'Only wind it into a ball,—It will lead you in at heaven's gate,Built in Jerusalem's wall.'
She nodded soberly, yet glowingly, and pondered the words for a moment. Then, 'That's very good,' she said. 'Please say it again.
'Well, by and by,' she continued, touching her finger as if she were half unconsciously enumerating the points of a discourse,—there was something indescribably simpleand downright in her manner of unfolding her experience,—'by and by, somebody gave me a card to the village library, and I began to read. Of course I had always gone to school, but the pieces in the readers didn't interest me particularly, and I hadn't followed them up. A reader isn't a book, anyway; it's a crazy quilt. I guess I shan't ever forget that summer. I couldn't do anything but read. I read stories and poems and books about travel and history and peoples' lives. I had a hiding-place up in the woods, where I used to go and stay for hours, sometimes whole days. My older sister couldn't get anything out of me in the way of housework. It was wonderful.' Her voice rose a little, and something of the old exultation came flooding back into her face. 'Isn't it silly to talk of books as if they were just print and paper, when they are really stars and seas and cities and pictures and people and everything! There was nothing my books didn't give me that summer; and yet, on the other hand, there was nothing they didn't make me want. I wanted to travel, to go everywhere, to see and hear everything; above all, by way of a beginning, I wanted to go to school.
'I was always an impatient child; and it did seem as if I couldn't wait till autumn, when the schools opened. There's a good school at Fieldsborough, over the mountain. I coaxed my father to let me go there; and, after a while, he consented. On the day he wrote to enter my name, I ran up in the woods and lay in a bed of ferns and cried for joy. I hugged every tree that came in my way. I tried to hug the brook. Dear me!' Again she broke off, and the light which had begun to burn in her eyes softened into a smile. 'That's the way I was then. I was so hot-hearted. I didn't understand.'
'But you went?' I inquired, my sympathetic eagerness suddenly breaking bounds. It seemed to me that I couldnot stand it if she had been disappointed. 'Oh! why not?' My voice faltered, for she shook her head.
'My eyes,' she said briefly. 'They had always bothered me; and, before he let me go to school, father had them examined by a city doctor who was boarding in the village. He said I'd surely be blind some day; and that, of course, the more books I read, the sooner the end would come.'
She spoke as if she referred to the wearing out of an umbrella or a pair of shoes; and, fortunately for us both, my distress kept me dumb.
'It was pretty hard at first—a real blow. But I was sixteen years old, and I had suffered once. Then, too, I thought I had to make a choice, and I needed all my wits about me. So I held on to myself, and went off to the woods to think. Should I go to school, or should I keep my eyes as long as I could? As soon as I had put my mind to it, however, I found that there wasn't any real question there. Of course I'd got to keep my eyes, and the school must go. There were all sorts of reasons. I wanted to see the woods and mountains as long as possible. I didn't want to become dependent on any one. My memory wasn't very good; and I knew, most likely, if I went to school and stuffed my mind full that year, I'd soon forget everything, and there I'd be—worse off than ever. So I gave over thinking about it, and just lay in the ferns all the afternoon.
'Maybe you'll hardly believe me when I tell you that I was happy that day. I don't know what it was. Something moved in the treetops and in the shadows. I watched it closely; and, by and by, when I was just on the point of seeing it, I realized that both my eyes were closed. If I hadn't been so surprised by that discovery and so taken up with wondering how I had happened to shut my eyeswithout knowing it, I believe I'd have seen—'
Her voice trailed off into silence; and I presently found myself wondering if she had left that sentence unfinished also without knowing it.
'My father died the next year,' she continued, after a few thoughtful minutes, 'and my sister married, and I came to live in this little house. I had it fixed over to suit me, so that it was as simple and convenient as possible; and I set myself to learn it by heart. I did a lot of my housework after dark. Inside a year, I was so independent that I knew I need never worry about having to get anybody to help me. By taking plenty of time, I managed to learn some books by heart too; and I found it was much more interesting to sit and think about one paragraph for an hour than to read twenty pages. Even a few words are enough. Take, "Be still, and know that I am God"; or, "Acquaint now thyself with Him, and be at peace." There's no end to those sentences.
'Well,'—She touched her third finger, and then, for the first time, she came to a full pause, as if she were not sure about going on. Her face grew shy and reserved and reluctant.
I looked away—not for anything would I have urged her further confidence. But she went on presently. She had committed herself to the stream of this confession, and she would not refuse to be carried by it wherever it might wind.
'After a while I had a lover. He was a man from the city, and I met him in the woods. We were never introduced; and, for a long time, I didn't know anything about him—except that I loved him and he loved me. We couldn't help it, for we felt the same way about thewoods. I had never known any one like him before, and never expected to, because I'm so different from most folks. He made me understand how lonely it is to be different. I—we—'
But, after all, she could not dwell on this experience, and I did not want her to. The poignant beauty of the relation was already sufficiently apparent to my imagination.
'One day he told me that he had a wife at home,' she concluded; 'and I never saw him again. I think it was then that I really knew and understood.'
Knew what? Understood what? She had an air of having said all that was necessary, of having come to the end of her story; and I shrank from putting any crude questions to her. But it seemed to me that, if she did not tell me something more of her secret, I should just miss the most significant revelation I had ever caught a glimpse of.
Perhaps she read my suspense. At any rate, she said presently,—
'It was very simple. If it hadn't been, I couldn't have understood it; for I was never a good hand at trying to reason things out. It was just that I wasn't ever to have anything I wanted. When I once knew and accepted that, I felt as if I'd slipped out into a great, wide, quiet sea.'
This was, to her own mind, so definitely the end of her narrative, that, after sitting a moment in silence, she half rose as if to go into the house and attend to some domestic task. But I put out my hand and held her apron's hem.
'You mean—' I stammered.
Really, she must tell me a little more!
A look of perplexity, almost of distress, came into her tranquil face, and she shook her head.
'I told you I was no hand at working things out,' she said. 'It's better just to know.'
'Please!' I insisted.
It was crass in me; but I felt that something as precious as life itself depended on my grasping the full significance of this story.
Gently, but very resolutely, she stooped and released her apron from my clutch.
'I've some bread in the oven,' she said, and disappeared.
She was gone so long that I had time to do what I would with the fragments of the story which she had so non-committally delivered to me. Since analysis was my way, I should have full scope for it. I sat with my head in my hands, my elbows on my knees. The sunset deepened and glowed around me, but I paid no attention to it. The cloudy abstraction which hovered before my inner vision, and let me grasp here a fringe, there a fold, was all-absorbing to me.
Souls that want greatly, like Hesper, are doomed to failure or disappointment. No earthly having can possibly satisfy them. For what they really want is simply God, and earth represents Him very imperfectly. Hesper had not been happy with the thing she had come nearest having—her mother. Would she have been happy with her lover? Would he have let her love him 'too well'? Books and education and travel are all finite and fragmentary means to an end which never arrives. Only adventurous spirits can escape the torment in them. And, with all her eagerness, Hesper was not adventurous. She was too earnest and humble, she was too direct. Fate had been good to her; and, in giving her nothing, had really given her everything. Everything: that was God. Well, her story had not once referred to Him, but it had been as instinct with Him as a star with light. It was He who had beckoned andlured her by lurking in her three definite interests, and then had shattered them before her in order that she might find Him. She had Him fast at last, and He had her. There was no mistaking the heavenly surrender of her face. I was awed with the apprehension of the passionate seeking and finding between a human soul and its Maker. Did she recognize and acknowledge the situation? Or, here again, did she prefer a blind certainty?
Blind! The word had dogged me for several weeks, but I had evaded it. Now, when it suddenly confronted me, I was all but staggered by it. I think I groaned slightly; I know I pressed my hand closely over my eyes. Then my own action admonished me. Here was I, deliberately shutting myself away from the sight of the outer world in order that I might hold and marshal my thoughts in the presence of reality. The hills and sky are distracting; the whole flying glory of creation is a perpetual challenge and disturbance to the meditative spirit. How supremely excellent it would be if one could only look long and hard and adoringly enough at it to see through it once; and then never see it again, for the rapt contemplation of That which lies behind!
I had come to this point in my revery when Hesper softly returned and stood in the doorway behind me. I looked up at her. She returned my smile, but I thought that her eyes did not quite fix me. Neither did she glance at the sky when I commented on the beauty of the sunset—although she assented to the comment convincingly. As she sat down beside me, her hands and feet made a deft groping. I said nothing; and I have never known whether she or any one else knew that she was blind.
The minister's wife waylaid me, as I passed her house that evening on my way back to my room.
'You've been to see Hesper Sherwood again?' she remarked,with a righteous, tolerant air of ignoring a slight. 'I'm so glad! Her life is so empty that any little attention means riches to her.'
'Empty!'
The expostulation was a mistake, but I really could not help it.
'I have never known such a brimming life,' I added, still more foolishly.
The minister's wife stared at me.
'Why, she has nothing at all,' she said.
'Precisely!' I commented, and went on my way.
ANNEMARMONT, of old the pupil of the nuns, had told her about Andecy: an ancient place, half-manor, half-farm, in the Marne valley, whence you could walk over a wind-swept plain to the battlefields of the Hundred Days.
'The nuns, being exiled, of course can't keep it up any longer, and no one wants to buy. I remember it as a place of heavenly peace—though in my day they used to make the oldest and crossest nun in the order superior at Andecy. However, Madame Françoise de Paule is dead now, and there aren't any nuns anyhow. Do take it, dear. If you want quiet'—Anne Marmont swept her arms out as if to embrace illimitable horizons. 'Nothing but a church-spire or a clump of trees to be seen from edge to edge of the plain. The unstable ocean is nothing to it. And if you want variety, you can walk over to Champaubert and look at the house where Napoleon stayed, the night before the battle. Riddled with bullet-holes it is. There used to be a foolish ancient there who remembered the Hundred Days. He's dead now, I suppose—but then, so is Madame Françoise de Paule, thank Heaven, and her cane, too. I hope they buried the cane. Do take it, darling. It's dirt cheap, and my dear nuns would be so pleased. They'd probably send the money to the new Nicaragua convent.'
And Miss Stanley had gone to Andecy, had been conquered by the insuperable peace of the plain, and had set up her little household. No place that she had ever seen seemed so good to wait in. When Edmund Laye cameback from the Argentine to marry her, she would submit to London; but already she had hopes of enticing him to Andecy for the honeymoon. The chill of the slow spring warmed her northern blood; she liked the reluctance of the season's green, the roaring fire that met her in thesalon, the sharp cold click of her boots on the brick-paved corridor.
She was well cared for: a Protestant and a foreigner, who was, none the less, a mysterious well-wisher of 'ces dames,' she found a shy allegiance springing up about her steps as she traversed the plain. There was always a hotgalettefor her at 'la vieille Andecy,' an obsequious curtsy at Congy château from the housekeeper, who showed with mumbling pride the bed where Henri Quatre had slept; and a welcoming smile from St. Eloi, that holy humorist, in the Champaubert chapel. She sat until twilight, often, on the sinister shore of l'Etang des Loups. Even the legended 'Croix Jeanne,' leaning against its pine thicket, seemed glad of her awkward Protestant dip. It was a good place—and all for the price of a second-rate hotel splotched with Baedekers.
Loneliness, in the sense of removal from the social scene, did not afflict her. She who shrank almost morbidly from human encounters, had no fear of the peasants. Slim, shy, timorous, she felt safe here. Her terrors were all of people and what people could do to her. The plain ignored her self-distrust. Letters came from Edmund, regularly, if you granted the delay of driving to Sézanne to fetch them. The months rounded slowly, punctually, to winter and her marriage. So might a châtelaine have waited, powerless but trusting.
Then, in full summer-time, the lightning struck, choosing again the Montmirail plain, after a hundred years' respite. The first rumors were vague and vivid—all detail and nosubstance, like news in the Middle Ages. There was war, and she scarcely knew more. Jacques or Étienne turned over night into a reservist, and departed; but had it not been for that, she would hardly have known. The two maid-servants whom she had brought with her clamored for Paris; she gave them money and had them driven to Sézanne. After the mobilization they must have got through, for she never heard again. It did not occur to her to strike out, herself, for the capital; for her common sense told her she was better off where she was until Paris had cleared the decks for action. Besides, Paris frightened her. She hated being jostled in streets; she resented even a curious stare.
Old Marie and her husband, with their grandchild, came up from their cottage to the manor to sleep; and with the son and nephew gone, there was nothing for them to do but potter about rheumatically in her behalf. For many days, the click of the rosary was never stilled among the corridors of Andecy.
And still the rumors grew, terror capping terror, until it seemed that even at Andecy blood might rain down at any moment from the arched heaven. At first Miss Stanley forced herself to drive the fat donkey into Sézanne for news—a half-day's trip with only more terror at the end. The feeble crowds beset the bulletins posted outside themairie, and scattered, murmuring their own comments on the laconic messages. Sometimes crones and half-grown children on the edge of the crowd got her to report to them, as she emerged from the denser group in front of the mairie wall. She did so as gently as she could, for they were all involved: fathers, husbands, sweethearts, brothers, sons, were facing the enemy at some point or other that only the War Office knew. If some creatures had hadnothing to give, it was only because the Prussians had taken all they had, in '70.
There was no insane terror; the people were strangely calm; yet they and theirs had been, of all time, the peculiar food of the enemy, and there was pessimism afloat. The plain was as defenseless as they: its mild crops as fore-ordained to mutilation by feet and hoofs and wheels as they to splintering shells.
Miss Stanley, who was so shy of unfamiliar action, felt Sézanne too much for her. She stopped going, after a week, and resigned herself to not knowing. She chafed under the censorship, though she knew that Edmund Laye would tell her that it was well done of the 'Powers that Were' to stanch the leakage of news as you would stanch blood from an artery. The General Staff was better off not drained of its vital facts. To be sure, Miss Stanley never read newspapers. Even less, did she subscribe to them. But she longed now for a neutral America, where the extras came hot and hot, where experts of every kind fought out the battles on the front page, and good journalese stimulated the lax imagination.
Her determination to go no more to Sézanne led her for exercise to other quarters of the plain. She would walk quickly, tensely, for an hour, her eyes fixed on a clump of trees or a church-spire far ahead of her at the end of the unswerving road, until the clump and the spire rose up to match her height and she came to the first whitewashed cottage. Champaubert church was never empty, these days, of worshipers who gazed up at gaudy St. Eloi as if he could help. The crops that waved on the old Montmirail battlefield were thinly harvested by women and an impeding fry of children. The steep little streets of Congy were dirtier than ever, and the ducks and the infantsplashed about more indiscriminately in the common mud-puddles. No more galettes at 'la vieille Andecy': the old woman was prostrated by the loss of her reservist grandson.
Finally she gave up the plain too, and withdrew into Andecy itself, waiting, always waiting, for word of Edmund Laye. There had been a touch of loyalty to him in her staying on without plan of escape. News of him would reach her here sooner than elsewhere. If she left, she would be lost in a maelstrom, and might lose some precious word. Until she heard from Edmund of his sailing, or of a change of plan, she would stay where he thought of her as being. When she heard, she would go.
Some atavistic sense in Miss Stanley caused her to look, all through early August, to the provisioning of the manor—some dim instinct to hoard food, that might have sprung from the heart of a colonial ancestress behind a stockade of logs: premonition against death and savages. She sent old Marie to buy thriftily, making it clear that her fortress was not for herself alone, but for all who might be in need. Together, she and Marie and the granddaughter piled provisions in the empty rooms and the dark cellars; and they lived frugally on milk and eggs andsoupe aux choux.
Sometimes she wondered whether the danger was not a mere fixed idea of the foolish peasants who had all been touched in the wits by '70. True, the able-bodied men were gone, but the reports these people brought her made no sense. Their quality verged on folk-lore. Something gigantic was going on, somewhere, but it had nothing to do with Edmund Laye in the Argentine, or with her at Andecy. Paris in danger? Perhaps: but how to take it on their word? Belgium flowing with blood? Just what did it mean? An aeroplane over Sézanne at dawn? It mustoften have happened,allez! The air was never free, nowadays. The Germans in France? They had been seeing Germans behind every bush for forty years. So she talked with old Marie, scarcely sure whether she or old Marie were the fool.
Since the household no longer drove the fat donkey to Sézanne, none of them knew even what the War Office said—unless what old Séraphine from the next farm reported that her granddaughter had heard in Champaubert from a woman whose married daughter had been to Sézanne two days before, could be called a War Office report. And never, from the first, on the plain of Andecy, had anyone understoodwhy. According to the plain, all things were to be believed of the German Emperor, who was usually drunk; but, on the other hand, who could trust an atheist government? The soil of the Hundred Days had never recovered from Bonapartist tendencies, Miss Stanley had often noted; and even old Marie would sometimes mix up '15 and '70. The White Paper—which Miss Stanley had never heard of—would have been wasted on Champaubert and Montmirail.
Wonder stirred at last even in old Marie's fatalistic mind at the lack of panic in this shy young foreigner—who could not chaffer, who could not bully, who could not endure even the mimic urbanity of Sézanne. Strange that she should be willing to stay quietly pacing up and down the cobbled courtyard of Andecy for sole exercise! Past mid-August, Marie put a vague question.
'When I hear from him, I shall go, Marie,' Miss Stanley answered. 'But I leave everything here to you and Théophile. The British fleet holds the sea, they say, and I shall be better off in England. I shall surely come back when the war is over, and perhaps I shall bring my husband with me.'
Some dim muscular effort deepened the wrinkles in the old woman's face. It was as if a knife had cut them in the living flesh.
'I hope so—if Théophile and I are here. To be sure, you must go where it is your duty. We will keep such of the provisions as can be kept—'
'Keep nothing. It is all for you who have been so kind to me—you and yours. Not a child, not a creature, for a dozen miles about that I would not wish to share with, as you know. But—listen, Marie.' Miss Stanley blushed faintly as she bent her head nearer Marie's good ear.
'Itismy duty. My first duty, that is, must be to my future husband. When he returns from America' (she had long ago learned the futility of distinguishing, for Marie, between 'l'Amérique du nord' and 'l'Amérique du sud'; and was patient with her belief that New York was a suburb of Cayenne) 'he will wish me there. He was to have sailed last month. A letter—a telegram—must have gone astray in the confusion. When I hear, he will doubtless be in England. And when he reached England, I was to go to my friends and be married to him. My heart bleeds for France; but I am not French, and my duty is not here. I am American, you see, dear Marie, and myfiancéis English.'
'Ah!' Marie shook her head. 'My old head is turned with all they tell me, and the buzzing in my bad ear is like cannon. But I had thought that the English, for some reason I do not understand, were fighting with us. They have been telling us for ten years that we do not hate the English—that we love them. And Théophile thought that an English army was against the Germans. But perhaps I am wrong.Monsieur votre fiancéwill not have to fight, then? I congratulate you, mademoiselle.'
'The English are fighting with the French, Marie. Butall Englishmen are not soldiers. Monsieur Laye is not a soldier. He is an engineer.'
'He is perhaps past the age.'
'There is no conscription in England, Marie. No man is a soldier unless he chooses.'
'No service to make?'
'None.'
'C'est beau, ça!All Frenchmen must fight. So England may go to war, and still have men to till the fields. But where do their armies come from?'
'Any man who wishes may go. But none are compelled—except the soldiers by profession. There will be enough, never fear. England will not desert France.'
The old woman nodded. 'I am not afraid of that. And you are not afraid thatmonsieur le fiancéwill fight? I do not understand these things. As Théophile says, what I comprehend I do not hear, and what I hear I do not comprehend. I go to fetch mademoiselle's soup. They are lucky, all the same, to get the crops in, in time of war.' She clattered from the room.
Miss Stanley felt her heart grow heavy, she did not know precisely why. If only word would come! Perhaps she was a fool to stay. There must be trains through to Paris now. Anything to get nearer Edmund, away from this historic, war-bound plain! She crouched by the window to eat hersoupe aux chouxand stale bread. If only some boy would come riding into the courtyard with a letter for her! She had bribed half the urchins who loitered by the mairie in Sézanne to rush to her hot-foot with anything that came.
The lightning that had struck once at Champaubert and Montmirail was to strike again before she heard from Edmund Laye. Suddenly, with no warning, the heavens opened with that reiterant flash. Frightened stragglersover the plain, refugees from the north pushing on from beyond Sézanne in a blind stumbling dash to the southward; rumors that sprang up out of the ground so that she had but to stand still to hear the world move; indescribable distant noises, commotions less seen than sensed, on the far horizon; a casual smudge of aeroplanes on the great blue round of heaven; an earth, for no visible reason, tumultuously vibrating beneath her,—and then, at last, one hot noon, a frightened boy falling exhausted at her feet. She gave him the piece of gold which for many days had been waiting for him in her pocket, and bade him rest where he lay until he was ready for food. Marie and Théophile crouched beside him, listening to his winded babbling.
Armies, armies, fighting, men riding on horses, guns and wounded—like '15, like '70, like Hell. People like themselves leaving their cottages and farms, making, with such portable treasures as they had (food, relics, poultry, babes in arms), for the shelter of a town. No town could avail them, for in the towns sat the officers, and the marketplace offered only a bigger, a more organized destruction. But the hope of shelter would take them far afield. Anything was better than to see sabres splintering your walls, and a greasy flame replacing all that had been ancestral and intimate. Better to die in the open with friends—not smoked out of your own cellar to fall on a bayonet. They knew the secular ways of war: the dwellers on the plain were the foredoomed type of the refugee, the world over. Once in so often men fought, and poor people were homeless. And now none of the 'vieux de la vieille' were there to guard.
These were the visions that assembled in Miss Stanley's brain while Marie, her lean fists clenched, reported the boy's wild talk. The lumps of fat hardened on her congealingsoup; and still her mind went painfully, shuttle-wise, back and forth from her telegram—infinitely delayed, but clearly authentic—to the apocalyptic events surrounding her. Like most Americans perpetually defended by two oceans, Miss Stanley had no conception of invasion as a reality. The insult of an enemy on your own ground was one which she had never steeled herself to meet. There was no weapon in her little arsenal for a literal foe. Her knees trembled under her as she rose to look out of the window, after Marie, spent with eloquence, had left her.
Edmund Laye, by this, was with his regiment—even she might not know where. No point in trying to break through to London: his telegram, dated the day of his arrival in England, was already too old. The letter he promised her would go the way of all the letters he must have written, that she had never had. And she herself was caught: she had waited too long on that predestined plain. The noises she heard seemed rumblings of the earth and cracklings of the inflamed sky. Andecy manor had not yet seen one soldier, unless you reckoned the pilots of those soaring monoplanes. But their hours were numbered: soon—any moment, now—all that hidden rumor would break forth into visible fruit of fighting men—men with rifles, men with lances, men with mitrailleuses or howitzers. She was trapped. To try, even with no luggage, to make the miles to Sézanne, would be not so much to take her life in her hands as to kick it from her. Caught; and her nervous nostrils feigned for her a subtle odor of smoke. She turned from the window and went to the quiet room that had once been the chapel. Out of those windows she could not look, thank Heaven! The life of the Virgin, in villainous stained glass, barred her vision.
She was absolutely alone. Old Marie and Théophile were not people: they were strangers, creatures, animals—what not. She scarcely knew. 'Allies' meant nothing to her at the moment but marching men. Even Edmund—who would be killed unless they hid in caves and let their beauty rot in the dark. Fool that she had been not to go to England while there was time! Fool that she had been to forget that Edmund Laye, landing in England, would be first of all a Territorial—one of the thousands of slim reeds on which Kitchener was so heavily leaning. She had been obsessed with peace: sure that war could not touch her or what was privately, supremely, hers. She was a creature of peace; a little doctrinaire who supposed that, in the inverted moral world in which she walked, right made might. There was a deal of most logical self-pity in her tears. How did any of it concern her, that she should be cooped in a country manor to await horrors from unknown people? Why should Edmund Laye, who had chosen an antipodal career, be dragged back to present himself as a mark for some Prussian shell? The senselessness of it angered her. Nations meant little to her; the cosmos nothing. Alone in the chapel, she treated herself to a vivid personal rage. And still the strange tumult, that was more than half made of vibrations too slow for sound-waves, beat upon her nerves like an injury to the internal ear.
By twilight, the physical need of action came to her. She felt, in the subtler fibres of her mind, that if she stayed longer there half prone in her worm-eaten arm-chair, groveling mentally in this welter of concrete alarms, she should sink into a pit whence reason could not rescue her. She had been so calm in her folly, so lulled by the sense of her sacred detachment from this bloody business, so surethat neutrality protected you from fire and steel even in the thickestmêlée—she could not have been more ridiculous if she had worn a dress cut out of the Stars and Stripes. Now, some obscure inhibition told her, she must act. She must move her hands and feet, limber her cramped muscles, set the blood flowing properly in her veins, make herself physically normal, or her worthless mind would let her go mad. She must not think of death or outrage or torture.
She must forget the things she had heard those first days at Sézanne. She must forget the gossip of Marie and Théophile and Séraphine, inventing, inventing, with a mediæval prolixity and a racial gift for themacabre, on chill evenings by the fire. They had no need of news. They dug up out of the bloody deeps of the past things the like of which she had never expected to hear. She must forget—shut her staring mouth and forget. Whatever visited itself on Andecy must not find a gibbering mistress there. Perhaps, if she pretended that Edmund knew, moment by moment, what she was doing, she could master her faltering flesh and her undisciplined mind. She had lost him forever, but she would try to be some of the things he thought her. Edmund Laye had called her flower-like. Well: flowers were broken, but they did not go mad. She must be—decent.
Her brisk pacing of the chapel did not allay her fears, but it brought back to her a sense of decorum. Her body had never lent itself to an immodest gesture; what—she caught at the notion—could be more immodest than visible fear? So gradually, by artificial means, she brought herself back into some dignity; scolding and shaking herself into a trooper's demeanor. She could not trust her mind, but perhaps she could get her instincts into fighting form. Cautiously she tried them—as you try a crazy foothold to see if it will bear your weight. Her musclesseemed to respond: suppleness, strength, coordination, were reported satisfactory. She thought she could promise not to fall a-shivering again. The noise in her ears faded; the vibrations ceased to rock her nerves. Miss Stanley flung open the chapel door, and walked firmly, ignoring echoes, down the brick-paved corridor to the kitchen.
Marie, Théophile, and little Jeanne watched, in a kind of apathy, the pot on the fire. In the dim corners of the big kitchen, Miss Stanley thought she saw strange figures. Inspection revealed a few frightened women and children from farms that had once been dependencies of Andecy. Here was something to do—more blessed exercise for hands and feet.
'You, Françoise? and the little ones? And you, Mathilde? and the girl? Good! It is time the children had food and went to bed. We must economize candles, so we will all eat here. The dining-room, in half an hour, will be a dormitory. Jeanne shall sleep in my room. Milk and gruel for the little ones, Marie, andsoupe aux chouxfor the rest of us. Milk we will use while we have it. Eggs also. We cannot expect to keep the livestock forever. Bread we have not—until I bake it in my own fashion. It may come to that. Jeanne, you will eat with us older ones. Come and help me make beds for the children. Luckily, there are cots for a whole community. In half an hour'—she took out her watch—'the babies sup and say their prayers. To-morrow, I prepare the chapel and the pupils' old dormitory for wounded. Wounded there will be, if what we hear from Sézanne—though they are all fools in Sézanne, from the fat mayor down—be true. My fiancé is at the front. We wait here for our men, hein?' And she beckoned to Jeanne.
She had made her speech blindly, recklessly planning asshe spoke, thinking that if she could convince her hearers she could perhaps convince herself. She looked for the effect on them when she had done. The speech had worked. If it worked for them, it must work for her, too. It could not be madness, if it had lighted up those sodden faces. And as she looked from one to another, she saw a flicker of pride, of patriotism, reflected in their eyes. Reflected from what? From her, without doubt. There must have been pride in her voice and glance when she spoke of Edmund Laye. Good! That was the line to take. There should be a brave show: she would work her muscles to death to keep it going. Every due emotion should be cultivated in each limb and feature; every surface inch of skin should play its part. The drum and fife should play all the more bravely because her heart was hollow. Perhaps, if she got a fair start, a fine physical impetus toward courage, she could keep it up to the end.
'Come, Jeanne.' She beckoned the child.
The women stirred, and the children huddled against their skirts crept out upon the floor.
'Théophile, is the great gate locked?'
The old man shook his head vaguely. He had gone near to losing his few wits with the rumors from Sézanne which his ears had drunk up so greedily. His shaken mind was wandering windily about in reminiscences of '70 and legends of '15.
'It had best be locked at once. The lantern, Jeanne. Come.'
The child looked at her piteously.
'Oh, very well!' Miss Stanley pushed her gently aside. 'I shall not need it. There is still light enough. Fetch the bowls for the babies, Jeanne. We must all get to bed, and be up with the dawn.'
Alone, she left the house and crossed the innumerablecobblestones of the huge courtyard to the outer gate. She knew the way of the heavy bolts and bars, for she had often escorted Théophile on his rounds before the officialcoucherof the household; but her shaking fingers tapped the rusty iron ineffectually. She loathed her fingers: insubordinate little beasts! She struck her right hand smartly with her left, her left with her right, to punish them with real pain. The fingers steadied; she drove the foolish, antiquated bolts home.
Something white fluttered about her feet in the twilight: the hens had not been shut up. Miss Stanley was very angry, for a moment, with Théophile; then angry with herself for her anger. Théophile was frightened because heknew: '70 had been the moment of his prime. She did not know; she had no right to be frightened. Tales of the Civil War, she remembered now, had always bored her; she had never listened to them. Her duty now was to secure the poultry. They must have eggs while they could, and chicken broth for the children. Mathilde's little girl was a weakling. So she ran hither and yon, trying to drive the silly handful toward the little grange where they were kept. With traditional idiocy, they resisted; and the last stragglers she lifted and imprisoned ruthlessly in her skirt. She hated the creatures; to touch them made her flesh crawl; but at last she got them all in, squawking, and fastened the door upon them. How like the stupid things, to make extra trouble because there was a war! Her anger against them was quite serious, and sank into proper insignificance only when her task was done.
A stone wall, continuing the house wall all the way round, bounded the courtyard; but through the grille she could see rocket-like sputters of flame far off on the horizon, and here and there a patch of light in the sky which meant fires burning steadily beneath. The pounding vibrationshad ceased. There was trouble, a mighty trouble, upon them all; and with the dawn, perhaps, all the things those chattering fools by the fire had spent their phrases on.
Strangest of all to her was the sudden thought that Edmund, separated from her now by the innumerable leagues of destiny, might be, as the crow flies, not so far away. A few fatal miles might be replacing, even now, the friendly, familiar ocean whose division of the lovers had been a mere coquetry of Time. On that thought she must not dwell; besides—irony returned to her at last—did she not gather from those idiots within that all soldiers one ever saw were Germans? One's own armies were routed somewhere; but one encountered, one's self, only the victors, ever. Then the jealous captain to whom she had given the command reminded her that such reflections meant mutiny.
Slim, straight, hollowed out with fear, but walking delicately ahead, she went back to the house and superintended the babies' supper. Then the grown-ups ate—standing about the table as at the Passover, faces half-averted toward the door—and she marshaled them all to their appointed sleeping-places. Marie and Théophile abdicated their dominion with an uncouth relief. If mademoiselle, so shy, so small, could be so sure of what they ought to do—doubtless hers was a great brain in a frail form. After prayers, in which Miss Stanley herself joined, borrowing achapelet, they went off to snore peacefully in the guardianship of that great brain so opportunely discovered.
'You have not an American flag?' old Marie asked, as she shuffled off.
Théophile, past any coherent reflections, was mumbling over the dying fire.
'No, nothing of the sort. I am sorry. I should use it if I had.'
'You could not make one?'
'Impossible, to-night. To-morrow I will see.'
Marie apologetically offered a last suggestion to the great brain. 'A white flag? It would do no harm to have it ready. Françoise swears they are in Sézanne to-night.'
'I will see.Allez vous coucher.'
And Miss Stanley turned on her heel and sought the little room where Jeanne was already restlessly dreaming.
Save the babies, Andecy found no deep sleep that night. The old people napped and woke and napped again, according to their habit. The mothers rose and walked beside their children's cots, then fell limply back and dozed. Miss Stanley slept from sheer exhaustion until an hour before dawn. Then she rose and dressed herself, and, when dressed, sent Jeanne to wake her grandparents. Whatever the day might bring, it should not find them either asleep or fasting. They would eat, if it was to be their last meal.
Alone in her room, by candle-light, Miss Stanley made a white flag out of a linen skirt. She sewed hastily but firmly, that it might be no flimsier than she could help. By the first streaks of daylight, she groped for and found, in a lumber-room, a long stick to fasten it to—probably, it flashed across her, Madam Françoise de Paule's cane, never buried, as Anne Marmont had hoped. When the flag was finished, she loathed it: loathed its symbolism, loathed its uselessness. No: whatever happened, she would have nothing to do with that. What could be more humiliating than to hold up a white flag in vain? Another idea came to her; and while breakfast was preparing and the children were being dressed, she carried it swiftly into execution. Slashing a great cross out of a scarlet cape,she sewed it firmly to the white ground.Thatshe might hang to the dove-cot, after breakfasting.
She carried it martially with her into the great kitchen, and placed it in a corner. The sun itself was hardly up, but the children brought the flag out into the firelight and old Marie was jubilant. The wonderful idea! The great brain of mademoiselle! She fussed almost happily over the simmering skillet of milk. But the great brain was pondering apart in the lessening shadows. Better the American flag, if she could manage it. She would beg an old blue smock of Théophile's, for she had nothing herself. Those wretched stars! It would take her a long morning; and she felt convinced that this day's sun would not rise peacefully to the zenith. This thing she had made was a lie. Incalculable harm could be done by assuming a badge you had no right to—incalculable harm to those who had the right. She was mortally afraid; but she would not do anything in pure panic. That would make it worse for every one in the end.
An American flag: it must be made. How many states were there? She had no notion, but she fancied they were as the sands of the sea. It would take a woman all day to cut out those stars and sew them to a blue field hacked out of Théophile's smock. And what a makeshift banner, in the end! Even if the enemy politely waited for her to finish it, would they not detect it at once? Was not that the kind of thing every German knew better than she—how many little silly stars there were, safe and far away, sending senators to Washington? A sullen tide of mirth was let loose in her far below the surface. Here she was, quivering with terror, with a lot of foolish livestock on her hands—livestock that she could not give up to slaughter as if they had been the sheep that they really were.
Miss Stanley caught up one of the children to her lapand fed it great spoonfuls of warm milk—choking it hopelessly. Luckily the mother was too apathetic to reproach her. She could not even feed a child without wetting it all over! Disgusted, she put the child down again. It whimpered, and the mother, roused, moved over to it. Miss Stanley looked at her cup. Chocolate—no coffee, for the coffee was gone. Coffee might have cleared her brain, but this mess would do nothing for her. Still, she drank it. And gradually, as their hunger was appeased, they crept about her. Even those who did not move their chairs turned and faced her. She could not meet so many eyes. She had nothing to do with them—these tellers of old wives' tales, who expected her to deliver them from the horrors their own lips had fabricated. Why did they stare at her as if she might have an idol's power over events? Whispering, almost inaudibly, their strung and beaded prayers, yet blasphemously looking to her!
The shadows still lessened in the great kitchen. The sun lay in level streaks on the centre of the stone floor, and even the twilight in the corners was big with noon. The women sat in a helpless huddle, not knowing how to go about the abnormal tasks of the abnormal day. The far-off thunders of the plain began again: vibrations as of earthquake first, then explicit sounds, unmistakable and portentous. To-day, you could distinguish among those clamors. Miss Stanley, with the first sounds, expected to have a tiny mob to quell; but their apathy did not leave them. Even the children turned that steady, hypnotized stare on her. And then Jeanne—how could she not have missed Jeanne from the assembly?—ran down the corridor with a sharp clatter.
'They are there! Soldiers—on horseback—at the gate!'
And indeed now, in the sudden tragic hush, Miss Stanleycould hear the faint metallic thrill and tinkle of iron bars, at a distance, struck sharply. Old Théophile roused himself as if by unconscious antediluvian habit, but Marie plucked him back and ran for the flag with the scarlet cloth cross. This she thrust into the American girl's hand. No one else moved, except that Mathilde flung her heavy skirt over her little girl's head.
For one moment, Miss Stanley stood irresolute. She had never dreamed of such a tyranny of irrelevant fact. She must, for life or death,—for honor, at all events,—respond to a situation for which nothing, since her birth, had prepared her. Peace had been to her as air and sunlight—the natural condition of life. This was like being flung into a vacuum; it was death to her whole organism. Yet, somehow, she was still alive.
Irony took her by the throat; and then the thought of Edmund Laye—linked, himself, with events like these, riding or marching beneath just such skies, on just such a planet, under just such a law. Never had there been, really, immunity like that which she had fancied to be the very condition of human existence. It was all human, with a wild inclusiveness that took her breath. And, whatever happened, paralysis like that which even now crept slowly up her limbs, was of the devil. Against that last ignominy she braced herself.
Her muscles responded miraculously to her call for help, and she felt her feet moving across the floor. If feet could move, hands could. She rolled up the little banner and threw it in the very centre of the fire. It occurred to her as a last insult that she did not know enough German even to proclaim her nationality; but she did not falter again. Some residuum of human courage out of the past kept her body loyal—some archaic fashion of the flesh that dominated the newness of the mind. Past generationssquared her shoulders for her, and gave her lips a phrase to practice.
As she passed down the corridor, she flung each door wide open. She paused, a mere fraction of an instant, in the big front door of the house; but from there she could see only a confusion of helmets, and horses nosing at the grille. Almost immediately she passed through the door and walked, hatless, her arms hanging stiffly at her sides, across the innumerable cobblestones, to the gate.
HEwas in the heart of the crowd, in it, and of it—the crowd of late afternoon whose simultaneous movement is the expression of a common wish to cease to be a crowd. His was one of the thousand faces that are almost tragical with weariness, tragical without thought. At five o'clock the sparkle of the morning is forgotten. There is no seeking of hidden treasure in the face opposite, for the face opposite, whosesoever it may be, has become too hatefully intrusive with its own burden to yield any light of recognition.
He was running down the Elevated stairs at the appointed minute, when his foot slipped and he fell. It seemed hardly a second before he was up again, angered by the sudden congestion about him. One white-cheeked woman put her hand to her mouth and gave a cry.
'Let me by!' he exclaimed, straining to break through the fast-pressing barrier. The very throng of which he had been an undistinguishable member had suddenly closed round him, focusing its Argus glance upon him, nearer and nearer, and it was only by extreme struggle that he was able to push away and be free.
He sat down in the train, breathless from his final sprint. He felt as if the incident had roused him from some deep lethargy of which he had hitherto been unaware. With his quickened pulse, his thoughts ran more quickly, more crystally onward. He felt as if a wonderful but unknown piece of luck had befallen him. An ecstatic sense of fortune made him wonder at himself.
'What am I so damned happy about, all of a sudden?' he thought.
He made an indifferent survey of his fellow passengers, and as he noted the familiar heads and shoulders, he had a most curious sensation of utter bliss, and thanked heaven that his lot was not theirs.
'Am I dreaming?' he asked himself. 'Am I about to discover a gold-mine, or what?'
As the train moved out he sank comfortably back into his seat, and with his chin on his hand he took up his accustomed nightly gaze on the outer landscape. His thoughts ran back to the morning. He saw the room where he had gone to wake his children. It was a large, square room, with colored nursery pictures on the walls and a collection of battered toys in the corner. The place was fresh and cool with the sparkling air of early May, and through the open windows he had seen the lawn thick spread with cobwebs. And in each of the three small beds a pretty child of his lay stretched in a childish attitude of sleep. Very tender they looked, very lovable, in their naïve curlings-up, a young, shapely arm flung out in the restlessness of approaching day, lips and nostrils just stirred by the tiny motion of their breathing, and an unbelievable, blossomy hand spread in fairy gesture across a pillow. As he walked through the room, he heard the boy John murmur in his waking dreams. Alicia sat up suddenly, as thin and straight as a new reed in her prim nightgown. Her eyelashes were black and her eyes were heather-purple.
'Father!' she had cried, 'I know what day it is!' And in a moment three small whirlwinds stood up on the floor, dropped their nightgowns, and began to fling their arms and legs into their morning apparel, and there was a great deal of loud conversation full of the presage of festivity. Their father had forgotten that he had a birthday until hiswife and children had recovered it from obscurity and made it a day of days.
As he left the house he had looked at Maggie, his fragile, high-hearted wife, and urged her not to get tired with the nonsense. She had looked back at him with mock haughtiness and warned him not to be late to supper, or make light of feast days. He did not notice her words; he was curiously unable to grow accustomed to her face. The more he saw it, the more unbelievably beautiful, the more eloquent in delicate and gentle meanings, it became to him. She looked into his eyes quickly, with a question for his sudden absent-mindedness.
'Because your face is so heavenly,' he answered reverently.
As the train moved on, he saw that a fresh, green haze had begun to veil and adorn the landscape which through the cold months had been so gaunt and ugly to his daily observation. The hint of fever was in the air—the slight madness that accompanies the pangs of seasonal change.
Love glowed in his heart and touched all the veins of his body with its winelike warmth, its inimitable winelike bouquet. 'Life is sweet! Life is sweet!' his body said, echoing and reëchoing through all the channels of his being. And as the train carried him on through the fields and woods outside the city, something almost like the fervor of genius took hold of him, plucking at his heart for words, crying to him out of the silent fields and woods for words, words!
A slight rain was in the air, darkening the twilight, when he stepped down from the train. He was grateful for the darkness, for the soft air on his face, grateful indeed for the silence. Evening had brought him back to his obscure town, a small station marked by one lantern swung in the stiff grasp of an ancient man. The usual handful of threeor four passengers alighted, and exchanging remarks up and down the village street, quickly disappeared within the generous portals of their hereditary houses. The sound of a door opening and shutting, the pleasant light of lamps, the brief glimpse of a shining supper-table, the departing whistle of the train as it shot away through field and thicket, and the remote town was undisturbed again.
He was grateful indeed for the nightly renascence of his spirit in the clear air and gracious heaven of the place. On this May night of mist and darkness he took up again the thread of his real existence. Only to-night it seemed more golden, more palpitating with hope and mystery—a still moment wherein one could only half distinguish between the future and the past. He was thirty years old to-day, he told himself, and he had a wife and three children. A short swift time it had been! Had he them then, or was it a dream? Where were his footsteps taking him down the empty street? To Babylon, or some lost coast of gods and visions? He turned a familiar corner. A fresh breeze struck his face with a sudden shower of drops, and he saw in the dim light the heads of crocuses shaking in the grass beside the walk. He flung open the door and heard Maggie's voice in the dining-room and the laughter of Alicia.
'Hallo!' he called; and getting no answer, he walked into the dining-room. There was a circle of candles on the table, unlighted as yet, and a bowl of flowers.
Maggie was sitting by the fire, cracking nuts, and telling a story to the children who sat about her in white frocks, the firelight on their faces. The boy John was staring into the flame with the look that made his mother believe that she had given habitation to a poet's soul, and that inspired her to tell the most extravagant tales of wonder thather brain could conjure. Vibrant mystery rang in the low monotony of her voice.
Their father checked himself at the doorway, thinking that he had done violence to the etiquette of birthdays by allowing himself to view the preparation. He laughed and stepped out again.
'Oh, I see you don't want me. I really didn't look at a thing!' And he called back from the stair, 'How soonmayI come?'
He heard nothing but the cracking of nuts, Maggie's enchanting tone, and the short laughter of Alicia.
'O Maggie, dear!' he called again.
No reply,—only the soft continuance of the magic tale in the inner room.
'By the way,'—He stepped down a stair. 'By the way, Maggie, may I see you a second?'
The story had ceased, but Maggie neither answered nor came. He stepped to the dining-room door with a curious sense of apprehension. There was a touch of surprise in his tone.
'Maggie!'
She looked round and on her face was the quick and strange reflection of his bewilderment. Yet she looked beyond him, through him, as if he had not been there. The boy John was still staring into the fire, folded deep in the robe of enthrallment his mother had made. As if from the hushed heart of it, he said,—
'What did you hear, mother?'
She gave him a startled glance, and then she smiled upon him, tenderly, warmly.
'Only the wind outside, dear child. It is a rainy and windy night.'
She looked again toward the door of the room.
'Maggie!'
Such was the sudden torture and fear in his breast, he could scarcely lift his voice. He put one hand to his head and stepped nearer his wife.
As if to find tranquillity in a moment of nervousness, she rested her soft glance on Alicia, the child of delicate hands and delicate thoughts.
Robbie, the importunate youngest, leaned against his mother with heavy and troubled eyes.
'I thought I heard something, mother,' he said.
She bent over him, visibly trembling.
'What did you think it was, darling?' she asked.
'I thought it was the rain hitting the window and trying to get in.'
She laughed and rose uneasily from her chair, and taking the child in her arms, she walked up and down before the friendly fire. For a long time there was no sound in the room except the vague sound of wind, of flame, and of Maggie's footsteps.
Suddenly Robbie gave a little cry from her shoulder.
'Why doesn't father come?'
The man rushed toward his wife to clasp her and the child in his arms, crying,—
'O Maggie!'
She sank to her chair, trembling and stroking the head of her child with fearful compassion.
'O heavy mystery! Is this life,' he cried, 'or death?' He stretched out his arms in vain. The impassable gulf lay between them. Then, as he turned away from her, the walls of the house grew heavy upon him, the fire sent forth a smothering heat, and incomprehensible, unendurable became the spectacle of human grief.
He went toward the door. Hesitating he looked back again. Robbie's face was buried in her breast; her eyes were deep and dark with the half-guessed truth.
There came a sound at the door, that caused Maggie to start piteously. He forgot his desire to be free in his desire to clasp her again and console her.
She left the children and went unhesitating and pale to answer the summons, he hovering beside her. What a flower she looked and how fragilely shaken, like the rain-beaten crocuses in the grass!
As the door opened he saw two men standing in the dark and wet. For a moment neither spoke. One looked at the other, and broke out,—
'You tell her, for God's sake!'
This came to him dimly as if he were a thousand miles away. He heard no more. He had gone out into the wind and rain. It struck his breast again with its incomparable sweetness. He saw dark hills lying before him. Gateways long barred within him rushed open with a sound of singing and triumph. He felt no more sorrow, no more pity,—only incredible freedom and joy. The stone had been rolled away.
'Death is sweet! Death is sweet!' echoed and reëchoed through all the passages of his being. He smelt the icy breath of mountains, and he knew the vast solitude of the plains of the sea. The veins of his body were the great rivers of the earth, sparkling in even splendor. His head was among the stars, he saw the sun and the moon together, and the four seasons were marshaled about him. The clouds of the sky parted and fell away, and across the blue sward of heaven he saw the procession of glowing, gracious figures whose broken shadow is cast with such vague majesty across the face of the earth.
ITwas a warm summer's day in late August. No men were visible in the Belgian hamlet. The women reaped in the fields; the insects hummed in the dry warm air; the house doors stood open. On a bed in a room in one of the cottages lay a woman. Beside her sat a small boy. He was still, but alert. His eyes followed the buzzing flies. With a bit of paper he drove the intruders from the bed. His mother slept. It was evident from the pale, drawn face that she was ill.
Suddenly the dreaming, silent summer day was broken by the sound of clattering hoofs. Some one was riding hurriedly through the town.
The woman moved uneasily. Her eyes opened. She smiled at the little boy.
'What is it, dear?'
The boy went to the window. Women were gathering in the street. He told his mother and hurried from the room. Her eyes grew troubled. In a few minutes the child was back, breathless and excited.
'O, mother, mother, the Germans are coming!'
The woman braced herself against the shock. At first she hardly grasped the news. Then her face whitened, her body quivered and became convulsed. Pain sprang to her eyes, driving out fear; beads of perspiration stood on her forehead; a little animal cry of pain broke from her lips. The boy gazed at her paralyzed, horrified; then he flung himself down beside the bed and seized his mother's hand.
'What is it, mother, what is it?'
The paroxysm of pain passed; the woman's body relaxed, her hand reached for the boy's head and stroked it. 'It's all right, my son.' Then as the pain began again, 'Quick, sonny, bring auntie.'
The boy darted from the room. Auntie was the woman doctor of B. He found her in the Square. The townspeople were wildly excited. The Germans were coming. But the boy thought only of his mother. He tugged at auntie's sleeve. His frenzied efforts at last caught her attention. She saw he was in need and went with him.
Agonizing little moans issued from the house as they entered. In an instant the midwife understood. She wanted to send the boy away, but she must have help. Who was there to fetch and carry? The neighbors, terrified at their danger, were making plans for departure. She let the boy stay.
Through the succeeding hour a white-faced little boy worked manfully. His mother's cries wrung his childish heart. Why did babies come this way? He could not understand. Would she die? Had his birth given such pain? If only she would speak! And once, as if realizing his necessity, his mother did speak.
'It's all right, my son; it will soon be over.'
That message brought comfort; but his heart failed when the end came. He rushed to the window and put his little hands tight over his ears. It was only for a moment. He was needed. His mother's moans had ceased and a baby's cry broke the stillness.
The drama of birth passed, the midwife grew restless. She became conscious of the outer world. There were high excited voices; wagons clattered over stones; moving day had descended on the town. She turned to the window. Neighbors with wheelbarrows and carts piled highwith household possessions hurried by. They beckoned to her.
For a moment the woman hesitated. She looked at the mother on the bed, nestling her babe to her breast; then the panic of the outside world seized her. Quickly she left the room.
The small boy knelt at his mother's bedside, his little face against hers. Softly he kissed the pale cheek. The boy's heart had become a man's. He tried by touch and look to speak his love, his sympathy, his admiration. His mother smiled at him as she soothed the baby, glad to be free from pain. But presently the shouted order of the departing townspeople reached her ears. She stirred uneasily. Fear crept into her eyes. Passionately she strained her little one to her.
'How soon, little son, how soon?'
The lad, absorbed in his mother, had forgotten the Germans. With a start, he realized the danger. His new-born manhood took command. His father was at the front. He must protect his mother and tiny sister. His mother was too ill to move, but they ought to get away. Who had a wagon? He hurried to the window, but already even the stragglers were far down the road. All but three of the horses had been sent to the front. Those three were now out of sight with their overloaded wagons. The boy stood stupefied and helpless. The woman on the bed stirred.
'My son,' she called. 'My son.'
He went to her.
'You must leave me and go on.'
'I can't, mother.'
The woman drew the boy down beside her. She knew the struggle to come. How could she make him understand that his life and the baby's meant more to her thanher own. Lovingly she stroked the soft cheek. It was a grave, determined little face with very steady eyes.
'Son, dear, think of little sister. The Germans won't bother with babies. There isn't any milk. Mother hasn't any for her. You must take baby in your strong little arms and run—run with her right out of this land into Holland.'
But he could not be persuaded. The mother understood that love and a sense of duty held him. She gathered the baby in her arms and tried to rise, but the overtaxed heart failed and she fell back half-fainting. The boy brought water and bathed her head until the tired eyes opened.
'Little son, it will kill mother if you don't go.'
The boy's shoulders shook. He knelt by the bed. A sob broke from him. Then there came the faint far-distant call of the bugle. Frantically the mother gathered up her baby and held it out to the boy.
'For mother's sake, son, for mother.'
In a flash, the boy understood. His mother had risked her life for the tiny sister. She wanted the baby saved more than anything in the world. He dashed the tears from his eyes. He wound his arms about his mother in a long passionate embrace.
'I'll take her, mother; I'll get her there safely.'
The bugle grew louder. Through the open window on the far-distant road could be seen a cloud of dust. There was not a moment to lose. Stooping, the boy caught up the red squirming baby. Very tenderly he placed the little body against his breast and buttoned his coat over his burden.
The sound of marching feet could now be heard. Swiftly he ran to the door. As he reached the threshold he turned. His mother, her eyes shining with love and hope, was wavinga last good-bye. Down the stairs, out the back door, and across the fields sped the child. Over grass and across streams flew the sure little feet. His heart tugged fiercely to go back, but that look in his mother's face sustained him.
He knew the road to Holland: it was straight to the north. But he kept to the fields. He didn't want the baby discovered. Mile after mile, through hour after hour he pushed on, until twilight came. He found a little spring and drank thirstily. Then he moistened the baby's mouth. The little creature was very good. Occasionally she uttered a feeble cry, but most of the time she slept. The boy was intensely weary. His feet ached. He sat down under a great tree and leaned against it. Was it right to keep a baby out all night? Ought he to go to some farmhouse? If he did, would the people take baby away? His mother had said, 'Run straight to Holland.' But Holland was twenty miles away. He opened his coat and looked at the tiny creature. She slept peacefully.
The night was very warm. He decided to remain where he was. It had grown dark. The trees and bushes loomed big. His heart beat quickly. He was glad of the warm, soft, live little creature in his arms. He had come on this journey for his mother, but suddenly his boy's heart opened to the tiny clinging thing at his breast. His little hand stroked the baby tenderly. Then he stooped, and softly his lips touched the red wrinkled face. Presently his little body relaxed and he slept. He had walked eight miles. Through the long night the deep sleep of exhaustion held him. He lay quite motionless, head and shoulders resting against the tree-trunk, and the new-born babe enveloped in the warmth of his body and arms slept also. The feeble cry of the child woke him. The sun was comingover the horizon and the air was alive with the twitter of birds.
At first he thought he was at home and had awakened to a long happy summer's day. Then the fretful little cries brought back memory with a rush. His new-born love flooded him. Tenderly he laid the little sister down. Stretching his stiff and aching body, he hurried for water. Very carefully he put a few drops in the little mouth and wet the baby's lips with his little brown finger. This proved soothing and the cries ceased. The tug of the baby's lips on his finger clutched his heart. The helpless little thing was hungry, and he too was desperately hungry. What should he do? His mother had spoken of milk. He must get milk. Again he gathered up his burden and buttoned his coat. From the rising ground on which he stood he could see a farmhouse with smoke issuing from its chimney. He hurried down to the friendly open door. A kindly woman gave him food. She recognized him as a little refugee bound for Holland. He had some difficulty in concealing the baby, but fortunately she did not cry. The woman saw that he carried something, but when he asked for milk, she concluded he had a pet kitten. He accepted this explanation. Eagerly he took the coveted milk and started on.
But day-old babies do not know how to drink. When he dropped milk into the baby's mouth she choked and sputtered. He had to be content with moistening her mouth and giving her a milk-soaked finger.
Refreshed by sleep and food, the boy set off briskly. Holland did not now seem so far off. If only his mother were safe! Had the Germans been good to her? These thoughts pursued and tormented him. As before, he kept off the beaten track, making his way through open meadows, and patches of trees. But as the day advanced, theheat grew intense. His feet ached, his arms ached, and, worst of all, the baby cried fretfully.
At noon he came to a little brook sheltered by trees. He sat down on the bank and dangled his swollen feet in the cool, fresh stream. But his tiny sister still cried. Suddenly a thought came to him. Placing the baby on his knees he undid the towel that enveloped her. There had been no time for clothes. Then he dipped a dirty pocket handkerchief in the brook and gently sponged the hot, restless little body. Very tenderly he washed the little arms and legs. That successfully accomplished, he turned the tiny creature and bathed the small back. Evidently this was the proper treatment, for the baby grew quiet. His heart swelled with pride. Reverently he wrapped the towel around the naked little one, and administering a few drops of milk, again went on.
All through that long hot afternoon he toiled. His footsteps grew slower and slower; he covered diminishing distances. Frequently he stopped to rest, and now the baby had begun again to cry fitfully. At one time his strength failed. Then he placed the baby under a tree and rising on his knees uttered a prayer:—
'O God, she's such a little thing, help me to get her there.'
Like a benediction came the cool breeze of the sunset hour, bringing renewed strength.
In the afternoon of the following day, a wagon stopped before a Belgian Refugee camp in Holland. Slowly and stiffly a small boy slid to the ground. He had been picked up just over the border by a friendly farmer and driven to camp. He was dirty, dedraggled, and footsore. Very kindly the ladies' committee received him. He was placed at a table and a bowl of hot soup was set before him. Heate awkwardly with his left hand. His right hand held something beneath his coat, which he never for a moment forgot. The women tried to get his story, but he remained strangely silent. His eyes wandered over the room and back to their faces. He seemed to be testing them. Not for an hour, not until there was a faint stirring in his coat, did he disclose his burden. Then, going to her whom he had chosen as most to be trusted, he opened his jacket. In a dirty towel lay a naked, miserably thin, three-days-old baby.
Mutely holding out the forlorn object, the boy begged help. Bit by bit they got his story. Hurriedly a Belgian Refugee mother was sent for. She was told what had happened, and she took the baby to her breast. Jealously the boy stood guard while his tiny sister had her first real meal. But the spark of life was very low.
For two days the camp concentrated its attention on the tiny creature. The boy never left his sister's side. But her ordeal had been too great. It was only a feeble flicker of life at best, and during the third night the little flame went out. The boy was utterly crushed. He had now but one thought—to reach his mother. It was impossible to keep the news from him longer. He would have gone in search. Gently he was told of the skirmish that had destroyed the Belgian hamlet. There were no houses or people in the town that had once been his home.