Home Fires in France Part 11

"Looks that way," said Mr. Pennypacker, nodding, and searching for a lost paper. The moment after, he had forgotten the question and the questioner.

Ellen had always rather regretted not having been able to "go on with her education," and this gave her certain little habits of mind which differentiated her somewhat from the other stenographers and typewriters in the office with her, and from her cousin, with whom she shared the small bedroom in Mrs. Wilson's boarding-house. For instance, she looked up words in the dictionary when she did not understand them, and she had kept all her old schoolbooks on the shelf of the boarding-house bedroom.

Finding that she had only a dim recollection of where Belgium was, she took down her old geography and located it. This was in the wait for lunch, which meal was always late at Mrs. Wilson's. The relation between the size of the little country and the bulk of Germany made an impression on her. "My! it looks as though they could just make one mouthful of it," she remarked. "It's _awfully_ little."

"Who?" asked Maggie. "What?"

"Belgium and Germany."

Maggie was blank for a moment. Then she remembered. "Oh, the war. Yes, I know. Mr. Wentworth's fine sermon was about it yesterday. War is the wickedest thing in the world. Anything is better than to go killing each other. They ought to settle it by arbitration. Mr. Wentworth said so."

"They oughtn't to have done it if they'd promised not to," said Ellen.

The bell rang for the belated lunch and she went down to the dining-room even more serious than was her habit.

She read the paper very closely for the next few days, and one morning surprised Maggie by the loudness of her exclamation as she glanced at the headlines.

"What's the matter?" asked her cousin. "Have they found the man who killed that old woman?" She herself was deeply interested in a murder case in Chicago.

Ellen did not hear her. "Well, thank _goodness_!" she exclaimed.

"England is going to help France and Belgium!"

Maggie looked over her shoulder disapprovingly. "Oh, I think it's awful!

Another country going to war! England a Christian nation, too! I don't see how Christians _can_ go to war. And I don't see what call the Belgians had, anyhow, to fight Germany. They might have known they couldn't stand up against such a big country. All the Germans wanted to do was just to walk along the roads. They wouldn't have done any harm.

Mr. Schnitzler was explaining it to me down at the office."

"They'd promised they wouldn't," repeated Ellen. "And the Belgians had promised everybody that they wouldn't let anybody go across their land to pick on France that way. They kept their promise and the Germans didn't. It makes me _mad_! I wish to goodness our country would help them!"

Maggie was horrified. "_Ellen Boardman_, would you want _Americans_ to commit murder? You'd better go to church with me next Sunday and hear Mr. Wentworth preach one of his fine sermons."

Ellen did this, and heard a sermon on pa.s.sive resistance as the best answer to violence. She was accustomed to accepting without question any statement she found in a printed book, or what any speaker said in any lecture. Also her mind, having been uniquely devoted for many years to the problems of office administration, moved with more readiness among letter-files and card-catalogues of customers than among the abstract ideas where now, rather to her dismay, she began to find her thoughts centering. More than a week pa.s.sed after hearing that sermon before she said, one night as she was brushing her hair: "About the Belgians--if a robber wanted us to let him go through this room so he could get into Mrs. Wilson's room and take all her money and maybe kill her, would you feel all right just to snuggle down in bed and let him? Especially if you had told Mrs. Wilson that she needn't ever lock the door that leads into our room, because you'd see to it that n.o.body came through?"

"Oh, but," said Maggie, "Mr. Wentworth says it is only the German _Government_ that wanted to invade Belgium, that the German soldiers just hated to do it. If you could fight the German Kaiser, it'd be all right."

Ellen jumped at this admission. "Oh, Mr. Wentworth does think there are _some_ cases where it isn't enough just to stand by, and say you don't like it?"

Maggie ignored this. "He says the people who really get killed are only the poor soldiers that aren't to blame."

Ellen stood for a moment by the gas, her hair up in curl-papers, the light full on her plain, serious face, sallow above the crude white of her straight, unornamented nightgown. She said, and to her own surprise her voice shook as she spoke: "Well, suppose the real robber stayed down in the street and only sent up here to rob and kill Mrs. Wilson some men who just hated to do it, but were too afraid of him not to. Would you think it was all right for us to open our door and let them go through without trying to stop them?"

Maggie did not follow this reasoning, but she received a disagreeable, rather daunting impression from the eyes which looked at her so hard, from the stern, quivering voice. She flounced back on her pillow, saying impatiently: "I don't know what's got into you, Ellen Boardman. You look actually _queer_, these days! What do _you_ care so much about the Belgians for? You never heard of them before all this began! And everybody knows how immoral French people are."

Ellen turned out the gas and got into bed silently.

Maggie felt uncomfortable and aggrieved. The next time she saw Mr.

Wentworth she repeated the conversation to him. She hoped and expected that the young minister would immediately furnish her with a crushing argument to lay Ellen low, but instead he was silent for a moment, and then said: "That's rather an interesting ill.u.s.tration, about the burglars going through your room. Where does she get such ideas?"

Maggie disavowed with some heat any knowledge of the source of her cousin's eccentricities. "I don't _know_ where! She's a stenographer downtown."

Mr. Wentworth looked thoughtful and walked away, evidently having forgotten Maggie.

In the days which followed, the office-manager of the wholesale hardware house more and more justified the accusation of looking "queer." It came to be so noticeable that one day her employer, Mr. Pennypacker, asked her if she didn't feel well. "You've been looking sort of under the weather," he said.

She answered, "I'm just _sick_ because the United States won't do anything to help Belgium and France."

Mr. Pennypacker had never received a more violent shock of pure astonishment. "Great Scotland!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, "what's that to _you_?"

"Well, I live in the United States," she advanced, as though it were an argument.

Mr. Pennypacker looked at her hard. It was the same plain, serious, rather sallow face he had seen for years bent over his typewriter and his letter-files. But the eyes were different--anxious, troubled.

"It makes me sick," she repeated, "to see a great big nation picking on a little one that was only keeping its promise."

Her employer cast about for a conceivable reason for the aberration.

"Any of your folks come here from there?" he ventured.

"Gracious, _no_!" cried Ellen, almost as much shocked as Maggie would have been at the idea that there might be "foreigners" in her family.

She added: "But you don't have to be related to a little boy, do you, to get mad at a man that's beating him up, especially if the boy hasn't done anything he oughtn't to?"

Mr. Pennypacker stared. "I don't know that I ever looked at it that way." He added: "I've been so taken up with that lost shipment of nails, to tell the truth, that I haven't read much about the war. There's always _some_ sort of a war going on over there in Europe, seems to me."

He stared for a moment into s.p.a.ce, and came back with a jerk to the letter he was dictating.

That evening, over the supper-table, he repeated to his wife what his stenographer had said. His wife asked, "That little sallow Miss Boardman that never has a word to say for herself?" and upon being told that it was the same, said wonderingly, "Well, what ever started _her_ up, I wonder?" After a time she said: "_Is_ Germany so much bigger than Belgium as all that? Pete, go get your geography." She and her husband and their High School son gazed at the map. "It looks that way," said the father. "Gee! They must have had their nerve with them! Gimme the paper." He read with care the war-news and the editorial which he had skipped in the morning, and as he read he looked very grave, and rather cross. When he laid the paper down he said, impatiently: "Oh, d.a.m.n the war! d.a.m.n Europe, anyhow!" His wife took the paper out of his hand and read in her turn the news of the advance into Northern France.

Just before they fell asleep his wife remarked out of the darkness, "Mr.

Scheidemann, down at the grocery, said to-day the war was because the other nations were jealous of Germany."

"Well, I don't know," said Mr. Pennypacker heavily, "that I'd have any call to take an ax to a man because I thought he was jealous of me."

"That's so," admitted his wife.

During that autumn Ellen read the papers, and from time to time broke her silence and unburdened her mind to the people in the boarding-house.

They considered her unbalanced on the subject. The young reporter on the Marshallton _Herald_ liked to lead her on to "get her going," as he said--but the others dodged whenever the war was mentioned and looked apprehensively in her direction.

The law of a.s.sociation of ideas works, naturally enough, in Marshallton, Kansas, quite as much at its ease as in any psychological laboratory. In fact Marshallton was a psychological laboratory with Ellen Boardman, an undefined element of trans.m.u.tation. Without knowing why, scarcely realizing that the little drab figure had crossed his field of vision, Mr. Pennypacker found the war recurring to his thoughts every time he saw her. He did not at all enjoy this, and each time that it happened he thrust the disagreeable subject out of his mind with impatience. The constant recurrence of the necessity for this effort brought upon his usually alert, good-humored face an occasional clouded expression like that which darkened his stenographer's eyes. When Ellen came into the dining-room of the boarding-house, even though she did not say a word, every one there was aware of an unpleasant interruption to the habitual, pleasant current of their thoughts directed upon their own affairs. In self-defense some of the women took to knitting polo-caps for Belgian children. With those in their hands they could listen, with more rea.s.suring certainty that she was "queer," to Miss Boardman's comments on what she read in the newspaper. Every time Mr. Wentworth, preaching one of his excellent, civic-minded sermons on caring for the babies of the poor, or organizing a playground for the children of the factory workers, or extending the work of the Ladies' Guild to neighborhood visits, caught sight of that plain, very serious face looking up at him searchingly, expectantly, he wondered if he had been right in announcing that he would not speak on the war because it would certainly cause dissension among his congregation.

One day, in the middle of winter, he found Miss Boardman waiting for him in the church vestibule after every one else had gone. She said, with her usual directness: "Mr. Wentworth, do you think the French ought to have just let the Germans walk right in and take Paris? Would you let them walk right in and take Washington?"

The minister was a young man, with a good deal of natural heat in his composition, and he found himself answering this bald question with a simplicity as bald: "No, I wouldn't."

"Well, if they did right, why don't we help them?" Ellen's homely, monosyllabic words had a ring of despairing sincerity.

Mr. Wentworth dodged them hastily. "We _are_ helping them. The charitable effort of the United States in the war is something astounding. The statistics show that we have helped...." He was going on to repeat some statistics of American war-relief just then current, when Mr. Scheidemann, the prosperous German grocer, a most influential member of the First Congregational Church, came back into the vestibule to look for his umbrella, which he had forgotten after the service. By a reflex action beyond his control, the minister stopped talking about the war.

He and Miss Boardman had, for just long enough so that he realized it, the appearance of people "caught" discussing something they ought not to mention. The instant after, when Ellen had turned away, he felt the liveliest astonishment and annoyance at having done this. He feared that Miss Boardman might have the preposterous notion that he was _afraid_ to talk about the war before a German. This idea nettled him intolerably.

Just before he fell asleep that night he had a most disagreeable moment, half awake, half asleep, when he himself entertained the preposterous idea which he had attributed to Miss Boardman. It woke him up, broad awake, and very much vexed. The little wound he had inflicted on his own vanity smarted. Thereafter at any mention of the war he straightened his back to a conscious stiffness, and raised his voice if a German were within hearing. And every time he saw that plain, dull face of the stenographer, he winced.

On the 8th of May, 1915, when Ellen went down to breakfast, the boarding-house dining-room was excited. Ellen heard the sinking of the _Lusitania_ read out aloud by the young reporter. To every one's surprise, she added nothing to the exclamations of horror with which the others greeted the news. She looked very white and left the room without touching her breakfast. She went directly down to the office and when Mr. Pennypacker came in at nine o'clock she asked him for a leave of absence, "maybe three months, maybe more," depending on how long her money held out. She explained that she had in the savings-bank five hundred dollars, the entire savings of a lifetime, which she intended to use now.