At the door we peered cautiously out. No one had been aroused. The hot night breathed about us as softly as a sleeping child, ignorant, indifferent, and calm. Tragedy, comedy, farce—we had played them all unwittingly, and no one knew or cared but we!
An old herdick hitched to a decrepit horse stood in the shadow of the street corner! We thrust Yvette, Guilbert, and the poet into its shelter and waved them good-night. “Au revoir, messieurs!” the three called to us gaily.
“Adieu!” McTeague responded. “It is not au revoir: it is good-bye!” Then he added, sotto voce, to me, “They are true artists—unmoral—like marionettes—just figures of the dance, aren’t they?... Come!” he said, after a pause. “They have forgotten it already, but we must go back to the Café du Cid and get the proprietor out of this scrape. Right?”
“Right,” I responded. And we slowly followed the creaking herdick down the narrow street.
V
THE SAVIOUR OF MONT CÉSAR
Rain fell softly, as it frequently falls in Belgium, drenching the ripening fields of Brabant and the ghosts of ruined towns. By six o’clock in the evening we had reached Louvain. My motor-car rolled through the porte de Bruxelles and down the narrow, slippery Flemish streets into the heart of the city. From a sentry box marked with barber-pole stripes in the German colours—black, white, red; black, white, red again—a bearded Landsturm man leaped out, wearing a helmet like a Yohoghany miner’s cap, a faded gray-green service uniform, and high, mud-coloured boots. The car skidded past him over the moist cobblestones. “Halt!” he shouted, waving his rifle; but I flaunted my celluloid-covered pass-case at him and yelled in tourist German, “Amerikanische Hilfskomite,” and he nodded and crawled back into his shelter.
It was the first anniversary of the destruction of Louvain.