The Project Gutenberg eBook of Tales from a Famished Land, by Edward Eyre Hunt.

COPYRIGHT, 1916, 1917, BY THE REPUBLIC PUBLISHING COMPANY, INC.
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY THE AMERICAN RED CROSS SOCIETY
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY THE OUTLOOK COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY P. F. COLLIER’S SONS

Collier’s Weekly, The Outlook, The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Red Cross Magazine have published certain of these tales in serial form, and to them my thanks are due for permission to republish in book form.

FOREWORD

Herbert Clark Hoover, chairman of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, once called that amazing organization, “the door in the wall of steel.” Between November, 1914, and March, 1917, when America entered the world war, there had passed through that door millions of dollars in money, thousands of tons of foodstuffs and clothing, and four or five dozen young Americans, most of them just out of their ’teens, who played a part in Belgian history which they are still trying to explain in words of one syllable to admiring relatives and friends!

Theirs is a story of sweet romance, gallant adventure, grotesque comedy, and grim tragedy. The tales which are here set down are a part of their story. These tales are not strictly truth, but they are not fiction. They[x] are both. They try to describe the state of mind, the atmosphere in which History—both truth and fiction—is made; the atmosphere behind long lines of barbed-wire and bayonets, behind waves of poisoned gas, in a famished land where ten million heroic people, both French and Belgians, have silently and steadily fought to keep their self-respect, their sanity, and their courage.

These tales have been written in a spirit of gratitude and love; with gratitude and love first of all to Herbert Clark Hoover, then to the other officers and members of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, and then, and perhaps most of all, to those unnamed French, Walloon, and Flemish millions with whom we Americans stood shoulder to shoulder on the inside of the “door in the wall of steel.”

I
SAINT DYMPNA’S MIRACLE

Pierre, the chauffeur, launched a savage kick at the newly punctured tire and swore into the night. “Three quarters of an hour, monsieur, to repair it,” he said reluctantly, switching off the motor. “Do you wish——”

Into the sudden silence stole the slow, incessant roar of the Yser cannon. The level stretches of the Campine, alternating black vistas of scrub evergreens with little fields, peat bogs, and kitchen gardens, lay fragrant and silent in the moonlight. Heather was in bloom, nightingales were nesting and so were no longer singing, and the narrow Flemish road before and behind the[4] automobile lay like a placid silver river, inviting one to quiet thoughts.

“Yes,” I answered Pierre’s unfinished query. “I’ll go for a stroll toward the next farmhouse. Take your time, Pierre. There’s no hurry to-night.”

We had just left the town of Gheel, one of the most remarkable places in Belgium, a town where more than a thousand insane folk live quiet and useful lives, parcelled out among the peasants, but under the supervision of district doctors. The insane are treated as if they were normal beings, are given work according to their strength, mental and physical, and find companionship among a peasantry noted for industry and stubborn independence. This is originally due to certain miracles of Saint Dympna, one of the guardian saints of the insane—an Irish princess, converted to Christianity, and martyred at Gheel by her pagan father on the 30th of May in the year of Our Lord 600.

Under the bright moon the land seemed[5] singularly like Ireland, and a little old man stepping toward me down the silvery road, his pipe in his mouth, his eyes screwed up, his bent legs wrapped in ill-fitting trousers, his feet in wooden shoes, might have been the fabled leprechaun, or Wee Hughie Gallagher of Donegal. He wore a brassard on his right sleeve, for he was one of the village watch, guarding the telephone and telegraph wires so that no accident might happen to them to give the Germans an excuse for crushing the commune with an exorbitant fine.

“I am the American delegate of the Komiteit voor Hulp en Voeding,” I explained.

“Mynheer is American?” he asked doubtfully, taking his pipe from his mouth and scratching his head as if to recall where or what America could be.

My superlative courtesy seemed to decide him, and he gave a gesture of assent. Side by side and in silence then we walked down the silver road to the first farmhouse. A black mass of protecting trees hung close over the chimney, and low thatch swept down like the back of some prehistoric monster, gray green in the clear moonlight. The walls were lath filled in with clay. Two little rectangular windows glowed dully, and the edges of the thick, ill-fitting door shone with faint light.

He thrust open the door without knocking. I stumbled into the dimly lighted room,[7] hardly knowing what I expected to find. Peasants’ cottages were invariably interesting to me, and invariably they contained surprises. But this was older and more primitive than any I had yet visited—a relic of long-gone days. It was like opening an ancient tomb or a buried city. I entered expectantly, and lo! the centuries rolled backward, and I stood with people of Froissart’s day, with peasants who had scarcely altered since the Middle Ages, whose feet were hardly on the threshold of modernity.

The room was square. At one end was a brick fireplace, rude as if aborigines had built it, with an iron frame squatting in the ashes, a thick pot suspended by a chain, a broiling rack, a heavy iron fork, a charred stick for a poker, and a rude crane. In the smoke of a tiny turf fire on the hearth hung rows of drying vegetables and skins of meat. The floor was beaten earth, hard as brick. The walls were whitewashed. The ceiling was low and strung with onions and other roots and vegetables, and the only touch of[8] modern things was a hanging lamp in the centre. In a corner hung a man’s suit of Sunday clothes, like a creature which has been hanged. A ladder beside it went up to the blind loft overhead. A picture of the Virgin hung on one wall, and a plaster statuette of Saint Anthony and Saint Joseph gleamed from a shelf over the fireplace, drawing one’s eye to a row of plates and dishes. An odour of smoke and cooking and manure heaps and the foul smells of unwashed human beings crowded the little room, and the air droned with the sleepy buzzing of innumerable flies.

A barefooted, prematurely aged woman, bent with too much child-bearing, gave me a chair, wiping it ceremoniously with her apron. The man spat on the floor behind us and scraped the spittle with his sabot. Three children were asleep in a recess on a pile of litter curtained from sight in the day-time. But the most striking person in the room was a young woman, sitting before the turf fire with a fourth child—evidently the youngest—i[9]n her lap. She wore stockings, leather shoes, and a simple, black bombazine dress. Her face was turned from me, but I saw that her hair was neatly coiled about her head and pinned with a shell comb.

The older woman sprang to the hanging lamp and turned it high until it smoked. “Good evening, mynheer,” she called in a panic of fear and pleasure. “Be seated, if it please your Excellency.”

She dragged the chair beside the lamp and the table in the centre of the room. During the next five minutes she was feverishly busy offering me beer, milk, and everything else that her mean little house afforded.

I stared at the woman beside the fireplace, and my host—who refused to seat himself in my presence—at last touched his head significantly. “Ah, monsieur,” he sighed. (He had been one of the franksmannen, migratory labourers who work for several months of the year in France, and he spoke tolerable French. Indeed he was much better informed and quicker of wit than his[10] person or his home would indicate.) “She is mad: like all the world, she is mad. All the world is mad.”

“Yes, monsieur. Saint Dympna has received thousands of mad ones, and of those who are mad but whom she has not received, there are millions. When the war broke out two men went mad in this village. They were carried away to Gheel, raving. Their eyes stared, their lips frothed, and they twitched all over. When the Germans came here, certain ones went mad at sight of them. I have seen it with my eyes, monsieur. They say that when the Germans came into France they sent whole long trainloads of mad ones back into their own land. When the big shells burst in the forts, all the garrison goes mad. When the aviator flies over the trench, men go mad. You have seen there are always two German sentries together? It is so that if one goes mad the other will be at hand. For they go mad, monsieur, by dozens, by hundreds, by thousands. Have you seen their eyes? They are mad. And their lips? They work like the lips of men always talking to themselves. When the war began, I, too, was mad. I dreamed terrible dreams. For two months I was mad—like all the world.”

“But the woman there?” I asked, pointing to the figure beside the turf glow.

The man clattered over to her and laid his hand gently on her shoulder. “Madame,” he said, “there is a gentleman here to speak with you.”

She turned and gave me a searching glance. The movement revealed that her breast was uncovered, and that she held the sleeping child against her heart. “Nay,” she said again, “not until midnight.”

He came slowly back. “When a child is sick, she knows it and she comes,” he explained apologetically.[12] “At midnight she goes back to the doctor’s house.”

“Alone, monsieur. God and the Devil alike love the mad. God and the Devil alike watch over them. This one”—he pointed to the woman with the child—[13]“was a lady of Louvain, of the Krakenstraat; she was rich; she had a husband and two children. They were killed by the Germans and she was wounded in the shoulder. Her house was burned; her money lost. She went mad. She was taken to Duffel, I think; then to Antwerp, then to Hoogstraeten, then she was brought to Gheel, screaming for her children and her husband—mad—mad and soon to die. Then, monsieur, Saint Dympna wrought a miracle through the love of a little child, a little sick boy in the doctor’s house where madame was confined, and she became well after a fashion. And now in whatever house a child is ill, madame by the grace of God knows of it, and she comes and nurses it back to health. The first madness is of the Devil, monsieur, violent and bloody; the second is of God, and it is kind.”

In the midst of his prattle the woman rose slowly, holding the sleeping child in the hollow of her right arm and buttoning the bosom of her dress with her left hand. “Hush!” she admonished softly. “Listen, mynheeren!” From some instinct of courtesy I rose to my feet. She raised her hand warningly but did not turn her head. “Listen,” she repeated, staring toward the fireplace.

It was an uncanny thing. We stood as if frozen. The heavy breathing of the peasant woman pulsed through the quiet room; the old man stared with all his eyes; a sleepy chicken chuckled from an adjoining shed, but there was no other sound from outside. A minute went by; another; a third, and still we stood stiffly in the centre of the room. At last madame beckoned to the peasant-mother, who stole across the floor toward her and paused at her side. Silently she gave the mother her child, her finger on her lips, her eyes still fixed on the spot near the fireplace.

Then she turned, and laying her hands on the head of the sleeping boy, she began in a strange, low, hissing voice, “This one shall be an avenger of Louvain, he shall be an avenger of Dinant, and Termonde, and Aerschot, and Andenne, and Liége, and Tamines, and Visé. He shall avenge our nation. He shall not forget. In the days of his happiness he shall remember our sorrow; in the days of his prosperity he shall remember our misery; in the days of his strength he shall remember our weakness. Go! Be healed!” Then in her quiet, natural voice, pointing to the spot on a level with her eyes at which she had stared, she added, “A sick child is there, mynheeren. Three, four kilometres away it is, and I must go to it.”

“I must go now. The child is very ill. I must go now, or I shall be too late.”

The old man crossed himself again and again. “God! God!” he repeated helplessly.

The young woman wheeled suddenly. “What is that noise?” she exclaimed, pointing to the roadway.

She showed no astonishment or perplexity. Her mind seemed wholly absorbed in the problem of the sick child. “Take me in your automobile to the child, monsieur,” she replied rapidly, speaking in French. “Let us hurry, hurry!”

“I do not know, monsieur, but I will show you. There! There!” She waved her hand in the direction of Gheel.

We hurried like fugitives from the house and into the tonneau, leaving the awe-struck peasants standing with mouths agape. Pierre stared in consternation at our coming, but said no word. I did not try to explain. Our passenger sat tense, her head turned[16] to one side as if she were listening closely.

She was quiet for an instant. “To the right hand,” she exclaimed suddenly. “Make haste! There! In that house!”

The car jerked to a stop, and I leaped out to help madame to the ground. Now that we had arrived, to my astonishment she made no move to leave the car. Her head sank slowly forward to her breast, and she sat huddled listlessly, paying no attention to Pierre or me.

“But no, madame!” I exclaimed. “Go quickly and help!” At the moment I believed in her supernatural powers as firmly as any peasant of the Campine.

She lifted her head. A sad light had come into her eyes. “It is too late. The avenger of Belgium is not to come from this house,” she muttered.

The madness of my words did not occur to me until days afterward: the lunacy of thinking either that she could heal, or that the child of these poor peasant-folk when healed would avenge his nation on her enemies. God knows what wild thoughts were in my mind that night! God knows, and Saint Dympna!

“I will go in then,” she said, rising, giving her hand with a queenly gesture, and stepping from the car. “Thank you, monsieur. You need not wait; indeed you must not wait. I am here with friends. Adieu!”

A piercing wail rose from the quiet cottage; a dull lamp flared as it was borne hastily past a window; a man’s deep voice[18] groaned horribly. Children in the loft, wakened by the outcry, began to scream, and a startled dog far away howled in terror.

Madame released my arm and walked slowly toward the house of death. At the door she turned and looked back at us as if she feared to go in. Her left hand fumbled for the latch; her right waved our dismissal. “Adieu, monsieur, adieu,” she called in a strained, unhappy tone. And we drove quietly away and left her under the placid moon.

II
LOVE IN A BARGE

A little Spitz ran back and forth on the deck of the lighter Cornelis de Vriendt, barking defiance at all the world and especially at me for my efforts to come aboard. Two fat Flemish babies clad only in shirts and no underclothes sat in the bow watching him.

A gigantic shock of red hair appeared from the cabin, followed by a long face, prodigiously wrinkled, and a thin body in blue shirt and nondescript trousers, from which protruded broad red hands and naked feet. Like the babies, the captain stared at me in silence and made no move to come nearer.

I aimed a kick at the dancing, barking bundle of fur and feet, lost my balance on the edge of the wharf, and came down on the sloping deck of the Cornelis de Vriendt on all fours. The dog went wild, and the frightened babies howled, but the skipper watched motionless as before. “What did you say, mynheer?” he asked imperturbably.

It seemed no time for the French or Flemish languages. In an emotional crisis, such as a deathbed repentance or losing one’s heart or one’s temper, the tongue turns to the speech of youth, and I fell to cursing in most excellent and idiomatic English. The shock-head stared. “For God’s sake, sir,” he exclaimed at last, in English like my own, “are you a British spy?”

“A spy, you idiot? I’m the American delegate of the Commission for Relief in Belgium. What do you mean by staring at me like that and letting your crazy dog bark his head off at me? I’m the consignee of this cargo, and I’ve come to inspect it.”

The bargeman leaped to the peak of the vessel and came forward, his bare toes clutching the ridge of the deck, smacked the nearest infant into silence, swore at the dog, and came down to me. He drew an old cap from his pocket and began to clean my clothes, using the cap as a dust cloth. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said meekly, “but you see, sir, I has to be careful, wot with the Germans and all.”

“With that accent I should think you would have to be careful,” I retorted grimly.

“Ow no, sir,” he returned, “I’m a Belgian all right-o, but I ’ave served my time in the British navy.”

He smiled and scratched his head.[22] “There was a woman, sir, as done me into doing it—leaving the navy, I mean. O’ course she wasn’t the first woman I ever see, but when I saw her I thort she was.”

“Well, you’re a funny one!” I exclaimed heartily, feeling a sudden kinship with the lanky red-crowned scarecrow before me—a kinship which would have been impossible without our common language. “Is this Queen of Sheba still travelling with you?”

“Yes, indeed, sir, and here are two of my little shavers.” He pointed with extraordinary pride at the half-naked youngsters clinging to their precarious seats on the sloping deck. “Fine little fellers, aren’t they, sir? I’ve got three children, and there is going to be a fourth. These is twins—both boys,” he said.

“So I see,” I retorted. The jest was lost on him. “Well, open up hatches and let’s look at your cargo.”

He bent to the fastenings and slipped off the round lead seals.[23] “Funny thing about these Germans, sir, ’ow careful they are. That Johnny standing sentry-go over there”—he pointed to the lonely watch in the distance—, “’e always comes up and asks me for them little bits of lead. I gives ’em to ’im, sir. ’E gets paid for ’em and they don’t do me no good, so I gives ’em to him.” He lifted the first hatch, still chatting affably. “It’s a good lot o’ flour, sir, as I sees it. Only up at Rotterdam sometimes they has to unload too fast, and they piles it into the lighters in all kinds o’ weather. I’ve got forty-eight bags of bad flour in ’ere myself—spoilt by the rain in Rotterdam.”

“They uses ’ooks on the bags, too, sir, and that ain’t right. Ortn’t to use no ’ooks. They always break the bags. Still, they’re a good sort up there, and they treat me right so far.... Now this flour, sir, it’s first rate—better than the Belgians is used to, if I do say it, and well stowed, ain’t it?” He dusted the white meal from his hands and replaced the hatches.[24] “It ain’t bad, is it, sir?”

“No, I don’t regret being skipper on a canal boat ’stead of hordinary seaman banging ’round in a cruiser’s forecastle and target-practising at the ’Uns. It’s an awful life, sea-faring is, sir. A man wot is a man owes it to himself to marry and settle down.”

He grinned. “Yes, sir. Why, the first time I sawr ’er she was a-standing behind the till in a sweets-shop, in Flushing, and a-crying ’er pretty eyes out.”

“Ow, yes, sir. She was a-standing behind the counter in a sweets-shop and a-crying ’er pretty eyes out, and I come in just off the ship with a ’unger for sweets so strong[25] my tongue was fair ’anging out of my mouth. (You gets that way banging round in a cruiser’s forecastle, sir.)

“Sniff—sniff—sniff—— ‘What’ll ye ’ave, mynheer?’ she says to me.

“‘Good-day juffrouw, and what’s the matter with you, my pretty dear?’ I says back at her. ‘I’ll ’ave a kiss,’ I says.

“‘You’ll ’ave nothing of the sort, you bad man,’ she says, wiping her eyes and glaring at me.

“‘Juffrouw,’ I says, free and easy, ‘I’m just off ship and I’m ’ungry—so ’ungry I could fair eat you—and I never see a pretty maid crying but I kiss ’er tears away. I ain’t been drinking either. I ain’t a drinking man.’

“I was serious for all my glib talk, sir. I was that serious as I’d never been in my life before; and, between ourselves, sir, though I ’ate to admit it, I didn’t kiss no tears away that day. She wouldn’t ’ave it.

“Wot was she weeping for? She’d just lorst ’er sweetheart, sir, that was wot for![26] ’E was a sheep-faced Dutchman—I sawr ’im afterward, I did, and he ’adn’t a merit to ’im. She didn’t really love ’im, but she thort she did, and that’s where I come in a-asking for a kiss!

“‘Oom Jan,’ she yells to the back of the shop. ‘Come ’ere and throw out this drunken sailor-man.’

“Lucky for me ’er uncle didn’t ’ear ’er, so I leans across the counter and I says very serious, ‘Juffrouw, I love you. Tell me, wot’s the tears about?’”...

“I tell you, sir,” he interrupted his story to observe, “in dealing with women tell ’em the truth first pop. If you love ’em, tell ’em so. Lies is all right in dealing man to man, but with the wimmen, tell ’em the truth.

“So it wasn’t long till we was fair intimate. I ’ung ’round ’er shop for three days, I did, and then I thort as ’ow I might take a few liberties with ’er.

“‘No,’ she says, ‘nothing of that, George. I want to make you a good wife,’ she says.

“‘Wife,’ I says to myself. I was sitting in the potaties all right-o, with a quid a month and no ‘ome ner nothing. Wife! Wot ’ave I let myself in for?’ But she was that simple ’earted I couldn’t say no to ’er and I loved her fair to distraction.

“I went back to my ship, but I couldn’t stand it, so at last I gave it up and went to her and we was married in a church and set up ’ousekeeping in a barge!”

A sharp voice from the cabin cut short our colloquy. The skipper jumped as if shot. “Coming, coming,” he called in a very respectful voice, “coming, my dear!”

“It’s——” I left the useless question unfinished. I knew it was the Queen of Sheba, the heroine of the sweets-shop in Flushing, the Mrs. Noah of the barge.

“Yes, it’s my wife. A strong bellus she has, sir: good lungs; and the little shavers has ’em, too.” He pointed to the babies on the deck.[28] “Sea-faring men needs good lungs, you know, sir. But my lads don’t seem to take much to salt water, sir. They prefers canals. They gets sick on the Hollandsch Diep. Can’t make sailor-men o’ them, sir.”

“Sailor-men!” I retorted. “What about that cruiser’s forecastle talk you were giving me, and marrying and settling down? Were you joking with me, skipper? Isn’t love in a barge all it’s cracked up to be?”

“No, sir; yes, sir,” he said, answering both my questions at once but pulling a very sober face. “A man what is a man owes it to hisself to marry and settle down. But a lad, now! that’s another question, sir. I tell you, sir, confidential-like, I’m going to name the next lad after Sir David Beatty!”

“I’ll name her ‘Rule Brittania,’ sir—if my wife agrees.... Coming, coming, my dear; coming,” he called.[29] “Good day, sir; thank you, sir.”

III
THE ODYSSEY OF MR. SOLSLOG

“You-all are in charge of the Relief Commission, suh? I am Mistah Solslog, of Alabama. I’m lookin’ for my sistah.”

The tense blue eyes of my fellow-countryman stared at me searchingly, and I at him. He wore a rubber collar and a false shirt front of a style which afforded popular subjects for caricature twenty-five years ago. His salt-and-pepper suit was cheap, horribly cheap, thin, cotton, summer weight, but immaculate. His hat—an old, well-brushed Stetson—was in his hand. He had no luggage. In the cold winter light of my office in Antwerp his slight, lean features looked prematurely aged, but neither age nor hardship had changed the characteristically even Southern drawl.

“Sit down, Mr. Solslog,” I said. “We’re feeding eleven hundred thousand Belgians here, and clothing and giving work, too, but an American citizen certainly has a claim.”

His face reddened. “Thank you, suh, but it ain’t that sort of help I reequiah, Preehaps you did not understand me. I’m a-lookin’ for my sistah.”

“She was in Maubeuge when the war broke out.” He pronounced it Maw-booge. “She was a governess, suh. I read in the Atlanta Constitution that war was declared. That was on a Sunday. I quit my job in the lumberyard an’ come straight over here on the old Saint Paul, and I ain’t found her—not yet.”

“The Germans captured Maubeuge on August 27th; they took the fortress on September 6th.”

“Yes, suh. I know they did. I was there. You don’t quite understand me. I was lookin’ for my sistah.”

The man amazed, angered, and puzzled me. Common-sense told me that the Germans allowed no one—least of all a stray American—to wander into Belgium, inside the German lines, on the flimsy excuse of “looking for his sister,” but here was just such a man. Worst of all, he really seemed simple and candid: the more dangerous as a spy, probably, though what he was to spy upon I had not the ghost of an idea.

“Sprechen Sie Deutsch, Herr Solslog? Warum sind Sie hier in Belgien? Sind Sie Spion? Vous parlez Français, n’est-ce pas? Vous êtes espion, oui? ’ut U Veaamsch klappen?” I shot at him rapidly.

He smiled a smile which disarmed my suspicions, a pathetic, whimsical, puzzled smile. “People are always sayin’ things to me I[32] cain’t understand in these here foreign countries. No, suh, I don’t understand any language but plain You-nited States. I can say ‘uh franc, doo franc’—that’s French, you know, suh—and I know ‘Muhsoor’, that’s French for ‘Mistah’ and ‘my sistah.’ I’ll never forget that word.

“It’s like this, suh: I got up almost to Maw-booge—oh, yes, suh, I had a pass. I got up there with the French. Just walked along with ’em; they couldn’t understand me; I couldn’t understand them, but we walked along. Then we got ’most to Maw-booge where my sistah was—red roofs, like all them pretty towns in France—I could see the town, fightin’ everywhere. I was with a battery, what they call swasuntcans. The officer could speak my language.

“‘Go back,’ he says. ‘Go with these refugee people.’ Everybody was runnin’ away—the fields was full of ’em, dirty and tired, but still runnin’. ‘Go to Paris,’ he says.

“We was standin’ in a poppy field, his battery was firing in fours—pop! pop! pop! pop!—like that. A German ae-reoplane come over like a big bee and dropped a bomb. They screamed and run, everybody did, but the bomb busted and nothin’ come out but powdered lime. Then everybody laughed. But in three minutes more the Germans was a-droppin’ shells all over us. That lime was just a marker.

“They hit my officer friend. ‘Git out,’ he says again to me, ‘Git out quick.’ His fingers dug into the poppies, he was hurt so bad; hit in the stomach. Then he kind of smiled once and pulled off a poppy flower and held it up to me. ‘Here’s a red poppy—the blood of France,’ he says. ‘Take it as a souvenir, and git out.’

“They got me, though—the Germans did. I was in Mardeevay” (I have no idea what the name of the town was) “when they come in. After all the fightin’ I’d seen I went to[34] sleep in a church, and along come the Germans. They was massacreein’ the people. They wanted to shoot me, too, but one of ’em understood my lingo and he took me to the gen’ral. ‘So you’re an English spy,’ he says politely. ‘We’ll examine you a little bit, and then we’ll have you shot. Good-day,’ he says. Then they drug me into a little room in the town hall and kep’ me there. But next day come a man who spoke You-nited States; he’d been in Birmingham, Alabama—funny, ain’t it, how they travel?—and he found out I wasn’t no spy.

Mr. Solslog smiled his slow, child-like smile. “Yes, suh. It wasn’t hard a-tall. I was captured by the French. You see, suh, it ain’t hard to travel about in the war so long as the fightin’ is goin’ on. Them French peesants was captured by the Germans, then captured by the French, then captured by the Germans again, then captured[35] by their own people again. It’s when the armies sits down and quits fightin’ on their feet that you cain’t git around. I could a-gone from Berlin right to Paris through all the fightin’ durin’ the first month of the war, before the battle of the Marne.

“Funny thing about that battle. I was all through it, and I never knowed till afterward in Paris that it was the battle of the Marne.

“Then I got to Paris. Paris was awful, half dead, Zeppelins comin’ over most every night, government in Bordoo. I got to the Embassy——”

“Mr. Solslog,” I interrupted, “how on earth did you get about knowing not a word of French?”

“Oh, I made mistakes, in course. But an American can do anything, suh; can git anywhere he has a mind to, I mean. They was always some one who could say a few words of my language—English Tommies, American reporters—they was everywhere I went.”

“I had a hundred and forty francs when I got to Paris. I paid for everything,” he said proudly, “and they never cheated me so’s I could notice it. They’re great people, the Frenchies. Once I worked for ’em two weeks in one of their field hospitals, just because I liked ’em. ‘Muhsoor luh American,’ they called me. ‘Muhsoor’—that’s French for ‘Mistah’ and my sis——But I told you that beefore.

“I told ’em about my sistah. They hadn’t had word about her, so I got the pass. Then I got a pass from General Caselnow and went to the front.” His tired eyes gleamed restlessly as he went on. “You-all here cain’t imagine it, I reckon, how dirty it is and how it stinks. War is mostly bad smells. The men cain’t wash, they’re covered with live things, flies is awful, rotten horses and rotten men have to lie about, sometimes for weeks, till people can bury ’em. Soldiers[37] marching through a town you can smell for blocks sometimes.

“I got arrested, in course, but the Frenchies is always kind. It’s the English is hard. They locked me up in Calais; wouldn’t listen to me. I told ’em about my sistah, but they only laughed. They let me write to the Embassy, though, and Mr. Herrick made ’em release me. That was in November, I think, and I hadn’t had word of my sistah.

“Then I went to London on an empty horse transport. They knew I was stowed away on it, all right, and it was ’gainst orders, so they chased me—tried to find me all night. The transport was awful dirty after all them horses had been in it, but I had to git to London to see if they had got word of my sistah. I slid down a ventilator and lit in a horse stall. It half killed me: knocked me plum out and sprained my back so’s I couldn’t run no more. They come a-snoopin’ round with lanterns, right up into the stall, till the light fell plum on my face. I did[38]n’t hardly breathe, but my hurt back seemed broken right through, so I says, ‘Here I am.’ An’ they found me.

“They talk a queer kind of language, the English do: it’s a little like ours, and they’re more like us Americans than the Frenchies, or the Dutchmen, or the Germans. They helped me up, cussed me out a lot; but they got hot water and bathed my back, and one of ’em, a dirty hostler from Chelsea, he bedded me down for the rest of the night and give me tobacco. So I got along all right. They smuggled me off.

“Mr. Page’s secretary in London told me they hadn’t heard of my sistah, and he sent me to see Hoover’s committee—the committee to send Americans home, preehaps you know. It was about closed up, but I didn’t want to go home, not without my sistah, and they hadn’t any word of her, so I went back to the Embassy. They was a man there. I misrecollect his name now, he was very good to me. He told me to go home. I says I wouldn’t—without my sistah I wouldn’t, so he helped me to git over to Holland. Oh, I forgot to tell you, suh, I was sick in London; had some kind of fever and stayed in the hospital two months. It hurts me still here,” he pointed solemnly at his forehead. “I had awful dreams: dreamed that the Germans had caught my sistah—they had her in a little house, and she was screamin’.” His eyes lighted dreadfully. “You-all cain’t understand it, preehaps, but I hear her screamin’ ’most every night and sometimes in the daytime if I ain’t feeling very well. Listen! Listen, suh! I’m huntin’ for my sistah, and you-all must help me! You-all’s got to help me, or I’ll—I’ll—I’ll go crazy—I’ll kill somebody!”

The soft Southern drawl mounted to a shriek, and my visitor had me by the throat. I fought him off desperately. His sickness had weakened him, or else he would have throttled me. Suddenly his hands relaxed, his eyes lost their light, and he spoke again in the slow, gentle voice he had first used:

“You-all must pardon me, suh. I—I’m right ashamed of myself. I’ve spoiled your tie.” He deftly rearranged the crumpled folds before I could interfere. “I—I reckon I’m not quite reesponsible when I think of—of things that might have happened. It’s seven months, suh, and I ain’t had word of my sistah.” He drew out a tattered paper, stamped with many stamps, sealed with many seals, and showed me a line in German script.

“To look for his sister, reported to be in Maubeuge at the beginning of the war.”

“To go to Antwerp, Brussels, Mons, Charleroi, Maubeuge, Dinant, Namur, Liége,” I translated aloud, “to look for his sister.”

Months later Mr. Solslog came again. “There is a gentleman in the reception room waiting for monsieur: an American gentleman——” Leon shrugged his shoulders expressively, spread out his palms,[41] and went on in a rapid whisper: “He asked for monsieur. Nothing else could I understand. He has waited for monsieur four hours, and he talks, talks to himself always!”

From the hall I heard a steady gentle voice talking, talking, talking. “Mr. Solslog,” I hailed him. The voice stopped. He must have stepped swiftly from the thick carpet to the tiled floor of the hall, for he came like a man running.

“You-all here, suh,” he asked, without an interrogative lift to the question. “Let me—let me hold on to your hand for a minute. I—I’m right glad to see you. They’ve just—I’ve just got out.” He gathered his voice and breath for a tremendous effort. His next sentence came like a blast of prophecy. “Oh, may God damn the Germans!” he screamed.

“Oh, no, suh; not for me. I don’t use it.” Mr. Solslog gently released my hands and walked beside me into the reception[42] room. His face was whiter than before, the lines in it deeper, and the pathetic, patient eyes stranger than when I had seen him last; but the fever fit of passion passed and left him calm as usual.

“I haven’t found my sistah—it isn’t that,” he explained in his slow, drawling voice. “I’ve jist got out of prison here in Antwerp, suh. I told the German officer if I ever see him again I’ll kill him. I’m going to kill him if I ever see him again. I’m going to——”

“Yes, yes,” I said soothingly. The monotonous recitative I had heard on first entering the house had begun.

“I told him I’d kill him, I’d kill him, suh, kill him, I’d kill him——”

“Oh, yes.” He gathered himself together.[43] “I went to Brussels and Charleyroy—I say I’ll kill him—and Maw-booge. She ain’t there—at none of those places. I dream about her all the time, I see her and hear her. Preehaps you don’t altogether understand me. Suh—they’re chokin’ her—and—and mistreatin’ her, the Germans are, suh; and she’s callin’ to me—screamin’ and callin’—I told him I’d kill him! Then I come back to Malines. I got a paper from the burgomaster to go out and see ’em diggin’ up the dead Belgian soldiers and buryin’ ’em in new cemeteries.” Some wild, morbid impulse must have led him to do this thing. “And the Germans caught me, suh. They said my passport was expired. I cain’t read German, suh, so how was I to know? They drug me up here to Antwerp, and a German officer—I told him I’d kill him—and in the police place, he said I was an English spy. They stripped me, suh. They searched my skin. They took photygraphs of my clothes and looked at my collar against a light. They even went over my money with a microscope and looked under my hair to see if anything was tattooed on to me. I told that officer I’d kill him!

“‘You damned spy’—I told him I’d kill him—‘you dirty spy,’ he says.

“‘I’m just as clean as you are,’ I told him. ‘I buy a shirt when I need it. I reckon I’m as clean as you, and I’ll kill you!’

“He jumped at me and beat me with his fists. ‘I’ll kill you! Some day I’ll kill you,’ I says. They wouldn’t let me sleep; hectored me for two nights, but ‘I’ll kill you,’ I says to him. ‘I’ll——’”

He rose to his feet and faced me, then his knees sagged, and slowly, very slowly, he fell over in a dead faint.

There is little to add to this strange tale. The wilder wanderings of a sick mind followed the wild wanderings of his broken body. He was lodged in a private house where he had good care, but his case was hopeless from the start. About a month before his death I received a note written in his own hand. It read:

“They says I am vury sick but I doo not beleeve them in a few days moor I am gooen back to Mawbooj. I beleeve my sister is there still goodbie.

IV
FIGURES OF THE DANCE

The poet finished his recitation and resumed his cigarette, waiting for our applause.

“It is a man absolutely extraordinary,” murmured the dancing-master across the table at my left, under cover of the hand-clapping. “He is the greatest poet of Belgium, monsieur. Verhaeren, Cammaerts, Maeterlinck—they are nothing. If you bring him an album—presto! he writes you an ode in it.”

In the tight little supper-room over the Café de la Toison d’Or we were sweltering and dining at the expense of McTeague. It was a night in August, and the heat of noon had not yet died out of the boulevards and streets of Brussels, ville basse. The cheap[47] cotton curtains at the two windows fronting on the avenue waved languidly to and fro, and the air of the room reeked with cigarette smoke and the odours of Belgian cooking.

McTeague sat at the table’s head—a huge, lonely, unsophisticated American, with a mop of gray hair topping a face like a child’s, tired eyes, slightly Roman nose, and what once was a rose-bud mouth. At his right was Yvette, the dancer of the Scala; pretty, of course, the big, muscular, operatic-soprano type of beauty rather than the petite beings we usually think of in the dance; sleek, serpentine, appraising the world about her. Next her was I; then Yvette’s husband, the poet; then Guilbert, her dancing-master.

“Thanks! thanks! I thank you infinitely, monsieur. Bravo! Bis, bis!” said McTeague, in his heavy Scotian French.

“No, no, monsieur,” the poet answered gloomily, shaking his head.[48] “I demand pardon, but no.”

“Ah, it is the war, then! You feel such a sadness that you cannot be gay, monsieur?”

“No, it is not the war. What is the war? It is of nations. For me nations are nothing: men, men—Pushkin, Byron, Whitman, Schiller, Napoleon, Goethe, Victor Hugo—those for me are worth while. The rest? Pah!”

“Do not mind, monsieur,” the dancing-master whispered ecstatically, as if he feared such sentiments might offend me, “it is a poet, n’est-ce pas? Art—art—that is a world of itself.” He mopped his forehead, beaded with drops of perspiration, his little black eyes rolled in his head, and he drummed on the tablecloth as if his fingertips would do the office of his toes. The man was a genuine enthusiast. To dance and to teach others to dance—that was life!

“Yvette, you have brought your ballet costume so you can dance for messieurs the Americans?” he asked.

We drained our coffee cups reluctantly, rose from the table, and stirred out into the hot passageway, Yvette and McTeague ahead, old Guilbert following with me, the poet trailing behind. Through little winding streets, dusky, sleepy, and sweltering we passed, and at length out beside the Maison du Roi and the golden Flemish splendours of the corporation halls and the Hôtel de Ville on the Grand’ Place. We wound through the lines of German sentries and up the steps of a new restaurant—the Café du Cid—up dirty, twisting stairs behind the bar rail, to the dancing-hall where Guilbert taught.

“Now,” he exclaimed in rapture, turning on his toes with a movement of astonishing grace for one so old and fat. “Monsieur le poète to the piano! Madame Yvette to the dressing-room, quick! Messieurs les Américains, seat yourselves, if you please! Quick! Quick! Quick! Everybody!

“Messieurs!” He flung up his fingers and addressed us as we sank languidly into[50] chairs before the open windows. “It is a dance which I have myself composed—the dance of the ourang-outang. I am he—the great man-ape. I dance so.... Music!” he called to the poet at the piano. “Music! Moussorgsky—slow—terrible—so!”

The poet smote the ivory keys, keys yellow as the teeth of an old horse, and the dance began solo. Old Guilbert swayed and leaped over the dusty floor under the hanging lamps—swayed and leaped heavily, horribly, bestially, while the wild music of the piano panted and coughed through the room. The hot night air doubtless added to the grim effect on McTeague and me. I seemed to breathe the very exhalations of a jungle, and watched as if fascinated the contortions of the dancing-master.

As he danced he roared explanations and orders.[51] “It is a forest, messieurs, and I, the ourang-outang, I dance in the moonlight under the trees, so, and so, and so; and as I dance I long for something to love, something to destroy. I am seeking here, there, as I dance.... Ah! I have found her—there, there!”

He made an extraordinary succession of leaps toward Madame Yvette’s dressing-room, and suddenly she floated out before us, her heavy body spinning on her toes, light as a cloud and almost as swift; her eyes half closed, her hands at her breast, a Liberty cap on her head; and at the end of her turn she sank quietly into a heap in the middle of the floor.

Guilbert’s horrid dance began again, and the rapid flow of his explanation: “She is asleep, messieurs, this fay in the forest.” He paused ecstatically before her. “I have found her, I love her, I will have her, I shall win her by my dancing.” He touched her on the breast. She leaped to her feet and spun across the floor like a whirlwind, terror and amazement and grace and voluptuousness all portrayed in her movements. The ape leaped after her, dancing round and round her, enmeshing her like a firefly in a[52] cage of grass. Her eyes grew wider with terror, she danced this way and that, trying to escape him; he seized her, and she flew to right and left, still fast in his clutches; she leaped straight up, and he caught her firmly in his arms and yelled, actually yelled, with delight.

And then—it seems utterly impossible even as I tell it—into the music came a wild, unholy burst of “The Watch on the Rhine.” The two figures on the floor leaped and curveted. A hoarse cheer rose to us from outside, and below the windows I saw three ecstatic German soldiers swaying and bellowing applause.... The ape held the forest-fay securely as they danced.... It must have been the music which first warned me of change, for into the German hymn stole a wilder motif—the great chords of an alien theme intruded, fought, conquered, and swept over the fragments of the old, and like a wild mob of music bursting from prisons of silence poured forth the “Marseillaise.” The dance was symbolic,[53] then: Germany and Europe! The conquest of the world!... The knit figures still swayed and leaped, but the ape was weakening. The taller figure of the woman slowly dominated and then submerged the male. With a sudden thrust she flung him prone, but the music went on. There came a howl at our backs, and I saw the soldiers in the square below waving their rifles and dancing with anger.

McTeague stared as if he were just recovering from a trance, shook himself clumsily, and muttered through the “Marseillaise”: “Strange, isn’t it, how artistic these Belgians are? Now if you and I were arranging a dance——”

The loud howls of the Germans beneath us interrupted McTeague’s moralizings. Swift feet were upon the stair, the proprietor of the café and his wife burst in upon us, weeping, gesticulating, talking all at once. Guilbert lay quietly in the middle of the floor, still acting his part; the poet at the piano pounded lustily. Yvette, more practical[54] than they, ran to a window at the back of the hall and looked out, then ran back to us and grasped us. “Come quickly,” she exclaimed. “We can escape before the Germans come.”

“Drag them behind us, then,” she replied, shrugging her naked shoulders. “Come at once. The Germans are on the stair!”

Directly beneath our feet we heard a tumult of rough voices, a clatter of dishes and pans, and then tramping boots coming up the winding stair. Panic seized on McTeague and me simultaneously. We leaped at the performers and hustled them across the floor behind the twinkling feet of the dancing-girl. Before we reached the window she had already scrambled through it and dropped to a roof five or six feet below. We leaped after her and ran across a space sloping like a deck. Guilbert and the poet had not yet spoken a word. I had begun to laugh—a wild, hysterical laugh which irritated[55] McTeague, so that while we ran he remonstrated with me: “Germans—’ll hear—come after us,” he panted. “What—’s matter—now?”

Yvette stopped abruptly before a whitewashed wall and gazed up at an open window three feet above the level of her head.

“Jamais de la vie!” I stuttered. “It’s right to escape, but I won’t be caught breaking and entering somebody’s house.”

Nothing is stranger than truth; nothing more grotesque, more dramatic, more truly[56] unreal. I can imagine how this revelation would have been received on the stage in any of the five continents: the gestures of the outraged husband, the tableau of the horrified perceptor, and the amazement of the guests. But clinging to our precarious footing on the roof, we received it only as a stroke of luck—a means of escape from our awful predicament. We thanked Heaven for Yvette’s lover!

“Up with her!” I hissed at the poet. “Stoop down, man, and I’ll lift her into the room.”

He leaned obediently against the bricks. I grasped the dancer firmly by the sole of her soft dancing buskin and boosted her against the wall, the poet clumsily bent lower still, and she clambered over him to the window sill. Scraping, gasping, struggling, she reached it, slipped her arms over the sill, and rose. There was a flutter of stiff dancing skirt, her twinkling, white-clad legs and feet slipped over the ledge and out of sight. Then came a pause. McTeague[57] and I stared at each other soberly. “Hm!” he breathed deeply. “Hm! Hm!”

Her head, with the Liberty Cap ridiculously awry, peeped over the window ledge. “It’s all right. He isn’t here. I’ll help you in, messieurs,” Yvette said calmly, and in two minutes more we stood beside her in the unlighted bedroom of her ami.

In single file we tiptoed across the room and reached the door. I heard the knob turn softly; a rush of hot air streamed over our perspiring faces, we pattered out to a landing from which descended another flight of stairs, and stood breathlessly listening. The night seemed to pant with the heat, the dull heavy noises of life spoke behind closed doors, and far away I heard the tramp of a squad of soldiers off to relieve the guard.

“Come,” said Yvette softly.[58] “It would not do for my friend to find us here, n’est-ce pas? One of you, messieurs, he might mistake for a rival!” I am afraid I laughed as she said this; for McTeague, who usually treated me with great respect, laid his hot moist hand on my mouth. “Hush!” he said. “You mustn’t laugh at her. You mustn’t approve. These people don’t look at these things as we do. They’re unmor——”

A door slammed in the darkness below us, and the scrape of heavy boots echoed from the stair-well! “Mon Dieu!” Yvette whispered. “It is he! It must be he! Here!” She leaped back into the gloom, hustling us with her, and crouched in the farthest corner of the hall. McTeague was first in the line; then I; then the poet; then Guilbert; then Yvette. The heavy tread of the newcomer sounded louder and louder, but no louder than the anguished beating of our hearts. He reached the top of the stair. An odour of lambic or faro scented the fetid air. We could see in the darkness an immense bulk, and Yvette trembled. It was her that he must have heard, for even while his hand was on the knob, he turned.

“Hello, old fellow,” he called jocularly. “What have you got there? Let me see?”

In the vague semi-darkness I saw McTeague scramble slowly to his feet. I thought he would surrender at discretion, but the sound of his voice disillusioned and astonished me. “Go into that room, you villain,” he roared, advancing on the friendly inebriate and bawling fit to wake the dead. “Go in! Go in!”

His voice or his impressive advance frightened Yvette’s friend. The door banged open; there was a short pause; then it slammed shut and I could hear a panting, frightened human mass flung hard against it to keep out the intruder.

McTeague gripped the handle of the door and tried to turn it, but Yvette—more wise than he—clutched him about the waist and flung him with all her force toward the stair. “Hurry, hurry, we must run!” she sobbed. “Hurry, hurry!” And we charged down the dark well.

At the door we peered cautiously out. No one had been aroused. The hot night breathed about us as softly as a sleeping child, ignorant, indifferent, and calm. Tragedy, comedy, farce—we had played them all unwittingly, and no one knew or cared but we!

An old herdick hitched to a decrepit horse stood in the shadow of the street corner! We thrust Yvette, Guilbert, and the poet into its shelter and waved them good-night. “Au revoir, messieurs!” the three called to us gaily.

“Adieu!” McTeague responded. “It is not au revoir: it is good-bye!” Then he added, sotto voce, to me, “They are true artists—unmoral—like marionettes—just figures of the dance, aren’t they?... Come!” he said, after a pause. “They have forgotten it already, but we must go back to the Café du Cid and get the proprietor out of this scrape. Right?”

“Right,” I responded. And we slowly followed the creaking herdick down the narrow street.

V
THE SAVIOUR OF MONT CÉSAR

Rain fell softly, as it frequently falls in Belgium, drenching the ripening fields of Brabant and the ghosts of ruined towns. By six o’clock in the evening we had reached Louvain. My motor-car rolled through the porte de Bruxelles and down the narrow, slippery Flemish streets into the heart of the city. From a sentry box marked with barber-pole stripes in the German colours—black, white, red; black, white, red again—a bearded Landsturm man leaped out, wearing a helmet like a Yohoghany miner’s cap, a faded gray-green service uniform, and high, mud-coloured boots. The car skidded past him over the moist cobblestones. “Halt!” he shouted, waving his rifle; but I flaunted my celluloid-covered[62] pass-case at him and yelled in tourist German, “Amerikanische Hilfskomite,” and he nodded and crawled back into his shelter.

Before the majestic Hôtel de Ville—its six slender open towers riding high like a stranded ship in a waste of ruins—sole relic of the old glories of Louvain’s Grand’ Place, Pierre stopped the car and looked back at me inquiringly.

“Go to the Kommandantur and ask the commandant for a garage for the Relief Commission’s car.”

“I shall walk to the monastery,” I added in response to his unspoken question. “You may go now.”

“Pardon, but is monsieur to assist at the ceremony in memory of the saviour of Mont César?”

“Monsieur has not heard—the German officer who saved the monastery: the Prussian who would not burn the monastery, although he was so ordered. Monsieur has not heard?”

“Si, si, si, monsieur! It is true,” he insisted vehemently, “every word. I swear it. He would not burn the monastery, that German; and so to-night and for one hundred years the monks sing and march in procession for him.”

“Go find a garage!” I ordered in disgust. The idea of Belgian monks holding service for a German was absurd. Chauffeur tales, I had found, while often interesting, were not always true. “Pierre must think me a fool indeed to tell me such a stupid falsehood,” I thought, as I went grumblingly up the street.

Dusk and the gray rain fell together, covering the gray city with an impenetrable[64] shroud. Ghostly walls and empty balconies, bricks, ashes, gaunt wooden fences to hide the worst of the ruins; a stray dog which snapped as he ran past; women with black shawls over their bent heads hurrying along the street; a file of stodgy German Landsturm plodding through the rain—these things I saw as I walked through the city where Lipsius had taught, the city which had been the home of learning and art and the seat of Catholic piety for more than five centuries, the city whose ruin is one of many eternal blots on the ’scutcheon of Germany.

I climbed up past the tall stately hill called Mont César—a height on which local legend says Cæsar built a camp and a fortress—where the dour, unbeautiful monastery of Mont César broods over the wrecked city.

The pater hospitalis, Jan Heynderyckx, greeted me with grave pleasure. He was not old, yet the beard which just touched the breast of his Benedictine habit was almost white, his eyes were gray and tired,[65] and his skin, in the fluttering candlelight, was like the vellum of mediæval manuscripts. I had an odd fancy that his face was a perfect transcript of his life, limned by the hands of life and death, fear, ecstasy, hope, ambition, love, and hate. He bowed me into a small reception room at the right of the arched door and went for sherry and tobacco. Far away, from the chapel, came the faint thunder of bass voices chanting a service. It echoed and re-echoed through the hollow halls, roaring and subsiding like distant waves. The monks were singing litanies for the murdered city.

The room where I sat was curious; little larger than a closet. On the four walls hung old oil paintings of fathers-superior of the Benedictine order: Dom Pothier, Dom Schmitt, Dom Egbert—sombre, saintly men whose bones long since were dust. But over the wooden mantel opposite me hung a framed photograph. It amused and fascinated me—that one touch of modernity in the bleak monastic hall—and I stared at it dreamily.

“Ah, the photograph, monsieur?” The monk had entered quietly and stood beside me. He, too, gazed at the picture, while his hands poured the wine and set forth Turkish cigarettes. “To your good health, monsieur le Délégué. The photograph?” He took a huge pinch of snuff, flourished his handkerchief, and breathed noisily. “You may look at it if you wish.”

“A thousand thanks, brother,” I answered indifferently, rising and going toward the little frame. The monk followed me, catching up a flickering candle and holding it close to the glass for me to see the better.

“My God!” I almost shouted the words in my astonishment. “It is a German officer!” The picture before us was a cheap cabinet photograph of a lieutenant of infantry, evidently a Prussian, his crop head showing beneath his cap, his steady, narrow eyes gazing straight into ours! His right cheek was slashed with Schmizzes of student duels; his hard mouth was half covered with bristling moustaches, and the white and black[67] ribbon of the Iron Cross, second class, peeped from his buttonhole. “Mahn, Ober-Leutnant,” I read, written across the lower half of the photograph with a military flourish, and under it in fine Flemish script in another hand, “The saviour of Mont César, Louvain, August, 1914.”

Father Jan gazed at me sorrowfully. “You do not yet understand. This is still Belgium, and God will punish the guilty. Listen, monsieur, you understand Latin?” He pointed down the corridors where the bass voices were chanting again in unison. “You hear what they are singing?”

“Listen, monsieur le Délégué, Primo—anno—magni—belli—in the first year of the Great War—sub—bono—rege—Alberto—in the reign of good King Albert—praefectus Mahnius—monasterium—montis Caesarii—ab exitio—servavit—laus Deo!—Officer Mahn saved from destruction the monastery of Mont César.”

“We had fled to Malines, monsieur, we monks of Mont César, and two days after Louvain had been put to the torch Dom Egbert ordered me to return to the monastery and care for it. Such lamentations, monsieur! My brothers and I knew I was going to my death, and my blood froze even to think of what the Germans might do to me; but I went, monsieur, I went guided by God, doubtless, through the hordes of refugees along the roads, and the Belgian outposts, and the Germans, and so at dusk I reached the porte de Malines and saw our sacred monastery still unharmed by the fires, untouched by the vandals.

“Louvain flared like a furnace. From kilometres away I saw it like a red blot on the sky, and the stench of its burning spread thoughts so mournful that one entered veritably as if into the house of death.

“Monsieur le Délégué, there was no sound here at our monastery, so I knocked, and[69] then suddenly some one had me by the throat with harsh hands and a voice grunted in German, ‘So, spy! I have thee?’

“I was as one dead, monsieur, and fell flat on the stone; but that one said, ‘Up, spy. Ha! Ha! In priest’s costume, art thou, eh? We shall have sport with thee—a spy-priest!’ For he had felt of my cassock in the darkness and he believed, as all the Germans believe, that Belgian officers wore the garb of priests, that they spied disguised as priests, that they even directed rifle-fire and artillery-fire gowned as priests—in a word, they believed every lie which their generals could invent of us. And so my captor dragged me through the doorway and down the black corridor, where all smelled of naphtha as if one were ready to kindle a great fire.

“He stopped; he beat softly on a door; a voice called ‘Herein’: the door opened, and I was flung into the very cell where we sit, monsieur.

“There sat a man at the table where you sit, monsieur le Délégué—the man whose[70] photograph you see—a man young, and hard, and cruel, in the costume of a German officer. He sat alone before his untasted supper dishes. At either end of the table a candle dripped and sputtered. The man’s elbows were propped against the edge of the table, and his head hung forward between the candles, as if he were ill or broken with anxiety.

“He had been reading, monsieur, and he thrust a paper into the breast of his uniform as we entered—the sentry and I. His hand trembled, and his voice trembled, too, but he roared out, ‘Speak, one of you.’

“‘A spy, Herr Leutnant,’ grunted the soldier behind me. ‘He was prowling round the door.’

“‘He is a damned spy—a damned franc-tireur. Else why did he come back?’

“I was speechless, monsieur. My throat ached horribly, for I was half throttled; my senses ebbed and flowed like water; I could say nothing.

“‘You understand German, spy?’ the Lieutenant spat at me. ‘You understand German bullets, nicht? You understand Leffe, Latour, Gelrode, Bovenloo?’ He named over some of the towns where our brother-priests had been done to death.

“‘You see this revolver?’ He slipped a metal thing from its holster and placed it beside his plate.[72] ‘I will shoot you if you move so much as a millimetre! Now we shall see who you are.’ He stared past me at the sentry. ‘Fetch the caretaker!’ he ordered.

“Then, monsieur, when we were alone together, the German became strangely quiet. He became as one who is puzzled and who wishes to believe something which he scarcely dares believe. ‘Who are you?’ he asked, almost gently.

“‘My father-superior ordered me back from Malines to stay in the monastery—to care for it.’

“The German leaned forward. He took up the revolver and tapped it against the nearer candlestick. ‘If you lie, you die,’ he said roughly, yet it seemed to me, monsieur, as if he wished to believe me, as if he[73] desired something of me, as if a new thought had risen in his mind, or a new and better impulse in his soul, and as if he had resolved on a higher course. I have been a parish priest, monsieur; I needs must know the human heart.

“The door opened and the sentry entered, pushing before him old Piet, the man-of-all-work in the monastery cellars—old Piet whom we had forgotten and left behind when we fled to Malines. He was trembling like an aspen leaf and he bent almost to the floor.

“‘Stick him with the bayonet if he doesn’t stand up,’ the Lieutenant roared. ‘Do you know this person?’ He pointed at me.

“The Lieutenant rose from his chair. His face became the face of a madman. He[74] whipped the revolver from the table and pointed it wildly. His hand shook, his eyes rolled, so that even the sentry was terrified and tried to hide behind old Piet and me. ‘Bitte! Bitte!’ he ejaculated, ‘Bitte, Herr Leutnant!’ But suddenly my courage came, and I spoke swiftly in the familiar Flemish.

“‘Don’t you know me, Piet?’ I asked. ‘I am Brother Jan. Surely you know me!’

“‘You, mynheer Jan, you? Of course, of course I know you. I was afraid,’ the old man babbled. ‘I was afraid of him—the mad devil in the chair. He is going to burn the monastery. He has put naphtha in all the rooms. He is going to burn Mont César!’

“The Lieutenant smiled like one who is pleased, and slid down again into his chair. ‘What does he say?’ he asked.

“‘Good, good! You are an honest man, Herr monk. I asked you to see if you would lie to me. I understand Flemish. Take the old man away,’ he ordered, turning again to the sentry, ‘then come here.’

“Then, monsieur, there happened the strangest thing of all. The door closed. We stared into each other’s faces, we were like gamblers with all at stake, haggard, eager, watchful—a priest against a soldier.

“The German leaned forward. ‘Herr monk,’ he said in a voice which was like a whisper, ‘I am not going to burn your monastery. You see before you the saviour of Mont César!’

“Monsieur, for one breathless moment I stood like a stone. I could not believe my ears. The man had gone mad, or else I was myself mad.

“I screamed at him. I thought a thousand horrible things in a moment, men pierced on stakes, boiled in oil, crucified. I screamed,[76] ‘Kill me! Kill me quickly, but do not murder me with words. I will not talk with a madman!’

“‘Herr monk,’ he answered, ‘I am not mad. See!’ He thrust his hand into the bosom of his uniform and pulled out a crumpled paper, ‘See! Here is von Manteuffel’s order; it is dated August 26th. It directs me to burn Mont César. The paper shall be yours, and the monastery is saved!’

“‘You lie!’ I screamed again. ‘What is this new trick of a scrap of paper?’

“‘Ha!’ I laughed at him. ‘A German is ordered to burn a monastery and he disobeys! That is indeed droll! A German who has murdered scores in Belgium, who has burned and pillaged and outraged, now saves a monastery! Ha, ha! That is likely, is it not?’

“‘I have saved Mont César,’ he repeated steadily. ‘Here is the order.’ He thrust the crumpled paper into my hand.

“I stared at it. Monsieur, though the thing is incredible, it is true. The paper was an order from Major von Manteuffel[77] directing Ober-Leutnant Mahn to burn Mont César! The thing was not a forgery. It is incredible, but it is true. I held in my hand the thing which could destroy Mont César!

“‘Ha!’ I laughed at him again. ‘You disobey an order—you who are a lieutenant of infantry—but does that save Mont César? Yours is a relentless, cruel race. You have saved our monastery for a day, maybe: von Manteuffel will burn it to-morrow!’

“This, monsieur, I said because I doubted God’s providence, because I feared men more than God!

“‘Manteuffel will not burn it to-morrow or ever, Herr monk,’ he replied.[78] ‘I have learned that Berlin is angry at the scandal of Louvain, and has forbidden more burnings. Two days have gone by. Your monastery is saved. I have saved Mont César.’

“A third time the sentry entered, and a third time the officer’s face grew stern and his voice rose angrily: ‘Take this monk through the monastery; then bring him here. Be quick. There is no time to lose,’ he said. And I followed the sentry out into the black corridor.

“He secured a lantern and I followed him down the long halls. In each monastery cell, in the refectory, in the kitchen, in the library, everything had been piled in a heap, soaked in naphtha, and prepared for burning. Everything was ready, monsieur, and had been ready for two days. This lieutenant alone had defeated the machinations of that man-devil—that Manteuffel who commanded in Louvain. Why? I do not know, except that it was the will of God that Mont César should be preserved, and the good God, monsieur, uses even the vilest of men to work His will. The Good God uses even Germans——

“Again I stood in the little cell before the saviour of Mont César. ‘Herr Offizier,’ I[79] said, ‘Give me the order, and by the good God whose instrument you are——’

“‘What is the devil’s work—that you have saved the monastery? No. That is of God.’

“‘God has forgotten already. I shall be shot for this. I have disobeyed orders.’

“Monsieur, it was the mood of the confessional, was it not? And this man was indeed an instrument of God. Do you blame me that I heard his confession, and that I gave him comfort—he, an alien, an enemy, a Prussian, who had saved Mont César and did not know why he had saved it, except that God had led him? He knew that von Manteuffel had learned of his disobedience; he knew that death and disgrace were before him; yet knowing these[80] things he had persisted, and Mont César was saved.

“Monsieur, God’s will is strange, and the seed that God plants bears strange fruit. All men long for immortality; all men long for something which will bear their name to posterity, and he who had saved Mont César—do you blame him if he longed to be held in remembrance by the monks of our monastery? I promised to place his photograph here where you see it. I promised to write on it ‘The Saviour of Mont César’—as you see. I swore by the cross I wear that all this should be done, and yet—it was God’s will, monsieur—the German was not satisfied. I could see that his mind was tormented still.

“‘Very well. I promise, my son,’ I said. You see, monsieur, I called him ‘son,’ for he was a true son of the Church although a[81] Prussian, and he had obeyed the voice of the good God although he was my enemy.

“‘Promise me that you will sing in your processions—that you will sing of the saving of Mont César.’

“‘Promise that you will sing of me, of Lieutenant Mahn, who saved your monastery; that you will sing of me for one hundred years!’

“His face became like the face of one dead. ‘You have promised,’ he muttered.[82] ‘Sing only that I saved your monastery; only that.’

“Place yourself in that situation, monsieur! Was it so great a thing he asked? God made us to long for immortality; was it after all so great a thing the German asked of me?

“Maybe you think he bargained with me, maybe to you it seems a high price to pay even to him who had saved Mont César—the price of a procession once a year for one hundred years and a chant of remembrance. But no, monsieur, it was not excessive, that price. It was God who demanded it—not he. It was God who willed that he should save Mont César, that he should disobey, that he should be led out in disgrace to die, and that his memory should be held accurst by all but his enemies—by all save the monks of Mont César. Was it, then, so great a thing he asked? I had vowed: I must keep my vow. I bent my head in prayer, and in an instant I was answered. Monsieur, I promised! I would grant that strange wish!

“‘Tell me, Herr monk, what will you sing?’ he begged. ‘Tell me in Latin, just as you will sing it.’

“And I, slowly seeking for the words, began to speak those which you have heard to-night in the halls of Mont César: ‘Primo anno magni belli, sub bono rege Alberto, praefectus Mahnius——’

“‘Yes. Praefectus Mahnius monasterium montis Caesarii ab exitio servavit—laus Deo!’

“‘Sing it for me,’ he entreated when I was done. And I slowly chanted the words. ‘Teach it to me.’

“Slowly, very slowly I repeated the words again and again and again; and ‘... ab exitio servavit, laus Deo!’ he recited after me.

“How shall I tell you the end, monsieur? There were loud footfalls in the corridor and the door resounded to heavy blows!

“‘They have come for me, Herr monk,’ the officer whispered.[84] ‘Good-bye. I am a dead man. Primo anno magni belli—those are the words?... Herein!’ he called confidently.

“Then in they came—a non-commissioned officer and four privates who filed through the doorway, saluted, and stood at attention. ‘I am named Sergeant Schneider—Herr Leutnant Mahn?’ the leader asked.

“‘My warrant,’ said the sergeant, offering a paper. ‘You are under arrest. Come.’

“The lieutenant rose slowly from his chair. He thrust his pistol into its holster. His eyes were bright and very calm. For an instant I admired him although he was my enemy; he was so calm, so sure. God was with him, I know. ‘Ab exitio servavit, nicht, Herr monk?’ he asked.

“He picked up from the table the written order of von Manteuffel. ‘Your passport and carte d’identite,’ he continued slowly, as if we had been speaking of them. ‘You may stay in charge of the monastery with Piet. All is in order.... Your photograph, Herr.’ He handed me his own photograph—the photograph[85] you see on the wall, monsieur. ‘Your Ausweiss!’ He gave me the written order from von Manteuffel directing that the monastery be burned. Then he turned quietly to the file of soldiers and walked out before them....

“It is not the face of a bad man, that face in the photograph, monsieur,” said Brother Jan, as I stared again into the steady, narrow eyes of the picture of Lieutenant Mahn.[86] “God asks no questions of men when He would use them. Our monastery is saved through the hand of a stranger and an enemy. It is the work of God, laus Deo! Let us praise God, monsieur.”

VI
GHOSTS

Belgian peasants say that on the Eve of All Souls unquiet spirits are loosed from their graves for an hour after sunset. Those who died by violence, or those who died unshriven, rise from the dark and speak to passersby; they rise with the load of their sins upon them, with the hatred, or fear, or agony, or longing which they felt while dying, still in their tortured hearts, and they beg the passersby to take vengeance on their enemies, or to give them news of those they loved or hated. And after a brief hour they sink back again into the dust.

I believe the story, for I have met those sad spirits. It was on a foggy evening in October—All Souls’ Eve—on the road from[87] Brussels to Antwerp, where Belgians and Britons a year before faced the German hordes in weeks of bitter fighting. We were in a terrible hurry. Pierre, the chauffeur, was driving the motor-car; I was seated beside him. The headlights blurred like drowned eyes, and the open windshield dripped with wet. If we met a belated cart, or if we misjudged distances on that winding road, we would never reach our destination alive! But we were in a hurry, for it was All Souls’ Eve—the night of the dead.

Drowned trees writhed in the blurred light, culverts leaped out of the yellow flood like fountains, and dead walls in the burned and ravished villages seemed like rows of Roman tombs. We flew through the murdered town of Eppeghem, down vacant alleys lined with gaunt, disembowelled dwellings, beneath the shell of a church, beside stark walls lit for a breathless instant by the headlight of the motor then blotted into chaos. It was eerie and terrifying. A peculiar odour of decay, the odour of sour[88] soil in early spring when the grip of the ice is relaxed and the buried abominations of winter steal up into the sun, rose from the town and pursued us—a smell like rotten fungi in old crypts. Sounds like the flapping of garments on a clothesline stole through the steady bass roar of the motor, and to my heavy eyes, tortured with staring into the yellow blur ahead, a vague shape seemed to float beside the car, a shape which was strangely human; erect, but rigid, flying along like a dry leaf upright in a gale.

I could see it only with the tail of my eye. It disappeared when I turned my head. It was clearest when I rolled my eyes high and looked through the lower part of the retina—a sort of second-sight, I suppose. The thing puzzled, angered, then frightened me. “Faster! Vite! Vite!” I yelled, suddenly grasping Pierre by the arm. The shadowy thing danced into the edges of the blur of light directly ahead. “Look out, Pierre!” The emergency brake came on with a grind[89] and jolt, and the lights flared with the pulse of the engine. “It’s nothing,” I protested, half ashamed of myself, for evidently Pierre saw nothing. “Encore plus vite.”

We seemed to have lost the shadow-thing, until suddenly I discovered that there were others with it, swinging rigid through the fog like trees uprooted in a cyclone. My eyes were smarting with cold tears: it was like swimming with one’s eyes open in a stiff current. And all the time I watched the shadow-shapes gathering closer. Faintly luminous pale yellow blots seemed to grow in the dingy black of the racing forms. They were phosphorescent, as I think of them now. Something brushed my hair. A clicking sound like castanets came from the empty tonneau behind me, and then a whistling, like the speech of a man with no palate.

“Sssss—Feld—Feld—Feldwebel war ich, aus Bayern—sechs—sechsundzwanzigsten—infanterie Regiment.”

I turned my head with an involuntary[90] sob. There was absolutely nothing in the car. Pierre put on brakes violently.

We listened and sniffed. “Nothing, monsieur,” Pierre said, quivering and crossing himself. The noise of the motor died, and we sat motionless in gruesome darkness listening to the hollow dripping of fog-water on the fallen leaves in the roadway. We were swallowed, lost in mist, with only a square yard of paved road visible before us. “Go on, Pierre,” I said softly.

Then gradually I saw the ghosts more plainly. A woman, bent like an old hinge, flung along beside the flying motor-car, and a naked, frightened child ran fearfully before her. “Ask him, Grutje, ask him about home!” a thin child-voice sobbed. A younger woman whose head had been hacked from her shoulders floated along with them, fondling the severed member and wailing, “De Deutschers—the Germans!” A group of[91] mangled bodies of Belgian artillerymen hung like a swarm of bees together, mouthing curses as they flew, and a gigantic peasant, with clotted beard and arms stretched rigid in the form of a cross, stared with a face stabbed through and through like honey-comb.

“Feldwebel Stoner. König, Kaiser, Vaterland, sie leben hoch!” whispered a voice.

The swarming spirits grew till they darkened the mist. We flew through the empty corridors of Malines, and on to Waelhem—first of the Antwerp forts to fall—up the ridge to Waerloos and Contich, toward Oude God and the inner forts. Still the swarms grew, crowding closer and closer. The eyes of the dead peered like cats’ eyes in the yellow dark, and my soul chilled to ice. The odour of dead clay was so strong I nearly fainted, and bony fingers seemed to press against my back and shoulders as if heavy wires were freezing into the flesh. “Light the dash-light, for God’s sake, Pierre!” I cried, hoping the new electric blur would banish the phantoms, but their sulphurous[92] eyes glowed only the more in its feeble ray.

And the hissing, clicking, and rattling grew. “Feldwebel Stoner, aus Bayern, tot, Eppeghem, September dreizehn ... König, Kaiser, und Vaterland—hoch!” a voice shrilled; “De Deutschers! de Deutschers!” sobbed an echo after it. And then, with a sudden access of horror, I remembered the saying of the peasants; I knew what had wakened those unquiet spirits; knew that they wished to question me; knew that I must answer their questions in the brief hour of their release; all of them I must answer!

“... Sozialdemokrat—for world-peace I fought, that the world might have peace. Is there peace?”

“Ask, Grutje, ask!” trilled a child’s voice, and a sad shriek answered it: “Home—the little farm on the road to Elewyt beside Kasteel Weerde—is it safe?”

I knew that farm, a blackened ruin like the castle beside it, with two lath crosses leaning crazily over sunken graves in the dooryard. “No!”

“No, no, no!” The horrid refrain beat them back. By ones and tens and hundreds they asked and were denied. They had died as most men live, hoping to-morrow would bring bliss which yesterday withheld. They had died, as most men live, for dreams. In all the world there was no consolation for them, no word[94] of honest hope or recompense. In all the world there was nothing for them but a shallow grave and a little wooden cross.

“I came from Devon to Antwerp, sir, with the Marines. Have we whipped the Huns?”

A woman’s passionate voice screamed out: “They murdered my child, they murdered my man, they murdered me. Vengeance! Vengeance! Vengeance!”

When I awoke the fog had almost disappeared, Pierre was chafing my cold hands, and the shadow-shapes had gone. They had sunken again into their hollow graves, unsatisfied, unconsoled. We rode swiftly on toward Antwerp. A clean breeze stole up from the west, purifying the stricken fields and their sad memories. It tore the last remnants of gray veil from the sky. And as we turned into the black, silent city[95] streets, I leaned my head far back and stared up into the night with a sudden sense of relief and even of comfort. The sick little planet Earth fell away from me, far, far, infinitely far, and about me was unvexed emptiness and the tremendous stars.

VII
THE DESERTER

It was five o’clock in the morning. A riotous sunrise deluged the Campine as I slipped into my clothes and ran down the narrow, twisting tower-stair to keep a secret tryst with the Baas, or overseer. Little slits in the tower wall, cut for mediæval archers, let in the arrows of the sun; and as I ran through the gloomy armoury and the high-roofed Flemish dining hall—stripped of their treasure of old pikes, swords, crossbows, and blunderbusses by the diligent Germans—out to the causeway, and over the creaking draw-bridge on my way to the stables and the dismantled brewery, I imagined myself an escaped prisoner from the donjons of Château Drie Toren. In truth, I was running away from Baron van Steen’s week-end[97] house-party for a breath of rustic air while the others slept.

The stables, tool sheds, hostlers’ barracks, bake-oven, and brewery were thatch roofed and walled with brick, toned to a claret-red, pierced with small windows and heavy oaken doors. The doors were banded with the baronial colours—blue stripes alternating with yellow, like stripes on a barber pole—and in the centre of the hollow square of farm buildings fumed a mammoth brown manure pile. A smell of fresh-cut hay and the warm smell of animals clung about the stables, and I heard the watch-dog rattle his chain and sniff at the door as I passed.

I found the Baas standing before his door, his face wrinkled with pleasure, his cap in his hand. Behind him his wife peered out at us, wiping her fat hands on her skirts, and two half-grown children stared from the nearest window. The Baas and his wife were the parents of sixteen children!

“Good day, madame; good day, Baas.” (I used the Flemish title for overseer—the word from which has come our much-abused word “Boss.”) “I’m a deserter this morning: the rest of the Baron’s party sleeps.”

“Ah, so,” laughed the wife. “Mynheer is like the German soldiers who desert by dozens nowadays. And would your Honour hide in the forest like them—like the Germans?”

“To be sure. The Baas is to show me the deepest coverts, where mynheer the Baron will never find me more.”

We laughed and passed on. A girl with a neckyoke and full milk pails came by from the dairy; nodding faces appeared at the windows of the farm buildings as we walked toward the woods; bees sped up the air from conical straw hives close to our path; and in a few minutes we were threading our way through a nursery of young pines, tilled like corn rows in Kansas, and all of equal age.

“Monsieur, there is a soul in trees,” said[99] the Baas, affectionately patting an ancient linden on the border of the old forest. The Baas was a man from the Province of Liége, and he preferred to speak French with me rather than Flemish. He had, too, a Walloon lightness of wit which went sometimes incongruously with his heavy frame, as when he said to me once when we were debating the joys of youth versus age, “To be old has its advantages, monsieur. One can then be virtuous, and it is not hard!”

“There is a soul in trees,” he repeated. “All together the trees have a soul. A forest is one spirit. These trees are old men and old women, very patient and kindly and sluggish of blood. They nod their heads in the wind like peasants over a stove. And they talk. Sometimes I think that I can understand their talk—very wise and patient and slow. Men hurry apart, monsieur, but the trees remain together like old married people and watch their children grow up around them.

“Here”—we had turned down a path[100] and were in the fringes of another forest of small pines—“here the Germans have taken trees for their fortifications, slashed and cut, and those trees that are left are like wounded soldiers: they have arms too long or too short, heads smashed, feet uprooted, and yet they wish to live, because they are one spirit.”

“What is this?” I demanded abruptly, for at my feet yawned a little pit, with lumpy clay still fresh about it and a fallen cross lying half hidden in the weeds.

“Ho, that? It is the grave of a German,” said the Baas heartily. He spat into the raw pit. “The German has been taken away, but the children of Drie Toren are still afraid. They will not come by this path on account of the dead Deutscher.”

His foot crushed the rude cross as he talked, and we walked on. But I was vaguely troubled. That vile pit and the thought of what it had contained had spoiled my promenade. As I had found on a thousand other occasions, my freedom in Belgium was[101] only a fiction. The war could not be forgotten, even for an hour.

A partridge thundered up at our feet and rocketed to earth again beyond the protecting pines. In a little glade we surprised four young rabbits together at breakfast. The Baas laid his hand lightly on my arm. “It is sad, monsieur, isn’t it?” he said. “The poachers steal right and left nowadays. The gardes champêtres are no longer armed, so the thieves do as they will. There is more pheasant in the city markets than chicken, and more rabbit than veal. The game will soon be gone, like our horses and cattle.

“You remember, monsieur, the sand dunes by Blankenberghe and Knocke on the Belgian coast? Ah, the rabbits that used to be in those dunes! But now the firing of cannon has driven them all away.”

A silence fell upon us both. The thickets grew denser, and we pushed our way slowly toward the deeper coverts. I found myself thinking of the little crosses along the seaside dunes which marked where greater game[102] than rabbits had fallen—the graves of men—the biggest game on earth—the shallow pits and the frail wooden crosses, like that which the Baas’s leather boot had crushed a half hour before.

We had reached the deepest woods when a gasping, choking cry stopped us short. The thicket directly before us stirred and then lay still as death. The cry had been horrible as a Banshee’s wail, and as mysterious, but it was not the cry of an animal; it was human, and it came from a human being in agony. The Baas crossed himself swiftly and leaped forward, and instantly we had parted the protecting bushes and were looking down on a man lying flat on the ground—a spectre with a thin white face, chattering teeth, enormous frightened eyes, and a filthy, much-worn German uniform.

The soldier did not answer, he did not rise, he lay motionless and hideous, like a beast. Then I caught sight of his left ankle, enormously[103] swollen and wrapped in rags, and his hands—they were thin as sticks. The man was helpless, and he was starving.

And now came a strange thing. We two walked slowly around the man on the ground, as if he were a wild creature caught in a snare. We felt no pity or astonishment; only curiosity. Utterly unemotionally we took note of him and his surroundings. He had no gun, no knife, and no blankets. He lay on some broken boughs, and he seemed to have covered himself with boughs at night. The wild, haggard eyes turned in their sockets and watched us as we moved, but otherwise no part of the man stirred. He seemed transfixed, frozen in an agony of fear and horror.

“Ashes! He has had a fire here, monsieur, but it was days ago.” At the man’s feet the Baas had discovered the remnants of a little fire. “Holy blue!” he added in astonishment, “he has eaten these!”

A pile of small green twigs lay near the fire. The bark had been chewed from them!

At the end of our search we turned again to the man on the ground. “Who are you? What are you doing here?” I demanded again. There was no answer. “Baas, have you a flask?”

The old man slowly drew a little leather-clad bottle from his breast pocket and passed it to me in silence. He offered it with obvious reluctance, and watched jealously as I knelt and dropped a little stream of liquid between the parted lips of the creature on the ground. The man’s lips sucked inward, his throat choked at the raw liquor, he opened his mouth wide and gasped horribly for breath, his knees twitched, and his wrists trembled as if he were dying. Then the parched mouth tried to form words; it could only grimace.

For a moment I felt a mad impulse to leap on that moving mouth and crush it into stillness; such an impulse as makes a hunter wring the neck of a wounded bird. Instead, I continued dropping the stinging liquor and listening.

Then came the first word. “More!” the[105] black lips begged, and I emptied the flask into them. The Baas sighed plaintively. “German?” the soldier whispered.

“Missing.” He used the German word vermisst—the word employed in the official lists of losses to designate the wounded or dead who are not recovered, and those lost by capture or desertion.

“He says he is a German soldier—a deserter, I suppose, trying to make his way over the frontier to Holland. And he is starving.”

The Baas’s face became a battleground of emotions. His kindly eyes glared merrily,[106] his lips twisted until his beard seemed to spread to twice its natural width. Instantly his face became grave again, then puzzled, even anxious. A stream of invective and imprecation in mingled French and Flemish poured from his troubled lips, and he stamped his feet vigorously.

“For you, yes; for me, no. The Germans can only disgrace me as a member of the Relief Commission. They cannot kill me.”

“So am I, Baas. Yet you must decide, and not I. It is much more dangerous for you than for me.”

We stared into each other’s eyes, trying to guess each other’s thoughts. Every one in Belgium knows that the German army sows its informers everywhere. We could not even trust each other in that stricken country. Deserters and traitors were tracked like dogs. Any one who gave aid or comfort to such persons did so at the risk of his life. It is said that pretended deserters deliberately trapped Belgians into aiding them, and then betrayed their hosts. Something of the sort was hinted in the famous case of Miss Edith Cavell. Knowledge, then, bade us be cautious; instinct alone bade us be kind.

The Baas’s wide eyes turned again to the creature on the ground, and he sighed plaintively. “Monsieur,” he began, in a very[108] low, gentle voice, “I will help him. Give me my flask and I will go for food and drink. Then we must plan. Does it please you to remain here?”

I knelt beside the soldier and chafed his filthy hands until blood flowed again in his dry veins. The swollen pupils of his eyes brightened. He talked continuously in a thin trickling whisper—a patter of information about dinners he had eaten, wines he had drunk, his military service, his hardships, and his physical and mental sensations. I had read of victims of scurvy in the Arctic snows dreaming and talking day and night of food, only of food. So it was with the starving soldier. The liquor had made him slightly delirious, and he babbled on and on.

His broken ankle pained him. When I moved him about to rest it, his lightness astonished me. The man had been large and heavy; he was shrunken to a bag of[109] bones. His uniform hung about him like a sack, and it seemed as if the slightest jar would snap his arms and legs. Tears welled under his heavy, dirty eyelids. “Mother! Mother!” he whispered once. “Art thou there? Mother!” Then, as his eyes again cleared and he saw the trees interarched above him—the trees which the Baas had told me were one spirit; the grim, silent, sepulchral trees; the haunted, malignant trees which had wooed him with their shelter and then broken him and starved him; the trees beneath which his forest-dwelling ancestors had cowered for thousands of years and to which they had offered human sacrifices—he broke down and sobbed horribly. “She is not here! She is not here! No, she is not here!” he repeated over and over again.

When the Baas returned, we covered the deserter with our coats and fed him. Perhaps we did wrong to give him food, although I think now that he was doomed before we found him. We did our best, but it was not[110] enough. In less than an hour, after a horrible spell of vomiting, the poor man was beyond all help of ours. His eyes rolled desperately, his breath came in horrid gasps, and he grew rigid like a man in an epileptic fit.

We tore open the breast of his uniform to ease his laboured breathing. A metal identification disk hung on a cord from about his neck over a chest which was like a wicker-work of ribs. His belly was sunken until one almost saw the spinal column through it. His tortured lungs subsided little by little, the terrifying sound of his breathing sank to nothing, his head thrust far back and over to the right side, his arms stiffened slowly, his mouth fell open.

We watched, as if fascinated, the pulsing vein in his emaciated neck, still pumping blood through a body which had ceased to breathe. The top of the blood column at last appeared, like mercury in a thermometer. It fell half an inch with each stroke of the famished heart. It reached the base of the[111] neck and sank from sight, and still we stared and stared. The man was dead, yet I seemed to have an awful vision of billions of sentient cells, billions of little selfish lives which had made up his life, fighting, choking, starving to death within that cooling clay.

The Baas bent his head, uncovered, and crossed himself. With a quick stooping motion he closed the wide-open eyes and straightened the bent limbs. Then he rose to his full height and looked at me sadly. “This man had a mother, monsieur,” he said. “We must forget the rest.”

In the pit where the other German had lain we buried the body of the deserter, and we found and repaired the little lath cross and set it up at the grave’s head. But first I took from about the neck of the corpse the oval medallion which told the man’s name and regimental number. It was a silver medal, finer than those usually worn by privates in the German army. I have it by me as I write, and on it is etched the brave sentence,[112] “God shield you from all dangers of warfare, and render you back to us safe and victorious!”

I was late for breakfast at the Château, but Van Steen kindly made room for me at his right hand. “Aha, monsieur,” he called gaily, “we thought you were helping to find the deserter.”

“The German deserter. A file of soldiers woke us up at seven o’clock, inquiring for one of their men who ran away from Mons a month ago. They are searching the stables and the forest. They have traced him here to our commune. I hope they catch him!”

My fingers clutched the silver disk in my pocket. “I think they will not catch him, messieurs. He ran away a month ago, you say?”

“A month ago.... But it is nothing to us, eh? Let us eat our breakfasts.” The Baron bowed grandly to me. “Monsieur le Délégué,” he began in his smooth,[113] formal voice, “once again we remind ourselves that it is thanks to you and the generous American people that we have bread. It is thanks to you that our noble Belgium is not starving.... Eh bien! Let us eat our breakfasts.”

VIII
THE GLORY OF TINARLOO

A second time we seated ourselves at our little round table in the restaurant on the boulevard Anspach—the director of the art museum and I. A mug of light Belgian beer was before each of us, and a copy of La Belgique telling of the Somme battles. The director’s hands shook as he reached for the newspaper and his half-finished beer. His breath came in short, apoplectic gasps. He was wildly angry. A couple of minutes before a Flemish newsboy had rushed into the restaurant and shouted, “Aeroplane! The Germans are shooting it!” And the restaurant had emptied like a hive, filling the boulevard, where every one gazed at the dull gray dragonfly droning at an immense height over the city, pursued[115] with soft white smoke-flowers which thudded as they bloomed in the upper air. While we watched, an old peasant in wooden shoes and padded black petticoats dropped her market basket on the director’s toes. He forgot aeroplane and anti-aircraft guns, war, the crowds, and me, his guest. He howled, he cursed, he danced; and now that we were safe again at our table in the restaurant, anathema and malediction still tumbled from his full red lips.

“Ces sales paysants, ils sont des brutes! Imbéciles! Idiots! Cochons!” he stuttered, his feet prancing under the table. “They are beasts truly, monsieur: not men, but beasts, these peasants. What a temper I am in. But these beasts of peasants. Ah!...” he smiled suddenly and went on, “I will tell you a story of them.

“You have heard, monsieur, of Van de Werve, the artist? He was of the school of Rubens; he died in Italy, very young. He had only twenty-three years when he died. He was not rich; he was very poor. But[116] he had the spirit, the genius, the flair, and Rubens loved him. The Master said one day, ‘You must go to Italy to study. Here is a purse of gold. Here are letters of introduction to my friends. Here is a horse. Go to Italy.’ And the young man started. Months went by and no word of him came to Rubens or the other friends he had in Antwerp. He did not arrive in Italy. The purse of gold, the letters of introduction, the horse, the pupil of Rubens—all were completely lost to sight. After a year some friends set out to search for him, and behold! in the village of Tinarloo in Brabant they found him, painting an altar piece for the chapel of that place, and kissing and clipping the daughter of the burgomaster, who sat on his knee! He was always gallant, was Van de Werve, and as he rode into Tinarloo on his way to Italy, he had seen and fallen in love with the burgomaster’s daughter and sat at her feet for a year.

“But the altar piece, monsieur! You have never seen it? Ah, that was magnificent—‘The[117] Virgin of the Stair’—gold, green, ravishing! What atmosphere! What feeling! What soul!

“I saw it only once before the war. I tried to buy it for the museum, but those dirty peasants of Tinarloo would not give it up. Ugh—a village of fat farmers smelling of dungheaps and cattle pens and garlic! Their chapel was bastard Gothic—no fit place for such an altar piece. I urged the curé to sell, but he would not. He was ignorant as his peasants, but he was crafty, too. He said the picture was the glory of Tinarloo, the chief joy of the peasants. I offered him twice as much as I first intended, thinking he meant to bargain with me; three times, four times as much. He refused two thousand francs, monsieur!

“Afterward came the war. I am a brave man, monsieur. I am not afraid of the Germans. When they advanced near to Tinarloo I thought of the ‘Virgin of the Stair.’ ‘It must be saved[118],’ I said to myself. ‘Those peasants, that curé will be glad to give it up now.’ I hurried there in a cart. Eastward, near Namur, the great guns roared. There stood sentries along the roads. Peasants were running away before the Germans with farmcarts piled with goods. They blocked the road, and I had even to beat them out of my way with my whip.

“So I reached Tinarloo. Every one was terrified. I went to the chapel. The curé was there, and the burgomaster, a toothless old man with a dirty beard. ‘Give me the picture, quick,’ I exclaimed. ‘I will save it from the Germans. Quick!’ ‘No, monsieur,’ said the curé. ‘The picture will stay here. It is the glory of Tinarloo; it is the chief joy of our peasants.’

“There came a scream and a roar from the street, monsieur, like the sound of a great storm, and I knew the Germans were shelling the village. The old burgomaster bellowed something. I do not understand Flemish, but I knew he said something of the church and the picture; maybe it was that the Germans always destroy churches[119] and pictures. He hobbled out ‘The picture, the picture, give me the picture!’ I roared at the curé. ‘Give it to me or I will take it. Fool! the Germans will take it if I do not. Give it to me. Quick!’ ‘It is the glory of Tinarloo; the chief joy of our peasants. I will not give it.’ ‘Then I will take it,’ I shouted, for I was stronger than he, monsieur. He clutched me, but I threw him off and grasped the picture by the corner. There came another roar, terrible, and a part of the church tower fell through the roof. The curé screamed and dropped to his knees, praying. I worked to get the picture from the frame.

“Suddenly, monsieur, I was grasped and thrown down. Those brutes of peasants had come into the church; twelve, fifteen of them, following the burgomaster with the dirty beard. They held me fast with their stinking hands. One of them tried to strangle me, and my neck bears the marks to this day. Bang—a shell fell in the churchyard and bits of shrapnel ripped the windows.[120] The church was choked with dust and roared with noise. The curé stood up before the picture. He yelled to the animals who held me down. They loosed me, and I stood upright, gasping. One of them had a great club in his hand, another a dung-fork, another a flail. They gathered close to the curé, close to the picture, and talked; the fools talked while shells flew, knowing the Germans always aim at churches; yet they talked.

“Then the curé came down to me where I was standing. ‘They say to give you the picture, monsieur,’ he said. ‘But you must swear by this cross to bring it back when all is safe. It is the glory of Tinarloo; it is the chief joy——’

“Monsieur, there was a scream like devils in torment and a shock like earthquake. I was knocked from my feet. Bricks, timbers fell. Dust covered me, and I lost consciousness. Long afterward I found myself lying in the grass of the churchyard, among the black crosses, and the curé kneeling over[121] me; only the curé! ‘Go,’ he said. His mouth was bleeding from a deep cut and his gown was slashed to ribbon. ‘Go, go,’ he said. I heard him as if in a dream.[122] ‘Go! There is no longer any picture. Go! before the Germans come.’

“So I came away, monsieur.... They are strange beasts, these Belgian peasants.”

IX
A FLEMISH FANCY

“The instant Father Guido died his naked soul leaped from his body and ran up the air as on a stair.” Odile stopped her story. “Hoo-oo,” she sighed reproachfully, crossing her gaunt old hands over her middle and staring at my sleepy head. “Mynheer is not listening!”

Odile always came into my bedroom before I was up in the morning. It was her function to waken me, and then to gossip with me while she opened the green Venetian blinds, tightly closed the windows against the noxious air of morning, laid out linen, and prepared my bath in an adjoining room. Her thin, motherly face was the first thing I saw when I wakened; always smiling, no matter if things had gone well or ill, always[123] ready to tell me a story if that were needed to put me in a good humour. “All well, Odile?” “Ja, mynheer, except that the Germans half killed a policeman in front of the house last night. He screamed horribly, mynheer.” Such was a typical morning’s news.

She petted me outrageously, and, although she never summoned courage to assert it to my face, among the servants below-stairs she gave herself airs and boldly called me her bébé. I confided to her my love affairs in return for which small flatteries she embroidered my handkerchiefs, criticised my unstarched American shirts, doped me faithfully whenever I fell ill, and protested eloquently against the perils of too frequent bathing. Daily baths might be healthy in America; they were certainly unhealthy in Belgium, said Odile.

The tale of what happened to Father Guido comes back to me in fragments. Perhaps Odile did not tell it to me at all. Perhaps she told it when I was too sleepy[124] to remember. In any event, I cannot now tell how much is hers and how much my own. The words, alas! are mine, in any case.

“He was a holy priest, a canon in his monastery, but he doubted God’s promise of the bliss of heaven!”

“Yes, wasn’t it, mynheer? So he died, and his soul ran up the air as on a stair. And now listen! The soul of Father Guido stopped for breath and wheezed hard. It was not used to running. It stood stark naked in the sunlight just three meters above the bell-tower of the monastery where he had lived and served God twenty-seven years. The garden looked very sheltered and inviting. You must know that Father Guido loved gardening, mynheer. The soul could see his favourite mulberry tree, and acolytes in gray gowns walking beneath, meditating. One of the acolytes lifted a hand and stole a[125] berry. ‘Rogue!’ the soul thought. It was about to walk down into the garden and remonstrate with the thief when suddenly it leaped into the air as if a wasp had stung it. The heavy monastery bell just below it clanged like an explosion. Bang! went the bell; then again, bang! and after a pause, again, bang! ‘Some one is dead,’ thought the soul. It licked its lips thoughtfully. They tasted damp and oily. And suddenly it remembered—that was the oil of extreme unction. ‘I am dead,’ said the soul of Father Guido with resignation, ‘and on my way to bliss—I hope.’

“The soul began to climb up long vistas of air, but abruptly it stopped. ‘My God, I’m stark naked!’ it thought; ‘stark naked, and the eye of all the world is on me.’ Not once since Father Guido donned his habit had he been unclothed in public. But the waste of air about the poor soul offered no shelter, and there was no returning the way it had come. Its chest heaved with sorrow and its eyes peered everywhere, above, below, beside[126] it; but nothing—not even a summer cloud—came near to give it shelter. ‘I’m thin and withered and I’ve a belly like a tun,’ the soul said bitterly, and it slapped its thin shanks as it ran, and breathed hard.

“A hawk circled in space, and the soul turned and climbed in the direction of the swinging bird. It got within two meters of the hawk and hailed him in Flemish—for all the birds understand Flemish, mynheer—but the hawk sailed by unheeding, its eye on the distant earth. Father Guido’s soul was disappointed. ‘But if I can’t be heard or seen, it doesn’t much matter about my clothes,’ it said, and climbed on slowly.

“The high air grew very cold, but the exertions of the soul kept it in a healthy perspiration. It gathered strength and agility as it climbed; it seemed to leap from hilltop to hilltop of the atmosphere, and below it earth fell away like a ball dropped into a well. A shadow came crawling from the east, devouring the earth as Father Guido’s soul watched and climbed; the shadow floated[127] like pitch over all the world, silently, swiftly eating everything. It reached the centre of the world. It devoured the monastery and went on, gathering all things into its mouth. Long afterward the sun dropped out of sight, and darkness leaped upon the soul high in air and cloaked it in freezing night.

“The soul was dreadfully alone now, alone with millions of winking stars, but it climbed on and on and on.

“Mynheer, no man has ever told how lonely the dead are; how they cry out in the darkness and stretch out their arms; where yesterday there was warmth and light and friendly hands and soft laughter there is only cold, emptiness, nothing. Oh, how lonely the dead are! How lonely the dead are!

“Men do not know how many months or years or centuries the soul climbed up through the swarming stars, but at last it came to the foot of battlements shooting up into space—battlements that rose like flames rooted in clouds, and burning so brightly that the strained eyes[128] of the soul pinched with the bliss of gazing. And still the soul of Father Guido climbed and climbed and climbed.

“‘It’s too beautiful for purgatory; this must be heaven,’ said the soul to itself, ‘but there’s no door.’ And indeed, mynheer, there seemed to be no door, for the poor soul climbed up and up those topless cliffs, but found no entrance at all. ‘There’s no door! There’s no door! There’s no door!’ the soul of Father Guido repeated like a prayer as it climbed beside the battlements.

“‘God and Mary help us!’ it sobbed at last in despair; and no sooner had it said these words than it saw a little gate opening into the jewelled heights, and it flew up hopefully.

“Outside the doorway it paused. There was a door, half closed, and the soul was afraid. It felt conscious again of its nakedness, although the paunch was gone from constant exercise and hard muscles showed under its star-burned skin.[129] ‘I’m a thin old codger, though; not presentable to St. Peter at all. I’ll wait behind the door-post until somebody appears.’ So it pressed its ribs close against the door-jamb and waited. An hour went by, or a minute, or an age; still nobody appeared. Father Guido’s soul grew anxious. ‘I’ll look inside—just one peek,’ it whispered. ‘One peek won’t matter.’ So it gently pried open the pearly door and looked in.

“An armchair, mynheer, carved of jewels, like the battlements, stood beside the door, but the chair was empty. The soul looked farther. ‘Hum!’ it said thoughtfully; ‘there’s no pater hospitalis here. I’m disappointed. And St. Peter’s left no substitute.’

“Father Guido, you must understand, mynheer,” said Odile, by way of parenthesis, “had been pater hospitalis in his monastery. He took care of the guests, he selected the wines, he was jovial in welcoming those who came and tearful in bidding adieu to those who went; so he was distressed that no one should meet him at the gate of heaven.”

I nodded sympathetically, and she went[130] on: “A little weed grew in a crack in the golden pavement where the holy saint’s feet had worn the flagstone smoothest, and a green scurf of moss pushed out here and there in the golden gutters. ‘That’s strange; that’s strange indeed,’ said the soul of Father Guido; but it had little time to wonder at small things like these, for the whole of heaven towered before its eyes. Streets and mansions and gardens blazed with lights of a thousand colours; mansions of silver and amethyst and jacinth rose amid bowers of roses; towers and roofs and walls and lattices shone like jewels in changeless sunlight, and avenues of strange trees stretching farther than eye could see glowed green as emerald along streets of gold.

“But there was no sound anywhere, mynheer. Father Guido’s soul held its breath with holy awe and fear. In spite of the warmth of the eternal sunlight sluicing its bare limbs, cold perspiration came out on its neck and face, and goose-flesh pricked its legs. The soul hid itself in a rose hedge and[131] waited breathlessly. Nothing appeared. Still there was no sound. Presently the soul crept out again and pattered cautiously up the golden avenue, picking little rose thorns from its sides and back as it marched.

“Glorious beyond the prophecies of saints and evangels was heaven, rising terrace on terrace, height upon height, glowing with the light of gems, bourgeoning with gardens, and flashing with pools of clear blue water; so that the soul of Father Guido climbed and climbed, speechless and marvelling. And still there was no sound but those of its bare feet slapping the golden pave.

“So the solitary soul came at last to the summit of all Created Things; to the Mountain that is like a Diamond, with the sunlight flashing naked swords above it; to the Palace which is carved like a human heart from a Jewel for which there is No Name; and the soul knew that this was the Home of the King of Kings, of the Verigod of Verigods, and it knelt on the pavement in terrified awe and worshipped.

“But, mynheer, the naked toes of the poor soul of Father Guido nestled into the heart of a little thistle growing in the grass beside the golden stair leading up to the Palace of God, and the prick roused it from its devotions, so that it sprang to its feet abruptly, and bent over and rubbed the hurt digits. ‘God save us!’ it ejaculated piously. ‘Salvation or damnation, that hurts! But I must go on!’ And it pattered up the palace steps.

“Mynheer, there were no guards at the steps. There were no watchmen at the door. There were no angels inside the door. The corridors were empty. But at the far end of the central corridor the soul saw a curtain hanging from ceiling to floor, red as blood, tremendous, veiling mysteries.

“The soul of Father Guido went forward to see what the curtain concealed. It reached the curtain. It stretched out its hand. It touched the curtain. Then it caught the hem and pulled.”

“But no, listen. You have forgotten the power of God. The soul of Father Guido dropped the curtain and fell flat on the ground. It could not believe what it had seen, and it fell to screaming, the most horrible screams that heaven ever heard. It screamed again and again, like a child in the dark, like a little lost child.

“And then suddenly, mynheer, there was a roar of wings, and loud singing, and a brightness new, like lightning, and the air was thick with angels playing and dancing and whistling. Father Guido had believed, you see, or else his soul would not have been disappointed and would not have screamed. He doubted as you doubt, mynheer!

“And now, when St. Peter is tired, the[134] soul of Father Guido sits in the chair beside the little gate to welcome newcomers, as he used to do in the monastery, and he is kind to those who come, mynheer, for he, too, has known what it is to doubt.”

X
THE SWALLOWS OF DIEST

My automobile broke down on the outskirts of Diest, and I was obliged to spend the night in the Gouden Kat—a typical Flemish inn. A dozen little round tables stood outside on the flagstones bordering the Grand’ Place, the supper room within was divided about equally among food, drink, and billiards, and madame sat in state behind a showcase of cigarettes. There were no Germans lodged in the Gouden Kat so I was given the best room, and as I came down the tiny, twisted stair after a good night’s sleep in a high bed with carved posts at either corner, a tester and lacy hangings, under a black crucifix and the faded eyes of a colour print of King Albert, a small gray feather spun slowly[136] down and fell at my feet in the doorway. There was a flutter of wings, and a swallow skimmed over my head, almost touching me, and out through the open door.

A few gloomy citizens, an occasional housewife, small boys and girls in neat cheap clothes and noisy wooden shoes stalked across the open square before the cathedral. A squad of German soldiers tramped by on their way to the Kommandantur in the Stadthuis. Soon mass was over, and a flood of grave, black-clad figures filled the square and melted away into the by-streets. A worn black flag fluttered from a pole on the very top of the church.

“Madame, what is the black flag on your cathedral?” I asked, sipping black coffee.

“Monsieur, it is the flag which we of Diest hoisted when the Germans came. Aerschot, Louvain, Schaffen—they were destroyed by the Germans. Diest,” she shrugged her shoulders,[137] “Diest is as you see it.”

Across the Grand’ Place, behind the gates of a porte cochère belonging to a rival inn, I found my chauffeur, Alexis, busy with the broken motor.

“Monsieur, this is the cylinder which does not march,” he called loudly, his tricky eyes eager for praise and his mouth smiling blandly behind his curved moustaches. “More oil!” he ordered imperiously from the bent old innkeeper who stood, cap in hand, watching; and while the man shuffled off with a wash-bowl, Alexis loudly continued to explain to me the difficulty. “I am mechanician as well as chauffeur, monsieur,” he declaimed, although I was well aware of the fact. “I will arrange everything. In an hour all is arranged.”

A side glance gave me the clue to Alexis’s authoritative tone. The young wife of the innkeeper, a heavy flaxen-haired Flemish woman, watched smiling from the open door. Alexis’s gestures and mouthings were for her.

In the rafters over the motor-car I heard soft cheeping, and a swallow slid from a mud cup fixed to one of the timbers and stole out[138] into the morning sunshine. There were other earthen cups, lined no doubt with feathers, in the shadow above us: three or four cups brimming with swallow babies. One after another the gray-blue mothers came and went, circling fearlessly over us, engaged in the sensible business of filling the world with swallows.

“In an hour, monsieur, all is arranged,” Alexis repeated, trying to get rid of me. So I determined to stay.

“Een potteke Lovens voor mynheer, Marieke, allez!” chuckled the bent old innkeeper, coming up with a bowl of oil and shoving her with his shoulder.

Alexis sulked, but worked; the innkeeper[139] watched admiringly; I sat in a tiny chair propped against the inn door and talked with madame, while the swallows circled and cheeped overhead. The motor backfired when it was tested, and the swallows screamed in fright and fled through a cloud of stifling smoke which rose into their nests. But in a moment they were back again at work, filling the world with swallows.

“Like the cannon, is it not?” said madame in sluggish, country-bred Flemish, speaking of the motor’s tricks. “But the swallows return.” She laid her hand on her breast with a curious, passionate gesture.

“He is your husband?” I pointed to the old innkeeper, bent almost double over the motor as he watched Alexis.

“I shall have one in three months—about All Saints’ Day, mynheer.” She spoke with the simplicity of a peasant, to whom life and death and birth and growth are the simplest things in a complex world.

I changed the subject. She was only a peasant, yet she knew how to rebuff my levity. “Why did you marry, madame?” I asked, and my tone was serious, befitting the question.

“But why did you choose him?” I gestured again toward the old man, still bent[141] over Alexis as he tugged at the cylinder core.

“I did not choose, mynheer. The swallows,” she pointed to the earthen nests, “do they choose? Other people, do they choose?”

“No,” I admitted, astonished at her. “It is Nature. They do not choose.” I felt a sudden respect for the dully smiling enigma before me. Love? choice? romance? the adventure of living?—what were they after all? The stress of towns has bred these fantastic ideas in men’s brains. This country woman knew she was no different from birds and beasts, and she knew that it did not really matter to anybody—not even to herself. In a few slow words, still smiling, she sketched the dull drama of her life: peasant-born, unbeautiful, bought from her family by the old innkeeper as soon as the Church permitted her to marry, twice a mother, but both her children dead, pregnant again: that was the whole story. She did not know that her recital was sad, or that[142] it could inspire pity. She did not even know that it was interesting. She seemed to tell it instinctively, as a bird cries in the thicket or as a tired dog whines at the door.

“Almost, monsieur,” he answered; then turning to the innkeeper he bawled, “Get me a pan and matches!” He rested his hands on his hips and stared insolently at the woman and me. “Monsieur has seen the flag on the cathedral?” he asked. He continued in Flemish, “The brave men of Diest ran up a white flag while the Germans were still at Liége! Madame says they did well to surrender.”

“I said that to surrender is nothing, myne heeren,” she interrupted slowly, looking at me but addressing us both. “Every thing surrenders.”

“Ha, madame! Foolishness! Talk like a Belgian patriot if you please. We never surrender, we Belgians: we fight, fight, fight!” Alexis swung his arm and waited confidently for my applause.

“Murder? arson? rape? pillage? millions dead and maimed? millions enslaved? Madame!” I found myself addressing her as if she were a logician instead of a peasant.

“It is nothing, nothing; I know it is nothing. I feel it here.” Again she laid her hand on her breast with the singular passionate gesture I had marked before. “It does not change anything; it does not change the soil of the earth, it does not change the man, it does not change the woman, it does not change the child. Then it is nothing. We of Belgium are like rain falling on a field: they [the Germans] are like rain falling. We do not choose: they do not choose. It is all—nothing.”

Alexis leaped forward, his tricky eyes blazing,[144] his moustaches stiff with anger. These patriotic outbursts were no new thing to me, yet I was astonished at him. He trembled with honest emotion. “Madame! You are no Belgian, you are no Christian, you are no woman!” he shouted. “You have no sense of honour, you have no patriotism, you have no decency. Bah! you would have us handed over to the Boches!” He stopped his tirade abruptly and addressed me in French, “Monsieur, the car is ready in a moment, if you please. This woman—this woman——” He raised his arm as if he would strike her. All this time she had stood watching and listening, still smiling heavily and making no move. “This woman is a peasant, she is not human, she is a beast.... Here!” he called to the innkeeper, who had reappeared, “give me the matches. Hold the basin there.” He jumped back to his place and pressed the self-starter. The motor hummed with curious coughs and gasps from the jury-rigged cylinder.[145] “It will march until we reach home,” called Alexis, his voice still keyed high with anger. “Monsieur is ready?”

I paid the modest reckoning and climbed into the tonneau. The woman stared past me at Alexis; even my “good day” was unheard or at any rate unnoticed. The motor roared and the frightened swallows flew. The innkeeper flung open the double gates, removing his cap and bowing low, and we rolled slowly into the square.

There was a patter of slippers on the cobblestones behind us, a gasp and a choking cry, and madame was hanging to the running-board beside Alexis, pouring forth a torrent of passionate Flemish. The German sentries before the Stadthuis across the square stared anxiously, passersby stopped as if thunder-struck, I looked back and saw the old innkeeper standing open-mouthed and motionless in the doorway.

“Mon Dieu, monsieur, she wants to go with me!” muttered Alexis, mechanically stopping the car. The woman flung her arms toward me with a piteous gesture.[146] Her heavy, ugly face streamed tears. All her reserve, her self-control were gone. She had chosen at last, and she had chosen this!

“Wants what, you fool?” I exclaimed, appalled. “Drive on, Alexis. Make her go back. You know the Germans would arrest us at the first sentry-post. Damn you, anyway!” I roared, my anger mounting to outraged brutality to think that a chauffeur’s cheap amour might land us both in a German jail. “What have you done to get us into this mess?”

He thrust his fist into the pleading face. “Go back, go back,” he grunted, apparently without a trace of feeling for her.

She ignored me and again burst into a storm of entreaty, all aimed at Alexis. “No, no, no, no,” he shouted in answer to her pleas. “Go back to your husband! Go, you—animal!”

Her hand flew to her breast with the old gesture. As the automobile leaped forward, she walked a few steps toward the inn. I turned and watched her: Alexis stared straight in front of him. She wheeled and looked after us, her hand still at her breast, her body swaying from side to side. Then she looked at the inn, and again at the fleeing car. Finally, as we dashed away from the square, I saw her stumbling toward the wretched old man, who still stood in the blazing sunlight which streamed through the open doorway, while the swallows of Diest circled and cried over his hoary head.

XI
PENSIONERS

Wilson belonged emphatically to the genus Homo sapiens; species, Texicana; habitat, southwestern parts of the United States and Antwerp, Belgium. He was tall and lithe and handsome, and also sentimental. He was the only member of the American Commission for Relief in Belgium who flatly refused to fly the American flag from his automobile; he was the only member who publicly declared that he said his prayers every night, but, as he confided to me once in a moment of great emotion, he had never in his life prayed for the President of the United States. The reason for these startling facts was that Wilson was an unreconstructed rebel and wore pinned in his shirt, just over his heart, a little butternut[149] badge which his grandfather had worn in ’63—a symbol of the dead Confederacy and the Lost Cause.

We called him “Johnny Reb,” “Tex,” or “Stonewall Jackson,” just as it happened to strike us.

Wilson was disturbed about something. “The Socialists are right,” he said, thoughtfully, drawing his six feet two from the chair beside my office desk. “There’s only one way to prevent wars—kill the spirit of patriotism. Look at that old fool out there!” he continued, bitterly, pointing toward a gray-bearded Landsturm soldier in shapeless flat service cap, faded gray-green uniform and high hob-nailed boots, who, with gun on shoulder, strode along the pavement of the Graanmarkt on his way to the Kommandantur: “That old fellow is probably a toy-maker in Nuremberg or a barber in Munich, and here he is wandering round Belgium ready to die for Kaiser and Vaterland!”

“Mankind’s a failure,” I acknowledged cheerfully. “Go on, Wilson.” I knew these moods.

“The trouble is this,” he drawled.[151] “There are five old Belgians in the outer office who have come to ask about their pension money. It’s the first time I’ve had to do with Yankee pensioners. They were here yesterday,” he went on, impressively, “and for a solid hour I listened to one of ’em making patriotic speeches and telling me how he fought and bled and died for my country—my country!—a damned Yankee pensioner.”

I laughed gleefully, and Wilson turned on his heel. “Sit down, you Johnny Reb,” I gasped. “What’s it all about? Are they Belgian citizens who fought in our Civil War?”

“‘Civil War’!” he quoted. “There you go again! Haven’t I explained to you that you mustn’t call it the ‘Civil War?’ It’s the ‘War between the States.’”

A timid, eminently respectful knock interrupted us, and Peeters, the clerk, thrust his head through the half-open door, bowing to each of us in turn. “The men have come,” he announced.

“The men who saw Mr. Wilson yesterday.” He coughed apologetically.[152] “The men for the pensions. They want to see you, sir.”

I looked at Wilson, who was still meditating flight and cursing under his breath. “Send them right in, Peeters. Mr. Wilson and I are delighted to see them.”

“Delighted, are we?” my victim snarled; then his voice changed to honeyed sweetness—the sweetness underlying all Southern courtesy and hospitality, which is the sweetest in the world. “Aah, goeden dag, myneheeren, quel plaisir de vous revoir! Mynheer van der Aa, Mynheer de Vos, Mynheer Dekkers, Mynheer van Oolen, Mynheer Anderson.” He introduced them with a flourish—a little file of old men, dressed in dingy Sunday best, with heavy leather shoes in place of the customary slippers or wooden blokken, each holding his cap in his hand, each bearded and bewhiskered, each with thick weather-worn skin and little eyes folded deep in wrinkled cheeks. These were the pensioners.

The first of them was scarcely five feet high. Little black eyes snapped out from beneath his bushy brows, and he wore a sweeping white moustache and an imperial. The[153] second was tall and had once been blond; now he was bald as a prophet, and his great white beard swung from his heavy head like a broad pendulum ticking off the minutes. The third was blind; his graceful, narrow head tilted forward, a flickering smile played about his mouth, and I noticed that when his attention was strongly attracted his eyes occasionally turned up with a strange abortive movement, as if he might take the darkness by surprise and change it into light. The fourth man stood straight and soldierly, his knees tight together, his great feet splayed out from his ankles, and his arms hanging perpendicularly. He had an ox-like head, and his wide shoulders were heavy and stooped with age. The fifth man was an aged negro, and feeble-minded.

Peeters handed me a little paper which I read aloud: “Jan van der Aa, Pieter de Vos, Georges Dekkers, Willem van Oolen, David Anderson. Is that right?”

“Ja, ja, mynheer”—“Parfaitement, monsieur”—“Yes, sair,” the voices quavered.

“Don’t you all speak English?” I demanded. “You’re entitled to American pension money, yet you don’t speak our language? Vous ne parlez pas——”

The little man with the imperial burst into volcanic speech. “Sir,” he ejaculated, “they have forgotten the Eengleesh, but I—I speak it pairfectly.”

Wilson sighed. “Yes, hang it, he does!” he whispered to me. “He’s the damnedest, convincingest, Fourth-of-July orator you ever listened to. Now he’s off! You can’t stop him!”

“Jan van der Aa, sir,” he acknowledged, bowing, and continued impressively: “Sirs, you see beforre you five men who fought in the Grrand Arrmy of the Rrepublic, in the grrandest arrmy of the grreatest rrepublic of the earth.” He rolled the rr’s like thunder down the valleys of his speech.[155] “It was not for nothing that we fought. Liberrty and Union are not little things. They are eterrnal. They are the same in everry country and in everry time. We five were at Gettysburrg and Cold Harrbourr, de Vos was at Antietam, Dekkars was wounded at Atlanta, I was at Chickamauga underr Thomas, Anderson was at Peterrsburrg”—the strange, foreign accent turned the familiar battle names into mighty voices, voices to conjure dead men from the grave and dead deeds from the old books where they lie buried; the man before us was a born orator, he was winsome, sweet, powerful, pathetic, by turns—“Forrt Fisherr, Culpeperr Courrt-House, Vicksburrg, Shiloh, Champion’s Hill, Cairro, Chattanooga.” The tremendous words rolled forth; the file of old men stirred; they awoke and threw up their heads as he trumpeted forth these names, and I seemed to see them young again and soldiers of the Republic.

But Van der Aa stopped abruptly. He turned half apologetically to the others, speaking a most vulgar and harsh Flemish:[156] “’k Heb ’t verget—I’d forgotten what we came for—our moneys,” he said. “Sirs”—he addressed Wilson and me once more—“our pension moneys are overdue. We have received nothing since Antwerp was captured. The American Consul-General writes, but we receive nothing. Will you tell Washington of us? The Government have forgotten; we are far away, and so they have forgotten us.”

“Oh, tell them you’ll get their money for them. Tell them anything,” he whispered, harshly, fumbling his handkerchief. “Stop that devil of a Van der Aa! You don’t understand; that man can talk you to tears!”

“Mr. Wilson knows all about the case,” I said. “He will cable to Washington the first time he goes to Rotterdam. We shall do everything in the world to get your money.”

Van der Aa thanked me with a gesture and a low bow, and repeated my words in Flemish to the others. They thanked us slowly. “And now, sirs——” he began again.

“——the only things men gladly die for, freedom and union. Freedom and union, one and inseparable, now and forever.”

The spell came over us like a ghost—the ghost of something high and splendid—and the voice of America spoke in conquered Belgium. Not through American lips, but through the lips of an alien; and not the voice of America to-day, divided, disunited, enslaved in a thousand ways to fear and base interests; not the America, I suppose, of the sixties, blatantly provincial, cursed with over-confidence, torn with civil war; but the voice of the ideal America—that America of the spirit which Lincoln must have seen as Moses saw the Holy Land from Mount Nebo, the America which may be, which must be; the mighty nation like a city set upon a hill, with the glory of heaven shining upon her, and young men and women singing in her streets.

I mopped my eyes; Wilson coughed and blew his nose. The five old men stood imperturbable,[158] and Van der Aa spoke on and on. He was pitiless and glorious. As he talked I saw a flag borne to the tops of tall mountains, flung over precipices, whipped through morasses and dismal swamps, flung up from the sea and set firm in rocky earth; and that flag was the American flag—the flag of Wilson’s country and my country. These men had followed that flag—these five aliens. I saw freedom and union like simple things, things to be held in the hand as well as in the heart; necessary, elemental, homely things. And I saw the world-wide war which is waged in every land against freedom and union—the fight of caste against caste, of class against class, of masters with slaves, of the state against its citizens, of the thousand and one Frankenstein monsters of commerce and industry and politics and religion, fighting against the human beings who have created them. Everywhere I gazed there was war.

“Liberty and union, one and inseparable, now and forever,” concluded Van der Aa, his right arm outstretched to emphasize[159] his last period, the eyes of the blind man straining up to catch the vanished sun.

Next morning Wilson’s motor car arrived an hour late at the office, and I noticed that from a staff wired to the wind-shield there floated a little American flag.

“Yes,” he said, defiantly, “I say kill patriotism and you kill war. I’m taking the first step. I used to be for the South against the world, now I’m for America against the world, and maybe some day I’ll be for all the world against the world.

“I’ll see you late to-night,” he added, very seriously.[160] “I’ve got to go to Rotterdam to cable Washington about those old pensioners.”

XII
DOÑA QUIXOTE

Her parents had always regarded her as a sort of stepchild. There was Elaine, her elder sister, docile, petite, with fair looks and a proper dot, married at eighteen and mother of two babies; but Virginie was twenty and unwed. Although I did not know her until 1914, I can fancy the picture in the ancient moated castle of Drie Toren two years before when Virginie faced the old Baron, her father, and declared her independence of parental restraints of all sorts. The old Baron, bearded like a Numidian lion, had a special vocabulary for matters which concerned his unmarried daughter. “Incroyable! pénible! triste! terrible! effrayante! bête!”—I heard them dozens of times a day—and the shy, wilted[161] floweret of a Baroness, her mother, sat with hands placidly folded, waiting for the final catastrophe which was sure to overwhelm her “pauvre Virginie.”

La Baronne Virginie was delighted to tell me of the famous interview with her father. She told it with shrieks and giggles, between puffs from one of my strongest cigarettes, her cold, gray-blue eyes—inherited from some merciless Viking ancestor who had once harried the coasts of Flanders—dancing with delight, and her bright golden hair waving as she tossed her head to give point to the jest.

“‘Mais, mon père,’ j’ai dit.... The devil! I forget always and speak French. That morning I was very angry, so I slid down the banisters and shrieked with the top of my breath, and there was my father at the foot of the stair, like this!” She made an adorable caricature of the leonine astonishment of her father at sight of the apparition of his daughter, her foot caught in her skirt,[162] kicking vigorously to free herself and spreading tatters of lace petticoat over the Chinese carpet. “‘Come here,’ he roared, as if I were a servant. ‘Come here, cher Papatje, s’il te plaît. I have something to say,’ I answer very respectfully, as a Belgian girl must always speak: ‘I will not marry. I will not worship some man like Jules. (Jules is my brother-in-law. He has red hair and a wart on his nose. Ugh!) I will not have babies. I will not be as Elaine. No, no, no, no, no, I will not. I am going to England to be a suf-fer-a-gette. I will burn churches and bite people. I hate men!’”

“Of course!” The light of her eyes was like the light on Swiss glaciers. “I hate all men—you especially.”

“Ha! I do,” she repeated, following up her advantage. “And I hate my father—enough, not much, just a little. ‘Oufff!’ he says to me,[163] ‘what for a person is this my daughter! Have I not give you all in the world, miserable one?’ ‘No,’ I answer. ‘Freedom? No.’ ‘Freedom!’ he says. ‘Yes, freedom,’ I answer again. ‘It is the century of the woman. We must have freedom.’ (I got that from an American book, but I did not tell him. He was so troubled already.)

“So next day I went to England, and in England I burned one church and bit two people.”

It was I who named her Doña Quixote. For all her Viking eyes she was a perfect Spanish type, such a type as one occasionally finds nowadays in villages of the Dutch Province of Zeeland or in the Belgian Provinces of East Flanders and Antwerp, almost the sole reminders of the days when the Dons lorded it in the Low Countries. She was not brunette, but a Spanish blonde, with a magnificent complexion burnished on the cheeks, straight, aristocratic nose, and jeweled mouth. The oval of her face was positively Mediterranean, and seeing her[164] glorious hair I knew what the Elizabethan poets meant by singing of “golden wires.” She was adorable, perfect, and cold as frost.

“Never ask me the why of anything. It is because I choose. Isn’t that enough?”

“No,” I burst out angrily. “I’m a reasonable being, I’ll have you to know, and I must be treated reasonably. What the dickens——?”

She laughed suddenly and delightedly. “Ice, ice, I thought you were of ice. I thought all Americans were of ice, Monsieur. Good! You thaw. I shall tell you, because you know how to get angry like a Belgian.”

“At the convent school in Bruges where I went to school the nuns call us ‘madame’. It is a school for the petty nobility, you understand, so we are called ‘madame’ just as the little Princess Marie-Jose is called ‘Madame’ and not ‘Mademoiselle la Princesse.’ I like it.”

“That is all one to me,” she responded calmly. “You are to call me ‘madame’.”

“I won’t. Not until you are married, and maybe I won’t even then. Maybe I’ll call you by your first name.”

She examined curiously my flushed face, stubborn, unhappy, disgusted with my own boorishness, but seeing no way out. Her cold gaze took in all that she wanted; noted that I was a fly in her spider-net; and she dimpled and thawed graciously. “Please!” she begged.

“Doña—that is Spanish for a noble lady. I shall call you Doña—Doña Quixote.”

For the first and, I was about to say, the[166] last time, I caught her off her guard, astonished, wounded, a bit angry. But the one word was all I wanted. It showed me I could bully her. That word had been warm and human, utterly unlike the icy flood which normally came from her lips. “Doña Quixote!” I repeated blandly.

“Yes, and you are a madwoman. You won’t listen to the people who love you.”

XIII
IN THE STREET OF THE SPY

The Commissaire of the Arrondissement of Metseys beat on the glass front of the limousine and arrested the mad career of the Government automobile in which we were riding. The soldier-chauffeur (a Belgian in the near-British uniform which the Belgian army now wears, with a small round button in his cap marked with the Belgian colours in concentric circles—black, white, red) turned and looked back into the car inquiringly. “We stop here,” the Commissaire announced in pantomime.

Just five minutes before we had rushed directly under a battery of heavy French guns blazing away like furnaces. I did not know they were French guns—although the accent was marked!—until the Commissaire[168] told me; but then he knew every battery, every cantonment, every airdrome, and every hospital in that little bit of Belgium behind the Yser lines which is still free from the invaders. As we passed the battery, a wave of sulphur had engulfed us, the glass of the limousine rattled dangerously, and that mad chauffeur, putting on all power, had rushed us down the winding Flemish road, scattering stray groups of mild-eyed Belgian infantrymen and cavalrymen and grazing the metallic flanks of lumbering British motor lorries, their canvas sides splashed with Flanders mud, on their way down to the lines. He had rushed us over a little canal where two or three soldiers were fishing sleepily, in spite of the noise of the bombardment. He had dashed us alongside a field of over-ripe wheat, through a long avenue of stunted willows, across an acre of barbed-wire entanglements, and into the town of Zandt, its gray walls gleaming in the splashing sunlight which had just followed the customary morning shower, its claret-red[169] roofs burnished like the morocco binding of old books.

We stepped stiffly from the car on to the slippery cobblestones and stared about us.

“The Germans shell Zandt almost every day,” said the Commissaire coolly. “That French battery we just passed will probably wake them up. Put the car in the lee of that wall, Pierre,” he called to the chauffeur. “We shall be back in ten minutes.”

“This, gentlemen,” he said, as we walked down the principal street of Zandt, “is called the Street of the Spy, because, up to this moment, no German shells have fallen in it. The population of Zandt pretend that it is because the Germans have a spy living in this street. Droll, isn’t it?”

We laughed with him. It is true that no shells had fallen in the Street of the Spy, but they had missed it by inches, not yards or rods. If I have ever said that the Germans do not use heavy calibre shells on unfortified villages and towns, I apologize. They use their very heaviest shells on these little[170] defenceless villages of west Flanders just behind the Yser lines; they throw almost daily shells which are as destructive as cyclones into three or four room dwelling-houses. A row of such houses falls like a sand castle when such a shell arrives.

“But the people want to stay here, of course,” explained the Commissaire. “Where can they go? The peasant and the man of the small town has no capital except his farm or his house or his winkel—his little shop. He has no bank account. He is primitive. He is simple. All he has in the world is here in Zandt. And so he stays. Yes, we give them gas-masks, for the Germans use asphyxiating gas very often here. But it is hardest on the children and the little babies.

“Those boys we are sending away to-morrow to a safe place in France.” He pointed to two youngsters, nine and seven years old, peering through the broken glass of a near-by window.

“Because one has fear of the bombardment, mynheer,” said the boy, shivering.

“This you must see,” said the Commissaire, ducking his head and leading us into a small passageway between two brick walls. “It is the most interesting person in Zandt. She is eighty-three years old. She lost her only grandson in the war. She has nothing to eat except from her little garden. There, see!”

We had emerged on the edge of a tiny plot of land, perhaps twenty-two feet square. A gray one-story cottage, covered with mossy thatch, bounded it on one side; low walls and an outhouse inclosed it on the others. The little plot was cultivated, densely, compactly, expertly—a mosaic of fruits and green vegetables. Two apricot trees trimmed in the French fashion were trained along the wall, and a low vine, with some sort of pendent fruit, hung from the outhouse.

But strangest of all there were three beds of ornamental flowers. I stared hard at them, and suddenly I saw that they were graves!

“Good-day, madame,” the Commissaire called, touching his hat. “See, these are American gentlemen come to look at your little garden.”

She came slowly from the cottage, a wisp of lace in her white hair, wearing the ceremonial black frock which a peasant woman puts on for such feast days as the Feast of the Assumption, a white apron, and leather shoes. “You are welcome, gentlemen, you are welcome,” she said, with the grace of a chatelaine.

“But aren’t those graves?” I asked, pointing to the beds of nasturtiums, geraniums, and marigolds which covered three long mounds at the end of the garden, taking up almost half of the room available for vegetables and fruits. “Madame, aren’t those graves?”

“They have not been here long, madame?” I was looking at the transplanted geraniums, well rooted in the mud, but not yet wholly at home, and the raw, muddy rim about the edges of the three mounds.

I turned to the Commissaire. “None of those is her grandson’s grave?” I asked in a low voice.

“Oh, no,” he muttered. “Her grandson died in Germany. He was taken prisoner at Liége in August, 1914. Madame,” he said to her, “the gentleman asks if he may look at your graves.”

“Oh, yes, mynheeren.” She fluttered down before us, bent rheumatically at the first mound, and pulled at a weed which the rain had freshened.

“‘Pray for the soul of Franz Mueller,’” I read in breathless amazement. “A Boche?”

“And the other two—they are Boches also? ‘Pray for the soul of Max Edelsheim’ and ‘Pray for the soul of Erich Schneider,’” I read aloud. The neat wooden crosses bore also the regimental numbers of the men and the date of their death.

“Boches, too. It happens that they were killed in this garden on a reconnaissance.”

“But why don’t you remove them? You can put them somewhere else, and then this poor old woman can use all her garden. I should think she could hardly raise enough to eat from all this little plot, let alone from half of it.”

We had spoken in French, and of course the old proprietress had not understood. The Commissaire now turned to her, speaking the rhythmic, metrical Flemish of west Flanders. “Madame, the mynheer says that we should take up these bodies and place them in the churchyard. Do you wish it done so?”

At first she did not seem to understand, and bent inquiringly toward the Commissaire, her little gray eyes screwed up in bewilderment at his words. “What is it, mynheer?” she asked.

“Mynheer says that we should remove the three Germans and let you have your garden.”

“Oh, nay, nay,” she remonstrated, shaking her head emphatically. “Nay, mynheeren. God gave me these three graves instead of the grave of my boy. I could not tend them so well if they were in the churchyard. It is too far from my house. Nay, nay, let the three sleep here.”

“There is room in my heart and in my garden, mynheer. I shall keep these three graves, and maybe in Germany there is some one who will keep the grave of my boy.”

“Messieurs, there is no use arguing with a Belgian peasant,” said the Commissaire of Metseys, as we walked back through the Street of the Spy to our waiting automobile.[176] “But she has a fine spirit, that old grandmother.”

XIV
THE WHITE ISLAND
A STORY OF THE GALLIPOLI ADVENTURE

The aviation launch rolled slowly in the grip of the grounds well behind one of the desolate islands off Tenedos, southwest of the entrance to the Dardanelles. The afternoon was windless and humid. Warm, dripping fog covered the launch and hid from her the outlines of the rocky, treeless island in the lee of which she lay. Fog had sprinkled the deck as if with baptismal water, and the day was noiseless except for the lazy slapping of waves against the launch’s side.

A hydro-aeroplane alongside dipped and rose rhythmically with the launch’s motion, and the aviator, Lieutenant Douka, of the Royal Flying Corps, muffled in a British airman’s uniform, with thick wadded helmet[177] on his head, goggles, and rubber gauntlets, bent over and tested the bomb-dropping mechanism. Those who had known Douka as a student in America or as an unambitious idler in Paris would hardly have recognized him in his new rôle. He had always been romantic, but he explained this amiable weakness as an inheritance from his Byzantine ancestors. “My grandparents were Greek, you know,” was his offhand explanation to college friends of his glowing fondness for the classics and things Hellenic. His two or three trips to Greece had been marred by the unpleasant contrast between the Greece he had imagined and the Greece of to-day. He could scarcely make himself understood in the modern tongue of Hellas; it irritated him, as modern English would doubtless irritate Chaucer. “A degenerate language and a degenerate people,” he told himself. Yet he had taken up aviation at Pau, not as a sport—although that is what he told his friends—but as one of the gifts he could offer modern Greece when the day[178] of her final fight with the Turk should dawn.

The war came. He went hopefully to Athens. There came a day when King Constantine overrode his people, Venizelos retired, constitutional government in Greece ceased to be, and Douka went to London and volunteered in time for the Dardanelles expedition.

But he gave no sign of all this as he tested and retested the bomb-dropping mechanism hanging between the pontoons which supported the machine, and pushed and pulled the controls. He thrust his feet against the pedals and examined the petrol and oil throttles. “Right, lieutenant?” called the skipper of the launch. “Right, sir,” he answered. “Belay there! Lively!” the skipper shouted to two sailors who held the machine. A mechanician spun the propeller and dropped from sight; the motor churned nervously; Lieutenant Douka lifted his hand and signalled that all was satisfactory. The launch shot sidewise, and the ’plane skated[179] swiftly forward, leaving a foaming wake. She tilted and shot forward faster, then up from the water and heavily into the mist. Douka swung her back and around the launch. Along the deck beneath him the sailors stood at attention, but a gust of gray smoke showed him that his escort was already in motion, off for the mother-ship and the flock of aeroplanes at Imbros, and he was alone, sailing away to bomb the Sultan Omar, the flagship of the Turkish fleet.

He looked at the clock—it read 3:17; then at the oil gauge—it was working properly. He climbed to fifteen hundred feet. Under him the mist lay like an Arctic snow-field, broken by pools of rotten ice through which the gray sea stared. The sea abruptly changed to gray land, and he mounted higher. He was flying at a height of four thousand feet over Asia, the ancestral enemy of his race and his continent. Somewhere down in the haze beneath lay Troy. Douka smiled bitterly as he thought again of the ten years’ warfare, and of how the Greeks[180] had blotted her from the earth. The sullen roar of his motor seemed to stimulate his imagination. The mist thinned slightly, and he saw far away the narrow blue ribbon of the Dardanelles—the blood-thickened boundary between free Europe and the despotic East. Haughty Xerxes once sat on those cliffs and watched his Asiatic worms crossing to conquer the West. Twenty-eight centuries had battled on that blue line. Always it had been the same, age after age, century after century, always the Greek against the Asiatic, the Greek against the barbarian, and for five hundred years the disinherited Christian Greek against the Moslem Turk. Muffled in his helmet as he was, he began to sing an old Byzantine war song—a song his grandmother had taught him. His hate rose like a bird in a gale; his clutched hands bit into the rubber sheathing of the levers; he drove ahead at top speed, but his wrath seemed to leap out before him like a racer distancing the thing behind. To kill, to destroy, to blot out, utterly obsessed him.

High over the Sea of Marmora he flew toward Constantinople. Battles without end had been fought on the watery plains below. There the vast Greek Empire had struggled to the death with the hordes of Asia. The mist which had half hidden the land thinned and disappeared. The choppy air became cleaner and easier to fly through. He climbed to eight thousand feet. Far away he caught sight of the Golden Horn, the royal city of Constantine the Great, like a Grecian jewel set in Oriental gold, or like a Grecian body pierced by the bright spears of Turkish minarets. For five centuries she had been the spoil of the East. He cursed her conquerors and laughed to himself. What if he should bomb the mosque of Omar or the Sultan’s palace?... He shook his fist at Scutari as if the city were a person. Little flowers of dirty-white smoke bloomed in the air beside him and above him; once he seemed to fly through a shower where before all had been clear, and he felt small pieces of steel drumming like rain on the wings of his[182] ’plane. It was a burst of shrapnel. He laughed and flew on.

Up the Bosphorus he drove, searching the sea with his eyes. The British Secret Service had reported the Sultan Omar at Bojukdere. He strained for a sight of her.

Then suddenly, like a mirage, he saw the half-moon of a harbour and black ships at anchorage. He drew rapidly near. A violent puff of smoke rose from the funnels of the largest ship. She had seen him, or she had been warned, and was endeavouring to escape. He recognized her with a cry of delight. She was the Sultan Omar.

Hidden forts on the green hills about the harbour burst into life. Smoke, flame, and the dull thud of cannon rose to him, for he was flying lower and lower. A shrapnel shell flashed just in front of him and showered steel splinters against his windshield. He screamed with laughter. It seemed to him ridiculously funny that they should think they could kill him or escape him.

He volplaned; from seven thousand feet[183] he sank to one thousand, then to eight hundred—to seven hundred—to six hundred—to five hundred. A curving white wake showed him that his victim was in motion. He was almost over her. Rifles cracked as the crew endeavoured to reach him with their bullets. He did not hear them. His right arm swung deliberately back to the bomb-thrower. He was near. He was over. He jerked madly, and the pent volcano fell straight on the warship.

The air rocked and heaved. His ’plane almost turned a somersault, and he fought to restore its balance in an atmosphere reeling like a typhoon. Solid waves of air beat and buffeted him. He jerked the levers and fought furiously. Then, like a bronco, the machine found her feet, prancing and shuddering in the choppy air, and up he climbed. A glance over his shoulder was enough, even if the boiling air had not told him of his success. The blue sea was black with wreckage; men like insects floated in the water, but the Sultan Omar had disappeared.

The air still cracked and roared as the Turks shelled him. The whole land seemed to wake, and the setting sun shone through a curtain of dirty smoke. A Turkish aeroplane slid up in long spirals behind him to cut off his retreat; petrol dripped slowly from a leak in his reservoir caused by shrapnel or a rifle bullet. It was the price of his success; a glance told him that he could not stop the leak. He had often thought of that moment. Should he go back and risk capture by the Turks? No; he would fly straight out into the Black Sea and die alone in its waters. He would fly out into the sea where his ancestors had sailed centuries before the Moslems had taken Constantinople; the sea of the Golden Fleece, of Medea, of Xenophon and the Ten Thousand, of the long campaigns against the Persians. He would die there.

The sun set swiftly. In the twilight his mind seemed to slip its leash and play high jinks with him. His palms grew into the handles of the controls and became part of[185] the mechanism; his fingers lengthened into levers, his legs into rods upholding the aeroplane, and he flew, screaming, laughing, and cursing, until night fell like a plummet from the dusky sky.

Suddenly his machine struck the level surface of the sea and buckled forward. Douka awoke, as if from sleep, tore the harness from his aching head, and slumped forward against the straps, waiting for the end. The wreckage of his machine still floated on the long, slow waves, and rocked easily to and fro, but one of the pontoons was crushed and another was leaking.

He felt no wind against his face, and the sea was calm. “Lucky,” he thought listlessly, knowing that at a touch of wind or wave the ’plane would go under. It might float for hours, or only for minutes; he did not care. Death was certain.

But there seemed to be a sound of voices in the air, a distant singing and a splash of oars. “Delirium,” he said calmly.[186] “But how beautifully they sing! What is it? It is Greek! Why, it is the old Greek: ‘To thee, Zeus, blessings upon our timid flocks.’” His wondering lips formed the words which he had learned in school.

Then out of the darkness swam a boat, and in the boat were a steersman and four men at the oars, and the men were singing a hymn to Zeus, the Father of all and the King of all. To Lieutenant Douka nothing now seemed strange. To his shaken mind it seemed good to hear them, good to see them, good to find them loosing the straps which held him to the wrecked machine, and lifting him, in silence, into their boat.

Half an hour they rowed, when Douka caught across the level sea a hot breath of wind and the odour breathed from rye-fields in midsummer. “Land! It is land!” he exclaimed. “It is land—the White Island,” they answered gently. Both he and they had spoken in the classic Greek, the Greek of the old heroic days—not the bastard modern speech, larded with cruel words from[187] the Turks and the rough idioms of northern barbarians. His tired eyes strained forward. Like night mist advancing upon them came the land, white like foam and very fair; and he heard cicadas chanting in the olive trees, and the warm breath of the night brought murmurs of song and the sibilant lapping of waves along a sandy shore.

All the island was white. A crescent moon stole out of cloudbanks and stared down on white sands, white balustrades, the white walls of palaces, white hills swelling against the darkness, silvery white olive groves, and slowly moving figures, clad all in white, pacing along the stairs.

A white crane beside the landing-place awoke, flapped his wings, and flew slowly off. Stately men and beautiful women thronged the quay and looked down curiously as the boat grated against the beach. “We have brought another from the wars,” the steersman called to them. “Welcome, friend,” those on the quay called gently; and “Thanks, friends,” Douka answered.

His tortured muscles knotted and failed as he tried to climb from the boat, and he fell back helplessly. Two of the oarsmen bent to him, lifted him like a child, and bore him between them up the long flights of steps. He had fainted.

When he awoke, his nude body lay on a warm marble slab, and two male attendants of the bath were kneading his aching flesh with perfumed hands. Their touch was like ice and like fire, and life seemed poured back into his body as into a wineskin as they worked. The hands stole over him, gradually more and more softly, exploring, soothing, stupefying. He slept.... He awoke once more, to find that they had placed him in what seemed to be a bed of live coals, in a white furnace which burned and leaped with light, but the crackling heat did not harm him, and again he slept.... He awoke in a high-roofed hall, and all around him was light and laughter, jets of fountains and music of slow streams; and the two attendants plunged him again and again into[189] pools which received him as into a bed and covered him with warm floods.

Then he was rubbed with oils, and a garland was placed on his head. Two girls came, bringing him clothing—a blue-bordered peplos, a white mantle for his shoulders, and white sandals for his feet. “Drink,” they said, and they gave him a cup of barley crushed in water flavoured with mint.

“Now it is time for the feast,” they cried gayly. “Come to the feast.” And they led him through alleys bordered with white violets, hyacinths, roses, crocuses, and ghostly narcissi. In the cleft hills the olive groves gleamed like pools of moonlight; a waking dove gurgled drowsily, and the cicadas sang; and to left and right he heard faint snatches of old Greek hymns and saw white figures moving slowly along the sandy paths.

So they brought him to the banquet in a high-roofed hall of marble, lit by flambeaux in sconces along the walls, garlanded with white lilies, and spread with Oriental tables and low couches. And boys and girls flew[190] laughingly about serving the meats and drink.

He was led to his place, and reclined in the antique fashion on a cushion beneath his elbow. Then guests began to appear through the wide marble doors. To his delight and astonishment he knew them. They were like old friends—friends of his youth, friends of the youth of all the world; and they came into the hall with garlands in their hair and bright robes upon them and gayety and peace in their looks.

There came Achilles, his gigantic arm over the shoulders of Hector, and a smile on his youthful face as he talked; and goat-bearded, bandy-legged Thersites, limping and chattering endlessly; and stately Nestor; broad-breasted, stout Agamemnon; Priam, leaning on an ivory staff; wily Odysseus, walking alone in the throng; huge, ungainly Ajax; gossipy Menelaus, Sarpedon, and Patroclus; Neoptolemus leading by the hand the sweet boy Astyanax; Diomedes, Æneas, smooth-shaven Troilus, black Memnon, laughing[191] Paris. And the women! white-armed Briseïs, motherly Hecuba, Andromache and gentle Cressida, Chryseïs, grave Cassandra, Penelope, Polyxena, Iphigenia, the lithe, dark-eyed beauty of Myrine the Amazon, and the golden radiance of Helen, her face like noon sunlight—Helen of Sparta, for whose sake the Greeks are forever named Hellenes, at whose shrine all men worship, and shall worship so long as beauty endures—these came into the high-roofed hall; these, and many more.

And after them came an old blind singer, a lyre in his hands, a laurel crown on his head. “Homer, Homer!” they cried. “A welcome to Homer!” All rose as he passed, and they led him to the highest place in the hall, and took their pillows again, applauding him.

They poured libations and began the banquet, drinking from four-handled cups studded with gold. They ate no flesh. There was no mark of death in the hall, or violence, or cruelty. They talked gayly, and all their[192] talk was of peace; they told old stories, but all their stories were of peace; and when they sang, their songs were of peace. And always the boys and girls served them, laughing.

Douka drank from his cup, and it was filled again and again. Pain and hatred fell from him like a garment; he laughed and jested with the rest—with Paris of Troy, Paris of Asia, Paris of the East, smiling on his right, and bearded Odysseus on his left. “Tell us a tale, Odysseus,” he begged at last, “a tale of your travels and your prowess.” And Odysseus, shaking great tones from his chest like snowflakes in winter, told of Nausicaa, daughter of King Alcinoüs, and the game of ball on the Phocæan shore.

“Prowess?” he ended. “There is no prowess but kindliness. Only kindliness lives forever in the memory.”

Then Helen, smiling at them, cried: “Sing, Homer, sing, for the moon has set, and the Pleiades; it is midnight, and the time is going by. Sing of hearth and shrine, sing of youth and age, sing of love, sing of peace, sing of[193] the flocks safe from harm, the plowed earth and the groves, and the untroubled sea. Sing of the child nestling close to his mother, and of joy, joy, joy! Sing to us of these, old Homer.”

At three o’clock in the morning a Turkish torpedo-boat patrolling in the Black Sea came upon the aviator who had destroyed the Sultan Omar. He lay in the wreckage of his hydro-aeroplane. The Turks took him unresistingly into their craft. They say that he sang softly to himself in an obscure Grecian dialect and babbled incessantly of Helen and the heroes who fell before Troy.

Transcriber’s Notes:

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		PAGE
Foreword		ix
I.	Saint Dympna’s Miracle	3
II.	Love in a Barge	19
III.	The Odyssey of Mr. Solslog	29
IV.	Figures of the Dance	46
V.	The Saviour of Mont César	61
VI.	Ghosts	86
VII.	The Deserter	96
VIII.	The Glory of Tinarloo	114
IX.	A Flemish Fancy	122
X.	The Swallows of Diest	135
XI.	Pensioners	148
XII.	Doña Quixote	160
XIII.	In the Street of the Spy	167
XIV.	The White Island—A Story of the Dardanelles	176