Title: The End: How the Great War Was Stopped - A Novelistic Vagary
Author: Gratacap, L. P. (Louis Pope)
Language: English
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THE END



 THE END

 How the Great War was Stopped
 A Novelistic Vagary

 By
 L.P. GRATACAP

 NEW YORK
 THOMAS BENTON
 1917



 Copyright by
 L.P. GRATACAP
 1917


 Printed by
 THE EDDY PRESS CORPORATION
 Cumberland, Maryland



CONTENTS


       Chapter                        Page

    _I. Saint Choiseul_                7

   _II. Gabrielle_                    27

  _III. My Return_                    49

   _IV. Gabrielle's Seance_           71

    _V. The War_                      95

   _VI. The Invasion_                120

  _VII. The Repulse_                 150

 _VIII. Gabrielle's Visitation_      168

   _IX. God's Hand_                  195

    _X. The End_                     221

   _XI. Conclusion_                  270



CHAPTER I

SAINT CHOISEUL


It is a pretty village, Saint Choiseul, perched on a hillside whose
slopes, undeviatingly smooth and moderate, subside into a flowing
land of streams and fields and white roadways. Its narrow streets are
decorous with straight lines of prim poplars that have a military
stiffness, and while the wind stirs their hedged leaves into audible
protest--the flutter of a restrained salutation or a salute simply--it
seems hardly able to extort from their braced branches the tribute of
an obeisance.

The houses are generally simple things of two and sometimes only
one story, built of limestone blocks that have weathered into an
undecipherable composition of brown blotches, staring white strips,
mossy crevices, little pits of black, and crannies of nutritious
decomposition, where tiny grass blades have sprouted. Under favorable
skies--and they are almost always favorable at St. Choiseul--their
uneven walls become fascinating studies of minor-color harmonies, and
rising as they do amid beds of flowers, or just grazed grass, from
which they seemed in the broad sunshine to gather subtle tints of
gayety, by some evanescent reflexion, they become fascinatingly pretty,
and commodious, so to say, to an artist's fancy.

The clustered chimneys in some larger villa formed occasional and
well-spaced visual incidents that broke the monotony of the low
cottages and added a keenly valued distinction to our pleasant hamlet.
It was delightful. You felt its persuasive loveliness the moment you
came up the road from far-away Paris--Ah! not so far away that we could
not see the Eiffel Tower on fair days, and on all days, or rather
nights, note the dull flare of its lights in the sky. The road you came
by crossed a stone bridge that threw its moss-covered span over a clear
deep brook, running all the way from Briois, with pollarded willows on
rushy banks, and drooping wistarias wildly clinging to white birches
in the meadow lands of rich farmers, where the brook, loitering, made
pools in which the cattle stood for hours in cream and russet dabs over
the half glittering rippled water. _Mon Dieu! Comme il était beau!_

Our house was the second in the village on the right hand side of the
road, as you came from Paris, just next to Privat Deschat, an old
carpet-weaver whose back-yard was as many colored as a flower garden
with bright rugs, green, and yellow, and blue, and red, and brown, hung
out on lines that webbed the air like a spider's nest, in the spring.
And a very pleasant, inviting house ours was with its staid look of
reserved happiness, I might say. There it was with its deep-silled
windows, filled with geraniums and heart's ease, its wide black door,
and big brass knocker, that was a dragon's tongue lolling out of a
dragon's scaly jaw, its long slanting shingled roof, with two dormer
windows, and its pastiche red bricks peeping in ruddy streaks through
the dense ampelopsis that climbed up to the eaves, and then lurked in
the dark, to make its way into the house, and lingering there, became
pale and white.

There was no veranda or piazza, but just a covered porch with four
wooden pillars and two bench seats, where sister Gabrielle and I
sat long hours in the evenings in summer time, when we were afraid
sometimes to enter the house because--Ah, but I must not tell that now,
for just that fear and what it led to, and how it helped us to end the
WAR, is the sole reason of my telling this story at all. No, no, that
is a long way towards the end, and here I've hardly begun.

Well, as pleasing and welcoming as the house seemed on the outside,
it was even more lovely within. I don't wonder the spirits--Ah, _bête
encore_--Yes, most lovely. You see there was a wide hall in soft yellow
and china-blue tile, with the Privat Deschat's rag-carpet in short
strips over it, and a big Holland clock against the wall, and prints
in black and white framed in mahogany, and an old narrow carved table
with tall porcelain candle-sticks on it, from Dresden, and then some
straw-bottomed chairs in gilded frames, and the garden of blooms, seen
through the door on the other side, which opened on a walk covered with
a vine-trellis, and bordered by smart gillyflowers, and hollyhocks, and
sunflowers, and cushions of pansies.

Then there was a good big square room on the right of the hall full
of books, and friendly chairs, and pictures, with a big desk-table in
the centre, where rose toweringly a superb old bronze French lamp,
that even then we burned with whale oil. You wound it up, and the
oil was pumped on the wicks and--the light was soft and charming and
companionable. The windows were high and low; they reached up to the
ceiling, and they left spaces for window seats at the floor, and white
tapestry curtains shaded them, and then at night--we did it in the
winter mostly--there could be drawn over them soft, thick folds of
green baize, and we seemed softly entombed in a delicious seclusion--so
delicate, so sure. My sister loved the long evenings that way, of
winter, and if it stormed and the snow stung the windows with sharp
taps, she would laugh almost, with the happiness of security.

And there was a big fire-place on the west side of the room--you see
this library was on the west side of the house too--but it was the
whole width of the house also, and the southern outlook swept over
the low land and gazed straight to Paris. That chimney corner was
delightful, and the wisps of light from the soft coal lit up the mantel
and played grotesquely over the row of Peruvian Inca figures and
face-jars that filled it--I brought them from America--so that they
seemed to squint and grin, or just look glum and melancholy. Gabrielle
said they came to life in the half dark, and she made them talk to
me--for she interpreted them in her odd way--the old Inca warriors and
the medicine men and the priests, and the little beggar with a stump
for a leg, and the squinting big-toothed demon in red and black.

All that in the winter, but in summer and early fall, with the windows
all open, the cooling night air came in, and brought with it odors of
the ground and perfumes--O! so delicate and ravishing--of the flowers;
St. Choiseul loved flowers; there was not a home without them--and
so mixed with these, as if sound and smell had run together in a
composite, half of each, the murmur of insects, the endless roundelay
of the peeping tree toads, a twittering of birds, and the shivering of
leaves in the trees. How we loved it!

I am rambling dully, but you see, kind friend, such strange weird
things happened in that house afterwards, and such sorrow came to me
after all the blessed joy of years, now lost, forever lost, that I
cannot stop my thought picturing everything about it, as if I would
leap back into the arms of other days, and let them caress and soothe
me and banish my grief.

On the east side of the hall-way was our dining room, a simple room
with just straw-bottomed chairs, an immense oak side-board, royally set
out with glass and blue plates, and on the walls quaint expressionless
portraits of our people, including mother and father, a fat uncle with
a pipe, and half closed eye, and a great grandfather in the regimentals
of the Revolution--very brave looking and handsome--and some very
staring aunts, and great aunts in starched finery, that made them look
like owls.

Back of the pantry was the kitchen, with old Hortense, as the high
priestess and oracle--our own dear Hortense, with such a kind heart,
and a ready ear, and a generous hand--Ah! how we children loved her,
and how she loved us, and how she packed our napkins for school, or our
baskets for picnics--as the Americans say. She used to shake her wise
old head slyly at us when we looked in at the kitchen door, with that
little hungry grin on our faces:

"_Certainement_, you are veery hungree. Oh I know--it is a great pity
and there is nothing, _Vraiment_--nothing--but See! I do so," and her
long fingers snapped, and she waved them in an appeal to space, and
then she cautiously raised a big bowl and _Voila!_ a nest of crisp,
aromatic, yellow buns, or cookies, or _gateaux aux raisins_, so good,
so inexpressibly good!

And upstairs were the pleasant bed-rooms, so inviting to repose in
their demure neatness, with high posters and pavilions, and their broad
bottomed rockers, and their rainbow wallpapers, and rag carpet strips,
over the bronzed, aged, and russety black wooden floors.

My own room was over the library; it looked north and west, and I would
hang out of its window for half an hour at a time, watching the red sun
quench itself behind the golden and flaming horizon, whose secrets I
yearned to know, whose untrodden wonders I dreamed to penetrate. Those
wistful hours awoke the unconfessed but sleepless passion of my heart
to sail out over the Atlantic, a passion too of unrest, linked in my
disposition with ecstacies and imaginations.

Sister Gabrielle was in the next room to mine, and in her sweet,
tasteful, fresh and white bed-room, rose the chimney from the library
fire-place below--so that she had her own chimney corner too, in the
second story of the house and THERE--Well, wait, that comes later.

Our parents were nervously alert in nature, intelligent and
conscientious. In them a strain of Huguenot puritanism was combined
with an intellectual appetite that seemed to create in each a
physical activity that made them restless in manner, and weak in
health. They watched my sister and myself too suspiciously, and their
affection became almost an aggravation of kindness, and solicitude,
and curiosity, which made me more eager to escape that protecting
roof-tree, and see the world. On my sister, as I shall explain, it
exercised the most unfortunate influence, and accentuated that peculiar
neurosis whose roots--as I was to learn later--were enlaced in a
sub-conscious sensitivity to occult and invisible agencies, which
indeed I helped to strengthen.

We were provided with neighbors and friends, and while the village of
St. Choiseul was sufficiently democratic to tolerate and encourage
friendly intercourse with everyone, as a matter of congeniality and
temperamental tastes, we knew intimately but five persons in St.
Choiseul. These five composed a contrasted and picturesque group, and
when all were assembled in our big library, father and mother seemed to
me most attractive, for in converse that was stimulating and personal,
they attained a serenity of feeling and manner, that made them really
delightful. Let me quickly describe our friends.

There was the rug-maker and carpet weaver, Privat Deschat, an elderly,
robust Norman, who worked hard at his tasks in the mornings--and his
mornings began very early--read as steadily for three or four hours
in the afternoon, napped two hours, ate supper with his housekeeper
and hunted up a friend with whom he smoked and chatted, or played Demi
Rouge for the remainder of his day, which never extended over midnight,
and more customarily closed at ten.

Privat Deschat was unquestionably very good company, quiet, attentive,
observant, and spasmodically conversational, when his suppressed
gift of speech awoke a momentary admiration. He was a short, strong
man, with large cheeks, a massive head, an expressive mouth, made
more so by very good teeth, and what might be called reticent eyes,
in which his delicate and studious self retreated, under the guise
of inexpressiveness. Again these quiet eyes would light up with
enthusiasm, or it might be with distrust and defiance. His speech
accompanied his roused spirit, and no one dared--no one wished--to
interrupt, lest the rebuke might return him to silence. You see, he
thoroughly delighted us. He was a bit quaint in his way of saying
things.

And there was Capitaine Bleu-Pistache, who had been wounded in the 1870
fight and limped about on a wooden peg, with a stout cane in one hand.
He was an amiable old mustachio, with pleasant eyes, under frowning
eyebrows, a white whisp of hair on the top of his high brow, and a
hooked nose that made him look like a bird of prey. But ah, he was most
lovable! In the afternoon his little yard--he lived down the street on
the opposite side from us in a small red and yellow brick house, hidden
in climbing roses--was filled with children, for the old _sabreur_ told
stories well, and the boys and girls loved to hear him, and then in the
spring he played marbles with them, so like a big chuckling boy, that
it made us laugh to watch him get down on his good knee, and then get
helped up again by the biggest boys, after he had taken his shot. It
was _tres jolie_! Gabrielle and I thought so, and we played with him
and the rest, when we too were, as the Americans say, kiddies. In later
years when the aches--_la sciatique abominable_, as he said--settled
in his bones, he gave up marbles, and turned to knitting, and it kept
him quite happy. He would come in the evenings and enjoy our library,
and very often fall asleep and snore ferociously. Father and mother,
I think, loved him, but there was a good deal of veneration in their
affection; Capitaine Jean Sebastien Bleu-Pistache always wore his medal
of honor, won at Gravelotte.

The captain had a daughter who was the apple of his eye and never was
there a daughter more sweet and affectionate. Blanchette, he said, was
so like her mother--_pauvre Blanche_--dead now and resting among the
big weeping willows in the crooked church yard, that ran down the hill
at the other end of the village, with the grave-stones like a huddle
of white or gray lambs chasing each other down the same slope, to the
beech grove, and the purring brooklet, washing the long iris-bloom in
summer. Blanchette said very little, but she always watched her father
softly out of the corners of her eyes, and clapped her hands together
softly too at his old, old stories, just as if she had never heard them
before. Well Blanchette was our third friend.

And then the school-master--_maître d'école_--was a good friend, who
smoked profusely, drank our red wine profusely too, and munched the
sugary cookies mother made, as if he had never tasted anything so nice
before. Indeed perhaps he had not, for he lived poorly some miles
away, and came to school on a funny old mule that he never hitched
up anywhere, but just jumped off its back, and let it wander as it
would. Only it wouldn't. It went to sleep on the shady side of the
school-house, and when the sun woke it up then it ambled slowly to the
other side, for you see Emile Chouteau fed his dear friend so very
well, that she was never hungry--whatever along the roadside, coming
to school, she fancied, she ate--and always seemed growing fatter and
fatter, so that it looked as if Emile would have to walk to school at
last, when Sarah--he called her that--grew too fat to move.

How funny--_O! tres drôle_--the two were so different in size and way;
the fat, sleepy, moody mule, lounging along, and stopping as if to
yawn, while Emile read his book on its back, his head buried in its
pages. And the school-master was so meagre, and long, and nervously
restless and even excitable, and that perplexed stare with his glasses
shoved up on the very top of his bald head! Ah, I see him always when
I pass the school-house now. He dressed in tight fitting clothes,
and they were just a little too small even for his thin body. Where
he got his clothes was a matter of wonder to us. They were a little
faded looking when new, and when they were old they became glossy, and
then old Emile had the tatters mended by his boarding-house mistress.
He looked neat and scrupulous too, in a way, and indeed we liked him
greatly, although he lectured somewhat, and was apt to talk overmuch
when our red wine lashed his spirits into a fervor of enthusiasm about
Virgil, for the whole of reading and literature was summed up in Virgil
to Emile Chouteau.

He loved to tell us:

 "_Virgil est un homme du Mond entier. Il presente le principe du
 cosmopolitanisme. Il est immortel parce qu'il n'appartient pas à aucun
 pays. Il devient la propriété de tous. La Renaissance était fondue sur
 Virgil: les meilleurs sont ses disciples._"

Poor Emile Chouteau, he died before I came back from America, though
long before that he had been pensioned, and lived with his mule in the
same way that he had lived all the long unchanged years of his teaching
in the little school house. And Sarah? Sarah seemed to miss something
after Emile's funeral--the country side followed Emile's body with
candles, for Emile was a devoted Catholic--and not long afterwards she
was found in the school-house. She had broken in the door and walked
in; was she looking for Emile? The last time I saw Sarah she was
ploughing a field in Briois.

Emile's successor was the fifth acquisition we boasted of in our little
company of intimates--Lorenzo Sebastien Quintado--a Spaniard.

Lorenzo was not typically Spanish after the fashion of the
story-writers. He was not darkly handsome, languorous, taciturn and
irritable, nor meagre, tall, with flashing eyes and raven hair. O!
quite different and because so different so likeable. For all the world
he made me think of the bachelor Sampson Carrasco in _Don Quixote_.
Do you recall him--"Though Sampson by name this bachelor was no giant
in person, but a little mirth-loving man, with a good understanding,
about twenty-four years of age, of a pale complexion, round faced,
flat-nosed and wide mouthed; all indicating humour, and a native relish
for jocularity?"

Yes that does bring back to my mind the way, the poise even, and the
sprightly liveliness, the almost expectant jubilation of Lorenzo. He
sang well, and in the long dusks, when the quivering lights of the
sunset died out of the sky along the burning west, where black fringes
of the thick-set trees seemed dipped in fire, his voice rose richly, in
caressing and ear-catching melodies. I almost hear him now, singing so
carelessly, with an untaught art, a simple song praising the charms of
Spanish girls. His voice was a high barytone.

  _Fair are the vineyards of Seville,
      O! fair beyond compare,
  But fairer than their fairness still
      The eyes of ladies there.
  The orange groves of Moguér
      Are golden as the sun,
  But brighter is the golden hair
      Of girls who in them run._


  _The morning skies of Cordova
      Were tinted as in flame,
  The cheeks of damsels rosier far
      As from the hills they came.
  Long live the darling girls of Spain
      Untouched by age or time,
  Forever free from care or pain,
      Ah! may one yet be mine._

I remember on one of the last evenings I passed at home--that was
before I went to America--when the fall had come, and the foliage was
deepening into splendid colors, not so splendidly indeed as in America
I think, but still gloriously vivid. There was Privat Deschat, and
Capitaine Bleu-Pistache, and his daughter--we sat together and our
hands often crossed--and dear old Emile--he died soon after--and father
and mother. We were sitting in our pleasant garden around a little
table, directly under the stone wall that shut in our ground on the
south--towards Paris--and everywhere lay the drifted leaves of the one
big chestnut, that grew just outside the wall, in the sloping ground
towards the big green fields, with islands of woods in them. Emile
called the yellow leaves as they dropped silently through the sunlight,
and shone like lustres in the sunlight, before they touched the ground,
_pans d'or_--gold flakes.

Our red wine was on the table, and that delicious morsel that Hortense
made better than anyone, _la galette aux amandes_, and it was the
captain who was talking. He was telling about the awful days when the
Germans took possession of the land, when the whole village struck for
the woods, and camped there in a sorry fright, for the women and the
children said to each other, "_Nous savons que Bismarck tue tous les
enfants pour qu'il n'y ait plus de Français._"

"Well, well, they are over--_les scelerats ne puissent--ils faire cela
encore_--Eh? We are strong now. The army is _fitte_, as the English
say, and--Ah I will never shoulder arms again, _mais_, I could, _Oui!
Oui! Je puis tirer._"

I leaned over and whispered to Blanchette, "They should never touch
you Blanchette--_Pourquoi; parce que je t'aime_," and she pressed my
hand ever so lightly and smiled, and I knew that she was pleased, and
then--"_Mon Dieu_--I could have stopped _l'escadron d'allemands tout
seul_!"

 "_Tu quoque littoribus nostris, Aeniea nutrix,
 Aeternam moriens famam, Caieta, dedisti:
 Et nunc servat honos sedem tuus._"

It was Emile, of course, talking his indispensable Virgil, though
surely the captain was not dead yet. "Yes, captain, France will never
forget your service. I know those were hard days. I was sick then at
the village of Louvry, not so far you know from the preserve and
forests of Villers-Cotterets, and I can tell you that the Huns came to
us for champagne, and my people told them there was none in the house,
and they swore--_terriblement_--and said they had seen the bottles
empty, and they would show them to us, and they went into the cellar
and they--_Helas, il était tres drôle_--pointed to bottles of _eau de
Seidlitz_ which--_vous savez_--look like champagne bottles a little--a
little--_n'est ce pas?_--and they took them away, and soon they had
them empty too--_ce sont buveurs monstrueuses_--but--splendid, the
retribution of the Gods--

 _Di tibi, si qua pios respectant numina, si quid
 Usquam justitia est_--;

they were all shockingly sick; you see, _la purgative totale_--"

There was some laughing, though Blanchette blushed a good deal, and I
could have boxed the careless mouth of Monsieur, _le Maître d'École_.

"Listen _mes amis_," now it was the curious treble of Privat Deschat,
"I am not sure but the skies will blacken again, and the _buse_ (eagle)
will shut out the sunlight with its swarming hosts. It is not all
over yet. Be watchful. You remember the thunder-storm last week when
the _chevreuil_ came into the back-yards, the stags were seen in the
roadways, and the wild boars ran into Briois roaring. I was up that
night late, for I had a package of rugs to send to Paris, and it struck
one in the morning when I put out the light, and said my prayers--_ils
n'étaient pas beaucoup_--there came a crack, like the last call of
judgment, and then the wind and rain grew mad with ambitions to outdo
each other. It was then I guess that the blow knocked over the tower
on the ruins at Bienne and filled the moat of the chateau, and swelled
the brooks with rain, so that the land to Mareuil became a lake and the
chicken coops swam all the way to La Ferté. Well about an hour after
that the storm vanished. I was still up fearful and watching.

"I can see a long way over the farms, and suddenly the moon broke
through with a wonderful light--it was full moon--and the wind shifted,
piling the clouds up in swirling masses, black as ink, and still, at
moments flashing with lightning, and crashing with thunder. I could see
the lands far off towards Bienne shining with great lakes of water, the
dark walls of forest, and in the fields huddled cattle, in droves. Then
it seemed to me as if the light grew stronger in the sky--it was about
two in the morning then--so strong it grew, that I felt there must be
some fires about, perhaps towards Briois. I went outside in the road.
It was ankle deep with mud, but I ploughed through it to the edge of
the slope of the road, from Paris, and looked towards the east, for the
clear spaces of the sky were there. Then came the vision."

The speaker stood up among his now fascinated hearers; they were all
leaning toward him, as if drawn by a magnet, and while I closed my hand
more tightly around the warm fingers of Blanchette I too, with her,
strained my ears to hear Deschat's words which were less loud.

"I could see no fire anywhere, and yet the light was raining down
around me like an electric glow. I was half frightened; it seemed so
marvelous! Well slowly from out of the rolled up thunder and rain
clouds came a curious thing. It was a galloping squadron of horses,
manes flowing, tails stiff behind them, and on them riders and on the
heads of the riders the _pickelhaube_ of the Germans. They flew over
the open sky, and the moonlight seemed to pierce them through and
through, and they shone with white lines within the dark bodies; the
WHITE LINES of SKELETONS. What did it mean? I thought they would never
end. On and on in hosts. Of course they were only mists, clouds, but
so true to form, so real, like gigantic ghosts! I trembled before the
apparition--_vue spirituel_--and then the light died away, and the
figures became blurred, and the moon went out, behind the clouds, and I
came back to the house. It was half past three.

"I may be wrong friends, but--I take it that vision was prophecy. The
HUN comes again. Get ready. He comes again--_encore_!"

We were all silent for a minute or so, and then--it was the scolding
squeak of Emile--"_Eh bien_--What of it? We will be ready. _Rumpe moras
omnes; et turbata arripe castra._"

"_Mes amis_--" it was my father now who rose, and addressed the little
group, turning to this side and to that, almost as if he were before an
assembly; "Deschat is right--_il y a raison_--the hour of trial comes
once more, the pride of race, the sense of justification demands the
restoration of Alsace and Lorraine. We all know that. Our conquerors
know that, for the poets of both nations have sung it, and the poets
are the prophets, for they feel the vibrations of the pulse of the
peoples; their ears are sharp, they hear the _timbre_ of the distant
gun, before the common eye can see its smoke."



CHAPTER II

GABRIELLE


My sister Gabrielle was singularly circumstanced in temperament, as
she had been too curiously abused in treatment. I left her a young man
of twenty-one--she was two years older than I--and only knew of her
changing experiences from letters sent to me at San Antonio, Texas.
Mother and father were always a trifle worried over Gabrielle's retired
and shrinking ways, her abnormal shyness before people, a physical
timidity almost that kept her face averted, her rich, deep, large eyes
half closed as if in dreams, and controlled her speech, impeding and
denying it.

Her languid action and the frequent recurrent fits of a semi-stupor
passing off into reveries, when the loosened current of her thought
found an unexpected vent in rambling half-lucid, oftentimes poetic
apostrophes and ascriptions, wrought in them a transparent terror that
embarrassed the grieving girl.

Something of the sort had disturbed me before I left home, because
I loved Gabrielle dearly, and remembered so many intimacies between
us. In our walks around fair Briois we--both perhaps prematurely
serious and inquisitive--talked of things invisible and beautiful, as
angels and fairies, and in an old graveyard back of a church beyond
the village and on the edge of a wood where the birds nested and sung,
wondered over the dead. We amused our fancies with inventions of their
work and play, now their bodies were so securely anchored in the earth.
Because of all this, yes, and because Gabrielle was very pretty too, I
tried to break the mystery of her modesty and lonely habits.

But really there was no mystery, and her modesty was a lovely maidenly
reserve. Gabrielle was nervously over-strung, and her susceptibilities
were extremely tender and responsive, and then there was growing in her
that inexplicable power which forms the _raison d'être_ of all this
marvellous experience which--as everyone knows now--put an end to the
awful WAR.

Well, before I left home, before I found myself hung, as it were, over
the bottomless Atlantic in a big sea-worthy American ship, booked for
Galveston, Texas, mother and father decided to send Gabrielle to Paris
to a training school of nurses. It had occurred to them that my sister
with her gentleness, and a real skill in the use of her fingers, would
do well, while the contact with doctors and surgeons--rather direct,
imperious, and active men--would wear away her apparent mistrust and
nervousness.

But here was their mistake. The analysis was correct, the procedure
hopelessly wrong. Gabrielle, always obedient and gravely mute about
her own wishes, assented, and entered a training school for nurses
and almost at once encountered the terrors of the operating room. Her
sensitive and refined sense shuddered at the sight of suffering and
disease, her pity for it--willing and self-sacrificing as was her
desire to help--caused her involuntary agony of mind. The vulgarities
of treatment, the raw necessities of the exposure, mutilations, and
the repulsion she felt for blood, and the naked sightlessness of
wounds, amputations, incisions--all the obtrusive physical facts of
the hospital offended her. Too delicate in feeling, too aesthetic in
temperament, too limpid in her affinities, as of a spirit discarnate,
soaring, and apprehensive, she underwent mental tortures--hard to
realize to others differently conditioned--in this enforced service.

Perhaps I was not myself solicitous enough about her, and her welfare;
because--well, it is clear I am sure--because I was much in love with
Blanchette, and as the days brought me nearer to that moment when I
would leave home, and struggle for that wealth America seems to hold so
temptingly out in her outstretched hands to everyone, I felt almost
bitterly the probability that--in the nature of things--Blanchette
would not, could not wait for me. When might I return--Ah when?--the
thought wrenched me like a physical violence, and the nightly scarlet
of the evening skies almost, to my despairing heart, seemed stained
with the drops of my own blood.

It was a year before I went to America--that was in 1895--that I sat
with Blanchette in the garden back of her pleasant home on a low mound,
in a bosque or coppice of trimmed beeches, with a little fairyland
of garden beds before us, of larkspur, hollyhocks, geraniums, and
piebald four-o'clocks, and the slant lights fading slowly upwards
left a thousand hues among their petals. The captain favored our
_rendez-vous_, and I half thought that I saw him in an upper window of
the house benignantly smiling upon our tryst.

The comeliness of a sweetly fair girl was Blanchette's, and the
ringletted hair of her blonde mother--a Swede--caught in an abundant
chignon behind her well shaped head, brought into ravishing relief the
rounded and blushing cheeks, the winning deep-set blue eyes, where
something, to me almost etherial, dwelt, the full lipped mouth, with
the blue veins of her temples, the round white neck, and the ample
contours of her shoulders, hidden that night beneath the blue folds of
a crepe handkerchief, crossed over her breast like a _fichu_.

"Blanchette," I said at length, just as the last lingering patches of
sunlight seemed to escape skyward from the flowers, "you know that I am
going away to America--and--I am not going solely for myself--_pas de
tout_. You will be with me in my daily thoughts, in my work, and every
dollar--_toujours dollars en l'Amerique_--I make, will be put away for
YOU; _Mais comme je t'aime!_"

It was a sudden impulse, and its very awkwardness showed the sincerity
of my feeling, its impetuous earnestness; and deliciously was it
rewarded. Blanchette caught my face in her soft long hands, and brought
it down to her own; our lips met, and the pledge of our future life
together unuttered, was sworn so deeply in our hearts, that we were
dumbfounded with the overmastering passion of the moment.

Again and again we embraced, and our lips sought each other with a
rapture inexpressible--_une rapture indicible_--while the moving hours
swept the heavens of all light, and the fragrance of the gardens rose
overpoweringly like sensuous incitations to our immeasurable needs.

The long pent-up torrent of our love caught upon its waves each
momentary reserve, and smothered it in the racing tides of our
limitless joy. Voices seemed to speak to us from every side, as if
the spirits of nature, enthralled in flower, and tree, and grass, and
herb, disincarnate through sympathy, spoke to us, inarticulate but
real. _C'était l'appel aphrodisiac de l'âme_--the ecstatic epitome of a
life-time.

That night I leaned out of the window of my room, and the night,
calm and gloriously light with the gibbous moon half flooding the
broad distances with its pale splendors, seemed to bathe my spirit in
incredible consolations of hope, ambition. An exorbitant confidence
seized me. Anticipation and resolve raised innumerable visions, and the
bending salutation of Success almost audibly filled my ears with its
siren promises.

Blanchette would wait. I must not be too avaricious. A little was
enough for our serene and inconspicuous days. Let it be in a year--two?
_Les fortunes merveilleuses ne viendraient-ils?_ Perhaps--perhaps--let
us believe so, now, and if the time is lengthened, well--_les noces
s'attarderaient seulement un peu_.

So dreaming, so feeding illustrious hopes, I forgot Gabrielle, in
my selfish egotism, and while I had dimly divined the result of her
new work I offered no opposition to our parents' designs, and even
encouraged Gabrielle with specious flatteries. She would grow stronger;
the life of the great city would be full of wonders, and captivate her
mind with its marvels. Then there would be fresh friendships, the
gayety of companionships, innumerable alleviations of _l'ennui_.

Gabrielle shook her dear head, and the sweet yearning eyes watched me
with a sad disillusionment that I had deserted her, and, I, in the
madness of my joy and in the eagerness of my plans, recurred to the
artifice of commonplaces, and the flat sophistries of comfort.

I came upon her one morning weeping quietly in her room with her head
leaning against the mantel piece, her white slender fingers pressed
upon her eyes and the tears slipping through them. I caught her in
my arms, and turned her head upon my breast with the real anguish of
self-reproach.

"Gabrielle, Gabrielle, what hurts you? You break my heart. Have I
been forgetful? O! believe me Gabrielle it will be all well, and
if--if--perhaps--I know, you say I have been only thinking of myself.
Ah forgive me, Gabrielle; surely you know that I love you from the very
bottom of my heart and if you could only see it you would believe."

"Yes," she murmured between sobs that wrung my heart. "_Oui_ Alfred,
_c'est vrai_--but I feel so sorrowful at times, and I am afraid of the
great city, and the visions come to me at night and I wake up shaking
with strange doubts."

"Why Gabrielle, what do you mean? Visions! You have never told me of
that before. What visions?"

It was some time before I could contrive to make her tell me more, and
when she finally drew me to a sofa at the window, keeping her face
fixed outward on the sweet pageantry of the little gardens on the
hill, and the far-away loveliness of the forests, and the shifting
radiances of the lowlands, she held me spell-bound with the strange
confession. Her voice was at first very low, almost inaudible, but
slowly she regained her composure, and the story came from her lips
with an unstudied grace and realism that imposed its truthfulness
upon its hearer. Indeed my own latent sympathy in nature with that of
Gabrielle's, from the first, enthralled me in a trance of confidence.

"Why, Alfred, a year ago I was standing at my bed-side--it was late
and the night was dark. I had put out my lamp, and was about to say my
prayers, when softly there seemed to steal into the room a light. It
came at first from the ceiling of the room, and then it shifted and
shone like a phosphorescent ball, or a little cloud of glowing fire
half concealed behind a veil. I was not frightened--No, not at all, but
I felt a delicious calmness, a wonderful soothing self-surrender to
an unseen influence, as if the effluence of some mind controlled me,
and--I thought so--I sank slowly to the floor, while the light rose
and expanded and grew before my eyes into a shape, a form of flowing
lines of light, with shades between them, and the faintest pencillings
of a rosy tint ran here and there over it, and then--perhaps then
Alfred I had swooned; but there was no fear. It was just like a
delicious lapse in unconsciousness into sleep, and with that came
voices in my ears--faint, very faint, murmurous, indistinguishable, and
then--"

"And then?" I exclaimed, now thoroughly excited myself, and catching
Gabrielle's hands, bringing her face to mine, and gazing into her eyes
with mute expostulating curiosity.

"I knew nothing more--all vanished, apparition and voices, and I woke
up leaning against my bed and bathed in perspiration."

We were both silent for a time, and without any encouragement Gabrielle
resumed her story, but she had freed herself from my arms, and walked
to the center of her room--its walls were well filled with pretty
colored prints, for the most part religious figures--and with her
hands crossed behind her back, stood before me and continued--and now
her rueful expression, and the rebuking tenderness of her eyes, had
disappeared, and in their place was an old familiar smile, inexplicably
reminiscent, like a visible soliloquy. It often arose to her face and
it became her.

"I waited for the visitation again and again, putting myself in the
same position, and shutting out the light, and--praying. It came
once, a few months after the first, and then I thought it was some
forewarning of danger to father or mother, or to you Alfred, and I
dreaded to open my eyes in the mornings, fearing disaster, sickness--I
know not what; and then Alfred it suddenly seemed to me it meant that
_it was my own summons_!"

"And when it came the second time, was it different?" I almost cried
aloud, abruptly guessing that it portended mischief to Blanchette.

"No, quite the same, but less bright and more restless, changing in its
brightness, and flitting slowly up the walls and back again, and never
forming a figure as at the first. But something else was different;
O! much different--_The Voices_. They were stronger, and Alfred it is
the voices now that fill my ears at night with callings, and singular
messages, that I cannot understand, and Alfred," she came closer to me,
and her voice, sinking to a whisper, seemed almost stealthy; "I have
spells of fainting. Mother has picked me up many times and I have heard
her talking to father about it, and they have written to the doctors in
the Training School and-- Well you know it is all settled, but Alfred
it will not help me. I dread it. I shall be unhappy."

The forlorn misery returned to her eyes, and the despairing gesture,
as she brought her hands forward and leaned them against my shoulders
and with a keen interrogation fixed her gaze upon my own, revealed her
unwillingness to go to Paris. She went on:

"In those trances--if they are really trances--the voices come in all
sorts of ways to me. I cannot understand it; it scares me and yet I
have grown to wish to hear them--some of them. For they are very, very
different. Some voices are like children talking low, almost lisping,
and always musical, and others are cold and hard; but--Alfred, is not
this wonderful? I can drive those hard, stern voices off, by just
wishing them away; my mind does it somehow, and the others come to me
when I wish them to--O! but it is marvelous."

Her eyes were lit again with a saintly joy--a little wild I
thought--and for a moment I shuddered at the thought that perhaps
Gabrielle was losing her mind, under the stress of her hallucinations.
Ah! but were they hallucinations? I was not unwilling to believe them.
Both Gabrielle and I had indulged in the reading of ghostly tales, when
children, and because it was just a little difficult for us to gratify
our fancy for the weird and the supernatural--all the eccentricities of
the disembodied--we had loved them the more.

We were interrupted in our talk by some call for Gabrielle, and I
was left alone to ponder the strange matter, with I think, a crude
kind of expectancy that we approached transcendent mysteries,
dwelling unconfessed in my mind. But I was not a little alarmed also.
Gabrielle's delicate texture, her spiritualized emotions, which also
in their poignant intensity of feeling assumed now to me the aspect of
a thaumaturgic power, might induce some mental derangement. Uncertain
what to do, and unwilling to tell the affair to our parents, who would
only see in it a new urgency for Gabrielle's transportation to changed
fields of association, I concluded to confide everything Gabrielle had
told me to Blanchette.

Blanchette was incredulous. She could not believe it. It offended
her robust sense of actual living and the sharp realization in her
of the materiality of the senses. You see in Blanchette something of
the captain's skepticism, his naked Voltairism had developed. She was
silent for a while, and then answered very slowly my question, "What is
best to do?"

"Alfred, Gabrielle is unwell; you must get her away. She lives too
lonely a life, reads too much, and is unsociable. Let her once live
among the hard facts of the hospital, and the training school,
and--Ah! then--it will all go, like the fogs--_comme les brouillards
s'evanouis-saient quand le soleil les éclate_. Eh? Alfred, you know
that."

I did not know it, and I was ill disposed at first to adopt
Blanchette's view. But she was very tender and affectionate, and I was
blind and too happy--too miserable too, as I must soon leave her--to
do justice to Gabrielle. And so it came about that I argued the matter
with Gabrielle, and insisted that she must try Paris, and the school,
and the doctors, and forget the visitations, and mingle with the world
a little, and, amongst new acquaintances, put to flight the aggravating
"voices," for--the other marvel--the shining image--had never returned.

This latter fact contributed a better efficacy to my persuasions, as it
seemed to prove that the whole business was some delusion of the mind.
Gabrielle was not a bit convinced, but she was so dutiful, so resigned,
and so faithful, that she yielded, put on the address of willingness
she did not really feel, just to please me.

I took her to Paris and entrusted her with, O so many adjurations, to
Doctor Manuelle Herissois, who was most considerate and pleasing and
talked with Gabrielle with great adroitness and--I left her smiling,
but as she kissed me _Adieu_, her dear eyes were very wet indeed,
and for a moment in my own heart I mistrusted the part I had played,
and might have, in an instant, reversed the whole transaction, when
Gabrielle turned half away, while our hands yet pressed each other,
and said; "_Adieu_ Alfred. Do not come to see me when you go away to
America. I could not stand it. Write only. That will do," and then,
with a half stifled cry she fled into her room--her apartment in the
school, and quickly closed the door, and I was left mute and irresolute.

What is more bitter than the remembrance of careless acts, thoughtless
things we have done which caused grief to those we loved, and yet,
while loving, neglected. It all came wrong, and still--_assurement le
bon Dieu, Il le faisait_--it ended the war!

That night--I well recall it, I think, each minute of it--Blanchette
ravished me with her loveliness, her joyous salutation, her infectious
gayety, and lost in my own pleasure, the foolish vanities of doting
youth, poor Gabrielle in her loneliness, was altogether forgotten. Dear
sweet sister, with the patient heart, the endless resignation, the
guileless impulses, and with that inscrutable mysticism of feeling,
that finally brought to her the discarnate souls of the slain, the
ghostly assault of the unnumbered dead--Ah! _Malheureuse!_ not yet!
again my tell-tale tongue, the hurrying scribble of my heedless pen!

Well, there were so many things to think of, and Blanchette was so
eager to see me every minute, that when I had taken leave of all of
our friends, and father and mother had invoked blessings on my head,
and exacted promises that I would write each week, and the captain had
made me very sure that he wanted a few pounds of the Texas pecan nuts
sent to him, and Privat Deschat asked for a half dozen hanks of Texas
cotton, if they could be found in the Galveston stores, Emile Chouteau
(it was after he had left the school), wished only my happy return,
that the waters would be propitious, the winds and the waves, and, if
storms, why then:

       _dicto citius tumida aequora placat
 Collectasque fugat nubes, solemque reducit_;

and Sebastien Quintado had hugged me a dozen times and smacked me
robustly as many times on each cheek--why, there was no time to be lost
for me to pack up my few belongings, and get away to Marseilles as
fast as ever I could--and then had not Gabrielle said _not to come to
bid her Adieu; that she could not stand it_? _Certainement._ And so it
was, that when I stood on the quay at Marseilles, trembling, nervous,
and half regretful, everyone had been seen, everyone embraced, and
everyone's orders taken, and--she, the wounded, dear sister of my flesh
and blood, was forgotten--O! No, not forgotten--not that, but missed
as it were in the furious haste, and wonderment, and expectation, and
dread.

It was a big ship, a frigate, loaded with wines and cheeses and spices,
and many jim-cracks of all sorts, that was to take me to the New World,
and when I stood on her glistening deck, beneath the blazing sun, and
France slowly sank away from my eyes and just at last the white spot
of Marseilles, like a disk on the horizon, _went out_, like a light
snuffed out in a candle, I went to my room and cabin, and laid down and
held my hands before my face and cried pretty hard.

And somehow then, the very presence of Gabrielle surged before me like
some embodiment of rebuke, and the physical pressure of a hand on my
shoulder startled me to my feet with a cry of anguish. But it was
nothing, only the reaction of my body to the urgency of my grief over
Gabrielle's neglect. For days the thought of my sister obscured my
happiness, although the newness of everything--ministered deliciously
to my _amour-propre_. Good resolutions helped to comfort me, and the
first thing for me to do when America was gained would be to write a
long, careful, loving letter to Gabrielle.

My project of going to America can be briefly explained, as it may
appear almost quixotic and unreasonable otherwise, especially my
destination in Texas. But some years before acquaintances, made in
Paris, where I was studying law, led to this departure. They had
interests in cattle and farm lands, in the great state, and had
frequently made me offers to go out, and watch their rights, and report
the prospects and conditions, with inducements so advantageous to
myself that, conjoined with the long cherished project formed in my own
mind to try the chances in the Republic, resulted in this. I accepted
their invitations against my parents' wishes, who at first resolutely
denied their permission. This was overcome by my own increasing
obstinacy, that had begun to approach the earnestness of disobedience.

Blanchette and I had, with the ludicrous solemnity of young lovers,
exchanged the pledges of fidelity, and I, in an exuberance of
hopefulness, promised to return in five years, which by some fancied
finality seemed to both of us the limit of our possible endurance. With
forceful vows I had engaged to live most simply and the frugality of my
expectations in living--measured the quickness and value of my savings,
and indeed, as it happened, I made my way fast.

At San Antonio I became at last established, with the various
interests, I was to watch, quite fully comprehended and diligently
tended. I do not know that I ever fell in love with San Antonio, but I
certainly got to like it very well, and in later years I have recalled
it with feelings of tenderness, that came pretty near to affection. I
have every reason to be grateful to it, for I was most successful. I
had prospered, greatly prospered. When I found at last that the term
of my exile came ideally near to the period when I might consider
myself well enough off to go back and claim Blanchette, I think that my
respect for San Antonio rose to the apex of unaffected enthusiasm.

Because the purpose and body of this history is connected with the
utterly unparalleled circumstances of the ending of the monstrous war
of this century, I pass over the irrelevant details of my life in
America, except only to point out the financial luck that enabled me
to return to France, at a critical moment. In five years I was almost
rich--in my own modest estimation. At any rate I had enough, and a
luxurious indolence, which was part of my nature, fascinated me with
its temptations of rest and culture, while the thought of the waiting
Blanchette--whose letters were so true-hearted and devoted--kept
sensitized my eagerness to return almost to the point of madness. And
there was Gabrielle.

I had been most dutiful to Gabrielle. I fulfilled all of the many
brotherly resolves I made on the voyage to America, which had been the
index of my self-reproach at leaving her so carelessly, and sweetly
and reassuringly had she answered. Alas! I only learned much later
how devotedly she had hidden her sufferings from me, that I might
not be distressed in my new home. Now when I realized that my little
fortune--part of it the result of a speculative incident so frequent
in the wonderful land of Hope--would not only unite me with Blanchette
but enable me to give comfort and happiness to Gabrielle, I was wild
with impatience to get away. It was my last month in San Antonio; the
leave for my return had been received by me, from my employers, and the
successor to my position would be at any moment in my office ready to
take charge.

It was my last day; a sultry wilting day towards the end of August,
and I had exerted every energy in arranging the directions for my
successor, and incidentally clearing off a large amount of that
surreptitiously invading refuse of unfinished odds and ends, that
accumulate, in one way and another, in any business, which cannot be
completed by daily installments of work. A large amount of mail had
been disposed of. The office force, tired out, and half angry at the
unexpected pace I had demanded, had left, and I was alone in a large
shop fronting upon ---- Street, the principal street of San Antonio.
Gray frowning clouds had formed somewhere in the upper air. I could
detect their presence even without seeing them, by the deepening
obscurement of the opposite houses, and a chill brought in their
enveloping bosoms as they crowded down upon the city, conveyed a well
understood notice of some sudden meteorological caprice that would
relieve the tension of the heat, with possibly damaging accompaniments
of disaster.

I sighed contentedly; the future just then, however dark the sky might
be, was radiant with the most varied lights of anticipation and of
promise. My hand moved an apparently unopened letter, or perhaps, in
its vague stirring over the desk before me, had dislodged it from
some crevice in the drawers, or beneath the folios and baskets,
and I abruptly became conscious of ITS presence. It was a human
utterance--that letter--it might have cried out to me with the incisive
agony of its menacing contents. It might I say--perhaps it did--but
through the coarse obstructive mechanism of my ears its voice, that
should have crashed around me like the call of Fate, was utterly
unheard, and it lay there just an overlooked and silent scrap of paper.

I turned to it lazily, but in the next instant my eyes, apprehensive
through that nervous divination of thought, that writes a message in
our souls before we read or hear it, recognized the hand-writing of
Gabrielle. I felt the racing blood leave my cheeks, and stir my heart
with feverish palpitations. No letter from my sister was due now; only
last week I had received one. I could scarcely keep my fingers still
enough to tear open its cover. I knew; I knew. O! God how certainly I
knew, that in the blackness of the darkening day a greater blackness,
behind that spotless white paper, would rush out to overwhelm my life!

In the fading light leaning against the door-sill as the men and
women of the street hurried homeward, with backward glances at the
now onrushing columns of dusky vapor in the sky, I read the letter. I
shuddered in the fear lest in the uncontrolled frenzy of my heart some
treacherous cry, some blackguard defiance of the Almighty, might bring
them around me in consternation and in anger.

My eyes glazing slowly with the rising paralysis of terror read this:

 _Dear Brother_,

 _Something has happened. Alfred, Blanchette is sick_--vraiment--_quite
 sick. I am now home in St. Choiseul nursing her. She asks for you,
 Alfred. Could you come? Perhaps it would be well_--Je dis peut-etre
 seulement--_and yet, Alfred, I believe it would be best. You could
 help her wonderfully. Even yet, say, you will come, and things will be
 better._

 _Ah! my brother, I am sorry. O! so sorry to write this, but you
 see there is nothing to be done but to--shall I say it?--Alfred,
 Blanchette is very sick. It is a fever. The doctors reassure us, but
 because Blanchette calls for you so often, they are convinced that it
 would be good--very good--perhaps indispensable; you understand. Come
 Alfred--Come, come. We will tell her you are coming._

 _Gabrielle; St. Choiseul,
 1900_

The paper crumpled in my hands; something like a vapor clouded my eyes,
and hearing in my ears was suffocated in a sullen roar that came from
nowhere, and then I felt myself smashed against the pavement, at the
door of the office, and some undissipated residue of cognition recorded
the fact, that I was being lifted and carried away.

And when again the coordinated senses revealed sensibly to me my
surroundings, I was on a bed in the hospital, in a wide white room,
with a nurse and a doctor, and in my own ears now sounded my own voice,
and all it said was compressed in struggling cries: "_Je viens, Je
viens, Je viens_--I come, I come, I come!"



CHAPTER III

MY RETURN


It is fifteen years today since Blanchette died. I have grown old since
then with an age not of years, though by reason of a sister's love, I
have been consoled, strengthened, even, and now, in the presence of the
world's disaster, succumb to some unutterable conviction that the ends
of God have little need of the prayers of men.

After my delirium in San Antonio had passed, I resumed my normal
self-possession, though a nervous weakness--since developing into a
muscular paralysis--made me at moments inert or half trembling with a
deceitful dread that set my heart beating curiously. How well I recall
it all; those days of anguish, with the twilight glimmering of joy
that I had come in time to see her, and with too a mystical sense of
attachment between us both, lasting beyond death, and bathed, as with a
consecration, in the bitterest waters of Marah.

I had rushed from San Antonio to New York, and from New York to Havre,
and thus, in two weeks, almost exactly, stood halting before the gate
of the captain's house in St. Choiseul. The autumn season already had
begun to stain the woods with red and yellow, the delicate atmosphere
of early fall filled the fair scenes of meadow and hill and clustered
homesteads, with ravishing tints. Everything, as I despairingly gazed
upon it was so eloquent of beauty and peace and--realization! And what
lay in the house before me? I almost fell to my knees in the crushed
agony of suspense, but Ah! No! it was not suspense. I _knew_; that
psychic power which dwelt in my Gabrielle, which brought to her the
myriad voices of the dead in their awful supplications--_Eh bien_, not
that now--some of that power was with me too, and every step I went
forward to that pitiless revelation of defeat, accompanied the stern
record in the thought that hope was delusion. I had met no one; the
deserted village was itself a presage.

I looked up at the silent house charming in its vines, flowers, into
the walled garden blushing now in the hectic flush of royal gladiolus,
up at the empty windows, and above, far above into the depthless
blue sky, where we men and women somehow place the everlasting
dwelling-place of the Almighty. Almost as I reached the door it opened,
and in its frame stood Gabrielle, much changed; I saw that at once,
through all my sadness, but solemnly beautiful I thought. My heart
leaped towards her; in the fast approaching desolation she, my blessed
sister, would save me, lift me up from the terrors of bereavement, not
with strength, but with the divine compassion that I felt now visibly
abided in her.

Gabrielle opened wide her arms. I caught her in my own, and she
whispered in my ear; "Alfred I knew you were here. Before I saw you the
_sense_ of it was with me."

"Gabrielle, is there no hope--no hope?" The words choked me like some
insurmountable obstruction in my throat.

"Yes Alfred," the voice, always soft and delightful, was just a little
tremulous with sympathy, her own deep love. "There may be; the fever
has subsided a little, but--Well, come in. Blanchette asks for you so
much. Come, the spare room is at the head of the stairs. Be noiseless.
I will fix everything."

We ascended the stairs, and I waited outside the closed door with my
head pressed against its lintels, murmuring--what were they?--Prayers?
Possibly.

It opened softly in a few minutes, and Gabrielle with a gesture of
invitation to enter and with her finger on her lips, moved before me
into the room. I saw the waiting group at the side of a low wide bed.
The captain, erect, still, with features blanched into a pallor that
matched his white disordered hair, his figure bent slightly forward as
he leaned on his cane, and kept his eyes unchangingly riveted upon the
bed, whose occupant I could not see. At the bed-side was the watching
doctor, and to him now Gabrielle approached, withdrawing then a little
to one side with her head bowed, but with her eyes noting the sick girl
whom yet I could not see.

I slipped to my knees with a sudden motion outward, that brought me to
the bed-side, and for a moment I stopped there, with my face buried in
the coverlid. It had been done; Blanchette knew. The next moment her
hand caressed my hair, and the weak stroke penetrated me with such an
ageless longing that, do what I would, I shook from head to toe. _Mais
courage_; I must be now most calm. Yes, yes, _most calm_. So I wrestled
with myself, biting my lips, and forcing to my eyes the haggard smile
of reassurance. My hands imprisoned the hand of Blanchette, and slowly
raising my head our eyes met.

I did not see what I saw afterwards, the shrunken figure, the hollow
cheeks, the paling lips, the slow hideous change of emaciation. No!
nothing; only her eyes, and in them shone something so fathomless, so
beatific, that it suddenly lifted the intolerable weight of pain, it
smote the clouds of misunderstanding or rebellion, and they vanished.
It filled my ears with music, in place of groans, it summoned by the
wand of a supernatural enchantment unheralded figures of blessing, and
in those eyes I read the futurity of our endless happiness.

I moved my head towards her, and despite the restraining hand of the
doctor kissed her lips, slowly, slowly, that the lingering embrace
might fill her soul with confidence, and against her heated cheeks
I swept my lips again and again. It was over. Our tryst was kept.
Gabrielle called me gently, and Blanchette fell from me in a fainting
spell, while the doctor firmly lifted me up to my feet, and the captain
caught my unsteady body.

And--we had not spoken in that transient interval of surrender--thus
mutely with the deep intelligence of an uttermost love we were married,
and in that restraint unrepiningly, with an entire joy, I have lived
and _live_. Some symptoms of that psychic erethism which possessed
Gabrielle were also born in me, and before my eyes even now sweeps the
vision of my Blanchette, and in the night her voice fills my ears, and
her hand caresses my forehead. But later it was through Gabrielle that
I summoned her to me, and in this way grew the apparent supersensual
power of my sister to materialize the ghostly denizens of the
Hereafter, and install them, as it were, in matter before the physical
eye.

Blanchette's burial was itself a poem, so sweet, so tender, so rich
in the love of friends, and in the graces of both religion and of
nature. The day was divinely rare. Everywhere was the blessed soft,
gently warming sunshine, and the last flowers of the autumn woke to
the summery touch, and bloomed again. From the doorway of her home
the little procession filed, bearing, on the unshrinking shoulders
of eight villagers, the coffin, draped in white and enjeweled with
blooms. Before it went the wavering line of altar boys, singing in
thin sopranos, and the robed Padre--Father Antoine--grave and noble,
and behind it the captain and I walked, our hands clasped together.
Although the captain moved forward erectly, I felt the nervous
pressures of his hand, tightening and relaxing, and for a moment now
and then he leaned upon me. _Mais--le brave garçon_--he never flinched,
and if his heart was near the breaking point, no one knew. Behind him
walked Gabrielle and father--mother was in the church waiting with
the congregation--and then Privat Deschat and Sebastien Quintado, and
then the long file of friends followed, old and young, who had loved
Blanchette for her goodness, her prettiness, her kindness, her grace of
being and of sympathy.

They came from far and near; they were men and women, girls and boys,
some carrying candles, some wreaths, some little crosses of Easter
palms which they would throw in the grave, or on it. The altar boys
carried lighted candles, and the air was so still that the almost
invisible wisps of flames rose straight upward, and were revealed by
the undulous smoke that sprang from their tips as the candles wavered
in the hands of the acolytes. Slowly we moved on--somehow I seemed half
unconscious, and yet most sensitive to the day's supreme charm--the
shrill chanting of the boys, mingled almost indistinguishably in my
ears with the murmurous hum of belated cicadas, the slow rustling of
footsteps before and behind me, the occasional whisper of the vacantly
stirred foliage in the trees, the distant pipings of birds, and the
far-off wail of some wandering or bereaved dog.

It was a dream almost, and ever and anon, like some spiritual
effluence, the fragrance of the dying season from the field, the
distant woods, the savory banks of the meadow-streams, invaded and
enmeshed my feelings, with a strange fervor of complacency, as though
I followed, not the dead body of my love, but was on my way to meet
her elsewhere. So indeed it seemed to me in the little church, where
all the frail magnificence our little church could summon for her
funeral was so loyally displayed, and where the soft voiced father
spoke with the brave and cordial accent of confidence, that Blanchette
Bleu-Pistache was most surely now in Paradise. Then I felt my own soul
leaving me amid the tapestries and lights, and upward with her, hand
in hand, I was hastening to fields of asphodel and unbroken choirs of
the celestial, and that then I swooned sideways, and for an instant the
captain held me, when the reverberant senses returned, with the rush of
whirring sounds, and I was myself again.

Blanchette was buried in our church-yard, somewhat towards its western
wall, where the ivy clung late in the winter to the stones, where a
tall Lombardy poplar planted too against the wall, stood like some
impossibly gigantic sentinel, and where afterwards indeed the flowers
that I watered, in an agony of trust that Blanchette knew I kept thus
alive within me the imperishable union of our hearts--spread the sweet
wantonness of abundant color and perfume above her, flowers that when
they died in the autumn's cold and the winter's searing frosts and
snows, were replenished with others plucked from the conservatory of
our home, and placed under the white cross like some herbal sacrifice.

Ah--_c'est assez_--I must not linger on the great sorrow, though in the
inextinguishable pain that I feel at moments over its recall, a hidden
selfishness as of a satiety of suffering prevails to force me to write
and write. But I have forgotten and my wandering thought obscures my
whole purpose. It is Gabrielle that all this grievous remembrance leads
to, and she who has ended the awful WAR, is the theme of this most
wonderful experience, I have essayed to tell so imperfectly.

After Blanchette's death I stayed with the captain for some months,
until a grave disease struck me down almost to death's door, which
indeed I craved to open and to close behind me. It was a nervous fever,
from which I have never quite recovered, as it left me with recurrent
fits of weakness and a debility of energy quite unlike my former self.
The captain adopted an orphan girl, who was like an incarnation of his
daughter, and who infinitely blessed him, with a similar gentleness and
sanity and beauty.

Gabrielle and myself became again closely knit together in
sympathy. She had nursed me in my sickness, and she read to me in
my convalescence, and then she told me of the harsh and repulsive
life of the hospital; how its penury of grace afflicted her, and the
physical destitution of the hideously sick had overcome her with an
irrepressible repulsion, and the half savage nakedness of exposures and
surgery had thrown her into momentary spasms of despairing melancholy.
But she had not complained; it was the ordeal of preparation, she
said; she had undergone extreme dread and misery of heart and mind,
and, under the visitations of her distress, those ecstasies--as she
now slowly and tearfully confessed--of desire to see the ghostly and
immaterial had returned and strengthened, and to her had come visions
and voices, and again and again in her prayers the apparent touch of
fingers tracing the braid of her hair, or even smoothing the temples of
her head had actually been felt.

None of these things were told to me by Gabrielle until I was
effectually improved, and then they became the outpouring of her heart.
She had been unwilling to speak of them to father and mother since
they would have, beyond any question, regarded them as the symptoms of
mental infirmity, and their solicitude might have readily taken the
form of some new insistence upon the avocations of the city. Gabrielle,
after the death of Blanchette had persisted in her refusal to return
to the hospital in Paris, and, after a brief and a little unpleasant
disagreement, mother and father permitted her to stay at home. Then
came my sickness, when Gabrielle proved most useful, and then by a
natural adjustment--for exactly as it had been in the old days of
childhood we became inseparable--Gabrielle assumed domestic duties, and
our home life was reinstituted and complete.

It was delightful, though the happiness it brought to me was a solemn
tenderness of feeling and thought simply. I had brought back from
America a small sum of uninvested funds, and when this was carefully
invested, with the interest from the moneys held by me in America and
with my father's maintenance, our living became, more than ever, free
from anxieties, and comfortably luxurious. Nor were we careless of our
duties to the less fortunate; the instruction of our parents had always
laid emphasis upon the invincible demands of charity in the Christian
life, and no one more thoughtfully than they furnished to us examples
of its most admirable exercise.

And here I must refer to something now certainly obvious to my reader.
The religious faith of our parents was not ours--not Gabrielle's
nor mine. Perhaps that had much to do with that felt, though never
mentioned, separation--_désaccordement_, we French would, I think, call
it--that latently grew up between our parents and ourselves, dutiful
as we always were and loving too. Gabrielle and I were Catholics, and
our reversion, as it might be called, had taken place as we approached
maturity, when something in our natures responded vitally to the
spiritual richness and the sensuous impressions of the Catholic church,
while the absence of a Protestant church in St. Choiseul--supplemented
by the meeting together of various members in a room, wherein my
father often assumed the functions of the preacher--helped to establish
our desertion. There was indeed a moment's exasperation over it all,
but it was most evanescent, and, yielding to a larger liberality of
conviction than most Protestants, our parents were at least contented
that their children worshipped God and Christ.

Certainly to Gabrielle the Catholic symposium of saints, and its
hierarchy of visible and invisible powers, appealed overwhelmingly.
She surrendered to the full harvest of its supernatural offerings,
with the gladness, the rapture, of the energumen. Now too that the
psychiatric sense or control had started within her nature, she rose
to the strange contingency of communication with the dead, with a
transcendent joy. No longer thrust upon the abhorrent carnalities
of the hospital, graciously as she acknowledged their necessity and
kindness, Gabrielle, with me, her emotional companion too, returned
to all the quietism of our life in St. Choiseul, and revelled in her
exuberance of mystical detachment. It was a partial aberration of mind,
I almost now think, despite its wondrous results, accompanied with
the enthralled wonderment and pleasure of a temperament poetical and
structurally imaginative. Gabrielle became neurotic. Her hospital life
and its terrors had something to do with it.

This community of feeling and the gradual development of that
unhealthy indulgence in the mediumistic power, Gabrielle now discovered
she possessed (which became encouraged through my own solicitations)
formed between us a bond of fellowship, that became secretive and
masonic. It was not a fortunate circumstance, and yet SEE what marvels
flowed from it--at least so I think, and indeed I am not unwilling to
protest that it was God's hand! Of course it was my desire to approach
Blanchette in her spiritualized state, that led us onward along the
mysterious and fascinating path of our strange psychic experiments.
And so I come to that illustrious moment when I saw Blanchette in the
spirit, when--_Mon Dieu_, can I ever forget it?--that pale vision of my
own Blanchette issued from the darkness, stayed on the threshold of the
real for an instant, softly luminous, and yet discrete in form, though
the corporeal properties of the dear face I adored, seemed blurred in
the haze of an exceeding brightness.

It was probably about six months after Blanchette's death, that I
ventured to speak to Gabrielle about the hope I almost treacherously
nourished--for the practice is forbidden by the Church--that she might
be able to summon Blanchette from the world of spirits. It was towards
the evening of a spring day, that just began to intimate the glorious
oncoming of the new season's wealth of beauty--a beauty I longed for,
for with the reawakening earth, with the fresh laughter of the whole
wide sphere of living things, I knew the dead weight of my grief would
be lightened. The sunlight, the song of birds, the flowing vesture of
the colored earth, would enter and dissolve it, and thus, mellowed into
sadness only, it would encumber me no longer with leaden hopelessness.
We were standing together at the bottom of the garden, watching the
first sproutings of the crocus from beneath a film of sheltered snow,
and the cheering warmth of the full sun filled us with the instincts of
life. It opened my lips.

"Gabrielle," I said, "I want you to bring Blanchette back to me."

My sister was not surprised; she turned to me with the most natural
gesture of willingness, placing her hands upon my shoulders and looking
straight into my eyes.

"Yes, Alfred, I will. I have heard Blanchette. But I was afraid to
tell you. Twice she has spoken to me, in the night, and once in the
brightest daylight, as I stood at the window of my room. Can you stand
it? For _see_ Alfred, I feel the power strongly in these spring days,
as if the resurrection of life in all these things," she swept her arms
outward to the landscape, "brought with it the spirits of the dead; as
if they too liked a reprieve from their isolation, and thronged to the
earth. Is it not so?"

"Oh! Gabrielle what has Blanchette said to you? Was it in words?
Gabrielle, Gabrielle, it cannot be. Do not fool me with mere fancies."

Gabrielle smiled, a smile, as it were, of commiseration at my doubt,
for now indeed she lived, I do believe, in a mingled world of things
that we call real, and things that we call unreal, and _to her_ they
were almost the same.

"I do not fool you Alfred. Why should I? It is so simple and it is so
true. See."

She left me, beckoning for me to follow her. She walked to a walnut
tree, a low precarious sapling which had furtively pushed its
way upward into some semblance of a tree, and leaned against its
slender trunk, with her eyes pressed upon her crossed hands. I stood
irresolute, half expectant, half miserably self-reproachful. Suddenly
Gabrielle spoke. Her voice was itself strange, very distinct but
chilled into a sepulchral gravity.

"It is all very dim, yellow and blue clouds float up and down, and
here and there a figure moves, and there are voices, and now a great
light--too bright--too bright--it shatters all!"

Her voice had risen to a tone louder than conversation, and she had
raised her head with a quick upward movement, as if it had been jerked
backward. Almost instantly she turned again to me, her face blanched,
and her eyes just a little wild and strained, with no recognition in
them. The oddness passed almost as quickly as it came, and Gabrielle
smiled, and shook her head apologetically, and for one moment we
watched each other with curiosity. But Gabrielle was quite herself, and
coming close to me, she whispered:

"No Alfred it is not hard. You saw that I pierced the unseen; though,
as it most usually happens when in the open, or with others, the
pictures are confused and the voices difficult. I cannot make them out.
But we shall try tonight together. Hold my hand and wish your wish, and
let our minds--our souls--call for _her_ and she will come. O! I am
certain!"

"Gabrielle, I think this is not wise. You must cast off this
inclination, and banish all of these impressions. Is it not a
dangerous habit? Are you not afraid that it may unhinge your reason?
And yet--Ah! how well you know, Gabrielle, that if I could only just
be quite certain that Blanchette waits--waits. And then _but once_!
Yes but once! Gabrielle," I caught her by the shoulders, and held her
imprisoned, so that our eyes gazed into each other's, mine with a
scrutiny that was half anger, half solicitude, and hers with an intense
affection.

"Gabrielle--this must end. You hear me. _End._ Call Blanchette if you
can. I will help you--and then--Let it all go. Cure your temperament,
banish these hallucinations. I know I have been guilty in listening to
you, but now--after Blanchette--after Blanchette--" the words left my
lips wearily, as if the next alternative were feared most by me; "after
Blanchette, no more of it. It is wrong, it is a diabolical procedure,
mixed up with nonsense and disease. _Stop it._" How extravagant are our
inconsistencies. I admonished Gabrielle, but I was not unwilling myself
to stoop to the indulgence that might bring me a glimpse--no matter
how fraught with deception, with the danger of madness, of the worse
consequences of physical deterioration, even of religious apostacy, if
only a glimpse of her I had made eternally the lode-star of my life,
now and hereafter; if only a glimpse, might be vouch-safed.

_Mais pourquoi Non_--was I so wrong? What indeed has happened? Ah I
know Gabrielle is--_arretez vous, pauvre barbouilleur, pas encore_--Go
on with your story. It is Gabrielle speaking.

"Brother, you do not know what you are asking me. It is impossible--it
would rob me of life, for I should not know then whether to really live
in this world and to die in the other, or to leave you and mother, and
father and home here, and to live the more glorious life beyond. Now I
live in both worlds. Yes truly--in the mornings the clouds of angels
waken me, through the nights my bed-side is covered with the spread
haloes of the dead, and in my ears sound the sweetest whispers, and
salutations of the saints. Throughout the day, if I only shut my eyes,
and ask for their appearing, the visions continue, and even my face is
brushed by fairy hands, or my lips feel the imprint of unseen, unknown
faces."

My sister's face shone with an interior illumination, impossible to
describe, and as she talked to me I felt the astonishment that might
come to one who converses with some incarnate spirit. It did appeal
to my sympathy, for I lived now myself half immersed in the daily
contemplation of another world; it met my own anticipations vividly,
and I could not condemn, nor evade its fascination. But I wondered and
so questioned her more closely.

"Gabrielle, how can all this be? You have never said such things to me
before, as if you were moving in a spirit-land with your feet in this
world, and your head lifted above the stars. What does it mean? I knew
something, but this tumult--_fourmillement_--of apparitions I knew
nothing of."

"No, Alfred, I know you did not, though it has often been on my tongue
to let you know how the visitations multiplied. I think, Alfred, it
really is, as St. Paul says, that we are encompassed by a cloud
of witnesses, or this world is itself unreal, and the realities
are elsewhere; perhaps that everything about us, could we for an
instant strip them of their appearances, would be something else--you
see?--_something else_, and this atmosphere," she lifted her hand
upward, shook it rapidly, causing little puffs of air against my face,
"was loaded with currents of the dead!"

We both got up and walked slowly towards the house.

"Of course you have said nothing of any of these things to mother or
father?" I queried.

"Ah, Alfred, I could not. They would not understand, and then why--why
should I?"

After a pause: "Alfred, it will do no harm. Do not think me mad, or
deluded, or--or--unbalanced, as they say, even. I cannot make it plain
perhaps--but this I know--_they_ are there--_they_, the spirits--" and
she waved her hand up and down--"and when I call them they come, and
they come when I do not call."

She was almost laughing now, and studying her attentively I could not
see any of those symptoms in feature, or eyes, or voice, or manner,
that betray to the alienist the disordered brain. Gabrielle never to me
looked lovelier.

The next moment as we entered the hall-way I caught her arm and turned
her abruptly to myself; "Gabrielle, show me Blanchette."

Her arms were about my neck in a trice, and she spoke in my ear; "Yes,
Alfred, tonight, in the library. Come. It will be my seance--and
_yours_ too. Our spirits are in tune. We will roll back the visible and
see the invisible. The substantial shall become the transubstantial,
and the diverse, one."

This language was the only indication, at the moment, that I possibly
could have regarded as idiotic--in the common sense--and I was half
inclined to believe that Gabrielle--not without fun and humour--meant
to bewilder me with it, as a joke.

Would I come? "Yes certainly," and so I left her, wonderingly, as I
passed to my room, recalling that utterly impossible fiction in an
English book written by an artist, called, as I remember it, _The
Martian_. I shuddered a little when I closed the door of my room, and
sank back in an easy chair, to grapple with a now peculiar problem.
Should Gabrielle be permitted to live in this world of spiritual
essences, and apparitions any longer?

I think that I was not disinclined to live in it myself, but with
me the material stringency of affairs was unmistakable, and I did,
spasmodically at least, revolt against this extreme spiritualism. I
hunted along my book-shelves, and found the Martian book, and chasing
through its pages I stopped at this incomprehensible passage:

 "For when the life of the body ceases and the body itself is burned
 and its ashes scattered to the winds and waves, the infinitesimal,
 imponderable, and indestructible something we call the soul is
 known to lose itself in a sunbeam and make for the sun, with all
 its memories about it, that it may then receive further development
 fitting it for other systems altogether beyond conception."

And then came the intolerable fancy of these Martian souls getting into
the bodies of animals, and into men and women, and how the particular
Martia influenced the divine Englishman, and made him write wonderful
transforming books, and he thought of a life

 "where arabesques of artificial light and interwoven curves of subtle
 sound had a significance undreamt of by mortal eyes or ears, and
 served as conductors to a heavenly bliss unknown to earth."

I fell into a stupor of meditation. Might not Blanchette do such things
for me? Her image sprang to my eyes, her voice sounded in my ears,
her arms embraced me, the very fragrance of her person enchanted my
nostrils, and then, as the stupor passed, and the dying day sent the
broad beams of the sun full into my face, I rose, and, feeling with
a sudden particularity of certitude, the absolute hopelessness of
fancies, of dreams, of anything but _work_, with my own life broken
at its very beginning, and the overshadowing pall of an unforgettable
disaster shrouding it from corner to corner, I sank to my couch, and,
stretched along its length, wept bitterly.



CHAPTER IV

GABRIELLE'S SEANCE


It was only a few minutes later that, shaking off the dreary
sluggishness of my grief, I started out of the house for a brisk walk.
Down through the village, out into the broad highway towards Briois,
where the Diligence from Paris then shot past me, with salutations
shouted from its windows, and handkerchiefs waved from its Imperial and
still on, along the fields growing verdant, while the warm tremulous
air, with its procreative touch, unclasped the glutinous envelopes of
the buds in the alders and poplars, and afar towards Bienne, and the
ruined chateau, the massed background of the walled forests spanned the
horizon with a palpitating purple haze, as of an arrested atmosphere or
emanation, and in the very zenith above me a creamy rosiness, like an
etherial colored lymph, dripped from cloudlet to cloudlet.

How wonderfully beautiful it all was; its tenderness, the auroral
lights of the sky, and the definite joy of the returning life; it
renewed my courage, rather it put to flight the dull meanness of
sottish fears and regrets. The verses of ---- came to my mind, and
aloud, on the straight road that was now darkening, as the day fled
to the empyrean, and thence must fly over the great ocean to the
wonderland of America, I repeated them:

 _O renouveau! Soleil! Tout palpite, tout vibre
 Tout rayonne, et J'ai dit, ouvrant la main; "Sois libre,"
 L'oiseau s'est évadé dans les rameaux flottants,
 Et dans l'immensité splendide du printemps;
 Et J'ai vu s'en aller au loin la petite âme
 Dans cette clarté rose ou se mêle une flamme,
 Dans l'air profond, parmi les arbres infinis,
 Volant au vague appel des amours et des nids,
 Planant éperdument vers d'autres ailes blanches,
 Ne sachant quel palais choisir, courant aux branches,
 Aux fleurs, aux flots, aux bois, fraîchement reverdis,
 Avec l'effarement d'entrer au paradis....
 Alors, dans la lumière et dans la transparence,
 Regardant cette fuite et cette deliverance,
 Et ce pauvre être, ainsi disparu dans le port,
 Pensif, je me suis dit: "Je viens d'être la morte."_

Then my thoughts reverted to the strange things Gabrielle had told
me, to the mysterious experience she promised to lead me through,
_that night_, and, as the stars stole one by one timorously out of the
filmy shadows of the east, into the grey dark sky, I speculated on
our relations with the unseen, and whether we might be so attuned,
as Gabrielle seemed to be, to respond and feel that numerous company,
and their thoughts, and wishes, their influences, and their designs? I
knew, everyone knows, that the scale of sound runs beyond the coarse
mechanism of our ears at either end of the gamut, as indeed there are
rays of light which our eyes do not catch in the ultra-violet end of
the spectrum. Could it be that actually we are immersed in a vast
ocean of spiritualized animation, which we cannot apprehend--most of
us--which touches us on every side, and is yet as unapproachable as the
stars I was looking at, but, unlike the stars, is not even suspected.

But perhaps--so I mused--there were hierophants, translators of its
mysteries, souls enriched with some finer sense, who felt it, saw it,
or, like pulsating membranes that record the varying pressure of the
air, were so marvellously made as to feel its pressure too. They were
pendulums, swinging in two worlds, and passing from one to the other,
as one might pass from darkness to light, from discord to harmony,
from confusion to order, from the apparent and back again to the real.
Of these was Gabrielle. Or they were doorways, windows, passages,
that afforded access to us, the corporeal prisoners of the earth,
through which they came back--_les revenants_--when they too dearly
loved us to find even happiness in their new abode unless they might
occasionally regain our company. Ah could it be so with Blanchette! And
then the queer book of Du Maurier's (that was the name of the English
artist who wrote it) came into my head, and the impossible fancy of the
Martian woman living in the body or the brain of Barty Joselin, and the
death of the girl Marty who had become the second home of the beautiful
demon woman--the Martian sprite.

I half wondered whether Blanchette could come and tenant my own body,
with me, or was she inhabiting Gabrielle? Ah--_la folie_--but should
I indeed see her tonight? I hurried along the familiar road, now in
a growing tempest and terror of mind, almost with, I cannot describe
it, a queer sense of disembodiment, as if I, myself, were not in my
flesh and blood, but some ghost of myself, with an engagement to meet
the ghost I had loved--and yet loved. Thus I hastened backward in the
night, and entered my home, where the lights burned most cheerfully,
and found my parents and sister waiting for me, and Hortense--still
with us, with her flagging energies helped out by a pretty brunette
waitress Gabrielle had brought from Paris--impatient, at the table, for
our evening repast.

"Alfred, we have been waiting for you. Tonight your mother and myself
must go to Briois. There is to be a meeting there of the Protestant
Union, and I am expected to say something on the needs of our
country-side for religious instruction. I hope to be able to bring
about the building of a little church where our people may have the
consolations of their religion;" it was my father speaking.

"Ah pardon, I _am_ late, but the night is heavenly, and the spring
comes on divinely. I have been just now towards Briois, and I could
have walked, I think, on to La Ferté without fatigue. My legs do
improve in these pleasant days, and the warmth stirs my blood. I am
glad, father, you will have a church. Are you sure it is best to build
it in St. Choiseul?" I answered.

"Why not, Alfred?" asked mother.

"Well there are not so many here who would need it and _pas d'abeilles
pas de miel;_" I said laughing.

"But, Alfred, we are to have a new visitor to live with us in
St. Choiseul, a rich man from Bordeaux, who is a leader of our
congregations there. He is too what the English call, an exhorter, _un
homme qui exhorte_; very eloquent, a great preacher in his way. If the
church is built in our village he will help us, and then it might be
that he will be willing to be our pastor too. He is a relative of _le
Capitaine_, and now he has suffered a great sorrow. His daughter--the
apple of his eye--died on the same day that Blanchette left us, _nous
laissait_. The captain begged him to come to St. Choiseul, and he
consented. It will be good for the captain, good for St. Choiseul--good
for all of us. Is it not so?"

"Yes, mother," said Gabrielle, and she leaned towards her with her
gentle smile of reassurance--there had been growing between sister and
myself, and our parents, since Blanchette's death, a severer feeling of
religious estrangement--"It _will_ be good. I have heard Père Grandin.
I heard him in the wards of the hospital, and he is a good man,
_parlant le plus beau? français avec une voix délicieuse_."

Mother and father were delighted; it was a great surprise, and during
our evening meal we talked of nothing else than the coming of Père
Grandin. They asked Gabrielle about him with an increasing pleasure,
as they saw how really admiring sister was of the excellent man's
skill and sweetness. It was a pleasant time, and in the domestic glow
of confidence, that the Père Grandin would become an instrument of
propitiation, rather than of discord, while Julie placed before us one
of Hortense's masterpieces--_chefs d'oeuvres_--_le ragout de mouton_,
with garnishments of peppers and haricots, with her hot cakes--_pains
de seigle_--and the melting _chou-fleur_ and the inspiriting Burgundy,
we bloomed, so to say, into a renewed affection. It was admirable. I
recall it--shall I ever forget that wondrous night?--almost as if it
had been a moment ago. I was soothed and quieted, and the rising frenzy
of my blood subsided, and a most ingratiating blissfulness invaded me,
and we lingered long at the table. Gabrielle was so gay and reminiscent
it seemed as if she loved the hospital, now she was well free of it,
and, as I listened in astonishment, I slowly realized that Gabrielle
was responding to some hidden elation, and that--Was it her ecstacy
to show me her strange power? Ah, yes, there was, too, her gladness
that mother and father were to be away that night, and so--_Voila, la
diablerie sans bornes!_ Bah, I will confess I was displeased, and felt
a little disgusted amazement at Gabrielle.

An hour later our parents were tucked in the cabriolet, the short
snapping strokes of the horse's hoofs passed away into silence, and
Gabrielle and I were alone. We faced each other as the door closed,
and Gabrielle seized my arm, and speaking very slowly, with her face
covered by her other hand, with all her late show of spirits vanished,
said:

"Alfred, I feel the power; it thrills me. I cannot explain, but as the
time comes on, I am crowded with a multitude--_un essaim_--of motions
within me, as if I might be slowly dissolved into air, or something
else light and floating. You thought that I was careless at dinner.
I know, I watched your eyes. You thought I was glad that father and
mother were going away, so that I could show you my power when I call
Blanchette (I shuddered) back to meet you. But that was not true. I
felt disengaged and well, most well, and my heart was contented. There
was no deception, no guiltiness as of escaping detection. None, I was
myself, that was all. And Alfred I shall _tell_ father and mother. Why
not?" at my gesture of discouragement.

"Gabrielle, promise me you will reveal nothing about this to anyone,
until I have consented. Remember--_the Hospital_. Father and mother
will be appalled. They cannot understand as I do your mysticism--and
then, who knows what the power leads to? Be silent."

My sister lifted her face, and stared almost stealthily into my
eyes. I, the _soi-disant_ critic of her "delusions"--that was my
word, was now masking her concealment, and urging her to continued
secrecy, intending--what did she think?--to use her potency for the
gratification of my mad cravings?--to make her the servile means of
communication with Blanchette, more and more, that thus my awakened
desires might be stilled with the apparitional image of possession?

I did not answer the mute question. I could not. An unopposed, a sudden
quenchless need of Blanchette, frustrated all honesty of speech,
and I really caught at, snatched, the proffered chance--_diablerie_
or no _diablerie_--to see again the face, the form, the flesh--Was
it indeed materialization as the mediumistic parlance had it?--of
Blanchette. The more I thought of it, the more I coveted the vision.
Its quality should be tested. That I swore. And my connivance became
more cautious. We would try nothing, until Hortense and Julie had
retired. A sudden tension of almost ravenous expectancy rose within me,
utterly surprising, and _now_, I was the exhilarator, and prompter,
and accomplice, more desirous, more credulous, than Gabrielle herself.
The delay for _the thing_ to begin seemed insufferable, but there must
be no interruption, and the sceptic, the half believer, the moderating
protestant, at the unreasonableness and danger of the indulgence,
moved now in its preparation with an unresisting acceptance of its
realization, hungry for its fulfillment, every scruple banished!

"Gabrielle, go to your room. We will not begin until Hortense and
Julie have gone to bed; then, when the house is all ours," my voice
was strained and unnatural, and perhaps my features were themselves
distorted with excitement, for Gabrielle slightly withdrew from me,
"then, let us go to the library, and there we will unite our minds and
hearts, and--_bring Blanchette back_!"

Only a violent self-control withheld my tongue from shouting the
words, so monstrously grew within me the insatiable passion for
the coveted design, a passion, half orgiastic, half a maddened
curiosity, and within which, I know now, not a trace of spiritual
feeling, or aspirations, or tenderness, or beauty, reigned, or had a
part. So variously are we composed, and thus from the waters of our
souls, when stirred, or clouded, darkened by the overturning prods
of the rebellious body, which disturb its slimy sediments, rise
the exhalations of unworthy motives. In that instant, as I waited
afterwards for the hour agreed upon for our nocturnal incantations--the
word suits the debased frame of my mind--just one overpowering
conception ruled my heart, the possibility of clasping Blanchette to
my breast as a physical presentment. Whither had flown the beautiful
boundless dreams of our beatific, immaterial union, bathed in the
everlasting lights of celestial choirs? Alas--whither?

It was about eleven o'clock, when Gabrielle tapped at the door between
our rooms, and I opened it. Gabrielle had changed her dress somewhat.
She had put on a dark serge gown that fitted quite closely, and she had
opened the waist at the throat slightly, and discarded all collar. The
sleeves closed about the wrists; in her hair, loosely piled up above
her temples, were three silver combs, and they formed the only light
touch in her apparel. We both wore slippers, as almost instinctively
the association of lightness and noiselessness with the work in hand
came to my mind. We said nothing, but passed out of my room, and
stepped swiftly down the stairway to the library. I glanced out of
the window hastily, and found the sky clear, mistily studded with the
stars, and with strips of cloud strung along the western limits of the
firmament.

Gabrielle asked me to light the lamp for a minute's instruction;
otherwise we would proceed in complete darkness; that she averred was
best. I lit the lamp, and was a little disturbed by Gabrielle's pallor
which in the yellow light of the lamp appeared deathly. I asked her if
she felt unwell. She smiled and said, "No, not at all," and then she
motioned me to a seat near her, at the centre of the room, where she
had chosen a chair, quite detached from any other article of furniture.
Behind her were simply the unillumined corners of the apartment. I sat
down and waited for her instructions, which however I fully understood
as the manner of this seance had been in words rehearsed between us.

"Alfred, take my hands in your own, and bend your forehead forward upon
my knees, and then just THINK of Blanchette, and remain so, no matter
how long it seems. When the soul of Blanchette comes it will be light,
but do not release my hands."

I recall the absolute precision of certainty in Gabrielle's words,
in her voice, and then that she leaned back, shut her eyes, and just
perceptibly drew her shoulders upward, while her lips moved as if in
prayer. I put out the light. I pressed her hands in mine; they were
supremely warm, and soft, and unresisting, and then I knelt and bowed
my head and--endowed, as I have in this narrative many times intimated,
some visualizing or occult force--brought to my eyes the very figure,
color, expression, and voice of the dead girl. It was not so much a
feeling of solemnity--that does not express it at all--as a feeling
of mystery, of indefinite approach towards the incredible, with the
mingled half delirious anticipations in myself of actually again seeing
the live Blanchette, that held me rigid.

At length Gabrielle's fingers twitched slightly, and she half
released them, but I held them tightly, and then Gabrielle seemed to
be murmuring aloud. I still held my face downwards, forcing to my
eyes the image of Blanchette, recalling her voice, and straining my
mind outward as it were, in my effort to impress all of this upon
Gabrielle. The voice of my sister grew slightly louder, and the words
were at intervals coherent and intelligible, and then I lifted my head.

At first I could see nothing but soon I became conscious of some
diffused light or glow, a kind of absorbed brightness, as if it
escaped from the darkness itself, perhaps faintly bluish. It arrested
my attention, and the thought of Blanchette died away as I actually
saw the brightness increase around me. It was a strange indescribable
light. It was not only seen by the eyes; it was felt by the mind,
if I may put it that way. Looking more cautiously and intently it
became evident that it lay in lines proceeding through the blackness
of the room, from a point somewhere at our side, and it still grew
slowly stronger, with a soft interior palpitation, as if the source
of the emanations pulsed regularly, sending out the luminous streams
in waves. With this increasing intensity--though intensity hardly
expresses it, it was so vaguely dispersed and yet obviously confined in
radial directions--with the increasing intensity, the mental influence
deepened also, and it was only by a supreme effort that I retained my
position.

The inclination with me was to allow myself to float, from the
unmistakable sense of buoyancy that invaded all my body, and with
that came to my sensorium a most peculiar incomputable sensation of
diffusion. I cannot put it into words. It felt like a dissolution,
as if the material substance of which I was composed were undergoing
dispersion or extension, and the solvent was this strengthening light.
But the sensation was also peculiarly delightful so that, while you
felt yourself as it were vanishing, there was no sickness of fear with
it, nor any, the slightest, physical resistance. I feel certain it was
the prelude to unconsciousness. Some residual wakefulness, springing
from my curiosity, saved me from the invited surrender, and I slowly
rose to my feet, still holding Gabrielle's hands.

Then I looked at my sister, and, so it seemed, in that gloom there had
developed around her head a half nebulous curtain or aureole of light
also, which, in its turn, was emitting the peculiar light beams. It was
at that moment I dropped her hands, that had become almost lifeless to
my feeling. In an instant the previous sense of dematerialization left
me, and with a shock, absurdly like the flying back of widely distended
or separated limbs, I became keenly conscious, and concretely centered.
I remember the faint thrill of amusement that this _réassemblage_
caused to me. And now--there was not much desire on my part to be
ratiocinative--the other point, the emergent initial centre of the
emanations grew, not only brighter, but greatly larger, and I divined
with a sudden consternation of heart, that there were forming before me
the outlines of a human figure. I shrank backward for an instant, and
for an instant only, and then bent forward and moved forward with the
increasing light, for now the adjutant centres--that about the evolving
apparition, and that around my sister--both increased, filling my eyes
with the radiance, and yet administering no particular illumination to
the objects in the room. These latter were perhaps more visible than
they had been. That I think was incontestable, but the light might have
been described as self-centered, in this sense, that it was entirely
refluent on its source and confined in its illuminating effect to that.

And now--I lost sight of everything else, so concentrated was my
thought upon the spectacle--the light to the side and in the depth
of the room expanded rapidly, and the shape that it made was that
of a naked phosphorescent figure, whose configuration, while it was
discerned, was not really revealed, so bathed it seemed to be in the
billowy light that encumbered it, and yet exposed it. Only the arms
of the figure escaped that luminous envelope, and, stretching outward
beyond it, put on the semblance of white flesh. I put my hand to my
head. It was wet with the dew of perspiration, that may have been the
sweat of amazement, or of excitement.

The intention so dearly formed of seizing my restored Blanchette
died away before this immaculate phenomenon, for in it there dawned
no reminiscence of the earthly charm I had called by that name.
That loveliness whose perishable garb of color and of matter I had
worshipped was not suggested here; the showery lightness that seemed
tremulous with a thousand interior responses had its wonderfulness
indeed, but it only left me wonder-stricken. Neither did it appall me.
I became chilled into immobility, although every nerve was shaking
with the impressed realization of a miracle. I was standing before the
resurrected DEAD.

Whether it was this thought or the resuscitated passion of my
heart, rebelling against the incandescent splendor, I do not know,
but I suddenly stepped towards the scintillating object and spoke:
"Blanchette! Blanchette! Blanchette!" My voice was instinct with the
note of human passion, the earthly cry of love for the reality of
warmth, and softness, and breath, and fragrance, the concomitants of
the living body--and, as my words were repeated, and again repeated,
and my arms were outstretched, while my face, bathed in the sepulchral
light, perhaps might have showed my yearning, this marvellous and
stupendous reality occurred:

The phosphorescent configuration with the extended arms grew paler
and paler, and as its extreme blurry splendor died away, there sprang
forward from within it, the real similitude of Blanchette, a pallid
figure of light, and in it the dear face of the girl, tender, divinely,
to my eyes, beautiful, with now a compassionate wistfulness of
prettiness, O! so faintly expressed, in the dim radiance that seemed
yet to stream with undulous waves through the room from the relaxed,
motionless body of my sister. And--so it appeared to me--the figure
advanced towards me with the same outstretched arms, with which I
leaped forward to receive it.

I clasped the empty air and fell headlong in a convulsion, that rattled
my very bones, while sharp strokes of pain severed my muscles, and
throbs, like the intermittent knocks of a hammer, beat within my brain.
It was an utterly unnatural collapse; the strained attitude of the
last few hours, with the previous anticipation--unsuspectingly untying
the resistance of my nerves--did not clearly explain it. There was
something else. I was still quite conscious and, more than that, I was
wrathful with disappointment, as if caught in a trick of deception, the
hocus-pocus of a mere _niaiserie_. My eyes watched the faded spot of
light from which the transfiguration had started. It actually flitted
unevenly for some moments over my fallen body, and then it moved
slowly--now contracted into a mere ball of luminosity--towards my yet
unawakened sister. There it increased in brilliancy, and the former
glowing outline, with the resumed extended arms, reappeared, and then
came the last denouement. In an instant there was a flashing collision
between the light of the vision and the light, seemingly emitted by my
sister, when the entire room became vivid with light--everything seen,
with absolutely nothing there but my sister and myself, and then the
darkness again more profound by contrast, and swimming--the word is
exactly descriptive--upward, and then sideways a ball, a mere star, of
brightness, sparkled for one second in the fire-place, and vanished.

There was no sound, there had not been an audible word, and now there
was the undisturbed apartment with myself spread out in pain on the
floor, and my sister still in her unbroken trance. I struggled to my
feet and seized Gabrielle's hands and drew her up. She awoke, dazed,
and also in pain, standing at my side in a benumbed speechless way
that startled me. I lit the lamp hurriedly, and led her to the couch,
where she again fell into unconsciousness. I chafed her hands. I wet
her temples. Finally she slowly responded to the treatment, and I was
able to lead her to her room. She had by that time become normal, but
reticent and oppressed, and begged me to leave. I went away.

My own distress lasted some hours, but slowly improved, the jolts
of pain growing less, and at longer intervals, and succumbing to my
complete restoration.

The next day found Gabrielle and myself talking in the garden at the
same spot where we had conceived of the seance; we had both been almost
feverishly waiting the opportunity to rehearse our experience. We met
almost as if by agreement, walking down the garden, on opposite sides
at the same time, as to a _rendez-vous_.

I related everything to Gabrielle as I had seen it, and asked her about
her own experience. I said, "Gabrielle, I think that it is best not to
indulge this power of yours any longer. It was a disappointment every
way, and the results only unhealthy and stupid."

"Alfred," she replied, "I have often brought back the spirits of the
dead, not by my own will but because they came to me willingly, and it
has never hurt me. It seemed a delight rather, and the sensations were
blissful. But it was all different last night. It was spoiled somehow.
There was some discord, something improper in our thoughts--_in yours_,
_Alfred_?"

"Gabrielle, just what happened to yourself, when you fell away in the
trance?"

"I seemed to be rising upward on wings, with sunny lights shining upon
me, and the endless shimmering of spirit bodies about me, and then came
a darkness with a despairing feeling of loneliness and of desertion,
and then a slow, consuming pain until you waked me."

"Gabrielle, have you ever actually seen the spirits? Were they, as the
jargon goes, materialized before your eyes?"

"Not exactly, perhaps. They came to me in my sleep, but I have
indeed--so it seems to me--awakened and found the air about me filled
with shapes. They did not last, wavering away with swingings this way
and that, but their faces smiled as they went off, and a low pleasant
light remained; that too gently--_doucement_--fading away."

We walked slowly back again towards the house, quite silent. I, buried
in a reverie of self-dissatisfaction, Gabrielle doubtless in one of
afflicted wonder. At length I said, stopping abruptly, and turning
Gabrielle towards me, as I often did, with my two hands clasping her
shoulders, "Gabrielle, let us agree to banish these practices. It may
cost you an effort, but I believe it is best for both of us. We shall
lose our wits with these devilments." Gabrielle resented that, and her
face showed her protest. "Well, not that exactly," I added quickly,
"let us call them illusions. Some scientific wiseacres call them
_hypnagogic_ illusions. It is not altogether normal and reasonable
and--" I hesitated a moment, and Gabrielle added, "You mean improper,
unhealthy, unsafe?"

"Yes I mean all that, and then I think by some occultism we cannot
define, or even recognize, they will torment us, and actually drag us
into lunacy."

"Alfred, did you see Blanchette?"

"Why, yes, I saw something that brought her distinctly before me for an
instant--but, Gabrielle," I was ashamed to betray my hope for some sort
of bodily incarnation, "it was only a madness of the brain--only that."

"But, Alfred, you did see the light; they always come in
light-clouds--_les voiles de lumière_."

"Oh, yes, I saw the shining figure--so it seemed--and the light,
Gabrielle, that seemed to stream from your head in rays. All
that I saw, but whether it was an actual light, or some infernal
hallucination, or just some mesmeric phenomena, and we both were
asleep, I fear to say. But it has left me queerly disgusted and
upset. At any rate I will have nothing more to do with it--nothing.
My work (Redaction of the Code Législatif for Court Practice) will
be interfered with, and then perhaps my poor brain will leave me
altogether."

We laughed, and at length Gabrielle answered, liberating herself from
my hold and musingly watching the sparrows twittering and flying
spasmodically in swarms from the thicketed ampelopsis on the house. Her
voice was low, and its accent firm, and half persuasive too.

"Alfred, I will go half way. I will do nothing to bring back the
visions, but if they come I shall not scare them away. And as for
séances--well, we both have had all we want of them. Eh?"

"Truly Gabrielle, I think that if we continued these visitations, if
they are that, it would be with us as it was with Argan in _Le Malade
Imaginaire_, who was threatened by Dr. Purgan, you know, after a long
line of disorders, _avec la privation de la vie, ou nous aura conduit
notre folie_."

I never again spoke about the spirits to Gabrielle. I grew strangely
fearful of them, the thought of them made me shudder--until the war
brought upon us the awful visitation that I have written this book to
describe, and which--Well, what it did is now the common knowledge of
the world. Nor did Gabrielle allude to them until the gathering terrors
of the dead broke her silence. And to describe that moment and its
undreamed of marvels, its vast resurrections from the holocausts of
the battle fields, the fathomless panorama of the endless dead, with
the stupefying and convulsing climax of the horrid warfare, choked by
their immitigable hosts, is now my dangerous and difficult task.

       *       *       *       *       *

Father and mother returned from Briois most radiant over their success.
Père Grandin was superb, a wonderful man, _un homme de sagesse, de
piété, et, ma Foi, un homme des affaires; enfin, un homme eloquent et
fin aussi_. He would come to St. Choiseul, and it was certain that Père
Grandin and Père Antoine would get on well together.

The spring was all about us; each day added to the charm of the
country-side and the gardens of St. Choiseul grew gayer and gayer with
the snowy and carmine splendor of the tulips, the purple glories of the
hyacinth, the blossoming trails of periwinkle, leading at last to the
zenith loveliness of the blushing roses, when St. Choiseul sent its
fragrant breath far and wide over the green meadows, and far into the
thick-set and shadowed woods.

The _bienséance_ of nature was seen too in the overflowing happiness
of the country, its peace and increasing wealth, with the flow towards
it of the gracious friendliness of the peoples, and the establishment
among us of the pure principles of liberty. Indeed we were all gay.
Privat Deschat's hideous predictions that evening so long ago--how long
ago it indeed seemed, as if in another age; that was before I went
to America--were all forgotten, or if recalled just laughed at--and
yet there had been the Agadir affair and there had been disturbances
in Alsace and cruel muttering elsewhere; the Cassagnac matter and
the German correspondents. But that was nothing--_une bagatelle
simplement_--and so the bright years rolled along, braided with
delights, illustrious with hopes, serene with gifts, not altogether
free from acquiescent tears, while the inevitable CALAMITY came closer
and closer, and like a thunderbolt crashed suddenly from the peaceful
skies, and darkened all the world with its despair and misery.



CHAPTER V

THE WAR


Père Grandin very soon became a favorite, and not the least devoted of
his friends was Père Antoine, our village priest. The temper of the
two men was most congenial, and the fervor of their love of goodness,
their common age, a certain sweet complacency in the joyousness of life
and in the complete mercy of God, wedded them to each other, and so
into our intimate circle of friends Père Antoine, through the mediation
of Père Grandin was joined, and both father and mother thus grew more
sympathetic and permissive with Gabrielle and myself, and the days
flowed smoothly, and the years followed each other joyously.

I became more and more interested in the work I had undertaken, and,
under the pressure of its laborious needs, with frequent visits to
Paris, found my time admirably occupied, while I was not too busy to
omit the recreations of the home life with our friends. Above all
caressed by my dear sister, whose companionship I now more and more
delighted in, I was growing, perhaps by a premature decline of animal
spirits, into a bachelor, whose inmost heart still kept unimpaired
the image and hope of his first love. That indeed dwelt with me
perpetually, and by the platonic resuscitation of its enjoyment
administered literally to my physical contentment.

There was in my library an English book written by an American
authoress in which I came upon this sentence (the book was sent to me
by a Texan acquaintance after I had left America): "there were hours
when she felt that any bitter personal past--that the recollection
of a single despairing kiss or a blighted love would have filled her
days with happiness. What she craved was the conscious dignity of a
broken heart--some lofty memory that she might rest upon in her hour of
weakness."

The philosophy and the psychology of the paragraph are profoundly true.
That relationship which sex seems inexorably to claim is satisfied
naturally by union, but its omission finds exoneration at least in the
remembrance of disappointment. I grew with each succeeding year more
and more sedately complacent, and a gravity of thought, deepened by a
pleasant melancholy, mingled with the real consolations of religion and
the inseparable charm of my sister and kept me composed and evenly--at
times almost jubilantly--happy. My work was attracting some attention,
and it promised for me continued and congenial employment.

We had many garden parties with Privat Deschat and Capitaine
Bleu-Pistache--growing more feeble now, more silent, with often
unbidden tears springing to his eyes--and Quintado and Père Grandin and
Père Antoine--though he was not so often with us--and the sweet-voiced
and sparkling little orphan girl the captain had adopted--Dora Destin,
a vivacious creature with delicate ways and a keen appetite for tarts
and pastry, and a peculiar shyness that came and went so oddly, that
one instant she might be hiding, as if afraid, and the next leaping
amongst us like a bird. Mother and father had become in the later
years even graver, and a calmness--I dreaded to believe that it meant
some interior failing--descended upon them, that made their ways a
little embarrassing at times. We all noted it. It was a presage, a
shadow. They were silent in company, and once or twice, I thought--this
was just a year before the War--father seemed unconscious of his
surroundings; his mind wandered and he kept saying "_Alfred_, _Alfred_"
to me, as if dazed or grieved. The stealthy hand of Paralysis thus
crept slowly forward towards its unescapable conclusion.

Of course Gabrielle was in our parties, and she had become to me the
concentrated bliss of my living. Her growth into a healthier condition
of mind and body had accompanied an increasing adaptability to company,
and while the reserved manner remained, bestowing upon her a fine
dignity, she was truly sociable and friendly. Gabrielle never quite
outgrew the secretive habit of her thoughtfulness, and her deportment
had been criticized and found fault with, as cold and austere. The
inference would have been cruelly unjust, for never breathed a kinder
and more devotedly good heart than my sister possessed. Her abstracted
way often arose from the custom of religious meditation, and I suppose
too was influenced by that singular supernatural--to call it so--power
that she always felt, but now, so far as I knew, seldom exercised. It
was that power that made of her the MEDIATRIX of the nations.

It was hardly fifteen years after my return that the Grown Prince of
Austria was shot in Sarajevo in Serbia, and that was on the day of
the _Grand Prix de Paris_. I read the news to Gabrielle, and Père
Grandin was there. He had taken dinner with us. How well I remember his
terror-stricken face. He pushed his spectacles up over his high white
forehead, and his bright eyes glowed strangely with a growing fear. His
expressive lips twitched almost as if he were in pain, and he lifted up
his hands in protestation.

"God forbid. The blow has fallen then. The bolt shot. Alfred, this is
the torch that starts the conflagration. The material--all inflammable,
all explosive--has been heaped up between the nations, and, like a
fierce _feu-de-joie_ it will kindle into a wall of fire--_un rideau de
feu_--between the countries. God save France!"

I was incredulous as were at the time most people. I laughed at
the good man's warning, and because he felt half grieved at my
carelessness, half stifled with apprehension as if almost--so he put
it--his ears were filling already with the rumble of cannon, he begged
our pardon for his distress. He put on his crumpled Panama hat and
stood at the doorway, almost irresolute in his trepidation and sadness.
He looked at me quite long.

I recall the moon riding high in white drifting vapors that came in
from Calais--and in the changing light and shade he seemed almost
preternaturally pale and sombre.

"_Mon patrie_," he sighed, "again the ravage, the desolation, the
orphaned, the widowed, the crippled, the sick, the breaking hearts--Ah,
Ah--" and seizing my hands as if in support in his agitation, he wept.

"But Père Grandin" I said, now thoroughly alarmed over his evident
agony, "surely you are too quick, too hasty. Europe is at peace. Its
people are reasonably happy. They will not permit war, and--"

I got no further. The old man was choking with emotion--it was half
wrath, half despair.

"Permit it? Can they stop it? Do they govern? Is it not kings and
princes and royal houses and titled ministers, the tyrants of opinion,
the caprice or the pride or the selfishness of aristocrats, that
control everything?

"See, they prance by us, unseeing, unthoughtful, just living for
themselves, and then when the crash comes--the crash they have prepared
with their silly talk of national honor, national enlargement, national
continuity, racial union, destiny, putting over it all a gorgeous
light of promised glory--just as the heroes in a stage play walk and
stand in the glare of the electric lantern from the gallery, uttering
bombast--when the crash comes, they summon the troops, they dragoon
the people, they empty the banks, they crack the whip of urgency, and,
pointing to the flag, drive us in hecatombs to death.

"No, no, Alfred--the war will come. I have long felt its growing
tremors. We cultivate revenge in our hearts, the Germans cultivate
hate, the Cossacks conquest, the Austrians dynasty, the Englishmen
trade-money, their assumed preeminence, and there have been cabals
and understandings, and a jolt snaps the artifice of our pretended
brotherhood and, with hoof and claw, we fly at each other's throats.
Bah--_vous verrez_."

His rage had restored his strength, and he stumbled away muttering and
gesticulating. I watched him going across the roadway in the light
that danced with the swinging lanterns when the night wind from the
distant shores blew more strongly. The disks and outlines of shadows
imparted to him a peculiar effect of unsteadiness. I half thought he
staggered.

I went back to the library. There I found Gabrielle leaning over the
paper I had flung down at the old man's outburst, and reading of the
assassination. She looked up as I returned, and her face was white, and
in her eyes too I saw an awful consternation. I was impatient with this
foolishness, and expostulated loudly.

"What, Gabrielle, are you too imbecile? Père Grandin is in a panic.
Why? He sees us fighting already--just because the heir to a crown is
shot. It's absurd--_pas vraisemblable_."

"Alfred, I think we should not be too sure. It all looks bad to me,
and--if it comes. What?"

Her eyes dilated with terror.

"Why, Gabrielle, have we not prepared ourselves for just this! Besides
we have allies now--it is not as it was in 1870. There is England,
there is Russia. _Sacre nom_, it will be as when Greek meets Greek--not
_comme les vautours et les pigeons_."

"Ah, Alfred, think of the suffering. O! I have seen suffering in the
hospitals, but a whole nation to be made into one huge hospital. _Mon
Dieu, c'est incroyable!_"

"Wait, Gabrielle. Don't borrow trouble. The world cannot afford war
now. _La Guerre est un peu passée aujourd'hui. Eh?_"

"Alfred, the devil is never sick, and never tired, and never asleep."

That night the news was confirmed. Then came Austria's demands; and
then a chasing hither and thither of couriers; the wires hot with
messages; lights in the embassies all night; rage, dismay; in the
cities the people silent or cheering in the streets; houses closed or
hidden in flags; in the ministries forebodings; feverish despatches;
and almost always hopelessness. Peace was impossible; everywhere the
"mailed fist"--_poing armée_--of the Kaiser. Then came Austria's
declaration of war against Servia on July 29th. The detonation was at
hand which would burst Europe asunder.

Capitaine Bleu-Pistache asked me to go to Paris at once, so did
Père Grandin, so did Privat Deschat, and although father and mother
seemed listless about it I, thoroughly awake now to the disaster, was
impatient to visit the capital, and see how things were going. But
Gabrielle did not wish me to go.

"Alfred, is it not best to hear the news here? You cannot enlist.
Alfred you know that is impossible." She suddenly checked herself. I
knew her thought, and my cheeks grew crimson--my weakness and physical
deficiency now cut me off from service--"No, Alfred it was not that,
not that," her embarrassment brought tears to her eyes. "No not that,
but I am afraid of some danger. Now it is everywhere, an explosion, a
chance shot, a street quarrel. Alfred let me go too."

"Gabrielle I shall be quite safe. I shall be O! so very timid."

She smiled.

"Not so timid alone Alfred, as if I were there too."

"Nonsense Gabrielle, is it not written, _la femme fait le coeur
intrépide_. But really it would be very foolish for you to come. Watch
here. I will be so careful."

She seemed inconsolable, so I promised to write daily.

Père Grandin wished all the papers sent to him, and the captain, the
pictures, illustrations, prints, anything that would _speak_ rather
than _tell_--so he put it. And Privat Deschat whispered, "Alfred Lupin,
you remember my prophecy of more than twenty years ago. I have said
nothing about it--_rien_. But Lupin, if by a chance you can kill a
Dutchman or even come by a dead one bring me his two ears."

"Privat," I almost shouted, "by all means--but Why?"

"Alfred," Deschat tossed his big head this side and that as a mastif
might, coming out of the water, "I would dry them hard, tan them, and
wear them as tassels on my smoking cap, _mon chapeau de fumée_."

Père Antoine was the last man I saw in St. Choiseul. I left for Briois
in the cabriolet in the evening, and with all of my adieus at home
over I had settled back in my seat, in a gloomy meditation upon the
frightful turn in events, and with some compunctions too over my own
indiscreet skepticism as to its possibility. My face was buried in the
nosegay Gabrielle had pressed into my hands--I see her now standing in
the doorway where the light from the hall flung around her the aureole
of its pale illumination--and my thoughts grew each moment more sombre,
when the carriage was abruptly stopped, and I heard the voice of Père
Antoine speaking to the driver.

I recognized the father at once, and delightedly welcomed the
interruption; my own sombreness threatened a positive _malaise_.

"Father, you here? Step into the carriage. I am on my way to Briois,
and then by train to Paris. My friends--yours too--wanted me to go and
I am impatient to watch things nearer the focus."

"Ah, my child" answered the benignant man, now seated beside me, "what
new horrors does it all mean? I tremble for religion. I know the
sneers that will be flung at FAITH. Where, where, they will cry, is
this merciful GOD?--and as the misery rises, their cry will seem to
have its justification. But surely God is in the storm as well as in
the quiet dawn? If the war really breaks out then it leads to larger
things--all in the scheme and providence of the Almighty."

"Father we must hope and pray that the worst cannot happen."

"Yes my son, but we must be also submissive. We must not fix in our
prayers the stubbornness of expectation. What comes we must accept as
the work of God. There can be no reservations in our acknowledgment of
the immediate and uninterrupted immanence of the divine POWER. Let us
simply trust."

I murmured disheartedly:

 _Ici tout meurt, la fleur, l'été,
 La jeunesse et la vie._

The good man pressed my hands, and as we drew near to the lights in the
station I saw his pained and overflowing eyes.

       *       *       *       *       *

I came into Paris at the Gare d'Orsay on August first. Mobilization
began the next day and when I reached the Place de l'Opéra crowds of
young men were marching in the streets, crying, almost shrieking,
"_Vive la France_." Girls along the balconies and from the windows
showered flowers on them. In other streets groups of young men were
singing the Marseillaise, and waving the flags of France and Russia
and England. It was fiercely exciting, and when at last my eagerness
broke all restraint I joined some of them--my limp was no hindrance
there--and almost forgot my destination, drinking in the elixir of
patriotism for a few delirious moments.

It was the next day (August third) that I hurried to my
publisher's--Avenue de l'Alma--and found him with his family about him,
disordered in dress, and dismally grave. It was M. Albert Yvette. He
welcomed me with effusion, and resolved to take me to the Chamber of
Deputies where the premier M. Viviani would speak on the situation.
That would be the next day, and for the moment we would go over some
copy as a temporary distraction from the mind-blighting crisis which
had overcome the country. M. Yvette had four sons, two of whom had
already joined the colors, and three exquisite daughters, two young
girls, and the third a married woman, who in this extremity had
united her family with her father's, and added to his own overflowing
_famille_ three boys--_joufflus et bruants_--so that there was no lack
of excitement; conversation and predictions too.

On August first Jaures the socialist leader had been assassinated, and
yet this monstrous assault failed to arouse national dissension. Yvette
said it was significant. France was as one man and an undivided nation
would frustrate the enemy.

We all agreed, but the coming test promised to be a severe one. The
news that came in from the advancing Germans was not welcome, and
showed the organization of a powerful attack. Yvette was confident
that even the "spray," as he termed it, of the Teutonic wave would not
reach us. I did not think so. Paris was in danger. Madame Yvette became
tremulous and the daughters were in tears. Then came the news, flashed
through the streets as if by a magnetic sympathy, answering the popular
suspense, that England had declared war upon Germany. This was most
cheering, and the days before France seemed less threatening.

We attended the session of the Chamber of Deputies. It was inspiring.
The English and Russian ambassadors sat together, and the Chamber
awaited the proceedings in complete silence. A tribute to the dead
socialist Jaures was delivered by M. Paul Deschanel. It was eloquent,
and the resounding shout that greeted the declaration that with France
"there are no more adversaries; there are only Frenchmen," thrilled
everyone present by its vociferous unanimity. Then followed the speech
of the Premier M. Viviani, who read his address, punctuated by repeated
cries of "_Vive la France_," and when he concluded with the phrase,
uttered in a tone of metallic defiance, "We are without reproach. We
shall be without fear," the Chamber went mad, and the walls sent back
the billows of sound, as the air above the heads of the deputies became
white with waving handkerchiefs and papers.

Yvette was overcome with his feelings, and I led him from the room
trembling with emotion.

The next day Yvette appeared greatly refreshed, and suggested almost
jocosely that we should together "_parcourir la ville_." I gladly
assented. I craved this intimacy with the dramatic incidents of the
moment, and was only too anxious to record some vivid impression of the
city under this terrifying menace. That was August sixth, and we walked
or rode all of the day. At night Paris was silent and dark, the streets
almost deserted, and the soldiery watchful.

The dressmakers and milliners on the Rue de la Paix--the irony of the
name grimly diverted us--were almost all shut up, and the street was a
long dull succession of iron shutters. We saw women on the street cars
(tramways). Along the Boulevard des Capucines our eyes were astonished
by a drove of a hundred cows being driven through that avenue; the
papers were sold in immense numbers, and the lively trade in them
brought boys, girls, women, and old men from the suburbs to share in
the momentary activity. Everywhere we saw the momentous enthusiasm and
determination of the people, and any appearance of troops entrained for
the frontier started the wildest applause.

Paris has been for an instant stunned by the spell of a terrible
apprehension, that quickly succumbed to a returning wave of excited,
indignant, overwhelming patriotism. I felt that the actual danger as a
fear vanished in the tremendous reaction of rage and resolution. Its
industries are crippled, its hilarity suppressed, and the many hued
veil of joy and enjoyment that enveloped it like a cloud, has been torn
aside, only to reveal the underlying hardihood and substance of manhood
and devotion.

It looked finely, but I could not now shake off the terror of my
mind over the Germanic rush onward. I intuitively felt that their
devastating passage southward from Belgium would stretch far into
France, and if arrested at all must be parried or flung back by
the concentrated energy of the French and English armies, before
its irresistible massiveness assumed such proportions as to become
immovable and impregnable. I began to fear for St. Choiseul, and
was anxious to return. M. Yvette pressed me to remain a few days
longer, and as I had despatched all of my commissions--papers to
Privat Deschat, and pictures to the captain, and letters every day to
Gabrielle and Père Antoine--I assented.

Each succeeding day manifested the overturn in the domestic and routine
days of the great city. The morning breakfast rolls had gone because
the bakers are with the army, and families are supplied only with
_boulot_ and _demi-fendu_, but the supply is irregular, and the girls
go after both the bread and the milk. In a hundred ways the national
emergency is felt in the family, apart from the departure of sons,
and the even retinue of service has been disarranged, with amusing
consequences. Lines were formed before the provision shops in the
mornings.

On August eighth good news was received, and the quickly revived
spirits of the city became apparent in the crowded streets, with a
noticeable resumption of gayety. I went to church, leaving the Yvettes
home. The church was filled to repletion, and there was a large
proportion of men. The service was well rendered, and the preacher
touched upon the one thing uppermost in all minds, and admonished
faith, courage, and prayer. As the congregation emerged from the
portals of the church, the Marseillaise was heard from a near-by
street, and, like a spark conveyed to combustibles, the surging mass
broke out with song. It was a convulsion of fervor that made one almost
quail before its immense intensity.

I took my leave of the Yvettes, who had been charmingly pleasant to
me in their great home, and where the enormous sadness was sensibly
softened by their amiability and courage. That was August fifteenth.
The morning was dark with heavy thunderstorms, and the rain fell
continuously. In the large dining room of the Yvettes, we gathered at
a late breakfast--_une affaire de semi-cuisine à midi_--and, as the
chandeliers were lighted and candles graced the side-board, and the
mantel, and the high square _étagères_, it took on the expression of an
"occasion." M. Yvette said it was my valedictory. I hardly knew what he
meant, but this I know, that that was the last time I saw Yvette, or
any of his splendid family. Yvette died at Bordeaux after the official
evacuation of Paris; his two boys were killed at the battle of the
Marne, and then the widow and the unmarried daughters left the mansion
in the Avenue de l'Alma and lived with Madame Aubray, the married
daughter. I have never seen any of them since.

We all tried to be cheerful, but the incessant marching of troops in
the city during the last three days occurred to some of us as ominous
of the encroaching and steadily moving Teuton. The conversation was
most disingenuous, touching upon almost anything but the immediate
preoccupations of our minds, and the apparent social _abandon_ masked
the uneasy sense of danger. The only remark that related to the war
was one by myself, to the purpose that the superbly furnished table
offered no suggestions of the possibility of Paris being starved--which
perhaps under the circumstances was a little _maladroit_--and the story
that Madame Aubray repeated, that a Prussian officer speaking French
perfectly, among a group of prisoners at Versailles, met some French
reservists, who passed the convoy singing the Marseillaise, and he
turned to his guard and quickly remarked, "_What a disillusion awaits
us!_"

M. Yvette accompanied me to the train at the Gare du Nord, and as I
bade him "Farewell," he referred to the familiar and deep impression
made upon everyone of the profound unity of the people, telling me that
the Catholic Abbé Marcadé whose services at Le Bourget had attracted so
much praise, had dined with the officers of the regiment and with the
socialist mayor of the commune. He added, "I tell you, M. Lupin, the
cementation of France is extraordinary. National cohesion has made us
incompressible."

"Ah," I answered as I stepped into the almost empty train, "remember,
M. Yvette, there is also such a calamity as pulverization."

My spirits had undergone a complete change since my talk with Père
Grandin, and a gnawing feeling of hopelessness tormented me.

But how inexpressibly sweet it all was at St. Choiseul, and in the
lovely and beloved country about it, as I walked along the familiar
road from Briois, with the scent of the meadows, slowly ripening and
withering at the summer's close; caught the long glimpses of the white
road--lit now only by the light of the stars--indistinctly heaped,
under the straight poplars, with the falling leaves, and then after the
little stone bridge was passed with the liquid eyes of the stars gazing
up to me as if from depthless nether worlds in the deep pools, I saw
the massed houses of our village with hospitable lights shining from
their windows. The urgent smell of flowers breathed from its walled
gardens, and I prayed aloud that the hand of the destroyer or the cruel
fury of bomb and shell and shrapnel might not invade the entrancing
spot. The fresh odors--roses, heliotrope, verbena--enriched with an
added effluence from the wet ground, bestowed upon the place a sort of
consecration of beauty, peace, and sweetness.

I passed Privat Deschat's, and there was no light in the upper story
window where he often read late into the night. I instantly caught
sight of our home, where the windows of the library sent out so bright
a light, that as I stood before the gate I could distinguish its
occupants. Lights in other rooms shone out more timidly. The old home
had doubtless gathered our group of friends, and it was an auspicious
moment for me to enter. I raised the knocker and let it fall with a
rub-a-dub-dub that I invariably used. I heard the running footsteps
within, and the door flew open and I fell into the arms of Gabrielle.

"Alfred, Alfred. How good. O! We are glad to see you. And our friends
are here, and we are all wild with anxiety to know what is being done;
what is happening. Come, come," and the impatient creature pulled me
into the now filled doorway of the library, where one by the other
stood father and mother, Père Antoine, Père Grandin, the captain, and
Privat Deschat, with Dora Destin, the little circle of our intimates,
all peering with wide-open eyes at me as the bearer of new tidings, new
hopes perhaps.

An embrace of mother and father and of the _Capitaine_, a hearty
hand-shake of Père Grandin and Père Antoine, of good Privat Deschat,
and an unreluctant kiss from the pretty Dora brought me well into the
room.

"Where," I said, "is Quintado?"

"O! Monsieur Lupin," it was the half wailing voice of Dora, "He has
gone to the regiment and is on his way to the front."

I looked intently at the half weeping child, and discovered a budding
romance there.

"Come, come, Alfred," said the captain. "Tell us everything. Are there
troops enough? Where are the robbers? We hear they are advancing along
by Maubeuge in a broad front."

"And Alfred," it was the voice of Père Antoine, "the hospitals and the
aids to the injured. Are they in good hands?"

"Monsieur Lupin," now it was Père Grandin, "is the Ministry together?
Are we in safe hands under Viviani and Delcassé? Is Paris well guarded,
and how goes the English alliance? Belgium is wiped out. Do the
Russians make headway?"

I expected to hear next the shrill insistent voice of Privat Deschat,
but as I turned towards him with a smile of interrogation, I saw he had
withdrawn, and was moodily studying the ceiling.

"Alfred, will our credit be maintained? It is clear that the expense of
the support of the armies, the purchase of stores, of munitions, the
care of the wounded, will be almost ruinous. Does anyone predict how
long the war will last? What are _rentes_ selling at?" It was my father
who put this practical aspect of the case before me.

"But Alfred, what can we do? Everyone must help. Could I nurse? I would
go gladly." I knew that sweet voice and I felt how the devoted heart
which gave it utterance would sacrifice herself to the last atom of her
body in the cause. It was Gabrielle.

"Alfred, you are hungry and tired. Hortense and Julie have put up
for you a good dinner--the things you like, _un ragout de viande
de saucisse avec les pommes de terres et les girofles_, all _bien
melée_." Ah, that was the mother's voice, and there behind her at the
library entrance shone the honest face of Hortense, brimming full of
admiration, and the little curious _petite visage_ of Julie at her
side, also admiring.

"Come, let us all go together with him in the dining room and sit
around and hear him," said the disconsolate Dora.

Mother objected to that proposal and so I was whisked off under
apologies, and with the strictest promise that I would be back in as
short a time as possible, and then we would use up the night in talk
and confidences, with mother's red wine and _les gateaux aux amandes_
to loosen our tongues.

In our old dining room under the stiff surveillance of our over-painted
ancestors, with mother opposite to me, and Hortense bustling in every
minute, with new contributions of _les bonnes bouches_, I sat enjoying
to the uttermost the good dinner, while I told mother of the Yvettes,
and of Paris, of the soldiers, the anticipated invasion of the Germans,
and how the high and low, the rich and the poor, the learned and the
ignorant, were standing shoulder to shoulder in the immense effort to
preserve _la patrie_!

Ah! that was a famous night! How we all talked, and how I rehearsed
all I had seen, all I had heard, all that I thought and, all that
Yvette heard, and saw, and thought too. How defiant was the captain,
how grieving the Père Antoine--who half thought that the threatened
death of the Pope might stop the war!--how impatient Père Grandin,
how attentive and silent was Gabrielle--waiting for them all to go to
besiege me with questions and offers--and how we all became silent,
stifled with a fearful dread, when the invasion of the Huns was thought
of, as reaching St. Choiseul. I argued against that likelihood. The
wish was indeed then the father to the thought.

"The tide of approach will be more to the north and east, and if the
worst happens before our men can check the deluge, the enemy's hordes
will sweep into the Paris environs directly from the east and north.
Our position north-west of Paris must protect us for some time, but--of
course there are possibilities."

"It can't be done," the old captain strode into the centre of the
room and swung round to us as he made his point clear. "It can't be
done--_c'est impossible_. Why? Because with each retreat our armies are
rolled up into thicker lines, and the Germans must broaden their wings
to save themselves from being out-flanked and to protect their lines
of retreat and supply. It can't be done--_c'est impossible. Je vous le
dit._"

Perhaps we were not persuaded--so many things might happen--but we all
felt better by making up our minds that St. Choiseul was rather out of
the path of danger. Then we went over plans to help, and the suggestion
was made by Père Antoine that I speak at the church house, and all of
St. Choiseul and Briois and the country-side around be assembled there,
and a committee be formed, and work started to gather and make material
for the hospitals, the Red Cross missions, and to send gifts and warm
underwear to the camps.

Now it was surprising, and it gave me an almost unpleasant shock
of disillusionment, that throughout the night Privat Deschat
had said nothing--_absolument_. Glances fell upon him from the
company, as if his voice in the talk would be welcomed, and yet,
listening with an absorbed earnestness, he "never opened his mouth"
(_Americain_)--_jamais il ouvrait son bouche_--and it produced the
disagreeable effect of alienation, of indifference. It could not be
believed. Ah--God be blessed--that cloud of doubt was quite dissolved.
About, as the morning sent its streaks of red over the east, and a
fresher scent invaded us from the windows, Privat Deschat stood up
at the corner of the group, where he had been sitting in his, to us,
unfathomable taciturnity, and in a low voice, his big face moving with
unconcealed emotion said these words. It closed our council:

"You wonder that I have kept silent. It seems to you a treachery. It
is not. I can say but little. I know nothing. My heart beats with
yours, with that of France, but neither your hearts nor the noble
heart of France will force conclusions in this matter. Fate," he cast
a momentary amused glance at Père Antoine, "is not concerned with the
wishes of nations, any more than with the wishes of men and women. But
after all Fate can be COERCED," he spoke the word with a simulated cry
of anguish--it made me start. "Force and Strength and Devotion can
put Fate to flight. You may not believe it, because Fate, or the way
things go, is to you," he paused, as weighing the possibility of his
inclusion, "_all_--the will of God. It may be in the meanings of Fate
to destroy France, but our _FAITH in France_--and that means _Force_
and _Strength_ and _Devotion_ will put that _Fate to flight_."



CHAPTER VI

THE INVASION


The deluge came. The spreading front of the magnificent wave of
destroying Germans swept into France from Belgium, engulfing towns,
foundering villages, flooding the wide country with its encompassing
waters. Bah--the symbol is hopeless. _Not water_, the life-giving and
fructifying essence of the skies, which fills the earth with gladness,
not the moisture of the meandering rivulets that enamel the ground
with flowers and grass, not the blessed warm rains that search the
little brown rootlets of the glorious trees, and feed them nutriment
and gather to them the atoms of mineral from the ground, that through
the great trunks and all of the enlacing branches, build aloft to the
bending skies the temple for the birds, and the home of protecting
shadows, the wide canopy of beauty that holds the mists of the morning,
and holds back the fury of the storms. None of these things that start
in our minds familiar images of flowers and fruitage, when the pleasant
word _waters_ fills our ears--none of these came with the Germans.

It was a wave, but a wave of FIRE, consuming, scorifying, killing,
_fire_; it was a flood, but a flood of ravenous _flames_, ravishing,
withering, scorching, cremating _flames_--and there were indeed
_waters_. What?--the endlessly running fountain of tears. _Tears_ of
fathers, and mothers, wives and children, tears over vanished homes,
vanished faces, vanished tongues; tears before the black unpitying
future of penury and want, of loneliness and beggary; tears over
maimed lives, lost bodies, voiceless orphans, crushed shrines, deluded
hopes--Nay differently, tears that were never shed, dried up in the
fierce heat of bitterness and hate and terror, of shuddering despair,
of dumb abnegation; fountains of grief indeed that were sucked dry by
the tempest of impiety, that gathered them up into a storm-cloud before
the Throne of the Most High and from whose depths rolled the awful
summons--"_Why, Why, Why, is This?_"

I had given my lecture in St. Choiseul, and the little church house was
finely packed. The people came from the villages about, trudging over
the roads, riding horses and mules, driving in wagons and chariots,
with country gentlemen amongst them, and lovely ladies, and bunches of
the older children. The choir of the seminary at Bienne helped us, and
sang touching songs, and gay ones too, and songs of courage and songs
of prayer. It was inspiring. I looked at the patch-work assemblage, the
earnest young and the pale and trembling old--many helped by their
children to walk into the big room--the maidens wearing the tricolor
in profusion, the boys waving flags, and Monsieur Raoul la Fayette de
Birot, the owner of the superb chateau over towards La Ferté where
each year were held the grand _chasse-cours_, seated in the front row
with madame, splendidly arrayed, while at his side sat the humble
_chasse-mulet_ from Briois shrinking at first and fumbling his way to
some less conspicuous place, and held back by M. de Birot who spoke up
quite loudly:

"_Restez. Je vous prie. À present nous sommes tous français, tous amis,
Comment! fait-il une difference, quand la patrie est en peril?_"

There were shouts of encouragement and approval, and then the crowded
hall rose _en masse_, and sang the Marseillaise. It shook the rafters
and went far away through the open windows, and woke the sleeping birds.

Père Antoine introduced me very prettily, very sweetly, and when
he took my hand and led me forward to the edge of the stage the
cheering was tremendous. I saw Gabrielle, and father and mother, the
_Capitaine_, Privat Deschat, and Père Grandin, all together near the
front, and dear sister held her face in her kerchief, because she could
not hold back the tears.

I was a little frightened at the beginning, but I found my tongue, and
described the scenes in Paris, and what the government was doing and
how the troops were being mobilized, and the news of the successful
landing of the English reinforcements, and the confidence everywhere,
and then I read a part of M. Viviani's speech at the Chamber of
Deputies, and closed with a recitation from Bambetta's great oration.

Ah! that was magnificent; I had skill in such things--as what Frenchman
has not--and thrilled with emotion, my heart afire with pride and hope
and love, I declaimed the blazing lines as though my lips were touched
by the same divine flame that had lit those of the great tribune.

The tribute was immense; the building seemed to rock in the vibrations
caused by the thunders of applause. All were standing, hats and caps
filled the air, a sea of handkerchiefs sprang up, and the flags were
torn from the walls and the standards, and mingled their brave colors
in the ocean of snow. I saw Gabrielle between the _Capitaine_ and
Privat Deschat pale and rigid as if transfixed with pain.

Père Antoine spoke then, and invited M. de Birot to become chairman of
the supplementary meeting, designed to form committees, and outline
plans for practical work. We were most successful; the principal
committee, that of Hospital Supplies, made me its chairman, and I
instantly began my work. It was this work that carried me over the
department, and kept me long weeks from home. Gabrielle wished to go
to Paris and serve under the Red Cross, but I opposed that vigorously
and kept her at St. Choiseul where she did nobly, gathering hospital
supplies and furnishings for the soldiers, and where was inaugurated
that mystical and supernatural VISITATION that led--as the world now
knows--to the suppression of the raging conflict, as it threatened to
level all of Europe in smouldering ruin; when--was it not so?--the
HAND of GOD rested upon the earth, and the Armies shrank back from the
Vision and DISSOLVED.

On August twenty-second the mailed hand of the Germans sprang over
the borders of France, and from Mons to Luxembourg, its outstretched
fingers were crushing the land and strangling its people. Against
those groping fingers the twined hands of the French and English
were now eagerly--albeit with some trepidation--also grappling. On
the twenty-fourth there was reported terrific fighting on the Sambre
and the Meuse. On the twenty-fifth, the French and English allies
retreated, forced back by the hammering strength and anvil blows of the
Germans, who dealt their _coups de tonnerre_ while banked against each
other around their massed guns, the whole monster moved onward like
some titanic physical eruption.

Again on the twenty-sixth the allies reluctantly yield--yielding
everywhere with fierce retributive blows on their part, and
consolidating as they retreat, every energy of resistance behind them,
while they prepare new lines of defense, and gather together every
available scrap of support, material and human. On the twenty-seventh
the news is received that the battle line reaches from Maubeuge to the
mountains of the Vosges, and that the Germans number one million men.
Against this mountainous avalanche of soldiery and guns the grimmest
determination alone can hold its ground. But the walls are unbroken and
the raging flood breaks through nowhere yet.

On the twenty-ninth I was far north with the armies, in the Red-Cross
ambulances. The Germans fought their way to La Fère--north-west of
Laon, and about 140 kilometres from Paris (about 90 miles), but the
watch word _Tiens ferme_--Hold tight--was passed from mouth to mouth,
and the tense strain of dogged endurance held the fronts together, each
inch fought for with savage fury.

Someone blundered; there seems to be no doubt of that. We were not
receiving reinforcements as we should; the troops had been urged into
Alsace, tempted by a barren victory, and the large support which these
battalions could have provided failed. _C'était miserable!_

On the thirtieth our left yielded. A gigantic battle was fought out
in the department of the Aisnes near La Fère, at Guise and Laon, on
the road to Paris. The English allies proved to be adamant, immovable.
Under Sir John French at Mons and at Cambrai, they saved the day.

The cannonading was deafening, and the red tongues of fire quivered
in dense volumes along the struggling lines of men, shot forward
here, stumbling backward there, crowded in disarranged groups that
swayed this way and that. Ever and anon terrific rushes forced, from
either side, into the open midst the raging storm of the vomiting
guns, impotent sallies, whose human units fell beneath the withering,
blasting discharges of the cannon, torn into fragments by the bursting
shells, or suddenly trampled into disfigured masses by maddened
charges of cavalry, these last again stricken into death or helpless
mutilation by the converging fire of the batteries, victim and victor,
man and horse, heaped up in a throbbing or motionless blackened mass,
filtered through with the oozing streams of blood, where indeed to
the disembodied ear, that might have bent above them, rose the cries
of suffering, or the last murmurs of the anguished dying, or the
indistinguishable agonized prayers of those who yet lived and prayed
for deliverance.

Above the armies on either side the air was loaded with the brown and
bluescent clouds of smoke, in which the lurid splashes of carmine from
bursting shells broke momentary gaps. The dropping shells sent to every
side scurrying figures, pressed against each other in panic, when
with sullen roar, lost almost amidst the universal din and clash and
swelter of noise, its imprisoned powers were released in straight lines
of fire, carrying along their blinding thread of light the shattering
steel missiles of death, the blistering resin and sulphur, while at the
inner edges of that crushed resurgence of living men lay the victims of
its rage, limbless soldiers, bodies stricken into shapelessness, the
fainting suitors of Death gasping for breath.

But often the harsh steel missile, with its cracked sides, emitting
the fell arsenal of its sputtering and lightning driven contents,
failed to meet its desired mark, the soft flesh and the brittle bones
of living men. It sank, defeated, upon the impassive earth, vengefully
burrowing its hot way into the yielding ground, becoming in its burial
a mimic volcano, ripping aside its earthen tomb, as its detonation,
deadened to a hideous grumble, sent ball and canister through the soil,
spattering far and wide with dirt and mud and grass, the curtains of
the ambulances, the wheels of the wagons, the guards of the ammunition
motors, the backs and shins and breasts of men. Back of the lines the
gouged earth showed everywhere the frightful plunges of the foiled
demons, while with inconstant frequency noticeable to the trained eye,
not unobserved by those who thereby just escaped destruction, lay the
black bolides, extinguished and harmless.

Behind that wavering and uneasy or else just stiffened frontier of
combat, where the murderous duel was played its sharpest, where men
with blood-shot eyes, blackened bodies, and rent clothing were lashed
into a maniacal heroism, where officers at intervals feeling the
necessity, or inspired by the traditional splendor of service, dashed
into the open and in the withering rain of shot and shell, upright,
and with sentinel precision, directed the fire or exhorted their men
to steadfastness--behind that marvellous line of human endurance,
the fluctuating panorama of supply and reparation and reinforcement
spread. Here were the gathered platoons ready for entering the thinning
lines, the marshalled helpers of the ambulance corps, the doctors
and orderlies, the racing caissons constantly feeding the rapacious
and smoothly running cannon, the more distant assemblages of the
commissariat, and behind them--a long long way off--that perpetual
train of fleeing victims, the procession of the evicted, hidden, as to
their resemblances to human proportions, under loads of domestic goods,
the paraphernalia of the household, so that they indistinguishably took
on the appearance of a vast titanic, coarsely corrugated and dirtily
colored reptile, worming its way endlessly into the distance.

And when the eye, freed momentarily from its awful imprisonment in
that hideous wrestle of death and life, turned outward to the wide
horizons, the image of the desolating ravages of war were multiplied.
The confused flames and smoke-clouds of burning villages or deserted
shelters rose tardily into the dimmed skies, while, caught nearer at
hand perchance, and beyond the invading surges of the Germans, if seen
at all through the screen of vapors, the broken angular edges of wall
and parapet, tower and steeple, cut the horizon with cruel indentations.

I had reached the neighborhood of a little village near Noyon, and
intended to enter the lines, having a special pass which would permit
me to come quite close to the firing ranges. The reason for this
urgency on my part was the knowledge that Sebastien was with the
Third Fusiliers, in a division of the Fifth Army Corps, and a letter
sent by him to Dora Destin which had been communicated to the captain
by an _attaché_ of Gallieni who was commandant of Paris, told his
sweetheart that he was not well, and expressed a wish to hear from her.
Dora had come to me with the letter, stained with tears, and begged
me to make an effort to get to Quintado, and to take him not only her
message--written in the neatest hand-writing--but a package of woven
odds and ends which would help his comfort in the camps. Poor girl, she
was inconsolable.

It was about two in the afternoon of a dull day, with the skies heavily
laden with gray flat clouds, and there was a light drizzle falling,
with occasional sharper gusts of wind that smote the rain into keen
lines slanting eastward. I had pushed on--helped by my commission--and
found access almost to the immediate front unhindered. The Third
Fusiliers, I was told, held a part of the most exposed part of the
field, and that the battle was raging at that instant. That fact was
too evident. I heard the continuous roar of the guns; I saw the shells
exploding above and around me, while past me through the open ways of
access and retreat the stretchers passed in undeviating succession,
in their rapid methodical transference of the wounded to the field
hospitals further out, and in the direction of Compiègne. The incessant
strain of anxious incisive movement, the troubled crowding of exertion
among the waiters, the sharp punctuated orders, the bristling worry of
preparation, the racing ambulances--these indications behind the lines
formed the declarative prelude, were one approaching the battle from
behind it, of its terrible reality. As reality lay just beyond that
thicket of trees, that hastily constructed redoubt, that furrowed field
where shallow trenches cut it lengthwise, that crumbling hut, smoking
with concealed flames and spitting gun-shots.

I knew that the battle raged, but I insisted on making my way
forward, and the favoring chance of a sudden disturbance, some
intense propulsion of the enemy driving our soldiers rearward in a
dishevellement--quickly overcome--brought me right within the focus of
the fight. I was seized up in the refluent movement that reestablished
our line. The oscillation sent me eastward, and I was thrown down,
rolled over and almost trampled on, in a furious despairing rush
forward of artillery. I fell within sight of a hillock, whose little
yet unscathed crown of grass was sprinkled with daisies--the pathetic
irony of flowers in that waste of slaughter! I crawled to this trivial
protection, and, with a prayer on my lips, dug myself into the yielding
mould, and watched. The battle line was still somewhat beyond me and to
my amazement and satisfaction I soon discovered that I was actually in
the companies of the Third Fusiliers. Was Sebastien in the front?

As I recall that instant now, it seems almost an illusion that it
occurred at all. It was the concentrated immensity of it; its vast
superabundant detail, crushed into a measure of time out of all
proportion insignificant, that put it among the categories of dreams.
Before me was a very slight declension of the ground, forming a sort
of broad hollow, traversed at its centre by a stream-bed, now almost
dry, but retaining a penurious thread of water, somewhat replenished
now by the rain, which, assisted by frequent depressions had gathered
into stagnant pools. Beyond the hollow to the right and to the left,
were two sparse clumps of trees, crowning the opposite crest of the
subsidence. Sheltered in these puny groves were cannon which had
apparently just reached that forward position, as the gunners were
seen desperately forcing them into position. Between the cannon-groups
came the tightly compacted formation of the Germans--wedge-like--half
crouchingly as they advanced, the close combination of figures making a
chain of stern set faces above the pressed guns and bristling bayonets.

Our men had been driven off the opposite ridge, where the crippled
trees showed the bitterness of the contest, and where lay motionless
bodies in heaps while down the very gradual decline--less
frequently--could be detected the fallen figures, some yet moving, and
still nearer to my point of view strewn from end to end of the hollow
were the dead and dying, while--gruesome spectacle--the darkened waters
of the pools betrayed the slow infiltration of blood. From the hollow
the French had retreated to the southern edge, and were now entrenching
themselves for a new stand, at the moment when the Germans, recovering
their confidence after a partial repulse, renewed the attack, and were
coming again to close quarters with our soldiers. Our positions were
being shelled. The _mitrailleuse_ rapidly seizing position would soon
add their panic-breeding terrors, belching forth their destroying
torrents of ball and canister. The soft hiss of an ascending bomb
reached my ears, and later the roar or ripping whine of its explosion.
Our artillery, entangled in the previous _debacle_, was not yet
reorganized for response, and the moment looked perilously uncertain
for our defense.

Quickly the commanding officers realized that the stabilizing help of a
vigorous charge would bring to the derailment time to straighten out,
and, before the full power of the enemy's batteries could be developed,
inflict a salutary repulse. There was a breathing space left. A
moment's halt had brought with it reawakened energies, and when the
order was given the ground thickened with men, and the disarray, as by
the flourish of a wand of dissipation, vanished, and with shouts the
braced bodies poured forward into that shallow trough, sprang across
it, and rose on its opposite edge.

I too had risen out of my half buried position, and, transported by the
surpassing glory of the effort became oblivious of danger. The cheering
lines shot on, men dropping from the ranks and rolling backward,
becoming limp and silent, to be seized the next minute by the quickly
following support, and carried out of danger to the ambulances.

My eye was fastened upon the racing lines. The Germans, unable to
bring at once the full power of their batteries to bear upon the
French, awaited the attack with their massed infantry; indeed under the
vociferous orders of their officers, leaped against it. The shock was
blood-curdling. On either side the officers led, and amid the frightful
collisions swords, bayonets, the heavily wielded butts of guns swayed,
and rose and fell, among the frantic combatants. All loud sounds seemed
suddenly stilled, and only the muffled groans and hissing suspirations
of the heaving intermingled and vitalized mound of humans were heard
and above them the metallic clash of arms.

The gunners dared not fire. It was, as if arrested by the suspense of
a mortal conflict, each side was held at bay, except where between the
armies this intimate carnage raged. More companies were hurled into
the hollow--and from both sides--and the insignificant crease in the
landscape became a boiling caldron of death. The German resistance had
at first proved successful, and our men were being forced down into
the battered and now unrecognizable rivulet, so that the hand to hand
engagement filled the hollow with its lethal turbulence.

To and fro the mixed tumult bent and receded, when from our right,
somewhere in the rear, a bomb soared. Its hiss, sweetened to a murmur
only, sang in my ears as the harbinger of rescue. It fell a little
within the German lines, and then came the detonation, and the mangled
masses fell backward. The pressure relieved, and the appalling sense
of some successor to the avenging missile, breaking down the courage
of the enemy, our reinforced battalion was suddenly afforded room,
from the enemy's recoil. Our antagonists were ballotted backward,
as if struck with doom, and so, swinging their guns into horizontal
phalanx, with naked bayonets the French renewed their charge, and
drove the ravaged ranks before them, up, over the ridge, and back. The
next moment was scarcely passed, before the hollow was again refilled
with troops ordered to take and turn the enemy's batteries, somewhat
screened in the desolated groves of trees.

In the twinkling of an eye the work was accomplished, and the Germans
fled. Down the line for more than a kilometre I suddenly saw on either
side of me a frontier of bayonets--from fresh arrivals--fixed and
advancing and flashing. The slowly falling rain had relented, and the
sun gleamed for an instant on the bared needle points, as if in augury
of our success. Then the serried profile of bayonets paused, perhaps
for mechanical alignments, tilted upward and moved; moved as with the
release of a gigantic spring.

The line swept on. I watched them, fascinated, enthralled by its awful
menace. The deserted hollow--no longer a battle field--was almost
empty, save of those criss-crossed piles of fallen bodies where the
transfixed agony of individual conflict yet remained unchanged, in
the attitudes of foes knit together in the horrid embrace of their
death-fight. Where the severed corpses, fouled in smoke and grime and
dirt, lay shapeless, or distended on back or face, or sometimes with
arms twisted in knots among each other, or just alone, hither and
thither, solitary bodies unsoiled by any mutilation and bent together,
as if bivouacked for sleep. And here too were the wounded, sometimes
moaning audibly, sometimes still writhing with the urgent wounds, fresh
in leg or arm or breast. And everywhere was the ploughed and tormented
earth, trampled and dug into by the straining feet of the combatants,
meshed with holes of water and now, under the recovered sun,
glistening, wet, and muddy. I hurried along with the Red-Cross men into
the hollow with my mission quite driven out of my head; only anxious
to assist the wounded to some places of safety and relief. The battle
seemed for the moment displaced, though around us the orders sounded,
caissons rumbled, regiments poured past us and the intermittent aerial
swish of shells was heard, and not so far to the right and to the left
the German front was murderously insistent, pinching us where we stood
in a dangerous salient.

After lifting a number of the limp bodies of men, in whose faces shone
at times the benediction of gratitude, and at others rested just the
pallid smile of recognition, or else were filmed with the bleaching
shades of death, I went to the top of the ridge beyond which our
forward flung companies had routed the Germans. The fearful clash, body
against body, was resumed in a ploughed field but the horrors were
augmented--though too it had a splendor in it--by the added carnage
of the plunging cavalry that now thickened the fight into a crucial
contest. The captured batteries were useless here, but they were being
dragged into the French lines behind us. I was leaning against one of
the willows of the groves, thrashed into a ruin of fallen branches,
yielding to sickness of heart that might have thrown me into a faint
when I felt my feet tugged at. I started and looked down. In the heavy
grass, trampled and rutted, I saw the outstretched body of a soldier,
dragging itself upward by my legs, and he had so far freed himself from
the herbage that our eyes met. It was Sebastien Quintado.

Perhaps I shouted. I hardly think so. If I had Sebastien never heard
me, for he had fallen back again, and lay motionless. For an instant
I thought his life had fled. I seized his shoulders, and pulled him
within the trees. He was bleeding from a cutlass wound across his
chest, and from a gash in his thigh. We carried him back into the camp
and he slowly revived. The half extinguished spark was relit. Of course
he knew me. He said he knew me as I stood above him on the battlefield,
but thought, half deliriously, that it was a dream only.

I had secured excellent quarters for Quintado, and his wounds while
grave were surely healing. Had I not met him in time--the very nick of
time--he might have bled to death. At the earliest practicable moment
I intended to bring him to St. Choiseul. I knew that when I could tell
him that, he would be better. _L'espoir est à le fond de la santé._

We were in a relay hospital, back some kilometres from the front, and
on the road to Paris, where most of the charges were transferred. It
was an encampment of tents, and in one of these--indeed it was near
Compiègne--the day after I had brought him from the field, and when too
at any moment we might find it necessary to hastily retreat, as the
Germans pressed on in spite of the grim resistance that like a wall
delayed them. I say it was in one of these tents, towards sunset, as
the level rays, unchecked by a cloud poured over the camp a light that
seemed to wash out the stains of dirt and use, and make it brilliant,
that, as I sat near Quintado's cot, I caught his eyes resting upon me
with an indescribable affection.

"Sebastien," I said, "you will live, and very soon, O! very soon, I
will take you to St. Choiseul, and you shall stay with us. Is it well?"

He murmured; "Ah, Alfred. How surely you know it is well."

"Sebastien, you must not talk any more. You see what I hope to do. At
the most two or three days and you will be with Dora." His eyes were
bright with joy, and then almost as quickly they darkened with tears.

"No! No!" I remonstrated, "No! Sebastien--you need have no fears. The
doctor says you will be quite the same, a strong, well man. Eh! Do you
hear me? And see, this is what Dora has sent to you. All made by her
own hands. Are you not content?"

I unfolded the roll of stockings, and handkerchiefs, and mittens, and
waist bands, and as I handed them to feel he touched them with his
lips, as though they were holy--indeed to him they were most holy--and
then his lips moved too in prayer and a look unutterably tender flushed
his face. His great liquid eyes closed, and his heart was consecrated
anew to the pretty orphan girl.

Ah! those were terrible days. The shocking Teuton never faltered. He
came on with big weltering blows that beat the French and English back,
though we kept in good order, and, as the bulletin gave it, "The dam
still holds, and breaches are being repaired." The government thought
it best to leave Paris, and re-establish itself in Bordeaux, and the
people thronged east and south from Paris to Tours, Orleans, Le Mons,
Biarritz, Brest, Rennes, Nantes, Bordeaux, going in all ways, and
blocking the roads so that nothing could move, and the men and women
slept in the carriages, and wagons, and motor-cars, and in the roadside
houses, and in the fields.

And the peasants north of Paris, in the farms and gardens, left in
terror, and about fifteen hundred of them entered Paris--trudged the
whole way--with boxes, and bags, bundles, strings of poultry, and
sometimes driving their cows and pulling their pigs, with provisions
tied up in shawls, and utterly dumb with grief and consternation.

Then the flying men appeared over Paris and dropped bombs just to
scare the populace, letting fall papers and threats with lying news of
the Germans almost at the gates of the city, and enclosing scoffing
invitations to surrender. The bombs were dropped in the Rue de Hanovre,
the Rue du Mart, the Rue Colbert, the Rue de Londres, the Rue de la
Condamine. But later our aviators paroled the skies, and garrisoned
the air, and the frightful _taubes_ came no more. But it was I think
on September third (thirty-two days after the beginning of the war),
that a daring show-man let out orchestra stalls at the "_butte_" of
Montmartre on an arranged tribune, whence the big German dragons could
be seen hideously humming above the city.

_Il était un peu drôle, mais la plaisanterie est dans le fond de la
nature française; n'est ce pas?_ But Père Grandin frowned, and called
it _une grande folie_, and then repeated the lines from La Fontaine:

 _Le trépas vient tout guérir;
    Mais ne bougeons d'ou nous sommes:
 Plutôt souffrir que mourir,
    C'est la devise des hommes._

Well I got Sebastien away from Compiègne--and it was only about six
days later that the Germans swarmed over this region--and after delays
in the trains, crowded with the wounded, brought him to Paris. The city
was in a suppressed excitement with a seething exodus of citizens going
on, who stood in lines at the stations ten abreast and almost half a
mile long waiting their turns to get away to the south. I stayed some
days in Paris, putting Sebastien in one of the well equipped hospital
_échoppes_ in the Champ de Mars. He was yet weak and nervous, and his
breast caused him much pain. I saw him every night, and we went over
the orders and the news of each day together.

The government left Paris for Bordeaux, on September second, and it
was thought that there might soon be a pitched battle around the Paris
forts before a week was over. The enemy was pushing its outposts nearer
and nearer, with the main advance directed against the left flank of
the French centre. On September eighth the allied armies were more than
holding their own from Ourcq to Verdun. Preparations went on furiously
all over Paris, and the Bois de Boulogne was turned into a cattle
ranch, and the ratio of available provisions to the population--then
over two million--carefully calculated. The use of gas for cooking was
prohibited, and its use confined to lighting. East of Paris were lines
of refugees, filling the roads from Verdun, almost seventy kilometres
(about 43 miles) long; the Chateau de Bizy was transformed into a
hospital, and also the Chateau des Penitents at Vernonnet.

It was evident that St. Choiseul for the present was comparatively safe
from invasion, the current of investment moving to the south-east,
although a letter I received from Gabrielle said that German military
motors had been seen near Briois and that their occupants had rifled
the wine cellars of M. Villiers. Sebastien was impatient to get away,
and I feeling too excited to remain with him, concluded to send him at
once to St. Choiseul, writing to Gabrielle that we would come together.
My intention to return to St. Choiseul was further quickened by some
indefinite statements by my sister that father and mother had partly
lost their memories. I instinctively divined that the relentless pall
of paralysis was closing about them, and the miserable sombreness of
this thought with all of the present darkness about me, plunged me into
a dull speechless misery.

The autumn lights shone upon the fair lands about St. Choiseul and
shone upon the gardens, thicketed with early chrysanthemums of the
sweet village itself, with a lovelier tenderness. It was altogether
charming, and as we rode from Briois gently--very gently--Sebastien
caught my shoulders and head in his arms, and hid his face on my
breast, sobbing softly. The poor boy's heart was full of memories and
full too doubtless of presaging fears. The happiness snatched from his
life by the nation's peril, the yet unfaded impressions of the dreadful
conflict painted to his eyes with the darkest, deadliest colors of
suffering, the returning familiar beauty of his old home, and the
rising flood of anticipation before the realization of his welcome,
mingled together in a torrent of emotion too strong for his composure.
I clasped him warmly, and the sympathy of my own bereaved soul covered
him as with a benediction. Slowly we moved on amid the splendid
fruitage of the fall, where, on either side, the richly laden fields
bore their golden crops, and where too--another note of the country's
extremity--the hardy old men and the children, and the silent devoted
women, toiled almost alone at the deeply needed task of the generous
harvest.

_Mais, voila, qui arrive!_ We have reached the little bridge, from
whose moss encrusted arches rises the low hill of the dear village,
and just over there, half way up, stands the old chestnut tree. And,
coming down to meet us, is the whole _entourage_ of old men and women
and children, a mimic army bearing flags, the banners of the church,
and singing, while an improvised little group of musicians at their
head, sent far over the wayside the throb of the drums and the shrill
whistles of the fifes.

It was indeed Quintado's welcome home. Our horse recoiled, snorted and
reared at the unusual spectacle, and the stirring accompaniment, and
the next moment the throng was all about us, and there were cheers and
salutations, and waving caps, and a happy bubbling merriment, that made
poor Sebastien half wild, and so bewildered him with pride and joy
that the poor fellow was speechless, and almost in tears. I spoke a
little for him, and the good people then ranged themselves around the
carriage, and the horse, led by the head, to prevent his sudden bolting
away from the noise and clamor, brought us into St. Choiseul.

Quintado had whispered to me with a blush on his cheeks and with a
faltering voice, "But Dora is not here?"

"Ah, Sebastien," I cried, "the best comes last. Wait. You shall see.
I think I know that Dora was afraid. Yes really afraid. It would
be too much joy. Remember she has heard that you were wounded, and
perhaps--surely you understand--"

I did not finish my assurance. His good arm was about my neck, and just
to see him so overcome, without knowing the reason, pleased the good
friends, marching happily in his company, and the smiling children, so
that these, his pupils, broke out in a loud chorus that he had taught
them at school; a gay barcarolle from Moliere, that reflected the
buoyant unimpeded liveliness of young and loving spirits, though indeed
I felt some scruples as to its propriety just now, when we bowed to the
dark menace of a punishing destiny:

 _Sortez, sortez de ces lieux,
   Soucis, chagrins, et tristesse;
 Venez, venez, ris et jeux,
   Plaisirs, amours et tendresse.
 Ne songeons qu'à nous réjouir,
 La grande affaire est le plaisir._

It was pleasant to hear; the voices, sharp trebles, stabbing the quiet
air with their keen accents, like vocal poignards, and running on
with us under the first short group of walnuts--just opposite Privat
Deschat's--whose lower branches were draped in the bronzed leaves of
escaped vines. We moved along altogether in, to me, a curious sad
emblematic way of the past happinesses and peace. The song breathed the
pensive reminder of a remote dalliance and serenity, lost now behind
the rolling clouds of belching cannon and smoking bombs.

The swinging melody put to flight immediate fears, yet like an
incantation and, like dreamers, we surrendered to the transient
forgetfulness:

 _Aimons jusques au trépas;
   La raison nous y convie.
 Helas! si l'on n'aimait pas,
   Que serait--ce de la vie!
 Ah! perdons plutôt le jour
 Que de perdre notre amour._

Well! that was fitting enough, and as I glanced at Quintado his
ingenuous bliss under this vocal stimulation of his natural feelings
was boundlessly agreeable. How very handsome he was; excitement had
thrown into his flat cheeks a becoming color, and the lingering pallor,
elsewhere, bestowed upon him an enticing interest, quite pleasing.
His deep eyes glowed with pleasure, and the black hair escaping from
beneath his pompon lay like ebony fingers on his white temples. Really
for example, he was angelic, though of the darker hue and deeper
temperament of angels, and there glinted from his eyes a stubborn
tender maliciousness of animal joy. _He knew that Dora waited for him._

And so we came decorously, with manifold lingerings, where the brisk
people pressed against the carriage wheels, and almost stood under the
horse's feet, up to our house, the one--you remember--next to that
of Privat Deschat's and there, _Mon Dieu_, how I see it now! There
was a beautiful arcade of branches of yews, and amongst them red,
red roses, like ruby stars, and over the path beneath the arch were
strewn vine-leaves. We alighted very slowly, for Quintado had again
become weak, and the people were most respectful, and considerate,
and, because it might have jarred him, withheld their cheers, and just
hailed him with uncovered heads. Ah! it was most pathetic I think.

And up the path we went to that porch, where later, much later,
Gabrielle and I sat, overwrought and stricken with wonder and dread,
and on it stood father and mother, trembling, but gracious, and
tenderly sympathetic, and then--

Then Deschat and I took him up the stairs, on the chair made of our
crossed hands--the chair children make for each other--with Quintado's
good arm about my neck, and brought him to the bed-chamber, so dainty
and white, and sweet-smelling, and clean, and on the great broad bed
we laid him _so_ gently down and, from where he lay, his eyes could
see the sky, blue like a pea-blossom, with the trellised vapors spun
across it, and the window framed in Virginia creeper, with, at that
very moment, a wren whisking through its tendrils. And then Gabrielle
brought Dora to the door, and softly we went away, and the two lovers
were left there, and--_Helas!_ I was just envious perhaps, with some
illy stirred remembrance, some indefinable despair--I looked back, and
the two faces clung together and the whispering voices mingled, in the
inarticulate ecstacy of that meeting.

I stepped again to the porch; the people were drifting away, still
softly singing, but I did not see them. I saw only the field of
battle, sodden with the dead; I heard only the menacing whisper of
the ascending shell; I thought only of one Divine Figure--He of the
Cross--weeping before His Father in Heaven for the sins of the world.

And so the night came on, and I still sat there, until a hand rested on
my shoulder. I noticed its trembling pressure.

I raised my eyes. There stood near me the captain, Père Grandin and
Père Antoine. It was the last who spoke:

"_My son, Sebastien Quintado is no more!_"



CHAPTER VII

THE REPULSE


As the Germans crossed the border of France and the hordes of the
Kaiser, like some whirlwind of devastation, crushed our villages,
trampled down our gardens, smote our sons, France trembled with rage, a
rage at first not unmixed with fears. But it was for a moment only. The
fierce reaction followed, and with the steadfast poise of her faith,
her endurance, her heroism, she resisted. That resistance was a sublime
act of confidence in herself. It meant an endless self-sacrifice. It
meant a solidarity of hearts. It meant a complete disenthrallment
from the illusions of ease and indolence and impregnability. We
were surprised. The enemy was at our gates. And Paris, the cynosure
of our pride and of our affection banished its _insouciance_, and
suddenly became strained with gravity, and a kind of, I know not what,
absorption in a new life.

The German wedge moved on, and then our armies holding stiffly
together fell back, prodding the sides of the huge leviathan, that
sprawled over our fair land with its fierce talons extended, with
a savage not-to-be-denied hunger reaching out for that paramount
morsel--Paris--and spitting out of its ravenous mouth sprays of
desecrating Uhlans and automobile excursionists, who were here and
there, now hiding in a wood, now racing over the roads. It was these
drops and waterings of saliva from its horrid living mass that spread
terror and anxiety and a sickening dread. But we had not severed our
lines, and the retreating army corps tightly kept their cordon intact,
though falling back with a deep reentering swerve in the centre, where
the enemy fought hard to break through. And not seldom it happened
that those exudations from its vast throat were stamped out summarily,
so that no spot of their defilement remained. And Joffre--_Pater
patriae_--was not worried. That we knew; the plan was working. I
learned that from a colonel who had been at the crossing of the Meuse,
where, so he said, "the Germans spent their thousands to gain their
end, squadrons upon squadrons, slaughtered like pigeons from a trap,
coming on, stuck together like an army of termites, and beaten into
death by the merciless fire from our guns. But they got over," he said,
"and that was what they wanted to do. Why, living men were thrown into
the gaps to be rained down with shot and shell, like so much earth and
stone into a pit that must be crossed."

The plan was to thrust the great beast sideways, and for that purpose
Joffre kept his plunging assaults on the west, while the English lured
them eastward and then came the Battle of the Marne. Charleroi, Rheims,
Rethel, Soissons, St. Quentin, had been passed, the bridge over the
Marne near Meaux blown up, and now came the sudden halt with our backs
against the wall, as it were, and every nerve and muscle strained in
the death-grip. The magnificence of our resistance was the measure of
our sense of peril.

I had trembled for St. Choiseul, but as the tide swept southward those
fears passed, at least there was a breathing spell for us all. It
had been sad enough. The few men who were under command to join the
colors left in a little company, with their wives and children, their
sweethearts and parents, all silent and dreary, with the dreariness
of nameless fears. The men only were smiling and cheerful, and--not
all of them; the women mute, and the prattling children impressed by
some instinctive sympathy, almost always mute too. The women were all
resigned, I thought, with just here and there some silently weeping
girl, who smothered her sobs, and forced to her eyes the same earnest
pathetic resolve of resignation that the others wore. Gabrielle had
been an angel of mercy to these women. She had visited them; she
opened our house to them, and entertained them, and took care of some
of the children, and was so brave and loving with them, that they
called her, among themselves, _la Mère de Pitié_--the Mother of Pity. A
pretty name.

I had been driven to the verge of exhaustion with work in the Red-Cross
and with service in Paris. The dispersion southward of the war-cloud
roused my spirits, and then I was requested to follow the troops to
Meaux--that was in September just after Quintado died--and I was more
than glad. There was much work to do there, and I knew the leaders
thought that the Germans were trapped. There had been some evidence of
shortage of ammunition with them, and their loss had been crippling--so
it seemed, though like some scourge of insects extinction was
impossible. Behind those who fell pressed on the unnumbered legions,
fresh and ready. But the advance had been too rapid and the critical
moment dawned when the blow could be struck that would hurl them
backward. So it was thought. So it proved.

The country-side about Meaux is delicious in its pastoral charm. It is
_un pay riant_, and its smiles are so large and gentle, so benignant
and inviting, that the dwellers there are always smiling too. The
broken land rising, falling, with streams, passing hither, thither,
that gleam beneath the fair skies, and are like silver bands and
threads on its bursting jacket of green and gold, is a land of gardens
and fields, with clustering woods on hilltops, or, just missing that,
creeping down like warm coverlids in capes and tippets to the wide
valleys. Ah! it is most beautiful. And into this sweet refuge upon
these quiet happy changeful villages--changeful in the drifting shadows
from the slumbering clouds that basked above them in the glittering
sun--came the rough confusion of WAR. But it was not for long. No,
no, not for long. The kind God banished it before it had ravaged and
soiled the peaceful homes, the dainty walled gardens, the sweeping
fruitful meadows, the plenteous orchards, the teaming acres ripening so
enchantingly with grain and barley, or profaned its pretty grave-yards
gathered so warmly around its spired churches. Yes indeed our armies
and the English allies banked here with stubborn courage, and put it
all to flight. Drove it forty miles away!

I saw much of that fighting. I was not far away when the English fought
like bull-dogs at Landrecies, when they hit the Teutons even harder
at Coulommiers, and in one engagement with our own men I took part. I
was not with the colors, but in the emergency I offered to shoulder
a gun and was assigned to a company by Colonel Brissot, who indulged
my fervor with a resigned and sympathetic shake of his noble head,
remarking:

"_C'est un peu dure. Mais que voulez vous. Quand un homme veut à mourir
pour la Patrie c'est son affaire._"

We lay back on a hill in a thin wood, and had planted the machine
guns in shallow pits. It overlooked a road, down which our scouts
reported the Germans were coming. I saw the first advanced lines, the
gray multitude plunging on, apparently unadvised of our proximity. It
was our intention to enfilade them, and then, under cover of fire to
retreat, to another eminence, with a supporting column swinging from
the opposite quarter, so that eventually we might catch the enemy in
the double grip of two cross fires. On the Boches came confidently.
They spied us before our spit-fires got into action, and the order rang
out to charge us. Three companies were thought sufficient for the task
of cleaning us out. They went at us in a huge lunge forward, almost
unbrokenly up the hill slope, their ranks close pressed, and unwavering
by the fraction of a foot. Almost at the minute when they started
up the hill, from the rear a caisson rolled up to our position, and
two shells were dropped amongst them. I saw the individual men fall,
while, as they fell, others through the gaps sprang into their places,
and the solid front unchangeably swept upward. It was magnificent
discipline and superb valor. Another shell shattered the line, and I
saw the mangled bodies drop. But still the unchecked tide poured on,
with shouts, and somewhere from a distance I caught the vigorous beat
of drums. The next instant they were almost at the muzzles of our
cannon. The word was given and the ripping articulation of our machines
rained three deadly streams of shot. The men rolled over each other in
the murderous hail, and, for a moment, the whole line halted. The limp
dead bodies formed a rampart, and behind that hideous protection their
comrades fell to their knees and answered our fire with their guns.
At the same moment a shell with the detonation of a crack of thunder
soared over us, and struck the ground behind us, gimleting its way into
the scorched earth, that smoked like a mimic crater. A fragment of the
shell knocked over the gunner at one of the machine-guns and the next
instant our officer caught sight of a swarming mass of gray bodies,
debouching into the roadway to our left, stealthily and rapidly driving
down upon us, with the evident purpose of surrounding our salient.
The order to retreat under the charge of the right wing, who, for the
expedient, was to hold the enemy, now pretty well discomfited by the
unceasing machine fusillade, was given, and we on the left and centre
slowly retired, moving to the second line of defence, more stoutly
guarded by three regiments of infantry and the park of cannon.

The position of our machine guns, and the endangered right wing, which
had utterly disarrayed the Germans by their bayonet onslaught, demanded
attention. It would require but a few minutes for the arrival of a new
division of the enemy, and already a greater force was seen detaching
itself from the main body on the road, crossing the field below the
hill, with a run. Everywhere in front of us the Teuton front seemed to
be enlarging, and the glittering helmets of the plumed Uhlans, like a
sheet of kindling fires, suddenly emerged within it. There was nothing
for it but retreat, and a retreat quickly made. I trembled for the
safety of the thin file of defenders on the hilltop. Their certain
extinction or capture was inevitable.

Then something most unexpected happened. Dropping shells from the
extreme right of our second line of defense, where the danger had been
reported, covered the hillside with a rapid succession of eruptions.
It was insupportable, though, with characteristic stubbornness--the
German officers rushed more men to the desolated slope, where the
shells ripped the ground, and filled the air with iron splinters. It
was terrific, and our gunners and infantry, dismayed for their own
safety, in the superabundant rescue, scrambled back and, together
almost, entered the lines of the second defense. I remember well enough
my own struggles to get there, for at the very conjuncture when my legs
should have best succored me, the injured member became almost useless.
I rolled into a lucky hole, where there had been at some time an
excavation made, or begun, for some reason, possibly the building of an
outhouse or cattle shed. An intense pain developed, and I found myself
quite, as the Americans say, "out of commission." Within sight was our
second line of defense, bristling with rifles and concealed machine
guns, a strong position, well garrisoned, and immediately before me
raced the parting remnants of the small parleying party that I had
adventurously joined.

My predicament was dangerous. The very thought of capture and isolation
for months or years from St. Choiseul and Gabrielle and the domestic
duties I was so sorely needed to perform, terrified me, but it also
made me more methodical and ingenious. I searched the possibilities of
a return to my friends, and the obvious plan was to "lie still," and in
the night, if the positions of the armies remained unchanged to steal
under the cover of darkness back to the French lines.

Suddenly I heard the oncoming shouts of German troops, and I realized
that it was the advance ranks of the division deployed to our left to
surround the hill,--now deserted--and which probably would continue
their advance to the attack, of our second line of defense, with the
whole strength of the German corps. I glanced about me. Some overturned
bushes lay at the side of the hole, and instinctively I seized them to
ambuscade my refuge.

I crouched--perhaps a derisive observer would have said I
squatted--closely within the lowest recess of the accidental
excavation, and drew after me, with all the caution my necessity and
impatience permitted, the withered and prickly bushes--a hawthorn
bramble--so that, like a cowering rabbit in its warren, I awaited
the rapidly nearing host of the Germans. Luckily the excavation was
somewhat removed from their direct approach, and formed so obvious and
considerable a feature in the ground, that the platoons would avoid
it, or at the worst jump over it. Nearer and nearer came the clamorous
companies, and the heavy tramp of their feet, beating in unison the
stubbled field, made my heart beat too with an insistent rapidity.

Now they were passing my tiny screen. I could hear their laughter
and the occasional rough sallies of their voices. The line seemed
endless. Just dimly through the interlaced twigs and dirt encumbered
branches of the hawthorn, I could actually catch a broken view of the
massive column. The horrible thought of one of the soldiers, through
an inadvertence, or from the crowding of the lines, falling into my
dug-out, sent the blood whirring through my veins and bathed me in
perspiration. I drew my revolver. It might be a straggler, and, if
just one man, the weapon would serve completely for my protection.
I shuddered at the awful chance. This extremity was worse than the
indiscriminate and generalized murder of the battlefield.

Then just as this suspense almost throttled my breathing, the whole
line rested, and there above me--I could see their strong figures,
their gray coats, even the gleam of their _pickelhaubes_--the babel
of conversation broke out in incoherent gurglings of German. Another
instant and the order might be given to break ranks, to camp, and my
screen might serve, practically enough, to light a fire, or even the
hole be selected as a preeminently good substitute for a hearth. Smoked
and roasted out then it would be!

No, the line moved again, with the unintermittent trudge of the
hundreds of booted feet, now and then the clangor of a sword, now and
then the whish of grazing coats, and always a certain observed but
indescribable hum of rapidly passing bodies. Then came silence--no
more?--could it be possible? In my hole the light had grown dimmer
and dimmer, and while it was no prudent criterion of the time of day
above me, still I felt sure--for I had counted the seconds elapsing
as the battalion swept over me--that the night drew near, and
then--deliverance.

At first I scarcely dared to stir, fearing the betrayal of my retreat
by the animated bush which I would raise above me. But after a long
wait, while the light sensibly failed, I cautiously crowded what I
could of it, _the bush_, beside me, and surmounting it, at length was
able to peer out of the hole, and note the opportunities for my escape.
It was very dark, the night threatened to be stormy, and the rising
wind prevented my distinctly hearing sounds about me, if anyone was in
the vicinity. Slowly with the finest sense of carefulness and stealth,
I crawled to the lip of the shallow pit, and rose above it, and stood
up, achingly relieving my sharply disabled limb.

"_Sind gefangen_;" the voice was at my side, and a shadow accompanied
it. But I was quicker than its groping arms or hands, quicker than the
gun or sword, or whatever else it seized for my despatch. I jumped at
the black body with my revolver trigger snapped back, and pressed the
muzzle upon the now rampant body, that grappled with me, and discharged
it. The report was almost inaudible, and the sound of the falling
German, as he dropped lifeless into the pit, that had sheltered me,
was hardly more than a dull thud. What was about me? was the enemies'
circuit here on every side? I hesitated for a moment. There came no
sound of rescue. The topography of the country I knew well. Far--about
a half a mile--to the right as you looked westward, was a road leading
directly to a village that was in the rear of the second line of our
defense. That road I would reach if I could. It was the simplest--to
me the only--issue of salvation. I turned quickly aside and fell to
the ground. My leg pained me, and seemed almost incapable of movement.
Lying there I swung my head about to discover what objects surrounded
me. In the night-light, almost absent, I could discern nothing, and
taking the risk as there was no other alternative I abandoned the idea
of walking to the road, over the rough field, and began slowly to crawl
in its direction. The sense of direction was infallible with me, and
I had not the slightest doubt of my position. Of course the Germans
might by this time have swarmed over the whole area, but that they had
not yet attacked the second line of our defense seemed certain as I
had heard no firing. Both sides awaited the morning. The Germans were
there, no doubt, but farther to the east.

I canvassed these conditions while I crawled over the stinging
grass-stubble, and at intervals waded through water holes and muddy
banks. Now the ground was rising. I had attained the further side of
the broad field, and was surmounting a hillslope beyond which ran the
little road that would conduct me to safety. Well, I shall not rehearse
the mingling feelings of dread and relief, of quick suspense and then
exulting certainty, that I experienced, on that dismal trip on my hands
and knees all the way to the village. For only at intervals was it
possible for me to use my injured leg that increased in helplessness as
I went on. I reached the village, and the first man I encountered on
its outskirts was the man who had been next to me in the line of battle.

We were dislodged from our position, and the weary retreat towards
Paris continued. I still stayed with the army, and I was in one other
fight, when my leg had somewhat regained its usefulness. It was then
that I was wounded, then that my soul most revolted against the
barbarity of War.

We were in a village near the Marne, when the Germans attacked the
place. We had thrown up strong barricades at the end of the main
street, from which every vestige of life had departed except--I recall
the whimsical observation--that a black cat still crouched upon the
narrow window sill of an upper window of one of the little houses. The
Germans with their usual intrepidity and singular tenacity of habit
were expected to move down upon us in solid formation, and our guns
would receive them--we thought--with the almost certain decision of
their repulse. I was next to a gunner whose impatience to start the
fearful havoc was unrestrained. He kept muttering between his teeth.

"_Sacre Bleu! Pas encore! Pas encore! Les scelerats; Pourquoi ne
venaient-ils pas?_"

He did not have long to wait. At the head of the street, with shouts
and the loud beating of near-by drums, the Boches came on, almost as
if maneuvering upon a field of drill-practice. I was compelled to
admire their stolid impervious confidence and fearlessness. Down the
deserted alley of houses they rushed, and from behind them swung upward
with stunning reports exploding shells, intended for our discomfiture.
But the range was imperfect, and they fell beyond our position. I
trembled with expectation--the advance of the enemy, so determinedly
forceful, with the ranks close pressed in dense crowds, promised an
awful disillusion. Our captain warned against any premature discharge.
He would give the word. On the bristling lines swung, massively
compacted, like some human battering ram, and when I could almost see
the buttons on their gray coats the order came.

It was a _whisper_, and the next instant the machine guns spouted, and
each soldier braced himself for the charge that might follow the foe's
disorder, with fixed bayonet. That was a hideous moment. The bodies
of the slain Germans piled high before the oncoming ranks, and from
side to side of the street--now become a veritable slaughter-pen--the
heaving mass still unrelentingly pressed over their dismembered and
fallen comrades. It was the veriest depth of hell. I awaited the next
word to charge, and it seemed to me incredible that I could urge myself
to do the deed, running the cold steel of the bayonet into quivering
flesh. Later like a flash this detachment passed, and the frenzy of
the moment blinded me to everything, but the fierce desire to destroy
our invaders. I waited. The machine guns unceasingly hissed, and they
shook with the uninterrupted intensity of their working. I watched in
a delirium of satisfaction their ravages. Arms and hands, even heads,
severed as if cut with a knife, flew into the air, and yet the flood of
humans, with not-to-be-denied insistency, rose to our barricade, and in
another breath would overwhelm us.

Then came the order "_Charge_" and over the barricade with set
bayonets--I as best I might--our companies leaped and dashed into the
baying pack before us, with the shrivelling terror of the cold steel.
The Germans did not like the treatment. The machine guns were withdrawn
under the protection of this assault, and while we stemmed the tide,
for an instant, it was for an instant only. No effective pressure we
could then summon, would withstand the leviathan movement of those
belted Prussians. The shells too were finding us out, and we yielded.
A German officer cut down with his sword the brave gunner who had
so intemperately desired their approach. He was severed almost from
shoulder to waist. But he was avenged. I rushed upon the miscreant--so
he seemed to me--and pierced his neck with the bayonet in my hands.
There were no misgivings then, no secondary thoughts, not even the
transient survival of my sickening sense of faintness at the sight of
blood. I was acquiring the war-hardening that accompanies incessant
Murder.

We fell back from the position in fairly good shape, and soon were
reinforced by new regiments, and then by artillery, and mortars, and,
as the battle widened, with more and more success on our side, we
checked the invasion, and soon were overmastering the invaders. At
length they fled, and the whole line swept onward, while fresh men
strode into the footsteps of their predecessors and Joffre won the
Battle of the Marne.

It was then that I was shot in the breast and shoulder, and fell
heavily on my head against a roadside pile of stone. I lay directly
in the way of the Red-Cross men--those blessed gleaners of the
wounded--and so was quickly carried to safety.



CHAPTER VIII

GABRIELLE'S VISITATION


It was the day after the battle of the Marne that as I lay in a
Red-Cross ambulance, one of an endless line making a slow progress to
Paris, past packed masses of soldiery, parks of artillery, ammunition
vans, hay wagons, meat carts buried in straw, commissariat busses--many
of them English, still pasted with placards of coffee-houses, groceries
and smoking tobacco, that a letter was brought to me by the orderly
attached to our company of wagons. How well I recall his grimed face
and the blood-stains on his white surtout! The letter was marked
"_urgente_" and also "_par permission de le chef-major de corps
d'hôpital_." The young orderly was gay with the pleasure of bringing me
a note from home--"_Que vous serez heureux; le mot de la femme et les
petites_!" The innocent salutation stabbed deeper than had the sabre of
the Teuton giant. My eyes started, and the pang passed. The cheerful
greeting was as some taunting whisper hissed in my ears, but--alas--how
well meant!--_bien entendu_.

I recognized Gabrielle's hand-writing. I held the letter unopened, and
my flaccid nerves scarcely measured its meaning. Ah! it seemed to me
now almost a light matter what happened. The horrors and depths of
pitiless sufferings I had been through had stunned my susceptibilities,
and any added blow fell on a sensorium become rigid, or simply
pulseless with shock. At length my hand, mechanically almost, opened
the letter, and if it was unsteady it was the tremor of weakness only.
My blurred eyes read it as they might have uncertainly read a sign on
the street. And yet there was intelligence still remaining in them. My
heart beat faster, my eyes closed a moment, while a puny pain like a
shooting neuralgic ache, somewhere about my heart too, pierced me, and
then my lips moved in a whisper--_Dieu defende_.

But indeed it was with me as with an eye fatigued with flashes, that
sees no longer, or sees everything fantastically. I read the letter and
laughed. The mild manner of a death--even the death of a father and
mother--in their own bed, by its luminous contrast with this manifold
Dance of Death in which I had shared, where Death nakedly came out of
the air, and shot you, or impaled you, or stifled you, where things
worse--_Ah! miserable_--than death happened, seemed almost benignant.
It won an enviable distinction. And, for the meaning of it all, the
disclosure of Death seemed itself now an admirable escape. Conception
with me had become so darkened by excitation, that in the black
background of consciousness, the loss of a father or of a mother,
created no discernible image.

And yet--a few minutes later, as I read again the letter--crushed
into a ball in my hand--a natural recreation of sensibility terrified
me by its acute punishments. I cried out in a kind of fury, and
then I wept. My nerves went to pieces. I was delirious. That raging
tempest of madness lasted three days. I was taken to Paris. There
in a well appointed hospital in the Faubourg Saint Antoine, I was
treated with the most happy kindness, and there my sister came to see
me and to nurse me, and by that incommunicable power of sweetness
and sympathy--wherein too lurked the kindred genius of our common
parentage--she restored me to sanity, and the broken strained mind was
healed and fitted--as it were--together again, and the extinguished
candle of reason relit. Those were days of infinite bliss. It was
something wonderful indeed to be present and observant of one's own
regeneration. Yet so it seemed. A consciousness, feeble and complacent,
but always delighted, noted the return of another master-consciousness
to the control of its despoiled and scattered properties, and in noting
it, was willing to fade itself away, or re-enter its mysterious hidden
realm of feeling.

And then I grew to so love Gabrielle. It was a sense of recreation,
of absolute reference of a second birth to her power. She assumed a
spiritual maternity before my eyes, and enrolled like some nucleal
miniature of divinity within my soul. She walked before my seeing eyes
an Angel of Grace. My bed lay in a separate room, quite apart from
the general dormitory, wherein the crowded cots held the anguished
sufferers from the battle fields, now forwarding their daily harvest
of wounded, in thicker and thicker bunches. It was an unsolicited
privilege but one granted through the benevolent insistence of the
superintending surgeon. Its window looked out of the back of the
hospital over a broken prospect of high chimneys, peaked walls, and
balustraded roofs. Points of color flamed here and there, where
jardinieres still bloomed on the window-sills, or where a tricolor,
in wreaths of bunting, festooned the near and far piazzas. Dull
surfaces of drab rose to parapeted balconies, and in a side-long
glimpse I could see the tree-lined boulevard of ----. Above the
mingled edges and angles an autumn sky laughed and wept, now flushed
with delicate primrose, when the sunset closed the day, and now,
for days too, drearily gray with inexpressive and moisture dropping
clouds. The room was prettily set with some plain furniture--a bureau
and a table covered with green baize, a cuvette and a few chairs.
The shining floor, in the light, mirrored the furniture, and in it
too were reflected the three pictures that decorated the walls.
Gabrielle had put these pictures where they were, and they were all
religious. One a Madonna, one a Christ, and the third the new Pope.
The walls were faintly _rougeatre_ and from the middle of the ceiling
hung an electrolier. That made the place at night gay with light.
It seemed to me a little corner of Heaven. Was it not so, after all
I had seen and been through? But I felt the sting of self-reproach,
when my thoughts traveled back to the desolate comrades on the shell
splintered, shrapnel haunted, bullet riddled field, there far away at
the front--and not indeed so far away either.

Here Gabrielle nursed me, her pale face and sunken eyes were ominous
symptoms of her own failing strength--and here she told me of my
parents' deaths. It had a mysterious fore-ordained simplicity, and, as
it were, a naturalness. It seemed just a going out, as one would leave
a room, or pass through a door, and enter upon the world beyond. Father
and mother were stricken with the hand of that hovering paralysis that
had followed them for some time, and the achieving blow fell upon them
both as they lay in the morning, in their bed, conversing. Even their
thoughts had dwelt at that very instant upon the inevitable end, and
the light flame of life was snuffed out even as their hands crossed,
and the smile of a mutual resignation bathed their faces in hope and
confidence.

This news brought to me no added misery--no, no, rather a strange
placidity of contentment. For in that region of experience wherein I
wandered along the borders of the great darkling ocean of Eternity,
I felt the intervening space of life, between this existence and the
next, to be of a transient and incomputable narrowness. The luxury of a
gentle inanition overcame me, and so unevenly did the spark of life at
times flutter in its cage, that I was unaware exactly whether I lived,
or had begun to float otherwhere on an uncharted sea.

Slowly everything rectified itself, and then Grief came, and
realization, and reproach, and memory started its accusative course,
and I bewailed the impotence and forgetfulness of my pallid rectitude.
My filial uses had not been energetic enough, nor altogether wakeful.
That I knew.

Thus between the relapses of my sorrow, and the soothing influence of
Gabrielle, I leaned more and more upon my sister, and, by a subjection
of will and emotion, caught her frame of mind, her tincture of
spiritualized enthusiasm. I now come to the very nucleus and meaning,
the very heart and life of this story--the longed for confession and
explanation which two worlds have waited for, the marvellous tale
of a young woman's intervention with the unnumbered dead, and their
disembodied re-entrance in the world to stay the earth's destroying
plague of War. To tell finally how in the agony of her sublime
assumption, to bring this to pass, my sister's soul left her body, and
withdrew in the wake of that vast ascension of spirits, to the Eternal
Sphere of the Immortals.

I had reached successfully the last stage of convalescence. My
recovery had been stubbornly contested by the militant eager sprites
of disease which somewhere lurked within me. I had only "come round,"
as the English say, slowly, with veerings and retreats, that kept
Gabrielle miserably anxious. When I was at last able to leave my
bed and sit up--sitting up in a Morris chair, most capacious and
comfortable--Gabrielle came to me one afternoon, when the white
radiance of the glorious day might cancel the unearthly shock and
the ghostly melancholy of her story, and almost kneeling at my side
repeated her incredible and wondrous confession.

"Alfred, I have something very strange to tell you. Something that has
been happening for some time, and seems to grow more frequent as this
awful war--_cette guerre desesperant_--goes on. For it has to do with
it--with the war. You want to hear it, surely?"

"Yes," I replied, "Gabrielle, I do indeed. Is it some of the visits
again from the other world which we agreed should be discontinued?"

"Yes, Alfred, it is," Gabrielle looked up at me with a scrutiny
of wistful, almost beseeching ardor, and as I remained silent she
continued, "Alfred, the DEAD come back to me! They speak to me. Oh,
more than that, they throng my room, and in my ears sounds the endless
wailing of their prayers."

"Prayers?" I repeated, aroused now into a sudden repulsion of these
renewed surrenders to the old-time madness.

"Yes, Alfred, _Prayers_. I do not hear them now in Paris, but at
St. Choiseul the night long they have assailed my ears with piteous
prayers. I have endured it without confiding it to anyone, the dreadful
matter, but I have so wanted to tell you."

"But Gabrielle, why do you surrender to this delusion? It will wear
you to death. Ah sister, be very careful. We are alone in this great
world now, and you are everything to me. These nightmares will turn
your reason, unhinge your strength. Put them all to flight as you did
before."

"Ah, Alfred it is different now--much different. Really the old visions
were soft and gentle and pleasant, and I accepted them as pictures
almost of lovely beings, happy and serene and sympathetic. But these
are so dreadful. At first I screamed with terror at them or just shrank
into myself and shuddered. I did put them to flight, Alfred. I begged
Julie to sleep in the room with me, and then they never came. But just
to see what it all meant I tried several times to sleep alone and the
things came thicker and faster as the war went on. I resisted my fear,
but the misery of these wounded and broken spirits--as it was shown to
me--was killing me. I once more drove them all away by getting Julie to
come to my room. One night Julie awoke me and said there was someone
or something in the room. We started up in the bed, and looked about
the room, and then that light you once saw came again, but no figure,
just a wonderful shimmering of threads of mellow light, traced through
the air of the room, and flowing out of the open window like skeins of
smoke caught in a draught. Julie clutched me and cried, and her voice
broke the spell--if spell it was--the light vanished and nothing more
happened that night."

"How long has this been going on?" I asked in suspense, in half
incredulity.

"It began after the first days of the war. But at first the voices
were indistinct, and the visions vague and shadowy. I did not mind
that. I thought it would wear off, and the spirits go away. They did
for a while, but after the battle of Mons suddenly at night I saw an
awful picture, not the battle field, but the ascending shades drifting
upward from it like innumerable specks of vapor. Ah Alfred, how shall I
describe it? I seemed to be carried there. It was a dream, and yet it
was full of reality to me, and the ground, the wrecked villages, the
streets strewn with the dead and dying, were all half hidden; sometimes
in the dream altogether erased, by the multitudes of the shades going
on, and on, and on, up and up, and up, in smoky masses, with faces and
limbs spectral and ghostly, like some vast current of fog shaped into
human forms."

"Well," I groaned, "what next?"

"I awoke, and there was nothing--nothing--but an hour later the voices
were resumed and they murmured and murmured, and words now and then
were understood, like 'Have Mercy'--'Oh God my wife'--'My home,' and
then furious words like blasphemies. Ah Alfred, it was terrible," and
the woman hid her face in my lap and shook convulsively.

"Gabrielle, my sister, how have you gone through with all this misery?
Our father and mother dead, and these horrible visitations! I must get
well quickly and together we will go to St. Choiseul, and then I can
see for myself if such things can be."

"Can be, Alfred? You do not doubt me, do you? I am indeed telling you
the very truth, and you will wound me to the heart if you think that I
have been deluded, or am deceiving you."

Her loving, tender eyes were filled with the tears of remonstrance. I
seized her arms, and brought her to my breast, and embraced and kissed
her, whispering with all the devotion of my soul, "No Gabrielle, I know
that these things have, in their way, happened, and that your tired
senses and strained nerves may have actually created them, worn out as
we all are with this grievous trial. And the _Prayers_, darling. What
were they when they were intelligible? Could you make them out--tell
me."

"At first I could only recognize them as supplications by the imploring
voices, and then later they often became distinguishable as short cries
for help and mercy, and deliverance, and then short staccato calls, as
if from madness, insanity, brutality, unrighteousness. Lately and here
in Paris I have not heard them, and I control myself better--" the last
words were spoken by my sister hesitatingly, or at least slowly, as if
she felt unwilling to utter them. I noticed the indecision at once.

"What is it, Gabrielle--your control? Have you yielded to the old
temptation--the feeling that you wished to summon the DEAD?"

"Alfred," the voice was very low, and Gabrielle cast her eyes down, as
if depressed by some unwonted shame of contrition; "Alfred, although
I say that I exert no power to open the communications with the
spirit world, yet I believe that in some unconscious way I actually
summon these to me. Watching myself in the voluntary movements of my
mind, I detect at times that without my volition, my mind assumes the
mediumistic poise, as the books say. I am ashamed of it, and I think
it is wicked. That makes me dread these visions for, perhaps, they are
simply satanic. Oh what shall I do?"

Poor girl, worn out with service, beaten to the earth with sorrow,
and now devitalized, unwillingly surrendering herself to the--to
me--abhorrent power she seemed endowed with, to materialize the dead,
and converse with the other side of the veil of life! The refuge of
my partnership with her of these secrets was an immense relief. I
gathered together my strength, and forced the laugh to my lips, and
the merry words to my lips also, for her sake. Thus, with a deepening
mutual absorption in each other, brother and sister grew inseparable in
feeling and in thought and in affections.

It was almost three weeks later that I was permitted to leave the
hospital, and return with my sister to St. Choiseul. It was a return
strangely mingling the accents of sorrow, with the notes of a sudden
joy. The autumn lights were beautiful, and the darkening vineyards,
and the striped hop poles, the yet radiant gladiolus and the glancing
lustres of the streams, the long peaceful perspectives, unsullied
by war, the romantic cluster of the ivy coated ruins of the chateau
towards Briois, the winding road, the straight sentinel line of
poplars, and the unchanged village--empty and silent perhaps--crowning
the slow ascent, bathed in the soft atmosphere of dewy sweetness--_Mon
Dieu_, it almost made me swoon away with ecstacy!

And here at our doorway, was the little circle, Père Antoine, Père
Grandin, the _Capitaine_, and Privat Deschat, Hortense, and Julie, and
the pale faded loveliness of the orphan girl, Dora, but no father or
mother was there. The tears rose to my eyes; it was impossible to check
their almost unnoticed flow.

I fell into their arms. I kissed them all. I was half swooning with the
pain of my affection.

"My son, how good it is to see you again, the vampire has not swallowed
you up--_Dieu soit benit_;" that was Père Antoine.

"Ah Alfred, you see the plague has not touched us yet--the desecrating
fiends were near. Yes, they were seen east of Briois--foraging, And
you? Well? You look grave. Ah! it is not a time for smiles;" that was
Père Grandin.

"Alfred, where are the Boches now? Where? _Ma foi_ it is not this
time as it was in '70. You shall tell us all. It is _un histoire
magnifique_. The flag is supreme;" that was the _Capitaine_.

"_Maître_ Alfred, you must not leave us again. _Souvenez vous_--I will
make the _galette aux amandes chaque jour_? Eh? You will not go away
again?" that was Hortense.

They all laughed a little. But Hortense wiped her eyes with her broad
apron.

"Ah Gabrielle, we have been unhappy without you--all of us. Never,
_never_, shall you go away again--OR--you take me with you, and the
_Capitaine_;" that was Dora, and her pallid face, with the serious
eyes, haunted now always with sorrow, the expressive index of her
life's tragedy, flushed ever so slightly, and her arms were flung about
my sister's neck, and she was caught again by Gabrielle, in her own
blessed arms of reassurance and protection.

"Well Alfred, we are all traveling the same road together now. Death
walks at everyone's side. But they who have died on the battlefield,
they have sown in their own ashes the seeds of Redemption." And the
speaker's voice rose, so that we felt startled at its suddenness.
"They will yet fight as avenging spirits. They are about us now. When
Heaven is too full of them they will descend, and destroy the enemy.
_La Patrie_ is Eternal;" _that_ was Privat Deschat.

This last apostrophe awkwardly dampened the moment's happiness, and we
went into the house slowly and silently, as if to the summons of an
obsequy. When Deschat mentioned the descending spirits I saw Gabrielle
quail and draw Dora to her side in a trembling spasm of alarm.

Slowly we entered the house. I shuddered in a momentary realization
that its master and mistress were no longer sanctioning its
hospitality. But how peaceful and comforting it all was! I felt
embraced by the manifold tendernesses of form and picture and color and
furnishment. Around the table of the dining room that evening in the
cheerful splendor of the old oil lamp, with the shadows, grotesquely
friendly, moving over the walls, we sat together, while Hortense and
Julie outdid themselves in overloading the table with _les pièces
precieuses de la cuisine_. I hardly dared to taste these delicacies.
It seemed a profanation. Those suffering patient men at the front, so
often almost starving! It was an impiety against patriotism to feast so
lavishly.

I touched almost nothing, buried in sombre memories. The regalement
was darkened by my abrupt disillusionment, and I could not easily
rehearse my experience. I begged them to excuse me--another time I
would go through it all, but just then--Ah surely they understood.
There were so many reasons for hesitation, for suspense, for
silence. They were most sympathetic, and I, who was to have been the
_raconteur_, sat now almost moodily amongst them, and listened to the
news of the neighborhood, as one and the other kept up the trivial
narration.

How the Uhlans had been seen by little Mimette Collot prancing along a
highway toward Cabrelet, how the thunders from the constant attrition
eastward, between the armies, had kept them all awake at night; how the
English soldiers had visited them and they had turned their pantries
inside out to welcome and refresh them; how a _taube_ had wheeled and
droned above them, like some colossal bumble bee, and how it dropped
one bomb in a pasturage, and had killed a young mother cow and her
calf; how good Mother Webbe--she at the crossroads where you go east
toward Landrecies and Mons--had given a young English soldier on a
motorcycle a full glass of _vin de prunes_, and he had fallen from his
cycle along the roadside "dead-drunk"--_un ivrogne jusque mort_--; the
dear soul had thought it was only _vin ordinaire_; how the men had
deserted the country-side to enlist, and the old men and the women, the
boys and girls, had taken their places; how the Diligence had a woman
driver now, and how she dressed in man's clothes, and how bitter she
was with the horses, just to seem more mannish--_comme un homme_.

They told how the troops had filled the roads moving eastward, and
with them the long files of ambulances, of ammunition vans, of cannon
carriages; how when the news came of our victory the church bells were
rung, bonfires were made in the streets, and processions of boys and
girls went up and down the roads singing the Marseillaise.

But somehow the spirit of our reunion dragged and drooped, and I
suppose it was all my fault. The oppression of despair had seized me. I
could not escape a sense of doom, not exactly my own, or the country's,
but some vague awfulness of desolation, approaching with black
pestilence--breathing power, to desecrate and ravage the earth. It kept
me dumb. And all of this uneasy and ungracious apathy or morose grief,
had developed since I entered the house--where at first the happiness
of refuge seemed so inexpressible.

When I bade them "Good night," I said some stumbling words about my
disappointment with myself, and promised to make amends. I needed
rest. My body and soul, my mind were ill at ease. And so they left me,
that clear star-lit night as the rising wind, threatening frosts or
snow, rocketed upward with gusty roars from the house-tops, and rushed
away with a wail that almost sounded to me as the incorporeal echo of
those ravenous moans and cries, those palpitating shrieks, that I had
heard sweep across the battlefield, and that, as the hours waned died
away in death.

       *       *       *       *       *

I recovered my strength but slowly, and there were recurrent lapses
into periods of frightful depression, nervousness, and I fear
irritability, that tried the devoted soul of Gabrielle, who remained
unchanged in her devotion, and unceasing in her soothing ministrations.
We often talked about the strange apparitions, and the voices, and the
weaving and winnowed lights, but there was no return to Gabrielle of
these visitations. She had gained in strength, her old time loveliness
of face bloomed again, and, delighted with my companionship, she
withheld--if indeed they assaulted her at all, or essayed to--the
disembodied souls. Gabrielle was utterly transparent and confessed
everything. I know that for at least seven months, there literally was
no return of the manifestations. Because they seemed to have vanished
entirely we permitted ourselves to talk them over freely, and it
amused me. The terrifying thought though often arose, in the minds of
both of us, that the discharged multitudes of spirits, shot almost
into eternity, clung to the earth. Their gathering increasing shades
haunted the loved earth, and their affections, somehow still retained
for the living, nursed in them a rising anger at the continuance of the
slaughters.

For the war went on; west and east the perpetual deluge of shells and
shrapnel and bullets, the surges of poisonous gases, the savagery
of assassination, and the cruelty of the bayonet, were emptying
homes, thinning the ranks, and draining the country of its best, its
strongest, men. And now came the trench lines; the insinuating deep
gutters in the earth, worming themselves this way and that, here in
unutterable perplexity of entrance and exit, there more simple, running
on with occasional dug-outs and bomb-proof dungeons, cellar-like
dismal caverns of darkness, humidity, and sickness. Stuck in them
at various intervals were the platoons of shooting men, the hunters
after other men's lives, quick, almost instinctive in their scent of
opportunity, almost wolfish in their ample placidity of intention to
take those other men's lives, if they could reach them. The long lines
of subterranean fortification, stretching, with irregular intervals of
defenselessness, like broad gaps in a strong fence, swept over fields,
and up hills, and over rivers, and through villages, junketed ever and
anon with ruins, shattered homes, or burrowing like the entrails of
a corrupting cancer under churches, and massing hither and thither,
in coils of black and muddy gashes, like the redoubled and tangled
intestines of an animal.

Here went on the daily work of murder, helped by the batteries, and
at propitious moments intensified into the uttermost diabolism by the
whine, scream, and tear of shells, the detonations of shrapnel, and the
thudding din of cannon, the whipping, ping-pong hiss of bullets. And
following that splenetic outburst the sudden bolt forward of regiments
of men might follow; headlong charges, frenzied rushes, dashes through
a hail of shot, men tumbling this way and that, wounded, dying, dead,
and then the ferocity of bodily collision with stabs from bayonets, and
slashes from swords and all in a tense silence, save for the oppressed
suspiration, the swish of brushing bodies pinned to each other, a
momentary cry of pain, smothered objurgations.

Over the wavering line of lethal burrows, high in the air, swung or
raced the bird-like combatants of the French and the Germans, their
shadows sometimes thrown upon a cloud, sometimes drifting over the
ground in a grotesque patch--a mere spot perhaps--of gray. Thus the
mortal combat sullied the pure air with its disorder. Up to those armed
fliers rose the stark stenches of the earth--the smell of unburied
corpses--and their eagle eyes looked down upon long stretches of torn
mud flats, ploughed by missiles, dreary plains of desolation, beaten
into a black and brown hideousness of confused holes and gaping rents,
gouged out hillsides, heaped mounds of fantastic earth, stippled
everywhere with the half hidden bodies of the dead.

From Ostend to Arras, from Arras to Maubeuge, from Maubeuge to Vouzier,
the indented, buried, smoking furrows of human explosives stretched its
weary length, concealing armies; hiding, in its ambuscades and pits and
mines, volcanoes of ammunition, a vast aneurism draining two nations of
their life and substance. What was a half stifled combat here in the
east in Galicia and in Poland was a fiercer conflict, and from there
as from here--in the west--each hour sent to some home the stab of
bereavement.

I could not return to my work. Recurrent chills and nervous breakdowns,
constantly augmented by the horrible agony of this insufferable crime,
kept my mind weakened, my body helpless.

It was a little more than seven months after the repulse of the
invaders at the Battle of the Marne, that the strange symptoms of the
spirit visitation that had troubled Gabrielle returned with appalling
violence. The spring about St. Choiseul had filled the hills and the
valleys with a wonderful beauty, more entrancing because the season had
prevailed with rain, and this had imbued the skies with a fascinating
vaporousness, which, suffused with sunlight, made the picture about
us in the lowlands so lovely in its grace and clinging softness of
light and shades. This sweet peacefulness made the horrid nightmare
of the war, only a few miles away, more unbearable and hateful. How
often that spring Gabrielle and I sat out on the porch late into the
night, amid the renewed fragrance of the flowers, the rising chorus of
the insect and tree life, murmuring in field and stream and wood and
along the grassy edges of the highway, talking over the miseries of our
dear land! Gabrielle had worn herself to skin and bone--as the English
say--with her work in the hospital at Paris, and now together, both
melancholy and disabled, we lingered long in thoughtful communion on
what the meaning and upshot of this unwearied struggle might be.

Perhaps it was about the middle of April, 1915, that late at night--it
might have been after midnight--as I read in my room some late reports
and personal letters from the front, my door--the one leading from my
room into Gabrielle's, opened, and my sister appeared at the entrance,
in her night dress. In her face was a wild, startled look, as of one
who had been surprised in her sleep by some awful dream, and yet
trembled under the malign shock.

"Gabrielle," I cried, myself moved to the outcry by her famished,
stricken, hunted look, "What is it? Are you ill?"

She did not answer at once, but stole towards me with a wavering
stealthiness, as of one escaping from a pursuer. When she was at my
side--I had leaped to my feet in consternation and alarm--she flung
her arms around my neck, and in a choking whisper, that half audible
mixture of breathing and utterance which betokens physical and nervous
exhaustion, said:

"Alfred, the spirits are here again, and they crowd my room; they
are filling this room now. Don't you feel them? Have you seen, felt,
heard nothing? They are the ghosts of the slain--I know it, for they
tell me so, and their faces are so imploring--They ask me to stop the
war. They tell me--" her voice grew stronger, and in the rush of her
emotion and excitement the words followed faster and faster, but still
her voice was a whisper only--"They tell me I can help. And O! Alfred
their cry for Mercy is piteous. They feel the pain of those who have
lost them--whom they have lost too. A voice came to my ears, clear and
calm: 'Help us! Help us! Our sadness is yours. We wished to live.
Death for us is wrong--too soon--too soon--too soon;' and then it died
away, like a fading bell-note, far, far away. And Alfred the voice
sounded to me like Sebastien's. O! Alfred there are others too--and
some--" she shuddered in my arms, and clasped me convulsively, as if
the pain of the recollection were too great to bear.

"Gabrielle," I answered, now aroused and almost terrified, "stay here.
Are you quite well? The morning must soon break. Rest on my bed. We
will watch it out. And--and--perhaps Gabrielle it will be best for us
to leave this strange, bewitched place." My voice was loud. Its very
loudness seemed to reassure her.

She released my arms, and controlling herself sank into the armchair I
had risen from. She pressed her hands to her brows and her eyes closed.
A moment later she opened them, looked steadfastly at me, then turned,
without rising, and looked about the room in a dazed scrutiny, as if
searching for something. Her wandering eyes returned to my face. I bent
suddenly in surprise towards her. She was smiling. The staggering fancy
crossed my mind that Gabrielle might have lost her reason. Anguish and
despair and sympathy had spread madness and dementia throughout France
already, that I knew.

"Alfred they have gone; how wonderful! Your loud words cleared the room
of the crowding host. Alfred it _was_ a host. I felt their presence
before I woke. But they come like air; they vanish as darkness vanishes
at the touch of day."

"Gabrielle, no more of it now. No. Rest. Sleep. I will sit up and
read. I have letters to write to men at the front, in the trenches
whom I know, who know me, who expect to hear from me. I have packed a
wagon-load of things for these brave boys, and it goes to the front
tomorrow. I wish I could go with it. But--"

"No Alfred--O! No!--not now! Do not leave me. Some strange powers are
working, and in the voices I have heard I feel the approach of a vast
spiritual finale."

"Why, Gabrielle, what do you mean? Stay. No more of it tonight. My
brusqueness has chased them away. If a little noise scares these
mockers, I can always furnish that."

I laughed and chided my sister for her seriousness. But Gabrielle
rebuked me. I rebuked myself. A strange oppressive and yet merciful
theory was shaping itself in my mind. I apprehended that a mysterious
supernatural power might be summoned to end the war. And--Yes, so I
thought--Gabrielle might be its protagonist and avatar.

I helped my sister to my bed, and when she again had regained her
cheerfulness, and welcome sleep--that chrism of the Almighty to vexed
hearts and minds--closed her eyes, I resumed my work. The silence was
the very enclosure of the grave. But then it was like the grave in
nothing else. The spring air, dewy, warm, perfumed, entered the room,
and once or twice when I looked out of the window the shimmering stars
shone in a velvet night over a world buried in slumber. All of the
gentle twitterings and murmurs of the night seemed stilled. I think I
fell asleep myself, for I awoke with a strange, a most benumbing sense
of confinement, of restraint that I could not define, but perhaps was
most easily compared to an immersion in some high pressure atmosphere.
I felt suffocated. I sprang to my feet. The lamp was flickering as
if about to go out, but its light fell on my watch, which recorded
the hour as 2:30 past midnight. Someone stood at my side. I felt the
presence, as we instinctively do--a cognition like a telepathy. It
was Gabrielle again. Her face was pale and her eyes gazed, as if in
a spell, upon the space above my head; her hands gropingly rested
now on my arm. I waited for her to speak, and almost immediately the
flickering flame of the lamp expired. We were in darkness.

But we were not _alone_. Some kinesthetic sense made me aware of
beings, entities, existencies, about me. I yielded to the impression
that a peculiar nervous excitation, a thrilled expectancy, as though
the next instant some miracle of strangeness would befall me, was due
to this influence of an invisible flood of spirits, or souls, or what
you will, that had invaded the room. It was Gabrielle's voice that
spoke in my ears, it was her arms again that encircled my neck.

"Alfred, again! They are all about us; and Alfred," the voice sank to a
whisper, "the spirit of Sebastien Quintado is here too."

I could not restrain the impetuous cry that broke from my lips.
Perhaps, were it rightly interpreted, it was fear, the sudden effort
to restore some balance of sanity in the madness of a nightmare, that
forced this outburst. I only knew that I almost shouted:

"Gabrielle, Gabrielle! You have gone mad." I sprang to the lamp and
relit it. The pale lights of morning were streaking the sky, and the
vocal welcome of Nature was breaking out from myriad throats in the
wide jubilation of the spring's resurrection.

Gabrielle was on her knees before me with her face bowed within her
embracing hands. I raised her up, and we walked together to the window
in silence. Upon us both fell the overwhelming consciousness that our
home had become a _rendez-vous for the spirits of the slain_. _It was
haunted. But to what end?_



CHAPTER IX

GOD'S HAND


Neither Gabrielle nor I spoke of these marvellous matters to anyone. It
was of course connected with my sister's peculiar power of mediumistic
control. The appearances were oddly varied, and we began to associate
the return of the spirits with certain atmospheric conditions. Then
there was a notable increase--if it could be so called--of these
mysterious visitants after heavy engagements, when we might assume
that the hosts of the disembodied had been greatly augmented. For
weeks the conditions of the house were normal, and there would be no
manifestations--manifestations which I myself began to appreciate
and detect. The times most favorable for the discarnate effects were
the still nights, and more generally after cold days than after hot
ones. Dark nights were not necessarily preferred, as on a wonderfully
splendid moonlight night, my sister saw the myriad shapes and lines of
these, shall I call them GHOSTS? I remember feeling myself the thrill
of some electric-like sensation penetrating my nerves, and half caught
before my eyes the scintillations of tiny specks of light.

At first we were both not a little frightened. The tremendous impact of
this mass of disembodied creatures broke down our mental equilibrium.
We felt suddenly half immersed in the other world, and felt too the
oncoming _denouement_ which, apprehended but unforeseen, awaited
this spectral deluge. How often we sat at nights, deep into the
night, at the front door under the leaf-embowered porch, fearful of
entrance into the house, which had become a sort of _adytum_, which
we might not penetrate, evicted as we were, by the unbidden tenants,
that swarmed from grave, and trench, and field, hilltop and valley,
from the crevices of walls, and the streets of villages, the cellars
of churches, and the torn up holes of tree-roots. We might indeed
have instituted--as at times I suggested--a sort of analysis of the
psychical constants of these disembodied beings whose actuality neither
of us doubted for an instant. We might have noted the exact moments of
their larger recurrence, the intervals of their absence, the occasions
when they became vocal, the peculiarities of their incidence upon
ourselves in our physical sensations, or mental susceptibilities, or
emotional response, if such observations were possible--that is if we
could discover that the presence of these souls (?) affected us in
those three elements of our existence at all.

Nothing of a systematic record was kept, but certain very sharp
and certain hopelessly hazy impressions are quite, by me, easily
recalled. The sharp impressions were in the nature of shocks allied
with what might be less flatteringly called _frights_, and the hazy
ones were indubitably aural influences such as have been determined as
electrical, or epileptic, or hysteric. Naturally the latter possess
the greater interest and have more to do with the extra-natural
mystical agencies of spirits. Perhaps it would not be amiss to describe
these--not too tediously--before I rehearse the last convincing stages
of the spiritualistic manifestations as they ushered in the final
descent of the "_Other World_" for the shame of human strife, and the
obliterating arrest of this infernal, this demoralizing, this vast
national embroilment of bitterness and hatred, that has unloosed the
satanic energies of HELL to the confusion of _Faith_ and _Hope_ and
_Charity_.

An experience of the first sort, followed immediately by the aural
influence, took place about the beginning of June in 1916. It was a
beautiful day, the light gloriously brilliant, and the summer fragrance
of St. Choiseul filling our little world with its inexhaustible
presence of roses, when, as I stood at my open window, leaning outward
to regale my senses with the precious offerings of the earth and
sky, I felt a wind, perhaps without any precise quality of heat or
coolness, blow over me, although not a breath of the moving atmosphere
outside stirred leaf or blade or flower, and then supervened a loss of
consciousness, a relaxation of my body in sleep, and I, overcome with
this unnatural drowsiness against which I forlornly struggled, sank
into a chair, and did not recover consciousness before the evening. Now
on that day was fought the battle of the ---- which killed 5000 men
here in the west, while almost simultaneously the conflict in Poland
added another 5000 to the number of the slain. There could be no doubt
that my unconsciousness partook of the immediate character of syncope,
or, to be even more scientific, that it was lethal, and might have
terminated my life. That is my firm conviction. From a later experience
I have become convinced that the ingestion so to speak into the air of
the disembodied, actually devitalizes the atmosphere, and produces in
those subjected to their multitudinous contact, asphyxiation. I awoke
from my sleep wearied and apathetic.

The second occasion happened at night, and was not attributable to
any sudden influx of the dead from contemporaneous battles. I have no
theory to explain it. I was asleep in my bed. It was in the following
August. I awoke with a start, almost as if I had been struck, and
realized the most curious tingling inside my head, as if a thousand
or more needles were therein busily engaged in employing their myriad
points upon my sensitive tissues. It was an excruciating agony,
not exactly acutely painful, but maddeningly intolerable and nerve
racking and confusing. It was unendurable. Instinctively I clapped
the bedclothes to my head and instantly there was complete relief.
Exposing my head again to this outside atmospheric bombardment the
agony recurred. I maintained my self-possession and actually tried the
experiment over and over again of alternately putting my head outside
of the bedclothes and then covering it with them. The effects were
constant, and the inference unimpeachable that the air contained some
agencies that exasperated my brain and pierced its envelope of skull,
while the interposition of the loose textures of the bed-coverings
stopped it. I can add authoritatively, that, as might have been
expected, the thicker the covering of my head the more complete the
relief, while upon no other part of my exposed body was any effect
noticeable. The irritatable surfaces were confined to my head only. Not
the spinal column nor the ganglionic centres along the thigh responded
to this inexplicable force. There was no cessation of this attack
throughout the night, but it slowly quieted down and disappeared as
the day broke. The aural effects upon me were dual in character. They
were physiological to the extent of producing a severe intermittent
headache, and they were psychic or mental inasmuch as they provoked an
irrepressible activity of thought, and, quite humiliatingly, with it,
an extreme emotional irritability. So cross did I become that I left
the house, and exhausted myself walking about the country to rid myself
of this abominable disagreeableness.

Another experience distinctly connected with the frightful cost of
the assaults upon the German trenches in September, 1915, took place
in that month, a few days after the engagements--the suggestion might
be hazarded that it requires some time for the "ghosts" to assemble
themselves and repair to any agreed upon _rendez-vous_--when entering
the house at evening, both my sister and myself became stifled with the
strange suffocating effect of the air. It was irrespirable. I muttered
"Again the spirits." The conclusion was ludicrous enough. We fell
to our knees and crawled out of the room. In fact the circumstances
resembled exactly the entrance of irrespirable gases into a room of
pure air, and the consequent escape of the victims by creeping along
the floor.

I must now state that these material effects were much more noticeable
with me than with my sister. My sister, as the foregoing pages have
reiterated was familiar with the spiritual world, and her powers
of mediumistic control had been successfully evoked. She had indeed
been visited apparently by numbers of the dead, and no unpleasant
bodily sensations had been felt. The voices _alone_ had become to
her unendurable, but for many months now these voices had been
stilled, as it were; in fact ever since that moment when she saw the
wraith of Sebastien Quintado above us in my room their intelligible
articulations had not been heard--hearing meaning a kind of _inaudible
utterance_ within the veil of the mind or soul. I do not think that
I ever attained the sensitivity necessary to distinguish the voices,
though, whether it was imagination or reality, my ears have possibly at
moments rung with an indescribable confused murmur. And never, until
the last _materialization_, did I discern faces. I except the special
incarnation of Blanchette. These incidents, I have recalled, have
only the slenderest value to establish any facts associated with the
nature and functions of the disembodied, and they need not be further
extended. Let me at once come to the ultimate act of this inexpressible
drama.

My readers all know how, upon the approach of the spring of 1917, the
Allies and their Teutonic adversaries prepared for the last desperate
struggle, how it had become almost mutually understood that the fierce
death-grapple should be undertaken outside of the trenches, and that
the arbitrament of war, under skies darkened by all the most hideous
emissions of shell, canister, powder, and infernal machines of poison,
should be attempted in a colossal conflict, that strains the mind to
conceive, and that might have approached in its horribleness of means
and results, the very uttermost image of the _End of All Things_.
The huge forces on both sides were assembled within the ten thousand
miles of trenches, that had converted the northeastern edges of our
country into a subterranean battlefield. From these trenches, almost
so arranged by some supervising destiny, they were to arise, like
implacable fiends or bloodless furies, and plunge their regiments,
their brigades, their squadrons, their divisions, their armies against
each other, in an unutterable tremendousness of slaughter, that
might have rent the vault of Heaven, if any feeling, any sympathy,
any recognition, any compassion, any power resided there! All of the
resources were accumulated, and the last promised carnage proclaimed
the extinction of civilized man in Europe.

Well that was the situation. On the eastern front the war had subsided.
Russia was practically fought to a standstill, and though, with the
customary Muscovite happiness of pretension, the Bear addressed his
allies with pompous declarations, no one seriously thought of him.
The Balkan turmoil had also simmered down to expectation simply. The
invasion of Egypt and the upheaval of the Indian mutineers had not so
very considerably materialized. Indeed everything now hung and was made
to hang, upon this final, incalculable, terrible decision. Would either
side survive its furious exterminating madness? Rumania was destroyed.

See what it meant. Two gigantic armies confronted each other over a
line of two hundred and fifty miles, and the last resources of all
the armaments of the magnified and reinforced invention of the great
nations of Europe had been marshalled together to bring to some lasting
decision the desecrating ravages of this racial duel. From the plain of
Antwerp and the winding valleys of the Meuse, to the hilltops of the
Marne, from Chalons to the slopes of the Vosges, the steel-bristling
squadrons, carrying in their flanks volcanic fires, watched each other
nervously, and yet, with a stolidity, born of custom and the grim
confidence of an irreparable doom; with a detachment also from earthly
ties, that made them seem like, almost like, discarnate beings. But
to these men, brought there from the ends of Europe, to meet DEATH,
as they might meet the morning or the evening of the common day, each
country, throughout its fields and shires, its wards and towns, its
bourgesses and departments and communes, its duchies, and electorates,
would soon become an empty cenotaph.

Ah, but that was not all. There was a miracle in it. Yes, a miracle.
God had moved the minds of the leaders towards this vast _denouement_.
The huge military programme, replete with bristling glories of arms and
men, the caparisoned squadrons of cavalry, the wide-mouthed, serried
cannon, the lumpy groups of the squandering "Busy Berthas," and "Jack
Johnsons," that wasted the ransom of kings in a few hours, the crowding
millions of men covering square miles of desolated countrysides, the
pitched tents, where the electric service, installed with thousands of
wires, kept the tendrilous nets of communication quivering with orders,
despatches, and rumors, the littered commissariats, filling screened
refuges with barrels, wagons, soup-kitchens, and interminable bales of
food, the long ranges of the hospital equipments, the stretchers, the
Red-Cross orderlies, the waiting doctors in barracks and in tents, the
auto-ambulances, the piled ramparts of bandages, and near at hand in
loosely framed operating chambers the sweet sickly odors of ether and
iodiform, and then back of all, along interminable alleys, the loaded
ammunition vans, carrying the shells and canisters, the cartridges
and gas engines and back again of these the grouped multitudes of
spectators--all of this vast spectacle, repeated on the opposite line
of the enemy--_vis-a-vis_--was thus concentrated, by a common impulse
in both camps, for the irrevocable decision, _because GOD willed it_.

In such a grandiose style should the last act of HIS interposition be
culminated, and the races of the earth should learn from the cavernous
receptacles of spirit, from the shrined multitudes of the DEAD,
enwrapped in the boundless fields of sky and star and cloud, issuing
perchance from the wide-swung gates of Paradise, or Heaven, or of Hell
itself--of the overwhelming pressure of the OTHER WORLD, learn thus too
of the maintenance of sympathy between the affairs this side, and the
affairs that side, of the narrow gap of DEATH! So it was.

But wonderful things had happened in the summer of 1916 and in its
early autumn. There had been awful carnage at Verdun where the Teuton
attempted to drive through to Paris and where the Gallic defiance
rang out, _Ils ne passeron pas_. To and fro had the lines wavered,
each interval strewn with innumerable corpses; the curtains of fire
had swept to and fro and in their murderous folds life had expired
as the flames destroy the swarming moths at harvest. Super-human
deeds of valor had amazed the world that watched the struggle with
terror-stricken eyes, and at last the Germans were pushed backward
and the valleys of the Meuse, its hills and fields, its villages lay
scorched, blackened, upheaved, overthrown, scarred from end to end,
with most damnable desolation.

And northward the English had, along the Somme, struck at the Teuton
with savage fury. The skies had been eclipsed with thunderous
avalanches of fire, and for days the satanic deluge of shot and shell
had stricken the German into helpless panic. Beyond Albert, with
headlong rushes animated by God only knows what courage, the Briton
had reached Thiepval Ginchy, Guillemont Clery and then shot forward
with staggering, awful vehemence towards Bapaume and Peronne, and the
defenses of the enemy, assailed on all sides, were melting away, and
the invasion promised the greatest results. Except on the east the
German forces seemed exhausted and the debacle had begun. The Allies
were ready for the supreme effort.

Yes--there had been talk of PEACE--and, for one short moment, the world
reeled almost in its dazed wonder-stricken joy. But the war-clouds
closed again, and the steel-toothed, fire-shrouded fight stormed out
again.

And then there had been another change. Their long line of armament
had again been pushed further west by the Germans, who had forced
our lines back, and again threatened the safety of Paris, had indeed
so far trespassed over France, that their trenches and up-flung
fortifications, their mounded parapets and encircling redoubts, broke
in the line from Maubeuge, Rocroi, Dinant, Mézières, and Montmedy,
eastward to Laon, again to Soissons, Compiègne, to Rheims, and now
indeed, from the high ruined tower of the Chateau at La Ferté the
trench line of the Teutons could be distinctly seen. The matter
is important for _there_ Gabrielle summoned--summoned I say--the
disembodied to the great intervention. _Ne riez pas; c'est vrai, le
dernier mot de verité intime. Attendez! Vous savez bien la grande chose
qui finit la guerre!_

All of this happened in the winter of 1917. And about the first of
April of that spring--let me see--that was on a Sunday morning,
Gabrielle came into my room--before our breakfast--and sat down at the
window, that one looking west. She had been to early mass, her face was
drawn and inspired, her eyes were large and frightened, and she was
trembling with excitement.

I had been reading and scarcely noticed her entrance. The instant my
eyes met hers I started with alarm.

"_Gabrielle qu'avez vous?_ What is it? The GHOSTS?"

She rose softly and came towards me. Then she knelt at my side, and
looking rather down at her moving fingers than at me, told me this
wonderful thing: One word--the spirits had not visited us for months,
and we had, partly at least, forgotten them, in the busy work of the
relief, and the frequent visits hither and thither, on errands of the
Red-Cross mission. Gabrielle spoke rapidly in parts of her narrative,
and then she hesitated, and seemed absent-minded, worn, and bewildered,
but as she went on her words flowed abundantly and fastly,--so you
remember it was before--and as she ended she had risen, and her
expression assumed a peculiar vividness of--of--Ah how shall I say?--of
seraphic beauty!

Yes, yes, it was just so. _Vraiment!_

"Alfred last night about two o'clock towards morning, I seemed to be
awake, and I _saw_--Alfred I was not awake, it was a vision in my
dreams--the figure of Sebastien Quintado like a blade of light standing
at my bed-side, his eyes fixed into mine so that I was spell-bound--"
Gabrielle here stopped, and her face blushed, I thought, with a kind
of modest shame I could not comprehend--"Finally he spoke, and his
voice sounded like an echo; I seemed just to hear it. Sometimes it grew
louder, and then it faded and died away and I thought I leaned towards
him to catch his words--so it seemed Alfred. He said this:

"'Gabrielle! Gabrielle! the spirits need you. The great war ends.
The millions who have died, who now, as I do, repine in spirit-land,
have gathered together, thousands upon thousands, upon thousands, and
GOD sends them to stop the slaughter. God has dispensed council--the
council of willfulness--to the nations and their generals, and in a
little while they will assemble the vast armies on the west, and try
out the conflict _in one great battle_. So it will be determined; So
God wills it.

"'And then Gabrielle _WE_--the millions of the dead, those torn away
from wives and children, from youth and love and joy, from friends and
country, from all of the ambitions which animate our kind on earth; we
will flock like clouds, when the north wind blows over St. Choiseul,
and descend, visible, luminous, vocal, from the glowing skies, and
from us, Gabrielle, will proceed a terrible Paralysis--Ay more--an
undeniable dread and weakness.

"'It will, like a contagion, spread throughout the armies from rank
to rank, from private to general, and back again; it will freeze the
blood, it will dwindle the heart, it will thrill the brain. Before
it bravery becomes a shrinking, ambition a regret, the thought of
conflict a remorse. It will do more. It will slowly become a strange,
unendurable, gnawing, piercing, scorching, internal pain, a pain so
bitter and keen, that flesh will refuse its infliction, and so there
will enter in that innumerable host just one thought--FLIGHT!

"'It will not be, though, the FLIGHT of cowards, but of
Conscience-stricken men. And then a greater thing will come. There will
be _no Flight_; the pain will manacle their feet, will stifle their
voices, will wither their wills--one monstrous Stupor will overcome
them, and for three days and a night, like the men overcome with sleep
that watched the Apostle St. Peter in the prison, the armies of the
Nations will sleep--Ay--and sleep in PAIN!

"'We shall abide above them. Our millions, by night and day, will
perpetually afflict them. By day we will be unseen, by night we shall
be seen. And from every particle of our incorporeal beings will flow
the influence of our terror and our punishment. There will be no
mitigation. GOD so wills it!

"'And when the three days are finished, then those men will
awake--General and Prince and King and Private and Officer--and their
strength will be as nothing, their vigor as a reed shaken by the wind,
their wills as shaking vials of water, their threats like sheets
whipped by the wind. So shall it be. Like men dazed in a flame, or
smoke, or men caught half dead from the waters, will it be to them. It
will be to them as the prophet Isaiah said:

"'"And they shall be brought down and shall speak out of the ground,
and their speech shall be low out of the dust, and their voice shall
be, as of one that hath a familiar spirit, out of the ground, and their
speech shall whisper out of the dust."

"'But'--it was at this point that Gabrielle rose, and stood like some
Sybil or Prophetess, replenished with a divine ardor--'Gabrielle, you
have been chosen as the instrument of our incarnation. I chose you.
See! It is God's way! Great issues HE brings about through the lowly
and the humble, the contrite and the simple. God chooses you. There
must be the human, living, breathing, earth-born medium. Go to the
Chateau of La Ferté on ---- and use your power. It will be added to.
Let it be at night, the night before the great combat and the whole
world will be advertised of it. That is the intention of God. So does
He sway the feeble minds of men, turning their pride into humiliation,
their certainties into failures, their promises into dreams. GO!

"'And Gabrielle, perchance it shall happen that then you also will be
numbered with US--_those of the Over-World_.'"

Here Gabrielle stopped, a sudden flush mounted to her temples, and
after came a deathly pallor, and then she fell upon my neck in an
embrace utterly tearless, when I felt her body sway upon mine with deep
pulsations, while her lips sought my own, and almost inaudibly she
whispered in my ear--"Alfred, Sebastien kissed me as he vanished, and
his lips were like fire, and the power he brought to me rested with me
from his lips. I am ready to go. But you, Alfred, will go with me. It
may be afterwards we shall be no more together."

Truly upon us unutterable things had fallen. We sat there together,
almost unnoticing the passage of the day, immersed in a wonder that
deepened into sadness as the anticipation of some wild unearthly ending
of the great war steadily became more and more fixed in our minds, and
with it--Ah there was the desperate cruelty and anguish of it--the
possible separation of our lives. We hardly spoke, and only as the noon
hour flooded the room with light and heat, did we arise, and, hand
in hand, almost as if then we approached the tragic sacrifice of our
happiness, went out, and down the stairway to our duties.

Perhaps dear old Emile Chouteau thinking of our propitiation would have
said:

 _Sic, sic juvat ire sub umbras._

       *       *       *       *       *

During the long weeks before that awfully auspicious moment came,
Gabrielle and I kept working at our tasks; she at the villages about
us, in the homes of sick returning soldiers, and also at Paris on
errands of every sort, and I in work of distribution, supervision and
occasionally administration. But it was mostly at the hospital of Saint
Jean that I experienced the full measure of an unusual depression--the
customary, and now grown habitual, grievous seriousness of a national
crisis, deepened into a pathos, almost unassuaged with any hope of joy.
Here I saw our soldiers in that delicately conceived and apportioned
religious retreat, itself a poetic dream of gentle loveliness, with
its walls of time-stained stone, its avenues of trees, the ranged
gardens of its sunny domains, with the petunias, the geraniums, the
sages, and the high-browed and over shadowing chestnuts, the outspread
firm outlines of tower and hall, its innumerable vistas, at evenings
breathing a strange and subtle melancholy--_malheur à qui n'a pas senti
ces mélancolies_ (Renan)--and the devoted community of priests and
nurses. Here I saw the sons of my country dying, praying, chanting,
smiling in their ferocious sufferings, slipping away into eternity
with prayers for _La patrie_, or rising from the very border of the
grave with mutilated bodies, and yet yearning for the last chance of
fighting still again. Here I saw the deathless love of home, lingering
in the sick bodies, whose lips moved in a delirium of dreams, that
they were soon to revisit the old orchards, the vineyards, the chimney
places, and their people--_Ah c'était miserable_--and I have seen the
chapel filled with the mourners and the broken-limbed companions of the
dead, lifting the coffin so gently, as if the lifeless figure in it
might feel their friendliness and thank them for it. Yes more too--a
spectacle that might have touched the heart of Heaven--the wounded in
the wards singing, in murmurs, between their gasps of pain, or just
slowly gesturing, as it were, with body and fingers and with their
speaking eyes in unison, _La Marseillaise_. You know how M. ---- has
described it. _Ecoutez._

 "_Nos blessés chantaient ainsi par la bouche de leur blessures et nous
 en écoutant les strophes sublimes, il nous semblait les comprendre
 pour la première fois!_"

Our--Gabrielle's and mine--miraculous mission was never forgotten. We
did not speak of it, but we watched the racing days, and as we watched
the words of the VISION grew visibly true. The Great Effort was to
be made; that we knew. In the face of all prudence, driven onward by
the irresistible purpose of the Almighty, the generals of the armies
announced the dread decision of "_trying it out_"--the English
said--in one colossal combat. It was the edict of fate that rushed
them on to this conclusion. And it was trumpeted to the whole world.
And no one thought it strange. No one wondered. And yet in any finite
human view what unutterable folly! Ah--it was God's way. HE had blinded
the eyes of the wise. HE had perverted the judgment of the mighty.
HE had turned the councils of the Great into childishness. His hand
indeed again rested on the earth, and its peoples, and the vast _END_
would be--so it became clear to my sister and to me--HIS Revelation
of Himself, blasting clean into the hearts of men this truth, that HE
LIVED.

So the armies of the Allies and of the Powers gathered together against
each other, along the line of the eastern frontiers of France, as I
have said. There the last gage of war was to be flung down, and the
issue tested.

But no new command came to us from the spirit-world. It was now within
two weeks of the hour set for the DESCENT, and Gabrielle and I wondered
that we should not hear again of the mysterious matter. Need we doubt?
See how the current of events foretold the END! That last night at
the old home in St. Choiseul I shall never forget. We sat together in
the big library throughout the night expecting some sudden GUIDANCE
from the Unknown. We said very little. The weight of our purpose had
withdrawn us from the companionship of our neighbors, and for weeks
we had lived alone in a reserve of solitude, of wondering suspense,
that also tied our tongues. We had become stupefied with the terror of
this admission to the supernatural, as if we were holding the hands of
the Creator! Did we believe? Gabrielle did, and--I will confess it--I
linked it all with the phantasmagoria of events of the hideous war, as
something possible--just possible.

That was the end of September. We must be at the Chateau of La
Ferté the following night if punctuality counted in this tremendous
eventuality. And of course it did count. How exactly GOD had given his
commands to Moses and Joshua, to Barak and to Gideon, to Jephthah, to
David, to Solomon, to Elijah! So instinctively we grouped ourselves
with the designs of Providence as indeed commissioned agents of its
ends.

It was almost morning; the eastern sky reddening with flakes of fire
scattered over it, and the light entering the room from the south wall
of the garden, where the clustering vines hung untouched and forgotten;
when Gabrielle spoke to me.

"Alfred have you any doubts? The time is short for our preparation.
Tonight we should be at La Ferté."

"I will go with you Gabrielle. Would you go alone?"

And my sister answered in the words of Barak to Deborah:

"'If thou will go with me then I will go; but if thou will not go with
me, then I will not go.'"

"Gabrielle all issues are with God. I will go with you."

Later, when the day had fully broken, and the sunlight flooded
everything without and within the house, and, from its singular
clarity, the not usual picture of the Eiffel Tower, far off in
Zeppelin-haunted Paris, was just descried as a hazy skein of lines in
the sky--we were both looking at it--the front door was assailed with a
furious knocking. I ran to it and opening it encountered Privat Deschat
with a paper in his hands, his face convulsed with emotion, his mouth
wide open, and crowded with insulting epithets, that he flung upon me
with such emphasis that, for an instant, I thought I was the occasion
of his rage. But it was not so. It was what he read that had startled
him into this unaccustomed excitement and denunciation.

"_Voila_," he shouted, waving the sheet he held in my face. "_Voila,
une clique des fous. Les scelerats; les imbecilles abominables;
traitres_; Dogs of Perdition. See, they intend to risk all on a single
cast of the die and then--_C'est assez à faire un homme honnête_--with
his head on his shoulders--_créver avec desespoir_, with madness.
Alfred Lupin, what do you suppose? The Allies and the Boches and their
forces have agreed upon tomorrow as a day of final quittance. There
is to be one huge battle, _un conflit superbe_ and then--_Quoi?_
Give up--_la FIN. C'est a dire une massacre insupportable_, unheard
of, monstrous, irreparable, and then--_Ah, le Diable pourquoi existe
je?--la renvoi à jour fixe._ Can you believe such a suicide of the
nation, such a shameless cowardice, such insanity, such depravity of
ideas? And they make of it a circus, _une parade macaronique_, and of
the nation _un jouet_. Is it not most damnable? Eh?"

Stunned by this unexpected outburst I retreated a step, and following
me with the offending paper he continued his onslaught.

"Have you not heard? The Generals, the Kings, the Princes, the
Diplomats, the Soldiers, have all agreed upon one infernal
exterminating duel, and with that over no matter who wins, they throw
down their arms and make peace. And here--HERE--" he shouted, still
pursuing me backward into the hall-way, while behind me gathered
Hortense, Julie, and even Gabrielle in appalled curiosity--"here they
proclaim it to their peoples, and bid them gather at the carnage,
_Une spectacle magnifique assurement_--the death of the nations. What
poison of insanity, of miserable, hopeless, brutal, depraved idiocy,
possesses our men? Has the whole world become a drivelling fool, _une
bête écervelé_?"

He was still holding out towards me the paper, and in despair over
his exasperation, I seized it, and rushed with it to the light, while
Privat Deschat rushed with me, and the little circle of auditors closed
about us in amazement. I saw at once the cause of Deschat's disgust.
The sheet he had brought to us was a broadside--_une bordée_--which
evidently was intended for circulation throughout the country, and
had been posted over the walls of the cities, where what I knew, was
frankly announced--the _umpirage_, the _arbitrament_ in one last
conflict of the undecided war. It read.

 PROCLAMATION

 PEACE COMES WITH VICTORY. ONE BATTLE MORE. THEN IT IS ALL OVER. ON
 ---- THE BATTLE BEGINS. THAT ENDS THE WAR. LET THE NATIONS GATHER. THE
 TOURNAMENT OF CIVILIZATION IS AT HAND. SUCH IS THE DECISION OF THE
 RULERS, AFTER THAT INDUSTRY, REST. PRAY FOR US, AND COME AND SEE.

 L'ADMINISTRATION.

"Yes," mocked Deschat, "_l'es boutiquiers_ are selling seats for it
now in Paris, in Berlin, in London. _Mon Dieu je vais à me mettre au
cercueil._" With that admonishment he vanished from the house.

I turned to Gabrielle.

"Gabrielle, it is enough. It is the writing on the wall. GOD COMES. He
has truly turned the heads of the nations. It is again the words of the
prophet Jeremiah:

"'Yes, the stork in the heavens knoweth her appointed times; and the
turtle and the crane and the swallow, observe the time of their coming;
but my people know not the judgment of the Lord.'

"We need no further assurance, Gabrielle. It will be as the spirit of
Sebastien Quintado said. LET US GO AT ONCE."



CHAPTER X

THE END


The Chateau of La Ferté stands upon a low hill forty kilometres (about
twenty-five miles) northeast of Briois. It is a wooded hill, because
it has been a neglected one. The old trees of the ancient demesne have
grown up in disorder, and have gathered to themselves a wild brood of
other trees and bushes. The whole place is a wilderness, but threaded
with paths of picnickers--_parties du plaisir_--and it is a place, too,
full of game; here pasture deer, and the fox lurks in its coverts,
and the grouse and the partridge, and on the shielded lake swim wild
ducks. Its great towers are falling to ruin; the stone walls that bound
them together are in decay, but buried in the thicketed vines that
have sprung upon them in profusion like a horde of biting hounds. The
strong trunks of the wistarias, like mighty thighs have crushed in
their partitions, and the old courtyards are damp with rank weeds and
spotted fungus-growths. The northeast tower still lifts up its gray
masses of wall above the encroaching trees, but its feet are buried in
the luxuriant verdure of the plants and trees. A strangely beautiful
spot. Traces of the old gardens remain, and a few still decipherable
paths wander up and down the northern slopes. Some of these lead to
the lake, invaded on all sides by rushes and sedges, thickly wadding
its sides, except at one rim where still a pebbly margin stretches its
white ribbon against the vivid green of descending, creeping mosses.

A moat was once dug deeply about the fortress-villa, and the range
of the portcullis can be irregularly interpreted in the crumbling
walls, that faced the ditch. It is a wide domain, embracing hundreds
of acres, and the tangled thickets are interrupted by open grassy
plains, while towards the south an orchard partially redeemed by some
neighboring farmers, mixes with the savage glories of the unmolested
wilderness, the pastoral sweetness of cultivation. It is a rare bit
of natural artistry, enriched by feudal history and weirdly darkened
by ancient crime, and now in the country circuits ascribed a half
sinister population of unfavorable natural tenants. Here the owl
secretes his nest and bewitches the night with his melancholy screams,
the mosaic-backed snakes glide within its shadows, or bask in its hot
exposures, the claw legged bats drape its fastnesses in the daytime,
and wheel in twitching gyrations about its grim sentinel towers in the
moonlight. Toads and stealthy rats find in its uninvaded precincts
safe hiding. Like some untamed forest land it invited the flight
of the hated denizens of the countrysides, and freely offered its
thickets, overgrown jungles, and sunless recesses for their concealment
and protection.

But there were more terrible things said of La Ferté. The displeasure
of Heaven had visited it. The blazing lightning had struck it again and
again. Its ancient oaks had been blasted by the fires of the Almighty.
When storms came from the north or east, their worst fury was spent on
the wearied old walls of La Ferté; when the snow fell it fell deepest
at La Ferté and the winds played there their most demoniacal tricks.
Some wanderers who once had taken refuge in its deserted rooms, had
been killed by the bolts of lightning, and others--a Gypsy band--in
winter had been found huddled together dead in its woods, buried
beneath enormous drifts, when the snowfall outside of the fated spot
and over the general country-land had been light and even.

Ah yes, the old castle lay under a curse. In its old dungeons men
and women, and children too had been done to death, and there was
the well-known tale of the murdered duke and his beautiful wife and
three fair children stabbed to death with the very dining forks at a
banquet, when words ran high and the wine had turned the heads of the
wicked guests who were the duke's own kindred; such current gossip as
fascinates the contemplation of every deserted ruin.

In the spring St. Elmo fires burned on its turrets, and were one to
enter its woods at night haunting lights shone from its empty windows,
and, if the wind rose--it soon became a tempest at La Ferté--and on it
rose a chorus of wailing, long sighing sobs, that you could hear as far
as the post road. That was well known everywhere. And then a thunder
bolt, a great iron rock, hurled from Heaven, had crushed in the roof
of an old keep, outside of the moat, where once a pretty girl--so ran
the legend--and boy who were in the way of a terrible baron, way back
in the reign of Charles V, had been strangled, and their bodies sunk
in a well, which sometimes filled even now with blood, and ran out,
painting the ground in red streaks under the hawthorn bushes. You could
see the stone now, though the way to it was through thick-set briars.
No wild flowers ever grew there, though everywhere else at La Ferté
they were plentiful enough, and the marguerites were famous. Hundreds
came there to gather them for birthdays, at weddings, and for funerals.
Yes, yes--but only in daylight was La Ferté visited. All good people
gave it a wide berth at night. The post road passed near it, but those
who chanced to travel on it by night hurried past the gloomy shadows of
La Ferté--darkest too like ink or ebony, when the moon silvered its
craggy walls.

To Gabrielle and to me, La Ferté was invested with no terrors. We loved
it. From our earliest years of life we had every summer gone to it on
pleasure parties, and later--so absorbing was it to my fancy--I had,
when a very young man, made a complete survey of it, mapped its old
walk-ways, gardens, and outbuildings, reconstructed in drawings, from
ancient prints, its granaries and storerooms, the cellars, vaults,
larders, arsenals, and the upper stories of its dwelling apartments.
So the supernatural summons to repair to La Ferté brought with it,
despite its ghostly origin, no fears. Indeed fear under the spell of
this awful errand could not have been suspected. It all lay prone
before the sublime magnitude of the event which we were to serve, whose
heralds and appanage we were. The excitement, spiritual and mental,
woven with the emancipated feelings of destiny, and also with the
emotional elation over the issue of peace and restoration, lifted us
completely above usual physical states, and half immersed us in that
dreamless sleep which the Hindus call _prajna_, or something like it.
Consciousness was there with us, of course, but a larger consciousness
obliterated our own selves, and we had become mixed in with the
currents of the intentions of the Supreme Spirit.

However I was all the time intensely practical and I had formed exactly
my plans for our installation at the chateau. Almost immediately after
the storming Privat Deschat had left us, we started. An automobile,
already engaged from the hospital, carried us to Briois, and there,
almost on the instant of our arrival, we took a train for the village
of Peltry, which is not far from the chateau. From the village we made
our way across the fields to the chateau. We were quite alone, but not
knowing what circumstances might arise, and eagerly insistent upon the
demands of nature, I provided us with a plentifully supplied basket of
provisions, which momentarily may strike the reader as an anticlimax
to our exalted states of mind. It was really nothing of the sort.
Physical weakness could only have interfered with our mediation. It was
not satiety or even satisfaction I was thinking of, but just physical
endurance under some unforeseen and incomputable exigency.

All the way we had been made aware of the vast concentration of
troops, and of the nation, towards the frontiers of the country, where
the confronting armies were to try out the dread decision. Marching
regiments, the vans, the clouds of aeroplanes, and the multitudes of
people traveling in all manner of ways, and mostly afoot, landing from
trains from Paris, from the west, from the south, and converging in
one colossal mass upon the selected battlefield, convinced us that
the utterly suicidal madness was to subserve the purposes of God. The
spectacle was to be grandiose and universal. The testimony to its power
should not be lacking in emphasis.

Streams of men and women, mostly old men now, and children, swept past
us. The land was inundated with the migrating crowds. These spectators
invaded the fields, waded the little streams, overran the farmyards,
pressing on to that strange goal, the _duel of the nations_. Surely
the poison of an insane prepossession had turned reason and wisdom
and experience and prudence into foolishness. So we thought. Thus the
mysterious messages revealed to us seemed to be visibly corroborated.

But the hilltop of La Ferté was not sought. The drifting crowds,
pushing stubbornly on, almost without sound of voice, in a dreadful
silence, like creatures driven to their doom, divided there their
compact masses, and it remained like some obstacle in a river's rush
and freshet, and only around it poured the human tides, animated by
some fear perhaps--No, rather directed by the mystical forces of the
intelligences that ruled the hour, and ruling the hour ruled also the
inclinations of the hearts that, in their blind animal herding, obeyed
them.

We had hurried along with the scattered throngs, veering constantly
towards the untouched wilderness of bushes, swards, jungles, and woods,
around the ancient ruin, until upon its verge we stepped out of the
vast struggle, and moved upward on the slopes towards its towers. There
were wondering comments, and a few for a moment were inclined to follow
our example. But the murmur of disapproval rose like the breaking of
waves upon a beach, half articulate, half inarticulate, but wholly in
remonstrance. Some words were intelligible. They sufficed.

"_Non, non--pas là. Retournez; c'est un pays maudit. Ne restons là.
C'est une place méchante. Voila._ Back, back; the devil owns it. _Je
vous le dit. Aucun qui reste là se flétrie._"

We were watched a little while with consternation and astonishment,
and then the bovine muteness returned, and the headlong plunge went on
uninterrupted. We were left alone. The edge of the preserve which we
crossed was a grassy slope, terminated at a little height by a thicket
of hawthorns. Through this latter, along a devious pathway, we made
our way, bending beneath the heavily draped branches. Then came an
open space, and a large ragged chestnut of huge girth was encountered.
Its wide flung branches struck against the very walls of the western
tower, which here, crumbling and falling apart, had crushed the
front wall of the enclosure, and left its inner courtyards exposed,
seen over blackened masonry, and piles of bricks, and rudely cut
limestone blocks. Scrambling over this obstacle we found ourselves at
length in the chateau's courtyard, and in the darkest shadows, almost
impenetrable in daylight. Beyond us rose the better preserved eastern
tower, which it was my intention to ascend. Shy lizards shot hither
and thither along the walls, and the air seemed almost irrespirable
with the odors of decay, from rotting timbers, and the multitudinous
growth of fungi, and ivy, and a red confervae coating the pavement in
the little undried pools. I knew exactly where I was. I led the way
further to a descent of a few steps, that brought us within the rounded
walls of the tower, where a fairly well preserved winding stairway led
upward to its very summit. I had often ascended it to its very summit.
Now I told Gabrielle to wait below, and I would first essay the steps,
and discover their condition. I felt confident of their strength. It
had been spoliation, more than weathering, that had destroyed the
western tower. There had been four towers once, but the two northern
ones had been almost razed to the ground by the frequent plunderings of
their stones for bridges, and stables, and culverts of the surrounding
country. Their stumps and foundations were thickly encumbered with
all kinds of wild growths, amongst which the stunted saplings of apple
trees had inserted themselves, making the enclosure in the late spring
a bower of fragrance with their abundant blossoms.

I found that the stairs were unchanged; their solidity could not be
questioned. The better preservation of the eastern tower with the still
unbroached and massive roof at its summit, had kept the stairway in
an almost pristine condition of stability, though, here and there,
the inroads of the elements, the disheartened growth of mosses and
pallid fungi upon the thin accumulations of earth in the corners, and
along the rises of the steps, imparted a sense rather than a look
of decay. At the topmost winding of the circular stairs, everywhere
supported by the central newel about which they wound, I discovered,
to my interested surprise, that the lightning had played some of its
mischievous tricks, which were popularly ascribed to the infamous
history of the ancient keep and castle, as marking it for devastation
and vengeance. A splitting of the parapet wall had occurred here, and
the angular line of dislocation had separated the stones of the rather
high wall, and, under the stress of subsequent rains and wind storms,
they had fallen out for a space of two or three feet. The accident was
not inopportune. It permitted a view of the land towards the east,
towards the vast panorama of the assembled armies and the gathering
multitudes, who thus now, under the sway of an over-ruling Providence,
flocked to this utterly amazing exploit. No conceit of theatrical
device could have been more spectacular; no imaginative invention of
the epic poets more sublime.

I stood a moment at the opening of the wall and looked out over the
fair landscape. The trance-like wonder of that moment I can never
forget. Upon the brink of what tremendous phenomenon did I stand? Was
the visible intervention of the Most High soon to be revealed, and
we--my sister and myself--were we the chosen instrumentalities--trivial
and feeble--for its transcendent beauty?

The westering sun threw the long shadows of the chateau, far flung
over the trees and bushes, the slopes and even outward upon the
throngs, at my distance hardly seen to move, a generally dark streaming
mass, darkening at the horizon, which it seemed to overrun--the
exodus of a nation! Beyond the farthest elevations northward, and
again southward in the plain, extended--unseen but understood--the
_boyeaux_, the labyrinths, the cave shelters, of Picardy and Champagne
where the soldiers waited. Beyond that ravelled edge of desperation,
of suffering, of confronted death, lay the bordering edges of the
enemy. Beyond that again, another concourse, summoned from the towns,
the villages, and the farm-lands of Germany, instinct with the same
hallucination. And above us all--WHAT? The approaching descent of the
shriven and unshriven hosts of the slain?

The day, fast closing, ushered in a night warm and clear. I assisted
Gabrielle up the long ascent of stairs; I returned for the baskets
and wraps and two small tent-stool chairs, our entire furnishment for
that ordeal, doubtless, unattended, I divined, with either hunger or
fatigue. Still the provision of these simple comforts seemed wise.
Indeed as the day died away, we ate the bread and drank the wine, in
silence, waiting. Below us came the murmurs, the catches of song, the
wailing melodies of hymns, and over the illimitable concourse spread
with flickering inconstancy, the spangles of lights, with here and
there a spurt of flames from the bonfires of improvised camps.

Perhaps it was about midnight, or later--we knew nothing of time, the
very breathing of our bodies, the beating of our hearts, hurried and
rapid as they were, were not even felt, or were only noticed in the
moments of self-realization. How could it have been otherwise? About
midnight, I say, we both became conscious of an unwonted agitation in
our minds or souls--who shall say which?--and we started up together,
crouching down at the broken gap of the parapet. Surely the instinct of
premonition was awakened in us. The sky was moonless. The stars shone
distantly, their light softened into spotted glows only.

"Look," it was Gabrielle speaking, with uplifted hand pointing above us.

I raised my eyes.

A light--O so slowly developed--the faintest possible silvery radiance,
emerged somewhere in the centre--or what seemed to us the centre--of
the sky, and grew steadily broader and brighter. At first it was a
curdling spot of light, from whose rapidly moving--we could now discern
its motion--edges, like the margins of a thunder cloud which is torn
or frayed into wisps of sullen vapor, thin wavering flames of a richer
golden light shot softly, now piercing the darkness in arrowy lines,
now withdrawn to descend again in broad blades of nebulous splendor.
And from them an illumination, pale, like the first morning's glow,
spread upon the earth beneath, and the dense distant masses of men, the
springing features of the landscape, slowly developed spectrally. How
marvellous it was. I was transfixed not with wonder so much as with
admiration, an awful admiration--Ah yes a quickening sense of worship
perhaps. Within me stirred those original promptings of a recognition
of the OVER-RULE, somewhere in those depthless heavens above us, where
the stars shine.

Gabrielle had risen to her feet, and with her hands clasped tightly
across her eyes swayed with the moment's inspiration, with her own
evoked transcendentally strengthened powers. I stood aside and watched,
a human record simply of the immeasurable spectacle.

The light descended bodily; it almost seemed as a shimmering mist at
first but taking on a skeiny texture, and streaked here and there with
lines of brightness. If it was a vast cloud of the disembodied it was
too far away from us to analyze it into forms or faces, or whatever
the spectral apparitions were. There however incontestably before us,
it grew and distended and softly sank, in an increasing radiance, upon
the earth. This radiance was superbly delicate, and yet intense. It
seemed almost colorless, though I thought, too, bluescent masses passed
over it or through it, like floating shadows on a wall. The fight was
comparable to the strong glow of an electric light, shaded within an
opalescent glass. The whole descent of the cloud was in the nature of
a progression or inundation. It appeared to touch the earth, and then
to roll north and south, while an endless ocean of the same brightness
poured downward from the remote zenith. It was ineffably amazing.

But quietly, like the rising winds in an approaching storm, motion
developed. And it became quicker and quicker, until I could discern
within the vast, white, shining envelope, currents of light passing
this way and that in unbroken rushes, and then came a sound. I heard
it distinctly and yet doubted my senses. I turned to Gabrielle. She
was not there. Terrified with the sudden thought of some miraculous
transfiguration I called aloud. _My voice was a whisper._ Turning
abruptly to one side I stumbled upon her prostrate body. She lay almost
face downward, on the damp paving, and as I seized her and raised her
up, there could scarcely be perceived any token of life in her. Hastily
chafing her hands, and clasping her to my breast for warmth, I felt the
renewed pulsations, and a moment later she opened her eyes and gazed at
me in a transfixed vacant way that again startled my fears as to some
hideous issues to this night of wonder.

"Gabrielle," I could see her and the objects everywhere plainly, by
the flooding light that momentarily grew more and more brilliant,
"Gabrielle. What is it? Are you sick?"

There was no answer; her eyes were closed again, and her hands seemed
stiffened together in the figure of prayer. I placed her on one of the
stools, and without relinquishing my hold of her, opened the basket of
food and wine, took out a flask and pressed it between her lips. She
responded. The wine revived her, and like a dazed person, she stared
about her as if lost.

"Gabrielle, here I am--Alfred, your brother. Speak, Gabrielle. O!
speak."

Sentient life was returning, its force was reawakened, and she opened
her arms, and embraced me, and--blessed sound--her words entered my
ears, soft, low, almost gasping.

"Alfred. See. The Spirits are here. My summons has been heard. Quintado
has kept his word. It is all as he said. Listen, Alfred. There are
voices--a sort of music; singing or--is it sighing? Ah! This ends the
war. And the cries, the shouts, Alfred. What are they?"

The light had become more and more strong--it rained now upon old La
Ferté, and its solitary tower, and its ruins, the wandering ancient
park with trees and bushes started outward, clothed in the strange
splendor. The glory of it filled the skies, and it beat upon the
motionless crowds revealing their compacted and scattered groups. And
the people? Everywhere was confusion or consternation. A widespread
agitation was expressed in uplifted hands, in bowed heads, in kneeling
bodies. We could see that, indistinctly, on the country-side, beyond
La Ferté. But it was the mammoth voice of that people that Gabrielle
had heard, rising--rising--blotting out the ethereal music, until its
indescribable weirdness, its inarticulate ululations were like some
animal expiration of immeasurable magnitude. It shot a singular terror
into my heart. Was this indeed the End of the Earth?

"Gabrielle," I whispered, "let us go. We cannot stay here. This light,
this influence--these ghostly crowds. I cannot--you cannot stand it.
_Come--come._"

I lifted her to her feet, forced her again to drink of the wine
and drank myself. And then we turned to the steps to descend.
Everything was in a bright light, and the light was accompanied now
by gleaming shooting darts or rays, that split it in streaks of
phosphorescent--nothing else quite describes it--cleavages.

I thought I saw faces--but they were like thoughts only. Gabrielle
clung closely to me, and shielded her eyes from the marvellous picture,
that increased its stupendous power every minute. I took one last look
through the broad gap in the parapet. The clouds of glory were still
descending, sometimes in rolling folds, and the billowy masses or
reservoirs of light that had reached the earth were visibly hastening
onward along the track of that distant endless marshalled host, like
dust-storms of countless sparks. I thought too, different from the
colossal moan of the multitude, I caught the sharp note of distant
cries. Was that the beginning of that "_terrible Paralysis_" Quintado
in his vision to Gabrielle had threatened? I thought so.

I almost carried Gabrielle down the winding stairs. Her interest
increased, animation awakened, the vitality of her tired nerves was
renewed; she seemed suddenly thrilled with an exorbitant curiosity.
At the foot of the long descent, painfully traversed, as I could not
bring with me my little lantern, though the exterior splendor sent
innumerable dashes of light through chinks and narrow eyelets, that
dimly lit our winding way--at the foot, Gabrielle seemed quickened into
an almost delirious activity.

"Alfred. Let us go to the trenches. Are they far away? _The soldiers_,
Alfred--Sebastien said they would be as dead men, that they would throw
away their arms and flee, suddenly stricken with the crime of their
murders. And then will come the STUPOR, that will hold them asleep,
motionless, the many millions--and then Alfred--I almost can hear him
now telling me--the three days of the _Presence of the Dead_ over them,
and the terror, the punishment, and then, Alfred--you remember?--their
weakness and remorse--and then Alfred, _Peace_--and then--" her voice
faltered a moment, but only for a moment--"then Alfred, comes--, Ah,
Alfred, do not think me cruel--then perhaps I shall leave you, and
Sebastien will take me to Heaven."

Her voice became almost inaudible. I struggled with an overwhelming
agony of sorrow, because--never had the thought been altogether
absent--Gabrielle too might leave me, and then Ah God,--then I
would be just a drifting relic, on the ocean of chance, unnoticed,
unloved--ALONE. It seemed too hard, too cruel. Yet even amid the
distracting misery of this anticipation, a curious malignancy of
suspicion--No, not that--a pained wonder surprised me. Did Gabrielle
love Sebastien Quintado? Did she seek him in Heaven? And Dora? What
about her?

I lifted my eyes above into the magnificence that now enveloped our
earth--this unearthly vapor or emission of spirits--and there above me
in the air I saw the figure of Sebastien. The face above it was grave
and smiling, the lips seemed moving in salutation, although I heard
nothing. A form leaped past me. It was Gabrielle. Her outstretched
arms were raised to the pallid spectre. The tableau lasted for a few
minutes, and then the spirit shape vanished into the effluence above
and around us. Gabrielle returned to my side.

"Alfred; come. Sebastien says the Spell of Heaven is on the Earth.
He says, '_Go and See._' God's manifestation confounds the purposes
of men. '_Go and See._' Come Alfred, I have new strength, new power.
Nothing now can tire me. COME."

So silently, hand in hand, we walked through the groves, the hawthorn
trees, the old grass clothed mounds, past mimic lakes reflecting the
supernal fires, as though the moon shone on them, but diversified
with the play of incomputable radiances, past the last long slope of
meadow and out into the horrified, worshipping multitudes, making our
way on, and on, and on, over the five mile walk to the trenches of the
soldiers. My inquisitive thoughts left nothing unessayed, untried,
unseen. And this is what I saw.

       *       *       *       *       *

Beyond La Ferté stretched a diversified country-side, roads and fields,
sloping descents into meadow-like expanses, whose grass and sedges were
interrupted by low wooded islets, taller hillsides crowned by farm
houses, thin strips of forest land, and uneven half hummocky ranges of
elevations, crowding down upon narrow and shallow streams, with broader
sweeps of scarcely undulating land, spreading upward to chalk terraces
on the horizon, where burrowed the hidden chained chambers of the army,
the masked batteries, the mud pasted trenches.

Everywhere were the people. They were the most numerous on the roads,
where the blockade of carriages, vehicles, automobiles extended for
miles. The fences were lined with spectators and over the farm-lands,
in groups, and families, or sometimes in packed crowds, the populace
was encountered.

We passed amongst them almost unnoticed. Here was a group of peasant
folk kneeling on the grass, and led in prayer by a parson or a
priest. Here others stood in mute masses, gazing upward aghast, or
thrilled, or motionless, and numbed as in a trance. But there were
exciting contrasts to all this immobility. Men were shouting with
delirium; women singing in strident unison, their harsh voices rising
in vocal yelps of pious song; in places I saw colonies thrown down
upon the ground, men and women and children, rolling over and back
again, against each other, in a queer rhythmic way, like some bed of
mechanical reciprocating cylinders. It was almost ludicrous. Young men
had climbed the trees, and their bodies bored the white radiance that
enveloped the earth, with black patches, like spots of gloom. The roofs
of the farmhouses and those of a few little villages we passed through
were sometimes thickly invested with people, and against the lambent
horizon they made serrated hedges of heads, broken now and again with
ejaculating hands and arms.

I stood a little while at the back of a dairy--_laiterie_--where a
milkmaid on her knees, working the white rosary in her hands, was
surrounded by a knot of small children. Their prattle was infinitely
pleasing. For an instant it seemed to conciliate the monstrous prodigy
about us with things human and ordinary.

"_Comme, il est beau!_" cried a small boy with his hands clapping in
delight. "_Je crois que les anges descendent sur la terre; n'est ce
pas?_" and he nudged the oblivious milkmaid who stuck persistently to
her rosary.

"Ah, well," said a still smaller girl, "I think they are fairies--all
those shining spots--and they come to live with us and help us.
_Voila._"

"Ah then we shall have anything we wish--toys and good clothes I
guess," muttered a rather larger girl.

"Yes, Bertha, but you must be very good and not kick Margarite. The
fairies are--are--_tres particulières_. _Ils n'aiment pas les filles
méchantes._"

"But where--where," asked another boy, pushing his way forward among
the others, "where did the fairies get so many candles? _Pas en Ciel?_"

I looked up; there was now a startling glory in the spectacle. The
white enveloping banks of ghostly things had become tremulous with
countless flickering spires of light, so slightly different from the
quality of the entire luminousness, that they appeared and disappeared,
with an incessant discontinuity that produced the effect of an interior
commotion most strangely beautiful.

We passed from the _laiterie_ into an open pasture, where the cows,
motionless and resting, continued to chew their cuds, apathetic and
unmoved, while from point to point, marking the houses on our way,
the dismayed dogs kept up their long prolonged baying, howls, and
half suppressed growls. It was hard to believe that we were still in
quite the usual world. Gabrielle retained her composure, and showed no
symptoms of exhaustion. I feared her sudden collapse under the double
strain of the mere muscular exertion, and that nervous preoccupation
that drove her onward to the trenches. The rising ground to a higher
hill indicated the approaching terminus of our fevered journey.

"Gabrielle, let us stay here a few minutes. Why kill yourself with this
rapid gait? Besides, the morning comes, and then it will be time--quite
time enough."

"Yes Alfred, I am quite willing. For a little time past I have noticed
the fading of the light. Quintado said that in the daytime the host
of the dead would be invisible though their influence would stay.
Here--let us sit down and watch."

The place was propitious, a deserted shelter for cattle with a few
benches in it, and facing the east.

For a while at least all our thoughts were absorbed in the marvelous
atmospheric--if I might so term it--mutations taking place in the sky
around us or above us. It almost seemed that we had left the earth, and
had become part and participants in some vast celestial panorama; as
if, under the magic of some incalculable influence and REVELATION, we
were entering on the sublimities of Heaven.

The horizon lights as the sun toiled upward were clearly seen. There
was first against the earth-rim a high wall of grey-blue clouds, their
precipitous heights crowned with parapets, and these last glowing
with gold. Later, and above the slowly dissolving cloud walls there
developed reefs of separated islets, faintly roseate, moored off
from a blue-grey shore, over which rose cloud dunes, themselves also
acknowledging the coming of the day with faintest blushes, and then
below the reefs taking the places of the parapeted walls, a pearly
sky. And _then_, an almost instantaneous splendor of multiplied
iridescences in the Ghost-Cloud before us, either a physical refraction
or some supernatural addition, obliterated the sunrise, and flung
far and wide its intolerable brilliancies. We sank to our knees
in a trance of adoration. How long we remained kneeling I cannot
say. From time to time I raised my eyes; Gabrielle never moved. The
colored scintillations were inscrutably piercing and varied; the whole
celestial radiance was shot through and through with the compounded
glories of thousands and thousands of rainbows. And then it faded,
_faded_, the lights dropping out in broken fashion, now here, now
there, until all was gone, and the uncovered sun lifted its round
orb above the hills, and spread its native light over the earth,
and the familiarity of that same earth itself was all resumed. The
MANIFESTATION had vanished.

When I looked around me, the country-side there was bare of people.
Perhaps they had fled; perhaps that portion of the land had not been
visited. We had walked now about four and a half miles, and, gazing
ahead, I saw the hills littered with _prostrate figures--the motionless
thousands of soldiers along the lines of the trenches_! We had reached
the PARALYSIS, that now held the armies of a continent in its awful
chancery. And--God be Praised--this was the END.

Some distance behind the shed where we had taken our rest was a farm
house, and, though not a sign of life distinguished it, it offered
the only visible opportunity for securing nourishment, and of that
both Gabrielle and I felt the need. The walk had been long, and the
excitement, the fierce turmoil and agitation of our thoughts and the
dazed exhaustion of our senses demanded succor. We quickly walked back
to it and entered the open door that led into its small chambers. It
was deserted. I called aloud, but there was no answer, and opening
door after door, mounted the steps to the attic, and studying from
that elevation the neighborhood, I could see no one. We seemed to have
reached a point which was far away from the crowds we had at first
encountered. Had some resistless panic driven them back? OR--had the
Paralysis seized them, and thrown them everywhere to the ground and,
thus inert, they lay in the distances, undiscovered, undiscoverable?
The wonder had been realized by myself over our apparent immunity
from the dread coercion of this omnipresent stupor. How was that to
be explained? Ah--how was anything to be explained? At least--if
explanations must be sought--I thought it was the preserving graces of
Gabrielle that lifted from us the covenanted affliction.

When I returned to the diminutive kitchen filled with the utensils
of domestic use, with its unmade fire, where had been gathered the
sticks and peat for its sustention, and with the pantries stocked
with the humble provisions of the poor peasantry, I was overcome
with a savage resentment. To what end, conceived of under the
most accommodating suffrages of Faith and Religion, could all this
wretchedness, the starved desolation of a country-side, serve? Nay,
the utter subversion of a nation upon whose bent shoulders now would
weigh the insufferable and unredeemable burden of an incalculable
debt--a nation, too, groaning aloud with the wounds of bereavement,
of sorrows, that a life-time would never heal. Oh! how desolating,
how harsh and unrelenting it seemed--the blackness of a huge despair
overtaxed me. I sank to the table with outspread arms, and burst into
sobs of utter, direful misery. I felt the caress of Gabrielle, I heard
her sweet comforting voice, I felt her tender lips press my cheeks--her
very breath seemed the incense of an offering to God. And would my
SISTER be added to the necessary sacrifices? The thought stung me
into madness. My old revolt and rebellion, that which had momentarily
defied the purposes of the Most High when Blanchette died, arose again,
revengeful, blaspheming, sharply irreconcilable. And then, even then,
an inexpressible mystery blessed me.

I lost consciousness--consciousness to earth--but I entered the gates
of a dreamland, blessed with prophecy. I was in flight, rapid flight,
and my way surmounted the mountain heights, and yet to my eyes nothing
was hid upon the earth. It was too this same Europe. I swept over
the cities of France, over the sunlit loveliness of its country,
now far off into the bordering areas of Belgium, and again over the
dike-seamed, flat-lands of Holland, and then with a monstrous swing
that clove the air with the mighty speed of thought, I looked down upon
the fair provinces of Germany, of Austria, of Italy--it even seemed
that for an instant I stood upon the endless plains of Russia, and even
surveyed the minarets of Constantinople, and everywhere in all of that
measureless domain there was PEACE. Over the fresh verdure of England
I returned, and ever and again renewed my flight, as if the gracious
beauty of the smiling lands, creased with scouring trains, their rivers
brimful of traffic, prosperous with teaming markets, and gay with merry
life, was too sweet and bountiful a picture not to be rehearsed to
satiety. I saw the flags of all the countries waving in their cities,
but above them all too I thought I saw another flag that waved with
them, and this second flag was everywhere the _same_--it was the Flag
of BROTHERHOOD, and it meant the consolidation of the nations in a
Brotherhood of States. I heard the music of the songs of the people,
ascending from the homes of the whole continent, and the sound of bells
ringing in the churches, and the hum of an incessant industry, and the
murmur, like the unceasing murmur of the ocean, of the sons of men
at their daily tasks, and the instantaneous realization came to me,
that at length Europe had put aside its soldiery, its mighty guns, the
hideous ingenuity of its death factories, the useless edifices of its
Class Mummeries and Families, and all of the venomous pride of Title,
and Europe had turned its beseeching eyes to the future, unlearning
the barbarity of its past, and working and planning and divining the
things that would bring upon the Earth _Peace, Good-Will to Men_. And
then it seemed to me that as I wondered and laughed in the depthless
joy of this realization, that a voice like the Voice of God, filled the
empyrean wherein I sailed, and it said:

"FOR THIS END CAME I INTO THE WORLD."

       *       *       *       *       *

We threaded our way through the thickly filled ranks of soldiers--we
had passed by the wagons of ammunition, the ambulance corps, the vast
_enceinte_ of kitchen equipments--and everywhere was the stupefaction
of utter apathy, here and there in individuals beginning to assume
consciousness, with the twitching pains of increasing misery, that
we had been told would be both physical and mental, the double
excruciation of pain and remorse. But what a sight!

The inveterate poignancy of my wonder and my curious freedom from the
omnipresent influence--derived somehow from Gabrielle's immunity--kept
me vigilant and observing. Gabrielle was constantly at my side, but
she seemed less intent upon seeing, as upon ceaselessly going on. We
advanced carefully between files of men, from whose hands guns and
swords had fallen, as their owners succumbed to the incredible stupor.
The relaxed arms had dropped the guns, the nerveless fingers released
the control, the stricken bodies had reeled to the ground. We stepped
over the motionless heaps of men who had sunk together in twisted
groups of overlaid bodies and sprawling limbs--as I had seen the dead
at Landrecies and at Coulommiers--steeped in this etherial opiate. We
came upon battalions of cavalry slowly dissolving in a confusion of
riderless horses. The riders had fallen from their saddles, or lay
forward upon the necks of their horses, as if drugged with sleep. The
horses were moving this way and that, confused, startled, neighing in
their bewilderment, or, with wild eyes, struggling in broken companies
to escape the weird strangeness of being unbidden, missing the familiar
voices, the guiding check. Numbers slowly ambled away, their masters
falling to the ground, pulling the belly-bands of the saddles after
them, while, most miraculously, their imprisoned feet freed themselves
from the stirrups, and the disengaged animals moved continuously away.

In the trickery of this supernatural stagnation there was no
real panic among the animals, and the horses watching the ground
seemed instinct with intelligence. _I felt DIRECTION over-ruling
circumstance._ Occasionally incongruous predicaments arose, as when
a cavalry man had fallen backward over his horse's broad back, and
his head rolled slowly over the horse's rump with the latter's
oscillation. A few riders were dragged onward with the horses, but
they seemed finally to become disentangled and slumped to the ground.
It was a bizarre disorganization, wherein the rigorous modernity of
detail and preparation, had been hopelessly dispelled under a divine
disintegration.

Indeed a portentous trance had gripped the millions of men. In its
ensnarement they lay like corpses, hither, thither, rolled into masses,
carpeting the ground in phalanxes, drooping upon each other in mimic
embraces, or leaning in thick palisades of bodies like clustered logs.
It seemed a vast immeasurable inebriety.

And the shadowy host? Where was it? The daylight illumined the
interminable vistas. The wind blew softly over a spring landscape. The
white flecks of clouds drifted as usual across the feebly bluescent
sky. Nothing on earth was different except this palsied host, before,
behind, around us. The similitudes from legend and romance came to
my mind; the bolstered court in the Sleeping Beauty, the stricken
seneschals in Consuelo, the death masque in Vathek, the rigid warriors
with Frederick Barbarossa in the subterranean halls of earth, waiting
their summons to leap forth in battle, the lifeless bodies in the pit
that Sinbad saw.

But the invisible PRESENCE that held this world of men stiffened into
immobility. What was it? Where was it? We moved through it, Gabrielle
and I, but felt nothing; nothing more than the faintly heated air of
spring. Would it shine illimitably again at night? Well, we should see.
And the _Enemy_--How was it with them? The thought made us hasten.

We had walked until noon, and had reached the trenches. There stretched
the pitch-forked angular line, the shelters, the dug-outs, the wire
embarbments, the peering snouts of cannon. Men had crawled out and
lay recumbent in the full light unharmed. We stole furtively into
one subterranean cave. Behind the front space against a wall of half
dripping clay ran backward a narrow room. In its centre a table was
spread with the rude service of dishes, and behind that again a ruder
grotto held a fire-place where a blaze of wood was charring a forgotten
leg of mutton. Around the table slept twenty men, and an officer at its
head groaned uneasily. Boyau after boyau was entered, and always the
arrested work, the drugged sleepers. From point to point, like rabbits
hanging on the lips of their warrens, men were revealed, half exposed,
half hidden. But no murderous fire despatched them. The enemy too
slumbered. We looked that way. The ground over which our eyes searched
eastward and northward, was ploughed with the horrid ruts of shells,
beaten into mud slowly drying in barren cankerous tracts of dust, or
gouged with holes, while mounds rose intermittently, whose washed sides
disclosed the limbs of buried men. Perhaps half a kilometre away on
hillsides, in valleys, through the frayed margins of woods, thrashed
into splinters by the shells, ran a crease, like a smeared titanic
pencil mark, where now we knew the Teuton, the unspeakable Boche,
snored unresistingly and oblivious.

We essayed the experiment of seeing if it was indeed so. In the dying
day we crossed that silent tract, and safely, in a zone which for
months had trembled beneath the explosions of shells, where sudden
sorties had filled it with the clash of arms, or sent along its pale
yellow and black surfaces the groans, the prayers, the gasps of dying
soldiers. Now it was a graveyard only, and as silent as the place of
tombs. We entered the lines of the enemy--and there--stark in the
embrace of the Paralysis the mighty German, officer and men, yes,
generals and--at the very point of our first contact with them--a
prince too, rolled ignominiously together, in the suffocation of this
asphyxia. It was a humiliating discomfiture. It confounded appreciation
for distinction. They were thrown down along the banks in droves, and
backward in the avenues of approach the legions upon legions slept.
It made me think of the rafts of logs upon Texan rivers caught in
inextricable confusion, tilted, submerged, locked, and tumbling over
each other in heaving booms, as the tides jammed them together in
thicker and denser snags.

Strangely unbelievable it seemed, those stunned masses of men! The
setting sun sent its rays upon them and, through an exact orientation
in spots of the serried helmets, they were returned in a blaze of
reflected light. We wandered on, along the edges of this sea of faces,
dreading to penetrate their ranks. There was an unearthly horribleness
in it all, as if an Universal Death had expelled Life from the earth,
and in the continental solitude _we_ alone lived. I shuddered, with a
sickness of despair at my heart, wondering if indeed we should see the
dawn of the Last Judgment.

And now a marvelous thing happened. Gabrielle and I had retreated
from the German line, slowly, with bowed heads hurrying towards our
countrymen, when, as the day darkened, the air above us, with an
infinity of sparklings, like a scattered ignition in combustibles,
resumed slowly its supernatural brilliancy. The great ghost bank
enveloped us. We quailed beneath it. We clung together, thrilled and
speechless, in the immersing splendors of the heavenly light; the
radiance of unnumbered souls. We could not see within it as we had seen
when without its limits. It dazzled our eyes, and for the first time I
felt a singular numbness creeping upward in my limbs, an insuperable
heaviness in my head, and dull reiterating beats in my ears. Gabrielle
seemed almost lifeless.

The ghost mass was vital with movement, there was indeed a low
decrepitation in the spaces above us, and an incessant arrowy flight
of forms, or veils of forms, where, too, faces shone, half traceable
in features, half blurred, as in a sheen that erased them, as soon as
seen. And those faces! They were not the presentiments of color and
shade and shadow, perhaps, as a pictorial fact. No, not that--they were
evocative lights, that created in my mind's eye, an image as it were,
of a living face, and they were most solemn, most sad; in them dwelt an
irretrievable impress of desolation. A wave of gloom overwhelmed me.
The ground beneath me seemed sinking, I caught Gabrielle to my breast,
and, as if in an engulfing swarm of myriads and myriads of stars, I
fell to the ground.

       *       *       *       *       *

The day had again risen, and our neighborhoods still showed the
recumbent acres of motionless figures--we had moved on far to the north
and westward--the huge aggregations had here drawn together and the
trench lines of the hostile armies were scarcely three hundred metres
apart. In the French and in the German battalions that indescribable
unrest of FEAR that Quintado had predicted was now easily detected.
This opened up a more singular and a deeply interesting panorama.
By ones and twos, by hundreds and by thousands, slowly, slowly, the
immense leaven of repentance of the unsearchable agony of a mingled
moral and physical pain, was lifting them from the first stupor,
and we could see the figures struggling to their feet, we could see
their dazed, horrified, and distorted features, their exchanges of
questioning glances, almost as if in their friends, they saw their
foes. Nothing more utterly diableresque could be imagined.

Over ourselves had now been developed a great change of feeling. It was
the second day of the miraculous intervention, and we had become imbued
with the meaning of the miracle. It meant the End of the War, and it
meant too a startling Enlightenment. The nations should put an end to
their insane rivalries. The era of a divine economy and brotherhood
was about to dawn upon the puerile egotism of the world. A new insight
deep and revolutionary would adapt the coming centuries to new ends.
So an exultation born of this divination urged us to watch and record
the accuracy of the prediction. We became neutralized in sympathy by
reason of an exorbitant curiosity, and from camp to camp, turning now
to the enemy and now to the friend, we pursued our way, that monstrous
and wonderful day. The dramatic intensity of it--albeit not a word was
spoken in those marshalled millions--surpasses relation. At one moment
we watched a group of Germans starting to their feet with consternation
in their faces, their arms waving in protest, their features wearing
a hundred expressions, terror, maddened wonder, abject subjection,
grimness, a mixed commotion of tempers that rolled their eyes, and
jerked their lips, and contorted their limbs. And then these initial
emotions succumbed to the overpowering sense of torment, and on that
followed their convulsive efforts to rise and flee. And their flight
was impossible; their feet stuck to the earth, where they stood, and
their most violent efforts tumbled them headlong to the ground, and
thus quivering into quietness, like the palpitations of a dying animal,
they lay motionless.

At another moment we gazed upon the French, behind entanglements
of wire, with fierce-looking and harsh iron-toothed fences, near a
millsite where the shattering shells had ploughed their desolating way
through solid masonry, while beneath it the tortuous crawling boyaux
journeyed on for miles. Here was a company of the _chasseurs-a-pieds_,
the bravest of the Frenchmen whose dauntless courage and resolution in
the face of death, like some fatalistic spell, had made them motionless
under fire, and furious, with a whirlwind of roused premonitions of
success, in their lightning charges. I knew of them well. These stem
gallants of the battle field, were crowding the apertures of their
underground burrows, and many had pulled themselves into the remnants
of grass and clover, even sprinkled, as with dashes of blood, with
carmine blossoms, at the lips of their retreats. Their faces expressed,
with a wide difference of interior consciousness, the same amazement
that had clouded the German faces, but here, in the Frenchmen, the
amazement participated with a half revealed penitence, the stricken
sense of sorrow, and of an awakening realization of an oncoming
transformation. Intelligence beautified its misery with the colors
of a mild, yes, an expostulating contrition. I watched them with an
understanding sympathy. The dismay, the terror even, was all there,
and that distinguishable physical suffering that was the prologue
to their mutual surrender to the mission of Peace that the Spirits
brought. But what else was there? Was that invisible multitude of the
dead individualized to each and every man of the vast armies? Did these
men, thus quenched in the waters of a mental and bodily affliction,
hear unspoken words, see the faces of their lost comrades, and did
they feel the piercing ardor of their contact with the revealing dead?
Who shall say? As with the Germans they too had essayed Flight, and
their will was helpless in the strangling grip of the vast prostration.
_There_ stayed the tremendous equipment of the nation, helpless as a
nursery of children.

I spoke to these men, bending over them with Gabrielle, but there was
no recognition. They stared at me as if eyeless, or deprived of vision.
If I shouted in their ears, there was no response. If I tugged at their
limbs they acted as inert figures of clay. And yet there was expression
in their faces. What could it mean? Was all their attention focussed
upon an interior illumination while their outward senses remained
calloused in some impossible apathy?

And then we approached the lines of the stalwart English fighters.
At one point spread a cantonment of infantry, rayed with bands of
artillery, and flanked by the surcharged battalions of horsemen. The
field view was picturesque. It was east of Landrecies where early in
the war the English had met the Germans in withering combat. It was a
shallow sweeping basin-like valley, between two wooded hills, where
the thick set trees, shielded by some whim of accident, yet preserved
their branches and uncrippled growth, and wore the blazonry of
spring. A narrow stream crossed by a hump-backed bridge traversed the
foreground, and beyond the stream eastward rolled a meadowland. Beyond
that somewhere lay the slumbering Germans. But their puissant foes were
slumbering too. The valley stretch was filled, like an overflowing
bowl, with the English troops, and in hedges, in human sheaves, in
rows, as in wind-swept, rain-beaten fields of high grass, the soldiers
tossed their pain-racked bodies. We had become accustomed to the
grotesque predicament and entered the camps, where we were tempted by
the rudeness or wonder of the spectacle, with a stolid confidence. Our
own strength too seemed inexhaustible. We were immune from the wide
gathering Paralysis. Indeed a sort of exultation now surged within us
as we began to see that Quintado's prophecy approached its certain
conclusion, the END of the WAR. It almost filled us with gayety. We
could have shouted a _Te Deum_.

I pointed out to Gabrielle a low farm house upon the northern
hillside, and we made our way there among the masses of men, actually
stepping upon them, as though they clothed the ground with a human
corduroy. We opened the swinging door and walked into a room fitted
out as a headquarters. Its floor was dotted with the recumbent figures
of officers. Those mighty men plotting their strategies had been
overcome by a strategy more sublime, and overthrown, with the benumbing
exhalations of the heavenly armies, sprawled upon the tables, over the
chairs, and the General curled ludicrously upon the floor. I could have
laughed at the humiliation of the scene, except that for an instant I
doubted my senses. It had all the inane inconsequence of a dream.

Behind the front room of the little house was a messroom, and there
the same talismanic somnolence had pitched its occupants on floor and
table. I gathered some untouched food, and Gabrielle and I retreated.
As we emerged and our eyes surveyed the prodigious _debacle_, there
rose from the disordered companies a titanic sigh--like the possible
suspiration of an agonized monster--and visibly those thousands,
weltering together in panic, rose to their feet, and with uplifted
arms, their fingers clutching convulsively at nothing, struggled
mightily to move. It was as Quintado had spoken:

 "_There will be no Flight; the pain will manacle their feet, will
 stifle their voices, will wither their wills--one monstrous Stupor
 will overcome them, and for three days, like the men overcome with
 sleep that watched the Apostle Saint Peter in the prison the armies of
 the Nations will sleep--Ay, and sleep in PAIN._"

       *       *       *       *       *

We were in the environs of Arras, and it was the very evening of the
third day. Our pilgrimage had passed along the zigzagging frontiers
of the marshalled armies, and everywhere it had been the same--the
coma, the recurrent efforts at escape, the nerveless surrender to
imprisonment. And what was happening beyond those frontiers of the
armies we knew nothing of. In the civilian populations of France and of
Germany, and beyond them in the widened circles of national conflict,
in England, in Russia, in Belgium, in Turkey, and the Balkans was
this tremendous visitation recognized? Was the strange metempsychosis
effecting there too its intangible reconciliations? Between the double
cordon of the armies, moving along the broad and narrow corridor
that separated their lines, we were excluded from the world. Around
us lay the sleepers, shuddering in unutterable nightmares, and in
our diversified roadway there was nothing but the ruins of villages,
the shattered walls, the holed ground, the catacombs of trenches,
deflowered woods, the sinuous storm-marked track of war's desolation.
We, Gabrielle and I, alone lived in this camerated solitude. But it was
the third day and then--what? Ah, what indeed?

We had made great strides toward the north, and our rapid march had
been hastened by the use of the horses of the troopers. I was not
unfamiliar--from my experiences in Texas--with the management of
horses and in this living cenotaph wherein we moved the animals alone
seemed living. Everywhere they were found strayed and masterless,
and seemingly confused, foraging as best they might upon the scanty
herbage, in the ruined fields, and probably escaping beyond the army
confines into the surrounding country. I found two most serviceable
mares, and, as Gabrielle was a good _equestrienne_, our journey was
more rapid, while it too grew more and more fabulous, gathering to
itself like a figment of fiction, the unreal, the incredible and in it
rested the _denouement_ of a great mystery. All through the night, the
dazzling luminousness dwelt upon the earth, all the day it was unseen,
though potent, and now the termination of its mission drew near. What
then?

Near Vitry between Arras and Douay is a raised mound, a long softly
swelling protuberance in the undulating landscape, uncrowned by any
structure. The village lies somewhere west of it, and it commands,
almost uninterruptedly, the view running north and south through the
avenue of a slightly winding valley. You can see the village lights
from its summit, and you can hear the church bells there too, when the
wind is west. It was on this modest elevation that we pitched our camp,
when the ghost fog "_lifted_." Almost, as if at the finale of a grand
play, Gabrielle and I waited for that last night. The day died slowly
and it grew colder. Thin clouds thickened into denser volumes and the
sky became overcast. Starlets of snow dropped through the air. A timely
shelter was provided for us in the barracks of an old sheepfold, and
the thoughtful provision of some blankets, taken by me from one of
the camps, kept us warm, and so we watched the fading day. Again, as
always, that outpoured ocean of light, less shimmering than at first,
less moving, less inconstant with variation, as if in the very thought
of its countless denizens the premonition of retreat made a thoughtful
stillness. We did not tremble as at first, at its envelopment, rather
it seemed a benison of blessed promises. It lay over the armies, it
penetrated them, soaking them with the flood of its spiritual waves, an
effluence indescribably, insufferably desolating. To us it was simply
an unnatural splendor.

As the night came on Gabrielle became _distrait_ and restless. I feared
again some nervous breakdown. There was a deeper fear. The fear of
spoliation, her robbery from me by the mystic invaders, the evocation
of her very soul into that retiring vortex of spiritual life. She
should not go. I pressed her closely to me. I kissed her lips, and
muttered, as if in desperation that she should promise me, not to
follow that elusive host. My terror rose because she did not answer. It
almost seemed that she did not hear me. What other voices stole, were
stealing, away her allegiance?

At midnight the glory of the light was supreme. It became a homogeneous
radiance, like the solid glow of the melted metals in the furnaces. An
hour later great billows coursed through it, and the wavering crests
smote each other, and when this collision occurred the light darkened
with broad paths of extinction; an instant after the glooms vanished
in the recurrent glory. It was then that I saw currents in flashing
streams, push upward, and then more, and more, and more, as if, sucked
up into some opening receptacle, the conflux had begun to separate
itself from the earth. Its swift motion begot a sound like the trilling
of innumerable violins, a keen and yet delicate staccato of quick
notes, and suddenly looking over towards the horizon, I realized that
indeed the whole composition, complex, and solution was sinking upward
into the zenith. And Gabrielle?

I caught her in my arms more closely, and in the sepulchral light saw
her face as if filmed already with the pallor of death. A smile gleamed
there too, and a voice spoke in my ears. I looked above me. Again
that haunting form and face of Sebastien Quintado, and with it--O my
God--the entwined wraith of my sister. The dead body was in my arms,
the _creature_ was fleeing beyond my hold. I sprang to my feet, and yet
clinging to the dead figure of Gabrielle, lying on my breast, I raised
an imploring hand, and cried out in the oncoming darkness--fit symbol
of my despair:

"Gabrielle, is this your love? You know that Life is now my prison.
Return! Return!"

If human effort could have torn my own soul from my body, then, there,
I would have wrecked my substance, and flown with her in the cosmic
tide of the disembodied. But human effort waits only on the decrees of
Fate. It was not to be. I still saw with enthralled eyes the rising
figures of Quintado and of Gabrielle. The irretrievable misery of it
half maddened me, and again I cried out, with might and main rending
the silences around me with the fierce invocation: "God! God! Give me
back my sister!"

And then, benumbed with wonder, I saw the shades part, and slowly
descending upon me, the figure of Gabrielle, like some floating dream
of shape, drew near. It stopped above my head, and the face bent
forward, and the lips--those sweet lips of truth and innocence--opened,
and to me came the REVELATION.

"Alfred! Alfred! There can be no separation between loving hearts. I
shall always be with you. But it is appointed that there are times and
seasons. I am called, you remain. Life and Death have no meaning to the
immortal soul. It is in both the same. The vapor that melts in the air
is still there; a moment's colder breath might bring it back again.
Perhaps I shall return, perhaps not, perhaps you may come to me, but
through the eternal series of designs that God weaves with Life and
Death an immortal purpose runs. It is the Salvation of Mankind. Watch
how even now it shall be upon the earth. These spirits, rent from all
they loved, in this ministration of their return, have sanctified the
hearts of men to a new consecration of endless PEACE upon the earth.
The Death of thousands brings with it the irreversible decree of the
Life of Reconciliation."

The voice was heard no more. With the rapture of my love I watched
the last ghostly remnant of that beloved being fade upward, into the
swiftly racing tides, forever out of my sight. On me the cruel burden
of taking up life alone had been insupportably laid. I think that it
was then that I ran forward and gazed around the hillside, looking
towards Vitry, and searched the sky. There above me fled the last
meteoric trails, like phosphorescent skeins. I could see the eclipsed
stars reappear through them. It was--so I recall it--as if a cupola of
shining walls opened in the very centre of the Firmament, and, rushing
through it, a tiny spark. Was that the fleeting soul of Gabrielle?
Strained beyond endurance, agonized by the vehement protest of my
despairing heart, the hope of even then rejoining her roused me to a
sudden murderous resolve. I had seen a shepherd's knife left in the
sheepcote. That should cut the loosening knot of Life. I found it, and
then--there arose somewhere from illimitable distances, and from the
neighborhoods about me, an unearthly muffled groan, like a cry buried
in the ground, and heard in stifled shouts. It froze the blood, for
it half seemed as if the corpses of the slain everywhere about, were
speaking from their graves, the raucous outcry of mutilated bodies. A
moment later I forgot my suicidal intent. The sentence from Isaiah that
Quintado had spoken to Gabrielle, rang in my ears; rang like a trumpet.

 "_And they shall be brought down, and shall speak out of the ground,
 and their speech shall be low out of the dust, and their voice shall
 be, as of one that hath a familiar spirit, out of the ground, and
 their speech shall whisper out of the dust._"

_The great groan was the utterance of the embattled millions, coming to
consciousness._



CHAPTER XI

THE CONCLUSION


The Great War is over. There is peace in Europe. It is now five years
since the armies of the nations succumbed in terror to the incursions
of the Spirits. And there is peace in St. Choiseul. Our old home is
unchanged except that some familiar faces and some familiar voices are
not seen or heard within its walls now--not all. Privat Deschat lives
and Père Grandin and Père Antoine, and Dora is here, and our little
housekeeper Julie. But the _Capitaine_ is dead, and old Hortense,
and--Ah that you know--Gabrielle is gone.

Tonight the wide country-side is wonderful with its snow-blanket
and, with the moon lighting it up, shadows lie on the smooth white
banks like pencilled drawings, flat and black. I have regained
composure--perhaps happiness. At any rate St. Choiseul retains all of
its loveliness, and in the nursery of its beauty why should not the
heart grow calm. Visitors come often to see our house, and to see me.
Privat Deschat says I should lecture about the Visitation. That I would
make a king's ransom.

But that I could not do. It would be just pure profanation. I do not
like to have the visitors. I talk to them in general phrases. Some
understand my reticence, and some are vexed. _Mais pourquoi?_ How can
I go over and over again that miracle I have seen--the great miracle
of the war? _See_, I have written this little book, so that I may no
longer endure this intrusion, and now I have only to ask "Have you read
my book?"

Sometimes it is an Englishman who remonstrates, with:

"But my dear sir; it is the living voice I want, the voice of the man
who witnessed the Descent of the Dead. And then there are impressions
that no book fairly gives--your own exact feeling you know--that is
what I am after. Don't you see? It was a very remarkable circumstance."

Sometimes it is an American:

"Well! Well! That gets ahead of anything I ever knew. Weren't you
shaken up a bit? Strikes me that my life would have been scared out of
my body. Now let us have the whole thing."

These pertinacities and irrelevant curiosities I could not endure,
and Dora urged me to write the book, and so at last it is written,
and the world may now know the very truth of the matter--the truth as
well as I can give it, for even now I sometimes feel as if I had been
the toy of an illusion. And yet see the proofs. Is there not peace?
Did not Gabrielle leave me? Is it not well known that the very day
after the visions disappeared, the stir in the camps began? Is it not
a common attested fact that the droves of soldiers broke out from all
command--indeed that there was no command, the officers with the men
being seized with one irresistible impulse--and streamed in disordered
legions, over the country, seeking, this way and that, their homes,
and hurting no one; all reduced to a childlike weariness of limb and
spirit? And have not the lengthy histories recorded the voluntary
abandonment of the war by the soldiers and their officers, despite
what the bigger men and the so-called rulers wished? And was there not
wholesale rejoicing everywhere, and were not the churches crowded to
the doors, and did not the flocking multitudes improvise services in
the fields, and on the roadways? And then came the signed manifestoes
of the troops, that nothing in heaven, or on the earth, would drive
them back to the trenches--that it was God's will that the carnage and
the wretchedness of the whole business--_l'affaire entière_--should be
put an end to?

And how was it with the governments?

They "surrendered" as the Americans say. They put their wise heads
together and did for the first time what the people said they
should do. And--again the good American slang--"_there was no back
talk_." They did it. And how is it now? Where are the huge military
establishments--where the drill, drill, drill, of uniformed and
gun-carrying men, where the war bureaus and the generals, where that
"power of the sword" that the Teuton blindly worshipped, where the
Gospel of Power? Blotted out, and in its place the sanctification of
Peace. The vision I had on that battlefield, when Gabrielle and I
walked in the midst of the unshriven dead has been realized. _The flags
of the nations wave still, but with them waves the flag of their common
Brotherhood._

Well, I am no great writer. I must not attempt eloquence. Let the
historians and the essayists do that. What I think I saw, I _must_ have
seen, for what I see about me, everyone else sees, and this latter
thing is the child of the former thing.

Reader are you content? The wonderfulness of the repatriation of the
soldiers, as they swept from the battlefields and got back to the
natural tasks of life has been written about, in hundreds of letters
and books. I have given you the entire history of the strange event,
that brought all that about. Again I ask: "Are you content?"

In years I am yet young, but I am old in spirit. The sharp experiences
I have passed through; the transcendent Miracle I have been a part of,
have delivered me from the trivial considerations of life. But too I
have my part in life, and the darling prettiness of St. Choiseul, the
noble friendship of Père Grandin, and the holy consolations of Père
Antoine, the honest service of Julie, are not unconsidered. And--_there
is Dora_.

_Sincèrement. Je vous dit--le monde m'apparaît tres bon._



*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The End: How the Great War Was Stopped - A Novelistic Vagary" ***

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