Her thoughts were interrupted, not by a sound nor a movement, but by a sudden great silence that had fallen, like a star from the sky at night, upon the assembled host of little people.
Petite Jeanne was not a stranger to silence. She had stood at the edge of a clearing before an abandoned cabin, far from the home of any living man just as the stars were coming out, when a hush had fallen over all; not a leaf had stirred, not a bird note had sounded, and the living, breathing world had seemed far away. She had called that silence.
She had drifted with idle paddle in a canoe far out upon the glimmering surface of Lake Huron. There, alone, with night falling, she had listened until every tiniest wavelet had gone to rest. She had heard the throb of a motor die away in the distance. She had felt rather than heard the breath of air stirred by the last lone seagull on his way to some rocky ledge for rest. She had at last listened for the faintest sound, then had whispered:
“This is silence.”
It may have been, but never had a silence impressed her as did the silence of this moment as, seated there on the floor, far from her friends, an uninvited guest to some weird ceremony, she awaited with bated breath that which was to come.
She had not long to wait. A long tremulous sigh, like the tide sweeping across the ocean at night, passed over the motionless throng; a sigh, that was all.
But Petite Jeanne? She wished to scream, to rise and dash out of the room crying, “Fire! Fire!”
She did not scream. Something held her back. Perhaps it was the sigh, and perhaps the silence.
The thing that was happening was weird in the extreme. On the stage a curtain was slowly, silently closing. No one was near to close it. It appeared endowed with life. This was not all. The curtain was aflame. Tongues of fire darted up its folds. One expected this fire to roar. It did not. Yet, as the little French girl, with heart in throat and finger nails cutting deep, sat there petrified, flames raced up the curtain again and yet again. And all the time, in great, graceful folds, it was gliding, silently gliding from the right and the left.
“Soon it will close,” she told herself. “And then—”