The Garden of Swords

by Max Pemberton

Brandon dined in his little room above the office near the Porte des Pierres; and when dusk fell he set out to walk to the Contades and to his favourite café there. The ball which Thérèse Lavencourt was to give had no longer an interest for him. He sought to be alone and to forget the day.

It was almost dusk when he reached the park, and he remembered, in spite of himself, that Beatrix would be already in the farmhouse on the hills above the Sauer. He had not wished to think of it, and had gone to the gardens that friends might help him to forget; but when a waiter had served him with coffee and he had read the papers from Paris, it seemed to him that a greater sense of solitude possessed him than he had ever known since he left Cambridge and came, at his father’s wish, to help his father’s business in Strasburg. One day had changed his view of life. While she was in the city, he could forget the reasons that kept him to a merchant’s desk and had expatriated him. He could forget the years of public-school life in the England he had left. He could forget his own ambitions buried in those vast and dusty cellars of Frankfort wherefrom his father, William North, sent the Rhine wine to the courts of Europe. But Beatrix was in Strasburg no more. He would not have believed yesterday that there was such a lonely place in all the world.

There were many soldiers in the café—lancers and artillerymen, Turcos and zouaves. A band played, with rare intervals of silence, and its flippant music was an irritant to his ear. He heard pretty women chattering nonsense to officers of cavalry whose wit reached no higher point than assent incoherent. He beheld slipshod and rolling troopers, and remembered the hussars in Germany, and the strong hand which built there a house of steel for a nation’s safety. In such a moment as this he would almost forgive his father because he had wished to make a German of him. It was no glorious employment to sell so many bottles of wine per annum; no glorious employment, it is true, for a man who had written decent Greek prose, and had spoken of immortal things at the Union. He would have preferred a commission in a cavalry regiment at home; or, better still, that liberty which ties a man neither to city nor to country, but sends him to see and hear on the wide road of the world. But his father had other views. “The stool that I sat on should not be too high for my son,” he said; and Brandon took it, and found his consolation elsewhere.

“There were many soldiers in the cafe.”

He was the friend of Germany as much of necessity as of admiration. The French, as a people, fascinated him, yet won no allegiance from him. His own gifts of strength of will and purpose, of method, of physical capability, were just such gifts as he found wanting in all the Frenchmen he knew. The power to achieve by thought and years, that power which was the very heart of Germany, engrossed him always. He saw these men of Strasburg, and he knew that if ever the day should come when the hosts of Germany crossed the Rhine, not only a city but an empire and a kingdom would fall. There were moments even when the sordid nature of his own business made him reflect that war would not only change the current of his life in a day, but would open up for him those scenes of humanity militant which had been the study of his imagination in many a lonely hour. But war now—now that Beatrix had gone to the Görsdorf!

He laughed at himself for thinking of it, and turned again to watch the unshapely troopers who slouched before the door of the café, and stood for all the glory of the glorious army of France. What would war mean to such men as these? Scorn of their deficiencies became almost anger sometimes. He had the impulse to get up and drill them—to straighten them with the flat of a sword he must borrow.

There was no one in the café that he knew; but when he had been there a little while old Père Bonot, the cigar merchant, and with him Rosenbad, the brewer, came up to his table, and insisted, as was their wont, upon speaking of the one event which Strasburg recognised that day. He listened to them in spite of himself. A subtle fascination compelled him to join in the talk.

“I was at the Gare; I saw her go,” said the brewer, triumphantly. “She sat upon the right side; he pulled down the blind. Donnerwetter—if it had been this hand! I would have pulled down that blind myself—et vous savez—I have fifty years!”

Old Bonot stirred a glass of coffee vigorously.