The End: How the Great War Was Stopped. A Novelistic Vagary

by L. P. Gratacap

I slipped to my knees with a sudden motion outward, that brought me to the bed-side, and for a moment I stopped there, with my face buried in the coverlid. It had been done; Blanchette knew. The next moment her hand caressed my hair, and the weak stroke penetrated me with such an ageless longing that, do what I would, I shook from head to toe. Mais courage; I must be now most calm. Yes, yes, most calm. So I wrestled with myself, biting my lips, and forcing to my eyes the haggard smile of reassurance. My hands imprisoned the hand of Blanchette, and slowly raising my head our eyes met.

I did not see what I saw afterwards, the shrunken figure, the hollow cheeks, the paling lips, the slow hideous change of emaciation. No! nothing; only her eyes, and in them shone something so fathomless, so beatific, that it suddenly lifted the intolerable weight of pain, it smote the clouds of misunderstanding or rebellion, and they vanished. It filled my ears with music, in place of groans, it summoned by the wand of a supernatural enchantment unheralded figures of blessing, and in those eyes I read the futurity of our endless happiness.

I moved my head towards her, and despite the restraining hand of the doctor kissed her lips, slowly, slowly, that the lingering embrace might fill her soul with confidence, and against her heated cheeks I swept my lips again and again. It was over. Our tryst was kept. Gabrielle called me gently, and Blanchette fell from me in a fainting spell, while the doctor firmly lifted me up to my feet, and the captain caught my unsteady body.

And—we had not spoken in that transient interval of surrender—thus mutely with the deep intelligence of an uttermost love we were married, and in that restraint unrepiningly, with an entire joy, I have lived and live. Some symptoms of that psychic erethism which possessed Gabrielle were also born in me, and before my eyes even now sweeps the vision of my Blanchette, and in the night her voice fills my ears, and her hand caresses my forehead. But later it was through Gabrielle that I summoned her to me, and in this way grew the apparent supersensual power of my sister to materialize the ghostly denizens of the Hereafter, and install them, as it were, in matter before the physical eye.

Blanchette's burial was itself a poem, so sweet, so tender, so rich in the love of friends, and in the graces of both religion and of nature. The day was divinely rare. Everywhere was the blessed soft, gently warming sunshine, and the last flowers of the autumn woke to the summery touch, and bloomed again. From the doorway of her home the little procession filed, bearing, on the unshrinking shoulders of eight villagers, the coffin, draped in white and enjeweled with blooms. Before it went the wavering line of altar boys, singing in thin sopranos, and the robed Padre—Father Antoine—grave and noble, and behind it the captain and I walked, our hands clasped together. Although the captain moved forward erectly, I felt the nervous pressures of his hand, tightening and relaxing, and for a moment now and then he leaned upon me. Mais—le brave garçon—he never flinched, and if his heart was near the breaking point, no one knew. Behind him walked Gabrielle and father—mother was in the church waiting with the congregation—and then Privat Deschat and Sebastien Quintado, and then the long file of friends followed, old and young, who had loved Blanchette for her goodness, her prettiness, her kindness, her grace of being and of sympathy.

They came from far and near; they were men and women, girls and boys, some carrying candles, some wreaths, some little crosses of Easter palms which they would throw in the grave, or on it. The altar boys carried lighted candles, and the air was so still that the almost invisible wisps of flames rose straight upward, and were revealed by the undulous smoke that sprang from their tips as the candles wavered in the hands of the acolytes. Slowly we moved on—somehow I seemed half unconscious, and yet most sensitive to the day's supreme charm—the shrill chanting of the boys, mingled almost indistinguishably in my ears with the murmurous hum of belated cicadas, the slow rustling of footsteps before and behind me, the occasional whisper of the vacantly stirred foliage in the trees, the distant pipings of birds, and the far-off wail of some wandering or bereaved dog.

It was a dream almost, and ever and anon, like some spiritual effluence, the fragrance of the dying season from the field, the distant woods, the savory banks of the meadow-streams, invaded and enmeshed my feelings, with a strange fervor of complacency, as though I followed, not the dead body of my love, but was on my way to meet her elsewhere. So indeed it seemed to me in the little church, where all the frail magnificence our little church could summon for her funeral was so loyally displayed, and where the soft voiced father spoke with the brave and cordial accent of confidence, that Blanchette Bleu-Pistache was most surely now in Paradise. Then I felt my own soul leaving me amid the tapestries and lights, and upward with her, hand in hand, I was hastening to fields of asphodel and unbroken choirs of the celestial, and that then I swooned sideways, and for an instant the captain held me, when the reverberant senses returned, with the rush of whirring sounds, and I was myself again.

Blanchette was buried in our church-yard, somewhat towards its western wall, where the ivy clung late in the winter to the stones, where a tall Lombardy poplar planted too against the wall, stood like some impossibly gigantic sentinel, and where afterwards indeed the flowers that I watered, in an agony of trust that Blanchette knew I kept thus alive within me the imperishable union of our hearts—spread the sweet wantonness of abundant color and perfume above her, flowers that when they died in the autumn's cold and the winter's searing frosts and snows, were replenished with others plucked from the conservatory of our home, and placed under the white cross like some herbal sacrifice.

Ah—c'est assez—I must not linger on the great sorrow, though in the inextinguishable pain that I feel at moments over its recall, a hidden selfishness as of a satiety of suffering prevails to force me to write and write. But I have forgotten and my wandering thought obscures my whole purpose. It is Gabrielle that all this grievous remembrance leads to, and she who has ended the awful WAR, is the theme of this most wonderful experience, I have essayed to tell so imperfectly.

After Blanchette's death I stayed with the captain for some months, until a grave disease struck me down almost to death's door, which indeed I craved to open and to close behind me. It was a nervous fever, from which I have never quite recovered, as it left me with recurrent fits of weakness and a debility of energy quite unlike my former self. The captain adopted an orphan girl, who was like an incarnation of his daughter, and who infinitely blessed him, with a similar gentleness and sanity and beauty.