THE END
How the Great War was Stopped
A Novelistic Vagary
By
L.P. GRATACAP
NEW YORK
THOMAS BENTON
1917
Copyright by
L.P. GRATACAP
1917
Printed by
THE EDDY PRESS CORPORATION
Cumberland, Maryland
CONTENTS
SAINT CHOISEUL
It is a pretty village, Saint Choiseul, perched on a hillside whose slopes, undeviatingly smooth and moderate, subside into a flowing land of streams and fields and white roadways. Its narrow streets are decorous with straight lines of prim poplars that have a military stiffness, and while the wind stirs their hedged leaves into audible protest—the flutter of a restrained salutation or a salute simply—it seems hardly able to extort from their braced branches the tribute of an obeisance.
The houses are generally simple things of two and sometimes only one story, built of limestone blocks that have weathered into an undecipherable composition of brown blotches, staring white strips, mossy crevices, little pits of black, and crannies of nutritious decomposition, where tiny grass blades have sprouted. Under favorable skies—and they are almost always favorable at St. Choiseul—their uneven walls become fascinating studies of minor-color harmonies, and rising as they do amid beds of flowers, or just grazed grass, from which they seemed in the broad sunshine to gather subtle tints of gayety, by some evanescent reflexion, they become fascinatingly pretty, and commodious, so to say, to an artist's fancy.
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.
On the east side of the hall-way was our dining room, a simple room with just straw-bottomed chairs, an immense oak side-board, royally set out with glass and blue plates, and on the walls quaint expressionless portraits of our people, including mother and father, a fat uncle with a pipe, and half closed eye, and a great grandfather in the regimentals of the Revolution—very brave looking and handsome—and some very staring aunts, and great aunts in starched finery, that made them look like owls.
Back of the pantry was the kitchen, with old Hortense, as the high priestess and oracle—our own dear Hortense, with such a kind heart, and a ready ear, and a generous hand—Ah! how we children loved her, and how she loved us, and how she packed our napkins for school, or our baskets for picnics—as the Americans say. She used to shake her wise old head slyly at us when we looked in at the kitchen door, with that little hungry grin on our faces:
"Certainement, you are veery hungree. Oh I know—it is a great pity and there is nothing, Vraiment—nothing—but See! I do so," and her long fingers snapped, and she waved them in an appeal to space, and then she cautiously raised a big bowl and Voila! a nest of crisp, aromatic, yellow buns, or cookies, or gateaux aux raisins, so good, so inexpressibly good!
And upstairs were the pleasant bed-rooms, so inviting to repose in their demure neatness, with high posters and pavilions, and their broad bottomed rockers, and their rainbow wallpapers, and rag carpet strips, over the bronzed, aged, and russety black wooden floors.
My own room was over the library; it looked north and west, and I would hang out of its window for half an hour at a time, watching the red sun quench itself behind the golden and flaming horizon, whose secrets I yearned to know, whose untrodden wonders I dreamed to penetrate. Those wistful hours awoke the unconfessed but sleepless passion of my heart to sail out over the Atlantic, a passion too of unrest, linked in my disposition with ecstacies and imaginations.
Sister Gabrielle was in the next room to mine, and in her sweet, tasteful, fresh and white bed-room, rose the chimney from the library fire-place below—so that she had her own chimney corner too, in the second story of the house and THERE—Well, wait, that comes later.
Our parents were nervously alert in nature, intelligent and conscientious. In them a strain of Huguenot puritanism was combined with an intellectual appetite that seemed to create in each a physical activity that made them restless in manner, and weak in health. They watched my sister and myself too suspiciously, and their affection became almost an aggravation of kindness, and solicitude, and curiosity, which made me more eager to escape that protecting roof-tree, and see the world. On my sister, as I shall explain, it exercised the most unfortunate influence, and accentuated that peculiar neurosis whose roots—as I was to learn later—were enlaced in a sub-conscious sensitivity to occult and invisible agencies, which indeed I helped to strengthen.
We were provided with neighbors and friends, and while the village of St. Choiseul was sufficiently democratic to tolerate and encourage friendly intercourse with everyone, as a matter of congeniality and temperamental tastes, we knew intimately but five persons in St. Choiseul. These five composed a contrasted and picturesque group, and when all were assembled in our big library, father and mother seemed to me most attractive, for in converse that was stimulating and personal, they attained a serenity of feeling and manner, that made them really delightful. Let me quickly describe our friends.
There was the rug-maker and carpet weaver, Privat Deschat, an elderly, robust Norman, who worked hard at his tasks in the mornings—and his mornings began very early—read as steadily for three or four hours in the afternoon, napped two hours, ate supper with his housekeeper and hunted up a friend with whom he smoked and chatted, or played Demi Rouge for the remainder of his day, which never extended over midnight, and more customarily closed at ten.
Privat Deschat was unquestionably very good company, quiet, attentive, observant, and spasmodically conversational, when his suppressed gift of speech awoke a momentary admiration. He was a short, strong man, with large cheeks, a massive head, an expressive mouth, made more so by very good teeth, and what might be called reticent eyes, in which his delicate and studious self retreated, under the guise of inexpressiveness. Again these quiet eyes would light up with enthusiasm, or it might be with distrust and defiance. His speech accompanied his roused spirit, and no one dared—no one wished—to interrupt, lest the rebuke might return him to silence. You see, he thoroughly delighted us. He was a bit quaint in his way of saying things.
And there was Capitaine Bleu-Pistache, who had been wounded in the 1870 fight and limped about on a wooden peg, with a stout cane in one hand. He was an amiable old mustachio, with pleasant eyes, under frowning eyebrows, a white whisp of hair on the top of his high brow, and a hooked nose that made him look like a bird of prey. But ah, he was most lovable! In the afternoon his little yard—he lived down the street on the opposite side from us in a small red and yellow brick house, hidden in climbing roses—was filled with children, for the old sabreur told stories well, and the boys and girls loved to hear him, and then in the spring he played marbles with them, so like a big chuckling boy, that it made us laugh to watch him get down on his good knee, and then get helped up again by the biggest boys, after he had taken his shot. It was tres jolie! Gabrielle and I thought so, and we played with him and the rest, when we too were, as the Americans say, kiddies. In later years when the aches—la sciatique abominable, as he said—settled in his bones, he gave up marbles, and turned to knitting, and it kept him quite happy. He would come in the evenings and enjoy our library, and very often fall asleep and snore ferociously. Father and mother, I think, loved him, but there was a good deal of veneration in their affection; Capitaine Jean Sebastien Bleu-Pistache always wore his medal of honor, won at Gravelotte.
The captain had a daughter who was the apple of his eye and never was there a daughter more sweet and affectionate. Blanchette, he said, was so like her mother—pauvre Blanche—dead now and resting among the big weeping willows in the crooked church yard, that ran down the hill at the other end of the village, with the grave-stones like a huddle of white or gray lambs chasing each other down the same slope, to the beech grove, and the purring brooklet, washing the long iris-bloom in summer. Blanchette said very little, but she always watched her father softly out of the corners of her eyes, and clapped her hands together softly too at his old, old stories, just as if she had never heard them before. Well Blanchette was our third friend.
And then the school-master—maître d'école—was a good friend, who smoked profusely, drank our red wine profusely too, and munched the sugary cookies mother made, as if he had never tasted anything so nice before. Indeed perhaps he had not, for he lived poorly some miles away, and came to school on a funny old mule that he never hitched up anywhere, but just jumped off its back, and let it wander as it would. Only it wouldn't. It went to sleep on the shady side of the school-house, and when the sun woke it up then it ambled slowly to the other side, for you see Emile Chouteau fed his dear friend so very well, that she was never hungry—whatever along the roadside, coming to school, she fancied, she ate—and always seemed growing fatter and fatter, so that it looked as if Emile would have to walk to school at last, when Sarah—he called her that—grew too fat to move.
How funny—O! tres drôle—the two were so different in size and way; the fat, sleepy, moody mule, lounging along, and stopping as if to yawn, while Emile read his book on its back, his head buried in its pages. And the school-master was so meagre, and long, and nervously restless and even excitable, and that perplexed stare with his glasses shoved up on the very top of his bald head! Ah, I see him always when I pass the school-house now. He dressed in tight fitting clothes, and they were just a little too small even for his thin body. Where he got his clothes was a matter of wonder to us. They were a little faded looking when new, and when they were old they became glossy, and then old Emile had the tatters mended by his boarding-house mistress. He looked neat and scrupulous too, in a way, and indeed we liked him greatly, although he lectured somewhat, and was apt to talk overmuch when our red wine lashed his spirits into a fervor of enthusiasm about Virgil, for the whole of reading and literature was summed up in Virgil to Emile Chouteau.
He loved to tell us:
"Virgil est un homme du Mond entier. Il presente le principe du cosmopolitanisme. Il est immortel parce qu'il n'appartient pas à aucun pays. Il devient la propriété de tous. La Renaissance était fondue sur Virgil: les meilleurs sont ses disciples."
Poor Emile Chouteau, he died before I came back from America, though long before that he had been pensioned, and lived with his mule in the same way that he had lived all the long unchanged years of his teaching in the little school house. And Sarah? Sarah seemed to miss something after Emile's funeral—the country side followed Emile's body with candles, for Emile was a devoted Catholic—and not long afterwards she was found in the school-house. She had broken in the door and walked in; was she looking for Emile? The last time I saw Sarah she was ploughing a field in Briois.
Emile's successor was the fifth acquisition we boasted of in our little company of intimates—Lorenzo Sebastien Quintado—a Spaniard.
Lorenzo was not typically Spanish after the fashion of the story-writers. He was not darkly handsome, languorous, taciturn and irritable, nor meagre, tall, with flashing eyes and raven hair. O! quite different and because so different so likeable. For all the world he made me think of the bachelor Sampson Carrasco in Don Quixote. Do you recall him—"Though Sampson by name this bachelor was no giant in person, but a little mirth-loving man, with a good understanding, about twenty-four years of age, of a pale complexion, round faced, flat-nosed and wide mouthed; all indicating humour, and a native relish for jocularity?"
Yes that does bring back to my mind the way, the poise even, and the sprightly liveliness, the almost expectant jubilation of Lorenzo. He sang well, and in the long dusks, when the quivering lights of the sunset died out of the sky along the burning west, where black fringes of the thick-set trees seemed dipped in fire, his voice rose richly, in caressing and ear-catching melodies. I almost hear him now, singing so carelessly, with an untaught art, a simple song praising the charms of Spanish girls. His voice was a high barytone.
Fair are the vineyards of Seville,
O! fair beyond compare,
But fairer than their fairness still
The eyes of ladies there.
The orange groves of Moguér
Are golden as the sun,
But brighter is the golden hair
Of girls who in them run.
The morning skies of Cordova
Were tinted as in flame,
The cheeks of damsels rosier far
As from the hills they came.
Long live the darling girls of Spain
Untouched by age or time,
Forever free from care or pain,
Ah! may one yet be mine.
I remember on one of the last evenings I passed at home—that was before I went to America—when the fall had come, and the foliage was deepening into splendid colors, not so splendidly indeed as in America I think, but still gloriously vivid. There was Privat Deschat, and Capitaine Bleu-Pistache, and his daughter—we sat together and our hands often crossed—and dear old Emile—he died soon after—and father and mother. We were sitting in our pleasant garden around a little table, directly under the stone wall that shut in our ground on the south—towards Paris—and everywhere lay the drifted leaves of the one big chestnut, that grew just outside the wall, in the sloping ground towards the big green fields, with islands of woods in them. Emile called the yellow leaves as they dropped silently through the sunlight, and shone like lustres in the sunlight, before they touched the ground, pans d'or—gold flakes.
Our red wine was on the table, and that delicious morsel that Hortense made better than anyone, la galette aux amandes, and it was the captain who was talking. He was telling about the awful days when the Germans took possession of the land, when the whole village struck for the woods, and camped there in a sorry fright, for the women and the children said to each other, "Nous savons que Bismarck tue tous les enfants pour qu'il n'y ait plus de Français."
"Well, well, they are over—les scelerats ne puissent—ils faire cela encore—Eh? We are strong now. The army is fitte, as the English say, and—Ah I will never shoulder arms again, mais, I could, Oui! Oui! Je puis tirer."
I leaned over and whispered to Blanchette, "They should never touch you Blanchette—Pourquoi; parce que je t'aime," and she pressed my hand ever so lightly and smiled, and I knew that she was pleased, and then—"Mon Dieu—I could have stopped l'escadron d'allemands tout seul!"
"Tu quoque littoribus nostris, Aeniea nutrix,
Aeternam moriens famam, Caieta, dedisti:
Et nunc servat honos sedem tuus."
It was Emile, of course, talking his indispensable Virgil, though surely the captain was not dead yet. "Yes, captain, France will never forget your service. I know those were hard days. I was sick then at the village of Louvry, not so far you know from the preserve and forests of Villers-Cotterets, and I can tell you that the Huns came to us for champagne, and my people told them there was none in the house, and they swore—terriblement—and said they had seen the bottles empty, and they would show them to us, and they went into the cellar and they—Helas, il était tres drôle—pointed to bottles of eau de Seidlitz which—vous savez—look like champagne bottles a little—a little—n'est ce pas?—and they took them away, and soon they had them empty too—ce sont buveurs monstrueuses—but—splendid, the retribution of the Gods—
Di tibi, si qua pios respectant numina, si quid
Usquam justitia est—;
they were all shockingly sick; you see, la purgative totale—"
There was some laughing, though Blanchette blushed a good deal, and I could have boxed the careless mouth of Monsieur, le Maître d'École.
"Listen mes amis," now it was the curious treble of Privat Deschat, "I am not sure but the skies will blacken again, and the buse (eagle) will shut out the sunlight with its swarming hosts. It is not all over yet. Be watchful. You remember the thunder-storm last week when the chevreuil came into the back-yards, the stags were seen in the roadways, and the wild boars ran into Briois roaring. I was up that night late, for I had a package of rugs to send to Paris, and it struck one in the morning when I put out the light, and said my prayers—ils n'étaient pas beaucoup—there came a crack, like the last call of judgment, and then the wind and rain grew mad with ambitions to outdo each other. It was then I guess that the blow knocked over the tower on the ruins at Bienne and filled the moat of the chateau, and swelled the brooks with rain, so that the land to Mareuil became a lake and the chicken coops swam all the way to La Ferté. Well about an hour after that the storm vanished. I was still up fearful and watching.
"I can see a long way over the farms, and suddenly the moon broke through with a wonderful light—it was full moon—and the wind shifted, piling the clouds up in swirling masses, black as ink, and still, at moments flashing with lightning, and crashing with thunder. I could see the lands far off towards Bienne shining with great lakes of water, the dark walls of forest, and in the fields huddled cattle, in droves. Then it seemed to me as if the light grew stronger in the sky—it was about two in the morning then—so strong it grew, that I felt there must be some fires about, perhaps towards Briois. I went outside in the road. It was ankle deep with mud, but I ploughed through it to the edge of the slope of the road, from Paris, and looked towards the east, for the clear spaces of the sky were there. Then came the vision."
The speaker stood up among his now fascinated hearers; they were all leaning toward him, as if drawn by a magnet, and while I closed my hand more tightly around the warm fingers of Blanchette I too, with her, strained my ears to hear Deschat's words which were less loud.
"I could see no fire anywhere, and yet the light was raining down around me like an electric glow. I was half frightened; it seemed so marvelous! Well slowly from out of the rolled up thunder and rain clouds came a curious thing. It was a galloping squadron of horses, manes flowing, tails stiff behind them, and on them riders and on the heads of the riders the pickelhaube of the Germans. They flew over the open sky, and the moonlight seemed to pierce them through and through, and they shone with white lines within the dark bodies; the WHITE LINES of SKELETONS. What did it mean? I thought they would never end. On and on in hosts. Of course they were only mists, clouds, but so true to form, so real, like gigantic ghosts! I trembled before the apparition—vue spirituel—and then the light died away, and the figures became blurred, and the moon went out, behind the clouds, and I came back to the house. It was half past three.
"I may be wrong friends, but—I take it that vision was prophecy. The HUN comes again. Get ready. He comes again—encore!"
We were all silent for a minute or so, and then—it was the scolding squeak of Emile—"Eh bien—What of it? We will be ready. Rumpe moras omnes; et turbata arripe castra."
"Mes amis—" it was my father now who rose, and addressed the little group, turning to this side and to that, almost as if he were before an assembly; "Deschat is right—il y a raison—the hour of trial comes once more, the pride of race, the sense of justification demands the restoration of Alsace and Lorraine. We all know that. Our conquerors know that, for the poets of both nations have sung it, and the poets are the prophets, for they feel the vibrations of the pulse of the peoples; their ears are sharp, they hear the timbre of the distant gun, before the common eye can see its smoke."
GABRIELLE
My sister Gabrielle was singularly circumstanced in temperament, as she had been too curiously abused in treatment. I left her a young man of twenty-one—she was two years older than I—and only knew of her changing experiences from letters sent to me at San Antonio, Texas. Mother and father were always a trifle worried over Gabrielle's retired and shrinking ways, her abnormal shyness before people, a physical timidity almost that kept her face averted, her rich, deep, large eyes half closed as if in dreams, and controlled her speech, impeding and denying it.
Her languid action and the frequent recurrent fits of a semi-stupor passing off into reveries, when the loosened current of her thought found an unexpected vent in rambling half-lucid, oftentimes poetic apostrophes and ascriptions, wrought in them a transparent terror that embarrassed the grieving girl.
Something of the sort had disturbed me before I left home, because I loved Gabrielle dearly, and remembered so many intimacies between us. In our walks around fair Briois we—both perhaps prematurely serious and inquisitive—talked of things invisible and beautiful, as angels and fairies, and in an old graveyard back of a church beyond the village and on the edge of a wood where the birds nested and sung, wondered over the dead. We amused our fancies with inventions of their work and play, now their bodies were so securely anchored in the earth. Because of all this, yes, and because Gabrielle was very pretty too, I tried to break the mystery of her modesty and lonely habits.
But really there was no mystery, and her modesty was a lovely maidenly reserve. Gabrielle was nervously over-strung, and her susceptibilities were extremely tender and responsive, and then there was growing in her that inexplicable power which forms the raison d'être of all this marvellous experience which—as everyone knows now—put an end to the awful WAR.
Well, before I left home, before I found myself hung, as it were, over the bottomless Atlantic in a big sea-worthy American ship, booked for Galveston, Texas, mother and father decided to send Gabrielle to Paris to a training school of nurses. It had occurred to them that my sister with her gentleness, and a real skill in the use of her fingers, would do well, while the contact with doctors and surgeons—rather direct, imperious, and active men—would wear away her apparent mistrust and nervousness.
But here was their mistake. The analysis was correct, the procedure hopelessly wrong. Gabrielle, always obedient and gravely mute about her own wishes, assented, and entered a training school for nurses and almost at once encountered the terrors of the operating room. Her sensitive and refined sense shuddered at the sight of suffering and disease, her pity for it—willing and self-sacrificing as was her desire to help—caused her involuntary agony of mind. The vulgarities of treatment, the raw necessities of the exposure, mutilations, and the repulsion she felt for blood, and the naked sightlessness of wounds, amputations, incisions—all the obtrusive physical facts of the hospital offended her. Too delicate in feeling, too aesthetic in temperament, too limpid in her affinities, as of a spirit discarnate, soaring, and apprehensive, she underwent mental tortures—hard to realize to others differently conditioned—in this enforced service.
Perhaps I was not myself solicitous enough about her, and her welfare; because—well, it is clear I am sure—because I was much in love with Blanchette, and as the days brought me nearer to that moment when I would leave home, and struggle for that wealth America seems to hold so temptingly out in her outstretched hands to everyone, I felt almost bitterly the probability that—in the nature of things—Blanchette would not, could not wait for me. When might I return—Ah when?—the thought wrenched me like a physical violence, and the nightly scarlet of the evening skies almost, to my despairing heart, seemed stained with the drops of my own blood.
It was a year before I went to America—that was in 1895—that I sat with Blanchette in the garden back of her pleasant home on a low mound, in a bosque or coppice of trimmed beeches, with a little fairyland of garden beds before us, of larkspur, hollyhocks, geraniums, and piebald four-o'clocks, and the slant lights fading slowly upwards left a thousand hues among their petals. The captain favored our rendez-vous, and I half thought that I saw him in an upper window of the house benignantly smiling upon our tryst.
The comeliness of a sweetly fair girl was Blanchette's, and the ringletted hair of her blonde mother—a Swede—caught in an abundant chignon behind her well shaped head, brought into ravishing relief the rounded and blushing cheeks, the winning deep-set blue eyes, where something, to me almost etherial, dwelt, the full lipped mouth, with the blue veins of her temples, the round white neck, and the ample contours of her shoulders, hidden that night beneath the blue folds of a crepe handkerchief, crossed over her breast like a fichu.
"Blanchette," I said at length, just as the last lingering patches of sunlight seemed to escape skyward from the flowers, "you know that I am going away to America—and—I am not going solely for myself—pas de tout. You will be with me in my daily thoughts, in my work, and every dollar—toujours dollars en l'Amerique—I make, will be put away for YOU; Mais comme je t'aime!"
It was a sudden impulse, and its very awkwardness showed the sincerity of my feeling, its impetuous earnestness; and deliciously was it rewarded. Blanchette caught my face in her soft long hands, and brought it down to her own; our lips met, and the pledge of our future life together unuttered, was sworn so deeply in our hearts, that we were dumbfounded with the overmastering passion of the moment.
Again and again we embraced, and our lips sought each other with a rapture inexpressible—une rapture indicible—while the moving hours swept the heavens of all light, and the fragrance of the gardens rose overpoweringly like sensuous incitations to our immeasurable needs.
The long pent-up torrent of our love caught upon its waves each momentary reserve, and smothered it in the racing tides of our limitless joy. Voices seemed to speak to us from every side, as if the spirits of nature, enthralled in flower, and tree, and grass, and herb, disincarnate through sympathy, spoke to us, inarticulate but real. C'était l'appel aphrodisiac de l'âme—the ecstatic epitome of a life-time.
That night I leaned out of the window of my room, and the night, calm and gloriously light with the gibbous moon half flooding the broad distances with its pale splendors, seemed to bathe my spirit in incredible consolations of hope, ambition. An exorbitant confidence seized me. Anticipation and resolve raised innumerable visions, and the bending salutation of Success almost audibly filled my ears with its siren promises.
Blanchette would wait. I must not be too avaricious. A little was enough for our serene and inconspicuous days. Let it be in a year—two? Les fortunes merveilleuses ne viendraient-ils? Perhaps—perhaps—let us believe so, now, and if the time is lengthened, well—les noces s'attarderaient seulement un peu.
So dreaming, so feeding illustrious hopes, I forgot Gabrielle, in my selfish egotism, and while I had dimly divined the result of her new work I offered no opposition to our parents' designs, and even encouraged Gabrielle with specious flatteries. She would grow stronger; the life of the great city would be full of wonders, and captivate her mind with its marvels. Then there would be fresh friendships, the gayety of companionships, innumerable alleviations of l'ennui.
Gabrielle shook her dear head, and the sweet yearning eyes watched me with a sad disillusionment that I had deserted her, and, I, in the madness of my joy and in the eagerness of my plans, recurred to the artifice of commonplaces, and the flat sophistries of comfort.
I came upon her one morning weeping quietly in her room with her head leaning against the mantel piece, her white slender fingers pressed upon her eyes and the tears slipping through them. I caught her in my arms, and turned her head upon my breast with the real anguish of self-reproach.
"Gabrielle, Gabrielle, what hurts you? You break my heart. Have I been forgetful? O! believe me Gabrielle it will be all well, and if—if—perhaps—I know, you say I have been only thinking of myself. Ah forgive me, Gabrielle; surely you know that I love you from the very bottom of my heart and if you could only see it you would believe."
"Yes," she murmured between sobs that wrung my heart. "Oui Alfred, c'est vrai—but I feel so sorrowful at times, and I am afraid of the great city, and the visions come to me at night and I wake up shaking with strange doubts."
"Why Gabrielle, what do you mean? Visions! You have never told me of that before. What visions?"
It was some time before I could contrive to make her tell me more, and when she finally drew me to a sofa at the window, keeping her face fixed outward on the sweet pageantry of the little gardens on the hill, and the far-away loveliness of the forests, and the shifting radiances of the lowlands, she held me spell-bound with the strange confession. Her voice was at first very low, almost inaudible, but slowly she regained her composure, and the story came from her lips with an unstudied grace and realism that imposed its truthfulness upon its hearer. Indeed my own latent sympathy in nature with that of Gabrielle's, from the first, enthralled me in a trance of confidence.
"Why, Alfred, a year ago I was standing at my bed-side—it was late and the night was dark. I had put out my lamp, and was about to say my prayers, when softly there seemed to steal into the room a light. It came at first from the ceiling of the room, and then it shifted and shone like a phosphorescent ball, or a little cloud of glowing fire half concealed behind a veil. I was not frightened—No, not at all, but I felt a delicious calmness, a wonderful soothing self-surrender to an unseen influence, as if the effluence of some mind controlled me, and—I thought so—I sank slowly to the floor, while the light rose and expanded and grew before my eyes into a shape, a form of flowing lines of light, with shades between them, and the faintest pencillings of a rosy tint ran here and there over it, and then—perhaps then Alfred I had swooned; but there was no fear. It was just like a delicious lapse in unconsciousness into sleep, and with that came voices in my ears—faint, very faint, murmurous, indistinguishable, and then—"
"And then?" I exclaimed, now thoroughly excited myself, and catching Gabrielle's hands, bringing her face to mine, and gazing into her eyes with mute expostulating curiosity.
"I knew nothing more—all vanished, apparition and voices, and I woke up leaning against my bed and bathed in perspiration."
We were both silent for a time, and without any encouragement Gabrielle resumed her story, but she had freed herself from my arms, and walked to the center of her room—its walls were well filled with pretty colored prints, for the most part religious figures—and with her hands crossed behind her back, stood before me and continued—and now her rueful expression, and the rebuking tenderness of her eyes, had disappeared, and in their place was an old familiar smile, inexplicably reminiscent, like a visible soliloquy. It often arose to her face and it became her.
"I waited for the visitation again and again, putting myself in the same position, and shutting out the light, and—praying. It came once, a few months after the first, and then I thought it was some forewarning of danger to father or mother, or to you Alfred, and I dreaded to open my eyes in the mornings, fearing disaster, sickness—I know not what; and then Alfred it suddenly seemed to me it meant that it was my own summons!"
"And when it came the second time, was it different?" I almost cried aloud, abruptly guessing that it portended mischief to Blanchette.
"No, quite the same, but less bright and more restless, changing in its brightness, and flitting slowly up the walls and back again, and never forming a figure as at the first. But something else was different; O! much different—The Voices. They were stronger, and Alfred it is the voices now that fill my ears at night with callings, and singular messages, that I cannot understand, and Alfred," she came closer to me, and her voice, sinking to a whisper, seemed almost stealthy; "I have spells of fainting. Mother has picked me up many times and I have heard her talking to father about it, and they have written to the doctors in the Training School and— Well you know it is all settled, but Alfred it will not help me. I dread it. I shall be unhappy."
The forlorn misery returned to her eyes, and the despairing gesture, as she brought her hands forward and leaned them against my shoulders and with a keen interrogation fixed her gaze upon my own, revealed her unwillingness to go to Paris. She went on:
"In those trances—if they are really trances—the voices come in all sorts of ways to me. I cannot understand it; it scares me and yet I have grown to wish to hear them—some of them. For they are very, very different. Some voices are like children talking low, almost lisping, and always musical, and others are cold and hard; but—Alfred, is not this wonderful? I can drive those hard, stern voices off, by just wishing them away; my mind does it somehow, and the others come to me when I wish them to—O! but it is marvelous."
Her eyes were lit again with a saintly joy—a little wild I thought—and for a moment I shuddered at the thought that perhaps Gabrielle was losing her mind, under the stress of her hallucinations. Ah! but were they hallucinations? I was not unwilling to believe them. Both Gabrielle and I had indulged in the reading of ghostly tales, when children, and because it was just a little difficult for us to gratify our fancy for the weird and the supernatural—all the eccentricities of the disembodied—we had loved them the more.
We were interrupted in our talk by some call for Gabrielle, and I was left alone to ponder the strange matter, with I think, a crude kind of expectancy that we approached transcendent mysteries, dwelling unconfessed in my mind. But I was not a little alarmed also. Gabrielle's delicate texture, her spiritualized emotions, which also in their poignant intensity of feeling assumed now to me the aspect of a thaumaturgic power, might induce some mental derangement. Uncertain what to do, and unwilling to tell the affair to our parents, who would only see in it a new urgency for Gabrielle's transportation to changed fields of association, I concluded to confide everything Gabrielle had told me to Blanchette.
Blanchette was incredulous. She could not believe it. It offended her robust sense of actual living and the sharp realization in her of the materiality of the senses. You see in Blanchette something of the captain's skepticism, his naked Voltairism had developed. She was silent for a while, and then answered very slowly my question, "What is best to do?"
"Alfred, Gabrielle is unwell; you must get her away. She lives too lonely a life, reads too much, and is unsociable. Let her once live among the hard facts of the hospital, and the training school, and—Ah! then—it will all go, like the fogs—comme les brouillards s'evanouis-saient quand le soleil les éclate. Eh? Alfred, you know that."
I did not know it, and I was ill disposed at first to adopt Blanchette's view. But she was very tender and affectionate, and I was blind and too happy—too miserable too, as I must soon leave her—to do justice to Gabrielle. And so it came about that I argued the matter with Gabrielle, and insisted that she must try Paris, and the school, and the doctors, and forget the visitations, and mingle with the world a little, and, amongst new acquaintances, put to flight the aggravating "voices," for—the other marvel—the shining image—had never returned.
This latter fact contributed a better efficacy to my persuasions, as it seemed to prove that the whole business was some delusion of the mind. Gabrielle was not a bit convinced, but she was so dutiful, so resigned, and so faithful, that she yielded, put on the address of willingness she did not really feel, just to please me.
I took her to Paris and entrusted her with, O so many adjurations, to Doctor Manuelle Herissois, who was most considerate and pleasing and talked with Gabrielle with great adroitness and—I left her smiling, but as she kissed me Adieu, her dear eyes were very wet indeed, and for a moment in my own heart I mistrusted the part I had played, and might have, in an instant, reversed the whole transaction, when Gabrielle turned half away, while our hands yet pressed each other, and said; "Adieu Alfred. Do not come to see me when you go away to America. I could not stand it. Write only. That will do," and then, with a half stifled cry she fled into her room—her apartment in the school, and quickly closed the door, and I was left mute and irresolute.
What is more bitter than the remembrance of careless acts, thoughtless things we have done which caused grief to those we loved, and yet, while loving, neglected. It all came wrong, and still—assurement le bon Dieu, Il le faisait—it ended the war!
That night—I well recall it, I think, each minute of it—Blanchette ravished me with her loveliness, her joyous salutation, her infectious gayety, and lost in my own pleasure, the foolish vanities of doting youth, poor Gabrielle in her loneliness, was altogether forgotten. Dear sweet sister, with the patient heart, the endless resignation, the guileless impulses, and with that inscrutable mysticism of feeling, that finally brought to her the discarnate souls of the slain, the ghostly assault of the unnumbered dead—Ah! Malheureuse! not yet! again my tell-tale tongue, the hurrying scribble of my heedless pen!
Well, there were so many things to think of, and Blanchette was so eager to see me every minute, that when I had taken leave of all of our friends, and father and mother had invoked blessings on my head, and exacted promises that I would write each week, and the captain had made me very sure that he wanted a few pounds of the Texas pecan nuts sent to him, and Privat Deschat asked for a half dozen hanks of Texas cotton, if they could be found in the Galveston stores, Emile Chouteau (it was after he had left the school), wished only my happy return, that the waters would be propitious, the winds and the waves, and, if storms, why then:
dicto citius tumida aequora placat
Collectasque fugat nubes, solemque reducit;
and Sebastien Quintado had hugged me a dozen times and smacked me robustly as many times on each cheek—why, there was no time to be lost for me to pack up my few belongings, and get away to Marseilles as fast as ever I could—and then had not Gabrielle said not to come to bid her Adieu; that she could not stand it? Certainement. And so it was, that when I stood on the quay at Marseilles, trembling, nervous, and half regretful, everyone had been seen, everyone embraced, and everyone's orders taken, and—she, the wounded, dear sister of my flesh and blood, was forgotten—O! No, not forgotten—not that, but missed as it were in the furious haste, and wonderment, and expectation, and dread.
It was a big ship, a frigate, loaded with wines and cheeses and spices, and many jim-cracks of all sorts, that was to take me to the New World, and when I stood on her glistening deck, beneath the blazing sun, and France slowly sank away from my eyes and just at last the white spot of Marseilles, like a disk on the horizon, went out, like a light snuffed out in a candle, I went to my room and cabin, and laid down and held my hands before my face and cried pretty hard.
And somehow then, the very presence of Gabrielle surged before me like some embodiment of rebuke, and the physical pressure of a hand on my shoulder startled me to my feet with a cry of anguish. But it was nothing, only the reaction of my body to the urgency of my grief over Gabrielle's neglect. For days the thought of my sister obscured my happiness, although the newness of everything—ministered deliciously to my amour-propre. Good resolutions helped to comfort me, and the first thing for me to do when America was gained would be to write a long, careful, loving letter to Gabrielle.
My project of going to America can be briefly explained, as it may appear almost quixotic and unreasonable otherwise, especially my destination in Texas. But some years before acquaintances, made in Paris, where I was studying law, led to this departure. They had interests in cattle and farm lands, in the great state, and had frequently made me offers to go out, and watch their rights, and report the prospects and conditions, with inducements so advantageous to myself that, conjoined with the long cherished project formed in my own mind to try the chances in the Republic, resulted in this. I accepted their invitations against my parents' wishes, who at first resolutely denied their permission. This was overcome by my own increasing obstinacy, that had begun to approach the earnestness of disobedience.
Blanchette and I had, with the ludicrous solemnity of young lovers, exchanged the pledges of fidelity, and I, in an exuberance of hopefulness, promised to return in five years, which by some fancied finality seemed to both of us the limit of our possible endurance. With forceful vows I had engaged to live most simply and the frugality of my expectations in living—measured the quickness and value of my savings, and indeed, as it happened, I made my way fast.
At San Antonio I became at last established, with the various interests, I was to watch, quite fully comprehended and diligently tended. I do not know that I ever fell in love with San Antonio, but I certainly got to like it very well, and in later years I have recalled it with feelings of tenderness, that came pretty near to affection. I have every reason to be grateful to it, for I was most successful. I had prospered, greatly prospered. When I found at last that the term of my exile came ideally near to the period when I might consider myself well enough off to go back and claim Blanchette, I think that my respect for San Antonio rose to the apex of unaffected enthusiasm.
Because the purpose and body of this history is connected with the utterly unparalleled circumstances of the ending of the monstrous war of this century, I pass over the irrelevant details of my life in America, except only to point out the financial luck that enabled me to return to France, at a critical moment. In five years I was almost rich—in my own modest estimation. At any rate I had enough, and a luxurious indolence, which was part of my nature, fascinated me with its temptations of rest and culture, while the thought of the waiting Blanchette—whose letters were so true-hearted and devoted—kept sensitized my eagerness to return almost to the point of madness. And there was Gabrielle.
I had been most dutiful to Gabrielle. I fulfilled all of the many brotherly resolves I made on the voyage to America, which had been the index of my self-reproach at leaving her so carelessly, and sweetly and reassuringly had she answered. Alas! I only learned much later how devotedly she had hidden her sufferings from me, that I might not be distressed in my new home. Now when I realized that my little fortune—part of it the result of a speculative incident so frequent in the wonderful land of Hope—would not only unite me with Blanchette but enable me to give comfort and happiness to Gabrielle, I was wild with impatience to get away. It was my last month in San Antonio; the leave for my return had been received by me, from my employers, and the successor to my position would be at any moment in my office ready to take charge.
It was my last day; a sultry wilting day towards the end of August, and I had exerted every energy in arranging the directions for my successor, and incidentally clearing off a large amount of that surreptitiously invading refuse of unfinished odds and ends, that accumulate, in one way and another, in any business, which cannot be completed by daily installments of work. A large amount of mail had been disposed of. The office force, tired out, and half angry at the unexpected pace I had demanded, had left, and I was alone in a large shop fronting upon —— Street, the principal street of San Antonio. Gray frowning clouds had formed somewhere in the upper air. I could detect their presence even without seeing them, by the deepening obscurement of the opposite houses, and a chill brought in their enveloping bosoms as they crowded down upon the city, conveyed a well understood notice of some sudden meteorological caprice that would relieve the tension of the heat, with possibly damaging accompaniments of disaster.
I sighed contentedly; the future just then, however dark the sky might be, was radiant with the most varied lights of anticipation and of promise. My hand moved an apparently unopened letter, or perhaps, in its vague stirring over the desk before me, had dislodged it from some crevice in the drawers, or beneath the folios and baskets, and I abruptly became conscious of ITS presence. It was a human utterance—that letter—it might have cried out to me with the incisive agony of its menacing contents. It might I say—perhaps it did—but through the coarse obstructive mechanism of my ears its voice, that should have crashed around me like the call of Fate, was utterly unheard, and it lay there just an overlooked and silent scrap of paper.
I turned to it lazily, but in the next instant my eyes, apprehensive through that nervous divination of thought, that writes a message in our souls before we read or hear it, recognized the hand-writing of Gabrielle. I felt the racing blood leave my cheeks, and stir my heart with feverish palpitations. No letter from my sister was due now; only last week I had received one. I could scarcely keep my fingers still enough to tear open its cover. I knew; I knew. O! God how certainly I knew, that in the blackness of the darkening day a greater blackness, behind that spotless white paper, would rush out to overwhelm my life!
In the fading light leaning against the door-sill as the men and women of the street hurried homeward, with backward glances at the now onrushing columns of dusky vapor in the sky, I read the letter. I shuddered in the fear lest in the uncontrolled frenzy of my heart some treacherous cry, some blackguard defiance of the Almighty, might bring them around me in consternation and in anger.
My eyes glazing slowly with the rising paralysis of terror read this:
Dear Brother,
Something has happened. Alfred, Blanchette is sick—vraiment—quite sick. I am now home in St. Choiseul nursing her. She asks for you, Alfred. Could you come? Perhaps it would be well—Je dis peut-etre seulement—and yet, Alfred, I believe it would be best. You could help her wonderfully. Even yet, say, you will come, and things will be better.
Ah! my brother, I am sorry. O! so sorry to write this, but you see there is nothing to be done but to—shall I say it?—Alfred, Blanchette is very sick. It is a fever. The doctors reassure us, but because Blanchette calls for you so often, they are convinced that it would be good—very good—perhaps indispensable; you understand. Come Alfred—Come, come. We will tell her you are coming.
Gabrielle; St. Choiseul,
1900
The paper crumpled in my hands; something like a vapor clouded my eyes, and hearing in my ears was suffocated in a sullen roar that came from nowhere, and then I felt myself smashed against the pavement, at the door of the office, and some undissipated residue of cognition recorded the fact, that I was being lifted and carried away.
And when again the coordinated senses revealed sensibly to me my surroundings, I was on a bed in the hospital, in a wide white room, with a nurse and a doctor, and in my own ears now sounded my own voice, and all it said was compressed in struggling cries: "Je viens, Je viens, Je viens—I come, I come, I come!"
MY RETURN
It is fifteen years today since Blanchette died. I have grown old since then with an age not of years, though by reason of a sister's love, I have been consoled, strengthened, even, and now, in the presence of the world's disaster, succumb to some unutterable conviction that the ends of God have little need of the prayers of men.
After my delirium in San Antonio had passed, I resumed my normal self-possession, though a nervous weakness—since developing into a muscular paralysis—made me at moments inert or half trembling with a deceitful dread that set my heart beating curiously. How well I recall it all; those days of anguish, with the twilight glimmering of joy that I had come in time to see her, and with too a mystical sense of attachment between us both, lasting beyond death, and bathed, as with a consecration, in the bitterest waters of Marah.
I had rushed from San Antonio to New York, and from New York to Havre, and thus, in two weeks, almost exactly, stood halting before the gate of the captain's house in St. Choiseul. The autumn season already had begun to stain the woods with red and yellow, the delicate atmosphere of early fall filled the fair scenes of meadow and hill and clustered homesteads, with ravishing tints. Everything, as I despairingly gazed upon it was so eloquent of beauty and peace and—realization! And what lay in the house before me? I almost fell to my knees in the crushed agony of suspense, but Ah! No! it was not suspense. I knew; that psychic power which dwelt in my Gabrielle, which brought to her the myriad voices of the dead in their awful supplications—Eh bien, not that now—some of that power was with me too, and every step I went forward to that pitiless revelation of defeat, accompanied the stern record in the thought that hope was delusion. I had met no one; the deserted village was itself a presage.
I looked up at the silent house charming in its vines, flowers, into the walled garden blushing now in the hectic flush of royal gladiolus, up at the empty windows, and above, far above into the depthless blue sky, where we men and women somehow place the everlasting dwelling-place of the Almighty. Almost as I reached the door it opened, and in its frame stood Gabrielle, much changed; I saw that at once, through all my sadness, but solemnly beautiful I thought. My heart leaped towards her; in the fast approaching desolation she, my blessed sister, would save me, lift me up from the terrors of bereavement, not with strength, but with the divine compassion that I felt now visibly abided in her.
Gabrielle opened wide her arms. I caught her in my own, and she whispered in my ear; "Alfred I knew you were here. Before I saw you the sense of it was with me."
"Gabrielle, is there no hope—no hope?" The words choked me like some insurmountable obstruction in my throat.
"Yes Alfred," the voice, always soft and delightful, was just a little tremulous with sympathy, her own deep love. "There may be; the fever has subsided a little, but—Well, come in. Blanchette asks for you so much. Come, the spare room is at the head of the stairs. Be noiseless. I will fix everything."
We ascended the stairs, and I waited outside the closed door with my head pressed against its lintels, murmuring—what were they?—Prayers? Possibly.
It opened softly in a few minutes, and Gabrielle with a gesture of invitation to enter and with her finger on her lips, moved before me into the room. I saw the waiting group at the side of a low wide bed. The captain, erect, still, with features blanched into a pallor that matched his white disordered hair, his figure bent slightly forward as he leaned on his cane, and kept his eyes unchangingly riveted upon the bed, whose occupant I could not see. At the bed-side was the watching doctor, and to him now Gabrielle approached, withdrawing then a little to one side with her head bowed, but with her eyes noting the sick girl whom yet I could not see.
I slipped to my knees with a sudden motion outward, that brought me to the bed-side, and for a moment I stopped there, with my face buried in the coverlid. It had been done; Blanchette knew. The next moment her hand caressed my hair, and the weak stroke penetrated me with such an ageless longing that, do what I would, I shook from head to toe. Mais courage; I must be now most calm. Yes, yes, most calm. So I wrestled with myself, biting my lips, and forcing to my eyes the haggard smile of reassurance. My hands imprisoned the hand of Blanchette, and slowly raising my head our eyes met.
I did not see what I saw afterwards, the shrunken figure, the hollow cheeks, the paling lips, the slow hideous change of emaciation. No! nothing; only her eyes, and in them shone something so fathomless, so beatific, that it suddenly lifted the intolerable weight of pain, it smote the clouds of misunderstanding or rebellion, and they vanished. It filled my ears with music, in place of groans, it summoned by the wand of a supernatural enchantment unheralded figures of blessing, and in those eyes I read the futurity of our endless happiness.
I moved my head towards her, and despite the restraining hand of the doctor kissed her lips, slowly, slowly, that the lingering embrace might fill her soul with confidence, and against her heated cheeks I swept my lips again and again. It was over. Our tryst was kept. Gabrielle called me gently, and Blanchette fell from me in a fainting spell, while the doctor firmly lifted me up to my feet, and the captain caught my unsteady body.
And—we had not spoken in that transient interval of surrender—thus mutely with the deep intelligence of an uttermost love we were married, and in that restraint unrepiningly, with an entire joy, I have lived and live. Some symptoms of that psychic erethism which possessed Gabrielle were also born in me, and before my eyes even now sweeps the vision of my Blanchette, and in the night her voice fills my ears, and her hand caresses my forehead. But later it was through Gabrielle that I summoned her to me, and in this way grew the apparent supersensual power of my sister to materialize the ghostly denizens of the Hereafter, and install them, as it were, in matter before the physical eye.
Blanchette's burial was itself a poem, so sweet, so tender, so rich in the love of friends, and in the graces of both religion and of nature. The day was divinely rare. Everywhere was the blessed soft, gently warming sunshine, and the last flowers of the autumn woke to the summery touch, and bloomed again. From the doorway of her home the little procession filed, bearing, on the unshrinking shoulders of eight villagers, the coffin, draped in white and enjeweled with blooms. Before it went the wavering line of altar boys, singing in thin sopranos, and the robed Padre—Father Antoine—grave and noble, and behind it the captain and I walked, our hands clasped together. Although the captain moved forward erectly, I felt the nervous pressures of his hand, tightening and relaxing, and for a moment now and then he leaned upon me. Mais—le brave garçon—he never flinched, and if his heart was near the breaking point, no one knew. Behind him walked Gabrielle and father—mother was in the church waiting with the congregation—and then Privat Deschat and Sebastien Quintado, and then the long file of friends followed, old and young, who had loved Blanchette for her goodness, her prettiness, her kindness, her grace of being and of sympathy.
They came from far and near; they were men and women, girls and boys, some carrying candles, some wreaths, some little crosses of Easter palms which they would throw in the grave, or on it. The altar boys carried lighted candles, and the air was so still that the almost invisible wisps of flames rose straight upward, and were revealed by the undulous smoke that sprang from their tips as the candles wavered in the hands of the acolytes. Slowly we moved on—somehow I seemed half unconscious, and yet most sensitive to the day's supreme charm—the shrill chanting of the boys, mingled almost indistinguishably in my ears with the murmurous hum of belated cicadas, the slow rustling of footsteps before and behind me, the occasional whisper of the vacantly stirred foliage in the trees, the distant pipings of birds, and the far-off wail of some wandering or bereaved dog.
It was a dream almost, and ever and anon, like some spiritual effluence, the fragrance of the dying season from the field, the distant woods, the savory banks of the meadow-streams, invaded and enmeshed my feelings, with a strange fervor of complacency, as though I followed, not the dead body of my love, but was on my way to meet her elsewhere. So indeed it seemed to me in the little church, where all the frail magnificence our little church could summon for her funeral was so loyally displayed, and where the soft voiced father spoke with the brave and cordial accent of confidence, that Blanchette Bleu-Pistache was most surely now in Paradise. Then I felt my own soul leaving me amid the tapestries and lights, and upward with her, hand in hand, I was hastening to fields of asphodel and unbroken choirs of the celestial, and that then I swooned sideways, and for an instant the captain held me, when the reverberant senses returned, with the rush of whirring sounds, and I was myself again.
Blanchette was buried in our church-yard, somewhat towards its western wall, where the ivy clung late in the winter to the stones, where a tall Lombardy poplar planted too against the wall, stood like some impossibly gigantic sentinel, and where afterwards indeed the flowers that I watered, in an agony of trust that Blanchette knew I kept thus alive within me the imperishable union of our hearts—spread the sweet wantonness of abundant color and perfume above her, flowers that when they died in the autumn's cold and the winter's searing frosts and snows, were replenished with others plucked from the conservatory of our home, and placed under the white cross like some herbal sacrifice.
Ah—c'est assez—I must not linger on the great sorrow, though in the inextinguishable pain that I feel at moments over its recall, a hidden selfishness as of a satiety of suffering prevails to force me to write and write. But I have forgotten and my wandering thought obscures my whole purpose. It is Gabrielle that all this grievous remembrance leads to, and she who has ended the awful WAR, is the theme of this most wonderful experience, I have essayed to tell so imperfectly.
After Blanchette's death I stayed with the captain for some months, until a grave disease struck me down almost to death's door, which indeed I craved to open and to close behind me. It was a nervous fever, from which I have never quite recovered, as it left me with recurrent fits of weakness and a debility of energy quite unlike my former self. The captain adopted an orphan girl, who was like an incarnation of his daughter, and who infinitely blessed him, with a similar gentleness and sanity and beauty.
Gabrielle and myself became again closely knit together in sympathy. She had nursed me in my sickness, and she read to me in my convalescence, and then she told me of the harsh and repulsive life of the hospital; how its penury of grace afflicted her, and the physical destitution of the hideously sick had overcome her with an irrepressible repulsion, and the half savage nakedness of exposures and surgery had thrown her into momentary spasms of despairing melancholy. But she had not complained; it was the ordeal of preparation, she said; she had undergone extreme dread and misery of heart and mind, and, under the visitations of her distress, those ecstasies—as she now slowly and tearfully confessed—of desire to see the ghostly and immaterial had returned and strengthened, and to her had come visions and voices, and again and again in her prayers the apparent touch of fingers tracing the braid of her hair, or even smoothing the temples of her head had actually been felt.
None of these things were told to me by Gabrielle until I was effectually improved, and then they became the outpouring of her heart. She had been unwilling to speak of them to father and mother since they would have, beyond any question, regarded them as the symptoms of mental infirmity, and their solicitude might have readily taken the form of some new insistence upon the avocations of the city. Gabrielle, after the death of Blanchette had persisted in her refusal to return to the hospital in Paris, and, after a brief and a little unpleasant disagreement, mother and father permitted her to stay at home. Then came my sickness, when Gabrielle proved most useful, and then by a natural adjustment—for exactly as it had been in the old days of childhood we became inseparable—Gabrielle assumed domestic duties, and our home life was reinstituted and complete.
It was delightful, though the happiness it brought to me was a solemn tenderness of feeling and thought simply. I had brought back from America a small sum of uninvested funds, and when this was carefully invested, with the interest from the moneys held by me in America and with my father's maintenance, our living became, more than ever, free from anxieties, and comfortably luxurious. Nor were we careless of our duties to the less fortunate; the instruction of our parents had always laid emphasis upon the invincible demands of charity in the Christian life, and no one more thoughtfully than they furnished to us examples of its most admirable exercise.
And here I must refer to something now certainly obvious to my reader. The religious faith of our parents was not ours—not Gabrielle's nor mine. Perhaps that had much to do with that felt, though never mentioned, separation—désaccordement, we French would, I think, call it—that latently grew up between our parents and ourselves, dutiful as we always were and loving too. Gabrielle and I were Catholics, and our reversion, as it might be called, had taken place as we approached maturity, when something in our natures responded vitally to the spiritual richness and the sensuous impressions of the Catholic church, while the absence of a Protestant church in St. Choiseul—supplemented by the meeting together of various members in a room, wherein my father often assumed the functions of the preacher—helped to establish our desertion. There was indeed a moment's exasperation over it all, but it was most evanescent, and, yielding to a larger liberality of conviction than most Protestants, our parents were at least contented that their children worshipped God and Christ.
Certainly to Gabrielle the Catholic symposium of saints, and its hierarchy of visible and invisible powers, appealed overwhelmingly. She surrendered to the full harvest of its supernatural offerings, with the gladness, the rapture, of the energumen. Now too that the psychiatric sense or control had started within her nature, she rose to the strange contingency of communication with the dead, with a transcendent joy. No longer thrust upon the abhorrent carnalities of the hospital, graciously as she acknowledged their necessity and kindness, Gabrielle, with me, her emotional companion too, returned to all the quietism of our life in St. Choiseul, and revelled in her exuberance of mystical detachment. It was a partial aberration of mind, I almost now think, despite its wondrous results, accompanied with the enthralled wonderment and pleasure of a temperament poetical and structurally imaginative. Gabrielle became neurotic. Her hospital life and its terrors had something to do with it.
This community of feeling and the gradual development of that unhealthy indulgence in the mediumistic power, Gabrielle now discovered she possessed (which became encouraged through my own solicitations) formed between us a bond of fellowship, that became secretive and masonic. It was not a fortunate circumstance, and yet SEE what marvels flowed from it—at least so I think, and indeed I am not unwilling to protest that it was God's hand! Of course it was my desire to approach Blanchette in her spiritualized state, that led us onward along the mysterious and fascinating path of our strange psychic experiments. And so I come to that illustrious moment when I saw Blanchette in the spirit, when—Mon Dieu, can I ever forget it?—that pale vision of my own Blanchette issued from the darkness, stayed on the threshold of the real for an instant, softly luminous, and yet discrete in form, though the corporeal properties of the dear face I adored, seemed blurred in the haze of an exceeding brightness.
It was probably about six months after Blanchette's death, that I ventured to speak to Gabrielle about the hope I almost treacherously nourished—for the practice is forbidden by the Church—that she might be able to summon Blanchette from the world of spirits. It was towards the evening of a spring day, that just began to intimate the glorious oncoming of the new season's wealth of beauty—a beauty I longed for, for with the reawakening earth, with the fresh laughter of the whole wide sphere of living things, I knew the dead weight of my grief would be lightened. The sunlight, the song of birds, the flowing vesture of the colored earth, would enter and dissolve it, and thus, mellowed into sadness only, it would encumber me no longer with leaden hopelessness. We were standing together at the bottom of the garden, watching the first sproutings of the crocus from beneath a film of sheltered snow, and the cheering warmth of the full sun filled us with the instincts of life. It opened my lips.
"Gabrielle," I said, "I want you to bring Blanchette back to me."
My sister was not surprised; she turned to me with the most natural gesture of willingness, placing her hands upon my shoulders and looking straight into my eyes.
"Yes, Alfred, I will. I have heard Blanchette. But I was afraid to tell you. Twice she has spoken to me, in the night, and once in the brightest daylight, as I stood at the window of my room. Can you stand it? For see Alfred, I feel the power strongly in these spring days, as if the resurrection of life in all these things," she swept her arms outward to the landscape, "brought with it the spirits of the dead; as if they too liked a reprieve from their isolation, and thronged to the earth. Is it not so?"
"Oh! Gabrielle what has Blanchette said to you? Was it in words? Gabrielle, Gabrielle, it cannot be. Do not fool me with mere fancies."
Gabrielle smiled, a smile, as it were, of commiseration at my doubt, for now indeed she lived, I do believe, in a mingled world of things that we call real, and things that we call unreal, and to her they were almost the same.
"I do not fool you Alfred. Why should I? It is so simple and it is so true. See."
She left me, beckoning for me to follow her. She walked to a walnut tree, a low precarious sapling which had furtively pushed its way upward into some semblance of a tree, and leaned against its slender trunk, with her eyes pressed upon her crossed hands. I stood irresolute, half expectant, half miserably self-reproachful. Suddenly Gabrielle spoke. Her voice was itself strange, very distinct but chilled into a sepulchral gravity.
"It is all very dim, yellow and blue clouds float up and down, and here and there a figure moves, and there are voices, and now a great light—too bright—too bright—it shatters all!"
Her voice had risen to a tone louder than conversation, and she had raised her head with a quick upward movement, as if it had been jerked backward. Almost instantly she turned again to me, her face blanched, and her eyes just a little wild and strained, with no recognition in them. The oddness passed almost as quickly as it came, and Gabrielle smiled, and shook her head apologetically, and for one moment we watched each other with curiosity. But Gabrielle was quite herself, and coming close to me, she whispered:
"No Alfred it is not hard. You saw that I pierced the unseen; though, as it most usually happens when in the open, or with others, the pictures are confused and the voices difficult. I cannot make them out. But we shall try tonight together. Hold my hand and wish your wish, and let our minds—our souls—call for her and she will come. O! I am certain!"
"Gabrielle, I think this is not wise. You must cast off this inclination, and banish all of these impressions. Is it not a dangerous habit? Are you not afraid that it may unhinge your reason? And yet—Ah! how well you know, Gabrielle, that if I could only just be quite certain that Blanchette waits—waits. And then but once! Yes but once! Gabrielle," I caught her by the shoulders, and held her imprisoned, so that our eyes gazed into each other's, mine with a scrutiny that was half anger, half solicitude, and hers with an intense affection.
"Gabrielle—this must end. You hear me. End. Call Blanchette if you can. I will help you—and then—Let it all go. Cure your temperament, banish these hallucinations. I know I have been guilty in listening to you, but now—after Blanchette—after Blanchette—" the words left my lips wearily, as if the next alternative were feared most by me; "after Blanchette, no more of it. It is wrong, it is a diabolical procedure, mixed up with nonsense and disease. Stop it." How extravagant are our inconsistencies. I admonished Gabrielle, but I was not unwilling myself to stoop to the indulgence that might bring me a glimpse—no matter how fraught with deception, with the danger of madness, of the worse consequences of physical deterioration, even of religious apostacy, if only a glimpse of her I had made eternally the lode-star of my life, now and hereafter; if only a glimpse, might be vouch-safed.
Mais pourquoi Non—was I so wrong? What indeed has happened? Ah I know Gabrielle is—arretez vous, pauvre barbouilleur, pas encore—Go on with your story. It is Gabrielle speaking.
"Brother, you do not know what you are asking me. It is impossible—it would rob me of life, for I should not know then whether to really live in this world and to die in the other, or to leave you and mother, and father and home here, and to live the more glorious life beyond. Now I live in both worlds. Yes truly—in the mornings the clouds of angels waken me, through the nights my bed-side is covered with the spread haloes of the dead, and in my ears sound the sweetest whispers, and salutations of the saints. Throughout the day, if I only shut my eyes, and ask for their appearing, the visions continue, and even my face is brushed by fairy hands, or my lips feel the imprint of unseen, unknown faces."
My sister's face shone with an interior illumination, impossible to describe, and as she talked to me I felt the astonishment that might come to one who converses with some incarnate spirit. It did appeal to my sympathy, for I lived now myself half immersed in the daily contemplation of another world; it met my own anticipations vividly, and I could not condemn, nor evade its fascination. But I wondered and so questioned her more closely.
"Gabrielle, how can all this be? You have never said such things to me before, as if you were moving in a spirit-land with your feet in this world, and your head lifted above the stars. What does it mean? I knew something, but this tumult—fourmillement—of apparitions I knew nothing of."
"No, Alfred, I know you did not, though it has often been on my tongue to let you know how the visitations multiplied. I think, Alfred, it really is, as St. Paul says, that we are encompassed by a cloud of witnesses, or this world is itself unreal, and the realities are elsewhere; perhaps that everything about us, could we for an instant strip them of their appearances, would be something else—you see?—something else, and this atmosphere," she lifted her hand upward, shook it rapidly, causing little puffs of air against my face, "was loaded with currents of the dead!"
We both got up and walked slowly towards the house.
"Of course you have said nothing of any of these things to mother or father?" I queried.
"Ah, Alfred, I could not. They would not understand, and then why—why should I?"
After a pause: "Alfred, it will do no harm. Do not think me mad, or deluded, or—or—unbalanced, as they say, even. I cannot make it plain perhaps—but this I know—they are there—they, the spirits—" and she waved her hand up and down—"and when I call them they come, and they come when I do not call."
She was almost laughing now, and studying her attentively I could not see any of those symptoms in feature, or eyes, or voice, or manner, that betray to the alienist the disordered brain. Gabrielle never to me looked lovelier.
The next moment as we entered the hall-way I caught her arm and turned her abruptly to myself; "Gabrielle, show me Blanchette."
Her arms were about my neck in a trice, and she spoke in my ear; "Yes, Alfred, tonight, in the library. Come. It will be my seance—and yours too. Our spirits are in tune. We will roll back the visible and see the invisible. The substantial shall become the transubstantial, and the diverse, one."
This language was the only indication, at the moment, that I possibly could have regarded as idiotic—in the common sense—and I was half inclined to believe that Gabrielle—not without fun and humour—meant to bewilder me with it, as a joke.
Would I come? "Yes certainly," and so I left her, wonderingly, as I passed to my room, recalling that utterly impossible fiction in an English book written by an artist, called, as I remember it, The Martian. I shuddered a little when I closed the door of my room, and sank back in an easy chair, to grapple with a now peculiar problem. Should Gabrielle be permitted to live in this world of spiritual essences, and apparitions any longer?
I think that I was not disinclined to live in it myself, but with me the material stringency of affairs was unmistakable, and I did, spasmodically at least, revolt against this extreme spiritualism. I hunted along my book-shelves, and found the Martian book, and chasing through its pages I stopped at this incomprehensible passage:
"For when the life of the body ceases and the body itself is burned and its ashes scattered to the winds and waves, the infinitesimal, imponderable, and indestructible something we call the soul is known to lose itself in a sunbeam and make for the sun, with all its memories about it, that it may then receive further development fitting it for other systems altogether beyond conception."
And then came the intolerable fancy of these Martian souls getting into the bodies of animals, and into men and women, and how the particular Martia influenced the divine Englishman, and made him write wonderful transforming books, and he thought of a life
"where arabesques of artificial light and interwoven curves of subtle sound had a significance undreamt of by mortal eyes or ears, and served as conductors to a heavenly bliss unknown to earth."
I fell into a stupor of meditation. Might not Blanchette do such things for me? Her image sprang to my eyes, her voice sounded in my ears, her arms embraced me, the very fragrance of her person enchanted my nostrils, and then, as the stupor passed, and the dying day sent the broad beams of the sun full into my face, I rose, and, feeling with a sudden particularity of certitude, the absolute hopelessness of fancies, of dreams, of anything but work, with my own life broken at its very beginning, and the overshadowing pall of an unforgettable disaster shrouding it from corner to corner, I sank to my couch, and, stretched along its length, wept bitterly.
GABRIELLE'S SEANCE
It was only a few minutes later that, shaking off the dreary sluggishness of my grief, I started out of the house for a brisk walk. Down through the village, out into the broad highway towards Briois, where the Diligence from Paris then shot past me, with salutations shouted from its windows, and handkerchiefs waved from its Imperial and still on, along the fields growing verdant, while the warm tremulous air, with its procreative touch, unclasped the glutinous envelopes of the buds in the alders and poplars, and afar towards Bienne, and the ruined chateau, the massed background of the walled forests spanned the horizon with a palpitating purple haze, as of an arrested atmosphere or emanation, and in the very zenith above me a creamy rosiness, like an etherial colored lymph, dripped from cloudlet to cloudlet.
How wonderfully beautiful it all was; its tenderness, the auroral lights of the sky, and the definite joy of the returning life; it renewed my courage, rather it put to flight the dull meanness of sottish fears and regrets. The verses of —— came to my mind, and aloud, on the straight road that was now darkening, as the day fled to the empyrean, and thence must fly over the great ocean to the wonderland of America, I repeated them:
O renouveau! Soleil! Tout palpite, tout vibre
Tout rayonne, et J'ai dit, ouvrant la main; "Sois libre,"
L'oiseau s'est évadé dans les rameaux flottants,
Et dans l'immensité splendide du printemps;
Et J'ai vu s'en aller au loin la petite âme
Dans cette clarté rose ou se mêle une flamme,
Dans l'air profond, parmi les arbres infinis,
Volant au vague appel des amours et des nids,
Planant éperdument vers d'autres ailes blanches,
Ne sachant quel palais choisir, courant aux branches,
Aux fleurs, aux flots, aux bois, fraîchement reverdis,
Avec l'effarement d'entrer au paradis....
Alors, dans la lumière et dans la transparence,
Regardant cette fuite et cette deliverance,
Et ce pauvre être, ainsi disparu dans le port,
Pensif, je me suis dit: "Je viens d'être la morte."
Then my thoughts reverted to the strange things Gabrielle had told me, to the mysterious experience she promised to lead me through, that night, and, as the stars stole one by one timorously out of the filmy shadows of the east, into the grey dark sky, I speculated on our relations with the unseen, and whether we might be so attuned, as Gabrielle seemed to be, to respond and feel that numerous company, and their thoughts, and wishes, their influences, and their designs? I knew, everyone knows, that the scale of sound runs beyond the coarse mechanism of our ears at either end of the gamut, as indeed there are rays of light which our eyes do not catch in the ultra-violet end of the spectrum. Could it be that actually we are immersed in a vast ocean of spiritualized animation, which we cannot apprehend—most of us—which touches us on every side, and is yet as unapproachable as the stars I was looking at, but, unlike the stars, is not even suspected.
But perhaps—so I mused—there were hierophants, translators of its mysteries, souls enriched with some finer sense, who felt it, saw it, or, like pulsating membranes that record the varying pressure of the air, were so marvellously made as to feel its pressure too. They were pendulums, swinging in two worlds, and passing from one to the other, as one might pass from darkness to light, from discord to harmony, from confusion to order, from the apparent and back again to the real. Of these was Gabrielle. Or they were doorways, windows, passages, that afforded access to us, the corporeal prisoners of the earth, through which they came back—les revenants—when they too dearly loved us to find even happiness in their new abode unless they might occasionally regain our company. Ah could it be so with Blanchette! And then the queer book of Du Maurier's (that was the name of the English artist who wrote it) came into my head, and the impossible fancy of the Martian woman living in the body or the brain of Barty Joselin, and the death of the girl Marty who had become the second home of the beautiful demon woman—the Martian sprite.
I half wondered whether Blanchette could come and tenant my own body, with me, or was she inhabiting Gabrielle? Ah—la folie—but should I indeed see her tonight? I hurried along the familiar road, now in a growing tempest and terror of mind, almost with, I cannot describe it, a queer sense of disembodiment, as if I, myself, were not in my flesh and blood, but some ghost of myself, with an engagement to meet the ghost I had loved—and yet loved. Thus I hastened backward in the night, and entered my home, where the lights burned most cheerfully, and found my parents and sister waiting for me, and Hortense—still with us, with her flagging energies helped out by a pretty brunette waitress Gabrielle had brought from Paris—impatient, at the table, for our evening repast.
"Alfred, we have been waiting for you. Tonight your mother and myself must go to Briois. There is to be a meeting there of the Protestant Union, and I am expected to say something on the needs of our country-side for religious instruction. I hope to be able to bring about the building of a little church where our people may have the consolations of their religion;" it was my father speaking.
"Ah pardon, I am late, but the night is heavenly, and the spring comes on divinely. I have been just now towards Briois, and I could have walked, I think, on to La Ferté without fatigue. My legs do improve in these pleasant days, and the warmth stirs my blood. I am glad, father, you will have a church. Are you sure it is best to build it in St. Choiseul?" I answered.
"Why not, Alfred?" asked mother.
"Well there are not so many here who would need it and pas d'abeilles pas de miel;" I said laughing.
"But, Alfred, we are to have a new visitor to live with us in St. Choiseul, a rich man from Bordeaux, who is a leader of our congregations there. He is too what the English call, an exhorter, un homme qui exhorte; very eloquent, a great preacher in his way. If the church is built in our village he will help us, and then it might be that he will be willing to be our pastor too. He is a relative of le Capitaine, and now he has suffered a great sorrow. His daughter—the apple of his eye—died on the same day that Blanchette left us, nous laissait. The captain begged him to come to St. Choiseul, and he consented. It will be good for the captain, good for St. Choiseul—good for all of us. Is it not so?"
"Yes, mother," said Gabrielle, and she leaned towards her with her gentle smile of reassurance—there had been growing between sister and myself, and our parents, since Blanchette's death, a severer feeling of religious estrangement—"It will be good. I have heard Père Grandin. I heard him in the wards of the hospital, and he is a good man, parlant le plus beau? français avec une voix délicieuse."
Mother and father were delighted; it was a great surprise, and during our evening meal we talked of nothing else than the coming of Père Grandin. They asked Gabrielle about him with an increasing pleasure, as they saw how really admiring sister was of the excellent man's skill and sweetness. It was a pleasant time, and in the domestic glow of confidence, that the Père Grandin would become an instrument of propitiation, rather than of discord, while Julie placed before us one of Hortense's masterpieces—chefs d'oeuvres—le ragout de mouton, with garnishments of peppers and haricots, with her hot cakes—pains de seigle—and the melting chou-fleur and the inspiriting Burgundy, we bloomed, so to say, into a renewed affection. It was admirable. I recall it—shall I ever forget that wondrous night?—almost as if it had been a moment ago. I was soothed and quieted, and the rising frenzy of my blood subsided, and a most ingratiating blissfulness invaded me, and we lingered long at the table. Gabrielle was so gay and reminiscent it seemed as if she loved the hospital, now she was well free of it, and, as I listened in astonishment, I slowly realized that Gabrielle was responding to some hidden elation, and that—Was it her ecstacy to show me her strange power? Ah, yes, there was, too, her gladness that mother and father were to be away that night, and so—Voila, la diablerie sans bornes! Bah, I will confess I was displeased, and felt a little disgusted amazement at Gabrielle.
An hour later our parents were tucked in the cabriolet, the short snapping strokes of the horse's hoofs passed away into silence, and Gabrielle and I were alone. We faced each other as the door closed, and Gabrielle seized my arm, and speaking very slowly, with her face covered by her other hand, with all her late show of spirits vanished, said:
"Alfred, I feel the power; it thrills me. I cannot explain, but as the time comes on, I am crowded with a multitude—un essaim—of motions within me, as if I might be slowly dissolved into air, or something else light and floating. You thought that I was careless at dinner. I know, I watched your eyes. You thought I was glad that father and mother were going away, so that I could show you my power when I call Blanchette (I shuddered) back to meet you. But that was not true. I felt disengaged and well, most well, and my heart was contented. There was no deception, no guiltiness as of escaping detection. None, I was myself, that was all. And Alfred I shall tell father and mother. Why not?" at my gesture of discouragement.
"Gabrielle, promise me you will reveal nothing about this to anyone, until I have consented. Remember—the Hospital. Father and mother will be appalled. They cannot understand as I do your mysticism—and then, who knows what the power leads to? Be silent."
My sister lifted her face, and stared almost stealthily into my eyes. I, the soi-disant critic of her "delusions"—that was my word, was now masking her concealment, and urging her to continued secrecy, intending—what did she think?—to use her potency for the gratification of my mad cravings?—to make her the servile means of communication with Blanchette, more and more, that thus my awakened desires might be stilled with the apparitional image of possession?
I did not answer the mute question. I could not. An unopposed, a sudden quenchless need of Blanchette, frustrated all honesty of speech, and I really caught at, snatched, the proffered chance—diablerie or no diablerie—to see again the face, the form, the flesh—Was it indeed materialization as the mediumistic parlance had it?—of Blanchette. The more I thought of it, the more I coveted the vision. Its quality should be tested. That I swore. And my connivance became more cautious. We would try nothing, until Hortense and Julie had retired. A sudden tension of almost ravenous expectancy rose within me, utterly surprising, and now, I was the exhilarator, and prompter, and accomplice, more desirous, more credulous, than Gabrielle herself. The delay for the thing to begin seemed insufferable, but there must be no interruption, and the sceptic, the half believer, the moderating protestant, at the unreasonableness and danger of the indulgence, moved now in its preparation with an unresisting acceptance of its realization, hungry for its fulfillment, every scruple banished!
"Gabrielle, go to your room. We will not begin until Hortense and Julie have gone to bed; then, when the house is all ours," my voice was strained and unnatural, and perhaps my features were themselves distorted with excitement, for Gabrielle slightly withdrew from me, "then, let us go to the library, and there we will unite our minds and hearts, and—bring Blanchette back!"
Only a violent self-control withheld my tongue from shouting the words, so monstrously grew within me the insatiable passion for the coveted design, a passion, half orgiastic, half a maddened curiosity, and within which, I know now, not a trace of spiritual feeling, or aspirations, or tenderness, or beauty, reigned, or had a part. So variously are we composed, and thus from the waters of our souls, when stirred, or clouded, darkened by the overturning prods of the rebellious body, which disturb its slimy sediments, rise the exhalations of unworthy motives. In that instant, as I waited afterwards for the hour agreed upon for our nocturnal incantations—the word suits the debased frame of my mind—just one overpowering conception ruled my heart, the possibility of clasping Blanchette to my breast as a physical presentment. Whither had flown the beautiful boundless dreams of our beatific, immaterial union, bathed in the everlasting lights of celestial choirs? Alas—whither?
It was about eleven o'clock, when Gabrielle tapped at the door between our rooms, and I opened it. Gabrielle had changed her dress somewhat. She had put on a dark serge gown that fitted quite closely, and she had opened the waist at the throat slightly, and discarded all collar. The sleeves closed about the wrists; in her hair, loosely piled up above her temples, were three silver combs, and they formed the only light touch in her apparel. We both wore slippers, as almost instinctively the association of lightness and noiselessness with the work in hand came to my mind. We said nothing, but passed out of my room, and stepped swiftly down the stairway to the library. I glanced out of the window hastily, and found the sky clear, mistily studded with the stars, and with strips of cloud strung along the western limits of the firmament.
Gabrielle asked me to light the lamp for a minute's instruction; otherwise we would proceed in complete darkness; that she averred was best. I lit the lamp, and was a little disturbed by Gabrielle's pallor which in the yellow light of the lamp appeared deathly. I asked her if she felt unwell. She smiled and said, "No, not at all," and then she motioned me to a seat near her, at the centre of the room, where she had chosen a chair, quite detached from any other article of furniture. Behind her were simply the unillumined corners of the apartment. I sat down and waited for her instructions, which however I fully understood as the manner of this seance had been in words rehearsed between us.
"Alfred, take my hands in your own, and bend your forehead forward upon my knees, and then just THINK of Blanchette, and remain so, no matter how long it seems. When the soul of Blanchette comes it will be light, but do not release my hands."
I recall the absolute precision of certainty in Gabrielle's words, in her voice, and then that she leaned back, shut her eyes, and just perceptibly drew her shoulders upward, while her lips moved as if in prayer. I put out the light. I pressed her hands in mine; they were supremely warm, and soft, and unresisting, and then I knelt and bowed my head and—endowed, as I have in this narrative many times intimated, some visualizing or occult force—brought to my eyes the very figure, color, expression, and voice of the dead girl. It was not so much a feeling of solemnity—that does not express it at all—as a feeling of mystery, of indefinite approach towards the incredible, with the mingled half delirious anticipations in myself of actually again seeing the live Blanchette, that held me rigid.
At length Gabrielle's fingers twitched slightly, and she half released them, but I held them tightly, and then Gabrielle seemed to be murmuring aloud. I still held my face downwards, forcing to my eyes the image of Blanchette, recalling her voice, and straining my mind outward as it were, in my effort to impress all of this upon Gabrielle. The voice of my sister grew slightly louder, and the words were at intervals coherent and intelligible, and then I lifted my head.
At first I could see nothing but soon I became conscious of some diffused light or glow, a kind of absorbed brightness, as if it escaped from the darkness itself, perhaps faintly bluish. It arrested my attention, and the thought of Blanchette died away as I actually saw the brightness increase around me. It was a strange indescribable light. It was not only seen by the eyes; it was felt by the mind, if I may put it that way. Looking more cautiously and intently it became evident that it lay in lines proceeding through the blackness of the room, from a point somewhere at our side, and it still grew slowly stronger, with a soft interior palpitation, as if the source of the emanations pulsed regularly, sending out the luminous streams in waves. With this increasing intensity—though intensity hardly expresses it, it was so vaguely dispersed and yet obviously confined in radial directions—with the increasing intensity, the mental influence deepened also, and it was only by a supreme effort that I retained my position.
The inclination with me was to allow myself to float, from the unmistakable sense of buoyancy that invaded all my body, and with that came to my sensorium a most peculiar incomputable sensation of diffusion. I cannot put it into words. It felt like a dissolution, as if the material substance of which I was composed were undergoing dispersion or extension, and the solvent was this strengthening light. But the sensation was also peculiarly delightful so that, while you felt yourself as it were vanishing, there was no sickness of fear with it, nor any, the slightest, physical resistance. I feel certain it was the prelude to unconsciousness. Some residual wakefulness, springing from my curiosity, saved me from the invited surrender, and I slowly rose to my feet, still holding Gabrielle's hands.
Then I looked at my sister, and, so it seemed, in that gloom there had developed around her head a half nebulous curtain or aureole of light also, which, in its turn, was emitting the peculiar light beams. It was at that moment I dropped her hands, that had become almost lifeless to my feeling. In an instant the previous sense of dematerialization left me, and with a shock, absurdly like the flying back of widely distended or separated limbs, I became keenly conscious, and concretely centered. I remember the faint thrill of amusement that this réassemblage caused to me. And now—there was not much desire on my part to be ratiocinative—the other point, the emergent initial centre of the emanations grew, not only brighter, but greatly larger, and I divined with a sudden consternation of heart, that there were forming before me the outlines of a human figure. I shrank backward for an instant, and for an instant only, and then bent forward and moved forward with the increasing light, for now the adjutant centres—that about the evolving apparition, and that around my sister—both increased, filling my eyes with the radiance, and yet administering no particular illumination to the objects in the room. These latter were perhaps more visible than they had been. That I think was incontestable, but the light might have been described as self-centered, in this sense, that it was entirely refluent on its source and confined in its illuminating effect to that.
And now—I lost sight of everything else, so concentrated was my thought upon the spectacle—the light to the side and in the depth of the room expanded rapidly, and the shape that it made was that of a naked phosphorescent figure, whose configuration, while it was discerned, was not really revealed, so bathed it seemed to be in the billowy light that encumbered it, and yet exposed it. Only the arms of the figure escaped that luminous envelope, and, stretching outward beyond it, put on the semblance of white flesh. I put my hand to my head. It was wet with the dew of perspiration, that may have been the sweat of amazement, or of excitement.
The intention so dearly formed of seizing my restored Blanchette died away before this immaculate phenomenon, for in it there dawned no reminiscence of the earthly charm I had called by that name. That loveliness whose perishable garb of color and of matter I had worshipped was not suggested here; the showery lightness that seemed tremulous with a thousand interior responses had its wonderfulness indeed, but it only left me wonder-stricken. Neither did it appall me. I became chilled into immobility, although every nerve was shaking with the impressed realization of a miracle. I was standing before the resurrected DEAD.
Whether it was this thought or the resuscitated passion of my heart, rebelling against the incandescent splendor, I do not know, but I suddenly stepped towards the scintillating object and spoke: "Blanchette! Blanchette! Blanchette!" My voice was instinct with the note of human passion, the earthly cry of love for the reality of warmth, and softness, and breath, and fragrance, the concomitants of the living body—and, as my words were repeated, and again repeated, and my arms were outstretched, while my face, bathed in the sepulchral light, perhaps might have showed my yearning, this marvellous and stupendous reality occurred:
The phosphorescent configuration with the extended arms grew paler and paler, and as its extreme blurry splendor died away, there sprang forward from within it, the real similitude of Blanchette, a pallid figure of light, and in it the dear face of the girl, tender, divinely, to my eyes, beautiful, with now a compassionate wistfulness of prettiness, O! so faintly expressed, in the dim radiance that seemed yet to stream with undulous waves through the room from the relaxed, motionless body of my sister. And—so it appeared to me—the figure advanced towards me with the same outstretched arms, with which I leaped forward to receive it.
I clasped the empty air and fell headlong in a convulsion, that rattled my very bones, while sharp strokes of pain severed my muscles, and throbs, like the intermittent knocks of a hammer, beat within my brain. It was an utterly unnatural collapse; the strained attitude of the last few hours, with the previous anticipation—unsuspectingly untying the resistance of my nerves—did not clearly explain it. There was something else. I was still quite conscious and, more than that, I was wrathful with disappointment, as if caught in a trick of deception, the hocus-pocus of a mere niaiserie. My eyes watched the faded spot of light from which the transfiguration had started. It actually flitted unevenly for some moments over my fallen body, and then it moved slowly—now contracted into a mere ball of luminosity—towards my yet unawakened sister. There it increased in brilliancy, and the former glowing outline, with the resumed extended arms, reappeared, and then came the last denouement. In an instant there was a flashing collision between the light of the vision and the light, seemingly emitted by my sister, when the entire room became vivid with light—everything seen, with absolutely nothing there but my sister and myself, and then the darkness again more profound by contrast, and swimming—the word is exactly descriptive—upward, and then sideways a ball, a mere star, of brightness, sparkled for one second in the fire-place, and vanished.
There was no sound, there had not been an audible word, and now there was the undisturbed apartment with myself spread out in pain on the floor, and my sister still in her unbroken trance. I struggled to my feet and seized Gabrielle's hands and drew her up. She awoke, dazed, and also in pain, standing at my side in a benumbed speechless way that startled me. I lit the lamp hurriedly, and led her to the couch, where she again fell into unconsciousness. I chafed her hands. I wet her temples. Finally she slowly responded to the treatment, and I was able to lead her to her room. She had by that time become normal, but reticent and oppressed, and begged me to leave. I went away.
My own distress lasted some hours, but slowly improved, the jolts of pain growing less, and at longer intervals, and succumbing to my complete restoration.
The next day found Gabrielle and myself talking in the garden at the same spot where we had conceived of the seance; we had both been almost feverishly waiting the opportunity to rehearse our experience. We met almost as if by agreement, walking down the garden, on opposite sides at the same time, as to a rendez-vous.
I related everything to Gabrielle as I had seen it, and asked her about her own experience. I said, "Gabrielle, I think that it is best not to indulge this power of yours any longer. It was a disappointment every way, and the results only unhealthy and stupid."
"Alfred," she replied, "I have often brought back the spirits of the dead, not by my own will but because they came to me willingly, and it has never hurt me. It seemed a delight rather, and the sensations were blissful. But it was all different last night. It was spoiled somehow. There was some discord, something improper in our thoughts—in yours, Alfred?"
"Gabrielle, just what happened to yourself, when you fell away in the trance?"
"I seemed to be rising upward on wings, with sunny lights shining upon me, and the endless shimmering of spirit bodies about me, and then came a darkness with a despairing feeling of loneliness and of desertion, and then a slow, consuming pain until you waked me."
"Gabrielle, have you ever actually seen the spirits? Were they, as the jargon goes, materialized before your eyes?"
"Not exactly, perhaps. They came to me in my sleep, but I have indeed—so it seems to me—awakened and found the air about me filled with shapes. They did not last, wavering away with swingings this way and that, but their faces smiled as they went off, and a low pleasant light remained; that too gently—doucement—fading away."
We walked slowly back again towards the house, quite silent. I, buried in a reverie of self-dissatisfaction, Gabrielle doubtless in one of afflicted wonder. At length I said, stopping abruptly, and turning Gabrielle towards me, as I often did, with my two hands clasping her shoulders, "Gabrielle, let us agree to banish these practices. It may cost you an effort, but I believe it is best for both of us. We shall lose our wits with these devilments." Gabrielle resented that, and her face showed her protest. "Well, not that exactly," I added quickly, "let us call them illusions. Some scientific wiseacres call them hypnagogic illusions. It is not altogether normal and reasonable and—" I hesitated a moment, and Gabrielle added, "You mean improper, unhealthy, unsafe?"
"Yes I mean all that, and then I think by some occultism we cannot define, or even recognize, they will torment us, and actually drag us into lunacy."
"Alfred, did you see Blanchette?"
"Why, yes, I saw something that brought her distinctly before me for an instant—but, Gabrielle," I was ashamed to betray my hope for some sort of bodily incarnation, "it was only a madness of the brain—only that."
"But, Alfred, you did see the light; they always come in light-clouds—les voiles de lumière."
"Oh, yes, I saw the shining figure—so it seemed—and the light, Gabrielle, that seemed to stream from your head in rays. All that I saw, but whether it was an actual light, or some infernal hallucination, or just some mesmeric phenomena, and we both were asleep, I fear to say. But it has left me queerly disgusted and upset. At any rate I will have nothing more to do with it—nothing. My work (Redaction of the Code Législatif for Court Practice) will be interfered with, and then perhaps my poor brain will leave me altogether."
We laughed, and at length Gabrielle answered, liberating herself from my hold and musingly watching the sparrows twittering and flying spasmodically in swarms from the thicketed ampelopsis on the house. Her voice was low, and its accent firm, and half persuasive too.
"Alfred, I will go half way. I will do nothing to bring back the visions, but if they come I shall not scare them away. And as for séances—well, we both have had all we want of them. Eh?"
"Truly Gabrielle, I think that if we continued these visitations, if they are that, it would be with us as it was with Argan in Le Malade Imaginaire, who was threatened by Dr. Purgan, you know, after a long line of disorders, avec la privation de la vie, ou nous aura conduit notre folie."
I never again spoke about the spirits to Gabrielle. I grew strangely fearful of them, the thought of them made me shudder—until the war brought upon us the awful visitation that I have written this book to describe, and which—Well, what it did is now the common knowledge of the world. Nor did Gabrielle allude to them until the gathering terrors of the dead broke her silence. And to describe that moment and its undreamed of marvels, its vast resurrections from the holocausts of the battle fields, the fathomless panorama of the endless dead, with the stupefying and convulsing climax of the horrid warfare, choked by their immitigable hosts, is now my dangerous and difficult task.
Father and mother returned from Briois most radiant over their success. Père Grandin was superb, a wonderful man, un homme de sagesse, de piété, et, ma Foi, un homme des affaires; enfin, un homme eloquent et fin aussi. He would come to St. Choiseul, and it was certain that Père Grandin and Père Antoine would get on well together.
The spring was all about us; each day added to the charm of the country-side and the gardens of St. Choiseul grew gayer and gayer with the snowy and carmine splendor of the tulips, the purple glories of the hyacinth, the blossoming trails of periwinkle, leading at last to the zenith loveliness of the blushing roses, when St. Choiseul sent its fragrant breath far and wide over the green meadows, and far into the thick-set and shadowed woods.
The bienséance of nature was seen too in the overflowing happiness of the country, its peace and increasing wealth, with the flow towards it of the gracious friendliness of the peoples, and the establishment among us of the pure principles of liberty. Indeed we were all gay. Privat Deschat's hideous predictions that evening so long ago—how long ago it indeed seemed, as if in another age; that was before I went to America—were all forgotten, or if recalled just laughed at—and yet there had been the Agadir affair and there had been disturbances in Alsace and cruel muttering elsewhere; the Cassagnac matter and the German correspondents. But that was nothing—une bagatelle simplement—and so the bright years rolled along, braided with delights, illustrious with hopes, serene with gifts, not altogether free from acquiescent tears, while the inevitable CALAMITY came closer and closer, and like a thunderbolt crashed suddenly from the peaceful skies, and darkened all the world with its despair and misery.
THE WAR
Père Grandin very soon became a favorite, and not the least devoted of his friends was Père Antoine, our village priest. The temper of the two men was most congenial, and the fervor of their love of goodness, their common age, a certain sweet complacency in the joyousness of life and in the complete mercy of God, wedded them to each other, and so into our intimate circle of friends Père Antoine, through the mediation of Père Grandin was joined, and both father and mother thus grew more sympathetic and permissive with Gabrielle and myself, and the days flowed smoothly, and the years followed each other joyously.
I became more and more interested in the work I had undertaken, and, under the pressure of its laborious needs, with frequent visits to Paris, found my time admirably occupied, while I was not too busy to omit the recreations of the home life with our friends. Above all caressed by my dear sister, whose companionship I now more and more delighted in, I was growing, perhaps by a premature decline of animal spirits, into a bachelor, whose inmost heart still kept unimpaired the image and hope of his first love. That indeed dwelt with me perpetually, and by the platonic resuscitation of its enjoyment administered literally to my physical contentment.
There was in my library an English book written by an American authoress in which I came upon this sentence (the book was sent to me by a Texan acquaintance after I had left America): "there were hours when she felt that any bitter personal past—that the recollection of a single despairing kiss or a blighted love would have filled her days with happiness. What she craved was the conscious dignity of a broken heart—some lofty memory that she might rest upon in her hour of weakness."
The philosophy and the psychology of the paragraph are profoundly true. That relationship which sex seems inexorably to claim is satisfied naturally by union, but its omission finds exoneration at least in the remembrance of disappointment. I grew with each succeeding year more and more sedately complacent, and a gravity of thought, deepened by a pleasant melancholy, mingled with the real consolations of religion and the inseparable charm of my sister and kept me composed and evenly—at times almost jubilantly—happy. My work was attracting some attention, and it promised for me continued and congenial employment.
We had many garden parties with Privat Deschat and Capitaine Bleu-Pistache—growing more feeble now, more silent, with often unbidden tears springing to his eyes—and Quintado and Père Grandin and Père Antoine—though he was not so often with us—and the sweet-voiced and sparkling little orphan girl the captain had adopted—Dora Destin, a vivacious creature with delicate ways and a keen appetite for tarts and pastry, and a peculiar shyness that came and went so oddly, that one instant she might be hiding, as if afraid, and the next leaping amongst us like a bird. Mother and father had become in the later years even graver, and a calmness—I dreaded to believe that it meant some interior failing—descended upon them, that made their ways a little embarrassing at times. We all noted it. It was a presage, a shadow. They were silent in company, and once or twice, I thought—this was just a year before the War—father seemed unconscious of his surroundings; his mind wandered and he kept saying "Alfred, Alfred" to me, as if dazed or grieved. The stealthy hand of Paralysis thus crept slowly forward towards its unescapable conclusion.
Of course Gabrielle was in our parties, and she had become to me the concentrated bliss of my living. Her growth into a healthier condition of mind and body had accompanied an increasing adaptability to company, and while the reserved manner remained, bestowing upon her a fine dignity, she was truly sociable and friendly. Gabrielle never quite outgrew the secretive habit of her thoughtfulness, and her deportment had been criticized and found fault with, as cold and austere. The inference would have been cruelly unjust, for never breathed a kinder and more devotedly good heart than my sister possessed. Her abstracted way often arose from the custom of religious meditation, and I suppose too was influenced by that singular supernatural—to call it so—power that she always felt, but now, so far as I knew, seldom exercised. It was that power that made of her the MEDIATRIX of the nations.
It was hardly fifteen years after my return that the Grown Prince of Austria was shot in Sarajevo in Serbia, and that was on the day of the Grand Prix de Paris. I read the news to Gabrielle, and Père Grandin was there. He had taken dinner with us. How well I remember his terror-stricken face. He pushed his spectacles up over his high white forehead, and his bright eyes glowed strangely with a growing fear. His expressive lips twitched almost as if he were in pain, and he lifted up his hands in protestation.
"God forbid. The blow has fallen then. The bolt shot. Alfred, this is the torch that starts the conflagration. The material—all inflammable, all explosive—has been heaped up between the nations, and, like a fierce feu-de-joie it will kindle into a wall of fire—un rideau de feu—between the countries. God save France!"
I was incredulous as were at the time most people. I laughed at the good man's warning, and because he felt half grieved at my carelessness, half stifled with apprehension as if almost—so he put it—his ears were filling already with the rumble of cannon, he begged our pardon for his distress. He put on his crumpled Panama hat and stood at the doorway, almost irresolute in his trepidation and sadness. He looked at me quite long.
I recall the moon riding high in white drifting vapors that came in from Calais—and in the changing light and shade he seemed almost preternaturally pale and sombre.
"Mon patrie," he sighed, "again the ravage, the desolation, the orphaned, the widowed, the crippled, the sick, the breaking hearts—Ah, Ah—" and seizing my hands as if in support in his agitation, he wept.
"But Père Grandin" I said, now thoroughly alarmed over his evident agony, "surely you are too quick, too hasty. Europe is at peace. Its people are reasonably happy. They will not permit war, and—"
I got no further. The old man was choking with emotion—it was half wrath, half despair.
"Permit it? Can they stop it? Do they govern? Is it not kings and princes and royal houses and titled ministers, the tyrants of opinion, the caprice or the pride or the selfishness of aristocrats, that control everything?
"See, they prance by us, unseeing, unthoughtful, just living for themselves, and then when the crash comes—the crash they have prepared with their silly talk of national honor, national enlargement, national continuity, racial union, destiny, putting over it all a gorgeous light of promised glory—just as the heroes in a stage play walk and stand in the glare of the electric lantern from the gallery, uttering bombast—when the crash comes, they summon the troops, they dragoon the people, they empty the banks, they crack the whip of urgency, and, pointing to the flag, drive us in hecatombs to death.
"No, no, Alfred—the war will come. I have long felt its growing tremors. We cultivate revenge in our hearts, the Germans cultivate hate, the Cossacks conquest, the Austrians dynasty, the Englishmen trade-money, their assumed preeminence, and there have been cabals and understandings, and a jolt snaps the artifice of our pretended brotherhood and, with hoof and claw, we fly at each other's throats. Bah—vous verrez."
His rage had restored his strength, and he stumbled away muttering and gesticulating. I watched him going across the roadway in the light that danced with the swinging lanterns when the night wind from the distant shores blew more strongly. The disks and outlines of shadows imparted to him a peculiar effect of unsteadiness. I half thought he staggered.
I went back to the library. There I found Gabrielle leaning over the paper I had flung down at the old man's outburst, and reading of the assassination. She looked up as I returned, and her face was white, and in her eyes too I saw an awful consternation. I was impatient with this foolishness, and expostulated loudly.
"What, Gabrielle, are you too imbecile? Père Grandin is in a panic. Why? He sees us fighting already—just because the heir to a crown is shot. It's absurd—pas vraisemblable."
"Alfred, I think we should not be too sure. It all looks bad to me, and—if it comes. What?"
Her eyes dilated with terror.
"Why, Gabrielle, have we not prepared ourselves for just this! Besides we have allies now—it is not as it was in 1870. There is England, there is Russia. Sacre nom, it will be as when Greek meets Greek—not comme les vautours et les pigeons."
"Ah, Alfred, think of the suffering. O! I have seen suffering in the hospitals, but a whole nation to be made into one huge hospital. Mon Dieu, c'est incroyable!"
"Wait, Gabrielle. Don't borrow trouble. The world cannot afford war now. La Guerre est un peu passée aujourd'hui. Eh?"
"Alfred, the devil is never sick, and never tired, and never asleep."
That night the news was confirmed. Then came Austria's demands; and then a chasing hither and thither of couriers; the wires hot with messages; lights in the embassies all night; rage, dismay; in the cities the people silent or cheering in the streets; houses closed or hidden in flags; in the ministries forebodings; feverish despatches; and almost always hopelessness. Peace was impossible; everywhere the "mailed fist"—poing armée—of the Kaiser. Then came Austria's declaration of war against Servia on July 29th. The detonation was at hand which would burst Europe asunder.
Capitaine Bleu-Pistache asked me to go to Paris at once, so did Père Grandin, so did Privat Deschat, and although father and mother seemed listless about it I, thoroughly awake now to the disaster, was impatient to visit the capital, and see how things were going. But Gabrielle did not wish me to go.
"Alfred, is it not best to hear the news here? You cannot enlist. Alfred you know that is impossible." She suddenly checked herself. I knew her thought, and my cheeks grew crimson—my weakness and physical deficiency now cut me off from service—"No, Alfred it was not that, not that," her embarrassment brought tears to her eyes. "No not that, but I am afraid of some danger. Now it is everywhere, an explosion, a chance shot, a street quarrel. Alfred let me go too."
"Gabrielle I shall be quite safe. I shall be O! so very timid."
She smiled.
"Not so timid alone Alfred, as if I were there too."
"Nonsense Gabrielle, is it not written, la femme fait le coeur intrépide. But really it would be very foolish for you to come. Watch here. I will be so careful."