7s are es eve) * PRP RC RPM PSPS OS ei De BS Oat Marta ee anc e959 ae Ee A3 ie et KES Pea > “a ares AY rit d FOOT ee Ae ee re we — 2 + Late arash f vere: are Pgh hn enw Ant). => nthek ME ae . mee +f eet > neue 3.4 type tees - ee Pi U ews ee NEN eee 5 ah wl sae : Poth WL vee eter ae righ Bi) ie Caceree © totsls aipleitteteigistat ‘ Hoes eee ae * S = 5a : et ply . ms anh cre pach abe ¥ . F * > . a ¥ *% RAW MATERIAL BY THE SAME AUTHOR THE SQUIRREL-CAGE A MONTESSORI MOTHER MOTHERS AND CHILDREN THE BENT TWIG THE REAL MOTIVE FELLOW CAPTAINS (With Saran N. CLEGHORN) UNDERSTOOD BETSY HOME FIRES IN FRANCE THE DAY OF GLORY THE BRIMMING CUP ROUGH-HEWN RAW MATERIAL BY DOROTHY CANFIELD AD NEW YORK HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC. PRINTED IN THE U.S. A. BY The Quinn & Woden Companp BOOK MANUFACTURERS RAHWAY NEW JERSEY CONTENTS Raw MatTeERIAL Ay © WSS ne irene’ crete ata 9 UNCLE GILES . ; t : ‘ : : eee 1: “Wuat Gors Ur...” . . : i : as O_p MAN WARNER . j ; iy G0 Tue IpEAs oF M. Broparp . f : ‘ vag FarrRFAX HUNTER . ‘ ; ; " ’ er SEE Pucemeoes TAU, MIEVER 2° =... as aes © Deen wee Gonos. 6. LAs Beem aMe CARVES. 9 6 51 Se ee a a a OF CoLoNEL SHAYS.. Saari Ne ee ate os) A Great Love eats. 187 Pere as Dewann 197 UNCLE ELLIS. ; Pe att Gop’s CouUNTRY Peery ema vad es at SS poe SRS INHERITANCE .. : ’ g ; : a ee Tuirty YEARS AFTER. Pie “Tur OLp New ENGLAND sree? meee OcTOBER, 1918 . ee A Breton Amonc Hst Hsr . ; : ; {365 ann ne Rpt aati ALMERA ere Catwierp. . . 273 RAW MATERIAL ae ¥ 7. ’ \ V \ ‘ : 4 bd 4 \ RAW MATERIAL I pon’t know who is responsible for this rather odd book, but I lay it to the earlier generations of my family. My clergyman grandfather always said that he never enjoyed any sermons so much as the ones he preached to himself sitting under another clergyman’s pulpit. When the text was given out, his mind seized on it with a vivid fresh interest and, running rapidly away from the intrusive sound of the other preacher’s voice, wove a tissue of clear, strong, and fascinatingly interesting reasonings and exhortations. Grandfather used to say that such sermons preached to himself were in the nature of things much better than any he could ever deliver in church. “I don’t have to keep a wary eye out for stupid old Mrs. Ellsworth, who never under- stands anything light or fanciful; I don’t have to remember to thunder occasionally at stolid Mr. Peters to wake him up. I don’t have to remember to keep my voice raised so that deaf old Senator Peaseley can hear me. I am not obliged to hold the wandering attention of their muddled heads by a series of foolish little rhetorical tricks or by a pro- 9 10 RAW MATERIAL digious effort of my personality. I can just make my sermon what it ought to be.” My father, who did a great deal of public speak- ing, though not in pulpits, took up this habit in his turn. When a speaker began an address, he always fell into a trance-like condition, his eyes fixed stead- ily on the other orator, apparently giving him the most profound attention, but in reality making in his mind, on the theme suggested by the audible speaker, a fluent, impassioned address of his own. He used to say that he came to himself after one of these auto-addresses infinitely exhilarated and re- freshed by the experience of having been speaking to an audience which instantly caught his every point, and which, although entirely sympathetic, was stimulatingly quick to find the weak spots in his argument and eager to keep him up to his best. Afterwards he dreaded an ordinary audience with its limping comprehension, its wandering attention, its ill-timed laughter and applause. After I began to read for myself I found the same habit of mind familiar to many authors. The Stevensons walked up and down the porch at Sara- nac, talking at the tops of their voices, on fire with enthusiasm for their first conception of “The Wrecker.” There never was, there never could be RAW MATERIAL Il (so they found out afterwards) a story half so fine as that tale seemed to them in those glorious mo- ments when they saw it as they would have liked to make it. I nodded my head understandingly over this episode. Yes, that was what, in their plain way, my grandfather and father had done. I recognized the process. It was evidently a universal one. And — when in “Cousine Bette’ I encountered Wencelas Steinbock, I recognized him from afar. ‘To muse, to dream, to conceive of fine works, is a delightful occupation. The work then floats in all the grace of infancy, in the mad joy of conception, with the fragrant beauty of a flower, and the aromatic juice of a fruit enjoyed in anticipation.” And upon my own arrival in adult life it seemed quite the expected and natural thing to find my own fancy constantly occupied in this way. The stories I told myself were infinitely superior to anything I ever got down on paper. Just as my father had been the ideal audience for himself, so I was my own best reader, a reader who needed no long explanations, who caught the idea at once, who brought to the tale all the experience which made it intelligible. Two words with the grocer’s boy, delivering soap and canned salmon at the back door, and I was off, author and reader galloping along side by side, on a 12 RAW MATERIAL story which made not only my own written tales, but other people’s as well, seem clumsy, obvious, and wordy. A look on an old cousin’s face was to me— like a text to my grandfather—a springboard from which author and reader plunged simultaneously into the sea of human relationships, sensing in human life significances pitiful, exalted, profound, beyond anything that can be drawn out with the loose-meshed net of words. Did I sit idling in a railway station, my great-uncle, who died before I was born, stood there beside me, expounding his life to me with a precision, a daring abandon, a zest- ful ardor which would wither and fade if it were transferred to the pages of a book. At first I thought this habit of mind entirely uni- versal—as it is certainly the most natural one possi- ble; but in the course of much random talk about things in general, I have occasionally come across people whose eyes are too weak for the white bril- liance of reality, who can only see life through the printed page, which is a very opaque object. Such people—and they are often cultivated, university- bred—will say, quite as if they were uttering a tru- ism: “Of course characters in books—well-written books—are ever so much more interesting than men and women in real life.” RAW MATERIAL 13 They perceive the fateful mixture of beast and angel in the human face only in a portrait gallery; for them the birds sing, the winds sigh, and human hearts cry out, only at a symphony concert; they depend on books to give them faintly, dully, dimly, at third-hand, what lies before them every day, bright-colored, throbbing, and alive. It is a mental attitude hard for me to understand but it does exist. I have seen them turn away from a stern and noble tragedy in the life of their washerwoman, to the cheap sentimentality of a poor novel, which guaran- tees (as a fake dentist promises to fill teeth without pain) to provide tears without emotion. I have seen women who might have been playing with a baby, laughing at his inimitable funniness, leave him to a nurse and go out to enliven their minds by the con- templation of custard-pies smeared over the human countenance. We are so used to this phenomenon that it does not seem strange to us. But it is strange—strange and tragic. And I do not in the least believe that the tragedy is one of the inevitable ones. I think it is simply a bad habit which has grown up as the modern world has taken to reading. Why did the habit ever start? Naturally enough. Because the new medium of cheap printing let loose 14 RAW MATERIAL on the world the innate loquacity of writers, unre- pressed by the limitations of the human voice. Other people have not been able to hear themselves think since Gutenberg enabled writers to drown out the grave, silent, first-hand mental processes of people blessed by nature with taciturnity. The writer is not born (as is his boast) with more ca- pacity than other people for seeing color and interest and meaning in life; he is born merely with an ir- repressible desire to tell everybody what he sees and feels. We have been hypnotized by his formidable capacity for speech into thinking that he is the only human being on whom life makes an impression. This is not so. He is merely so made that he can- not rest till he has told everybody who will listen to him, the impression that life has made on him. This is the queer mainspring of creative literature. The writer cannot keep a shut mouth. To speak out seems to be the only useful thing he can do in life. And in its way it is a very useful occupation. But there is no reason why other people who have other useful things to do should miss the purity and vividness of a first-hand impression of life which they could enjoy without spoiling it, as an artist al- ways does, by his instant anxiety about how much of it he can carry off with him for his art, by his in- RAW MATERIAL 15 stant mental fumbling with technical means, by his anguished mental questions: ‘“‘What would be the best way to get that effect over in a book?” or ‘““How could you convey that impression in a dialogue?” It is a dog’s life, believe me, this absurd, preten- tious carrying about of your little literary yardstick and holding it up against the magnificent hugeness of the world. I cannot believe that it is necessary to have that yardstick in hand before seeing the hugeness which it can never measure. One proof that it is not necessary is the fact that artists enjoy the raw materials of arts which they do not practise, much more freely and light-heartedly than the raw material of their own. I love the materials from which painters make pictures and musicians make music vastly more than the materials from which novelists make novels, because I feel no responsibil- ity about them, because I know that they do not mean for me a struggle, foredoomed to failure, to get them down on canvas or between the five lines of the musical staff. Do I seem to be advocating a habit of mind which would put an end to the writing of novels alto- gether? Personally I do not believe that the foun- dations of the world would move by a hair if that end were brought about. But, as a matter of fact, I 16 RAW MATERIAL do not in the least think that novel-writing would be anything but immensely benefited by a reading pub- lic which had acquired its own eyesight and did not depend on the writer’s. Such a body of creative- minded readers would lift the art of fiction up to levels we have none of us conceived. With such a public of trained, practised observers, fiction could cast off the encumbering paraphernalia of explana- tions and photographs which now weigh it down. There need be no fear for the future of fiction if every one takes to being his own novelist. For then readers will not look in novels for what is never there, reality itself. They will look for what is the only thing that ought to be there, the impression which reality has made on the writer, and they will have an impression of their own with which to com- pare that of the writer. This will free the author forever from attempting the impossible, bricks-with- out-straw undertaking of trying to get life itself be- tween the covers of a book. For never, never can fiction hope to attain myriads of effects which life effortlessly puts over wherever we look, if we will only see what is there. If we leave those inimitable natural effects of beauty, or fun, or tragedy, or farce entirely for the professional writer to see and enjoy and ponder on, we are show- RAW MATERIAL YW ing the same sort of passive, closed imaginations which lead Persians to sit obesely at ease on cush- ions, and watch professional dancers have all the fun of dancing. The phrase which we traditionally ascribe to them is this, “Why bother to dance your- selves, when you can hire somebody to do it much better?” But that is our own unspoken phrase about the raw material of art and its monopoly by the professional artist. We Westerners dance, ourselves, not because we have any notion that we can dance better than the professionals, but because we have discovered by experience that to dance gives us a very different sort of pleasure from that given by looking at professionals. We have also discov- ered that it does not at all prevent us from hiring professionals and enjoying them as much as any Persians. It is for the active-minded people who enjoy doing their own thinking as well as watching the author do his, that I have put this volume together. When life speaks to them, their hearts answer, as a friend to a friend. They are my brothers and my sisters. They practise the delight-giving art of being their own authors. They know the familiar, exquisite in- terest of trying to arrange in coherence the raw material which life constantly washes up to every 18 RAW MATERIAL one in great flooding masses. And they do this for their own high pleasure, with no idea of profiting by it in the eyes of the world. They work to create order out of chaos with a single-hearted effort, im- possible to poor authors, tortured by the aching need to get the results of their efforts into words in- telligible to others. Being useful in other ways to the world, it is quite permissible for them to indulge in what was perni- cious self-indulgence for an artist like Wencelas Steinbock. They are good children who, having nourished themselves on the substantial food of use- ful work, may eat candy without risking indigestion. The artist’s work is the fatiguing attempt to trans- form the wonder of life into art! Those other dis- interested observers of life, those wise, deeply pon- dering, far-seeing men and women, driven by their own need to make something understandable out of our tangled life, struggle, just as the artist does, to piece together what they see into intelligible order. But they do this in their own hearts, for their own satisfaction. How singularly free-handed and open- hearted and generous their attitude seems, compared to the artist’s frugal, not to say penurious, not to say avaricious, anxiety to utilize every scrap of his life as raw material for his art. RAW MATERIAL 19 Such people have, as the reward for their disin- terested attitude of mind, all the pleasures of the creative artist’s life and none of its terrible pains. All the pleasure, that is, except the dubious one of seeing themselves in print. This is—for me at least —a, pleasure deeply colored with humiliation. The stuff which I manage to get into a printed book is so tragically dry and lifeless compared to the vi- brating, ordered, succulent life which goes on in- side my head before I put pen to paper! For my part, I envy the clever, happy people who are con- tent to let it stay in their heads, and never try to decant it into a book, only to find that the bouquet and aroma are all gone. I quite sympathize with them when they are impatient with the verbose literal-minded garrulity with which most writers of fiction spread out clumsily over two pages that which takes but a flash to think or to feel. They think, and quite rightly, that what is slowly written out in the inaccurate, halting system we call language, bears little relation to the arrow-swift movements of the thinking mind and feeling heart. That which is written down in an attempt to make it intelligible to everybody is a rude approximation like that of ready-made clothing, manufactured to fit every one somewhat and no one exactly. That 20 RAW MATERIAL which springs into being in the brain at a contact with life, exactly fits the comprehension, back- ground, and experience of the person who owns the brain. There are no waste motions, no paragraphs to skip, no compressions too bare, no descriptions too wordy, none of those sore, never-solved prob- lems of the writer who addresses unknown readers, “How much can I leave out? How far can I sug- gest and not state? How far can I trust the read- er’s attention not to flag, his intelligence to under- stand at a hint, rather than at a statement? What experience of life can I presuppose him to have hade”’ When you are your own author, you know all about your reader, and need never think of his limitations. He is faithful to you, flies lightly when you rise into the air, plods steadily beside you at your own pace as you slowly work your way into unfamiliar country, flashes back into the past and selects exactly what is needed from his experience, sinks with you into a golden haze of contemplation over some surprising or puzzling phenomenon, is in no nagging hurry to “get on with the story.” After some experience of such a marriage of author and reader, don’t you find it hard to put up with the fumbling guesswork of a printed book? RAW MATERIAL 21 And yet here I have written another book? No, this is not a written book in the usual sense. It is a book where nearly everything is left for the reader to do. I have only set down in it, just as if I were noting them down for my own use, a score of in- stances out of human life, which have long served me as pegs on which to hang the meditations of many different moods. Note well that I have not set down those medita- tions . . . or at most—for the flesh is weak!—only here and there a trace of them. But if I have occa- sionally back-slid from the strait neutral path of sacred Objectivity, at least let me here and now warn you to ignore whatever moralizings of mine have escaped excision. Pay no attention to them, if you run across one or two. I know for a certainty that my musings about the men and women who were the originals of these portraits would not serve you as they do me. I know you can make for your- selves infinitely better ones. I know that what you will do for yourselves will be like the living lace- work of many-colored sea-weed floating free and quivering in quiet sunlit pools; and that what I could get down in a book would be a poor little faded collection of stiff dead tendrils, pasted on blot- ting paper. 22 RAW MATERIAL In this unrelated, unorganized bundle of facts, I give you just the sort of thing from which a novelist makes principal or secondary characters, or episodes in a novel. I offer them to you for the novels you are writing inside your own heads, be- fore I have spoiled them by the additions, cuttings, stretchings, or twistings necessary to make them fit into the fabric of a book. I give them to you, rounded and whole, just as they happened, without filing and smoothing truth down to the limits of pos- sibility as all fiction-writers are forced to do. I spare you all the long-winded conventional devices, descriptions, transitions, exposition, eloquent pas- sages and the like, by which writers try to divert the minds of their readers from the inherent im- probability of their stories, devices which, to the suspicious mind, resemble the patter of thimblerig- gers at a county fair. You know as well as I how inherently improbable life is. Why pretend that it is not? I have treated you just as though you were that other self in me who is my best reader. I have given you the fare I like best. And I have faith to believe that you will enjoy for once being able to move about in a book without a clutter of explanations and sign-boards to show you the road the author wishes you to take. I do RAW MATERIAL 23 not wish you to take any road in particular, and rather hope you will try a good many different ones, as I do. I have only tried to loan you a little more to add to the raw material which life has brought you, out of which you are constructing your own at- tempt to understand. I am only handing you from my shelves a few more curiosities to set among the oddities you have already collected, and which from time to time you take down as I do mine, turning them around in your hands, poring over them with a smile, or a somber gaze, or a puzzled look of surprise. UNCLE GILES THERE are few personalities which survive the blurring, dimming results of being the subject of family talk through several generations; but the personality of my Great-Uncle Giles has suffered no partial obliteration. It has come down to us with outlines keen and sharply etched into the family consciousness by the acid of exact recollection. This is not at all because Uncle Giles ever dis- graced the family or did any evil or wicked action. Quite the contrary! Uncle Giles thought that he was the only member of the entire tribe with any fineness or distinction of feeling, with any fitness for a higher sphere of activities than the grubby middle-class world of his kinsmen. Yes, that 1s what Uncle Giles thought, probably adding to him- self that he often felt that he was a “gentleman among canaille.” To this day the family bristles rise at the mention of any one who openly professes to be a gentleman. A gentleman should not be forced to the menial task of earning his living. Uncle Giles was never forced to the menial task of earning his living. 25 26 RAW MATERIAL None of the coarsely materialistic forces in human life ever succeeded in forcing him to it, not even the combined and violent efforts of a good many able-bodied and energetic kinspeople. The tales of how Uncle Giles blandly outwitted their stub- fingered attacks on his liberty and succeeded to the end of a very long life in living without work are endless in number and infinite in variety; and for three generations now have wrought the members of our family to wrath and laughter. He was in- credible. You can’t imagine anything like him. Unless you have had him in your family too. For many years Uncle Giles was “preparing for the ministry.” These were the candid years when his people did not know him so well as later, and still believed that with a little more help Giles would be able to get on his feet. He was a great favorite in the Theological Seminary. where he was a student for so long, a handsome well-set-up blond young man, with beautiful large blue eyes. I know just how he looked, for we have an expensive minia- ture of him that was painted at the time. He paid for that miniature with the money my great-grand- father pried out of a Vermont farm. It had been sent to pay for his board. You can’t abandon a son just on the point of becoming a clergyman and being UNCLE GILES 27 a credit to the entire family. Great-grandfather himself had no more money to send at that time, but his other sons, hard-working, energetic, success- ful men, clubbed together and made up the amount necessary to settle that board-bill. Uncle Giles thanked them and forwarded with his letter, to show them, in his own phrase, “that their bounty was not ill-advised,” a beautifully bound, high- priced, little red morocco note-book in which he had written down the flattering things said of him by his professors and others—especially others. He underlined certain passages, thus: “. . . a very worthy young man, most pleasing in society.” “A model to all im the decorum and grace of his man- ners.” His board bill had to be paid a good many times before Uncle Giles finally gave up preparing him- self for the ministry. The summer vacations of this period he spent in visiting first one and then an- other member of the family, a first-rate ornament on the front porch and at the table, admired by the ladies of the neighborhood, a prime favorite on picnics and on the croquet ground. He always seemed to have dropped from a higher world into the rough middle-class existence of his kin, but his courtesy was so exquisite that he refrained from 28 RAW MATERIAL commenting on this in any way. Still you could see that he felt it. Especially if you were one of the well-to-do neighbors on whom the distinguished young theological student paid evening calls, you admired his quiet tact and his steady loyalty to his commonplace family. The effect which his quiet tact and steady loyalty had on his commonplace family was so great that it has persisted undiminished to this day. Any one of us, to the remotest cousin, can spot an Uncle Giles as far as we can see him. We know all about him, and it is not on our front porches that he comes to display his tact and loyalty, and the decorum and grace of his manners. As for allowing the faintest trace of Uncle-Gilesism to color our own lives, there is not one of us who would not rush out to earn his living by breaking stone by the road-side rather than accept even the most genuinely voluntary loan. We are, as Uncle Giles felt, a very commonplace family, of the most ordinary Anglo-Saxon stock, with no illuminating vein of imaginative Irish or Scotch or Welsh blood; and I think it very likely that if we had not experienced Uncle Giles we would have been the stodgiest of the stodgy as far as so- cial injustice is concerned. But our imaginations seem to have been torn open by Uncle Giles as by UNCLE GILES 29 a charge of dynamite; and, having once understood what he meant, we hang to that comprehension with all our dull Anglo-Saxon tenacity. We have a deep, unfailing sympathy with any one who is trying to secure a better and fairer adjustment of burdens in human life, because we see in our plain dull way that what he is trying to do is to eliminate the Uncle Gileses from society and force them to work. And we are always uneasily trying to make sure that we are not in the bigger scheme, without realizing it, Uncle Gilesing it ourselves. After a while Uncle Giles stopped preparing for the ministry and became an invalid. He bore this affliction with the unaffected manly courage which was always one of his marked characteristics. He never complained: he “‘bore up” in all circumstances; even on busy wash-days when there was no time to prepare one of the dainty little dishes which the delicacy of his taste enabled him so greatly to ap- preciate. Uncle Giles always said of the rude, vig- orous, hearty, undiscriminating men of the family, that they could “eat anything.” His accent in say- ing this was the wistful one of resigned envy of their health. It has been a point of honor with us all, ever since, to be able to “eat anything.” Any one, even a 30 RAW MATERIAL legitimate invalid, who is inclined to be fastidious and make it difficult for the others, feels a united family glare concentrating on him, which makes him, in a panic, reach out eagerly for the boiled pork and cabbage. Uncle Giles’s was a singular case, “one of those mysterious maladies which baffle even the wisest physicians,” as he used to say himself. A good many ladies in those days had mysterious maladies which baffled even the wisest physicians, and they used to enjoy Uncle Giles above everything. No other man had such an understanding of their symp- toms and such sympathy for their sufferings. The easy chair beside Uncle Giles’s invalid couch was seldom vacant. Ladies going away after having left a vaseful of flowers for him, and a plateful of cake, and two or three jars of jelly, and some cold breasts of chicken, would say with shining, exalted countenances, “In spite of his terrible trials, what an inspiration our friend can be! An hour with that good man is like an hour on Pisgah.” They would, as like as not, make such a remark to the brave invalid’s brother or cousin (or, in later years, nephew) who was earning the money to keep the household going. I am afraid we are no longer as a family very sure what or where Pisgah is, al- UNCLE GILES 31 though we know it is in the Bible somewhere, but there is a fierce family tradition against fussing over your health which is as vivid this minute as on the day when the brother or cousin or nephew of Uncle Giles turned away with discourteous haste from the shining-faced lady and stamped rudely into another room. Doctors enter our homes for a broken leg or for a confinement, but seldom for any- thing else. When the Civil War came on, and Uncle Giles ‘was the only man in the family left at home, he rose splendidly to the occasion and devoted himself to the instruction of his kinswomen, ignorant of the technique of warfare. From his invalid couch he ex- plained to them the strategy of the great battles in which their brothers and husbands and fathers were fighting; and when the letters from hospital came with news of the wounded, who but Uncle Giles was competent to understand and explain the symptoms reported. As a rule the women of his family were too frantically busy with their Martha-like concen- tration on the mere material problems of wartime life to give these lucid and intellectual discussions of strategy the attention and consideration they de- served. The war, however, though it seemed end- less, lasted after all but four years. And when it 32 RAW MATERIAL was over, Uncle Giles was free to go back to discus- sions more congenial to his literary and esthetic tastes. By this time he was past middle-age, “a butterfly broken on the wheel of life,” as he said; it was of course out of the question to expect him to think of earning his own living. He had become a family tradition by that time, too, firmly embedded in the solidly set cement of family habits. The older gen- eration always had taken care of him, the younger saw no way out, and with an unsurprised resigna- tion bent their shoulders to carry on. So, before any other plans could be made, Uncle Giles had to be thought of. Vacations were taken seriatim not to leave Uncle Giles alone. In buying or building a house, care had to be taken to have a room suitable for Uncle Giles when it was your turn to entertain him. If the children had measles, one of the first things to do was to get Uncle Giles into some other home so that he would not be quarantined. That strange law of family life which ordains that the person most difficult to please is always, in the long run, the one to please whom most efforts are made, worked out in its usual complete detail. The dishes Uncle Giles liked were the only ones served (since other men could “eat anything”); the songs Uncle UNCLE GILES 33 Giles liked were the only ones sung; the houses were adjusted to him; the very color of the rugs and the pictures on the walls were selected to suit Uncle Giles’s fine and exacting taste. Looking back, through the perspective of a gen- eration-and-a-half, I can see the exact point of safely acknowledged middle-age when Uncle Giles’s health began cautiously to improve; but it must have been imperceptible to those around him, so gradual was the change. His kin grew used to each successive stage of his recovery before they realized it was there, and nobody seems to have been surprised to have Uncle Giles pass into a remarkably hale and vigorous old age. “Invalids often are strong in their later years,” he said of himself. “It is God’s compensation for their earlier sufferings.” He passed into the full rewards of the most re- _ warded old age. It was a period of apotheosis for him, and a very lengthy one at that, for he lived to be well past eighty. In any gathering Uncle Giles, erect and handsome, specklessly attired, his smooth old face neatly shaved, with a quaint, gentle, old- world courtesy and protecting chivalry in his man- ner to ladies, was a conspicuous and much-admired figure. People brought their visitors to call on him, 34 RAW MATERIAL and to hear him tell in his vivid, animated way of old times in the country. His great specialty was the Civil War. At any gathering where veterans of the War were to be honored, Uncle Giles held every one breathless with his descriptions of Gettysburg and Chancellorsville; and when he spoke of Mobile Bay and Sherman’s march, how his voice pealed, how his fine eyes lighted up! Strangers used to say to themselves that it was easy to see what an elo- quent preacher he must have been when he was in the active ministry. The glum old men in worn blue coats used to gather in a knot in the farthest corner, and in low tones, not to interrupt his discourse, would chat to each other of crops, fishing, and poli- tics. Somewhere we have a scrapbook in which an ironic cousin of mine carefully pasted in all the newspaper articles that were written about Uncle Giles in his old age, and the many handsome obitu- ary notices which appeared when he finally died. I can remember my father’s getting it out occasionally, and reading the clippings to himself with a very grim expression on his face; but it always moved my light-hearted, fun-loving mother to peals of laughter. After all, she was related to Uncle Giles only by marriage and felt no responsibility for him. UNCLE GILES 35 The other day, in looking over some old legal papers, I came across a yellowed letter, folded and sealed (as was the habit before envelopes were com- mon) with three handsome pale-blue seals on its back. The seals were made with the crested cameo ring which Uncle Giles always wore, bearing what he insisted was the “coat of arms” of our family. The handwriting of the letter was beautiful, formed with an amorous pride in every letter. It was from Uncle Giles to one of his uncles, my great- grandfather’s brother. It had lain there lost for half a century or more, and of course I had never seen it before; but every word of it was familiar to me as I glanced it over. It began in a manner char- acteristic of Uncle Giles’s polished courtesy, with inquiries after every member of his uncle’s family, and a pleasant word for each one. He then detailed the state of his health, which, alas, left much to be desired, and seemed, so the doctors told him, to re- quire urgently a summer in the mountains. Leav- ing this subject, he jumped to the local news of the town where he was then living, and told one or two amusing stories. In one of them I remember was this phrase, “I told her I might be poor, but that a gentleman of good birth did not recognize poverty as a member of the family.” Through a neat transi- 36 RAW MATERIAL tion after this he led up again to the subject of his health and to the desirability of his passing some months in the mountains, “in the pure air of God’s great hills.” Then he entered upon a discreet, pleasant, whimsical reference to the fact that only a contribution from his uncle’s purse could make this possible. There never was anybody who could beat Uncle Giles on ease and grace, and pleasant, pungent humor when it came to asking for money. The only person embarrassed in that situation was the one of whom Uncle Giles was expecting the loan. I read no more. With no conscious volition of mine, my hand had scrunched the letter into a ball, and my arm, without my bidding, had hurled the ball into the heart of the fire. But as I reflected on the subject afterwards, and thought of the influence which Uncle Giles has al- ways had on our family, it occurred to me that I was wrong. Uncle Giles ought not to be forgotten. I ought to have saved that letter to show to my children. Writ GOES UP .. .” Amonc the many agreeably arranged European lives which were roughly interrupted by the war, I know of none more snugly and compactly comforta- ble than that of Octavie Moreau. Indeed, for some years there had been in the back of my mind a faint notion of something almost indiscreet in the admira- bly competent way in which ’Tavie arranged her life precisely to her taste. I don’t mean that it was an easeful or elegant or self-indulgent life. She cared as little for dress as any other inteilectual Frenchwoman, let herself get portly, did up her hair queerly, and the rigorously hearth-and-home matrons of Tourciennes pointed her out to their young daughters as a horrible example of what happens to the looks of a woman who acquires too much learn- ing. As for ease and self-indulgence, ’Tavie’s vig- orous personality and powerful, disciplined brain, as well as the need to earn her living, kept her from laying on intellectual fat. But all that vigorous personality, that powerful brain, as well as all the money which she competently earned, seemed more and more to be concentrated on her own comfort and of 38 RAW MATERIAL on nothing else. Her excellent salary as professor of science in the girls’ Lycée was almost doubled by what she made by private lessons, for she was an inspired natural teacher, who can, as the saying goes, teach anybody anything. In the thirty years of her life in Tourciennes she has pulled innumera- ble despairing boys and girls through dreaded exam- inations in science and mathematics; and parents pay well, the world over, for having their boys and girls pulled through examinations. ‘They respect the woman who can do it, even if, as in Octavie’s case, their respect is tempered with considerable disapprobation of eccentric dress, irreligious ideas, immense skepticism, and cigarette-smoking. And in this case the respect was heightened by Mlle. Moreau’s well-known ability to drive a hard bargain and to see through any one’s else attempt to do the same. Octavie had plenty of everything, brains, will-power and money; but as far as I could see, she never did anything with this plenty, except to feather her own nest. I mean this quite literally, for *Tavie had a nest, a pretty, red-roofed, gray- walled, old villa, in the outskirts of Tourciennes, which she had bought years before at a great bar- gain, and which was the center of her life. Her younger sister, a weaker edition of Octavie, who pyre FP OGORS URS...” 39 lived with her, and kept house for her, and revolved about her, and adored her, and depended on her, joined with her in this, as in everything else. Those two women visibly existed for the purpose of bring- ing to perfection that house and the fine, walled garden about it. Long before anybody else in our circle in France thought of such a thing as having a real bathroom with hot and cold water, "Tavie had one, tiled, and glazed, and gleaming. Octavie’s li- brary was the best one (in science and economic history) in that part of France. Never were there such perfectly laid and kept floors as ’Tavie’s, nor such a kitchen garden, nor closets so convenient and ingeniously arranged, nor a kitchen of such perfec- tion. All well-to-do kitchens in the north of France are works of art, but ’Iavie’s was several degrees more shining and copper-kettled and red-tiled and polished than any other, just as the food which was prepared there was several degrees more succulent, even than the superexcellent meals served elsewhere in that affluent industrial city of the North. As I finished one of *Tavie’s wonderful dinners, and stepped with her into the ordered marvel of her great garden, I remember one day having on the tip of my tongue some half-baked remark about how far the same amount of intelligence and energy 40 RAW MATERIAL would have gone towards providing more decent homes for a few of the poor in her quarter—for the housing of the poor in Tourciennes was notorious for its wretchedness. But you may be sure I said nothing of the sort. Nobody ventured to make any such sanctimonious comment to caustic Octavie Moreau, fifty-four years old, weighty, powerful, ut- terly indifferent to other people’s opinions, her fine mind at the perfection of its maturity, her well- tempered personality like a splendid tool at the service of her will, her heart preserved from care about other people’s troubles by her biological con- viction of the futility of trying to help any one not energetic enough to help himself. She was not un- kind to people she happened to know personally, oc- casionally spilling over on the needy ones a little of her superabundant vigor, and some of the money she earned so easily. But in her heart she scorned people who were either materially or morally needy, as she scorned every one who was weak and ignorant and timorous, who was not strong enough to walk straight up to what he wanted and take it. She had always done that. Anybody who couldn't... ! Then the war began and well-planned lives be- came like grains of dust in a whirlwind. Tour- owWHAT GOES UP :. .” 4I ciennes was at once taken by the Germans and held until the very last of the war, and for more than four years none of the rest of us had a word from *Tavie and her sister. Beyond the trenches Tour- ciennes seemed more remote than the palest asteroid. But after the armistice, what with letters and visits, we soon learned all about their life under the German occupation, in most ways like the lives of all our other friends in the North, the grinding round of petty and great vexations and extortions and oppressions, and slow, dirty starvation of body, mind, and soul which has been described so many times since Armistice Day—but with one notable exception. To Octavie life had brought something more than this. Early in the third year of the war, the grimly en- during town was appalled by a decree, issued from German Headquarters. In reprisal for something said to have happened in far-away Alsace-Lorraine, forty of the leading women of Tourciennes were to be taken as hostages, conveyed to a prison-camp in the north of Germany, and left there indefinitely till the grievance (whatever it was) in Alsace-Lorraine had been adjusted to the satisfaction of the German government. By the third year of the war, every one in Tour- 42 RAW MATERIAL ciennes knew very well what deportation to a Ger- man prison-camp meant: almost sure death, and certainly broken health for the most vigorous men. They had all at one time or another gone to the railway station to meet returned prisoners, ragged, demoralized groups of broken, tubercular skeletons, who had gone away from home elderly but power- ful men, leaders in their professions. And these latest hostages were to be women, delicately reared, not in their first youth, many of them already half- ill after three years of war privations. In order to make the deepest possible impression on the public of the captive city the most respected and conspicu- ous women were chosen, prominent either for their husband’s standing and wealth or for the place they had made for themselves, by their own intelligence and energy: the Directress of the Hospital, a well known teacher of music, the Mayor’s wife, the daughter of a noted professor. Of course, our Oc- tavie was among the number. We knew some of the others, too, either by repu- tation or personally, and could imagine the heart- sick horror in which their families saw them make their few hasty preparations for departure. Here is a typical case. One of the names on the list was that of Mme. Orléanne, a woman of seventy. She ayia GOERS UPT. .” 43 was then so weak from malassimilation of war-food that she had not been out of doors for months! It was nothing less than a death-sentence for her. Her family did not even let her see the list. Her elder daughter, married to a wealthy manufacturer, went to the German officials and offered herself to be de- ported as a substitute, although she had two chil- dren, a girl of eight and a little boy of three! She was accepted, and, death in her heart, set about making up the tiny bundle of necessaries—all they were allowed to carry. Her little girl was old enough to take up the tradition of tragic stoicism of her elders and listened with a blanched face to the instructions of her desperate mother, who told her that there was now nothing but dignity left to Frenchwomen. When the German guard came to tell Mme. Baudoin that the truck which was to carry the hostages away to the railroad was waiting at the door, little Elise, rigid and gray, kissed her mother good-by silently, though after the truck had gone, she fainted and lay unconscious for hours. But Raoul, only a baby, screamed, and struck at the German soldier, clung wildly to his mother with hysteric strength, and after she had gone, broke away from his aunt, rushed out of the street door, shrieking, “Mother, Mother! don’t go away from 44 RAW MATERIAL Raoul!” and flung himself frantically upon his mother’s skirts. She said to me, as she told me of this, “dying will be easy compared to that moment!” But without weakening she did the intolerable thing, the only thing there was to do, she reached down, tore the little boy’s tense fingers from her dress, and climbed up into the truck. “As I looked away from Raoul I saw that tears were running down the cheeks of the German guard who stood at the back of the truck.” Ah, this human race we belong to! Shuddering with the anguish of such scenes of separation, the hostages were locked for three days into cattle-cars, cold, windowless, jolting prisons, where they lived over and over those unbearable last moments with children, or sisters, or parents, or husbands, whom they never expected to see again. At the end of this ordeal, the wretched women, numb, half-starved, limping along in their disordered garments, raging inwardly, inflamed with indignant hatred for the soldiers who marshaled them, were brought together in their prison and left alone, save for two bored guards who sat at the door and stared at them. “WHAT GOES UP...” 45 The prison camp was an enormous one in the north of Germany, a dreary clutter of rough wooden buildings thrown down on a flat, sandy plain, en- tangled and surrounded by miles of barbed-wire fencing. The prison-room allotted to the forty women from Tourciennes was a high, bare loft, like a part of an ill-built, hastily constructed barn. Around three walls were tiers of bunks, filled with damp, moldy straw, a couple of dirty . blankets on each. In the middle of the room was a smallish stove, rather tall and thin in shape, with one hole in the top, closed by a flat lid. An iron kettle stood on the stove. Windows were set in one wall of the room. Under the windows ran a long bench, and before it stood a long table made of a wide board. There was nothing else to be seen, except grease and caked filth on the rough, unpainted boards of the floor and walls. The last of the women stag- gered into the room; the door was shut, and they faced each other in the gray winter light which fil- tered in through the smeared panes of the windows. All during the black nightmare of the journey, every one of them had been quivering with sup- pressed anguish. Absorbed each in her own grief and despair, they had lain on the thin layer of straw on the floor of the freight car, at the end of their 46 RAW MATERIAL strength, undone by the ignominy of their utter de- fenselessness before brute force. ‘The marks of tears showed on their gray, unwashed faces, but they had no more tears to shed now. They leaned against the walls and the bunks, their knees shaking with exhaustion, and looked about them at the dreary, dirty desolation of the room which from now on was to be their world. The guards stared at them indifferently, seeing nothing of any interest in that group of prisoners more than in any other, especially as these were women no longer young, disheveled, wrinkled, unappetizing, with uncombed, gray hair, and grimy hands. A little stir among them, and there was Octavie, our ’Tavie, on her feet, haggard with fatigue, dowdy, crumpled, battered, but powerful and magnetic. She was speaking to them, speaking with the authority of her long years of directing others, with the weight and assurance of her puissant personality. I can tell you almost exactly what she said, for the woman who were there and who told me about it afterwards, had apparently not forgotten a word! She began by saying clearly and energetically, like an older sister, ‘“Come, come, we are all French- women, and so we have courage; and we all have brains. People with brains and courage have noth- “WHAT GOES UP...” 47 ing to fear anywhere, if they'll use them. Now let’s get to work and use ours, all for one and one for all!” Her bold, strong voice, her dauntless look, her masterful gesture, brought them out of their lassi- tude, brought them from all sides and corners of the room, where they had abandoned themselves, brought them in a compact group close about her. She went on, her steady eyes going from one to the other, “I think I know what is the first thing to do; to take a solemn vow to stick by each other loyally. You know it is said that women always quarrel among themselves, and that all French people do. We are in a desperate plight. If we quarrel ever, at all: if we are divided, we are undone. We're of all sorts, Catholics, free-thinkers, aristocrats, radi- cals, housekeepers, business-women, and we don’t know each other very well. But we are all women, civilized women, Frenchwomen, sisters! Nobody can help us but ourselves. But if we give all we have, they can never conquer us!” She stopped and looked at them deeply, her strong, ugly face, white with intensity. “A vow, my friends, a vow from every one of us, by what she holds most sacred, that she will summon all her strength to give of her very best for the common 48 RAW MATERIAL good. In the name of our love for those we have left—” her voice broke, and she could not go on. She lifted her hand silently and held it up, her eyes fixed on them. The other hands went up, the drawn faces steadied, the quivering hearts, centered each on its own suffering, calmed by taking thought for others. The very air in the barrack-room seemed less stifling. The two German guards looked on, astonished by the incomprehensible ceremony. These scattered, half-dead women, flung into the room like cattle, who had not seemed to know each other, all at once to be one unit! Octavie drew a long breath. Then, homely, fa- miliar, coherent as though she were giving a pre- liminary explanation to a class at the beginning of a school-year, ‘Now let us understand clearly what is happening to us, so that we can defend ourselves against it. What is it that is being done to us? An attempt is being made to break us down, physically and. morally. But these people around us here are not the ones who wish this; they are not as intelli- gent as we; and they haven’t half the personal incentive to accomplish it, that we have to prevent it. We have a thousand resources of ingenuity that they can’t touch at all. “We must begin by economizing every atom pos- “WHAT GOES UP .. .” 49 sible of our strength, moral and physical. And we can start on that right now by not wasting any more strength hating our guards as we have all been hating the Germans who have had to touch us, so far. We can think of them as demons and infernal forces of evil and make them into horrors that will shadow our every thought. Or we can look straight at them to see what they are, and disregard them, just leave them out of our moral lives, when we see that they are ordinary men, for the most part coarse and common men, and now forced to be abnormal, forced by others into a situation that develops every germ of brutality in them.” At this, young Mme. Baudoin spoke out and told of the German guard who had wept when her little boy was dragged away; and, “I’d rather be in my shoes than his,” cried Octavie vigorously. “So then we sweep them out of our world,” she went on, “and that leaves the decks cleared for real action. I should say,” she went on with a change of manner, including in one wide humorous glance her own dirty hands, the tangled hair of the others, and the grease and grime of the room, “that the next thing is to organize ourselves to get clean! It’s plain only a few of us can do it at a time; let’s draw lots to see who begins, and the others can lie down 50 RAW MATERIAL while they wait. Is there anybody here who speaks German enough to ask for soap and water? I see the broom here at hand.”