The girls remained longer than they expected in the little hut. It was extraordinarily interesting, with a thriftiness and tidiness that were characteristically French. Indeed, living seemed to have been reduced to the simplest conditions. One big room formed the center of the hut. It had a stone floor and a big fireplace where the food was cooked over a peat fire. A plain wooden table and some benches were the only furniture, except two tall and strangely handsome chairs, which must have been the property of some old French family. They had drifted into the cottage by mistake, probably as a gift to an old servant.
On the walls of the room hung a gun of a pattern of the Franco-Prussian war, a cheap lithograph of President Poincairé, and one[151] of General Joffre and General French. So this little hut was also filled with the war spirit. But the old French mère explained that her husband and four sons were in the battle line, so few persons had a greater right to a display of patriotism.
The two American girls found the old French woman one of the most picturesque figures they had ever imagined. She wore a bodice and short blue cotton skirt and a cap with pointed ends. Her shoes were wooden and her stockings homespun. Although only between fifty and sixty years old, her visitors were under the impression that Mère Marie must be at least seventy except for her vigor. For her shoulders were bent and her tanned cheeks wrinkled into a criss-cross of lines. Only her black eyes shone keenly above a high arched nose, and she moved with a sprightliness any young person might envy.
Then too she was agreeably hospitable to her unexpected guests, though not communicative. She did not appear to wish to talk about her own affairs.
But although the old woman was so[152] interesting, her son Anton was a dreadful person of whom the two visitors felt a little afraid. He was almost uncanny, like a character you may have seen in a play, or read of in some fantastic book. His coarse black hair hung down to his shoulders and was chopped off at the end in an uneven fashion, his eyes were black and stared, but with a peculiar blank look in them, and his big mouth hung open showing huge yellow teeth. One of the unhappy things about the boy was that he looked so like the woman who was his mother and yet so horribly unlike her because there was no intelligence behind the mask of his face. He did not look brutish, however, only vacant and foolish, and sat in the corner mumbling to himself while Nona and Barbara and Mrs. Curtis had their coffee and rolls.
But once the two girls were away from the little house, Barbara, glancing behind, saw the boy following them. First she shook her head at him, pointing toward his own home, then she brandished a stick. The lad only grinned and kept after them.
[153]
The girls had not yet started back to the hospital, as they had more than an hour before them and the morning was too beautiful to be wasted.
“We have got to get rid of that boy somehow, Nona; he gives me the creeps,” Barbara suggested. “Suppose we slip out of this field, which may belong to them, and go down to the foot of that little hill. There is an orchard on the other side of the wall and we can stay there under the trees until we must go back to work. Hope no one will think it wrong, our having wandered off in this fashion! The truth is they will probably be too busy to miss us. At least, I am glad that Mildred and Eugenia are being so successful. They may save the day for the United States until our chance comes.”
The two girls then sat down in the grass under an old French apple tree, which looked very like one of any other nationality, but was the more romantic for being French. This country of northern France ravaged by mad armies is an orchard and vineyard land and one of the fairest places on earth.
[154]
Looking up into the clear sky, Nona spoke first.
“It is as though the war were a horrible nightmare, isn’t it?” she began, leaning her chin on her hand and gazing out over the country. “But do you know, Barbara, dreadful as you may think it of me, I am not content to stay on here in the shelter of the hospital, hard and sad as the work of caring for the wounded is. I feel I must know what the battlefield is like, smell the smoke, see the trenches. Often I think I can hear the booming of the great guns, see the wounded alone and needing help before help can come. I am going over there some day, though I don’t know just how or when I can manage it.”
The girl’s face was quiet and determined. She was not excited; it was as if she felt a more definite work calling her and wished to answer it.
Then Nona quieted down, and without replying Barbara lay resting her head in the older girl’s lap. There was a growing sympathy between them, although so unlike.
[155]
Barbara’s blue eyes were upturned toward the clear sky when suddenly her companion felt her body stiffen. For an instant she lay rigid, the next she pointed upward.
“Nona,” she exclaimed in a stifled voice, “it doesn’t seem possible, but—well, what is that in the sky over there? Perhaps we are not so far from the fighting as you believe.”
Nona followed the other girl’s gaze, but perhaps she was less far-sighted and her golden brown eyes had not the vision of her friend’s blue ones.
“Why, dear, I only see two small black clouds.” Then she laughed............