PRIESTS AND PEOPLE

I

Having tasted the delights of a mild vagabondage, we now turned our thoughts to other villages, modestly supposing that by degrees we could "do" the Meuse. (Had we but known it the whole of France lay before us, refugees everywhere, and every refugee in need). Having requisitioned a motor-car we planned tours, but first we investigated Behonne on foot. It lies on the hill above the aviation ground, so let no man ask why it came first in our affections.

I suppose it would be impolitic to say how many sheds there were, or how many aeroplanes we used to see squatting like great winged beetles on the ground, and then rising so lightly, so delicately, spiralling higher and higher, and then darting away with swift wing far into the shimmering blue.

Although Behonne is at the top of a hill, it has managed to tuck itself into a hollow—so many French villages have this burrowing tendency—and all you can see of it as you approach is the top of the church spire rising like a funny candle-extinguisher above the ridge of the hill. The village itself is dull and uninteresting, but the surrounding country beautiful beyond measure, especially when the corn is ripening in the sun; the refugees for the most part not necessitous, having driven from home in their farm carts, magnificently throned on feather beds and duvets, with other household goods.

Two houses, however, made a lasting impression. In one, in a room in the centre of which was a well (boarded over of course), lived a woman, her two children, and an old man in no way related to them. The walls were rotting, in many places straw had been stuffed in to fill fissures and holes, the ceiling was broken, enterprising chunks of it making occasional excursions to the floor below, and one window was "glazed" with paper. The doors, through which rats gnawed an occasional way, were ill-fitting; in bad weather the place was a funnel through which the wind whistled and tore. The woman had one blanket and some old clothes with which to cover herself and her children at night, the old man had a strip of carpet given him by the CurÉ, a kindly old man of peasant stock and very narrow means. The room was exceedingly dirty, the children looked neglected, the woman was ill.

In the other house was a cheery individual whose husband had been a cripple since childhood. She told us she had four children, the youngest being three years old. He came running in from the street, a great fat lusty thing, demanding to be fed, and we learned to our astonishment that he was not yet weaned. Eugenically interesting, this habit of nursing children up to the age of two or even three years of age is not uncommon, and it throws a strong light upon the psychology of French Motherhood.

A few miles beyond Behonne lies Vavincourt, sacred to the omelette of immortal memory—but oh, what a day it was that saw us there! A fierce wind that seemed to tear all the clothes from our bodies blew from the north, there were some inches of snow on the ground, light powdery snow fell incessantly. We were frozen as we drove out, we froze still harder as we made our way from house to house, slipping and sliding on the treacherous snow, absorbing moisture through our boots, staggering like wooden-legged icicles into rooms whose temperature sensibly declined with our advent. A day of supreme physical discomfort; a day that would surely have been our last had not the Mayor's wife overtaken us in the street and swept us into her kitchen, there to revive like flies in sunshine, under the mellifluous influence of hot coffee and omelette, confitures and cheese.

It was in Vavincourt that we first saw women embroidering silk gowns for the Paris shops. The panels in pale pink were stretched on a frame (mÉtier), at which they worked one on either side; a common method, as we discovered during the winter. In Bar-le-Duc we had come upon a few women who worked without a mÉtier, but as time went on more and more brodeuses of every description came upon our books, and so an industry was started which lived at first more or less by taking in its own washing, but later blossomed out into more ambitious ways. Orders came to us from England, and a consignment of dainty things was sent to America, but with what result I cannot say, as I left Bar before its fate was decided.

The Verdun and Nancy districts appear to be the chief centres of the broderie industry, the latter being so famous that girls are sent there to be apprenticed to the trade, which, however, is wretchedly paid, the rate being four sous, or rather less than twopence, an hour, the women finding their own cotton. We gave six sous and cotton free—gilded luxury in the workers' eyes, though sweating in ours, and trusted to their honesty in the matter of time, a trust which was amply repaid, as with one or two exceptions they were scrupulous to a degree. The most amusing delinquent was a voluble lady from Resson who glibly replied, "Oh, at least sixty hours, Mademoiselle," to every question.

"What, sixty hours to do THAT?" we would remonstrate, looking at a small tray-cloth with a motif in each corner.

"Well, À peu prÈs, one does not count exactly; but it was long, long, vous savez." A steely eye searched ours, read incredulity, wavered; "Six francs fifty? Eh, mon Dieu, on acceptera bien cela." And off she would go, to come back in faith with the same outrageous story on the next market day. Perhaps there is excuse for a debt of six francs swelling to eighteen when one walks ten miles to collect it.

Quite a hundred women inscribed their names on our broderie wages-sheet, the war having dislocated their connection with their old markets. The trade itself was languishing, the workers scattered and unable to get into touch with former employers, for Paris shops do not deal direct as a rule, they work through entrepreneuses, or middlewomen, who now being themselves refugees were unable to carry on their old trade. It was almost pitiable to see how the women snatched at an opportunity of working, only a very few, and these chiefly mÉtier workers, being still in receipt of orders from Paris. Some whom we found difficulty in employing were only festonneuses, earning at the best miserable pay and doing coarse, rough work, quite unfit for our purpose—buttonholing round the necks and arms of cheap chemises, for instance. Others were belles brodeuses, turning out the most exquisitely dainty things, fairy garments or house-linen of the most beautiful kind.

Of all ways of helping the refugees there was none better than this. How they longed for work! The old people would come begging for knitting or sewing. "Ça change les idÉes," they would say. Anything rather than sit day after day brooding, thinking, going back over the tragic past, looking out upon the uncertain future. Every franc earned was a franc in the stocking, the bas de laine whose contents were to help to make a home for them once more when the war was over. And what could be better than working at one's own trade, at the thing which one loved and which lay in one's fingers? When the needle was busy the mind was at rest, and despair, that devourer of endurance, slunk abashed out of sight. For they find the time of waiting long, these refugees. Can you wonder? Wherever we went we heard the same story; in village or town we were asked the same question. Each stroke of good fortune, every "push," every fresh batch of prisoners brought the sun through the low-hanging clouds; every reverse, the forced inactivity of winter, drew darkness once more across the sky. In the villages the people who owned horses were fairly well off, they could earn their four francs a day, but the others found little comfort. Work was scarce, their neighbours often as poor as themselves. There are few, if any, big country houses ruled by wealthy, kind-hearted despots in these districts of France. In all our wanderings we found only one village basking in manorial smiles, and enjoying the generosity of a "lady of the house." The needy had to fend for themselves, and work out their own salvation as best they might. The reception given to the Belgians in England read to them like a fairy tale, and fostered wild ideas of England's wealth in their minds. "All the English are rich," they would cry; "have we not heard of les milords anglais?" They received accounts of the poverty in our big cities with polite incredulity; if our own people were starving or naked, why succour foreigners?

Sometimes they smiled a little pityingly. "The English gaspillent tout." Spendthrifts. And they would nod sapient heads, murmuring things it is not expedient to set down. It may even be indiscretion to add that between the French and the Belgians no love is set, some racial hatred having thrust its roots in deep.

It is in the winter that vitality and resistance-power run lowest, especially in the villages, for though work may be found in the fields during the summer, the long dark winter months drag heavily by. Brodeuses would walk eight miles in and eight out again in the most inclement weather to ask for work, others would come as many weary miles to get a hank or two of wool with which to knit socks and shawls. Sometimes one woman would take back work for half a dozen, and always our field of operations spread as village after village was visited and the Society became known.

They came in their tens, they came in their hundreds, I am tempted to swear that they came in their thousands. Madame soon ceased to announce them, they lined the hall, they blocked the staircase, they swirled in the Common-room. There were days when all the resources of the establishment failed, when broderie ran short and wool ran short, when there were no more chemises or matinÉes waiting to be made up, and when our hair, metaphorically speaking, lay in tufts over the house, plucked from our heads by our distracted fingers. They came for work, they came for clothes, they came for medicine and medical attendance, they came for food—only the very poorest these—they came for condensed milk for their babies, or for farine lactÉe, or for orders for admission to the Society's hospitals at ChÂlons and Sermaize, or to ask us to send their children to the Colonies des Vacances, or for paper and packing to make up parcels for husbands at the Front. They came to buy beds and pillows and bolsters at reduced prices and on the instalment plan, paying so much per month according to their means; they came for chairs and cupboards, or for the "trousseau," a gift—it may be reckoned as such, as they only contributed one franc fifty towards the entire cost—of three sheets, four pillow-cases and six towels, each of which had to be hand-stitched or hemmed, and marked or embroidered with the owner's name. They came to ask for white dresses and veils—which they did not get—for candidates for confirmation, they came for sabots and boots, and sometimes they came for the whole lot.

"Well, Madame, Ça va bien?" Thus we greeted a hardy old campaigner in the street one day.

"Eh bien, Ça va tout doucement." Then with an engaging smile, "I am coming to see you to-morrow."

"Indeed? And what do you want now?" This looks crude, but we laboured under no delusions where Madame Morge was concerned. It was not for the sake of our beaux yeux that she visited us.

"Eh, ma fois, un peu de tout," she replied audaciously, and we shot at her a mendacious, "Don't you know that distributions have ceased?" which left her calling heaven and her gods to witness that the earth was crumbling.

Villagers who lived too far away for personal visits wrote, or their Mayor or their priest wrote for them. We had by this time organised our system, and knew that the person who could supply us with a complete and detailed list was the Mayor, or his secretary the schoolmaster.

Sometimes these worthies were hard of heart, assuring us that no one in the commune was necessitous, but we knew from experience that the official mind is sometimes a superficial mind, judging by externals only, so we persisted in our demand, and were invariably satisfied in the end. Others, and they were in a large majority, met us with open arms, cheerfully placed their time and their knowledge at our disposal, were hospitable, helpful and kind, and careful to draw our attention to specially deserving cases. Once when on a tour of inquiry we stumbled into a village during the luncheon hour. A regiment was resting there, and, as the first English who presumably had set foot in it, we were immediately surrounded by an admiring and critical crowd, some imaginative members of which murmured the ominous word Spy. The Mayor's house indicated, we rapped at the door, and in response to a gruff Entrez found ourselves in a small and very crowded kitchen, where a good pot-au-feu was being discussed at a large round table. The situation was sufficiently embarrassing, especially as the Mayor, being deaf, heard only a few words of our introductory speech, and promptly wished all refugees at the devil. A list? He was weary of lists. Every one wanted lists, the PrÉfet wanted lists, the Ministre de l'IntÉrieur wanted lists. And now we came and demanded them. Who the—well, who were we that he should set his quill a-driving on our behalf?

"Shout 'Anglaises' at him." It was a ticklish moment. He was on the point of throwing us out neck and crop. The advice was taken, the roar might have been heard in Bar.

"English? You are English?"

Have you ever seen a raging lion suddenly transform itself into a nice brown-eyed dog? We have, in that little kitchen in a remote village of the Meuse. Our hands were grasped, the Mayor was beaming. A list? He would give us twenty lists. English? Our hands were shaken till our fingers nearly dropped off, and if we had eaten up all the pot-au-feu Monsieur would have deemed it an honour. However, we didn't eat it. Monsieur's family was gazing at it with hungry eyes, and even the best of Ententes may be strained too far.

When we reached the street again the crowd had fraternised with our chauffeur, and we drove away under a pyrotechnical display of smiles.

Another day a soldier suddenly sprang off the pavement, jumped on the step of the motor-car, thrust some freshly-roasted chestnuts into my hand and was gone before I could cry, "Thank you."

We met many priests in these peripatetic adventures, the stout, practical and pompous, the autocratic, the negligent (there was one who regretted he could tell us nothing: "I have only been fifteen months here, so I don't yet know the people"), the old—I remember a visit to a presbytery in the Aube, and finding there a charming, gentle, diffident creature, a lover of books, poor, spiritual, half-detached from this world, very close to the next. He had a fine church, pure Gothic, a joy to the eye of the connoisseur, but no congregation. Only a wee handful of people who met each Sunday in a side chapel, the great unfilled vault of the church telling its own tale of changed thought and agnostic days.

But most intimately of all we came to know the AbbÉ B. who lived in our own town of Bar, because, greatly daring, we rang one evening at his door and asked him to teach us French.

We had heard of him from EugÉnie, and knew that he taught at the École St Louis, that he was a refugee—he escaped from M. on his bicycle a few minutes before the Germans entered it—and that his church and his village were in ruins. But we had never seen him, and when, having rung his bell, escape was no longer possible, an awful thought shattered us. Suppose he were fat and greasy and dull? Could any ingenuity extract us from the situation into which we had thrust ourselves? We felt sure it could not, so we followed EugÉnie with quaking hearts, followed her to the garden where we found a short, dark man with a humorous mouth and an ugly, attractive face, busily planting peas. We nodded our satisfaction to one another, and before we left the arrangement was made.

Our first lesson was devastating. The AbbÉ credited us with the intelligence of children, telling us how to make a plural, and how by adding "e" a masculine word can be changed into a feminine; fort, forte; grand, grande; and so on. Then he gave us a devoir (home work), and we came away feeling like naughty children who have been put into the corner. His parlour was stifling, and how we rejoiced when the weather was fine, and we could hold our class in the garden. I can see him now standing by the low wall under the arbour, his gaze turned far away out across the hills. "It is there," he pointed, "the village. Out there near St Mihiel."

For twenty-seven years he had ministered there, he had seen the children he baptised grow to manhood and womanhood, and had gathered their children, too, into the fold of Christ. He had beautified and adorned the church—how he loved it!—year after year with tireless energy and care, making it more and more perfect, more and more fit for the service of the God he worshipped. And now it is a ruin blown to fragments by the guns of friend and foe alike, and his people are scattered, many of them dead. He came to Bar penniless, owning just the clothes he stood up in, and he told me once that his income, including his salary at the school and a grant from some special fund, was just one hundred francs a month. Scarcely a pound a week.

Once hearing me say that I was not rich, he asked me the amount of my income, adding naÏvely, "I do not ask out of curiosity," and I felt mean as I dodged the question, for an income that is "not riches" in England looks wonderfully like wealth in a refugee's parlour in Bar.

All his dream, all his desire is to go back to M. and build his church again. The church the central, the focussing point, then the schoolhouse, then homes for the people, that is his plan; but he has no money, his congregation is destitute—or nearly so—he cannot look to the Government. Whence, then, will help come? So he would question, filling us with intense desire to rush back to England and plead for him and his cause in every market square in the land. He would go back to M. now if they would allow him to, he will go back with or without permission when the slaughter ends.

"The valley is so fertile," he would say; "watered by the Meuse, it is one of the richest in France. Such grass, such a prairie. And after the war we must cultivate, cultivate quickly; they cannot allow land like ours to be idle, and so we shall go back at once."

"But," we said, "will you be able to cultivate? Surely heavy and constant shell-fire makes the land unfit for the plough?"

We knew what the ground is like all along the blood-stained Front, hundreds of miles of it fought over for four interminable years, its soil enriched by the hallowed dead, torn and lacerated by shells, incalculable tons of iron piercing its breast, and knew, too, that Death lurks cunningly in many an unexploded bomb or mortar or shell, and that prolonged and costly sanitation will be necessary before man dare live on it again. Yes, the AbbÉ knew it too, but knew that a strip of his richest land lay between two hills, the French on one, the Germans on the other, and not a trench dug in all the length between. No wonder hope rode gallantly in his breast, no wonder he saw his people going quietly to their labour, and heard his church bell ringing again its call to peaceful prayer. And then he would revert again to the ever-present problem, the problem of ways and means.

Ah, we in England do not know how that question tortures the heart of stricken France. Shall I tell you of it, leaving the AbbÉ for the moment to look out across the hills, the reverberant thunder in his ear and infinite longing in his loyal heart?

II

A little poem of Padraic Colum's springs to my mind as I ask myself how to make you realise, how bring the truth home to those who have never seen the eternal question shadow the eyes of homeless men. One verse of it runs—

and it just sums up the refugee desire.

You—if you are a refugee—had a home once, you earned a livelihood; but the home is laid waste and bare, your livelihood has vanished, and in all probability your savings with it.

You buried what money you had in the cellar before you left, because you thought you were only going away for a few weeks, and now the Germans have found it. You know that they pour water over cellar floors, watching carefully to see whether any percolates through. If it does it is clear that the earth has recently been disturbed, so away they go for shovels and dig; if it doesn't they try elsewhere. There is the well, for instance. A carefully-made-up packet might lie safely at the bottom for years, so what more suitable as a hiding-place? What, indeed, says the wily Hun as he is cautiously lowered into the darkness, there to probe and pry and fish, and if he is lucky to drag treasure from the deeps. Or you may have hidden your all under that white rock at the end of the garden. The rock is overturned to-day, and a hole shows where the robber has found your gold.

A gnarled tree-trunk, a post, a cross-road, anything that might serve as a mark lures him as sugar lures the ant; he has dug and delved, and searched the surface of France as an intensive culturist digs over his patch of ground. He has cut down the communal forests, the famous cherry and walnut trees of Les Éparges have all been levelled and the timber sent into Germany; he has ripped up floors, torn out window frames; he falls on copper and steel and iron with shrieks of joy; he is the locust of war, with the digestion of an ostrich; he literally "licks the platter clean," and what he cannot gorge he destroys.

So if you are a refugee you ask yourself daily, "What shall we find when we go back? How shall we start life afresh? Who will rebuild our houses, restock our farms and our shops, and indemnify us for all we have lost? France? She will have no money after the war, and Germany will be bankrupt.

What can we, sheltered and safe in England, know of such sorrow as this? To say we have never known invasion is to say we have never known the real meaning of war. It may and does press hardly on us, but it does not grind us under foot. It does not set its iron heel upon our hearts and laugh when the red blood spurts upon the ground; it does not take our chastity in its filthy hands and batten upon it in the market-place; it doesn't rob us of liberty, nor of honour, nor does it break our altars, spuming its bestialities over the sacred flame. Our inner sanctuaries are still holy and undefiled. Those whom we have given have gone clear-eyed and pure-hearted to the White Temple of Sacrifice, there to lay their gift upon the outstretched hand of God: not one has died in shame.

Whatever the war may have in store for us—and that it has much of suffering, of hardship, of privation and bitter sorrow who can doubt?—if it spares us the violation of our homes and of our sanctuaries, if it leaves our frontiers unbroken, if it leaves us FREE, then, indeed, we shall have incurred a debt which it will be difficult to pay. A debt of gratitude which must become a debt of honour to be paid in full measure, pressed down, and running over to those, less fortunate than ourselves, who will turn to us in their need.

And in the longed-for days to come France will need us as she needs us now. She will need our sympathy, our money, our very selves. She will no longer call on us to destroy in order to save, she will call on us to regenerate, redeem, to roll away the Stone from her House of Death, and touching the crucified with our hand, bid them come forth, revivified, strong and free.

Yes, there will be fine work to do in France when the war is over! Constructive work, the building up of all that has been broken down; work much of which she will be too exhausted to undertake herself, work of such magnitude that generations yet unborn may not see it completed.

A new world to make! What possibilities that suggests. Rolling away the Stone, watching the dead limbs stir, the flush of health coming back into the grey, shrivelled faces, and light springing again into the eyes. Seeing Joy light her lamps, and Hope break into blossom, seeing human hearts and human souls cast off the cerecloths and come forth into the fruitful garden. Surely we can await the end with such a Vision Beautiful as that before us, and—who knows?—it may be that in healing the wounds of others we shall find balm for our own.

The Return. If the French visualise it at all, do they see it as a concrete thing, a long procession of worn, exhausted, but eager men and women winding its way from every quarter of France, from the far Pyrenees, from the Midi, from the snow-clad Alps, from the fertile plains, winding, with many a pitiful gap in its ranks, back over the thorn-strewn road? Is that their dream? Yet it may be that the reality is only the beginning of another exile, as long, as patient, as difficult to endure.

Hard-headed, practical, unimaginative reformers of the world's woes sometimes blame the refugees who have remained so near the Front.

In Bar house-rent is high, living exceedingly dear. Legends such as "Le sucre manque: Pas de tabac: no matches; no paraffin," are constantly displayed in the shop windows, wood has more than doubled in price, coal is simply hors de prix. Milk, butter and eggs are frequently unobtainable, and generally bad; gas is an uncertain quantity as coal is scarce, and has a diabolic knack of going out just when you need it most. All of which things do not lend to the gaiety of nations, still less to that of the allocation-supported refugee. If troops are being moved from one part of the Front to another, the Petite Vitesse ceases from its labours and supplies are cut off from the town. Farther south these lamentable things do not happen, but farther south is farther from home. And there's the rub! For home is a magnet and would draw the refugee to the actual Front itself, there to cower in any rude shelter did common sense and l'autoritÉ compÉtente militaire not intervene.

So as many as possible have stayed as near the barrier as possible. And—this is a secret, you mustn't divulge it—these wicked, wily, homeless ones are plotting. They are afraid that after the war the Government will bar the road now swept by German guns; that orders will go forth forbidding return; that railway station guichets will be barred and roads watched by lynx-eyed policemen whom no bribe can corrupt—they will be very special policemen, you know—no tears cajole.

And so they plan to slip back unobserved. If one is at the very door, not more than the proverbial hop, skip and jump away—well, the magnet is very powerful, and even Jove and Governments nod sometimes. And just as the head drops forward and the eyes close, hey presto! they will be over the border, and when the barrier closes down they will be inside, and all the gendarmes in France will not be able to put them out again. If they can't GO home, they will SNEAK home. They will get there if they have to invent an entirely new mode of locomotion, even if they have to live in cellars or shell-holes and eat grass—but there may not be any grass. Didn't Sermaize live in cellars and exist on nothing at all?—live in cellars and grow fond of them? There is one old lady in a jolly little wooden house to-day, who suffers from so acute a nostalgia for her cellar she is afraid to walk past the ruins that cover it. If she did, she declares, the beautiful little wooden house would know her no more. The cellar was as dark and as damp as the inside of a whale, and it gave her a rheumatism of the devil in all her bones, but she lived in it for three years, and in three years one attaches oneself, ma foi, one forms des liaisons. So she sits and sighs while the house-builders meditate on the eternal irony of things, and their pride is as a worm that daws have pecked.

So be sure the refugees will go back just as soon as ever they can go, as the AbbÉ plans to go, caring little if it is unwise, perhaps not realising that even if Peace were declared to-morrow, many years must pass before the earth can become fruitful again, many years must set behind the hills of Time before new villages, new towns, new cities can spring from the graves of the old.

Personally, I hope that some of these graves will be left just as Germany has made them, that a few villages, an historic town or two will be carefully guarded and preserved, partly because ruin-loving America will pay vast sums to see them, and so help to rebuild others, and partly because—am I a vindictive beast?—I want them to remain, silent, inexorable witnesses of the true inwardness of the German method and the German soul, if anything so degraded as she is can be said to have a soul. "Lest we forget," these ghosts of towns should haunt us for ever, stirring the memory and quickening the imagination, a reproach to conscience, an incorruptible judge of blood-guiltiness, which we should neither pardon nor forget till the fullest reparation has been made, the utmost contrition has been shown. And it must be no lip-service either. By its deeds we must know it. I want to see Germany humbled to the very dust; I want to see Germany in sackcloth and ashes rebuilding what she has destroyed, sending new legions into France, but armed this time with shovel and with pick, with brick and with mortar; I want to see those legions labouring to efface the imprints of the old; I want to see Germany feeding them and paying them—they must not cost France one sou; I want to see her in the white shroud of the penitent, candle in hand, barefoot and bareheaded before the Tribunal of the World, confessing her sins, and expiating them every one in an agony not one whit less poignant than that which she has inflicted upon others. Yes, let the destroyer turn builder. And until she does so let us ostracise her, cut her out of our Book of Life. Who are we that we should associate with the Judas who has betrayed civilisation?

A refugee rarely spoke of the Germans without prefixing the adjective dirty—ces sales Boches—and the AbbÉ was no exception to the rule; indeed, he was plain-spoken to bluntness on most occasions. His criticisms of our French compositions would have withered the vanity of a Narcissus, and proved altogether too much for one timid soul, who, having endured a martyrdom through two lessons, stubbornly refused to go back any more. Which was regrettable, as on closer acquaintance he proved to be rather a lovable person, with a simplicity of soul that was as rare as it was childlike.

Like the CurÉ of N., he presumed us Roman Catholic, asked us if England were not rapidly coming into the light, and commented upon the "conversion" of Queen Victoria shortly before her death. Though it shook him, I think he never quite believed our denial of this remarkable story, and have sometimes reproached myself for having deprived him of the obvious comfort it brought him; but he took it all in good part, and subsequently showed us that he could be broad-minded, and tolerant as well.

"Charity knows no creed," he cried, and it was impossible to avoid contrasting his implicit faith in our honesty, his steady confidence that we would never use our exceptional opportunities for winning the confidence and even the affection of the people for any illegitimate purpose, with the deep distrust of the average Irish priest. The hag-ridden fear of Proselytism which clouds every Irish sky dares not show its evil face in France, nor did we ever find even a breath of intolerance tainting our relations with priests or with people.

But then perhaps they, like the AbbÉ, realise that our error of faith is a misfortune rather than a fault. Having been born that way, we were not wholly responsible. Indeed the AbbÉ went so far as to assure me that I was not responsible at all.

"Then who is, M. l'AbbÉ?" I questioned, reading condemnation of some one in his eye.

"Henry the Eighth," he replied, with exquisite conviction, and I gasped. Henry the Eighth!

"Assurement." Had he not a quarrel with his Holiness the Pope, and being greedy for temporal power renounced Catholicism in a fit of rage, and so flung the English people into the profundities of spiritual darkness? We—we other Protestants—are his victims; our error of faith is one for which we shall neither be judged nor punished, but he ... I realised that Henry deserved all my sympathy; he is not having too good a time of it lÀ bas. Of course it was comforting to know that we were blameless, but privately I thought it was rather unfair to poor old Hal, who surely has enough sins of his own to expiate without having those of an obscure bog-trotting Irishwoman foisted upon him as well.

"Yours," went on the AbbÉ, "is natural religion, the heritage of your parents; ours is revealed. Some day I will explain it to you, not—this very naÏvely—with any desire to convert you, but in order to help you to understand why truth is to be found only in the arms of the Roman Church."

It puzzled him a little that we should be Protestant, it was so austere, so comfortless, so cold. "La scÈne-froide" was the expression he used in describing our services, "les mystÈres" when talking of his own. He denounced as the grossest superstition the pathetic belief of many an Irish peasant in the infallibility, the almost-divine power of the priesthood, and, unlike his colleagues in that tormented land, he is an advocate of education even on the broadest basis. "Let people think for themselves; if you keep too tight a rein they will only revolt."

That he detests the present form of Government goes without saying, his condemnation being so sweeping the big pine tree in the garden positively trembled before the winds of his rage. "Anything but this," he cried, "even a monarchy, mÊme un Protestant, mÊme le Roi Albert. Atheists, self-seekers all, they are ruining France," and then he repeated the oft-heard conviction that the war has been sent as a punishment for agnosticism and unbelief.

For PrefÊts and Sous-PrefÊts he entertains the profoundest contempt, even going as far as to designate one of the former, whom I heroically refuse to name, a gros, gras paresseux,[8] and the Sous-PrefÊts the Âmes damnÉes of the Minister of the Interieur. How he hates the whole breed of them! And how joyfully he would depose them every one! The feud between Church and State has ploughed deep furrows in his soul, and I gather that brotherly love did not continue long—supposing that it ever existed—in M. when its waves swept the village into rival factions. The Mayor, needless to say, was agnostic, and loyal to his Government; the AbbÉ furious, but trying hard to be impartial, to eschew politics, and serve his God. He might have succeeded had not the spirit of mischief that lurks in his eye betrayed him and dragged him from his precarious fence. He plunged into the controversy, but—oh, M. l'AbbÉ! M. l'AbbÉ!—in patois and in the columns of the local Press. Now his knowledge of patois, gathered as a boy, had been carefully hidden under a bushel, and so the authorship of the fierce, sarcastic, ironical letters was never known, nor did M. le Maire ever guess why the priest's eyes twinkled so wickedly when he passed him in the street.

They twinkled as he told the story, thoroughly enjoying his little ruse, but grew fierce again when he talked of Freemasons. To say that he thinks Freemasonry an incarnation of the devil is to put his feelings mildly. They are, he declares, the enemy of all virtue, purity and truth; criminal atheists, hotbeds of everything evil, their "tendency" resolutely set against good. They are insidious, corrupt; defilers of public morals and public taste.

"But, M. l'AbbÉ," I cried, "that is not so. In England——" I gave him a few facts. It shook him somewhat to hear that the late King Edward, whom he profoundly admires, was a Mason, but he recovered himself quickly.

"Perhaps in England they may seem good, there may even be good people among them, poor dupes who do not see below the surface. There all is corruption, the goodness is only a mask worn to deceive the ignorant and the credulous. Ah, the evil they have wrought in the world! It was they who brought about the war (its Divine origin was for the moment forgotten), they were undermining Europe, they would drag her down into the pit, to filth and decay."

It was odd to hear such words from the lips of so kindly, so wise a man, and one with so profound a knowledge of human nature. He told me that in all his years of ministry at M. there was only one illegitimate birth in the village—a statement which students of De Maupassant will find it difficult to believe.

We were talking of certain moral problems intensified by the war, the perpetually recurring "sex-question," not any more insistent perhaps in France than elsewhere, but obtruding itself less ashamedly upon the notice. It was the acceptance, the toleration of certain things that puzzled me, an acceptance which I am sometimes tempted to believe is due to some deep, wise understanding of human frailty, of the fierceness of human passions, the weakness of human will when Love has taken over the citadel of the heart. Or is it due to fatalism, the conviction that it is useless to strive against what cannot be altered, absurd to fight Nature in her unbridled moods?

The priest, needless to say, neither accepted nor condoned. He blamed public opinion, above all he blamed the unbelief of the people, and then he told me of M. and the purity of the life there. Only one girl in all those years, and she, after her baby was born, led so exemplary, so modest a life that its father subsequently married her, and together they built up one of the happiest homes in the village. (You will gather that the AbbÉ was not above entertaining at least one popular superstition in that he insinuated that all the blame rested on the shoulders of the woman.)

One other story he told me which flashed a white light upon his soul. A certain atheist, one of his bitterest enemies, came to him one day in deep distress of mind. His wife, an unbeliever like himself, was dying, and, dying, was afraid. The man was rich, and thought he could buy his way and hers into the Kingdom of Heaven. But the AbbÉ refused his gold. "You cannot buy salvation nor ease of conscience," he said sternly. "Keep your money; God wants your heart, and not your purse." He attended the woman, gave her Christian burial, and asked exactly the legal fee. Not one penny more would he take, nor could all the atheist's prayers move him.

He told me that he would not bury a man or a woman living in what he called le concubinage civile, people married by the State only and not by Church and State. For these, he said, there could only be the burial of a dog, for they lived in sin, knowing their error as do the contractors of mixed marriages if they do not ask for and receive a dispensation. The rules governing these latter appear to be much the same as those which hold good in Ireland. No service in a Protestant church is permitted, and the Protestant must promise that all children born of the union shall be baptised and brought up in the Catholic faith. There is no written contract, and the promise may, of course, be broken, but if the Catholic is a party to it he is guilty of mortal sin.

You will see that as our classes ran their course—and circumstances decreed that I should take the final lessons alone—we got very far away from "s" for plural and "e" for feminine. Exercises corrected, many an interesting half-hour we passed in the little parlour, and many a tale of the trenches the AbbÉ gathered up for us, and many a "well-founded, authentic" prophecy of the speedy termination of the war. Ah, he was so sure he would be in his beloved M. this winter. Did not his friend the Editor of—he mentioned a leading Paris journal—tell him so?

But this is the war of the unforeseen. Perhaps that is why some of us dare to believe that when the end comes it will come suddenly, swiftly, like thunder pealing through the heavy stillness of a breathless, sullen night.