 marechal. ' ' The scrap of paper was in an envelope. 
 Across the flap of the envelope he had written — ^the 
 order must have come after he'd closed his letter, 
 and he was only nineteen, happy and proud — "To- 
 morrow we'U be under fire." 
 
 The Other Door 
 
 Quinzieme jour de la mobilisation. In the de- 
 serted Palace a door, closed, behind which, one 
 knew, passed something terrible. 
 
 A man, of hanging head, white face eaten all up 
 by a black beard, black eyes, haunted, took his place 
 on the bench of the accused. 
 317 
 
Accidentals 
 
 "Your name, age, profession, domicile?" asked 
 of him the colonel. 
 
 The man answered — ^never mind his name — 
 twenty-nine years, comptable, and the house, num- 
 ber, and the street; 
 
 The order of mis en jugement was read by the 
 grefiSer. He told how this man, on the third of 
 August, tried to sell to the enemy information. He 
 thought he was dealing with a spy. But it was 
 with a detective that he was dealing. 
 
 One can divine the rest. 
 
 It was quite right, inevitable, the decision of those 
 who listened to the reading of the pieces de forme. 
 
 A woman with red eyes and ravaged face was 
 hanging about the Porte du Conseil. 
 
 "Monsieur, c'est par la qu'il va sortir?" 
 
 Railway Station 
 
 Under the oil lamp, on the platform of the little 
 railway station, a table was laid out with bandages 
 and dressings, and a couple of nurses waited. Be- 
 side the table was a barrow with wine and bread 
 and September fruit. 
 
 There was a full white moon that night; in the 
 light of it one could see, from the station platform, 
 318 
 
Railway Station 
 
 the shapes of the little, low, village houses, the 
 square church tower, the width of the fields, the 
 outlines of the hills far off. The odours of the 
 fields, and the autumn night stillness, came with 
 the moonlight into the little railway station where 
 the Red Cross nurses waited for the train of 
 wounded that would stop to take water there. 
 
 AH day, from the station one could have heard 
 the sound of cannon and could have seen the black 
 cloud of smoke that hung under the red sun above 
 the battle. 
 
 The train came in, its headlights gleaming in 
 the dark. It was composed of loose trucks fitted 
 with stretchers. It contained the first of the men 
 who had fallen in the battle of the day. 
 
 The train stopped. Those of the men who could 
 walk got out to help care for the more badly 
 wounded. 
 
 The cure had come to help. He worked with 
 zeal. 
 
 A soldier ran to him. One of the wounded was 
 dying there and then. 
 
 The cure went to him. 
 
 It was very strange in the white moonlight. 
 There was always the sound of cannon from under 
 the hills. One had come to know the different voices 
 of the cannon — ^the heavier tone of the German 
 guns, the sharper note of the French. 
 319 
 
Accidentals 
 
 There was only time for the cur6 to give hfs 
 blessing. 
 
 The wounded man's arms had been crossed on 
 his heart. They fell to his sides, and he was no 
 more breathing. 
 
 They carried his body to the van at the end of 
 the train. 
 
 The Sunshine of the Beginning 
 
 In those first days of the great war, Paris knew 
 a very special sort of sunlight. In August it was 
 like the sunlight of spring, the real beginning of 
 years and days, and it was so beautiful that it 
 seemed as if, each time, it was a thing that never 
 had been before. The sunshine had clear wide 
 spaces opened, left empty for it, because all the 
 false things that had clogged the way were gone. 
 None of those things counted any more. The leaves 
 were fallen in the Cour la Keine and the Champs 
 Elysees, and in all the gardens where children 
 played as they had used to play, — rwhen could it 
 have been? only just days ago? Had the children's 
 playing soldiers in the gardens meant nothing, only 
 just days ago ? Surely the mothers knitting in the 
 gardens had never, never, chattered of idle things ? 
 
 320