Molly Brown of Kentucky

“But where would I come in then?” said Edwin Green whimsically.

“And little Mildred?” from Molly, hugging her infant.

“And Sue’s new car, not to mention Cyrus?” teased Kent.

“You are right, children. I should be more of a philosopher.

“‘The Moving Finger writes: and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.’”

Molly stood over Kent with a cup of steaming tea and taking her cue from her mother’s quotation from the Rubaiyat and prompted by his knownothing attitude with his Aunt Clay, she got off the stanza:

“Yesterday This Day’s Madness did prepare;
To-morrow’s Silence, Triumph, or Despair:
Drink! for you know not whence you came nor why:
Drink! for you know not why you go, nor where.”

CHAPTER V.

LETTERS FROM PARIS AND BERLIN

From Miss Julia Kean to Mrs. Edwin Green.

    Paris, and no idea of the date.
    No fixed address, but the American
    Club might reach me.

Molly darling:

Things are moving so fast that even I can’t quite catch on, and you know I am some mover myself. Jo and I came to Paris as I wrote you we would, but I haven’t seen her since. She told me in as polite words as she could command that she couldn’t be bothered with me any more. At least that was the trend of her remarks. She has the business before her of making up to look as much like a man as possible and then of being taken into the aviation school.

I met an art student from Carlo Rossi’s on the street and he told me Polly was already the proud driver of an ambulance. Lots of the American art students have enlisted or joined the Red Cross. If I liked sick folks or nursing, I think I’d join myself. I feel that I should be doing something while I wait to hear from Bobby. I hope to see the American Ambassador next week. He is simply floored under with duties just now. I don’t want any help from him, but just to find out something about Bobby and Mamma.

If you could see Paris now! Oh, Molly, our gay, beautiful, eternally youthful city has grown suddenly sad and middle-aged. There is no gaiety or frivolity now. Her step has changed from a dance to a march. Her laughter has turned to weeping, but silent weeping – she makes no outcry but one knows the tears are there. Her beautiful festive clothes are laid away and now there is nothing but khaki and mourning. The gallant little soldier is to discard his flaming red trousers and blue coat for khaki. The German finds him too easy a mark.

I begin to tremble for Paris, but strange to say I have no fear for myself.

I have seen the Ambassador! He was very grave when I told him about Bobby. There was some English capital involved in the railroad that Bobby was to build in Turkey, and for that reason there may be some complication. He is to communicate with Gerard immediately. In the meantime, he advises me to go home. I told him I had no home, but would wait here until I found out something. He asked me if I had plenty of money and I told him yes, indeed, my letter of credit was good for almost any amount. I had not had to draw on it as I had stocked up before I went to G – to keep house with the Polly Perkinses. The Ambassador actually laughed at me. Do you know, I can’t get any more money? What a fool I have been! I have been so taken up with Paris and the sights and sounds that money has never entered my head. I have quite a little left, though, and I intend to live on next to nothing.

The Bents have left for America and have given me their key to use their studio as I see fit. Mrs. Bent wanted me to go with them, but I can’t go until we hear from Gerard. Now I am back in the Rue Brea! It seems strange to be there again where we had such a glorious winter. The studio where Kent and Pierce Kinsella lived all last year is vacant. I don’t know where Pierce is. Gone to war, perhaps!

I spend the days on the streets, walking up and down, listening to the talk and watching the regiments as they move away. I ran across some old friends yesterday. You remember a wedding party I butted in on at St. Cloud that day I scared all of you so when I took the wrong train from Versailles and landed at Chartres? Well, I ran plump against the bride on Montparnasse (only she is no longer a bride but had a rosy infant over her shoulder). She came out of a little delicatessen shop and her husband in war togs followed her, and there I witnessed their parting. I seem fated to be present at every crisis in their lives. The girl did not recognize me but the young man did. I had danced with him in too mad a whirl for him to forget me. Then came the old father and his wife who looked like a member of the Commune. They keep the little shop, it seems. I shook hands with them and together we waited for the young man’s regiment to come swinging down the street. With another embrace all around, even me, he caught step with his comrades and was gone. The bonnemère clasped her daughter-in-law to her grenadier-like bosom and they mingled their tears, the rosy baby gasping for breath between the two. The old father turned to me:

“This is different from the last time we met, ma’mselle!”

“Yes, so different!”

“Come in and have a bite and sup with us. There is still something to eat in Paris besides horse flesh.” His wife and daughter-in-law joined him in the invitation and so I went in. I enjoyed the meal more than I can tell you. The grenadier is some cook and although the fare was simple, it was so well seasoned and appetizing that I ate as I have not done since I got back to Paris. The truth of the matter is, I am living so cheap for fear of getting out of money and I am afraid I have been neglecting my inner man. I can’t cook a thing myself, which is certainly trifling of me, and so have depended on restaurants for sustenance. I dressed the salad (you remember it is my one accomplishment) and it met with the approval of host and hostess.

I told them of my trouble and how I felt I must wait until I heard something definite of my mother and father, and they were all sympathy. I have promised to come to them if I get into difficulty, and you don’t know the comfortable feeling I have now that I have some adopted folks.

I might go to the Marquise d’Ochtè, but I know she has all on her hands and mind that she can attend to. I don’t need anything but just companionship. I am such a gregarious animal that I must have folks.

I am dying to hear from you and to know if Kent landed his job. Is he – well, angry with me for staying over? I would not have missed staying for anything, even if he should be put out. I can’t believe he is, though. I had rather hoped for letters when the American mail came in this morning, but the man at the bank was very unfeeling and had nothing. Nobody seems to be getting any mail. I wonder if they are stopping it for some reason or other. I have a great mind to take this to some American who is fleeing and have it mailed in New York. I will do that very thing. Good by, Molly – don’t be uneasy about me. You know my catlike nature of lighting on my feet.

    Your own,
    Judy.

From Mr. Robert Kean to his Daughter Julia.

Berlin.

My dear Judy:

I know you are intensely uneasy about us, but down in your heart you also know that we never get into scrapes we can’t get out of, and we will get out of this. This letter will probably be postmarked Sweden but that does not mean I am there. In fact, I am in durance vile here in Berlin. I am allowed to walk around the streets and to pay my own living expenses but leave Berlin I cannot. Your mother can’t leave, either – not that she would. You know how she thinks that she protects me and so she insists that she will stay. I am allowed to write no letters and can receive none. I am getting this off to you by a clever device of your mother’s, which I shall not divulge now for fear it might be seized and thus get an innocent person in bad with this remarkable Government.

I am kept here all because I know too much about the geography and topography of Turkey. Of course I have made careful maps of the proposed railroad from Constantinople, the one we have been trying to get the concessions for. Well, they have naturally seized the maps. But before I dreamed of the possibility of this war, for, like all of us fool Anglo Saxons, I have been nosing along like a mole, I had a talk with a high Prussian Muckamuck at dinner one evening about this proposed road and I drew the blame thing on the table cloth, and with bits of bread and salt cellars and what not I explained the whole topography of the country and the benefit it would be to mankind to have this particular railroad built, financed by my particular company. That was where I “broke my ’lasses pitcher.” Of course, having surveyed the country and made the maps, at least, having had a finger in the pie from the beginning, I can reproduce those maps from memory, if not very accurately, at least, accurately enough to get the Germans going if that particular information should be needed by the Allies.

Do you know what I see in this? Why, Turkey will be in this war before so very long.

I am hungry for news. I feel that I will go mad if I can’t get some information besides what is printed in these boot licking newspapers of Berlin. They speak of their soldiers as though they were avenging angels – avenging what? Avenging the insult Belgium offered them for not lying down and making a road of herself for them to walk over. Avenging France for not opening wide her gates and getting ready the Christmas dinner the Kaiser meant to eat in Paris. I’d like to prepare his Christmas dinner, and surely I would serve a hors-d’œuvre of rough-on-rats, an entrée of ptomaines, and finish off with a dessert of hanging, which would be too sweet for him. Now just suppose this letter is seized and they see this above remark – what then? I must not be allowed to write my opinion of their ruler to my own daughter, but these Prussians who go to United States and get all they can from our country, feel at perfect liberty to publish newspapers vilifying our President and to burst into print at any moment about our men who are high in authority.

Berlin is wild with enthusiasm and joy over her victories. Every Belgian village that is razed to the ground makes them think it is cause for a torch-light procession. I can’t understand them. They can hardly be the same kindly folk we have so often stayed among. They are still kind, kind to each other and kind in a way to us and to all the strangers within their gates, but how they can rejoice over the reports of their victories I cannot see.

They one and all believe that they were forced to fight. They say France was marching to Berlin for the President to eat Christmas dinner here, and that Belgium had promised they should go straight through her gates unmolested and did not regard the agreement of neutrality. I say nonsense to such statements. At least I think nonsense. I really say very little for one who has so much to say. I am bubbling over to talk politics with some one. Your poor little mumsy listens to me but she never jaws back. I want some one to jaw back. I have promised her to keep off the subject with these Prussians. They are so violent and so on the lookout for treason. There is one thing I am sure of and that is that no Frenchman would want to eat Christmas dinner or any other kind of dinner here if he could eat it in Paris. I am sick of raw goose and blood pudding and Limburger cheese.

As I write this tirade, I am wondering, my dear daughter, where you are. Did you go back to America with Kent Brown, who, you wrote me in your last letter, was sailing in a week, or are you in Paris? I hope not there! Since I see the transports of joy these law-abiding, home-loving citizens, women and men, can get in over an account of what seems to me mere massacre, I tremble to think what the soldiers are capable of in the lust of bloodshed.

From the last bulletin, the Germans are certainly coming closer and closer to Paris. I hope they are lying in their report. They are capable of falsifying anything.

I am trying to get hold of our Ambassador to get me out of this mess, but he is so busy it is hard to see him. I think he is doing excellent work and I feel it is best for me to wait and let the Americans who are in more urgent need get first aid. I have enough money to tide us over for a few weeks with very careful expenditure. Of course I can get no more, just like all the rest of, the Americans who are stranded here.

I feel terribly restless for work. I don’t know how to loaf, never did. I’d go to work here at something, but I feel if I did, it would just mean that these Prussians could then spare one more man for their butchery, and I will at least not help them that much. Your mother and I are on the street a great deal. We walk up and down and go in and out of shops and sit in the parks. I keep moving as much as possible, not only because I am so restless but because I like to keep the stupid spy who is set to watch over me as busy as possible. He has some weird notion that I do not know he is ever near me. I keep up the farce and I give him many anxious moments. Yesterday I wrote limericks and nonsense verses on letter paper and made little boats of them and sent them sailing on the lake in the park. If you could have seen this man’s excitement. He called in an accomplice and they fished out the boats and carefully concealing them, they got hold of a third spy to take them to the chief. I wonder what they made of:

“The Window has Four little Panes:
But One have I.
The Window Panes are in its Sash, —
I wonder why!”

or this:

“I wish that my Room had a Floor —
I don’t so much care for a Door,
But this walking around
Without touching the ground
Is getting to be quite a bore!”