Our—Gabrielle's and mine—miraculous mission was never forgotten. We did not speak of it, but we watched the racing days, and as we watched the words of the VISION grew visibly true. The Great Effort was to be made; that we knew. In the face of all prudence, driven onward by the irresistible purpose of the Almighty, the generals of the armies announced the dread decision of "trying it out"—theEnglish said—in one colossal combat. It was the edict of fate that rushed them on to this conclusion. And it was trumpeted to the whole world. And no one thought it strange. No one wondered. And yet in any finite human view what unutterable folly! Ah—it was God's way. HE had blinded the eyes of the wise. HE had perverted the judgment of the mighty. HE had turned the councils of the Great into childishness. His hand indeed again rested on the earth, and its peoples, and the vastENDwould be—so it became clear to my sister and to me—HIS Revelation of Himself, blasting clean into the hearts of men this truth, that HE LIVED.
So the armies of the Allies and of the Powers gathered together against each other, along the line of the eastern frontiers of France, as I have said. There the last gage of war was to be flung down, and the issue tested.
But no new command came to us from the spirit-world. It was now within two weeks of the hour set for the DESCENT, and Gabrielle and I wondered that we should not hear again of the mysterious matter. Need we doubt? See how the current of events foretold the END! That last night at the old home in St. Choiseul I shall never forget. We sat together in the big library throughout the night expecting some sudden GUIDANCE from the Unknown. Wesaid very little. The weight of our purpose had withdrawn us from the companionship of our neighbors, and for weeks we had lived alone in a reserve of solitude, of wondering suspense, that also tied our tongues. We had become stupefied with the terror of this admission to the supernatural, as if we were holding the hands of the Creator! Did we believe? Gabrielle did, and—I will confess it—I linked it all with the phantasmagoria of events of the hideous war, as something possible—just possible.
That was the end of September. We must be at the Chateau of La Ferté the following night if punctuality counted in this tremendous eventuality. And of course it did count. How exactly GOD had given his commands to Moses and Joshua, to Barak and to Gideon, to Jephthah, to David, to Solomon, to Elijah! So instinctively we grouped ourselves with the designs of Providence as indeed commissioned agents of its ends.
It was almost morning; the eastern sky reddening with flakes of fire scattered over it, and the light entering the room from the south wall of the garden, where the clustering vines hung untouched and forgotten; when Gabrielle spoke to me.
"Alfred have you any doubts? The time is short for our preparation. Tonight we should be at La Ferté."
"I will go with you Gabrielle. Would you go alone?"
And my sister answered in the words of Barak to Deborah:
"'If thou will go with me then I will go; but if thou will not go with me, then I will not go.'"
"Gabrielle all issues are with God. I will go with you."
Later, when the day had fully broken, and the sunlight flooded everything without and within the house, and, from its singular clarity, the not usual picture of the Eiffel Tower, far off in Zeppelin-haunted Paris, was just descried as a hazy skein of lines in the sky—we were both looking at it—the front door was assailed with a furious knocking. I ran to it and opening it encountered Privat Deschat with a paper in his hands, his face convulsed with emotion, his mouth wide open, and crowded with insulting epithets, that he flung upon me with such emphasis that, for an instant, I thought I was the occasion of his rage. But it was not so. It was what he read that had startled him into this unaccustomed excitement and denunciation.
"Voila," he shouted, waving the sheet he held in my face. "Voila, une clique des fous. Les scelerats; les imbecilles abominables; traitres; Dogs of Perdition. See, they intend to risk all on a single cast of the die and then—C'est assez à faire un homme honnête—with his headon his shoulders—créver avec desespoir, with madness. Alfred Lupin, what do you suppose? The Allies and the Boches and their forces have agreed upon tomorrow as a day of final quittance. There is to be one huge battle,un conflit superbeand then—Quoi?Give up—la FIN. C'est a dire une massacre insupportable, unheard of, monstrous, irreparable, and then—Ah, le Diable pourquoi existe je?—la renvoi à jour fixe.Can you believe such a suicide of the nation, such a shameless cowardice, such insanity, such depravity of ideas? And they make of it a circus,une parade macaronique, and of the nationun jouet. Is it not most damnable? Eh?"
Stunned by this unexpected outburst I retreated a step, and following me with the offending paper he continued his onslaught.
"Have you not heard? The Generals, the Kings, the Princes, the Diplomats, the Soldiers, have all agreed upon one infernal exterminating duel, and with that over no matter who wins, they throw down their arms and make peace. And here—HERE—" he shouted, still pursuing me backward into the hall-way, while behind me gathered Hortense, Julie, and even Gabrielle in appalled curiosity—"here they proclaim it to their peoples, and bid them gather at the carnage,Une spectacle magnifique assurement—the death of the nations. What poison of insanity, of miserable, hopeless, brutal, depraved idiocy, possesses our men? Has the whole world become a drivelling fool,une bête écervelé?"
He was still holding out towards me the paper, and in despair over his exasperation, I seized it, and rushed with it to the light, while Privat Deschat rushed with me, and the little circle of auditors closed about us in amazement. I saw at once the cause of Deschat's disgust. The sheet he had brought to us was a broadside—une bordée—which evidently was intended for circulation throughout the country, and had been posted over the walls of the cities, where what I knew, was frankly announced—theumpirage, thearbitramentin one last conflict of the undecided war. It read.
PROCLAMATIONPEACE COMES WITH VICTORY. ONE BATTLE MORE. THEN IT IS ALL OVER. ON —— THE BATTLE BEGINS. THAT ENDS THE WAR. LET THE NATIONS GATHER. THE TOURNAMENT OF CIVILIZATION IS AT HAND. SUCH IS THE DECISION OF THE RULERS, AFTER THAT INDUSTRY, REST. PRAY FOR US, AND COME AND SEE.L'ADMINISTRATION.
PROCLAMATION
PEACE COMES WITH VICTORY. ONE BATTLE MORE. THEN IT IS ALL OVER. ON —— THE BATTLE BEGINS. THAT ENDS THE WAR. LET THE NATIONS GATHER. THE TOURNAMENT OF CIVILIZATION IS AT HAND. SUCH IS THE DECISION OF THE RULERS, AFTER THAT INDUSTRY, REST. PRAY FOR US, AND COME AND SEE.
L'ADMINISTRATION.
"Yes," mocked Deschat, "l'es boutiquiersareselling seats for it now in Paris, in Berlin, in London.Mon Dieu je vais à me mettre au cercueil." With that admonishment he vanished from the house.
I turned to Gabrielle.
"Gabrielle, it is enough. It is the writing on the wall. GOD COMES. He has truly turned the heads of the nations. It is again the words of the prophet Jeremiah:
"'Yes, the stork in the heavens knoweth her appointed times; and the turtle and the crane and the swallow, observe the time of their coming; but my people know not the judgment of the Lord.'
"We need no further assurance, Gabrielle. It will be as the spirit of Sebastien Quintado said. LET US GO AT ONCE."
CHAPTER X
THE END
TheChateau of La Ferté stands upon a low hill forty kilometres (about twenty-five miles) northeast of Briois. It is a wooded hill, because it has been a neglected one. The old trees of the ancient demesne have grown up in disorder, and have gathered to themselves a wild brood of other trees and bushes. The whole place is a wilderness, but threaded with paths of picnickers—parties du plaisir—and it is a place, too, full of game; here pasture deer, and the fox lurks in its coverts, and the grouse and the partridge, and on the shielded lake swim wild ducks. Its great towers are falling to ruin; the stone walls that bound them together are in decay, but buried in the thicketed vines that have sprung upon them in profusion like a horde of biting hounds. The strong trunks of the wistarias, like mighty thighs have crushed in their partitions, and the old courtyards are damp with rank weeds and spotted fungus-growths. The northeast tower still lifts up its gray masses of wall above the encroaching trees, but its feet are buried in the luxuriant verdure of the plants and trees. Astrangely beautiful spot. Traces of the old gardens remain, and a few still decipherable paths wander up and down the northern slopes. Some of these lead to the lake, invaded on all sides by rushes and sedges, thickly wadding its sides, except at one rim where still a pebbly margin stretches its white ribbon against the vivid green of descending, creeping mosses.
A moat was once dug deeply about the fortress-villa, and the range of the portcullis can be irregularly interpreted in the crumbling walls, that faced the ditch. It is a wide domain, embracing hundreds of acres, and the tangled thickets are interrupted by open grassy plains, while towards the south an orchard partially redeemed by some neighboring farmers, mixes with the savage glories of the unmolested wilderness, the pastoral sweetness of cultivation. It is a rare bit of natural artistry, enriched by feudal history and weirdly darkened by ancient crime, and now in the country circuits ascribed a half sinister population of unfavorable natural tenants. Here the owl secretes his nest and bewitches the night with his melancholy screams, the mosaic-backed snakes glide within its shadows, or bask in its hot exposures, the claw legged bats drape its fastnesses in the daytime, and wheel in twitching gyrations about its grim sentinel towers in the moonlight. Toads and stealthy rats find in its uninvaded precincts safehiding. Like some untamed forest land it invited the flight of the hated denizens of the countrysides, and freely offered its thickets, overgrown jungles, and sunless recesses for their concealment and protection.
But there were more terrible things said of La Ferté. The displeasure of Heaven had visited it. The blazing lightning had struck it again and again. Its ancient oaks had been blasted by the fires of the Almighty. When storms came from the north or east, their worst fury was spent on the wearied old walls of La Ferté; when the snow fell it fell deepest at La Ferté and the winds played there their most demoniacal tricks. Some wanderers who once had taken refuge in its deserted rooms, had been killed by the bolts of lightning, and others—a Gypsy band—in winter had been found huddled together dead in its woods, buried beneath enormous drifts, when the snowfall outside of the fated spot and over the general country-land had been light and even.
Ah yes, the old castle lay under a curse. In its old dungeons men and women, and children too had been done to death, and there was the well-known tale of the murdered duke and his beautiful wife and three fair children stabbed to death with the very dining forks at a banquet, when words ran high and the wine had turned the heads of the wicked guests who were theduke's own kindred; such current gossip as fascinates the contemplation of every deserted ruin.
In the spring St. Elmo fires burned on its turrets, and were one to enter its woods at night haunting lights shone from its empty windows, and, if the wind rose—it soon became a tempest at La Ferté—and on it rose a chorus of wailing, long sighing sobs, that you could hear as far as the post road. That was well known everywhere. And then a thunder bolt, a great iron rock, hurled from Heaven, had crushed in the roof of an old keep, outside of the moat, where once a pretty girl—so ran the legend—and boy who were in the way of a terrible baron, way back in the reign of Charles V, had been strangled, and their bodies sunk in a well, which sometimes filled even now with blood, and ran out, painting the ground in red streaks under the hawthorn bushes. You could see the stone now, though the way to it was through thick-set briars. No wild flowers ever grew there, though everywhere else at La Ferté they were plentiful enough, and the marguerites were famous. Hundreds came there to gather them for birthdays, at weddings, and for funerals. Yes, yes—but only in daylight was La Ferté visited. All good people gave it a wide berth at night. The post road passed near it, but those who chanced to travel on it by night hurried past the gloomy shadows of La Ferté—darkest too like ink or ebony, when the moon silvered its craggy walls.
To Gabrielle and to me, La Ferté was invested with no terrors. We loved it. From our earliest years of life we had every summer gone to it on pleasure parties, and later—so absorbing was it to my fancy—I had, when a very young man, made a complete survey of it, mapped its old walk-ways, gardens, and outbuildings, reconstructed in drawings, from ancient prints, its granaries and storerooms, the cellars, vaults, larders, arsenals, and the upper stories of its dwelling apartments. So the supernatural summons to repair to La Ferté brought with it, despite its ghostly origin, no fears. Indeed fear under the spell of this awful errand could not have been suspected. It all lay prone before the sublime magnitude of the event which we were to serve, whose heralds and appanage we were. The excitement, spiritual and mental, woven with the emancipated feelings of destiny, and also with the emotional elation over the issue of peace and restoration, lifted us completely above usual physical states, and half immersed us in that dreamless sleep which the Hindus callprajna, or something like it. Consciousness was there with us, of course, but a larger consciousness obliterated our own selves, and we had become mixed in with the currents of the intentions of the Supreme Spirit.
However I was all the time intensely practical and I had formed exactly my plans for our installation at the chateau. Almost immediately after the storming Privat Deschat had left us, we started. An automobile, already engaged from the hospital, carried us to Briois, and there, almost on the instant of our arrival, we took a train for the village of Peltry, which is not far from the chateau. From the village we made our way across the fields to the chateau. We were quite alone, but not knowing what circumstances might arise, and eagerly insistent upon the demands of nature, I provided us with a plentifully supplied basket of provisions, which momentarily may strike the reader as an anticlimax to our exalted states of mind. It was really nothing of the sort. Physical weakness could only have interfered with our mediation. It was not satiety or even satisfaction I was thinking of, but just physical endurance under some unforeseen and incomputable exigency.
All the way we had been made aware of the vast concentration of troops, and of the nation, towards the frontiers of the country, where the confronting armies were to try out the dread decision. Marching regiments, the vans, the clouds of aeroplanes, and the multitudes of people traveling in all manner of ways, and mostly afoot, landing from trains from Paris,from the west, from the south, and converging in one colossal mass upon the selected battlefield, convinced us that the utterly suicidal madness was to subserve the purposes of God. The spectacle was to be grandiose and universal. The testimony to its power should not be lacking in emphasis.
Streams of men and women, mostly old men now, and children, swept past us. The land was inundated with the migrating crowds. These spectators invaded the fields, waded the little streams, overran the farmyards, pressing on to that strange goal, theduel of the nations. Surely the poison of an insane prepossession had turned reason and wisdom and experience and prudence into foolishness. So we thought. Thus the mysterious messages revealed to us seemed to be visibly corroborated.
But the hilltop of La Ferté was not sought. The drifting crowds, pushing stubbornly on, almost without sound of voice, in a dreadful silence, like creatures driven to their doom, divided there their compact masses, and it remained like some obstacle in a river's rush and freshet, and only around it poured the human tides, animated by some fear perhaps—No, rather directed by the mystical forces of the intelligences that ruled the hour, and ruling the hour ruled also the inclinations of the hearts that, in their blind animal herding, obeyed them.
We had hurried along with the scattered throngs, veering constantly towards the untouched wilderness of bushes, swards, jungles, and woods, around the ancient ruin, until upon its verge we stepped out of the vast struggle, and moved upward on the slopes towards its towers. There were wondering comments, and a few for a moment were inclined to follow our example. But the murmur of disapproval rose like the breaking of waves upon a beach, half articulate, half inarticulate, but wholly in remonstrance. Some words were intelligible. They sufficed.
"Non, non—pas là. Retournez; c'est un pays maudit. Ne restons là. C'est une place méchante. Voila.Back, back; the devil owns it.Je vous le dit. Aucun qui reste là se flétrie."
We were watched a little while with consternation and astonishment, and then the bovine muteness returned, and the headlong plunge went on uninterrupted. We were left alone. The edge of the preserve which we crossed was a grassy slope, terminated at a little height by a thicket of hawthorns. Through this latter, along a devious pathway, we made our way, bending beneath the heavily draped branches. Then came an open space, and a large ragged chestnut of huge girth was encountered. Its wide flung branches struck against the very walls of the western tower,which here, crumbling and falling apart, had crushed the front wall of the enclosure, and left its inner courtyards exposed, seen over blackened masonry, and piles of bricks, and rudely cut limestone blocks. Scrambling over this obstacle we found ourselves at length in the chateau's courtyard, and in the darkest shadows, almost impenetrable in daylight. Beyond us rose the better preserved eastern tower, which it was my intention to ascend. Shy lizards shot hither and thither along the walls, and the air seemed almost irrespirable with the odors of decay, from rotting timbers, and the multitudinous growth of fungi, and ivy, and a red confervae coating the pavement in the little undried pools. I knew exactly where I was. I led the way further to a descent of a few steps, that brought us within the rounded walls of the tower, where a fairly well preserved winding stairway led upward to its very summit. I had often ascended it to its very summit. Now I told Gabrielle to wait below, and I would first essay the steps, and discover their condition. I felt confident of their strength. It had been spoliation, more than weathering, that had destroyed the western tower. There had been four towers once, but the two northern ones had been almost razed to the ground by the frequent plunderings of their stones for bridges, and stables, and culverts of the surrounding country. Their stumpsand foundations were thickly encumbered with all kinds of wild growths, amongst which the stunted saplings of apple trees had inserted themselves, making the enclosure in the late spring a bower of fragrance with their abundant blossoms.
I found that the stairs were unchanged; their solidity could not be questioned. The better preservation of the eastern tower with the still unbroached and massive roof at its summit, had kept the stairway in an almost pristine condition of stability, though, here and there, the inroads of the elements, the disheartened growth of mosses and pallid fungi upon the thin accumulations of earth in the corners, and along the rises of the steps, imparted a sense rather than a look of decay. At the topmost winding of the circular stairs, everywhere supported by the central newel about which they wound, I discovered, to my interested surprise, that the lightning had played some of its mischievous tricks, which were popularly ascribed to the infamous history of the ancient keep and castle, as marking it for devastation and vengeance. A splitting of the parapet wall had occurred here, and the angular line of dislocation had separated the stones of the rather high wall, and, under the stress of subsequent rains and wind storms, they had fallen out for a space of two or three feet. The accident wasnot inopportune. It permitted a view of the land towards the east, towards the vast panorama of the assembled armies and the gathering multitudes, who thus now, under the sway of an over-ruling Providence, flocked to this utterly amazing exploit. No conceit of theatrical device could have been more spectacular; no imaginative invention of the epic poets more sublime.
I stood a moment at the opening of the wall and looked out over the fair landscape. The trance-like wonder of that moment I can never forget. Upon the brink of what tremendous phenomenon did I stand? Was the visible intervention of the Most High soon to be revealed, and we—my sister and myself—were we the chosen instrumentalities—trivial and feeble—for its transcendent beauty?
The westering sun threw the long shadows of the chateau, far flung over the trees and bushes, the slopes and even outward upon the throngs, at my distance hardly seen to move, a generally dark streaming mass, darkening at the horizon, which it seemed to overrun—the exodus of a nation! Beyond the farthest elevations northward, and again southward in the plain, extended—unseen but understood—theboyeaux, the labyrinths, the cave shelters, of Picardy and Champagne where the soldiers waited. Beyond that ravelled edge of desperation, of suffering, ofconfronted death, lay the bordering edges of the enemy. Beyond that again, another concourse, summoned from the towns, the villages, and the farm-lands of Germany, instinct with the same hallucination. And above us all—WHAT? The approaching descent of the shriven and unshriven hosts of the slain?
The day, fast closing, ushered in a night warm and clear. I assisted Gabrielle up the long ascent of stairs; I returned for the baskets and wraps and two small tent-stool chairs, our entire furnishment for that ordeal, doubtless, unattended, I divined, with either hunger or fatigue. Still the provision of these simple comforts seemed wise. Indeed as the day died away, we ate the bread and drank the wine, in silence, waiting. Below us came the murmurs, the catches of song, the wailing melodies of hymns, and over the illimitable concourse spread with flickering inconstancy, the spangles of lights, with here and there a spurt of flames from the bonfires of improvised camps.
Perhaps it was about midnight, or later—we knew nothing of time, the very breathing of our bodies, the beating of our hearts, hurried and rapid as they were, were not even felt, or were only noticed in the moments of self-realization. How could it have been otherwise? About midnight, I say, we both became conscious of an unwonted agitation in our minds or souls—whoshall say which?—and we started up together, crouching down at the broken gap of the parapet. Surely the instinct of premonition was awakened in us. The sky was moonless. The stars shone distantly, their light softened into spotted glows only.
"Look," it was Gabrielle speaking, with uplifted hand pointing above us.
I raised my eyes.
A light—O so slowly developed—the faintest possible silvery radiance, emerged somewhere in the centre—or what seemed to us the centre—of the sky, and grew steadily broader and brighter. At first it was a curdling spot of light, from whose rapidly moving—we could now discern its motion—edges, like the margins of a thunder cloud which is torn or frayed into wisps of sullen vapor, thin wavering flames of a richer golden light shot softly, now piercing the darkness in arrowy lines, now withdrawn to descend again in broad blades of nebulous splendor. And from them an illumination, pale, like the first morning's glow, spread upon the earth beneath, and the dense distant masses of men, the springing features of the landscape, slowly developed spectrally. How marvellous it was. I was transfixed not with wonder so much as with admiration, an awful admiration—Ah yes a quickening sense of worship perhaps. Within me stirred those original promptings of a recognition of the OVER-RULE, somewhere in those depthless heavens above us, where the stars shine.
Gabrielle had risen to her feet, and with her hands clasped tightly across her eyes swayed with the moment's inspiration, with her own evoked transcendentally strengthened powers. I stood aside and watched, a human record simply of the immeasurable spectacle.
The light descended bodily; it almost seemed as a shimmering mist at first but taking on a skeiny texture, and streaked here and there with lines of brightness. If it was a vast cloud of the disembodied it was too far away from us to analyze it into forms or faces, or whatever the spectral apparitions were. There however incontestably before us, it grew and distended and softly sank, in an increasing radiance, upon the earth. This radiance was superbly delicate, and yet intense. It seemed almost colorless, though I thought, too, bluescent masses passed over it or through it, like floating shadows on a wall. The fight was comparable to the strong glow of an electric light, shaded within an opalescent glass. The whole descent of the cloud was in the nature of a progression or inundation. It appeared to touch the earth, and then to roll north and south, while an endless ocean of the same brightness poured downwardfrom the remote zenith. It was ineffably amazing.
But quietly, like the rising winds in an approaching storm, motion developed. And it became quicker and quicker, until I could discern within the vast, white, shining envelope, currents of light passing this way and that in unbroken rushes, and then came a sound. I heard it distinctly and yet doubted my senses. I turned to Gabrielle. She was not there. Terrified with the sudden thought of some miraculous transfiguration I called aloud.My voice was a whisper.Turning abruptly to one side I stumbled upon her prostrate body. She lay almost face downward, on the damp paving, and as I seized her and raised her up, there could scarcely be perceived any token of life in her. Hastily chafing her hands, and clasping her to my breast for warmth, I felt the renewed pulsations, and a moment later she opened her eyes and gazed at me in a transfixed vacant way that again startled my fears as to some hideous issues to this night of wonder.
"Gabrielle," I could see her and the objects everywhere plainly, by the flooding light that momentarily grew more and more brilliant, "Gabrielle. What is it? Are you sick?"
There was no answer; her eyes were closed again, and her hands seemed stiffened together in the figure of prayer. I placed her on one ofthe stools, and without relinquishing my hold of her, opened the basket of food and wine, took out a flask and pressed it between her lips. She responded. The wine revived her, and like a dazed person, she stared about her as if lost.
"Gabrielle, here I am—Alfred, your brother. Speak, Gabrielle. O! speak."
Sentient life was returning, its force was reawakened, and she opened her arms, and embraced me, and—blessed sound—her words entered my ears, soft, low, almost gasping.
"Alfred. See. The Spirits are here. My summons has been heard. Quintado has kept his word. It is all as he said. Listen, Alfred. There are voices—a sort of music; singing or—is it sighing? Ah! This ends the war. And the cries, the shouts, Alfred. What are they?"
The light had become more and more strong—it rained now upon old La Ferté, and its solitary tower, and its ruins, the wandering ancient park with trees and bushes started outward, clothed in the strange splendor. The glory of it filled the skies, and it beat upon the motionless crowds revealing their compacted and scattered groups. And the people? Everywhere was confusion or consternation. A widespread agitation was expressed in uplifted hands, in bowed heads, in kneeling bodies. We could see that, indistinctly, on the country-side, beyond La Ferté. But it was the mammoth voiceof that people that Gabrielle had heard, rising—rising—blotting out the ethereal music, until its indescribable weirdness, its inarticulate ululations were like some animal expiration of immeasurable magnitude. It shot a singular terror into my heart. Was this indeed the End of the Earth?
"Gabrielle," I whispered, "let us go. We cannot stay here. This light, this influence—these ghostly crowds. I cannot—you cannot stand it.Come—come."
I lifted her to her feet, forced her again to drink of the wine and drank myself. And then we turned to the steps to descend. Everything was in a bright light, and the light was accompanied now by gleaming shooting darts or rays, that split it in streaks of phosphorescent—nothing else quite describes it—cleavages.
I thought I saw faces—but they were like thoughts only. Gabrielle clung closely to me, and shielded her eyes from the marvellous picture, that increased its stupendous power every minute. I took one last look through the broad gap in the parapet. The clouds of glory were still descending, sometimes in rolling folds, and the billowy masses or reservoirs of light that had reached the earth were visibly hastening onward along the track of that distant endless marshalled host, like dust-storms of countless sparks. I thought too, different from thecolossal moan of the multitude, I caught the sharp note of distant cries. Was that the beginning of that "terrible Paralysis" Quintado in his vision to Gabrielle had threatened? I thought so.
I almost carried Gabrielle down the winding stairs. Her interest increased, animation awakened, the vitality of her tired nerves was renewed; she seemed suddenly thrilled with an exorbitant curiosity. At the foot of the long descent, painfully traversed, as I could not bring with me my little lantern, though the exterior splendor sent innumerable dashes of light through chinks and narrow eyelets, that dimly lit our winding way—at the foot, Gabrielle seemed quickened into an almost delirious activity.
"Alfred. Let us go to the trenches. Are they far away?The soldiers, Alfred—Sebastien said they would be as dead men, that they would throw away their arms and flee, suddenly stricken with the crime of their murders. And then will come the STUPOR, that will hold them asleep, motionless, the many millions—and then Alfred—I almost can hear him now telling me—the three days of thePresence of the Deadover them, and the terror, the punishment, and then, Alfred—you remember?—their weakness and remorse—and then Alfred,Peace—and then—" her voice faltered a moment, but only for amoment—"then Alfred, comes—, Ah, Alfred, do not think me cruel—then perhaps I shall leave you, and Sebastien will take me to Heaven."
Her voice became almost inaudible. I struggled with an overwhelming agony of sorrow, because—never had the thought been altogether absent—Gabrielle too might leave me, and then Ah God,—then I would be just a drifting relic, on the ocean of chance, unnoticed, unloved—ALONE. It seemed too hard, too cruel. Yet even amid the distracting misery of this anticipation, a curious malignancy of suspicion—No, not that—a pained wonder surprised me. Did Gabrielle love Sebastien Quintado? Did she seek him in Heaven? And Dora? What about her?
I lifted my eyes above into the magnificence that now enveloped our earth—this unearthly vapor or emission of spirits—and there above me in the air I saw the figure of Sebastien. The face above it was grave and smiling, the lips seemed moving in salutation, although I heard nothing. A form leaped past me. It was Gabrielle. Her outstretched arms were raised to the pallid spectre. The tableau lasted for a few minutes, and then the spirit shape vanished into the effluence above and around us. Gabrielle returned to my side.
"Alfred; come. Sebastien says the Spell of Heaven is on the Earth. He says, 'Go andSee.' God's manifestation confounds the purposes of men. 'Go and See.' Come Alfred, I have new strength, new power. Nothing now can tire me. COME."
So silently, hand in hand, we walked through the groves, the hawthorn trees, the old grass clothed mounds, past mimic lakes reflecting the supernal fires, as though the moon shone on them, but diversified with the play of incomputable radiances, past the last long slope of meadow and out into the horrified, worshipping multitudes, making our way on, and on, and on, over the five mile walk to the trenches of the soldiers. My inquisitive thoughts left nothing unessayed, untried, unseen. And this is what I saw.
Beyond La Ferté stretched a diversified country-side, roads and fields, sloping descents into meadow-like expanses, whose grass and sedges were interrupted by low wooded islets, taller hillsides crowned by farm houses, thin strips of forest land, and uneven half hummocky ranges of elevations, crowding down upon narrow and shallow streams, with broader sweeps of scarcely undulating land, spreading upward to chalk terraces on the horizon, where burrowed the hidden chained chambers of the army, the masked batteries, the mud pasted trenches.
Everywhere were the people. They were the most numerous on the roads, where the blockade of carriages, vehicles, automobiles extended for miles. The fences were lined with spectators and over the farm-lands, in groups, and families, or sometimes in packed crowds, the populace was encountered.
We passed amongst them almost unnoticed. Here was a group of peasant folk kneeling on the grass, and led in prayer by a parson or a priest. Here others stood in mute masses, gazing upward aghast, or thrilled, or motionless, and numbed as in a trance. But there were exciting contrasts to all this immobility. Men were shouting with delirium; women singing in strident unison, their harsh voices rising in vocal yelps of pious song; in places I saw colonies thrown down upon the ground, men and women and children, rolling over and back again, against each other, in a queer rhythmic way, like some bed of mechanical reciprocating cylinders. It was almost ludicrous. Young men had climbed the trees, and their bodies bored the white radiance that enveloped the earth, with black patches, like spots of gloom. The roofs of the farmhouses and those of a few little villages we passed through were sometimes thickly invested with people, and against the lambent horizon they made serrated hedges ofheads, broken now and again with ejaculating hands and arms.
I stood a little while at the back of a dairy—laiterie—where a milkmaid on her knees, working the white rosary in her hands, was surrounded by a knot of small children. Their prattle was infinitely pleasing. For an instant it seemed to conciliate the monstrous prodigy about us with things human and ordinary.
"Comme, il est beau!" cried a small boy with his hands clapping in delight. "Je crois que les anges descendent sur la terre; n'est ce pas?" and he nudged the oblivious milkmaid who stuck persistently to her rosary.
"Ah, well," said a still smaller girl, "I think they are fairies—all those shining spots—and they come to live with us and help us.Voila."
"Ah then we shall have anything we wish—toys and good clothes I guess," muttered a rather larger girl.
"Yes, Bertha, but you must be very good and not kick Margarite. The fairies are—are—tres particulières.Ils n'aiment pas les filles méchantes."
"But where—where," asked another boy, pushing his way forward among the others, "where did the fairies get so many candles?Pas en Ciel?"
I looked up; there was now a startling glory in the spectacle. The white enveloping banks of ghostly things had become tremulous withcountless flickering spires of light, so slightly different from the quality of the entire luminousness, that they appeared and disappeared, with an incessant discontinuity that produced the effect of an interior commotion most strangely beautiful.
We passed from thelaiterieinto an open pasture, where the cows, motionless and resting, continued to chew their cuds, apathetic and unmoved, while from point to point, marking the houses on our way, the dismayed dogs kept up their long prolonged baying, howls, and half suppressed growls. It was hard to believe that we were still in quite the usual world. Gabrielle retained her composure, and showed no symptoms of exhaustion. I feared her sudden collapse under the double strain of the mere muscular exertion, and that nervous preoccupation that drove her onward to the trenches. The rising ground to a higher hill indicated the approaching terminus of our fevered journey.
"Gabrielle, let us stay here a few minutes. Why kill yourself with this rapid gait? Besides, the morning comes, and then it will be time—quite time enough."
"Yes Alfred, I am quite willing. For a little time past I have noticed the fading of the light. Quintado said that in the daytime the host of the dead would be invisible though their influence would stay. Here—let us sit down and watch."
The place was propitious, a deserted shelter for cattle with a few benches in it, and facing the east.
For a while at least all our thoughts were absorbed in the marvelous atmospheric—if I might so term it—mutations taking place in the sky around us or above us. It almost seemed that we had left the earth, and had become part and participants in some vast celestial panorama; as if, under the magic of some incalculable influence and REVELATION, we were entering on the sublimities of Heaven.
The horizon lights as the sun toiled upward were clearly seen. There was first against the earth-rim a high wall of grey-blue clouds, their precipitous heights crowned with parapets, and these last glowing with gold. Later, and above the slowly dissolving cloud walls there developed reefs of separated islets, faintly roseate, moored off from a blue-grey shore, over which rose cloud dunes, themselves also acknowledging the coming of the day with faintest blushes, and then below the reefs taking the places of the parapeted walls, a pearly sky. Andthen, an almost instantaneous splendor of multiplied iridescences in the Ghost-Cloud before us, either a physical refraction or some supernatural addition, obliterated the sunrise, and flung far and wide its intolerable brilliancies. We sank to our knees in a trance of adoration. How longwe remained kneeling I cannot say. From time to time I raised my eyes; Gabrielle never moved. The colored scintillations were inscrutably piercing and varied; the whole celestial radiance was shot through and through with the compounded glories of thousands and thousands of rainbows. And then it faded,faded, the lights dropping out in broken fashion, now here, now there, until all was gone, and the uncovered sun lifted its round orb above the hills, and spread its native light over the earth, and the familiarity of that same earth itself was all resumed. The MANIFESTATION had vanished.
When I looked around me, the country-side there was bare of people. Perhaps they had fled; perhaps that portion of the land had not been visited. We had walked now about four and a half miles, and, gazing ahead, I saw the hills littered withprostrate figures—the motionless thousands of soldiers along the lines of the trenches! We had reached the PARALYSIS, that now held the armies of a continent in its awful chancery. And—God be Praised—this was the END.
Some distance behind the shed where we had taken our rest was a farm house, and, though not a sign of life distinguished it, it offered the only visible opportunity for securing nourishment, and of that both Gabrielle and I felt theneed. The walk had been long, and the excitement, the fierce turmoil and agitation of our thoughts and the dazed exhaustion of our senses demanded succor. We quickly walked back to it and entered the open door that led into its small chambers. It was deserted. I called aloud, but there was no answer, and opening door after door, mounted the steps to the attic, and studying from that elevation the neighborhood, I could see no one. We seemed to have reached a point which was far away from the crowds we had at first encountered. Had some resistless panic driven them back? OR—had the Paralysis seized them, and thrown them everywhere to the ground and, thus inert, they lay in the distances, undiscovered, undiscoverable? The wonder had been realized by myself over our apparent immunity from the dread coercion of this omnipresent stupor. How was that to be explained? Ah—how was anything to be explained? At least—if explanations must be sought—I thought it was the preserving graces of Gabrielle that lifted from us the covenanted affliction.
When I returned to the diminutive kitchen filled with the utensils of domestic use, with its unmade fire, where had been gathered the sticks and peat for its sustention, and with the pantries stocked with the humble provisions of the poor peasantry, I was overcome with a savageresentment. To what end, conceived of under the most accommodating suffrages of Faith and Religion, could all this wretchedness, the starved desolation of a country-side, serve? Nay, the utter subversion of a nation upon whose bent shoulders now would weigh the insufferable and unredeemable burden of an incalculable debt—a nation, too, groaning aloud with the wounds of bereavement, of sorrows, that a life-time would never heal. Oh! how desolating, how harsh and unrelenting it seemed—the blackness of a huge despair overtaxed me. I sank to the table with outspread arms, and burst into sobs of utter, direful misery. I felt the caress of Gabrielle, I heard her sweet comforting voice, I felt her tender lips press my cheeks—her very breath seemed the incense of an offering to God. And would my SISTER be added to the necessary sacrifices? The thought stung me into madness. My old revolt and rebellion, that which had momentarily defied the purposes of the Most High when Blanchette died, arose again, revengeful, blaspheming, sharply irreconcilable. And then, even then, an inexpressible mystery blessed me.
I lost consciousness—consciousness to earth—but I entered the gates of a dreamland, blessed with prophecy. I was in flight, rapid flight, and my way surmounted the mountain heights, and yet to my eyes nothing was hid upon theearth. It was too this same Europe. I swept over the cities of France, over the sunlit loveliness of its country, now far off into the bordering areas of Belgium, and again over the dike-seamed, flat-lands of Holland, and then with a monstrous swing that clove the air with the mighty speed of thought, I looked down upon the fair provinces of Germany, of Austria, of Italy—it even seemed that for an instant I stood upon the endless plains of Russia, and even surveyed the minarets of Constantinople, and everywhere in all of that measureless domain there was PEACE. Over the fresh verdure of England I returned, and ever and again renewed my flight, as if the gracious beauty of the smiling lands, creased with scouring trains, their rivers brimful of traffic, prosperous with teaming markets, and gay with merry life, was too sweet and bountiful a picture not to be rehearsed to satiety. I saw the flags of all the countries waving in their cities, but above them all too I thought I saw another flag that waved with them, and this second flag was everywhere thesame—it was the Flag of BROTHERHOOD, and it meant the consolidation of the nations in a Brotherhood of States. I heard the music of the songs of the people, ascending from the homes of the whole continent, and the sound of bells ringing in the churches, and the hum of an incessant industry, and the murmur, likethe unceasing murmur of the ocean, of the sons of men at their daily tasks, and the instantaneous realization came to me, that at length Europe had put aside its soldiery, its mighty guns, the hideous ingenuity of its death factories, the useless edifices of its Class Mummeries and Families, and all of the venomous pride of Title, and Europe had turned its beseeching eyes to the future, unlearning the barbarity of its past, and working and planning and divining the things that would bring upon the EarthPeace, Good-Will to Men. And then it seemed to me that as I wondered and laughed in the depthless joy of this realization, that a voice like the Voice of God, filled the empyrean wherein I sailed, and it said:
"FOR THIS END CAME I INTO THE WORLD."
We threaded our way through the thickly filled ranks of soldiers—we had passed by the wagons of ammunition, the ambulance corps, the vastenceinteof kitchen equipments—and everywhere was the stupefaction of utter apathy, here and there in individuals beginning to assume consciousness, with the twitching pains of increasing misery, that we had been told would be both physical and mental, the double excruciation of pain and remorse. But what a sight!
The inveterate poignancy of my wonder andmy curious freedom from the omnipresent influence—derived somehow from Gabrielle's immunity—kept me vigilant and observing. Gabrielle was constantly at my side, but she seemed less intent upon seeing, as upon ceaselessly going on. We advanced carefully between files of men, from whose hands guns and swords had fallen, as their owners succumbed to the incredible stupor. The relaxed arms had dropped the guns, the nerveless fingers released the control, the stricken bodies had reeled to the ground. We stepped over the motionless heaps of men who had sunk together in twisted groups of overlaid bodies and sprawling limbs—as I had seen the dead at Landrecies and at Coulommiers—steeped in this etherial opiate. We came upon battalions of cavalry slowly dissolving in a confusion of riderless horses. The riders had fallen from their saddles, or lay forward upon the necks of their horses, as if drugged with sleep. The horses were moving this way and that, confused, startled, neighing in their bewilderment, or, with wild eyes, struggling in broken companies to escape the weird strangeness of being unbidden, missing the familiar voices, the guiding check. Numbers slowly ambled away, their masters falling to the ground, pulling the belly-bands of the saddles after them, while, most miraculously, their imprisoned feet freed themselves from thestirrups, and the disengaged animals moved continuously away.
In the trickery of this supernatural stagnation there was no real panic among the animals, and the horses watching the ground seemed instinct with intelligence.I felt DIRECTION over-ruling circumstance.Occasionally incongruous predicaments arose, as when a cavalry man had fallen backward over his horse's broad back, and his head rolled slowly over the horse's rump with the latter's oscillation. A few riders were dragged onward with the horses, but they seemed finally to become disentangled and slumped to the ground. It was a bizarre disorganization, wherein the rigorous modernity of detail and preparation, had been hopelessly dispelled under a divine disintegration.
Indeed a portentous trance had gripped the millions of men. In its ensnarement they lay like corpses, hither, thither, rolled into masses, carpeting the ground in phalanxes, drooping upon each other in mimic embraces, or leaning in thick palisades of bodies like clustered logs. It seemed a vast immeasurable inebriety.
And the shadowy host? Where was it? The daylight illumined the interminable vistas. The wind blew softly over a spring landscape. The white flecks of clouds drifted as usual across the feebly bluescent sky. Nothing on earth was different except this palsied host,before, behind, around us. The similitudes from legend and romance came to my mind; the bolstered court in the Sleeping Beauty, the stricken seneschals in Consuelo, the death masque in Vathek, the rigid warriors with Frederick Barbarossa in the subterranean halls of earth, waiting their summons to leap forth in battle, the lifeless bodies in the pit that Sinbad saw.
But the invisible PRESENCE that held this world of men stiffened into immobility. What was it? Where was it? We moved through it, Gabrielle and I, but felt nothing; nothing more than the faintly heated air of spring. Would it shine illimitably again at night? Well, we should see. And theEnemy—How was it with them? The thought made us hasten.
We had walked until noon, and had reached the trenches. There stretched the pitch-forked angular line, the shelters, the dug-outs, the wire embarbments, the peering snouts of cannon. Men had crawled out and lay recumbent in the full light unharmed. We stole furtively into one subterranean cave. Behind the front space against a wall of half dripping clay ran backward a narrow room. In its centre a table was spread with the rude service of dishes, and behind that again a ruder grotto held a fire-place where a blaze of wood was charring a forgotten leg of mutton. Around the table slept twenty men, and an officer at its head groaned uneasily. Boyau after boyau was entered, and always the arrested work, the drugged sleepers. From point to point, like rabbits hanging on the lips of their warrens, men were revealed, half exposed, half hidden. But no murderous fire despatched them. The enemy too slumbered. We looked that way. The ground over which our eyes searched eastward and northward, was ploughed with the horrid ruts of shells, beaten into mud slowly drying in barren cankerous tracts of dust, or gouged with holes, while mounds rose intermittently, whose washed sides disclosed the limbs of buried men. Perhaps half a kilometre away on hillsides, in valleys, through the frayed margins of woods, thrashed into splinters by the shells, ran a crease, like a smeared titanic pencil mark, where now we knew the Teuton, the unspeakable Boche, snored unresistingly and oblivious.
We essayed the experiment of seeing if it was indeed so. In the dying day we crossed that silent tract, and safely, in a zone which for months had trembled beneath the explosions of shells, where sudden sorties had filled it with the clash of arms, or sent along its pale yellow and black surfaces the groans, the prayers, the gasps of dying soldiers. Now it was a graveyard only, and as silent as the place of tombs. We entered the lines of the enemy—and there—stark in the embrace of the Paralysis the mightyGerman, officer and men, yes, generals and—at the very point of our first contact with them—a prince too, rolled ignominiously together, in the suffocation of this asphyxia. It was a humiliating discomfiture. It confounded appreciation for distinction. They were thrown down along the banks in droves, and backward in the avenues of approach the legions upon legions slept. It made me think of the rafts of logs upon Texan rivers caught in inextricable confusion, tilted, submerged, locked, and tumbling over each other in heaving booms, as the tides jammed them together in thicker and denser snags.
Strangely unbelievable it seemed, those stunned masses of men! The setting sun sent its rays upon them and, through an exact orientation in spots of the serried helmets, they were returned in a blaze of reflected light. We wandered on, along the edges of this sea of faces, dreading to penetrate their ranks. There was an unearthly horribleness in it all, as if an Universal Death had expelled Life from the earth, and in the continental solitudewealone lived. I shuddered, with a sickness of despair at my heart, wondering if indeed we should see the dawn of the Last Judgment.
And now a marvelous thing happened. Gabrielle and I had retreated from the German line, slowly, with bowed heads hurrying towards our countrymen, when, as the day darkened, the airabove us, with an infinity of sparklings, like a scattered ignition in combustibles, resumed slowly its supernatural brilliancy. The great ghost bank enveloped us. We quailed beneath it. We clung together, thrilled and speechless, in the immersing splendors of the heavenly light; the radiance of unnumbered souls. We could not see within it as we had seen when without its limits. It dazzled our eyes, and for the first time I felt a singular numbness creeping upward in my limbs, an insuperable heaviness in my head, and dull reiterating beats in my ears. Gabrielle seemed almost lifeless.
The ghost mass was vital with movement, there was indeed a low decrepitation in the spaces above us, and an incessant arrowy flight of forms, or veils of forms, where, too, faces shone, half traceable in features, half blurred, as in a sheen that erased them, as soon as seen. And those faces! They were not the presentiments of color and shade and shadow, perhaps, as a pictorial fact. No, not that—they were evocative lights, that created in my mind's eye, an image as it were, of a living face, and they were most solemn, most sad; in them dwelt an irretrievable impress of desolation. A wave of gloom overwhelmed me. The ground beneath me seemed sinking, I caught Gabrielle to my breast, and, as if in an engulfing swarm ofmyriads and myriads of stars, I fell to the ground.
The day had again risen, and our neighborhoods still showed the recumbent acres of motionless figures—we had moved on far to the north and westward—the huge aggregations had here drawn together and the trench lines of the hostile armies were scarcely three hundred metres apart. In the French and in the German battalions that indescribable unrest of FEAR that Quintado had predicted was now easily detected. This opened up a more singular and a deeply interesting panorama. By ones and twos, by hundreds and by thousands, slowly, slowly, the immense leaven of repentance of the unsearchable agony of a mingled moral and physical pain, was lifting them from the first stupor, and we could see the figures struggling to their feet, we could see their dazed, horrified, and distorted features, their exchanges of questioning glances, almost as if in their friends, they saw their foes. Nothing more utterly diableresque could be imagined.
Over ourselves had now been developed a great change of feeling. It was the second day of the miraculous intervention, and we had become imbued with the meaning of the miracle. It meant the End of the War, and it meant too a startling Enlightenment. The nations shouldput an end to their insane rivalries. The era of a divine economy and brotherhood was about to dawn upon the puerile egotism of the world. A new insight deep and revolutionary would adapt the coming centuries to new ends. So an exultation born of this divination urged us to watch and record the accuracy of the prediction. We became neutralized in sympathy by reason of an exorbitant curiosity, and from camp to camp, turning now to the enemy and now to the friend, we pursued our way, that monstrous and wonderful day. The dramatic intensity of it—albeit not a word was spoken in those marshalled millions—surpasses relation. At one moment we watched a group of Germans starting to their feet with consternation in their faces, their arms waving in protest, their features wearing a hundred expressions, terror, maddened wonder, abject subjection, grimness, a mixed commotion of tempers that rolled their eyes, and jerked their lips, and contorted their limbs. And then these initial emotions succumbed to the overpowering sense of torment, and on that followed their convulsive efforts to rise and flee. And their flight was impossible; their feet stuck to the earth, where they stood, and their most violent efforts tumbled them headlong to the ground, and thus quivering into quietness, like the palpitations of a dying animal, they lay motionless.
At another moment we gazed upon the French, behind entanglements of wire, with fierce-looking and harsh iron-toothed fences, near a millsite where the shattering shells had ploughed their desolating way through solid masonry, while beneath it the tortuous crawling boyaux journeyed on for miles. Here was a company of thechasseurs-a-pieds, the bravest of the Frenchmen whose dauntless courage and resolution in the face of death, like some fatalistic spell, had made them motionless under fire, and furious, with a whirlwind of roused premonitions of success, in their lightning charges. I knew of them well. These stem gallants of the battle field, were crowding the apertures of their underground burrows, and many had pulled themselves into the remnants of grass and clover, even sprinkled, as with dashes of blood, with carmine blossoms, at the lips of their retreats. Their faces expressed, with a wide difference of interior consciousness, the same amazement that had clouded the German faces, but here, in the Frenchmen, the amazement participated with a half revealed penitence, the stricken sense of sorrow, and of an awakening realization of an oncoming transformation. Intelligence beautified its misery with the colors of a mild, yes, an expostulating contrition. I watched them with an understanding sympathy. The dismay, the terror even, was all there, andthat distinguishable physical suffering that was the prologue to their mutual surrender to the mission of Peace that the Spirits brought. But what else was there? Was that invisible multitude of the dead individualized to each and every man of the vast armies? Did these men, thus quenched in the waters of a mental and bodily affliction, hear unspoken words, see the faces of their lost comrades, and did they feel the piercing ardor of their contact with the revealing dead? Who shall say? As with the Germans they too had essayed Flight, and their will was helpless in the strangling grip of the vast prostration.Therestayed the tremendous equipment of the nation, helpless as a nursery of children.
I spoke to these men, bending over them with Gabrielle, but there was no recognition. They stared at me as if eyeless, or deprived of vision. If I shouted in their ears, there was no response. If I tugged at their limbs they acted as inert figures of clay. And yet there was expression in their faces. What could it mean? Was all their attention focussed upon an interior illumination while their outward senses remained calloused in some impossible apathy?
And then we approached the lines of the stalwart English fighters. At one point spread a cantonment of infantry, rayed with bands of artillery, and flanked by the surcharged battalions of horsemen. The field view was picturesque. It was east of Landrecies where early in the war the English had met the Germans in withering combat. It was a shallow sweeping basin-like valley, between two wooded hills, where the thick set trees, shielded by some whim of accident, yet preserved their branches and uncrippled growth, and wore the blazonry of spring. A narrow stream crossed by a hump-backed bridge traversed the foreground, and beyond the stream eastward rolled a meadowland. Beyond that somewhere lay the slumbering Germans. But their puissant foes were slumbering too. The valley stretch was filled, like an overflowing bowl, with the English troops, and in hedges, in human sheaves, in rows, as in wind-swept, rain-beaten fields of high grass, the soldiers tossed their pain-racked bodies. We had become accustomed to the grotesque predicament and entered the camps, where we were tempted by the rudeness or wonder of the spectacle, with a stolid confidence. Our own strength too seemed inexhaustible. We were immune from the wide gathering Paralysis. Indeed a sort of exultation now surged within us as we began to see that Quintado's prophecy approached its certain conclusion, the END of the WAR. It almost filled us with gayety. We could have shouted aTe Deum.
I pointed out to Gabrielle a low farm houseupon the northern hillside, and we made our way there among the masses of men, actually stepping upon them, as though they clothed the ground with a human corduroy. We opened the swinging door and walked into a room fitted out as a headquarters. Its floor was dotted with the recumbent figures of officers. Those mighty men plotting their strategies had been overcome by a strategy more sublime, and overthrown, with the benumbing exhalations of the heavenly armies, sprawled upon the tables, over the chairs, and the General curled ludicrously upon the floor. I could have laughed at the humiliation of the scene, except that for an instant I doubted my senses. It had all the inane inconsequence of a dream.
Behind the front room of the little house was a messroom, and there the same talismanic somnolence had pitched its occupants on floor and table. I gathered some untouched food, and Gabrielle and I retreated. As we emerged and our eyes surveyed the prodigiousdebacle, there rose from the disordered companies a titanic sigh—like the possible suspiration of an agonized monster—and visibly those thousands, weltering together in panic, rose to their feet, and with uplifted arms, their fingers clutching convulsively at nothing, struggled mightily to move. It was as Quintado had spoken:
"There will be no Flight; the pain will manacle their feet, will stifle their voices, will wither their wills—one monstrous Stupor will overcome them, and for three days, like the men overcome with sleep that watched the Apostle Saint Peter in the prison the armies of the Nations will sleep—Ay, and sleep in PAIN."
"There will be no Flight; the pain will manacle their feet, will stifle their voices, will wither their wills—one monstrous Stupor will overcome them, and for three days, like the men overcome with sleep that watched the Apostle Saint Peter in the prison the armies of the Nations will sleep—Ay, and sleep in PAIN."
We were in the environs of Arras, and it was the very evening of the third day. Our pilgrimage had passed along the zigzagging frontiers of the marshalled armies, and everywhere it had been the same—the coma, the recurrent efforts at escape, the nerveless surrender to imprisonment. And what was happening beyond those frontiers of the armies we knew nothing of. In the civilian populations of France and of Germany, and beyond them in the widened circles of national conflict, in England, in Russia, in Belgium, in Turkey, and the Balkans was this tremendous visitation recognized? Was the strange metempsychosis effecting there too its intangible reconciliations? Between the double cordon of the armies, moving along the broad and narrow corridor that separated their lines, we were excluded from the world. Around us lay the sleepers, shuddering in unutterable nightmares, and in our diversified roadway there was nothing but the ruins of villages, the shattered walls, the holed ground, the catacombs oftrenches, deflowered woods, the sinuous storm-marked track of war's desolation. We, Gabrielle and I, alone lived in this camerated solitude. But it was the third day and then—what? Ah, what indeed?
We had made great strides toward the north, and our rapid march had been hastened by the use of the horses of the troopers. I was not unfamiliar—from my experiences in Texas—with the management of horses and in this living cenotaph wherein we moved the animals alone seemed living. Everywhere they were found strayed and masterless, and seemingly confused, foraging as best they might upon the scanty herbage, in the ruined fields, and probably escaping beyond the army confines into the surrounding country. I found two most serviceable mares, and, as Gabrielle was a goodequestrienne, our journey was more rapid, while it too grew more and more fabulous, gathering to itself like a figment of fiction, the unreal, the incredible and in it rested thedenouementof a great mystery. All through the night, the dazzling luminousness dwelt upon the earth, all the day it was unseen, though potent, and now the termination of its mission drew near. What then?
Near Vitry between Arras and Douay is a raised mound, a long softly swelling protuberance in the undulating landscape, uncrownedby any structure. The village lies somewhere west of it, and it commands, almost uninterruptedly, the view running north and south through the avenue of a slightly winding valley. You can see the village lights from its summit, and you can hear the church bells there too, when the wind is west. It was on this modest elevation that we pitched our camp, when the ghost fog "lifted." Almost, as if at the finale of a grand play, Gabrielle and I waited for that last night. The day died slowly and it grew colder. Thin clouds thickened into denser volumes and the sky became overcast. Starlets of snow dropped through the air. A timely shelter was provided for us in the barracks of an old sheepfold, and the thoughtful provision of some blankets, taken by me from one of the camps, kept us warm, and so we watched the fading day. Again, as always, that outpoured ocean of light, less shimmering than at first, less moving, less inconstant with variation, as if in the very thought of its countless denizens the premonition of retreat made a thoughtful stillness. We did not tremble as at first, at its envelopment, rather it seemed a benison of blessed promises. It lay over the armies, it penetrated them, soaking them with the flood of its spiritual waves, an effluence indescribably, insufferably desolating. To us it was simply an unnatural splendor.
As the night came on Gabrielle becamedistraitand restless. I feared again some nervous breakdown. There was a deeper fear. The fear of spoliation, her robbery from me by the mystic invaders, the evocation of her very soul into that retiring vortex of spiritual life. She should not go. I pressed her closely to me. I kissed her lips, and muttered, as if in desperation that she should promise me, not to follow that elusive host. My terror rose because she did not answer. It almost seemed that she did not hear me. What other voices stole, were stealing, away her allegiance?
At midnight the glory of the light was supreme. It became a homogeneous radiance, like the solid glow of the melted metals in the furnaces. An hour later great billows coursed through it, and the wavering crests smote each other, and when this collision occurred the light darkened with broad paths of extinction; an instant after the glooms vanished in the recurrent glory. It was then that I saw currents in flashing streams, push upward, and then more, and more, and more, as if, sucked up into some opening receptacle, the conflux had begun to separate itself from the earth. Its swift motion begot a sound like the trilling of innumerable violins, a keen and yet delicate staccato of quick notes, and suddenly looking over towards the horizon, I realized that indeed the whole composition, complex, and solution was sinking upward into the zenith. And Gabrielle?
I caught her in my arms more closely, and in the sepulchral light saw her face as if filmed already with the pallor of death. A smile gleamed there too, and a voice spoke in my ears. I looked above me. Again that haunting form and face of Sebastien Quintado, and with it—O my God—the entwined wraith of my sister. The dead body was in my arms, thecreaturewas fleeing beyond my hold. I sprang to my feet, and yet clinging to the dead figure of Gabrielle, lying on my breast, I raised an imploring hand, and cried out in the oncoming darkness—fit symbol of my despair:
"Gabrielle, is this your love? You know that Life is now my prison. Return! Return!"
If human effort could have torn my own soul from my body, then, there, I would have wrecked my substance, and flown with her in the cosmic tide of the disembodied. But human effort waits only on the decrees of Fate. It was not to be. I still saw with enthralled eyes the rising figures of Quintado and of Gabrielle. The irretrievable misery of it half maddened me, and again I cried out, with might and main rending the silences around me with the fierce invocation: "God! God! Give me back my sister!"
And then, benumbed with wonder, I saw the shades part, and slowly descending upon me,the figure of Gabrielle, like some floating dream of shape, drew near. It stopped above my head, and the face bent forward, and the lips—those sweet lips of truth and innocence—opened, and to me came the REVELATION.
"Alfred! Alfred! There can be no separation between loving hearts. I shall always be with you. But it is appointed that there are times and seasons. I am called, you remain. Life and Death have no meaning to the immortal soul. It is in both the same. The vapor that melts in the air is still there; a moment's colder breath might bring it back again. Perhaps I shall return, perhaps not, perhaps you may come to me, but through the eternal series of designs that God weaves with Life and Death an immortal purpose runs. It is the Salvation of Mankind. Watch how even now it shall be upon the earth. These spirits, rent from all they loved, in this ministration of their return, have sanctified the hearts of men to a new consecration of endless PEACE upon the earth. The Death of thousands brings with it the irreversible decree of the Life of Reconciliation."
The voice was heard no more. With the rapture of my love I watched the last ghostly remnant of that beloved being fade upward, into the swiftly racing tides, forever out of my sight. On me the cruel burden of taking up life alone had been insupportably laid. I think that itwas then that I ran forward and gazed around the hillside, looking towards Vitry, and searched the sky. There above me fled the last meteoric trails, like phosphorescent skeins. I could see the eclipsed stars reappear through them. It was—so I recall it—as if a cupola of shining walls opened in the very centre of the Firmament, and, rushing through it, a tiny spark. Was that the fleeting soul of Gabrielle? Strained beyond endurance, agonized by the vehement protest of my despairing heart, the hope of even then rejoining her roused me to a sudden murderous resolve. I had seen a shepherd's knife left in the sheepcote. That should cut the loosening knot of Life. I found it, and then—there arose somewhere from illimitable distances, and from the neighborhoods about me, an unearthly muffled groan, like a cry buried in the ground, and heard in stifled shouts. It froze the blood, for it half seemed as if the corpses of the slain everywhere about, were speaking from their graves, the raucous outcry of mutilated bodies. A moment later I forgot my suicidal intent. The sentence from Isaiah that Quintado had spoken to Gabrielle, rang in my ears; rang like a trumpet.
"And they shall be brought down, and shall speak out of the ground, and their speech shall be low out of the dust, and their voice shall be, as ofone that hath a familiar spirit, out of the ground, and their speech shall whisper out of the dust."
"And they shall be brought down, and shall speak out of the ground, and their speech shall be low out of the dust, and their voice shall be, as ofone that hath a familiar spirit, out of the ground, and their speech shall whisper out of the dust."