The old servant met them at the door with uplifted finger. Father Fontanel was sleeping. They did not wish to disturb him but sat down to wait in the anteroom, which seemed to breathe of little tragedies of Saint Pierre. On one side of the room was the door that was never locked; on the other, the entrance to the sleeping-room of the priest. Thus he kept his ear to the city's pulse. Peter Stock drowsed in the suffocating air. Charter's mind slowly revolved and fitted to the great concept.... The woman was drawn to him, and there had been no need of words.... Each moment she was more wonderful and radiant. There had not been a glance, a word, a movement, a moment, a breath, an aspiration, a lift of brow or shoulder or thought, that had not more dearly charmed his conception of her triune beauty.
The day had left in his brain a crowd of unassimilated actions, and into this formless company came the thrilling mystery of his last moment with her—a shining cord of happiness for the labyrinth of the late days.... There had been so muchbeyond wordsbetween them—an overtone of singing. He had seen in her eyes all the eager treasure of brimming womanhood, rising to burst the bonds of repression for the first time. Dawn was a far voyage, but he settled himself to wait with the will of a weathered voyager whose heart feels the hungry arms upon the waiting shore.
The volcano lost its monstrous rhythm again, and was ripping forth irregular crashes. Father Fontanel awoke and theRue Victor Hugobecame alive with voices, aroused by the rattling in the throat of the mountain. Charter went into the room where the priest lay.
"Come, Father," he said, "We have waited long for you. I want you to go out to the ship for the rest of the night. You must breathe true air for an hour. Do this for me."
"Ah, my son!" the old man murmured, drawing Charter's head down to his breast. "My mind was clouded, and I could not see you clearly in the travail of yesterday."
"Many of your people are in Fort de France, Father," the young man added. "They will be glad to see you. Then you may come back here—even to-morrow, if you are stronger. Besides, the stalwart friend who has done so much for your people, wants you one night on his ship."
"Yes, my son.... I was waiting for you. I shall be glad to breathe the dawn at sea."
Peter Stock pressed Charter's hand as they led Father Fontanel forth. The mountain was quieter again. The bells of Saint Pierre rang the hour of two.... The three reached the Sugar Landing where theSaragossa'slaunch lay.
"Hello, Ernst," Stock called to his man. "I've kept you waiting long, but top-speed to the ship—deep water and ocean air!"
The launch sped across the smoky harbor, riding down little isles of flotsam, dead birds from the sky and nameless mysteries from the roiled bed of the harbor. The wind was hot in their faces, like a stoke-hold blast. Often they heard a hissing in the water, like the sound of a wet finger touching hot iron. A burning cinder fell upon Charter's hand, a messenger from Pelée. He could not feel fire that night.... He was living over that last moment with her—gazing into her eyes as one who seeks to penetrate the mystery of creation, as if it were any clearer in a woman's eyes than in a Nile night, a Venetian song, or in the flow of gasolene to the spark, which filled the contemplation of Ernst.... He remembered the swift intaking of her breath at the last, and knew that she was close to tears.
The launch was swinging around to theSaragossa'sladder. Father Fontanel had not spoken. Wherever the ship-lights fell, the sheeting of ash could be seen—upon mast and railing and plates. They helped the good man up the ladder, and Stock ordered Laird, his first officer, to steam out of the blizzard, a dozen miles if necessary. The anchor chain began to grind at once, and three minutes later, theSaragossa'sscrews were kicking the ugly harbor tide. Charter watched, strangely disconcerted, until only the dull red of Pelée pierced the thick veil behind. A star, and another, pricked the blue vault ahead, and the air blew in fragrant as wine from the rolling Caribbean, but each moment was an arraignment now.... He wanted none of the clean sea; and the mere fact that he would not rouse her before daylight, even if he were at thePalms, did not lessen the savage pressure of the time.... Father Fontanel would not sleep, but moved among his people on deck. The natives refused to stay below, now that the defiled harbor was behind. There was a humming of old French lullabies to the little ones. Cool air had brought back the songs of peace and summer to the lowly hearts. It was an hour before dawn, and theSaragossawas already putting back toward the roadstead, when Father Fontanel called Charter suddenly.
"Make haste and go to the woman, my son," he said strangely.
Charter could not answer. The priest had spoken little more than this, since they led him from the parish-house. TheSaragossacrept into the edge of the smoke. The gray ghost of morning was stealing into the hateful haze. They found anchorage. The launch was in readiness below. It was not yet six. Ernst was off duty, and another sailor,—one whose room was prepared in the dim pavilion—waited at the tiller. Charter waved at the pale mute face of the priest, leaning overside, and the fog rushed in between.
The launch gained the inner harbor, and the white ships at anchor were vague as phantoms in the vapor—French steamers, Italian barques, and the smaller West Indian craft—all with their work to do and their way to win. Charter heard one officer shout to another a whimsical inquiry—if Saint Pierre were in her usual place or had switched sites with hell. The day was clearing rapidly, however, and before the launch reached shore, the haze so lifted that Pelée could be seen, floating a pennant of black out to sea. In the city, a large frame warehouse was ablaze. The tinder-dry structure was being destroyed with almost explosive speed.
A blistering heat rushed down from the expiring building to the edge of the land. Crowds watched the destruction. Many of the people were in holiday attire. This was the Day of Ascension, and Saint Pierre would shortly pray and praise at the cathedral; and atNotre Dame des Lourdes, where Father Fontanel would be missed quite the same as if they had taken the figure of Saint Anne from the altar.... Even now the cathedral bells were calling, and there was low laughter from a group of Creole maidens. Was it not good to live, since the sun was trying to shine again and the mountain did not answer the ringing of the bells? It was true that Pelée poured forth a black streamer with lightning in its folds; true that the people trod upon the hot, gray dust of the volcano's waste; that the heat was such as no man had ever felt before, and many sat in misery upon the ground; true, indeed, that voices of hysteria came from the hovels, and the weaker were dying too swiftly for the priests to attend them all—but the gala-spirit was not dead. The bells were calling, the mountain was still, bright dresses were abroad—for the torrid children of France must laugh.
A carriage was not procurable, so Charter fell in with the procession on the way to the cathedral. Many of the natives nodded to him; and may have wondered at the color in his skin, the fire in his eyes, and the glad ring of his voice. Standing for a moment before the church, he hurled over the little gathering the germ of flight; told them of the food and shelter in Fort de France, begged them laughingly to take their women and children out of this killing air.... It was nearly eight—eight on the morning of Ascension Day.... She would be ready. He hoped to find a carriage at the hotel.... At nine they would be in the launch again, speeding out toward theSaragossa.
Twenty times a minute she recurred to him as he walked. There was no waning nor wearing—save a wearing brighter, perhaps—of the images she had put in his mind. Palaces, gardens, treasure-houses—with the turn of every thought, new riches of possibility identified with her, were revealed. Thoughts of her, winged in and out his mind like bright birds that had a cote within—until he was lifted to heights of gladness which seemed to shatter the dome of human limitations—and leave him crown and shoulders emerged into illimitable ether.
The road up theMornestretched blinding white before him. The sun was braver. Panting and spent not a little, he strode upward through the vicious pressure of heat, holding his helmet free from his head, that air might circulate under the rim. Upon the crest of theMorne, he perceived the gables of the old plantation-house, above the palms and mangoes, strangely yellowed in the ashen haze.
Pelée roared. Sullen and dreadful out of the silence voiced the Monster roused to his labor afresh. Charter darted a glance back at the darkening North, and began to run.... The crisis was not past; the holiday darkened. The ship would fill with refugees now, and the road to Fort de France turn black with flight. These were his thoughts as he ran.
The lights of the day burned out one by one. The crust of the earth stretched to a cracking tension. The air was beetling with strange concussions. In the clutch of realization, Charter turned one shining look toward the woman hurrying forward on the veranda of thePalms.... Detonations accumulated into the crash of a thousand navies.
She halted, her eyes fascinated, lost in the North. He caught her up like a child. Across the lawn, through the roaring black, he bore her, brushing her fingers and her fallen hair from his eyes. He reached the curbing of the old well with his burden, crawled over and caught the rusty chain. Incandescent tongues lapped the cistern's raised coping. There was a scream as from the souls of Night and Storm and Chaos triumphant—a mighty planetary madness—shocking magnitudes from the very core of sound! Air was sucked from the vault, from their ears and lungs by the shrieking vacuums, burned through the cushion of atmosphere by the league-long lanes of electric fire.... Running streams of red dust filtered down.
It was eight on the morning of Ascension Day.La Montagne Peléewas giving birth to death.
Peter Stock stared long into the faint film of smoke, until the launch bearing Charter ashore was lost in the shipping. The pale, winding sheet was unwrapped from the beauty of morning. There was an edging of rose and gold on the far dim hills. His eyes smarted from weariness, but his mind, like an automatic thing, swept around the great circle—from the ship to the city, to the plantation-house on theMorneand back to the ship again. He was sick of the shore, disgusted with people who would listen to M. Mondet and not to him. Miss Wyndam had refused him so often, that he was half afraid Charter would not be successful, but he was willing to wait two hours longer, for he liked the young woman immensely, liked her breeding and her brain.... He joined Laird, his first officer, on the bridge. The latter was scrutinizing through the glass a blotch of smoke on the city-front.
"What do you make of it, sir?" Laird asked.
The lenses brought to the owner a nucleus of red in the black bank. The rest of Saint Pierre was a gray, doll-settlement, set in the shelter of little gray hills. He could see the riven and castellated crest of Pelée weaving his black ribbon. It was all small, silent, and unearthly.
"That's a fire on the water-front," he said.
"That's what I made of it, sir," Laird responded.
Shortly afterward the trumpetings of the Monster began. The harbor grew yellowish-black. The shore crawled deeper into the shroud, and was lost altogether. The water took on a foul look, as if the bed of the sea were churned with some beastly passion. The anchor-chain grew taught, mysteriously strained, and banged a tattoo against its steel-bound eye. Blue Peter drooping at the foremast, livened suddenly into a spasm of writhing, like a hooked lizard. The black, quivering columns of smoke from the funnels were fanned down upon the deck, adding soot to the white smear from the volcano.
"Better get the natives below—squall coming!" Peter Stock said, in a low tone to Laird, and noted upon the quiet, serious face of this officer, as he obeyed, an expression quite new. It was the look of a man who sees the end, and does not wince.
The women wailed, as the sailors hurried them below and sealed the ways after them. A deep-sea language passed over the ship. There were running feet, bells below, muffled cries from the native-women, quick oaths from the sailors; and then, Peter Stock felt the iron-fingers of fear about his heart—not for himself and his ship eight miles at sea, but for his good young friend and for the woman who had refused to come.
A hot, fetid breath charged the air. The ship rose and settled like a feather in a breeze; in a queer light way, as though its element were heavily charged with air, the water danced, alive with the yeast of worlds. The disordered sky intoned violence. Pelée had set the foundations to trembling. A step upon the bridge-ladder caused the American to turn with a start. Father Fontanel was coming up.
"Oh, this won't do at all," Peter Stock cried in French. "We're going to catch hell up here, and you don't belong."
He dashed down the ladder, and led the old man swiftly back to the cabin, where he rushed to the ports and screwed them tight with lightning fingers, led the priest to a chair and locked it in its socket. Father Fontanel spoke for the first time.
"It's very good of you," he said dully, "but what of my people?"
Stock did not answer, but rushed forth. Six feet from the cabin-door, he met the fiery van of the cataclysm, and found strength to battle his way back into the cabin.... From out the shoreward darkness thundered vibrations which rendered soundless all that had passed before. Comets flashed by the port-holes. TheSaragossashuddered and fell to her starboard side.
Eight bells had just sounded when the great thunder rocked over the gray-black harbor, and the molten vitals of the Monster, wrapped in a black cloud, filled the heavens, gathered and plunged down upon the city and the sea. As for the ship, eight miles from the shore and twelve miles from the craters, she seemed to have fallen from a habitable planet into the firemist of an unfinished world. She heeled over like a biscuit-tin, dipping her bridge and gunwales. She was deluged by blasts of steam and molten stone. Her anchor-chain gave way, and, burning in a dozen places, she was sucked inshore.
Laird was on the bridge. Plass, the second officer, on his way to the bridge, to relieve or assist Laird as the bell struck, was felled at the door of the chart-room. A sailor trying to drag the body of Plass to shelter, was overpowered by the blizzard of steam, gas, and molten stone, falling across the body of his officer. The ship was rolling like a runaway-buoy.
Peter Stock had been hurled across the cabin, but clutched the chair in which the priest was sitting, and clung to an arm of it, pinning the other to his seat. Several moments may have passed before he regained his feet. Though badly burned, he felt pain only in his throat and lungs, from that awful, outer breath as he regained the cabin. Firebrands still screamed into the sea outside, but theSaragossawas steadying a trifle, and vague day returned. Stock was first to reach the deck, the woodwork of which was burning everywhere. He tried to shout, but his throat was closed by the hot dust. The body of a man was hanging over the railing of the bridge. It was Laird, with his face burned away. There were others fallen.
The shock of his burns and the terrible outer heat was beginning to overpower the commander when Pugh, the third officer, untouched by fire, appeared from below. In a horrid, tongueless way, Stock fired the other to act, and staggered back into the cabin. Pugh shrieked up the hands, and set to the fires and the ship's course. Out of two officers and three sailors on deck when Pelée struck, none had lived. Peter Stock owed his life to the mute and momentary appearance of Father Fontanel.
The screaming of the native-women reached his ears from the hold. Father Fontanel stared at him with the most pitiful eyes ever seen in child or woman. Black clouds were rolling out to sea. Deep thunder of a righteous source answered Pelée's lamentations. The sailors were fighting fire and carrying the dead. The thin shaken voice of Pugh came from the bridge. The engines were throbbing. Macready, Stock's personal servant, entered with a blast of heat.
"Thank God, you're alive, sir!" he said, with the little roll of Ireland on his tongue. "I was below, where better men were not.... Eight miles at sea—the long-armed divil av a mountain—what must the infightin' have been!"
Peter Stock beckoned him close and called huskily for lint and oils. Macready was back in a moment from the store-room, removed the cracked and twisted boots; cleansed the ashes from the face and ears of his chief; administered stimulant and talked incessantly.
"It's rainin' evenchooalities out.... Ha, thim burns is not so bad, though your shoes were pretty thin, an' the deck's smeared with red-hot paste. It's no bit of a geyser in a dirt-pile, sure, can tell Misther Stock whin to come and whin to go."
The cabin filled with the odor of burnt flesh as he stripped the coat from Stock's shoulder, where an incandescent pebble had fallen and burned through the cloth. Ointments and bandages were applied before the owner said:
"We must be getting pretty close in the harbor?"
This corked Macready's effervescence. Pugh had been putting theSaragossaout to sea, since he assumed control. It hadn't occurred to the little Irishman that Mr. Stock would put back into the harbor of an island freshly-exploded.
"I dunno, sir. It's hard to see for the rain."
"Go to the door and find out".
The rain fell in sheets. Big seas were driving past, and the steady beat of the engines was audible. There was no smoke, no familiar shadow of hills, but a leaden tumult of sky, and the rollers of open sea beaten by a cloudburst. The commander did not need to be told. It all came back to him—Laird's body hanging over the railing of the bridge; Plass down; Pugh, a new man, in command.
"Up to the bridge, Macready, and tell Pugh for me not to be in such a damned hurry—running away from a stricken town. Tell him to put back in the roadstead where we belong."
Macready was gone several moments, and reported, "Pugh says we're short-handed; that the ship's badly-charred, but worth savin'; in short, sir, that he's not takin' orders from no valet—meanin' me."
Nature was righting herself in the brain of the American, but the problems of time and space still were mountains to him. Macready saw the gray eye harden, and knew what the next words would be before they were spoken.
"Bring Pugh here!"
It was rather a sweet duty for Macready, whose colors had been lowered by the untried officer. The latter was in a funk, if ever a seaman had such a seizure. Pugh gave an order to the man at the wheel and followed the Irishman below, where he encountered the gray eye, and felt Macready behind him at the door.
"Turn back to harbor at once—full speed!"
Pugh hesitated, his small black eyes burning with terror.
"Turn back, I say! Get to hell out of here!"
"But a firefly couldn't live in there, sir——"
"Call two sailors, Macready!" Stock commanded, and when they came, added, "Put him in irons, you men!... Macready, help me to the bridge."
It was after eleven when theSaragossaregained the harbor. The terrific cloudburst had spent itself. Out from the land rolled an unctuous smudge, which bore suggestions of the heinous impartiality of a great conflagration. The harbor was cluttered with wreckage, a doom picture for the eyes of the seaman. Dimly, fitfully, through the pall, they began to see the ghosts of the shipping—black hulls without helm or hope. TheSaragossavented a deep-toned roar, but no answer was returned, save a wailing echo—not a voice from the wreckage, not even the scream of a gull. A sailor heaved the lead, and the scathed steamer bore into the rising heat.
Ahead was emptiness. Peter Stock, reclining upon the bridge, and suffering martyrdoms from his burns, gave up his last hope that the guns of Pelée had been turned straight seaward, sparing the city or a portion of it. Rough winds tunnelling through the smoke revealed a hint of hills shorn of Saint Pierre. A cry was wrung from the American's breast, and Macready hastened to his side with a glass of spirits.
"I want a boat made ready—food, medicines, bandages, two or three hundred pounds of ice covered with blankets and a tarpaulin," Stock said. "You are to take a couple of men and get in there. Get the steward started fitting the boat, and see that the natives are kept a bit quieter. Make 'em see the other side—if they hadn't come aboard."
"Mother av God," Macready muttered as he went about these affairs. "I could bake a potatie here, sure, in the holla av my hand. What, thin, must it be in that pit of destruction?" He feared Pelée less, however, than the gray eye, and the fate of Pugh.
The launch had not returned from taking Charter ashore, so one of the life-boats was put into commission. The German, Ernst, and another sailor of Macready's choice, were shortly ready to set out.
"You know why I'm not with you, men," the commander told them at the last moment. "It isn't that I couldn't stand it in the boat, but there's a trip ashore for you to make, and there's no walking for me on these puff-balls for weeks to come. Macready, you know Mr. Charter. He had time to reach thePalmsbefore hell broke loose. I want you to go there and bring him back alive—and a woman who'll be with him! Also report to me regarding conditions in the city. That's all. Lower away."
A half-hour later, the little boat was forced to return to the ship. The sailor was whimpering at the oars; the lips of Ernst were twisted in agony; while Macready was silent, sign enough of his failing endurance. Human vitality could not withstand the withering draughts of heat. At noon, another amazing downpour of rain came to the aid of Peter Stock who, granting that the little party had encountered conditions which flesh could not conquer, had, nevertheless, been chafing furiously. At two in the afternoon, a second start was made.
Deeper and deeper in toward the gray low beach the little boat was pulled, its occupants the first to look upon the heaped and over-running measure of Saint Pierre's destruction. The three took turns at the oars. Fear and suffering brought out a strange feminine quality in the sailor, not of cowardice; rather he seemed beset by visionary terrors. Rare running-mates were Macready and Ernst, odd as two white men can be, but matched to a hair in courage. The German bent to his work, a grim stolid mechanism. Macready jerked at the oars, and found breath and energy remaining to assail the world, the flesh and the devil, which was Pugh, with his barbed and invariably glib tongue. How many times the blue eyes of the German rolled back under the lids, and his grip relaxed upon the oars; how many times the whipping tongue of Macready mumbled, forgetting its object, while his senses reeled against the burning walls of his brain; how many times the sailor hoarsely commanded them to look through the fog for figures which alone he saw—only God and these knew. But the little boat held its prow to the desolate shore.
They gained the Sugar Landing at last, or the place where it had been, and strange sounds came from the lips of Ernst, as he pointed to the hulk of theSaragossa'slaunch, burned to the water-line. It had been in his care steadily until its last trip. Gray-covered heaps were sprawled upon the shore, some half-covered by the incoming tide, others entirely awash. Pelée had brought down the city; and the fire-tiger had rushed in at the kill. He was hissing and crunching still, under the ruins. The sailor moaned and covered his face.
"There's nothing alive!" he repeated with dreadful stress.
"What else would you look for—here at the very fut av the mountain?" Macready demanded. "Wait till we get over the hill, and you'll hear the birds singin' an' the naygurs laughin' in the fields an' wonderin' why the milkman don't come."
The market-place near the shore was filled with the stones from the surrounding buildings, hurled there as dice from a box. Smoke and steam oozed from every ruin. The silence was awful as the sight of death. The streets of the city were effaced. Saint Pierre had been felled and altered, as the Sioux women once altered the corpses of the slain whites. There was no discernible way up theMorne. Breathing piles of debris barred every passage. Under one of these, a clock suddenly struck three—an irreverent survival carrying on its shocking business beneath the collapsed walls of a burned and beaten city, frightening them hideously. It would have been impossible to traverseRue Victor Hugohad the way been clear, since a hundred feet from the shore or less, they encountered a zone of unendurable heat.
"I could die happy holdin' Pugh here," Macready gasped. "Do you think hell is worse than this, Ernst, barrin' the effrontery of the question? Ha—don't step there!"
He yanked the German away from a puddle of uncongealed stuff, hot as running metal.... The sailor screamed. He had stepped upon what seemed to be an ash-covered stone. It was soft, springy, and vented a wheezy sigh. Rain and rock-dust had smeared all things alike in this gray roasting shambles.
"Won't somebody say something?" the sailor cried in a momentary silence.
"It looks like rain, ma'm," Macready offered.
They had been forced back into the boat, and were skirting the shore around by theMorne. Saint Pierre had rushed to the sea—at the last. The volcano had found the women with the children, as all manner of visitations find them—and the men a little apart. Pelée had not faltered. There was nothing to do by the way, no lips to moisten, no voice of pain to hush, no dying thing to ease. There was not an insect-murmur in the air, nor a crawling thing upon the beach, not a moving wing in the hot, gray sky—a necropolis, shore of death absolute.
They climbed the cliffs to the north of thePalms, glanced down through the smoke at the city—sunken like a toothless mouth. Even theMornewas a husk divested of its fruit. Pelée had cut the cane-fields, sucked the juices and left the blasted stalks in his paste. The old plantation-house pushed forth no shadow of an outline. It might be felled or lost in the smoky distance. The nearer landmarks were gone—homes that had brightened the heights in their day, whose windows had flashed the rays of the afternoon sun as it rode down oversea—levelled like the fields of cane. Pelée had swept far and left only his shroud, and the heaps upon the way, to show that the old sea-road, so white, so beautiful, had been the haunt of man. The mangoes had lost their vesture; the palms were gnarled and naked fingers pointing to the pitiless sky.
Macready had known this highway in the mornings, when joy was not dead, when the songs of the toilers and the laughter of children glorified the fields; in the white moonlight, when the sea-winds met and mingled with the spice from tropic hills, and the fragrance from the jasmine and rose-gardens.... He stared ahead now, wetting his puffed and tortured lips. They had passed the radius of terrific heat, but he was thinking of the waiting gray eye, when he returned without the man and the woman.
"It'll be back to the bunkers for Dinny," he muttered.... "Ernst, ye goat, you're intertainin', you're loquenchus."
They stepped forward swiftly now. There was not a hope that the mountain had shown mercy at the journey's end.... They would find whom they sought down like the others, and the great house about them. Still, there was a vague God to whom Macready had prayed once or twice in his life—a God who had the power to strike blasphemers dead, to still tempests, light volcanic fuses and fell Babylons. To this God he muttered a prayer now....
The ruins of the plantation house wavered forth from the fog. The sailor plucked at Macready's sleeve, and Ernst mumbled thickly that they might as well get back aboard.... But the Irishman stood forth from them; and in that smoky gloom, desolate as the first day, before Light was turned upon the Formless Void, bayed the names of Charter and the woman.
Then the answer:
"In the cistern—in the old cistern!"
Macready made a mental appointment with his God, and yelled presently: "Didn't I tell you 'twould take more than the sphit of a mountain to singe the hair of him?... Are you hurted, sir?"
Charter roused, after an unknown time, to the realization that the woman was in his arms; later, that he was sitting upon a slimy stone in a subterranean cell filled with steam. The slab of stone held him free from the four or five inches of almost scalding water on the floor of the cistern. The vault was square, and luckily much larger than its circular orifice; so that back in the corner they were free from the volcanic discharge which had showered down through the mouth of the pit—the cause of the heated water and the released vapors. An earthquake years before had loosened the stone-lining of the vault. With every shudder of the earth now, under the wrath of Pelée, the walls, still upstanding, trembled.
Charter was given much time to observe these matters; and to reckon with mere surface disorders, such as a bleeding right hand, lacerated from the rusty chain; a torn shoulder, and a variety of burns which he promptly decided must be inconsequential, since they stung so in the hot vapor. Then, someone with a powerful arm was knocking out three-cushion caroms in his brain-pan. This spoiled good thinking results. It is true, he did not grasp the points of the position, with the remotest trace of the sequence in which they are put down. Indeed, his mind, emerging from the depths into which the shock of eruption had felled it, held alone with any persistence the all-enfolding miracle that the woman was in his arms....
Presently, his brain began to sort the side-issues. Her head had lain, upon his shoulder during that precipitous plunge, and her hair had fallen when he first caught her up. He remembered it blowing and covering his eyes in a manner of playful endearment quite impossible for an outsider to conceive. Meanwhile, the blast from Pelée was upon the city; traversing the six miles from the crater to theMorne, faster than its own sound; six miles in little more than the time it had taken him to cross the lawn from the veranda to the cistern. A second or two had saved them.
The fire had touched her hair.... Her bare arm brushed his cheek, and his whole nature suddenly crawled with the fear that she might not wake. His head dropped to her breast, and he heard her heart, light and steadily on its way. His eyes were straining through the darkness into her face, but he could not be sure it was without burns. There was cumulative harshness in the fear that her face, so fragile, of purest line, should meet the coarse element, burning dirt. His hands were not free, but he touched her eyes, and knew that they were whole.... She sighed, stirred and winced a little—breath of consciousness returning. Then he heard:
"What is this dripping darkness?"
The words were slowly uttered, and the tones soft and vague, as from one dreaming, or very close to the Gates.... In a great dark room somewhere, in a past life, perhaps, he had heard such a voice from someone lying in the shadows.
"We are in the old cistern—you and I——"
"I—knew—you—would—come—for—me."
It was murmured as from someone very weary, very happy—as a child falling asleep after a dream, murmurs with a little contented nestle under the mother-wing.
"But how could you know?" he whispered quickly. "My heart was too full—to take a mere mountain seriously—until the last minute——"
"Skylarks—always—know!"
Torrents of rain were descending. Pelée roared with the after-pangs. Though cooled and replenished by floods of black rain, the rising water in the cistern was still hot.
"It was always hard for me to call you Wyndam——"
"Harder to hear, Quentin Charter...."
"But are you sure you are not badly burned?" he asked for the tenth time.
"I don't feel badly burned.... I was watching for you from the window in my room. I didn't like the way my hair looked, and was changing it when I saw you coming—and the Black behind you. I tried to fasten it with one pin, as I ran downstairs.... It fell. It is very thick and kept the fire from me——"
"From us." He would have preferred his share of the red dust.
She shivered contentedly. "What little is burned will grow again. Red mops invariably do."
" ... And to think I should have found the old cistern in the night!... One night when I could not sleep, I walked out here and explored. The idea came then——"
"I watched you from the upper window.... The shutter wiggled as you went away. It was the next day that the 'fraids got me. You rushed off to the mountain."
Often they verged like this beyond the borders of rational quotation. One hears only the voices, not the words often, from Rapture's Roadway.
"Just as I begin to think of something Pelée erupts all over again in my skull——"
"I didn't know men understood headache matters.... Don't you think—don't you really think—I might be allowed to stand a little bit?"
"Water's still too hot," he replied briefly.
The cavern was not so utterly dark. The circle of the orifice was sharply lit with gray.... They lost track of the hours; for moments at a time forgot physical distress, since they had known only mystic journeys before.... They whispered the fate of Saint Pierre—a city's soul torn from the shrieking flesh; shadows lifted from the mystery of the little wine-shop; clearly they saw how the occultist, his magnetism crippled, had used Jacques and Soronia; and Charter recalled now where he had seen the face of Paula before—the photograph in the Bellingham-cabin on thePanther.... A second cloudburst cooled and eased them, though they stood in water.... It seemed that Peter Stock should have made an effort to reach them by this time. Save that the gray was unchangeable in the roof the world, Charter could not have believed that this was all one day. The power which had devastated the city, and with unspent violence swept theMorne, might have reached three leagues at sea!... Above all these probabilities arose their happiness.
"It seems that I've become a little boy," he said, "on one of those perfect Christmas mornings. Don't you remember, the greatest moment of all—coming downstairs, partly dressed, into the roomTheyhad made ready? That moment, before you actually see—just as you enter the mingled dawn and fire-light and catch the first glisten of the tree?... I'm afraid, Paula Linster, you have found——"
"A boy," she whispered. Her face was very close in the gray.... "The loved dream-boy. The boy went away to meet sternness and suffering and mazes of misdirection—had to compromise with the world to fit at all. Ah, I have waited long, and the man has come back to me—a boy."
"La Montagne Peléeis artistic."
"It may be in this marvellous world, where men carry on their wars and their wooings," she went on strangely, "some pursuing their little ways of darkness, some bursting into blooms of valor and tenderness;—it may be that two of Earth's people, after a dreadful passage through agony and terror, have been restored to each other—as we are. It may be that in the roll of Earth's tableaux, another such film is curled away from another age and another cataclysm."
"Paula," he declared, after a moment, "I have found a Living Truth in this happiness—the Great Good that Drives the World! I think I shall not lose it again. Glimpses of it came to me facing the East—as I wrote and thought of you. One glimpse was so clear that I expressed it in a letter, 'I tell you there is no death, since I have heard the Skylark sing....' I lost the bright fragment, for a few days in New York—battled for the prize again both in New York and yesterday at the mountain. To-day has brought it to me—always to keep. It is this: Were you to die, I should love you and know you were near. This is love above Flesh and Death—the old mystifying Interchangeables. This happiness is the triumph over death. It is a revelation, a mighty adoring—not a mere woman in my arms, but an ineffable issue of eternity. A woman, but more—Love and Labor and Life and the Great Good that Drives the World! This is the happiness I have and hold to-day: Though you died, I should know that you lived and were mine."
"I see it—it is the triumph over death—but, Quentin Charter—I wantyoustill!"
"Don't you see, it is the strength you give me!—that girds me to say such things?"
So they had their flights into silence, while the eternal gray lived in their round summit of sky—until the voices of the rescuers and their own grateful answers.... The sailor was sent back to the boat for rope, while Macready cheered them with a fine and soothing Gaelic oil.... They lifted Paula, who steadied and helped herself by the chain; then sent the noose down for Charter.
"Have you the strent', sir, to do the overhand up the chain?" Macready questioned, and added in a ghost's whisper, "with the fairest of tin thousand waitin' at the top?"
Charter laughed. To lift his right arm was thrashing pain, but he made it easy as he could for them; and in the gray light faced the woman.
She saw his lacerated hand, the mire, fire-blisters upon his face, the blood upon his clothing, swollen veins of throat and temples, and the glowing adoration in his eyes.... She had bound her hair, and there was much still to bind. No mortal hurt was visible. Behind her was the falling sea. On her right hand the smoking ruin of thePalms; to the left, Pelée and his tens of thousands slain; above, the hot, leaden, hurrying clouds.... Ernst, Macready and the sailor moved discreetly away. Backs turned, they watched the puffs of smoke and steam that rose like gray-white birds from the valley of the dead city.
"Ernst, lad," said Macready, "the boss and the leadin' lady are havin' an intellekchool repast in the cinter av the stage by the old well. Bear in mind you're a chorus girl and conduct yourself in accord. Have you a drop left in the heel av the flask, Adele, dear?"
They were nearing theSaragossain the dusk, and their call had been answered with a rousing cheer from the ship....
"Please, sir, you said you would take me sailing," Paula called, as she readied the head of the ladder.
Though he could not stand, Peter Stock had an arm for each; and they were only released to fall into the embrace of Father Fontanel. They saw it now in the ship's light: Pelée had stricken the old priest, but not with fire.... The two were together shortly afterward at supper, in clean dry make-shifts, very ludicrous.
"I came to you empty-handed, and soiled from the travail of the journey," she whispered. "All but myself was in a certain room that faced the North."
"There are booties, flounces and ribands in the shops of Fort de France," Charter replied with delight. "Peter Stock shall be allowed certain privileges, but not to make any such purchases. I carry circular notes—and insist on straightening them out."
"Haven't you discovered that Skylarks are not of the insisting kind—even when they need new plumage? Anything that looks like insistence nearly scares the life out of them. Isn't it a dear world?"
All this was smoothly coherent to him.... Alone that night, they drew deck-chairs close together forward; and snugly wrapped, would have nothing whatever to do with Peter Stock's sumptuous cabins. They needed floods of rest, but were too happy, save just to take little sips of sleep between talk.
"You must have been afraid at first," she said, "of turning a foolish person's head with all that beauty of praise in your letters.... I think you were writing to some image you wanted to believe lived somewhere, but had little hope ever really to find. I could not take it all home to me at first.... I felt that you were writing to a lovely, shadowy sister who was safely put away in a kind of twilight faëry—a little figure by a well of magical waters. Sometimes I could go to her, reach the well, but I could not drink at first—only listen to the music of the water, watch it bubble and flash in the moon."
"I love your mind, Paula Linster," he said suddenly, "—every phase of it. By the way—love'sa word I never used before to-day—not even in my work, save as an abstraction."
She remembered that Selma Cross had said this of him—that he never used that word.
"You could not have said that to 'Wyndam'——"
"Yes—for Skylark was singing more and more about her. I soon should have had to say it to 'Wyndam.'"
"I loved your fidelity to Skylark," she told him softly.
Dust of Pelée would fall upon the archipelago for weeks, but this of starless dark was their supreme night. "Feel the sting of the spray," he commanded. "Hear the bows sing!... It's all for us—the loveliest of earth's distances and the sky afterward——"
"But behind," she whispered pitifully.
"Yes—Pelée 'splashed at a ten-league canvas with brushes of comet's hair.'"
The next night had fallen, and the two were through with the shops of Fort de France. Paula's dress was white and lustrous, a strange native fabric which the man regarded with seriousness and awe. He was in white, too. His right hand was swathed for repairs, the arm slung, and a thickness of lint was fitted under his collar. About his eyes and mouth was a slight look of strain still, which could not live another day before the force of recuperative happiness.... Up through the streets of the Capital, they made their way. Casements were open to the night and the sea, but the people were dulled with grief. Martinique had lost her first born, and Fort de France, the gentle sister of Saint Pierre, was bowed with the spirit of weeping. They had loved and leaned on each other, this boy and girl of the Mother Island.
Through the silent crowds, Charter and Paula walked, a part of the silence, passing the groves and towers, where the laws of France are born again for the little aliens; treading streets of darkness and moaning. A field of fire-lights shone ahead—red glow shining upon new canvas. This was the little colony of Father Fontanel, sustained by his American friend,—brands plucked from the burning of Saint Pierre. They passed the edge of the bivouac. A woman sat nursing her babe, fire-light upon her face and breast, drowsy little ones about her. Coffee and night-air and quavering lullabies; above all, ardent Josephine in marble, smiling and dreaming of Europe among the stars.... It was a powerful moment to Quentin Charter. Great joy and thrilling tragedy breathed upon his heart. He saw a tear upon Paula's cheek, and heard the low voice of Father Fontanel—like an echo across a stream. He saw them and hastened forward, more than white in the radiance.
"It is the moment of ten thousand years!" he exclaimed, grasping their hands.
Paula started, and turned to Charter whose gaze sank into her brain.... And so it came about unexpectedly; in the fire-light among the priest's beloved, under the Seven Palms and the ardent mystic smile of the Empress....
Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God hath already accepted thy works.... Let thy garments be always white; and let not thy head lack ointment. Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest, all the days of thy life.
The words rang in their ears, when they were alone in the city's darkness, and the fire-lights far behind.
On the third day following, they stood together on theMorne d'Orange—the three. Father Fontanel had been in feverish haste to gaze once more upon his city; while Charter and Paula had a mission among the ruins.... TheSaragossawas sitting for a new complexion in the harbor of Fort de France, so they had been driven over from the Capital, along the old sea-road. The wind was still; the sun shone through silent towers of smoke, and it was noon. Sunlight bathed the stripped fields of cane, and, seemingly inseparable from the stillness, brooded upon the blue Caribbean. The wreck of the old plantation-house was hunched closer to the ground.
They left Father Fontanel in the carriage, and approached the cistern. Charter halted suddenly at the edge of the stricken lianas, grasping Paula's arm. The well-curbing was broken away, and the earth, for yards surrounding, had caved into the vault. They stood there without speaking for a moment or two, and then he led her back to the carriage.... Father Fontanel did not seem aware of their coming or going, but smiled when they spoke. His eyes, charmed with sunlight, were lost oversea.
At last they stood, the priest between them, at the very edge of theMorneoverlooking the shadowedRue Victor Hugo—a collapsed artery of the whited sepulchre.... The priest caught his breath; his hands lifted from their shoulders and stretched out over the necropolis. His face was upraised.
"God, love the World!" he breathed, and the flesh sank from him.... Much death had dulled their emotions, but this was translation. For an instant they were lifted, exalted, as by the rushing winds of a chariot.
They did not enter the city that day, but came again, the fourth day after the cataclysm. Out of the heat from the prone city, arose a forbidding breath, so that Paula was prevailed upon to stay behind on theMorne.... Sickened and terrified by the actualities, dreadful beyond any imaging, Charter made his way up the cluttered road intoRue Rivoli. Saint Pierre, a smoky pestilential charnel, was only alive now through the lamentations of those who had come down from the hills for their dead.
The wine-shop had partly fallen in front. The stone-arch remained, but the wooden-door had been levelled and was partially devoured by fire. A breath of coolness still lingered in the dark place, and the fruity odor of spilled wine mingled revoltingly with the heaviness of death. The ash-covered floor was packed hard, and still wet from the gusts of rain that had swept in through the open door and the broken-backed roof; stained, too, from the leakage of the casks. Charter's boot touched an empty bottle, and it wheeled and careened across the stones—until he thought it would never stop.... Steady as a ticking clock, came the "drip-drip" of liquor, escaping through a sprung seam from somewhere among the merciful shadows, where the old soldier of France had fallen from his chair.
He climbed over the heap of stones, which had been the rear-door, and entered the little court from which the song-birds had flown. Across the drifts of ash, he forced his steps—into the semi-dark of the living-room behind.
The great head that he had come to find, was rigidly erect, as if the muscles were locked, and faced the aperture through which he had entered. It seemed to be done in iron, and was covered with white dust—Pelée's dust, fresh-wrought from the fire in which the stars were forged. The first impression was that of calm, but Charter's soul chilled with terror, before his eyes fathomed the reality of that look. Under the thick dust, there suddenly appeared upon the features, as if invisible demons tugged at the muscles with hideous art, a reflection from the depths.... Bellingham was sitting beside a table. He had seen Death in the open door. The colossal energies of his life had risen to vanquish the Foe, yet again. His mind had realized their failure, and what failure meant, before the End. Out of the havoc of nether-planes, where Abominations are born, had come a last call for him. That glimpse of hell was mirrored in the staring dustless eyes.... Around his shoulders, like a golden vine, and lying across his knees, clung the trophy of defeat—Soronia. Denied the lily—he had taken the tiger-lily.... Under the unset stones of the floor, a lizard croaked.
Charter, who had fallen of old into the Caverns of Devouring, backed out into the court of the song-birds, in agony for clean light, for he had seen old hells again, in the luminous decay of those staring eyes.... He recalled the end of Father Fontanel and this—with reverent awe, as one on the edge of the mystery. Through the ends of these two, had some essential balance of power been preserved in the world?
Peter Stock had cabled to New York for officers and men to make up a ship's company. TheSaragossawas overhauled, meanwhile, in the harbor of Fort de France, and the owner expressed his intention of finishing his healing at sea. On the same ship, which brought his seamen from New York, arrived in Fort de France a corps of newspaper correspondents, who were not slow to discover that in the bandaged capitalist lay one of the great stones of the eruption from the American point of view. This literally unseated Peter Stock from his chair on the veranda of the hotel at the Capital. With his guests, he put to sea within thirty-six hours after the arrival of the steamer from New York; indeed, before theSaragossa'spaint was dry. His vitality was not abated, but the great figures of Pelée and Fontanel, enriched by M. Mondet as a sort of clown-attendant, had strangely softened and strengthened this rarely-flavored personality. As for his two guests, that month of voyaging in the Caribbean and below, is particularly their own. The three were on deck as theSaragossaplied past Saint Pierre, five or six miles deep in the roadstead, a last time. The brute, Pelée, lay asleep in the sun before the gate of the whited sepulchre.
"Did I ever tell you about my last interview with M. Mondet?" Peter Stock inquired.
Charter had witnessed it, on his way to the craters that morning, but he did not say so, and was regaled with the story. "Bear witness," Peter Stock finished, pointing toward the city, "that I forgive M. Mondet. Doubtless he was writing a paragraph on the staunchness of Pelée—when his desk was closed for him."
They reached New York the first week in July. No sooner had Peter Stock berthed theSaragossaand breathed the big city, than he discovered how dearly he loved Pittsburg.... Paula went alone to the little apartment Top-side o' Park, where Madame Nestor absolved her strong young queen; alone also first toThe States, though there was a table set for four over in Staten Island the following day....
Charter and Reifferscheid regarded each other a trifle nervously in the latter's office, before they left for the ferry. Each, however, found in the eyes of the other a sudden grip on finer matters than obvious explanations, so that no adjustment of past affairs was required. To Charter, this moment of meeting with the editor became a singularly bright memory, like certain moments with Father Fontanel. Reifferscheid had put away all the flowerings of romance, and could not know that their imperishable lustre was in his eyes—for the deeper-seeing eyes of the woman. He was big enough to praise her happiness, big enough to burst into singing. It had been a hard moment for her, but he sprang high among the nobilities of her heart, and was sustained.... What if it were just a throat-singing? There was no discordant note. These are the men and the moments to clinch one's faith in the Great Good that Drives the World.
Selma Cross had left theZoroaster, and, with Stephen Cabot, was happily on the wing, between the city, shores and mountains.The Thingwas to open again in September at theHerriot, and the initial venture into the West was over. Had she wished, Paula was not given a chance to do without the old friendship.... The story of taking the Company down into Kentucky from Cincinnati and fulfilling the old promise to Calhoun Knox proved rare listening:
"I won't soon forget that night in Cincinnati, when I parted from Stephen Cabot," she said, falling with the same old readiness into her disclosures. "'Stephen,' I told him, 'I am taking the Company down into Danube to play to-morrow night in my home. I don't want you to go....' I had seen the real man shine out through physical pain many times. It was so now, and he looked the master in the deeper hurt. He's a self-fighter—the champion. He asked me if I meant to stay long, as I took his cool, slim hand. I told him that I hoped not, but if it transpired that I must stay for a while, I should come back to Cincinnati—for one day—to tell him.... I saw he was the stronger. I was all woman that moment, all human, wanting nothing that crowds or art could give. I think my talk became a little flighty, as I watched his face, so brave and so white.
"I knew his heart, knew that his thoughts that moment would have burned to the brute husk, coarser stuff than he was made of.... Here's a Stephen who could smile up from the ground as—as they stoned.... So I left him, standing by the window, in the upper-room of the hotel, watching the moving river-lights down on the Ohio.
"Late the next afternoon I reached Danube, and was driven directly to the theatre—which was new. There was a pang in this. The town seemed just the same; the streets and buildings, the sounds and smells, even the sunset patch at the head of Main Street—all were just as they should be, except the theatre. You see, all the dreams of greatness of that savage, homely girl, had found their source and culmination in the old house of melodrama, parts of which, they told me, now were made over into darkey shanties down by the river. I felt that my success was qualified a little in that it had not come in the life of the old house.
"I joined the Company at the theatre, without seeing any of the Danube folk. The audience was already gathering. Through an eyelet of the curtain, I saw Calhoun Knox enter alone, and take a seat in the centre, five rows from the orchestra. He seemed smaller. The good brown tan was gone. There was a twitch about his mouth that twitched mine. Other faces were the same—even the lips that had spoken my doom so long ago. I had no hate for them now....
"I looked at Calhoun Knox again, looked for the charm of clean simplicity, and kept putting Stephen Cabot out of my heart and brain.... This man before me had fought for me twice, when I had needed a champion.... They pulled me away from the eyelet, andThe Thingwas on.
"I could feel the town's group-soul that night—responded to its every thought, as if a nerve-system of my own was installed in every mind. They were listening to the woman who had startled New York. I felt their awe. It was not sweet, as I had dreamed the moment would be. After all, these were my people.
"I wanted their love, not their adulation. There had been nights back in the East, when I had felt my audience, and turned looseThe Thingwith utmost daring, knowing that enough of the throng could follow me. But this night I played slowly, played down, so that all could get it. This was not a concession to the public, but a reconciliation. And at the last, I moved and spoke pityingly, lest I hurt them; played to the working face of Calhoun Knox with all its limitations—as you would tell a story to a child, and hasten the happy ending to steady the quivering lip.... And then it came to me slowly, after the last curtain had fallen, that Danube was calling for its own, and I stepped out from behind.
"'Once in the days of tumult and misunderstanding,' I told them, 'I was angry because you did not love me. Now I know that I was not lovable. And now I feel your goodness and your forgiveness. I pray you not to thank me any more, lest I break down under too much joy....' Then I went down among them. A woman kissed me, but the moment was so big and my eyes so clouded that I did not remember the face.... Presently the real consciousness came. Danube had dropped back to the doors. My hand was in the hand of Calhoun Knox.
"Far out the Lone Ridge pike, we walked, to the foot of the Knobs. I was breathing the smell of my old mountains. You can rely, that I had kept my voice bright. 'I have come back to you, Calhoun,' I said.
"'I shouldn't be here,' he stammered in real panic. 'You didn't write, and I married——'
"I could have hugged him in a way that would not have disturbed his wife, but I said reproachfully, 'And you let me come 'way out here alone with you, wicked Married Man?...' I started back for town, and then thought better of it—waited for him to come up, and took his hand.
"'Calhoun,' I said, 'I found you a solid friend when I needed one pitifully. Selma Cross never forgets. You have always been my Kentucky Gentleman. God bless your big bright heart. I wish you kingly happiness!'
"And then I did rush back. We separated at the edge of the town. I wanted to run and cry aloud. The joy was so new and so vast that I could scarcely hold it. Miles away, I heard the night-train whistle. My baggage was at the hotel, but I didn't care for that, and reached the depot-platform in time. The Company was there, but they had reserved a Pullman. I went into the day-coach, because I wanted to be alone—sat rigidly in the thin-backed seat. There were snoring, sprawling folks on every hand.... After a long time, some one stirred in his seat and muttered, 'High Bridge.' The brakeman came through at age-long intervals, calling stations that had once seemed to me the far country. Then across the aisle, a babe awoke and wailed. The mother had others—a sweet sort of woman sick with weariness. I took the little one, and it liked the fresh arms and fell asleep. It fitted right in—the soft helpless warm little thing—and felt good to me. Dawn dimmed the old meadows before I gave it up to be fed—and begged it back again.
"And then Cincinnati from the river—brown river below and brown smoke-clouds above. It seemed as if I had been gone ages, instead of only since yesterday. Unhampered by baggage, I sped out of the day-coach, far ahead of the Company in the Pullman, but the carriage to the hotel was insufferably slow; the elevator dragged.... It was only eight in the morning, but I knew his ways—how little he slept.... His door was partly open, and I heard the crinkle of his paper, as he answered my tap.
"'Aren't you pretty near ready for breakfast, Stephen?' I asked.... He stood in the doorway—his head just to my breast. His face was hallowed, but his body seemed to weaken. I crossed the threshold to help him, and we—we're to be married before the new season opens."
Paula loved the story.
And at length Paula and Charter reached the house of his mother, whose glory was about her, as she stood in the doorway. Before he kissed her, the mother-eyes had searched his heart.... Then she turned to his garland of victory.
"I am so glad you have brought me a daughter."
The women faced each other—the strangest moment in three lives.... All the ages passed between the eyes of the maid and the mother; and wisdoms finer than words, as when two suns, sweeping past in their great cycle, shine across the darkness of the infinite deep; ages of gleaning, adoring, suffering, bearing, praying; ages of listening to little children and building dreams out of pain; the weathered lustre of Naomi and the fresh radiance of Ruth; but over all, that look which passed between the women shone the secret of the meaning of men—God-taught Motherhood.
To Charter, standing afar-off, came the simple but tremendous revelation, just a glimpse into that lovely arcanum which mere man may never know in full.... He saw that these two were closer than prophets to the Lifting Heart of Things; that such are the handmaidens of the Spirit, to whom are intrusted God's avatars; that no prophet is greater than his mother.
To the man, it was new as the dream which nestled in Paula's heart; to the women, it was old as the flocks on the mountain-sides of Lebanon. They turned to him smiling. And when he could speak, he said to Paula:
"I thought you would like to see the garret, and the window that faces the East."
Well-known as one of the most successful short-story contributors to American magazines, Will Levington Comfort awoke one morning a little over a year ago to find himself famous as a long-story writer. Seldom has the first novel of an author been accorded the very essence of praise from the conservative critics as was Mr. Comfort's "Routledge Rides Alone," acknowledged to be the best book of 1910.
While young in years, Mr. Comfort, who is thirty-three, is old in experience. In 1898 he enlisted in the Fifth United States Cavalry, and saw Cuban service in the Spanish-American War. The following year he rode as a war correspondent in the Philippines a rise which resulted from vivid letters written to newspapers from the battlefields and prisons.
Stricken with fever, wearied of service and thinking of Home, he was next ordered by cable up into China to watch the lid lifted from the Legations at Peking. Here he saw General Liscum killed on the Tientsin Wall and got his earliest glance of the Japanese in war. Another attack of fever completely prostrated him and he was sent home on the hospital ship "Relief."
In the interval between the Boxer Uprising and the Russo-Japanese War, Mr. Comfort began to dwell upon the great fundamental facts of world-politics. But the call of smoke and battle was too strong, and, securing a berth as war-correspondent for a leading midwestern newspaper, he returned to the far East and the scenes of the Russo-Japanese conflict in 1904. He was present at the battle of Liaoyang his description of which in "Routledge Rides Alone" fairly overwhelms the reader.
Few novels of recent years have aroused the same enthusiasm as was evoked by this story of "Routledge." Book reviewers both in this country and in Europe have suggested that the book should win for its author the Peace prize because it is one of the greatest and most effective arguments against warfare that has ever been presented.