Two hours later he was at the headquarters of the Staff and asked to see the Commandant. He was shown into his presence without delay. "Well?" said the Commandant. "Monsieur le Général, I have collected the fine," said the maire. The General's face relaxed its habitual sternness; he grew at once pleasant and polite. "Good," he said. The maire opened a fat leather wallet and placed upon the table under the General's predatory nose a large pile of blue documents, some (but not all) stamped with the violet stamp of the German A.Q.M.G. "If the hochgeehrter General will count them," said the maire, "he will see they come to 325,000 francs. It is rather more than the fine," he explained, "but I have made allowance for the fact that they are not immediately redeemable. They are mostly stamped, and—they are as good as gold."
For three minutes there was absolute silence in the room. The gilt clock in its glass sepulchre on the mantelpiece ticked off the seconds as loudly as a cricket on the hearth in the stillness of the night. The maire speculated with more curiosity than fear as to how many more of these seconds he had to live. Never had the intervals seemed so long nor their registration so insistent. The ashes fell with a soft susurrus in the grate. The Commandant looked at the maire; the maire looked at the Commandant. Then the Commandant smiled. It was an inscrutable smile; a smile in which the eyes participated not at all. There was merely a muscular relaxation of the lips disclosing the teeth; to the maire there seemed something almost canine in it. At last the General spoke. "Gut!" he said gutturally; "you may go."
"You astonish me," I said to the maire, as he concluded his narrative. We were sitting in his parlour, smoking a cigar together one day in February in a town not a thousand miles from the German lines. "You know, Monsieur le Maire, they have shot many a municipal magistrate for less. I wonder they didn't make up their minds to shoot you." The maire smiled. "They did," he said quietly. He carefully nicked the ash off his cigar, as he laid it down upon his desk, and opened the drawer of his escritoire. He took out a piece of paper and handed it to me. It was an order in German to shoot the maire on the evacuation of the town.
"You see, monsieur," he exclaimed, "your brave soldiers were a little too quick for them. You made a surprise attack in force early one morning and drove the enemy out. So surprising was it that the Staff officers billeted in my house left a box half full of cigars on my sideboard! You are smoking one of them now—a very good cigar, is it not?" It was. "And they left a good many official papers behind—what you call 'chits,' is it not?—and this one among them. Please mind your cigar-ash, monsieur! You see I rather value my own death-warrant."
Moved by an irresistible impulse I rose from my chair and held out my hand. The maire took it in mild surprise. "Monsieur," I said frankly, if crudely, "you are a brave man. And you have endured much."
"Yes, monsieur," said the maire gravely, as he glanced at a proclamation on the wall which he has added to his private collection of antiquities, "that is true. I have often been très fâché to think that I who won the Michelet prize at the Lycée should have put my name to that thing over there."[26]
FOOTNOTES:
[25] Deputy.
[26] This narrative follows with some fidelity the course of events as related to the writer by the maire of the town in question. But for the most obvious of reasons the writer has deemed it his duty to suppress names, disguise events, and give the narrative something of the investiture of fiction. It is, however, true "in substance and in fact."—J. H. M.