Part 6 (2/2)
We were talking of the facility with which he reeled off, day after day, columns of lively, finished prose, and I asked whether he wrote in longhand, dictated, or used a typewriter.
This question seemed to amuse and interest the old war-horse greatly. He went to his desk and brought back a sheet of paper, half of which was covered with a small, firm handwriting. It was his next day's broadside, not yet finished.
”There is nothing mysterious about it,” he said. ”I get up at half past three every morning. I am at that desk most of the day; I go to bed at nine o'clock. If I had to write a ba.n.a.l note, it might take time, but there are certain ideas which I have worked with all my life. I worked a good many years without expressing them; they are all in my head, and when I want them I've only got to take them out. I am eighty-three years old, and if I couldn't express myself by this time”--the old gentleman lifted his eyebrows, smiled whimsically, and, with a quick movement of shoulders and hands, concluded--”it would be a public calamity--a malheur public!”
I thought of the padded lives of some of our literary charlatans and editorial gold bricks at home, of the clever young artists ruined as painters by becoming popular ill.u.s.trators, the young writers content to subst.i.tute overpaid ba.n.a.lity and bathos for honest work, and I must confess that the sight of this indomitable old fighter, who had known great men and held high place in his day, and now at eighty-three got up before daylight to pound out in longhand his columns of vivid prose, stirred every drop of what you might call one's intellectual sporting blood. Of his opinions I know little, of the justice of his attacks less, and, to be quite frank, I suspect he is something of a trouble-maker. But as he stood there, bundled up in his overcoat and cap, in that chilly lodging-house room, witty, unsubdued, full of fight and of charm, he seemed to stand for that wonderful French spirit--for its ardor and penetration, its fusion of sense and sensibility, its tireless intelligence and unquenchable fire.
Monday.
The consul of Cognac! It sounded like a musical comedy when we met on the steamer last August; not quite so odd when we b.u.mped into each other in Bordeaux; and now it turns out to mean, in addition to being a young University of Virginia man, thoroughly acquainted with the people he has to deal with, living in a town where the towers of Francis I's castle still stand, rowing on a charming old river in the summer, and in these days hearing a charming old French gentleman, vice-consul, tell how he fought against the Prussians in '70. Cognac is a real place, it appears--an old town of twenty thousand people or so, and it is really where cognac comes from, all other brandies being, of course, as one will learn here, mere upstart eaux-de-vie. We went through some of the cellars to-day, as venerable and vast as the claret cellars in Bordeaux, although not quite as interesting, perhaps, because not so ”alive.” For wine is a living thing, as the man said in Bordeaux, and it must be ign.o.bly boiled and destroyed before turning into a distilled spirit. To some this pale spiritual essence may possess a finer poetry--the cellars are more fragrant, at any rate.
All the young men had gone to the front--their wages continued as usual --and the work was carried on by women and old servitors, scarcely one of the latter under seventy. They were pointed out as examples of the beneficent effect of the true cognac--these old boys who had inhaled the slightly pungent fragrance of the cellars and bottling-rooms all their lives. You get this perfume all over Cognac. It comes wandering down old alleyways, out from under dark arches, people live literally in a fine mist of it. The very stones are turned black by the faint fumes.
There must be scores of towns south of Paris which look more or less like this--the young men gone or drilling in the neighborhood, the schools turned into hospitals, the little old provincial hotels sheltering families fled from Paris. There are several such at our hotel, nice, comfortable people--you might think you were in some semi-summer-resort hotel at home--Ridgefield, Conn., for instance, in winter time.
The making of cognac occupies nearly every one, one way or another, and it has made the place next to the richest town of its size in France.
They make the cognac, and they make the bottles for it in a gla.s.s factory on a hill overlooking the town--about as airy and pleasant a place for a factory as one could imagine. The molten gla.s.s is poured into moulds, the moulds closed--psst! a stream of compressed air turned in, the bottles blown, and there you are--a score or so of them turned out every minute. As we came out of the furnace-room into the chilly afternoon a regiment of reservists tramped in from a practise march in the country. Some were young fellows, wearing uniforms for the first time, apparently; some looked like convalescents drafted back into the army. They took one road and we another, and half an hour later swung down the main street of Cognac behind a chorus of shrilling bugles. All over France, south of Paris, they must be marching like this these frosty afternoons.
Coming up from Bordeaux the other night we missed the regular connection and had to spend the night at Saintes. The tall, quizzical, rather grim old landlady of the neat little Hotel de la Gare--characteristic of that rugged France which tourists who only see a few streets in Paris know little about--was plainly puzzled. There we were, two able-bodied men, and P------, saying nothing about being consul, merely remarked that he lived in Cognac. ”In Cognac!” the old woman repeated, looking from one to the other, and then added, as one putting an unanswerable question: ”But you are not soldiers?”
We went out for a walk in the frosty air before turning in. There was scarce a soul in the streets, but at the other end of the town a handful of young fellows pa.s.sed on the other side singing. They were boys of the 1915 cla.s.s who had been called out and in a few days would be getting ready for war. In Paris you will see young fellows just like them, decorated with flags and feathers, driving round town in rattle-trap wagons like picnic parties returning on a summer night at home. Arm in arm and keeping step, these boys of Saintes were singing as they marched:
”Il est rouge et noir et blanc, Et fendu au derriere--d.”
”He's red, white, and black, And split up the back!”
They saw themselves, doubtless, marching down the streets of Berlin as now they were marching down the streets of Saintes--and they kept flinging back through the frosty dark:
”Il est rouge--et noir--et blanc--Et fendu--au derriere--d...”
Chapter VI
”The Great Days”
They were playing ”The Categorical Imperative” that evening at the Little Theatre in Unter den Linden. It is an old-fas.h.i.+oned comedy laid in the Vienna of 1815--two love-stories, lightly and quaintly told, across which, through the chatter of a little Viennese salon, we dimly see Napoleon return from Elba and hear the thunder of Waterloo. A young cub of a Saxon schoolmaster, full of simple-hearted enthusiasm and philosophy, comes down to the Austrian capital, and, taken up by a kindly, coquettish young countess, becomes the tutor of her cousin, a girl as simple as he. The older woman with her knowing charm, the younger with her freshness, present a dualism more bewildering than any he has ever read about in his philosophy books, and part of the fun consists in seeing him fall in love with the younger in terms of pure reason, and finally, when the motherly young countess has quietly got him a professors.h.i.+p at Konigsberg, present to his delighted Elise his ”categorical imperative.”
You can imagine that thoroughly German mixture of sentiment and philosophy, the quaint references to a Prussia not yet, in its present sense, begun to exist; how to that audience--nearly every one of whom had a son or husband or brother at the front--the century suddenly seemed to close up and the Napoleonic days became part of their own ”grosse Zeit.” You can imagine the young schoolmaster and the frivolous older man going off to war, and the two women consoling each other, and with what strange eloquence the words of that girl of 1815, watching them from the window, come down across the years:
”Why is it that from time to time men must go and kill each other?
There it stands in the paper--two thousand more men--it writes itself so easily! But that every one of them has a wife or mother or sister or a-- ... And when they cry their eyes out that means that it is a victory, and when some brave young fellow has fallen, he is only one of the 'forces'--so and so many men--and n.o.body even knows his name...”
You must imagine them coming back from the war, and pale, benign, leaning on their canes as returning heroes do in plays, talk across the footlights to real young soldiers you have just seen limping in with real wounds--pink-cheeked boys with heads and feet bandaged and Iron Crosses on black-and-white ribbons tucked into their coats, home from East Prussia or the Aisne. Then between the acts you must imagine them pouring out to the refreshment-room for a look at each other and something to eat--will they never stop eating?--fathers and mothers and daughters with their b.u.t.terbrod and Sc.h.i.n.ken and big gla.s.ses of beer in the genial German fas.h.i.+on, beaming on the young heroes limping by or, with heads bandaged like schoolboys with mumps, grinning in spite of their scars.
And when they drift out into the street at last, softened and brought together by the play--the street with its lights and flags, officers in long, blue-gray overcoats and soldiers everywhere, and a military automobile shooting by, perhaps, with its gay ”Ta-tee! Ta-td!”--the extras are out with another Russian army smashed and two more s.h.i.+ps sunk in the Channel. The old newspaper woman at the Friedrichsstra.s.se corner is chanting it hoa.r.s.ely, ”Zwei englische Dampfer gesunken!”--and they read that ”the sands have run, the prologue is spoken, the curtain risen on the tragedy of England's destiny.”
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