Bot-S: The Complete Works of Edith Wharton

COMING HOME ***




Produced by David Widger





COMING HOME

By Edith Wharton

Copyright, 1916, By Charles Scribner’s Sons




I

The young men of our American Relief Corps are beginning to come back
from the front with stories.

There was no time to pick them up during the first months--the whole
business was too wild and grim. The horror has not decreased, but nerves
and sight are beginning to be disciplined to it. In the earlier days,
moreover, such fragments of experience as one got were torn from their
setting like bits of flesh scattered by shrapnel. Now things that seemed
disjointed are beginning to link themselves together, and the broken
bones of history are rising from the battle-fields.

I can’t say that, in this respect, all the members of the Relief Corps
have made the most of their opportunity. Some are unobservant, or
perhaps simply inarticulate; others, when going beyond the bald
statistics of their job, tend to drop into sentiment and cinema scenes;
and none but H. Macy Greer has the gift of making the thing told seem as
true as if one had seen it. So it is on H. Macy Greer that I depend,
and when his motor dashes him back to Paris for supplies I never fail to
hunt him down and coax him to my rooms for dinner and a long cigar.

Greer is a small hard-muscled youth, with pleasant manners, a
sallow face, straight hemp-coloured hair and grey eyes of unexpected
inwardness. He has a voice like thick soup, and speaks with the slovenly
drawl of the new generation of Americans, dragging his words along like
reluctant dogs on a string, and depriving his narrative of every shade
of expression that intelligent intonation gives. But his eyes see so
much that they make one see even what his foggy voice obscures.

Some of his tales are dark and dreadful, some are unutterably sad, and
some end in a huge laugh of irony. I am not sure how I ought to classify
the one I have written down here.




II

ON my first dash to the Northern fighting line--Greer told me the other
night--I carried supplies to an ambulance where the surgeon asked me to
have a talk with an officer who was badly wounded and fretting for news
of his people in the east of France.

He was a young Frenchman, a cavalry lieutenant, trim and slim, with a
pleasant smile and obstinate blue eyes that I liked. He looked as if
he could hold on tight when it was worth his while. He had had a leg
smashed, poor devil, in the first fighting in Flanders, and had been
dragging on for weeks in the squalid camp-hospital where I found him. He
didn’t waste any words on himself, but began at once about his family.
They were living, when the war broke out, at their country-place in
the Vosges; his father and mother, his sister, just eighteen, and his
brother Alain, two years younger. His father, the Comte de Réchamp,
had married late in life, and was over seventy: his mother, a good deal
younger, was crippled with rheumatism; and there was, besides--to
round off the group--a helpless but intensely alive and domineering
old grandmother about whom all the others revolved. You know how French
families hang together, and throw out branches that make new roots but
keep hold of the central trunk, like that tree--what’s it called?--that
they give pictures of in books about the East.

Jean de Réchamp--that was my lieutenant’s name--told me his family was
a typical case. “We’re very _province_,” he said. “My people live
at Réchamp all the year. We have a house at Nancy--rather a fine old
hôtel--but my parents go there only once in two or three years, for a
few weeks. That’s our ‘season.’...Imagine the point of view! Or rather
don’t, because you couldn’t....” (He had been about the world a good
deal, and known something of other angles of vision.)

Well, of this helpless exposed little knot of people he had had no
word--simply nothing--since the first of August. He was at home, staying
with them at Réchamp, when war broke out. He was mobilised the first
day, and had only time to throw his traps into a cart and dash to the
station. His depot was on the other side of France, and communications
with the East by mail and telegraph were completely interrupted during
the first weeks. His regiment was sent at once to the fighting line,
and the first news he got came to him in October, from a communiqué in
a Paris paper a month old, saying: “The enemy yesterday retook Réchamp.”
 After that, dead silence: and the poor devil left in the trenches to
digest that “_retook_”!

There are thousands and thousands of just such cases; and men bearing
them, and cracking jokes, and hitting out as hard as they can. Jean
de Réchamp knew this, and tried to crack jokes too--but he got his leg
smashed just afterward, and ever since he’d been lying on a straw pallet
under a horse-blanket, saying to himself: “_Réchamp retaken_.”

“Of course,” he explained with a weary smile, “as long as you can tot
up your daily bag in the trenches it’s a sort of satisfaction--though
I don’t quite know why; anyhow, you’re so dead-beat at night that no
dreams come. But lying here staring at the ceiling one goes through the
whole business once an hour, at the least: the attack, the slaughter,
the ruins...and worse.... Haven’t I seen and heard things enough on
_this_ side to know what’s been happening on the other? Don’t try to
sugar the dose. I _like_ it bitter.”

I was three days in the neighbourhood, and I went back every day to see
him. He liked to talk to me because he had a faint hope of my getting
news of his family when I returned to Paris. I hadn’t much myself, but
there was no use telling him so. Besides, things change from day to day,
and when we parted I promised to get word to him as soon as I could
find out anything. We both knew, of course, that that would not be till
Réchamp was taken a third time--by his own troops; and perhaps soon
after that, I should be able to get there, or near there, and make
enquiries myself. To make sure that I should forget nothing, he drew
the family photographs from under his pillow, and handed them over:
the little witch-grandmother, with a face like a withered walnut, the
father, a fine broken-looking old boy with a Roman nose and a weak chin,
the mother, in crape, simple, serious and provincial, the little sister
ditto, and Alain, the young brother--just the age the brutes have been
carrying off to German prisons--an over-grown thread-paper boy with too
much forehead and eyes, and not a muscle in his body. A charming-looking
family, distinguished and amiable; but all, except the grandmother,
rather usual. The kind of people who come in sets.

As I pocketed the photographs I noticed that another lay face down by
his pillow. “Is that for me too?” I asked.

He coloured and shook his head, and I felt I had blundered. But after a
moment he turned the photograph over and held it out.

“It’s the young girl I am engaged to. She was at Réchamp visiting my
parents when war was declared; but she was to leave the day after I
did....” He hesitated. “There may have been some difficulty about her
going.... I should like to be sure she got away.... Her name is Yvonne
Malo.”

He did not offer me the photograph, and I did not need it. That girl had
a face of her own! Dark and keen and splendid: a type so different
from the others that I found myself staring. If he had not said “_ma
fiancée_” I should have understood better. After another pause he went
on: “I will give you her address in Paris. She has no family: she lives
alone--she is a musician. Perhaps you may find her there.” His colour
deepened again as he added: “But I know nothing--I have had no news of
her either.”

To ease the silence that followed I suggested: “But if she has no
family, wouldn’t she have been likely to stay with your people, and
wouldn’t that be the reason of your not hearing from her?”

“Oh, no--I don’t think she stayed.” He seemed about to add: “If she
could help it,” but shut his lips and slid the picture out of sight.

As soon as I got back to Paris I made enquiries, but without result.
The Germans had been pushed back from that particular spot after a
fortnight’s intermittent occupation; but their lines were close by,
across the valley, and Réchamp was still in a net of trenches. No one
could get to it, and apparently no news could come from it. For the
moment, at any rate, I found it impossible to get in touch with the
place.

My enquiries about Mlle. Malo were equally unfruitful. I went to the
address Réchamp had given me, somewhere off in Passy, among gardens, in
what they call a “Square,” no doubt because it’s oblong: a kind of long
narrow court with aesthetic-looking studio buildings round it. Mlle.
Malo lived in one of them, on the top floor, the concierge said, and
I looked up and saw a big studio window, and a roof-terrace with dead
gourds dangling from a pergola. But she wasn’t there, she hadn’t been
there, and they had no news of her. I wrote to Réchamp of my double
failure, he sent me back a line of thanks; and after that for a long
while I heard no more of him.

By the beginning of November the enemy’s hold had begun to loosen in the
Argonne and along the Vosges, and one day we were sent off to the
East with a couple of ambulances. Of course we had to have military
chauffeurs, and the one attached to my ambulance happened to be a fellow
I knew. The day before we started, in talking over our route with him,
I said: “I suppose we can manage to get to Réchamp now?” He looked
puzzled--it was such a little place that he’d forgotten the name. “Why
do you want to get there?” he wondered. I told him, and he gave an
exclamation. “Good God! Of course--but how extraordinary! Jean de
Réchamp’s here now, in Paris, too lame for the front, and driving
a motor.” We stared at each other, and he went on: “He must take my
place--he must go with you. I don’t know how it can be done; but done it
shall be.”

Done it was, and the next morning at daylight I found Jean de Réchamp at
the wheel of my car. He looked another fellow from the wreck I had left
in the Flemish hospital; all made over, and burning with activity, but
older, and with lines about his eyes. He had had news from his people in
the interval, and had learned that they were still at Réchamp, and well.
What was more surprising was that Mlle. Malo was with them--had never
left. Alain had been got away to England, where he remained; but none of
the others had budged. They had fitted up an ambulance in the château,
and Mlle. Malo and the little sister were nursing the wounded. There
were not many details in the letters, and they had been a long time on
the way; but their tone was so reassuring that Jean could give himself
up to unclouded anticipation. You may fancy if he was grateful for the
chance I was giving him; for of course he couldn’t have seen his people
in any other way.

Our permits, as you know, don’t as a rule let us into the firing-line:
we only take supplies to second-line ambulances, and carry back the
badly wounded in need of delicate operations. So I wasn’t in the least
sure we should be allowed to go to Réchamp--though I had made up my mind
to get there, anyhow.

We were about a fortnight on the way, coming and going in Champagne and
the Argonne, and that gave us time to get to know each other. It was
bitter cold, and after our long runs over the lonely frozen hills we
used to crawl into the café of the inn--if there was one--and talk and
talk. We put up in fairly rough places, generally in a farm house or a
cottage packed with soldiers; for the villages have all remained empty
since the autumn, except when troops are quartered in them. Usually, to
keep warm, we had to go up after supper to the room we shared, and
get under the blankets with our clothes on. Once some jolly Sisters
of Charity took us in at their Hospice, and we slept two nights in
an ice-cold whitewashed cell--but what tales we heard around their
kitchen-fire! The Sisters had stayed alone to face the Germans, had seen
the town burn, and had made the Teutons turn the hose on the singed
roof of their Hospice and beat the fire back from it. It’s a pity those
Sisters of Charity can’t marry....

Réchamp told me a lot in those days. I don’t believe he was talkative
before the war, but his long weeks in hospital, starving for news, had
unstrung him. And then he was mad with excitement at getting back to his
own place. In the interval he’d heard how other people caught in their
country-houses had fared--you know the stories we all refused to believe
at first, and that we now prefer not to think about.... Well, he’d been
thinking about those stories pretty steadily for some months; and he
kept repeating: “My people say they’re all right--but they give no
details.”

“You see,” he explained, “there never were such helpless beings. Even if
there had been time to leave, they couldn’t have done it. My mother
had been having one of her worst attacks of rheumatism--she was in bed,
helpless, when I left. And my grandmother, who is a demon of activity in
the house, won’t stir out of it. We haven’t been able to coax her into
the garden for years. She says it’s draughty; and you know how we all
feel about draughts! As for my father, he hasn’t had to decide anything
since the Comte de Chambord refused to adopt the tricolour. My father
decided that he was right, and since then there has been nothing
particular for him to take a stand about. But I know how he behaved just
as well as if I’d been there--he kept saying: ‘One must act--one
must act!’ and sitting in his chair and doing nothing. Oh, I’m not
disrespectful: they were _like_ that in his generation! Besides--it’s
better to laugh at things, isn’t it?” And suddenly his face would
darken....

On the whole, however, his spirits were good till we began to traverse
the line of ruined towns between Sainte Menehould and Bar-le-Duc. “This
is the way the devils came,” he kept saying to me; and I saw he was hard
at work picturing the work they must have done in his own neighbourhood.

“But since your sister writes that your people are safe!”

“They may have made her write that to reassure me. They’d heard I was
badly wounded. And, mind you, there’s never been a line from my mother.”

“But you say your mother’s hands are so lame that she can’t hold a pen.
And wouldn’t Mlle. Malo have written you the truth?”

At that his frown would lift. “Oh, yes. She would despise any attempt at
concealment.”

“Well, then--what the deuce is the matter?”

“It’s when I see these devils’ traces--” he could only mutter.

One day, when we had passed through a particularly devastated little
place, and had got from the curé some more than usually abominable
details of things done there, Réchamp broke out to me over the
kitchen-fire of our night’s lodging. “When I hear things like that I
don’t believe anybody who tells me my people are all right!”

“But you know well enough,” I insisted, “that the Germans are not all
alike--that it all depends on the particular officer....”

“Yes, yes, I know,” he assented, with a visible effort at impartiality.
“Only, you see--as one gets nearer....” He went on to say that, when he
had been sent from the ambulance at the front to a hospital at Moulins,
he had been for a day or two in a ward next to some wounded German
soldiers--bad cases, they were--and had heard them talking. They didn’t
know he knew German, and he had heard things.... There was one name
always coming back in their talk, von Scharlach, Oberst von Scharlach.
One of them, a young fellow, said: “I wish now I’d cut my hand off
rather than do what he told us to that night.... Every time the fever
comes I see it all again. I wish I’d been struck dead first.” They all
said “Scharlach” with a kind of terror in their voices, as if he might
hear them even there, and come down on them horribly. Réchamp had asked
where their regiment came from, and had been told: From the Vosges.
That had set his brain working, and whenever he saw a ruined village, or
heard a tale of savagery, the Scharlach nerve began to quiver. At such
times it was no use reminding him that the Germans had had at least
three hundred thousand men in the East in August. He simply didn’t
listen....




III

The day before we started for Réchamp his spirits flew up again, and
that night he became confidential. “You’ve been such a friend to me that
there are certain things--seeing what’s ahead of us--that I should like
to explain”; and, noticing my surprise, he went on: “I mean about my
people. The state of mind in my _milieu_ must be so remote from anything
you’re used to in your happy country.... But perhaps I can make you
understand....”

I saw that what he wanted was to talk to me of the girl he was engaged
to. Mlle. Malo, left an orphan at ten, had been the ward of a neighbour
of the Réchamps’, a chap with an old name and a starred château, who
had lost almost everything else at baccarat before he was forty, and had
repented, had the gout and studied agriculture for the rest of his life.
The girl’s father was a rather brilliant painter, who died young, and
her mother, who followed him in a year or two, was a Pole: you may fancy
that, with such antecedents, the girl was just the mixture to shake down
quietly into French country life with a gouty and repentant guardian.
The Marquis de Corvenaire--that was his name--brought her down to his
place, got an old maid sister to come and stay, and really, as far as
one knows, brought his ward up rather decently.

Now and then she used to be driven over to play with the young Réchamps,
and Jean remembered her as an ugly little girl in a plaid frock, who
used to invent wonderful games and get tired of playing them just as the
other children were beginning to learn how. But her domineering ways
and searching questions did not meet with his mother’s approval, and her
visits were not encouraged. When she was seventeen her guardian died
and left her a little money. The maiden sister had gone dotty, there was
nobody to look after Yvonne, and she went to Paris, to an aunt, broke
loose from the aunt when she came of age, set up her studio, travelled,
painted, played the violin, knew lots of people; and never laid eyes on
Jean de Réchamp till about a year before the war, when her guardian’s
place was sold, and she had to go down there to see about her interest
in the property.

The old Réchamps heard she was coming, but didn’t ask her to stay.
Jean drove over to the shut-up chateau, however, and found Mlle. Malo
lunching on a corner of the kitchen table. She exclaimed: “My little
Jean!” flew to him with a kiss for each cheek, and made him sit down and
share her omelet.... The ugly little girl had shed her chrysalis--and
you may fancy if he went back once or twice!

Mlle. Malo was staying at the chateau all alone, with the farmer’s wife
to come in and cook her dinner: not a soul in the house at night but
herself and her brindled sheep dog. She had to be there a week, and
Jean suggested to his people to ask her to Réchamp. But at Réchamp they
hesitated, coughed, looked away, said the sparerooms were all upside
down, and the valet-de-chambre laid up with the mumps, and the cook
short-handed--till finally the irrepressible grandmother broke out: “A
young girl who chooses to live alone--probably prefers to live alone!”

There was a deadly silence, and Jean did not raise the question again;
but I can imagine his blue eyes getting obstinate.

Soon after Mlle. Malo’s return to Paris he followed her and began to
frequent the Passy studio. The life there was unlike anything he had
ever seen--or conceived as possible, short of the prairies. He had
sampled the usual varieties of French womankind, and explored most
of the social layers; but he had missed the newest, that of the
artistic-emancipated. I don’t know much about that set myself, but from
his descriptions I should say they were a good deal like intelligent
Americans, except that they don’t seem to keep art and life in such
water-tight compartments. But his great discovery was the new girl.
Apparently he had never before known any but the traditional type, which
predominates in the provinces, and still persists, he tells me, in the
last fastnesses of the Faubourg St. Germain. The girl who comes and goes
as she pleases, reads what she likes, has opinions about what she reads,
who talks, looks, behaves with the independence of a married woman--and
yet has kept the Diana-freshness--think how she must have shaken up
such a man’s inherited view of things! Mlle. Malo did far more than make
Réchamp fall in love with her: she turned his world topsy-turvey,
and prevented his ever again squeezing himself into his little old
pigeon-hole of prejudices.

Before long they confessed their love--just like any young couple of
Anglo-Saxons--and Jean went down to Réchamp to ask permission to marry
her. Neither you nor I can quite enter into the state of mind of a young
man of twenty-seven who has knocked about all over the globe, and
been in and out of the usual sentimental coils--and who has to ask his
parents’ leave to get married! Don’t let us try: it’s no use. We should
only end by picturing him as an incorrigible ninny. But there isn’t a
man in France who wouldn’t feel it his duty to take that step, as Jean
de Réchamp did. All we can do is to accept the premise and pass on.

Well--Jean went down and asked his father and his mother and his old
grandmother if they would permit him to marry Mlle. Malo; and they all
with one voice said they wouldn’t. There was an uproar, in fact; and the
old grandmother contributed the most piercing note to the concert. Marry
Mlle. Malo! A young girl who lived alone! Travelled! Spent her time with
foreigners--with musicians and painters! _A young girl!_ Of course, if
she had been a married woman--that is, a widow--much as they would have
preferred a young girl for Jean, or even, if widow it had to be, a widow
of another type--still, it was conceivable that, out of affection for
him, they might have resigned themselves to his choice. But a young
girl--bring such a young girl to Réchamp! Ask them to receive her under
the same roof with their little Simone, their innocent Alain....

He had a bad hour of it; but he held his own, keeping silent while
they screamed, and stiffening as they began to wobble from exhaustion.
Finally he took his mother apart, and tried to reason with her. His
arguments were not much use, but his resolution impressed her, and he
saw it. As for his father, nobody was afraid of Monsieur de Réchamp.
When he said: “Never--never while I live, and there is a roof on
Réchamp!” they all knew he had collapsed inside. But the grandmother
was terrible. She was terrible because she was so old, and so clever
at taking advantage of it. She could bring on a valvular heart attack by
just sitting still and holding her breath, as Jean and his mother had
long since found out; and she always treated them to one when things
weren’t going as she liked. Madame de Réchamp promised Jean that she
would intercede with her mother-in-law; but she hadn’t much faith in
the result, and when she came out of the old lady’s room she whispered:
“She’s just sitting there holding her breath.”

The next day Jean himself advanced to the attack. His grandmother was
the most intelligent member of the family, and she knew he knew it, and
liked him for having found it out; so when he had her alone she listened
to him without resorting to any valvular tricks. “Of course,” he
explained, “you’re much too clever not to understand that the times have
changed, and manners with them, and that what a woman was criticised for
doing yesterday she is ridiculed for not doing to-day. Nearly all the
old social thou-shalt-nots have gone: intelligent people nowadays don’t
give a fig for them, and that simple fact has abolished them. They
only existed as long as there was some one left for them to scare.” His
grandmother listened with a sparkle of admiration in her ancient eyes.
“And of course,” Jean pursued, “that can’t be the real reason for your
opposing my marriage--a marriage with a young girl you’ve always known,
who has been received here--”

“Ah, that’s it--we’ve always known her!” the old lady snapped him up.

“What of that? I don’t see--”

“Of course you don’t. You’re here so little: you don’t hear things....”

“What things?”

“Things in the air... that blow about.... You were doing your military
service at the time....”

“At what time?”

She leaned forward and laid a warning hand on his arm. “Why did
Corvenaire leave her all that money--_why?_”

“But why not--why shouldn’t he?” Jean stammered, indignant. Then she
unpacked her bag--a heap of vague insinuations, baseless conjectures,
village tattle, all, at the last analysis, based, as he succeeded
in proving, and making her own, on a word launched at random by a
discharged maid-servant who had retailed her grievance to the cure’s
housekeeper. “Oh, she does what she likes with Monsieur le Marquis, the
young miss! _She_ knows how....” On that single phrase the neighbourhood
had raised a slander built of adamant.

Well, I’ll give you an idea of what a determined fellow Réchamp is, when
I tell you he pulled it down--or thought he did. He kept his temper,
hunted up the servant’s record, proved her a liar and dishonest, cast
grave doubts on the discretion of the cure’s housekeeper, and poured
such a flood of ridicule over the whole flimsy fable, and those who
had believed in it, that in sheer shamefacedness at having based her
objection on such grounds, his grandmother gave way, and brought his
parents toppling down with her.

All this happened a few weeks before the war, and soon afterward Mlle.
Malo came down to Réchamp. Jean had insisted on her coming: he wanted
her presence there, as his betrothed, to be known to the neighbourhood.
As for her, she seemed delighted to come. I could see from Rechamp’s
tone, when he reached this part of his story, that he rather thought I
should expect its heroine to have shown a becoming reluctance--to
have stood on her dignity. He was distinctly relieved when he found I
expected no such thing.

“She’s simplicity itself--it’s her great quality. Vain complications
don’t exist for her, because she doesn’t see them... that’s what my
people can’t be made to understand....”

I gathered from the last phrase that the visit had not been a complete
success, and this explained his having let out, when he first told me
of his fears for his family, that he was sure Mlle. Malo would not have
remained at Réchamp if she could help it. Oh, no, decidedly, the visit
was not a success....

“You see,” he explained with a half-embarrassed smile, “it was partly
her fault. Other girls as clever, but less--how shall I say?--less
proud, would have adapted themselves, arranged things, avoided startling
allusions. She wouldn’t stoop to that; she talked to my family as
naturally as she did to me. You can imagine for instance, the effect of
her saying: ‘One night, after a supper at Montmartre, I was walking home
with two or three pals’--. It was her way of affirming her convictions,
and I adored her for it--but I wished she wouldn’t!”

And he depicted, to my joy, the neighbours rumbling over to call in
heraldic barouches (the mothers alone--with embarrassed excuses for not
bringing their daughters), and the agony of not knowing, till they were
in the room, if Yvonne would receive them with lowered lids and folded
hands, sitting by in a _pose de fiancée_ while the elders talked; or
if she would take the opportunity to air her views on the separation of
Church and State, or the necessity of making divorce easier. “It’s not,”
 he explained, “that she really takes much interest in such questions:
she’s much more absorbed in her music and painting. But anything her
eye lights on sets her mind dancing--as she said to me once: ‘It’s your
mother’s friends’ bonnets that make me stand up for divorce!’” He broke
off abruptly to add: “Good God, how far off all that nonsense seems!”




IV

The next day we started for Réchamp, not sure if we could get through,
but bound to, anyhow! It was the coldest day we’d had, the sky steel,
the earth iron, and a snow-wind howling down on us from the north. The
Vosges are splendid in winter. In summer they are just plump puddingy
hills; when the wind strips them they turn to mountains. And we seemed
to have the whole country to ourselves--the black firs, the blue
shadows, the beech-woods cracking and groaning like rigging, the bursts
of snowy sunlight from cold clouds. Not a soul in sight except the
sentinels guarding the railways, muffled to the eyes, or peering out
of their huts of pine-boughs at the cross-roads. Every now and then we
passed a long string of seventy-fives, or a train of supply waggons or
army ambulances, and at intervals a cavalryman cantered by, his cloak
bellied out by the gale; but of ordinary people about the common jobs of
life, not a sign.

The sense of loneliness and remoteness that the absence of the civil
population produces everywhere in eastern France is increased by the
fact that all the names and distances on the mile-stones have been
scratched out and the sign-posts at the cross-roads thrown down. It was
done, presumably, to throw the enemy off the track in September: and the
signs have never been put back. The result is that one is forever losing
one’s way, for the soldiers quartered in the district know only the
names of their particular villages, and those on the march can tell you
nothing about the places they are passing through. We had got badly
off our road several times during the trip, but on the last day’s run
Réchamp was in his own country, and knew every yard of the way--or
thought he did. We had turned off the main road, and were running along
between rather featureless fields and woods, crossed by a good many
wood-roads with nothing to distinguish them; but he continued to push
ahead, saying:

“We don’t turn till we get to a manor-house on a stream, with a big
paper-mill across the road.” He went on to tell me that the mill-owners
lived in the manor, and were old friends of his people: good old local
stock, who had lived there for generations and done a lot for the
neighbourhood.

“It’s queer I don’t see their village-steeple from this rise. The
village is just beyond the house. How the devil could I have missed the
turn?” We ran on a little farther, and suddenly he stopped the motor
with a jerk. We were at a cross-road, with a stream running under the
bank on our right. The place looked like an abandoned stoneyard. I never
saw completer ruin. To the left, a fortified gate gaped on emptiness; to
the right, a mill-wheel hung in the stream. Everything else was as flat
as your dinner-table.

“Was this what you were trying to see from that rise?” I asked; and I
saw a tear or two running down his face.

“They were the kindest people: their only son got himself shot the first
month in Champagne--”

He had jumped out of the car and was standing staring at the level
waste. “The house was there--there was a splendid lime in the court. I
used to sit under it and have a glass of _vin cris de Lorraine_ with the
old people.... Over there, where that cinder-heap is, all their children
are buried.” He walked across to the grave-yard under a blackened
wall--a bit of the apse of the vanished church--and sat down on a
grave-stone. “If the devils have done this _here_--so close to us,” he
burst out, and covered his face.

An old woman walked toward us down the road. Réchamp jumped up and ran
to meet her. “Why, Marie Jeanne, what are you doing in these ruins?” The
old woman looked at him with unastonished eyes. She seemed incapable of
any surprise. “They left my house standing. I’m glad to see Monsieur,”
 she simply said. We followed her to the one house left in the waste of
stones. It was a two-roomed cottage, propped against a cow-stable,
but fairly decent, with a curtain in the window and a cat on the sill.
Réchamp caught me by the arm and pointed to the door-panel. “Oberst von
Scharlach” was scrawled on it. He turned as white as your table-cloth,
and hung on to me a minute; then he spoke to the old woman. “The
officers were quartered here: that was the reason they spared your
house?”

She nodded. “Yes: I was lucky. But the gentlemen must come in and have a
mouthful.”

Réchamp’s finger was on the name. “And this one--this was their
commanding officer?”

“I suppose so. Is it somebody’s name?” She had evidently never
speculated on the meaning of the scrawl that had saved her.

“You remember him--their captain? Was his name Scharlach?” Réchamp
persisted.

Under its rich weathering the old woman’s face grew as pale as his.
“Yes, that was his name--I heard it often enough.”

“Describe him, then. What was he like? Tall and fair? They’re all
that--but what else? What in particular?”

She hesitated, and then said: “This one wasn’t fair. He was dark, and
had a scar that drew up the left corner of his mouth.”

Réchamp turned to me. “It’s the same. I heard the men describing him at
Moulins.”

We followed the old woman into the house, and while she gave us some
bread and wine she told us about the wrecking of the village and the
factory. It was one of the most damnable stories I’ve heard yet. Put
together the worst of the typical horrors and you’ll have a fair idea of
it. Murder, outrage, torture: Scharlach’s programme seemed to be
fairly comprehensive. She ended off by saying: “His orderly showed me a
silver-mounted flute he always travelled with, and a beautiful paint-box
mounted in silver too. Before he left he sat down on my door-step and
made a painting of the ruins....”

Soon after leaving this place of death we got to the second lines and
our troubles began. We had to do a lot of talking to get through the
lines, but what Réchamp had just seen had made him eloquent.
Luckily, too, the ambulance doctor, a charming fellow, was short of
tetanus-serum, and I had some left; and while I went over with him to
the pine-branch hut where he hid his wounded I explained Réchamp’s
case, and implored him to get us through. Finally it was settled that
we should leave the ambulance there--for in the lines the ban against
motors is absolute--and drive the remaining twelve miles. A sergeant
fished out of a farmhouse a toothless old woman with a furry horse
harnessed to a two-wheeled trap, and we started off by round-about
wood-tracks. The horse was in no hurry, nor the old lady either; for
there were bits of road that were pretty steadily currycombed by shell,
and it was to everybody’s interest not to cross them before twilight.
Jean de Réchamp’s excitement seemed to have dropped: he sat beside me
dumb as a fish, staring straight ahead of him. I didn’t feel talkative
either, for a word the doctor had let drop had left me thinking. “That
poor old granny mind the shells? Not she!” he had said when our crazy
chariot drove up. “She doesn’t know them from snow-flakes any more.
Nothing matters to her now, except trying to outwit a German. They’re
all like that where Scharlach’s been--you’ve heard of him? She had only
one boy--half-witted: he cocked a broomhandle at them, and they burnt
him. Oh, she’ll take you to Réchamp safe enough.”

“Where Scharlach’s been”--so he had been as close as this to Réchamp! I
was wondering if Jean knew it, and if that had sealed his lips and given
him that flinty profile. The old horse’s woolly flanks jogged on under
the bare branches and the old woman’s bent back jogged in time with it.
She never once spoke or looked around at us. “It isn’t the noise we
make that’ll give us away,” I said at last; and just then the old woman
turned her head and pointed silently with the osier-twig she used as a
whip. Just ahead of us lay a heap of ruins: the wreck, apparently, of
a great château and its dependencies. “Lermont!” Réchamp exclaimed,
turning white. He made a motion to jump out and then dropped back into
the seat. “What’s the use?” he muttered. He leaned forward and touched
the old woman’s shoulder.

“I hadn’t heard of this--when did it happen?”

“In September.”

“_They_ did it?”

“Yes. Our wounded were there. It’s like this everywhere in our country.”

I saw Jean stiffening himself for the next question. “At Réchamp, too?”

She relapsed into indifference. “I haven’t been as far as Réchamp.”

“But you must have seen people who’d been there--you must have heard.”

“I’ve heard the masters were still there--so there must be something
standing. Maybe though,” she reflected, “they’re in the cellars....”

We continued to jog on through the dusk.




V


“There’s the steeple!” Réchamp burst out.

Through the dimness I couldn’t tell which way to look; but I suppose in
the thickest midnight he would have known where he was. He jumped from
the trap and took the old horse by the bridle. I made out that he was
guiding us into a long village street edged by houses in which
every light was extinguished. The snow on the ground sent up a pale
reflection, and I began to see the gabled outline of the houses and
the steeple at the head of the street. The place seemed as calm and
unchanged as if the sound of war had never reached it. In the open space
at the end of the village Réchamp checked the horse.

“The elm--there’s the old elm in front of the church!” he shouted in
a voice like a boy’s. He ran back and caught me by both hands. “It was
true, then--nothing’s touched!” The old woman asked: “Is this Réchamp?”
 and he went back to the horse’s head and turned the trap toward a tall
gate between park walls. The gate was barred and padlocked, and not a
gleam showed through the shutters of the porter’s lodge; but Réchamp,
after listening a minute or two, gave a low call twice repeated, and
presently the lodge door opened, and an old man peered out. Well--I
leave you to brush in the rest. Old family servant, tears and hugs and
so on. I know you affect to scorn the cinema, and this was it, tremolo
and all. Hang it! This war’s going to teach us not to be afraid of the
obvious.

We piled into the trap and drove down a long avenue to the house. Black
as the grave, of course; but in another minute the door opened, and
there, in the hall, was another servant, screening a light--and then
more doors opened on another cinema-scene: fine old drawing-room with
family portraits, shaded lamp, domestic group about the fire. They
evidently thought it was the servant coming to announce dinner, and
not a head turned at our approach. I could see them all over Jean’s
shoulder: a grey-haired lady knitting with stiff fingers, an old
gentleman with a high nose and a weak chin sitting in a big carved
armchair and looking more like a portrait than the portraits; a pretty
girl at his feet, with a dog’s head in her lap, and another girl, who
had a Red Cross on her sleeve, at the table with a book. She had been
reading aloud in a rich veiled voice, and broke off her last phrase
to say: “Dinner....” Then she looked up and saw Jean. Her dark face
remained perfectly calm, but she lifted her hand in a just perceptible
gesture of warning, and instantly understanding he drew back and pushed
the servant forward in his place.

“Madame la Comtesse--it is some one outside asking for Mademoiselle.”

The dark girl jumped up and ran out into the hall. I remember wondering:
“Is it because she wants to have him to herself first--or because she’s
afraid of their being startled?” I wished myself out of the way, but she
took no notice of me, and going straight to Jean flung her arms about
him. I was behind him and could see her hands about his neck, and
her brown fingers tightly locked. There wasn’t much doubt about those
two....

The next minute she caught sight of me, and I was being rapidly tested
by a pair of the finest eyes I ever saw--I don’t apply the term to their
setting, though that was fine too, but to the look itself, a look at
once warm and resolute, all-promising and all-penetrating. I really
can’t do with fewer adjectives....

Réchamp explained me, and she was full of thanks and welcome; not
excessive, but--well, I don’t know--eloquent! She gave every intonation
all it could carry, and without the least emphasis: that’s the wonder.

She went back to “prepare” the parents, as they say in melodrama; and
in a minute or two we followed. What struck me first was that these
insignificant and inadequate people had the command of the grand
gesture--had _la ligne_. The mother had laid aside her knitting--_not_
dropped it--and stood waiting with open arms. But even in clasping
her son she seemed to include me in her welcome. I don’t know how to
describe it; but they never let me feel I was in the way. I suppose
that’s part of what you call distinction; knowing instinctively how to
deal with unusual moments.

All the while, I was looking about me at the fine secure old room, in
which nothing seemed altered or disturbed, the portraits smiling from
the walls, the servants beaming in the doorway--and wondering how such
things could have survived in the trail of death and havoc we had been
following.

The same thought had evidently struck Jean, for he dropped his sister’s
hand and turned to gaze about him too.

“Then nothing’s touched--nothing? I don’t understand,” he stammered.

Monsieur de Réchamp raised himself majestically from his chair,
crossed the room and lifted Yvonne Malo’s hand to his lips. “Nothing is
touched--thanks to this hand and this brain.”

Madame de Réchamp was shining on her son through tears. “Ah, yes--we owe
it all to Yvonne.”

“All, all! Grandmamma will tell you!” Simone chimed in; and Yvonne,
brushing aside their praise with a half-impatient laugh, said to her
betrothed: “But your grandmother! You must go up to her at once.”

A wonderful specimen, that grandmother: I was taken to see her after
dinner. She sat by the fire in a bare panelled bedroom, bolt upright
in an armchair with ears, a knitting-table at her elbow with a shaded
candle on it.

She was even more withered and ancient than she looked in her
photograph, and I judge she’d never been pretty; but she somehow made
me feel as if I’d got through with prettiness. I don’t know exactly what
she reminded me of: a dried bouquet, or something rich and clovy that
had turned brittle through long keeping in a sandal-wood box. I suppose
her sandal-wood box had been Good Society. Well, I had a rare evening
with her. Jean and his parents were called down to see the curé, who had
hurried over to the château when he heard of the young man’s arrival;
and the old lady asked me to stay on and chat with her. She related
their experiences with uncanny detachment, seeming chiefly to resent
the indignity of having been made to descend into the cellar--“to avoid
French shells, if you’ll believe it: the Germans had the decency not to
bombard us,” she observed impartially. I was so struck by the absence
of rancour in her tone that finally, out of sheer curiosity, I made
an allusion to the horror of having the enemy under one’s roof. “Oh,
I might almost say I didn’t see them,” she returned. “I never go
downstairs any longer; and they didn’t do me the honour of coming beyond
my door. A glance sufficed them--an old woman like me!” she added with a
phosphorescent gleam of coquetry.

“But they searched the château, surely?” “Oh, a mere form; they were
very decent--very decent,” she almost snapped at me. “There was a first
moment, of course, when we feared it might be hard to get Monsieur de
Réchamp away with my young grandson; but Mlle. Malo managed that very
cleverly. They slipped off while the officers were dining.” She looked
at me with the smile of some arch old lady in a Louis XV pastel. “My
grandson Jean’s fiancée is a very clever young woman: in my time no
young girl would have been so sure of herself, so cool and quick. After
all, there is something to be said for the new way of bringing up girls.
My poor daughter-in-law, at Yvonne’s age, was a bleating baby: she is so
still, at times. The convent doesn’t develop character. I’m glad Yvonne
was not brought up in a convent.” And this champion of tradition smiled
on me more intensely.

Little by little I got from her the story of the German approach: the
distracted fugitives pouring in from the villages north of Réchamp, the
sound of distant cannonading, and suddenly, the next afternoon, after a
reassuring lull, the sight of a single spiked helmet at the end of the
drive. In a few minutes a dozen followed: mostly officers; then all at
once the place hummed with them. There were supply waggons and motors in
the court, bundles of hay, stacks of rifles, artillery-men unharnessing
and rubbing down their horses. The crowd was hot and thirsty, and in a
moment the old lady, to her amazement, saw wine and cider being handed
about by the Réchamp servants. “Or so at least I was told,” she added,
correcting herself, “for it’s not my habit to look out of the window. I
simply sat here and waited.” Her seat, as she spoke, might have been a
curule chair.

Downstairs, it appeared, Mlle. Malo had instantly taken her measures.
_She_ didn’t sit and wait. Surprised in the garden with Simone, she had
made the girl walk quietly back to the house and receive the officers
with her on the doorstep. The officer in command--captain, or whatever
he was--had arrived in a bad temper, cursing and swearing, and growling
out menaces about spies. The day was intensely hot, and possibly he had
had too much wine. At any rate Mlle. Malo had known how to “put him in
his place”; and when he and the other officers entered they found
the dining-table set out with refreshing drinks and cigars, melons,
strawberries and iced coffee. “The clever creature! She even remembered
that they liked whipped cream with their coffee!”

The effect had been miraculous. The captain--what was his name? Yes,
Chariot, Chariot--Captain Chariot had been specially complimentary on
the subject of the whipped cream and the cigars. Then he asked to see
the other members of the family, and Mlle. Malo told him there were only
two--two old women! “He made a face at that, and said all the same he
should like to meet them; and she answered: ‘One is your hostess, the
Comtesse de Réchamp, who is ill in bed’--for my poor daughter-in-law
was lying in bed paralyzed with rheumatism--‘and the other her
mother-in-law, a very old lady who never leaves her room.’”

“But aren’t there any men in the family?” he had then asked; and she had
said: “Oh yes--two. The Comte de Réchamp and his son.”

“And where are they?”

“In England. Monsieur de Réchamp went a month ago to take his son on a
trip.”

The officer said: “I was told they were here to-day”; and Mlle. Malo
replied: “You had better have the house searched and satisfy yourself.”

He laughed and said: “The idea _had_ occurred to me.” She laughed also,
and sitting down at the piano struck a few chords. Captain Chariot, who
had his foot on the threshold, turned back--Simone had described the
scene to her grandmother afterward. “Some of the brutes, it seems, are
musical,” the old lady explained; “and this was one of them. While he
was listening, some soldiers appeared in the court carrying another who
seemed to be wounded. It turned out afterward that he’d been climbing a
garden wall after fruit, and cut himself on the broken glass at the top;
but the blood was enough--they raised the usual dreadful outcry about
an ambush, and a lieutenant clattered into the room where Mlle. Malo
sat playing Stravinsky.” The old lady paused for her effect, and I was
conscious of giving her all she wanted.

“Well--?”

“Will you believe it? It seems she looked at her watch-bracelet and said:
‘Do you gentlemen dress for dinner? _I_ do--but we’ve still time for a
little Moussorgsky’--or whatever wild names they call themselves--‘if
you’ll make those people outside hold their tongues.’ Our captain looked
at her again, laughed, gave an order that sent the lieutenant right
about, and sat down beside her at the piano. Imagine my stupour, dear
sir: the drawing-room is directly under this room, and in a moment I
heard two voices coming up to me. Well, I won’t conceal from you that
his was the finest. But then I always adored a barytone.” She folded her
shrivelled hands among their laces. “After that, the Germans were
_très bien--très bien_. They stayed two days, and there was nothing to
complain of. Indeed, when the second detachment came, a week later, they
never even entered the gates. Orders had been left that they should be
quartered elsewhere. Of course we were lucky in happening on a man of
the world like Captain Chariot.”

“Yes, very lucky. It’s odd, though, his having a French name.”

“Very. It probably accounts for his breeding,” she answered placidly;
and left me marvelling at the happy remoteness of old age.




VI

The next morning early Jean de Réchamp came to my room. I was struck
at once by the change in him: he had lost his first glow, and seemed
nervous and hesitating. I knew what he had come for: to ask me to
postpone our departure for another twenty-four hours. By rights we
should have been off that morning; but there had been a sharp brush a
few kilometres away, and a couple of poor devils had been brought to
the château whom it would have been death to carry farther that day and
criminal not to hurry to a base hospital the next morning. “We’ve simply
_got_ to stay till to-morrow: you’re in luck,” I said laughing.

He laughed back, but with a frown that made me feel I had been a brute
to speak in that way of a respite due to such a cause.

“The men will pull through, you know--trust Mlle. Malo for that!” I
said.

His frown did not lift. He went to the window and drummed on the pane.

“Do you see that breach in the wall, down there behind the trees?
It’s the only scratch the place has got. And think of Lennont! It’s
incredible--simply incredible!”

“But it’s like that everywhere, isn’t it? Everything depends on the
officer in command.”

“Yes: that’s it, I suppose. I haven’t had time to get a consecutive
account of what happened: they’re all too excited. Mlle. Malo is the
only person who can tell me exactly how things went.” He swung about on
me. “Look here, it sounds absurd, what I’m asking; but try to get me an
hour alone with her, will you?”

I stared at the request, and he went on, still half-laughing: “You
see, they all hang on me; my father and mother, Simone, the curé, the
servants. The whole village is coming up presently: they want to stuff
their eyes full of me. It’s natural enough, after living here all these
long months cut off from everything. But the result is I haven’t said
two words to her yet.”

“Well, you shall,” I declared; and with an easier smile he turned to
hurry down to a mass of thanksgiving which the curé was to celebrate
in the private chapel. “My parents wanted it,” he explained; “and after
that the whole village will be upon us. But later--”

“Later I’ll effect a diversion; I swear I will,” I assured him.

*****

By daylight, decidedly, Mlle. Malo was less handsome than in the
evening. It was my first thought as she came toward me, that afternoon,
under the limes. Jean was still indoors, with his people, receiving
the village; I rather wondered she hadn’t stayed there with him.
Theoretically, her place was at his side; but I knew she was a young
woman who didn’t live by rule, and she had already struck me as having a
distaste for superfluous expenditures of feeling.

Yes, she was less effective by day. She looked older for one thing; her
face was pinched, and a little sallow and for the first time I noticed
that her cheek-bones were too high. Her eyes, too, had lost their velvet
depth: fine eyes still, but not unfathomable. But the smile with
which she greeted me was charming: it ran over her tired face like a
lamp-lighter kindling flames as he runs.

“I was looking for you,” she said. “Shall we have a little talk? The
reception is sure to last another hour: every one of the villagers is
going to tell just what happened to him or her when the Germans came.”

“And you’ve run away from the ceremony?”

“I’m a trifle tired of hearing the same adventures retold,” she said,
still smiling.

“But I thought there _were_ no adventures--that that was the wonder of
it?”

She shrugged. “It makes their stories a little dull, at any rate; we’ve
not a hero or a martyr to show.” She had strolled farther from the house
as we talked, leading me in the direction of a bare horse-chestnut walk
that led toward the park.

“Of course Jean’s got to listen to it all, poor boy; but I needn’t,” she
explained.

I didn’t know exactly what to answer and we walked on a little way in
silence; then she said: “If you’d carried him off this morning he would
have escaped all this fuss.” After a pause she added slowly: “On the
whole, it might have been as well.”

“To carry him off?”

“Yes.” She stopped and looked at me. “I wish you _would_.”

“Would?--Now?”

“Yes, now: as soon as you can. He’s really not strong yet--he’s drawn
and nervous.” (“So are you,” I thought.) “And the excitement is greater
than you can perhaps imagine--”

I gave her back her look. “Why, I think I _can_ imagine....”

She coloured up through her sallow skin and then laughed away her blush.
“Oh, I don’t mean the excitement of seeing _me!_ But his parents, his
grandmother, the curé, all the old associations--”

I considered for a moment; then I said: “As a matter of fact, you’re
about the only person he _hasn’t_ seen.”

She checked a quick answer on her lips, and for a moment or two we faced
each other silently. A sudden sense of intimacy, of complicity almost,
came over me. What was it that the girl’s silence was crying out to me?

“If I take him away now he won’t have seen you at all,” I continued.

She stood under the bare trees, keeping her eyes on me. “Then take
him away now!” she retorted; and as she spoke I saw her face change,
decompose into deadly apprehension and as quickly regain its usual calm.
From where she stood she faced the courtyard, and glancing in the same
direction I saw the throng of villagers coming out of the château. “Take
him away--take him away at once!” she passionately commanded; and the
next minute Jean de Réchamp detached himself from the group and began to
limp down the walk in our direction.

What was I to do? I can’t exaggerate the sense of urgency Mlle. Malo’s
appeal gave me, or my faith in her sincerity. No one who had seen her
meeting with Réchamp the night before could have doubted her feeling for
him: if she wanted him away it was not because she did not delight in
his presence. Even now, as he approached, I saw her face veiled by
a faint mist of emotion: it was like watching a fruit ripen under a
midsummer sun. But she turned sharply from the house and began to walk
on.

“Can’t you give me a hint of your reason?” I suggested as I followed.

“My reason? I’ve given it!” I suppose I looked incredulous, for she
added in a lower voice: “I don’t want him to hear--yet--about all the
horrors.”

“The horrors? I thought there had been none here.”

“All around us--” Her voice became a whisper. “Our friends... our
neighbours... every one....”

“He can hardly avoid hearing of that, can he? And besides, since you’re
all safe and happy.... Look here,” I broke off, “he’s coming after us.
Don’t we look as if we were running away?”

She turned around, suddenly paler; and in a stride or two Réchamp was
at our side. He was pale too; and before I could find a pretext for
slipping away he had begun to speak. But I saw at once that he didn’t
know or care if I was there.

“What was the name of the officer in command who was quartered here?” he
asked, looking straight at the girl.

She raised her eye-brows slightly. “Do you mean to say that after
listening for three hours to every inhabitant of Béchamp you haven’t
found that out?”

“They all call him something different. My grandmother says he had a
French name: she calls him Chariot.”

“Your grandmother was never taught German: his name was the Oberst von
Scharlach.” She did not remember my presence either: the two were still
looking straight in each other’s eyes.

Béchamp had grown white to the lips: he was rigid with the effort to
control himself.

“Why didn’t you tell me it was Scharlach who was here?” he brought out
at last in a low voice.

She turned her eyes in my direction. “I was just explaining to Mr.
Greer--”

“To Mr. Greer?” He looked at me too, half-angrily.

“I know the stories that are about,” she continued quietly; “and I was
saying to your friend that, since we had been so happy as to be spared,
it seemed useless to dwell on what has happened elsewhere.”

“Damn what happened elsewhere! I don’t yet know what happened here.”

I put a hand on his arm. Mlle. Malo was looking hard at me, but I
wouldn’t let her see I knew it. “I’m going to leave you to hear the
whole story now,” I said to Réchamp.

“But there isn’t any story for him to hear!” she broke in. She pointed
at the serene front of the château, looking out across its gardens to
the unscarred fields. “We’re safe; the place is untouched. Why brood on
other horrors--horrors we were powerless to help?”

Réchamp held his ground doggedly. “But the man’s name is a curse and an
abomination. Wherever he went he spread ruin.”

“So they say. Mayn’t there be a mistake? Legends grow up so quickly in
these dreadful times. Here--” she looked about her again at the peaceful
scene--“here he behaved as you see. For heaven’s sake be content with
that!”

“Content?” He passed his hand across his forehead. “I’m blind with
joy...or should be, if only...”

She looked at me entreatingly, almost desperately, and I took hold of
Réchamp’s arm with a warning pressure.

“My dear fellow, don’t you see that Mlle. Malo has been under a great
strain? _La joie fait peur_--that’s the trouble with both of you!”

He lowered his head. “Yes, I suppose it is.” He took her hand And kissed
it. “I beg your pardon. Greer’s right: we’re both on edge.”

“Yes: I’ll leave you for a little while, if you and Mr Greer will excuse
me.” She included us both in a quiet look that seemed to me extremely
noble, and walked slowly away toward the château. Réchamp stood gazing
after her for a moment; then he dropped down on one of benches at
the edge of the path. He covered his face with his hands.
“Scharlach--Scharlach!” I heard him say.

We sat there side by side for ten minutes or more without speaking.
Finally I said: “Look here, Réchamp--she’s right and you’re wrong. I
shall be sorry I brought you here if you don’t see it before it’s too
late.”

His face was still hidden; but presently he dropped his hands and
answered me. “I do see. She’s saved everything for me--my, people and
my house, and the ground we’re standing on. And I worship it because she
walks on it!”

“And so do your people: the war’s done that for you, anyhow,” I reminded
him.




VII

The morning after we were off before dawn. Our time allowance was up,
and it was thought advisable, on account of our wounded, to slip across
the exposed bit of road in the dark.

Mlle. Malo was downstairs when we started, pale in her white dress, but
calm and active. We had borrowed a farmer’s cart in which our two men
could be laid on a mattress, and she had stocked our trap with food and
remedies. Nothing seemed to have been forgotten. While I was settling
the men I suppose Réchamp turned back into the hall to bid her good-bye;
anyhow, when she followed him out a moment later he looked quieter
and less strained. He had taken leave of his parents and his sister
upstairs, and Yvonne Malo stood alone in the dark driveway, watching us
as we drove away.

There was not much talk between us during our slow drive back to the
lines. We had to go it a snail’s pace, for the roads were rough; and
there was time for meditation. I knew well enough what my companion was
thinking about and my own thoughts ran on the same lines. Though the
story of the German occupation of Réchamp had been retold to us a dozen
times the main facts did not vary. There were little discrepancies of
detail, and gaps in the narrative here and there; but all the household,
from the astute ancestress to the last bewildered pantry-boy, were
at one in saying that Mlle. Malo’s coolness and courage had saved the
chateau and the village. The officer in command had arrived full of
threats and insolence: Mlle. Malo had placated and disarmed him, turned
his suspicions to ridicule, entertained him and his comrades at dinner,
and contrived during that time--or rather while they were making music
afterward (which they did for half the night, it seemed)--that Monsieur
de Réchamp and Alain should slip out of the cellar in which they had
been hidden, gain the end of the gardens through an old hidden passage,
and get off in the darkness. Meanwhile Simone had been safe upstairs
with her mother and grandmother, and none of the officers lodged in the
château had--after a first hasty inspection--set foot in any part of the
house but the wing assigned to them. On the third morning they had left,
and Scharlach, before going, had put in Mlle. Malo’s hands a
letter requesting whatever officer should follow him to show
every consideration to the family of the Comte de Réchamp, and if
possible--owing to the grave illness of the Countess--avoid taking up
quarters in the château: a request which had been scrupulously observed.

Such were the amazing but undisputed facts over which Réchamp and I, in
our different ways, were now pondering. He hardly spoke, and when he did
it was only to make some casual reference to the road or to our wounded
soldiers; but all the while I sat at his side I kept hearing the echo
of the question he was inwardly asking himself, and hoping to God he
wouldn’t put it to me....

It was nearly noon when we finally reached the lines, and the men had to
have a rest before we could start again; but a couple of hours later we
landed them safely at the base hospital. From there we had intended
to go back to Paris; but as we were starting there came an unexpected
summons to another point of the front, where there had been a successful
night-attack, and a lot of Germans taken in a blown-up trench. The place
was fifty miles away, and off my beat, but the number of wounded on
both sides was exceptionally heavy, and all the available ambulances had
already started. An urgent call had come for more, and there was nothing
for it but to go; so we went.

We found things in a bad mess at the second line shanty-hospital where
they were dumping the wounded as fast as they could bring them in. At
first we were told that none were fit to be carried farther that night;
and after we had done what we could we went off to hunt up a shake-down
in the village. But a few minutes later an orderly overtook us with a
message from the surgeon. There was a German with an abdominal wound who
was in a bad way, but might be saved by an operation if he could be got
back to the base before midnight.

Would we take him at once and then come back for others?

There is only one answer to such requests, and a few minutes later we
were back at the hospital, and the wounded man was being carried out on
a stretcher. In the shaky lantern gleam I caught a glimpse of a livid
face and a torn uniform, and saw that he was an officer, and nearly done
for. Réchamp had climbed to the box, and seemed not to be noticing what
was going on at the back of the motor. I understood that he loathed the
job, and wanted not to see the face of the man we were carrying; so when
we had got him settled I jumped into the ambulance beside him and called
out to Béchamp that we were ready. A second later an _infirmier_ ran
up with a little packet and pushed it into my hand. “His papers,” he
explained. I pocketed them and pulled the door shut, and we were off.

The man lay motionless on his back, conscious, but desperately weak.
Once I turned my pocket-lamp on him and saw that he was young--about
thirty--with damp dark hair and a thin face. He had received a
flesh-wound above the eyes, and his forehead was bandaged, but the rest
of the face uncovered. As the light fell on him he lifted his eyelids
and looked at me: his look was inscrutable.

For half an hour or so I sat there in the dark, the sense of that face
pressing close on me. It was a damnable face--meanly handsome, basely
proud. In my one glimpse of it I had seen that the man was suffering
atrociously, but as we slid along through the night he made no sound.
At length the motor stopped with a violent jerk that drew a single moan
from him. I turned the light on him, but he lay perfectly still, lips
and lids shut, making no sign; and I jumped out and ran round to the
front to see what had happened.

The motor had stopped for lack of gasolene and was stock still in the
deep mud. Réchamp muttered something about a leak in his tank. As he
bent over it, the lantern flame struck up into his face, which was set
and businesslike. It struck me vaguely that he showed no particular
surprise.

“What’s to be done?” I asked.

“I think I can tinker it up; but we’ve got to have more essence to go on
with.”

I stared at him in despair: it was a good hour’s walk back to the lines,
and we weren’t so sure of getting any gasolene when we got there! But
there was no help for it; and as Réchamp was dead lame, no alternative
but for me to go.

I opened the ambulance door, gave another look at the motionless man
inside and took out a remedy which I handed over to Réchamp with a word
of explanation. “You know how to give a hypo? Keep a close eye on him
and pop this in if you see a change--not otherwise.”

He nodded. “Do you suppose he’ll die?” he asked below his breath.

“No, I don’t. If we get him to the hospital before morning I think he’ll
pull through.”

“Oh, all right.” He unhooked one of the motor lanterns and handed it
over to me. “I’ll do my best,” he said as I turned away.

Getting back to the lines through that pitch-black forest, and finding
somebody to bring the gasolene back for me was about the weariest job I
ever tackled. I couldn’t imagine why it wasn’t daylight when we finally
got to the place where I had left the motor. It seemed to me as if I had
been gone twelve hours when I finally caught sight of the grey bulk of
the car through the thinning darkness.

Réchamp came forward to meet us, and took hold of my arm as I was
opening the door of the car. “The man’s dead,” he said.

I had lifted up my pocket-lamp, and its light fell on Réchamp’s face,
which was perfectly composed, and seemed less gaunt and drawn than at
any time since we had started on our trip.

“Dead? Why--how? What happened? Did you give him the hypodermic?” I
stammered, taken aback.

“No time to. He died in a minute.”

“How do you know he did? Were you with him?”

“Of course I was with him,” Réchamp retorted, with a sudden harshness
which made me aware that I had grown harsh myself. But I had been almost
sure the man wasn’t anywhere near death when I left him. I opened the
door of the ambulance and climbed in with my lantern. He didn’t appear
to have moved, but he was dead sure enough--had been for two or three
hours, by the feel of him. It must have happened not long after I
left.... Well, I’m not a doctor, anyhow....

I don’t think Réchamp and I exchanged a word during the rest of that
run. But it was my fault and not his if we didn’t. By the mere rub of
his sleeve against mine as we sat side by side on the motor I knew he
was conscious of no bar between us: he had somehow got back, in the
night’s interval, to a state of wholesome stolidity, while I, on the
contrary, was tingling all over with exposed nerves.

I was glad enough when we got back to the base at last, and the grim
load we carried was lifted out and taken into the hospital. Réchamp
waited in the courtyard beside his car, lighting a cigarette in the
cold early sunlight; but I followed the bearers and the surgeon into the
whitewashed room where the dead man was laid out to be undressed. I had
a burning spot at the pit of my stomach while his clothes were ripped
off him and the bandages undone: I couldn’t take my eyes from the
surgeon’s face. But the surgeon, with a big batch of wounded on his
hands, was probably thinking more of the living than the dead; and
besides, we were near the front, and the body before him was an enemy’s.

He finished his examination and scribbled something in a note-book.
“Death must have taken place nearly five hours ago,” he merely remarked:
it was the conclusion I had already come to myself.

“And how about the papers?” the surgeon continued. “You have them, I
suppose? This way, please.”

We left the half-stripped body on the blood-stained oil-cloth, and he
led me into an office where a functionary sat behind a littered desk.

“The papers? Thank you. You haven’t examined them? Let us see, then.”

I handed over the leather note-case I had thrust into my pocket the
evening before, and saw for the first time its silver-edged corners and
the coronet in one of them. The official took out the papers and spread
them on the desk between us. I watched him absently while he did so.

Suddenly he uttered an exclamation. “Ah--that’s a haul!” he said, and
pushed a bit of paper toward me. On it was engraved the name: Oberst
Graf Benno von Scharlach....

“A good riddance,” said the surgeon over my shoulder.

I went back to the courtyard and saw Réchamp still smoking his cigarette
in the cold sunlight. I don’t suppose I’d been in the hospital ten
minutes; but I felt as old as Methuselah.

My friend greeted me with a smile. “Ready for breakfast?” he said, and
a little chill ran down my spine.... But I said: “Oh, all right--come
along....”

For, after all, I _knew_ there wasn’t a paper of any sort on that
man when he was lifted into my ambulance the night before: the French
officials attend to their business too carefully for me not to have been
sure of that. And there wasn’t the least shred of evidence to prove that
he hadn’t died of his wounds during the unlucky delay in the forest; or
that Réchamp had known his tank was leaking when we started out from the
lines.

“I could do with a _café complet_, couldn’t you?” Réchamp suggested,
looking straight at me with his good blue eyes; and arm in arm we
started off to hunt for the inn....


THE CHOICE ***




Produced by David Widger





THE CHOICE

By Edith Wharton

Copyright, 1916, By Charles Scribner’s Sons




I

Stilling, that night after dinner, had surpassed himself. He always did,
Wrayford reflected, when the small fry from Highfield came to dine. He,
Cobham Stilling, who had to find his bearings and keep to his level in
the big heedless ironic world of New York, dilated and grew vast in the
congenial medium of Highfield. The Red House was the biggest house of
the Highfield summer colony, and Cobham Stilling was its biggest man. No
one else within a radius of a hundred miles (on a conservative estimate)
had as many horses, as many greenhouses, as many servants, and assuredly
no one else had three motors and a motor-boat for the lake.

The motor-boat was Stilling’s latest hobby, and he rode--or steered--it
in and out of the conversation all the evening, to the obvious
edification of every one present save his wife and his visitor, Austin
Wrayford. The interest of the latter two who, from opposite ends of the
drawing-room, exchanged a fleeting glance when Stilling again launched
his craft on the thin current of the talk--the interest of Mrs. Stilling
and Wrayford had already lost its edge by protracted contact with the
subject.

But the dinner-guests--the Rector, Mr. Swordsley, his wife Mrs.
Swordsley, Lucy and Agnes Granger, their brother Addison, and young
Jack Emmerton from Harvard--were all, for divers reasons, stirred to the
proper pitch of feeling. Mr. Swordsley, no doubt, was saying to himself:
“If my good parishioner here can afford to buy a motor-boat, in addition
to all the other expenditures which an establishment like this must
entail, I certainly need not scruple to appeal to him again for a
contribution for our Galahad Club.” The Granger girls, meanwhile, were
evoking visions of lakeside picnics, not unadorned with the presence of
young Mr. Emmerton; while that youth himself speculated as to whether
his affable host would let him, when he came back on his next vacation,
“learn to run the thing himself”; and Mr. Addison Granger, the elderly
bachelor brother of the volatile Lucy and Agnes, mentally formulated
the precise phrase in which, in his next letter to his cousin Professor
Spildyke of the University of East Latmos, he should allude to “our last
delightful trip in my old friend Cobham Stilling’s ten-thousand-dollar
motor-launch”--for East Latmos was still in that primitive stage of
culture on which five figures impinge.

Isabel Stilling, sitting beside Mrs. Swordsley, her bead slightly
bent above the needlework with which on these occasions it was her
old-fashioned habit to employ herself--Isabel also had doubtless her
reflections to make. As Wrayford leaned back in his corner and looked
at her across the wide flower-filled drawing-room he noted, first of
all--for the how many hundredth time?--the play of her hands above the
embroidery-frame, the shadow of the thick dark hair on her forehead,
 the lids over her somewhat full grey eyes. He noted all this with a
conscious deliberateness of enjoyment, taking in unconsciously, at the
same time, the particular quality in her attitude, in the fall of her
dress and the turn of her head, which had set her for him, from the
first day, in a separate world; then he said to himself: “She is
certainly thinking: ‘Where on earth will Cobham get the money to pay for
it?’”

Stilling, cigar in mouth and thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, was
impressively perorating from his usual dominant position on the
hearth-rug.

“I said: ‘If I have the thing at all, I want the best that can be
got.’ That’s my way, you know, Swordsley; I suppose I’m what you’d call
fastidious. Always was, about everything, from cigars to wom--” his
eye met the apprehensive glance of Mrs. Swordsley, who looked like her
husband with his clerical coat cut slightly lower--“so I said: ‘If
I have the thing at all, I want the best that can be got.’ Nothing
makeshift for me, no second-best. I never cared for the cheap and showy.
I always say frankly to a man: ‘If you can’t give me a first-rate cigar,
for the Lord’s sake let me smoke my own.’” He paused to do so. “Well, if
you have my standards, you can’t buy a thing in a minute. You must look
round, compare, select. I found there were lots of motor-boats on the
market, just as there’s lots of stuff called champagne. But I said to
myself: ‘Ten to one there’s only one fit to buy, just as there’s only
one champagne fit for a gentleman to drink.’ Argued like a lawyer, eh,
Austin?” He tossed this to Wrayford. “Take me for one of your own trade,
wouldn’t you? Well, I’m not such a fool as I look. I suppose you fellows
who are tied to the treadmill--excuse me, Swordsley, but work’s work,
isn’t it?--I suppose you think a man like me has nothing to do but take
it easy: loll through life like a woman. By George, sir, I’d like either
of you to see the time it takes--I won’t say the _brain_--but just the
time it takes to pick out a good motor-boat. Why, I went--”

Mrs. Stilling set her embroidery-frame noiselessly on the table at her
side, and turned her head toward Wrayford. “Would you mind ringing for
the tray?”

The interruption helped Mrs. Swordsley to waver to her feet. “I’m afraid
we ought really to be going; my husband has an early service to-morrow.”

Her host intervened with a genial protest. “Going already? Nothing of
the sort! Why, the night’s still young, as the poet says. Long way from
here to the rectory? Nonsense! In our little twenty-horse car we do
it in five minutes--don’t we, Belle? Ah, you’re walking, to be sure--”
 Stilling’s indulgent gesture seemed to concede that, in such a case,
allowances must be made, and that he was the last man not to make them.
“Well, then, Swordsley--” He held out a thick red hand that seemed to
exude beneficence, and the clergyman, pressing it, ventured to murmur a
suggestion.

“What, that Galahad Club again? Why, I thought my wife--Isabel, didn’t
we--No? Well, it must have been my mother, then. Of course, you know,
anything my good mother gives is--well--virtually--You haven’t asked
her? Sure? I could have sworn; I get so many of these appeals. And in
these times, you know, we have to go cautiously. I’m sure you recognize
that yourself, Swordsley. With my obligations--here now, to show you
don’t bear malice, have a brandy and soda before you go. Nonsense, man!
This brandy isn’t liquor; it’s liqueur. I picked it up last year in
London--last of a famous lot from Lord St. Oswyn’s cellar. Laid down
here, it stood me at--Eh?” he broke off as his wife moved toward him.
“Ah, yes, of course. Miss Lucy, Miss Agnes--a drop of soda-water? Look
here, Addison, you won’t refuse my tipple, I know. Well, take a cigar,
at any rate, Swordsley. And, by the way, I’m afraid you’ll have to go
round the long way by the avenue to-night. Sorry, Mrs. Swordsley, but I
forgot to tell them to leave the gate into the lane unlocked. Well, it’s
a jolly night, and I daresay you won’t mind the extra turn along the
lake. And, by Jove! if the moon’s out, you’ll have a glimpse of the
motorboat. She’s moored just out beyond our boat-house; and it’s a
privilege to look at her, I can tell you!”

*****

The dispersal of his guests carried Stilling out into the hall, where
his pleasantries reverberated under the oak rafters while the Granger
girls were being muffled for the drive and the carriages summoned from
the stables.

By a common impulse Mrs. Stilling and Wrayford had moved together toward
the fire-place, which was hidden by a tall screen from the door into
the hall. Wrayford leaned his elbow against the mantel-piece, and Mrs.
Stilling stood beside him, her clasped hands hanging down before her.

“Have you anything more to talk over with him?” she asked.

“No. We wound it all up before dinner. He doesn’t want to talk about it
any more than he can help.”

“It’s so bad?”

“No; but this time he’s got to pull up.”

She stood silent, with lowered lids. He listened a moment, catching
Stilling’s farewell shout; then he moved a little nearer, and laid his
hand on her arm.

“In an hour?”

She made an imperceptible motion of assent.

“I’ll tell you about it then. The key’s as usual?”

She signed another “Yes” and walked away with her long drifting step as
her husband came in from the hall.

He went up to the tray and poured himself out a tall glass of brandy and
soda.

“The weather is turning queer--black as pitch. I hope the Swordsleys
won’t walk into the lake--involuntary immersion, eh? He’d come out
a Baptist, I suppose. What’d the Bishop do in such a case? There’s a
problem for a lawyer, my boy!”

He clapped his hand on Wrayford’s thin shoulder and then walked over to
his wife, who was gathering up her embroidery silks and dropping them
into her work-bag. Stilling took her by the arms and swung her playfully
about so that she faced the lamplight.

“What’s the matter with you tonight?”

“The matter?” she echoed, colouring a little, and standing very straight
in her desire not to appear to shrink from his touch.

“You never opened your lips. Left me the whole job of entertaining those
blessed people. Didn’t she, Austin?”

Wrayford laughed and lit a cigarette.

“There! You see even Austin noticed it. What’s the matter, I say? Aren’t
they good enough for you? I don’t say they’re particularly exciting;
but, hang it! I like to ask them here--I like to give people pleasure.”

“I didn’t mean to be dull,” said Isabel.

“Well, you must learn to make an effort. Don’t treat people as if they
weren’t in the room just because they don’t happen to amuse you. Do you
know what they’ll think? They’ll think it’s because you’ve got a bigger
house and more money than they have. Shall I tell you something? My
mother said she’d noticed the same thing in you lately. She said she
sometimes felt you looked down on her for living in a small house. Oh,
she was half joking, of course; but you see you do give people that
impression. I can’t understand treating any one in that way. The more I
have myself, the more I want to make other people happy.”

Isabel gently freed herself and laid the work-bag on her
embroidery-frame. “I have a headache; perhaps that made me stupid. I’m
going to bed.” She turned toward Wrayford and held out her hand. “Good
night.”

“Good night,” he answered, opening the door for her.

When he turned back into the room, his host was pouring himself a third
glass of brandy and soda.

“Here, have a nip, Austin? Gad, I need it badly, after the shaking up
you gave me this afternoon.” Stilling laughed and carried his glass to
the hearth, where he took up his usual commanding position. “Why the
deuce don’t you drink something? You look as glum as Isabel. One would
think you were the chap that had been hit by this business.”

Wrayford threw himself into the chair from which Mrs. Stilling had
lately risen. It was the one she usually sat in, and to his fancy
a faint scent of her clung to it. He leaned back and looked up at
Stilling.

“Want a cigar?” the latter continued. “Shall we go into the den and
smoke?”

Wrayford hesitated. “If there’s anything more you want to ask me
about--”

“Gad, no! I had full measure and running over this afternoon. The deuce
of it is, I don’t see where the money’s all gone to. Luckily I’ve got
plenty of nerve; I’m not the kind of man to sit down and snivel because
I’ve been touched in Wall Street.”

Wrayford got to his feet again. “Then, if you don’t want me, I think
I’ll go up to my room and put some finishing touches to a brief before I
turn in. I must get back to town to-morrow afternoon.”

“All right, then.” Stilling set down his empty glass, and held out his
hand with a tinge of alacrity. “Good night, old man.”

They shook hands, and Wrayford moved toward the door.

“I say, Austin--stop a minute!” his host called after him. Wrayford
turned, and the two men faced each other across the hearth-rug.
Stilling’s eyes shifted uneasily.

“There’s one thing more you can do for me before you leave. Tell Isabel
about that loan; explain to her that she’s got to sign a note for it.”

Wrayford, in his turn, flushed slightly. “You want me to tell her?”

“Hang it! I’m soft-hearted--that’s the worst of me.”

Stilling moved toward the tray, and lifted the brandy decanter. “And
she’ll take it better from you; she’ll _have_ to take it from you. She’s
proud. You can take her out for a row to-morrow morning--look here, take
her out in the motor-launch if you like. I meant to have a spin in it
myself; but if you’ll tell her--”

Wrayford hesitated. “All right, I’ll tell her.”

“Thanks a lot, my dear fellow. And you’ll make her see it wasn’t my
fault, eh? Women are awfully vague about money, and she’ll think it’s
all right if you back me up.”

Wrayford nodded. “As you please.”

“And, Austin--there’s just one more thing. You needn’t say anything to
Isabel about the other business--I mean about my mother’s securities.”

“Ah?” said Wrayford, pausing.

Stilling shifted from one foot to the other. “I’d rather put that to
the old lady myself. I can make it clear to her. She idolizes me,
you know--and, hang it! I’ve got a good record. Up to now, I mean. My
mother’s been in clover since I married; I may say she’s been my first
thought. And I don’t want her to hear of this beastly business from
Isabel. Isabel’s a little harsh at times--and of course this isn’t going
to make her any easier to live with.”

“Very well,” said Wrayford.

Stilling, with a look of relief, walked toward the window which opened
on the terrace. “Gad! what a queer night! Hot as the kitchen-range.
Shouldn’t wonder if we had a squall before morning. I wonder if that
infernal skipper took in the launch’s awnings before he went home.”

Wrayford stopped with his hand on the door. “Yes, I saw him do it. She’s
shipshape for the night.”

“Good! That saves me a run down to the shore.”

“Good night, then,” said Wrayford.

“Good night, old man. You’ll tell her?”

“I’ll tell her.”

“And mum about my mother!” his host called after him.




II

The darkness had thinned a little when Wrayford scrambled down the steep
path to the shore. Though the air was heavy the threat of a storm seemed
to have vanished, and now and then the moon’s edge showed above a torn
slope of cloud.

But in the thick shrubbery about the boat-house the darkness was still
dense, and Wrayford had to strike a match before he could find the lock
and insert his key. He left the door unlatched, and groped his way in.
How often he had crept into this warm pine-scented obscurity, guiding
himself by the edge of the bench along the wall, and hearing the soft
lap of water through the gaps in the flooring! He knew just where one
had to duck one’s head to avoid the two canoes swung from the rafters,
and just where to put his hand on the latch of the farther door that led
to the broad balcony above the lake.

The boat-house represented one of Stilling’s abandoned whims. He had
built it some seven years before, and for a time it had been the scene
of incessant nautical exploits. Stilling had rowed, sailed, paddled
indefatigably, and all Highfield had been impressed to bear him company,
and to admire his versatility. Then motors had come in, and he had
forsaken aquatic sports for the flying chariot. The canoes of birch-bark
and canvas had been hoisted to the roof, the sail-boat had rotted at her
moorings, and the movable floor of the boat-house, ingeniously contrived
to slide back on noiseless runners, had lain undisturbed through several
seasons. Even the key of the boat-house had been mislaid--by Isabel’s
fault, her husband said--and the locksmith had to be called in to make a
new one when the purchase of the motor-boat made the lake once more the
centre of Stilling’s activity.

As Wrayford entered he noticed that a strange oily odor overpowered the
usual scent of dry pine-wood; and at the next step his foot struck an
object that rolled noisily across the boards. He lighted another match,
and found he had overturned a can of grease which the boatman had no
doubt been using to oil the runners of the sliding floor.

Wrayford felt his way down the length of the boathouse, and softly
opening the balcony door looked out on the lake. A few yards away, he
saw the launch lying at anchor in the veiled moonlight; and just below
him, on the black water, was the dim outline of the skiff which the
boatman kept to paddle out to her. The silence was so intense that
Wrayford fancied he heard a faint rustling in the shrubbery on the
high bank behind the boat-house, and the crackle of gravel on the path
descending to it.

He closed the door again and turned back into the darkness; and as he
did so the other door, on the land-side, swung inward, and he saw a
figure in the dim opening. Just enough light entered through the round
holes above the respective doors to reveal Mrs. Stilling’s cloaked
outline, and to guide her to him as he advanced. But before they met she
stumbled and gave a little cry.

“What is it?” he exclaimed.

“My foot caught; the floor seemed to give way under me. Ah, of course--”
 she bent down in the darkness--“I saw the men oiling it this morning.”

Wrayford caught her by the arm. “Do take care! It might be dangerous if
it slid too easily. The water’s deep under here.”

“Yes; the water’s very deep. I sometimes wish--” She leaned against him
without finishing her sentence, and he put both arms about her.

“Hush!” he said, his lips on hers.

Suddenly she threw her head back and seemed to listen.

“What’s the matter? What do you hear?”

“I don’t know.” He felt her trembling. “I’m not sure this place is as
safe as it used to be--”

Wrayford held her to him reassuringly. “But the boatman sleeps down at
the village; and who else should come here at this hour?”

“Cobham might. He thinks of nothing but the launch.’”

“He won’t to-night. I told him I’d seen the skipper put her shipshape,
and that satisfied him.”

“Ah--he did think of coming, then?”

“Only for a minute, when the sky looked so black half an hour ago, and
he was afraid of a squall. It’s clearing now, and there’s no danger.”

He drew her down on the bench, and they sat a moment or two in silence,
her hands in his. Then she said: “You’d better tell me.”

Wrayford gave a faint laugh. “Yes, I suppose I had. In fact, he asked me
to.”

“He asked you to?”

“Yes.”

She uttered an exclamation of contempt. “He’s afraid!”

Wrayford made no reply, and she went on: “I’m not. Tell me everything,
please.”

“Well, he’s chucked away a pretty big sum again--”

“How?”

“He says he doesn’t know. He’s been speculating, I suppose. The madness
of making him your trustee!”

She drew her hands away. “You know why I did it. When we married I
didn’t want to put him in the false position of the man who contributes
nothing and accepts everything; I wanted people to think the money was
partly his.”

“I don’t know what you’ve made people think; but you’ve been eminently
successful in one respect. _He_ thinks it’s all his--and he loses it as
if it were.”

“There are worse things. What was it that he wished you to tell me?”

“That you’ve got to sign another promissory note--for fifty thousand
this time.”

“Is that all?”

Wrayford hesitated; then he said: “Yes--for the present.”

She sat motionless, her head bent, her hand resting passively in his.

He leaned nearer. “What did you mean just now, by worse things?”

She hesitated. “Haven’t you noticed that he’s been drinking a great deal
lately?”

“Yes; I’ve noticed.”

They were both silent; then Wrayford broke out, with sudden vehemence:
“And yet you won’t--”

“Won’t?”

“Put an end to it. Good God! Save what’s left of your life.”

She made no answer, and in the stillness the throb of the water
underneath them sounded like the beat of a tormented heart.

“Isabel--” Wrayford murmured. He bent over to kiss her. “Isabel! I can’t
stand it! listen--”

“No; no. I’ve thought of everything. There’s the boy--the boy’s fond of
him. He’s not a bad father.”

“Except in the trifling matter of ruining his son.”

“And there’s his poor old mother. He’s a good son, at any rate; he’d
never hurt her. And I know her. If I left him, she’d never take a penny
of my money. What she has of her own is not enough to live on; and how
could he provide for her? If I put him out of doors, I should be putting
his mother out too.”

“You could arrange that--there are always ways.”

“Not for her! She’s proud. And then she believes in him. Lots of people
believe in him, you know. It would kill her if she ever found out.”

Wrayford made an impatient movement. “It will kill you if you stay with
him to prevent her finding out.”

She laid her other hand on his. “Not while I have you.”

“Have me? In this way?”

“In any way.”

“My poor girl--poor child!”

“Unless you grow tired--unless your patience gives out.”

He was silent, and she went on insistently: “Don’t you suppose I’ve
thought of that too--foreseen it?”

“Well--and then?” he exclaimed.

“I’ve accepted that too.”

He dropped her hands with a despairing gesture. “Then, indeed, I waste
my breath!”

She made no answer, and for a time they sat silent again, a little
between them. At length he asked: “You’re not crying?”

“No.”

“I can’t see your face, it’s grown so dark.”

“Yes. The storm must be coming.” She made a motion as if to rise.

He drew close and put his arm about her. “Don’t leave me yet. You know I
must go to-morrow.” He broke off with a laugh. “I’m to break the news
to you to-morrow morning, by the way; I’m to take you out in the
motorlaunch and break it to you.” He dropped her hands and stood up.
“Good God! How can I go and leave you here with him?”

“You’ve done it often.”

“Yes; but each time it’s more damnable. And then I’ve always had a
hope--”

She rose also. “Give it up! Give it up!”

“You’ve none, then, yourself?”

She was silent, drawing the folds of her cloak about her.

“None--none?” he insisted.

He had to bend his head to hear her answer. “Only one!”

“What, my dearest? What?”

“Don’t touch me! That he may die!”

They drew apart again, hearing each other’s quick breathing through the
darkness.

“You wish that too?” he said.

“I wish it always--every day, every hour, every moment!” She paused, and
then let the words break from her. “You’d better know it; you’d better
know the worst of me. I’m not the saint you suppose; the duty I do is
poisoned by the thoughts I think. Day by day, hour by hour, I wish him
dead. When he goes out I pray for something to happen; when he comes
back I say to myself: ‘Are you here again?’ When I hear of people being
killed in accidents, I think: ‘Why wasn’t he there?’ When I read the
death-notices in the paper I say: ‘So-and-so was just his age.’ When
I see him taking such care of his health and his diet--as he does, you
know, except when he gets reckless and begins to drink too much--when
I see him exercising and resting, and eating only certain things, and
weighing himself, and feeling his muscles, and boasting that he hasn’t
gained a pound, I think of the men who die from overwork, or who throw
their lives away for some great object, and I say to myself: ‘What can
kill a man who thinks only of himself?’ And night after night I keep
myself from going to sleep for fear I may dream that he’s dead. When I
dream that, and wake and find him there it’s worse than ever--”

She broke off with a sob, and the loud lapping of the water under the
floor was like the beat of a rebellious heart.

“There, you know the truth!” she said.

He answered after a pause: “People do die.”

“Do they?” She laughed. “Yes--in happy marriages!”

They were silent again, and Isabel turned, feeling her way toward the
door. As she did so, the profound stillness was broken by the sound of a
man’s voice trolling out unsteadily the refrain of a music-hall song.

The two in the boat-house darted toward each other with a simultaneous
movement, clutching hands as they met.

“He’s coming!” Isabel said.

Wrayford disengaged his hands.

“He may only be out for a turn before he goes to bed. Wait a minute.
I’ll see.” He felt his way to the bench, scrambled up on it, and
stretching his body forward managed to bring his eyes in line with the
opening above the door.

“It’s as black as pitch. I can’t see anything.”

The refrain rang out nearer.

“Wait! I saw something twinkle. There it is again. It’s his cigar. It’s
coming this way--down the path.”

There was a long rattle of thunder through the stillness.

“It’s the storm!” Isabel whispered. “He’s coming to see about the
launch.”

Wrayford dropped noiselessly from the bench and she caught him by the
arm.

“Isn’t there time to get up the path and slip under the shrubbery?”

“No, he’s in the path now. He’ll be here in two minutes. He’ll find us.”

He felt her hand tighten on his arm.

“You must go in the skiff, then. It’s the only way.”

“And let him find you? And hear my oars? Listen--there’s something I
must say.”

She flung her arms about him and pressed her face to his.

“Isabel, just now I didn’t tell you everything. He’s ruined his
mother--taken everything of hers too. And he’s got to tell her; it can’t
be kept from her.”

She uttered an incredulous exclamation and drew back.

“Is this the truth? Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“He forbade me. You were not to know.”

Close above them, in the shrubbery, Stilling warbled:

     “_Nita, Juanita,
     Ask thy soul if we must part!_”


Wrayford held her by both arms. “Understand this--if he comes in, he’ll
find us. And if there’s a row you’ll lose your boy.”

She seemed not to hear him. “You--you--you--he’ll kill you!” she
exclaimed.

Wrayford laughed impatiently and released her, and she stood shrinking
against the wall, her hands pressed to her breast. Wrayford straightened
himself and she felt that he was listening intently. Then he dropped to
his knees and laid his hands against the boards of the sliding floor. It
yielded at once, as if with a kind of evil alacrity; and at their feet
they saw, under the motionless solid night, another darker night that
moved and shimmered. Wrayford threw himself back against the opposite
wall, behind the door.

A key rattled in the lock, and after a moment’s fumbling the door swung
open. Wrayford and Isabel saw a man’s black bulk against the obscurity.
It moved a step, lurched forward, and vanished out of sight. From the
depths beneath them there came a splash and a long cry.

“Go! go!” Wrayford cried out, feeling blindly for Isabel in the
blackness.

“Oh--” she cried, wrenching herself away from him.

He stood still a moment, as if dazed; then she saw him suddenly plunge
from her side, and heard another splash far down, and a tumult in the
beaten water.

In the darkness she cowered close to the opening, pressing her face
over the edge, and crying out the name of each of the two men in turn.
Suddenly she began to see: the obscurity was less opaque, as if a
faint moon-pallor diluted it. Isabel vaguely discerned the two shapes
struggling in the black pit below her; once she saw the gleam of a face.
She glanced up desperately for some means of rescue, and caught sight
of the oars ranged on brackets against the wall. She snatched down
the nearest, bent over the opening, and pushed the oar down into the
blackness, crying out her husband’s name.

The clouds had swallowed the moon again, and she could see nothing below
her; but she still heard the tumult in the beaten water.

“Cobham! Cobham!” she screamed.

As if in answer, she felt a mighty clutch on the oar, a clutch that
strained her arms to the breaking-point as she tried to brace her knees
against the runners of the sliding floor.

“Hold on! Hold on! Hold on!” a voice gasped out from below; and she held
on, with racked muscles, with bleeding palms, with eyes straining from
their sockets, and a heart that tugged at her as the weight was tugging
at the oar.

Suddenly the weight relaxed, and the oar slipped up through her
lacerated hands. She felt a wet body scrambling over the edge of the
opening, and Stilling’s voice, raucous and strange, groaned out, close
to her: “God! I thought I was done for.”

He staggered to his knees, coughing and sputtering, and the water
dripped on her from his streaming clothes.

She flung herself down, again, straining over the pit. Not a sound came
up from it.

“Austin! Austin! Quick! Another oar!” she shrieked.

Stilling gave a cry. “My God! Was it Austin? What in hell--Another oar?
No, no; untie the skiff, I tell you. But it’s no use. Nothing’s any use.
I felt him lose hold as I came up.”

*****

After that she was conscious of nothing till, hours later, as it
appeared to her, she became dimly aware of her husband’s voice, high,
hysterical and important, haranguing a group of scared lantern-struck
faces that had sprung up mysteriously about them in the night.

“Poor Austin! Poor Wrayford... terrible loss to me... mysterious
dispensation. Yes, I do feel gratitude--miraculous escape--but I wish
old Austin could have known that I was saved!”


FIGHTING FRANCE ***




Produced by Charles Aldarondo.  HTML version by Al Haines.









FIGHTING FRANCE

FROM DUNKERQUE TO BELPORT


BY EDITH WHARTON


NEW YORK: MCMXV






CONTENTS


  THE LOOK OF PARIS
  IN ARGONNE
  IN LORRAINE AND THE VOSGES
  IN THE NORTH
  IN ALSACE
  THE TONE OF FRANCE





THE LOOK OF PARIS

(AUGUST, 1914--FEBUARY, 1915)


I

AUGUST


On the 30th of July, 1914, motoring north from Poitiers, we had
lunched somewhere by the roadside under apple-trees on the edge of a
field. Other fields stretched away on our right and left to a border
of woodland and a village steeple. All around was noonday quiet, and
the sober disciplined landscape which the traveller's memory is apt
to evoke as distinctively French. Sometimes, even to accustomed
eyes, these ruled-off fields and compact grey villages seem merely
flat and tame; at other moments the sensitive imagination sees in
every thrifty sod and even furrow the ceaseless vigilant attachment
of generations faithful to the soil. The particular bit of landscape
before us spoke in all its lines of that attachment. The air seemed
full of the long murmur of human effort, the rhythm of oft-repeated
tasks, the serenity of the scene smiled away the war rumours which
had hung on us since morning.

All day the sky had been banked with thunder-clouds, but by the time
we reached Chartres, toward four o'clock, they had rolled away under
the horizon, and the town was so saturated with sunlight that to
pass into the cathedral was like entering the dense obscurity of a
church in Spain. At first all detail was imperceptible; we were in a
hollow night. Then, as the shadows gradually thinned and gathered
themselves up into pier and vault and ribbing, there burst out of
them great sheets and showers of colour. Framed by such depths of
darkness, and steeped in a blaze of mid-summer sun, the familiar
windows seemed singularly remote and yet overpoweringly vivid. Now
they widened into dark-shored pools splashed with sunset, now
glittered and menaced like the shields of fighting angels. Some were
cataracts of sapphires, others roses dropped from a saint's tunic,
others great carven platters strewn with heavenly regalia, others
the sails of galleons bound for the Purple Islands; and in the
western wall the scattered fires of the rose-window hung like a
constellation in an African night. When one dropped one's eyes form
these ethereal harmonies, the dark masses of masonry below them, all
veiled and muffled in a mist pricked by a few altar lights, seemed
to symbolize the life on earth, with its shadows, its heavy
distances and its little islands of illusion. All that a great
cathedral can be, all the meanings it can express, all the
tranquilizing power it can breathe upon the soul, all the richness
of detail it can fuse into a large utterance of strength and beauty,
the cathedral of Chartres gave us in that perfect hour.

It was sunset when we reached the gates of Paris. Under the heights
of St. Cloud and Suresnes the reaches of the Seine trembled with the
blue-pink lustre of an early Monet. The Bois lay about us in the
stillness of a holiday evening, and the lawns of Bagatelle were as
fresh as June. Below the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs Elysees sloped
downward in a sun-powdered haze to the mist of fountains and the
ethereal obelisk; and the currents of summer life ebbed and flowed
with a normal beat under the trees of the radiating avenues. The
great city, so made for peace and art and all humanest graces,
seemed to lie by her river-side like a princess guarded by the
watchful giant of the Eiffel Tower.

The next day the air was thundery with rumours. Nobody believed
them, everybody repeated them. War? Of course there couldn't be war!
The Cabinets, like naughty children, were again dangling their feet
over the edge; but the whole incalculable weight of things-as-they-were,
of the daily necessary business of living, continued calmly and
convincingly to assert itself against the bandying of diplomatic
words. Paris went on steadily about her mid-summer business of
feeding, dressing, and amusing the great army of tourists who were
the only invaders she had seen for nearly half a century.

All the while, every one knew that other work was going on also. The
whole fabric of the country's seemingly undisturbed routine was
threaded with noiseless invisible currents of preparation, the sense
of them was in the calm air as the sense of changing weather is in
the balminess of a perfect afternoon. Paris counted the minutes till
the evening papers came.

They said little or nothing except what every one was already
declaring all over the country. "We don't want war--_mais it faut
que cela finisse!_" "This kind of thing has got to stop": that was
the only phase one heard. If diplomacy could still arrest the war,
so much the better: no one in France wanted it. All who spent the
first days of August in Paris will testify to the agreement of
feeling on that point. But if war had to come, the country, and
every heart in it, was ready.

At the dressmaker's, the next morning, the tired fitters were
preparing to leave for their usual holiday. They looked pale and
anxious--decidedly, there was a new weight of apprehension in the
air. And in the rue Royale, at the corner of the Place de la
Concorde, a few people had stopped to look at a little strip of
white paper against the wall of the Ministere de la Marine. "General
mobilization" they read--and an armed nation knows what that means.
But the group about the paper was small and quiet. Passers by read
the notice and went on. There were no cheers, no gesticulations: the
dramatic sense of the race had already told them that the event was
too great to be dramatized. Like a monstrous landslide it had fallen
across the path of an orderly laborious nation, disrupting its
routine, annihilating its industries, rending families apart, and
burying under a heap of senseless ruin the patiently and painfully
wrought machinery of civilization...

That evening, in a restaurant of the rue Royale, we sat at a table
in one of the open windows, abreast with the street, and saw the
strange new crowds stream by. In an instant we were being shown what
mobilization was--a huge break in the normal flow of traffic, like
the sudden rupture of a dyke. The street was flooded by the torrent
of people sweeping past us to the various railway stations. All were
on foot, and carrying their luggage; for since dawn every cab and
taxi and motor--omnibus had disappeared. The War Office had thrown
out its drag-net and caught them all in. The crowd that passed our
window was chiefly composed of conscripts, the _mobilisables_ of the
first day, who were on the way to the station accompanied by their
families and friends; but among them were little clusters of
bewildered tourists, labouring along with bags and bundles, and
watching their luggage pushed before them on hand-carts--puzzled
inarticulate waifs caught in the cross-tides racing to a maelstrom.

In the restaurant, the befrogged and red-coated band poured out
patriotic music, and the intervals between the courses that so few
waiters were left to serve were broken by the ever-recurring
obligation to stand up for the Marseillaise, to stand up for God
Save the King, to stand up for the Russian National Anthem, to stand
up again for the Marseillaise. "_Et dire que ce sont des Hongrois
qui jouent tout cela!"_ a humourist remarked from the pavement.

As the evening wore on and the crowd about our window thickened, the
loiterers outside began to join in the war-songs. "_Allons, debout!_
"--and the loyal round begins again. "La chanson du depart" is a
frequent demand; and the chorus of spectators chimes in roundly. A
sort of quiet humour was the note of the street. Down the rue
Royale, toward the Madeleine, the bands of other restaurants were
attracting other throngs, and martial refrains were strung along the
Boulevard like its garlands of arc-lights. It was a night of singing
and acclamations, not boisterous, but gallant and determined. It was
Paris _badauderie_ at its best.

Meanwhile, beyond the fringe of idlers the steady stream of
conscripts still poured along. Wives and families trudged beside
them, carrying all kinds of odd improvised bags and bundles. The
impression disengaging itself from all this superficial confusion
was that of a cheerful steadiness of spirit. The faces ceaselessly
streaming by were serious but not sad; nor was there any air of
bewilderment--the stare of driven cattle. All these lads and young
men seemed to know what they were about and why they were about it.
The youngest of them looked suddenly grown up and responsible; they
understood their stake in the job, and accepted it.

The next day the army of midsummer travel was immobilized to let the
other army move. No more wild rushes to the station, no more bribing
of concierges, vain quests for invisible cabs, haggard hours of
waiting in the queue at Cook's. No train stirred except to carry
soldiers, and the civilians who had not bribed and jammed their way
into a cranny of the thronged carriages leaving the first night
could only creep back through the hot streets to their hotel and
wait. Back they went, disappointed yet half-relieved, to the
resounding emptiness of porterless halls, waiterless restaurants,
motionless lifts: to the queer disjointed life of fashionable hotels
suddenly reduced to the intimacies and make-shift of a Latin
Quarter _pension._ Meanwhile it was strange to watch the gradual
paralysis of the city. As the motors, taxis, cabs and vans had
vanished from the streets, so the lively little steamers had left
the Seine. The canal-boats too were gone, or lay motionless: loading
and unloading had ceased. Every great architectural opening framed
an emptiness; all the endless avenues stretched away to desert
distances. In the parks and gardens no one raked the paths or
trimmed the borders. The fountains slept in their basins, the
worried sparrows fluttered unfed, and vague dogs, shaken out of
their daily habits, roamed unquietly, looking for familiar eyes.
Paris, so intensely conscious yet so strangely entranced, seemed to
have had _curare_ injected into all her veins.

The next day--the 2nd of August--from the terrace of the Hotel
de Crillon one looked down on a first faint stir of returning life.
Now and then a taxi-cab or a private motor crossed the Place de la
Concorde, carrying soldiers to the stations. Other conscripts, in
detachments, tramped by on foot with bags and banners. One
detachment stopped before the black-veiled statue of Strasbourg and
laid a garland at her feet. In ordinary times this demonstration
would at once have attracted a crowd; but at the very moment when it
might have been expected to provoke a patriotic outburst it excited
no more attention than if one of the soldiers had turned aside to
give a penny to a beggar. The people crossing the square did not
even stop to look. The meaning of this apparent indifference was
obvious. When an armed nation mobilizes, everybody is busy, and busy
in a definite and pressing way. It is not only the fighters that
mobilize: those who stay behind must do the same. For each French
household, for each individual man or woman in France, war means a
complete reorganization of life. The detachment of conscripts,
unnoticed, paid their tribute to the Cause and passed on...

Looked back on from these sterner months those early days in Paris,
in their setting of grave architecture and summer skies, wear the
light of the ideal and the abstract. The sudden flaming up of
national life, the abeyance of every small and mean preoccupation,
cleared the moral air as the streets had been cleared, and made the
spectator feel as though he were reading a great poem on War rather
than facing its realities.

Something of this sense of exaltation seemed to penetrate the
throngs who streamed up and down the Boulevards till late into the
night. All wheeled traffic had ceased, except that of the rare
taxi-cabs impressed to carry conscripts to the stations; and the
middle of the Boulevards was as thronged with foot-passengers as an
Italian market-place on a Sunday morning. The vast tide swayed up
and down at a slow pace, breaking now and then to make room for one
of the volunteer "legions" which were forming at every corner:
Italian, Roumanian, South American, North American, each headed by
its national flag and hailed with cheering as it passed. But even
the cheers were sober: Paris was not to be shaken out of her
self-imposed serenity. One felt something nobly conscious and
voluntary in the mood of this quiet multitude. Yet it was a mixed
throng, made up of every class, from the scum of the Exterior
Boulevards to the cream of the fashionable restaurants. These
people, only two days ago, had been leading a thousand different
lives, in indifference or in antagonism to each other, as alien as
enemies across a frontier: now workers and idlers, thieves, beggars,
saints, poets, drabs and sharpers, genuine people and showy shams,
were all bumping up against each other in an instinctive community
of emotion. The "people," luckily, predominated; the faces of
workers look best in such a crowd, and there were thousands of them,
each illuminated and singled out by its magnesium-flash of passion.

I remember especially the steady-browed faces of the women; and also
the small but significant fact that every one of them had remembered
to bring her dog. The biggest of these amiable companions had to
take their chance of seeing what they could through the forest of
human legs; but every one that was portable was snugly lodged in the
bend of an elbow, and from this safe perch scores and scores of
small serious muzzles, blunt or sharp, smooth or woolly, brown or
grey or white or black or brindled, looked out on the scene with the
quiet awareness of the Paris dog. It was certainly a good sign that
they had not been forgotten that night.


II

WE had been shown, impressively, what it was to live through a
mobilization; now we were to learn that mobilization is only one of
the concomitants of martial law, and that martial law is not
comfortable to live under--at least till one gets used to it.

At first its main purpose, to the neutral civilian, seemed certainly
to be the wayward pleasure of complicating his life; and in that
line it excelled in the last refinements of ingenuity. Instructions
began to shower on us after the lull of the first days: instructions
as to what to do, and what not to do, in order to make our presence
tolerable and our persons secure. In the first place, foreigners
could not remain in France without satisfying the authorities as to
their nationality and antecedents; and to do this necessitated
repeated ineffective visits to chanceries, consulates and police
stations, each too densely thronged with flustered applicants to
permit the entrance of one more. Between these vain pilgrimages, the
traveller impatient to leave had to toil on foot to distant railway
stations, from which he returned baffled by vague answers and
disheartened by the declaration that tickets, when achievable, must
also be _vises_ by the police. There was a moment when it seemed
that ones inmost thoughts had to have that unobtainable _visa_--to
obtain which, more fruitless hours must be lived on grimy stairways
between perspiring layers of fellow-aliens. Meanwhile one's money
was probable running short, and one must cable or telegraph for
more. Ah--but cables and telegrams must be _vises_ too--and even
when they were, one got no guarantee that they would be sent! Then
one could not use code addresses, and the ridiculous number of words
contained in a New York address seemed to multiply as the francs in
one's pockets diminished. And when the cable was finally dispatched
it was either lost on the way, or reached its destination only to
call forth, after anxious days, the disheartening response:
"Impossible at present. Making every effort." It is fair to add
that, tedious and even irritating as many of these transactions
were, they were greatly eased by the sudden uniform good-nature of
the French functionary, who, for the first time, probably, in the
long tradition of his line, broke through its fundamental rule and
was kind.

Luckily, too, these incessant comings and goings involved much
walking of the beautiful idle summer streets, which grew idler and
more beautiful each day. Never had such blue-grey softness of
afternoon brooded over Paris, such sunsets turned the heights of the
Trocadero into Dido's Carthage, never, above all, so rich a moon
ripened through such perfect evenings. The Seine itself had no small
share in this mysterious increase of the city's beauty. Released
from all traffic, its hurried ripples smoothed themselves into long
silken reaches in which quays and monuments at last saw their
unbroken images. At night the fire-fly lights of the boats had
vanished, and the reflections of the street lamps were lengthened
into streamers of red and gold and purple that slept on the calm
current like fluted water-weeds. Then the moon rose and took
possession of the city, purifying it of all accidents, calming and
enlarging it and giving it back its ideal lines of strength and
repose. There was something strangely moving in this new Paris of
the August evenings, so exposed yet so serene, as though her very
beauty shielded her.

So, gradually, we fell into the habit of living under martial law.
After the first days of flustered adjustment the personal
inconveniences were so few that one felt almost ashamed of their not
being more, of not being called on to contribute some greater
sacrifice of comfort to the Cause. Within the first week over two
thirds of the shops had closed--the greater number bearing on their
shuttered windows the notice "Pour cause de mobilisation," which
showed that the "patron" and staff were at the front. But enough
remained open to satisfy every ordinary want, and the closing of the
others served to prove how much one could do without. Provisions
were as cheap and plentiful as ever, though for a while it was
easier to buy food than to have it cooked. The restaurants were
closing rapidly, and one often had to wander a long way for a meal,
and wait a longer time to get it. A few hotels still carried on a
halting life, galvanized by an occasional inrush of travel from
Belgium and Germany; but most of them had closed or were being
hastily transformed into hospitals.

The signs over these hotel doors first disturbed the dreaming
harmony of Paris. In a night, as it seemed, the whole city was hung
with Red Crosses. Every other building showed the red and white band
across its front, with "Ouvroir" or "Hopital" beneath; there
was something sinister in these preparations for horrors in which
one could not yet believe, in the making of bandages for limbs yet
sound and whole, the spreading of pillows for heads yet carried
high. But insist as they would on the woe to come, these warning
signs did not deeply stir the trance of Paris. The first days of the
war were full of a kind of unrealizing confidence, not boastful or
fatuous, yet as different as possible from the clear-headed tenacity
of purpose that the experience of the next few months was to
develop. It is hard to evoke, without seeming to exaggerate it, that
the mood of early August: the assurance, the balance, the kind of
smiling fatalism with which Paris moved to her task. It is not
impossible that the beauty of the season and the silence of the city
may have helped to produce this mood. War, the shrieking fury, had
announced herself by a great wave of stillness. Never was desert
hush more complete: the silence of a street is always so much deeper
than the silence of wood or field.

The heaviness of the August air intensified this impression of
suspended life. The days were dumb enough; but at night the hush
became acute. In the quarter I inhabit, always deserted in summer,
the shuttered streets were mute as catacombs, and the faintest
pin-prick of noise seemed to tear a rent in a black pall of silence.
I could hear the tired tap of a lame hoof half a mile away, and the
tread of the policeman guarding the Embassy across the street beat
against the pavement like a series of detonations. Even the
variegated noises of the city's waking-up had ceased. If any
sweepers, scavengers or rag-pickers still plied their trades they
did it as secretly as ghosts. I remember one morning being roused
out of a deep sleep by a sudden explosion of noise in my room. I sat
up with a start, and found I had been waked by a low-voiced exchange
of "Bonjours" in the street...

Another fact that kept the reality of war from Paris was the curious
absence of troops in the streets. After the first rush of conscripts
hurrying to their military bases it might have been imagined that
the reign of peace had set in. While smaller cities were swarming
with soldiers no glitter of arms was reflected in the empty avenues
of the capital, no military music sounded through them. Paris
scorned all show of war, and fed the patriotism of her children on
the mere sight of her beauty. It was enough.

Even when the news of the first ephemeral successes in Alsace began
to come in, the Parisians did not swerve from their even gait. The
newsboys did all the shouting--and even theirs was presently
silenced by decree. It seemed as though it had been unanimously,
instinctively decided that the Paris of 1914 should in no respect
resemble the Paris of 1870, and as though this resolution had passed
at birth into the blood of millions born since that fatal date, and
ignorant of its bitter lesson. The unanimity of self-restraint was
the notable characteristic of this people suddenly plunged into an
unsought and unexpected war. At first their steadiness of spirit
might have passed for the bewilderment of a generation born and bred
in peace, which did not yet understand what war implied. But it is
precisely on such a mood that easy triumphs might have been supposed
to have the most disturbing effect. It was the crowd in the street
that shouted "A Berlin!" in 1870; now the crowd in the street
continued to mind its own business, in spite of showers of extras
and too-sanguine bulletins.

I remember the morning when our butcher's boy brought the news that
the first German flag had been hung out on the balcony of the
Ministry of War. Now I thought, the Latin will boil over! And I
wanted to be there to see. I hurried down the quiet rue de
Martignac, turned the corner of the Place Sainte Clotilde, and came
on an orderly crowd filling the street before the Ministry of War.
The crowd was so orderly that the few pacific gestures of the police
easily cleared a way for passing cabs, and for the military motors
perpetually dashing up. It was composed of all classes, and there
were many family groups, with little boys straddling their mothers'
shoulders, or lifted up by the policemen when they were too heavy
for their mothers. It is safe to say that there was hardly a man or
woman of that crowd who had not a soldier at the front; and there
before them hung the enemy's first flag--a splendid silk flag, white
and black and crimson, and embroidered in gold. It was the flag of
an Alsatian regiment--a regiment of Prussianized Alsace. It
symbolized all they most abhorred in the whole abhorrent job that
lay ahead of them; it symbolized also their finest ardour and their
noblest hate, and the reason why, if every other reason failed,
France could never lay down arms till the last of such flags was
low. And there they stood and looked at it, not dully or
uncomprehendingly, but consciously, advisedly, and in silence; as if
already foreseeing all it would cost to keep that flag and add to it
others like it; forseeing the cost and accepting it. There seemed to
be men's hearts even in the children of that crowd, and in the
mothers whose weak arms held them up. So they gazed and went on, and
made way for others like them, who gazed in their turn and went on
too. All day the crowd renewed itself, and it was always the same
crowd, intent and understanding and silent, who looked steadily at
the flag, and knew what its being there meant. That, in August, was
the look of Paris.


III

FEBRUARY

FEBRUARY dusk on the Seine. The boats are plying again, but they
stop at nightfall, and the river is inky-smooth, with the same long
weed-like reflections as in August. Only the reflections are fewer
and paler; bright lights are muffled everywhere. The line of the
quays is scarcely discernible, and the heights of the Trocadero are
lost in the blur of night, which presently effaces even the firm
tower-tops of Notre-Dame. Down the damp pavements only a few street
lamps throw their watery zigzags. The shops are shut, and the
windows above them thickly curtained. The faces of the houses are
all blind.

In the narrow streets of the Rive Gauche the darkness is even
deeper, and the few scattered lights in courts or "cites" create
effects of Piranesi-like mystery. The gleam of the chestnut-roaster's
brazier at a street corner deepens the sense of an old adventurous
Italy, and the darkness beyond seems full of cloaks and conspiracies.
I turn, on my way home, into an empty street between high garden
walls, with a single light showing far off at its farther end. Not a
soul is in sight between me and that light: my steps echo endlessly
in the silence. Presently a dim figure comes around the corner ahead
of me. Man or woman? Impossible to tell till I overtake it. The
February fog deepens the darkness, and the faces one passes are
indistinguishable. As for the numbers of the houses, no one thinks
of looking for them. If you know the quarter you count doors from
the corner, or try to puzzle out the familiar outline of a balcony
or a pediment; if you are in a strange street, you must ask at the
nearest tobacconist's--for, as for finding a policeman, a yard off
you couldn't tell him from your grandmother!

Such, after six months of war, are the nights of Paris; the days are
less remarkable and less romantic.

Almost all the early flush and shiver of romance is gone; or so at
least it seems to those who have watched the gradual revival of
life. It may appear otherwise to observers from other countries,
even from those involved in the war. After London, with all her
theaters open, and her machinery of amusement almost unimpaired,
Paris no doubt seems like a city on whom great issues weigh. But to
those who lived through that first sunlit silent month the streets
to-day show an almost normal activity. The vanishing of all the
motorbuses, and of the huge lumbering commercial vans, leaves many a
forgotten perspective open and reveals many a lost grace of
architecture; but the taxi-cabs and private motors are almost as
abundant as in peace-time, and the peril of pedestrianism is kept at
its normal pitch by the incessant dashing to and fro of those
unrivalled engines of destruction, the hospital and War Office
motors. Many shops have reopened, a few theatres are tentatively
producing patriotic drama or mixed programmes seasonal with
sentiment and mirth, and the cinema again unrolls its eventful
kilometres.

For a while, in September and October, the streets were made
picturesque by the coming and going of English soldiery, and the
aggressive flourish of British military motors. Then the fresh faces
and smart uniforms disappeared, and now the nearest approach to
"militarism" which Paris offers to the casual sight-seer is the
occasional drilling of a handful of _piou-pious_ on the muddy
reaches of the Place des Invalides. But there is another army in
Paris. Its first detachments came months ago, in the dark September
days--lamentable rear-guard of the Allies' retreat on Paris. Since
then its numbers have grown and grown, its dingy streams have
percolated through all the currents of Paris life, so that wherever
one goes, in every quarter and at every hour, among the busy
confident strongly-stepping Parisians one sees these other people,
dazed and slowly moving--men and women with sordid bundles on their
backs, shuffling along hesitatingly in their tattered shoes,
children dragging at their hands and tired-out babies pressed
against their shoulders: the great army of the Refugees. Their faces
are unmistakable and unforgettable. No one who has ever caught that
stare of dumb bewilderment--or that other look of concentrated
horror, full of the reflection of flames and ruins--can shake off
the obsession of the Refugees. The look in their eyes is part of the
look of Paris. It is the dark shadow on the brightness of the face
she turns to the enemy. These poor people cannot look across the
borders to eventual triumph. They belong mostly to a class whose
knowledge of the world's affairs is measured by the shadow of their
village steeple. They are no more curious of the laws of causation
than the thousands overwhelmed at Avezzano. They were ploughing and
sowing, spinning and weaving and minding their business, when
suddenly a great darkness full of fire and blood came down on them.
And now they are here, in a strange country, among unfamiliar faces
and new ways, with nothing left to them in the world but the memory
of burning homes and massacred children and young men dragged to
slavery, of infants torn from their mothers, old men trampled by
drunken heels and priests slain while they prayed beside the dying.
These are the people who stand in hundreds every day outside the
doors of the shelters improvised to rescue them, and who receive, in
return for the loss of everything that makes life sweet, or
intelligible, or at least endurable, a cot in a dormitory, a
meal-ticket--and perhaps, on lucky days, a pair of shoes...

What are the Parisians doing meanwhile? For one thing--and the sign
is a good one--they are refilling the shops, and especially, of
course, the great "department stores." In the early war days there
was no stranger sight than those deserted palaces, where one strayed
between miles of unpurchased wares in quest of vanished salesmen. A
few clerks, of course, were left: enough, one would have thought,
for the rare purchasers who disturbed their meditations. But the few
there were did not care to be disturbed: they lurked behind their
walls of sheeting, their bastions of flannelette, as if ashamed to
be discovered. And when one had coaxed them out they went through
the necessary gestures automatically, as if mournfully wondering
that any one should care to buy. I remember once, at the Louvre,
seeing the whole force of a "department," including the salesman I
was trying to cajole into showing me some medicated gauze, desert
their posts simultaneously to gather about a motor-cyclist in a
muddy uniform who had dropped in to see his pals with tales from the
front. But after six months the pressure of normal appetites has
begun to reassert itself--and to shop is one of the normal appetites
of woman. I say "shop" instead of buy, to distinguish between the
dull purchase of necessities and the voluptuousness of acquiring
things one might do without. It is evident that many of the
thousands now fighting their way into the great shops must be
indulging in the latter delight. At a moment when real wants are
reduced to a minimum, how else account for the congestion of the
department store? Even allowing for the immense, the perpetual
buying of supplies for hospitals and work-rooms, the incessant
stoking-up of the innumerable centres of charitable production,
there is no explanation of the crowding of the other departments
except the fact that woman, however valiant, however tried, however
suffering and however self-denying, must eventually, in the long
run, and at whatever cost to her pocket and her ideals, begin to
shop again. She has renounced the theatre, she denies herself the
teo-rooms, she goes apologetically and furtively (and economically)
to concerts--but the swinging doors of the department stores suck
her irresistibly into their quicksand of remnants and reductions.

No one, in this respect, would wish the look of Paris to be changed.
It is a good sign to see the crowds pouring into the shops again,
even though the sight is less interesting than that of the other
crowds streaming daily--and on Sunday in immensely augmented
numbers--across the Pont Alexandre III to the great court of the
Invalides where the German trophies are displayed. Here the heart of
France beats with a richer blood, and something of its glow passes
into foreign veins as one watches the perpetually renewed throngs
face to face with the long triple row of German guns. There are few
in those throngs to whom one of the deadly pack has not dealt a
blow; there are personal losses, lacerating memories, bound up with
the sight of all those evil engines. But personal sorrow is the
sentiment least visible in the look of Paris. It is not fanciful to
say that the Parisian face, after six months of trial, has acquired
a new character. The change seems to have affected the very stuff it
is moulded of, as though the long ordeal had hardened the poor human
clay into some dense commemorative substance. I often pass in the
street women whose faces look like memorial medals--idealized images
of what they were in the flesh. And the masks of some of the
men--those queer tormented Gallic masks, crushed-in and squat and a
little satyr-like--look like the bronzes of the Naples Museum, burnt
and twisted from their baptism of fire. But none of these faces
reveals a personal preoccupation: they are looking, one and all, at
France erect on her borders. Even the women who are comparing
different widths of Valenciennes at the lace-counter all have
something of that vision in their eyes--or else one does not see the
ones who haven't.

It is still true of Paris that she has not the air of a capital in
arms. There are as few troops to be seen as ever, and but for the
coming and going of the orderlies attached to the War Office and the
Military Government, and the sprinkling of uniforms about the doors
of barracks, there would be no sign of war in the streets--no sign,
that is, except the presence of the wounded. It is only lately that
they have begun to appear, for in the early months of the war they
were not sent to Paris, and the splendidly appointed hospitals of
the capital stood almost empty, while others, all over the country,
were overcrowded. The motives for the disposal of the wounded have
been much speculated upon and variously explained: one of its
results may have been the maintaining in Paris of the extraordinary
moral health which has given its tone to the whole country, and
which is now sound and strong enough to face the sight of any
misery.

And miseries enough it has to face. Day by day the limping figures
grow more numerous on the pavement, the pale bandaged heads more
frequent in passing carriages. In the stalls at the theatres and
concerts there are many uniforms; and their wearers usually have to
wait till the hall is emptied before they hobble out on a supporting
arm. Most of them are very young, and it is the expression of their
faces which I should like to picture and interpret as being the very
essence of what I have called the look of Paris. They are grave,
these young faces: one hears a great deal of the gaiety in the
trenches, but the wounded are not gay. Neither are they sad,
however. They are calm, meditative, strangely purified and matured.
It is as though their great experience had purged them of pettiness,
meanness and frivolity, burning them down to the bare bones of
character, the fundamental substance of the soul, and shaping that
substance into something so strong and finely tempered that for a
long time to come Paris will not care to wear any look unworthy of
the look on their faces.




IN ARGONNE


I

The permission to visit a few ambulances and evacuation hospitals
behind the lines gave me, at the end of February, my first sight of
War.

Paris is no longer included in the military zone, either in fact or
in appearance. Though it is still manifestly under the war-cloud,
its air of reviving activity produces the illusion that the menace
which casts that cloud is far off not only in distance but in time.
Paris, a few months ago so alive to the nearness of the enemy, seems
to have grown completely oblivious of that nearness; and it is
startling, not more than twenty miles from the gates, to pass from
such an atmosphere of workaday security to the imminent sense of
war.

Going eastward, one begins to feel the change just beyond Meaux.
Between that quiet episcopal city and the hill-town of Montmirail,
some forty miles farther east, there are no sensational evidences of
the great conflict of September--only, here and there, in an
unploughed field, or among the fresh brown furrows, a little mound
with a wooden cross and a wreath on it. Nevertheless, one begins to
perceive, by certain negative signs, that one is already in another
world. On the cold February day when we turned out of Meaux and took
the road to the Argonne, the change was chiefly shown by the curious
absence of life in the villages through which we passed. Now and
then a lonely ploughman and his team stood out against the sky, or a
child and an old woman looked from a doorway; but many of the fields
were fallow and most of the doorways empty. We passed a few carts
driven by peasants, a stray wood-cutter in a copse, a road-mender
hammering at his stones; but already the "civilian motor" had
disappeared, and all the dust-coloured cars dashing past us were
marked with the Red Cross or the number of an army division. At
every bridge and railway-crossing a sentinel, standing in the middle
of the road with lifted rifle, stopped the motor and examined our
papers. In this negative sphere there was hardly any other tangible
proof of military rule; but with the descent of the first hill
beyond Montmirail there came the positive feeling: _This is war!_

Along the white road rippling away eastward over the dimpled country
the army motors were pouring by in endless lines, broken now and
then by the dark mass of a tramping regiment or the clatter of a
train of artillery. In the intervals between these waves of military
traffic we had the road to ourselves, except for the flashing past
of despatch-bearers on motor-cycles and of hideously hooting little
motors carrying goggled officers in goat-skins and woollen helmets.

The villages along the road all seemed empty--not figuratively but
literally empty. None of them has suffered from the German invasion,
save by the destruction, here and there, of a single house on which
some random malice has wreaked itself; but since the general flight
in September all have remained abandoned, or are provisionally
occupied by troops, and the rich country between Montmirail and
Chalons is a desert.

The first sight of Chame is extraordinarily exhilarating. The old
town lying so pleasantly between canal and river is the
Head-quarters of an army--not of a corps or of a division, but of a
whole army--and the network of grey provincial streets about the
Romanesque towers of Notre Dame rustles with the movement of war.
The square before the principal hotel--the incomparably named "Haute
Mere-Dieu"--is as vivid a sight as any scene of modern war
can be. Rows of grey motor-lorries and omnibuses do not lend
themselves to as happy groupings as a detachment of cavalry, and
spitting and spurting motor-cycles and "torpedo" racers are no
substitute for the glitter of helmets and the curvetting of
chargers; but once the eye has adapted itself to the ugly lines and
the neutral tints of the new warfare, the scene in that crowded
clattering square becomes positively brilliant. It is a vision of
one of the central functions of a great war, in all its concentrated
energy, without the saddening suggestions of what, on the distant
periphery, that energy is daily and hourly resulting in. Yet even
here such suggestions are never long out of sight; for one cannot
pass through Chalons without meeting, on their way from the station,
a long line of "eclopes"--the unwounded but battered, shattered,
frost-bitten, deafened and half-paralyzed wreckage of the
awful struggle. These poor wretches, in their thousands, are daily
shipped back from the front to rest and be restored; and it is a
grim sight to watch them limping by, and to meet the dazed stare of
eyes that have seen what one dare not picture.

If one could think away the "'eclopes" in the streets and the
wounded in their hospitals, Chalons would be an invigorating
spectacle. When we drove up to the hotel even the grey motors and
the sober uniforms seemed to sparkle under the cold sky. The
continual coming and going of alert and busy messengers, the riding
up of officers (for some still ride!), the arrival of much-decorated
military personages in luxurious motors, the hurrying to and fro of
orderlies, the perpetual depleting and refilling of the long rows of
grey vans across the square, the movements of Red Cross ambulances
and the passing of detachments for the front, all these are sights
that the pacific stranger could forever gape at. And in the hotel,
what a clatter of swords, what a piling up of fur coats and
haversacks, what a grouping of bronzed energetic heads about the
packed tables in the restaurant! It is not easy for civilians to get
to Chalons, and almost every table is occupied by officers and
soldiers--for, once off duty, there seems to be no rank distinction
in this happy democratic army, and the simple private, if he chooses
to treat himself to the excellent fare of the Haute Mere-Dieu, has
as good a right to it as his colonel.

The scene in the restaurant is inexhaustibly interesting. The mere
attempt to puzzle out the different uniforms is absorbing. A week's
experience near the front convinces me that no two uniforms in the
French army are alike either in colour or in cut. Within the last
two years the question of colour has greatly preoccupied the French
military authorities, who have been seeking an invisible blue; and
the range of their experiments is proved by the extraordinary
variety of shades of blue, ranging from a sort of greyish
robin's-egg to the darkest navy, in which the army is clothed. The
result attained is the conviction that no blue is really
inconspicuous, and that some of the harsh new slaty tints are no
less striking than the deeper shades they have superseded. But to
this scale of experimental blues, other colours must be added: the
poppy-red of the Spahis' tunics, and various other less familiar
colours--grey, and a certain greenish khaki--the use of which is due
to the fact that the cloth supply has given out and that all
available materials are employed. As for the differences in cut, the
uniforms vary from the old tight tunic to the loose belted jacket
copied from the English, and the emblems of the various arms and
ranks embroidered on these diversified habits add a new element of
perplexity. The aviator's wings, the motorist's wheel, and many of
the newer symbols, are easily recognizable--but there are all the
other arms, and the doctors and the stretcher-bearers, the sappers
and miners, and heaven knows how many more ramifications of this
great host which is really all the nation.

The main interest of the scene, however, is that it shows almost as
many types as uniforms, and that almost all the types are so good.
One begins to understand (if one has failed to before) why the
French say of themselves: "_La France est une nation guerriere._"
War is the greatest of paradoxes: the most senseless and
disheartening of human retrogressions, and yet the stimulant of
qualities of soul which, in every race, can seemingly find no other
means of renewal. Everything depends, therefore, on the category of
impulses that war excites in a people. Looking at the faces at
Chalons, one sees at once in which [Page 54] sense the French are
"une nation guerriere." It is not too much to say that war has given
beauty to faces that were interesting, humorous, acute, malicious, a
hundred vivid and expressive things, but last and least of all
beautiful. Almost all the faces about these crowded tables--young or
old, plain or handsome, distinguished or average--have the same look
of quiet authority: it is as though all "nervosity," fussiness,
little personal oddities, meannesses and vulgarities, had been burnt
away in a great flame of self-dedication. It is a wonderful example
of the rapidity with which purpose models the human countenance.
More than half of these men were probably doing dull or useless or
unimportant things till the first of last August; now each one of
them, however small his job, is sharing in a great task, and knows
it, and has been made over by knowing it.

Our road on leaving Chalons continued to run northeastward toward
the hills of the Argonne.

We passed through more deserted villages, with soldiers lounging in
the doors where old women should have sat with their distaffs,
soldiers watering their horses in the village pond, soldiers cooking
over gypsy fires in the farm-yards. In the patches of woodland along
the road we came upon more soldiers, cutting down pine saplings,
chopping them into even lengths and loading them on hand-carts, with
the green boughs piled on top. We soon saw to what use they were
put, for at every cross-road or railway bridge a warm sentry-box of
mud and straw and plaited pine-branches was plastered against a bank
or tucked like a swallow's nest into a sheltered corner. A little
farther on we began to come more and more frequently on big colonies
of "Seventy-fives." Drawn up nose to nose, usually against a curtain
of woodland, in a field at some distance from the road, and always
attended by a cumbrous drove of motor-vans, they looked like giant
gazelles feeding among elephants; and the stables of woven
pine-boughs which stood near by might have been the huge huts of
their herdsmen.

The country between Marne and Meuse is one of the regions on which
German fury spent itself most bestially during the abominable
September days. Half way between Chalons and Sainte Menehould we
came on the first evidence of the invasion: the lamentable ruins of
the village of Auve. These pleasant villages of the Aisne, with
their one long street, their half-timbered houses and high-roofed
granaries with espaliered gable-ends, are all much of one pattern,
and one can easily picture what Auve must have been as it looked
out, in the blue September weather, above the ripening pears of its
gardens to the crops in the valley and the large landscape beyond.
Now it is a mere waste of rubble [Page 58] and cinders, not one
threshold distinguishable from another. We saw many other ruined
villages after Auve, but this was the first, and perhaps for that
reason one had there, most hauntingly, the vision of all the
separate terrors, anguishes, uprootings and rendings apart involved
in the destruction of the obscurest of human communities. The
photographs on the walls, the twigs of withered box above the
crucifixes, the old wedding-dresses in brass-clamped trunks, the
bundles of letters laboriously written and as painfully deciphered,
all the thousand and one bits of the past that give meaning and
continuity to the present--of all that accumulated warmth nothing was
left but a brick-heap and some twisted stove-pipes!

As we ran on toward Sainte Menehould the names on our map showed us
that, just beyond the parallel range of hills six or seven miles to
the north, the two armies lay interlocked. But we heard no cannon
yet, and the first visible evidence of the nearness of the struggle
was the encounter, at a bend of the road, of a long line of
grey-coated figures tramping toward us between the bayonets of their
captors. They were a sturdy lot, this fresh "bag" from the hills, of
a fine fighting age, and much less famished and war-worn than one
could have wished. Their broad blond faces were meaningless,
guarded, but neither defiant nor unhappy: they seemed none too sorry
for their fate.

Our pass from the General Head-quarters carried us to Sainte
Menehould on the edge of the Argonne, where we had to apply to the
Head-quarters of the division for a farther extension. The Staff are
lodged in a house considerably the worse for German occupancy, where
offices have been improvised by means of wooden hoardings, and
where, sitting in a bare passage on a frayed damask sofa surmounted
by theatrical posters and faced by a bed with a plum-coloured
counterpane, we listened for a while to the jingle of telephones,
the rat-tat of typewriters, the steady hum of dictation and the
coming and going of hurried despatch-bearers and orderlies. The
extension to the permit was presently delivered with the courteous
request that we should push on to Verdun as fast as possible, as
civilian motors were not wanted on the road that afternoon; and this
request, coupled with the evident stir of activity at Head-quarters,
gave us the impression that there must be a good deal happening
beyond the low line of hills to the north. How much there was we
were soon to know.

We left Sainte Menehould at about eleven, and before twelve o'clock
we were nearing a large village on a ridge from which the land swept
away to right and left in ample reaches. The first glimpse of the
outlying houses showed nothing unusual; but presently the main
street turned and dipped downward, and below and beyond us lay a
long stretch of ruins: the calcined remains of Clermont-en-Argonne,
destroyed by the Germans on the 4th of September. The free and lofty
situation of the little town--for it was really a good deal more
than a village--makes its present state the more lamentable. One can
see it from so far off, and through the torn traceries of its ruined
church the eye travels over so lovely a stretch of country! No doubt
its beauty enriched the joy of wrecking it.

At the farther end of what was once the main street another small
knot of houses has survived. Chief among them is the Hospice for old
men, where Sister Gabrielle Rosnet, when the authorities of Clermont
took to their heels, stayed behind to defend her charges, and where,
ever since, she has nursed an undiminishing stream of wounded from
the eastern front. We found Soeur Rosnet, with her Sisters,
preparing the midday meal of her patients in the little kitchen of
the Hospice: the kitchen which is also her dining-room and private
office. She insisted on our finding time to share the _filet_ and
fried potatoes that were just being taken off the stove, and while
we lunched she told us the story of the invasion--of the Hospice
doors broken down "a coups de crosse" and the grey officers bursting
in with revolvers, and finding her there before them, in the big
vaulted vestibule, "alone with my old men and my Sisters." Soeur
Gabrielle Rosnet is a small round active woman, with a shrewd and
ruddy face of the type that looks out calmly from the dark
background of certain Flemish pictures. Her blue eyes are full of
warmth and humour, and she puts as much gaiety as wrath into her
tale. She does not spare epithets in talking of "ces satanes
Allemands"--these Sisters and nurses of the front have seen sights
to dry up the last drop of sentimental pity--but through all the
horror of those fierce September days, with Clermont blazing about
her and the helpless remnant of its inhabitants under the perpetual
threat of massacre, she retained her sense of the little inevitable
absurdities of life, such as her not knowing how to address the
officer in command "because he was so tall that I couldn't see up to
his shoulder-straps."--"Et ils etaient tous comme ca," she added, a
sort of reluctant admiration in her eyes.

A subordinate "good Sister" had just cleared the table and poured
out our coffee when a woman came in to say, in a matter-of-fact
tone, that there was hard fighting going on across the valley. She
added calmly, as she dipped our plates into a tub, that an obus had
just fallen a mile or two off, and that if we liked we could see the
fighting from a garden over the way. It did not take us long to
reach that garden! Soeur Gabrielle showed the way, bouncing up the
stairs of a house across the street, and flying at her heels we came
out on a grassy terrace full of soldiers.

The cannon were booming without a pause, and seemingly so near that
it was bewildering to look out across empty fields at a hillside
that seemed like any other. But luckily somebody had a field-glass,
and with its help a little corner of the battle of Vauquois was
suddenly brought close to us--the rush of French infantry up the
slopes, the feathery drift of French gun-smoke lower down, and, high
up, on the wooded crest along the sky, the red lightnings and white
puffs of the German artillery. Rap, rap, rap, went the answering
guns, as the troops swept up and disappeared into the fire-tongued
wood; and we stood there dumbfounded at the accident of having
stumbled on this visible episode of the great subterranean struggle.

Though Soeur Rosnet had seen too many such sights to be much moved,
she was full of a lively curiosity, and stood beside us, squarely
planted in the mud, holding the field-glass to her eyes, or passing
it laughingly about among the soldiers. But as we turned to go she
said: "They've sent us word to be ready for another four hundred
to-night"; and the twinkle died out of her good eyes.

Her expectations were to be dreadfully surpassed; for, as we learned
a fortnight later from a three column _communique,_ the scene we had
assisted at was no less than the first act of the successful assault
on the high-perched village of Vauquois, a point of the first
importance to the Germans, since it masked their operations to the
north of Varennes and commanded the railway by which, since
September, they have been revictualling and reinforcing their army
in the Argonne. Vauquois had been taken by them at the end of
September and, thanks to its strong position on a rocky spur, had
been almost impregnably fortified; but the attack we looked on at
from the garden of Clermont, on Sunday, February 28th, carried the
victorious French troops to the top of the ridge, and made them
masters of a part of the village. Driven from it again that night,
they were to retake it after a five days' struggle of exceptional
violence and prodigal heroism, and are now securely established
there in a position described as "of vital importance to the
operations." "But what it cost!" Soeur Gabrielle said, when we saw
her again a few days later.


II

The time had come to remember our promise and hurry away from
Clermont; but a few miles farther our attention was arrested by the
sight of the Red Cross over a village house. The house was little
more than a hovel, the village--Blercourt it was called--a mere
hamlet of scattered cottages and cow-stables: a place so easily
overlooked that it seemed likely our supplies might be needed there.

An orderly went to find the _medecin-chef_, and we waded after him
through the mud to one after another of the cottages in which, with
admirable ingenuity, he had managed to create out of next to nothing
the indispensable requirements of a second-line ambulance:
sterilizing and disinfecting appliances, a bandage-room, a pharmacy,
a well-filled wood-shed, and a clean kitchen in which "tisanes" were
brewing over a cheerful fire. A detachment of cavalry was quartered
in the village, which the trampling of hoofs had turned into a great
morass, and as we picked our way from cottage to cottage in the
doctor's wake he told us of the expedients to which he had been put
to secure even the few hovels into which his patients were crowded.
It was a complaint we were often to hear repeated along this line of
the front, where troops and wounded are packed in thousands into
villages meant to house four or five hundred; and we admired the
skill and devotion with which he had dealt with the difficulty, and
managed to lodge his patients decently.

We came back to the high-road, and he asked us if we should like to
see the church. It was about three o'clock, and in the low porch the
cure was ringing the bell for vespers. We pushed open the inner
doors and went in. The church was without aisles, and down the nave
stood four rows of wooden cots with brown blankets. In almost every
one lay a soldier--the doctor's "worst cases"--few of them wounded,
the greater number stricken with fever, bronchitis, frost-bite,
pleurisy, or some other form of trench-sickness too severe to permit
of their being carried farther from the front. One or two heads
turned on the pillows as we entered, but for the most part the men
did not move.

The cure, meanwhile, passing around to the sacristy, had come out
before the altar in his vestments, followed by a little white
acolyte. A handful of women, probably the only "civil" inhabitants
left, and some of the soldiers we had seen about the village, had
entered the church and stood together between the rows of cots; and
the service began. It was a sunless afternoon, and the picture was
all in monastic shades of black and white and ashen grey: the sick
under their earth-coloured blankets, their livid faces against the
pillows, the black dresses of the women (they seemed all to be in
mourning) and the silver haze floating out from the little acolyte's
censer. The only light in the scene--the candle-gleams on the altar,
and their reflection in the embroideries of the cure's chasuble--were
like a faint streak of sunset on the winter dusk.

For a while the long Latin cadences sounded on through the church;
but presently the cure took up in French the Canticle of the Sacred
Heart, composed during the war of 1870, and the little congregation
joined their trembling voices in the refrain:

  "_Sauvez, sauvez la France,
  Ne l'abandonnez pas!_"

The reiterated appeal rose in a sob above the rows of bodies in the
nave: "_Sauvez, sauvez la France_," the women wailed it near the
altar, the soldiers took it up from the door in stronger tones; but
the bodies in the cots never stirred, and more and more, as the day
faded, the church looked like a quiet grave-yard in a battle-field.

After we had left Sainte Menehould the sense of the nearness and
all-pervadingness of the war became even more vivid. Every road
branching away to our left was a finger touching a red wound:
Varennes, le Four de Paris, le Bois de la Grurie, were not more than
eight or ten miles to the north. Along our own road the stream of
motor-vans and the trains of ammunition grew longer and more
frequent. Once we passed a long line of "Seventy-fives" going single
file up a hillside, farther on we watched a big detachment of
artillery galloping across a stretch of open country. The movement
of supplies was continuous, and every village through which we
passed swarmed with soldiers busy loading or unloading the big vans,
or clustered about the commissariat motors while hams and quarters
of beef were handed out. As we approached Verdun the cannonade had
grown louder again; and when we reached the walls of the town and
passed under the iron teeth of the portcullis we felt ourselves in
one of the last outposts of a mighty line of defense. The desolation
of Verdun is as impressive as the feverish activity of Chalons.
The civil population was evacuated in September, and only a small
percentage have returned. Nine-tenths of the shops are closed, and
as the troops are nearly all in the trenches there is hardly any
movement in the streets.

The first duty of the traveller who has successfully passed the
challenge of the sentinel at the gates is to climb the steep hill to
the citadel at the top of the town. Here the military authorities
inspect one's papers, and deliver a "permis de sejour" which must be
verified by the police before lodgings can be obtained. We found the
principal hotel much less crowded than the Haute Mere-Dieu at
Chalons, though many of the officers of the garrison mess
there. The whole atmosphere of the place was different: silent,
concentrated, passive. To the chance observer, Verdun appears to
live only in its hospitals; and of these there are fourteen within
the walls alone. As darkness fell, the streets became completely
deserted, and the cannonade seemed to grow nearer and more
incessant. That first night the hush was so intense that every
reverberation from the dark hills beyond the walls brought out in
the mind its separate vision of destruction; and then, just as the
strained imagination could bear no more, the thunder ceased. A
moment later, in a court below my windows, a pigeon began to coo;
and all night long the two sounds strangely alternated...

On entering the gates, the first sight to attract us had been a
colony of roughly-built bungalows scattered over the miry slopes of
a little park adjoining the railway station, and surmounted by the
sign: "Evacuation Hospital No. 6." The next morning we went to visit
it. A part of the station buildings has been adapted to hospital
use, and among them a great roofless hall, which the surgeon in
charge has covered in with canvas and divided down its length into a
double row of tents. Each tent contains two wooden cots,
scrupulously clean and raised high above the floor; and the immense
ward is warmed by a row of stoves down the central passage. In the
bungalows across the road are beds for the patients who are to be
kept for a time before being transferred to the hospitals in the
town. In one bungalow an operating-room has been installed, in
another are the bathing arrangements for the newcomers from the
trenches. Every possible device for the relief of the wounded has
been carefully thought out and intelligently applied by the surgeon
in charge and the _infirmiere major_ who indefatigably seconds him.
Evacuation Hospital No. 6 sprang up in an hour, almost, on the
dreadful August day when four thousand wounded lay on stretchers
between the railway station and the gate of the little park across
the way; and it has gradually grown into the model of what such a
hospital may become in skilful and devoted hands.

Verdun has other excellent hospitals for the care of the severely
wounded who cannot be sent farther from the front. Among them St.
Nicolas, in a big airy building on the Meuse, is an example of a
great French Military Hospital at its best; but I visited few
others, for the main object of my journey was to get to some of the
second-line ambulances beyond the town. The first we went to was in
a small village to the north of Verdun, not far from the enemy's
lines at Cosenvoye, and was fairly representative of all the others.
The dreary muddy village was crammed with troops, and the ambulance
had been installed at haphazard in such houses as the military
authorities could spare. The arrangements were primitive but clean,
and even the dentist had set up his apparatus in one of the rooms.
The men lay on mattresses or in wooden cots, and the rooms were
heated by stoves. The great need, here as everywhere, was for
blankets and clean underclothing; for the wounded are brought in
from the front encrusted with frozen mud, and usually without having
washed or changed for weeks. There are no women nurses in these
second-line ambulances, but all the army doctors we saw seemed
intelligent, and anxious to do the best they could for their men in
conditions of unusual hardship. The principal obstacle in their way
is the over-crowded state of the villages. Thousands of soldiers are
camped in all of them, in hygienic conditions that would be bad
enough for men in health; and there is also a great need for light
diet, since the hospital commissariat of the front apparently
supplies no invalid foods, and men burning with fever have to be fed
on meat and vegetables.

In the afternoon we started out again in a snow-storm, over a
desolate rolling country to the south of Verdun. The wind blew
fiercely across the whitened slopes, and no one was in sight but the
sentries marching up and down the railway lines, and an occasional
cavalryman patrolling the lonely road. Nothing can exceed the
mournfulness of this depopulated land: we might have been wandering
over the wilds of Poland. We ran some twenty miles down the
steel-grey Meuse to a village about four miles west of Les Eparges,
the spot where, for weeks past, a desperate struggle had been going
on. There must have been a lull in the fighting that day, for the
cannon had ceased; but the scene at the point where we left the
motor gave us the sense of being on the very edge of the conflict.
The long straggling village lay on the river, and the trampling of
cavalry and the hauling of guns had turned the land about it into a
mud-flat. Before the primitive cottage where the doctor's office had
been installed were the motors of the surgeon and the medical
inspector who had accompanied us. Near by stood the usual flock of
grey motor-vans, and all about was the coming and going of cavalry
remounts, the riding up of officers, the unloading of supplies, the
incessant activity of mud-splashed sergeants and men.

The main ambulance was in a grange, of which the two stories had
been partitioned off into wards. Under the cobwebby rafters the men
lay in rows on clean pallets, and big stoves made the rooms dry and
warm. But the great superiority of this ambulance was its nearness
to a canalboat which had been fitted up with hot douches. The boat
was spotlessly clean, and each cabin was shut off by a gay curtain
of red-flowered chintz. Those curtains must do almost as much as the
hot water to make over the _morale_ of the men: they were the most
comforting sight of the day.

Farther north, and on the other bank of the Meuse, lies another
large village which has been turned into a colony of eclopes.
Fifteen hundred sick or exhausted men are housed there--and there
are no hot douches or chintz curtains to cheer them! We were taken
first to the church, a large featureless building at the head of the
street. In the doorway our passage was obstructed by a mountain of
damp straw which a gang of hostler-soldiers were pitch-forking out
of the aisles. The interior of the church was dim and suffocating.
Between the pillars hung screens of plaited straw, forming little
enclosures in each of which about a dozen sick men lay on more
straw, without mattresses or blankets. No beds, no tables, no
chairs, no washing appliances--in their muddy clothes, as they come
from the front, they are bedded down on the stone floor like cattle
till they are well enough to go back to their job. It was a pitiful
contrast to the little church at Blercourt, with the altar lights
twinkling above the clean beds; and one wondered if even so near the
front, it had to be. "The African village, we call it," one of our
companions said with a laugh: but the African village has blue sky
over it, and a clear stream runs between its mud huts.

We had been told at Sainte Menehould that, for military reasons, we
must follow a more southerly direction on our return to
Chalons; and when we left Verdun we took the road to
Bar-le-Duc. It runs southwest over beautiful broken country,
untouched by war except for the fact that its villages, like all the
others in this region, are either deserted or occupied by troops. As
we left Verdun behind us the sound of the cannon grew fainter and
died out, and we had the feeling that we were gradually passing
beyond the flaming boundaries into a more normal world; but
suddenly, at a cross-road, a sign-post snatched us back to war: _St.
Mihiel_, 18 _Kilometres_. St. Mihiel, the danger-spot of the region,
the weak joint in the armour! There it lay, up that harmless-looking
bye-road, not much more than ten miles away--a ten minutes' dash
would have brought us into the thick of the grey coats and spiked
helmets! The shadow of that sign-post followed us for miles,
darkening the landscape like the shadow from a racing storm-cloud.

Bar-le-Duc seemed unaware of the cloud. The charming old town was in
its normal state of provincial apathy: few soldiers were about, and
here at last civilian life again predominated. After a few days on
the edge of the war, in that intermediate region under its solemn
spell, there is something strangely lowering to the mood in the
first sight of a busy unconscious community. One looks instinctively,
in the eyes of the passers by, for a reflection of that other vision,
and feels diminished by contact with people going so indifferently
about their business.

A little way beyond Bar-le-Duc we came on another phase of the
war-vision, for our route lay exactly in the track of the August
invasion, and between Bar-le-Duc and Vitry-le-Francois the high-road
is lined with ruined towns. The first we came to was Laimont, a
large village wiped out as if a cyclone had beheaded it; then comes
Revigny, a town of over two thousand inhabitants, less completely
levelled because its houses were more solidly built, but a spectacle
of more tragic desolation, with its wide streets winding between
scorched and contorted fragments of masonry, bits of shop-fronts,
handsome doorways, the colonnaded court of a public building. A few
miles farther lies the most piteous of the group: the village of
Heiltz-le-Maurupt, once pleasantly set in gardens and orchards, now
an ugly waste like the others, and with a little church so stripped
and wounded and dishonoured that it lies there by the roadside like
a human victim.

In this part of the country, which is one of many cross-roads, we
began to have unexpected difficulty in finding our way, for the
names and distances on the milestones have all been effaced, the
sign-posts thrown down and the enamelled _plaques_ on the houses at
the entrance to the villages removed. One report has it that this
precaution was taken by the inhabitants at the approach of the
invading army, another that the Germans themselves demolished the
sign-posts and plastered over the mile-stones in order to paint on
them misleading and encouraging distances. The result is extremely
bewildering, for, all the villages being either in ruins or
uninhabited, there is no one to question but the soldiers one meets,
and their answer is almost invariably "We don't know--we don't
belong here." One is in luck if one comes across a sentinel who
knows the name of the village he is guarding.

It was the strangest of sensations to find ourselves in a chartless
wilderness within sixty or seventy miles of Paris, and to wander, as
we did, for hours across a high heathery waste, with wide blue
distances to north and south, and in all the scene not a landmark by
means of which we could make a guess at our whereabouts. One of our
haphazard turns at last brought us into a muddy bye-road with long
lines of "Seventy-fives" ranged along its banks like grey ant-eaters
in some monstrous menagerie. A little farther on we came to a
bemired village swarming with artillery and cavalry, and found
ourselves in the thick of an encampment just on the move. It seems
improbable that we were meant to be there, for our arrival caused
such surprise that no sentry remembered to challenge us, and
obsequiously saluting _sous-officiers_ instantly cleared a way for
the motor. So, by a happy accident, we caught one more war-picture,
all of vehement movement, as we passed out of the zone of war.

We were still very distinctly in it on returning to Chalons,
which, if it had seemed packed on our previous visit, was now
quivering and cracking with fresh crowds. The stir about the
fountain, in the square before the Haute Mere-Dieu, was more
melodramatic than ever. Every one was in a hurry, every one booted
and mudsplashed, and spurred or sworded or despatch-bagged, or
somehow labelled as a member of the huge military beehive. The
privilege of telephoning and telegraphing being denied to civilians
in the war-zone, it was ominous to arrive at night-fall on such a
crowded scene, and we were not surprised to be told that there was
not a room left at the Haute Mere-Dieu, and that even the sofas in
the reading-room had been let for the night. At every other inn in
the town we met with the same answer; and finally we decided to ask
permission to go on as far as Epernay, about twelve miles off. At
Head-quarters we were told that our request could not be granted. No
motors are allowed to circulate after night-fall in the zone of war,
and the officer charged with the distribution of motor-permits
pointed out that, even if an exception were made in our favour, we
should probably be turned back by the first sentinel we met, only to
find ourselves unable to re-enter Chalons without another
permit! This alternative was so alarming that we began to think
ourselves relatively lucky to be on the right side of the gates; and
we went back to the Haute Mere-Dieu to squeeze into a crowded corner
of the restaurant for dinner. The hope that some one might have
suddenly left the hotel in the interval was not realized; but after
dinner we learned from the landlady that she had certain rooms
permanently reserved for the use of the Staff, and that, as these
rooms had not yet been called for that evening, we might possibly be
allowed to occupy them for the night.

At Chalons the Head-quarters are in the Prefecture, a coldly
handsome building of the eighteenth century, and there, in a
majestic stone vestibule, beneath the gilded ramp of a great festal
staircase, we waited in anxious suspense, among the orderlies and
_estafettes_, while our unusual request was considered. The result
of the deliberation, was an expression of regret: nothing could be
done for us, as officers might at any moment arrive from the General
Head-quarters and require the rooms. It was then past nine o'clock,
and bitterly cold--and we began to wonder. Finally the polite
officer who had been charged to dismiss us, moved to compassion at
our plight, offered to give us a _laissez-passer_ back to Paris. But
Paris was about a hundred and twenty-five miles off, the night was
dark, the cold was piercing--and at every cross-road and railway
crossing a sentinel would have to be convinced of our right to go
farther. We remembered the warning given us earlier in the evening,
and, declining the offer, went out again into the cold. And just
then chance took pity on us. In the restaurant we had run across a
friend attached to the Staff, and now, meeting him again in the
depth of our difficulty, we were told of lodgings to be found near
by. He could not take us there, for it was past the hour when he had
a right to be out, or we either, for that matter, since curfew
sounds at nine at Chalons. But he told us how to find our way
through the maze of little unlit streets about the Cathedral;
standing there beside the motor, in the icy darkness of the deserted
square, and whispering hastily, as he turned to leave us: "You ought
not to be out so late; but the word tonight is _Jena_. When you give
it to the chauffeur, be sure no sentinel overhears you." With that
he was up the wide steps, the glass doors had closed on him, and I
stood there in the pitch-black night, suddenly unable to believe
that I was I, or Chalons Chalons, or that a young man who in Paris
drops in to dine with me and talk over new books and plays, had been
whispering a password in my ear to carry me unchallenged to a house
a few streets away! The sense of unreality produced by that one word
was so overwhelming that for a blissful moment the whole fabric of
what I had been experiencing, the whole huge and oppressive and
unescapable fact of the war, slipped away like a torn cobweb, and
I seemed to see behind it the reassuring face of things as they used
to be.

The next morning dispelled that vision. We woke to a noise of guns
closer and more incessant than even the first night's cannonade at
Verdun; and when we went out into the streets it seemed as if,
overnight, a new army had sprung out of the ground. Waylaid at one
corner after another by the long tide of troops streaming out
through the town to the northern suburbs, we saw in turn all the
various divisions of the unfolding frieze: first the infantry and
artillery, the sappers and miners, the endless trains of guns and
ammunition, then the long line of grey supply-waggons, and finally
the stretcher-bearers following the Red Cross ambulances. All the
story of a day's warfare was written in the spectacle of that
endless silent flow to the front: and we were to read it again, a
few days later, in the terse announcement of "renewed activity"
about Suippes, and of the bloody strip of ground gained between
Perthes and Beausejour.




IN LORRAINE AND THE VOSGES


NANCY, May 13th, 1915

Beside me, on my writing-table, stands a bunch of peonies, the jolly
round-faced pink peonies of the village garden. They were picked
this afternoon in the garden of a ruined house at Gerbeviller--a
house so calcined and convulsed that, for epithets dire enough to
fit it, one would have to borrow from a Hebrew prophet gloating over
the fall of a city of idolaters.

Since leaving Paris yesterday we have passed through streets and
streets of such murdered houses, through town after town spread out
in its last writhings; and before the black holes that were homes,
along the edge of the chasms that were streets, everywhere we have
seen flowers and vegetables springing up in freshly raked and
watered gardens. My pink peonies were not introduced to point the
stale allegory of unconscious Nature veiling Man's havoc: they are
put on my first page as a symbol of conscious human energy coming
back to replant and rebuild the wilderness...

Last March, in the Argonne, the towns we passed through seemed quite
dead; but yesterday new life was budding everywhere. We were
following another track of the invasion, one of the huge
tiger-scratches that the Beast flung over the land last September,
between Vitry-le-Francois and Bar-le-Duc. Etrepy, Pargny,
Sermaize-les-Bains, Andernay, are the names of this group of
victims: Sermaize a pretty watering-place along wooded slopes, the
others large villages fringed with farms, and all now mere
scrofulous blotches on the soft spring scene. But in many we heard
the sound of hammers, and saw brick-layers and masons at work. Even
in the most mortally stricken there were signs of returning life:
children playing among the stone heaps, and now and then a cautious
older face peering out of a shed propped against the ruins. In one
place an ancient tram-car had been converted into a cafe and
labelled: "Au Restaurant des Ruines"; and everywhere between the
calcined walls the carefully combed gardens aligned their radishes
and lettuce-tops.

From Bar-le-Duc we turned northeast, and as we entered the forest of
Commercy we began to hear again the Voice of the Front. It was the
warmest and stillest of May days, and in the clearing where we
stopped for luncheon the familiar boom broke with a magnified
loudness on the noonday hush. In the intervals between the crashes
there was not a sound but the gnats' hum in the moist sunshine and
the dryad-call of the cuckoo from greener depths. At the end of the
lane a few cavalrymen rode by in shabby blue, their horses' flanks
glinting like ripe chestnuts. They stopped to chat and accept some
cigarettes, and when they had trotted off again the gnat, the cuckoo
and the cannon took up their trio...

The town of Commercy looked so undisturbed that the cannonade
rocking it might have been some unheeded echo of the hills. These
frontier towns inured to the clash of war go about their business
with what one might call stolidity if there were not finer, and
truer, names for it. In Commercy, to be sure, there is little
business to go about just now save that connected with the military
occupation; but the peaceful look of the sunny sleepy streets made
one doubt if the fighting line was really less than five miles away...
Yet the French, with an odd perversion of race-vanity, still
persist in speaking of themselves as a "nervous and impressionable"
people!

This afternoon, on the road to Gerbeviller, we were again in the
track of the September invasion. Over all the slopes now cool with
spring foliage the battle rocked backward and forward during those
burning autumn days; and every mile of the struggle has left its
ghastly traces. The fields are full of wooden crosses which the
ploughshare makes a circuit to avoid; many of the villages have been
partly wrecked, and here and there an isolated ruin marks the
nucleus of a fiercer struggle. But the landscape, in its first sweet
leafiness, is so alive with ploughing and sowing and all the natural
tasks of spring, that the war scars seem like traces of a long-past
woe; and it was not till a bend of the road brought us in sight of
Gerbeviller that we breathed again the choking air of present
horror.

Gerbeviller, stretched out at ease on its slopes above the Meurthe,
must have been a happy place to live in. The streets slanted up
between scattered houses in gardens to the great Louis XIV
chateau above the town and the church that balanced it. So
much one can reconstruct from the first glimpse across the valley;
but when one enters the town all perspective is lost in chaos.
Gerbeviller has taken to herself the title of "the martyr town"; an
honour to which many sister victims might dispute her claim! But as
a sensational image of havoc it seems improbable that any can
surpass her. Her ruins seem to have been simultaneously vomited up
from the depths and hurled down from the skies, as though she had
perished in some monstrous clash of earthquake and tornado; and it
fills one with a cold despair to know that this double destruction
was no accident of nature but a piously planned and methodically
executed human deed. From the opposite heights the poor little
garden-girt town was shelled like a steel fortress; then, when the
Germans entered, a fire was built in every house, and at the
nicely-timed right moment one of the explosive tabloids which the
fearless Teuton carries about for his land-_Lusitanias_ was tossed
on each hearth. It was all so well done that one wonders--almost
apologetically for German thoroughness--that any of the human rats
escaped from their holes; but some did, and were neatly spitted on
lurking bayonets.

One old woman, hearing her son's deathcry, rashly looked out of her
door. A bullet instantly laid her low among her phloxes and lilies;
and there, in her little garden, her dead body was dishonoured. It
seemed singularly appropriate, in such a scene, to read above a
blackened doorway the sign: "Monuments Funebres," and to observe
that the house the doorway once belonged to had formed the angle of
a lane called "La Ruelle des Orphelines."

At one end of the main street of Gerbeviller there once stood a
charming house, of the sober old Lorraine pattern, with low door,
deep roof and ample gables: it was in the garden of this house that
my pink peonies were picked for me by its owner, Mr. Liegeay, a
former Mayor of Gerbeviller, who witnessed all the horrors of the
invasion.

Mr. Liegeay is now living in a neighbour's cellar, his own being
fully occupied by the debris of his charming house. He told us the
story of the three days of the German occupation; how he and his
wife and niece, and the niece's babies, took to their cellar while
the Germans set the house on fire, and how, peering through a door
into the stable-yard, they saw that the soldiers suspected they were
within and were trying to get at them. Luckily the incendiaries had
heaped wood and straw all round the outside of the house, and the
blaze was so hot that they could not reach the door. Between the
arch of the doorway and the door itself was a half-moon opening; and
Mr. Liegeay and his family, during three days and three nights,
broke up all the barrels in the cellar and threw the bits out
through the opening to feed the fire in the yard.

Finally, on the third day, when they began to be afraid that the
ruins of the house would fall in on them, they made a dash for
safety. The house was on the edge of the town, and the women and
children managed to get away into the country; but Mr. Liegeay was
surprised in his garden by a German soldier. He made a rush for the
high wall of the adjoining cemetery, and scrambling over it slipped
down between the wall and a big granite cross. The cross was covered
with the hideous wire and glass wreaths dear to French mourners; and
with these opportune mementoes Mr. Liegeay roofed himself in, lying
wedged in his narrow hiding-place from three in the afternoon till
night, and listening to the voices of the soldiers who were hunting
for him among the grave-stones. Luckily it was their last day at
Gerbeviller, and the German retreat saved his life.

Even in Gerbeviller we saw no worse scene of destruction than the
particular spot in which the ex-mayor stood while he told his story.
He looked about him at the heaps of blackened brick and contorted
iron. "This was my dining-room," he said. "There were some good old
paneling on the walls, and some fine prints that had been a
wedding-present to my grand-father." He led us into another black
pit. "This was our sitting-room: you see what a view we had." He
sighed, and added philosophically: "I suppose we were too well off.
I even had an electric light out there on the terrace, to read my
paper by on summer evenings. Yes, we were too well off..." That
was all.

Meanwhile all the town had been red with horror--flame and shot and
tortures unnameable; and at the other end of the long street, a
woman, a Sister of Charity, had held her own like Soeur Gabrielle at
Clermont-en-Argonne, gathering her flock of old men and children
about her and interposing her short stout figure between them and
the fury of the Germans. We found her in her Hospice, a ruddy,
indomitable woman who related with a quiet indignation more
thrilling than invective the hideous details of the bloody three
days; but that already belongs to the past, and at present she is
much more concerned with the task of clothing and feeding
Gerbeviller. For two thirds of the population have already "come
home"--that is what they call the return to this desert! "You see,"
Soeur Julie explained, "there are the crops to sow, the gardens to
tend. They had to come back. The government is building wooden
shelters for them; and people will surely send us beds and linen."
(Of course they would, one felt as one listened!) "Heavy boots,
too--boots for field-labourers. We want them for women as well as
men--like these." Soeur Julie, smiling, turned up a hob-nailed sole.
"I have directed all the work on our Hospice farm myself. All the
women are working in the fields--we must take the place of the men."
And I seemed to see my pink peonies flowering in the very prints of
her sturdy boots!



May 14th.

Nancy, the most beautiful town in France, has never been as
beautiful as now. Coming back to it last evening from a round of
ruins one felt as if the humbler Sisters sacrificed to spare it were
pleading with one not to forget them in the contemplation of its
dearly-bought perfection.

The last time I looked out on the great architectural setting of the
Place Stanislas was on a hot July evening, the evening of the
National Fete. The square and the avenues leading to it
swarmed with people, and as darkness fell the balanced lines of
arches and palaces sprang out in many coloured light. Garlands of
lamps looped the arcades leading into the Place de la Carriere,
peacock-coloured fires flared from the Arch of Triumph, long curves
of radiance beat like wings over the thickets of the park, the
sculptures of the fountains, the brown-and-gold foliation of Jean
Damour's great gates; and under this roofing of light was the murmur
of a happy crowd carelessly celebrating the tradition of
half-forgotten victories.

Now, at sunset, all life ceases in Nancy and veil after veil of
silence comes down on the deserted Place and its empty perspectives.
Last night by nine the few lingering lights in the streets had been
put out, every window was blind, and the moonless night lay over the
city like a canopy of velvet. Then, from some remote point, the arc
of a search-light swept the sky, laid a fugitive pallor on darkened
palace-fronts, a gleam of gold on invisible gates, trembled across
the black vault and vanished, leaving it still blacker. When we came
out of the darkened restaurant on the corner of the square, and the
iron curtain of the entrance had been hastily dropped on us, we
stood in such complete night that it took a waiter's friendly hand
to guide us to the curbstone. Then, as we grew used to the darkness,
we saw it lying still more densely under the colonnade of the Place
de la Carriere and the clipped trees beyond. The ordered masses of
architecture became august, the spaces between them immense, and the
black sky faintly strewn with stars seemed to overarch an enchanted
city. Not a footstep sounded, not a leaf rustled, not a breath of
air drew under the arches. And suddenly, through the dumb night, the
sound of the cannon began.


May 14th.

Luncheon with the General Staff in an old bourgeois house of a
little town as sleepy as "Cranford." In the warm walled gardens
everything was blooming at once: laburnums, lilacs, red hawthorn,
Banksia roses and all the pleasant border plants that go with box
and lavender. Never before did the flowers answer the spring
roll-call with such a rush! Upstairs, in the Empire bedroom which
the General has turned into his study, it was amusingly incongruous
to see the sturdy provincial furniture littered with war-maps,
trench-plans, aeroplane photographs and all the documentation of
modern war. Through the windows bees hummed, the garden rustled, and
one felt, close by, behind the walls of other gardens, the
untroubled continuance of a placid and orderly bourgeois life.

We started early for Mousson on the Moselle, the ruined
hill-fortress that gives its name to the better-known town at its
foot. Our road ran below the long range of the "Grand Couronne," the
line of hills curving southeast from Pont-a-Mousson to St.
Nicolas du Port. All through this pleasant broken country the battle
shook and swayed last autumn; but few signs of those days are left
except the wooden crosses in the fields. No troops are visible, and
the pictures of war that made the Argonne so tragic last March are
replaced by peaceful rustic scenes. On the way to Mousson the road
is overhung by an Italian-looking village clustered about a
hill-top. It marks the exact spot at which, last August, the German
invasion was finally checked and flung back; and the Muse of History
points out that on this very hill has long stood a memorial shaft
inscribed: _Here, in the year 362, Jovinus defeated the Teutonic
hordes._

A little way up the ascent to Mousson we left the motor behind a bit
of rising ground. The road is raked by the German lines, and stray
pedestrians (unless in a group) are less liable than a motor to have
a shell spent on them. We climbed under a driving grey sky which
swept gusts of rain across our road. In the lee of the castle we
stopped to look down at the valley of the Moselle, the slate roofs
of Pont-a-Mousson and the broken bridge which once linked
together the two sides of the town. Nothing but the wreck of the
bridge showed that we were on the edge of war. The wind was too high
for firing, and we saw no reason for believing that the wood just
behind the Hospice roof at our feet was seamed with German trenches
and bristling with guns, or that from every slope across the valley
the eye of the cannon sleeplessly glared. But there the Germans
were, drawing an iron ring about three sides of the watch-tower; and
as one peered through an embrasure of the ancient walls one
gradually found one's self re-living the sensations of the little
mediaeval burgh as it looked out on some earlier circle of
besiegers. The longer one looked, the more oppressive and menacing
the invisibility of the foe became. "_There_ they are--and
_there_--and _there._" We strained our eyes obediently, but saw only
calm hillsides, dozing farms. It was as if the earth itself were the
enemy, as if the hordes of evil were in the clods and grass-blades.
Only one conical hill close by showed an odd artificial patterning,
like the work of huge ants who had scarred it with criss-cross
ridges. We were told that these were French trenches, but they
looked much more like the harmless traces of a prehistoric camp.

Suddenly an officer, pointing to the west of the trenched hill said:
"Do you see that farm?" It lay just below, near the river, and so
close that good eyes could easily have discerned people or animals
in the farm-yard, if there had been any; but the whole place seemed
to be sleeping the sleep of bucolic peace. "_They are there_," the
officer said; and the innocent vignette framed by my field-glass
suddenly glared back at me like a human mask of hate. The loudest
cannonade had not made "them" seem as real as that!...

At this point the military lines and the old political frontier
everywhere overlap, and in a cleft of the wooded hills that conceal
the German batteries we saw a dark grey blur on the grey horizon. It
was Metz, the Promised City, lying there with its fair steeples and
towers, like the mystic banner that Constantine saw upon the sky...

Through wet vineyards and orchards we scrambled down the hill to the
river and entered Pont-a-Mousson. It was by mere meteorological good
luck that we got there, for if the winds had been asleep the guns
would have been awake, and when they wake poor Pont-a-Mousson is not
at home to visitors. One understood why as one stood in the riverside
garden of the great Premonstratensian Monastery which is now the
hospital and the general asylum of the town. Between the clipped
limes and formal borders the German shells had scooped out three
or four "dreadful hollows," in one of which, only last week, a
little girl found her death; and the facade of the building is
pock-marked by shot and disfigured with gaping holes. Yet in this
precarious shelter Sister Theresia, of the same indomitable breed as
the Sisters of Clermont and Gerbeviller, has gathered a miscellaneous
flock of soldiers wounded in the trenches, civilians shattered by the
bombardment, eclopes, old women and children: all the human wreckage
of this storm-beaten point of the front. Sister Theresia seems in no
wise disconcerted by the fact that the shells continually play over
her roof. The building is immense and spreading, and when one wing
is damaged she picks up her proteges and trots them off, bed and
baggage, to another. "_Je promene mes malades_," she said calmly,
as if boasting of the varied accommodation of an ultra-modern
hospital, as she led us through vaulted and stuccoed galleries where
caryatid-saints look down in plaster pomp on the rows of
brown-blanketed pallets and the long tables at which haggard eclopes
were enjoying their evening soup.


May 15th.

I have seen the happiest being on earth: a man who has found his
job.

This afternoon we motored southwest of Nancy to a little place
called Menil-sur-Belvitte. The name is not yet intimately known to
history, but there are reasons why it deserves to be, and in one
man's mind it already is. Menil-sur-Belvitte is a village on the
edge of the Vosges. It is badly battered, for awful fighting took
place there in the first month of the war. The houses lie in a
hollow, and just beyond it the ground rises and spreads into a
plateau waving with wheat and backed by wooded slopes--the ideal
"battleground" of the history-books. And here a real above-ground
battle of the old obsolete kind took place, and the French, driving
the Germans back victoriously, fell by thousands in the trampled
wheat.

The church of Menil is a ruin, but the parsonage still stands--a
plain little house at the end of the street; and here the cure
received us, and led us into a room which he has turned into a
chapel. The chapel is also a war museum, and everything in it has
something to do with the battle that took place among the
wheat-fields. The candelabra on the altar are made of "Seventy-five"
shells, the Virgin's halo is composed of radiating bayonets, the
walls are intricately adorned with German trophies and French
relics, and on the ceiling the cure has had painted a kind of
zodiacal chart of the whole region, in which Menil-sur-Belvitte's
handful of houses figures as the central orb of the system, and
Verdun, Nancy, Metz, and Belfort as its humble satellites. But the
chapel-museum is only a surplus expression of the cure's impassioned
dedication to the dead. His real work has been done on the
battle-field, where row after row of graves, marked and listed as
soon as the struggle was over, have been fenced about, symmetrically
disposed, planted with flowers and young firs, and marked by the
names and death-dates of the fallen. As he led us from one of these
enclosures to another his face was lit with the flame of a gratified
vocation. This particular man was made to do this particular thing:
he is a born collector, classifier, and hero-worshipper. In the hall
of the "presbytere" hangs a case of carefully-mounted butterflies,
the result, no doubt, of an earlier passion for collecting. His
"specimens" have changed, that is all: he has passed from
butterflies to men, from the actual to the visionary Psyche.

On the way to Menil we stopped at the village of Crevic. The Germans
were there in August, but the place is untouched--except for one
house. That house, a large one, standing in a park at one end of the
village, was the birth-place and home of General Lyautey, one of
France's best soldiers, and Germany's worst enemy in Africa. It is
no exaggeration to say that last August General Lyautey, by his
promptness and audacity, saved Morocco for France. The Germans know
it, and hate him; and as soon as the first soldiers reached
Crevic--so obscure and imperceptible a spot that even German
omniscience might have missed it--the officer in command asked for
General Lyautey's house, went straight to it, had all the papers,
portraits, furniture and family relics piled in a bonfire in the
court, and then burnt down the house. As we sat in the neglected
park with the plaintive ruin before us we heard from the gardener
this typical tale of German thoroughness and German chivalry. It is
corroborated by the fact that not another house in Crevic was
destroyed.


May 16th.

About two miles from the German frontier (_frontier_ just here as
well as front) an isolated hill rises out of the Lorraine meadows.
East of it, a ribbon of river winds among poplars, and that ribbon
is the boundary between Empire and Republic. On such a clear day as
this the view from the hill is extraordinarily interesting. From its
grassy top a little aeroplane cannon stares to heaven, watching the
east for the danger speck; and the circumference of the hill is
furrowed by a deep trench--a "bowel," rather--winding invisibly from
one subterranean observation post to another. In each of these
earthly warrens (ingeniously wattled, roofed and iron-sheeted) stand
two or three artillery officers with keen quiet faces, directing by
telephone the fire of batteries nestling somewhere in the woods four
or five miles away. Interesting as the place was, the men who lived
there interested me far more. They obviously belonged to different
classes, and had received a different social education; but their
mental and moral fraternity was complete. They were all fairly
young, and their faces had the look that war has given to French
faces: a look of sharpened intelligence, strengthened will and
sobered judgment, as if every faculty, trebly vivified, were so bent
on the one end that personal problems had been pushed back to the
vanishing point of the great perspective.

From this vigilant height--one of the intentest eyes open on the
frontier--we went a short distance down the hillside to a village
out of range of the guns, where the commanding officer gave us tea
in a charming old house with a terraced garden full of flowers and
puppies. Below the terrace, lost Lorraine stretched away to her blue
heights, a vision of summer peace: and just above us the unsleeping
hill kept watch, its signal-wires trembling night and day. It was
one of the intervals of rest and sweetness when the whole horrible
black business seems to press most intolerably on the nerves.

Below the village the road wound down to a forest that had formed a
dark blur in our bird's-eye view of the plain. We passed into the
forest and halted on the edge of a colony of queer exotic huts. On
all sides they peeped through the branches, themselves so branched
and sodded and leafy that they seemed like some transition form
between tree and house. We were in one of the so-called "villages
negres" of the second-line trenches, the jolly little settlements to
which the troops retire after doing their shift under fire. This
particular colony has been developed to an extreme degree of comfort
and safety. The houses are partly underground, connected by deep
winding "bowels" over which light rustic bridges have been thrown,
and so profoundly roofed with sods that as much of them as shows
above ground is shell-proof. Yet they are real houses, with real
doors and windows under their grass-eaves, real furniture inside,
and real beds of daisies and pansies at their doors. In the
Colonel's bungalow a big bunch of spring flowers bloomed on the
table, and everywhere we saw the same neatness and order, the same
amused pride in the look of things. The men were dining at long
trestle-tables under the trees; tired, unshaven men in shabby
uniforms of all cuts and almost every colour. They were off duty,
relaxed, in a good humour; but every face had the look of the faces
watching on the hill-top. Wherever I go among these men of the front
I have the same impression: the impression that the absorbing
undivided thought of the Defense of France lives in the heart and
brain of each soldier as intensely as in the heart and brain of
their chief.

We walked a dozen yards down the road and came to the edge of the
forest. A wattled palisade bounded it, and through a gap in the
palisade we looked out across a field to the roofs of a quiet
village a mile away. I went out a few steps into the field and was
abruptly pulled back. "Take care--those are the trenches!" What
looked like a ridge thrown up by a plough was the enemy's line; and
in the quiet village French cannon watched. Suddenly, as we stood
there, they woke, and at the same moment we heard the unmistakable
Gr-r-r of an aeroplane and saw a Bird of Evil high up against the
blue. Snap, snap, snap barked the mitrailleuse on the hill, the
soldiers jumped from their wine and strained their eyes through the
trees, and the Taube, finding itself the centre of so much
attention, turned grey tail and swished away to the concealing
clouds.


May 17th.

Today we started with an intenser sense of adventure. Hitherto we
had always been told beforehand where we were going and how much we
were to be allowed to see; but now we were being launched into the
unknown. Beyond a certain point all was conjecture--we knew only
that what happened after that would depend on the good-will of a
Colonel of Chasseurs-a-pied whom we were to go a long way to
find, up into the folds of the mountains on our southeast horizon.

We picked up a staff-officer at Head-quarters and flew on to a
battered town on the edge of the hills. From there we wound up
through a narrowing valley, under wooded cliffs, to a little
settlement where the Colonel of the Brigade was to be found. There
was a short conference between the Colonel and our staff-officer,
and then we annexed a Captain of Chasseurs and spun away again. Our
road lay through a town so exposed that our companion from
Head-quarters suggested the advisability of avoiding it; but our
guide hadn't the heart to inflict such a disappointment on his new
acquaintances. "Oh, we won't stop the motor--we'll just dash
through," he said indulgently; and in the excess of his indulgence
he even permitted us to dash slowly.

Oh, that poor town--when we reached it, along a road ploughed with
fresh obus-holes, I didn't want to stop the motor; I wanted to hurry
on and blot the picture from my memory! It was doubly sad to look at
because of the fact that it wasn't _quite dead;_ faint spasms of
life still quivered through it. A few children played in the ravaged
streets; a few pale mothers watched them from cellar doorways. "They
oughtn't to be here," our guide explained; "but about a hundred and
fifty begged so hard to stay that the General gave them leave. The
officer in command has an eye on them, and whenever he gives the
signal they dive down into their burrows. He says they are perfectly
obedient. It was he who asked that they might stay..."

Up and up into the hills. The vision of human pain and ruin was lost
in beauty. We were among the firs, and the air was full of balm. The
mossy banks gave out a scent of rain, and little water-falls from
the heights set the branches trembling over secret pools. At each
turn of the road, forest, and always more forest, climbing with us
as we climbed, and dropped away from us to narrow valleys that
converged on slate-blue distances. At one of these turns we overtook
a company of soldiers, spade on shoulder and bags of tools across
their backs--"trench-workers" swinging up to the heights to which we
were bound. Life must be a better thing in this crystal air than in
the mud-welter of the Argonne and the fogs of the North; and these
men's faces were fresh with wind and weather.

Higher still ... and presently a halt on a ridge, in another
"black village," this time almost a town! The soldiers gathered
round us as the motor stopped--throngs of chasseurs-a-pied in
faded, trench-stained uniforms--for few visitors climb to this
point, and their pleasure at the sight of new faces was presently
expressed in a large "_Vive l'Amerique!_" scrawled on the door of
the car. _L'Amerique_ was glad and proud to be there, and instantly
conscious of breathing an air saturated with courage and the dogged
determination to endure. The men were all reservists: that is to
say, mostly married, and all beyond the first fighting age. For many
months there has not been much active work along this front, no
great adventure to rouse the blood and wing the imagination: it has
just been month after month of monotonous watching and holding on.
And the soldiers' faces showed it: there was no light of heady
enterprise in their eyes, but the look of men who knew their job,
had thought it over, and were there to hold their bit of France till
the day of victory or extermination.

Meanwhile, they had made the best of the situation and turned their
quarters into a forest colony that would enchant any normal boy.
Their village architecture was more elaborate than any we had yet
seen. In the Colonel's "dugout" a long table decked with lilacs and
tulips was spread for tea. In other cheery catacombs we found neat
rows of bunks, mess-tables, sizzling sauce-pans over kitchen-fires.
Everywhere were endless ingenuities in the way of camp-furniture and
household decoration. Farther down the road a path between
fir-boughs led to a hidden hospital, a marvel of underground
compactness. While we chatted with the surgeon a soldier came in
from the trenches: an elderly, bearded man, with a good average
civilian face--the kind that one runs against by hundreds in any
French crowd. He had a scalp-wound which had just been dressed, and
was very pale. The Colonel stopped to ask a few questions, and then,
turning to him, said: "Feeling rather better now?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good. In a day or two you'll be thinking about going back to the
trenches, eh?"

"_I'm going now, sir._" It was said quite simply, and received in
the same way. "Oh, all right," the Colonel merely rejoined; but he
laid his hand on the man's shoulder as we went out.

Our next visit was to a sod-thatched hut, "At the sign of the
Ambulant Artisans," where two or three soldiers were modelling and
chiselling all kinds of trinkets from the aluminum of enemy shells.
One of the ambulant artisans was just finishing a ring with
beautifully modelled fauns' heads, another offered me a
"Pickelhaube" small enough for Mustard-seed's wear, but complete in
every detail, and inlaid with the bronze eagle from an Imperial
pfennig. There are many such ringsmiths among the privates at the
front, and the severe, somewhat archaic design of their rings is a
proof of the sureness of French taste; but the two we visited
happened to be Paris jewellers, for whom "artisan" was really too
modest a pseudonym. Officers and men were evidently proud of their
work, and as they stood hammering away in their cramped smithy, a
red gleam lighting up the intentness of their faces, they seemed to
be beating out the cheerful rhythm of "I too will something make,
and joy in the making."...

Up the hillside, in deeper shadow, was another little structure; a
wooden shed with an open gable sheltering an altar with candles and
flowers. Here mass is said by one of the conscript priests of the
regiment, while his congregation kneel between the fir-trunks,
giving life to the old metaphor of the cathedral-forest. Near by was
the grave-yard, where day by day these quiet elderly men lay their
comrades, the _peres de famille_ who don't go back. The care of this
woodland cemetery is left entirely to the soldiers, and they have
spent treasures of piety on the inscriptions and decorations of the
graves. Fresh flowers are brought up from the valleys to cover them,
and when some favourite comrade goes, the men scorning ephemeral
tributes, club together to buy a monstrous indestructible wreath
with emblazoned streamers. It was near the end of the afternoon, and
many soldiers were strolling along the paths between the graves.
"It's their favourite walk at this hour," the Colonel said. He
stopped to look down on a grave smothered in beady tokens, the grave
of the last pal to fall. "He was mentioned in the Order of the Day,"
the Colonel explained; and the group of soldiers standing near
looked at us proudly, as if sharing their comrade's honour, and
wanting to be sure that we understood the reason of their pride...

"And now," said our Captain of Chasseurs, "that you've seen the
second-line trenches, what do you say to taking a look at the
first?"

We followed him to a point higher up the hill, where we plunged into
a deep ditch of red earth--the "bowel" leading to the first lines.
It climbed still higher, under the wet firs, and then, turning,
dipped over the edge and began to wind in sharp loops down the other
side of the ridge. Down we scrambled, single file, our chins on a
level with the top of the passage, the close green covert above us.
The "bowel" went twisting down more and more sharply into a deep
ravine; and presently, at a bend, we came to a fir-thatched outlook,
where a soldier stood with his back to us, his eye glued to a
peep-hole in the wattled wall. Another turn, and another outlook;
but here it was the iron-rimmed eye of the mitrailleuse that stared
across the ravine. By this time we were within a hundred yards or so
of the German lines, hidden, like ours, on the other side of the
narrowing hollow; and as we stole down and down, the hush and
secrecy of the scene, and the sense of that imminent lurking hatred
only a few branch-lengths away, seemed to fill the silence with
mysterious pulsations. Suddenly a sharp noise broke on them: the rap
of a rifle-shot against a tree-trunk a few yards ahead.

"Ah, the sharp-shooter," said our guide. "No more talking,
please--he's over there, in a tree somewhere, and whenever he hears
voices he fires. Some day we shall spot his tree."

We went on in silence to a point where a few soldiers were sitting
on a ledge of rock in a widening of the "bowel." They looked as
quiet as if they had been waiting for their bocks before a Boulevard
cafe.

"Not beyond, please," said the officer, holding me back; and I
stopped.

Here we were, then, actually and literally in the first lines! The
knowledge made one's heart tick a little; but, except for another
shot or two from our arboreal listener, and the motionless
intentness of the soldier's back at the peep-hole, there was nothing
to show that we were not a dozen miles away.

Perhaps the thought occurred to our Captain of Chasseurs; for just
as I was turning back he said with his friendliest twinkle: "Do you
want awfully to go a little farther? Well, then, come on."

We went past the soldiers sitting on the ledge and stole down and
down, to where the trees ended at the bottom of the ravine. The
sharp-shooter had stopped firing, and nothing disturbed the leafy
silence but an intermittent drip of rain. We were at the end of the
burrow, and the Captain signed to me that I might take a cautious
peep round its corner. I looked out and saw a strip of intensely
green meadow just under me, and a wooded cliff rising abruptly on
its other side. That was all. The wooded cliff swarmed with "them,"
and a few steps would have carried us across the interval; yet all
about us was silence, and the peace of the forest. Again, for a
minute, I had the sense of an all-pervading, invisible power of
evil, a saturation of the whole landscape with some hidden vitriol
of hate. Then the reaction of the unbelief set in, and I felt myself
in a harmless ordinary glen, like a million others on an untroubled
earth. We turned and began to climb again, loop by loop, up the
"bowel"--we passed the lolling soldiers, the silent mitrailleuse, we
came again to the watcher at his peep-hole. He heard us, let the
officer pass, and turned his head with a little sign of
understanding.

"Do you want to look down?"

He moved a step away from his window. The look-out projected over
the ravine, raking its depths; and here, with one's eye to the
leaf-lashed hole, one saw at last ... saw, at the bottom of the
harmless glen, half way between cliff and cliff, a grey uniform
huddled in a dead heap. "He's been there for days: they can't fetch
him away," said the watcher, regluing his eye to the hole; and it
was almost a relief to find it was after all a tangible enemy hidden
over there across the meadow...

The sun had set when we got back to our starting-point in the
underground village. The chasseurs-a-pied were lounging along
the roadside and standing in gossiping groups about the motor. It
was long since they had seen faces from the other life, the life
they had left nearly a year earlier and had not been allowed to go
back to for a day; and under all their jokes and good-humour their
farewell had a tinge of wistfulness. But one felt that this fugitive
reminder of a world they had put behind them would pass like a
dream, and their minds revert without effort to the one reality: the
business of holding their bit of France.

It is hard to say why this sense of the French soldier's
single-mindedness is so strong in all who have had even a glimpse of
the front; perhaps it is gathered less from what the men say than
from the look in their eyes. Even while they are accepting
cigarettes and exchanging trench-jokes, the look is there; and when
one comes on them unaware it is there also. In the dusk of the
forest that look followed us down the mountain; and as we skirted
the edge of the ravine between the armies, we felt that on the far
side of that dividing line were the men who had made the war, and on
the near side the men who had been made by it.




IN THE NORTH


June 19th, 1915.

On the way from Doullens to Montreuil-sur-Mer, on a shining summer
afternoon. A road between dusty hedges, choked, literally strangled,
by a torrent of westward-streaming troops of all arms. Every few
minutes there would come a break in the flow, and our motor would
wriggle through, advance a few yards, and be stopped again by a
widening of the torrent that jammed us into the ditch and splashed a
dazzle of dust into our eyes. The dust was stifling--but through it,
what a sight!

Standing up in the car and looking back, we watched the river of war
wind toward us. Cavalry, artillery, lancers, infantry, sappers and
miners, trench-diggers, road-makers, stretcher-bearers, they swept
on as smoothly as if in holiday order. Through the dust, the sun
picked out the flash of lances and the gloss of chargers' flanks,
flushed rows and rows of determined faces, found the least touch of
gold on faded uniforms, silvered the sad grey of mitrailleuses and
munition waggons. Close as the men were, they seemed allegorically
splendid: as if, under the arch of the sunset, we had been watching
the whole French army ride straight into glory...

Finally we left the last detachment behind, and had the country to
ourselves. The disfigurement of war has not touched the fields of
Artois. The thatched farmhouses dozed in gardens full of roses and
hollyhocks, and the hedges above the duck-ponds were weighed down
with layers of elder-blossom. On all sides wheat-fields skirted with
woodland went billowing away under the breezy light that seemed to
carry a breath of the Atlantic on its beams. The road ran up and
down as if our motor were a ship on a deep-sea swell; and such a
sense of space and light was in the distances, such a veil of beauty
over the whole world, that the vision of that army on the move grew
more and more fabulous and epic.

The sun had set and the sea-twilight was rolling in when we dipped
down from the town of Montreuil to the valley below, where the
towers of an ancient abbey-church rise above terraced orchards. The
gates at the end of the avenue were thrown open, and the motor drove
into a monastery court full of box and roses. Everything was sweet
and secluded in this mediaeval place; and from the shadow of
cloisters and arched passages groups of nuns fluttered out, nuns all
black or all white, gliding, peering and standing at gaze. It was as
if we had plunged back into a century to which motors were unknown
and our car had been some monster cast up from a Barbary shipwreck;
and the startled attitudes of these holy women did credit to their
sense of the picturesque; for the Abbey of Neuville is now a great
Belgian hospital, and such monsters must frequently intrude on its
seclusion...

Sunset, and summer dusk, and the moon. Under the monastery windows a
walled garden with stone pavilions at the angles and the drip of a
fountain. Below it, tiers of orchard-terraces fading into a great
moon-confused plain that might be either fields or sea...


June 20th.

Today our way ran northeast, through a landscape so English that
there was no incongruity in the sprinkling of khaki along the road.
Even the villages look English: the same plum-red brick of tidy
self-respecting houses, neat, demure and freshly painted, the
gardens all bursting with flowers, the landscape hedgerowed and
willowed and fed with water-courses, the people's faces square and
pink and honest, and the signs over the shops in a language half way
between English and German. Only the architecture of the towns is
French, of a reserved and robust northern type, but unmistakably in
the same great tradition.

War still seemed so far off that one had time for these digressions
as the motor flew on over the undulating miles. But presently we
came on an aviation camp spreading its sheds over a wide plateau.
Here the khaki throng was thicker and the familiar military stir
enlivened the landscape. A few miles farther, and we found ourselves
in what was seemingly a big English town oddly grouped about a
nucleus of French churches. This was St. Omer, grey, spacious,
coldly clean in its Sunday emptiness. At the street crossings
English sentries stood mechanically directing the absent traffic
with gestures familiar to Piccadilly; and the signs of the British
Red Cross and St. John's Ambulance hung on club-like facades that
might almost have claimed a home in Pall Mall.

The Englishness of things was emphasized, as we passed out through
the suburbs, by the look of the crowd on the canal bridges and along
the roads. Every nation has its own way of loitering, and there is
nothing so unlike the French way as the English. Even if all these
tall youths had not been in khaki, and the girls with them so pink
and countrified, one would instantly have recognized the passive
northern way of letting a holiday soak in instead of squeezing out
its juices with feverish fingers.

When we turned westward from St. Omer, across the same pastures and
watercourses, we were faced by two hills standing up abruptly out of
the plain; and on the top of one rose the walls and towers of a
compact little mediaeval town. As we took the windings that led up
to it a sense of Italy began to penetrate the persistent impression
of being somewhere near the English Channel. The town we were
approaching might have been a queer dream-blend of Winchelsea and
San Gimignano; but when we entered the gates of Cassel we were in a
place so intensely itself that all analogies dropped out of mind.

It was not surprising to learn from the guide-book that Cassel has
the most extensive view of any town in Europe: one felt at once that
it differed in all sorts of marked and self-assertive ways from
every other town, and would be almost sure to have the best things
going in every line. And the line of an illimitable horizon is
exactly the best to set off its own quaint compactness.

We found our hotel in the most perfect of little market squares,
with a Renaissance town-hall on one side, and on the other a
miniature Spanish palace with a front of rosy brick adorned by grey
carvings. The square was crowded with English army motors and
beautiful prancing chargers; and the restaurant of the inn (which
has the luck to face the pink and grey palace) swarmed with khaki
tea-drinkers turning indifferent shoulders to the widest view in
Europe. It is one of the most detestable things about war that
everything connected with it, except the death and ruin that result,
is such a heightening of life, so visually stimulating and
absorbing. "It was gay and terrible," is the phrase forever
recurring in "War and Peace"; and the gaiety of war was everywhere
in Cassel, transforming the lifeless little town into a romantic
stage-setting full of the flash of arms and the virile animation of
young faces.

From the park on top of the hill we looked down on another picture.
All about us was the plain, its distant rim merged in northern
sea-mist; and through the mist, in the glitter of the afternoon sun,
far-off towns and shadowy towers lay steeped, as it seemed, in
summer quiet. For a moment, while we looked, the vision of war
shrivelled up like a painted veil; then we caught the names
pronounced by a group of English soldiers leaning over the parapet
at our side. "That's Dunkerque"--one of them pointed it out with his
pipe--"and there's Poperinghe, just under us; that's Furnes beyond,
and Ypres and Dixmude, and Nieuport..." And at the mention of
those names the scene grew dark again, and we felt the passing of
the Angel to whom was given the Key of the Bottomless Pit.

That night we went up once more to the rock of Cassel. The moon was
full, and as civilians are not allowed out alone after dark a
staff-officer went with us to show us the view from the roof of the
disused Casino on top of the rock. It was the queerest of sensations
to push open a glazed door and find ourselves in a spectral painted
room with soldiers dozing in the moonlight on polished floors, their
kits stacked on the gaming tables. We passed through a big vestibule
among more soldiers lounging in the half-light, and up a long
staircase to the roof where a watcher challenged us and then let us
go to the edge of the parapet. Directly below lay the unlit mass of
the town. To the northwest a single sharp hill, the "Mont des Cats,"
stood out against the sky; the rest of the horizon was unbroken, and
floating in misty moonlight. The outline of the ruined towns had
vanished and peace seemed to have won back the world. But as we
stood there a red flash started out of the mist far off to the
northwest; then another and another flickered up at different points
of the long curve. "Luminous bombs thrown up along the lines," our
guide explained; and just then, at still another point a white light
opened like a tropical flower, spread to full bloom and drew itself
back into the night. "A flare," we were told; and another white
flower bloomed out farther down. Below us, the roofs of Cassel slept
their provincial sleep, the moonlight picking out every leaf in the
gardens; while beyond, those infernal flowers continued to open and
shut along the curve of death.


June 21st.

On the road from Cassel to Poperinghe. Heat, dust, crowds,
confusion, all the sordid shabby rear-view of war. The road running
across the plain between white-powdered hedges was ploughed up by
numberless motor-vans, supply-waggons and Red Cross ambulances.
Labouring through between them came detachments of British
artillery, clattering gun-carriages, straight young figures on
glossy horses, long Phidian lines of youths so ingenuously fair that
one wondered how they could have looked on the Medusa face of war
and lived. Men and beasts, in spite of the dust, were as fresh and
sleek as if they had come from a bath; and everywhere along the
wayside were improvised camps, with tents made of waggon-covers,
where the ceaseless indomitable work of cleaning was being carried
out in all its searching details. Shirts were drying on
elder-bushes, kettles boiling over gypsy fires, men shaving,
blacking their boots, cleaning their guns, rubbing down their
horses, greasing their saddles, polishing their stirrups and bits:
on all sides a general cheery struggle against the prevailing dust,
discomfort and disorder. Here and there a young soldier leaned
against a garden paling to talk to a girl among the hollyhocks, or
an older soldier initiated a group of children into some mystery of
military housekeeping; and everywhere were the same signs of
friendly inarticulate understanding with the owners of the fields
and gardens.

From the thronged high-road we passed into the emptiness of deserted
Poperinghe, and out again on the way to Ypres. Beyond the flats and
wind-mills to our left were the invisible German lines, and the
staff-officer who was with us leaned forward to caution our
chauffeur: "No tooting between here and Ypres." There was still a
good deal of movement on the road, though it was less crowded with
troops than near Poperinghe; but as we passed through the last
village and approached the low line of houses ahead, the silence and
emptiness widened about us. That low line was Ypres; every monument
that marked it, that gave it an individual outline, is gone. It is a
town without a profile.

The motor slipped through a suburb of small brick houses and stopped
under cover of some slightly taller buildings. Another military
motor waited there, the chauffeur relic-hunting in the gutted
houses.

We got out and walked toward the centre of the Cloth Market. We had
seen evacuated towns--Verdun, Badonviller, Raon-l'Etape--but we had
seen no emptiness like this. Not a human being was in the streets.
Endless lines of houses looked down on us from vacant windows. Our
footsteps echoed like the tramp of a crowd, our lowered voices
seemed to shout. In one street we came on three English soldiers who
were carrying a piano out of a house and lifting it onto a
hand-cart. They stopped to stare at us, and we stared back. It
seemed an age since we had seen a living being! One of the soldiers
scrambled into the cart and tapped out a tune on the cracked
key-board, and we all laughed with relief at the foolish noise...
Then we walked on and were alone again.

We had seen other ruined towns, but none like this. The towns of
Lorraine were blown up, burnt down, deliberately erased from the
earth. At worst they are like stone-yards, at best like Pompeii. But
Ypres has been bombarded to death, and the outer walls of its houses
are still standing, so that it presents the distant semblance of a
living city, while near by it is seen to be a disembowelled corpse.
Every window-pane is smashed, nearly every building unroofed, and
some house-fronts are sliced clean off, with the different stories
exposed, as if for the stage-setting of a farce. In these exposed
interiors the poor little household gods shiver and blink like owls
surprised in a hollow tree. A hundred signs of intimate and humble
tastes, of humdrum pursuits, of family association, cling to the
unmasked walls. Whiskered photographs fade on morning-glory
wallpapers, plaster saints pine under glass bells, antimacassars
droop from plush sofas, yellowing diplomas display their seals on
office walls. It was all so still and familiar that it seemed as if
the people for whom these things had a meaning might at any moment
come back and take up their daily business. And then--crash! the
guns began, slamming out volley after volley all along the English
lines, and the poor frail web of things that had made up the lives
of a vanished city-full hung dangling before us in that deathly
blast.

We had just reached the square before the Cathedral when the
cannonade began, and its roar seemed to build a roof of iron over
the glorious ruins of Ypres. The singular distinction of the city is
that it is destroyed but not abased. The walls of the Cathedral, the
long bulk of the Cloth Market, still lift themselves above the
market place with a majesty that seems to silence compassion. The
sight of those facades, so proud in death, recalled a phrase used
soon after the fall of Liege by Belgium's Foreign Minister--"_La
Belgique ne regrette rien_ "--which ought some day to serve as the
motto of the renovated city.

We were turning to go when we heard a whirr overhead, followed by a
volley of mitrailleuse. High up in the blue, over the centre of the
dead city, flew a German aeroplane; and all about it hundreds of
white shrapnel tufts burst out in the summer sky like the miraculous
snow-fall of Italian legend. Up and up they flew, on the trail of
the Taube, and on flew the Taube, faster still, till quarry and pack
were lost in mist, and the barking of the mitrailleuse died out. So
we left Ypres to the death-silence in which we had found her.

The afternoon carried us back to Poperinghe, where I was bound on a
quest for lace-cushions of the special kind required by our Flemish
refugees. The model is unobtainable in France, and I had been
told--with few and vague indications--that I might find the cushions
in a certain convent of the city. But in which?

Poperinghe, though little injured, is almost empty. In its tidy
desolation it looks like a town on which a wicked enchanter has laid
a spell. We roamed from quarter to quarter, hunting for some one to
show us the way to the convent I was looking for, till at last a
passer-by led us to a door which seemed the right one. At our knock
the bars were drawn and a cloistered face looked out. No, there were
no cushions there; and the nun had never heard of the order we
named. But there were the Penitents, the Benedictines--we might try.
Our guide offered to show us the way and we went on. From one or two
windows, wondering heads looked out and vanished; but the streets
were lifeless. At last we came to a convent where there were no nuns
left, but where, the caretaker told us, there were cushions--a great
many. He led us through pale blue passages, up cold stairs, through
rooms that smelt of linen and lavender. We passed a chapel with
plaster saints in white niches above paper flowers. Everything was
cold and bare and blank: like a mind from which memory has gone. We
came to a class room with lines of empty benches facing a
blue-mantled Virgin; and here, on the floor, lay rows and rows of
lace-cushions. On each a bit of lace had been begun--and there they
had been dropped when nuns and pupils fled. They had not been left
in disorder: the rows had been laid out evenly, a handkerchief
thrown over each cushion. And that orderly arrest of life seemed
sadder than any scene of disarray. It symbolized the senseless
paralysis of a whole nation's activities. Here were a houseful of
women and children, yesterday engaged in a useful task and now
aimlessly astray over the earth. And in hundreds of such houses, in
dozens, in hundreds of open towns, the hand of time had been
stopped, the heart of life had ceased to beat, all the currents of
hope and happiness and industry been choked--not that some great
military end might be gained, or the length of the war curtailed,
but that, wherever the shadow of Germany falls, all things should
wither at the root.

The same sight met us everywhere that afternoon. Over Furnes and
Bergues, and all the little intermediate villages, the evil shadow
lay. Germany had willed that these places should die, and wherever
her bombs could not reach her malediction had carried. Only Biblical
lamentation can convey a vision of this life-drained land. "Your
country is desolate; your cities are burned with fire; your land,
strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as
overthrown by strangers."

Late in the afternoon we came to Dunkerque, lying peacefully between
its harbour and canals. The bombardment of the previous month had
emptied it, and though no signs of damage were visible the same
spellbound air lay over everything. As we sat alone at tea in the
hall of the hotel on the Place Jean Bart, and looked out on the
silent square and its lifeless shops and cafes, some one suggested
that the hotel would be a convenient centre for the excursions we
had planned, and we decided to return there the next evening. Then
we motored back to Cassel.


June 22nd.

My first waking thought was: "How time flies! It must be the
Fourteenth of July!" I knew it could not be the Fourth of that
specially commemorative month, because I was just awake enough to be
sure I was not in America; and the only other event to justify such
a terrific clatter was the French national anniversary. I sat up and
listened to the popping of guns till a completed sense of reality
stole over me, and I realized that I was in the inn of the Wild Man
at Cassel, and that it was not the fourteenth of July but the
twenty-second of June.

Then, what--? A Taube, of course! And all the guns in the place were
cracking at it! By the time this mental process was complete, I had
scrambled up and hurried downstairs and, unbolting the heavy doors,
had rushed out into the square. It was about four in the morning,
the heavenliest moment of a summer dawn, and in spite of the tumult
Cassel still apparently slept. Only a few soldiers stood in the
square, looking up at a drift of white cloud behind which--they
averred--a Taube had just slipped out of sight. Cassel was evidently
used to Taubes, and I had the sense of having overdone my excitement
and not being exactly in tune; so after gazing a moment at the white
cloud I slunk back into the hotel, barred the door and mounted to my
room. At a window on the stairs I paused to look out over the
sloping roofs of the town, the gardens, the plain; and suddenly
there was another crash and a drift of white smoke blew up from the
fruit-trees just under the window. It was a last shot at the
fugitive, from a gun hidden in one of those quiet provincial gardens
between the houses; and its secret presence there was more startling
than all the clatter of mitrailleuses from the rock.

Silence and sleep came down again on Cassel; but an hour or two
later the hush was broken by a roar like the last trump. This time
it was no question of mitrailleuses. The Wild Man rocked on its
base, and every pane in my windows beat a tattoo. What was that
incredible unimagined sound? Why, it could be nothing, of course,
but the voice of the big siege-gun of Dixmude! Five times, while I
was dressing, the thunder shook my windows, and the air was filled
with a noise that may be compared--if the human imagination can
stand the strain--to the simultaneous closing of all the iron
shop-shutters in the world. The odd part was that, as far as the
Wild Man and its inhabitants were concerned, no visible effects
resulted, and dressing, packing and coffee-drinking went on
comfortably in the strange parentheses between the roars.

We set off early for a neighbouring Head-quarters, and it was not
till we turned out of the gates of Cassel that we came on signs of
the bombardment: the smashing of a gas-house and the converting of a
cabbage-field into a crater which, for some time to come, will spare
photographers the trouble of climbing Vesuvius. There was a certain
consolation in the discrepancy between the noise and the damage
done.

At Head-quarters we learned more of the morning's incidents.
Dunkerque, it appeared, had first been visited by the Taube which
afterward came to take the range of Cassel; and the big gun of
Dixmude had then turned all its fury on the French sea-port. The
bombardment of Dunkuerque was still going on; and we were asked, and
in fact bidden, to give up our plan of going there for the night.

After luncheon we turned north, toward the dunes. The villages we
drove through were all evacuated, some quite lifeless, others
occupied by troops. Presently we came to a group of military motors
drawn up by the roadside, and a field black with wheeling troops.
"Admiral Ronarc'h!" our companion from Head-quarters exclaimed; and
we understood that we had had the good luck to come on the hero of
Dixmude in the act of reviewing the marine fusiliers and
territorials whose magnificent defense of last October gave that
much-besieged town another lease of glory.

We stopped the motor and climbed to a ridge above the field. A high
wind was blowing, bringing with it the booming of the guns along the
front. A sun half-veiled in sand-dust shone on pale meadows, sandy
flats, grey wind-mills. The scene was deserted, except for the
handful of troops deploying before the officers on the edge of the
field. Admiral Ronarc'h, white-gloved and in full-dress uniform,
stood a little in advance, a young naval officer at his side. He had
just been distributing decorations to his fusiliers and
territorials, and they were marching past him, flags flying and
bugles playing. Every one of those men had a record of heroism, and
every face in those ranks had looked on horrors unnameable. They had
lost Dixmude--for a while--but they had gained great glory, and the
inspiration of their epic resistance had come from the quiet officer
who stood there, straight and grave, in his white gloves and gala
uniform.

One must have been in the North to know something of the tie that
exists, in this region of bitter and continuous fighting, between
officers and soldiers. The feeling of the chiefs is almost one of
veneration for their men; that of the soldiers, a kind of
half-humorous tenderness for the officers who have faced such odds
with them. This mutual regard reveals itself in a hundred
undefinable ways; but its fullest expression is in the tone with
which the commanding officers speak the two words oftenest on their
lips: "My men."

The little review over, we went on to Admiral Ronarc'h's quarters in
the dunes, and thence, after a brief visit, to another brigade
Head-quarters. We were in a region of sandy hillocks feathered by
tamarisk, and interspersed with poplar groves slanting like wheat in
the wind. Between these meagre thickets the roofs of seaside
bungalows showed above the dunes; and before one of these we
stopped, and were led into a sitting-room full of maps and aeroplane
photographs. One of the officers of the brigade telephoned to ask if
the way was clear to Nieuport; and the answer was that we might go
on.

Our road ran through the "Bois Triangulaire," a bit of woodland
exposed to constant shelling. Half the poor spindling trees were
down, and patches of blackened undergrowth and ragged hollows marked
the path of the shells. If the trees of a cannonaded wood are of
strong inland growth their fallen trunks have the majesty of a
ruined temple; but there was something humanly pitiful in the frail
trunks of the Bois Triangulaire, lying there like slaughtered rows
of immature troops.

A few miles more brought us to Nieuport, most lamentable of the
victim towns. It is not empty as Ypres is empty: troops are
quartered in the cellars, and at the approach of our motor knots of
cheerful zouaves came swarming out of the ground like ants. But
Ypres is majestic in death, poor Nieuport gruesomely comic. About
its splendid nucleus of mediaeval architecture a modern town had
grown up; and nothing stranger can be pictured than the contrast
between the streets of flimsy houses, twisted like curl-papers, and
the ruins of the Gothic Cathedral and the Cloth Market. It is like
passing from a smashed toy to the survival of a prehistoric
cataclysm.

Modern Nieuport seems to have died in a colic. No less homely image
expresses the contractions and contortions of the houses reaching
out the appeal of their desperate chimney-pots and agonized girders.
There is one view along the exterior of the town like nothing else
on the warfront. On the left, a line of palsied houses leads up like
a string of crutch-propped beggars to the mighty ruin of the
Templars' Tower; on the right the flats reach away to the almost
imperceptible humps of masonry that were once the villages of St.
Georges, Ramscappelle, Pervyse. And over it all the incessant crash
of the guns stretches a sounding-board of steel.

In front of the cathedral a German shell has dug a crater thirty
feet across, overhung by splintered tree-trunks, burnt shrubs, vague
mounds of rubbish; and a few steps beyond lies the peacefullest spot
in Nieuport, the grave-yard where the zouaves have buried their
comrades. The dead are laid in rows under the flank of the
cathedral, and on their carefully set grave-stones have been placed
collections of pious images gathered from the ruined houses. Some of
the most privileged are guarded by colonies of plaster saints and
Virgins that cover the whole slab; and over the handsomest Virgins
and the most gaily coloured saints the soldiers have placed the
glass bells that once protected the parlour clocks and wedding-wreaths
in the same houses.

From sad Nieuport we motored on to a little seaside colony where
gaiety prevails. Here the big hotels and the adjoining villas along
the beach are filled with troops just back from the trenches: it is
one of the "rest cures" of the front. When we drove up, the regiment
"au repos" was assembled in the wide sandy space between the
principal hotels, and in the centre of the jolly crowd the band was
playing. The Colonel and his officers stood listening to the music,
and presently the soldiers broke into the wild "chanson des zouaves"
of the --th zouaves. It was the strangest of sights to watch that
throng of dusky merry faces under their red fezes against the
background of sunless northern sea. When the music was over some one
with a kodak suggested "a group": we struck a collective attitude on
one of the hotel terraces, and just as the camera was being aimed at
us the Colonel turned and drew into the foreground a little grinning
pock-marked soldier. "He's just been decorated--he's got to be in
the group." A general exclamation of assent from the other officers,
and a protest from the hero: "Me? Why, my ugly mug will smash the
plate!" But it didn't--

Reluctantly we turned from this interval in the day's sad round, and
took the road to La Panne. Dust, dunes, deserted villages: my memory
keeps no more definite vision of the run. But at sunset we came on a
big seaside colony stretched out above the longest beach I ever saw:
along the sea-front, an esplanade bordered by the usual foolish
villas, and behind it a single street filled with hotels and shops.
All the life of the desert region we had traversed seemed to have
taken refuge at La Panne. The long street was swarming with throngs
of dark-uniformed Belgian soldiers, every shop seemed to be doing a
thriving trade, and the hotels looked as full as beehives.


June 23rd LA PANNE.

The particular hive that has taken us in is at the extreme end of
the esplanade, where asphalt and iron railings lapse abruptly into
sand and sea-grass. When I looked out of my window this morning I
saw only the endless stretch of brown sand against the grey roll of
the Northern Ocean and, on a crest of the dunes, the figure of a
solitary sentinel. But presently there was a sound of martial music,
and long lines of troops came marching along the esplanade and down
to the beach. The sands stretched away to east and west, a great
"field of Mars" on which an army could have manoeuvred; and the
morning exercises of cavalry and infantry began. Against the brown
beach the regiments in their dark uniforms looked as black as
silhouettes; and the cavalry galloping by in single file suggested a
black frieze of warriors encircling the dun-coloured flanks of an
Etruscan vase. For hours these long-drawn-out movements of troops
went on, to the wail of bugles, and under the eye of the lonely
sentinel on the sand-crest; then the soldiers poured back into the
town, and La Panne was once more a busy common-place _bain-de-mer_.
The common-placeness, however, was only on the surface; for as one
walked along the esplanade one discovered that the town had become a
citadel, and that all the doll's-house villas with their silly
gables and sillier names--"Seaweed," "The Sea-gull," "Mon Repos,"
and the rest--were really a continuous line of barracks swarming
with Belgian troops. In the main street there were hundreds of
soldiers, pottering along in couples, chatting in groups, romping
and wrestling like a crowd of school-boys, or bargaining in the
shops for shell-work souvenirs and sets of post-cards; and between
the dark-green and crimson uniforms was a frequent sprinkling of
khaki, with the occasional pale blue of a French officer's tunic.

Before luncheon we motored over to Dunkerque. The road runs along
the canal, between grass-flats and prosperous villages. No signs of
war were noticeable except on the road, which was crowded with motor
vans, ambulances and troops. The walls and gates of Dunkerque rose
before us as calm and undisturbed as when we entered the town the
day before yesterday. But within the gates we were in a desert. The
bombardment had ceased the previous evening, but a death-hush lay on
the town, Every house was shuttered and the streets were empty. We
drove to the Place Jean Bart, where two days ago we sat at tea in
the hall of the hotel. Now there was not a whole pane of glass in
the windows of the square, the doors of the hotel were closed, and
every now and then some one came out carrying a basketful of plaster
from fallen ceilings. The whole surface of the square was literally
paved with bits of glass from the hundreds of broken windows, and at
the foot of David's statue of Jean Bart, just where our motor had
stood while we had tea, the siege-gun of Dixmude had scooped out a
hollow as big as the crater at Nieuport.

Though not a house on the square was touched, the scene was one of
unmitigated desolation. It was the first time we had seen the raw
wounds of a bombardment, and the freshness of the havoc seemed to
accentuate its cruelty. We wandered down the street behind the hotel
to the graceful Gothic church of St. Eloi, of which one aisle had
been shattered; then, turning another corner, we came on a poor
_bourgeois_ house that had had its whole front torn away. The
squalid revelation of caved-in floors, smashed wardrobes, dangling
bedsteads, heaped-up blankets, topsy-turvy chairs and stoves and
wash-stands was far more painful than the sight of the wounded
church. St. Eloi was draped in the dignity of martyrdom, but the
poor little house reminded one of some shy humdrum person suddenly
exposed in the glare of a great misfortune.

A few people stood in clusters looking up at the ruins, or strayed
aimlessly about the streets. Not a loud word was heard. The air
seemed heavy with the suspended breath of a great city's activities:
the mournful hush of Dunkerque was even more oppressive than the
death-silence of Ypres. But when we came back to the Place Jean Bart
the unbreakable human spirit had begun to reassert itself. A handful
of children were playing in the bottom of the crater, collecting
"specimens" of glass and splintered brick; and about its rim the
market-people, quietly and as a matter of course, were setting up
their wooden stalls. In a few minutes the signs of German havoc
would be hidden behind stacks of crockery and household utensils,
and some of the pale women we had left in mournful contemplation of
the ruins would be bargaining as sharply as ever for a sauce-pan or
a butter-tub. Not once but a hundred times has the attitude of the
average French civilian near the front reminded me of the gallant
cry of Calanthea in _The Broken Heart:_ "Let me die smiling!" I
should have liked to stop and spend all I had in the market of
Dunkerque...

All the afternoon we wandered about La Panne. The exercises of the
troops had begun again, and the deploying of those endless black
lines along the beach was a sight of the strangest beauty. The sun
was veiled, and heavy surges rolled in under a northerly gale.
Toward evening the sea turned to cold tints of jade and pearl and
tarnished silver. Far down the beach a mysterious fleet of fishing
boats was drawn up on the sand, with black sails bellying in the
wind; and the black riders galloping by might have landed from them,
and been riding into the sunset out of some wild northern legend.
Presently a knot of buglers took up their stand on the edge of the
sea, facing inward, their feet in the surf, and began to play; and
their call was like the call of Roland's horn, when he blew it down
the pass against the heathen. On the sandcrest below my window the
lonely sentinel still watched...


June 24th.

It is like coming down from the mountains to leave the front. I
never had the feeling more strongly than when we passed out of
Belgium this afternoon. I had it most strongly as we drove by a
cluster of villas standing apart in a sterile region of sea-grass
and sand. In one of those villas for nearly a year, two hearts at
the highest pitch of human constancy have held up a light to the
world. It is impossible to pass that house without a sense of awe.
Because of the light that comes from it, dead faiths have come to
life, weak convictions have grown strong, fiery impulses have turned
to long endurance, and long endurance has kept the fire of impulse.
In the harbour of New York there is a pompous statue of a goddess
with a torch, designated as "Liberty enlightening the World." It
seems as though the title on her pedestal might well, for the time,
be transferred to the lintel of that villa in the dunes.

On leaving St. Omer we took a short cut southward across rolling
country. It was a happy accident that caused us to leave the main
road, for presently, over the crest of a hill, we saw surging toward
us a mighty movement of British and Indian troops. A great bath of
silver sunlight lay on the wheat-fields, the clumps of woodland and
the hilly blue horizon, and in that slanting radiance the cavalry
rode toward us, regiment after regiment of slim turbaned Indians,
with delicate proud faces like the faces of Princes in Persian
miniatures. Then came a long train of artillery; splendid horses,
clattering gun-carriages, clear-faced English youths galloping by
all aglow in the sunset. The stream of them seemed never-ending. Now
and then it was checked by a train of ambulances and supply-waggons,
or caught and congested in the crooked streets of a village where
children and girls had come out with bunches of flowers, and bakers
were selling hot loaves to the sutlers; and when we had extricated
our motor from the crowd, and climbed another hill, we came on
another cavalcade surging toward us through the wheat-fields. For
over an hour the procession poured by, so like and yet so unlike the
French division we had met on the move as we went north a few days
ago; so that we seemed to have passed to the northern front, and
away from it again, through a great flashing gateway in the long
wall of armies guarding the civilized world from the North Sea to
the Vosges.




IN ALSACE

August 13th, 1915.


My trip to the east began by a dash toward the north. Near Rheims is
a little town--hardly more than a village, but in English we have no
intermediate terms such as "bourg" and "petit bourg"--where one of
the new Red Cross sanitary motor units was to be seen "in action."
The inspection over, we climbed to a vineyard above the town and
looked down at a river valley traversed by a double line of trees.
The first line marked the canal, which is held by the French, who
have gun-boats on it. Behind this ran the high-road, with the
first-line French trenches, and just above, on the opposite slope,
were the German lines. The soil being chalky, the German positions
were clearly marked by two parallel white scorings across the brown
hill-front; and while we watched we heard desultory firing, and saw,
here and there along the ridge, the smoke-puff of an exploding
shell. It was incredibly strange to stand there, among the vines
humming with summer insects, and to look out over a peaceful country
heavy with the coming vintage, knowing that the trees at our feet
hid a line of gun-boats that were crashing death into those two
white scorings on the hill.

Rheims itself brings one nearer to the war by its look of deathlike
desolation. The paralysis of the bombarded towns is one of the most
tragic results of the invasion. One's soul revolts at this senseless
disorganizing of innumerable useful activities. Compared with the
towns of the north, Rheims is relatively unharmed; but for that very
reason the arrest of life seems the more futile and cruel. The
Cathedral square was deserted, all the houses around it were closed.
And there, before us, rose the Cathedral--_a_ cathedral, rather, for
it was not the one we had always known. It was, in fact, not like
any cathedral on earth. When the German bombardment began, the west
front of Rheims was covered with scaffolding: the shells set it on
fire, and the whole church was wrapped in flames. Now the
scaffolding is gone, and in the dull provincial square there stands
a structure so strange and beautiful that one must search the
Inferno, or some tale of Eastern magic, for words to picture the
luminous unearthly vision. The lower part of the front has been
warmed to deep tints of umber and burnt siena. This rich burnishing
passes, higher up, through yellowish-pink and carmine, to a sulphur
whitening to ivory; and the recesses of the portals and the hollows
behind the statues are lined with a black denser and more velvety
than any effect of shadow to be obtained by sculptured relief. The
interweaving of colour over the whole blunted bruised surface
recalls the metallic tints, the peacock-and-pigeon iridescences, the
incredible mingling of red, blue, umber and yellow of the rocks
along the Gulf of AEgina. And the wonder of the impression is
increased by the sense of its evanescence; the knowledge that this
is the beauty of disease and death, that every one of the
transfigured statues must crumble under the autumn rains, that every
one of the pink or golden stones is already eaten away to the core,
that the Cathedral of Rheims is glowing and dying before us like a
sunset...


August 14th.

A stone and brick chateau in a flat park with a stream running
through it. Pampas-grass, geraniums, rustic bridges, winding paths:
how _bourgeois_ and sleepy it would all seem but for the sentinel
challenging our motor at the gate!

Before the door a collie dozing in the sun, and a group of
staff-officers waiting for luncheon. Indoors, a room with handsome
tapestries, some good furniture and a table spread with the usual
military maps and aeroplane-photographs. At luncheon, the General,
the chiefs of the staff--a dozen in all--an officer from the General
Head-quarters. The usual atmosphere of _camaraderie_, confidence,
good-humour, and a kind of cheerful seriousness that I have come to
regard as characteristic of the men immersed in the actual facts of
the war. I set down this impression as typical of many such luncheon
hours along the front...


August 15th.

This morning we set out for reconquered Alsace. For reasons
unexplained to the civilian this corner of old-new France has
hitherto been inaccessible, even to highly placed French officials;
and there was a special sense of excitement in taking the road that
led to it.

We slipped through a valley or two, passed some placid villages with
vine-covered gables, and noticed that most of the signs over the
shops were German. We had crossed the old frontier unawares, and
were presently in the charming town of Massevaux. It was the Feast
of the Assumption, and mass was just over when we reached the square
before the church. The streets were full of holiday people,
well-dressed, smiling, seemingly unconscious of the war. Down the
church-steps, guided by fond mammas, came little girls in white
dresses, with white wreaths in their hair, and carrying, in baskets
slung over their shoulders, woolly lambs or blue and white Virgins.
Groups of cavalry officers stood chatting with civilians in their
Sunday best, and through the windows of the Golden Eagle we saw
active preparations for a crowded mid-day dinner. It was all as
happy and parochial as a "Hansi" picture, and the fine old gabled
houses and clean cobblestone streets made the traditional setting
for an Alsacian holiday.

At the Golden Eagle we laid in a store of provisions, and started
out across the mountains in the direction of Thann. The Vosges, at
this season, are in their short midsummer beauty, rustling with
streams, dripping with showers, balmy with the smell of firs and
braken, and of purple thyme on hot banks. We reached the top of a
ridge, and, hiding the motor behind a skirt of trees, went out into
the open to lunch on a sunny slope. Facing us across the valley was
a tall conical hill clothed with forest. That hill was
Hartmannswillerkopf, the centre of a long contest in which the
French have lately been victorious; and all about us stood other
crests and ridges from which German guns still look down on the
valley of Thann.

Thann itself is at the valley-head, in a neck between hills; a
handsome old town, with the air of prosperous stability so oddly
characteristic of this tormented region. As we drove through the
main street the pall of war-sadness fell on us again, darkening the
light and chilling the summer air. Thann is raked by the German
lines, and its windows are mostly shuttered and its streets
deserted. One or two houses in the Cathedral square have been
gutted, but the somewhat over-pinnacled and statued cathedral which
is the pride of Thann is almost untouched, and when we entered it
vespers were being sung, and a few people--mostly in black--knelt in
the nave.

No greater contrast could be imagined to the happy feast-day scene
we had left, a few miles off, at Massevaux; but Thann, in spite of
its empty streets, is not a deserted city. A vigorous life beats in
it, ready to break forth as soon as the German guns are silenced.
The French administration, working on the best of terms with the
population, are keeping up the civil activities of the town as the
Canons of the Cathedral are continuing the rites of the Church. Many
inhabitants still remain behind their closed shutters and dive down
into their cellars when the shells begin to crash; and the schools,
transferred to a neighbouring village, number over two thousand
pupils. We walked through the town, visited a vast catacomb of a
wine-cellar fitted up partly as an ambulance and partly as a shelter
for the cellarless, and saw the lamentable remains of the industrial
quarter along the river, which has been the special target of the
German guns. Thann has been industrially ruined, all its mills are
wrecked; but unlike the towns of the north it has had the good
fortune to preserve its outline, its civic personality, a face that
its children, when they come back, can recognize and take comfort
in.

After our visit to the ruins, a diversion was suggested by the
amiable administrators of Thann who had guided our sight-seeing.
They were just off for a military tournament which the --th dragoons
were giving that afternoon in a neighboring valley, and we were
invited to go with them.

The scene of the entertainment was a meadow enclosed in an
amphitheatre of rocks, with grassy ledges projecting from the cliff
like tiers of opera-boxes. These points of vantage were partly
occupied by interested spectators and partly by ruminating cattle;
on the lowest slope, the rank and fashion of the neighbourhood was
ranged on a semi-circle of chairs, and below, in the meadow, a
lively steeple-chase was going on. The riding was extremely pretty,
as French military riding always is. Few of the mounts were
thoroughbreds--the greater number, in fact, being local cart-horses
barely broken to the saddle--but their agility and dash did the
greater credit to their riders. The lancers, in particular, executed
an effective "musical ride" about a central pennon, to the immense
satisfaction of the fashionable public in the foreground and of the
gallery on the rocks.

The audience was even more interesting than the artists. Chatting
with the ladies in the front row were the General of division and
his staff, groups of officers invited from the adjoining
Head-quarters, and most of the civil and military administrators of
the restored "Departement du Haut Rhin." All classes had turned out
in honour of the fete, and every one was in a holiday mood.
The people among whom we sat were mostly Alsatian property-owners,
many of them industrials of Thann. Some had been driven from their
homes, others had seen their mills destroyed, all had been living
for a year on the perilous edge of war, under the menace of
reprisals too hideous to picture; yet the humour prevailing was that
of any group of merry-makers in a peaceful garrison town. I have
seen nothing, in my wanderings along the front, more indicative of
the good-breeding of the French than the spirit of the ladies and
gentlemen who sat chatting with the officers on that grassy slope of
Alsace.

The display of _haute ecole_ was to be followed by an exhibition of
"transportation throughout the ages," headed by a Gaulish chariot
driven by a trooper with a long horsehair moustache and mistletoe
wreath, and ending in a motor of which the engine had been taken out
and replaced by a large placid white horse. Unluckily a heavy rain
began while this instructive "number" awaited its turn, and we had
to leave before Vercingetorix had led his warriors into the ring...


August 16th.

Up and up into the mountains. We started early, taking our way along
a narrow interminable valley that sloped up gradually toward the
east. The road was encumbered with a stream of hooded supply vans
drawn by mules, for we were on the way to one of the main positions
in the Vosges, and this train of provisions is kept up day and
night. Finally we reached a mountain village under fir-clad slopes,
with a cold stream rushing down from the hills. On one side of the
road was a rustic inn, on the other, among the firs, a chalet
occupied by the brigade Head-quarters. Everywhere about us swarmed
the little "chasseurs Alpins" in blue Tam o'Shanters and leather
gaiters. For a year we had been reading of these heroes of the
hills, and here we were among them, looking into their thin
weather-beaten faces and meeting the twinkle of their friendly eyes.
Very friendly they all were, and yet, for Frenchmen, inarticulate
and shy. All over the world, no doubt, the mountain silences breed
this kind of reserve, this shrinking from the glibness of the
valleys. Yet one had fancied that French fluency must soar as high
as Mont Blanc.

Mules were brought, and we started on a long ride up the mountain.
The way led first over open ledges, with deep views into valleys
blue with distance, then through miles of forest, first of beech and
fir, and finally all of fir. Above the road the wooded slopes rose
interminably and here and there we came on tiers of mules, three or
four hundred together, stabled under the trees, in stalls dug out of
different levels of the slope. Near by were shelters for the men,
and perhaps at the next bend a village of "trappers' huts," as the
officers call the log-cabins they build in this region. These
colonies are always bustling with life: men busy cleaning their
arms, hauling material for new cabins, washing or mending their
clothes, or carrying down the mountain from the camp-kitchen the
two-handled pails full of steaming soup. The kitchen is always in
the most protected quarter of the camp, and generally at some
distance in the rear. Other soldiers, their job over, are lolling
about in groups, smoking, gossiping or writing home, the "Soldiers'
Letter-pad" propped on a patched blue knee, a scarred fist
laboriously driving the fountain pen received in hospital. Some are
leaning over the shoulder of a pal who has just received a Paris
paper, others chuckling together at the jokes of their own French
journal--the "Echo du Ravin," the "Journal des Poilus," or the
"Diable Bleu": little papers ground out in purplish script on
foolscap, and adorned with comic-sketches and a wealth of local
humour.

Higher up, under a fir-belt, at the edge of a meadow, the officer
who rode ahead signed to us to dismount and scramble after him. We
plunged under the trees, into what seemed a thicker thicket, and
found it to be a thatch of branches woven to screen the muzzles of a
battery. The big guns were all about us, crouched in these sylvan
lairs like wild beasts waiting to spring; and near each gun hovered
its attendant gunner, proud, possessive, important as a bridegroom
with his bride.

We climbed and climbed again, reaching at last a sun-and-wind-burnt
common which forms the top of one of the highest mountains in the
region. The forest was left below us and only a belt of dwarf firs
ran along the edge of the great grassy shoulder. We dismounted, the
mules were tethered among the trees, and our guide led us to an
insignificant looking stone in the grass. On one face of the stone
was cut the letter F., on the other was a D.; we stood on what, till
a year ago, was the boundary line between Republic and Empire. Since
then, in certain places, the line has been bent back a long way; but
where we stood we were still under German guns, and we had to creep
along in the shelter of the squat firs to reach the outlook on the
edge of the plateau. From there, under a sky of racing clouds, we
saw outstretched below us the Promised Land of Alsace. On one
horizon, far off in the plain, gleamed the roofs and spires of
Colmar, on the other rose the purplish heights beyond the Rhine.
Near by stood a ring of bare hills, those closest to us scarred by
ridges of upheaved earth, as if giant moles had been zigzagging over
them; and just under us, in a little green valley, lay the roofs of
a peaceful village. The earth-ridges and the peaceful village were
still German; but the French positions went down the mountain,
almost to the valley's edge; and one dark peak on the right was
already French.

We stopped at a gap in the firs and walked to the brink of the
plateau. Just under us lay a rock-rimmed lake. More zig-zag
earthworks surmounted it on all sides, and on the nearest shore was
the branched roofing of another great mule-shelter. We were looking
down at the spot to which the night-caravans of the Chasseurs Alpins
descend to distribute supplies to the fighting line.

"Who goes there? Attention! You're in sight of the lines!" a voice
called out from the firs, and our companion signed to us to move
back. We had been rather too conspicuously facing the German
batteries on the opposite slope, and our presence might have drawn
their fire on an artillery observation post installed near by. We
retreated hurriedly and unpacked our luncheon-basket on the more
sheltered side of the ridge. As we sat there in the grass, swept by
a great mountain breeze full of the scent of thyme and myrtle, while
the flutter of birds, the hum of insects, the still and busy life of
the hills went on all about us in the sunshine, the pressure of the
encircling line of death grew more intolerably real. It is not in
the mud and jokes and every-day activities of the trenches that one
most feels the damnable insanity of war; it is where it lurks like a
mythical monster in scenes to which the mind has always turned for
rest.

We had not yet made the whole tour of the mountain-top; and after
luncheon we rode over to a point where a long narrow yoke connects
it with a spur projecting directly above the German lines. We left
our mules in hiding and walked along the yoke, a mere knife-edge of
rock rimmed with dwarf vegetation. Suddenly we heard an explosion
behind us: one of the batteries we had passed on the way up was
giving tongue. The German lines roared back and for twenty minutes
the exchange of invective thundered on. The firing was almost
incessant; it seemed as if a great arch of steel were being built up
above us in the crystal air. And we could follow each curve of sound
from its incipience to its final crash in the trenches. There were
four distinct phases: the sharp bang from the cannon, the long
furious howl overhead, the dispersed and spreading noise of the
shell's explosion, and then the roll of its reverberation from cliff
to cliff. This is what we heard as we crouched in the lee of the
firs: what we saw when we looked out between them was only an
occasional burst of white smoke and red flame from one hillside, and
on the opposite one, a minute later, a brown geyser of dust.

Presently a deluge of rain descended on us, driving us back to our
mules, and down the nearest mountain-trail through rivers of mud. It
rained all the way: rained in such floods and cataracts that the
very rocks of the mountain seemed to dissolve and turn into mud. As
we slid down through it we met strings of Chasseurs Alpins coming
up, splashed to the waist with wet red clay, and leading pack-mules
so coated with it that they looked like studio models from which the
sculptor has just pulled off the dripping sheet. Lower down we came
on more "trapper" settlements, so saturated and reeking with wet
that they gave us a glimpse of what the winter months on the front
must be. No more cheerful polishing of fire-arms, hauling of
faggots, chatting and smoking in sociable groups: everybody had
crept under the doubtful shelter of branches and tarpaulins; the
whole army was back in its burrows.


August 17th.

Sunshine again for our arrival at Belfort. The invincible city lies
unpretentiously behind its green glacis and escutcheoned gates; but
the guardian Lion under the Citadel--well, the Lion is figuratively
as well as literally _a la hauteur._ With the sunset flush
on him, as he crouched aloft in his red lair below the fort, he
might almost have claimed kin with his mighty prototypes of the
Assarbanipal frieze. One wondered a little, seeing whose work he
was; but probably it is easier for an artist to symbolize an heroic
town than the abstract and elusive divinity who sheds light on the
world from New York harbour.

From Belfort back into reconquered Alsace the road runs through a
gentle landscape of fields and orchards. We were bound for
Dannemarie, one of the towns of the plain, and a centre of the new
administration. It is the usual "gros bourg" of Alsace, with
comfortable old houses in espaliered gardens: dull, well-to-do,
contented; not in the least the kind of setting demanded by the
patriotism which has to be fed on pictures of little girls singing
the Marseillaise in Alsatian head-dresses and old men with operatic
waistcoats tottering forward to kiss the flag. What we saw at
Dannemarie was less conspicuous to the eye but much more nourishing
to the imagination. The military and civil administrators had the
kindness and patience to explain their work and show us something of
its results; and the visit left one with the impression of a slow
and quiet process of adaptation wisely planned and fruitfully
carried out. We _did_, in fact, hear the school-girls of Dannemarie
sing the Marseillaise--and the boys too--but, what was far more
interesting, we saw them studying under the direction of the
teachers who had always had them in charge, and found that
everywhere it had been the aim of the French officials to let the
routine of the village policy go on undisturbed. The German signs
remain over the shop-fronts except where the shop-keepers have
chosen to paint them out; as is happening more and more frequently.
When a functionary has to be replaced he is chosen from the same
town or the same district, and even the _personnel_ of the civil and
military administration is mainly composed of officers and civilians
of Alsatian stock. The heads of both these departments, who
accompanied us on our rounds, could talk to the children and old
people in German as well as in their local dialect; and, as far as a
passing observer could discern, it seemed as though everything had
been done to reduce to a minimum the sense of strangeness and
friction which is inevitable in the transition from one rule to
another. The interesting point was that this exercise of tact and
tolerance seemed to proceed not from any pressure of expediency but
from a sympathetic understanding of the point of view of this people
of the border. I heard in Dannemarie not a syllable of lyrical
patriotism or post-card sentimentality, but only a kindly and
impartial estimate of facts as they were and must be dealt with.


August 18th.

Today again we started early for the mountains. Our road ran more to
the westward, through the heart of the Vosges, and up to a fold of
the hills near the borders of Lorraine. We stopped at a
Head-quarters where a young officer of dragoons was to join us, and
learned from him that we were to be allowed to visit some of the
first-line trenches which we had looked out on from a high-perched
observation post on our former visit to the Vosges. Violent fighting
was going on in that particular region, and after a climb of an hour
or two we had to leave the motor at a sheltered angle of the road
and strike across the hills on foot. Our path lay through the
forest, and every now and then we caught a glimpse of the high-road
running below us in full view of the German batteries. Presently we
reached a point where the road was screened by a thick growth of
trees behind which an observation post had been set up. We scrambled
down and looked through the peephole. Just below us lay a valley
with a village in its centre, and to the left and right of the
village were two hills, the one scored with French, the other with
German trenches. The village, at first sight, looked as normal as
those through which we had been passing; but a closer inspection
showed that its steeple was shattered and that some of its houses
were unroofed. Part of it was held by German, part by French troops.
The cemetery adjoining the church, and a quarry just under it,
belonged to the Germans; but a line of French trenches ran from the
farther side of the church up to the French batteries on the right
hand hill. Parallel with this line, but starting from the other side
of the village, was a hollow lane leading up to a single tree. This
lane was a German trench, protected by the guns of the left hand
hill; and between the two lay perhaps fifty yards of ground. All
this was close under us; and closer still was a slope of open ground
leading up to the village and traversed by a rough cart-track. Along
this track in the hot sunshine little French soldiers, the size of
tin toys, were scrambling up with bags and loads of faggots, their
ant-like activity as orderly and untroubled as if the two armies had
not lain trench to trench a few yards away. It was one of those
strange and contradictory scenes of war that bring home to the
bewildered looker-on the utter impossibility of picturing how the
thing _really happens._

While we stood watching we heard the sudden scream of a battery
close above us. The crest of the hill we were climbing was alive
with "Seventy-fives," and the piercing noise seemed to burst out at
our very backs. It was the most terrible war-shriek I had heard: a
kind of wolfish baying that called up an image of all the dogs of
war simultaneously tugging at their leashes. There is a dreadful
majesty in the sound of a distant cannonade; but these yelps and
hisses roused only thoughts of horror. And there, on the opposite
slope, the black and brown geysers were beginning to spout up from
the German trenches; and from the batteries above them came the puff
and roar of retaliation. Below us, along the cart-track, the little
French soldiers continued to scramble up peacefully to the
dilapidated village; and presently a group of officers of dragoons,
emerging from the wood, came down to welcome us to their
Head-quarters.

We continued to climb through the forest, the cannonade still
whistling overhead, till we reached the most elaborate trapper
colony we had yet seen. Half underground, walled with logs, and
deeply roofed by sods tufted with ferns and moss, the cabins were
scattered under the trees and connected with each other by paths
bordered with white stones. Before the Colonel's cabin the soldiers
had made a banked-up flower-bed sown with annuals; and farther up
the slope stood a log chapel, a mere gable with a wooden altar under
it, all tapestried with ivy and holly. Near by was the chaplain's
subterranean dwelling. It was reached by a deep cutting with
ivy-covered sides, and ivy and fir-boughs masked the front. This
sylvan retreat had just been completed, and the officers, the
chaplain, and the soldiers loitering near by, were all equally eager
to have it seen and hear it praised.

The commanding officer, having done the honours of the camp, led us
about a quarter of a mile down the hillside to an open cutting which
marked the beginning of the trenches. From the cutting we passed
into a long tortuous burrow walled and roofed with carefully fitted
logs. The earth floor was covered by a sort of wooden lattice. The
only light entering this tunnel was a faint ray from an occasional
narrow slit screened by branches; and beside each of these
peep-holes hung a shield-shaped metal shutter to be pushed over it
in case of emergency.

The passage wound down the hill, almost doubling on itself, in order
to give a view of all the surrounding lines. Presently the roof
became much higher, and we saw on one side a curtained niche about
five feet above the floor. One of the officers pulled the curtain
back, and there, on a narrow shelf, a gun between his knees, sat a
dragoon, his eyes on a peep-hole. The curtain was hastily drawn
again behind his motionless figure, lest the faint light at his back
should betray him. We passed by several of these helmeted watchers,
and now and then we came to a deeper recess in which a mitrailleuse
squatted, its black nose thrust through a net of branches. Sometimes
the roof of the tunnel was so low that we had to bend nearly double;
and at intervals we came to heavy doors, made of logs and sheeted
with iron, which shut off one section from another. It is hard to
guess the distance one covers in creeping through an unlit passage
with different levels and countless turnings; but we must have
descended the hillside for at least a mile before we came out into a
half-ruined farmhouse. This building, which had kept nothing but its
outer walls and one or two partitions between the rooms, had been
transformed into an observation post. In each of its corners a
ladder led up to a little shelf on the level of what was once the
second story, and on the shelf sat a dragoon at his peep-hole.
Below, in the dilapidated rooms, the usual life of a camp was going
on. Some of the soldiers were playing cards at a kitchen table,
others mending their clothes, or writing letters or chuckling
together (not too loud) over a comic newspaper. It might have been a
scene anywhere along the second-line trenches but for the lowered
voices, the suddenness with which I was drawn back from a slit in
the wall through which I had incautiously peered, and the presence
of these helmeted watchers overhead.

We plunged underground again and began to descend through another
darker and narrower tunnel. In the upper one there had been one or
two roofless stretches where one could straighten one's back and
breathe; but here we were in pitch blackness, and saved from
breaking our necks only by the gleam of the pocket-light which the
young lieutenant who led the party shed on our path. As he whisked
it up and down to warn us of sudden steps or sharp corners he
remarked that at night even this faint glimmer was forbidden, and
that it was a bad job going back and forth from the last outpost
till one had learned the turnings.

The last outpost was a half-ruined farmhouse like the other. A
telephone connected it with Head-quarters and more dumb dragoons sat
motionless on their lofty shelves. The house was shut off from the
tunnel by an armoured door, and the orders were that in case of
attack that door should be barred from within and the access to the
tunnel defended to the death by the men in the outpost. We were on
the extreme verge of the defences, on a slope just above the village
over which we had heard the artillery roaring a few hours earlier.
The spot where we stood was raked on all sides by the enemy's lines,
and the nearest trenches were only a few yards away. But of all this
nothing was really perceptible or comprehensible to me. As far as my
own observation went, we might have been a hundred miles from the
valley we had looked down on, where the French soldiers were walking
peacefully up the cart-track in the sunshine. I only knew that we
had come out of a black labyrinth into a gutted house among
fruit-trees, where soldiers were lounging and smoking, and people
whispered as they do about a death-bed. Over a break in the walls I
saw another gutted farmhouse close by in another orchard: it was an
enemy outpost, and silent watchers in helmets of another shape sat
there watching on the same high shelves. But all this was infinitely
less real and terrible than the cannonade above the disputed
village. The artillery had ceased and the air was full of summer
murmurs. Close by on a sheltered ledge I saw a patch of vineyard
with dewy cobwebs hanging to the vines. I could not understand where
we were, or what it was all about, or why a shell from the enemy
outpost did not suddenly annihilate us. And then, little by little,
there came over me the sense of that mute reciprocal watching from
trench to trench: the interlocked stare of innumerable pairs of
eyes, stretching on, mile after mile, along the whole sleepless line
from Dunkerque to Belfort.

My last vision of the French front which I had traveled from end to
end was this picture of a shelled house where a few men, who sat
smoking and playing cards in the sunshine, had orders to hold out to
the death rather than let their fraction of that front be broken.




THE TONE OF FRANCE


Nobody now asks the question that so often, at the beginning of the
war, came to me from the other side of the world: "_What is France
like?"_ Every one knows what France has proved to be like: from
being a difficult problem she has long since become a luminous
instance.

Nevertheless, to those on whom that illumination has shone only from
far off, there may still be something to learn about its component
elements; for it has come to consist of many separate rays, and the
weary strain of the last year has been the spectroscope to decompose
them. From the very beginning, when one felt the effulgence as the
mere pale brightness before dawn, the attempt to define it was
irresistible. "There _is_ a tone--" the tingling sense of it was in
the air from the first days, the first hours--"but what does it
consist in? And just how is one aware of it?" In those days the
answer was comparatively easy. The tone of France after the
declaration of war was the white glow of dedication: a great
nation's collective impulse (since there is no English equivalent
for that winged word, _elan_ ) to resist destruction. But at that
time no one knew what the resistance was to cost, how long it would
have to last, what sacrifices, material and moral, it would
necessitate. And for the moment baser sentiments were silenced:
greed, self-interest, pusillanimity seemed to have been purged from
the race. The great sitting of the Chamber, that almost religious
celebration of defensive union, really expressed the opinion of the
whole people. It is fairly easy to soar to the empyrean when one is
carried on the wings of such an impulse, and when one does not know
how long one is to be kept suspended at the breathing-limit.

But there is a term to the flight of the most soaring _elan_. It is
likely, after a while, to come back broken-winged and resign itself
to barn-yard bounds. National judgments cannot remain for long above
individual feelings; and you cannot get a national "tone" out of
anything less than a whole nation. The really interesting thing,
therefore, was to see, as the war went on, and grew into a calamity
unheard of in human annals, how the French spirit would meet it, and
what virtues extract from it.

The war has been a calamity unheard of; but France has never been
afraid of the unheard of. No race has ever yet so audaciously
dispensed with old precedents; as none has ever so revered their
relics. It is a great strength to be able to walk without the
support of analogies; and France has always shown that strength in
times of crisis. The absorbing question, as the war went on, was to
discover how far down into the people this intellectual audacity
penetrated, how instinctive it had become, and how it would endure
the strain of prolonged inaction.

There was never much doubt about the army. When a warlike race has
an invader on its soil, the men holding back the invader can never
be said to be inactive. But behind the army were the waiting
millions to whom that long motionless line in the trenches might
gradually have become a mere condition of thought, an accepted
limitation to all sorts of activities and pleasures. The danger was
that such a war--static, dogged, uneventful--might gradually cramp
instead of enlarging the mood of the lookers-on. Conscription, of
course, was there to minimize this danger. Every one was sharing
alike in the glory and the woe. But the glory was not of a kind to
penetrate or dazzle. It requires more imagination to see the halo
around tenacity than around dash; and the French still cling to the
view that they are, so to speak, the patentees and proprietors of
dash, and much less at home with his dull drudge of a partner. So
there was reason to fear, in the long run, a gradual but
irresistible disintegration, not of public opinion, but of something
subtler and more fundamental: public sentiment. It was possible that
civilian France, while collectively seeming to remain at the same
height, might individually deteriorate and diminish in its attitude
toward the war.

The French would not be human, and therefore would not be
interesting, if one had not perceived in them occasional symptoms of
such a peril. There has not been a Frenchman or a Frenchwoman--save
a few harmless and perhaps nervous theorizers--who has wavered about
the military policy of the country; but there have naturally been
some who have found it less easy than they could have foreseen to
live up to the sacrifices it has necessitated. Of course there have
been such people: one would have had to postulate them if they had
not come within one's experience. There have been some to whom it
was harder than they imagined to give up a certain way of living, or
a certain kind of breakfast-roll; though the French, being
fundamentally temperate, are far less the slaves of the luxuries
they have invented than are the other races who have adopted these
luxuries.

There have been many more who found the sacrifice of personal
happiness--of all that made life livable, or one's country worth
fighting for--infinitely harder than the most apprehensive
imagination could have pictured. There have been mothers and widows
for whom a single grave, or the appearance of one name on the
missing list, has turned the whole conflict into an idiot's tale.
There have been many such; but there have apparently not been enough
to deflect by a hair's breadth the subtle current of public
sentiment; unless it is truer, as it is infinitely more inspiring,
to suppose that, of this company of blinded baffled sufferers,
almost all have had the strength to hide their despair and to say of
the great national effort which has lost most of its meaning to
them: "Though it slay me, yet will I trust in it." That is probably
the finest triumph of the tone of France: that its myriad fiery
currents flow from so many hearts made insensible by suffering, that
so many dead hands feed its undying lamp.

This does not in the least imply that resignation is the prevailing
note in the tone of France. The attitude of the French people, after
fourteen months of trial, is not one of submission to unparalleled
calamity. It is one of exaltation, energy, the hot resolve to
dominate the disaster. In all classes the feeling is the same: every
word and every act is based on the resolute ignoring of any
alternative to victory. The French people no more think of a
compromise than people would think of facing a flood or an
earthquake with a white flag.

Two questions are likely to be put to any observer of the struggle
who risks such assertions. What, one may be asked, are the proofs of
this national tone? And what conditions and qualities seem to
minister to it?

The proofs, now that "the tumult and the shouting dies," and
civilian life has dropped back into something like its usual
routine, are naturally less definable than at the outset. One of the
most evident is the spirit in which all kinds of privations are
accepted. No one who has come in contact with the work-people and
small shop-keepers of Paris in the last year can fail to be struck
by the extreme dignity and grace with which doing without things is
practised. The Frenchwoman leaning in the door of her empty
_boutique_ still wears the smile with which she used to calm the
impatience of crowding shoppers. The seam-stress living on the
meagre pay of a charity work-room gives her day's sewing as
faithfully as if she were working for full wages in a fashionable
_atelier_, and never tries, by the least hint of private
difficulties, to extract additional help. The habitual cheerfulness
of the Parisian workwoman rises, in moments of sorrow, to the finest
fortitude. In a work-room where many women have been employed since
the beginning of the war, a young girl of sixteen heard late one
afternoon that her only brother had been killed. She had a moment of
desperate distress; but there was a big family to be helped by her
small earnings, and the next morning punctually she was back at
work. In this same work-room the women have one half-holiday in the
week, without reduction of pay; yet if an order has to be rushed
through for a hospital they give up that one afternoon as gaily as
if they were doing it for their pleasure. But if any one who has
lived for the last year among the workers and small tradesmen of
Paris should begin to cite instances of endurance, self-denial and
secret charity, the list would have no end. The essential of it all
is the spirit in which these acts are accomplished.

The second question: What are the conditions and qualities that have
produced such results? is less easy to answer. The door is so
largely open to conjecture that every explanation must depend
largely on the answerer's personal bias. But one thing is certain.
France has not achieved her present tone by the sacrifice of any of
her national traits, but rather by their extreme keying up;
therefore the surest way of finding a clue to that tone is to try to
single out whatever distinctively "French" characteristics--or those
that appear such to the envious alien--have a direct bearing on the
present attitude of France. Which (one must ask) of all their
multiple gifts most help the French today to be what they are in
just the way they are?

_Intelligence!_ is the first and instantaneous answer. Many French
people seem unaware of this. They are sincerely persuaded that the
curbing of their critical activity has been one of the most
important and useful results of the war. One is told that, in a
spirit of patriotism, this fault-finding people has learned not to
find fault. Nothing could be more untrue. The French, when they have
a grievance, do not air it in the _Times:_ their forum is the cafe
and not the newspaper. But in the cafe they are talking as freely as
ever, discriminating as keenly and judging as passionately. The
difference is that the very exercise of their intelligence on a
problem larger and more difficult than any they have hitherto faced
has freed them from the dominion of most of the prejudices,
catch-words and conventions that directed opinion before the war.
Then their intelligence ran in fixed channels; now it has overflowed
its banks.

This release has produced an immediate readjusting of all the
elements of national life. In great trials a race is tested by its
values; and the war has shown the world what are the real values of
France. Never for an instant has this people, so expert in the great
art of living, imagined that life consisted in being alive.
Enamoured of pleasure and beauty, dwelling freely and frankly in the
present, they have yet kept their sense of larger meanings, have
understood life to be made up of many things past and to come, of
renunciation as well as satisfaction, of traditions as well as
experiments, of dying as much as of living. Never have they
considered life as a thing to be cherished in itself, apart from its
reactions and its relations.

Intelligence first, then, has helped France to be what she is; and
next, perhaps, one of its corollaries, _expression_. The French are
the first to laugh at themselves for running to words: they seem to
regard their gift for expression as a weakness, a possible deterrent
to action. The last year has not confirmed that view. It has rather
shown that eloquence is a supplementary weapon. By "eloquence" I
naturally do not mean public speaking, nor yet the rhetorical
writing too often associated with the word. Rhetoric is the
dressing-up of conventional sentiment, eloquence the fearless
expression of real emotion. And this gift of the fearless expression
of emotion--fearless, that is, of ridicule, or of indifference in
the hearer--has been an inestimable strength to France. It is a sign
of the high average of French intelligence that feeling well-worded
can stir and uplift it; that "words" are not half shamefacedly
regarded as something separate from, and extraneous to, emotion, or
even as a mere vent for it, but as actually animating and forming
it. Every additional faculty for exteriorizing states of feeling,
giving them a face and a language, is a moral as well as an artistic
asset, and Goethe was never wiser than when he wrote:

  "A god gave me the voice to speak my pain."

It is not too much to say that the French are at this moment drawing
a part of their national strength from their language. The piety
with which they have cherished and cultivated it has made it a
precious instrument in their hands. It can say so beautifully what
they feel that they find strength and renovation in using it; and
the word once uttered is passed on, and carries the same help to
others. Countless instances of such happy expression could be cited
by any one who has lived the last year in France. On the bodies of
young soldiers have been found letters of farewell to their parents
that made one think of some heroic Elizabethan verse; and the
mothers robbed of these sons have sent them an answering cry of
courage.

"Thank you," such a mourner wrote me the other day, "for having
understood the cruelty of our fate, and having pitied us. Thank you
also for having exalted the pride that is mingled with our
unutterable sorrow." Simply that, and no more; but she might have
been speaking for all the mothers of France.

When the eloquent expression of feeling does not issue in action--or
at least in a state of mind equivalent to action--it sinks to the
level of rhetoric; but in France at this moment expression and
conduct supplement and reflect each other. And this brings me to the
other great attribute which goes to making up the tone of France:
the quality of courage. It is not unintentionally that it comes last
on my list. French courage is courage rationalized, courage thought
out, and found necessary to some special end; it is, as much as any
other quality of the French temperament, the result of French
intelligence.

No people so sensitive to beauty, so penetrated with a passionate
interest in life, so endowed with the power to express and
immortalize that interest, can ever really enjoy destruction for its
own sake. The French hate "militarism." It is stupid, inartistic,
unimaginative and enslaving; there could not be four better French
reasons for detesting it. Nor have the French ever enjoyed the
savage forms of sport which stimulate the blood of more apathetic or
more brutal races. Neither prize-fighting nor bull-fighting is of
the soil in France, and Frenchmen do not settle their private
differences impromptu with their fists: they do it, logically and
with deliberation, on the duelling-ground. But when a national
danger threatens, they instantly become what they proudly and justly
call themselves--"a warlike nation"--and apply to the business in
hand the ardour, the imagination, the perseverance that have made
them for centuries the great creative force of civilization. Every
French soldier knows why he is fighting, and why, at this moment,
physical courage is the first quality demanded of him; every
Frenchwoman knows why war is being waged, and why her moral courage
is needed to supplement the soldier's contempt of death.

The women of France are supplying this moral courage in act as well
as in word. Frenchwomen, as a rule, are perhaps less instinctively
"courageous," in the elementary sense, than their Anglo-Saxon
sisters. They are afraid of more things, and are less ashamed of
showing their fear. The French mother coddles her children, the boys
as well as the girls: when they tumble and bark their knees they are
expected to cry, and not taught to control themselves as English and
American children are. I have seen big French boys bawling over a
cut or a bruise that an Anglo-Saxon girl of the same age would have
felt compelled to bear without a tear. Frenchwomen are timid for
themselves as well as for their children. They are afraid of the
unexpected, the unknown, the experimental. It is not part of the
Frenchwoman's training to pretend to have physical courage. She has
not the advantage of our discipline in the hypocrisies of "good
form" when she is called on to be brave, she must draw her courage
from her brains. She must first be convinced of the necessity of
heroism; after that she is fit to go bridle to bridle with Jeanne
d'Arc.

The same display of reasoned courage is visible in the hasty
adaptation of the Frenchwoman to all kinds of uncongenial jobs.
Almost every kind of service she has been called to render since the
war began has been fundamentally uncongenial. A French doctor once
remarked to me that Frenchwomen never make really good sick-nurses
except when they are nursing their own people. They are too
personal, too emotional, and too much interested in more interesting
things, to take to the fussy details of good nursing, except when it
can help some one they care for. Even then, as a rule, they are not
systematic or tidy; but they make up for these deficiencies by
inexhaustible willingness and sympathy. And it has been easy for
them to become good war-nurses, because every Frenchwoman who nurses
a French soldier feels that she is caring for her kin. The French
war-nurse sometimes mislays an instrument or forgets to sterilize a
dressing; but she almost always finds the consoling word to say and
the right tone to take with her wounded soldiers. That profound
solidarity which is one of the results of conscription flowers, in
war-time, in an exquisite and impartial devotion.

This, then, is what "France is like." The whole civilian part of the
nation seems merged in one symbolic figure, carrying help and hope
to the fighters or passionately bent above the wounded. The
devotion, the self-denial, seem instinctive; but they are really
based on a reasoned knowledge of the situation and on an unflinching
estimate of values. All France knows today that real "life" consists
in the things that make it worth living, and that these things, for
France, depend on the free expression of her national genius. If
France perishes as an intellectual light and as a moral force every
Frenchman perishes with her; and the only death that Frenchmen fear
is not death in the trenches but death by the extinction of their
national ideal. It is against this death that the whole nation is
fighting; and it is the reasoned recognition of their peril which,
at this moment, is making the most intelligent people in the world
the most sublime.

THE LONG RUN ***




Produced by David Widger





THE LONG RUN

By Edith Wharton

Copyright, 1916, By Charles Scribner’s Sons


_The shade of those our days that had no tongue._




I

It was last winter, after a twelve years’ absence from New York, that
I saw again, at one of the Jim Cumnors’ dinners, my old friend Halston
Merrick.

The Cumnors’ house is one of the few where, even after such a lapse
of time, one can be sure of finding familiar faces and picking up old
threads; where for a moment one can abandon one’s self to the illusion
that New York humanity is a shade less unstable than its bricks and
mortar. And that evening in particular I remember feeling that there
could be no pleasanter way of re-entering the confused and careless
world to which I was returning than through the quiet softly-lit
diningroom in which Mrs. Cumnor, with a characteristic sense of my
needing to be broken in gradually, had contrived to assemble so many
friendly faces.

I was glad to see them all, including the three or four I did not know,
or failed to recognize, but had no difficulty in passing as in the
tradition and of the group; but I was most of all glad--as I rather
wonderingly found--to set eyes again on Halston Merrick.

He and I had been at Harvard together, for one thing, and had shared
there curiosities and ardours a little outside the current tendencies:
had, on the whole, been more critical than our comrades, and less
amenable to the accepted. Then, for the next following years, Merrick
had been a vivid and promising figure in young American life. Handsome,
careless, and free, he had wandered and tasted and compared. After
leaving Harvard he had spent two years at Oxford; then he had accepted
a private secretaryship to our Ambassador in England, and had come back
from this adventure with a fresh curiosity about public affairs at home,
and the conviction that men of his kind should play a larger part in
them. This led, first, to his running for a State Senatorship which he
failed to get, and ultimately to a few months of intelligent activity in
a municipal office. Soon after being deprived of this post by a change
of party he had published a small volume of delicate verse, and, a year
later, an odd uneven brilliant book on Municipal Government. After that
one hardly knew where to look for his next appearance; but chance rather
disappointingly solved the problem by killing off his father and placing
Halston at the head of the Merrick Iron Foundry at Yonkers.

His friends had gathered that, whenever this regrettable contingency
should occur, he meant to dispose of the business and continue his life
of free experiment. As often happens in just such cases, however, it was
not the moment for a sale, and Merrick had to take over the management
of the foundry. Some two years later he had a chance to free himself;
but when it came he did not choose to take it. This tame sequel to an
inspiriting start was disappointing to some of us, and I was among those
disposed to regret Merrick’s drop to the level of the prosperous. Then
I went away to a big engineering job in China, and from there to Africa,
and spent the next twelve years out of sight and sound of New York
doings.

During that long interval I heard of no new phase in Merrick’s
evolution, but this did not surprise me, as I had never expected from
him actions resonant enough to cross the globe. All I knew--and this did
surprise me--was that he had not married, and that he was still in the
iron business. All through those years, however, I never ceased to wish,
in certain situations and at certain turns of thought, that Merrick were
in reach, that I could tell this or that to Merrick. I had never, in the
interval, found any one with just his quickness of perception and just
his sureness of response.

After dinner, therefore, we irresistibly drew together. In Mrs. Cumnor’s
big easy drawing-room cigars were allowed, and there was no break in the
communion of the sexes; and, this being the case, I ought to have sought
a seat beside one of the ladies among whom we were allowed to remain.
But, as had generally happened of old when Merrick was in sight, I found
myself steering straight for him past all minor ports of call.

There had been no time, before dinner, for more than the barest
expression of satisfaction at meeting, and our seats had been at
opposite ends of the longish table, so that we got our first real look
at each other in the secluded corner to which Mrs. Cumnor’s vigilance
now directed us.

Merrick was still handsome in his stooping tawny way: handsomer perhaps,
with thinnish hair and more lines in his face, than in the young excess
of his good looks. He was very glad to see me and conveyed his gladness
by the same charming smile; but as soon as we began to talk I felt
a change. It was not merely the change that years and experience and
altered values bring. There was something more fundamental the matter
with Merrick, something dreadful, unforeseen, unaccountable: Merrick had
grown conventional and dull.

In the glow of his frank pleasure in seeing me I was ashamed to analyze
the nature of the change; but presently our talk began to flag--fancy a
talk with Merrick flagging!--and self-deception became impossible as I
watched myself handing out platitudes with the gesture of the salesman
offering something to a purchaser “equally good.” The worst of it was
that Merrick--Merrick, who had once felt everything!--didn’t seem to
feel the lack of spontaneity in my remarks, but hung on them with a
harrowing faith in the resuscitating power of our past. It was as if he
hugged the empty vessel of our friendship without perceiving that the
last drop of its essence was dry.

But after all, I am exaggerating. Through my surprise and disappointment
I felt a certain sense of well-being in the mere physical presence of my
old friend. I liked looking at the way his dark hair waved away from
the forehead, at the tautness of his dry brown cheek, the thoughtful
backward tilt of his head, the way his brown eyes mused upon the
scene through lowered lids. All the past was in his way of looking and
sitting, and I wanted to stay near him, and felt that he wanted me
to stay; but the devil of it was that neither of us knew what to talk
about.

It was this difficulty which caused me, after a while, since I could not
follow Merrick’s talk, to follow his eyes in their roaming circuit of
the room.

At the moment when our glances joined, his had paused on a lady
seated at some distance from our corner. Immersed, at first, in the
satisfaction of finding myself again with Merrick, I had been only half
aware of this lady, as of one of the few persons present whom I did not
know, or had failed to remember. There was nothing in her appearance to
challenge my attention or to excite my curiosity, and I don’t suppose I
should have looked at her again if I had not noticed that my friend was
doing so.

She was a woman of about forty-seven, with fair faded hair and a young
figure. Her gray dress was handsome but ineffective, and her pale and
rather serious face wore a small unvarying smile which might have
been pinned on with her ornaments. She was one of the women in whom
increasing years show rather what they have taken than what they have
bestowed, and only on looking closely did one see that what they had
taken must have been good of its kind.

Phil Cumnor and another man were talking to her, and the very intensity
of the attention she bestowed on them betrayed the straining of
rebellious thoughts. She never let her eyes stray or her smile drop; and
at the proper moment I saw she was ready with the proper sentiment.

The party, like most of those that Mrs. Cumnor gathered about her, was
not composed of exceptional beings. The people of the old vanished
New York set were not exceptional: they were mostly cut on the same
convenient and unobtrusive pattern; but they were often exceedingly
“nice.” And this obsolete quality marked every look and gesture of the
lady I was scrutinizing.

While these reflections were passing through my mind I was aware that
Merrick’s eyes rested still on her. I took a cross-section of his look
and found in it neither surprise nor absorption, but only a certain
sober pleasure just about at the emotional level of the rest of the
room.

If he continued to look at her, his expression seemed to say, it was
only because, all things considered, there were fewer reasons for
looking at anybody else.

This made me wonder what were the reasons for looking at _her_; and as
a first step toward enlightenment I said:--“I’m sure I’ve seen the lady
over there in gray--”

Merrick detached his eyes and turned them on me with a wondering look.

“Seen her? You know her.” He waited. “_Don’t_ you know her? It’s Mrs.
Reardon.”

I wondered that he should wonder, for I could not remember, in
the Cumnor group or elsewhere, having known any one of the name he
mentioned.

“But perhaps,” he continued, “you hadn’t heard of her marriage? You knew
her as Mrs. Trant.”

I gave him back his stare. “Not Mrs. Philip Trant?”

“Yes; Mrs. Philip Trant.”

“Not Paulina?”

“Yes--Paulina,” he said, with a just perceptible delay before the name.

In my surprise I continued to stare at him. He averted his eyes from
mine after a moment, and I saw that they had strayed back to her. “You
find her so changed?” he asked.

Something in his voice acted as a warning signal, and I tried to reduce
my astonishment to less unbecoming proportions. “I don’t find that she
looks much older.”

“No. Only different?” he suggested, as if there were nothing new to him
in my perplexity.

“Yes--awfully different.”

“I suppose we’re all awfully different. To you, I mean--coming from so
far?”

“I recognized all the rest of you,” I said, hesitating. “And she used to
be the one who stood out most.”

There was a flash, a wave, a stir of something deep down in his eyes.
“Yes,” he said. “_That’s_ the difference.”

“I see it is. She--she looks worn down. Soft but blurred, like the
figures in that tapestry behind her.”

He glanced at her again, as if to test the exactness of my analogy.

“Life wears everybody down,” he said.

“Yes--except those it makes more distinct. They’re the rare ones, of
course; but she _was_ rare.”

He stood up suddenly, looking old and tired. “I believe I’ll be off. I
wish you’d come down to my place for Sunday.... No, don’t shake hands--I
want to slide away unawares.”

He had backed away to the threshold and was turning the noiseless
door-knob. Even Mrs. Cumnor’s doorknobs had tact and didn’t tell.

“Of course I’ll come,” I promised warmly. In the last ten minutes he had
begun to interest me again.

“All right Good-bye.” Half through the door he paused to add:--“_She_
remembers you. You ought to speak to her.”

“I’m going to. But tell me a little more.” I thought I saw a shade
of constraint on his face, and did not add, as I had meant to: “Tell
me--because she interests me--what wore her down?” Instead, I asked:
“How soon after Trant’s death did she remarry?”

He seemed to make an effort of memory. “It was seven years ago, I
think.”

“And is Reardon here to-night?”

“Yes; over there, talking to Mrs. Cumnor.”

I looked across the broken groupings and saw a large glossy man with
straw-coloured hair and a red face, whose shirt and shoes and complexion
seemed all to have received a coat of the same expensive varnish.

As I looked there was a drop in the talk about us, and I heard Mr.
Reardon pronounce in a big booming voice: “What I say is: what’s the
good of disturbing things? Thank the Lord, I’m content with what I’ve
got!”

“Is _that_ her husband? What’s he like?”

“Oh, the best fellow in the world,” said Merrick, going.




II

Merrick had a little place at Riverdale, where he went occasionally to
be near the Iron Works, and where he hid his week-ends when the world
was too much with him.

Here, on the following Saturday afternoon I found him awaiting me in a
pleasant setting of books and prints and faded parental furniture.

We dined late, and smoked and talked afterward in his book-walled study
till the terrier on the hearth-rug stood up and yawned for bed. When
we took the hint and moved toward the staircase I felt, not that I
had found the old Merrick again, but that I was on his track, had come
across traces of his passage here and there in the thick jungle that had
grown up between us. But I had a feeling that when I finally came on the
man himself he might be dead....

As we started upstairs he turned back with one of his abrupt shy
movements, and walked into the study.

“Wait a bit!” he called to me.

I waited, and he came out in a moment carrying a limp folio.

“It’s typewritten. Will you take a look at it? I’ve been trying to get
to work again,” he explained, thrusting the manuscript into my hand.

“What? Poetry, I hope?” I exclaimed.

He shook his head with a gleam of derision. “No--just general
considerations. The fruit of fifty years of inexperience.”

He showed me to my room and said good-night.

*****

The following afternoon we took a long walk inland, across the hills,
and I said to Merrick what I could of his book. Unluckily there wasn’t
much to say. The essays were judicious, polished and cultivated; but
they lacked the freshness and audacity of his youthful work. I tried
to conceal my opinion behind the usual generalisations, but he broke
through these feints with a quick thrust to the heart of my meaning.

“It’s worn down--blurred? Like the figures in the Cumnors’ tapestry?”

I hesitated. “It’s a little too damned resigned,” I said.

“Ah,” he exclaimed, “so am I. Resigned.” He switched the bare brambles
by the roadside. “A man can’t serve two masters.”

“You mean business and literature?”

“No; I mean theory and instinct. The gray tree and the green. You’ve
got to choose which fruit you’ll try; and you don’t know till afterward
which of the two has the dead core.”

“How can anybody be sure that only one of them has?”

“I’m sure,” said Merrick sharply.

We turned back to the subject of his essays, and I was astonished at
the detachment with which he criticised and demolished them. Little by
little, as we talked, his old perspective, his old standards came
back to him; but with the difference that they no longer seemed like
functions of his mind but merely like attitudes assumed or dropped at
will. He could still, with an effort, put himself at the angle from
which he had formerly seen things; but it was with the effort of a man
climbing mountains after a sedentary life in the plain.

I tried to cut the talk short, but he kept coming back to it with
nervous insistence, forcing me into the last retrenchments of hypocrisy,
and anticipating the verdict I held back. I perceived that a great
deal--immensely more than I could see a reason for--had hung for him on
my opinion of his book.

Then, as suddenly, his insistence dropped and, as if ashamed of having
forced himself so long on my attention, he began to talk rapidly and
uninterestingly of other things.

We were alone again that evening, and after dinner, wishing to efface
the impression of the afternoon, and above all to show that I wanted him
to talk about himself, I reverted to his work. “You must need an outlet
of that sort. When a man’s once had it in him, as you have--and when
other things begin to dwindle--”

He laughed. “Your theory is that a man ought to be able to return to the
Muse as he comes back to his wife after he’s ceased to interest other
women?”

“No; as he comes back to his wife after the day’s work is done.” A new
thought came to me as I looked at him. “You ought to have had one,” I
added.

He laughed again. “A wife, you mean? So that there’d have been some one
waiting for me even if the Muse decamped?” He went on after a pause:
“I’ve a notion that the kind of woman worth coming back to wouldn’t
be much more patient than the Muse. But as it happens I never
tried--because, for fear they’d chuck me, I put them both out of doors
together.”

He turned his head and looked past me with a queer expression at the low
panelled door at my back. “Out of that very door they went--the two of
‘em, on a rainy night like this: and one stopped and looked back, to see
if I wasn’t going to call her--and I didn’t--and so they both went....”




III

“The Muse?” (said Merrick, refilling my glass and stooping to pat the
terrier as he went back to his chair)--“well, you’ve met the Muse in the
little volume of sonnets you used to like; and you’ve met the woman too,
and you used to like _her_; though you didn’t know her when you saw her
the other evening....

“No, I won’t ask you how she struck you when you talked to her: I know.
She struck you like that stuff I gave you to read last night. She’s
conformed--I’ve conformed--the mills have caught us and ground us:
ground us, oh, exceedingly small!

“But you remember what she was; and that’s the reason why I’m telling
you this now....

“You may recall that after my father’s death I tried to sell the Works.
I was impatient to free myself from anything that would keep me tied to
New York. I don’t dislike my trade, and I’ve made, in the end, a fairly
good thing of it; but industrialism was not, at that time, in the line
of my tastes, and I know now that it wasn’t what I was meant for.
Above all, I wanted to get away, to see new places and rub up against
different ideas. I had reached a time of life--the top of the first
hill, so to speak--where the distance draws one, and everything in the
foreground seems tame and stale. I was sick to death of the particular
set of conformities I had grown up among; sick of being a pleasant
popular young man with a long line of dinners on my list, and the dead
certainty of meeting the same people, or their prototypes, at all of
them.

“Well--I failed to sell the Works, and that increased my discontent.
I went through moods of cold unsociability, alternating with sudden
flushes of curiosity, when I gloated over stray scraps of talk overheard
in railway stations and omnibuses, when strange faces that I passed in
the street tantalized me with fugitive promises. I wanted to be among
things that were unexpected and unknown; and it seemed to me that nobody
about me understood in the least what I felt, but that somewhere just
out of reach there was some one who _did_, and whom I must find or
despair....

“It was just then that, one evening, I saw Mrs. Trant for the first
time.

“Yes: I know--you wonder what I mean. I’d known her, of course, as a
girl; I’d met her several times after her marriage; and I’d lately been
thrown with her, quite intimately and continuously, during a succession
of country-house visits. But I had never, as it happened, really _seen_
her....

“It was at a dinner at the Cumnors’; and there she was, in front of the
very tapestry we saw her against the other evening, with people about
her, and her face turned from me, and nothing noticeable or different
in her dress or manner; and suddenly she stood out for me against the
familiar unimportant background, and for the first time I saw a meaning
in the stale phrase of a picture’s walking out of its frame. For,
after all, most people _are_ just that to us: pictures, furniture, the
inanimate accessories of our little island-area of sensation. And then
sometimes one of these graven images moves and throws out live filaments
toward us, and the line they make draws us across the world as the
moon-track seems to draw a boat across the water....

“There she stood; and as this queer sensation came over me I felt
that she was looking steadily at me, that her eyes were voluntarily,
consciously resting on me with the weight of the very question I was
asking.

“I went over and joined her, and she turned and walked with me into the
music-room. Earlier in the evening some one had been singing, and
there were low lights there, and a few couples still sitting in those
confidential corners of which Mrs. Cumnor has the art; but we were under
no illusion as to the nature of these presences. We knew that they were
just painted in, and that the whole of life was in us two, flowing back
and forward between us. We talked, of course; we had the attitudes, even
the words, of the others: I remember her telling me her plans for the
spring and asking me politely about mine! As if there were the least
sense in plans, now that this thing had happened!

“When we went back into the drawing-room I had said nothing to her that
I might not have said to any other woman of the party; but when we shook
hands I knew we should meet the next day--and the next....

“That’s the way, I take it, that Nature has arranged the beginning of
the great enduring loves; and likewise of the little epidermal flurries.
And how is a man to know where he is going?

“From the first my feeling for Paulina Trant seemed to me a grave
business; but then the Enemy is given to producing that illusion. Many
a man--I’m talking of the kind with imagination--has thought he was
seeking a soul when all he wanted was a closer view of its tenement. And
I tried--honestly tried--to make myself think I was in the latter case.
Because, in the first place, I didn’t, just then, want a big disturbing
influence in my life; and because I didn’t want to be a dupe; and
because Paulina Trant was not, according to hearsay, the kind of woman
for whom it was worth while to bring up the big batteries....

“But my resistance was only half-hearted. What I really felt--_all_ I
really felt--was the flood of joy that comes of heightened emotion. She
had given me that, and I wanted her to give it to me again. That’s as
near as I’ve ever come to analyzing my state in the beginning.

“I knew her story, as no doubt you know it: the current version, I
mean. She had been poor and fond of enjoyment, and she had married that
pompous stick Philip Trant because she needed a home, and perhaps also
because she wanted a little luxury. Queer how we sneer at women for
wanting the thing that gives them half their attraction!

“People shook their heads over the marriage, and divided, prematurely,
into Philip’s partisans and hers: for no one thought it would work.
And they were almost disappointed when, after all, it did. She and her
wooden consort seemed to get on well enough. There was a ripple, at one
time, over her friendship with young Jim Dalham, who was always with her
during a summer at Newport and an autumn in Italy; then the talk died
out, and she and Trant were seen together, as before, on terms of
apparent good-fellowship.

“This was the more surprising because, from the first, Paulina had never
made the least attempt to change her tone or subdue her colours. In the
gray Trant atmosphere she flashed with prismatic fires. She smoked, she
talked subversively, she did as she liked and went where she chose, and
danced over the Trant prejudices and the Trant principles as if they’d
been a ball-room floor; and all without apparent offence to her solemn
husband and his cloud of cousins. I believe her frankness and directness
struck them dumb. She moved like a kind of primitive Una through the
virtuous rout, and never got a finger-mark on her freshness.

“One of the finest things about her was the fact that she never, for an
instant, used her situation as a means of enhancing her attraction. With
a husband like Trant it would have been so easy! He was a man who always
saw the small sides of big things. He thought most of life compressible
into a set of by-laws and the rest unmentionable; and with his stiff
frock-coated and tall-hatted mind, instinctively distrustful of
intelligences in another dress, with his arbitrary classification of
whatever he didn’t understand into ‘the kind of thing I don’t approve
of,’ ‘the kind of thing that isn’t done,’ and--deepest depth of
all--‘the kind of thing I’d rather not discuss,’ he lived in bondage to
a shadowy moral etiquette of which the complex rites and awful penalties
had cast an abiding gloom upon his manner.

“A woman like his wife couldn’t have asked a better foil; yet I’m sure
she never consciously used his dullness to relieve her brilliancy. She
may have felt that the case spoke for itself. But I believe her reserve
was rather due to a lively sense of justice, and to the rare habit (you
said she was rare) of looking at facts as they are, without any throwing
of sentimental lime-lights. She knew Trant could no more help being
Trant than she could help being herself--and there was an end of it.
I’ve never known a woman who ‘made up’ so little mentally....

“Perhaps her very reserve, the fierceness of her implicit rejection of
sympathy, exposed her the more to--well, to what happened when we met.
She said afterward that it was like having been shut up for months in
the hold of a ship, and coming suddenly on deck on a day that was all
flying blue and silver....

“I won’t try to tell you what she was. It’s easier to tell you what her
friendship made of me; and I can do that best by adopting her metaphor
of the ship. Haven’t you, sometimes, at the moment of starting on a
journey, some glorious plunge into the unknown, been tripped up by the
thought: ‘If only one hadn’t to come back’? Well, with her one had the
sense that one would never have to come back; that the magic ship, would
always carry one farther. And what an air one breathed on it! And, oh,
the wind, and the islands, and the sunsets!

“I said just now ‘her friendship’; and I used the word advisedly. Love
is deeper than friendship, but friendship is a good deal wider. The
beauty of our relation was that it included both dimensions. Our
thoughts met as naturally as our eyes: it was almost as if we loved each
other because we liked each other. The quality of a love may be tested
by the amount of friendship it contains, and in our case there was no
dividing line between loving and liking, no disproportion between them,
no barrier against which desire beat in vain or from which thought fell
back unsatisfied. Ours was a robust passion that could give an open-eyed
account of itself, and not a beautiful madness shrinking away from the
proof....

“For the first months friendship sufficed us, or rather gave us so much
by the way that we were in no hurry to reach what we knew it was
leading to. But we were moving there nevertheless, and one day we found
ourselves on the borders. It came about through a sudden decision of
Trant’s to start on a long tour with his wife. We had never foreseen
that: he seemed rooted in his New York habits and convinced that the
whole social and financial machinery of the metropolis would cease to
function if he did not keep an eye on it through the columns of his
morning paper, and pronounce judgment on it in the afternoon at his
club. But something new had happened to him: he caught a cold, which was
followed by a touch of pleurisy, and instantly he perceived the intense
interest and importance which ill-health may add to life. He took the
fullest advantage of it. A discerning doctor recommended travel in a
warm climate; and suddenly, the morning paper, the afternoon club, Fifth
Avenue, Wall Street, all the complex phenomena of the metropolis, faded
into insignificance, and the rest of the terrestrial globe, from being
a mere geographical hypothesis, useful in enabling one to determine the
latitude of New York, acquired reality and magnitude as a factor in the
convalescence of Mr. Philip Trant.

“His wife was absorbed in preparations for the journey. To move him
was like mobilizing an army, and weeks before the date set for their
departure it was almost as if she were already gone.

“This foretaste of separation showed us what we were to each other. Yet
I was letting her go--and there was no help for it, no way of preventing
it. Resistance was as useless as the vain struggles in a nightmare. She
was Trant’s and not mine: part of his luggage when he travelled as she
was part of his household furniture when he stayed at home....

“The day she told me that their passages were taken--it was on a
November afternoon, in her drawing-room in town--I turned away from her
and, going to the window, stood looking out at the torrent of traffic
interminably pouring down Fifth Avenue. I watched the senseless
machinery of life revolving in the rain and mud, and tried to picture
myself performing my small function in it after she had gone from me.

“‘It can’t be--it can’t be!’ I exclaimed.

“‘What can’t be?’

“I came back into the room and sat down by her. ‘This--this--’ I hadn’t
any words. ‘Two weeks!’ I said. ‘What’s two weeks?”

“She answered, vaguely, something about their thinking of Spain for the
spring--

“‘Two weeks--two weeks!’ I repeated. ‘And the months we’ve lost--the
days that belonged to us!’

“‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m thankful it’s settled.’

“Our words seemed irrelevant, haphazard. It was as if each were
answering a secret voice, and not what the other was saying.

“‘Don’t you _feel_ anything at all?’ I remember bursting out at her.
As I asked it the tears were streaming down her face. I felt angry with
her, and was almost glad to note that her lids were red and that she
didn’t cry becomingly. I can’t express my sensation to you except
by saying that she seemed part of life’s huge league against me. And
suddenly I thought of an afternoon we had spent together in the country,
on a ferny hill-side, when we had sat under a beech-tree, and her hand
had lain palm upward in the moss, close to mine, and I had watched a
little black-and-red beetle creeping over it....

“The bell rang, and we heard the voice of a visitor and the click of an
umbrella in the umbrella-stand.

“She rose to go into the inner drawing-room, and I caught her suddenly
by the wrist. ‘You understand,’ I said, ‘that we can’t go on like this?’

“‘I understand,’ she answered, and moved away to meet her visitor. As I
went out I heard her saying in the other room: ‘Yes, we’re really off on
the twelfth.’”




IV

“I wrote her a long letter that night, and waited two days for a reply.

“On the third day I had a brief line saying that she was going to spend
Sunday with some friends who had a place near Riverdale, and that she
would arrange to see me while she was there. That was all.

“It was on a Saturday that I received the note and I came out here the
same night. The next morning was rainy, and I was in despair, for I had
counted on her asking me to take her for a drive or a long walk. It was
hopeless to try to say what I had to say to her in the drawing-room of a
crowded country-house. And only eleven days were left!

“I stayed indoors all the morning, fearing to go out lest she should
telephone me. But no sign came, and I grew more and more restless and
anxious. She was too free and frank for coquetry, but her silence and
evasiveness made me feel that, for some reason, she did not wish to hear
what she knew I meant to say. Could it be that she was, after all, more
conventional, less genuine, than I had thought? I went again and again
over the whole maddening round of conjecture; but the only conclusion I
could rest in was that, if she loved me as I loved her, she would be as
determined as I was to let no obstacle come between us during the days
that were left.

“The luncheon-hour came and passed, and there was no word from her. I
had ordered my trap to be ready, so that I might drive over as soon as
she summoned me; but the hours dragged on, the early twilight came, and
I sat here in this very chair, or measured up and down, up and down, the
length of this very rug--and still there was no message and no letter.

“It had grown quite dark, and I had ordered away, impatiently, the
servant who came in with the lamps: I couldn’t _bear_ any definite sign
that the day was over! And I was standing there on the rug, staring at
the door, and noticing a bad crack in its panel, when I heard the
sound of wheels on the gravel. A word at last, no doubt--a line to
explain.... I didn’t seem to care much for her reasons, and I stood
where I was and continued to stare at the door. And suddenly it opened
and she came in.

“The servant followed her with a light, and then went out and closed the
door. Her face looked pale in the lamplight, but her voice was as clear
as a bell.

“‘Well,’ she said, ‘you see I’ve come.’

“I started toward her with hands outstretched. ‘You’ve come--you’ve
come!’ I stammered.

“Yes; it was like her to come in that way--without dissimulation or
explanation or excuse. It was like her, if she gave at all, to give not
furtively or in haste, but openly, deliberately, without stinting
the measure or counting the cost. But her quietness and serenity
disconcerted me. She did not look like a woman who has yielded
impetuously to an uncontrollable impulse. There was something almost
solemn in her face.

“The effect of it stole over me as I looked at her, suddenly subduing
the huge flush of gratified longing.

“‘You’re here, here, here!’ I kept repeating, like a child singing over
a happy word.

“‘You said,’ she continued, in her grave clear voice, ‘that we couldn’t
go on as we were--’

“‘Ah, it’s divine of you!’ I held out my arms to her.

“She didn’t draw back from them, but her faint smile said, ‘Wait,’ and
lifting her hands she took the pins from her hat, and laid the hat on
the table.

“As I saw her dear head bare in the lamp-light, with the thick hair
waving away from the parting, I forgot everything but the bliss and
wonder of her being here--here, in my house, on my hearth--that
fourth rose from the corner of the rug is the exact spot where she was
standing....

“I drew her to the fire, and made her sit down in the chair you’re in,
and knelt down by her, and hid my face on her knees. She put her hand on
my head, and I was happy to the depths of my soul.

“‘Oh, I forgot--’ she exclaimed suddenly. I lifted my head and our eyes
met. Hers were smiling.

“She reached out her hand, opened the little bag she had tossed down
with her hat, and drew a small object from it. ‘I left my trunk at the
station. Here’s the check. Can you send for it?’ she asked.

“Her trunk--she wanted me to send for her trunk! Oh, yes--I see your
smile, your ‘lucky man!’ Only, you see, I didn’t love her in that way.
I knew she couldn’t come to my house without running a big risk of
discovery, and my tenderness for her, my impulse to shield her, was
stronger, even then, than vanity or desire. Judged from the point of
view of those emotions I fell terribly short of my part. I hadn’t any
of the proper feelings. Such an act of romantic folly was so unlike her
that it almost irritated me, and I found myself desperately wondering
how I could get her to reconsider her plan without--well, without
seeming to want her to.

“It’s not the way a novel hero feels; it’s probably not the way a man in
real life ought to have felt. But it’s the way I felt--and she saw it.

“She put her hands on my shoulders and looked at me with deep, deep
eyes. ‘Then you didn’t expect me to stay?’ she asked.

“I caught her hands and pressed them to me, stammering out that I hadn’t
dared to dream....

“‘You thought I’d come--just for an hour?’

“‘How could I dare think more? I adore you, you know, for what
you’ve done! But it would be known if you--if you stayed on. My
servants--everybody about here knows you. I’ve no right to expose you to
the risk.’ She made no answer, and I went on tenderly: ‘Give me, if you
will, the next few hours: there’s a train that will get you to town by
midnight. And then we’ll arrange something--in town--where it’s safer
for you--more easily managed.... It’s beautiful, it’s heavenly of you
to have come; but I love you too much--I must take care of you and think
for you--’

“I don’t suppose it ever took me so long to say so few words, and
though they were profoundly sincere they sounded unutterably shallow,
irrelevant and grotesque. She made no effort to help me out, but sat
silent, listening, with her meditative smile. ‘It’s my duty, dearest, as
a man,’ I rambled on. The more I love you the more I’m bound--’

“‘Yes; but you don’t understand,’ she interrupted.

“She rose as she spoke, and I got up also, and we stood and looked at
each other.

“‘I haven’t come for a night; if you want me I’ve come for always,’ she
said.

“Here again, if I give you an honest account of my feelings I shall
write myself down as the poor-spirited creature I suppose I am. There
wasn’t, I swear, at the moment, a grain of selfishness, of personal
reluctance, in my feeling. I worshipped every hair of her head--when we
were together I was happy, when I was away from her something was gone
from every good thing; but I had always looked on our love for each
other, our possible relation to each other, as such situations are
looked on in what is called society. I had supposed her, for all her
freedom and originality, to be just as tacitly subservient to that view
as I was: ready to take what she wanted on the terms on which society
concedes such taking, and to pay for it by the usual restrictions,
concealments and hypocrisies. In short, I supposed that she would ‘play
the game’--look out for her own safety, and expect me to look out for
it. It sounds cheap enough, put that way--but it’s the rule we live
under, all of us. And the amazement of finding her suddenly outside of
it, oblivious of it, unconscious of it, left me, for an awful minute,
stammering at her like a graceless dolt.... Perhaps it wasn’t even a
minute; but in it she had gone the whole round of my thoughts.

“‘It’s raining,’ she said, very low. ‘I suppose you can telephone for a
trap?’

“There was no irony or resentment in her voice. She walked slowly across
the room and paused before the Brangwyn etching over there. ‘That’s a
good impression. _Will_ you telephone, please?’ she repeated.

“I found my voice again, and with it the power of movement. I followed
her and dropped at her feet. ‘You can’t go like this!’ I cried.

“She looked down on me from heights and heights. ‘I can’t stay like
this,’ she answered.

“I stood up and we faced each other like antagonists. ‘You don’t know,’
I accused her passionately, ‘in the least what you’re asking me to ask
of you!’

“‘Yes, I do: _everything_,’ she breathed.

“‘And it’s got to be that or nothing?’

“‘Oh, on both sides,’ she reminded me.

“‘_Not_ on both sides. It’s not fair. That’s why--’

“‘Why you won’t?’

“‘Why I cannot--may not!’

“‘Why you’ll take a night and not a life?’

“The taunt, for a woman usually so sure of her aim, fell so short of
the mark that its only effect was to increase my conviction of her
helplessness. The very intensity of my longing for her made me tremble
where she was fearless. I had to protect her first, and think of my own
attitude afterward.

“She was too discerning not to see this too. Her face softened, grew
inexpressibly appealing, and she dropped again into that chair you’re
in, leaned forward, and looked up with her grave smile.

“‘You think I’m beside myself--raving? (You’re not thinking of yourself,
I know.) I’m not: I never was saner. Since I’ve known you I’ve often
thought this might happen. This thing between us isn’t an ordinary
thing. If it had been we shouldn’t, all these months, have drifted. We
should have wanted to skip to the last page--and then throw down the
book. We shouldn’t have felt we could _trust_ the future as we did. We
were in no hurry because we knew we shouldn’t get tired; and when two
people feel that about each other they must live together--or part. I
don’t see what else they can do. A little trip along the coast won’t
answer. It’s the high seas--or else being tied up to Lethe wharf. And
I’m for the high seas, my dear!’

“Think of sitting here--here, in this room, in this chair--and listening
to that, and seeing the tight on her hair, and hearing the sound of her
voice! I don’t suppose there ever was a scene just like it....

“She was astounding--inexhaustible; through all my anguish of resistance
I found a kind of fierce joy in following her. It was lucidity at white
heat: the last sublimation of passion. She might have been an angel
arguing a point in the empyrean if she hadn’t been, so completely, a
woman pleading for her life....

“Her life: that was the thing at stake! She couldn’t do with less of it
than she was capable of; and a woman’s life is inextricably part of the
man’s she cares for.

“That was why, she argued, she couldn’t accept the usual solution:
couldn’t enter into the only relation that society tolerates between
people situated like ourselves. Yes: she knew all the arguments on
_that_ side: didn’t I suppose she’d been over them and over them? She
knew (for hadn’t she often said it of others?) what is said of the woman
who, by throwing in her lot with her lover’s, binds him to a lifelong
duty which has the irksomeness without the dignity of marriage. Oh,
she could talk on that side with the best of them: only she asked me to
consider the other--the side of the man and woman who love each other
deeply and completely enough to want their lives enlarged, and not
diminished, by their love. What, in such a case--she reasoned--must be
the inevitable effect of concealing, denying, disowning, the central
fact, the motive power of one’s existence? She asked me to picture the
course of such a love: first working as a fever in the blood, distorting
and deflecting everything, making all other interests insipid, all other
duties irksome, and then, as the acknowledged claims of life regained
their hold, gradually dying--the poor starved passion!--for want of the
wholesome necessary food of common living and doing, yet leaving life
impoverished by the loss of all it might have been.

“‘I’m not talking, dear--’ I see her now, leaning toward me with shining
eyes: ‘I’m not talking of the people who haven’t enough to fill their
days, and to whom a little mystery, a little manoeuvring, gives an
illusion of importance that they can’t afford to miss; I’m talking of
you and me, with all our tastes and curiosities and activities; and I
ask you what our love would become if we had to keep it apart from our
lives, like a pretty useless animal that we went to peep at and feed
with sweetmeats through its cage?’

“I won’t, my dear fellow, go into the other side of our strange duel:
the arguments I used were those that most men in my situation would
have felt bound to use, and that most women in Paulina’s accept
instinctively, without even formulating them. The exceptionalness, the
significance, of the case lay wholly in the fact that she had formulated
them all and then rejected them....

“There was one point I didn’t, of course, touch on; and that was the
popular conviction (which I confess I shared) that when a man and a
woman agree to defy the world together the man really sacrifices much
more than the woman. I was not even conscious of thinking of this at the
time, though it may have lurked somewhere in the shadow of my scruples
for her; but she dragged it out into the daylight and held me face to
face with it.

“‘Remember, I’m not attempting to lay down any general rule,’ she
insisted; ‘I’m not theorizing about Man and Woman, I’m talking about you
and me. How do I know what’s best for the woman in the next house? Very
likely she’ll bolt when it would have been better for her to stay at
home. And it’s the same with the man: he’ll probably do the wrong thing.
It’s generally the weak heads that commit follies, when it’s the strong
ones that ought to: and my point is that you and I are both strong
enough to behave like fools if we want to....

“‘Take your own case first--because, in spite of the sentimentalists,
it’s the man who stands to lose most. You’ll have to give up the Iron
Works: which you don’t much care about--because it won’t be particularly
agreeable for us to live in New York: which you don’t care much about
either. But you won’t be sacrificing what is called “a career.” You made
up your mind long ago that your best chance of self-development, and
consequently of general usefulness, lay in thinking rather than doing;
and, when we first met, you were already planning to sell out your
business, and travel and write. Well! Those ambitions are of a kind
that won’t be harmed by your dropping out of your social setting. On
the contrary, such work as you want to do ought to gain by it,
because you’ll be brought nearer to life-as-it-is, in contrast to
life-as-a-visiting-list....’

“She threw back her head with a sudden laugh. ‘And the joy of not having
any more visits to make! I wonder if you’ve ever thought of _that?_ Just
at first, I mean; for society’s getting so deplorably lax that, little
by little, it will edge up to us--you’ll see! I don’t want to idealize
the situation, dearest, and I won’t conceal from you that in time we
shall be called on. But, oh, the fun we shall have had in the interval!
And then, for the first time we shall be able to dictate our own terms,
one of which will be that no bores need apply. Think of being cured of
all one’s chronic bores! We shall feel as jolly as people do after a
successful operation.’

“I don’t know why this nonsense sticks in my mind when some of the
graver things we said are less distinct. Perhaps it’s because of a
certain iridescent quality of feeling that made her gaiety seem like
sunshine through a shower....

“‘You ask me to think of myself?’ she went on. ‘But the beauty of our
being together will be that, for the first time, I shall dare to! Now
I have to think of all the tedious trifles I can pack the days with,
because I’m afraid--I’m afraid--to hear the voice of the real me, down
below, in the windowless underground hole where I keep her....

“‘Remember again, please, it’s not Woman, it’s Paulina Trant,
I’m talking of. The woman in the next house may have all sorts of
reasons--honest reasons--for staying there. There may be some one
there who needs her badly: for whom the light would go out if she went.
Whereas to Philip I’ve been simply--well, what New York was before he
decided to travel: the most important thing in life till he made up his
mind to leave it; and now merely the starting-place of several lines of
steamers. Oh, I didn’t have to love you to know that! I only had to live
with _him_.... If he lost his eye-glasses he’d think it was the fault of
the eye-glasses; he’d really feel that the eyeglasses had been careless.
And he’d be convinced that no others would suit him quite as well.
But at the optician’s he’d probably be told that he needed something a
little different, and after that he’d feel that the old eye-glasses had
never suited him at all, and that _that_ was their fault too....’

“At one moment--but I don’t recall when--I remember she stood up with
one of her quick movements, and came toward me, holding out her arms.
‘Oh, my dear, I’m pleading for my life; do you suppose I shall ever want
for arguments?’ she cried....

“After that, for a bit, nothing much remains with me except a sense of
darkness and of conflict. The one spot of daylight in my whirling brain
was the conviction that I couldn’t--whatever happened--profit by the
sudden impulse she had acted on, and allow her to take, in a moment of
passion, a decision that was to shape her whole life. I couldn’t so
much as lift my little finger to keep her with me then, unless I were
prepared to accept for her as well as for myself the full consequences
of the future she had planned for us....

“Well--there’s the point: I wasn’t. I felt in her--poor fatuous idiot
that I was!--that lack of objective imagination which had always seemed
to me to account, at least in part, for many of the so-called heroic
qualities in women. When their feelings are involved they simply can’t
look ahead. Her unfaltering logic notwithstanding, I felt this about
Paulina as I listened. She had a specious air of knowing where she was
going, but she didn’t. She seemed the genius of logic and understanding,
but the demon of illusion spoke through her lips....

“I said just now that I hadn’t, at the outset, given my own side of the
case a thought. It would have been truer to say that I hadn’t given it a
_separate_ thought. But I couldn’t think of her without seeing myself as
a factor--the chief factor--in her problem, and without recognizing that
whatever the experiment made of me, that it must fatally, in the end,
make of her. If I couldn’t carry the thing through she must break
down with me: we should have to throw our separate selves into
the melting-pot of this mad adventure, and be ‘one’ in a terrible
indissoluble completeness of which marriage is only an imperfect
counterpart....

“There could be no better proof of her extraordinary power over me, and
of the way she had managed to clear the air of sentimental illusion,
than the fact that I presently found myself putting this before her with
a merciless precision of touch.

“‘If we love each other enough to do a thing like this, we must love
each other enough to see just what it is we’re going to do.’

“So I invited her to the dissecting-table, and I see now the fearless
eye with which she approached the cadaver. ‘For that’s what it is, you
know,’ she flashed out at me, at the end of my long demonstration. ‘It’s
a dead body, like all the instances and examples and hypothetical cases
that ever were! What do you expect to learn from that? The first great
anatomist was the man who stuck his knife in a heart that was beating;
and the only way to find out what doing a thing will be like is to do
it!’

“She looked away from me suddenly, as if she were fixing her eyes on
some vision on the outer rim of consciousness. ‘No: there’s one other
way,’ she exclaimed; ‘and that is, _not_ to do it! To abstain and
refrain; and then see what we become, or what we don’t become, in
the long run, and to draw our inferences. That’s the game that almost
everybody about us is playing, I suppose; there’s hardly one of the dull
people one meets at dinner who hasn’t had, just once, the chance of a
berth on a ship that was off for the Happy Isles, and hasn’t refused it
for fear of sticking on a sand-bank!

“‘I’m doing my best, you know,’ she continued, ‘to see the sequel as
you see it, as you believe it’s your duty to me to see it. I know the
instances you’re thinking of: the listless couples wearing out their
lives in shabby watering places, and hanging on the favour of hotel
acquaintances; or the proud quarrelling wretches shut up alone in a fine
house because they’re too good for the only society they can get, and
trying to cheat their boredom by squabbling with their tradesmen and
spying on their servants. No doubt there are such cases; but I don’t
recognize either of us in those dismal figures. Why, to do it would be
to admit that our life, yours and mine, is in the people about us
and not in ourselves; that we’re parasites and not self-sustaining
creatures; and that the lives we’re leading now are so brilliant, full
and satisfying that what we should have to give up would surpass even
the blessedness of being together!’

“At that stage, I confess, the solid ground of my resistance began to
give way under me. It was not that my convictions were shaken, but that
she had swept me into a world whose laws were different, where one could
reach out in directions that the slave of gravity hasn’t pictured. But
at the same time my opposition hardened from reason into instinct. I
knew it was her voice, and not her logic, that was unsettling me. I knew
that if she’d written out her thesis and sent it me by post I should
have made short work of it; and again the part of me which I called
by all the finest names: my chivalry, my unselfishness, my superior
masculine experience, cried out with one voice: ‘You can’t let a woman
use her graces to her own undoing--you can’t, for her own sake, let her
eyes convince you when her reasons don’t!’

“And then, abruptly, and for the first time, a doubt entered me: a
doubt of her perfect moral honesty. I don’t know how else to describe
my feeling that she wasn’t playing fair, that in coming to my house, in
throwing herself at my head (I called things by their names), she
had perhaps not so much obeyed an irresistible impulse as deeply,
deliberately reckoned on the dissolvent effect of her generosity, her
rashness and her beauty....

“From the moment that this mean doubt raised its head in me I was once
more the creature of all the conventional scruples: I was repeating,
before the looking-glass of my self-consciousness, all the stereotyped
gestures of the ‘man of honour.’... Oh, the sorry figure I must have
cut! You’ll understand my dropping the curtain on it as quickly as I
can....

“Yet I remember, as I made my point, being struck by its impressiveness.
I was suffering and enjoying my own suffering. I told her that, whatever
step we decided to take, I owed it to her to insist on its being taken
soberly, deliberately--

“[‘No: it’s “advisedly,” isn’t it? Oh, I was thinking of the Marriage
Service,’ she interposed with a faint laugh.)

“--that if I accepted, there, on the spot, her headlong beautiful gift
of herself, I should feel I had taken an unfair advantage of her, an
advantage which she would be justified in reproaching me with afterward;
that I was not afraid to tell her this because she was intelligent
enough to know that my scruples were the surest proof of the quality of
my love; that I refused to owe my happiness to an unconsidered impulse;
that we must see each other again, in her own house, in less agitating
circumstances, when she had had time to reflect on my words, to study
her heart and look into the future....

“The factitious exhilaration produced by uttering these beautiful
sentiments did not last very long, as you may imagine. It fell, little
by little, under her quiet gaze, a gaze in which there was neither
contempt nor irony nor wounded pride, but only a tender wistfulness of
interrogation; and I think the acutest point in my suffering was reached
when she said, as I ended: ‘Oh; yes, of course I understand.’

“‘If only you hadn’t come to me here!’ I blurted out in the torture of
my soul.

“She was on the threshold when I said it, and she turned and laid her
hand gently on mine. ‘There was no other way,’ she said; and at the
moment it seemed to me like some hackneyed phrase in a novel that she
had used without any sense of its meaning.

“I don’t remember what I answered or what more we either of us said. At
the end a desperate longing to take her in my arms and keep her with me
swept aside everything else, and I went up to her, pleading, stammering,
urging I don’t know what.... But she held me back with a quiet look,
and went. I had ordered the carriage, as she asked me to; and my last
definite recollection is of watching her drive off in the rain....

“I had her promise that she would see me, two days later, at her house
in town, and that we should then have what I called ‘a decisive talk’;
but I don’t think that even at the moment I was the dupe of my phrase. I
knew, and she knew, that the end had come....”




V

“It was about that time (Merrick went on after a long pause) that I
definitely decided not to sell the Works, but to stick to my job and
conform my life to it.

“I can’t describe to you the rage of conformity that possessed me.
Poetry, ideas--all the picture-making processes stopped. A kind of dull
self-discipline seemed to me the only exercise worthy of a reflecting
mind. I _had_ to justify my great refusal, and I tried to do it by
plunging myself up to the eyes into the very conditions I had been
instinctively struggling to get away from. The only possible consolation
would have been to find in a life of business routine and social
submission such moral compensations as may reward the citizen if they
fail the man; but to attain to these I should have had to accept the
old delusion that the social and the individual man are two. Now, on
the contrary, I found soon enough that I couldn’t get one part of my
machinery to work effectively while another wanted feeding: and that in
rejecting what had seemed to me a negation of action I had made all my
action negative.

“The best solution, of course, would have been to fall in love with
another woman; but it was long before I could bring myself to wish that
this might happen to me.... Then, at length, I suddenly and violently
desired it; and as such impulses are seldom without some kind of
imperfect issue I contrived, a year or two later, to work myself up into
the wished-for state.... She was a woman in society, and with all
the awe of that institution that Paulina lacked. Our relation was
consequently one of those unavowed affairs in which triviality is the
only alternative to tragedy. Luckily we had, on both sides, risked only
as much as prudent people stake in a drawingroom game; and when the
match was over I take it that we came out fairly even.

“My gain, at all events, was of an unexpected kind. The adventure
had served only to make me understand Paulina’s abhorrence of such
experiments, and at every turn of the slight intrigue I had felt how
exasperating and belittling such a relation was bound to be between two
people who, had they been free, would have mated openly. And so from a
brief phase of imperfect forgetting I was driven back to a deeper and
more understanding remembrance....

“This second incarnation of Paulina was one of the strangest episodes
of the whole strange experience. Things she had said during our
extraordinary talk, things I had hardly heard at the time, came back to
me with singular vividness and a fuller meaning. I hadn’t any longer
the cold consolation of believing in my own perspicacity: I saw that her
insight had been deeper and keener than mine.

“I remember, in particular, starting up in bed one sleepless night as
there flashed into my head the meaning of her last words: ‘There was
no other way’; the phrase I had half-smiled at at the time, as a
parrot-like echo of the novel-heroine’s stock farewell. I had never, up
to that moment, wholly understood why Paulina had come to my house that
night. I had never been able to make that particular act--which could
hardly, in the light of her subsequent conduct, be dismissed as a blind
surge of passion--square with my conception of her character. She was
at once the most spontaneous and the steadiest-minded woman I had
ever known, and the last to wish to owe any advantage to surprise, to
unpreparedness, to any play on the spring of sex. The better I came,
retrospectively, to know her, the more sure I was of this, and the less
intelligible her act appeared. And then, suddenly, after a night of
hungry restless thinking, the flash of enlightenment came. She had come
to my house, had brought her trunk with her, had thrown herself at my
head with all possible violence and publicity, in order to give me a
pretext, a loophole, an honourable excuse, for doing and saying--why,
precisely what I had said and done!

“As the idea came to me it was as if some ironic hand had touched an
electric button, and all my fatuous phrases had leapt out on me in fire.

“Of course she had known all along just the kind of thing I should
say if I didn’t at once open my arms to her; and to save my pride, my
dignity, my conception of the figure I was cutting in her eyes, she had
recklessly and magnificently provided me with the decentest pretext a
man could have for doing a pusillanimous thing....

“With that discovery the whole case took a different aspect. It hurt
less to think of Paulina--and yet it hurt more. The tinge of bitterness,
of doubt, in my thoughts of her had had a tonic quality. It was harder
to go on persuading myself that I had done right as, bit by bit, my
theories crumbled under the test of time. Yet, after all, as she herself
had said, one could judge of results only in the long run....

“The Trants stayed away for two years; and about a year after they got
back, you may remember, Trant was killed in a railway accident. You know
Fate’s way of untying a knot after everybody has given up tugging at it!

“Well--there I was, completely justified: all my weaknesses turned into
merits! I had ‘saved’ a weak woman from herself, I had kept her to the
path of duty, I had spared her the humiliation of scandal and the misery
of self-reproach; and now I had only to put out my hand and take my
reward.

“I had avoided Paulina since her return, and she had made no effort to
see me. But after Trant’s death I wrote her a few lines, to which she
sent a friendly answer; and when a decent interval had elapsed, and I
asked if I might call on her, she answered at once that she would see
me.

“I went to her house with the fixed intention of asking her to marry
me--and I left it without having done so. Why? I don’t know that I can
tell you. Perhaps you would have had to sit there opposite her, knowing
what I did and feeling as I did, to understand why. She was kind, she
was compassionate--I could see she didn’t want to make it hard for me.
Perhaps she even wanted to make it easy. But there, between us, was the
memory of the gesture I hadn’t made, forever parodying the one I was
attempting! There wasn’t a word I could think of that hadn’t an echo in
it of words of hers I had been deaf to; there wasn’t an appeal I could
make that didn’t mock the appeal I had rejected. I sat there and talked
of her husband’s death, of her plans, of my sympathy; and I knew she
understood; and knowing that, in a way, made it harder.... The door-bell
rang and the footman came in to ask if she would receive other visitors.
She looked at me a moment and said ‘Yes,’ and I got up and shook hands
and went away.

“A few days later she sailed for Europe, and the next time we met she
had married Reardon....”




VI

It was long past midnight, and the terrier’s hints became imperious.

Merrick rose from his chair, pushed back a fallen log and put up the
fender. He walked across the room and stared a moment at the Brangwyn
etching before which Paulina Trant had paused at a memorable turn of
their talk. Then he came back and laid his hand on my shoulder.

“She summed it all up, you know, when she said that one way of finding
out whether a risk is worth taking is _not_ to take it, and then to see
what one becomes in the long run, and draw one’s inferences. The long
run--well, we’ve run it, she and I. I know what I’ve become, but that’s
nothing to the misery of knowing what she’s become. She had to have some
kind of life, and she married Reardon. Reardon’s a very good fellow in
his way; but the worst of it is that it’s not her way....

“No: the worst of it is that now she and I meet as friends. We dine at
the same houses, we talk about the same people, we play bridge together,
and I lend her books. And sometimes Reardon slaps me on the back and
says: ‘Come in and dine with us, old man! What you want is to be cheered
up!’ And I go and dine with them, and he tells me how jolly comfortable
she makes him, and what an ass I am not to marry; and she presses on
me a second helping of _poulet Maryland_, and I smoke one of Reardon’s
cigars, and at half-past ten I get into my overcoat, and walk back alone
to my rooms....”



THE END


ARTEMIS TO ACTAEON ***




Produced by Charles Aldarondo.









ARTEMIS TO ACTAEON

AND OTHER VERSE


BY EDITH WHARTON



NEW YORK

1909






CONTENTS


Part I--

  ARTEMIS TO ACTAEON
  LIFE
  VESALIUS IN ZANTE
  MARGARET OF CORTONA
  A TORCHBEARER

Part II--

  THE MORTAL LEASE
  EXPERIENCE
  GRIEF
  CHARTRES
  TWO BACKGROUNDS
  THE TOMB OF ILARIA GIUNIGI
  THE ONE GRIEF
  THE EUMENIDES

Part III--

  ORPHEUS
  AN AUTUMN SUNSET
  MOONRISE OVER TYRINGHAM
  ALL SOULS
  ALL SAINTS
  THE OLD POLE STAR
  A GRAVE
  NON DOLET!
  A HUNTING-SONG
  SURVIVAL
  USES
  A MEETING





  I

  ARTEMIS TO ACTAEON


  THOU couldst not look on me and live: so runs
  The mortal legend--thou that couldst not live
  Nor look on me (so the divine decree)!
  That saw'st me in the cloud, the wave, the bough,
  The clod commoved with April, and the shapes
  Lurking 'twixt lid and eye-ball in the dark.
  Mocked I thee not in every guise of life,
  Hid in girls' eyes, a naiad in her well,
  Wooed through their laughter, and like echo fled,
  Luring thee down the primal silences
  Where the heart hushes and the flesh is dumb?
  Nay, was not I the tide that drew thee out
  Relentlessly from the detaining shore,
  Forth from the home-lights and the hailing voices,
  Forth from the last faint headland's failing line,
  Till I enveloped thee from verge to verge
  And hid thee in the hollow of my being?
  And still, because between us hung the veil,
  The myriad-tinted veil of sense, thy feet
  Refused their rest, thy hands the gifts of life,
  Thy heart its losses, lest some lesser face
  Should blur mine image in thine upturned soul
  Ere death had stamped it there. This was thy thought.
  And mine?

  The gods, they say, have all: not so!
  This have they--flocks on every hill, the blue
  Spirals of incense and the amber drip
  Of lucid honey-comb on sylvan shrines,
  First-chosen weanlings, doves immaculate,
  Twin-cooing in the osier-plaited cage,
  And ivy-garlands glaucous with the dew:
  Man's wealth, man's servitude, but not himself!
  And so they pale, for lack of warmth they wane,
  Freeze to the marble of their images,
  And, pinnacled on man's subserviency,
  Through the thick sacrificial haze discern
  Unheeding lives and loves, as some cold peak
  Through icy mists may enviously descry
  Warm vales unzoned to the all-fruitful sun.
  So they along an immortality
  Of endless-envistaed homage strain their gaze,
  If haply some rash votary, empty-urned,
  But light of foot, with all-adventuring hand,
  Break rank, fling past the people and the priest,
  Up the last step, on to the inmost shrine,
  And there, the sacred curtain in his clutch,
  Drop dead of seeing--while the others prayed!
  Yes, this we wait for, this renews us, this
  Incarnates us, pale people of your dreams,
  Who are but what you make us, wood or stone,
  Or cold chryselephantine hung with gems,
  Or else the beating purpose of your life,
  Your sword, your clay, the note your pipe pursues,
  The face that haunts your pillow, or the light
  Scarce visible over leagues of labouring sea!
  _O thus through use to reign again, to drink_
  _The cup of peradventure to the lees,_
  _For one dear instant disimmortalised_
  _In giving immortality!_
  So dream the gods upon their listless thrones.
  Yet sometimes, when the votary appears,
  With death-affronting forehead and glad eyes,
  _Too young_, they rather muse, _too frail thou art,_
  _And shall we rob some girl of saffron veil_
  _And nuptial garland for so slight a thing?_
  And so to their incurious loves return.

  Not so with thee; for some indeed there are
  Who would behold the truth and then return
  To pine among the semblances--but I
  Divined in thee the questing foot that never
  Revisits the cold hearth of yesterday
  Or calls achievement home. I from afar
  Beheld thee fashioned for one hour's high use,
  Nor meant to slake oblivion drop by drop.
  Long, long hadst thou inhabited my dreams,
  Surprising me as harts surprise a pool,
  Stealing to drink at midnight; I divined
  Thee rash to reach the heart of life, and lie
  Bosom to bosom in occasion's arms.
  And said: _Because I love thee thou shalt die!_

  For immortality is not to range
  Unlimited through vast Olympian days,
  Or sit in dull dominion over time;
  But this--to drink fate's utmost at a draught,
  Nor feel the wine grow stale upon the lip,
  To scale the summit of some soaring moment,
  Nor know the dulness of the long descent,
  To snatch the crown of life and seal it up
  Secure forever in the vaults of death!

  And this was thine: to lose thyself in me,
  Relive in my renewal, and become
  The light of other lives, a quenchless torch
  Passed on from hand to hand, till men are dust
  And the last garland withers from my shrine.




  LIFE


  NAY, lift me to thy lips, Life, and once more
  Pour the wild music through me--

  I quivered in the reed-bed with my kind,
  Rooted in Lethe-bank, when at the dawn
  There came a groping shape of mystery
  Moving among us, that with random stroke
  Severed, and rapt me from my silent tribe,
  Pierced, fashioned, lipped me, sounding for a voice,
  Laughing on Lethe-bank--and in my throat
  I felt the wing-beat of the fledgeling notes,
  The bubble of godlike laughter in my throat.

  Such little songs she sang,
  Pursing her lips to fit the tiny pipe,
  They trickled from me like a slender spring
  That strings frail wood-growths on its crystal thread,
  Nor dreams of glassing cities, bearing ships.
  She sang, and bore me through the April world
  Matching the birds, doubling the insect-hum
  In the meadows, under the low-moving airs,
  And breathings of the scarce-articulate air
  When it makes mouths of grasses--but when the sky
  Burst into storm, and took great trees for pipes,
  She thrust me in her breast, and warm beneath
  Her cloudy vesture, on her terrible heart,
  I shook, and heard the battle.

  But more oft,
  Those early days, we moved in charmed woods,
  Where once, at dusk, she piped against a faun,
  And one warm dawn a tree became a nymph
  Listening; and trembled; and Life laughed and passed.
  And once we came to a great stream that bore
  The stars upon its bosom like a sea,
  And ships like stars; so to the sea we came.
  And there she raised me to her lips, and sent
  One swift pang through me; then refrained her hand,
  And whispered: "Hear--" and into my frail flanks,
  Into my bursting veins, the whole sea poured
  Its spaces and its thunder; and I feared.

  We came to cities, and Life piped on me
  Low calls to dreaming girls,
  In counting-house windows, through the chink of gold,
  Flung cries that fired the captive brain of youth,
  And made the heavy merchant at his desk
  Curse us for a cracked hurdy-gurdy; Life
  Mimicked the hurdy-gurdy, and we passed.

  We climbed the slopes of solitude, and there
  Life met a god, who challenged her and said:
  "Thy pipe against my lyre!" But "Wait!" she laughed,
  And in my live flank dug a finger-hole,
  And wrung new music from it. Ah, the pain!

  We climbed and climbed, and left the god behind.
  We saw the earth spread vaster than the sea,
  With infinite surge of mountains surfed with snow,
  And a silence that was louder than the deep;
  But on the utmost pinnacle Life again
  Hid me, and I heard the terror in her hair.

  Safe in new vales, I ached for the old pang,
  And clamoured "Play me against a god again!"
  "Poor Marsyas-mortal--he shall bleed thee yet,"
  She breathed and kissed me, stilling the dim need.
  But evermore it woke, and stabbed my flank
  With yearnings for new music and new pain.
  "Another note against another god!"
  I clamoured; and she answered: "Bide my time.
  Of every heart-wound I will make a stop,
  And drink thy life in music, pang by pang,
  But first thou must yield the notes I stored in thee
  At dawn beside the river. Take my lips."

  She kissed me like a lover, but I wept,
  Remembering that high song against the god,
  And the old songs slept in me, and I was dumb.

  We came to cavernous foul places, blind
  With harpy-wings, and sulphurous with the glare
  Of sinful furnaces--where hunger toiled,
  And pleasure gathered in a starveling prey,
  And death fed delicately on young bones.

  "Now sing!" cried Life, and set her lips to me.
  "Here are gods also. Wilt thou pipe for Dis?"
  My cry was drowned beneath the furnace roar,
  Choked by the sulphur-fumes; and beast-lipped gods
  Laughed down on me, and mouthed the flutes of hell.

  "Now sing!" said Life, reissuing to the stars;
  And wrung a new note from my wounded side.

  So came we to clear spaces, and the sea.
  And now I felt its volume in my heart,
  And my heart waxed with it, and Life played on me
  The song of the Infinite. "Now the stars," she said.

  Then from the utmost pinnacle again
  She poured me on the wild sidereal stream,
  And I grew with her great breathings, till we swept
  The interstellar spaces like new worlds
  Loosed from the fiery ruin of a star.

  Cold, cold we rested on black peaks again,
  Under black skies, under a groping wind;
  And Life, grown old, hugged me to a numb breast,
  Pressing numb lips against me. Suddenly
  A blade of silver severed the black peaks
  From the black sky, and earth was born again,
  Breathing and various, under a god's feet.
  A god! A god! I felt the heart of Life
  Leap under me, and my cold flanks shook again.
  He bore no lyre, he rang no challenge out,
  But Life warmed to him, warming me with her,
  And as he neared I felt beneath her hands
  The stab of a new wound that sucked my soul
  Forth in a new song from my throbbing throat.

  "His name--his name?" I whispered, but she shed
  The music faster, and I grew with it,
  Became a part of it, while Life and I
  Clung lip to lip, and I from her wrung song
  As she from me, one song, one ecstasy,
  In indistinguishable union blent,
  Till she became the flute and I the player.
  And lo! the song I played on her was more
  Than any she had drawn from me; it held
  The stars, the peaks, the cities, and the sea,
  The faun's catch, the nymph's tremor, and the heart
  Of dreaming girls, of toilers at the desk,
  Apollo's challenge on the sunrise slope,
  And the hiss of the night-gods mouthing flutes of hell--
  All, to the dawn-wind's whisper in the reeds,
  When Life first came, a shape of mystery,
  Moving among us, and with random stroke
  Severed, and rapt me from my silent tribe.
  All this I wrung from her in that deep hour,
  While Love stood murmuring: "Play the god, poor grass!"

  Now, by that hour, I am a mate to thee
  Forever, Life, however spent and clogged,
  And tossed back useless to my native mud!
  Yea, groping for new reeds to fashion thee
  New instruments of anguish and delight,
  Thy hand shall leap to me, thy broken reed,
  Thine ear remember me, thy bosom thrill
  With the old subjection, then when Love and I
  Held thee, and fashioned thee, and made thee dance
  Like a slave-girl to her pipers--yea, thou yet
  Shalt hear my call, and dropping all thy toys
  Thou'lt lift me to thy lips, Life, and once more
  Pour the wild music through me--




  VESALIUS IN ZANTE (See note at end)

  (1564)


  SET wide the window. Let me drink the day.
  I loved light ever, light in eye and brain--
  No tapers mirrored in long palace floors,
  Nor dedicated depths of silent aisles,
  But just the common dusty wind-blown day
  That roofs earth's millions.

  O, too long I walked
  In that thrice-sifted air that princes breathe,
  Nor felt the heaven-wide jostling of the winds
  And all the ancient outlawry of earth!
  Now let me breathe and see.

  This pilgrimage
  They call a penance--let them call it that!
  I set my face to the East to shrive my soul
  Of mortal sin? So be it. If my blade
  Once questioned living flesh, if once I tore
  The pages of the Book in opening it,
  See what the torn page yielded ere the light
  Had paled its buried characters--and judge!

  The girl they brought me, pinioned hand and foot
  In catalepsy--say I should have known
  That trance had not yet darkened into death,
  And held my scalpel. Well, suppose I _knew?_
  Sum up the facts--her life against her death.
  Her life? The scum upon the pools of pleasure
  Breeds such by thousands. And her death? Perchance
  The obolus to appease the ferrying Shade,
  And waft her into immortality.
  Think what she purchased with that one heart-flutter
  That whispered its deep secret to my blade!
  For, just because her bosom fluttered still,
  It told me more than many rifled graves;
  Because I spoke too soon, she answered me,
  Her vain life ripened to this bud of death
  As the whole plant is forced into one flower,
  All her blank past a scroll on which God wrote
  His word of healing--so that the poor flesh,
  Which spread death living, died to purchase life!

  Ah, no! The sin I sinned was mine, not theirs.
  Not _that_ they sent me forth to wash away--
  None of their tariffed frailties, but a deed
  So far beyond their grasp of good or ill
  That, set to weigh it in the Church's balance,
  Scarce would they know which scale to cast it in.
  But I, I know. I sinned against my will,
  Myself, my soul--the God within the breast:
  Can any penance wash such sacrilege?

  When I was young in Venice, years ago,
  I walked the hospice with a Spanish monk,
  A solitary cloistered in high thoughts,
  The great Loyola, whom I reckoned then
  A mere refurbisher of faded creeds,
  Expert to edge anew the arms of faith,
  As who should say, a Galenist, resolved
  To hold the walls of dogma against fact,
  Experience, insight, his own self, if need be!
  Ah, how I pitied him, mine own eyes set
  Straight in the level beams of Truth, who groped
  In error's old deserted catacombs
  And lit his tapers upon empty graves!
  Ay, but he held his own, the monk--more man
  Than any laurelled cripple of the wars,
  Charles's spent shafts; for what he willed he willed,
  As those do that forerun the wheels of fate,
  Not take their dust--that force the virgin hours,
  Hew life into the likeness of themselves
  And wrest the stars from their concurrences.
  So firm his mould; but mine the ductile soul
  That wears the livery of circumstance
  And hangs obsequious on its suzerain's eye.
  For who rules now? The twilight-flitting monk,
  Or I, that took the morning like an Alp?
  He held his own, I let mine slip from me,
  The birthright that no sovereign can restore;
  And so ironic Time beholds us now
  Master and slave--he lord of half the earth,
  I ousted from my narrow heritage.

  For there's the sting! My kingdom knows me not.
  Reach me that folio--my usurper's title!
  Fallopius reigning, _vice_--nay, not so:
  Successor, not usurper. I am dead.
  My throne stood empty; he was heir to it.
  Ay, but who hewed his kingdom from the waste,
  Cleared, inch by inch, the acres for his sowing,
  Won back for man that ancient fief o' the Church,
  His body? Who flung Galen from his seat,
  And founded the great dynasty of truth
  In error's central kingdom?

  Ask men that,
  And see their answer: just a wondering stare
  To learn things were not always as they are--
  The very fight forgotten with the fighter;
  Already grows the moss upon my grave!
  Ay, and so meet--hold fast to that, Vesalius.
  They only, who re-conquer day by day
  The inch of ground they camped on over-night,
  Have right of foothold on this crowded earth.
  I left mine own; he seized it; with it went
  My name, my fame, my very self, it seems,
  Till I am but the symbol of a man,
  The sign-board creaking o'er an empty inn.
  He names me--true! _Oh, give the door its due_
  _I entered by. Only, I pray you, note,_
  _Had door been none, a shoulder-thrust of mine_
  _Had breached the crazy wall"_--he seems to say.
  So meet--and yet a word of thanks, of praise,
  Of recognition that the clue was found,
  Seized, followed, clung to, by some hand now dust--
  Had this obscured his quartering of my shield?

  How the one weakness stirs again! I thought
  I had done with that old thirst for gratitude
  That lured me to the desert years ago.
  I did my work--and was not that enough?
  No; but because the idlers sneered and shrugged,
  The envious whispered, the traducers lied,
  And friendship doubted where it should have cheered
  I flung aside the unfinished task, sought praise
  Outside my soul's esteem, and learned too late
  That victory, like God's kingdom, is within.
  (Nay, let the folio rest upon my knee.
  I do not feel its weight.) Ingratitude?
  The hurrying traveller does not ask the name
  Of him who points him on his way; and this
  Fallopius sits in the mid-heart of me,
  Because he keeps his eye upon the goal,
  Cuts a straight furrow to the end in view,
  Cares not who oped the fountain by the way,
  But drinks to draw fresh courage for his journey.
  That was the lesson that Ignatius taught--
  The one I might have learned from him, but would not--
  That we are but stray atoms on the wind,
  A dancing transiency of summer eves,
  Till we become one with our purpose, merged
  In that vast effort of the race which makes
  Mortality immortal.

  _"He that loseth_
  _His life shall find it":_ so the Scripture runs.
  But I so hugged the fleeting self in me,
  So loved the lovely perishable hours,
  So kissed myself to death upon their lips,
  That on one pyre we perished in the end--
  A grimmer bonfire than the Church e'er lit!
  Yet all was well--or seemed so--till I heard
  That younger voice, an echo of my own,
  And, like a wanderer turning to his home,
  Who finds another on the hearth, and learns,
  Half-dazed, that other is his actual self
  In name and claim, as the whole parish swears,
  So strangely, suddenly, stood dispossessed
  Of that same self I had sold all to keep,
  A baffled ghost that none would see or hear!
  _"Vesalius? Who's Vesalius? This Fallopius_
  _It is who dragged the Galen-idol down,_
  _Who rent the veil of flesh and forced a way_
  _Into the secret fortalice of life"_--
  Yet it was I that bore the brunt of it!

  Well, better so! Better awake and live
  My last brief moment as the man I was,
  Than lapse from life's long lethargy to death
  Without one conscious interval. At least
  I repossess my past, am once again
  No courtier med'cining the whims of kings
  In muffled palace-chambers, but the free
  Friendless Vesalius, with his back to the wall
  And all the world against him. O, for that
  Best gift of all, Fallopius, take my thanks--
  That, and much more. At first, when Padua wrote:
  "Master, Fallopius dead, resume again
  The chair even he could not completely fill,
  And see what usury age shall take of youth
  In honours forfeited"--why, just at first,
  I was quite simply credulously glad
  To think the old life stood ajar for me,
  Like a fond woman's unforgetting heart.
  But now that death waylays me--now I know
  This isle is the circumference of my days,
  And I shall die here in a little while--
  So also best, Fallopius!

  For I see
  The gods may give anew, but not restore;
  And though I think that, in my chair again,
  I might have argued my supplanters wrong
  In this or that--this Cesalpinus, say,
  With all his hot-foot blundering in the dark,
  Fabricius, with his over-cautious clutch
  On Galen (systole and diastole
  Of Truth's mysterious heart!)--yet, other ways,
  It may be that this dying serves the cause.
  For Truth stays not to build her monument
  For this or that co-operating hand,
  But props it with her servants' failures--nay,
  Cements its courses with their blood and brains,
  A living substance that shall clinch her walls
  Against the assaults of time. Already, see,
  Her scaffold rises on my hidden toil,
  I but the accepted premiss whence must spring
  The airy structure of her argument;
  Nor could the bricks it rests on serve to build
  The crowning finials. I abide her law:
  A different substance for a different end--
  Content to know I hold the building up;
  Though men, agape at dome and pinnacles,
  Guess not, the whole must crumble like a dream
  But for that buried labour underneath.
  Yet, Padua, I had still my word to say!
  _Let others say it!_--Ah, but will they guess
  Just the one word--? Nay, Truth is many-tongued.
  What one man failed to speak, another finds
  Another word for. May not all converge
  In some vast utterance, of which you and I,
  Fallopius, were but halting syllables?
  So knowledge come, no matter how it comes!
  No matter whence the light falls, so it fall!
  Truth's way, not mine--that I, whose service failed
  In action, yet may make amends in praise.
  Fabricius, Cesalpinus, say your word,
  Not yours, or mine, but Truth's, as you receive it!
  You miss a point I saw? See others, then!
  Misread my meaning? Yet expound your own!
  Obscure one space I cleared? The sky is wide,
  And you may yet uncover other stars.
  For thus I read the meaning of this end:
  There are two ways of spreading light: to be
  The candle or the mirror that reflects it.
  I let my wick burn out--there yet remains
  To spread an answering surface to the flame
  That others kindle.

  Turn me in my bed.
  The window darkens as the hours swing round;
  But yonder, look, the other casement glows!
  Let me face westward as my sun goes down.




  MARGARET OF CORTONA


  FRA PAOLO, since they say the end is near,
  And you of all men have the gentlest eyes,
  Most like our father Francis; since you know
  How I have toiled and prayed and scourged and striven,
  Mothered the orphan, waked beside the sick,
  Gone empty that mine enemy might eat,
  Given bread for stones in famine years, and channelled
  With vigilant knees the pavement of this cell,
  Till I constrained the Christ upon the wall
  To bend His thorn-crowned Head in mute forgiveness . . .
  Three times He bowed it . . . (but the whole stands writ,
  Sealed with the Bishop's signet, as you know),
  Once for each person of the Blessed Three--
  A miracle that the whole town attests,
  The very babes thrust forward for my blessing,
  And either parish plotting for my bones--
  Since this you know: sit near and bear with me.

  I have lain here, these many empty days
  I thought to pack with Credos and Hail Marys
  So close that not a fear should force the door--
  But still, between the blessed syllables
  That taper up like blazing angel heads,
  Praise over praise, to the Unutterable,
  Strange questions clutch me, thrusting fiery arms,
  As though, athwart the close-meshed litanies,
  My dead should pluck at me from hell, with eyes
  Alive in their obliterated faces! . . .
  I have tried the saints' names and our blessed Mother's
  Fra Paolo, I have tried them o'er and o'er,
  And like a blade bent backward at first thrust
  They yield and fail me--and the questions stay.
  And so I thought, into some human heart,
  Pure, and yet foot-worn with the tread of sin,
  If only I might creep for sanctuary,
  It might be that those eyes would let me rest. . .

  Fra Paolo, listen. How should I forget
  The day I saw him first? (You know the one.)
  I had been laughing in the market-place
  With others like me, I the youngest there,
  Jostling about a pack of mountebanks
  Like flies on carrion (I the youngest there!),
  Till darkness fell; and while the other girls
  Turned this way, that way, as perdition beckoned,
  I, wondering what the night would bring, half hoping:
  _If not, this once, a child's sleep in my garret,_
  _At least enough to buy that two-pronged coral_
  _The others covet 'gainst the evil eye,_
  _Since, after all, one sees that I'm the youngest_--
  So, muttering my litany to hell
  (The only prayer I knew that was not Latin),
  Felt on my arm a touch as kind as yours,
  And heard a voice as kind as yours say "Come."
  I turned and went; and from that day I never
  Looked on the face of any other man.
  So much is known; so much effaced; the sin
  Cast like a plague-struck body to the sea,
  Deep, deep into the unfathomable pardon--
  (The Head bowed thrice, as the whole town attests).
  What more, then? To what purpose? Bear with me!--

  It seems that he, a stranger in the place,
  First noted me that afternoon and wondered:
  _How grew so white a bud in such black slime,_
  _And why not mine the hand to pluck it out?_
  Why, so Christ deals with souls, you cry--what then?
  Not so! Not so! When Christ, the heavenly gardener,
  Plucks flowers for Paradise (do I not know?),
  He snaps the stem above the root, and presses
  The ransomed soul between two convent walls,
  A lifeless blossom in the Book of Life.
  But when my lover gathered me, he lifted
  Stem, root and all--ay, and the clinging mud--
  And set me on his sill to spread and bloom
  After the common way, take sun and rain,
  And make a patch of brightness for the street,
  Though raised above rough fingers--so you make
  A weed a flower, and others, passing, think:
  "Next ditch I cross, I'll lift a root from it,
  And dress my window" . . . and the blessing spreads.
  Well, so I grew, with every root and tendril
  Grappling the secret anchorage of his love,
  And so we loved each other till he died. . . .

  Ah, that black night he left me, that dead dawn
  I found him lying in the woods, alive
  To gasp my name out and his life-blood with it,
  As though the murderer's knife had probed for me
  In his hacked breast and found me in each wound. . .
  Well, it was there Christ came to me, you know,
  And led me home--just as that other led me.
  _(Just as that other?_ Father, bear with me!)
  My lover's death, they tell me, saved my soul,
  And I have lived to be a light to men.
  And gather sinners to the knees of grace.
  All this, you say, the Bishop's signet covers.
  But stay! Suppose my lover had not died?
  (At last my question! Father, help me face it.)
  I say: Suppose my lover had not died--
  Think you I ever would have left him living,
  Even to be Christ's blessed Margaret?
  --We lived in sin? Why, to the sin I died to
  That other was as Paradise, when God
  Walks there at eventide, the air pure gold,
  And angels treading all the grass to flowers!
  He was my Christ--he led me out of hell--
  He died to save me (so your casuists say!)--
  Could Christ do more? Your Christ out-pity mine?
  Why, _yours_ but let the sinner bathe His feet;
  Mine raised her to the level of his heart. . .
  And then Christ's way is saving, as man's way
  Is squandering--and the devil take the shards!
  But this man kept for sacramental use
  The cup that once had slaked a passing thirst;
  This man declared: "The same clay serves to model
  A devil or a saint; the scribe may stain
  The same fair parchment with obscenities,
  Or gild with benedictions; nay," he cried,
  "Because a satyr feasted in this wood,
  And fouled the grasses with carousing foot,
  Shall not a hermit build his chapel here
  And cleanse the echoes with his litanies?
  The sodden grasses spring again--why not
  The trampled soul? Is man less merciful
  Than nature, good more fugitive than grass?"
  And so--if, after all, he had not died,
  And suddenly that door should know his hand,
  And with that voice as kind as yours he said:
  "Come, Margaret, forth into the sun again,
  Back to the life we fashioned with our hands
  Out of old sins and follies, fragments scorned
  Of more ambitious builders, yet by Love,
  The patient architect, so shaped and fitted
  That not a crevice let the winter in--"
  Think you my bones would not arise and walk,
  This bruised body (as once the bruised soul)
  Turn from the wonders of the seventh heaven
  As from the antics of the market-place?
  If this could be (as I so oft have dreamed),
  I, who have known both loves, divine and human,
  Think you I would not leave this Christ for that?

  --I rave, you say? You start from me, Fra Paolo?
  Go, then; your going leaves me not alone.
  I marvel, rather, that I feared the question,
  Since, now I name it, it draws near to me
  With such dear reassurance in its eyes,
  And takes your place beside me. . .

  Nay, I tell you,
  Fra Paolo, I have cried on all the saints--
  If this be devil's prompting, let them drown it
  In Alleluias! Yet not one replies.
  And, for the Christ there--is He silent too?
  _Your_ Christ? Poor father; you that have but one,
  And that one silent--how I pity you!
  He will not answer? Will not help you cast
  The devil out? But hangs there on the wall,
  Blind wood and bone--?

  How if _I_ call on Him--
  I, whom He talks with, as the town attests?
  If ever prayer hath ravished me so high
  That its wings failed and dropped me in Thy breast,
  Christ, I adjure Thee! By that naked hour
  Of innermost commixture, when my soul
  Contained Thee as the paten holds the host,
  Judge Thou alone between this priest and me;
  Nay, rather, Lord, between my past and present,
  Thy Margaret and that other's--whose she is
  By right of salvage--and whose call should follow!
  Thine? Silent still.--Or his, who stooped to her,
  And drew her to Thee by the bands of love?
  Not Thine? Then his?

  Ah, Christ--the thorn-crowned Head
  Bends . . . bends again . . . down on your knees,

  Fra Paolo!
  If his, then Thine!

  Kneel, priest, for this is heaven. . .




  A TORCHBEARER


  GREAT cities rise and have their fall; the brass
  That held their glories moulders in its turn.
  Hard granite rots like an uprooted weed,
  And ever on the palimpsest of earth
  Impatient Time rubs out the word he writ.
  But one thing makes the years its pedestal,
  Springs from the ashes of its pyre, and claps
  A skyward wing above its epitaph--
  The will of man willing immortal things.

  The ages are but baubles hung upon
  The thread of some strong lives--and one slight wrist
  May lift a century above the dust;
  For Time,
  The Sisyphean load of little lives,
  Becomes the globe and sceptre of the great.
  But who are these that, linking hand in hand,
  Transmit across the twilight waste of years
  The flying brightness of a kindled hour?
  Not always, nor alone, the lives that search
  How they may snatch a glory out of heaven
  Or add a height to Babel; oftener they
  That in the still fulfilment of each day's
  Pacific order hold great deeds in leash,
  That in the sober sheath of tranquil tasks
  Hide the attempered blade of high emprise,
  And leap like lightning to the clap of fate.

  So greatly gave he, nurturing 'gainst the call
  Of one rare moment all the daily store
  Of joy distilled from the acquitted task,
  And that deliberate rashness which bespeaks
  The pondered action passed into the blood;
  So swift to harden purpose into deed
  That, with the wind of ruin in his hair,
  Soul sprang full-statured from the broken flesh,
  And at one stroke he lived the whole of life,
  Poured all in one libation to the truth,
  A brimming flood whose drops shall overflow
  On deserts of the soul long beaten down
  By the brute hoof of habit, till they spring
  In manifold upheaval to the sun.

  Call here no high artificer to raise
  His wordy monument--such lives as these
  Make death a dull misnomer and its pomp
  An empty vesture. Let resounding lives
  Re-echo splendidly through high-piled vaults
  And make the grave their spokesman--such as he
  Are as the hidden streams that, underground,
  Sweeten the pastures for the grazing kine,
  Or as spring airs that bring through prison bars
  The scent of freedom; or a light that burns
  Immutably across the shaken seas,
  Forevermore by nameless hands renewed,
  Where else were darkness and a glutted shore.






  II



  THE MORTAL LEASE


  I

  BECAUSE the currents of our love are poured
  Through the slow welter of the primal flood
  From some blind source of monster-haunted mud,
  And flung together by random forces stored
  Ere the vast void with rushing worlds was scored--
  Because we know ourselves but the dim scud
  Tossed from their heedless keels, the sea-blown bud
  That wastes and scatters ere the wave has roared--

  Because we have this knowledge in our veins,
  Shall we deny the journey's gathered lore--
  The great refusals and the long disdains,
  The stubborn questing for a phantom shore,
  The sleepless hopes and memorable pains,
  And all mortality's immortal gains?


  II

  Because our kiss is as the moon to draw
  The mounting waters of that red-lit sea
  That circles brain with sense, and bids us be
  The playthings of an elemental law,
  Shall we forego the deeper touch of awe
  On love's extremest pinnacle, where we,
  Winging the vistas of infinity,
  Gigantic on the mist our shadows saw?

  Shall kinship with the dim first-moving clod
  Not draw the folded pinion from the soul,
  And shall we not, by spirals vision-trod,
  Reach upward to some still-retreating goal,
  As earth, escaping from the night's control,
  Drinks at the founts of morning like a god?


  III

  All, all is sweet in that commingled draught
  Mysterious, that life pours for lovers' thirst,
  And I would meet your passion as the first
  Wild woodland woman met her captor's craft,
  Or as the Greek whose fearless beauty laughed
  And doffed her raiment by the Attic flood;
  But in the streams of my belated blood
  Flow all the warring potions love has quaffed.

  How can I be to you the nymph who danced
  Smooth by Ilissus as the plane-tree's bole,
  Or how the Nereid whose drenched lashes glanced
  Like sea-flowers through the summer sea's long roll--
  I that have also been the nun entranced
  Who night-long held her Bridegroom in her soul?


  IV

  "Sad Immortality is dead," you say,
  "And all her grey brood banished from the soul;
  Life, like the earth, is now a rounded whole,
  The orb of man's dominion. Live to-day."
  And every sense in me leapt to obey,
  Seeing the routed phantoms backward roll;
  But from their waning throng a whisper stole,
  And touched the morning splendour with decay.

  "Sad Immortality is dead; and we
  The funeral train that bear her to her grave.
  Yet hath she left a two-faced progeny
  In hearts of men, and some will always see
  The skull beneath the wreath, yet always crave
  In every kiss the folded kiss to be."


  V

  Yet for one rounded moment I will be
  No more to you than what my lips may give,
  And in the circle of your kisses live
  As in some island of a storm-blown sea,
  Where the cold surges of infinity
  Upon the outward reefs unheeded grieve,
  And the loud murmur of our blood shall weave
  Primeval silences round you and me.

  If in that moment we are all we are
  We live enough. Let this for all requite.
  Do I not know, some winged things from far
  Are borne along illimitable night
  To dance their lives out in a single flight
  Between the moonrise and the setting star?


  VI

  The Moment came, with sacramental cup
  Lifted--and all the vault of life grew bright
  With tides of incommensurable light--
  But tremblingly I turned and covered up
  My face before the wonder. Down the slope
  I heard her feet in irretrievable flight,
  And when I looked again, my stricken sight
  Saw night and rain in a dead world agrope.

  Now walks her ghost beside me, whispering
  With lips derisive: "Thou that wouldst forego--
  What god assured thee that the cup I bring
  Globes not in every drop the cosmic show,
  All that the insatiate heart of man can wring
  From life's long vintage?--Now thou shalt not know."


  VII

  Shall I not know? I, that could always catch
  The sunrise in one beam along the wall,
  The nests of June in April's mating call,
  And ruinous autumn in the wind's first snatch
  At summer's green impenetrable thatch--
  That always knew far off the secret fall
  Of a god's feet across the city's brawl,
  The touch of silent fingers on my latch?

  Not thou, vain Moment! Something more than thou
  Shall write the score of what mine eyes have wept,
  The touch of kisses that have missed my brow,
  The murmur of wings that brushed me while I slept,
  And some mute angel in the breast even now
  Measures my loss by all that I have kept.


  VIII

  Strive we no more. Some hearts are like the bright
  Tree-chequered spaces, flecked with sun and shade,
  Where gathered in old days the youth and maid
  To woo, and weave their dances: with the night
  They cease their flutings, and the next day's light
  Finds the smooth green unconscious of their tread,
  And ready its velvet pliancies to spread
  Under fresh feet, till these in turn take flight.

  But other hearts a long long road doth span,
  From some far region of old works and wars,
  And the weary armies of the thoughts of man
  Have trampled it, and furrowed it with scars,
  And sometimes, husht, a sacred caravan
  Moves over it alone, beneath the stars.




  EXPERIENCE


  I

  LIKE Crusoe with the bootless gold we stand
  Upon the desert verge of death, and say:
  "What shall avail the woes of yesterday
  To buy to-morrow's wisdom, in the land
  Whose currency is strange unto our hand?
  In life's small market they had served to pay
  Some late-found rapture, could we but delay
  Till Time hath matched our means to our demand."

  But otherwise Fate wills it, for, behold,
  Our gathered strength of individual pain,
  When Time's long alchemy hath made it gold,
  Dies with us--hoarded all these years in vain,
  Since those that might be heir to it the mould
  Renew, and coin themselves new griefs again.


  II

  O Death, we come full-handed to thy gate,
  Rich with strange burden of the mingled years,
  Gains and renunciations, mirth and tears,
  And love's oblivion, and remembering hate.
  Nor know we what compulsion laid such freight
  Upon our souls--and shall our hopes and fears
  Buy nothing of thee, Death? Behold our wares,
  And sell us the one joy for which we wait.
  Had we lived longer, life had such for sale,
  With the last coin of sorrow purchased cheap,
  But now we stand before thy shadowy pale,
  And all our longings lie within thy keep--
  Death, can it be the years shall naught avail?

  "Not so," Death answered, "they shall purchase sleep."




  GRIEF


  I

  ON immemorial altitudes august
  Grief holds her high dominion. Bold the feet
  That climb unblenching to that stern retreat
  Whence, looking down, man knows himself but dust.
  There lie the mightiest passions, earthward thrust
  Beneath her regnant footstool, and there meet
  Pale ghosts of buried longings that were sweet,
  With many an abdicated "shall" and "must."

  For there she rules omnipotent, whose will
  Compels a mute acceptance of her chart;
  Who holds the world, and lo! it cannot fill
  Her mighty hand; who will be served apart
  With uncommunicable rites, and still
  Surrender of the undivided heart.


  II

  She holds the world within her mighty hand,
  And lo! it is a toy for babes to toss,
  And all its shining imagery but dross,
  To those that in her awful presence stand;
  As sun-confronting eagles o'er the land
  That lies below, they send their gaze across
  The common intervals of gain and loss,
  And hope's infinitude without a strand.

  But he who, on that lonely eminence,
  Watches too long the whirling of the spheres
  Through dim eternities, descending thence
  The voices of his kind no longer hears,
  And, blinded by the spectacle immense,
  Journeys alone through all the after years.




  CHARTRES


  I

  IMMENSE, august, like some Titanic bloom,
  The mighty choir unfolds its lithic core,
  Petalled with panes of azure, gules and or,
  Splendidly lambent in the Gothic gloom,
  And stamened with keen flamelets that illume
  The pale high-altar. On the prayer-worn floor,
  By worshippers innumerous thronged of yore,
  A few brown crones, familiars of the tomb,
  The stranded driftwood of Faith's ebbing sea--
  For these alone the finials fret the skies,
  The topmost bosses shake their blossoms free,
  While from the triple portals, with grave eyes,
  Tranquil, and fixed upon eternity,
  The cloud of witnesses still testifies.


  II

  The crimson panes like blood-drops stigmatise
  The western floor. The aisles are mute and cold.
  A rigid fetich in her robe of gold,
  The Virgin of the Pillar, with blank eyes,
  Enthroned beneath her votive canopies,
  Gathers a meagre remnant to her fold.
  The rest is solitude; the church, grown old,
  Stands stark and grey beneath the burning skies.
  Well-nigh again its mighty framework grows
  To be a part of nature's self, withdrawn
  From hot humanity's impatient woes;
  The floor is ridged like some rude mountain lawn,
  And in the east one giant window shows
  The roseate coldness of an Alp at dawn.




  TWO BACKGROUNDS


  I

  LA VIERGE AU DONATEUR

  HERE by the ample river's argent sweep,
  Bosomed in tilth and vintage to her walls,
  A tower-crowned Cybele in armoured sleep
  The city lies, fat plenty in her halls,
  With calm parochial spires that hold in fee
  The friendly gables clustered at their base,
  And, equipoised o'er tower and market-place,
  The Gothic minister's winged immensity;
  And in that narrow burgh, with equal mood,
  Two placid hearts, to all life's good resigned,
  Might, from the altar to the lych-gate, find
  Long years of peace and dreamless plenitude.




  II

  MONA LISA

  Yon strange blue city crowns a scarped steep
  No mortal foot hath bloodlessly essayed:
  Dreams and illusions beacon from its keep.
  But at the gate an Angel bares his blade;
  And tales are told of those who thought to gain
  At dawn its ramparts; but when evening fell
  Far off they saw each fading pinnacle
  Lit with wild lightnings from the heaven of pain;
  Yet there two souls, whom life's perversities
  Had mocked with want in plenty, tears in mirth,
  Might meet in dreams, ungarmented of earth,
  And drain Joy's awful chalice to the lees.




  THE TOMB OF ILARIA GIUNIGI


  ILARIA, thou that wert so fair and dear
  That death would fain disown thee, grief made wise
  With prophecy thy husband's widowed eyes,
  And bade him call the master's art to rear
  Thy perfect image on the sculptured bier,
  With dreaming lids, hands laid in peaceful guise
  Beneath the breast that seems to fall and rise,
  And lips that at love's call should answer "Here!"

  First-born of the Renascence, when thy soul
  Cast the sweet robing of the flesh aside,
  Into these lovelier marble limbs it stole,
  Regenerate in art's sunrise clear and wide,
  As saints who, having kept faith's raiment whole,
  Change it above for garments glorified.




  THE ONE GRIEF


  ONE grief there is, the helpmeet of my heart,
  That shall not from me till my days be sped,
  That walks beside me in sunshine and in shade,
  And hath in all my fortunes equal part.
  At first I feared it, and would often start
  Aghast to find it bending o'er my bed,
  Till usage slowly dulled the edge of dread,
  And one cold night I cried: _How warm thou art!_

  Since then we two have travelled hand in hand,
  And, lo, my grief has been interpreter
  For me in many a fierce and alien land
  Whose speech young Joy had failed to understand,
  Plucking me tribute of red gold and myrrh
  From desolate whirlings of the desert sand.




  THE EUMENIDES


  THINK you we slept within the Delphic bower,
  What time our victim sought Apollo's grace?
  Nay, drawn into ourselves, in that deep place
  Where good and evil meet, we bode our hour.
  For not inexorable is our power.
  And we are hunted of the prey we chase,
  Soonest gain ground on them that flee apace,
  And draw temerity from hearts that cower.

  Shuddering we gather in the house of ruth,
  And on the fearful turn a face of fear,
  But they to whom the ways of doom are clear
  Not vainly named us the Eumenides.
  Our feet are faithful in the paths of truth,
  And in the constant heart we house at peace.




  III


  ORPHEUS

_Love will make men dare to die for their beloved. . . Of this
Alcestis is a monument . . . for she was willing to lay down her
life for her husband . . . and so noble did this appear to the gods
that they granted her the privilege of returning to earth . . . but
Orpheus, the son of OEagrus, they sent empty away. . ._

--PLATO: _The Symposium._



  ORPHEUS the Harper, coming to the gate
  Where the implacable dim warder sate,
  Besought for parley with a shade within,
  Dearer to him than life itself had been,
  Sweeter than sunlight on Illyrian sea,
  Or bloom of myrtle, or murmur of laden bee,
  Whom lately from his unconsenting breast
  The Fates, at some capricious blind behest,
  Intolerably had reft--Eurydice,
  Dear to the sunlight as Illyrian sea,
  Sweet as the murmur of bees, or myrtle bloom--
  And uncompanioned led her to the tomb.

  There, solitary by the Stygian tide,
  Strayed her dear feet, the shadow of his own,
  Since, 'mid the desolate millions who have died,
  Each phantom walks its crowded path alone;
  And there her head, that slept upon his breast,
  No more had such sweet harbour for its rest,
  Nor her swift ear from those disvoiced throats
  Could catch one echo of his living notes,
  And, dreaming nightly of her pallid doom,
  No solace had he of his own young bloom,
  But yearned to pour his blood into her veins
  And buy her back with unimagined pains.

  To whom the Shepherd of the Shadows said:
  "Yea, many thus would bargain for their dead;
  But when they hear my fatal gateway clang
  Life quivers in them with a last sweet pang.
  They see the smoke of home above the trees,
  The cordage whistles on the harbour breeze;
  The beaten path that wanders to the shore
  Grows dear because they shall not tread it more,
  The dog that drowsing on their threshold lies
  Looks at them with their childhood in his eyes,
  And in the sunset's melancholy fall
  They read a sunrise that shall give them all."

  "Not thus am I," the Harper smiled his scorn.
  "I see no path but those her feet have worn;
  My roof-tree is the shadow of her hair,
  And the light breaking through her long despair
  The only sunrise that mine eyelids crave;
  For doubly dead without me in the grave
  Is she who, if my feet had gone before,
  Had found life dark as death's abhorred shore."

  The gate clanged on him, and he went his way
  Amid the alien millions, mute and grey,
  Swept like a cold mist down an unlit strand,
  Where nameless wreckage gluts the stealthy sand,
  Drift of the cockle-shells of hope and faith
  Wherein they foundered on the rock of death.

  So came he to the image that he sought
  (Less living than her semblance in his thought),
  Who, at the summons of his thrilling notes,
  Drew back to life as a drowned creature floats
  Back to the surface; yet no less is dead.
  And cold fear smote him till she spoke and said:
  "Art thou then come to lay thy lips on mine,
  And pour thy life's libation out like wine?
  Shall I, through thee, revisit earth again,
  Traverse the shining sea, the fruitful plain,
  Behold the house we dwelt in, lay my head
  Upon the happy pillows of our bed,
  And feel in dreams the pressure of thine arms
  Kindle these pulses that no memory warms?
  Nay: give me for a space upon thy breast
  Death's shadowy substitute for rapture--rest;
  Then join again the joyous living throng,
  And give me life, but give it in thy song;
  For only they that die themselves may give
  Life to the dead: and I would have thee live."

  Fear seized him closer than her arms; but he
  Answered: "Not so--for thou shalt come with me!
  I sought thee not that we should part again,
  But that fresh joy should bud from the old pain;
  And the gods, if grudgingly their gifts they make,
  Yield all to them that without asking take."

  "The gods," she said, "(so runs life's ancient lore)
  Yield all man takes, but always claim their score.
  The iron wings of the Eumenides
  When heard far off seem but a summer breeze;
  But me thou'lt have alive on earth again
  Only by paying here my meed of pain.
  Then lay on my cold lips the tender ghost
  Of the dear kiss that used to warm them most,
  Take from my frozen hands thy hands of fire,
  And of my heart-strings make thee a new lyre,
  That in thy music men may find my voice,
  And something of me still on earth rejoice."

  Shuddering he heard her, but with close-flung arm
  Swept her resisting through the ghostly swarm.
  "Swift, hide thee 'neath my cloak, that we may glide
  Past the dim warder as the gate swings wide."
  He whirled her with him, lighter than a leaf
  Unwittingly whirled onward by a brief
  Autumnal eddy; but when the fatal door
  Suddenly yielded him to life once more,
  And issuing to the all-consoling skies
  He turned to seek the sunlight in her eyes,
  He clutched at emptiness--she was not there;
  And the dim warder answered to his prayer:
  "Only once have I seen the wonder wrought.
  But when Alcestis thus her master sought,
  Living she sought him not, nor dreamed that fate
  For any subterfuge would swing my gate.
  Loving, she gave herself to livid death,
  Joyous she bought his respite with her breath,
  Came, not embodied, but a tenuous shade,
  In whom her rapture a great radiance made.
  For never saw I ghost upon this shore
  Shine with such living ecstasy before,
  Nor heard an exile from the light above
  Hail me with smiles: _Thou art not Death but Love!_

  "But when the gods, frustrated, this beheld,
  How, living still, among the dead she dwelled,
  Because she lived in him whose life she won,
  And her blood beat in his beneath the sun,
  They reasoned: 'When the bitter Stygian wave
  The sweetness of love's kisses cannot lave,
  When the pale flood of Lethe washes not
  From mortal mind one high immortal thought,
  Akin to us the earthly creature grows,
  Since nature suffers only what it knows.
  If she whom we to this grey desert banned
  Still dreams she treads with him the sunlit land
  That for his sake she left without a tear,
  Set wide the gates--her being is not here.'

  "So ruled the gods; but thou, that sought'st to give
  Thy life for love, yet for thyself wouldst live.
  They know not for their kin; but back to earth
  Give, pitying, one that is of mortal birth."

  Humbled the Harper heard, and turned away,
  Mounting alone to the empoverished day;
  Yet, as he left the Stygian shades behind,
  He heard the cordage on the harbour wind,
  Saw the blue smoke above the homestead trees,
  And in his hidden heart was glad of these.




  AN AUTUMN SUNSET


  I

  LEAGUERED in fire
  The wild black promontories of the coast extend
  Their savage silhouettes;
  The sun in universal carnage sets,
  And, halting higher,
  The motionless storm-clouds mass their sullen threats,
  Like an advancing mob in sword-points penned,
  That, balked, yet stands at bay.
  Mid-zenith hangs the fascinated day
  In wind-lustrated hollows crystalline,
  A wan Valkyrie whose wide pinions shine
  Across the ensanguined ruins of the fray,
  And in her hand swings high o'erhead,
  Above the waste of war,
  The silver torch-light of the evening star
  Wherewith to search the faces of the dead.


  II

  Lagooned in gold,
  Seem not those jetty promontories rather
  The outposts of some ancient land forlorn,
  Uncomforted of morn,
  Where old oblivions gather,
  The melancholy unconsoling fold
  Of all things that go utterly to death
  And mix no more, no more
  With life's perpetually awakening breath?
  Shall Time not ferry me to such a shore,
  Over such sailless seas,
  To walk with hope's slain importunities
  In miserable marriage? Nay, shall not
  All things be there forgot,
  Save the sea's golden barrier and the black
  Close-crouching promontories?
  Dead to all shames, forgotten of all glories,
  Shall I not wander there, a shadow's shade,
  A spectre self-destroyed,
  So purged of all remembrance and sucked back
  Into the primal void,
  That should we on that shore phantasmal meet
  I should not know the coming of your feet?




  MOONRISE OVER TYRINGHAM


  NOW the high holocaust of hours is done,
  And all the west empurpled with their death,
  How swift oblivion drinks the fallen sun,
  How little while the dusk remembereth!

  Though some there were, proud hours that marched in mail,
  And took the morning on auspicious crest,
  Crying to fortune "Back, for I prevail!"--
  Yet now they lie disfeatured with the rest;

  And some that stole so soft on destiny
  Methought they had surprised her to a smile;
  But these fled frozen when she turned to see,
  And moaned and muttered through my heart awhile.

  But now the day is emptied of them all,
  And night absorbs their life-blood at a draught;
  And so my life lies, as the gods let fall
  An empty cup from which their lips have quaffed.

  Yet see--night is not . . . by translucent ways,
  Up the grey void of autumn afternoon
  Steals a mild crescent, charioted in haze,
  And all the air is merciful as June.

  The lake is a forgotten streak of day
  That trembles through the hemlocks' darkling bars,
  And still, my heart, still some divine delay
  Upon the threshold holds the earliest stars.

  O pale equivocal hour, whose suppliant feet
  Haunt the mute reaches of the sleeping wind,
  Art thou a watcher stealing to entreat
  Prayer and sepulture for thy fallen kind?

  Poor plaintive waif of a predestined race,
  Their ruin gapes for thee. Why linger here?
  Go hence in silence. Veil thine orphaned face,
  Lest I should look on it and call it dear.

  For if I love thee thou wilt sooner die;
  Some sudden ruin will plunge upon thy head,
  Midnight will fall from the revengeful sky
  And hurl thee down among thy shuddering dead.

  Avert thine eyes. Lapse softly from my sight,
  Call not my name, nor heed if thine I crave,
  So shalt thou sink through mitigated night
  And bathe thee in the all-effacing wave.

  But upward still thy perilous footsteps fare
  Along a high-hung heaven drenched in light,
  Dilating on a tide of crystal air
  That floods the dark hills to their utmost height.

  Strange hour, is this thy waning face that leans
  Out of mid-heaven and makes my soul its glass?
  What victory is imaged there? What means
  Thy tarrying smile? Oh, veil thy lips and pass.

  Nay . . . pause and let me name thee! For I see,
  O with what flooding ecstasy of light,
  Strange hour that wilt not loose thy hold on me,
  Thou'rt not day's latest, but the first of night!

  And after thee the gold-foot stars come thick,
  From hand to hand they toss the flying fire,
  Till all the zenith with their dance is quick
  About the wheeling music of the Lyre.

  Dread hour that lead'st the immemorial round,
  With lifted torch revealing one by one
  The thronging splendours that the day held bound,
  And how each blue abyss enshrines its sun--

  Be thou the image of a thought that fares
  Forth from itself, and flings its ray ahead,
  Leaping the barriers of ephemeral cares,
  To where our lives are but the ages' tread,

  And let this year be, not the last of youth,
  But first--like thee!--of some new train of hours,
  If more remote from hope, yet nearer truth,
  And kin to the unpetitionable powers.




  ALL SOULS


  I

  A THIN moon faints in the sky o'erhead,
  And dumb in the churchyard lie the dead.
  Walk we not, Sweet, by garden ways,
  Where the late rose hangs and the phlox delays,
  But forth of the gate and down the road,
  Past the church and the yews, to their dim abode.
  For it's turn of the year and All Souls' night,
  When the dead can hear and the dead have sight.


  II

  Fear not that sound like wind in the trees:
  It is only their call that comes on the breeze;
  Fear not the shudder that seems to pass:
  It is only the tread of their feet on the grass;
  Fear not the drip of the bough as you stoop:
  It is only the touch of their hands that grope--
  For the year's on the turn and it's All Souls' night,
  When the dead can yearn and the dead can smite.


  III

  And where should a man bring his sweet to woo
  But here, where such hundreds were lovers too?
  Where lie the dead lips that thirst to kiss,
  The empty hands that their fellows miss,
  Where the maid and her lover, from sere to green,
  Sleep bed by bed, with the worm between?
  For it's turn of the year and All Souls' night,
  When the dead can hear and the dead have sight.


  IV

  And now they rise and walk in the cold,
  Let us warm their blood and give youth to the old.
  Let them see us and hear us, and say: "Ah, thus
  In the prime of the year it went with us!"
  Till their lips drawn close, and so long unkist,
  Forget they are mist that mingles with mist!
  For the year's on the turn, and it's All Souls' night,
  When the dead can burn and the dead can smite.


  V

  Till they say, as they hear us--poor dead, poor dead!--
  "Just an hour of this, and our age-long bed--
  Just a thrill of the old remembered pains
  To kindle a flame in our frozen veins,
  A touch, and a sight, and a floating apart,
  As the chill of dawn strikes each phantom heart--
  For it's turn of the year and All Souls' night,
  When the dead can hear and the dead have sight."


  VI

  And where should the living feel alive
  But here in this wan white humming hive,
  As the moon wastes down, and the dawn turns cold,
  And one by one they creep back to the fold?
  And where should a man hold his mate and say:
  "One more, one more, ere we go their way"?
  For the year's on the turn, and it's All Souls' night,
  When the living can learn by the churchyard light.


  VII

  And how should we break faith who have seen
  Those dead lips plight with the mist between,
  And how forget, who have seen how soon
  They lie thus chambered and cold to the moon?
  How scorn, how hate, how strive, wee too,
  Who must do so soon as those others do?
  For it's All Souls' night, and break of the day,
  And behold, with the light the dead are away. . .




  ALL SAINTS


  _ALL so grave and shining see they come_
  _From the blissful ranks of the forgiven,_
  _Though so distant wheels the nearest crystal dome,_
  _And the spheres are seven._

  Are you in such haste to come to earth,
  Shining ones, the Wonder on your brow,
  To the low poor places of your birth,
  And the day that must be darkness now?

  Does the heart still crave the spot it yearned on
  In the grey and mortal years,
  The pure flame the smoky hearth it burned on,
  The clear eye its tears?

  Was there, in the narrow range of living,
  After all the wider scope?
  In the old old rapture of forgiving,
  In the long long flight of hope?

  Come you, from free sweep across the spaces,
  To the irksome bounds of mortal law,
  From the all-embracing Vision, to some face's
  Look that never saw?

  Never we, imprisoned here, had sought you,
  Lured you with the ancient bait of pain,
  Down the silver current of the light-years brought you
  To the beaten round again--

  Is it you, perchance, who ache to strain us
  Dumbly to the dim transfigured breast,
  Or with tragic gesture would detain us
  From the age-long search for rest?

  Is the labour then more glorious than the laurel,
  The learning than the conquered thought?
  Is the meed of men the righteous quarrel,
  Not the justice wrought?

  Long ago we guessed it, faithful ghosts,
  Proudly chose the present for our scene,
  And sent out indomitable hosts
  Day by day to widen our demesne.

  Sit you by our hearth-stone, lone immortals,
  Share again the bitter wine of life!
  Well we know, beyond the peaceful portals
  There is nothing better than our strife,

  Nought more thrilling than the cry that calls us,
  Spent and stumbling, to the conflict vain,
  After each disaster that befalls us
  Nerves us for a sterner strain.

  And, when flood or foeman shakes the sleeper
  In his moment's lapse from pain,
  Bids us fold our tents, and flee our kin, and deeper
  Drive into the wilderness again.




  THE OLD POLE STAR


  BEFORE the clepsydra had bound the days
  Man tethered Change to his fixed star, and said:
  "The elder races, that long since are dead,
  Marched by that light; it swerves not from its base
  Though all the worlds about it wax and fade."

  When Egypt saw it, fast in reeling spheres,
  Her Pyramids shaft-centred on its ray
  She reared and said: "Long as this star holds sway
  In uninvaded ether, shall the years
  Revere my monuments--" and went her way.

  The Pyramids abide; but through the shaft
  That held the polar pivot, eye to eye,
  Look now--blank nothingness! As though Change laughed
  At man's presumption and his puny craft,
  The star has slipped its leash and roams the sky.

  Yet could the immemorial piles be swung
  A skyey hair's-breadth from their rooted base,
  Back to the central anchorage of space,
  Ah, then again, as when the race was young,
  Should they behold the beacon of the race!

  Of old, men said: "The Truth is there: we rear
  Our faith full-centred on it. It was known
  Thus of the elders who foreran us here,
  Mapped out its circuit in the shifting sphere,
  And found it, 'mid mutation, fixed alone."

  Change laughs again, again the sky is cold,
  And down that fissure now no star-beam glides.
  Yet they whose sweep of vision grows not old
  Still at the central point of space behold
  Another pole-star: for the Truth abides.




  A GRAVE


  THOUGH life should come
  With all its marshalled honours, trump and drum,
  To proffer you the captaincy of some
  Resounding exploit, that shall fill
  Man's pulses with commemorative thrill,
  And be a banner to far battle days
  For truths unrisen upon untrod ways,
  What would your answer be,
  O heart once brave?
  _Seek otherwhere; for me,_
  _I watch beside a grave._

  Though to some shining festival of thought
  The sages call you from steep citadel
  Of bastioned argument, whose rampart gained
  Yields the pure vision passionately sought,
  In dreams known well,
  But never yet in wakefulness attained,
  How should you answer to their summons, save:
  _I watch beside a grave?_

  Though Beauty, from her fane within the soul
  Of fire-tongued seers descending,
  Or from the dream-lit temples of the past
  With feet immortal wending,
  Illuminate grief's antre swart and vast
  With half-veiled face that promises the whole
  To him who holds her fast,
  What answer could you give?
  _Sight of one face I crave,_
  _One only while I live;_
  _Woo elsewhere; for I watch beside a grave._

  Though love of the one heart that loves you best,
  A storm-tossed messenger,
  Should beat its wings for shelter in your breast,
  Where clung its last year's nest,
  The nest you built together and made fast
  Lest envious winds should stir,
  And winged each delicate thought to minister
  With sweetness far-amassed
  To the young dreams within--
  What answer could it win?
  _The nest was whelmed in sorrow's rising wave,_
  _Nor could I reach one drowning dream to save;_
  _I watch beside a grave._




  NON DOLET!


  AGE after age the fruit of knowledge falls
  To ashes on men's lips;
  Love fails, faith sickens, like a dying tree
  Life sheds its dreams that no new spring recalls;
  The longed-for ships
  Come empty home or founder on the deep,
  And eyes first lose their tears and then their sleep.

  So weary a world it lies, forlorn of day,
  And yet not wholly dark,
  Since evermore some soul that missed the mark
  Calls back to those agrope
  In the mad maze of hope,
  "Courage, my brothers--I have found the way!"

  The day is lost? What then?
  What though the straggling rear-guard of the fight
  Be whelmed in fear and night,
  And the flying scouts proclaim
  That death has gripped the van--
  Ever the heart of man
  Cheers on the hearts of men!

  _"It hurts not!"_ dying cried the Roman wife;
  And one by one
  The leaders in the strife
  Fall on the blade of failure and exclaim:
  "The day is won!"




  A HUNTING-SONG


  _HUNTERS, where does Hope nest?_
  Not in the half-oped breast,
  Nor the young rose,
  Nor April sunrise--those
  With a quick wing she brushes,
  The wide world through,
  Greets with the throat of thrushes,
  Fades from as fast as dew.

  But, would you spy her sleeping,
  Cradled warm,
  Look in the breast of weeping,
  The tree stript by storm;
  But, would you bind her fast,
  Yours at last,
  Bed-mate and lover,
  Gain the last headland bare
  That the cold tides cover,
  There may you capture her, there,
  Where the sea gives to the ground
  Only the drift of the drowned.
  Yet, if she slips you, once found,
  Push to her uttermost lair
  In the low house of despair.
  There will she watch by your head,
  Sing to you till you be dead,
  Then, with your child in her breast,
  In another heart build a new nest.




  SURVIVAL


  WHEN you and I, like all things kind or cruel,
  The garnered days and light evasive hours,
  Are gone again to be a part of flowers
  And tears and tides, in life's divine renewal,

  If some grey eve to certain eyes should wear
  A deeper radiance than mere light can give,
  Some silent page abruptly flush and live,
  May it not be that you and I are there?




  USES


  AH, from the niggard tree of Time
  How quickly fall the hours!
  It needs no touch of wind or rime
  To loose such facile flowers.

  Drift of the dead year's harvesting,
  They clog to-morrow's way,
  Yet serve to shelter growths of spring
  Beneath their warm decay,

  Or, blent by pious hands with rare
  Sweet savours of content,
  Surprise the soul's December air
  With June's forgotten scent.




  A MEETING


  ON a sheer peak of joy we meet;
  Below us hums the abyss;
  Death either way allures our feet
  If we take one step amiss.

  One moment let us drink the blue
  Transcendent air together--
  Then down where the same old work's to do
  In the same dull daily weather.

  We may not wait . . . yet look below!
  How part? On this keen ridge
  But one may pass. They call you--go!
  My life shall be your bridge.




Note.--Vesalius, the great anatomist, studied at Louvain and Paris,
and was called by Venice to the chair of surgery in the University
of Padua. He was one of the first physiologists to dissect the human
body, and his great work "The Structure of the Human Body" was an
open attack on the physiology of Galen. The book excited such
violent opposition, not only in the Church but in the University,
that in a fit of discouragement he burned his remaining manuscripts
and accepted the post of physician at the Court of Charles V., and
afterward of his son, Philip II, of Spain. This closed his life of
free enquiry, for the Inquisition forbade all scientific research,
and the dissection of corpses was prohibited in Spain. Vesalius led
for many years the life of the rich and successful court physician,
but regrets for his past were never wholly extinguished, and in 1561
they were roused afresh by the reading of an anatomical treatise by
Gabriel Fallopius, his successor in the chair at Padua. From that
moment life in Spain became intolerable to Vesalius, and in 1563 he
set out for the East. Tradition reports that this journey was a
penance to which the Church condemned him for having opened the body
of a woman before she was actually dead; but more probably Vesalius,
sick of his long servitude, made the pilgrimage a pretext to escape
from Spain.

Fallopius had meanwhile died, and the Venetian Senate is said to
have offered Vesalius his old chair; but on the way home from
Jerusalem he was seized with illness, and died at Zante in 1564.



AUTRES TEMPS... ***




Produced by David Widger





AUTRES TEMPS...

By Edith Wharton

Copyright, 1916, By Charles Scribner’s Sons




I

Mrs. Lidcote, as the huge menacing mass of New York defined itself far
off across the waters, shrank back into her corner of the deck and sat
listening with a kind of unreasoning terror to the steady onward drive
of the screws.

She had set out on the voyage quietly enough,--in what she called her
“reasonable” mood,--but the week at sea had given her too much time to
think of things and had left her too long alone with the past.

When she was alone, it was always the past that occupied her. She
couldn’t get away from it, and she didn’t any longer care to. During
her long years of exile she had made her terms with it, had learned
to accept the fact that it would always be there, huge, obstructing,
encumbering, bigger and more dominant than anything the future could
ever conjure up. And, at any rate, she was sure of it, she understood
it, knew how to reckon with it; she had learned to screen and manage and
protect it as one does an afflicted member of one’s family.

There had never been any danger of her being allowed to forget the past.
It looked out at her from the face of every acquaintance, it appeared
suddenly in the eyes of strangers when a word enlightened them: “Yes,
_the_ Mrs. Lidcote, don’t you know?” It had sprung at her the first day
out, when, across the dining-room, from the captain’s table, she had
seen Mrs. Lorin Boulger’s revolving eye-glass pause and the eye behind
it grow as blank as a dropped blind. The next day, of course, the
captain had asked: “You know your ambassadress, Mrs. Boulger?” and she
had replied that, No, she seldom left Florence, and hadn’t been to Rome
for more than a day since the Boulgers had been sent to Italy. She was
so used to these phrases that it cost her no effort to repeat them. And
the captain had promptly changed the subject.

No, she didn’t, as a rule, mind the past, because she was used to it and
understood it. It was a great concrete fact in her path that she had to
walk around every time she moved in any direction. But now, in the
light of the unhappy event that had summoned her from Italy,--the sudden
unanticipated news of her daughter’s divorce from Horace Pursh and
remarriage with Wilbour Barkley--the past, her own poor miserable past,
started up at her with eyes of accusation, became, to her disordered
fancy, like the afflicted relative suddenly breaking away from nurses
and keepers and publicly parading the horror and misery she had, all the
long years, so patiently screened and secluded.

Yes, there it had stood before her through the agitated weeks since the
news had come--during her interminable journey from India, where Leila’s
letter had overtaken her, and the feverish halt in her apartment in
Florence, where she had had to stop and gather up her possessions for a
fresh start--there it had stood grinning at her with a new balefillness
which seemed to say: “Oh, but you’ve got to look at me _now_, because
I’m not only your own past but Leila’s present.”

Certainly it was a master-stroke of those arch-ironists of the shears
and spindle to duplicate her own story in her daughter’s. Mrs. Lidcote
had always somewhat grimly fancied that, having so signally failed to
be of use to Leila in other ways, she would at least serve her as a
warning. She had even abstained from defending herself, from making
the best of her case, had stoically refused to plead extenuating
circumstances, lest Leila’s impulsive sympathy should lead to deductions
that might react disastrously on her own life. And now that very thing
had happened, and Mrs. Lidcote could hear the whole of New York saying
with one voice: “Yes, Leila’s done just what her mother did. With such
an example what could you expect?”

Yet if she had been an example, poor woman, she had been an awful one;
she had been, she would have supposed, of more use as a deterrent than
a hundred blameless mothers as incentives. For how could any one who
had seen anything of her life in the last eighteen years have had the
courage to repeat so disastrous an experiment?

Well, logic in such cases didn’t count, example didn’t count, nothing
probably counted but having the same impulses in the blood; and that was
the dark inheritance she had bestowed upon her daughter. Leila hadn’t
consciously copied her; she had simply “taken after” her, had been a
projection of her own long-past rebellion.

Mrs. Lidcote had deplored, when she started, that the _Utopia_ was a
slow steamer, and would take eight full days to bring her to her unhappy
daughter; but now, as the moment of reunion approached, she would
willingly have turned the boat about and fled back to the high seas. It
was not only because she felt still so unprepared to face what New York
had in store for her, but because she needed more time to dispose of
what the _Utopia_ had already given her. The past was bad enough,
but the present and future were worse, because they were less
comprehensible, and because, as she grew older, surprises and
inconsequences troubled her more than the worst certainties.

There was Mrs. Boulger, for instance. In the light, or rather the
darkness, of new developments, it might really be that Mrs. Boulger
had not meant to cut her, but had simply failed to recognize her.
Mrs. Lidcote had arrived at this hypothesis simply by listening to the
conversation of the persons sitting next to her on deck--two lively
young women with the latest Paris hats on their heads and the latest
New York ideas in them. These ladies, as to whom it would have been
impossible for a person with Mrs. Lidcote’s old-fashioned categories to
determine whether they were married or unmarried, “nice” or “horrid,” or
any one or other of the definite things which young women, in her
youth and her society, were conveniently assumed to be, had revealed
a familiarity with the world of New York that, again according to Mrs.
Lidcote’s traditions, should have implied a recognized place in it. But
in the present fluid state of manners what did anything imply except
what their hats implied--that no one could tell what was coming next?

They seemed, at any rate, to frequent a group of idle and opulent people
who executed the same gestures and revolved on the same pivots as Mrs.
Lidcote’s daughter and her friends: their Coras, Matties and Mabels
seemed at any moment likely to reveal familiar patronymics, and once
one of the speakers, summing up a discussion of which Mrs. Lidcote had
missed the beginning, had affirmed with headlong confidence: “Leila? Oh,
_Leila’s_ all right.”

Could it be _her_ Leila, the mother had wondered, with a sharp thrill of
apprehension? If only they would mention surnames! But their talk leaped
elliptically from allusion to allusion, their unfinished sentences
dangled over bottomless pits of conjecture, and they gave their
bewildered hearer the impression not so much of talking only of their
intimates, as of being intimate with every one alive.

Her old friend Franklin Ide could have told her, perhaps; but here was
the last day of the voyage, and she hadn’t yet found courage to ask him.
Great as had been the joy of discovering his name on the passenger-list
and seeing his friendly bearded face in the throng against the taffrail
at Cherbourg, she had as yet said nothing to him except, when they had
met: “Of course I’m going out to Leila.”

She had said nothing to Franklin Ide because she had always
instinctively shrunk from taking him into her confidence. She was sure
he felt sorry for her, sorrier perhaps than any one had ever felt;
but he had always paid her the supreme tribute of not showing it. His
attitude allowed her to imagine that compassion was not the basis of his
feeling for her, and it was part of her joy in his friendship that it
was the one relation seemingly unconditioned by her state, the only one
in which she could think and feel and behave like any other woman.

Now, however, as the problem of New York loomed nearer, she began to
regret that she had not spoken, had not at least questioned him about
the hints she had gathered on the way. He did not know the two ladies
next to her, he did not even, as it chanced, know Mrs. Lorin Boulger;
but he knew New York, and New York was the sphinx whose riddle she must
read or perish.

Almost as the thought passed through her mind his stooping shoulders
and grizzled head detached themselves against the blaze of light in the
west, and he sauntered down the empty deck and dropped into the chair at
her side.

“You’re expecting the Barkleys to meet you, I suppose?” he asked.

It was the first time she had heard any one pronounce her daughter’s
new name, and it occurred to her that her friend, who was shy and
inarticulate, had been trying to say it all the way over and had at last
shot it out at her only because he felt it must be now or never.

“I don’t know. I cabled, of course. But I believe she’s at--they’re
at--_his_ place somewhere.”

“Oh, Barkley’s; yes, near Lenox, isn’t it? But she’s sure to come to
town to meet you.”

He said it so easily and naturally that her own constraint was relieved,
and suddenly, before she knew what she meant to do, she had burst out:
“She may dislike the idea of seeing people.”

Ide, whose absent short-sighted gaze had been fixed on the slowly
gliding water, turned in his seat to stare at his companion.

“Who? Leila?” he said with an incredulous laugh.

Mrs. Lidcote flushed to her faded hair and grew pale again. “It took
_me_ a long time--to get used to it,” she said.

His look grew gently commiserating. “I think you’ll find--” he paused
for a word--“that things are different now--altogether easier.”

“That’s what I’ve been wondering--ever since we started.” She was
determined now to speak. She moved nearer, so that their arms touched,
and she could drop her voice to a murmur. “You see, it all came on me in
a flash. My going off to India and Siam on that long trip kept me
away from letters for weeks at a time; and she didn’t want to tell me
beforehand--oh, I understand _that_, poor child! You know how good she’s
always been to me; how she’s tried to spare me. And she knew, of course,
what a state of horror I’d be in. She knew I’d rush off to her at once
and try to stop it. So she never gave me a hint of anything, and she
even managed to muzzle Susy Suffern--you know Susy is the one of the
family who keeps me informed about things at home. I don’t yet see how
she prevented Susy’s telling me; but she did. And her first letter, the
one I got up at Bangkok, simply said the thing was over--the divorce, I
mean--and that the very next day she’d--well, I suppose there was no
use waiting; and _he_ seems to have behaved as well as possible, to have
wanted to marry her as much as--”

“Who? Barkley?” he helped her out. “I should say so! Why what do you
suppose--” He interrupted himself. “He’ll be devoted to her, I assure
you.”

“Oh, of course; I’m sure he will. He’s written me--really beautifully.
But it’s a terrible strain on a man’s devotion. I’m not sure that Leila
realizes--”

Ide sounded again his little reassuring laugh. “I’m not sure that you
realize. _They’re_ all right.”

It was the very phrase that the young lady in the next seat had applied
to the unknown “Leila,” and its recurrence on Ide’s lips flushed Mrs.
Lidcote with fresh courage.

“I wish I knew just what you mean. The two young women next to me--the
ones with the wonderful hats--have been talking in the same way.”

“What? About Leila?”

“About _a_ Leila; I fancied it might be mine. And about society in
general. All their friends seem to be divorced; some of them seem
to announce their engagements before they get their decree. One of
them--_her_ name was Mabel--as far as I could make out, her husband
found out that she meant to divorce him by noticing that she wore a new
engagement-ring.”

“Well, you see Leila did everything ‘regularly,’ as the French say,” Ide
rejoined.

“Yes; but are these people in society? The people my neighbours talk
about?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “It would take an arbitration commission a
good many sittings to define the boundaries of society nowadays. But
at any rate they’re in New York; and I assure you you’re _not_; you’re
farther and farther from it.”

“But I’ve been back there several times to see Leila.” She hesitated
and looked away from him. Then she brought out slowly: “And I’ve never
noticed--the least change--in--in my own case--”

“Oh,” he sounded deprecatingly, and she trembled with the fear of having
gone too far. But the hour was past when such scruples could restrain
her. She must know where she was and where Leila was. “Mrs. Boulger
still cuts me,” she brought out with an embarrassed laugh.

“Are you sure? You’ve probably cut _her_; if not now, at least in the
past. And in a cut if you’re not first you’re nowhere. That’s what keeps
up so many quarrels.”

The word roused Mrs. Lidcote to a renewed sense of realities. “But the
Purshes,” she said--“the Purshes are so strong! There are so many of
them, and they all back each other up, just as my husband’s family did.
I know what it means to have a clan against one. They’re stronger than
any number of separate friends. The Purshes will _never_ forgive Leila
for leaving Horace. Why, his mother opposed his marrying her because
of--of me. She tried to get Leila to promise that she wouldn’t see me
when they went to Europe on their honeymoon. And now she’ll say it was
my example.”

Her companion, vaguely stroking his beard, mused a moment upon this;
then he asked, with seeming irrelevance, “What did Leila say when you
wrote that you were coming?”

“She said it wasn’t the least necessary, but that I’d better come,
because it was the only way to convince me that it wasn’t.”

“Well, then, that proves she’s not afraid of the Purshes.”

She breathed a long sigh of remembrance. “Oh, just at first, you
know--one never is.”

He laid his hand on hers with a gesture of intelligence and pity.
“You’ll see, you’ll see,” he said.

A shadow lengthened down the deck before them, and a steward stood
there, proffering a Marconigram.

“Oh, now I shall know!” she exclaimed.

She tore the message open, and then let it fall on her knees, dropping
her hands on it in silence.

Ide’s enquiry roused her: “It’s all right?”

“Oh, quite right. Perfectly. She can’t come; but she’s sending Susy
Suffern. She says Susy will explain.” After another silence she added,
with a sudden gush of bitterness: “As if I needed any explanation!”

She felt Ide’s hesitating glance upon her. “She’s in the country?”

“Yes. ‘Prevented last moment. Longing for you, expecting you. Love from
both.’ Don’t you _see_, the poor darling, that she couldn’t face it?”

“No, I don’t.” He waited. “Do you mean to go to her immediately?”

“It will be too late to catch a train this evening; but I shall take
the first to-morrow morning.” She considered a moment. “‘Perhaps it’s
better. I need a talk with Susy first. She’s to meet me at the dock, and
I’ll take her straight back to the hotel with me.”

As she developed this plan, she had the sense that Ide was still
thoughtfully, even gravely, considering her. When she ceased, he
remained silent a moment; then he said almost ceremoniously: “If your
talk with Miss Suffern doesn’t last too late, may I come and see you
when it’s over? I shall be dining at my club, and I’ll call you up at
about ten, if I may. I’m off to Chicago on business to-morrow morning,
and it would be a satisfaction to know, before I start, that your
cousin’s been able to reassure you, as I know she will.”

He spoke with a shy deliberateness that, even to Mrs. Lidcote’s troubled
perceptions, sounded a long-silenced note of feeling. Perhaps the
breaking down of the barrier of reticence between them had released
unsuspected emotions in both. The tone of his appeal moved her curiously
and loosened the tight strain of her fears.

“Oh, yes, come--do come,” she said, rising. The huge threat of New York
was imminent now, dwarfing, under long reaches of embattled masonry, the
great deck she stood on and all the little specks of life it carried.
One of them, drifting nearer, took the shape of her maid, followed by
luggage-laden stewards, and signing to her that it was time to go below.
As they descended to the main deck, the throng swept her against Mrs.
Lorin Boulger’s shoulder, and she heard the ambassadress call out to
some one, over the vexed sea of hats: “So sorry! I should have been
delighted, but I’ve promised to spend Sunday with some friends at
Lenox.”




II

Susy Suffern’s explanation did not end till after ten o’clock, and she
had just gone when Franklin Ide, who, complying with an old New York
tradition, had caused himself to be preceded by a long white box of
roses, was shown into Mrs. Lidcote’s sitting-room.

He came forward with his shy half-humorous smile and, taking her hand,
looked at her for a moment without speaking.

“It’s all right,” he then pronounced.

Mrs. Lidcote returned his smile. “It’s extraordinary. Everything’s
changed. Even Susy has changed; and you know the extent to which Susy
used to represent the old New York. There’s no old New York left, it
seems. She talked in the most amazing way. She snaps her fingers at the
Purshes. She told me--_me_, that every woman had a right to happiness
and that self-expression was the highest duty. She accused me of
misunderstanding Leila; she said my point of view was conventional!
She was bursting with pride at having been in the secret, and wearing
a brooch that Wilbour Barkley’d given her!” Franklin Ide had seated
himself in the arm-chair she had pushed forward for him under the
electric chandelier. He threw back his head and laughed. “What did I
tell you?”

“Yes; but I can’t believe that Susy’s not mistaken. Poor dear, she has
the habit of lost causes; and she may feel that, having stuck to me, she
can do no less than stick to Leila.”

“But she didn’t--did she?--openly defy the world for you? She didn’t
snap her fingers at the Lidcotes?”

Mrs. Lidcote shook her head, still smiling. “No. It was enough to defy
_my_ family. It was doubtful at one time if they would tolerate her
seeing me, and she almost had to disinfect herself after each visit. I
believe that at first my sister-in-law wouldn’t let the girls come down
when Susy dined with her.”

“Well, isn’t your cousin’s present attitude the best possible proof that
times have changed?”

“Yes, yes; I know.” She leaned forward from her sofa-corner, fixing her
eyes on his thin kindly face, which gleamed on her indistinctly
through her tears. “If it’s true, it’s--it’s dazzling. She says Leila’s
perfectly happy. It’s as if an angel had gone about lifting gravestones,
and the buried people walked again, and the living didn’t shrink from
them.”

“That’s about it,” he assented.

She drew a deep breath, and sat looking away from him down the long
perspective of lamp-fringed streets over which her windows hung.

“I can understand how happy you must be,” he began at length.

She turned to him impetuously. “Yes, yes; I’m happy. But I’m lonely,
too--lonelier than ever. I didn’t take up much room in the world before;
but now--where is there a corner for me? Oh. since I’ve begun to confess
myself, why shouldn’t I go on? Telling you this lifts a gravestone from
_me!_ You see, before this, Leila needed me. She was unhappy, and I knew
it, and though we hardly ever talked of it I felt that, in a way, the
thought that I’d been through the same thing, and down to the dregs of
it, helped her. And her needing me helped _me_. And when the news of
her marriage came my first thought was that now she’d need me more
than ever, that she’d have no one but me to turn to. Yes, under all my
distress there was a fierce joy in that. It was so new and wonderful
to feel again that there was one person who wouldn’t be able to get on
without me! And now what you and Susy tell me seems to have taken my
child from me; and just at first that’s all I can feel.”

“Of course it’s all you feel.” He looked at her musingly. “Why didn’t
Leila come to meet you?”

“That was really my fault. You see, I’d cabled that I was not sure of
being able to get off on the _Utopia_, and apparently my second cable
was delayed, and when she received it she’d already asked some people
over Sunday--one or two of her old friends, Susy says. I’m so glad they
should have wanted to go to her at once; but naturally I’d rather have
been alone with her.”

“You still mean to go, then?”

“Oh, I must. Susy wanted to drag me off to Ridgefield with her over
Sunday, and Leila sent me word that of course I might go if I wanted
to, and that I was not to think of her; but I know how disappointed she
would be. Susy said she was afraid I might be upset at her having people
to stay, and that, if I minded, she wouldn’t urge me to come. But if
_they_ don’t mind, why should I? And of course, if they’re willing to go
to Leila it must mean--”

“Of course. I’m glad you recognize that,” Franklin Ide exclaimed
abruptly. He stood up and went over to her, taking her hand with one of
his quick gestures. “There’s something I want to say to you,” he began--
*****

The next morning, in the train, through all the other contending
thoughts in Mrs. Lidcote’s mind there ran the warm undercurrent of what
Franklin Ide had wanted to say to her.

He had wanted, she knew, to say it once before, when, nearly eight
years earlier, the hazard of meeting at the end of a rainy autumn in
a deserted Swiss hotel had thrown them for a fortnight into unwonted
propinquity. They had walked and talked together, borrowed each other’s
books and newspapers, spent the long chill evenings over the fire in the
dim lamplight of her little pitch-pine sitting-room; and she had been
wonderfully comforted by his presence, and hard frozen places in her had
melted, and she had known that she would be desperately sorry when he
went. And then, just at the end, in his odd indirect way, he had let her
see that it rested with her to have him stay. She could still relive the
sleepless night she had given to that discovery. It was preposterous, of
course, to think of repaying his devotion by accepting such a sacrifice;
but how find reasons to convince him? She could not bear to let
him think her less touched, less inclined to him than she was: the
generosity of his love deserved that she should repay it with the truth.
Yet how let him see what she felt, and yet refuse what he offered? How
confess to him what had been on her lips when he made the offer: “I’ve
seen what it did to one man; and there must never, never be another”?
The tacit ignoring of her past had been the element in which their
friendship lived, and she could not suddenly, to him of all men, begin
to talk of herself like a guilty woman in a play. Somehow, in the end,
she had managed it, had averted a direct explanation, had made him
understand that her life was over, that she existed only for her
daughter, and that a more definite word from him would have been almost
a breach of delicacy. She was so used to be having as if her life were
over! And, at any rate, he had taken her hint, and she had been able to
spare her sensitiveness and his. The next year, when he came to Florence
to see her, they met again in the old friendly way; and that till now
had continued to be the tenor of their intimacy.

And now, suddenly and unexpectedly, he had brought up the question
again, directly this time, and in such a form that she could not evade
it: putting the renewal of his plea, after so long an interval, on the
ground that, on her own showing, her chief argument against it no longer
existed.

“You tell me Leila’s happy. If she’s happy, she doesn’t need you--need
you, that is, in the same way as before. You wanted, I know, to be
always in reach, always free and available if she should suddenly call
you to her or take refuge with you. I understood that--I respected it.
I didn’t urge my case because I saw it was useless. You couldn’t, I
understood well enough, have felt free to take such happiness as life
with me might give you while she was unhappy, and, as you imagined,
with no hope of release. Even then I didn’t feel as you did about it; I
understood better the trend of things here. But ten years ago the change
hadn’t really come; and I had no way of convincing you that it was
coming. Still, I always fancied that Leila might not think her case was
closed, and so I chose to think that ours wasn’t either. Let me go on
thinking so, at any rate, till you’ve seen her, and confirmed with your
own eyes what Susy Suffern tells you.”




III

All through what Susy Suffern told and retold her during their
four-hours’ flight to the hills this plea of Ide’s kept coming back to
Mrs. Lidcote. She did not yet know what she felt as to its bearing on
her own fate, but it was something on which her confused thoughts
could stay themselves amid the welter of new impressions, and she was
inexpressibly glad that he had said what he had, and said it at that
particular moment. It helped her to hold fast to her identity in the
rush of strange names and new categories that her cousin’s talk poured
out on her.

With the progress of the journey Miss Suffern’s communications grew
more and more amazing. She was like a cicerone preparing the mind of an
inexperienced traveller for the marvels about to burst on it.

“You won’t know Leila. She’s had her pearls reset. Sargent’s to paint
her. Oh, and I was to tell you that she hopes you won’t mind being the
least bit squeezed over Sunday. The house was built by Wilbour’s father,
you know, and it’s rather old-fashioned--only ten spare bedrooms. Of
course that’s small for what they mean to do, and she’ll show you the
new plans they’ve had made. Their idea is to keep the present house as a
wing. She told me to explain--she’s so dreadfully sorry not to be able
to give you a sitting-room just at first. They’re thinking of Egypt for
next winter, unless, of course, Wilbour gets his appointment. Oh, didn’t
she write you about that? Why, he wants Borne, you know--the second
secretaryship. Or, rather, he wanted England; but Leila insisted that if
they went abroad she must be near you. And of course what she says is
law. Oh, they quite hope they’ll get it. You see Horace’s uncle is in
the Cabinet,--one of the assistant secretaries,--and I believe he has a
good deal of pull--”

“Horace’s uncle? You mean Wilbour’s, I suppose,” Mrs. Lidcote
interjected, with a gasp of which a fraction was given to Miss Suffern’s
flippant use of the language.

“Wilbour’s? No, I don’t. I mean Horace’s. There’s no bad feeling between
them, I assure you. Since Horace’s engagement was announced--you didn’t
know Horace was engaged? Why, he’s marrying one of Bishop Thorbury’s
girls: the red-haired one who wrote the novel that every one’s talking
about, ‘This Flesh of Mine.’ They’re to be married in the cathedral. Of
course Horace _can_, because it was Leila who--but, as I say, there’s
not the _least_ feeling, and Horace wrote himself to his uncle about
Wilbour.”

Mrs. Lidcote’s thoughts fled back to what she had said to Ide the day
before on the deck of the _Utopia_. “I didn’t take up much room before,
but now where is there a corner for me?” Where indeed in this crowded,
topsy-turvey world, with its headlong changes and helter-skelter
readjustments, its new tolerances and indifferences and accommodations,
was there room for a character fashioned by slower sterner processes and
a life broken under their inexorable pressure? And then, in a flash,
she viewed the chaos from a new angle, and order seemed to move upon the
void. If the old processes were changed, her case was changed with them;
she, too, was a part of the general readjustment, a tiny fragment of the
new pattern worked out in bolder freer harmonies. Since her daughter had
no penalty to pay, was not she herself released by the same stroke? The
rich arrears of youth and joy were gone; but was there not time enough
left to accumulate new stores of happiness? That, of course, was what
Franklin Ide had felt and had meant her to feel. He had seen at once
what the change in her daughter’s situation would make in her view of
her own. It was almost--wondrously enough!--as if Leila’s folly had been
the means of vindicating hers.

*****

Everything else for the moment faded for Mrs. Lidcote in the glow of her
daughter’s embrace. It was unnatural, it was almost terrifying, to find
herself standing on a strange threshold, under an unknown roof, in a big
hall full of pictures, flowers, firelight, and hurrying servants, and
in this spacious unfamiliar confusion to discover Leila, bareheaded,
laughing, authoritative, with a strange young man jovially echoing her
welcome and transmitting her orders; but once Mrs. Lidcote had her child
on her breast, and her child’s “It’s all right, you old darling!” in her
ears, every other feeling was lost in the deep sense of well-being that
only Leila’s hug could give.

The sense was still with her, warming her veins and pleasantly
fluttering her heart, as she went up to her room after luncheon. A
little constrained by the presence of visitors, and not altogether sorry
to defer for a few hours the “long talk” with her daughter for which she
somehow felt herself tremulously unready, she had withdrawn, on the plea
of fatigue, to the bright luxurious bedroom into which Leila had again
and again apologized for having been obliged to squeeze her. The room
was bigger and finer than any in her small apartment in Florence; but it
was not the standard of affluence implied in her daughter’s tone about
it that chiefly struck her, nor yet the finish and complexity of its
appointments. It was the look it shared with the rest of the house, and
with the perspective of the gardens beneath its windows, of being part
of an “establishment”--of something solid, avowed, founded on sacraments
and precedents and principles. There was nothing about the place, or
about Leila and Wilbour, that suggested either passion or peril: their
relation seemed as comfortable as their furniture and as respectable as
their balance at the bank.

This was, in the whole confusing experience, the thing that confused
Mrs. Lidcote most, that gave her at once the deepest feeling of security
for Leila and the strongest sense of apprehension for herself. Yes,
there was something oppressive in the completeness and compactness of
Leila’s well-being. Ide had been right: her daughter did not need her.
Leila, with her first embrace, had unconsciously attested the fact in
the same phrase as Ide himself and as the two young women with the hats.
“It’s all right, you old darling!” she had said; and her mother sat
alone, trying to fit herself into the new scheme of things which such a
certainty betokened.

Her first distinct feeling was one of irrational resentment. If such a
change was to come, why had it not come sooner? Here was she, a woman
not yet old, who had paid with the best years of her life for the theft
of the happiness that her daughter’s contemporaries were taking as
their due. There was no sense, no sequence, in it. She had had what she
wanted, but she had had to pay too much for it. She had had to pay the
last bitterest price of learning that love has a price: that it is worth
so much and no more. She had known the anguish of watching the man she
loved discover this first, and of reading the discovery in his eyes. It
was a part of her history that she had not trusted herself to think
of for a long time past: she always took a big turn about that haunted
corner. But now, at the sight of the young man downstairs, so openly and
jovially Leila’s, she was overwhelmed at the senseless waste of her own
adventure, and wrung with the irony of perceiving that the success
or failure of the deepest human experiences may hang on a matter of
chronology.

Then gradually the thought of Ide returned to her. “I chose to think
that our case wasn’t closed,” he had said. She had been deeply touched
by that. To every one else her case had been closed so long! _Finis_ was
scrawled all over her. But here was one man who had believed and waited,
and what if what he believed in and waited for were coming true? If
Leila’s “all right” should really foreshadow hers?

As yet, of course, it was impossible to tell. She had fancied, indeed,
when she entered the drawing-room before luncheon, that a too-sudden
hush had fallen on the assembled group of Leila’s friends, on the
slender vociferous young women and the lounging golf-stockinged young
men. They had all received her politely, with the kind of petrified
politeness that may be either a tribute to age or a protest at laxity;
but to them, of course, she must be an old woman because she was Leila’s
mother, and in a society so dominated by youth the mere presence of
maturity was a constraint.

One of the young girls, however, had presently emerged from the group,
and, attaching herself to Mrs. Lidcote, had listened to her with a
blue gaze of admiration which gave the older woman a sudden happy
consciousness of her long-forgotten social graces. It was agreeable to
find herself attracting this young Charlotte Wynn, whose mother had been
among her closest friends, and in whom something of the soberness and
softness of the earlier manners had survived. But the little colloquy,
broken up by the announcement of luncheon, could of course result in
nothing more definite than this reminiscent emotion.

No, she could not yet tell how her own case was to be fitted into the
new order of things; but there were more people--“older people” Leila
had put it--arriving by the afternoon train, and that evening at dinner
she would doubtless be able to judge. She began to wonder nervously who
the new-comers might be. Probably she would be spared the embarrassment
of finding old acquaintances among them; but it was odd that her
daughter had mentioned no names.

Leila had proposed that, later in the afternoon, Wilbour should take
her mother for a drive: she said she wanted them to have a “nice, quiet
talk.” But Mrs. Lidcote wished her talk with Leila to come first, and
had, moreover, at luncheon, caught stray allusions to an impending
tennis-match in which her son-in-law was engaged. Her fatigue had been a
sufficient pretext for declining the drive, and she had begged Leila to
think of her as peacefully resting in her room till such time as they
could snatch their quiet moment.

“Before tea, then, you duck!” Leila with a last kiss had decided; and
presently Mrs. Lidcote, through her open window, had heard the fresh
loud voices of her daughter’s visitors chiming across the gardens from
the tennis-court.




IV

Leila had come and gone, and they had had their talk. It had not lasted
as long as Mrs. Lidcote wished, for in the middle of it Leila had been
summoned to the telephone to receive an important message from town, and
had sent word to her mother that she couldn’t come back just then,
as one of the young ladies had been called away unexpectedly and
arrangements had to be made for her departure. But the mother and
daughter had had almost an hour together, and Mrs. Lidcote was happy.
She had never seen Leila so tender, so solicitous. The only thing that
troubled her was the very excess of this solicitude, the exaggerated
expression of her daughter’s annoyance that their first moments together
should have been marred by the presence of strangers.

“Not strangers to me, darling, since they’re friends of yours,” her
mother had assured her.

“Yes; but I know your feeling, you queer wild mother. I know how you’ve
always hated people.” (_Hated people!_ Had Leila forgotten why?)
“And that’s why I told Susy that if you preferred to go with her to
Ridgefield on Sunday I should perfectly understand, and patiently wait
for our good hug. But you didn’t really mind them at luncheon, did you,
dearest?”

Mrs. Lidcote, at that, had suddenly thrown a startled look at her
daughter. “I don’t mind things of that kind any longer,” she had simply
answered.

“But that doesn’t console me for having exposed you to the bother of it,
for having let you come here when I ought to have _ordered_ you off to
Ridgefield with Susy. If Susy hadn’t been stupid she’d have made you go
there with her. I hate to think of you up here all alone.”

Again Mrs. Lidcote tried to read something more than a rather obtuse
devotion in her daughter’s radiant gaze. “I’m glad to have had a rest
this afternoon, dear; and later--”

“Oh, yes, later, when all this fuss is over, we’ll more than make up for
it, sha’n’t we, you precious darling?” And at this point Leila had been
summoned to the telephone, leaving Mrs. Lidcote to her conjectures.

These were still floating before her in cloudy uncertainty when Miss
Suffern tapped at the door.

“You’ve come to take me down to tea? I’d forgotten how late it was,”
 Mrs. Lidcote exclaimed.

Miss Suffern, a plump peering little woman, with prim hair and a
conciliatory smile, nervously adjusted the pendent bugles of her
elaborate black dress. Miss Suffern was always in mourning, and always
commemorating the demise of distant relatives by wearing the discarded
wardrobe of their next of kin. “It isn’t _exactly_ mourning,” she would
say; “but it’s the only stitch of black poor Julia had--and of course
George was only my mother’s step-cousin.”

As she came forward Mrs. Lidcote found herself humorously wondering
whether she were mourning Horace Pursh’s divorce in one of his mother’s
old black satins.

“Oh, _did_ you mean to go down for tea?” Susy Suffern peered at her, a
little fluttered. “Leila sent me up to keep you company. She thought it
would be cozier for you to stay here. She was afraid you were feeling
rather tired.”

“I was; but I’ve had the whole afternoon to rest in. And this wonderful
sofa to help me.”

“Leila told me to tell you that she’d rush up for a minute before
dinner, after everybody had arrived; but the train is always dreadfully
late. She’s in despair at not giving you a sitting-room; she wanted to
know if I thought you really minded.”

“Of course I don’t mind. It’s not like Leila to think I should.” Mrs.
Lidcote drew aside to make way for the housemaid, who appeared in the
doorway bearing a table spread with a bewildering variety of tea-cakes.

“Leila saw to it herself,” Miss Suffern murmured as the door closed.
“Her one idea is that you should feel happy here.”

It struck Mrs. Lidcote as one more mark of the subverted state of
things that her daughter’s solicitude should find expression in the
multiplicity of sandwiches and the piping-hotness of muffins; but then
everything that had happened since her arrival seemed to increase her
confusion.

The note of a motor-horn down the drive gave another turn to her
thoughts. “Are those the new arrivals already?” she asked.

“Oh, dear, no; they won’t be here till after seven.” Miss Suffern
craned her head from the window to catch a glimpse of the motor. “It
must be Charlotte leaving.”

“Was it the little Wynn girl who was called away in a hurry? I hope it’s
not on account of illness.”

“Oh, no; I believe there was some mistake about dates. Her mother
telephoned her that she was expected at the Stepleys, at Fishkill, and
she had to be rushed over to Albany to catch a train.”

Mrs. Lidcote meditated. “I’m sorry. She’s a charming young thing. I
hoped I should have another talk with her this evening after dinner.”

“Yes; it’s too bad.” Miss Suffern’s gaze grew vague.

“You _do_ look tired, you know,” she continued, seating herself at
the tea-table and preparing to dispense its delicacies. “You must go
straight back to your sofa and let me wait on you. The excitement has
told on you more than you think, and you mustn’t fight against it any
longer. Just stay quietly up here and let yourself go. You’ll have Leila
to yourself on Monday.”

Mrs. Lidcote received the tea-cup which her cousin proffered, but showed
no other disposition to obey her injunctions. For a moment she stirred
her tea in silence; then she asked: “Is it your idea that I should stay
quietly up here till Monday?”

Miss Suffern set down her cup with a gesture so sudden that it
endangered an adjacent plate of scones. When she had assured herself of
the safety of the scones she looked up with a fluttered laugh. “Perhaps,
dear, by to-morrow you’ll be feeling differently. The air here, you
know--”

“Yes, I know.” Mrs. Lidcote bent forward to help herself to a scone.
“Who’s arriving this evening?” she asked.

Miss Suffern frowned and peered. “You know my wretched head for names.
Leila told me--but there are so many--”

“So many? She didn’t tell me she expected a big party.”

“Oh, not big: but rather outside of her little group. And of course, as
it’s the first time, she’s a little excited at having the older set.”

“The older set? Our contemporaries, you mean?”

“Why--yes.” Miss Suffern paused as if to gather herself up for a leap.
“The Ashton Gileses,” she brought out.

“The Ashton Gileses? Really? I shall be glad to see Mary Giles again. It
must be eighteen years,” said Mrs. Lidcote steadily.

“Yes,” Miss Suffern gasped, precipitately refilling her cup.

“The Ashton Gileses; and who else?”

“Well, the Sam Fresbies. But the most important person, of course, is
Mrs. Lorin Boulger.”

“Mrs. Boulger? Leila didn’t tell me she was coming.”

“Didn’t she? I suppose she forgot everything when she saw you. But the
party was got up for Mrs. Boulger. You see, it’s very important that she
should--well, take a fancy to Leila and Wilbour; his being appointed
to Rome virtually depends on it. And you know Leila insists on Rome in
order to be near you. So she asked Mary Giles, who’s intimate with the
Boulgers, if the visit couldn’t possibly be arranged; and Mary’s cable
caught Mrs. Boulger at Cherbourg. She’s to be only a fortnight in
America; and getting her to come directly here was rather a triumph.”

“Yes; I see it was,” said Mrs. Lidcote.

“You know, she’s rather--rather fussy; and Mary was a little doubtful
if--”

“If she would, on account of Leila?” Mrs. Lidcote murmured.

“Well, yes. In her official position. But luckily she’s a friend of the
Barkleys. And finding the Gileses and Fresbies here will make it all
right. The times have changed!” Susy Suffern indulgently summed up.

Mrs. Lidcote smiled. “Yes; a few years ago it would have seemed
improbable that I should ever again be dining with Mary Giles and
Harriet Fresbie and Mrs. Lorin Boulger.”

Miss Suffern did not at the moment seem disposed to enlarge upon this
theme; and after an interval of silence Mrs. Lidcote suddenly resumed:
“Do they know I’m here, by the way?”

The effect of her question was to produce in Miss Suffern an exaggerated
access of peering and frowning. She twitched the tea-things about,
fingered her bugles, and, looking at the clock, exclaimed amazedly:
“Mercy! Is it seven already?”

“Not that it can make any difference, I suppose,” Mrs. Lidcote
continued. “But did Leila tell them I was coming?”

Miss Suffern looked at her with pain. “Why, you don’t suppose, dearest,
that Leila would do anything--”

Mrs. Lidcote went on: “For, of course, it’s of the first importance, as
you say, that Mrs. Lorin Boulger should be favorably impressed, in order
that Wilbour may have the best possible chance of getting Borne.”

“I _told_ Leila you’d feel that, dear. You see, it’s actually on _your_
account--so that they may get a post near you--that Leila invited Mrs.
Boulger.”

“Yes, I see that.” Mrs. Lidcote, abruptly rising from her seat, turned
her eyes to the clock. “But, as you say, it’s getting late. Oughtn’t we
to dress for dinner?”

Miss Suffern, at the suggestion, stood up also, an agitated hand
among her bugles. “I do wish I could persuade you to stay up here this
evening. I’m sure Leila’d be happier if you would. Really, you’re much
too tired to come down.”

“What nonsense, Susy!” Mrs. Lidcote spoke with a sudden sharpness, her
hand stretched to the bell. “When do we dine? At half-past eight? Then I
must really send you packing. At my age it takes time to dress.”

Miss Suffern, thus projected toward the threshold, lingered there to
repeat: “Leila’ll never forgive herself if you make an effort you’re not
up to.” But Mrs. Lidcote smiled on her without answering, and the icy
lightwave propelled her through the door.




V

Mrs. Lidcote, though she had made the gesture of ringing for her maid,
had not done so.

When the door closed, she continued to stand motionless in the middle
of her soft spacious room. The fire which had been kindled at twilight
danced on the brightness of silver and mirrors and sober gilding; and
the sofa toward which she had been urged by Miss Suffern heaped up
its cushions in inviting proximity to a table laden with new books and
papers. She could not recall having ever been more luxuriously housed,
or having ever had so strange a sense of being out alone, under the
night, in a windbeaten plain. She sat down by the fire and thought.

A knock on the door made her lift her head, and she saw her daughter
on the threshold. The intricate ordering of Leila’s fair hair and the
flying folds of her dressinggown showed that she had interrupted her
dressing to hasten to her mother; but once in the room she paused a
moment, smiling uncertainly, as though she had forgotten the object of
her haste.

Mrs. Lidcote rose to her feet. “Time to dress, dearest? Don’t scold! I
shan’t be late.”

“To dress?” Leila stood before her with a puzzled look. “Why, I thought,
dear--I mean, I hoped you’d decided just to stay here quietly and rest.”

Her mother smiled. “But I’ve been resting all the afternoon!”

“Yes, but--you know you _do_ look tired. And when Susy told me just now
that you meant to make the effort--”

“You came to stop me?”

“I came to tell you that you needn’t feel in the least obliged--”

“Of course. I understand that.”

There was a pause during which Leila, vaguely averting herself from
her mother’s scrutiny, drifted toward the dressing-table and began to
disturb the symmetry of the brushes and bottles laid out on it.

“Do your visitors know that I’m here?” Mrs. Lidcote suddenly went on.

“Do they--Of course--why, naturally,” Leila rejoined, absorbed in
trying to turn the stopper of a salts-bottle.

“Then won’t they think it odd if I don’t appear?”

“Oh, not in the least, dearest. I assure you they’ll _all_ understand.”
 Leila laid down the bottle and turned back to her mother, her face
alight with reassurance.

Mrs. Lidcote stood motionless, her head erect, her smiling eyes on her
daughter’s. “Will they think it odd if I _do_?”

Leila stopped short, her lips half parted to reply. As she paused, the
colour stole over her bare neck, swept up to her throat, and burst into
flame in her cheeks. Thence it sent its devastating crimson up to her
very temples, to the lobes of her ears, to the edges of her eyelids,
beating all over her in fiery waves, as if fanned by some imperceptible
wind.

Mrs. Lidcote silently watched the conflagration; then she turned away
her eyes with a slight laugh. “I only meant that I was afraid it might
upset the arrangement of your dinner-table if I didn’t come down. If you
can assure me that it won’t, I believe I’ll take you at your word and
go back to this irresistible sofa.” She paused, as if waiting for her
daughter to speak; then she held out her arms. “Run off and dress,
dearest; and don’t have me on your mind.” She clasped Leila close,
pressing a long kiss on the last afterglow of her subsiding blush. “I do
feel the least bit overdone, and if it won’t inconvenience you to have
me drop out of things, I believe I’ll basely take to my bed and stay
there till your party scatters. And now run off, or you’ll be late; and
make my excuses to them all.”




VI

The Barkleys’ visitors had dispersed, and Mrs. Lidcote, completely
restored by her two days’ rest, found herself, on the following Monday
alone with her children and Miss Suffern.

There was a note of jubilation in the air, for the party had “gone
off” so extraordinarily well, and so completely, as it appeared, to the
satisfaction of Mrs. Lorin Boulger, that Wilbour’s early appointment
to Rome was almost to be counted on. So certain did this seem that the
prospect of a prompt reunion mitigated the distress with which Leila
learned of her mother’s decision to return almost immediately to
Italy. No one understood this decision; it seemed to Leila absolutely
unintelligible that Mrs. Lidcote should not stay on with them till their
own fate was fixed, and Wilbour echoed her astonishment.

“Why shouldn’t you, as Leila says, wait here till we can all pack up and
go together?”

Mrs. Lidcote smiled her gratitude with her refusal. “After all, it’s not
yet sure that you’ll be packing up.”

“Oh, you ought to have seen Wilbour with Mrs. Boulger,” Leila triumphed.

“No, you ought to have seen Leila with her,” Leila’s husband exulted.

Miss Suffern enthusiastically appended: “I _do_ think inviting Harriet
Fresbie was a stroke of genius!”

“Oh, we’ll be with you soon,” Leila laughed. “So soon that it’s really
foolish to separate.”

But Mrs. Lidcote held out with the quiet firmness which her daughter
knew it was useless to oppose. After her long months in India, it was
really imperative, she declared, that she should get back to Florence
and see what was happening to her little place there; and she had been
so comfortable on the _Utopia_ that she had a fancy to return by the
same ship. There was nothing for it, therefore, but to acquiesce in her
decision and keep her with them till the afternoon before the day of
the _Utopia’s_ sailing. This arrangement fitted in with certain projects
which, during her two days’ seclusion, Mrs. Lidcote had silently
matured. It had become to her of the first importance to get away as
soon as she could, and the little place in Florence, which held her
past in every fold of its curtains and between every page of its books,
seemed now to her the one spot where that past would be endurable to
look upon.

She was not unhappy during the intervening days. The sight of Leila’s
well-being, the sense of Leila’s tenderness, were, after all, what she
had come for; and of these she had had full measure. Leila had never
been happier or more tender; and the contemplation of her bliss, and the
enjoyment of her affection, were an absorbing occupation for her mother.
But they were also a sharp strain on certain overtightened chords, and
Mrs. Lidcote, when at last she found herself alone in the New York hotel
to which she had returned the night before embarking, had the feeling
that she had just escaped with her life from the clutch of a giant hand.

She had refused to let her daughter come to town with her; she had even
rejected Susy Suffern’s company. She wanted no viaticum but that of her
own thoughts; and she let these come to her without shrinking from them
as she sat in the same high-hung sitting-room in which, just a week
before, she and Franklin Ide had had their memorable talk.

She had promised her friend to let him hear from her, but she had not
kept her promise. She knew that he had probably come back from Chicago,
and that if he learned of her sudden decision to return to Italy it
would be impossible for her not to see him before sailing; and as she
wished above all things not to see him she had kept silent, intending to
send him a letter from the steamer.

There was no reason why she should wait till then to write it. The
actual moment was more favorable, and the task, though not agreeable,
would at least bridge over an hour of her lonely evening. She went up
to the writing-table, drew out a sheet of paper and began to write his
name. And as she did so, the door opened and he came in.

The words she met him with were the last she could have imagined herself
saying when they had parted. “How in the world did you know that I was
here?”

He caught her meaning in a flash. “You didn’t want me to, then?” He
stood looking at her. “I suppose I ought to have taken your silence as
meaning that. But I happened to meet Mrs. Wynn, who is stopping here,
and she asked me to dine with her and Charlotte, and Charlotte’s
young man. They told me they’d seen you arriving this afternoon, and I
couldn’t help coming up.”

There was a pause between them, which Mrs. Lidcote at last surprisingly
broke with the exclamation: “Ah, she _did_ recognize me, then!”

“Recognize you?” He stared. “Why--”

“Oh, I saw she did, though she never moved an eyelid. I saw it by
Charlotte’s blush. The child has the prettiest blush. I saw that her
mother wouldn’t let her speak to me.”

Ide put down his hat with an impatient laugh. “Hasn’t Leila cured you of
your delusions?”

She looked at him intently. “Then you don’t think Margaret Wynn meant to
cut me?”

“I think your ideas are absurd.”

She paused for a perceptible moment without taking this up; then she
said, at a tangent: “I’m sailing tomorrow early. I meant to write to
you--there’s the letter I’d begun.”

Ide followed her gesture, and then turned his eyes back to her face.
“You didn’t mean to see me, then, or even to let me know that you were
going till you’d left?”

“I felt it would be easier to explain to you in a letter--”

“What in God’s name is there to explain?” She made no reply, and he
pressed on: “It can’t be that you’re worried about Leila, for Charlotte
Wynn told me she’d been there last week, and there was a big
party arriving when she left: Fresbies and Gileses, and Mrs. Lorin
Boulger--all the board of examiners! If Leila has passed _that_, she’s
got her degree.”

Mrs. Lidcote had dropped down into a corner of the sofa where she had
sat during their talk of the week before. “I was stupid,” she began
abruptly. “I ought to have gone to Ridgefield with Susy. I didn’t see
till afterward that I was expected to.”

“You were expected to?”

“Yes. Oh, it wasn’t Leila’s fault. She suffered--poor darling; she was
distracted. But she’d asked her party before she knew I was arriving.”

“Oh, as to that--” Ide drew a deep breath of relief. “I can understand
that it must have been a disappointment not to have you to herself just
at first. But, after all, you were among old friends or their children:
the Gileses and Fresbies--and little Charlotte Wynn.” He paused a moment
before the last name, and scrutinized her hesitatingly. “Even if they
came at the wrong time, you must have been glad to see them all at
Leila’s.”

She gave him back his look with a faint smile. “I didn’t see them.”

“You didn’t see them?”

“No. That is, excepting little Charlotte Wynn. That child is exquisite.
We had a talk before luncheon the day I arrived. But when her mother
found out that I was staying in the house she telephoned her to leave
immediately, and so I didn’t see her again.”

The colour rushed to Ide’s sallow face. “I don’t know where you get such
ideas!”

She pursued, as if she had not heard him: “Oh, and I saw Mary Giles for
a minute too. Susy Suffern brought her up to my room the last evening,
after dinner, when all the others were at bridge. She meant it
kindly--but it wasn’t much use.”

“But what were you doing in your room in the evening after dinner?”

“Why, you see, when I found out my mistake in coming,--how embarrassing
it was for Leila, I mean--I simply told her I was very tired, and
preferred to stay upstairs till the party was over.”

Ide, with a groan, struck his hand against the arm of his chair. “I
wonder how much of all this you simply imagined!”

“I didn’t imagine the fact of Harriet Fresbie’s not even asking if
she might see me when she knew I was in the house. Nor of Mary Giles’s
getting Susy, at the eleventh hour, to smuggle her up to my room when
the others wouldn’t know where she’d gone; nor poor Leila’s ghastly fear
lest Mrs. Lorin Boulger, for whom the party was given, should guess I
was in the house, and prevent her husband’s giving Wilbour the second
secretaryship because she’d been obliged to spend a night under the same
roof with his mother-in-law!”

Ide continued to drum on his chair-arm with exasperated fingers. “You
don’t _know_ that any of the acts you describe are due to the causes you
suppose.”

Mrs. Lidcote paused before replying, as if honestly trying to measure
the weight of this argument. Then she said in a low tone: “I know that
Leila was in an agony lest I should come down to dinner the first night.
And it was for me she was afraid, not for herself. Leila is never afraid
for herself.”

“But the conclusions you draw are simply preposterous. There are
narrow-minded women everywhere, but the women who were at Leila’s knew
perfectly well that their going there would give her a sort of social
sanction, and if they were willing that she should have it, why on earth
should they want to withhold it from you?”

“That’s what I told myself a week ago, in this very room, after my first
talk with Susy Suffern.” She lifted a misty smile to his anxious eyes.
“That’s why I listened to what you said to me the same evening, and why
your arguments half convinced me, and made me think that what had
been possible for Leila might not be impossible for me. If the new
dispensation had come, why not for me as well as for the others? I can’t
tell you the flight my imagination took!”

Franklin Ide rose from his seat and crossed the room to a chair near her
sofa-corner. “All I cared about was that it seemed--for the moment--to
be carrying you toward me,” he said.

“I cared about that, too. That’s why I meant to go away without seeing
you.” They gave each other grave look for look. “Because, you see, I
was mistaken,” she went on. “We were both mistaken. You say it’s
preposterous that the women who didn’t object to accepting Leila’s
hospitality should have objected to meeting me under her roof. And so it
is; but I begin to understand why. It’s simply that society is much too
busy to revise its own judgments. Probably no one in the house with me
stopped to consider that my case and Leila’s were identical. They only
remembered that I’d done something which, at the time I did it, was
condemned by society. My case has been passed on and classified: I’m the
woman who has been cut for nearly twenty years. The older people have
half forgotten why, and the younger ones have never really known: it’s
simply become a tradition to cut me. And traditions that have lost their
meaning are the hardest of all to destroy.”

Ide sat motionless while she spoke. As she ended, he stood up with
a short laugh and walked across the room to the window. Outside, the
immense black prospect of New York, strung with its myriad lines of
light, stretched away into the smoky edges of the night. He showed it to
her with a gesture.

“What do you suppose such words as you’ve been using--‘society,’
‘tradition,’ and the rest--mean to all the life out there?”

She came and stood by him in the window. “Less than nothing, of course.
But you and I are not out there. We’re shut up in a little tight round
of habit and association, just as we’re shut up in this room. Remember,
I thought I’d got out of it once; but what really happened was that the
other people went out, and left me in the same little room. The only
difference was that I was there alone. Oh, I’ve made it habitable now,
I’m used to it; but I’ve lost any illusions I may have had as to an
angel’s opening the door.”

Ide again laughed impatiently. “Well, if the door won’t open, why not
let another prisoner in? At least it would be less of a solitude--”

She turned from the dark window back into the vividly lighted room.

“It would be more of a prison. You forget that I know all about that.
We’re all imprisoned, of course--all of us middling people, who don’t
carry our freedom in our brains. But we’ve accommodated ourselves to our
different cells, and if we’re moved suddenly into new ones we’re likely
to find a stone wall where we thought there was thin air, and to knock
ourselves senseless against it. I saw a man do that once.”

Ide, leaning with folded arms against the windowframe, watched her in
silence as she moved restlessly about the room, gathering together
some scattered books and tossing a handful of torn letters into the
paperbasket. When she ceased, he rejoined: “All you say is based on
preconceived theories. Why didn’t you put them to the test by coming
down to meet your old friends? Don’t you see the inference they would
naturally draw from your hiding yourself when they arrived? It looked as
though you were afraid of them--or as though you hadn’t forgiven them.
Either way, you put them in the wrong instead of waiting to let them put
you in the right. If Leila had buried herself in a desert do you suppose
society would have gone to fetch her out? You say you were afraid for
Leila and that she was afraid for you. Don’t you see what all these
complications of feeling mean? Simply that you were too nervous at the
moment to let things happen naturally, just as you’re too nervous now
to judge them rationally.” He paused and turned his eyes to her face.
“Don’t try to just yet. Give yourself a little more time. Give _me_ a
little more time. I’ve always known it would take time.”

He moved nearer, and she let him have her hand.

With the grave kindness of his face so close above her she felt like a
child roused out of frightened dreams and finding a light in the room.

“Perhaps you’re right--” she heard herself begin; then something within
her clutched her back, and her hand fell away from him.

“I know I’m right: trust me,” he urged. “We’ll talk of this in Florence
soon.”

She stood before him, feeling with despair his kindness, his patience
and his unreality. Everything he said seemed like a painted gauze let
down between herself and the real facts of life; and a sudden desire
seized her to tear the gauze into shreds.

She drew back and looked at him with a smile of superficial reassurance.
“You _are_ right--about not talking any longer now. I’m nervous and
tired, and it would do no good. I brood over things too much. As you
say, I must try not to shrink from people.” She turned away and glanced
at the clock. “Why, it’s only ten! If I send you off I shall begin
to brood again; and if you stay we shall go on talking about the same
thing. Why shouldn’t we go down and see Margaret Wynn for half an hour?”

She spoke lightly and rapidly, her brilliant eyes on his face. As she
watched him, she saw it change, as if her smile had thrown a too vivid
light upon it.

“Oh, no--not to-night!” he exclaimed.

“Not to-night? Why, what other night have I, when I’m off at
dawn? Besides, I want to show you at once that I mean to be more
sensible--that I’m not going to be afraid of people any more. And I
should really like another glimpse of little Charlotte.” He stood
before her, his hand in his beard, with the gesture he had in moments of
perplexity. “Come!” she ordered him gaily, turning to the door.

He followed her and laid his hand on her arm. “Don’t you think--hadn’t
you better let me go first and see? They told me they’d had a tiring day
at the dressmaker’s* I daresay they have gone to bed.”

“But you said they’d a young man of Charlotte’s dining with them. Surely
he wouldn’t have left by ten? At any rate, I’ll go down with you and
see. It takes so long if one sends a servant first” She put him gently
aside, and then paused as a new thought struck her. “Or wait; my maid’s
in the next room. I’ll tell her to go and ask if Margaret will receive
me. Yes, that’s much the best way.”

She turned back and went toward the door that led to her bedroom; but
before she could open it she felt Ide’s quick touch again.

“I believe--I remember now--Charlotte’s young man was suggesting that
they should all go out--to a musichall or something of the sort. I’m
sure--I’m positively sure that you won’t find them.”

Her hand dropped from the door, his dropped from her arm, and as they
drew back and faced each other she saw the blood rise slowly through his
sallow skin, redden his neck and ears, encroach upon the edges of his
beard, and settle in dull patches under his kind troubled eyes. She had
seen the same blush on another face, and the same impulse of compassion
she had then felt made her turn her gaze away again.

A knock on the door broke the silence, and a porter put his head’ into
the room.

“It’s only just to know how many pieces there’ll be to go down to the
steamer in the morning.”

With the words she felt that the veil of painted gauze was torn in
tatters, and that she was moving again among the grim edges of reality.

“Oh, dear,” she exclaimed, “I never _can_ remember! Wait a minute; I
shall have to ask my maid.”

She opened her bedroom door and called out: “Annette!”



MADAME DE TREYMES ***




Produced by Charles Aldarondo.  HTML version by Al Haines.









MADAME DE TREYMES


BY

EDITH WHARTON




MADAME DE TREYMES




I


John Durham, while he waited for Madame de Malrive to draw on her
gloves, stood in the hotel doorway looking out across the Rue de
Rivoli at the afternoon brightness of the Tuileries gardens.

His European visits were infrequent enough to have kept unimpaired
the freshness of his eye, and he was always struck anew by the vast
and consummately ordered spectacle of Paris: by its look of having
been boldly and deliberately planned as a background for the
enjoyment of life, instead of being forced into grudging concessions
to the festive instincts, or barricading itself against them in
unenlightened ugliness, like his own lamentable New York.

But to-day, if the scene had never presented itself more alluringly,
in that moist spring bloom between showers, when the horse-chestnuts
dome themselves in unreal green against a gauzy sky, and the very
dust of the pavement seems the fragrance of lilac made visible--to-day
for the first time the sense of a personal stake in it all, of having
to reckon individually with its effects and influences, kept Durham
from an unrestrained yielding to the spell. Paris might still be--to
the unimplicated it doubtless still was--the most beautiful city in
the world; but whether it were the most lovable or the most detestable
depended for him, in the last analysis, on the buttoning of the white
glove over which Fanny de Malrive still lingered.

The mere fact of her having forgotten to draw on her gloves as they
were descending in the hotel lift from his mother's drawing-room
was, in this connection, charged with significance to Durham. She
was the kind of woman who always presents herself to the mind's eye
as completely equipped, as made up of exquisitely cared for and
finely-related details; and that the heat of her parting with his
family should have left her unconscious that she was emerging
gloveless into Paris, seemed, on the whole, to speak hopefully for
Durham's future opinion of the city.

Even now, he could detect a certain confusion, a desire to draw
breath and catch up with life, in the way she dawdled over the last
buttons in the dimness of the porte-cochere, while her footman,
outside, hung on her retarded signal.

When at length they emerged, it was to learn from that functionary
that Madame la Marquise's carriage had been obliged to yield its
place at the door, but was at the moment in the act of regaining it.
Madame de Malrive cut the explanation short. "I shall walk home. The
carriage this evening at eight."

As the footman turned away, she raised her eyes for the first time
to Durham's.

"Will you walk with me? Let us cross the Tuileries. I should like to
sit a moment on the terrace."

She spoke quite easily and naturally, as if it were the most
commonplace thing in the world for them to be straying afoot
together over Paris; but even his vague knowledge of the world she
lived in--a knowledge mainly acquired through the perusal of
yellow-backed fiction--gave a thrilling significance to her
naturalness. Durham, indeed, was beginning to find that one of the
charms of a sophisticated society is that it lends point and
perspective to the slightest contact between the sexes. If, in the
old unrestricted New York days, Fanny Frisbee, from a brown stone
door-step, had proposed that they should take a walk in the Park,
the idea would have presented itself to her companion as agreeable
but unimportant; whereas Fanny de Malrive's suggestion that they
should stroll across the Tuileries was obviously fraught with
unspecified possibilities.

He was so throbbing with the sense of these possibilities that he
walked beside her without speaking down the length of the wide alley
which follows the line of the Rue de Rivoli, suffering her even,
when they reached its farthest end, to direct him in silence up the
steps to the terrace of the Feuillants. For, after all, the
possibilities were double-faced, and her bold departure from custom
might simply mean that what she had to say was so dreadful that it
needed all the tenderest mitigation of circumstance.

There was apparently nothing embarrassing to her in his silence: it
was a part of her long European discipline that she had learned to
manage pauses with ease. In her Frisbee days she might have packed
this one with a random fluency; now she was content to let it widen
slowly before them like the spacious prospect opening at their feet.
The complicated beauty of this prospect, as they moved toward it
between the symmetrically clipped limes of the lateral terrace,
touched him anew through her nearness, as with the hint of some vast
impersonal power, controlling and regulating her life in ways he
could not guess, putting between himself and her the whole width of
the civilization into which her marriage had absorbed her. And there
was such fear in the thought--he read such derision of what he had
to offer in the splendour of the great avenues tapering upward to
the sunset glories of the Arch--that all he had meant to say when he
finally spoke compressed itself at last into an abrupt unmitigated:
"Well?"

She answered at once--as though she had only awaited the call of the
national interrogation--"I don't know when I have been so happy."

"So happy?" The suddenness of his joy flushed up through his fair
skin.

"As I was just now--taking tea with your mother and sisters."

Durham's "Oh!" of surprise betrayed also a note of disillusionment,
which she met only by the reconciling murmur: "Shall we sit down?"

He found two of the springy yellow chairs indigenous to the spot,
and placed them under the tree near which they had paused, saying
reluctantly, as he did so: "Of course it was an immense pleasure to
_them_ to see you again."

"Oh, not in the same way. I mean--" she paused, sinking into the
chair, and betraying, for the first time, a momentary inability to
deal becomingly with the situation. "I mean," she resumed smiling,
"that it was not an event for them, as it was for me."

"An event?" he caught her up again, eagerly; for what, in the
language of any civilization, could that word mean but just the one
thing he most wished it to?

"To be with dear, good, sweet, simple, real Americans again!" she
burst out, heaping up her epithets with reckless prodigality.

Durham's smile once more faded to impersonality, as he rejoined,
just a shade on the defensive: "If it's merely our Americanism you
enjoyed--I've no doubt we can give you all you want in that line."

"Yes, it's just that! But if you knew what the word means to me! It
means--it means--" she paused as if to assure herself that they were
sufficiently isolated from the desultory groups beneath the other
trees--"it means that I'm _safe_ with them: as safe as in a bank!"

Durham felt a sudden warmth behind his eyes and in his throat. "I
think I do know--"

"No, you don't, really; you can't know how dear and strange and
familiar it all sounded: the old New York names that kept coming up
in your mother's talk, and her charming quaint ideas about
Europe--their all regarding it as a great big innocent pleasure
ground and shop for Americans; and your mother's missing the
home-made bread and preferring the American asparagus--I'm so tired
of Americans who despise even their own asparagus! And then your
married sister's spending her summers at--where is it?--the
Kittawittany House on Lake Pohunk--"

A vision of earnest women in Shetland shawls, with spectacles and
thin knobs of hair, eating blueberry pie at unwholesome hours in a
shingled dining-room on a bare New England hill-top, rose pallidly
between Durham and the verdant brightness of the Champs Elysees, and
he protested with a slight smile: "Oh, but my married sister is the
black sheep of the family--the rest of us never sank as low as
that."

"Low? I think it's beautiful--fresh and innocent and simple. I
remember going to such a place once. They have early dinner--rather
late--and go off in buckboards over terrible roads, and bring back
golden rod and autumn leaves, and read nature books aloud on the
piazza; and there is always one shy young man in flannels--only
one--who has come to see the prettiest girl (though how he can
choose among so many!) and who takes her off in a buggy for hours
and hours--" She paused and summed up with a long sigh: "It is
fifteen years since I was in America."

"And you're still so good an American."

"Oh, a better and better one every day!"

He hesitated. "Then why did you never come back?"

Her face altered instantly, exchanging its retrospective light for
the look of slightly shadowed watchfulness which he had known as
most habitual to it.

"It was impossible--it has always been so. My husband would not go;
and since--since our separation--there have been family reasons."

Durham sighed impatiently. "Why do you talk of reasons? The truth
is, you have made your life here. You could never give all this up!"
He made a discouraged gesture in the direction of the Place de la
Concorde.

"Give it up! I would go tomorrow! But it could never, now, be for
more than a visit. I must live in France on account of my boy."

Durham's heart gave a quick beat. At last the talk had neared the
point toward which his whole mind was straining, and he began to
feel a personal application in her words. But that made him all the
more cautious about choosing his own.

"It is an agreement--about the boy?" he ventured.

"I gave my word. They knew that was enough," she said proudly;
adding, as if to put him in full possession of her reasons: "It
would have been much more difficult for me to obtain complete
control of my son if it had not been understood that I was to live
in France."

"That seems fair," Durham assented after a moment's reflection: it
was his instinct, even in the heat of personal endeavour, to pause a
moment on the question of "fairness." The personal claim reasserted
itself as he added tentatively: "But when he _is_ brought up--when
he's grown up: then you would feel freer?"

She received this with a start, as a possibility too remote to have
entered into her view of the future. "He is only eight years old!"
she objected.

"Ah, of course it would be a long way off?"

"A long way off, thank heaven! French mothers part late with their
sons, and in that one respect I mean to be a French mother."

"Of course--naturally--since he has only you," Durham again
assented.

He was eager to show how fully he took her point of view, if only to
dispose her to the reciprocal fairness of taking his when the time
came to present it. And he began to think that the time had now
come; that their walk would not have thus resolved itself, without
excuse or pretext, into a tranquil session beneath the trees, for
any purpose less important than that of giving him his opportunity.

He took it, characteristically, without seeking a transition. "When
I spoke to you, the other day, about myself--about what I felt for
you--I said nothing of the future, because, for the moment, my mind
refused to travel beyond its immediate hope of happiness. But I
felt, of course, even then, that the hope involved various
difficulties--that we can't, as we might once have done, come
together without any thought but for ourselves; and whatever your
answer is to be, I want to tell you now that I am ready to accept my
share of the difficulties." He paused, and then added explicitly:
"If there's the least chance of your listening to me, I'm willing to
live over here as long as you can keep your boy with you."




II


Whatever Madame de Malrive's answer was to be, there could be no
doubt as to her readiness to listen. She received Durham's words
without sign of resistance, and took time to ponder them gently
before she answered in a voice touched by emotion: "You are very
generous--very unselfish; but when you fix a limit--no matter how
remote--to my remaining here, I see how wrong it is to let myself
consider for a moment such possibilities as we have been talking
of."

"Wrong? Why should it be wrong?"

"Because I shall want to keep my boy always! Not, of course, in the
sense of living with him, or even forming an important part of his
life; I am not deluded enough to think that possible. But I do
believe it possible never to pass wholly out of his life; and while
there is a hope of that, how can I leave him?" She paused, and
turned on him a new face, a face in which the past of which he was
still so ignorant showed itself like a shadow suddenly darkening a
clear pane. "How can I make you understand?" she went on urgently.
"It is not only because of my love for him--not only, I mean,
because of my own happiness in being with him; that I can't, in
imagination, surrender even the remotest hour of his future; it is
because, the moment he passes out of my influence, he passes under
that other--the influence I have been fighting against every hour
since he was born!--I don't mean, you know," she added, as Durham,
with bent head, continued to offer the silent fixity of his
attention, "I don't mean the special personal influence--except
inasmuch as it represents something wider, more general, something
that encloses and circulates through the whole world in which he
belongs. That is what I meant when I said you could never
understand! There is nothing in your experience--in any American
experience--to correspond with that far-reaching family
organization, which is itself a part of the larger system, and which
encloses a young man of my son's position in a network of accepted
prejudices and opinions. Everything is prepared in advance--his
political and religious convictions, his judgments of people, his
sense of honour, his ideas of women, his whole view of life. He is
taught to see vileness and corruption in every one not of his own
way of thinking, and in every idea that does not directly serve the
religious and political purposes of his class. The truth isn't a
fixed thing: it's not used to test actions by, it's tested by them,
and made to fit in with them. And this forming of the mind begins
with the child's first consciousness; it's in his nursery stories,
his baby prayers, his very games with his playmates! Already he is
only half mine, because the Church has the other half, and will be
reaching out for my share as soon as his education begins. But that
other half is still mine, and I mean to make it the strongest and
most living half of the two, so that, when the inevitable conflict
begins, the energy and the truth and the endurance shall be on my
side and not on theirs!"

She paused, flushing with the repressed fervour of her utterance,
though her voice had not been raised beyond its usual discreet
modulations; and Durham felt himself tingling with the transmitted
force of her resolve. Whatever shock her words brought to his
personal hope, he was grateful to her for speaking them so clearly,
for having so sure a grasp of her purpose.

Her decision strengthened his own, and after a pause of deliberation
he said quietly: "There might be a good deal to urge on the other
side--the ineffectualness of your sacrifice, the probability that
when your son marries he will inevitably be absorbed back into the
life of his class and his people; but I can't look at it in that
way, because if I were in your place I believe I should feel just as
you do about it. As long as there was a fighting chance I should
want to keep hold of my half, no matter how much the struggle cost
me. And one reason why I understand your feeling about your boy is
that I have the same feeling about _you:_ as long as there's a
fighting chance of keeping my half of you--the half he is willing to
spare me--I don't see how I can ever give it up." He waited again,
and then brought out firmly: "If you'll marry me, I'll agree to live
out here as long as you want, and we'll be two instead of one to
keep hold of your half of him."

He raised his eyes as he ended, and saw that hers met them through a
quick clouding of tears.

"Ah, I am glad to have had this said to me! But I could never accept
such an offer."

He caught instantly at the distinction. "That doesn't mean that you
could never accept _me?_"

"Under such conditions--"

"But if I am satisfied with the conditions? Don't think I am
speaking rashly, under the influence of the moment. I have expected
something of this sort, and I have thought out my side of the case.
As far as material circumstances go, I have worked long enough and
successfully enough to take my ease and take it where I choose. I
mention that because the life I offer you is offered to your boy as
well." He let this sink into her mind before summing up gravely:
"The offer I make is made deliberately, and at least I have a right
to a direct answer."

She was silent again, and then lifted a cleared gaze to his. "My
direct answer then is: if I were still Fanny Frisbee I would marry
you."

He bent toward her persuasively. "But you will be--when the divorce
is pronounced."

"Ah, the divorce--" She flushed deeply, with an instinctive
shrinking back of her whole person which made him straighten himself
in his chair.

"Do you so dislike the idea?"

"The idea of divorce? No--not in my case. I should like anything
that would do away with the past--obliterate it all--make everything
new in my life!"

"Then what--?" he began again, waiting with the patience of a wooer
on the uneasy circling of her tormented mind.

"Oh, don't ask me; I don't know; I am frightened."

Durham gave a deep sigh of discouragement. "I thought your coming
here with me today--and above all your going with me just now to see
my mother--was a sign that you were _not_ frightened!"

"Well, I was not when I was with your mother. She made everything
seem easy and natural. She took me back into that clear American air
where there are no obscurities, no mysteries--"

"What obscurities, what mysteries, are you afraid of?"

She looked about her with a faint shiver. "I am afraid of
everything!" she said.

"That's because you are alone; because you've no one to turn to.
I'll clear the air for you fast enough if you'll let me."

He looked forth defiantly, as if flinging his challenge at the great
city which had come to typify the powers contending with him for her
possession.

"You say that so easily! But you don't know; none of you know."

"Know what?"

"The difficulties--"

"I told you I was ready to take my share of the difficulties--and my
share naturally includes yours. You know Americans are great hands
at getting over difficulties." He drew himself up confidently. "Just
leave that to me--only tell me exactly what you're afraid of."

She paused again, and then said: "The divorce, to begin with--they
will never consent to it."

He noticed that she spoke as though the interests of the whole clan,
rather than her husband's individual claim, were to be considered;
and the use of the plural pronoun shocked his free individualism
like a glimpse of some dark feudal survival.

"But you are absolutely certain of your divorce! I've consulted--of
course without mentioning names--"

She interrupted him, with a melancholy smile: "Ah, so have I. The
divorce would be easy enough to get, if they ever let it come into
the courts."

"How on earth can they prevent that?"

"I don't know; my never knowing how they will do things is one of
the secrets of their power."

"Their power? What power?" he broke in with irrepressible contempt.
"Who are these bogeys whose machinations are going to arrest the
course of justice in a--comparatively--civilized country? You've
told me yourself that Monsieur de Malrive is the least likely to
give you trouble; and the others are his uncle the abbe, his mother
and sister. That kind of a syndicate doesn't scare me much. A priest
and two women _contra mundum!_"

She shook her head. "Not _contra mundum_, but with it, their whole
world is behind them. It's that mysterious solidarity that you can't
understand. One doesn't know how far they may reach, or in how many
directions. I have never known. They have always cropped up where I
least expected them."

Before this persistency of negation Durham's buoyancy began to flag,
but his determination grew the more fixed.

"Well, then, supposing them to possess these supernatural powers; do
you think it's to people of that kind that I'll ever consent to give
you up?"

She raised a half-smiling glance of protest. "Oh, they're not
wantonly wicked. They'll leave me alone as long as--"

"As I do?" he interrupted. "Do you want me to leave you alone? Was
that what you brought me here to tell me?"

The directness of the challenge seemed to gather up the scattered
strands of her hesitation, and lifting her head she turned on him a
look in which, but for its underlying shadow, he might have
recovered the full free beam of Fanny Frisbee's gaze.

"I don't know why I brought you here," she said gently, "except from
the wish to prolong a little the illusion of being once more an
American among Americans. Just now, sitting there with your mother
and Katy and Nannie, the difficulties seemed to vanish; the problems
grew as trivial to me as they are to you. And I wanted them to
remain so a little longer; I wanted to put off going back to them.
But it was of no use--they were waiting for me here. They are over
there now in that house across the river." She indicated the grey
sky-line of the Faubourg, shining in the splintered radiance of the
sunset beyond the long sweep of the quays. "They are a part of me--I
belong to them. I must go back to them!" she sighed.

She rose slowly to her feet, as though her metaphor had expressed an
actual fact and she felt herself bodily drawn from his side by the
influences of which she spoke.

Durham had risen too. "Then I go back with you!" he exclaimed
energetically; and as she paused, wavering a little under the shock
of his resolve: "I don't mean into your house--but into your life!"
he said.

She suffered him, at any rate, to accompany her to the door of the
house, and allowed their debate to prolong itself through the almost
monastic quiet of the quarter which led thither. On the way, he
succeeded in wresting from her the confession that, if it were
possible to ascertain in advance that her husband's family would not
oppose her action, she might decide to apply for a divorce. Short of
a positive assurance on this point, she made it clear that she would
never move in the matter; there must be no scandal, no _retentissement_,
nothing which her boy, necessarily brought up in the French tradition
of scrupulously preserved appearances, could afterward regard as the
faintest blur on his much-quartered escutcheon. But even this partial
concession again raised fresh obstacles; for there seemed to be no
one to whom she could entrust so delicate an investigation, and to
apply directly to the Marquis de Malrive or his relatives appeared,
in the light of her past experience, the last way of learning their
intentions.

"But," Durham objected, beginning to suspect a morbid fixity of idea
in her perpetual attitude of distrust--"but surely you have told me
that your husband's sister--what is her name? Madame de
Treymes?--was the most powerful member of the group, and that she
has always been on your side."

She hesitated. "Yes, Christiane has been on my side. She dislikes
her brother. But it would not do to ask her."

"But could no one else ask her? Who are her friends?"

"She has a great many; and some, of course, are mine. But in a case
like this they would be all hers; they wouldn't hesitate a moment
between us."

"Why should it be necessary to hesitate between you? Suppose Madame
de Treymes sees the reasonableness of what you ask; suppose, at any
rate, she sees the hopelessness of opposing you? Why should she make
a mystery of your opinion?"

"It's not that; it is that, if I went to her friends, I should never
get her real opinion from them. At least I should never know if it
_was_ her real opinion; and therefore I should be no farther
advanced. Don't you see?"

Durham struggled between the sentimental impulse to soothe her, and
the practical instinct that it was a moment for unmitigated
frankness.

"I'm not sure that I do; but if you can't find out what Madame de
Treymes thinks, I'll see what I can do myself."

"Oh--_you_!" broke from her in mingled terror and admiration; and
pausing on her doorstep to lay her hand in his before she touched
the bell, she added with a half-whimsical flash of regret: "Why
didn't this happen to Fanny Frisbee?"




III


Why had it not happened to Fanny Frisbee?

Durham put the question to himself as he walked back along the
quays, in a state of inner commotion which left him, for once,
insensible to the ordered beauty of his surroundings. Propinquity
had not been lacking: he had known Miss Frisbee since his college
days. In unsophisticated circles, one family is apt to quote
another; and the Durham ladies had always quoted the Frisbees. The
Frisbees were bold, experienced, enterprising: they had what the
novelists of the day called "dash." The beautiful Fanny was
especially dashing; she had the showiest national attributes,
tempered only by a native grace of softness, as the beam of her eyes
was subdued by the length of their lashes. And yet young Durham,
though not unsusceptible to such charms, had remained content to
enjoy them from a safe distance of good fellowship. If he had been
asked why, he could not have told; but the Durham of forty
understood. It was because there were, with minor modifications,
many other Fanny Frisbees; whereas never before, within his ken, had
there been a Fanny de Malrive.

He had felt it in a flash, when, the autumn before, he had run
across her one evening in the dining-room of the Beaurivage at
Ouchy; when, after a furtive exchange of glances, they had
simultaneously arrived at recognition, followed by an eager pressure
of hands, and a long evening of reminiscence on the starlit terrace.
She was the same, but so mysteriously changed! And it was the
mystery, the sense of unprobed depths of initiation, which drew him
to her as her freshness had never drawn him. He had not hitherto
attempted to define the nature of the change: it remained for his
sister Nannie to do that when, on his return to the Rue de Rivoli,
where the family were still sitting in conclave upon their recent
visitor, Miss Durham summed up their groping comments in the phrase:
"I never saw anything so French!"

Durham, understanding what his sister's use of the epithet implied,
recognized it instantly as the explanation of his own feelings. Yes,
it was the finish, the modelling, which Madame de Malrive's
experience had given her that set her apart from the fresh
uncomplicated personalities of which she had once been simply the
most charming type. The influences that had lowered her voice,
regulated her gestures, toned her down to harmony with the warm dim
background of a long social past--these influences had lent to her
natural fineness of perception a command of expression adapted to
complex conditions. She had moved in surroundings through which one
could hardly bounce and bang on the genial American plan without
knocking the angles off a number of sacred institutions; and her
acquired dexterity of movement seemed to Durham a crowning grace. It
was a shock, now that he knew at what cost the dexterity had been
acquired, to acknowledge this even to himself; he hated to think
that she could owe anything to such conditions as she had been
placed in. And it gave him a sense of the tremendous strength of the
organization into which she had been absorbed, that in spite of her
horror, her moral revolt, she had not reacted against its external
forms. She might abhor her husband, her marriage, and the world to
which it had introduced her, but she had become a product of that
world in its outward expression, and no better proof of the fact was
needed than her exotic enjoyment of Americanism.

The sense of the distance to which her American past had been
removed was never more present to him than when, a day or two later,
he went with his mother and sisters to return her visit. The region
beyond the river existed, for the Durham ladies, only as the
unmapped environment of the Bon Marche; and Nannie Durham's
exclamation on the pokiness of the streets and the dulness of the
houses showed Durham, with a start, how far he had already travelled
from the family point of view.

"Well, if this is all she got by marrying a Marquis!" the young lady
summed up as they paused before the small sober hotel in its
high-walled court; and Katy, following her mother through the
stone-vaulted and stone-floored vestibule, murmured: "It must be
simply freezing in winter."

In the softly-faded drawing-room, with its old pastels in old
frames, its windows looking on the damp green twilight of a garden
sunk deep in blackened walls, the American ladies might have been
even more conscious of the insufficiency of their friend's
compensations, had not the warmth of her welcome precluded all other
reflections. It was not till she had gathered them about her in the
corner beside the tea-table, that Durham identified the slender dark
lady loitering negligently in the background, and introduced in a
comprehensive murmur to the American group, as the redoubtable
sister-in-law to whom he had declared himself ready to throw down
his challenge.

There was nothing very redoubtable about Madame de Treymes, except
perhaps the kindly yet critical observation which she bestowed on
her sister-in-law's visitors: the unblinking attention of a
civilized spectator observing an encampment of aborigines. He had
heard of her as a beauty, and was surprised to find her, as Nannie
afterward put it, a mere stick to hang clothes on (but they _did_
hang!), with a small brown glancing face, like that of a charming
little inquisitive animal. Yet before she had addressed ten words to
him--nibbling at the hard English consonants like nuts--he owned the
justice of the epithet. She was a beauty, if beauty, instead of
being restricted to the cast of the face, is a pervasive attribute
informing the hands, the voice, the gestures, the very fall of a
flounce and tilt of a feather. In this impalpable _aura_ of grace
Madame de Treymes' dark meagre presence unmistakably moved, like a
thin flame in a wide quiver of light. And as he realized that she
looked much handsomer than she was, so while they talked, he felt
that she understood a great deal more than she betrayed. It was not
through the groping speech which formed their apparent medium of
communication that she imbibed her information: she found it in the
air, she extracted it from Durham's look and manner, she caught it
in the turn of her sister-in-law's defenseless eyes--for in her
presence Madame de Malrive became Fanny Frisbee again!--she put it
together, in short, out of just such unconsidered indescribable
trifles as differentiated the quiet felicity of her dress from
Nannie and Katy's "handsome" haphazard clothes.

Her actual converse with Durham moved, meanwhile, strictly in the
conventional ruts: had he been long in Paris, which of the new plays
did he like best, was it true that American _jeunes filles_ were
sometimes taken to the Boulevard theatres? And she threw an
interrogative glance at the young ladies beside the tea-table. To
Durham's reply that it depended how much French they knew, she
shrugged and smiled, replying that his compatriots all spoke French
like Parisians, enquiring, after a moment's thought, if they learned
it, _la bas, des negres_, and laughing heartily when Durham's
astonishment revealed her blunder.

When at length she had taken leave--enveloping the Durham ladies in
a last puzzled penetrating look--Madame de Malrive turned to Mrs.
Durham with a faintly embarrassed smile.

"My sister-in-law was much interested; I believe you are the first
Americans she has ever known."

"Good gracious!" ejaculated Nannie, as though such social darkness
required immediate missionary action on some one's part.

"Well, she knows _us_," said Durham, catching in Madame de Malrive's
rapid glance, a startled assent to his point.

"After all," reflected the accurate Katy, as though seeking an
excuse for Madame de Treymes' unenlightenment, "_we_ don't know
many French people, either."

To which Nannie promptly if obscurely retorted: "Ah, but we couldn't
and _she_ could!"




IV


Madame de Treymes' friendly observation of her sister-in-law's
visitors resulted in no expression on her part of a desire to renew
her study of them. To all appearances, she passed out of their lives
when Madame de Malrive's door closed on her; and Durham felt that
the arduous task of making her acquaintance was still to be begun.

He felt also, more than ever, the necessity of attempting it; and in
his determination to lose no time, and his perplexity how to set
most speedily about the business, he bethought himself of applying
to his cousin Mrs. Boykin.

Mrs. Elmer Boykin was a small plump woman, to whose vague prettiness
the lines of middle-age had given no meaning: as though whatever had
happened to her had merely added to the sum total of her
inexperience. After a Parisian residence of twenty-five years, spent
in a state of feverish servitude to the great artists of the rue de
la Paix, her dress and hair still retained a certain rigidity in
keeping with the directness of her gaze and the unmodulated candour
of her voice. Her very drawing-room had the hard bright atmosphere
of her native skies, and one felt that she was still true at heart
to the national ideals in electric lighting and plumbing.

She and her husband had left America owing to the impossibility of
living there with the finish and decorum which the Boykin standard
demanded; but in the isolation of their exile they had created about
them a kind of phantom America, where the national prejudices
continued to flourish unchecked by the national progressiveness: a
little world sparsely peopled by compatriots in the same attitude of
chronic opposition toward a society chronically unaware of them. In
this uncontaminated air Mr. and Mrs. Boykin had preserved the purity
of simpler conditions, and Elmer Boykin, returning rakishly from a
Sunday's racing at Chantilly, betrayed, under his "knowing" coat and
the racing-glasses slung ostentatiously across his shoulder, the
unmistakeable cut of the American business man coming "up town"
after a long day in the office.

It was a part of the Boykins' uncomfortable but determined
attitude--and perhaps a last expression of their latent
patriotism--to live in active disapproval of the world about them,
fixing in memory with little stabs of reprobation innumerable
instances of what the abominable foreigner was doing; so that they
reminded Durham of persons peacefully following the course of a
horrible war by pricking red pins in a map. To Mrs. Durham, with her
gentle tourist's view of the European continent, as a vast Museum in
which the human multitudes simply furnished the element of costume,
the Boykins seemed abysmally instructed, and darkly expert in
forbidden things; and her son, without sharing her simple faith in
their omniscience, credited them with an ample supply of the kind of
information of which he was in search.

Mrs. Boykin, from the corner of an intensely modern Gobelin sofa,
studied her cousin as he balanced himself insecurely on one of the
small gilt chairs which always look surprised at being sat in.

"Fanny de Malrive? Oh, of course: I remember you were all very
intimate with the Frisbees when they lived in West Thirty-third
Street. But she has dropped all her American friends since her
marriage. The excuse was that de Malrive didn't like them; but as
she's been separated for five or six years, I can't see--. You say
she's been very nice to your mother and the girls? Well, I daresay
she is beginning to feel the need of friends she can really trust;
for as for her French relations--! That Malrive set is the worst in
the Faubourg. Of course you know what _he_ is; even the family, for
decency's sake, had to back her up, and urge her to get a
separation. And Christiane de Treymes--"

Durham seized his opportunity. "Is she so very reprehensible too?"

Mrs. Boykin pursed up her small colourless mouth. "I can't speak
from personal experience. I know Madame de Treymes slightly--I have
met her at Fanny's--but she never remembers the fact except when she
wants me to go to one of her _ventes de charite_. They all remember
us then; and some American women are silly enough to ruin themselves
at the smart bazaars, and fancy they will get invitations in return.
They say Mrs. Addison G. Pack followed Madame d'Alglade around for a
whole winter, and spent a hundred thousand francs at her stalls; and
at the end of the season Madame d'Alglade asked her to tea, and when
she got there she found _that_ was for a charity too, and she had to
pay a hundred francs to get in."

Mrs. Boykin paused with a smile of compassion. "That is not _my_
way," she continued. "Personally I have no desire to thrust myself
into French society--I can't see how any American woman can do so
without loss of self-respect. But any one can tell you about Madame
de Treymes."

"I wish you would, then," Durham suggested.

"Well, I think Elmer had better," said his wife mysteriously, as Mr.
Boykin, at this point, advanced across the wide expanse of Aubusson
on which his wife and Durham were islanded in a state of propinquity
without privacy.

"What's that, Bessy? Hah, Durham, how are you? Didn't see you at
Auteuil this afternoon. You don't race? Busy sight-seeing, I
suppose? What was that my wife was telling you? Oh, about Madame de
Treymes."

He stroked his pepper-and-salt moustache with a gesture intended
rather to indicate than conceal the smile of experience beneath it.
"Well, Madame de Treymes has not been like a happy country--she's
had a history: several of 'em. Some one said she constituted the
_feuilleton_ of the Faubourg daily news. _La suite au prochain
numero_--you see the point? Not that I speak from personal
knowledge. Bessy and I have never cared to force our way--" He
paused, reflecting that his wife had probably anticipated him in the
expression of this familiar sentiment, and added with a significant
nod: "Of course you know the Prince d'Armillac by sight? No? I'm
surprised at that. Well, he's one of the choicest ornaments of the
Jockey Club: very fascinating to the ladies, I believe, but the
deuce and all at baccara. Ruined his mother and a couple of maiden
aunts already--and now Madame de Treymes has put the family pearls
up the spout, and is wearing imitation for love of him."

"I had that straight from my maid's cousin, who is employed by
Madame d'Armillac's jeweller," said Mrs. Boykin with conscious
pride.

"Oh, it's straight enough--more than _she_ is!" retorted her
husband, who was slightly jealous of having his facts reinforced by
any information not of his own gleaning.

"Be careful of what you say, Elmer," Mrs. Boykin interposed with
archness. "I suspect John of being seriously smitten by the lady."

Durham let this pass unchallenged, submitting with a good grace to
his host's low whistle of amusement, and the sardonic enquiry: "Ever
do anything with the foils? D'Armillac is what they call over here a
_fine lame_."

"Oh, I don't mean to resort to bloodshed unless it's absolutely
necessary; but I mean to make the lady's acquaintance," said Durham,
falling into his key.

Mrs. Boykin's lips tightened to the vanishing point. "I am afraid
you must apply for an introduction to more fashionable people than
_we_ are. Elmer and I so thoroughly disapprove of French society
that we have always declined to take any part in it. But why should
not Fanny de Malrive arrange a meeting for you?"

Durham hesitated. "I don't think she is on very intimate terms with
her husband's family--"

"You mean that she's not allowed to introduce _her_ friends to
them," Mrs. Boykin interjected sarcastically; while her husband
added, with an air of portentous initiation: "Ah, my dear fellow,
the way they treat the Americans over here--that's another chapter,
you know."

"How some people can _stand_ it!" Mrs. Boykin chimed in; and as the
footman, entering at that moment, tendered her a large coronetted
envelope, she held it up as if in illustration of the indignities to
which her countrymen were subjected.

"Look at that, my dear John," she exclaimed--"another card to one of
their everlasting bazaars! Why, it's at Madame d'Armillac's, the
Prince's mother. Madame de Treymes must have sent it, of course. The
brazen way in which they combine religion and immorality! Fifty
francs admission--_rien que cela!_--to see some of the most
disreputable people in Europe. And if you're an American, you're
expected to leave at least a thousand behind you. Their own people
naturally get off cheaper." She tossed over the card to her cousin.
"There's your opportunity to see Madame de Treymes."

"Make it two thousand, and she'll ask you to tea," Mr. Boykin
scathingly added.




V


In the monumental drawing-room of the Hotel de Malrive--it had been
a surprise to the American to read the name of the house emblazoned
on black marble over its still more monumental gateway--Durham found
himself surrounded by a buzz of feminine tea-sipping oddly out of
keeping with the wigged and cuirassed portraits frowning high on the
walls, the majestic attitude of the furniture, the rigidity of great
gilt consoles drawn up like lords-in-waiting against the tarnished
panels.

It was the old Marquise de Malrive's "day," and Madame de Treymes,
who lived with her mother, had admitted Durham to the heart of the
enemy's country by inviting him, after his prodigal disbursements at
the charity bazaar, to come in to tea on a Thursday. Whether, in
thus fulfilling Mr. Boykin's prediction, she had been aware of
Durham's purpose, and had her own reasons for falling in with it; or
whether she simply wished to reward his lavishness at the fair, and
permit herself another glimpse of an American so picturesquely
embodying the type familiar to French fiction--on these points
Durham was still in doubt.

Meanwhile, Madame de Treymes being engaged with a venerable Duchess
in a black shawl--all the older ladies present had the sloping
shoulders of a generation of shawl-wearers--her American visitor,
left in the isolation of his unimportance, was using it as a shelter
for a rapid survey of the scene.

He had begun his study of Fanny de Malrive's situation without any
real understanding of her fears. He knew the repugnance to divorce
existing in the French Catholic world, but since the French laws
sanctioned it, and in a case so flagrant as his injured friend's,
would inevitably accord it with the least possible delay and
exposure, he could not take seriously any risk of opposition on the
part of the husband's family. Madame de Malrive had not become a
Catholic, and since her religious scruples could not be played on,
the only weapon remaining to the enemy--the threat of fighting the
divorce--was one they could not wield without self-injury.
Certainly, if the chief object were to avoid scandal, common sense
must counsel Monsieur de Malrive and his friends not to give the
courts an opportunity of exploring his past; and since the echo of
such explorations, and their ultimate transmission to her son, were
what Madame de Malrive most dreaded, the opposing parties seemed to
have a common ground for agreement, and Durham could not but regard
his friend's fears as the result of over-taxed sensibilities. All
this had seemed evident enough to him as he entered the austere
portals of the Hotel de Malrive and passed, between the faded
liveries of old family servants, to the presence of the dreaded
dowager above. But he had not been ten minutes in that presence
before he had arrived at a faint intuition of what poor Fanny meant.
It was not in the exquisite mildness of the old Marquise, a little
gray-haired bunch of a woman in dowdy mourning, or in the small neat
presence of the priestly uncle, the Abbe who had so obviously just
stepped down from one of the picture-frames overhead: it was not in
the aspect of these chief protagonists, so outwardly unformidable,
that Durham read an occult danger to his friend. It was rather in
their setting, their surroundings, the little company of elderly and
dowdy persons--so uniformly clad in weeping blacks and purples that
they might have been assembled for some mortuary anniversary--it was
in the remoteness and the solidarity of this little group that
Durham had his first glimpse of the social force of which Fanny de
Malrive had spoken. All these amiably chatting visitors, who mostly
bore the stamp of personal insignificance on their mildly sloping or
aristocratically beaked faces, hung together in a visible closeness
of tradition, dress, attitude and manner, as different as possible
from the loose aggregation of a roomful of his own countrymen.
Durham felt, as he observed them, that he had never before known
what "society" meant; nor understood that, in an organized and
inherited system, it exists full-fledged where two or three of its
members are assembled.

Upon this state of bewilderment, this sense of having entered a room
in which the lights had suddenly been turned out, even Madame de
Treymes' intensely modern presence threw no illumination. He was
conscious, as she smilingly rejoined him, not of her points of
difference from the others, but of the myriad invisible threads by
which she held to them; he even recognized the audacious slant of
her little brown profile in the portrait of a powdered ancestress
beneath which she had paused a moment in advancing. She was simply
one particular facet of the solid, glittering impenetrable body
which he had thought to turn in his hands and look through like a
crystal; and when she said, in her clear staccato English, "Perhaps
you will like to see the other rooms," he felt like crying out in
his blindness: "If I could only be sure of seeing _anything_ here!"
Was she conscious of his blindness, and was he as remote and
unintelligible to her as she was to him? This possibility, as he
followed her through the nobly-unfolding rooms of the great house,
gave him his first hope of recoverable advantage. For, after all, he
had some vague traditional lights on her world and its antecedents;
whereas to her he was a wholly new phenomenon, as unexplained as a
fragment of meteorite dropped at her feet on the smooth gravel of
the garden-path they were pacing.

She had led him down into the garden, in response to his admiring
exclamation, and perhaps also because she was sure that, in the
chill spring afternoon, they would have its embowered privacies to
themselves. The garden was small, but intensely rich and deep--one
of those wells of verdure and fragrance which everywhere sweeten the
air of Paris by wafts blown above old walls on quiet streets; and as
Madame de Treymes paused against the ivy bank masking its farther
boundary, Durham felt more than ever removed from the normal
bearings of life.

His sense of strangeness was increased by the surprise of his
companion's next speech.

"You wish to marry my sister-in-law?" she asked abruptly; and
Durham's start of wonder was followed by an immediate feeling of
relief. He had expected the preliminaries of their interview to be
as complicated as the bargaining in an Eastern bazaar, and had
feared to lose himself at the first turn in a labyrinth of "foreign"
intrigue.

"Yes, I do," he said with equal directness; and they smiled together
at the sharp report of question and answer.

The smile put Durham more completely at his ease, and after waiting
for her to speak, he added with deliberation: "So far, however, the
wishing is entirely on my side." His scrupulous conscience felt
itself justified in this reserve by the conditional nature of Madame
de Malrive's consent.

"I understand; but you have been given reason to hope--"

"Every man in my position gives himself his own reasons for hoping,"
he interposed with a smile.

"I understand that too," Madame de Treymes assented. "But still--you
spent a great deal of money the other day at our bazaar."

"Yes: I wanted to have a talk with you, and it was the readiest--if
not the most distinguished--means of attracting your attention."

"I understand," she once more reiterated, with a gleam of amusement.

"It is because I suspect you of understanding everything that I have
been so anxious for this opportunity."

She bowed her acknowledgement, and said: "Shall we sit a moment?"
adding, as he drew their chairs under a tree: "You permit me, then,
to say that I believe I understand also a little of our good Fanny's
mind?"

"On that point I have no authority to speak. I am here only to
listen."

"Listen, then: you have persuaded her that there would be no harm in
divorcing my brother--since I believe your religion does not forbid
divorce?"

"Madame de Malrive's religion sanctions divorce in such a case as--"

"As my brother has furnished? Yes, I have heard that your race is
stricter in judging such _ecarts_. But you must not think," she
added, "that I defend my brother. Fanny must have told you that we
have always given her our sympathy."

"She has let me infer it from her way of speaking of you."

Madame de Treymes arched her dramatic eyebrows. "How cautious you
are! I am so straightforward that I shall have no chance with you."

"You will be quite safe, unless you are so straightforward that you
put me on my guard."

She met this with a low note of amusement.

"At this rate we shall never get any farther; and in two minutes I
must go back to my mother's visitors. Why should we go on fencing?
The situation is really quite simple. Tell me just what you wish to
know. I have always been Fanny's friend, and that disposes me to be
yours."

Durham, during this appeal, had had time to steady his thoughts; and
the result of his deliberation was that he said, with a return to
his former directness: "Well, then, what I wish to know is, what
position your family would take if Madame de Malrive should sue for
a divorce." He added, without giving her time to reply: "I naturally
wish to be clear on this point before urging my cause with your
sister-in-law."

Madame de Treymes seemed in no haste to answer; but after a pause of
reflection she said, not unkindly: "My poor Fanny might have asked
me that herself."

"I beg you to believe that I am not acting as her spokesman," Durham
hastily interposed. "I merely wish to clear up the situation before
speaking to her in my own behalf."

"You are the most delicate of suitors! But I understand your
feeling. Fanny also is extremely delicate: it was a great surprise
to us at first. Still, in this case--" Madame de Treymes
paused--"since she has no religious scruples, and she had no
difficulty in obtaining a separation, why should she fear any in
demanding a divorce?"

"I don't know that she does: but the mere fact of possible
opposition might be enough to alarm the delicacy you have observed
in her."

"Ah--yes: on her boy's account."

"Partly, doubtless, on her boy's account."

"So that, if my brother objects to a divorce, all he has to do is to
announce his objection? But, my dear sir, you are giving your case
into my hands!" She flashed an amused smile on him.

"Since you say you are Madame de Malrive's friend, could there be a
better place for it?"

As she turned her eyes on him he seemed to see, under the flitting
lightness of her glance, the sudden concentrated expression of the
ancestral will. "I am Fanny's friend, certainly. But with us family
considerations are paramount. And our religion forbids divorce."

"So that, inevitably, your brother will oppose it?"

She rose from her seat, and stood fretting with her slender boot-tip
the minute red pebbles of the path.

"I must really go in: my mother will never forgive me for deserting
her."

"But surely you owe me an answer?" Durham protested, rising also.

"In return for your purchases at my stall?"

"No: in return for the trust I have placed in you."

She mused on this, moving slowly a step or two toward the house.

"Certainly I wish to see you again; you interest me," she said
smiling. "But it is so difficult to arrange. If I were to ask you to
come here again, my mother and uncle would be surprised. And at
Fanny's--"

"Oh, not there!" he exclaimed.

"Where then? Is there any other house where we are likely to meet?"

Durham hesitated; but he was goaded by the flight of the precious
minutes. "Not unless you'll come and dine with me," he said boldly.

"Dine with you? _Au cabaret?_ Ah, that would be diverting--but
impossible!"

"Well, dine with my cousin, then--I have a cousin, an American lady,
who lives here," said Durham, with suddenly-soaring audacity.

She paused with puzzled brows. "An American lady whom I know?"

"By name, at any rate. You send her cards for all your charity
bazaars."

She received the thrust with a laugh. "We do exploit your
compatriots."

"Oh, I don't think she has ever gone to the bazaars."

"But she might if I dined with her?"

"Still less, I imagine."

She reflected on this, and then said with acuteness: "I like that,
and I accept--but what is the lady's name?"




VI


On the way home, in the first drop of his exaltation, Durham had
said to himself: "But why on earth should Bessy invite her?"

He had, naturally, no very cogent reasons to give Mrs. Boykin in
support of his astonishing request, and could only, marvelling at
his own growth in duplicity, suffer her to infer that he was really,
shamelessly "smitten" with the lady he thus proposed to thrust upon
her hospitality. But, to his surprise, Mrs. Boykin hardly gave
herself time to pause upon his reasons. They were swallowed up in
the fact that Madame de Treymes wished to dine with her, as the
lesser luminaries vanish in the blaze of the sun.

"I am not surprised," she declared, with a faint smile intended to
check her husband's unruly wonder. "I wonder _you_ are, Elmer.
Didn't you tell me that Armillac went out of his way to speak to you
the other day at the races? And at Madame d'Alglade's sale--yes, I
went there after all, just for a minute, because I found Katy and
Nannie were so anxious to be taken--well, that day I noticed that
Madame de Treymes was quite _empressee_ when we went up to her
stall. Oh, I didn't buy anything: I merely waited while the girls
chose some lampshades. They thought it would be interesting to take
home something painted by a real Marquise, and of course I didn't
tell them that those women _never_ make the things they sell at
their stalls. But I repeat I'm not surprised: I suspected that
Madame de Treymes had heard of our little dinners. You know they're
really horribly bored in that poky old Faubourg. My poor John, I see
now why she's been making up to you! But on one point I am quite
determined, Elmer; whatever you say, I shall _not_ invite the Prince
d'Armillac."

Elmer, as far as Durham could observe, did not say much; but, like
his wife, he continued in a state of pleasantly agitated activity
till the momentous evening of the dinner.

The festivity in question was restricted in numbers, either owing to
the difficulty of securing suitable guests, or from a desire not to
have it appear that Madame de Treymes' hosts attached any special
importance to her presence; but the smallness of the company was
counterbalanced by the multiplicity of the courses.

The national determination not to be "downed" by the despised
foreigner, to show a wealth of material resource obscurely felt to
compensate for the possible lack of other distinctions--this resolve
had taken, in Mrs. Boykin's case, the shape--or rather the multiple
shapes--of a series of culinary feats, of gastronomic combinations,
which would have commanded her deep respect had she seen them on any
other table, and which she naturally relied on to produce the same
effect on her guest. Whether or not the desired result was achieved,
Madame de Treymes' manner did not specifically declare; but it
showed a general complaisance, a charming willingness to be amused,
which made Mr. Boykin, for months afterward, allude to her among his
compatriots as "an old friend of my wife's--takes potluck with us,
you know. Of course there's not a word of truth in any of those
ridiculous stories."

It was only when, to Durham's intense surprise, Mr. Boykin hazarded
to his neighbour the regret that they had not been so lucky as to
"secure the Prince"--it was then only that the lady showed, not
indeed anything so simple and unprepared as embarrassment, but a
faint play of wonder, an under-flicker of amusement, as though
recognizing that, by some odd law of social compensation, the
crudity of the talk might account for the complexity of the dishes.

But Mr. Boykin was tremulously alive to hints, and the conversation
at once slid to safer topics, easy generalizations which left Madame
de Treymes ample time to explore the table, to use her narrowed gaze
like a knife slitting open the unsuspicious personalities about her.
Nannie and Katy Durham, who, after much discussion (to which their
hostess candidly admitted them), had been included in the feast,
were the special objects of Madame de Treymes' observation. During
dinner she ignored in their favour the other carefully-selected
guests--the fashionable art-critic, the old Legitimist general, the
beauty from the English Embassy, the whole impressive marshalling of
Mrs. Boykin's social resources--and when the men returned to the
drawing-room, Durham found her still fanning in his sisters the
flame of an easily kindled enthusiasm. Since she could hardly have
been held by the intrinsic interest of their converse, the sight
gave him another swift intuition of the working of those hidden
forces with which Fanny de Malrive felt herself encompassed. But
when Madame de Treymes, at his approach, let him see that it was for
him she had been reserving herself, he felt that so graceful an
impulse needed no special explanation. She had the art of making it
seem quite natural that they should move away together to the
remotest of Mrs. Boykin's far-drawn salons, and that there, in a
glaring privacy of brocade and ormolu, she should turn to him with a
smile which avowed her intentional quest of seclusion.

"Confess that I have done a great deal for you!" she exclaimed,
making room for him on a sofa judiciously screened from the
observation of the other rooms.

"In coming to dine with my cousin?" he enquired, answering her
smile.

"Let us say, in giving you this half hour."

"For that I am duly grateful--and shall be still more so when I know
what it contains for me."

"Ah, I am not sure. You will not like what I am going to say."

"Shall I not?" he rejoined, changing colour.

She raised her eyes from the thoughtful contemplation of her painted
fan. "You appear to have no idea of the difficulties."

"Should I have asked your help if I had not had an idea of them?"

"But you are still confident that with my help you can surmount
them?"

"I can't believe you have come here to take that confidence from
me?"

She leaned back, smiling at him through her lashes. "And all this I
am to do for your _beaux yeux?_"

"No--for your own: that you may see with them what happiness you are
conferring."

"You are extremely clever, and I like you." She paused, and then
brought out with lingering emphasis: "But my family will not hear of
a divorce."

She threw into her voice such an accent of finality that Durham, for
the moment, felt himself brought up against an insurmountable
barrier; but, almost at once, his fear was mitigated by the
conviction that she would not have put herself out so much to say so
little.

"When you speak of your family, do you include yourself?" he
suggested.

She threw a surprised glance at him. "I thought you understood that
I am simply their mouthpiece."

At this he rose quietly to his feet with a gesture of acceptance. "I
have only to thank you, then, for not keeping me longer in
suspense."

His air of wishing to put an immediate end to the conversation
seemed to surprise her. "Sit down a moment longer," she commanded
him kindly; and as he leaned against the back of his chair, without
appearing to hear her request, she added in a low voice: "I am very
sorry for you and Fanny--but you are not the only persons to be
pitied."

She had dropped her light manner as she might have tossed aside her
fan, and he was startled at the intimacy of misery to which her look
and movement abruptly admitted him. Perhaps no Anglo-Saxon fully
understands the fluency in self-revelation which centuries of the
confessional have given to the Latin races, and to Durham, at any
rate, Madame de Treymes' sudden avowal gave the shock of a physical
abandonment.

"I am so sorry," he stammered--"is there any way in which I can be
of use to you?"

She sat before him with her hands clasped, her eyes fixed on his in
a terrible intensity of appeal. "If you would--if you would! Oh,
there is nothing I would not do for you. I have still a great deal
of influence with my mother, and what my mother commands we all do.
I could help you--I am sure I could help you; but not if my own
situation were known. And if nothing can be done it must be known in
a few days."

Durham had reseated himself at her side. "Tell me what I can do," he
said in a low tone, forgetting his own preoccupations in his genuine
concern for her distress.

She looked up at him through tears. "How dare I? Your race is so
cautious, so self-controlled--you have so little indulgence for the
extravagances of the heart. And my folly has been incredible--and
unrewarded." She paused, and as Durham waited in a silence which she
guessed to be compassionate, she brought out below her breath: "I
have lent money--my husband's, my brother's--money that was not
mine, and now I have nothing to repay it with."

Durham gazed at her in genuine astonishment. The turn the
conversation had taken led quite beyond his uncomplicated
experiences with the other sex. She saw his surprise, and extended
her hands in deprecation and entreaty. "Alas, what must you think of
me? How can I explain my humiliating myself before a stranger? Only
by telling you the whole truth--the fact that I am not alone in this
disaster, that I could not confess my situation to my family without
ruining myself, and involving in my ruin some one who, however
undeservedly, has been as dear to me as--as you are to--"

Durham pushed his chair back with a sharp exclamation.

"Ah, even that does not move you!" she said.

The cry restored him to his senses by the long shaft of light it
sent down the dark windings of the situation. He seemed suddenly to
know Madame de Treymes as if he had been brought up with her in the
inscrutable shades of the Hotel de Malrive.

She, on her side, appeared to have a startled but uncomprehending
sense of the fact that his silence was no longer completely
sympathetic, that her touch called forth no answering vibration; and
she made a desperate clutch at the one chord she could be certain of
sounding.

"You have asked a great deal of me--much more than you can guess. Do
you mean to give me nothing--not even your sympathy--in return? Is
it because you have heard horrors of me? When are they not said of a
woman who is married unhappily? Perhaps not in your fortunate
country, where she may seek liberation without dishonour. But
here--! You who have seen the consequences of our disastrous
marriages--you who may yet be the victim of our cruel and abominable
system; have you no pity for one who has suffered in the same way,
and without the possibility of release?" She paused, laying her hand
on his arm with a smile of deprecating irony. "It is not because you
are not rich. At such times the crudest way is the shortest, and I
don't pretend to deny that I know I am asking you a trifle. You
Americans, when you want a thing, always pay ten times what it is
worth, and I am giving you the wonderful chance to get what you most
want at a bargain."

Durham sat silent, her little gloved hand burning his coat-sleeve as
if it had been a hot iron. His brain was tingling with the shock of
her confession. She wanted money, a great deal of money: that was
clear, but it was not the point. She was ready to sell her
influence, and he fancied she could be counted on to fulfil her side
of the bargain. The fact that he could so trust her seemed only to
make her more terrible to him--more supernaturally dauntless and
baleful. For what was it that she exacted of him? She had said she
must have money to pay her debts; but he knew that was only a
pre-text which she scarcely expected him to believe. She wanted the
money for some one else; that was what her allusion to a
fellow-victim meant. She wanted it to pay the Prince's gambling
debts--it was at that price that Durham was to buy the right to
marry Fanny de Malrive.

Once the situation had worked itself out in his mind, he found
himself unexpectedly relieved of the necessity of weighing the
arguments for and against it. All the traditional forces of his
blood were in revolt, and he could only surrender himself to their
pressure, without thought of compromise or parley.

He stood up in silence, and the abruptness of his movement caused
Madame de Treymes' hand to slip from his arm.

"You refuse?" she exclaimed; and he answered with a bow: "Only
because of the return you propose to make me."

She stood staring at him, in a perplexity so genuine and profound
that he could almost have smiled at it through his disgust.

"Ah, you are all incredible," she murmured at last, stooping to
repossess herself of her fan; and as she moved past him to rejoin
the group in the farther room, she added in an incisive undertone:
"You are quite at liberty to repeat our conversation to your
friend!"




VII


Durham did not take advantage of the permission thus strangely flung
at him: of his talk with her sister-in-law he gave to Madame de
Malrive only that part which concerned her.

Presenting himself for this purpose, the day after Mrs. Boykin's
dinner, he found his friend alone with her son; and the sight of the
child had the effect of dispelling whatever illusive hopes had
attended him to the threshold. Even after the governess's descent
upon the scene had left Madame de Malrive and her visitor alone, the
little boy's presence seemed to hover admonishingly between them,
reducing to a bare statement of fact Durham's confession of the
total failure of his errand.

Madame de Malrive heard the confession calmly; she had been too
prepared for it not to have prepared a countenance to receive it.
Her first comment was: "I have never known them to declare
themselves so plainly--" and Durham's baffled hopes fastened
themselves eagerly on the words. Had she not always warned him that
there was nothing so misleading as their plainness? And might it not
be that, in spite of his advisedness, he had suffered too easy a
rebuff? But second thoughts reminded him that the refusal had not
been as unconditional as his necessary reservations made it seem in
the repetition; and that, furthermore, it was his own act, and not
that of his opponents, which had determined it. The impossibility of
revealing this to Madame de Malrive only made the difficulty shut in
more darkly around him, and in the completeness of his discouragement
he scarcely needed her reminder of his promise to regard the subject
as closed when once the other side had defined its position.

He was secretly confirmed in this acceptance of his fate by the
knowledge that it was really he who had defined the position. Even
now that he was alone with Madame de Malrive, and subtly aware of
the struggle under her composure, he felt no temptation to abate his
stand by a jot. He had not yet formulated a reason for his
resistance: he simply went on feeling, more and more strongly with
every precious sign of her participation in his unhappiness, that he
could neither owe his escape from it to such a transaction, nor
suffer her, innocently, to owe hers.

The only mitigating effect of his determination was in an increase
of helpless tenderness toward her; so that, when she exclaimed, in
answer to his announcement that he meant to leave Paris the next
night: "Oh, give me a day or two longer!" he at once resigned
himself to saying: "If I can be of the least use, I'll give you a
hundred."

She answered sadly that all he could do would be to let her feel
that he was there--just for a day or two, till she had readjusted
herself to the idea of going on in the old way; and on this note of
renunciation they parted.

But Durham, however pledged to the passive part, could not long
sustain it without rebellion. To "hang round" the shut door of his
hopes seemed, after two long days, more than even his passion
required of him; and on the third he despatched a note of goodbye to
his friend. He was going off for a few weeks, he explained--his
mother and sisters wished to be taken to the Italian lakes: but he
would return to Paris, and say his real farewell to her, before
sailing for America in July.

He had not intended his note to act as an ultimatum: he had no wish
to surprise Madame de Malrive into unconsidered surrender. When,
almost immediately, his own messenger returned with a reply from
her, he even felt a pang of disappointment, a momentary fear lest
she should have stooped a little from the high place where his
passion had preferred to leave her; but her first words turned his
fear into rejoicing.

"Let me see you before you go: something extraordinary has
happened," she wrote.

What had happened, as he heard from her a few hours later--finding
her in a tremor of frightened gladness, with her door boldly closed
to all the world but himself--was nothing less extraordinary than a
visit from Madame de Treymes, who had come, officially delegated by
the family, to announce that Monsieur de Malrive had decided not to
oppose his wife's suit for divorce. Durham, at the news, was almost
afraid to show himself too amazed; but his small signs of alarm and
wonder were swallowed up in the flush of Madame de Malrive's
incredulous joy.

"It's the long habit, you know, of not believing them--of looking
for the truth always in what they _don't_ say. It took me hours and
hours to convince myself that there's no trick under it, that there
can't be any," she explained.

"Then you _are_ convinced now?" escaped from Durham; but the shadow
of his question lingered no more than the flit of a wing across her
face.

"I am convinced because the facts are there to reassure me.
Christiane tells me that Monsieur de Malrive has consulted his
lawyers, and that they have advised him to free me. Maitre
Enguerrand has been instructed to see my lawyer whenever I wish it.
They quite understand that I never should have taken the step in
face of any opposition on their part--I am so thankful to you for
making that perfectly clear to them!--and I suppose this is the
return their pride makes to mine. For they _can_ be proud
collectively--" She broke off and added, with happy hands
outstretched: "And I owe it all to you--Christiane said it was your
talk with her that had convinced them."

Durham, at this statement, had to repress a fresh sound of
amazement; but with her hands in his, and, a moment after, her whole
self drawn to him in the first yielding of her lips, doubt perforce
gave way to the lover's happy conviction that such love was after
all too strong for the powers of darkness.

It was only when they sat again in the blissful after-calm of their
understanding, that he felt the pricking of an unappeased distrust.

"Did Madame de Treymes give you any reason for this change of
front?" he risked asking, when he found the distrust was not
otherwise to be quelled.

"Oh, yes: just what I've said. It was really her admiration of
_you_--of your attitude--your delicacy. She said that at first she
hadn't believed in it: they're always looking for a hidden motive.
And when she found that yours was staring at her in the actual words
you said: that you really respected my scruples, and would never,
never try to coerce or entrap me--something in her--poor
Christiane!--answered to it, she told me, and she wanted to prove to
us that she was capable of understanding us too. If you knew her
history you'd find it wonderful and pathetic that she can!"

Durham thought he knew enough of it to infer that Madame de Treymes
had not been the object of many conscientious scruples on the part
of the opposite sex; but this increased rather his sense of the
strangeness than of the pathos of her action. Yet Madame de Malrive,
whom he had once inwardly taxed with the morbid raising of
obstacles, seemed to see none now; and he could only infer that her
sister-in-law's actual words had carried more conviction than
reached him in the repetition of them. The mere fact that he had so
much to gain by leaving his friend's faith undisturbed was no doubt
stirring his own suspicions to unnatural activity; and this sense
gradually reasoned him back into acceptance of her view, as the most
normal as well as the pleasantest he could take.




VIII


The uneasiness thus temporarily repressed slipped into the final
disguise of hoping he should not again meet Madame de Treymes; and
in this wish he was seconded by the decision, in which Madame de
Malrive concurred, that it would be well for him to leave Paris
while the preliminary negotiations were going on. He committed her
interests to the best professional care, and his mother, resigning
her dream of the lakes, remained to fortify Madame de Malrive by her
mild unimaginative view of the transaction, as an uncomfortable but
commonplace necessity, like house-cleaning or dentistry. Mrs. Durham
would doubtless have preferred that her only son, even with his hair
turning gray, should have chosen a Fanny Frisbee rather than a Fanny
de Malrive; but it was a part of her acceptance of life on a general
basis of innocence and kindliness, that she entered generously into
his dream of rescue and renewal, and devoted herself without
after-thought to keeping up Fanny's courage with so little to spare
for herself.

The process, the lawyers declared, would not be a long one, since
Monsieur de Malrive's acquiescence reduced it to a formality; and
when, at the end of June, Durham returned from Italy with Katy and
Nannie, there seemed no reason why he should not stop in Paris long
enough to learn what progress had been made.

But before he could learn this he was to hear, on entering Madame de
Malrive's presence, news more immediate if less personal. He found
her, in spite of her gladness in his return, so evidently
preoccupied and distressed that his first thought was one of fear
for their own future. But she read and dispelled this by saying,
before he could put his question: "Poor Christiane is here. She is
very unhappy. You have seen in the papers--?"

"I have seen no papers since we left Turin. What has happened?"

"The Prince d'Armillac has come to grief. There has been some
terrible scandal about money and he has been obliged to leave France
to escape arrest."

"And Madame de Treymes has left her husband?"

"Ah, no, poor creature: they don't leave their husbands--they can't.
But de Treymes has gone down to their place in Brittany, and as my
mother-in-law is with another daughter in Auvergne, Christiane came
here for a few days. With me, you see, she need not pretend--she can
cry her eyes out."

"And that is what she is doing?"

It was so unlike his conception of the way in which, under the most
adverse circumstances, Madame de Treymes would be likely to occupy
her time, that Durham was conscious of a note of scepticism in his
query.

"Poor thing--if you saw her you would feel nothing but pity. She is
suffering so horribly that I reproach myself for being happy under
the same roof."

Durham met this with a tender pressure of her hand; then he said,
after a pause of reflection: "I should like to see her."

He hardly knew what prompted him to utter the wish, unless it were a
sudden stir of compunction at the memory of his own dealings with
Madame de Treymes. Had he not sacrificed the poor creature to a
purely fantastic conception of conduct? She had said that she knew
she was asking a trifle of him; and the fact that, materially, it
would have been a trifle, had seemed at the moment only an added
reason for steeling himself in his moral resistance to it. But now
that he had gained his point--and through her own generosity, as it
still appeared--the largeness of her attitude made his own seem
cramped and petty. Since conduct, in the last resort, must be judged
by its enlarging or diminishing effect on character, might it not be
that the zealous weighing of the moral anise and cummin was less
important than the unconsidered lavishing of the precious ointment?
At any rate, he could enjoy no peace of mind under the burden of
Madame de Treymes' magnanimity, and when he had assured himself that
his own affairs were progressing favourably, he once more, at the
risk of surprising his betrothed, brought up the possibility of
seeing her relative.

Madame de Malrive evinced no surprise. "It is natural, knowing what
she has done for us, that you should want to show her your sympathy.
The difficulty is that it is just the one thing you _can't_ show
her. You can thank her, of course, for ourselves, but even that at
the moment--"

"Would seem brutal? Yes, I recognize that I should have to choose my
words," he admitted, guiltily conscious that his capability of dealing
with Madame de Treymes extended far beyond her sister-in-law's
conjecture.

Madame de Malrive still hesitated. "I can tell her; and when you
come back tomorrow--"

It had been decided that, in the interests of discretion--the
interests, in other words, of the poor little future Marquis de
Malrive--Durham was to remain but two days in Paris, withdrawing
then with his family till the conclusion of the divorce proceedings
permitted him to return in the acknowledged character of Madame de
Malrive's future husband. Even on this occasion, he had not come to
her alone; Nannie Durham, in the adjoining room, was chatting
conspicuously with the little Marquis, whom she could with
difficulty be restrained from teaching to call her "Aunt Nannie."
Durham thought her voice had risen unduly once or twice during his
visit, and when, on taking leave, he went to summon her from the
inner room, he found the higher note of ecstasy had been evoked by
the appearance of Madame de Treymes, and that the little boy,
himself absorbed in a new toy of Durham's bringing, was being bent
over by an actual as well as a potential aunt.

Madame de Treymes raised herself with a slight start at Durham's
approach: she had her hat on, and had evidently paused a moment on
her way out to speak with Nannie, without expecting to be surprised
by her sister-in-law's other visitor. But her surprises never wore
the awkward form of embarrassment, and she smiled beautifully on
Durham as he took her extended hand.

The smile was made the more appealing by the way in which it lit up
the ruin of her small dark face, which looked seared and hollowed as
by a flame that might have spread over it from her fevered eyes.
Durham, accustomed to the pale inward grief of the inexpressive
races, was positively startled by the way in which she seemed to
have been openly stretched on the pyre; he almost felt an indelicacy
in the ravages so tragically confessed.

The sight caused an involuntary readjustment of his whole view of
the situation, and made him, as far as his own share in it went,
more than ever inclined to extremities of self-disgust. With him
such sensations required, for his own relief, some immediate
penitential escape, and as Madame de Treymes turned toward the door
he addressed a glance of entreaty to his betrothed.

Madame de Malrive, whose intelligence could be counted on at such
moments, responded by laying a detaining hand on her sister-in-law's
arm.

"Dear Christiane, may I leave Mr. Durham in your charge for two
minutes? I have promised Nannie that she shall see the boy put to
bed."

Madame de Treymes made no audible response to this request, but when
the door had closed on the other ladies she said, looking quietly at
Durham: "I don't think that, in this house, your time will hang so
heavy that you need my help in supporting it."

Durham met her glance frankly. "It was not for that reason that
Madame de Malrive asked you to remain with me."

"Why, then? Surely not in the interest of preserving appearances,
since she is safely upstairs with your sister?"

"No; but simply because I asked her to. I told her I wanted to speak
to you."

"How you arrange things! And what reason can you have for wanting to
speak to me?"

He paused for a moment. "Can't you imagine? The desire to thank you
for what you have done."

She stirred restlessly, turning to adjust her hat before the glass
above the mantelpiece.

"Oh, as for what I have done--!"

"Don't speak as if you regretted it," he interposed.

She turned back to him with a flash of laughter lighting up the
haggardness of her face. "Regret working for the happiness of two
such excellent persons? Can't you fancy what a charming change it is
for me to do something so innocent and beneficent?"

He moved across the room and went up to her, drawing down the hand
which still flitted experimentally about her hat.

"Don't talk in that way, however much one of the persons of whom you
speak may have deserved it."

"One of the persons? Do you mean me?"

He released her hand, but continued to face her resolutely. "I mean
myself, as you know. You have been generous--extraordinarily
generous."

"Ah, but I was doing good in a good cause. You have made me see that
there is a distinction."

He flushed to the forehead. "I am here to let you say whatever you
choose to me."

"Whatever I choose?" She made a slight gesture of deprecation. "Has
it never occurred to you that I may conceivably choose to say
nothing?"

Durham paused, conscious of the increasing difficulty of the
advance. She met him, parried him, at every turn: he had to take his
baffled purpose back to another point of attack.

"Quite conceivably," he said: "so much so that I am aware I must
make the most of this opportunity, because I am not likely to get
another."

"But what remains of your opportunity, if it isn't one to me?"

"It still remains, for me, an occasion to abase myself--" He broke
off, conscious of a grossness of allusion that seemed, on a closer
approach, the real obstacle to full expression. But the moments were
flying, and for his self-esteem's sake he must find some way of
making her share the burden of his repentance.

"There is only one thinkable pretext for detaining you: it is that I
may still show my sense of what you have done for me."

Madame de Treymes, who had moved toward the door, paused at this and
faced him, resting her thin brown hands on a slender sofa-back.

"How do you propose to show that sense?" she enquired.

Durham coloured still more deeply: he saw that she was determined to
save her pride by making what he had to say of the utmost
difficulty. Well! he would let his expiation take that form,
then--it was as if her slender hands held out to him the fool's cap
he was condemned to press down on his own ears.

"By offering in return--in any form, and to the utmost--any service
you are forgiving enough to ask of me."

She received this with a low sound of laughter that scarcely rose to
her lips. "You are princely. But, my dear sir, does it not occur to
you that I may, meanwhile, have taken my own way of repaying myself
for any service I have been fortunate enough to render you?"

Durham, at the question, or still more, perhaps, at the tone in
which it was put, felt, through his compunction, a vague faint chill
of apprehension. Was she threatening him or only mocking him? Or was
this barbed swiftness of retort only the wounded creature's way of
defending the privacy of her own pain? He looked at her again, and
read his answer in the last conjecture.

"I don't know how you can have repaid yourself for anything so
disinterested--but I am sure, at least, that you have given me no
chance of recognizing, ever so slightly, what you have done."

She shook her head, with the flicker of a smile on her melancholy
lips. "Don't be too sure! You have given me a chance and I have
taken it--taken it to the full. So fully," she continued, keeping
her eyes fixed on his, "that if I were to accept any farther service
you might choose to offer, I should simply be robbing you--robbing
you shamelessly." She paused, and added in an undefinable voice: "I
was entitled, wasn't I, to take something in return for the service
I had the happiness of doing you?"

Durham could not tell whether the irony of her tone was
self-directed or addressed to himself--perhaps it comprehended them
both. At any rate, he chose to overlook his own share in it in
replying earnestly: "So much so, that I can't see how you can have
left me nothing to add to what you say you have taken."

"Ah, but you don't know what that is!" She continued to smile,
elusively, ambiguously. "And what's more, you wouldn't believe me if
I told you."

"How do you know?" he rejoined.

"You didn't believe me once before; and this is so much more
incredible."

He took the taunt full in the face. "I shall go away unhappy unless
you tell me--but then perhaps I have deserved to," he confessed.

She shook her head again, advancing toward the door with the evident
intention of bringing their conference to a close; but on the
threshold she paused to launch her reply.

"I can't send you away unhappy, since it is in the contemplation of
your happiness that I have found my reward."




IX


The next day Durham left with his family for England, with the
intention of not returning till after the divorce should have been
pronounced in September.

To say that he left with a quiet heart would be to overstate the
case: the fact that he could not communicate to Madame de Malrive
the substance of his talk with her sister-in-law still hung upon him
uneasily. But of definite apprehensions the lapse of time gradually
freed him, and Madame de Malrive's letters, addressed more
frequently to his mother and sisters than to himself, reflected, in
their reassuring serenity, the undisturbed course of events.

There was to Durham something peculiarly touching--as of an
involuntary confession of almost unbearable loneliness--in the way
she had regained, with her re-entry into the clear air of American
associations, her own fresh trustfulness of view. Once she had
accustomed herself to the surprise of finding her divorce unopposed,
she had been, as it now seemed to Durham, in almost too great haste
to renounce the habit of weighing motives and calculating chances.
It was as though her coming liberation had already freed her from
the garb of a mental slavery, as though she could not too soon or
too conspicuously cast off the ugly badge of suspicion. The fact
that Durham's cleverness had achieved so easy a victory over forces
apparently impregnable, merely raised her estimate of that
cleverness to the point of letting her feel that she could rest in
it without farther demur. He had even noticed in her, during his few
hours in Paris, a tendency to reproach herself for her lack of
charity, and a desire, almost as fervent as his own, to expiate it
by exaggerated recognition of the disinterestedness of her
opponents--if opponents they could still be called. This sudden
change in her attitude was peculiarly moving to Durham. He knew she
would hazard herself lightly enough wherever her heart called her;
but that, with the precious freight of her child's future weighing
her down, she should commit herself so blindly to his hand stirred
in him the depths of tenderness. Indeed, had the actual course of
events been less auspiciously regular, Madame de Malrive's
confidence would have gone far toward unsettling his own; but with
the process of law going on unimpeded, and the other side making no
sign of open or covert resistance, the fresh air of good faith
gradually swept through the inmost recesses of his distrust.

It was expected that the decision in the suit would be reached by
mid-September; and it was arranged that Durham and his family should
remain in England till a decent interval after the conclusion of the
proceedings. Early in the month, however, it became necessary for
Durham to go to France to confer with a business associate who was
in Paris for a few days, and on the point of sailing for Cherbourg.
The most zealous observance of appearances could hardly forbid
Durham's return for such a purpose; but it had been agreed between
himself and Madame de Malrive--who had once more been left alone by
Madame de Treymes' return to her family--that, so close to the
fruition of their wishes, they would propitiate fate by a scrupulous
adherence to usage, and communicate only, during his hasty visit, by
a daily interchange of notes.

The ingenuity of Madame de Malrive's tenderness found, however, the
day after his arrival, a means of tempering their privation.
"Christiane," she wrote, "is passing through Paris on her way from
Trouville, and has promised to see you for me if you will call on
her today. She thinks there is no reason why you should not go to
the Hotel de Malrive, as you will find her there alone, the family
having gone to Auvergne. She is really our friend and understands
us."

In obedience to this request--though perhaps inwardly regretting
that it should have been made--Durham that afternoon presented
himself at the proud old house beyond the Seine. More than ever, in
the semi-abandonment of the _morte saison_, with reduced service,
and shutters closed to the silence of the high-walled court, did it
strike the American as the incorruptible custodian of old prejudices
and strange social survivals. The thought of what he must represent
to the almost human consciousness which such old houses seem to
possess, made him feel like a barbarian desecrating the silence of a
temple of the earlier faith. Not that there was anything venerable
in the attestations of the Hotel de Malrive, except in so far as, to
a sensitive imagination, every concrete embodiment of a past order
of things testifies to real convictions once suffered for. Durham,
at any rate, always alive in practical issues to the view of the
other side, had enough sympathy left over to spend it sometimes,
whimsically, on such perceptions of difference. Today, especially,
the assurance of success--the sense of entering like a victorious
beleaguerer receiving the keys of the stronghold--disposed him to a
sentimental perception of what the other side might have to say for
itself, in the language of old portraits, old relics, old usages
dumbly outraged by his mere presence.

On the appearance of Madame de Treymes, however, such considerations
gave way to the immediate act of wondering how she meant to carry
off her share of the adventure. Durham had not forgotten the note on
which their last conversation had closed: the lapse of time serving
only to give more precision and perspective to the impression he had
then received.

Madame de Treymes' first words implied a recognition of what was in
his thoughts.

"It is extraordinary, my receiving you here; but _que voulez vous?_
There was no other place, and I would do more than this for our dear
Fanny."

Durham bowed. "It seems to me that you are also doing a great deal
for me."

"Perhaps you will see later that I have my reasons," she returned
smiling. "But before speaking for myself I must speak for Fanny."

She signed to him to take a chair near the sofa-corner in which she
had installed herself, and he listened in silence while she
delivered Madame de Malrive's message, and her own report of the
progress of affairs.

"You have put me still more deeply in your debt," he said, as she
concluded; "I wish you would make the expression of this feeling a
large part of the message I send back to Madame de Malrive."

She brushed this aside with one of her light gestures of
deprecation. "Oh, I told you I had my reasons. And since you are
here--and the mere sight of you assures me that you are as well as
Fanny charged me to find you--with all these preliminaries disposed
of, I am going to relieve you, in a small measure, of the weight of
your obligation."

Durham raised his head quickly. "By letting me do something in
return?"

She made an assenting motion. "By asking you to answer a question."

"That seems very little to do."

"Don't be so sure! It is never very little to your race." She leaned
back, studying him through half-dropped lids.

"Well, try me," he protested.

She did not immediately respond; and when she spoke, her first words
were explanatory rather than interrogative.

"I want to begin by saying that I believe I once did you an
injustice, to the extent of misunderstanding your motive for a
certain action."

Durham's uneasy flush confessed his recognition of her meaning. "Ah,
if we must go back to _that_--"

"You withdraw your assent to my request?"

"By no means; but nothing consolatory you can find to say on that
point can really make any difference."

"Will not the difference in my view of you perhaps make a difference
in your own?"

She looked at him earnestly, without a trace of irony in her eyes or
on her lips. "It is really I who have an _amende_ to make, as I now
understand the situation. I once turned to you for help in a painful
extremity, and I have only now learned to understand your reasons
for refusing to help me."

"Oh, my reasons--" groaned Durham.

"I have learned to understand them," she persisted, "by being so
much, lately, with Fanny."

"But I never told her!" he broke in.

"Exactly. That was what told _me_. I understood you through her, and
through your dealings with her. There she was--the woman you adored
and longed to save; and you would not lift a finger to make her
yours by means which would have seemed--I see it now--a desecration
of your feeling for each other." She paused, as if to find the exact
words for meanings she had never before had occasion to formulate.
"It came to me first--a light on your attitude--when I found you had
never breathed to her a word of our talk together. She had
confidently commissioned you to find a way for her, as the mediaeval
lady sent a prayer to her knight to deliver her from captivity, and
you came back, confessing you had failed, but never justifying
yourself by so much as a hint of the reason why. And when I had
lived a little in Fanny's intimacy--at a moment when circumstances
helped to bring us extraordinarily close--I understood why you had
done this; why you had let her take what view she pleased of your
failure, your passive acceptance of defeat, rather than let her
suspect the alternative offered you. You couldn't, even with my
permission, betray to any one a hint of my miserable secret, and you
couldn't, for your life's happiness, pay the particular price that I
asked." She leaned toward him in the intense, almost childlike,
effort at full expression. "Oh, we are of different races, with a
different point of honour; but I understand, I see, that you are
good people--just simply, courageously _good!_"

She paused, and then said slowly: "Have I understood you? Have I put
my hand on your motive?"

Durham sat speechless, subdued by the rush of emotion which her
words set free.

"That, you understand, is my question," she concluded with a faint
smile; and he answered hesitatingly: "What can it matter, when the
upshot is something I infinitely regret?"

"Having refused me? Don't!" She spoke with deep seriousness, bending
her eyes full on his: "Ah, I have suffered--suffered! But I have
learned also--my life has been enlarged. You see how I have
understood you both. And that is something I should have been
incapable of a few months ago."

Durham returned her look. "I can't think that you can ever have been
incapable of any generous interpretation."

She uttered a slight exclamation, which resolved itself into a laugh
of self-directed irony.

"If you knew into what language I have always translated life! But
that," she broke off, "is not what you are here to learn."

"I think," he returned gravely, "that I am here to learn the measure
of Christian charity."

She threw him a new, odd look. "Ah, no--but to show it!" she
exclaimed.

"To show it? And to whom?"

She paused for a moment, and then rejoined, instead of answering:
"Do you remember that day I talked with you at Fanny's? The day
after you came back from Italy?"

He made a motion of assent, and she went on: "You asked me then what
return I expected for my service to you, as you called it; and I
answered, the contemplation of your happiness. Well, do you know
what that meant in my old language--the language I was still
speaking then? It meant that I knew there was horrible misery in
store for you, and that I was waiting to feast my eyes on it: that's
all!"

She had flung out the words with one of her quick bursts of
self-abandonment, like a fevered sufferer stripping the bandage from
a wound. Durham received them with a face blanching to the pallour
of her own.

"What misery do you mean?" he exclaimed.

She leaned forward, laying her hand on his with just such a gesture
as she had used to enforce her appeal in Mrs. Boykin's boudoir. The
remembrance made him shrink slightly from her touch, and she drew
back with a smile.

"Have you never asked yourself," she enquired, "why our family
consented so readily to a divorce?"

"Yes, often," he replied, all his unformed fears gathering in a dark
throng about him. "But Fanny was so reassured, so convinced that we
owed it to your good offices--"

She broke into a laugh. "My good offices! Will you never, you
Americans, learn that we do not act individually in such cases? That
we are all obedient to a common principle of authority?"

"Then it was not you--?"

She made an impatient shrugging motion. "Oh, you are too
confiding--it is the other side of your beautiful good faith!"

"The side you have taken advantage of, it appears?"

"I--we--all of us. I especially!" she confessed.




X


There was another pause, during which Durham tried to steady himself
against the shock of the impending revelation. It was an odd
circumstance of the case that, though Madame de Treymes' avowal of
duplicity was fresh in his ears, he did not for a moment believe
that she would deceive him again. Whatever passed between them now
would go to the root of the matter.

The first thing that passed was the long look they exchanged:
searching on his part, tender, sad, undefinable on hers. As the
result of it he said: "Why, then, did you consent to the divorce?"

"To get the boy back," she answered instantly; and while he sat
stunned by the unexpectedness of the retort, she went on: "Is it
possible you never suspected? It has been our whole thought from the
first. Everything was planned with that object."

He drew a sharp breath of alarm. "But the divorce--how could that
give him back to you?"

"It was the only thing that could. We trembled lest the idea should
occur to you. But we were reasonably safe, for there has only been
one other case of the same kind before the courts." She leaned back,
the sight of his perplexity checking her quick rush of words. "You
didn't know," she began again, "that in that case, on the remarriage
of the mother, the courts instantly restored the child to the
father, though he had--well, given as much cause for divorce as my
unfortunate brother?"

Durham gave an ironic laugh. "Your French justice takes a grammar
and dictionary to understand."

She smiled. "_We_ understand it--and it isn't necessary that you
should."

"So it would appear!" he exclaimed bitterly.

"Don't judge us too harshly--or not, at least, till you have taken
the trouble to learn our point of view. You consider the
individual--we think only of the family."

"Why don't you take care to preserve it, then?"

"Ah, that's what we do; in spite of every aberration of the
individual. And so, when we saw it was impossible that my brother
and his wife should live together, we simply transferred our
allegiance to the child--we constituted _him_ the family."

"A precious kindness you did him! If the result is to give him back
to his father."

"That, I admit, is to be deplored; but his father is only a fraction
of the whole. What we really do is to give him back to his race, his
religion, his true place in the order of things."

"His mother never tried to deprive him of any of those inestimable
advantages!"

Madame de Treymes unclasped her hands with a slight gesture of
deprecation.

"Not consciously, perhaps; but silences and reserves can teach so
much. His mother has another point of view--"

"Thank heaven!" Durham interjected.

"Thank heaven for _her_--yes--perhaps; but it would not have done
for the boy."

Durham squared his shoulders with the sudden resolve of a man
breaking through a throng of ugly phantoms.

"You haven't yet convinced me that it won't have to do for him. At
the time of Madame de Malrive's separation, the court made no
difficulty about giving her the custody of her son; and you must
pardon me for reminding you that the father's unfitness was the
reason alleged."

Madame de Treymes shrugged her shoulders. "And my poor brother, you
would add, has not changed; but the circumstances have, and that
proves precisely what I have been trying to show you: that, in such
cases, the general course of events is considered, rather than the
action of any one person."

"Then why is Madame de Malrive's action to be considered?"

"Because it breaks up the unity of the family."

"_Unity--!_" broke from Durham; and Madame de Treymes gently
suffered his smile.

"Of the family tradition, I mean: it introduces new elements. You
are a new element."

"Thank heaven!" said Durham again.

She looked at him singularly. "Yes--you may thank heaven. Why isn't
it enough to satisfy Fanny?"

"Why isn't what enough?"

"Your being, as I say, a new element; taking her so completely into
a better air. Why shouldn't she be content to begin a new life with
you, without wanting to keep the boy too?"

Durham stared at her dumbly. "I don't know what you mean," he said
at length.

"I mean that in her place--" she broke off, dropping her eyes. "She
may have another son--the son of the man she adores."

Durham rose from his seat and took a quick turn through the room.
She sat motionless, following his steps through her lowered lashes,
which she raised again slowly as he stood before her.

"Your idea, then, is that I should tell her nothing?" he said.

"Tell her _now?_ But, my poor friend, you would be ruined!"

"Exactly." He paused. "Then why have you told _me?_"

Under her dark skin he saw the faint colour stealing. "We see things
so differently--but can't you conceive that, after all that has
passed, I felt it a kind of loyalty not to leave you in ignorance?"

"And you feel no such loyalty to her?"

"Ah, I leave her to you," she murmured, looking down again.

Durham continued to stand before her, grappling slowly with his
perplexity, which loomed larger and darker as it closed in on him.

"You don't leave her to me; you take her from me at a stroke! I
suppose," he added painfully, "I ought to thank you for doing it
before it's too late."

She stared. "I take her from you? I simply prevent your going to her
unprepared. Knowing Fanny as I do, it seemed to me necessary that
you should find a way in advance--a way of tiding over the first
moment. That, of course, is what we had planned that you shouldn't
have. We meant to let you marry, and then--. Oh, there is no
question about the result: we are certain of our case--our measures
have been taken _de loin_." She broke off, as if oppressed by his
stricken silence. "You will think me stupid, but my warning you of
this is the only return I know how to make for your generosity. I
could not bear to have you say afterward that I had deceived you
twice."

"Twice?" He looked at her perplexedly, and her colour rose.

"I deceived you once--that night at your cousin's, when I tried to
get you to bribe me. Even then we meant to consent to the
divorce--it was decided the first day that I saw you." He was
silent, and she added, with one of her mocking gestures: "You see
from what a _milieu_ you are taking her!"

Durham groaned. "She will never give up her son!"

"How can she help it? After you are married there will be no
choice."

"No--but there is one now."

"_Now?_" She sprang to her feet, clasping her hands in dismay.
"Haven't I made it clear to you? Haven't I shown you your course?"
She paused, and then brought out with emphasis: "I love Fanny, and I
am ready to trust her happiness to you."

"I shall have nothing to do with her happiness," he repeated
doggedly.

She stood close to him, with a look intently fixed on his face. "Are
you afraid?" she asked with one of her mocking flashes.

"Afraid?"

"Of not being able to make it up to her--?"

Their eyes met, and he returned her look steadily.

"No; if I had the chance, I believe I could."

"I know you could!" she exclaimed.

"That's the worst of it," he said with a cheerless laugh.

"The worst--?"

"Don't you see that I can't deceive her? Can't trick her into
marrying me now?"

Madame de Treymes continued to hold his eyes for a puzzled moment
after he had spoken; then she broke out despairingly: "Is happiness
never more to you, then, than this abstract standard of truth?"

Durham reflected. "I don't know--it's an instinct. There doesn't
seem to be any choice."

"Then I am a miserable wretch for not holding my tongue!"

He shook his head sadly. "That would not have helped me; and it
would have been a thousand times worse for her."

"Nothing can be as bad for her as losing you! Aren't you moved by
seeing her need?"

"Horribly--are not _you?_" he said, lifting his eyes to hers
suddenly.

She started under his look. "You mean, why don't I help you? Why
don't I use my influence? Ah, if you knew how I have tried!"

"And you are sure that nothing can be done?"

"Nothing, nothing: what arguments can I use? We abhor divorce--we go
against our religion in consenting to it--and nothing short of
recovering the boy could possibly justify us."

Durham turned slowly away. "Then there is nothing to be done," he
said, speaking more to himself than to her.

He felt her light touch on his arm. "Wait! There is one thing
more--" She stood close to him, with entreaty written on her small
passionate face. "There is one thing more," she repeated. "And that
is, to believe that I am deceiving you again."

He stopped short with a bewildered stare. "That you are deceiving
me--about the boy?"

"Yes--yes; why shouldn't I? You're so credulous--the temptation is
irresistible."

"Ah, it would be too easy to find out--"

"Don't try, then! Go on as if nothing had happened. I have been
lying to you," she declared with vehemence.

"Do you give me your word of honour?" he rejoined.

"A liar's? I haven't any! Take the logic of the facts instead. What
reason have you to believe any good of me? And what reason have I to
do any to you? Why on earth should I betray my family for your
benefit? Ah, don't let yourself be deceived to the end!" She
sparkled up at him, her eyes suffused with mockery; but on the
lashes he saw a tear.

He shook his head sadly. "I should first have to find a reason for
your deceiving me."

"Why, I gave it to you long ago. I wanted to punish you--and now
I've punished you enough."

"Yes, you've punished me enough," he conceded.

The tear gathered and fell down her thin cheek. "It's you who are
punishing me now. I tell you I'm false to the core. Look back and
see what I've done to you!"

He stood silent, with his eyes fixed on the ground. Then he took one
of her hands and raised it to his lips.

"You poor, good woman!" he said gravely.

Her hand trembled as she drew it away. "You're going to
her--straight from here?"

"Yes--straight from here."

"To tell her everything--to renounce your hope?"

"That is what it amounts to, I suppose."

She watched him cross the room and lay his hand on the door.

"Ah, you poor, good man!" she said with a sob.
The Complete Works of Edith Wharton - Part 11
