Part 1 (2/2)

This is a rolling country of grain fields, orchards, ma.s.ses of black-currant bushes, vegetable plots,--it is a great sugar-beet country,--and asparagus beds; for the Department of the Seine et Marne is one of the most productive in France, and every inch under cultivation. It is what the French call un paysage riant, and I a.s.sure you, it does more than smile these lovely June mornings. I am up every morning almost as soon as the sun, and I slip my feet into sabots, wrap myself in a big cloak, and run right on to the lawn to make sure that the panorama has not disappeared in the night. There always lie--too good almost to be true--miles and miles of laughing country, little white towns just smiling in the early light, a thin strip of river here and there, dimpling and dancing, stretches of fields of all colors--all so, peaceful and so gay, and so ”chummy” that it gladdens the opening day, and makes me rejoice to have lived to see it. I never weary of it.

It changes every hour, and I never can decide at which hour it is the loveliest. After all, it is a rather nice world.

Now get out your map and locate me.

You will not find Huiry. But you can find Esbly, my nearest station on the main line of the Eastern Railroad. Then you will find a little narrow-gauge road running from there to Crecy-la-Chapelle. Halfway between you will find Couilly-Saint-Germain. Well, I am right up the hill, about a third of the way between Couilly and Meaux.

It is a nice historic country. But for that matter so is all France. I am only fifteen miles northeast of Bondy, in whose forest the naughty Queen Fredegonde, beside whose tomb, in Saint-Denis, we have often stood together, had her husband killed, and nearer still to Ch.e.l.les, where the Merovingian kings once had a palace stained with the blood of many crimes, about which you read, in many awful details, in Maurice Strauss's ”Tragique Histoire des Reines Brunhaut et Fredegonde,” which I remember to have sent you when it first came out. Of course no trace of those days of the Merovingian dynasty remains here or anywhere else.

Ch.e.l.les is now one of the fortified places in the outer belt of forts surrounding Paris.

So, if you will not accept all this as an explanation of what you are pleased to call my ”desertion,” may I humbly and reluctantly put up a plea for my health, and hope for a sympathetic hearing?

If I am to live much longer,--and I am on the road down the hill, you know,--I demand of Life my physical well-being. I want a robust old age. I feel that I could never hope to have that much longer in town,--city-born and city-bred though I am. I used to think, and I continued to think for a long time, that I could not live if my feet did not press a city pavement. The fact that I have changed my mind seems to me, at my age, a sufficient excuse for, as frankly, changing my habits. It surely proves that I have not a sick will--yet. In the simple life I crave--digging in the earth, living out of doors--I expect to earn the strength of which city life and city habits were robbing me.

I believe I can. Faith half wins a battle. No one ever dies up on this hill, I am told, except of hard drink. Judging by my experience with workmen here, not always of that. I never saw so many very old, very active, robust people in so small a s.p.a.ce in all my life as I have seen here.

Are you answered?

Yet if, after all this expenditure of words, you still think I am s.h.i.+rking--well, I am sorry. It seems to me that, from another point of view, I am doing my duty, and giving the younger generation more room-- getting out of the lime-light, so to speak, which, between you and me, was getting trying for my mental complexion. If I have blundered, the consequences be on my own head. My hair could hardly be whiter--that's something. Besides, retreat is not cut off. I have sworn no eternal oath not to change my mind again.

In any case you have no occasion to worry about me: I've a head full of memories. I am going to cla.s.sify them, as I do my books. Some of them I am going to forget, just as I reject books that have ceased to interest me. I know the latter is always a wrench. The former may be impossible. I shall not be lonely. No one who reads is ever that. I may miss talking. Perhaps that is a good thing. I may have talked too much. That does happen.

Remember one thing--I am not inaccessible. I may now and then get an opportunity to talk again, and in a new background. Who knows? I am counting on nothing but the facts about me. So come on, Future. I've my back against the past. Anyway, as you see, it is too late to argue.

I've crossed the Rubicon, and can return only when I have built a new bridge.

II

June 18, 1914.

That's right. Accept the situation. You will soon find that Paris will seem the same to you. Besides, I had really given all I had to give there.

Indeed you shall know, to the smallest detail, just how the material side of my life is arranged,--all my comforts and discomforts,--since you ask.

I am now absolutely settled into my little ”hole” in the country, as you call it. It has been so easy. I have been here now nearly three weeks.

Everything is in perfect order. You would be amazed if you could see just how everything fell into place. The furniture has behaved itself beautifully. There are days when I wonder if either I or it ever lived anywhere else. The shabby old furniture with which you were long so familiar just slipped right into place. I had not a stick too little, and could not have placed another piece. I call that ”bull luck.”

I have always told you--you have not always agreed--that France was the easiest place in the world to live in, and the love of a land in which to be a pauper. That is why it suits me.

Don't harp on that word ”alone.” I know I am living alone, in a house that has four outside doors into the bargain. But you know I am not one of the ”afraid” kind. I am not boasting. That is a characteristic, not a quality. One is afraid or one is not. It happens that I am not.

Still, I am Very prudent. You would laugh if you could see me ”shutting up” for the night. All my windows on the ground floor are heavily barred. Such of the doors as have gla.s.s in them have shutters also.

The window shutters are primitive affairs of solid wood, with diamond-shaped holes in the upper part. First, I put up the shutters on the door in the dining-room which leads into the garden on the south side; then I lock the door. Then I do a similar service for the kitchen door on to the front terrace, and that into the orchard, and lock both doors. Then I go out the salon door and lock the stable and the grange and take out the keys. Then I come into the salon and lock the door after me, and push two of the biggest bolts you ever saw.

After which I hang up the keys, which are as big as the historic key of the Bastille, which you may remember to have seen at the Musee Carnavalet. Then I close and bolt all the shutters downstairs. I do it systematically every night--because I promised not to be foolhardy. I always grin, and feel as if it were a scene in a play. It impresses me so much like a tremendous piece of business--dramatic suspense--which leads up to nothing except my going quietly upstairs to bed.

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