# The Green Bay Tree (Bromfield, Frederick A. Stokes Company, printing 11)/Chapter 70

AT two o'clock in the house in the Rue Raynouard, Ellen came in to sit on the edge of her cousin's bed and discuss the happenings of the day.
"I guess," she observed, "Willie will be able to tell them a good story when he gets back to the Town. His mouth fairly hung open all the time when he was here."
Lily smiled. "I don't know," she replied, braiding her heavy bronze hair. "From what he tells me, he's in the backwater now. There are a lot of people there who have never heard of us. I suppose Willie and you and I are just back numbers so far as the Town is concerned."
After Ellen had gone to her own room, Lily settled herself on the chaise longue and, wrapped in a peignoir of pale blue chiffon all frothy with old lace the color of ivory, she took from her desk the enameled box, opened it and read the worn clippings. The pile had grown mightily. There were a score of new clippings. The headlines had increased in size and the editorials were an inch or two longer. The man was progressing. He was denounced with a steadily increasing hatred and bitterness. It was clear that he had become a national figure, that he was a leader in the battle against the roaring furnaces.
For a long time she lay with her eyes closed . . . thinking. And at last, hours after the rest of the house had grown still and dark, she sighed, replaced the clippings in the box and locked them once more into her desk. Then she settled herself to writing a letter over which she spent a long time, biting the end of the silver penholder from time to time with her firm white teeth. When at last the effort satisfied her, she placed it in an envelope and addressed it to Sister Monica in the Carmelite Convent at Lisieux. It was the hundredth letter she had written, letters in which she abased herself and begged forgiveness, letters to which there was never any reply save an ​unforgiving and relentless silence. It was like dropping the pale gray envelopes into a bottomless crevasse.
In the following May, Ellen went to Munich. It was the first step in a grand tour of the German cities. She would visit Salzburg, Cologne, Vienna, Leipsic. She would call upon Schönberg, Busoni, Richard Strauss, Pfitzner, von Schilling. . . . If the spirit moved her, she might even penetrate Russia. And certainly she would go to the festival at Weimar. All this was included in the plan she set forth to Lily. There was no schedule. She would simply progress from one place to another as her fancy dictated. She knew no German but she would learn it, as she had learned French, by living among the people. She went alone. Therefore she would have to learn the language.
The expedition was singularly characteristic of all her life. When she found that the Town was unendurable she had reversed the plan of her pioneer ancestors and turned east instead of west, to seek a new world which to her was far more strange than the rolling prairies of the west had been to her great-grandfather. When the traveling salesman, whom she used as a stepping stone, fell by the wayside and departed this life she was free to go unhindered on her own roving way, fortified by the experience of a few years of married life. She owned no fixed home. On the contrary, she moved about restlessly . . . exploring, conquering, exhausting now this city, now that one. She was, it seemed, possessed of a veritable demon of restlessness, of energy, of a sharp inquiring intelligence. It was this quality, stimulated constantly by an overpowering curiosity, which sent her pioneering into the world of new music which Lily disliked so intensely. She explored those regions which musicians of a more contemplative and less restless nature dared not enter. It was as if she were possessed by a Gargantuan desire to devour all the world within a single lifetime.
Once in Paris she said to Lily, "You know, I am obsessed by a terrible sense of the shortness of life. It is impossible to know and experience all that I wish to know."
But this was as near as she came to a contemplative philosophy. She had no time for reflection. The hours she spent with the indolent Lily inevitably fired her with a fierce and ​resentful unrest. It was then that she grew impatient, bad-tempered, unendurable. It was the descent of one of these black moods which drove her from the peaceful solitude of the house at Germigny upon a new voyage of exploration.
And so it happened that Lily and Madame Gigon were alone on the peaceful summer evening when Eustache, the red-cheeked farmer's boy, returning on his bicycle through the rain from Meaux, brought the final edition of the Figaro containing a short paragraph of the most enormous importance to all the world.
Madame Gigon had been installed days before on the first floor of the lodge, because she was no longer able to leave her bed and insisted upon being placed where her ears would serve her to the greatest advantage. The door of her room opened outward upon the terrace above the Marne and here, just inside the door, sat Lily when Eustache arrived.
She opened the Figaro and spread it across her knees.
Madame Gigon, hearing the rustle of the paper, stirred and said peevishly, "What is new to-day?"
"Not much of importance," said Lily, and after a pause. "The archduke of Austria has been assassinated. Shall I read you that?"
"Certainly," replied the old woman with a fierce impatience. "Certainly!"
It was only part of a daily game . . . this asking Madame Gigon what she would have read to her; because in the end the entire journal was read aloud by Lily—the daily progress of the celebrated case of Madame Caillaux, the signed articles by this or that politician, the news of the watering places . . . Deauville, Vichy, Aix, Biarritz, the accounts of the summer charity fêtes, the annual ball at the Opéra, the military news . . . everything was read to the old woman. For Madame Gigon found a keen delight in the recognition of a name among those who had been present at this fete or were stopping at that watering-place. After her own fashion, the blind old woman reduced all France to the proportions of a village. To her, the Caillaux trial became simply an old wives' tale, a village scandal.
So Lily read of the Archduke's assassination and Madame ​Gigon listened, thoughtfully, interrupting her occasionally with a clucking sound to indicate how terrible the affair really was. She understood these things, being a Bonapartist. It was as if the Prince himself had been shot down. It was the natural result of the Republican movement, of Socialism, which was, after all, the same thing. Just another example of what these wild ideas might lead to.
"These are sad times," remarked Madame Gigon when Lily had finished reading. "There is no such thing as law and order . . . no such thing as respect and regard for rank. A wild confusion (une melée sauvage) to see who can gain the most wealth and make the greatest display. Money!" the old woman muttered. "That's it. Money! If you make a fortune out of chocolate or soap, that is enough to put you into the government. Good God! What times are ahead!"
To this harangue, Lily listened absently. It was all monotonously familiar to her. Madame Gigon had said it a thousand times. Every evil she attributed to "these dirty times." She concluded by saying, "Crazy Madame Blaise is right after all. There will be a war . . . She was right. . . . There will be."
While she was speaking, Lily tore open the only interesting letter among the dozen. Quietly she read it to herself. When she had finished she interrupted Madame Gigon.
"I have a letter from M. de Cyon," she said, "about some furniture I was selling. He writes that Madame is ill again with indigestion . . . quite seriously this time."
Madame Gigon made a little grunting noise. "Nadine eats too much . . . I have told her so a dozen times but she will not listen. A woman as fat as that . . ."
And from the superior pinnacle of her great age, Madame allowed the sentence to trail off into unspeakable vistas of Madame de Cyon's folly. At the end of a long time during which they both sat silently in the dripping quiet of the summer evening Madame Gigon said explosively, "She will go off suddenly one of these days . . . like that," and she snapped her finger weakly.
At the sound Criquette and Michou got up lazily, stretched themselves, and waddled close to her chair. For a moment ​she scratched their heads with groping fingers and then turning to Lily said, "It is time for their milk. . . . And see to it, my child, that they have a little cream in it."
Lily rose and called the dogs inside the lodge. Across the river in the tiny church, the old curé, M. Dupont, rang the vesper bell. Behind the cropped willows along the Marne the last glow faded above the rolling fields of wheat. Inside the house Lily was singing softly, "O, le coeur de ma mie est petit, tous p'tit, p'tit." There was no other sound.
Presently, Madame Gigon leaned back in her bed and called to Lily. "To-morrow," she said, "you might ask M. Dupont to call on me. It has been two days since he was here."