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

by L. P. Gratacap

GABRIELLE'S VISITATION

It was the day after the battle of the Marne that as I lay in a Red-Cross ambulance, one of an endless line making a slow progress to Paris, past packed masses of soldiery, parks of artillery, ammunition vans, hay wagons, meat carts buried in straw, commissariat busses—many of them English, still pasted with placards of coffee-houses, groceries and smoking tobacco, that a letter was brought to me by the orderly attached to our company of wagons. How well I recall his grimed face and the blood-stains on his white surtout! The letter was marked "urgente" and also "par permission de le chef-major de corps d'hôpital." The young orderly was gay with the pleasure of bringing me a note from home—"Que vous serez heureux; le mot de la femme et les petites!" The innocent salutation stabbed deeper than had the sabre of the Teuton giant. My eyes started, and the pang passed. The cheerful greeting was as some taunting whisper hissed in my ears, but—alas—how well meant!—bien entendu.

I recognized Gabrielle's hand-writing. I held the letter unopened, and my flaccid nerves scarcely measured its meaning. Ah! it seemed to me now almost a light matter what happened. The horrors and depths of pitiless sufferings I had been through had stunned my susceptibilities, and any added blow fell on a sensorium become rigid, or simply pulseless with shock. At length my hand, mechanically almost, opened the letter, and if it was unsteady it was the tremor of weakness only. My blurred eyes read it as they might have uncertainly read a sign on the street. And yet there was intelligence still remaining in them. My heart beat faster, my eyes closed a moment, while a puny pain like a shooting neuralgic ache, somewhere about my heart too, pierced me, and then my lips moved in a whisper—Dieu defende.

But indeed it was with me as with an eye fatigued with flashes, that sees no longer, or sees everything fantastically. I read the letter and laughed. The mild manner of a death—even the death of a father and mother—in their own bed, by its luminous contrast with this manifold Dance of Death in which I had shared, where Death nakedly came out of the air, and shot you, or impaled you, or stifled you, where things worse—Ah! miserable—than death happened, seemed almost benignant. It won an enviable distinction. And, for the meaning of it all, the disclosure of Death seemed itself now an admirable escape. Conception with me had become so darkened by excitation, that in the black background of consciousness, the loss of a father or of a mother, created no discernible image.

And yet—a few minutes later, as I read again the letter—crushed into a ball in my hand—a natural recreation of sensibility terrified me by its acute punishments. I cried out in a kind of fury, and then I wept. My nerves went to pieces. I was delirious. That raging tempest of madness lasted three days. I was taken to Paris. There in a well appointed hospital in the Faubourg Saint Antoine, I was treated with the most happy kindness, and there my sister came to see me and to nurse me, and by that incommunicable power of sweetness and sympathy—wherein too lurked the kindred genius of our common parentage—she restored me to sanity, and the broken strained mind was healed and fitted—as it were—together again, and the extinguished candle of reason relit. Those were days of infinite bliss. It was something wonderful indeed to be present and observant of one's own regeneration. Yet so it seemed. A consciousness, feeble and complacent, but always delighted, noted the return of another master-consciousness to the control of its despoiled and scattered properties, and in noting it, was willing to fade itself away, or re-enter its mysterious hidden realm of feeling.

And then I grew to so love Gabrielle. It was a sense of recreation, of absolute reference of a second birth to her power. She assumed a spiritual maternity before my eyes, and enrolled like some nucleal miniature of divinity within my soul. She walked before my seeing eyes an Angel of Grace. My bed lay in a separate room, quite apart from the general dormitory, wherein the crowded cots held the anguished sufferers from the battle fields, now forwarding their daily harvest of wounded, in thicker and thicker bunches. It was an unsolicited privilege but one granted through the benevolent insistence of the superintending surgeon. Its window looked out of the back of the hospital over a broken prospect of high chimneys, peaked walls, and balustraded roofs. Points of color flamed here and there, where jardinieres still bloomed on the window-sills, or where a tricolor, in wreaths of bunting, festooned the near and far piazzas. Dull surfaces of drab rose to parapeted balconies, and in a side-long glimpse I could see the tree-lined boulevard of ——. Above the mingled edges and angles an autumn sky laughed and wept, now flushed with delicate primrose, when the sunset closed the day, and now, for days too, drearily gray with inexpressive and moisture dropping clouds. The room was prettily set with some plain furniture—a bureau and a table covered with green baize, a cuvette and a few chairs. The shining floor, in the light, mirrored the furniture, and in it too were reflected the three pictures that decorated the walls. Gabrielle had put these pictures where they were, and they were all religious. One a Madonna, one a Christ, and the third the new Pope. The walls were faintly rougeatre and from the middle of the ceiling hung an electrolier. That made the place at night gay with light. It seemed to me a little corner of Heaven. Was it not so, after all I had seen and been through? But I felt the sting of self-reproach, when my thoughts traveled back to the desolate comrades on the shell splintered, shrapnel haunted, bullet riddled field, there far away at the front—and not indeed so far away either.

Here Gabrielle nursed me, her pale face and sunken eyes were ominous symptoms of her own failing strength—and here she told me of my parents' deaths. It had a mysterious fore-ordained simplicity, and, as it were, a naturalness. It seemed just a going out, as one would leave a room, or pass through a door, and enter upon the world beyond. Father and mother were stricken with the hand of that hovering paralysis that had followed them for some time, and the achieving blow fell upon them both as they lay in the morning, in their bed, conversing. Even their thoughts had dwelt at that very instant upon the inevitable end, and the light flame of life was snuffed out even as their hands crossed, and the smile of a mutual resignation bathed their faces in hope and confidence.

This news brought to me no added misery—no, no, rather a strange placidity of contentment. For in that region of experience wherein I wandered along the borders of the great darkling ocean of Eternity, I felt the intervening space of life, between this existence and the next, to be of a transient and incomputable narrowness. The luxury of a gentle inanition overcame me, and so unevenly did the spark of life at times flutter in its cage, that I was unaware exactly whether I lived, or had begun to float otherwhere on an uncharted sea.

Slowly everything rectified itself, and then Grief came, and realization, and reproach, and memory started its accusative course, and I bewailed the impotence and forgetfulness of my pallid rectitude. My filial uses had not been energetic enough, nor altogether wakeful. That I knew.