"He is dead," said Dr. Pons.
I looked at the rapier in my hand. There were a few contracting spots on it.
Then De Brissac held my coat for me.
"His foot slipped, or you would not have got him like that," I heard him say.
"Oh, it is unpleasant enough, but the thing is perfectly in order. You need have no fear. Yes, yes; I will lead you to her. You will be at the Place Vendôme, I suppose? There will be an inquiry, and all that."
And then I found myself holding again the two warm hands. I was not thinking of De Coigny. I was in a dream. I stepped into a carriage that was before me. I heard De Brissac close the door, and say to the coachman "Paris." Then I felt a girl's arm round my neck.
"Toto," said a voice, "do you remember the white rabbit with the green eyes?"
The killing of De Coigny had blinded me, maddened me, and drawn from some distant past into full birth all sorts of strange and hitherto unknown attributes of myself.
It was as though Philippe de Saluce, slowly struggling into new birth during the last forty-eight hours,had, with the slaying of my adversary, suddenly become full born.
It was necessary for me to kill, it seems, before he could find speech and thought, and stand fully reincarnated.
"Oh, far beyond that—far beyond that!" I murmured, not knowing fully what I said or what I meant, knowing only that mysterious doors had been flung open, and that through them a spirit had rushed, filling me and embracing through me the woman at my side.
"I know," she said. And for a moment spoke no more.
In those two words she told all. It was as though she had said: "I know all. You are Philippe and I am Margaret. All is forgiven between us. Let us forget. What matters that old crime of long ago? We are reborn, we are young again, and the world is fair."
"Let us forget," I murmured, as if in answer to these words which, though unspoken by her lips, were heard by my spirit.
"I have forgotten," she replied. "I never remembered—or only in part. Let us talk of that time——"
"When we were children?"
"Yes. Do you remember——"
"Do I remember! Where is Gretel?"
"She is dead. I must tell you all; but we are nearing Paris. Cannot we go anywhere—some place where we can talk and be alone?"
"Yes." I remembered that Franzius and Eloisewere away, and that we could go to the Pavilion. I drew the check-string, and told the driver to take the road to Etiolles.
As I drew back into the carriage her hand slipped over my shoulder, and her arm round my neck again.
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"You know," she said, "that time when you left I nearly forgot you. I would have forgotten you entirely but for Gretel, who always kept making me remember, telling me to beware of you, till you became my nightmare. After the death of my father, Gretel took entire charge of me. I did not know that I was a girl: I never thought of the thing. I was dressed as a boy, I had tutors, the jägers took me hunting. Yes; you were my nightmare. I used to dream that you were running after me through the woods to kill me. All that was at night; but once—one afternoon, I fell asleep, and you nearly did kill me. It was only a dream, you know."
"Tell me about it."
"I was walking through a wood, and you were following to kill me, and I hid behind some bushes. But you saw me, and came after me, and I heard you falling into a pit. I looked into the pit, and you were lying there. Then I awoke."
"Go on—go on! Tell me about yourself. Don't say any more about that."
"Ah, yes, myself! Well, I grew up. Gretel died three years ago; and when she was dying she told me I was a girl. She told me all, and gave me the choice of going through life as what I am now, or as a man."
"And you?"
"Chose to be a man." She laughed deliciously, and under her breath. "These things"—and she plucked at her dress—"feel strange on me even now. Oh, yes, I chose to be a man. Who would not, if the choice were given them? And no one knew. The Baron Carl von Lichtenberg was quite a great person. He was admired by all the ladies. He was so ornamental that he was sent as attaché to the Embassy at Paris. Yes; and he went to the ball at the Marquis d'Harmonville's——"
"Ah, that night!" I muttered. "It was the beginning——"
"Of your tribulations," she laughed softly, and went on: "When I saw you I was nearly as startled as you were yourself. I had all my life determined that I would avoid you; but that night—ah! that night——"
"Well?"
"I don't know. I could not sleep. I cursed my man's clothes; and I would have given all I possessed to speak to you dressed as I am now. Then I sought you, and you avoided me. You insulted me, monsieur, at the Mirlitons."
"Ah! why—why did you not declare yourself then?" I muttered, speaking into the warmth of her delicious neck. "Think what we have lost—a whole year nearly of life and love!"
"Why, indeed! Just, I suppose, because I was a woman, filled with a woman's caprice; and the masquerade amused me, and I had my duties to perform—and how you evaded me! I was invited to meet you at dinner——"
"And I dined at the Café de Paris with a fool."
"Just so. And you ran away to Nice. Then the idea came to me—ah, yes, it was a fine idea!—I willmakehim meet me. And I slapped you on the shoulder with a glove."
"Yes; when I was seated in the box at the opera with a lady."
"Yes. Who was the lady? I was too excited to see anyone but you."
"She was——" Then I paused. And then I said—why, I can never tell—"She was a friend of my guardian."
"Next morning I received your challenge. How I laughed to myself!"
"But tell me one thing. Why did you stipulate for a delay of three months before the duel?"
She laughed again.
"Shall I tell you?"
"Yes."
"Because I wanted time—to—to——"
"Yes?"
"To let my hair grow. Do you like it?" She drew a long pin from her hat, removed her hat, and showed her perfect head and the coils of night-black hair.
"Oh! Do I like it?"
"Well—kiss it."
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"We must never part again."
"We need never," said she. "I am yours. I am not existent in the world. The Baron Carl von Lichtenberg is dead: he died when I put on these things. There is no one to trouble us!"
"Look!" I said. "This is Etiolles."
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I had as completely forgotten Franzius and Eloise as though they had never existed. Madame Ancelot seemed strange; and the Pavilion a place which I recognised, but which had no part in my new life.
Sitting opposite to my companion at table—for we had a déjeûner under the big chestnut-tree—I could contemplate her at my leisure. Surely God had never created a more lovely and perfect woman. Eyelashes long and black, up curved, and tipped with brown; violet-grey eyes. Ah, yes; I do not care to think of them now. I only care to remember that voice and smile, that ineffable expression, all that told of the existence of the beautiful spirit that Time might never touch nor Death destroy.
From the forest came the wood-doves' song to the immortal and ever-weeping Susie. We could hear the birds in the château gardens, and a bell from some village church ringing the Angelus—faint, far away, robbed of its harshness by the vast and sunlit silence. She seemed the soul of all that music, all that silence, all that sweetness; and she was mine, entirely and for ever. We were beyond convention and law, as were Adam and Eve.
"And you know," said she, as if reading my thoughts, "I am nobody—I have not even a name.Yesterday I was Baron Carl von Lichtenberg, with great estates. Now, who am I? And my great estates——" She opened a purse, in which lay a few louis. "Here they are."
I laughed, and put the little purse into my pocket.
"Tell me," I said; "where were you when you were coming out of your chrysalis? When you were changing—all these three months?"
"I—I was at Tours. The Baron von Lichtenberg received three months' foreign leave, and went to Tours. Oh, the complications! And the dressmakers! I did not even know at first how to wear these things. Do they fit me?"
"Do they fit you!"
I rose, and we crossed the drawbridge. As she passed over it, she paused and gazed at the water.
"How cool it looks! How dark and deep! Do you remember the pool at Lichtenberg?"
"And how I pushed you in. Do you remember the little drum?"
"And the child with the golden hair—Eloise. She called you Toto. I have always called you Toto since, M. Patrick Mahon."
"Call me it still," I said. "I love anything that reminds me of my past—of our past. Come, let us go into the woods, as we went that day."
She laughed at the recollection of the little Pomeranian grenadier.
"We were children then," said she.
I looked at her. In the shadow of the trees, in the broad drive where we stood, she might have been aghost from that time when La Vallière was a girl, when La Fontaine was a man, and Monsieur Fouquet held his court at Vaux.
Though of the fashion of the day, her dress had that grace which the wearer alone can give; and, as I looked at her, the forest sighed deeply from its cool, green heart, the boughs tossed, showering lights upon us, and the laughter of the birds followed the wind.
"We were children then," said I, "but we are not children now." I took both her hands, and held her soul to mine for a moment in a kiss that has not ended yet.
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Where the beech-glades give place to the tall pines—the fragrant pines, whose song sounds for ever like the sea on a distant strand—we sat down on a bank, which in spring would be mist-blue with violets.
"I have never kissed anyone before. Have you?" she asked.
"No one."
"Never loved anyone?" She rested her hands on my shoulders, and looked into my eyes.
"Never."
"For," said she, "if you had——"
"Yes?"
"I don't know. Sometimes I do not know my own thoughts. Sometimes I act and do things that seem strange to me afterwards. I made you meet me this morning out of caprice. I teased you, following you as I did to Nice, dressed as I was, from caprice. That is not me. There is something wicked and waywardin me that I cannot understand. Had it not been for me you would not have killed that man this morning."
I had not thought of De Coigny till now; and the remembrance of him lying there dead in the arms of Dr. Pons came like a gloomy stain across my mind. But it soon passed.
"We would have fought in any case," said I, "inevitably."
She sighed, as if relieved.
"He was a bad man," she said. "He deserved to die for the things he said about you to me. It was partly on that account that I arranged all that this morning, so that I might insult him before those men; but I never thought it would end as it did."
"Do you know," said I, "when I killed him it was as if the blood which I shed had baptised me into a new life! My full love for you only awoke then. It was as if some spirit out of the past that had loved you for ages had suddenly been born completely."
"Don't!" she said. "I hate to think of that. Let the past be gone for ever. You are yourself, alive and warm. You are my sun, my life, the air I breathe. You have been kept for me untouched. Oh, how I love you!
"Listen!" she said, freeing her lips from mine, and casting her beautiful eyes upwards. "No; it is not the wind. Ah! listen! listen!"
From the trees came a sound that was not the voice of the birds. Far away it seemed now, and now near. It was the spinning-song of Oberthal, that tune, thin as a thread of flax, rising, falling, poignant as Fate,and filled with the story of man—his swaddling-clothes, his marriage-bed, and his shroud.
There, amidst the trees, coming from nowhere, diffused by the echoes of the wood—for a wood is a living echo—heard just then, the song of Oberthal seemed the voice of Fate herself.
I knew quite well what had happened. Franzius had returned. Madame Ancelot had told him that I was in the wood. Wishing, no doubt, to find me, he had sent the tune to look for me—the old tune that he knew I liked so well.
It was then only that my past relationship with Eloise rose before me.
I had said nothing about it; I had even refrained from mentioning her name. I had done this from no ulterior motive. I was not ashamed that the woman I loved should know about Eloise. Had I not brought her to the Pavilion when it was quite possible that Eloise might have returned? Up to this my mind had been so filled with new things, so filled with happiness and extraordinary love, that all things earthly were for me not.
"It is a friend of mine, I think," said I. "A violinist. He stays at the Pavilion. And now I want to tell you something."
"Yes?"
It had seemed so easy, yet now it seemed very difficult.
"I told you I had never cared for another woman."
"Yes."
"Listen! The tune has ceased. Well, there hasbeen only one woman in my life till I met you. You remember little Eloise at Lichtenberg, she who called me Toto?"
"Yes." She had placed her hand to her heart, as though she felt a pain there.
"Well, I met her again in Paris. She had grown up. She was very poor, and I gave her the Pavilion to live in. She is living there now."
"Now!"
"Yes," said I, laughing. "And, see, there she is. Wait for me."
Franzius and Eloise had just appeared from the wood away down the drive. It was fortunate that Franzius was with her, for now I could bring them both up and introduce them. Their love for one another and their happiness was so evident that it would be an explanation in itself.
I ran towards them.
Eloise was radiant; Franzius as brown as a berry.
"Eloise!" I cried, as I kissed her and wrung both her hands, "do you remember little Carl? Do you remember saying to me: 'Toto, little Carl is a girl'? She is here; she is waiting to meet you. Come."
"Where?" asked Eloise.
I turned, laughing, to point out the figure of my companion. The drive was empty. The songs of the birds, the shadows of the trees, the golden swathes of light, were there, but of Margaret von Lichtenberg there was no trace.
"She has hidden herself amidst the trees," I cried. "Come."
But there was no trace of her amidst the trees.
"Margaret!"
I was frightened at my own voice, at its ghostliness, and the echo of the sweet name that came back from the wood.
A wreath of morning mist could not have vanished more completely.
I am sure that just then the Franzius' must have thought me mad.
Oh, caprice of a woman! To leave me like that in a moment of anger and jealousy, never to wait an explanation; to let fall what might be the curtain of eternal separation with a touch of her hand; to step away from me and vanish into that vast, vague, cruel land we call the world!
And I had held her so close to me! She was so entirely mine, the happiest dream that ever mortal dreamt, the most mysterious and beautiful.
She had taken the carriage which we left at the inn at Etiolles, and returned to Paris. That we discovered; but beyond that there was no word or sign to lead me.
I only knew that she was in Paris. Even of that I was not quite sure, for she may have used Paris only as a stage on her journey into the unknown.
But to Paris I came. I could not stay at Etiolles, even on the chance of her returning. I must go where she had gone. And I swore in my madness to find her, even though I searched Paris from the heights of Montmartre to the depths of the Seine.
And then, when I got to Paris, I found my hands idle and useless. I did not know, even, what name she had gone under during her metamorphosis. She who had no name—this ghost from the past!
At times I found myself wondering whether it was all a dream, an illusion of the brain. Whether I was mad. But actuality brought me to reason on this point. I had to answer the inquiries following the death of De Coigny. I had to appear before an examining magistrate, I and my seconds.
Felix Rebouton was the magistrate in question, the same who, if my memory serves me, conducted the inquiry on the death of Victor Noir.
He was a thin, tall man, in spectacles, a lawyer, not a man; a procès-verbal in a tightly buttoned frock-coat.
And I had to face this individual, who seemed less an individual than a roll of parchment, and, with my heart breaking and my thoughts elsewhere, answer questions relative to my relations with De Coigny.
"We have always hated each other, since boyhood. He lied about me, and I killed him," was my answer.
"This lady who arrived on the scene of the duel, and with whom you departed; where is she?"
"Ah, if you could tell me that," I replied, "I would give you every penny of my fortune."
"Her name?"
"She has no name."
"No name!"
"She is a ghost."
The man of parchment scratched his head and made a note, looked sideways through his spectacles at his clerk and at De Brissac and the other seconds who were in the room.
He thought I was mad. And he was not far wrong.
The inquiry was suspended for three weeks, and I was free to return to my misery and the streets of Paris.
I lived now in the streets. They were my only hope. From early morning till night I haunted the boulevards. Franzius had orders to telegraph to my club and to the Place Vendôme should any news reach the Pavilion, and the club porter grew weary of the inquiry: "Any telegram for me?"
Men began to avoid me as they do the stricken, the leprous, and the mad. I must have seemed mad, indeed, for ever wandering hither and thither, searching the crowded streets with eager eyes, scarcely answering if spoken to, careless and untidy in my dress, a phantom of myself. Like Poe's man of the crowd, I drifted about Paris, ever in the thick of the throng, seeking the most populous streets.
Impossible to tell in what quarter of the city caprice might have cast her, I sought her in all. Montmartre and La Villette, the Quartier Latin and the great boulevards: I dreaded only one thing—night.
Night, when my search must cease; night and the pitiless gas-lamps, the terrible gas-lamps. Then it was that light, the angel that all day had helped my search, became a devil, contracting itself, and spreading into a million heartless points to show me the darkness. Then it was that the stars burning in the clear sky above the city became part of my sorrow.
All things bright and all things fair were leagued against me, in that they fed the flame of my suffering;and the happiness and gaiety of others became the last insult of the world.
Then it was that Joubert showed himself in his true form. Not one word did he ever say to me, though my conduct, my manners, my disordered dress, must have given him food for the deepest speculation and disquiet. He would put out my clothes and attend to my wants, speak to me about ordinary topics, never heed my silence or my harsh replies. You see, he was an old soldier; he had seen men stricken so often that he knew the language and the signs of real grief and real suffering.
I lost count of the days, and from opium alone could I get any sleep. Absorbed in my grief, I took no heed of the events around me. I remember distinctly in cafés and at my club hearing men talking of the Hohenzollerns and the succession to the Spanish throne. Men talking vehemently about a subject which was to me as uninteresting and as unintelligible as algebra to a child. But I could feel the ferment and unrest around me.
On the 15th of July, at ten o'clock in the morning, I was passing across the Place de la Concorde, when a roar like the sound of a great and distant sea broke on the summer air. It came from the direction of the Rue St. Honoré. People were running across the Place de la Concorde, and pouring from the Rue de Rivoli and from the bridges. The Champs Elysées behind me had become alive with people; cabmen were standing up on the driving-seats of their carriages, waving their hats and shouting; windows of houseswere alive and white with fluttering handkerchiefs; and now, again and again, came the storm of sound, unlike anything I had ever heard before, unlike anything I will ever hear again; wave after wave, storm after storm, and through it all the drums of a marching regiment.
The Ninety-first Regiment of the Line were marching down the Rue St. Honoré, bayonets fixed, haversacks filled, drums beating, and colours fluttering. Paris was marching with them. And then through the storm came the cry uttered by a thousand throats: "À Berlin! À Berlin!"
"What is it?" I asked of a passer-by.
"War has been declared with Prussia!"
"With Prussia?"
"Bismarck——" I did not hear what else he had to say, deafened and dazed by the roar that now surrounded me.
"À Berlin! À Berlin!"
War had been declared with Prussia. Oh, fatality!
Bismarck! At the name the gardens of Lichtenberg unrolled before me. I saw them stretching to the edges of the pine forests. I heard the rattle of little Carl's drum as he marched before us, the sound that had echoed through the years, to be amplified and converted into this.
War! Red war! And then, curiously, as I stood gazing and listening to the storm that was gathering to wreck the last of my hope, I saw something which I had forgotten for years, and which now came before me as a vivid picture: a great hand with a seal ringon the little finger, holding and half caressing the tiny hand of a child. The hand of Bismarck holding the hand of Eloise, as I saw it that day long ago in the hall of Schloss Lichtenberg. The iron hand which was to crush the armies of France and fling Napoleon from his throne.
I elbowed my way through the crush towards the Place Vendôme. My own affairs were dwarfed, for the moment, by the magnitude of the event and the furnace roar of the rejoicing city. Jubilant and ferocious, lustful and bloodthirsty, triumphant as the blare of a trumpet, terrible as the voice of a tiger, the gusts of sound swept the heavens. It was the voice of the Second Empire, not the voice of a people; it was cruelty, lust, and organised vice crying aloud to God for blood.
God heard it, and made swift answer.
I arrived at the Place Vendôme to find a surprise awaiting me.
Franzius and Eloise were there. They had brought luggage with them, which was in the hall. The servant who opened the door for me told me they were in the library, and I ran there to meet them.
"Toto," cried Eloise; then, holding me at a little distance and staring at me as though I were a ghost: "What has happened to you?"
I caught a reflection of myself in the mirror above the fireplace, and for the first time I recognised the change in myself. Haggard, white, and drawn, my face was no longer the face of a young man.
"Never mind me," I replied. "Why have you left Etiolles? Have you any news?"
"My friend," said Franzius, answering for her, "there is no news—only news of war."
"Ah, yes," I said. "War. But tell me why you have left Etiolles?"
"I am a Prussian," replied Franzius; "and we are returning."
"Returning?"
"To my own country."
"You are leaving me?"
There was silence for a moment, and Eloise began to weep.
"Toto, can't you see?"
"Ah, yes," I said; "I can see—everything is going from me. Don't cry, Eloise; I can see. Franzius, forgive me. I forgot. I did not know what war meant till now."
Up to this I had seen war through the stories told in books. I had seen war on the canvases in the Luxembourg and the Louvre. But up till now, standing there in the library before Franzius, with his overcoat on his arm, and Eloise weeping, I had not seen war.
Oh, yes; it is very grand: the long lines of infantry going into action, the clouds of cavalry, the roar of the cannon, and the drums beating the charge!
But that is not war. War is voiceless.
Yesterday we were at peace. To-day we are at war. Something has entered into every heart and into every home; a million tiny fingers are busy snappinga million bonds of union. Blow trumpets and beat drums how you please, you cannot chase away the silence which has entered into the hearts of men, or the foreboding that tells us the great curse has come again.
"It is not even that we must go," said Franzius, "but that we must go at once. We are not going; we are driven forth. My friend, we will meet again, when it is over."
"When it is over," I said mechanically.
They had received their passports, and they told me of their plans. Franzius was beyond the age of military service. They would go to Frankfort, where he had some relations. He had plenty of money with which to live quietly till "it was over" and the world could hear music again.
I ordered a carriage to the door, and accompanied them to the station, through streets packed and crowded as if by some fête.
The station was thronged, and the train for the frontier was on the point of starting when we arrived. I have never seen such a crowd before. Families and their belongings, small tradesmen, Germans who had been prospering yesterday and who to-day, ruined and hopeless, were being driven forth back to their own country to starve. The buffet had been stripped of food; and when I thought of the long journey before my friends and the chances of the road, my heart misgave me, till Eloise showed me a basket that had been packed for them by Madame Ancelot.
Just as the train was starting, I jostled against avendor of oranges who still had a few unsold. I bought them and gave them to Eloise.
I could not help remembering the day we had gone down first to Evry, she and I, and the oranges I had bought for her in the Boulevard St. Michel. That day, in spring!
"Good-bye! Good-bye!"
Eloise had squeezed herself through the window beside Franzius; the train moved away; the people who were leaving said a last good-bye to the people they had left, to friends who had cared for them till war came as a separation, to brother Germans who were bound to depart by the next train. I never heard so mournful a sound as that when the great train drew away for its journey into for ever, leaving me alone on the platform.
I came back on foot. It was a long way; and as I passed the crowded cafés, the crowds of excited and fever-stricken people, it seemed to me that I was in a city whose inhabitants had at one stroke gone mad.
I found myself, for the first time in many days, able to note the things around me, and to take some interest in them. The great upheaval had shaken me in part away from my own especial preoccupation, the grief of the parting with Eloise and Franzius had obscured in part that other grief which had pursued me.
The great city had been stirred to its uttermost depths, as the great sea is sometimes stirred by a submarine explosion. Dregs came to the surface and floated as scum; and I saw people that day in thestreets that I had never seen before: terrible people, cast up from the purlieus and the slums, dog-men and beast-women, such as insulted the light of heaven during the Terror; faces that might have served Retzsch for his picture of the fiend, or Calot for his fantastic devil-drawings. Collette la Charonne, Mathurine Giroron, Elizabeth Trouvain, the capon and the franc-mitou from the past, elbowed the bully of the barrier and the fishwife from the Halles of the present.
At the word "War" Mathias Hungadi Spiculi rose from his long sleep, just as he had risen at the word "Revolution." All the elements of the Commune were there that day, shouting France to war, and ready to dance on her ruins.
Even the bourgeoisie, the placid people, the café loungers, were changed. The tiger-cat which lies at the heart of the Latin races, the animal that spits, and snarls, and howls, was unchained at last; and the joyful ferocity of the women was a thing to see and to remember. It was the uprising of the pampered beast, the beast that had sunned itself for years in prosperity. Long ages of insult might have condoned what I saw that day, but the circumstances never.
Bands of women arm-in-arm, students, waving the tricolour, cabs and carriages crowded with people driving nowhere, anywhere, so that they could find a new place to shout in, girls with men's hats on their heads, men with women's bonnets—it was Mabille, into which the beasts of the Jardin des Plantes had broken; La Closerie des Lilas on an infinite scale, roofed with sky.
And, beyond the Vosges, at his desk, quite unmoved, with a cigar in his mouth and a folio in his hand, was sitting Bismarck, secure in everything, possessed of everything, from the Erbswurst for the Prussian cooking-pot to the guns that were to batter down Paris.
I have said little about my social life in Paris, but I have indicated, I think, that my guardian and I were friends of the Emperor's; and I mention it as a strange fact, and a fact that casts volumes of light on his character, that now, in my desolation, deserted by my guardian, deserted by Franzius and Eloise, deserted by everyone I loved, the image of Napoleon arose before me as a person I would like to speak to. You know just what I mean. There is generally amongst one's friends some person, some homely individual, some good man or good woman, to whom we go when in affliction for a word of consolation, or even just to feel their presence. We look in and see them, even though we may say nothing of our troubles. Moved by this instinct, I resolved to look in and see the Emperor. To get near the Tuileries was a difficult business, and even to pass the Cent Gardes at the gate, but once inside, things were easier.
The Emperor had come to Paris from the Council at Saint Cloud, held the night before. I do not know whether the Empress accompanied him or not, but he was in the palace, and the great hall was thronged.
The excitement of the streets was here, too, though in a more subdued form. Men were talking and laughing; everyone felt, or seemed to feel, that some great good fortune was impending. As a matter of fact,the war seemed to promise a "move up" all round. Honour to France, showers of gold and decorations from those painted skies which Hope rears so pleasantly above fools, and, above all, change.
Most of these men were money-changers at heart; corrupt, vicious, ready to devour, true children of the Second Empire, descendants of the clique of rogues which manipulated the coup d'état, sent Hugo to exile, and flung France into the net spread by parasites, financiers, and corrupt politicians. France with her foot on the neck of Germany seemed to promise fabulous things to these. They had much, and they wanted more. They craved for change—and they got it.
Amidst the crowd, which included some of the greatest names in France, it seemed hopeless for me to seek an audience. But I knew the place. I saw the Palace Prefect, Baron Vareigne. He had just shaken himself free from half a dozen men, and was making off down a corridor when I tacked myself on to him.
"See him? Impossible! For a moment?—just to pay your respects? Oh, well, only for a moment, then. You will be a change from the others. He just said to me: 'For Heaven's sake, let in no more generals!'"
And, with a click of a door-handle, there he was before me, seated in full uniform, which did not seem to fit him, the eternal cigarette smouldering between his lips, just the same old gentleman who had received my guardian and me so courteously that day; just the same useless, shuffling manner, the nasal voice, thehalf-closed eyes, crafty yet kindly—rising to meet me with a little, subdued laugh, half cynical, as though thanking God I were not another general. He bade me be seated, and told me he was not in a hurry, but being hurried, and looked over some papers that Vareigne handed him, and said: "Yes, yes," and flicked some cigarette-ash off his trousers. He talked to me for a few minutes, asking after the Vicomte de Chatellan, and then dismissed me, pushing me out of the cabinet with a kindly hand on my shoulder, and a kindly wish to see me again—après.
This was the true Napoleon, the man kind to all, the injudicious man who made those unfortunate children half drunk at the children's party at Biarritz, the man who loved his little son so well, the man who would put a fistful of gold in a poor man's pocket, just because it was a poor man's pocket: I say, this was the true Napoleon. For what shall you measure a man by, when all is said and done, if not by his heart? Ah! how I would have loved that man if he had been my father!
When I left the Tuileries I remembered the fact that I had not eaten since morning. I went to a café and dined after a fashion. I returned home late; and as I entered the hall the servant who took my hat, said: "A lady called an hour ago to see monsieur."
"A lady to see me?"
"Yes, monsieur. I told her that you had gone to Etiolles, to the Pavilion of Saluce, and she ordered her coachman to drive there."
I remember, now, that when I started to seeFranzius and Eloise off at the station I had said to the servant that I might go to Saluce, and if I did not return I would be there.
"What was she like?"
"Madame was quite young, tall, dark, and—very beautiful."
"Good God!" I said. "Whydid I not return an hour sooner! Quick! Send me Joubert!"
Joubert found me in the dining-room.
"Joubert," I shouted, "the swiftest horses—quick!—and a carriage to take me to Etiolles! You will drive me."
Joubert glanced at me and left the room like a flash.
I walked up and down. She had been here an hour ago—here an hour ago—and I had been walking the streets unconscious of the fact! The war which had threatened to destroy my last hope had brought her, perhaps, to my door, and I had been dining at a café! I had come slowly home through the streets, and she was here waiting for me! Was she leaving France? Was Etiolles but a stage on the journey? And if she found that I was not there, what would she do? Would she return, or—go on?
I sprang to the bell and rang it violently.
"The horses! The horses!" I cried. "God in heaven! are they never coming?"
"The horses are at the door, monsieur."
I rushed out, seized my hat, which the man handed me; he opened the door, and there stood a closed carriage; two powerful greys were harnessed to it, and Joubert was on the box.
"Joubert," I said, "drive as you never have driven before. My life is in your hands!" Then we started.
And now, as if called up by nightmare, the crowd in the streets, which I had forgotten, impeded our progress. The Rue St. Honoré was like a fair. As, sitting in the carriage, that was compelled to go at a walking pace, I looked out of the window at the senseless illuminations, the brutal or foolish faces, I could have welcomed at once a German army that would have swept a clear path for me.
We passed the gates of Paris without hindrance, and then down a long street lined with houses. It was after ten o'clock now, but these houses, in which dwelt poor folk, were ablaze from basement to garret.
The good news of the war had spread itself here; the great national rejoicing had found an echo even in this street, where men slept sound as a rule, as men sleep who have passed the day labouring in a factory.
The horses had now settled into a swinging trot. Half a dozen times I lowered the window to urge Joubert, but I refrained. There was still twenty miles before us. If one of our horses broke down, it was highly improbable that we could get another.
The houses broke up, and became replaced by trees; market-gardens lay on either side of the way. Looking back, I could see Paris. Not the city, but the furnace glare that its gas-lit streets and cafés cast on the sky. We passed forts, huge black shadows marked in the darkness by the glitter of a sentry's bayonet or the swinging lantern of a patrol. We passed down the long street of Charenton, and then the wheels of the carriage rumbled on the bridge that crosses theriver, and we were in the true country, with great spaces of gloom marking the fields, and marked here and there with the dim, patient light of a farmhouse window or the firefly dance of a shepherd's lantern.
Up till now I had watched intently the passing objects: the houses, stray people, and lights; but now there was nothing to watch but dim shapes and vague shadows. Up to this I had controlled thought, forcing myself to wait without thinking for the event, but now, alone in the midst of night, with nothing to tell of the surrounding world but the rumble of the carriage wheels and the beat of the horse-hoofs on the road, thought assumed dominance, and would not be driven away. Nay, it returned with a suggestion that froze my heart.
"If she has gone to the Pavilion, she will leave her carriage in the Avenue and go there on foot—she will cross the drawbridge. Ah, yes; the drawbridge! Well, suppose that the drawbridge is up! God in heaven! will she see it?"
It froze my heart.
What time would Madame Ancelot retire, and would she raise the drawbridge?
I knew very well that the drawbridge was always raised, last thing at night: the tramp-infested forest made this necessary. And I knew very well that Madame Ancelot was in the habit of retiring at nine o'clock. Still, to-night was a night in a thousand. Old Fauchard had, without doubt, dropped into the Pavilion to talk about the great news of the war.
I put my head out of the window.
"Quicker, Joubert!"
"Oui, oui," came his voice, followed by the sound of the whip. The night air struck me in the face like a cold hand; and, looking back, I could still see the light of Paris reflected from the sky, paler now and more contracted in the vast and gloomy circle of night.
It was cloudy over Paris, but the clouds were breaking, and the piercing light of a star, here and there, shone through the rents. The moon was rising, too, and her light touched the clouds.
Ah! this must be Villeneuve St. Georges, this long street to which the trees and hedgerows have given place.
I know the road to Etiolles well, but to-night it all seemed changed.
We passed hamlets and villages, and now at last we were nearing Etiolles. I could tell it by the big houses on either side of the road, houses with walled-in gardens and grass lawns, where young ladies played croquet in the long summer afternoons, so that a person on the road could hear the click of the balls and the laughter of the players. The moon had fully risen now, casting her light on the houses, the walls, the vineyards rolling towards the river, the trees and shrubs.
Suddenly, as though an adamantine door had been flung across the road barring our way the carriage stopped; one of the horses had fallen as if felled by an axe. The pole was broken. Joubert was on his knees by the head of the fallen horse, dark blood was streaming from its nostrils in the vague moonlight that was now touching the white road.
Inexorable Fate.
We were two miles from the château gates, but across the fields and through the forest of Senart there away straight as the crow dies to the Pavilion.
I do not remember leaving Joubert; suddenly the fields were around me and I was running. My mind driven to madness had matched itself against fate. "I will conquer you," it cried. "No dead fate shall oppose my living will. Let the past be gone. I have sinned, but I have suffered. If she is dead I will fling myself after her and seize her soul in my arms forever."
"You are mine—living or dead, you are mine."
I must have shouted the words as I ran for I heard the words ringing in my ears. Then fell on me as I ran Delirium, or was it the past.
I was in the forest now, the vague light was filled with shapes. A form sprang at me, it was Von Lichtenberg. I struck at it and passed on.
The iron man of the bell tower struck at me with his hammer, I seized him and he turned to mist.
And now a form was running beside me trying to hold me back, it was Gretel, she tripped me up with her foot. I fell, she vanished and her foot turned to the root of a tree. And the tree turned to Vogel.
He passed me as I ran outstripping him, and from the darkness before me now broke a form, it was little Carl.
We were in the forest of Lichtenberg, the lake before us. I cried to him to stop. For only answer came the splash of the water, the cry of a child—the gasping of a person drowning in the dark.
Death lay in the water. I plunged to meet him and seized a struggling form.
But the form was not the form of Death, but the form of a woman living and sweet.
A moment later and I would have missed by all eternity the love that had been waiting for me since the beginning of Time.
Fate is strong, but the will of man is stronger.
All that winter from the passing of the investing army to the time when the siege guns began to shake earth and sky with their ceaseless roar and from then to the spring, we remained at the Pavilion, Joubert and I, unhindered, almost unvisited by the enemy. The Château drew them off. We had left the doors open to prevent them from being broken in; perhaps it was for this reason that so little mischief was done by the troops that quartered themselves there.
The coincidence of Winter and War, the leafless trees, the eternal roaring of Paris like a tiger at bay, the darkness and death in my heart, all these are in my life away back there, forming a picture or rather a dark mirror, reflecting the forms of Despair, Apathy and Ruin, just as the dark water of the moat reflects the fern fronds of the bank and the dark green plumage of those pine-trees.
Nothing could ever come right in the world again. The gloomy skies, shaken winter long by the cannon said that, and the woods, leafless and sad and sombre, where the squirrels and the hundred other wood creatures seemed banished for ever with the birds. So the winter passed, till one day—I had not been in the woods for a week—one day, following a path near the round pond I came across a troop of ghosts;violets growing right before me on the path side; and to the left amidst the trees, gem-like blue, and dim amidst the brown last autumn leaves—violets. Led by a few days' warmth a million violets had invaded the old forest, grouped themselves amidst the trees and along the paths, heedless of Death or the Prussians.
Even as I looked a breath of wind bent the tree branches like a warm hand, showing a patch of blue sky above and casting a ray of sunshine on the blue flowers below. The Drums of War, the trampling of armies at grip with one another, proclamations, treaties, the pageantry of victory, the sorrows of defeat, all in a moment were banished before that touch of spring and the vision of these lovely and immortal flowers.
Since then I have seen them growing amidst the ruins of Mycenae, in Vallombrosa, at the tomb of Virgil; poets, lovers, warriors, and kings, wherever sun may light or spring may touch their tombs, call to us again through the blue violets of spring, but never have these flowers of God brought the past to man so freshly, so strangely or with such poignancy as they brought it to me there, growing absolutely in the footsteps of Ruin, yet unruined and with not a dewdrop brushed from their leaves.
Ah, yes, there are times when the commonest man becomes a poet, as on that day when dreaming of the death of a woman and the dragon of war, I found spring hiding in the forest of Sénart just like some enchanting ghost of long ago, half-child, half-woman,and answering to my unspoken question, "War, Death, I have not seen them—I do not know whom you mean; they passed, mayhap, when I was asleep. Monsieur, do you not admire my violets?"
The sublime and heavenly cynicism of that artless question, the question itself, these combined to form the germs of a philosophy which has clung to me since then, a philosophy which, combined with love, has slain in me the remains of what was once Philippe de Saluce.
Then day by day and week by week the forest, the fields, the hills, became slowly overspread with the quiet, assured and triumphant beauty of spring. Just as long ago, I fancied that I could hear the forest awakening from sleep, so now I fancied I could hear the world awakening from war and night. Communards might fight in Paris, kings and captains assemble at Versailles, Alsace might go or Alsace might remain, what was all that toy and trumpery business to the great business of Life, to the preparation of the blossom, the building of the butterflies in the aerial shipyards, the letting slip of the dragon-fly on his dazzling voyage? What a hubbub they were making in the Courts of Europe as Von der Tann's army, the King of Saxony's army, all those other triumphant armies turned from Paris with bugles blowing, drums beating, and colours flying, laden with tumbrils of gold and the spoils of war!
"France will never arise again!" said the drums and the bugles, "never again," echoed Europe. "Ah, wait," said spring.
Behind the veils of sunshine and April rain, heedless of Von der Tann's drums or the Saxon bugles, or the vanquished men or the vanquished treasure; viewless and unvanquished, the Spirit of Earth was preparing the future for a new and more beautiful France. Each bee passing from blossom to blossom that spring was labouring for the greater France of the future, each acorn forming in its cup, each wheat grain sprouting in the dark, each grape globing in the vineyards of the Côte d'Or; each and all were labouring for the motherland, to fill again her granaries and her treasure house. Folly had brought her under the knee of Force; drained of blood, half dying, wholly vanquished; in tears, in madness, in despair, she lay forsaken by all the Olympians but Demeter.
Had I but known, those first violets in the forest of Sénart held in their beauty all the future splendour and beauty of the New France.
In my life I have seen many a wonderful thing, but my memory carries with it nothing more miraculous than those flowers of promise seen as I saw them in the forest of Despair.
I am writing these lines in the rose garden of Saluce, ghostly, even on this warm June day, with the memories and the pictures and the perfumes of the past. How good summer is to the old! And how much kinder even than summer is love.
Down the garden path towards me is coming the form of a woman. Once long ago with the romantic extravagance of youth I pictured this garden, haunted by the forms of lovely women long dead; but not one of those forms was as romantic as this living woman, coming towards me between the bushes of the amber and crimson roses.
How slowly she walks, and, see, she stops now and hesitates—ah, now, she has seen me, and she smiles. Age has not touched her sight, yet she is blind—for she is the only person in the world who cannot see that my hands are tremulous and that my hair is grey.