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

by L. P. Gratacap

The clustered chimneys in some larger villa formed occasional and well-spaced visual incidents that broke the monotony of the low cottages and added a keenly valued distinction to our pleasant hamlet. It was delightful. You felt its persuasive loveliness the moment you came up the road from far-away Paris—Ah! not so far away that we could not see the Eiffel Tower on fair days, and on all days, or rather nights, note the dull flare of its lights in the sky. The road you came by crossed a stone bridge that threw its moss-covered span over a clear deep brook, running all the way from Briois, with pollarded willows on rushy banks, and drooping wistarias wildly clinging to white birches in the meadow lands of rich farmers, where the brook, loitering, made pools in which the cattle stood for hours in cream and russet dabs over the half glittering rippled water. Mon Dieu! Comme il était beau!

Our house was the second in the village on the right hand side of the road, as you came from Paris, just next to Privat Deschat, an old carpet-weaver whose back-yard was as many colored as a flower garden with bright rugs, green, and yellow, and blue, and red, and brown, hung out on lines that webbed the air like a spider's nest, in the spring. And a very pleasant, inviting house ours was with its staid look of reserved happiness, I might say. There it was with its deep-silled windows, filled with geraniums and heart's ease, its wide black door, and big brass knocker, that was a dragon's tongue lolling out of a dragon's scaly jaw, its long slanting shingled roof, with two dormer windows, and its pastiche red bricks peeping in ruddy streaks through the dense ampelopsis that climbed up to the eaves, and then lurked in the dark, to make its way into the house, and lingering there, became pale and white.

There was no veranda or piazza, but just a covered porch with four wooden pillars and two bench seats, where sister Gabrielle and I sat long hours in the evenings in summer time, when we were afraid sometimes to enter the house because—Ah, but I must not tell that now, for just that fear and what it led to, and how it helped us to end the WAR, is the sole reason of my telling this story at all. No, no, that is a long way towards the end, and here I've hardly begun.

Well, as pleasing and welcoming as the house seemed on the outside, it was even more lovely within. I don't wonder the spirits—Ah, bête encore—Yes, most lovely. You see there was a wide hall in soft yellow and china-blue tile, with the Privat Deschat's rag-carpet in short strips over it, and a big Holland clock against the wall, and prints in black and white framed in mahogany, and an old narrow carved table with tall porcelain candle-sticks on it, from Dresden, and then some straw-bottomed chairs in gilded frames, and the garden of blooms, seen through the door on the other side, which opened on a walk covered with a vine-trellis, and bordered by smart gillyflowers, and hollyhocks, and sunflowers, and cushions of pansies.

Then there was a good big square room on the right of the hall full of books, and friendly chairs, and pictures, with a big desk-table in the centre, where rose toweringly a superb old bronze French lamp, that even then we burned with whale oil. You wound it up, and the oil was pumped on the wicks and—the light was soft and charming and companionable. The windows were high and low; they reached up to the ceiling, and they left spaces for window seats at the floor, and white tapestry curtains shaded them, and then at night—we did it in the winter mostly—there could be drawn over them soft, thick folds of green baize, and we seemed softly entombed in a delicious seclusion—so delicate, so sure. My sister loved the long evenings that way, of winter, and if it stormed and the snow stung the windows with sharp taps, she would laugh almost, with the happiness of security.

And there was a big fire-place on the west side of the room—you see this library was on the west side of the house too—but it was the whole width of the house also, and the southern outlook swept over the low land and gazed straight to Paris. That chimney corner was delightful, and the wisps of light from the soft coal lit up the mantel and played grotesquely over the row of Peruvian Inca figures and face-jars that filled it—I brought them from America—so that they seemed to squint and grin, or just look glum and melancholy. Gabrielle said they came to life in the half dark, and she made them talk to me—for she interpreted them in her odd way—the old Inca warriors and the medicine men and the priests, and the little beggar with a stump for a leg, and the squinting big-toothed demon in red and black.

All that in the winter, but in summer and early fall, with the windows all open, the cooling night air came in, and brought with it odors of the ground and perfumes—O! so delicate and ravishing—of the flowers; St. Choiseul loved flowers; there was not a home without them—and so mixed with these, as if sound and smell had run together in a composite, half of each, the murmur of insects, the endless roundelay of the peeping tree toads, a twittering of birds, and the shivering of leaves in the trees. How we loved it!

I am rambling dully, but you see, kind friend, such strange weird things happened in that house afterwards, and such sorrow came to me after all the blessed joy of years, now lost, forever lost, that I cannot stop my thought picturing everything about it, as if I would leap back into the arms of other days, and let them caress and soothe me and banish my grief.