“_Avond, mynheer_,” he answered in a weak voice.
“I am the American delegate of the _Komiteit voor Hulp en Voeding_,” I explained.
“Mynheer is American?” he asked doubtfully, taking his pipe from his mouth and scratching his head as if to recall where or what America could be.
“_Ja wel._ Have you a cup of milk at your house?”
He turned and faced back down the road, still scratching his head.
“_Als ’t U belieft, mynheer_,” I added ceremoniously.
My superlative courtesy seemed to decide him, and he gave a gesture of assent. Side by side and in silence then we walked down the silver road to the first farmhouse. A black mass of protecting trees hung close over the chimney, and low thatch swept down like the back of some prehistoric monster, gray green in the clear moonlight. The walls were lath filled in with clay. Two little rectangular windows glowed dully, and the edges of the thick, ill-fitting door shone with faint light.
He thrust open the door without knocking. I stumbled into the dimly lighted room, hardly knowing what I expected to find. Peasants’ cottages were invariably interesting to me, and invariably they contained surprises. But this was older and more primitive than any I had yet visited--a relic of long-gone days. It was like opening an ancient tomb or a buried city. I entered expectantly, and lo! the centuries rolled backward, and I stood with people of Froissart’s day, with peasants who had scarcely altered since the Middle Ages, whose feet were hardly on the threshold of modernity.
The room was square. At one end was a brick fireplace, rude as if aborigines had built it, with an iron frame squatting in the ashes, a thick pot suspended by a chain, a broiling rack, a heavy iron fork, a charred stick for a poker, and a rude crane. In the smoke of a tiny turf fire on the hearth hung rows of drying vegetables and skins of meat. The floor was beaten earth, hard as brick. The walls were whitewashed. The ceiling was low and strung with onions and other roots and vegetables, and the only touch of modern things was a hanging lamp in the centre. In a corner hung a man’s suit of Sunday clothes, like a creature which has been hanged. A ladder beside it went up to the blind loft overhead. A picture of the Virgin hung on one wall, and a plaster statuette of Saint Anthony and Saint Joseph gleamed from a shelf over the fireplace, drawing one’s eye to a row of plates and dishes. An odour of smoke and cooking and manure heaps and the foul smells of unwashed human beings crowded the little room, and the air droned with the sleepy buzzing of innumerable flies.