Читать книгу Journal of Small Things - Helen Mackay - Страница 24

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I have come home for six days. "I am here," I keep saying to myself, "I am here, at home," as if I could not believe it.

And those homeless people, that they begged for at all the stations where the train stopped on our way, those driven, herded people, stupid from horror they have passed through, helpless, in my home I keep imagining them. Where the train stopped in the dark at half-lit stations, people of the Red Cross came asking help, "Pour nos blessés, pour nos refugiés."

Somehow, in my little rooms, it is the refugees I see the more plainly. There is the young woman with the wheelbarrow, and the old woman, the grandmother, with the baby, the young man carrying the old man on his shoulders, the little brother and sister with the bundle. I see them toiling down the white road, turning back wild looks toward the smoke of their home. They had to leave the cow, but the old dog followed them. I see them in some strange place. They can go no farther. They do not care where they are, or what happens to them. They have looked upon the end of all that they had ever known.

Once, when the train stopped at a very small station, where one could smell the fields all close about and sweet, there was a woman's voice pleading; one heard her, as she came from door to door, along the train, in the dark, "For our homeless; we have thousands and thousands of homeless——" Her voice trailed on in the dark.

I was coming home. Until the boat lay against the quay I had not let myself believe that I was coming home. It was after sunset. The heaped-up town at the edge of the sea, with its old roofs and chimneys, was black, in a livid, cold, desolate sky, that made one think of the dead. The fields of France were dark as we came through them. The towns had few lights, one felt them to be in grief, and lonely. In each town there was the same pleading at the windows of the train, "Pour nos blessés, pour nos refugiés." We came in the small hours to Paris.

The broken-down fiacre dragged through scarcely lit streets that were all empty, and across the great Place, where nothing stirred, and over the bridge of the river, that was as lonely as a river of the wilderness. And then there was my home, where I must dream, all the nights, of homeless people, thousands and thousands of homeless people.