THE CONCLUSION
The Great War is over. There is peace in Europe. It is now five years since the armies of the nations succumbed in terror to the incursions of the Spirits. And there is peace in St. Choiseul. Our old home is unchanged except that some familiar faces and some familiar voices are not seen or heard within its walls now—not all. Privat Deschat lives and Père Grandin and Père Antoine, and Dora is here, and our little housekeeper Julie. But the Capitaine is dead, and old Hortense, and—Ah that you know—Gabrielle is gone.
Tonight the wide country-side is wonderful with its snow-blanket and, with the moon lighting it up, shadows lie on the smooth white banks like pencilled drawings, flat and black. I have regained composure—perhaps happiness. At any rate St. Choiseul retains all of its loveliness, and in the nursery of its beauty why should not the heart grow calm. Visitors come often to see our house, and to see me. Privat Deschat says I should lecture about the Visitation. That I would make a king's ransom.
But that I could not do. It would be just pure profanation. I do not like to have the visitors. I talk to them in general phrases. Some understand my reticence, and some are vexed. Mais pourquoi? How can I go over and over again that miracle I have seen—the great miracle of the war? See, I have written this little book, so that I may no longer endure this intrusion, and now I have only to ask "Have you read my book?"
Sometimes it is an Englishman who remonstrates, with:
"But my dear sir; it is the living voice I want, the voice of the man who witnessed the Descent of the Dead. And then there are impressions that no book fairly gives—your own exact feeling you know—that is what I am after. Don't you see? It was a very remarkable circumstance."
Sometimes it is an American:
"Well! Well! That gets ahead of anything I ever knew. Weren't you shaken up a bit? Strikes me that my life would have been scared out of my body. Now let us have the whole thing."
These pertinacities and irrelevant curiosities I could not endure, and Dora urged me to write the book, and so at last it is written, and the world may now know the very truth of the matter—the truth as well as I can give it, for even now I sometimes feel as if I had been the toy of an illusion. And yet see the proofs. Is there not peace? Did not Gabrielle leave me? Is it not well known that the very day after the visions disappeared, the stir in the camps began? Is it not a common attested fact that the droves of soldiers broke out from all command—indeed that there was no command, the officers with the men being seized with one irresistible impulse—and streamed in disordered legions, over the country, seeking, this way and that, their homes, and hurting no one; all reduced to a childlike weariness of limb and spirit? And have not the lengthy histories recorded the voluntary abandonment of the war by the soldiers and their officers, despite what the bigger men and the so-called rulers wished? And was there not wholesale rejoicing everywhere, and were not the churches crowded to the doors, and did not the flocking multitudes improvise services in the fields, and on the roadways? And then came the signed manifestoes of the troops, that nothing in heaven, or on the earth, would drive them back to the trenches—that it was God's will that the carnage and the wretchedness of the whole business—l'affaire entière—should be put an end to?
And how was it with the governments?