“No!”
A woman’s passionate voice screamed out: “They murdered my child, they murdered my man, they murdered me. Vengeance! Vengeance! Vengeance!”
“No!... No!... No!...” And I fell forward in the car senseless.
When I awoke the fog had almost disappeared, Pierre was chafing my cold hands, and the shadow-shapes had gone. They had sunken again into their hollow graves, unsatisfied, unconsoled. We rode swiftly on toward Antwerp. A clean breeze stole up from the west, purifying the stricken fields and their sad memories. It tore the last remnants of gray veil from the sky. And as we turned into the black, silent city streets, I leaned my head far back and stared up into the night with a sudden sense of relief and even of comfort. The sick little planet Earth fell away from me, far, far, infinitely far, and about me was unvexed emptiness and the tremendous stars.
VII
THE DESERTER
It was five o’clock in the morning. A riotous sunrise deluged the Campine as I slipped into my clothes and ran down the narrow, twisting tower-stair to keep a secret tryst with the Baas, or overseer. Little slits in the tower wall, cut for mediæval archers, let in the arrows of the sun; and as I ran through the gloomy armoury and the high-roofed Flemish dining hall—stripped of their treasure of old pikes, swords, crossbows, and blunderbusses by the diligent Germans—out to the causeway, and over the creaking draw-bridge on my way to the stables and the dismantled brewery, I imagined myself an escaped prisoner from the donjons of Château Drie Toren. In truth, I was running away from Baron van Steen’s week-end house-party for a breath of rustic air while the others slept.
The stables, tool sheds, hostlers’ barracks, bake-oven, and brewery were thatch roofed and walled with brick, toned to a claret-red, pierced with small windows and heavy oaken doors. The doors were banded with the baronial colours—blue stripes alternating with yellow, like stripes on a barber pole—and in the centre of the hollow square of farm buildings fumed a mammoth brown manure pile. A smell of fresh-cut hay and the warm smell of animals clung about the stables, and I heard the watch-dog rattle his chain and sniff at the door as I passed.