The End: How the Great War Was Stopped. A Novelistic Vagary
Date: 2021-05-28T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: World War; 1914-1918 -- Fiction; Paranormal fiction

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Title: The End: How the Great War Was Stopped. A Novelistic Vagary

Author: L. P. Gratacap

Release date: May 28, 2021 [eBook #65463]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/65463

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE END: HOW THE GREAT WAR WAS STOPPED. A NOVELISTIC VAGARY ***

THE END

How the Great War was Stopped
A Novelistic Vagary

By

L.P. GRATACAP

NEW YORK
THOMAS BENTON

1917

Copyright by

L.P. GRATACAP

1917

Printed by

THE EDDY PRESS CORPORATION

Cumberland, Maryland

CONTENTS

Chapter | | Page
I. | Saint Choiseul | 7
II. | Gabrielle | 27
III. | My Return | 49
IV. | Gabrielle's Seance | 71
V. | The War | 95
VI. | The Invasion | 120
VII. | The Repulse | 150
VIII. | Gabrielle's Visitation | 168
IX. | God's Hand | 195
X. | The End | 221
XI. | Conclusion | 270

CHAPTER I

SAINT CHOISEUL

It is a pretty village, Saint Choiseul, perched on a hillside whose slopes, undeviatingly smooth and moderate, subside into a flowing land of streams and fields and white roadways. Its narrow streets are decorous with straight lines of prim poplars that have a military stiffness, and while the wind stirs their hedged leaves into audible protest—the flutter of a restrained salutation or a salute simply—it seems hardly able to extort from their braced branches the tribute of an obeisance.

The houses are generally simple things of two and sometimes only one story, built of limestone blocks that have weathered into an undecipherable composition of brown blotches, staring white strips, mossy crevices, little pits of black, and crannies of nutritious decomposition, where tiny grass blades have sprouted. Under favorable skies—and they are almost always favorable at St. Choiseul—their uneven walls become fascinating studies of minor-color harmonies, and rising as they do amid beds of flowers, or just grazed grass, from which they seemed in the broad sunshine to gather subtle tints of gayety, by some evanescent reflexion, they become fascinatingly pretty, and commodious, so to say, to an artist's fancy.

The clustered chimneys in some larger villa formed occasional and well-spaced visual incidents that broke the monotony of the low cottages and added a keenly valued distinction to our pleasant hamlet. It was delightful. You felt its persuasive loveliness the moment you came up the road from far-away Paris—Ah! not so far away that we could not see the Eiffel Tower on fair days, and on all days, or rather nights, note the dull flare of its lights in the sky. The road you came by crossed a stone bridge that threw its moss-covered span over a clear deep brook, running all the way from Briois, with pollarded willows on rushy banks, and drooping wistarias wildly clinging to white birches in the meadow lands of rich farmers, where the brook, loitering, made pools in which the cattle stood for hours in cream and russet dabs over the half glittering rippled water. Mon Dieu! Comme il était beau!

Our house was the second in the village on the right hand side of the road, as you came from Paris, just next to Privat Deschat, an old carpet-weaver whose back-yard was as many colored as a flower garden with bright rugs, green, and yellow, and blue, and red, and brown, hung out on lines that webbed the air like a spider's nest, in the spring. And a very pleasant, inviting house ours was with its staid look of reserved happiness, I might say. There it was with its deep-silled windows, filled with geraniums and heart's ease, its wide black door, and big brass knocker, that was a dragon's tongue lolling out of a dragon's scaly jaw, its long slanting shingled roof, with two dormer windows, and its pastiche red bricks peeping in ruddy streaks through the dense ampelopsis that climbed up to the eaves, and then lurked in the dark, to make its way into the house, and lingering there, became pale and white.

There was no veranda or piazza, but just a covered porch with four wooden pillars and two bench seats, where sister Gabrielle and I sat long hours in the evenings in summer time, when we were afraid sometimes to enter the house because—Ah, but I must not tell that now, for just that fear and what it led to, and how it helped us to end the WAR, is the sole reason of my telling this story at all. No, no, that is a long way towards the end, and here I've hardly begun.

Well, as pleasing and welcoming as the house seemed on the outside, it was even more lovely within. I don't wonder the spirits—Ah, bête encore—Yes, most lovely. You see there was a wide hall in soft yellow and china-blue tile, with the Privat Deschat's rag-carpet in short strips over it, and a big Holland clock against the wall, and prints in black and white framed in mahogany, and an old narrow carved table with tall porcelain candle-sticks on it, from Dresden, and then some straw-bottomed chairs in gilded frames, and the garden of blooms, seen through the door on the other side, which opened on a walk covered with a vine-trellis, and bordered by smart gillyflowers, and hollyhocks, and sunflowers, and cushions of pansies.

Then there was a good big square room on the right of the hall full of books, and friendly chairs, and pictures, with a big desk-table in the centre, where rose toweringly a superb old bronze French lamp, that even then we burned with whale oil. You wound it up, and the oil was pumped on the wicks and—the light was soft and charming and companionable. The windows were high and low; they reached up to the ceiling, and they left spaces for window seats at the floor, and white tapestry curtains shaded them, and then at night—we did it in the winter mostly—there could be drawn over them soft, thick folds of green baize, and we seemed softly entombed in a delicious seclusion—so delicate, so sure. My sister loved the long evenings that way, of winter, and if it stormed and the snow stung the windows with sharp taps, she would laugh almost, with the happiness of security.

And there was a big fire-place on the west side of the room—you see this library was on the west side of the house too—but it was the whole width of the house also, and the southern outlook swept over the low land and gazed straight to Paris. That chimney corner was delightful, and the wisps of light from the soft coal lit up the mantel and played grotesquely over the row of Peruvian Inca figures and face-jars that filled it—I brought them from America—so that they seemed to squint and grin, or just look glum and melancholy. Gabrielle said they came to life in the half dark, and she made them talk to me—for she interpreted them in her odd way—the old Inca warriors and the medicine men and the priests, and the little beggar with a stump for a leg, and the squinting big-toothed demon in red and black.

All that in the winter, but in summer and early fall, with the windows all open, the cooling night air came in, and brought with it odors of the ground and perfumes—O! so delicate and ravishing—of the flowers; St. Choiseul loved flowers; there was not a home without them—and so mixed with these, as if sound and smell had run together in a composite, half of each, the murmur of insects, the endless roundelay of the peeping tree toads, a twittering of birds, and the shivering of leaves in the trees. How we loved it!

I am rambling dully, but you see, kind friend, such strange weird things happened in that house afterwards, and such sorrow came to me after all the blessed joy of years, now lost, forever lost, that I cannot stop my thought picturing everything about it, as if I would leap back into the arms of other days, and let them caress and soothe me and banish my grief.

On the east side of the hall-way was our dining room, a simple room with just straw-bottomed chairs, an immense oak side-board, royally set out with glass and blue plates, and on the walls quaint expressionless portraits of our people, including mother and father, a fat uncle with a pipe, and half closed eye, and a great grandfather in the regimentals of the Revolution—very brave looking and handsome—and some very staring aunts, and great aunts in starched finery, that made them look like owls.

Back of the pantry was the kitchen, with old Hortense, as the high priestess and oracle—our own dear Hortense, with such a kind heart, and a ready ear, and a generous hand—Ah! how we children loved her, and how she loved us, and how she packed our napkins for school, or our baskets for picnics—as the Americans say. She used to shake her wise old head slyly at us when we looked in at the kitchen door, with that little hungry grin on our faces:

"Certainement, you are veery hungree. Oh I know—it is a great pity and there is nothing, Vraiment—nothing—but See! I do so," and her long fingers snapped, and she waved them in an appeal to space, and then she cautiously raised a big bowl and Voila! a nest of crisp, aromatic, yellow buns, or cookies, or gateaux aux raisins, so good, so inexpressibly good!

And upstairs were the pleasant bed-rooms, so inviting to repose in their demure neatness, with high posters and pavilions, and their broad bottomed rockers, and their rainbow wallpapers, and rag carpet strips, over the bronzed, aged, and russety black wooden floors.

My own room was over the library; it looked north and west, and I would hang out of its window for half an hour at a time, watching the red sun quench itself behind the golden and flaming horizon, whose secrets I yearned to know, whose untrodden wonders I dreamed to penetrate. Those wistful hours awoke the unconfessed but sleepless passion of my heart to sail out over the Atlantic, a passion too of unrest, linked in my disposition with ecstacies and imaginations.

Sister Gabrielle was in the next room to mine, and in her sweet, tasteful, fresh and white bed-room, rose the chimney from the library fire-place below—so that she had her own chimney corner too, in the second story of the house and THERE—Well, wait, that comes later.

Our parents were nervously alert in nature, intelligent and conscientious. In them a strain of Huguenot puritanism was combined with an intellectual appetite that seemed to create in each a physical activity that made them restless in manner, and weak in health. They watched my sister and myself too suspiciously, and their affection became almost an aggravation of kindness, and solicitude, and curiosity, which made me more eager to escape that protecting roof-tree, and see the world. On my sister, as I shall explain, it exercised the most unfortunate influence, and accentuated that peculiar neurosis whose roots—as I was to learn later—were enlaced in a sub-conscious sensitivity to occult and invisible agencies, which indeed I helped to strengthen.

We were provided with neighbors and friends, and while the village of St. Choiseul was sufficiently democratic to tolerate and encourage friendly intercourse with everyone, as a matter of congeniality and temperamental tastes, we knew intimately but five persons in St. Choiseul. These five composed a contrasted and picturesque group, and when all were assembled in our big library, father and mother seemed to me most attractive, for in converse that was stimulating and personal, they attained a serenity of feeling and manner, that made them really delightful. Let me quickly describe our friends.

There was the rug-maker and carpet weaver, Privat Deschat, an elderly, robust Norman, who worked hard at his tasks in the mornings—and his mornings began very early—read as steadily for three or four hours in the afternoon, napped two hours, ate supper with his housekeeper and hunted up a friend with whom he smoked and chatted, or played Demi Rouge for the remainder of his day, which never extended over midnight, and more customarily closed at ten.

Privat Deschat was unquestionably very good company, quiet, attentive, observant, and spasmodically conversational, when his suppressed gift of speech awoke a momentary admiration. He was a short, strong man, with large cheeks, a massive head, an expressive mouth, made more so by very good teeth, and what might be called reticent eyes, in which his delicate and studious self retreated, under the guise of inexpressiveness. Again these quiet eyes would light up with enthusiasm, or it might be with distrust and defiance. His speech accompanied his roused spirit, and no one dared—no one wished—to interrupt, lest the rebuke might return him to silence. You see, he thoroughly delighted us. He was a bit quaint in his way of saying things.

And there was Capitaine Bleu-Pistache, who had been wounded in the 1870 fight and limped about on a wooden peg, with a stout cane in one hand. He was an amiable old mustachio, with pleasant eyes, under frowning eyebrows, a white whisp of hair on the top of his high brow, and a hooked nose that made him look like a bird of prey. But ah, he was most lovable! In the afternoon his little yard—he lived down the street on the opposite side from us in a small red and yellow brick house, hidden in climbing roses—was filled with children, for the old sabreur told stories well, and the boys and girls loved to hear him, and then in the spring he played marbles with them, so like a big chuckling boy, that it made us laugh to watch him get down on his good knee, and then get helped up again by the biggest boys, after he had taken his shot. It was tres jolie! Gabrielle and I thought so, and we played with him and the rest, when we too were, as the Americans say, kiddies. In later years when the aches—la sciatique abominable, as he said—settled in his bones, he gave up marbles, and turned to knitting, and it kept him quite happy. He would come in the evenings and enjoy our library, and very often fall asleep and snore ferociously. Father and mother, I think, loved him, but there was a good deal of veneration in their affection; Capitaine Jean Sebastien Bleu-Pistache always wore his medal of honor, won at Gravelotte.

The captain had a daughter who was the apple of his eye and never was there a daughter more sweet and affectionate. Blanchette, he said, was so like her mother—pauvre Blanche—dead now and resting among the big weeping willows in the crooked church yard, that ran down the hill at the other end of the village, with the grave-stones like a huddle of white or gray lambs chasing each other down the same slope, to the beech grove, and the purring brooklet, washing the long iris-bloom in summer. Blanchette said very little, but she always watched her father softly out of the corners of her eyes, and clapped her hands together softly too at his old, old stories, just as if she had never heard them before. Well Blanchette was our third friend.

And then the school-master—maître d'école—was a good friend, who smoked profusely, drank our red wine profusely too, and munched the sugary cookies mother made, as if he had never tasted anything so nice before. Indeed perhaps he had not, for he lived poorly some miles away, and came to school on a funny old mule that he never hitched up anywhere, but just jumped off its back, and let it wander as it would. Only it wouldn't. It went to sleep on the shady side of the school-house, and when the sun woke it up then it ambled slowly to the other side, for you see Emile Chouteau fed his dear friend so very well, that she was never hungry—whatever along the roadside, coming to school, she fancied, she ate—and always seemed growing fatter and fatter, so that it looked as if Emile would have to walk to school at last, when Sarah—he called her that—grew too fat to move.

How funny—O! tres drôle—the two were so different in size and way; the fat, sleepy, moody mule, lounging along, and stopping as if to yawn, while Emile read his book on its back, his head buried in its pages. And the school-master was so meagre, and long, and nervously restless and even excitable, and that perplexed stare with his glasses shoved up on the very top of his bald head! Ah, I see him always when I pass the school-house now. He dressed in tight fitting clothes, and they were just a little too small even for his thin body. Where he got his clothes was a matter of wonder to us. They were a little faded looking when new, and when they were old they became glossy, and then old Emile had the tatters mended by his boarding-house mistress. He looked neat and scrupulous too, in a way, and indeed we liked him greatly, although he lectured somewhat, and was apt to talk overmuch when our red wine lashed his spirits into a fervor of enthusiasm about Virgil, for the whole of reading and literature was summed up in Virgil to Emile Chouteau.

He loved to tell us:

"Virgil est un homme du Mond entier. Il presente le principe du cosmopolitanisme. Il est immortel parce qu'il n'appartient pas à aucun pays. Il devient la propriété de tous. La Renaissance était fondue sur Virgil: les meilleurs sont ses disciples."

Poor Emile Chouteau, he died before I came back from America, though long before that he had been pensioned, and lived with his mule in the same way that he had lived all the long unchanged years of his teaching in the little school house. And Sarah? Sarah seemed to miss something after Emile's funeral—the country side followed Emile's body with candles, for Emile was a devoted Catholic—and not long afterwards she was found in the school-house. She had broken in the door and walked in; was she looking for Emile? The last time I saw Sarah she was ploughing a field in Briois.

Emile's successor was the fifth acquisition we boasted of in our little company of intimates—Lorenzo Sebastien Quintado—a Spaniard.

Lorenzo was not typically Spanish after the fashion of the story-writers. He was not darkly handsome, languorous, taciturn and irritable, nor meagre, tall, with flashing eyes and raven hair. O! quite different and because so different so likeable. For all the world he made me think of the bachelor Sampson Carrasco in Don Quixote. Do you recall him—"Though Sampson by name this bachelor was no giant in person, but a little mirth-loving man, with a good understanding, about twenty-four years of age, of a pale complexion, round faced, flat-nosed and wide mouthed; all indicating humour, and a native relish for jocularity?"

Yes that does bring back to my mind the way, the poise even, and the sprightly liveliness, the almost expectant jubilation of Lorenzo. He sang well, and in the long dusks, when the quivering lights of the sunset died out of the sky along the burning west, where black fringes of the thick-set trees seemed dipped in fire, his voice rose richly, in caressing and ear-catching melodies. I almost hear him now, singing so carelessly, with an untaught art, a simple song praising the charms of Spanish girls. His voice was a high barytone.

Fair are the vineyards of Seville,
O! fair beyond compare,
But fairer than their fairness still
The eyes of ladies there.
The orange groves of Moguér
Are golden as the sun,
But brighter is the golden hair
Of girls who in them run.

The morning skies of Cordova
Were tinted as in flame,
The cheeks of damsels rosier far
As from the hills they came.
Long live the darling girls of Spain
Untouched by age or time,
Forever free from care or pain,
Ah! may one yet be mine.

I remember on one of the last evenings I passed at home—that was before I went to America—when the fall had come, and the foliage was deepening into splendid colors, not so splendidly indeed as in America I think, but still gloriously vivid. There was Privat Deschat, and Capitaine Bleu-Pistache, and his daughter—we sat together and our hands often crossed—and dear old Emile—he died soon after—and father and mother. We were sitting in our pleasant garden around a little table, directly under the stone wall that shut in our ground on the south—towards Paris—and everywhere lay the drifted leaves of the one big chestnut, that grew just outside the wall, in the sloping ground towards the big green fields, with islands of woods in them. Emile called the yellow leaves as they dropped silently through the sunlight, and shone like lustres in the sunlight, before they touched the ground, pans d'or—gold flakes.

Our red wine was on the table, and that delicious morsel that Hortense made better than anyone, la galette aux amandes, and it was the captain who was talking. He was telling about the awful days when the Germans took possession of the land, when the whole village struck for the woods, and camped there in a sorry fright, for the women and the children said to each other, "Nous savons que Bismarck tue tous les enfants pour qu'il n'y ait plus de Français."

"Well, well, they are over—les scelerats ne puissent—ils faire cela encore—Eh? We are strong now. The army is fitte, as the English say, and—Ah I will never shoulder arms again, mais, I could, Oui! Oui! Je puis tirer."

I leaned over and whispered to Blanchette, "They should never touch you Blanchette—Pourquoi; parce que je t'aime," and she pressed my hand ever so lightly and smiled, and I knew that she was pleased, and then—"Mon Dieu—I could have stopped l'escadron d'allemands tout seul!"

"Tu quoque littoribus nostris, Aeniea nutrix,
Aeternam moriens famam, Caieta, dedisti:
Et nunc servat honos sedem tuus."

It was Emile, of course, talking his indispensable Virgil, though surely the captain was not dead yet. "Yes, captain, France will never forget your service. I know those were hard days. I was sick then at the village of Louvry, not so far you know from the preserve and forests of Villers-Cotterets, and I can tell you that the Huns came to us for champagne, and my people told them there was none in the house, and they swore—terriblement—and said they had seen the bottles empty, and they would show them to us, and they went into the cellar and they—Helas, il était tres drôle—pointed to bottles of eau de Seidlitz which—vous savez—look like champagne bottles a little—a little—n'est ce pas?—and they took them away, and soon they had them empty too—ce sont buveurs monstrueuses—but—splendid, the retribution of the Gods—

Di tibi, si qua pios respectant numina, si quid
Usquam justitia est—;

they were all shockingly sick; you see, la purgative totale—"

There was some laughing, though Blanchette blushed a good deal, and I could have boxed the careless mouth of Monsieur, le Maître d'École.

"Listen mes amis," now it was the curious treble of Privat Deschat, "I am not sure but the skies will blacken again, and the buse (eagle) will shut out the sunlight with its swarming hosts. It is not all over yet. Be watchful. You remember the thunder-storm last week when the chevreuil came into the back-yards, the stags were seen in the roadways, and the wild boars ran into Briois roaring. I was up that night late, for I had a package of rugs to send to Paris, and it struck one in the morning when I put out the light, and said my prayers—ils n'étaient pas beaucoup—there came a crack, like the last call of judgment, and then the wind and rain grew mad with ambitions to outdo each other. It was then I guess that the blow knocked over the tower on the ruins at Bienne and filled the moat of the chateau, and swelled the brooks with rain, so that the land to Mareuil became a lake and the chicken coops swam all the way to La Ferté. Well about an hour after that the storm vanished. I was still up fearful and watching.

"I can see a long way over the farms, and suddenly the moon broke through with a wonderful light—it was full moon—and the wind shifted, piling the clouds up in swirling masses, black as ink, and still, at moments flashing with lightning, and crashing with thunder. I could see the lands far off towards Bienne shining with great lakes of water, the dark walls of forest, and in the fields huddled cattle, in droves. Then it seemed to me as if the light grew stronger in the sky—it was about two in the morning then—so strong it grew, that I felt there must be some fires about, perhaps towards Briois. I went outside in the road. It was ankle deep with mud, but I ploughed through it to the edge of the slope of the road, from Paris, and looked towards the east, for the clear spaces of the sky were there. Then came the vision."

The speaker stood up among his now fascinated hearers; they were all leaning toward him, as if drawn by a magnet, and while I closed my hand more tightly around the warm fingers of Blanchette I too, with her, strained my ears to hear Deschat's words which were less loud.

"I could see no fire anywhere, and yet the light was raining down around me like an electric glow. I was half frightened; it seemed so marvelous! Well slowly from out of the rolled up thunder and rain clouds came a curious thing. It was a galloping squadron of horses, manes flowing, tails stiff behind them, and on them riders and on the heads of the riders the pickelhaube of the Germans. They flew over the open sky, and the moonlight seemed to pierce them through and through, and they shone with white lines within the dark bodies; the WHITE LINES of SKELETONS. What did it mean? I thought they would never end. On and on in hosts. Of course they were only mists, clouds, but so true to form, so real, like gigantic ghosts! I trembled before the apparition—vue spirituel—and then the light died away, and the figures became blurred, and the moon went out, behind the clouds, and I came back to the house. It was half past three.

"I may be wrong friends, but—I take it that vision was prophecy. The HUN comes again. Get ready. He comes again—encore!"

We were all silent for a minute or so, and then—it was the scolding squeak of Emile—"Eh bien—What of it? We will be ready. Rumpe moras omnes; et turbata arripe castra."

"Mes amis—" it was my father now who rose, and addressed the little group, turning to this side and to that, almost as if he were before an assembly; "Deschat is right—il y a raison—the hour of trial comes once more, the pride of race, the sense of justification demands the restoration of Alsace and Lorraine. We all know that. Our conquerors know that, for the poets of both nations have sung it, and the poets are the prophets, for they feel the vibrations of the pulse of the peoples; their ears are sharp, they hear the timbre of the distant gun, before the common eye can see its smoke."

CHAPTER II

GABRIELLE

My sister Gabrielle was singularly circumstanced in temperament, as she had been too curiously abused in treatment. I left her a young man of twenty-one—she was two years older than I—and only knew of her changing experiences from letters sent to me at San Antonio, Texas. Mother and father were always a trifle worried over Gabrielle's retired and shrinking ways, her abnormal shyness before people, a physical timidity almost that kept her face averted, her rich, deep, large eyes half closed as if in dreams, and controlled her speech, impeding and denying it.

Her languid action and the frequent recurrent fits of a semi-stupor passing off into reveries, when the loosened current of her thought found an unexpected vent in rambling half-lucid, oftentimes poetic apostrophes and ascriptions, wrought in them a transparent terror that embarrassed the grieving girl.

Something of the sort had disturbed me before I left home, because I loved Gabrielle dearly, and remembered so many intimacies between us. In our walks around fair Briois we—both perhaps prematurely serious and inquisitive—talked of things invisible and beautiful, as angels and fairies, and in an old graveyard back of a church beyond the village and on the edge of a wood where the birds nested and sung, wondered over the dead. We amused our fancies with inventions of their work and play, now their bodies were so securely anchored in the earth. Because of all this, yes, and because Gabrielle was very pretty too, I tried to break the mystery of her modesty and lonely habits.

But really there was no mystery, and her modesty was a lovely maidenly reserve. Gabrielle was nervously over-strung, and her susceptibilities were extremely tender and responsive, and then there was growing in her that inexplicable power which forms the raison d'être of all this marvellous experience which—as everyone knows now—put an end to the awful WAR.

Well, before I left home, before I found myself hung, as it were, over the bottomless Atlantic in a big sea-worthy American ship, booked for Galveston, Texas, mother and father decided to send Gabrielle to Paris to a training school of nurses. It had occurred to them that my sister with her gentleness, and a real skill in the use of her fingers, would do well, while the contact with doctors and surgeons—rather direct, imperious, and active men—would wear away her apparent mistrust and nervousness.

But here was their mistake. The analysis was correct, the procedure hopelessly wrong. Gabrielle, always obedient and gravely mute about her own wishes, assented, and entered a training school for nurses and almost at once encountered the terrors of the operating room. Her sensitive and refined sense shuddered at the sight of suffering and disease, her pity for it—willing and self-sacrificing as was her desire to help—caused her involuntary agony of mind. The vulgarities of treatment, the raw necessities of the exposure, mutilations, and the repulsion she felt for blood, and the naked sightlessness of wounds, amputations, incisions—all the obtrusive physical facts of the hospital offended her. Too delicate in feeling, too aesthetic in temperament, too limpid in her affinities, as of a spirit discarnate, soaring, and apprehensive, she underwent mental tortures—hard to realize to others differently conditioned—in this enforced service.

Perhaps I was not myself solicitous enough about her, and her welfare; because—well, it is clear I am sure—because I was much in love with Blanchette, and as the days brought me nearer to that moment when I would leave home, and struggle for that wealth America seems to hold so temptingly out in her outstretched hands to everyone, I felt almost bitterly the probability that—in the nature of things—Blanchette would not, could not wait for me. When might I return—Ah when?—the thought wrenched me like a physical violence, and the nightly scarlet of the evening skies almost, to my despairing heart, seemed stained with the drops of my own blood.

It was a year before I went to America—that was in 1895—that I sat with Blanchette in the garden back of her pleasant home on a low mound, in a bosque or coppice of trimmed beeches, with a little fairyland of garden beds before us, of larkspur, hollyhocks, geraniums, and piebald four-o'clocks, and the slant lights fading slowly upwards left a thousand hues among their petals. The captain favored our rendez-vous, and I half thought that I saw him in an upper window of the house benignantly smiling upon our tryst.

The comeliness of a sweetly fair girl was Blanchette's, and the ringletted hair of her blonde mother—a Swede—caught in an abundant chignon behind her well shaped head, brought into ravishing relief the rounded and blushing cheeks, the winning deep-set blue eyes, where something, to me almost etherial, dwelt, the full lipped mouth, with the blue veins of her temples, the round white neck, and the ample contours of her shoulders, hidden that night beneath the blue folds of a crepe handkerchief, crossed over her breast like a fichu.

"Blanchette," I said at length, just as the last lingering patches of sunlight seemed to escape skyward from the flowers, "you know that I am going away to America—and—I am not going solely for myself—pas de tout. You will be with me in my daily thoughts, in my work, and every dollar—toujours dollars en l'Amerique—I make, will be put away for YOU; Mais comme je t'aime!"

It was a sudden impulse, and its very awkwardness showed the sincerity of my feeling, its impetuous earnestness; and deliciously was it rewarded. Blanchette caught my face in her soft long hands, and brought it down to her own; our lips met, and the pledge of our future life together unuttered, was sworn so deeply in our hearts, that we were dumbfounded with the overmastering passion of the moment.

Again and again we embraced, and our lips sought each other with a rapture inexpressible—une rapture indicible—while the moving hours swept the heavens of all light, and the fragrance of the gardens rose overpoweringly like sensuous incitations to our immeasurable needs.

The long pent-up torrent of our love caught upon its waves each momentary reserve, and smothered it in the racing tides of our limitless joy. Voices seemed to speak to us from every side, as if the spirits of nature, enthralled in flower, and tree, and grass, and herb, disincarnate through sympathy, spoke to us, inarticulate but real. C'était l'appel aphrodisiac de l'âme—the ecstatic epitome of a life-time.

That night I leaned out of the window of my room, and the night, calm and gloriously light with the gibbous moon half flooding the broad distances with its pale splendors, seemed to bathe my spirit in incredible consolations of hope, ambition. An exorbitant confidence seized me. Anticipation and resolve raised innumerable visions, and the bending salutation of Success almost audibly filled my ears with its siren promises.

Blanchette would wait. I must not be too avaricious. A little was enough for our serene and inconspicuous days. Let it be in a year—two? Les fortunes merveilleuses ne viendraient-ils? Perhaps—perhaps—let us believe so, now, and if the time is lengthened, well—les noces s'attarderaient seulement un peu.

So dreaming, so feeding illustrious hopes, I forgot Gabrielle, in my selfish egotism, and while I had dimly divined the result of her new work I offered no opposition to our parents' designs, and even encouraged Gabrielle with specious flatteries. She would grow stronger; the life of the great city would be full of wonders, and captivate her mind with its marvels. Then there would be fresh friendships, the gayety of companionships, innumerable alleviations of l'ennui.

Gabrielle shook her dear head, and the sweet yearning eyes watched me with a sad disillusionment that I had deserted her, and, I, in the madness of my joy and in the eagerness of my plans, recurred to the artifice of commonplaces, and the flat sophistries of comfort.

I came upon her one morning weeping quietly in her room with her head leaning against the mantel piece, her white slender fingers pressed upon her eyes and the tears slipping through them. I caught her in my arms, and turned her head upon my breast with the real anguish of self-reproach.

"Gabrielle, Gabrielle, what hurts you? You break my heart. Have I been forgetful? O! believe me Gabrielle it will be all well, and if—if—perhaps—I know, you say I have been only thinking of myself. Ah forgive me, Gabrielle; surely you know that I love you from the very bottom of my heart and if you could only see it you would believe."

"Yes," she murmured between sobs that wrung my heart. "Oui Alfred, c'est vrai—but I feel so sorrowful at times, and I am afraid of the great city, and the visions come to me at night and I wake up shaking with strange doubts."

"Why Gabrielle, what do you mean? Visions! You have never told me of that before. What visions?"

It was some time before I could contrive to make her tell me more, and when she finally drew me to a sofa at the window, keeping her face fixed outward on the sweet pageantry of the little gardens on the hill, and the far-away loveliness of the forests, and the shifting radiances of the lowlands, she held me spell-bound with the strange confession. Her voice was at first very low, almost inaudible, but slowly she regained her composure, and the story came from her lips with an unstudied grace and realism that imposed its truthfulness upon its hearer. Indeed my own latent sympathy in nature with that of Gabrielle's, from the first, enthralled me in a trance of confidence.

"Why, Alfred, a year ago I was standing at my bed-side—it was late and the night was dark. I had put out my lamp, and was about to say my prayers, when softly there seemed to steal into the room a light. It came at first from the ceiling of the room, and then it shifted and shone like a phosphorescent ball, or a little cloud of glowing fire half concealed behind a veil. I was not frightened—No, not at all, but I felt a delicious calmness, a wonderful soothing self-surrender to an unseen influence, as if the effluence of some mind controlled me, and—I thought so—I sank slowly to the floor, while the light rose and expanded and grew before my eyes into a shape, a form of flowing lines of light, with shades between them, and the faintest pencillings of a rosy tint ran here and there over it, and then—perhaps then Alfred I had swooned; but there was no fear. It was just like a delicious lapse in unconsciousness into sleep, and with that came voices in my ears—faint, very faint, murmurous, indistinguishable, and then—"

"And then?" I exclaimed, now thoroughly excited myself, and catching Gabrielle's hands, bringing her face to mine, and gazing into her eyes with mute expostulating curiosity.

"I knew nothing more—all vanished, apparition and voices, and I woke up leaning against my bed and bathed in perspiration."

We were both silent for a time, and without any encouragement Gabrielle resumed her story, but she had freed herself from my arms, and walked to the center of her room—its walls were well filled with pretty colored prints, for the most part religious figures—and with her hands crossed behind her back, stood before me and continued—and now her rueful expression, and the rebuking tenderness of her eyes, had disappeared, and in their place was an old familiar smile, inexplicably reminiscent, like a visible soliloquy. It often arose to her face and it became her.

"I waited for the visitation again and again, putting myself in the same position, and shutting out the light, and—praying. It came once, a few months after the first, and then I thought it was some forewarning of danger to father or mother, or to you Alfred, and I dreaded to open my eyes in the mornings, fearing disaster, sickness—I know not what; and then Alfred it suddenly seemed to me it meant that it was my own summons!"

"And when it came the second time, was it different?" I almost cried aloud, abruptly guessing that it portended mischief to Blanchette.

"No, quite the same, but less bright and more restless, changing in its brightness, and flitting slowly up the walls and back again, and never forming a figure as at the first. But something else was different; O! much different—The Voices. They were stronger, and Alfred it is the voices now that fill my ears at night with callings, and singular messages, that I cannot understand, and Alfred," she came closer to me, and her voice, sinking to a whisper, seemed almost stealthy; "I have spells of fainting. Mother has picked me up many times and I have heard her talking to father about it, and they have written to the doctors in the Training School and— Well you know it is all settled, but Alfred it will not help me. I dread it. I shall be unhappy."

The forlorn misery returned to her eyes, and the despairing gesture, as she brought her hands forward and leaned them against my shoulders and with a keen interrogation fixed her gaze upon my own, revealed her unwillingness to go to Paris. She went on:

"In those trances—if they are really trances—the voices come in all sorts of ways to me. I cannot understand it; it scares me and yet I have grown to wish to hear them—some of them. For they are very, very different. Some voices are like children talking low, almost lisping, and always musical, and others are cold and hard; but—Alfred, is not this wonderful? I can drive those hard, stern voices off, by just wishing them away; my mind does it somehow, and the others come to me when I wish them to—O! but it is marvelous."

Her eyes were lit again with a saintly joy—a little wild I thought—and for a moment I shuddered at the thought that perhaps Gabrielle was losing her mind, under the stress of her hallucinations. Ah! but were they hallucinations? I was not unwilling to believe them. Both Gabrielle and I had indulged in the reading of ghostly tales, when children, and because it was just a little difficult for us to gratify our fancy for the weird and the supernatural—all the eccentricities of the disembodied—we had loved them the more.

We were interrupted in our talk by some call for Gabrielle, and I was left alone to ponder the strange matter, with I think, a crude kind of expectancy that we approached transcendent mysteries, dwelling unconfessed in my mind. But I was not a little alarmed also. Gabrielle's delicate texture, her spiritualized emotions, which also in their poignant intensity of feeling assumed now to me the aspect of a thaumaturgic power, might induce some mental derangement. Uncertain what to do, and unwilling to tell the affair to our parents, who would only see in it a new urgency for Gabrielle's transportation to changed fields of association, I concluded to confide everything Gabrielle had told me to Blanchette.

Blanchette was incredulous. She could not believe it. It offended her robust sense of actual living and the sharp realization in her of the materiality of the senses. You see in Blanchette something of the captain's skepticism, his naked Voltairism had developed. She was silent for a while, and then answered very slowly my question, "What is best to do?"

"Alfred, Gabrielle is unwell; you must get her away. She lives too lonely a life, reads too much, and is unsociable. Let her once live among the hard facts of the hospital, and the training school, and—Ah! then—it will all go, like the fogs—comme les brouillards s'evanouis-saient quand le soleil les éclate. Eh? Alfred, you know that."

I did not know it, and I was ill disposed at first to adopt Blanchette's view. But she was very tender and affectionate, and I was blind and too happy—too miserable too, as I must soon leave her—to do justice to Gabrielle. And so it came about that I argued the matter with Gabrielle, and insisted that she must try Paris, and the school, and the doctors, and forget the visitations, and mingle with the world a little, and, amongst new acquaintances, put to flight the aggravating "voices," for—the other marvel—the shining image—had never returned.

This latter fact contributed a better efficacy to my persuasions, as it seemed to prove that the whole business was some delusion of the mind. Gabrielle was not a bit convinced, but she was so dutiful, so resigned, and so faithful, that she yielded, put on the address of willingness she did not really feel, just to please me.

I took her to Paris and entrusted her with, O so many adjurations, to Doctor Manuelle Herissois, who was most considerate and pleasing and talked with Gabrielle with great adroitness and—I left her smiling, but as she kissed me Adieu, her dear eyes were very wet indeed, and for a moment in my own heart I mistrusted the part I had played, and might have, in an instant, reversed the whole transaction, when Gabrielle turned half away, while our hands yet pressed each other, and said; "Adieu Alfred. Do not come to see me when you go away to America. I could not stand it. Write only. That will do," and then, with a half stifled cry she fled into her room—her apartment in the school, and quickly closed the door, and I was left mute and irresolute.

What is more bitter than the remembrance of careless acts, thoughtless things we have done which caused grief to those we loved, and yet, while loving, neglected. It all came wrong, and still—assurement le bon Dieu, Il le faisait—it ended the war!

That night—I well recall it, I think, each minute of it—Blanchette ravished me with her loveliness, her joyous salutation, her infectious gayety, and lost in my own pleasure, the foolish vanities of doting youth, poor Gabrielle in her loneliness, was altogether forgotten. Dear sweet sister, with the patient heart, the endless resignation, the guileless impulses, and with that inscrutable mysticism of feeling, that finally brought to her the discarnate souls of the slain, the ghostly assault of the unnumbered dead—Ah! Malheureuse! not yet! again my tell-tale tongue, the hurrying scribble of my heedless pen!

Well, there were so many things to think of, and Blanchette was so eager to see me every minute, that when I had taken leave of all of our friends, and father and mother had invoked blessings on my head, and exacted promises that I would write each week, and the captain had made me very sure that he wanted a few pounds of the Texas pecan nuts sent to him, and Privat Deschat asked for a half dozen hanks of Texas cotton, if they could be found in the Galveston stores, Emile Chouteau (it was after he had left the school), wished only my happy return, that the waters would be propitious, the winds and the waves, and, if storms, why then:

dicto citius tumida aequora placat
Collectasque fugat nubes, solemque reducit;

and Sebastien Quintado had hugged me a dozen times and smacked me robustly as many times on each cheek—why, there was no time to be lost for me to pack up my few belongings, and get away to Marseilles as fast as ever I could—and then had not Gabrielle said not to come to bid her Adieu; that she could not stand it? Certainement. And so it was, that when I stood on the quay at Marseilles, trembling, nervous, and half regretful, everyone had been seen, everyone embraced, and everyone's orders taken, and—she, the wounded, dear sister of my flesh and blood, was forgotten—O! No, not forgotten—not that, but missed as it were in the furious haste, and wonderment, and expectation, and dread.

It was a big ship, a frigate, loaded with wines and cheeses and spices, and many jim-cracks of all sorts, that was to take me to the New World, and when I stood on her glistening deck, beneath the blazing sun, and France slowly sank away from my eyes and just at last the white spot of Marseilles, like a disk on the horizon, went out, like a light snuffed out in a candle, I went to my room and cabin, and laid down and held my hands before my face and cried pretty hard.

And somehow then, the very presence of Gabrielle surged before me like some embodiment of rebuke, and the physical pressure of a hand on my shoulder startled me to my feet with a cry of anguish. But it was nothing, only the reaction of my body to the urgency of my grief over Gabrielle's neglect. For days the thought of my sister obscured my happiness, although the newness of everything—ministered deliciously to my amour-propre. Good resolutions helped to comfort me, and the first thing for me to do when America was gained would be to write a long, careful, loving letter to Gabrielle.

My project of going to America can be briefly explained, as it may appear almost quixotic and unreasonable otherwise, especially my destination in Texas. But some years before acquaintances, made in Paris, where I was studying law, led to this departure. They had interests in cattle and farm lands, in the great state, and had frequently made me offers to go out, and watch their rights, and report the prospects and conditions, with inducements so advantageous to myself that, conjoined with the long cherished project formed in my own mind to try the chances in the Republic, resulted in this. I accepted their invitations against my parents' wishes, who at first resolutely denied their permission. This was overcome by my own increasing obstinacy, that had begun to approach the earnestness of disobedience.

Blanchette and I had, with the ludicrous solemnity of young lovers, exchanged the pledges of fidelity, and I, in an exuberance of hopefulness, promised to return in five years, which by some fancied finality seemed to both of us the limit of our possible endurance. With forceful vows I had engaged to live most simply and the frugality of my expectations in living—measured the quickness and value of my savings, and indeed, as it happened, I made my way fast.

At San Antonio I became at last established, with the various interests, I was to watch, quite fully comprehended and diligently tended. I do not know that I ever fell in love with San Antonio, but I certainly got to like it very well, and in later years I have recalled it with feelings of tenderness, that came pretty near to affection. I have every reason to be grateful to it, for I was most successful. I had prospered, greatly prospered. When I found at last that the term of my exile came ideally near to the period when I might consider myself well enough off to go back and claim Blanchette, I think that my respect for San Antonio rose to the apex of unaffected enthusiasm.

Because the purpose and body of this history is connected with the utterly unparalleled circumstances of the ending of the monstrous war of this century, I pass over the irrelevant details of my life in America, except only to point out the financial luck that enabled me to return to France, at a critical moment. In five years I was almost rich—in my own modest estimation. At any rate I had enough, and a luxurious indolence, which was part of my nature, fascinated me with its temptations of rest and culture, while the thought of the waiting Blanchette—whose letters were so true-hearted and devoted—kept sensitized my eagerness to return almost to the point of madness. And there was Gabrielle.

I had been most dutiful to Gabrielle. I fulfilled all of the many brotherly resolves I made on the voyage to America, which had been the index of my self-reproach at leaving her so carelessly, and sweetly and reassuringly had she answered. Alas! I only learned much later how devotedly she had hidden her sufferings from me, that I might not be distressed in my new home. Now when I realized that my little fortune—part of it the result of a speculative incident so frequent in the wonderful land of Hope—would not only unite me with Blanchette but enable me to give comfort and happiness to Gabrielle, I was wild with impatience to get away. It was my last month in San Antonio; the leave for my return had been received by me, from my employers, and the successor to my position would be at any moment in my office ready to take charge.

It was my last day; a sultry wilting day towards the end of August, and I had exerted every energy in arranging the directions for my successor, and incidentally clearing off a large amount of that surreptitiously invading refuse of unfinished odds and ends, that accumulate, in one way and another, in any business, which cannot be completed by daily installments of work. A large amount of mail had been disposed of. The office force, tired out, and half angry at the unexpected pace I had demanded, had left, and I was alone in a large shop fronting upon —— Street, the principal street of San Antonio. Gray frowning clouds had formed somewhere in the upper air. I could detect their presence even without seeing them, by the deepening obscurement of the opposite houses, and a chill brought in their enveloping bosoms as they crowded down upon the city, conveyed a well understood notice of some sudden meteorological caprice that would relieve the tension of the heat, with possibly damaging accompaniments of disaster.

I sighed contentedly; the future just then, however dark the sky might be, was radiant with the most varied lights of anticipation and of promise. My hand moved an apparently unopened letter, or perhaps, in its vague stirring over the desk before me, had dislodged it from some crevice in the drawers, or beneath the folios and baskets, and I abruptly became conscious of ITS presence. It was a human utterance—that letter—it might have cried out to me with the incisive agony of its menacing contents. It might I say—perhaps it did—but through the coarse obstructive mechanism of my ears its voice, that should have crashed around me like the call of Fate, was utterly unheard, and it lay there just an overlooked and silent scrap of paper.

I turned to it lazily, but in the next instant my eyes, apprehensive through that nervous divination of thought, that writes a message in our souls before we read or hear it, recognized the hand-writing of Gabrielle. I felt the racing blood leave my cheeks, and stir my heart with feverish palpitations. No letter from my sister was due now; only last week I had received one. I could scarcely keep my fingers still enough to tear open its cover. I knew; I knew. O! God how certainly I knew, that in the blackness of the darkening day a greater blackness, behind that spotless white paper, would rush out to overwhelm my life!

In the fading light leaning against the door-sill as the men and women of the street hurried homeward, with backward glances at the now onrushing columns of dusky vapor in the sky, I read the letter. I shuddered in the fear lest in the uncontrolled frenzy of my heart some treacherous cry, some blackguard defiance of the Almighty, might bring them around me in consternation and in anger.

My eyes glazing slowly with the rising paralysis of terror read this:

Dear Brother,

Something has happened. Alfred, Blanchette is sick—vraiment—quite sick. I am now home in St. Choiseul nursing her. She asks for you, Alfred. Could you come? Perhaps it would be well—Je dis peut-etre seulement—and yet, Alfred, I believe it would be best. You could help her wonderfully. Even yet, say, you will come, and things will be better.

Ah! my brother, I am sorry. O! so sorry to write this, but you see there is nothing to be done but to—shall I say it?—Alfred, Blanchette is very sick. It is a fever. The doctors reassure us, but because Blanchette calls for you so often, they are convinced that it would be good—very good—perhaps indispensable; you understand. Come Alfred—Come, come. We will tell her you are coming.

Gabrielle; St. Choiseul,
1900

The paper crumpled in my hands; something like a vapor clouded my eyes, and hearing in my ears was suffocated in a sullen roar that came from nowhere, and then I felt myself smashed against the pavement, at the door of the office, and some undissipated residue of cognition recorded the fact, that I was being lifted and carried away.

And when again the coordinated senses revealed sensibly to me my surroundings, I was on a bed in the hospital, in a wide white room, with a nurse and a doctor, and in my own ears now sounded my own voice, and all it said was compressed in struggling cries: "Je viens, Je viens, Je viens—I come, I come, I come!"

CHAPTER III

MY RETURN

It is fifteen years today since Blanchette died. I have grown old since then with an age not of years, though by reason of a sister's love, I have been consoled, strengthened, even, and now, in the presence of the world's disaster, succumb to some unutterable conviction that the ends of God have little need of the prayers of men.

After my delirium in San Antonio had passed, I resumed my normal self-possession, though a nervous weakness—since developing into a muscular paralysis—made me at moments inert or half trembling with a deceitful dread that set my heart beating curiously. How well I recall it all; those days of anguish, with the twilight glimmering of joy that I had come in time to see her, and with too a mystical sense of attachment between us both, lasting beyond death, and bathed, as with a consecration, in the bitterest waters of Marah.

I had rushed from San Antonio to New York, and from New York to Havre, and thus, in two weeks, almost exactly, stood halting before the gate of the captain's house in St. Choiseul. The autumn season already had begun to stain the woods with red and yellow, the delicate atmosphere of early fall filled the fair scenes of meadow and hill and clustered homesteads, with ravishing tints. Everything, as I despairingly gazed upon it was so eloquent of beauty and peace and—realization! And what lay in the house before me? I almost fell to my knees in the crushed agony of suspense, but Ah! No! it was not suspense. I knew; that psychic power which dwelt in my Gabrielle, which brought to her the myriad voices of the dead in their awful supplications—Eh bien, not that now—some of that power was with me too, and every step I went forward to that pitiless revelation of defeat, accompanied the stern record in the thought that hope was delusion. I had met no one; the deserted village was itself a presage.

I looked up at the silent house charming in its vines, flowers, into the walled garden blushing now in the hectic flush of royal gladiolus, up at the empty windows, and above, far above into the depthless blue sky, where we men and women somehow place the everlasting dwelling-place of the Almighty. Almost as I reached the door it opened, and in its frame stood Gabrielle, much changed; I saw that at once, through all my sadness, but solemnly beautiful I thought. My heart leaped towards her; in the fast approaching desolation she, my blessed sister, would save me, lift me up from the terrors of bereavement, not with strength, but with the divine compassion that I felt now visibly abided in her.

Gabrielle opened wide her arms. I caught her in my own, and she whispered in my ear; "Alfred I knew you were here. Before I saw you the sense of it was with me."

"Gabrielle, is there no hope—no hope?" The words choked me like some insurmountable obstruction in my throat.

"Yes Alfred," the voice, always soft and delightful, was just a little tremulous with sympathy, her own deep love. "There may be; the fever has subsided a little, but—Well, come in. Blanchette asks for you so much. Come, the spare room is at the head of the stairs. Be noiseless. I will fix everything."

We ascended the stairs, and I waited outside the closed door with my head pressed against its lintels, murmuring—what were they?—Prayers? Possibly.

It opened softly in a few minutes, and Gabrielle with a gesture of invitation to enter and with her finger on her lips, moved before me into the room. I saw the waiting group at the side of a low wide bed. The captain, erect, still, with features blanched into a pallor that matched his white disordered hair, his figure bent slightly forward as he leaned on his cane, and kept his eyes unchangingly riveted upon the bed, whose occupant I could not see. At the bed-side was the watching doctor, and to him now Gabrielle approached, withdrawing then a little to one side with her head bowed, but with her eyes noting the sick girl whom yet I could not see.

I slipped to my knees with a sudden motion outward, that brought me to the bed-side, and for a moment I stopped there, with my face buried in the coverlid. It had been done; Blanchette knew. The next moment her hand caressed my hair, and the weak stroke penetrated me with such an ageless longing that, do what I would, I shook from head to toe. Mais courage; I must be now most calm. Yes, yes, most calm. So I wrestled with myself, biting my lips, and forcing to my eyes the haggard smile of reassurance. My hands imprisoned the hand of Blanchette, and slowly raising my head our eyes met.

I did not see what I saw afterwards, the shrunken figure, the hollow cheeks, the paling lips, the slow hideous change of emaciation. No! nothing; only her eyes, and in them shone something so fathomless, so beatific, that it suddenly lifted the intolerable weight of pain, it smote the clouds of misunderstanding or rebellion, and they vanished. It filled my ears with music, in place of groans, it summoned by the wand of a supernatural enchantment unheralded figures of blessing, and in those eyes I read the futurity of our endless happiness.

I moved my head towards her, and despite the restraining hand of the doctor kissed her lips, slowly, slowly, that the lingering embrace might fill her soul with confidence, and against her heated cheeks I swept my lips again and again. It was over. Our tryst was kept. Gabrielle called me gently, and Blanchette fell from me in a fainting spell, while the doctor firmly lifted me up to my feet, and the captain caught my unsteady body.

And—we had not spoken in that transient interval of surrender—thus mutely with the deep intelligence of an uttermost love we were married, and in that restraint unrepiningly, with an entire joy, I have lived and live. Some symptoms of that psychic erethism which possessed Gabrielle were also born in me, and before my eyes even now sweeps the vision of my Blanchette, and in the night her voice fills my ears, and her hand caresses my forehead. But later it was through Gabrielle that I summoned her to me, and in this way grew the apparent supersensual power of my sister to materialize the ghostly denizens of the Hereafter, and install them, as it were, in matter before the physical eye.

Blanchette's burial was itself a poem, so sweet, so tender, so rich in the love of friends, and in the graces of both religion and of nature. The day was divinely rare. Everywhere was the blessed soft, gently warming sunshine, and the last flowers of the autumn woke to the summery touch, and bloomed again. From the doorway of her home the little procession filed, bearing, on the unshrinking shoulders of eight villagers, the coffin, draped in white and enjeweled with blooms. Before it went the wavering line of altar boys, singing in thin sopranos, and the robed Padre—Father Antoine—grave and noble, and behind it the captain and I walked, our hands clasped together. Although the captain moved forward erectly, I felt the nervous pressures of his hand, tightening and relaxing, and for a moment now and then he leaned upon me. Mais—le brave garçon—he never flinched, and if his heart was near the breaking point, no one knew. Behind him walked Gabrielle and father—mother was in the church waiting with the congregation—and then Privat Deschat and Sebastien Quintado, and then the long file of friends followed, old and young, who had loved Blanchette for her goodness, her prettiness, her kindness, her grace of being and of sympathy.

They came from far and near; they were men and women, girls and boys, some carrying candles, some wreaths, some little crosses of Easter palms which they would throw in the grave, or on it. The altar boys carried lighted candles, and the air was so still that the almost invisible wisps of flames rose straight upward, and were revealed by the undulous smoke that sprang from their tips as the candles wavered in the hands of the acolytes. Slowly we moved on—somehow I seemed half unconscious, and yet most sensitive to the day's supreme charm—the shrill chanting of the boys, mingled almost indistinguishably in my ears with the murmurous hum of belated cicadas, the slow rustling of footsteps before and behind me, the occasional whisper of the vacantly stirred foliage in the trees, the distant pipings of birds, and the far-off wail of some wandering or bereaved dog.

It was a dream almost, and ever and anon, like some spiritual effluence, the fragrance of the dying season from the field, the distant woods, the savory banks of the meadow-streams, invaded and enmeshed my feelings, with a strange fervor of complacency, as though I followed, not the dead body of my love, but was on my way to meet her elsewhere. So indeed it seemed to me in the little church, where all the frail magnificence our little church could summon for her funeral was so loyally displayed, and where the soft voiced father spoke with the brave and cordial accent of confidence, that Blanchette Bleu-Pistache was most surely now in Paradise. Then I felt my own soul leaving me amid the tapestries and lights, and upward with her, hand in hand, I was hastening to fields of asphodel and unbroken choirs of the celestial, and that then I swooned sideways, and for an instant the captain held me, when the reverberant senses returned, with the rush of whirring sounds, and I was myself again.

Blanchette was buried in our church-yard, somewhat towards its western wall, where the ivy clung late in the winter to the stones, where a tall Lombardy poplar planted too against the wall, stood like some impossibly gigantic sentinel, and where afterwards indeed the flowers that I watered, in an agony of trust that Blanchette knew I kept thus alive within me the imperishable union of our hearts—spread the sweet wantonness of abundant color and perfume above her, flowers that when they died in the autumn's cold and the winter's searing frosts and snows, were replenished with others plucked from the conservatory of our home, and placed under the white cross like some herbal sacrifice.

Ah—c'est assez—I must not linger on the great sorrow, though in the inextinguishable pain that I feel at moments over its recall, a hidden selfishness as of a satiety of suffering prevails to force me to write and write. But I have forgotten and my wandering thought obscures my whole purpose. It is Gabrielle that all this grievous remembrance leads to, and she who has ended the awful WAR, is the theme of this most wonderful experience, I have essayed to tell so imperfectly.

After Blanchette's death I stayed with the captain for some months, until a grave disease struck me down almost to death's door, which indeed I craved to open and to close behind me. It was a nervous fever, from which I have never quite recovered, as it left me with recurrent fits of weakness and a debility of energy quite unlike my former self. The captain adopted an orphan girl, who was like an incarnation of his daughter, and who infinitely blessed him, with a similar gentleness and sanity and beauty.

Gabrielle and myself became again closely knit together in sympathy. She had nursed me in my sickness, and she read to me in my convalescence, and then she told me of the harsh and repulsive life of the hospital; how its penury of grace afflicted her, and the physical destitution of the hideously sick had overcome her with an irrepressible repulsion, and the half savage nakedness of exposures and surgery had thrown her into momentary spasms of despairing melancholy. But she had not complained; it was the ordeal of preparation, she said; she had undergone extreme dread and misery of heart and mind, and, under the visitations of her distress, those ecstasies—as she now slowly and tearfully confessed—of desire to see the ghostly and immaterial had returned and strengthened, and to her had come visions and voices, and again and again in her prayers the apparent touch of fingers tracing the braid of her hair, or even smoothing the temples of her head had actually been felt.

None of these things were told to me by Gabrielle until I was effectually improved, and then they became the outpouring of her heart. She had been unwilling to speak of them to father and mother since they would have, beyond any question, regarded them as the symptoms of mental infirmity, and their solicitude might have readily taken the form of some new insistence upon the avocations of the city. Gabrielle, after the death of Blanchette had persisted in her refusal to return to the hospital in Paris, and, after a brief and a little unpleasant disagreement, mother and father permitted her to stay at home. Then came my sickness, when Gabrielle proved most useful, and then by a natural adjustment—for exactly as it had been in the old days of childhood we became inseparable—Gabrielle assumed domestic duties, and our home life was reinstituted and complete.

It was delightful, though the happiness it brought to me was a solemn tenderness of feeling and thought simply. I had brought back from America a small sum of uninvested funds, and when this was carefully invested, with the interest from the moneys held by me in America and with my father's maintenance, our living became, more than ever, free from anxieties, and comfortably luxurious. Nor were we careless of our duties to the less fortunate; the instruction of our parents had always laid emphasis upon the invincible demands of charity in the Christian life, and no one more thoughtfully than they furnished to us examples of its most admirable exercise.

And here I must refer to something now certainly obvious to my reader. The religious faith of our parents was not ours—not Gabrielle's nor mine. Perhaps that had much to do with that felt, though never mentioned, separation—désaccordement, we French would, I think, call it—that latently grew up between our parents and ourselves, dutiful as we always were and loving too. Gabrielle and I were Catholics, and our reversion, as it might be called, had taken place as we approached maturity, when something in our natures responded vitally to the spiritual richness and the sensuous impressions of the Catholic church, while the absence of a Protestant church in St. Choiseul—supplemented by the meeting together of various members in a room, wherein my father often assumed the functions of the preacher—helped to establish our desertion. There was indeed a moment's exasperation over it all, but it was most evanescent, and, yielding to a larger liberality of conviction than most Protestants, our parents were at least contented that their children worshipped God and Christ.

Certainly to Gabrielle the Catholic symposium of saints, and its hierarchy of visible and invisible powers, appealed overwhelmingly. She surrendered to the full harvest of its supernatural offerings, with the gladness, the rapture, of the energumen. Now too that the psychiatric sense or control had started within her nature, she rose to the strange contingency of communication with the dead, with a transcendent joy. No longer thrust upon the abhorrent carnalities of the hospital, graciously as she acknowledged their necessity and kindness, Gabrielle, with me, her emotional companion too, returned to all the quietism of our life in St. Choiseul, and revelled in her exuberance of mystical detachment. It was a partial aberration of mind, I almost now think, despite its wondrous results, accompanied with the enthralled wonderment and pleasure of a temperament poetical and structurally imaginative. Gabrielle became neurotic. Her hospital life and its terrors had something to do with it.

This community of feeling and the gradual development of that unhealthy indulgence in the mediumistic power, Gabrielle now discovered she possessed (which became encouraged through my own solicitations) formed between us a bond of fellowship, that became secretive and masonic. It was not a fortunate circumstance, and yet SEE what marvels flowed from it—at least so I think, and indeed I am not unwilling to protest that it was God's hand! Of course it was my desire to approach Blanchette in her spiritualized state, that led us onward along the mysterious and fascinating path of our strange psychic experiments. And so I come to that illustrious moment when I saw Blanchette in the spirit, when—Mon Dieu, can I ever forget it?—that pale vision of my own Blanchette issued from the darkness, stayed on the threshold of the real for an instant, softly luminous, and yet discrete in form, though the corporeal properties of the dear face I adored, seemed blurred in the haze of an exceeding brightness.

It was probably about six months after Blanchette's death, that I ventured to speak to Gabrielle about the hope I almost treacherously nourished—for the practice is forbidden by the Church—that she might be able to summon Blanchette from the world of spirits. It was towards the evening of a spring day, that just began to intimate the glorious oncoming of the new season's wealth of beauty—a beauty I longed for, for with the reawakening earth, with the fresh laughter of the whole wide sphere of living things, I knew the dead weight of my grief would be lightened. The sunlight, the song of birds, the flowing vesture of the colored earth, would enter and dissolve it, and thus, mellowed into sadness only, it would encumber me no longer with leaden hopelessness. We were standing together at the bottom of the garden, watching the first sproutings of the crocus from beneath a film of sheltered snow, and the cheering warmth of the full sun filled us with the instincts of life. It opened my lips.

"Gabrielle," I said, "I want you to bring Blanchette back to me."

My sister was not surprised; she turned to me with the most natural gesture of willingness, placing her hands upon my shoulders and looking straight into my eyes.

"Yes, Alfred, I will. I have heard Blanchette. But I was afraid to tell you. Twice she has spoken to me, in the night, and once in the brightest daylight, as I stood at the window of my room. Can you stand it? For see Alfred, I feel the power strongly in these spring days, as if the resurrection of life in all these things," she swept her arms outward to the landscape, "brought with it the spirits of the dead; as if they too liked a reprieve from their isolation, and thronged to the earth. Is it not so?"

"Oh! Gabrielle what has Blanchette said to you? Was it in words? Gabrielle, Gabrielle, it cannot be. Do not fool me with mere fancies."

Gabrielle smiled, a smile, as it were, of commiseration at my doubt, for now indeed she lived, I do believe, in a mingled world of things that we call real, and things that we call unreal, and to her they were almost the same.

"I do not fool you Alfred. Why should I? It is so simple and it is so true. See."

She left me, beckoning for me to follow her. She walked to a walnut tree, a low precarious sapling which had furtively pushed its way upward into some semblance of a tree, and leaned against its slender trunk, with her eyes pressed upon her crossed hands. I stood irresolute, half expectant, half miserably self-reproachful. Suddenly Gabrielle spoke. Her voice was itself strange, very distinct but chilled into a sepulchral gravity.

"It is all very dim, yellow and blue clouds float up and down, and here and there a figure moves, and there are voices, and now a great light—too bright—too bright—it shatters all!"

Her voice had risen to a tone louder than conversation, and she had raised her head with a quick upward movement, as if it had been jerked backward. Almost instantly she turned again to me, her face blanched, and her eyes just a little wild and strained, with no recognition in them. The oddness passed almost as quickly as it came, and Gabrielle smiled, and shook her head apologetically, and for one moment we watched each other with curiosity. But Gabrielle was quite herself, and coming close to me, she whispered:

"No Alfred it is not hard. You saw that I pierced the unseen; though, as it most usually happens when in the open, or with others, the pictures are confused and the voices difficult. I cannot make them out. But we shall try tonight together. Hold my hand and wish your wish, and let our minds—our souls—call for her and she will come. O! I am certain!"

"Gabrielle, I think this is not wise. You must cast off this inclination, and banish all of these impressions. Is it not a dangerous habit? Are you not afraid that it may unhinge your reason? And yet—Ah! how well you know, Gabrielle, that if I could only just be quite certain that Blanchette waits—waits. And then but once! Yes but once! Gabrielle," I caught her by the shoulders, and held her imprisoned, so that our eyes gazed into each other's, mine with a scrutiny that was half anger, half solicitude, and hers with an intense affection.

"Gabrielle—this must end. You hear me. End. Call Blanchette if you can. I will help you—and then—Let it all go. Cure your temperament, banish these hallucinations. I know I have been guilty in listening to you, but now—after Blanchette—after Blanchette—" the words left my lips wearily, as if the next alternative were feared most by me; "after Blanchette, no more of it. It is wrong, it is a diabolical procedure, mixed up with nonsense and disease. Stop it." How extravagant are our inconsistencies. I admonished Gabrielle, but I was not unwilling myself to stoop to the indulgence that might bring me a glimpse—no matter how fraught with deception, with the danger of madness, of the worse consequences of physical deterioration, even of religious apostacy, if only a glimpse of her I had made eternally the lode-star of my life, now and hereafter; if only a glimpse, might be vouch-safed.

Mais pourquoi Non—was I so wrong? What indeed has happened? Ah I know Gabrielle is—arretez vous, pauvre barbouilleur, pas encore—Go on with your story. It is Gabrielle speaking.

"Brother, you do not know what you are asking me. It is impossible—it would rob me of life, for I should not know then whether to really live in this world and to die in the other, or to leave you and mother, and father and home here, and to live the more glorious life beyond. Now I live in both worlds. Yes truly—in the mornings the clouds of angels waken me, through the nights my bed-side is covered with the spread haloes of the dead, and in my ears sound the sweetest whispers, and salutations of the saints. Throughout the day, if I only shut my eyes, and ask for their appearing, the visions continue, and even my face is brushed by fairy hands, or my lips feel the imprint of unseen, unknown faces."

My sister's face shone with an interior illumination, impossible to describe, and as she talked to me I felt the astonishment that might come to one who converses with some incarnate spirit. It did appeal to my sympathy, for I lived now myself half immersed in the daily contemplation of another world; it met my own anticipations vividly, and I could not condemn, nor evade its fascination. But I wondered and so questioned her more closely.

"Gabrielle, how can all this be? You have never said such things to me before, as if you were moving in a spirit-land with your feet in this world, and your head lifted above the stars. What does it mean? I knew something, but this tumult—fourmillement—of apparitions I knew nothing of."

"No, Alfred, I know you did not, though it has often been on my tongue to let you know how the visitations multiplied. I think, Alfred, it really is, as St. Paul says, that we are encompassed by a cloud of witnesses, or this world is itself unreal, and the realities are elsewhere; perhaps that everything about us, could we for an instant strip them of their appearances, would be something else—you see?—something else, and this atmosphere," she lifted her hand upward, shook it rapidly, causing little puffs of air against my face, "was loaded with currents of the dead!"

We both got up and walked slowly towards the house.

"Of course you have said nothing of any of these things to mother or father?" I queried.

"Ah, Alfred, I could not. They would not understand, and then why—why should I?"

After a pause: "Alfred, it will do no harm. Do not think me mad, or deluded, or—or—unbalanced, as they say, even. I cannot make it plain perhaps—but this I know—they are there—they, the spirits—" and she waved her hand up and down—"and when I call them they come, and they come when I do not call."

She was almost laughing now, and studying her attentively I could not see any of those symptoms in feature, or eyes, or voice, or manner, that betray to the alienist the disordered brain. Gabrielle never to me looked lovelier.

The next moment as we entered the hall-way I caught her arm and turned her abruptly to myself; "Gabrielle, show me Blanchette."

Her arms were about my neck in a trice, and she spoke in my ear; "Yes, Alfred, tonight, in the library. Come. It will be my seance—and yours too. Our spirits are in tune. We will roll back the visible and see the invisible. The substantial shall become the transubstantial, and the diverse, one."

This language was the only indication, at the moment, that I possibly could have regarded as idiotic—in the common sense—and I was half inclined to believe that Gabrielle—not without fun and humour—meant to bewilder me with it, as a joke.

Would I come? "Yes certainly," and so I left her, wonderingly, as I passed to my room, recalling that utterly impossible fiction in an English book written by an artist, called, as I remember it, The Martian. I shuddered a little when I closed the door of my room, and sank back in an easy chair, to grapple with a now peculiar problem. Should Gabrielle be permitted to live in this world of spiritual essences, and apparitions any longer?

I think that I was not disinclined to live in it myself, but with me the material stringency of affairs was unmistakable, and I did, spasmodically at least, revolt against this extreme spiritualism. I hunted along my book-shelves, and found the Martian book, and chasing through its pages I stopped at this incomprehensible passage:

"For when the life of the body ceases and the body itself is burned and its ashes scattered to the winds and waves, the infinitesimal, imponderable, and indestructible something we call the soul is known to lose itself in a sunbeam and make for the sun, with all its memories about it, that it may then receive further development fitting it for other systems altogether beyond conception."

And then came the intolerable fancy of these Martian souls getting into the bodies of animals, and into men and women, and how the particular Martia influenced the divine Englishman, and made him write wonderful transforming books, and he thought of a life

"where arabesques of artificial light and interwoven curves of subtle sound had a significance undreamt of by mortal eyes or ears, and served as conductors to a heavenly bliss unknown to earth."

I fell into a stupor of meditation. Might not Blanchette do such things for me? Her image sprang to my eyes, her voice sounded in my ears, her arms embraced me, the very fragrance of her person enchanted my nostrils, and then, as the stupor passed, and the dying day sent the broad beams of the sun full into my face, I rose, and, feeling with a sudden particularity of certitude, the absolute hopelessness of fancies, of dreams, of anything but work, with my own life broken at its very beginning, and the overshadowing pall of an unforgettable disaster shrouding it from corner to corner, I sank to my couch, and, stretched along its length, wept bitterly.

CHAPTER IV

GABRIELLE'S SEANCE

It was only a few minutes later that, shaking off the dreary sluggishness of my grief, I started out of the house for a brisk walk. Down through the village, out into the broad highway towards Briois, where the Diligence from Paris then shot past me, with salutations shouted from its windows, and handkerchiefs waved from its Imperial and still on, along the fields growing verdant, while the warm tremulous air, with its procreative touch, unclasped the glutinous envelopes of the buds in the alders and poplars, and afar towards Bienne, and the ruined chateau, the massed background of the walled forests spanned the horizon with a palpitating purple haze, as of an arrested atmosphere or emanation, and in the very zenith above me a creamy rosiness, like an etherial colored lymph, dripped from cloudlet to cloudlet.

How wonderfully beautiful it all was; its tenderness, the auroral lights of the sky, and the definite joy of the returning life; it renewed my courage, rather it put to flight the dull meanness of sottish fears and regrets. The verses of —— came to my mind, and aloud, on the straight road that was now darkening, as the day fled to the empyrean, and thence must fly over the great ocean to the wonderland of America, I repeated them:

O renouveau! Soleil! Tout palpite, tout vibre
Tout rayonne, et J'ai dit, ouvrant la main; "Sois libre,"
L'oiseau s'est évadé dans les rameaux flottants,
Et dans l'immensité splendide du printemps;
Et J'ai vu s'en aller au loin la petite âme
Dans cette clarté rose ou se mêle une flamme,
Dans l'air profond, parmi les arbres infinis,
Volant au vague appel des amours et des nids,
Planant éperdument vers d'autres ailes blanches,
Ne sachant quel palais choisir, courant aux branches,
Aux fleurs, aux flots, aux bois, fraîchement reverdis,
Avec l'effarement d'entrer au paradis....
Alors, dans la lumière et dans la transparence,
Regardant cette fuite et cette deliverance,
Et ce pauvre être, ainsi disparu dans le port,
Pensif, je me suis dit: "Je viens d'être la morte."

Then my thoughts reverted to the strange things Gabrielle had told me, to the mysterious experience she promised to lead me through, that night, and, as the stars stole one by one timorously out of the filmy shadows of the east, into the grey dark sky, I speculated on our relations with the unseen, and whether we might be so attuned, as Gabrielle seemed to be, to respond and feel that numerous company, and their thoughts, and wishes, their influences, and their designs? I knew, everyone knows, that the scale of sound runs beyond the coarse mechanism of our ears at either end of the gamut, as indeed there are rays of light which our eyes do not catch in the ultra-violet end of the spectrum. Could it be that actually we are immersed in a vast ocean of spiritualized animation, which we cannot apprehend—most of us—which touches us on every side, and is yet as unapproachable as the stars I was looking at, but, unlike the stars, is not even suspected.

But perhaps—so I mused—there were hierophants, translators of its mysteries, souls enriched with some finer sense, who felt it, saw it, or, like pulsating membranes that record the varying pressure of the air, were so marvellously made as to feel its pressure too. They were pendulums, swinging in two worlds, and passing from one to the other, as one might pass from darkness to light, from discord to harmony, from confusion to order, from the apparent and back again to the real. Of these was Gabrielle. Or they were doorways, windows, passages, that afforded access to us, the corporeal prisoners of the earth, through which they came back—les revenants—when they too dearly loved us to find even happiness in their new abode unless they might occasionally regain our company. Ah could it be so with Blanchette! And then the queer book of Du Maurier's (that was the name of the English artist who wrote it) came into my head, and the impossible fancy of the Martian woman living in the body or the brain of Barty Joselin, and the death of the girl Marty who had become the second home of the beautiful demon woman—the Martian sprite.

I half wondered whether Blanchette could come and tenant my own body, with me, or was she inhabiting Gabrielle? Ah—la folie—but should I indeed see her tonight? I hurried along the familiar road, now in a growing tempest and terror of mind, almost with, I cannot describe it, a queer sense of disembodiment, as if I, myself, were not in my flesh and blood, but some ghost of myself, with an engagement to meet the ghost I had loved—and yet loved. Thus I hastened backward in the night, and entered my home, where the lights burned most cheerfully, and found my parents and sister waiting for me, and Hortense—still with us, with her flagging energies helped out by a pretty brunette waitress Gabrielle had brought from Paris—impatient, at the table, for our evening repast.

"Alfred, we have been waiting for you. Tonight your mother and myself must go to Briois. There is to be a meeting there of the Protestant Union, and I am expected to say something on the needs of our country-side for religious instruction. I hope to be able to bring about the building of a little church where our people may have the consolations of their religion;" it was my father speaking.

"Ah pardon, I am late, but the night is heavenly, and the spring comes on divinely. I have been just now towards Briois, and I could have walked, I think, on to La Ferté without fatigue. My legs do improve in these pleasant days, and the warmth stirs my blood. I am glad, father, you will have a church. Are you sure it is best to build it in St. Choiseul?" I answered.

"Why not, Alfred?" asked mother.

"Well there are not so many here who would need it and pas d'abeilles pas de miel;" I said laughing.

"But, Alfred, we are to have a new visitor to live with us in St. Choiseul, a rich man from Bordeaux, who is a leader of our congregations there. He is too what the English call, an exhorter, un homme qui exhorte; very eloquent, a great preacher in his way. If the church is built in our village he will help us, and then it might be that he will be willing to be our pastor too. He is a relative of le Capitaine, and now he has suffered a great sorrow. His daughter—the apple of his eye—died on the same day that Blanchette left us, nous laissait. The captain begged him to come to St. Choiseul, and he consented. It will be good for the captain, good for St. Choiseul—good for all of us. Is it not so?"

"Yes, mother," said Gabrielle, and she leaned towards her with her gentle smile of reassurance—there had been growing between sister and myself, and our parents, since Blanchette's death, a severer feeling of religious estrangement—"It will be good. I have heard Père Grandin. I heard him in the wards of the hospital, and he is a good man, parlant le plus beau? français avec une voix délicieuse."

Mother and father were delighted; it was a great surprise, and during our evening meal we talked of nothing else than the coming of Père Grandin. They asked Gabrielle about him with an increasing pleasure, as they saw how really admiring sister was of the excellent man's skill and sweetness. It was a pleasant time, and in the domestic glow of confidence, that the Père Grandin would become an instrument of propitiation, rather than of discord, while Julie placed before us one of Hortense's masterpieces—chefs d'oeuvres—le ragout de mouton, with garnishments of peppers and haricots, with her hot cakes—pains de seigle—and the melting chou-fleur and the inspiriting Burgundy, we bloomed, so to say, into a renewed affection. It was admirable. I recall it—shall I ever forget that wondrous night?—almost as if it had been a moment ago. I was soothed and quieted, and the rising frenzy of my blood subsided, and a most ingratiating blissfulness invaded me, and we lingered long at the table. Gabrielle was so gay and reminiscent it seemed as if she loved the hospital, now she was well free of it, and, as I listened in astonishment, I slowly realized that Gabrielle was responding to some hidden elation, and that—Was it her ecstacy to show me her strange power? Ah, yes, there was, too, her gladness that mother and father were to be away that night, and so—Voila, la diablerie sans bornes! Bah, I will confess I was displeased, and felt a little disgusted amazement at Gabrielle.

An hour later our parents were tucked in the cabriolet, the short snapping strokes of the horse's hoofs passed away into silence, and Gabrielle and I were alone. We faced each other as the door closed, and Gabrielle seized my arm, and speaking very slowly, with her face covered by her other hand, with all her late show of spirits vanished, said:

"Alfred, I feel the power; it thrills me. I cannot explain, but as the time comes on, I am crowded with a multitude—un essaim—of motions within me, as if I might be slowly dissolved into air, or something else light and floating. You thought that I was careless at dinner. I know, I watched your eyes. You thought I was glad that father and mother were going away, so that I could show you my power when I call Blanchette (I shuddered) back to meet you. But that was not true. I felt disengaged and well, most well, and my heart was contented. There was no deception, no guiltiness as of escaping detection. None, I was myself, that was all. And Alfred I shall tell father and mother. Why not?" at my gesture of discouragement.

"Gabrielle, promise me you will reveal nothing about this to anyone, until I have consented. Remember—the Hospital. Father and mother will be appalled. They cannot understand as I do your mysticism—and then, who knows what the power leads to? Be silent."

My sister lifted her face, and stared almost stealthily into my eyes. I, the soi-disant critic of her "delusions"—that was my word, was now masking her concealment, and urging her to continued secrecy, intending—what did she think?—to use her potency for the gratification of my mad cravings?—to make her the servile means of communication with Blanchette, more and more, that thus my awakened desires might be stilled with the apparitional image of possession?

I did not answer the mute question. I could not. An unopposed, a sudden quenchless need of Blanchette, frustrated all honesty of speech, and I really caught at, snatched, the proffered chance—diablerie or no diablerie—to see again the face, the form, the flesh—Was it indeed materialization as the mediumistic parlance had it?—of Blanchette. The more I thought of it, the more I coveted the vision. Its quality should be tested. That I swore. And my connivance became more cautious. We would try nothing, until Hortense and Julie had retired. A sudden tension of almost ravenous expectancy rose within me, utterly surprising, and now, I was the exhilarator, and prompter, and accomplice, more desirous, more credulous, than Gabrielle herself. The delay for the thing to begin seemed insufferable, but there must be no interruption, and the sceptic, the half believer, the moderating protestant, at the unreasonableness and danger of the indulgence, moved now in its preparation with an unresisting acceptance of its realization, hungry for its fulfillment, every scruple banished!

"Gabrielle, go to your room. We will not begin until Hortense and Julie have gone to bed; then, when the house is all ours," my voice was strained and unnatural, and perhaps my features were themselves distorted with excitement, for Gabrielle slightly withdrew from me, "then, let us go to the library, and there we will unite our minds and hearts, and—bring Blanchette back!"

Only a violent self-control withheld my tongue from shouting the words, so monstrously grew within me the insatiable passion for the coveted design, a passion, half orgiastic, half a maddened curiosity, and within which, I know now, not a trace of spiritual feeling, or aspirations, or tenderness, or beauty, reigned, or had a part. So variously are we composed, and thus from the waters of our souls, when stirred, or clouded, darkened by the overturning prods of the rebellious body, which disturb its slimy sediments, rise the exhalations of unworthy motives. In that instant, as I waited afterwards for the hour agreed upon for our nocturnal incantations—the word suits the debased frame of my mind—just one overpowering conception ruled my heart, the possibility of clasping Blanchette to my breast as a physical presentment. Whither had flown the beautiful boundless dreams of our beatific, immaterial union, bathed in the everlasting lights of celestial choirs? Alas—whither?

It was about eleven o'clock, when Gabrielle tapped at the door between our rooms, and I opened it. Gabrielle had changed her dress somewhat. She had put on a dark serge gown that fitted quite closely, and she had opened the waist at the throat slightly, and discarded all collar. The sleeves closed about the wrists; in her hair, loosely piled up above her temples, were three silver combs, and they formed the only light touch in her apparel. We both wore slippers, as almost instinctively the association of lightness and noiselessness with the work in hand came to my mind. We said nothing, but passed out of my room, and stepped swiftly down the stairway to the library. I glanced out of the window hastily, and found the sky clear, mistily studded with the stars, and with strips of cloud strung along the western limits of the firmament.

Gabrielle asked me to light the lamp for a minute's instruction; otherwise we would proceed in complete darkness; that she averred was best. I lit the lamp, and was a little disturbed by Gabrielle's pallor which in the yellow light of the lamp appeared deathly. I asked her if she felt unwell. She smiled and said, "No, not at all," and then she motioned me to a seat near her, at the centre of the room, where she had chosen a chair, quite detached from any other article of furniture. Behind her were simply the unillumined corners of the apartment. I sat down and waited for her instructions, which however I fully understood as the manner of this seance had been in words rehearsed between us.

"Alfred, take my hands in your own, and bend your forehead forward upon my knees, and then just THINK of Blanchette, and remain so, no matter how long it seems. When the soul of Blanchette comes it will be light, but do not release my hands."

I recall the absolute precision of certainty in Gabrielle's words, in her voice, and then that she leaned back, shut her eyes, and just perceptibly drew her shoulders upward, while her lips moved as if in prayer. I put out the light. I pressed her hands in mine; they were supremely warm, and soft, and unresisting, and then I knelt and bowed my head and—endowed, as I have in this narrative many times intimated, some visualizing or occult force—brought to my eyes the very figure, color, expression, and voice of the dead girl. It was not so much a feeling of solemnity—that does not express it at all—as a feeling of mystery, of indefinite approach towards the incredible, with the mingled half delirious anticipations in myself of actually again seeing the live Blanchette, that held me rigid.

At length Gabrielle's fingers twitched slightly, and she half released them, but I held them tightly, and then Gabrielle seemed to be murmuring aloud. I still held my face downwards, forcing to my eyes the image of Blanchette, recalling her voice, and straining my mind outward as it were, in my effort to impress all of this upon Gabrielle. The voice of my sister grew slightly louder, and the words were at intervals coherent and intelligible, and then I lifted my head.

At first I could see nothing but soon I became conscious of some diffused light or glow, a kind of absorbed brightness, as if it escaped from the darkness itself, perhaps faintly bluish. It arrested my attention, and the thought of Blanchette died away as I actually saw the brightness increase around me. It was a strange indescribable light. It was not only seen by the eyes; it was felt by the mind, if I may put it that way. Looking more cautiously and intently it became evident that it lay in lines proceeding through the blackness of the room, from a point somewhere at our side, and it still grew slowly stronger, with a soft interior palpitation, as if the source of the emanations pulsed regularly, sending out the luminous streams in waves. With this increasing intensity—though intensity hardly expresses it, it was so vaguely dispersed and yet obviously confined in radial directions—with the increasing intensity, the mental influence deepened also, and it was only by a supreme effort that I retained my position.

The inclination with me was to allow myself to float, from the unmistakable sense of buoyancy that invaded all my body, and with that came to my sensorium a most peculiar incomputable sensation of diffusion. I cannot put it into words. It felt like a dissolution, as if the material substance of which I was composed were undergoing dispersion or extension, and the solvent was this strengthening light. But the sensation was also peculiarly delightful so that, while you felt yourself as it were vanishing, there was no sickness of fear with it, nor any, the slightest, physical resistance. I feel certain it was the prelude to unconsciousness. Some residual wakefulness, springing from my curiosity, saved me from the invited surrender, and I slowly rose to my feet, still holding Gabrielle's hands.

Then I looked at my sister, and, so it seemed, in that gloom there had developed around her head a half nebulous curtain or aureole of light also, which, in its turn, was emitting the peculiar light beams. It was at that moment I dropped her hands, that had become almost lifeless to my feeling. In an instant the previous sense of dematerialization left me, and with a shock, absurdly like the flying back of widely distended or separated limbs, I became keenly conscious, and concretely centered. I remember the faint thrill of amusement that this réassemblage caused to me. And now—there was not much desire on my part to be ratiocinative—the other point, the emergent initial centre of the emanations grew, not only brighter, but greatly larger, and I divined with a sudden consternation of heart, that there were forming before me the outlines of a human figure. I shrank backward for an instant, and for an instant only, and then bent forward and moved forward with the increasing light, for now the adjutant centres—that about the evolving apparition, and that around my sister—both increased, filling my eyes with the radiance, and yet administering no particular illumination to the objects in the room. These latter were perhaps more visible than they had been. That I think was incontestable, but the light might have been described as self-centered, in this sense, that it was entirely refluent on its source and confined in its illuminating effect to that.

And now—I lost sight of everything else, so concentrated was my thought upon the spectacle—the light to the side and in the depth of the room expanded rapidly, and the shape that it made was that of a naked phosphorescent figure, whose configuration, while it was discerned, was not really revealed, so bathed it seemed to be in the billowy light that encumbered it, and yet exposed it. Only the arms of the figure escaped that luminous envelope, and, stretching outward beyond it, put on the semblance of white flesh. I put my hand to my head. It was wet with the dew of perspiration, that may have been the sweat of amazement, or of excitement.

The intention so dearly formed of seizing my restored Blanchette died away before this immaculate phenomenon, for in it there dawned no reminiscence of the earthly charm I had called by that name. That loveliness whose perishable garb of color and of matter I had worshipped was not suggested here; the showery lightness that seemed tremulous with a thousand interior responses had its wonderfulness indeed, but it only left me wonder-stricken. Neither did it appall me. I became chilled into immobility, although every nerve was shaking with the impressed realization of a miracle. I was standing before the resurrected DEAD.

Whether it was this thought or the resuscitated passion of my heart, rebelling against the incandescent splendor, I do not know, but I suddenly stepped towards the scintillating object and spoke: "Blanchette! Blanchette! Blanchette!" My voice was instinct with the note of human passion, the earthly cry of love for the reality of warmth, and softness, and breath, and fragrance, the concomitants of the living body—and, as my words were repeated, and again repeated, and my arms were outstretched, while my face, bathed in the sepulchral light, perhaps might have showed my yearning, this marvellous and stupendous reality occurred:

The phosphorescent configuration with the extended arms grew paler and paler, and as its extreme blurry splendor died away, there sprang forward from within it, the real similitude of Blanchette, a pallid figure of light, and in it the dear face of the girl, tender, divinely, to my eyes, beautiful, with now a compassionate wistfulness of prettiness, O! so faintly expressed, in the dim radiance that seemed yet to stream with undulous waves through the room from the relaxed, motionless body of my sister. And—so it appeared to me—the figure advanced towards me with the same outstretched arms, with which I leaped forward to receive it.

I clasped the empty air and fell headlong in a convulsion, that rattled my very bones, while sharp strokes of pain severed my muscles, and throbs, like the intermittent knocks of a hammer, beat within my brain. It was an utterly unnatural collapse; the strained attitude of the last few hours, with the previous anticipation—unsuspectingly untying the resistance of my nerves—did not clearly explain it. There was something else. I was still quite conscious and, more than that, I was wrathful with disappointment, as if caught in a trick of deception, the hocus-pocus of a mere niaiserie. My eyes watched the faded spot of light from which the transfiguration had started. It actually flitted unevenly for some moments over my fallen body, and then it moved slowly—now contracted into a mere ball of luminosity—towards my yet unawakened sister. There it increased in brilliancy, and the former glowing outline, with the resumed extended arms, reappeared, and then came the last denouement. In an instant there was a flashing collision between the light of the vision and the light, seemingly emitted by my sister, when the entire room became vivid with light—everything seen, with absolutely nothing there but my sister and myself, and then the darkness again more profound by contrast, and swimming—the word is exactly descriptive—upward, and then sideways a ball, a mere star, of brightness, sparkled for one second in the fire-place, and vanished.

There was no sound, there had not been an audible word, and now there was the undisturbed apartment with myself spread out in pain on the floor, and my sister still in her unbroken trance. I struggled to my feet and seized Gabrielle's hands and drew her up. She awoke, dazed, and also in pain, standing at my side in a benumbed speechless way that startled me. I lit the lamp hurriedly, and led her to the couch, where she again fell into unconsciousness. I chafed her hands. I wet her temples. Finally she slowly responded to the treatment, and I was able to lead her to her room. She had by that time become normal, but reticent and oppressed, and begged me to leave. I went away.

My own distress lasted some hours, but slowly improved, the jolts of pain growing less, and at longer intervals, and succumbing to my complete restoration.

The next day found Gabrielle and myself talking in the garden at the same spot where we had conceived of the seance; we had both been almost feverishly waiting the opportunity to rehearse our experience. We met almost as if by agreement, walking down the garden, on opposite sides at the same time, as to a rendez-vous.

I related everything to Gabrielle as I had seen it, and asked her about her own experience. I said, "Gabrielle, I think that it is best not to indulge this power of yours any longer. It was a disappointment every way, and the results only unhealthy and stupid."

"Alfred," she replied, "I have often brought back the spirits of the dead, not by my own will but because they came to me willingly, and it has never hurt me. It seemed a delight rather, and the sensations were blissful. But it was all different last night. It was spoiled somehow. There was some discord, something improper in our thoughts—in yours, Alfred?"

"Gabrielle, just what happened to yourself, when you fell away in the trance?"

"I seemed to be rising upward on wings, with sunny lights shining upon me, and the endless shimmering of spirit bodies about me, and then came a darkness with a despairing feeling of loneliness and of desertion, and then a slow, consuming pain until you waked me."

"Gabrielle, have you ever actually seen the spirits? Were they, as the jargon goes, materialized before your eyes?"

"Not exactly, perhaps. They came to me in my sleep, but I have indeed—so it seems to me—awakened and found the air about me filled with shapes. They did not last, wavering away with swingings this way and that, but their faces smiled as they went off, and a low pleasant light remained; that too gently—doucement—fading away."

We walked slowly back again towards the house, quite silent. I, buried in a reverie of self-dissatisfaction, Gabrielle doubtless in one of afflicted wonder. At length I said, stopping abruptly, and turning Gabrielle towards me, as I often did, with my two hands clasping her shoulders, "Gabrielle, let us agree to banish these practices. It may cost you an effort, but I believe it is best for both of us. We shall lose our wits with these devilments." Gabrielle resented that, and her face showed her protest. "Well, not that exactly," I added quickly, "let us call them illusions. Some scientific wiseacres call them hypnagogic illusions. It is not altogether normal and reasonable and—" I hesitated a moment, and Gabrielle added, "You mean improper, unhealthy, unsafe?"

"Yes I mean all that, and then I think by some occultism we cannot define, or even recognize, they will torment us, and actually drag us into lunacy."

"Alfred, did you see Blanchette?"

"Why, yes, I saw something that brought her distinctly before me for an instant—but, Gabrielle," I was ashamed to betray my hope for some sort of bodily incarnation, "it was only a madness of the brain—only that."

"But, Alfred, you did see the light; they always come in light-clouds—les voiles de lumière."

"Oh, yes, I saw the shining figure—so it seemed—and the light, Gabrielle, that seemed to stream from your head in rays. All that I saw, but whether it was an actual light, or some infernal hallucination, or just some mesmeric phenomena, and we both were asleep, I fear to say. But it has left me queerly disgusted and upset. At any rate I will have nothing more to do with it—nothing. My work (Redaction of the Code Législatif for Court Practice) will be interfered with, and then perhaps my poor brain will leave me altogether."

We laughed, and at length Gabrielle answered, liberating herself from my hold and musingly watching the sparrows twittering and flying spasmodically in swarms from the thicketed ampelopsis on the house. Her voice was low, and its accent firm, and half persuasive too.

"Alfred, I will go half way. I will do nothing to bring back the visions, but if they come I shall not scare them away. And as for séances—well, we both have had all we want of them. Eh?"

"Truly Gabrielle, I think that if we continued these visitations, if they are that, it would be with us as it was with Argan in Le Malade Imaginaire, who was threatened by Dr. Purgan, you know, after a long line of disorders, avec la privation de la vie, ou nous aura conduit notre folie."

I never again spoke about the spirits to Gabrielle. I grew strangely fearful of them, the thought of them made me shudder—until the war brought upon us the awful visitation that I have written this book to describe, and which—Well, what it did is now the common knowledge of the world. Nor did Gabrielle allude to them until the gathering terrors of the dead broke her silence. And to describe that moment and its undreamed of marvels, its vast resurrections from the holocausts of the battle fields, the fathomless panorama of the endless dead, with the stupefying and convulsing climax of the horrid warfare, choked by their immitigable hosts, is now my dangerous and difficult task.

Father and mother returned from Briois most radiant over their success. Père Grandin was superb, a wonderful man, un homme de sagesse, de piété, et, ma Foi, un homme des affaires; enfin, un homme eloquent et fin aussi. He would come to St. Choiseul, and it was certain that Père Grandin and Père Antoine would get on well together.

The spring was all about us; each day added to the charm of the country-side and the gardens of St. Choiseul grew gayer and gayer with the snowy and carmine splendor of the tulips, the purple glories of the hyacinth, the blossoming trails of periwinkle, leading at last to the zenith loveliness of the blushing roses, when St. Choiseul sent its fragrant breath far and wide over the green meadows, and far into the thick-set and shadowed woods.

The bienséance of nature was seen too in the overflowing happiness of the country, its peace and increasing wealth, with the flow towards it of the gracious friendliness of the peoples, and the establishment among us of the pure principles of liberty. Indeed we were all gay. Privat Deschat's hideous predictions that evening so long ago—how long ago it indeed seemed, as if in another age; that was before I went to America—were all forgotten, or if recalled just laughed at—and yet there had been the Agadir affair and there had been disturbances in Alsace and cruel muttering elsewhere; the Cassagnac matter and the German correspondents. But that was nothing—une bagatelle simplement—and so the bright years rolled along, braided with delights, illustrious with hopes, serene with gifts, not altogether free from acquiescent tears, while the inevitable CALAMITY came closer and closer, and like a thunderbolt crashed suddenly from the peaceful skies, and darkened all the world with its despair and misery.

CHAPTER V

THE WAR

Père Grandin very soon became a favorite, and not the least devoted of his friends was Père Antoine, our village priest. The temper of the two men was most congenial, and the fervor of their love of goodness, their common age, a certain sweet complacency in the joyousness of life and in the complete mercy of God, wedded them to each other, and so into our intimate circle of friends Père Antoine, through the mediation of Père Grandin was joined, and both father and mother thus grew more sympathetic and permissive with Gabrielle and myself, and the days flowed smoothly, and the years followed each other joyously.

I became more and more interested in the work I had undertaken, and, under the pressure of its laborious needs, with frequent visits to Paris, found my time admirably occupied, while I was not too busy to omit the recreations of the home life with our friends. Above all caressed by my dear sister, whose companionship I now more and more delighted in, I was growing, perhaps by a premature decline of animal spirits, into a bachelor, whose inmost heart still kept unimpaired the image and hope of his first love. That indeed dwelt with me perpetually, and by the platonic resuscitation of its enjoyment administered literally to my physical contentment.

There was in my library an English book written by an American authoress in which I came upon this sentence (the book was sent to me by a Texan acquaintance after I had left America): "there were hours when she felt that any bitter personal past—that the recollection of a single despairing kiss or a blighted love would have filled her days with happiness. What she craved was the conscious dignity of a broken heart—some lofty memory that she might rest upon in her hour of weakness."

The philosophy and the psychology of the paragraph are profoundly true. That relationship which sex seems inexorably to claim is satisfied naturally by union, but its omission finds exoneration at least in the remembrance of disappointment. I grew with each succeeding year more and more sedately complacent, and a gravity of thought, deepened by a pleasant melancholy, mingled with the real consolations of religion and the inseparable charm of my sister and kept me composed and evenly—at times almost jubilantly—happy. My work was attracting some attention, and it promised for me continued and congenial employment.

We had many garden parties with Privat Deschat and Capitaine Bleu-Pistache—growing more feeble now, more silent, with often unbidden tears springing to his eyes—and Quintado and Père Grandin and Père Antoine—though he was not so often with us—and the sweet-voiced and sparkling little orphan girl the captain had adopted—Dora Destin, a vivacious creature with delicate ways and a keen appetite for tarts and pastry, and a peculiar shyness that came and went so oddly, that one instant she might be hiding, as if afraid, and the next leaping amongst us like a bird. Mother and father had become in the later years even graver, and a calmness—I dreaded to believe that it meant some interior failing—descended upon them, that made their ways a little embarrassing at times. We all noted it. It was a presage, a shadow. They were silent in company, and once or twice, I thought—this was just a year before the War—father seemed unconscious of his surroundings; his mind wandered and he kept saying "Alfred, Alfred" to me, as if dazed or grieved. The stealthy hand of Paralysis thus crept slowly forward towards its unescapable conclusion.

Of course Gabrielle was in our parties, and she had become to me the concentrated bliss of my living. Her growth into a healthier condition of mind and body had accompanied an increasing adaptability to company, and while the reserved manner remained, bestowing upon her a fine dignity, she was truly sociable and friendly. Gabrielle never quite outgrew the secretive habit of her thoughtfulness, and her deportment had been criticized and found fault with, as cold and austere. The inference would have been cruelly unjust, for never breathed a kinder and more devotedly good heart than my sister possessed. Her abstracted way often arose from the custom of religious meditation, and I suppose too was influenced by that singular supernatural—to call it so—power that she always felt, but now, so far as I knew, seldom exercised. It was that power that made of her the MEDIATRIX of the nations.

It was hardly fifteen years after my return that the Grown Prince of Austria was shot in Sarajevo in Serbia, and that was on the day of the Grand Prix de Paris. I read the news to Gabrielle, and Père Grandin was there. He had taken dinner with us. How well I remember his terror-stricken face. He pushed his spectacles up over his high white forehead, and his bright eyes glowed strangely with a growing fear. His expressive lips twitched almost as if he were in pain, and he lifted up his hands in protestation.

"God forbid. The blow has fallen then. The bolt shot. Alfred, this is the torch that starts the conflagration. The material—all inflammable, all explosive—has been heaped up between the nations, and, like a fierce feu-de-joie it will kindle into a wall of fire—un rideau de feu—between the countries. God save France!"

I was incredulous as were at the time most people. I laughed at the good man's warning, and because he felt half grieved at my carelessness, half stifled with apprehension as if almost—so he put it—his ears were filling already with the rumble of cannon, he begged our pardon for his distress. He put on his crumpled Panama hat and stood at the doorway, almost irresolute in his trepidation and sadness. He looked at me quite long.

I recall the moon riding high in white drifting vapors that came in from Calais—and in the changing light and shade he seemed almost preternaturally pale and sombre.

"Mon patrie," he sighed, "again the ravage, the desolation, the orphaned, the widowed, the crippled, the sick, the breaking hearts—Ah, Ah—" and seizing my hands as if in support in his agitation, he wept.

"But Père Grandin" I said, now thoroughly alarmed over his evident agony, "surely you are too quick, too hasty. Europe is at peace. Its people are reasonably happy. They will not permit war, and—"

I got no further. The old man was choking with emotion—it was half wrath, half despair.

"Permit it? Can they stop it? Do they govern? Is it not kings and princes and royal houses and titled ministers, the tyrants of opinion, the caprice or the pride or the selfishness of aristocrats, that control everything?

"See, they prance by us, unseeing, unthoughtful, just living for themselves, and then when the crash comes—the crash they have prepared with their silly talk of national honor, national enlargement, national continuity, racial union, destiny, putting over it all a gorgeous light of promised glory—just as the heroes in a stage play walk and stand in the glare of the electric lantern from the gallery, uttering bombast—when the crash comes, they summon the troops, they dragoon the people, they empty the banks, they crack the whip of urgency, and, pointing to the flag, drive us in hecatombs to death.

"No, no, Alfred—the war will come. I have long felt its growing tremors. We cultivate revenge in our hearts, the Germans cultivate hate, the Cossacks conquest, the Austrians dynasty, the Englishmen trade-money, their assumed preeminence, and there have been cabals and understandings, and a jolt snaps the artifice of our pretended brotherhood and, with hoof and claw, we fly at each other's throats. Bah—vous verrez."

His rage had restored his strength, and he stumbled away muttering and gesticulating. I watched him going across the roadway in the light that danced with the swinging lanterns when the night wind from the distant shores blew more strongly. The disks and outlines of shadows imparted to him a peculiar effect of unsteadiness. I half thought he staggered.

I went back to the library. There I found Gabrielle leaning over the paper I had flung down at the old man's outburst, and reading of the assassination. She looked up as I returned, and her face was white, and in her eyes too I saw an awful consternation. I was impatient with this foolishness, and expostulated loudly.

"What, Gabrielle, are you too imbecile? Père Grandin is in a panic. Why? He sees us fighting already—just because the heir to a crown is shot. It's absurd—pas vraisemblable."

"Alfred, I think we should not be too sure. It all looks bad to me, and—if it comes. What?"

Her eyes dilated with terror.

"Why, Gabrielle, have we not prepared ourselves for just this! Besides we have allies now—it is not as it was in 1870. There is England, there is Russia. Sacre nom, it will be as when Greek meets Greek—not comme les vautours et les pigeons."

"Ah, Alfred, think of the suffering. O! I have seen suffering in the hospitals, but a whole nation to be made into one huge hospital. Mon Dieu, c'est incroyable!"

"Wait, Gabrielle. Don't borrow trouble. The world cannot afford war now. La Guerre est un peu passée aujourd'hui. Eh?"

"Alfred, the devil is never sick, and never tired, and never asleep."

That night the news was confirmed. Then came Austria's demands; and then a chasing hither and thither of couriers; the wires hot with messages; lights in the embassies all night; rage, dismay; in the cities the people silent or cheering in the streets; houses closed or hidden in flags; in the ministries forebodings; feverish despatches; and almost always hopelessness. Peace was impossible; everywhere the "mailed fist"—poing armée—of the Kaiser. Then came Austria's declaration of war against Servia on July 29th. The detonation was at hand which would burst Europe asunder.

Capitaine Bleu-Pistache asked me to go to Paris at once, so did Père Grandin, so did Privat Deschat, and although father and mother seemed listless about it I, thoroughly awake now to the disaster, was impatient to visit the capital, and see how things were going. But Gabrielle did not wish me to go.

"Alfred, is it not best to hear the news here? You cannot enlist. Alfred you know that is impossible." She suddenly checked herself. I knew her thought, and my cheeks grew crimson—my weakness and physical deficiency now cut me off from service—"No, Alfred it was not that, not that," her embarrassment brought tears to her eyes. "No not that, but I am afraid of some danger. Now it is everywhere, an explosion, a chance shot, a street quarrel. Alfred let me go too."

"Gabrielle I shall be quite safe. I shall be O! so very timid."

She smiled.

"Not so timid alone Alfred, as if I were there too."

"Nonsense Gabrielle, is it not written, la femme fait le coeur intrépide. But really it would be very foolish for you to come. Watch here. I will be so careful."

She seemed inconsolable, so I promised to write daily.

Père Grandin wished all the papers sent to him, and the captain, the pictures, illustrations, prints, anything that would speak rather than tell—so he put it. And Privat Deschat whispered, "Alfred Lupin, you remember my prophecy of more than twenty years ago. I have said nothing about it—rien. But Lupin, if by a chance you can kill a Dutchman or even come by a dead one bring me his two ears."

"Privat," I almost shouted, "by all means—but Why?"

"Alfred," Deschat tossed his big head this side and that as a mastif might, coming out of the water, "I would dry them hard, tan them, and wear them as tassels on my smoking cap, mon chapeau de fumée."

Père Antoine was the last man I saw in St. Choiseul. I left for Briois in the cabriolet in the evening, and with all of my adieus at home over I had settled back in my seat, in a gloomy meditation upon the frightful turn in events, and with some compunctions too over my own indiscreet skepticism as to its possibility. My face was buried in the nosegay Gabrielle had pressed into my hands—I see her now standing in the doorway where the light from the hall flung around her the aureole of its pale illumination—and my thoughts grew each moment more sombre, when the carriage was abruptly stopped, and I heard the voice of Père Antoine speaking to the driver.

I recognized the father at once, and delightedly welcomed the interruption; my own sombreness threatened a positive malaise.

"Father, you here? Step into the carriage. I am on my way to Briois, and then by train to Paris. My friends—yours too—wanted me to go and I am impatient to watch things nearer the focus."

"Ah, my child" answered the benignant man, now seated beside me, "what new horrors does it all mean? I tremble for religion. I know the sneers that will be flung at FAITH. Where, where, they will cry, is this merciful GOD?—and as the misery rises, their cry will seem to have its justification. But surely God is in the storm as well as in the quiet dawn? If the war really breaks out then it leads to larger things—all in the scheme and providence of the Almighty."

"Father we must hope and pray that the worst cannot happen."

"Yes my son, but we must be also submissive. We must not fix in our prayers the stubbornness of expectation. What comes we must accept as the work of God. There can be no reservations in our acknowledgment of the immediate and uninterrupted immanence of the divine POWER. Let us simply trust."

I murmured disheartedly:

Ici tout meurt, la fleur, l'été,
La jeunesse et la vie.

The good man pressed my hands, and as we drew near to the lights in the station I saw his pained and overflowing eyes.

I came into Paris at the Gare d'Orsay on August first. Mobilization began the next day and when I reached the Place de l'Opéra crowds of young men were marching in the streets, crying, almost shrieking, "Vive la France." Girls along the balconies and from the windows showered flowers on them. In other streets groups of young men were singing the Marseillaise, and waving the flags of France and Russia and England. It was fiercely exciting, and when at last my eagerness broke all restraint I joined some of them—my limp was no hindrance there—and almost forgot my destination, drinking in the elixir of patriotism for a few delirious moments.

It was the next day (August third) that I hurried to my publisher's—Avenue de l'Alma—and found him with his family about him, disordered in dress, and dismally grave. It was M. Albert Yvette. He welcomed me with effusion, and resolved to take me to the Chamber of Deputies where the premier M. Viviani would speak on the situation. That would be the next day, and for the moment we would go over some copy as a temporary distraction from the mind-blighting crisis which had overcome the country. M. Yvette had four sons, two of whom had already joined the colors, and three exquisite daughters, two young girls, and the third a married woman, who in this extremity had united her family with her father's, and added to his own overflowing famille three boys—joufflus et bruants—so that there was no lack of excitement; conversation and predictions too.

On August first Jaures the socialist leader had been assassinated, and yet this monstrous assault failed to arouse national dissension. Yvette said it was significant. France was as one man and an undivided nation would frustrate the enemy.

We all agreed, but the coming test promised to be a severe one. The news that came in from the advancing Germans was not welcome, and showed the organization of a powerful attack. Yvette was confident that even the "spray," as he termed it, of the Teutonic wave would not reach us. I did not think so. Paris was in danger. Madame Yvette became tremulous and the daughters were in tears. Then came the news, flashed through the streets as if by a magnetic sympathy, answering the popular suspense, that England had declared war upon Germany. This was most cheering, and the days before France seemed less threatening.

We attended the session of the Chamber of Deputies. It was inspiring. The English and Russian ambassadors sat together, and the Chamber awaited the proceedings in complete silence. A tribute to the dead socialist Jaures was delivered by M. Paul Deschanel. It was eloquent, and the resounding shout that greeted the declaration that with France "there are no more adversaries; there are only Frenchmen," thrilled everyone present by its vociferous unanimity. Then followed the speech of the Premier M. Viviani, who read his address, punctuated by repeated cries of "Vive la France," and when he concluded with the phrase, uttered in a tone of metallic defiance, "We are without reproach. We shall be without fear," the Chamber went mad, and the walls sent back the billows of sound, as the air above the heads of the deputies became white with waving handkerchiefs and papers.

Yvette was overcome with his feelings, and I led him from the room trembling with emotion.

The next day Yvette appeared greatly refreshed, and suggested almost jocosely that we should together "parcourir la ville." I gladly assented. I craved this intimacy with the dramatic incidents of the moment, and was only too anxious to record some vivid impression of the city under this terrifying menace. That was August sixth, and we walked or rode all of the day. At night Paris was silent and dark, the streets almost deserted, and the soldiery watchful.

The dressmakers and milliners on the Rue de la Paix—the irony of the name grimly diverted us—were almost all shut up, and the street was a long dull succession of iron shutters. We saw women on the street cars (tramways). Along the Boulevard des Capucines our eyes were astonished by a drove of a hundred cows being driven through that avenue; the papers were sold in immense numbers, and the lively trade in them brought boys, girls, women, and old men from the suburbs to share in the momentary activity. Everywhere we saw the momentous enthusiasm and determination of the people, and any appearance of troops entrained for the frontier started the wildest applause.

Paris has been for an instant stunned by the spell of a terrible apprehension, that quickly succumbed to a returning wave of excited, indignant, overwhelming patriotism. I felt that the actual danger as a fear vanished in the tremendous reaction of rage and resolution. Its industries are crippled, its hilarity suppressed, and the many hued veil of joy and enjoyment that enveloped it like a cloud, has been torn aside, only to reveal the underlying hardihood and substance of manhood and devotion.

It looked finely, but I could not now shake off the terror of my mind over the Germanic rush onward. I intuitively felt that their devastating passage southward from Belgium would stretch far into France, and if arrested at all must be parried or flung back by the concentrated energy of the French and English armies, before its irresistible massiveness assumed such proportions as to become immovable and impregnable. I began to fear for St. Choiseul, and was anxious to return. M. Yvette pressed me to remain a few days longer, and as I had despatched all of my commissions—papers to Privat Deschat, and pictures to the captain, and letters every day to Gabrielle and Père Antoine—I assented.

Each succeeding day manifested the overturn in the domestic and routine days of the great city. The morning breakfast rolls had gone because the bakers are with the army, and families are supplied only with boulot and demi-fendu, but the supply is irregular, and the girls go after both the bread and the milk. In a hundred ways the national emergency is felt in the family, apart from the departure of sons, and the even retinue of service has been disarranged, with amusing consequences. Lines were formed before the provision shops in the mornings.

On August eighth good news was received, and the quickly revived spirits of the city became apparent in the crowded streets, with a noticeable resumption of gayety. I went to church, leaving the Yvettes home. The church was filled to repletion, and there was a large proportion of men. The service was well rendered, and the preacher touched upon the one thing uppermost in all minds, and admonished faith, courage, and prayer. As the congregation emerged from the portals of the church, the Marseillaise was heard from a near-by street, and, like a spark conveyed to combustibles, the surging mass broke out with song. It was a convulsion of fervor that made one almost quail before its immense intensity.

I took my leave of the Yvettes, who had been charmingly pleasant to me in their great home, and where the enormous sadness was sensibly softened by their amiability and courage. That was August fifteenth. The morning was dark with heavy thunderstorms, and the rain fell continuously. In the large dining room of the Yvettes, we gathered at a late breakfast—une affaire de semi-cuisine à midi—and, as the chandeliers were lighted and candles graced the side-board, and the mantel, and the high square étagères, it took on the expression of an "occasion." M. Yvette said it was my valedictory. I hardly knew what he meant, but this I know, that that was the last time I saw Yvette, or any of his splendid family. Yvette died at Bordeaux after the official evacuation of Paris; his two boys were killed at the battle of the Marne, and then the widow and the unmarried daughters left the mansion in the Avenue de l'Alma and lived with Madame Aubray, the married daughter. I have never seen any of them since.

We all tried to be cheerful, but the incessant marching of troops in the city during the last three days occurred to some of us as ominous of the encroaching and steadily moving Teuton. The conversation was most disingenuous, touching upon almost anything but the immediate preoccupations of our minds, and the apparent social abandon masked the uneasy sense of danger. The only remark that related to the war was one by myself, to the purpose that the superbly furnished table offered no suggestions of the possibility of Paris being starved—which perhaps under the circumstances was a little maladroit—and the story that Madame Aubray repeated, that a Prussian officer speaking French perfectly, among a group of prisoners at Versailles, met some French reservists, who passed the convoy singing the Marseillaise, and he turned to his guard and quickly remarked, "What a disillusion awaits us!"

M. Yvette accompanied me to the train at the Gare du Nord, and as I bade him "Farewell," he referred to the familiar and deep impression made upon everyone of the profound unity of the people, telling me that the Catholic Abbé Marcadé whose services at Le Bourget had attracted so much praise, had dined with the officers of the regiment and with the socialist mayor of the commune. He added, "I tell you, M. Lupin, the cementation of France is extraordinary. National cohesion has made us incompressible."

"Ah," I answered as I stepped into the almost empty train, "remember, M. Yvette, there is also such a calamity as pulverization."

My spirits had undergone a complete change since my talk with Père Grandin, and a gnawing feeling of hopelessness tormented me.

But how inexpressibly sweet it all was at St. Choiseul, and in the lovely and beloved country about it, as I walked along the familiar road from Briois, with the scent of the meadows, slowly ripening and withering at the summer's close; caught the long glimpses of the white road—lit now only by the light of the stars—indistinctly heaped, under the straight poplars, with the falling leaves, and then after the little stone bridge was passed with the liquid eyes of the stars gazing up to me as if from depthless nether worlds in the deep pools, I saw the massed houses of our village with hospitable lights shining from their windows. The urgent smell of flowers breathed from its walled gardens, and I prayed aloud that the hand of the destroyer or the cruel fury of bomb and shell and shrapnel might not invade the entrancing spot. The fresh odors—roses, heliotrope, verbena—enriched with an added effluence from the wet ground, bestowed upon the place a sort of consecration of beauty, peace, and sweetness.

I passed Privat Deschat's, and there was no light in the upper story window where he often read late into the night. I instantly caught sight of our home, where the windows of the library sent out so bright a light, that as I stood before the gate I could distinguish its occupants. Lights in other rooms shone out more timidly. The old home had doubtless gathered our group of friends, and it was an auspicious moment for me to enter. I raised the knocker and let it fall with a rub-a-dub-dub that I invariably used. I heard the running footsteps within, and the door flew open and I fell into the arms of Gabrielle.

"Alfred, Alfred. How good. O! We are glad to see you. And our friends are here, and we are all wild with anxiety to know what is being done; what is happening. Come, come," and the impatient creature pulled me into the now filled doorway of the library, where one by the other stood father and mother, Père Antoine, Père Grandin, the captain, and Privat Deschat, with Dora Destin, the little circle of our intimates, all peering with wide-open eyes at me as the bearer of new tidings, new hopes perhaps.

An embrace of mother and father and of the Capitaine, a hearty hand-shake of Père Grandin and Père Antoine, of good Privat Deschat, and an unreluctant kiss from the pretty Dora brought me well into the room.

"Where," I said, "is Quintado?"

"O! Monsieur Lupin," it was the half wailing voice of Dora, "He has gone to the regiment and is on his way to the front."

I looked intently at the half weeping child, and discovered a budding romance there.

"Come, come, Alfred," said the captain. "Tell us everything. Are there troops enough? Where are the robbers? We hear they are advancing along by Maubeuge in a broad front."

"And Alfred," it was the voice of Père Antoine, "the hospitals and the aids to the injured. Are they in good hands?"

"Monsieur Lupin," now it was Père Grandin, "is the Ministry together? Are we in safe hands under Viviani and Delcassé? Is Paris well guarded, and how goes the English alliance? Belgium is wiped out. Do the Russians make headway?"

I expected to hear next the shrill insistent voice of Privat Deschat, but as I turned towards him with a smile of interrogation, I saw he had withdrawn, and was moodily studying the ceiling.

"Alfred, will our credit be maintained? It is clear that the expense of the support of the armies, the purchase of stores, of munitions, the care of the wounded, will be almost ruinous. Does anyone predict how long the war will last? What are rentes selling at?" It was my father who put this practical aspect of the case before me.

"But Alfred, what can we do? Everyone must help. Could I nurse? I would go gladly." I knew that sweet voice and I felt how the devoted heart which gave it utterance would sacrifice herself to the last atom of her body in the cause. It was Gabrielle.

"Alfred, you are hungry and tired. Hortense and Julie have put up for you a good dinner—the things you like, un ragout de viande de saucisse avec les pommes de terres et les girofles, all bien melée." Ah, that was the mother's voice, and there behind her at the library entrance shone the honest face of Hortense, brimming full of admiration, and the little curious petite visage of Julie at her side, also admiring.

"Come, let us all go together with him in the dining room and sit around and hear him," said the disconsolate Dora.

Mother objected to that proposal and so I was whisked off under apologies, and with the strictest promise that I would be back in as short a time as possible, and then we would use up the night in talk and confidences, with mother's red wine and les gateaux aux amandes to loosen our tongues.

In our old dining room under the stiff surveillance of our over-painted ancestors, with mother opposite to me, and Hortense bustling in every minute, with new contributions of les bonnes bouches, I sat enjoying to the uttermost the good dinner, while I told mother of the Yvettes, and of Paris, of the soldiers, the anticipated invasion of the Germans, and how the high and low, the rich and the poor, the learned and the ignorant, were standing shoulder to shoulder in the immense effort to preserve la patrie!

Ah! that was a famous night! How we all talked, and how I rehearsed all I had seen, all I had heard, all that I thought and, all that Yvette heard, and saw, and thought too. How defiant was the captain, how grieving the Père Antoine—who half thought that the threatened death of the Pope might stop the war!—how impatient Père Grandin, how attentive and silent was Gabrielle—waiting for them all to go to besiege me with questions and offers—and how we all became silent, stifled with a fearful dread, when the invasion of the Huns was thought of, as reaching St. Choiseul. I argued against that likelihood. The wish was indeed then the father to the thought.

"The tide of approach will be more to the north and east, and if the worst happens before our men can check the deluge, the enemy's hordes will sweep into the Paris environs directly from the east and north. Our position north-west of Paris must protect us for some time, but—of course there are possibilities."

"It can't be done," the old captain strode into the centre of the room and swung round to us as he made his point clear. "It can't be done—c'est impossible. Why? Because with each retreat our armies are rolled up into thicker lines, and the Germans must broaden their wings to save themselves from being out-flanked and to protect their lines of retreat and supply. It can't be done—c'est impossible. Je vous le dit."

Perhaps we were not persuaded—so many things might happen—but we all felt better by making up our minds that St. Choiseul was rather out of the path of danger. Then we went over plans to help, and the suggestion was made by Père Antoine that I speak at the church house, and all of St. Choiseul and Briois and the country-side around be assembled there, and a committee be formed, and work started to gather and make material for the hospitals, the Red Cross missions, and to send gifts and warm underwear to the camps.

Now it was surprising, and it gave me an almost unpleasant shock of disillusionment, that throughout the night Privat Deschat had said nothing—absolument. Glances fell upon him from the company, as if his voice in the talk would be welcomed, and yet, listening with an absorbed earnestness, he "never opened his mouth" (Americain)—jamais il ouvrait son bouche—and it produced the disagreeable effect of alienation, of indifference. It could not be believed. Ah—God be blessed—that cloud of doubt was quite dissolved. About, as the morning sent its streaks of red over the east, and a fresher scent invaded us from the windows, Privat Deschat stood up at the corner of the group, where he had been sitting in his, to us, unfathomable taciturnity, and in a low voice, his big face moving with unconcealed emotion said these words. It closed our council:

"You wonder that I have kept silent. It seems to you a treachery. It is not. I can say but little. I know nothing. My heart beats with yours, with that of France, but neither your hearts nor the noble heart of France will force conclusions in this matter. Fate," he cast a momentary amused glance at Père Antoine, "is not concerned with the wishes of nations, any more than with the wishes of men and women. But after all Fate can be COERCED," he spoke the word with a simulated cry of anguish—it made me start. "Force and Strength and Devotion can put Fate to flight. You may not believe it, because Fate, or the way things go, is to you," he paused, as weighing the possibility of his inclusion, "all—the will of God. It may be in the meanings of Fate to destroy France, but our FAITH in France—and that means Force and Strength and Devotion will put that Fate to flight."

CHAPTER VI

THE INVASION

The deluge came. The spreading front of the magnificent wave of destroying Germans swept into France from Belgium, engulfing towns, foundering villages, flooding the wide country with its encompassing waters. Bah—the symbol is hopeless. Not water, the life-giving and fructifying essence of the skies, which fills the earth with gladness, not the moisture of the meandering rivulets that enamel the ground with flowers and grass, not the blessed warm rains that search the little brown rootlets of the glorious trees, and feed them nutriment and gather to them the atoms of mineral from the ground, that through the great trunks and all of the enlacing branches, build aloft to the bending skies the temple for the birds, and the home of protecting shadows, the wide canopy of beauty that holds the mists of the morning, and holds back the fury of the storms. None of these things that start in our minds familiar images of flowers and fruitage, when the pleasant word waters fills our ears—none of these came with the Germans.

It was a wave, but a wave of FIRE, consuming, scorifying, killing, fire; it was a flood, but a flood of ravenous flames, ravishing, withering, scorching, cremating flames—and there were indeed waters. What?—the endlessly running fountain of tears. Tears of fathers, and mothers, wives and children, tears over vanished homes, vanished faces, vanished tongues; tears before the black unpitying future of penury and want, of loneliness and beggary; tears over maimed lives, lost bodies, voiceless orphans, crushed shrines, deluded hopes—Nay differently, tears that were never shed, dried up in the fierce heat of bitterness and hate and terror, of shuddering despair, of dumb abnegation; fountains of grief indeed that were sucked dry by the tempest of impiety, that gathered them up into a storm-cloud before the Throne of the Most High and from whose depths rolled the awful summons—"Why, Why, Why, is This?"

I had given my lecture in St. Choiseul, and the little church house was finely packed. The people came from the villages about, trudging over the roads, riding horses and mules, driving in wagons and chariots, with country gentlemen amongst them, and lovely ladies, and bunches of the older children. The choir of the seminary at Bienne helped us, and sang touching songs, and gay ones too, and songs of courage and songs of prayer. It was inspiring. I looked at the patch-work assemblage, the earnest young and the pale and trembling old—many helped by their children to walk into the big room—the maidens wearing the tricolor in profusion, the boys waving flags, and Monsieur Raoul la Fayette de Birot, the owner of the superb chateau over towards La Ferté where each year were held the grand chasse-cours, seated in the front row with madame, splendidly arrayed, while at his side sat the humble chasse-mulet from Briois shrinking at first and fumbling his way to some less conspicuous place, and held back by M. de Birot who spoke up quite loudly:

"Restez. Je vous prie. À present nous sommes tous français, tous amis, Comment! fait-il une difference, quand la patrie est en peril?"

There were shouts of encouragement and approval, and then the crowded hall rose en masse, and sang the Marseillaise. It shook the rafters and went far away through the open windows, and woke the sleeping birds.

Père Antoine introduced me very prettily, very sweetly, and when he took my hand and led me forward to the edge of the stage the cheering was tremendous. I saw Gabrielle, and father and mother, the Capitaine, Privat Deschat, and Père Grandin, all together near the front, and dear sister held her face in her kerchief, because she could not hold back the tears.

I was a little frightened at the beginning, but I found my tongue, and described the scenes in Paris, and what the government was doing and how the troops were being mobilized, and the news of the successful landing of the English reinforcements, and the confidence everywhere, and then I read a part of M. Viviani's speech at the Chamber of Deputies, and closed with a recitation from Bambetta's great oration.

Ah! that was magnificent; I had skill in such things—as what Frenchman has not—and thrilled with emotion, my heart afire with pride and hope and love, I declaimed the blazing lines as though my lips were touched by the same divine flame that had lit those of the great tribune.

The tribute was immense; the building seemed to rock in the vibrations caused by the thunders of applause. All were standing, hats and caps filled the air, a sea of handkerchiefs sprang up, and the flags were torn from the walls and the standards, and mingled their brave colors in the ocean of snow. I saw Gabrielle between the Capitaine and Privat Deschat pale and rigid as if transfixed with pain.

Père Antoine spoke then, and invited M. de Birot to become chairman of the supplementary meeting, designed to form committees, and outline plans for practical work. We were most successful; the principal committee, that of Hospital Supplies, made me its chairman, and I instantly began my work. It was this work that carried me over the department, and kept me long weeks from home. Gabrielle wished to go to Paris and serve under the Red Cross, but I opposed that vigorously and kept her at St. Choiseul where she did nobly, gathering hospital supplies and furnishings for the soldiers, and where was inaugurated that mystical and supernatural VISITATION that led—as the world now knows—to the suppression of the raging conflict, as it threatened to level all of Europe in smouldering ruin; when—was it not so?—the HAND of GOD rested upon the earth, and the Armies shrank back from the Vision and DISSOLVED.

On August twenty-second the mailed hand of the Germans sprang over the borders of France, and from Mons to Luxembourg, its outstretched fingers were crushing the land and strangling its people. Against those groping fingers the twined hands of the French and English were now eagerly—albeit with some trepidation—also grappling. On the twenty-fourth there was reported terrific fighting on the Sambre and the Meuse. On the twenty-fifth, the French and English allies retreated, forced back by the hammering strength and anvil blows of the Germans, who dealt their coups de tonnerre while banked against each other around their massed guns, the whole monster moved onward like some titanic physical eruption.

Again on the twenty-sixth the allies reluctantly yield—yielding everywhere with fierce retributive blows on their part, and consolidating as they retreat, every energy of resistance behind them, while they prepare new lines of defense, and gather together every available scrap of support, material and human. On the twenty-seventh the news is received that the battle line reaches from Maubeuge to the mountains of the Vosges, and that the Germans number one million men. Against this mountainous avalanche of soldiery and guns the grimmest determination alone can hold its ground. But the walls are unbroken and the raging flood breaks through nowhere yet.

On the twenty-ninth I was far north with the armies, in the Red-Cross ambulances. The Germans fought their way to La Fère—north-west of Laon, and about 140 kilometres from Paris (about 90 miles), but the watch word Tiens ferme—Hold tight—was passed from mouth to mouth, and the tense strain of dogged endurance held the fronts together, each inch fought for with savage fury.

Someone blundered; there seems to be no doubt of that. We were not receiving reinforcements as we should; the troops had been urged into Alsace, tempted by a barren victory, and the large support which these battalions could have provided failed. C'était miserable!

On the thirtieth our left yielded. A gigantic battle was fought out in the department of the Aisnes near La Fère, at Guise and Laon, on the road to Paris. The English allies proved to be adamant, immovable. Under Sir John French at Mons and at Cambrai, they saved the day.

The cannonading was deafening, and the red tongues of fire quivered in dense volumes along the struggling lines of men, shot forward here, stumbling backward there, crowded in disarranged groups that swayed this way and that. Ever and anon terrific rushes forced, from either side, into the open midst the raging storm of the vomiting guns, impotent sallies, whose human units fell beneath the withering, blasting discharges of the cannon, torn into fragments by the bursting shells, or suddenly trampled into disfigured masses by maddened charges of cavalry, these last again stricken into death or helpless mutilation by the converging fire of the batteries, victim and victor, man and horse, heaped up in a throbbing or motionless blackened mass, filtered through with the oozing streams of blood, where indeed to the disembodied ear, that might have bent above them, rose the cries of suffering, or the last murmurs of the anguished dying, or the indistinguishable agonized prayers of those who yet lived and prayed for deliverance.

Above the armies on either side the air was loaded with the brown and bluescent clouds of smoke, in which the lurid splashes of carmine from bursting shells broke momentary gaps. The dropping shells sent to every side scurrying figures, pressed against each other in panic, when with sullen roar, lost almost amidst the universal din and clash and swelter of noise, its imprisoned powers were released in straight lines of fire, carrying along their blinding thread of light the shattering steel missiles of death, the blistering resin and sulphur, while at the inner edges of that crushed resurgence of living men lay the victims of its rage, limbless soldiers, bodies stricken into shapelessness, the fainting suitors of Death gasping for breath.

But often the harsh steel missile, with its cracked sides, emitting the fell arsenal of its sputtering and lightning driven contents, failed to meet its desired mark, the soft flesh and the brittle bones of living men. It sank, defeated, upon the impassive earth, vengefully burrowing its hot way into the yielding ground, becoming in its burial a mimic volcano, ripping aside its earthen tomb, as its detonation, deadened to a hideous grumble, sent ball and canister through the soil, spattering far and wide with dirt and mud and grass, the curtains of the ambulances, the wheels of the wagons, the guards of the ammunition motors, the backs and shins and breasts of men. Back of the lines the gouged earth showed everywhere the frightful plunges of the foiled demons, while with inconstant frequency noticeable to the trained eye, not unobserved by those who thereby just escaped destruction, lay the black bolides, extinguished and harmless.

Behind that wavering and uneasy or else just stiffened frontier of combat, where the murderous duel was played its sharpest, where men with blood-shot eyes, blackened bodies, and rent clothing were lashed into a maniacal heroism, where officers at intervals feeling the necessity, or inspired by the traditional splendor of service, dashed into the open and in the withering rain of shot and shell, upright, and with sentinel precision, directed the fire or exhorted their men to steadfastness—behind that marvellous line of human endurance, the fluctuating panorama of supply and reparation and reinforcement spread. Here were the gathered platoons ready for entering the thinning lines, the marshalled helpers of the ambulance corps, the doctors and orderlies, the racing caissons constantly feeding the rapacious and smoothly running cannon, the more distant assemblages of the commissariat, and behind them—a long long way off—that perpetual train of fleeing victims, the procession of the evicted, hidden, as to their resemblances to human proportions, under loads of domestic goods, the paraphernalia of the household, so that they indistinguishably took on the appearance of a vast titanic, coarsely corrugated and dirtily colored reptile, worming its way endlessly into the distance.

And when the eye, freed momentarily from its awful imprisonment in that hideous wrestle of death and life, turned outward to the wide horizons, the image of the desolating ravages of war were multiplied. The confused flames and smoke-clouds of burning villages or deserted shelters rose tardily into the dimmed skies, while, caught nearer at hand perchance, and beyond the invading surges of the Germans, if seen at all through the screen of vapors, the broken angular edges of wall and parapet, tower and steeple, cut the horizon with cruel indentations.

I had reached the neighborhood of a little village near Noyon, and intended to enter the lines, having a special pass which would permit me to come quite close to the firing ranges. The reason for this urgency on my part was the knowledge that Sebastien was with the Third Fusiliers, in a division of the Fifth Army Corps, and a letter sent by him to Dora Destin which had been communicated to the captain by an attaché of Gallieni who was commandant of Paris, told his sweetheart that he was not well, and expressed a wish to hear from her. Dora had come to me with the letter, stained with tears, and begged me to make an effort to get to Quintado, and to take him not only her message—written in the neatest hand-writing—but a package of woven odds and ends which would help his comfort in the camps. Poor girl, she was inconsolable.

It was about two in the afternoon of a dull day, with the skies heavily laden with gray flat clouds, and there was a light drizzle falling, with occasional sharper gusts of wind that smote the rain into keen lines slanting eastward. I had pushed on—helped by my commission—and found access almost to the immediate front unhindered. The Third Fusiliers, I was told, held a part of the most exposed part of the field, and that the battle was raging at that instant. That fact was too evident. I heard the continuous roar of the guns; I saw the shells exploding above and around me, while past me through the open ways of access and retreat the stretchers passed in undeviating succession, in their rapid methodical transference of the wounded to the field hospitals further out, and in the direction of Compiègne. The incessant strain of anxious incisive movement, the troubled crowding of exertion among the waiters, the sharp punctuated orders, the bristling worry of preparation, the racing ambulances—these indications behind the lines formed the declarative prelude, were one approaching the battle from behind it, of its terrible reality. As reality lay just beyond that thicket of trees, that hastily constructed redoubt, that furrowed field where shallow trenches cut it lengthwise, that crumbling hut, smoking with concealed flames and spitting gun-shots.

I knew that the battle raged, but I insisted on making my way forward, and the favoring chance of a sudden disturbance, some intense propulsion of the enemy driving our soldiers rearward in a dishevellement—quickly overcome—brought me right within the focus of the fight. I was seized up in the refluent movement that reestablished our line. The oscillation sent me eastward, and I was thrown down, rolled over and almost trampled on, in a furious despairing rush forward of artillery. I fell within sight of a hillock, whose little yet unscathed crown of grass was sprinkled with daisies—the pathetic irony of flowers in that waste of slaughter! I crawled to this trivial protection, and, with a prayer on my lips, dug myself into the yielding mould, and watched. The battle line was still somewhat beyond me and to my amazement and satisfaction I soon discovered that I was actually in the companies of the Third Fusiliers. Was Sebastien in the front?

As I recall that instant now, it seems almost an illusion that it occurred at all. It was the concentrated immensity of it; its vast superabundant detail, crushed into a measure of time out of all proportion insignificant, that put it among the categories of dreams. Before me was a very slight declension of the ground, forming a sort of broad hollow, traversed at its centre by a stream-bed, now almost dry, but retaining a penurious thread of water, somewhat replenished now by the rain, which, assisted by frequent depressions had gathered into stagnant pools. Beyond the hollow to the right and to the left, were two sparse clumps of trees, crowning the opposite crest of the subsidence. Sheltered in these puny groves were cannon which had apparently just reached that forward position, as the gunners were seen desperately forcing them into position. Between the cannon-groups came the tightly compacted formation of the Germans—wedge-like—half crouchingly as they advanced, the close combination of figures making a chain of stern set faces above the pressed guns and bristling bayonets.

Our men had been driven off the opposite ridge, where the crippled trees showed the bitterness of the contest, and where lay motionless bodies in heaps while down the very gradual decline—less frequently—could be detected the fallen figures, some yet moving, and still nearer to my point of view strewn from end to end of the hollow were the dead and dying, while—gruesome spectacle—the darkened waters of the pools betrayed the slow infiltration of blood. From the hollow the French had retreated to the southern edge, and were now entrenching themselves for a new stand, at the moment when the Germans, recovering their confidence after a partial repulse, renewed the attack, and were coming again to close quarters with our soldiers. Our positions were being shelled. The mitrailleuse rapidly seizing position would soon add their panic-breeding terrors, belching forth their destroying torrents of ball and canister. The soft hiss of an ascending bomb reached my ears, and later the roar or ripping whine of its explosion. Our artillery, entangled in the previous debacle, was not yet reorganized for response, and the moment looked perilously uncertain for our defense.

Quickly the commanding officers realized that the stabilizing help of a vigorous charge would bring to the derailment time to straighten out, and, before the full power of the enemy's batteries could be developed, inflict a salutary repulse. There was a breathing space left. A moment's halt had brought with it reawakened energies, and when the order was given the ground thickened with men, and the disarray, as by the flourish of a wand of dissipation, vanished, and with shouts the braced bodies poured forward into that shallow trough, sprang across it, and rose on its opposite edge.

I too had risen out of my half buried position, and, transported by the surpassing glory of the effort became oblivious of danger. The cheering lines shot on, men dropping from the ranks and rolling backward, becoming limp and silent, to be seized the next minute by the quickly following support, and carried out of danger to the ambulances.

My eye was fastened upon the racing lines. The Germans, unable to bring at once the full power of their batteries to bear upon the French, awaited the attack with their massed infantry; indeed under the vociferous orders of their officers, leaped against it. The shock was blood-curdling. On either side the officers led, and amid the frightful collisions swords, bayonets, the heavily wielded butts of guns swayed, and rose and fell, among the frantic combatants. All loud sounds seemed suddenly stilled, and only the muffled groans and hissing suspirations of the heaving intermingled and vitalized mound of humans were heard and above them the metallic clash of arms.

The gunners dared not fire. It was, as if arrested by the suspense of a mortal conflict, each side was held at bay, except where between the armies this intimate carnage raged. More companies were hurled into the hollow—and from both sides—and the insignificant crease in the landscape became a boiling caldron of death. The German resistance had at first proved successful, and our men were being forced down into the battered and now unrecognizable rivulet, so that the hand to hand engagement filled the hollow with its lethal turbulence.

To and fro the mixed tumult bent and receded, when from our right, somewhere in the rear, a bomb soared. Its hiss, sweetened to a murmur only, sang in my ears as the harbinger of rescue. It fell a little within the German lines, and then came the detonation, and the mangled masses fell backward. The pressure relieved, and the appalling sense of some successor to the avenging missile, breaking down the courage of the enemy, our reinforced battalion was suddenly afforded room, from the enemy's recoil. Our antagonists were ballotted backward, as if struck with doom, and so, swinging their guns into horizontal phalanx, with naked bayonets the French renewed their charge, and drove the ravaged ranks before them, up, over the ridge, and back. The next moment was scarcely passed, before the hollow was again refilled with troops ordered to take and turn the enemy's batteries, somewhat screened in the desolated groves of trees.

In the twinkling of an eye the work was accomplished, and the Germans fled. Down the line for more than a kilometre I suddenly saw on either side of me a frontier of bayonets—from fresh arrivals—fixed and advancing and flashing. The slowly falling rain had relented, and the sun gleamed for an instant on the bared needle points, as if in augury of our success. Then the serried profile of bayonets paused, perhaps for mechanical alignments, tilted upward and moved; moved as with the release of a gigantic spring.

The line swept on. I watched them, fascinated, enthralled by its awful menace. The deserted hollow—no longer a battle field—was almost empty, save of those criss-crossed piles of fallen bodies where the transfixed agony of individual conflict yet remained unchanged, in the attitudes of foes knit together in the horrid embrace of their death-fight. Where the severed corpses, fouled in smoke and grime and dirt, lay shapeless, or distended on back or face, or sometimes with arms twisted in knots among each other, or just alone, hither and thither, solitary bodies unsoiled by any mutilation and bent together, as if bivouacked for sleep. And here too were the wounded, sometimes moaning audibly, sometimes still writhing with the urgent wounds, fresh in leg or arm or breast. And everywhere was the ploughed and tormented earth, trampled and dug into by the straining feet of the combatants, meshed with holes of water and now, under the recovered sun, glistening, wet, and muddy. I hurried along with the Red-Cross men into the hollow with my mission quite driven out of my head; only anxious to assist the wounded to some places of safety and relief. The battle seemed for the moment displaced, though around us the orders sounded, caissons rumbled, regiments poured past us and the intermittent aerial swish of shells was heard, and not so far to the right and to the left the German front was murderously insistent, pinching us where we stood in a dangerous salient.

After lifting a number of the limp bodies of men, in whose faces shone at times the benediction of gratitude, and at others rested just the pallid smile of recognition, or else were filmed with the bleaching shades of death, I went to the top of the ridge beyond which our forward flung companies had routed the Germans. The fearful clash, body against body, was resumed in a ploughed field but the horrors were augmented—though too it had a splendor in it—by the added carnage of the plunging cavalry that now thickened the fight into a crucial contest. The captured batteries were useless here, but they were being dragged into the French lines behind us. I was leaning against one of the willows of the groves, thrashed into a ruin of fallen branches, yielding to sickness of heart that might have thrown me into a faint when I felt my feet tugged at. I started and looked down. In the heavy grass, trampled and rutted, I saw the outstretched body of a soldier, dragging itself upward by my legs, and he had so far freed himself from the herbage that our eyes met. It was Sebastien Quintado.

Perhaps I shouted. I hardly think so. If I had Sebastien never heard me, for he had fallen back again, and lay motionless. For an instant I thought his life had fled. I seized his shoulders, and pulled him within the trees. He was bleeding from a cutlass wound across his chest, and from a gash in his thigh. We carried him back into the camp and he slowly revived. The half extinguished spark was relit. Of course he knew me. He said he knew me as I stood above him on the battlefield, but thought, half deliriously, that it was a dream only.

I had secured excellent quarters for Quintado, and his wounds while grave were surely healing. Had I not met him in time—the very nick of time—he might have bled to death. At the earliest practicable moment I intended to bring him to St. Choiseul. I knew that when I could tell him that, he would be better. L'espoir est à le fond de la santé.

We were in a relay hospital, back some kilometres from the front, and on the road to Paris, where most of the charges were transferred. It was an encampment of tents, and in one of these—indeed it was near Compiègne—the day after I had brought him from the field, and when too at any moment we might find it necessary to hastily retreat, as the Germans pressed on in spite of the grim resistance that like a wall delayed them. I say it was in one of these tents, towards sunset, as the level rays, unchecked by a cloud poured over the camp a light that seemed to wash out the stains of dirt and use, and make it brilliant, that, as I sat near Quintado's cot, I caught his eyes resting upon me with an indescribable affection.

"Sebastien," I said, "you will live, and very soon, O! very soon, I will take you to St. Choiseul, and you shall stay with us. Is it well?"

He murmured; "Ah, Alfred. How surely you know it is well."

"Sebastien, you must not talk any more. You see what I hope to do. At the most two or three days and you will be with Dora." His eyes were bright with joy, and then almost as quickly they darkened with tears.

"No! No!" I remonstrated, "No! Sebastien—you need have no fears. The doctor says you will be quite the same, a strong, well man. Eh! Do you hear me? And see, this is what Dora has sent to you. All made by her own hands. Are you not content?"

I unfolded the roll of stockings, and handkerchiefs, and mittens, and waist bands, and as I handed them to feel he touched them with his lips, as though they were holy—indeed to him they were most holy—and then his lips moved too in prayer and a look unutterably tender flushed his face. His great liquid eyes closed, and his heart was consecrated anew to the pretty orphan girl.

Ah! those were terrible days. The shocking Teuton never faltered. He came on with big weltering blows that beat the French and English back, though we kept in good order, and, as the bulletin gave it, "The dam still holds, and breaches are being repaired." The government thought it best to leave Paris, and re-establish itself in Bordeaux, and the people thronged east and south from Paris to Tours, Orleans, Le Mons, Biarritz, Brest, Rennes, Nantes, Bordeaux, going in all ways, and blocking the roads so that nothing could move, and the men and women slept in the carriages, and wagons, and motor-cars, and in the roadside houses, and in the fields.

And the peasants north of Paris, in the farms and gardens, left in terror, and about fifteen hundred of them entered Paris—trudged the whole way—with boxes, and bags, bundles, strings of poultry, and sometimes driving their cows and pulling their pigs, with provisions tied up in shawls, and utterly dumb with grief and consternation.

Then the flying men appeared over Paris and dropped bombs just to scare the populace, letting fall papers and threats with lying news of the Germans almost at the gates of the city, and enclosing scoffing invitations to surrender. The bombs were dropped in the Rue de Hanovre, the Rue du Mart, the Rue Colbert, the Rue de Londres, the Rue de la Condamine. But later our aviators paroled the skies, and garrisoned the air, and the frightful taubes came no more. But it was I think on September third (thirty-two days after the beginning of the war), that a daring show-man let out orchestra stalls at the "butte" of Montmartre on an arranged tribune, whence the big German dragons could be seen hideously humming above the city.

Il était un peu drôle, mais la plaisanterie est dans le fond de la nature française; n'est ce pas? But Père Grandin frowned, and called it une grande folie, and then repeated the lines from La Fontaine:

Le trépas vient tout guérir;
Mais ne bougeons d'ou nous sommes:
Plutôt souffrir que mourir,
C'est la devise des hommes.

Well I got Sebastien away from Compiègne—and it was only about six days later that the Germans swarmed over this region—and after delays in the trains, crowded with the wounded, brought him to Paris. The city was in a suppressed excitement with a seething exodus of citizens going on, who stood in lines at the stations ten abreast and almost half a mile long waiting their turns to get away to the south. I stayed some days in Paris, putting Sebastien in one of the well equipped hospital échoppes in the Champ de Mars. He was yet weak and nervous, and his breast caused him much pain. I saw him every night, and we went over the orders and the news of each day together.

The government left Paris for Bordeaux, on September second, and it was thought that there might soon be a pitched battle around the Paris forts before a week was over. The enemy was pushing its outposts nearer and nearer, with the main advance directed against the left flank of the French centre. On September eighth the allied armies were more than holding their own from Ourcq to Verdun. Preparations went on furiously all over Paris, and the Bois de Boulogne was turned into a cattle ranch, and the ratio of available provisions to the population—then over two million—carefully calculated. The use of gas for cooking was prohibited, and its use confined to lighting. East of Paris were lines of refugees, filling the roads from Verdun, almost seventy kilometres (about 43 miles) long; the Chateau de Bizy was transformed into a hospital, and also the Chateau des Penitents at Vernonnet.

It was evident that St. Choiseul for the present was comparatively safe from invasion, the current of investment moving to the south-east, although a letter I received from Gabrielle said that German military motors had been seen near Briois and that their occupants had rifled the wine cellars of M. Villiers. Sebastien was impatient to get away, and I feeling too excited to remain with him, concluded to send him at once to St. Choiseul, writing to Gabrielle that we would come together. My intention to return to St. Choiseul was further quickened by some indefinite statements by my sister that father and mother had partly lost their memories. I instinctively divined that the relentless pall of paralysis was closing about them, and the miserable sombreness of this thought with all of the present darkness about me, plunged me into a dull speechless misery.

The autumn lights shone upon the fair lands about St. Choiseul and shone upon the gardens, thicketed with early chrysanthemums of the sweet village itself, with a lovelier tenderness. It was altogether charming, and as we rode from Briois gently—very gently—Sebastien caught my shoulders and head in his arms, and hid his face on my breast, sobbing softly. The poor boy's heart was full of memories and full too doubtless of presaging fears. The happiness snatched from his life by the nation's peril, the yet unfaded impressions of the dreadful conflict painted to his eyes with the darkest, deadliest colors of suffering, the returning familiar beauty of his old home, and the rising flood of anticipation before the realization of his welcome, mingled together in a torrent of emotion too strong for his composure. I clasped him warmly, and the sympathy of my own bereaved soul covered him as with a benediction. Slowly we moved on amid the splendid fruitage of the fall, where, on either side, the richly laden fields bore their golden crops, and where too—another note of the country's extremity—the hardy old men and the children, and the silent devoted women, toiled almost alone at the deeply needed task of the generous harvest.

Mais, voila, qui arrive! We have reached the little bridge, from whose moss encrusted arches rises the low hill of the dear village, and just over there, half way up, stands the old chestnut tree. And, coming down to meet us, is the whole entourage of old men and women and children, a mimic army bearing flags, the banners of the church, and singing, while an improvised little group of musicians at their head, sent far over the wayside the throb of the drums and the shrill whistles of the fifes.

It was indeed Quintado's welcome home. Our horse recoiled, snorted and reared at the unusual spectacle, and the stirring accompaniment, and the next moment the throng was all about us, and there were cheers and salutations, and waving caps, and a happy bubbling merriment, that made poor Sebastien half wild, and so bewildered him with pride and joy that the poor fellow was speechless, and almost in tears. I spoke a little for him, and the good people then ranged themselves around the carriage, and the horse, led by the head, to prevent his sudden bolting away from the noise and clamor, brought us into St. Choiseul.

Quintado had whispered to me with a blush on his cheeks and with a faltering voice, "But Dora is not here?"

"Ah, Sebastien," I cried, "the best comes last. Wait. You shall see. I think I know that Dora was afraid. Yes really afraid. It would be too much joy. Remember she has heard that you were wounded, and perhaps—surely you understand—"

I did not finish my assurance. His good arm was about my neck, and just to see him so overcome, without knowing the reason, pleased the good friends, marching happily in his company, and the smiling children, so that these, his pupils, broke out in a loud chorus that he had taught them at school; a gay barcarolle from Moliere, that reflected the buoyant unimpeded liveliness of young and loving spirits, though indeed I felt some scruples as to its propriety just now, when we bowed to the dark menace of a punishing destiny:

Sortez, sortez de ces lieux,
Soucis, chagrins, et tristesse;
Venez, venez, ris et jeux,
Plaisirs, amours et tendresse.
Ne songeons qu'à nous réjouir,
La grande affaire est le plaisir.

It was pleasant to hear; the voices, sharp trebles, stabbing the quiet air with their keen accents, like vocal poignards, and running on with us under the first short group of walnuts—just opposite Privat Deschat's—whose lower branches were draped in the bronzed leaves of escaped vines. We moved along altogether in, to me, a curious sad emblematic way of the past happinesses and peace. The song breathed the pensive reminder of a remote dalliance and serenity, lost now behind the rolling clouds of belching cannon and smoking bombs.

The swinging melody put to flight immediate fears, yet like an incantation and, like dreamers, we surrendered to the transient forgetfulness:

Aimons jusques au trépas;
La raison nous y convie.
Helas! si l'on n'aimait pas,
Que serait—ce de la vie!
Ah! perdons plutôt le jour
Que de perdre notre amour.

Well! that was fitting enough, and as I glanced at Quintado his ingenuous bliss under this vocal stimulation of his natural feelings was boundlessly agreeable. How very handsome he was; excitement had thrown into his flat cheeks a becoming color, and the lingering pallor, elsewhere, bestowed upon him an enticing interest, quite pleasing. His deep eyes glowed with pleasure, and the black hair escaping from beneath his pompon lay like ebony fingers on his white temples. Really for example, he was angelic, though of the darker hue and deeper temperament of angels, and there glinted from his eyes a stubborn tender maliciousness of animal joy. He knew that Dora waited for him.

And so we came decorously, with manifold lingerings, where the brisk people pressed against the carriage wheels, and almost stood under the horse's feet, up to our house, the one—you remember—next to that of Privat Deschat's and there, Mon Dieu, how I see it now! There was a beautiful arcade of branches of yews, and amongst them red, red roses, like ruby stars, and over the path beneath the arch were strewn vine-leaves. We alighted very slowly, for Quintado had again become weak, and the people were most respectful, and considerate, and, because it might have jarred him, withheld their cheers, and just hailed him with uncovered heads. Ah! it was most pathetic I think.

And up the path we went to that porch, where later, much later, Gabrielle and I sat, overwrought and stricken with wonder and dread, and on it stood father and mother, trembling, but gracious, and tenderly sympathetic, and then—

Then Deschat and I took him up the stairs, on the chair made of our crossed hands—the chair children make for each other—with Quintado's good arm about my neck, and brought him to the bed-chamber, so dainty and white, and sweet-smelling, and clean, and on the great broad bed we laid him so gently down and, from where he lay, his eyes could see the sky, blue like a pea-blossom, with the trellised vapors spun across it, and the window framed in Virginia creeper, with, at that very moment, a wren whisking through its tendrils. And then Gabrielle brought Dora to the door, and softly we went away, and the two lovers were left there, and—Helas! I was just envious perhaps, with some illy stirred remembrance, some indefinable despair—I looked back, and the two faces clung together and the whispering voices mingled, in the inarticulate ecstacy of that meeting.

I stepped again to the porch; the people were drifting away, still softly singing, but I did not see them. I saw only the field of battle, sodden with the dead; I heard only the menacing whisper of the ascending shell; I thought only of one Divine Figure—He of the Cross—weeping before His Father in Heaven for the sins of the world.

And so the night came on, and I still sat there, until a hand rested on my shoulder. I noticed its trembling pressure.

I raised my eyes. There stood near me the captain, Père Grandin and Père Antoine. It was the last who spoke:

"My son, Sebastien Quintado is no more!"

CHAPTER VII

THE REPULSE

As the Germans crossed the border of France and the hordes of the Kaiser, like some whirlwind of devastation, crushed our villages, trampled down our gardens, smote our sons, France trembled with rage, a rage at first not unmixed with fears. But it was for a moment only. The fierce reaction followed, and with the steadfast poise of her faith, her endurance, her heroism, she resisted. That resistance was a sublime act of confidence in herself. It meant an endless self-sacrifice. It meant a solidarity of hearts. It meant a complete disenthrallment from the illusions of ease and indolence and impregnability. We were surprised. The enemy was at our gates. And Paris, the cynosure of our pride and of our affection banished its insouciance, and suddenly became strained with gravity, and a kind of, I know not what, absorption in a new life.

The German wedge moved on, and then our armies holding stiffly together fell back, prodding the sides of the huge leviathan, that sprawled over our fair land with its fierce talons extended, with a savage not-to-be-denied hunger reaching out for that paramount morsel—Paris—and spitting out of its ravenous mouth sprays of desecrating Uhlans and automobile excursionists, who were here and there, now hiding in a wood, now racing over the roads. It was these drops and waterings of saliva from its horrid living mass that spread terror and anxiety and a sickening dread. But we had not severed our lines, and the retreating army corps tightly kept their cordon intact, though falling back with a deep reentering swerve in the centre, where the enemy fought hard to break through. And not seldom it happened that those exudations from its vast throat were stamped out summarily, so that no spot of their defilement remained. And Joffre—Pater patriae—was not worried. That we knew; the plan was working. I learned that from a colonel who had been at the crossing of the Meuse, where, so he said, "the Germans spent their thousands to gain their end, squadrons upon squadrons, slaughtered like pigeons from a trap, coming on, stuck together like an army of termites, and beaten into death by the merciless fire from our guns. But they got over," he said, "and that was what they wanted to do. Why, living men were thrown into the gaps to be rained down with shot and shell, like so much earth and stone into a pit that must be crossed."

The plan was to thrust the great beast sideways, and for that purpose Joffre kept his plunging assaults on the west, while the English lured them eastward and then came the Battle of the Marne. Charleroi, Rheims, Rethel, Soissons, St. Quentin, had been passed, the bridge over the Marne near Meaux blown up, and now came the sudden halt with our backs against the wall, as it were, and every nerve and muscle strained in the death-grip. The magnificence of our resistance was the measure of our sense of peril.

I had trembled for St. Choiseul, but as the tide swept southward those fears passed, at least there was a breathing spell for us all. It had been sad enough. The few men who were under command to join the colors left in a little company, with their wives and children, their sweethearts and parents, all silent and dreary, with the dreariness of nameless fears. The men only were smiling and cheerful, and—not all of them; the women mute, and the prattling children impressed by some instinctive sympathy, almost always mute too. The women were all resigned, I thought, with just here and there some silently weeping girl, who smothered her sobs, and forced to her eyes the same earnest pathetic resolve of resignation that the others wore. Gabrielle had been an angel of mercy to these women. She had visited them; she opened our house to them, and entertained them, and took care of some of the children, and was so brave and loving with them, that they called her, among themselves, la Mère de Pitié—the Mother of Pity. A pretty name.

I had been driven to the verge of exhaustion with work in the Red-Cross and with service in Paris. The dispersion southward of the war-cloud roused my spirits, and then I was requested to follow the troops to Meaux—that was in September just after Quintado died—and I was more than glad. There was much work to do there, and I knew the leaders thought that the Germans were trapped. There had been some evidence of shortage of ammunition with them, and their loss had been crippling—so it seemed, though like some scourge of insects extinction was impossible. Behind those who fell pressed on the unnumbered legions, fresh and ready. But the advance had been too rapid and the critical moment dawned when the blow could be struck that would hurl them backward. So it was thought. So it proved.

The country-side about Meaux is delicious in its pastoral charm. It is un pay riant, and its smiles are so large and gentle, so benignant and inviting, that the dwellers there are always smiling too. The broken land rising, falling, with streams, passing hither, thither, that gleam beneath the fair skies, and are like silver bands and threads on its bursting jacket of green and gold, is a land of gardens and fields, with clustering woods on hilltops, or, just missing that, creeping down like warm coverlids in capes and tippets to the wide valleys. Ah! it is most beautiful. And into this sweet refuge upon these quiet happy changeful villages—changeful in the drifting shadows from the slumbering clouds that basked above them in the glittering sun—came the rough confusion of WAR. But it was not for long. No, no, not for long. The kind God banished it before it had ravaged and soiled the peaceful homes, the dainty walled gardens, the sweeping fruitful meadows, the plenteous orchards, the teaming acres ripening so enchantingly with grain and barley, or profaned its pretty grave-yards gathered so warmly around its spired churches. Yes indeed our armies and the English allies banked here with stubborn courage, and put it all to flight. Drove it forty miles away!

I saw much of that fighting. I was not far away when the English fought like bull-dogs at Landrecies, when they hit the Teutons even harder at Coulommiers, and in one engagement with our own men I took part. I was not with the colors, but in the emergency I offered to shoulder a gun and was assigned to a company by Colonel Brissot, who indulged my fervor with a resigned and sympathetic shake of his noble head, remarking:

"C'est un peu dure. Mais que voulez vous. Quand un homme veut à mourir pour la Patrie c'est son affaire."

We lay back on a hill in a thin wood, and had planted the machine guns in shallow pits. It overlooked a road, down which our scouts reported the Germans were coming. I saw the first advanced lines, the gray multitude plunging on, apparently unadvised of our proximity. It was our intention to enfilade them, and then, under cover of fire to retreat, to another eminence, with a supporting column swinging from the opposite quarter, so that eventually we might catch the enemy in the double grip of two cross fires. On the Boches came confidently. They spied us before our spit-fires got into action, and the order rang out to charge us. Three companies were thought sufficient for the task of cleaning us out. They went at us in a huge lunge forward, almost unbrokenly up the hill slope, their ranks close pressed, and unwavering by the fraction of a foot. Almost at the minute when they started up the hill, from the rear a caisson rolled up to our position, and two shells were dropped amongst them. I saw the individual men fall, while, as they fell, others through the gaps sprang into their places, and the solid front unchangeably swept upward. It was magnificent discipline and superb valor. Another shell shattered the line, and I saw the mangled bodies drop. But still the unchecked tide poured on, with shouts, and somewhere from a distance I caught the vigorous beat of drums. The next instant they were almost at the muzzles of our cannon. The word was given and the ripping articulation of our machines rained three deadly streams of shot. The men rolled over each other in the murderous hail, and, for a moment, the whole line halted. The limp dead bodies formed a rampart, and behind that hideous protection their comrades fell to their knees and answered our fire with their guns. At the same moment a shell with the detonation of a crack of thunder soared over us, and struck the ground behind us, gimleting its way into the scorched earth, that smoked like a mimic crater. A fragment of the shell knocked over the gunner at one of the machine-guns and the next instant our officer caught sight of a swarming mass of gray bodies, debouching into the roadway to our left, stealthily and rapidly driving down upon us, with the evident purpose of surrounding our salient. The order to retreat under the charge of the right wing, who, for the expedient, was to hold the enemy, now pretty well discomfited by the unceasing machine fusillade, was given, and we on the left and centre slowly retired, moving to the second line of defence, more stoutly guarded by three regiments of infantry and the park of cannon.

The position of our machine guns, and the endangered right wing, which had utterly disarrayed the Germans by their bayonet onslaught, demanded attention. It would require but a few minutes for the arrival of a new division of the enemy, and already a greater force was seen detaching itself from the main body on the road, crossing the field below the hill, with a run. Everywhere in front of us the Teuton front seemed to be enlarging, and the glittering helmets of the plumed Uhlans, like a sheet of kindling fires, suddenly emerged within it. There was nothing for it but retreat, and a retreat quickly made. I trembled for the safety of the thin file of defenders on the hilltop. Their certain extinction or capture was inevitable.

Then something most unexpected happened. Dropping shells from the extreme right of our second line of defense, where the danger had been reported, covered the hillside with a rapid succession of eruptions. It was insupportable, though, with characteristic stubbornness—the German officers rushed more men to the desolated slope, where the shells ripped the ground, and filled the air with iron splinters. It was terrific, and our gunners and infantry, dismayed for their own safety, in the superabundant rescue, scrambled back and, together almost, entered the lines of the second defense. I remember well enough my own struggles to get there, for at the very conjuncture when my legs should have best succored me, the injured member became almost useless. I rolled into a lucky hole, where there had been at some time an excavation made, or begun, for some reason, possibly the building of an outhouse or cattle shed. An intense pain developed, and I found myself quite, as the Americans say, "out of commission." Within sight was our second line of defense, bristling with rifles and concealed machine guns, a strong position, well garrisoned, and immediately before me raced the parting remnants of the small parleying party that I had adventurously joined.

My predicament was dangerous. The very thought of capture and isolation for months or years from St. Choiseul and Gabrielle and the domestic duties I was so sorely needed to perform, terrified me, but it also made me more methodical and ingenious. I searched the possibilities of a return to my friends, and the obvious plan was to "lie still," and in the night, if the positions of the armies remained unchanged to steal under the cover of darkness back to the French lines.

Suddenly I heard the oncoming shouts of German troops, and I realized that it was the advance ranks of the division deployed to our left to surround the hill,—now deserted—and which probably would continue their advance to the attack, of our second line of defense, with the whole strength of the German corps. I glanced about me. Some overturned bushes lay at the side of the hole, and instinctively I seized them to ambuscade my refuge.

I crouched—perhaps a derisive observer would have said I squatted—closely within the lowest recess of the accidental excavation, and drew after me, with all the caution my necessity and impatience permitted, the withered and prickly bushes—a hawthorn bramble—so that, like a cowering rabbit in its warren, I awaited the rapidly nearing host of the Germans. Luckily the excavation was somewhat removed from their direct approach, and formed so obvious and considerable a feature in the ground, that the platoons would avoid it, or at the worst jump over it. Nearer and nearer came the clamorous companies, and the heavy tramp of their feet, beating in unison the stubbled field, made my heart beat too with an insistent rapidity.

Now they were passing my tiny screen. I could hear their laughter and the occasional rough sallies of their voices. The line seemed endless. Just dimly through the interlaced twigs and dirt encumbered branches of the hawthorn, I could actually catch a broken view of the massive column. The horrible thought of one of the soldiers, through an inadvertence, or from the crowding of the lines, falling into my dug-out, sent the blood whirring through my veins and bathed me in perspiration. I drew my revolver. It might be a straggler, and, if just one man, the weapon would serve completely for my protection. I shuddered at the awful chance. This extremity was worse than the indiscriminate and generalized murder of the battlefield.

Then just as this suspense almost throttled my breathing, the whole line rested, and there above me—I could see their strong figures, their gray coats, even the gleam of their pickelhaubes—the babel of conversation broke out in incoherent gurglings of German. Another instant and the order might be given to break ranks, to camp, and my screen might serve, practically enough, to light a fire, or even the hole be selected as a preeminently good substitute for a hearth. Smoked and roasted out then it would be!

No, the line moved again, with the unintermittent trudge of the hundreds of booted feet, now and then the clangor of a sword, now and then the whish of grazing coats, and always a certain observed but indescribable hum of rapidly passing bodies. Then came silence—no more?—could it be possible? In my hole the light had grown dimmer and dimmer, and while it was no prudent criterion of the time of day above me, still I felt sure—for I had counted the seconds elapsing as the battalion swept over me—that the night drew near, and then—deliverance.

At first I scarcely dared to stir, fearing the betrayal of my retreat by the animated bush which I would raise above me. But after a long wait, while the light sensibly failed, I cautiously crowded what I could of it, the bush, beside me, and surmounting it, at length was able to peer out of the hole, and note the opportunities for my escape. It was very dark, the night threatened to be stormy, and the rising wind prevented my distinctly hearing sounds about me, if anyone was in the vicinity. Slowly with the finest sense of carefulness and stealth, I crawled to the lip of the shallow pit, and rose above it, and stood up, achingly relieving my sharply disabled limb.

"Sind gefangen;" the voice was at my side, and a shadow accompanied it. But I was quicker than its groping arms or hands, quicker than the gun or sword, or whatever else it seized for my despatch. I jumped at the black body with my revolver trigger snapped back, and pressed the muzzle upon the now rampant body, that grappled with me, and discharged it. The report was almost inaudible, and the sound of the falling German, as he dropped lifeless into the pit, that had sheltered me, was hardly more than a dull thud. What was about me? was the enemies' circuit here on every side? I hesitated for a moment. There came no sound of rescue. The topography of the country I knew well. Far—about a half a mile—to the right as you looked westward, was a road leading directly to a village that was in the rear of the second line of our defense. That road I would reach if I could. It was the simplest—to me the only—issue of salvation. I turned quickly aside and fell to the ground. My leg pained me, and seemed almost incapable of movement. Lying there I swung my head about to discover what objects surrounded me. In the night-light, almost absent, I could discern nothing, and taking the risk as there was no other alternative I abandoned the idea of walking to the road, over the rough field, and began slowly to crawl in its direction. The sense of direction was infallible with me, and I had not the slightest doubt of my position. Of course the Germans might by this time have swarmed over the whole area, but that they had not yet attacked the second line of our defense seemed certain as I had heard no firing. Both sides awaited the morning. The Germans were there, no doubt, but farther to the east.

I canvassed these conditions while I crawled over the stinging grass-stubble, and at intervals waded through water holes and muddy banks. Now the ground was rising. I had attained the further side of the broad field, and was surmounting a hillslope beyond which ran the little road that would conduct me to safety. Well, I shall not rehearse the mingling feelings of dread and relief, of quick suspense and then exulting certainty, that I experienced, on that dismal trip on my hands and knees all the way to the village. For only at intervals was it possible for me to use my injured leg that increased in helplessness as I went on. I reached the village, and the first man I encountered on its outskirts was the man who had been next to me in the line of battle.

We were dislodged from our position, and the weary retreat towards Paris continued. I still stayed with the army, and I was in one other fight, when my leg had somewhat regained its usefulness. It was then that I was wounded, then that my soul most revolted against the barbarity of War.

We were in a village near the Marne, when the Germans attacked the place. We had thrown up strong barricades at the end of the main street, from which every vestige of life had departed except—I recall the whimsical observation—that a black cat still crouched upon the narrow window sill of an upper window of one of the little houses. The Germans with their usual intrepidity and singular tenacity of habit were expected to move down upon us in solid formation, and our guns would receive them—we thought—with the almost certain decision of their repulse. I was next to a gunner whose impatience to start the fearful havoc was unrestrained. He kept muttering between his teeth.

"Sacre Bleu! Pas encore! Pas encore! Les scelerats; Pourquoi ne venaient-ils pas?"

He did not have long to wait. At the head of the street, with shouts and the loud beating of near-by drums, the Boches came on, almost as if maneuvering upon a field of drill-practice. I was compelled to admire their stolid impervious confidence and fearlessness. Down the deserted alley of houses they rushed, and from behind them swung upward with stunning reports exploding shells, intended for our discomfiture. But the range was imperfect, and they fell beyond our position. I trembled with expectation—the advance of the enemy, so determinedly forceful, with the ranks close pressed in dense crowds, promised an awful disillusion. Our captain warned against any premature discharge. He would give the word. On the bristling lines swung, massively compacted, like some human battering ram, and when I could almost see the buttons on their gray coats the order came.

It was a whisper, and the next instant the machine guns spouted, and each soldier braced himself for the charge that might follow the foe's disorder, with fixed bayonet. That was a hideous moment. The bodies of the slain Germans piled high before the oncoming ranks, and from side to side of the street—now become a veritable slaughter-pen—the heaving mass still unrelentingly pressed over their dismembered and fallen comrades. It was the veriest depth of hell. I awaited the next word to charge, and it seemed to me incredible that I could urge myself to do the deed, running the cold steel of the bayonet into quivering flesh. Later like a flash this detachment passed, and the frenzy of the moment blinded me to everything, but the fierce desire to destroy our invaders. I waited. The machine guns unceasingly hissed, and they shook with the uninterrupted intensity of their working. I watched in a delirium of satisfaction their ravages. Arms and hands, even heads, severed as if cut with a knife, flew into the air, and yet the flood of humans, with not-to-be-denied insistency, rose to our barricade, and in another breath would overwhelm us.

Then came the order "Charge" and over the barricade with set bayonets—I as best I might—our companies leaped and dashed into the baying pack before us, with the shrivelling terror of the cold steel. The Germans did not like the treatment. The machine guns were withdrawn under the protection of this assault, and while we stemmed the tide, for an instant, it was for an instant only. No effective pressure we could then summon, would withstand the leviathan movement of those belted Prussians. The shells too were finding us out, and we yielded. A German officer cut down with his sword the brave gunner who had so intemperately desired their approach. He was severed almost from shoulder to waist. But he was avenged. I rushed upon the miscreant—so he seemed to me—and pierced his neck with the bayonet in my hands. There were no misgivings then, no secondary thoughts, not even the transient survival of my sickening sense of faintness at the sight of blood. I was acquiring the war-hardening that accompanies incessant Murder.

We fell back from the position in fairly good shape, and soon were reinforced by new regiments, and then by artillery, and mortars, and, as the battle widened, with more and more success on our side, we checked the invasion, and soon were overmastering the invaders. At length they fled, and the whole line swept onward, while fresh men strode into the footsteps of their predecessors and Joffre won the Battle of the Marne.

It was then that I was shot in the breast and shoulder, and fell heavily on my head against a roadside pile of stone. I lay directly in the way of the Red-Cross men—those blessed gleaners of the wounded—and so was quickly carried to safety.

CHAPTER VIII

GABRIELLE'S VISITATION

It was the day after the battle of the Marne that as I lay in a Red-Cross ambulance, one of an endless line making a slow progress to Paris, past packed masses of soldiery, parks of artillery, ammunition vans, hay wagons, meat carts buried in straw, commissariat busses—many of them English, still pasted with placards of coffee-houses, groceries and smoking tobacco, that a letter was brought to me by the orderly attached to our company of wagons. How well I recall his grimed face and the blood-stains on his white surtout! The letter was marked "urgente" and also "par permission de le chef-major de corps d'hôpital." The young orderly was gay with the pleasure of bringing me a note from home—"Que vous serez heureux; le mot de la femme et les petites!" The innocent salutation stabbed deeper than had the sabre of the Teuton giant. My eyes started, and the pang passed. The cheerful greeting was as some taunting whisper hissed in my ears, but—alas—how well meant!—bien entendu.

I recognized Gabrielle's hand-writing. I held the letter unopened, and my flaccid nerves scarcely measured its meaning. Ah! it seemed to me now almost a light matter what happened. The horrors and depths of pitiless sufferings I had been through had stunned my susceptibilities, and any added blow fell on a sensorium become rigid, or simply pulseless with shock. At length my hand, mechanically almost, opened the letter, and if it was unsteady it was the tremor of weakness only. My blurred eyes read it as they might have uncertainly read a sign on the street. And yet there was intelligence still remaining in them. My heart beat faster, my eyes closed a moment, while a puny pain like a shooting neuralgic ache, somewhere about my heart too, pierced me, and then my lips moved in a whisper—Dieu defende.

But indeed it was with me as with an eye fatigued with flashes, that sees no longer, or sees everything fantastically. I read the letter and laughed. The mild manner of a death—even the death of a father and mother—in their own bed, by its luminous contrast with this manifold Dance of Death in which I had shared, where Death nakedly came out of the air, and shot you, or impaled you, or stifled you, where things worse—Ah! miserable—than death happened, seemed almost benignant. It won an enviable distinction. And, for the meaning of it all, the disclosure of Death seemed itself now an admirable escape. Conception with me had become so darkened by excitation, that in the black background of consciousness, the loss of a father or of a mother, created no discernible image.

And yet—a few minutes later, as I read again the letter—crushed into a ball in my hand—a natural recreation of sensibility terrified me by its acute punishments. I cried out in a kind of fury, and then I wept. My nerves went to pieces. I was delirious. That raging tempest of madness lasted three days. I was taken to Paris. There in a well appointed hospital in the Faubourg Saint Antoine, I was treated with the most happy kindness, and there my sister came to see me and to nurse me, and by that incommunicable power of sweetness and sympathy—wherein too lurked the kindred genius of our common parentage—she restored me to sanity, and the broken strained mind was healed and fitted—as it were—together again, and the extinguished candle of reason relit. Those were days of infinite bliss. It was something wonderful indeed to be present and observant of one's own regeneration. Yet so it seemed. A consciousness, feeble and complacent, but always delighted, noted the return of another master-consciousness to the control of its despoiled and scattered properties, and in noting it, was willing to fade itself away, or re-enter its mysterious hidden realm of feeling.

And then I grew to so love Gabrielle. It was a sense of recreation, of absolute reference of a second birth to her power. She assumed a spiritual maternity before my eyes, and enrolled like some nucleal miniature of divinity within my soul. She walked before my seeing eyes an Angel of Grace. My bed lay in a separate room, quite apart from the general dormitory, wherein the crowded cots held the anguished sufferers from the battle fields, now forwarding their daily harvest of wounded, in thicker and thicker bunches. It was an unsolicited privilege but one granted through the benevolent insistence of the superintending surgeon. Its window looked out of the back of the hospital over a broken prospect of high chimneys, peaked walls, and balustraded roofs. Points of color flamed here and there, where jardinieres still bloomed on the window-sills, or where a tricolor, in wreaths of bunting, festooned the near and far piazzas. Dull surfaces of drab rose to parapeted balconies, and in a side-long glimpse I could see the tree-lined boulevard of ——. Above the mingled edges and angles an autumn sky laughed and wept, now flushed with delicate primrose, when the sunset closed the day, and now, for days too, drearily gray with inexpressive and moisture dropping clouds. The room was prettily set with some plain furniture—a bureau and a table covered with green baize, a cuvette and a few chairs. The shining floor, in the light, mirrored the furniture, and in it too were reflected the three pictures that decorated the walls. Gabrielle had put these pictures where they were, and they were all religious. One a Madonna, one a Christ, and the third the new Pope. The walls were faintly rougeatre and from the middle of the ceiling hung an electrolier. That made the place at night gay with light. It seemed to me a little corner of Heaven. Was it not so, after all I had seen and been through? But I felt the sting of self-reproach, when my thoughts traveled back to the desolate comrades on the shell splintered, shrapnel haunted, bullet riddled field, there far away at the front—and not indeed so far away either.

Here Gabrielle nursed me, her pale face and sunken eyes were ominous symptoms of her own failing strength—and here she told me of my parents' deaths. It had a mysterious fore-ordained simplicity, and, as it were, a naturalness. It seemed just a going out, as one would leave a room, or pass through a door, and enter upon the world beyond. Father and mother were stricken with the hand of that hovering paralysis that had followed them for some time, and the achieving blow fell upon them both as they lay in the morning, in their bed, conversing. Even their thoughts had dwelt at that very instant upon the inevitable end, and the light flame of life was snuffed out even as their hands crossed, and the smile of a mutual resignation bathed their faces in hope and confidence.

This news brought to me no added misery—no, no, rather a strange placidity of contentment. For in that region of experience wherein I wandered along the borders of the great darkling ocean of Eternity, I felt the intervening space of life, between this existence and the next, to be of a transient and incomputable narrowness. The luxury of a gentle inanition overcame me, and so unevenly did the spark of life at times flutter in its cage, that I was unaware exactly whether I lived, or had begun to float otherwhere on an uncharted sea.

Slowly everything rectified itself, and then Grief came, and realization, and reproach, and memory started its accusative course, and I bewailed the impotence and forgetfulness of my pallid rectitude. My filial uses had not been energetic enough, nor altogether wakeful. That I knew.

Thus between the relapses of my sorrow, and the soothing influence of Gabrielle, I leaned more and more upon my sister, and, by a subjection of will and emotion, caught her frame of mind, her tincture of spiritualized enthusiasm. I now come to the very nucleus and meaning, the very heart and life of this story—the longed for confession and explanation which two worlds have waited for, the marvellous tale of a young woman's intervention with the unnumbered dead, and their disembodied re-entrance in the world to stay the earth's destroying plague of War. To tell finally how in the agony of her sublime assumption, to bring this to pass, my sister's soul left her body, and withdrew in the wake of that vast ascension of spirits, to the Eternal Sphere of the Immortals.

I had reached successfully the last stage of convalescence. My recovery had been stubbornly contested by the militant eager sprites of disease which somewhere lurked within me. I had only "come round," as the English say, slowly, with veerings and retreats, that kept Gabrielle miserably anxious. When I was at last able to leave my bed and sit up—sitting up in a Morris chair, most capacious and comfortable—Gabrielle came to me one afternoon, when the white radiance of the glorious day might cancel the unearthly shock and the ghostly melancholy of her story, and almost kneeling at my side repeated her incredible and wondrous confession.

"Alfred, I have something very strange to tell you. Something that has been happening for some time, and seems to grow more frequent as this awful war—cette guerre desesperant—goes on. For it has to do with it—with the war. You want to hear it, surely?"

"Yes," I replied, "Gabrielle, I do indeed. Is it some of the visits again from the other world which we agreed should be discontinued?"

"Yes, Alfred, it is," Gabrielle looked up at me with a scrutiny of wistful, almost beseeching ardor, and as I remained silent she continued, "Alfred, the DEAD come back to me! They speak to me. Oh, more than that, they throng my room, and in my ears sounds the endless wailing of their prayers."

"Prayers?" I repeated, aroused now into a sudden repulsion of these renewed surrenders to the old-time madness.

"Yes, Alfred, Prayers. I do not hear them now in Paris, but at St. Choiseul the night long they have assailed my ears with piteous prayers. I have endured it without confiding it to anyone, the dreadful matter, but I have so wanted to tell you."

"But Gabrielle, why do you surrender to this delusion? It will wear you to death. Ah sister, be very careful. We are alone in this great world now, and you are everything to me. These nightmares will turn your reason, unhinge your strength. Put them all to flight as you did before."

"Ah, Alfred it is different now—much different. Really the old visions were soft and gentle and pleasant, and I accepted them as pictures almost of lovely beings, happy and serene and sympathetic. But these are so dreadful. At first I screamed with terror at them or just shrank into myself and shuddered. I did put them to flight, Alfred. I begged Julie to sleep in the room with me, and then they never came. But just to see what it all meant I tried several times to sleep alone and the things came thicker and faster as the war went on. I resisted my fear, but the misery of these wounded and broken spirits—as it was shown to me—was killing me. I once more drove them all away by getting Julie to come to my room. One night Julie awoke me and said there was someone or something in the room. We started up in the bed, and looked about the room, and then that light you once saw came again, but no figure, just a wonderful shimmering of threads of mellow light, traced through the air of the room, and flowing out of the open window like skeins of smoke caught in a draught. Julie clutched me and cried, and her voice broke the spell—if spell it was—the light vanished and nothing more happened that night."

"How long has this been going on?" I asked in suspense, in half incredulity.

"It began after the first days of the war. But at first the voices were indistinct, and the visions vague and shadowy. I did not mind that. I thought it would wear off, and the spirits go away. They did for a while, but after the battle of Mons suddenly at night I saw an awful picture, not the battle field, but the ascending shades drifting upward from it like innumerable specks of vapor. Ah Alfred, how shall I describe it? I seemed to be carried there. It was a dream, and yet it was full of reality to me, and the ground, the wrecked villages, the streets strewn with the dead and dying, were all half hidden; sometimes in the dream altogether erased, by the multitudes of the shades going on, and on, and on, up and up, and up, in smoky masses, with faces and limbs spectral and ghostly, like some vast current of fog shaped into human forms."

"Well," I groaned, "what next?"

"I awoke, and there was nothing—nothing—but an hour later the voices were resumed and they murmured and murmured, and words now and then were understood, like 'Have Mercy'—'Oh God my wife'—'My home,' and then furious words like blasphemies. Ah Alfred, it was terrible," and the woman hid her face in my lap and shook convulsively.

"Gabrielle, my sister, how have you gone through with all this misery? Our father and mother dead, and these horrible visitations! I must get well quickly and together we will go to St. Choiseul, and then I can see for myself if such things can be."

"Can be, Alfred? You do not doubt me, do you? I am indeed telling you the very truth, and you will wound me to the heart if you think that I have been deluded, or am deceiving you."

Her loving, tender eyes were filled with the tears of remonstrance. I seized her arms, and brought her to my breast, and embraced and kissed her, whispering with all the devotion of my soul, "No Gabrielle, I know that these things have, in their way, happened, and that your tired senses and strained nerves may have actually created them, worn out as we all are with this grievous trial. And the Prayers, darling. What were they when they were intelligible? Could you make them out—tell me."

"At first I could only recognize them as supplications by the imploring voices, and then later they often became distinguishable as short cries for help and mercy, and deliverance, and then short staccato calls, as if from madness, insanity, brutality, unrighteousness. Lately and here in Paris I have not heard them, and I control myself better—" the last words were spoken by my sister hesitatingly, or at least slowly, as if she felt unwilling to utter them. I noticed the indecision at once.

"What is it, Gabrielle—your control? Have you yielded to the old temptation—the feeling that you wished to summon the DEAD?"

"Alfred," the voice was very low, and Gabrielle cast her eyes down, as if depressed by some unwonted shame of contrition; "Alfred, although I say that I exert no power to open the communications with the spirit world, yet I believe that in some unconscious way I actually summon these to me. Watching myself in the voluntary movements of my mind, I detect at times that without my volition, my mind assumes the mediumistic poise, as the books say. I am ashamed of it, and I think it is wicked. That makes me dread these visions for, perhaps, they are simply satanic. Oh what shall I do?"

Poor girl, worn out with service, beaten to the earth with sorrow, and now devitalized, unwillingly surrendering herself to the—to me—abhorrent power she seemed endowed with, to materialize the dead, and converse with the other side of the veil of life! The refuge of my partnership with her of these secrets was an immense relief. I gathered together my strength, and forced the laugh to my lips, and the merry words to my lips also, for her sake. Thus, with a deepening mutual absorption in each other, brother and sister grew inseparable in feeling and in thought and in affections.

It was almost three weeks later that I was permitted to leave the hospital, and return with my sister to St. Choiseul. It was a return strangely mingling the accents of sorrow, with the notes of a sudden joy. The autumn lights were beautiful, and the darkening vineyards, and the striped hop poles, the yet radiant gladiolus and the glancing lustres of the streams, the long peaceful perspectives, unsullied by war, the romantic cluster of the ivy coated ruins of the chateau towards Briois, the winding road, the straight sentinel line of poplars, and the unchanged village—empty and silent perhaps—crowning the slow ascent, bathed in the soft atmosphere of dewy sweetness—Mon Dieu, it almost made me swoon away with ecstacy!

And here at our doorway, was the little circle, Père Antoine, Père Grandin, the Capitaine, and Privat Deschat, Hortense, and Julie, and the pale faded loveliness of the orphan girl, Dora, but no father or mother was there. The tears rose to my eyes; it was impossible to check their almost unnoticed flow.

I fell into their arms. I kissed them all. I was half swooning with the pain of my affection.

"My son, how good it is to see you again, the vampire has not swallowed you up—Dieu soit benit;" that was Père Antoine.

"Ah Alfred, you see the plague has not touched us yet—the desecrating fiends were near. Yes, they were seen east of Briois—foraging, And you? Well? You look grave. Ah! it is not a time for smiles;" that was Père Grandin.

"Alfred, where are the Boches now? Where? Ma foi it is not this time as it was in '70. You shall tell us all. It is un histoire magnifique. The flag is supreme;" that was the Capitaine.

"Maître Alfred, you must not leave us again. Souvenez vous—I will make the galette aux amandes chaque jour? Eh? You will not go away again?" that was Hortense.

They all laughed a little. But Hortense wiped her eyes with her broad apron.

"Ah Gabrielle, we have been unhappy without you—all of us. Never, never, shall you go away again—OR—you take me with you, and the Capitaine;" that was Dora, and her pallid face, with the serious eyes, haunted now always with sorrow, the expressive index of her life's tragedy, flushed ever so slightly, and her arms were flung about my sister's neck, and she was caught again by Gabrielle, in her own blessed arms of reassurance and protection.

"Well Alfred, we are all traveling the same road together now. Death walks at everyone's side. But they who have died on the battlefield, they have sown in their own ashes the seeds of Redemption." And the speaker's voice rose, so that we felt startled at its suddenness. "They will yet fight as avenging spirits. They are about us now. When Heaven is too full of them they will descend, and destroy the enemy. La Patrie is Eternal;" that was Privat Deschat.

This last apostrophe awkwardly dampened the moment's happiness, and we went into the house slowly and silently, as if to the summons of an obsequy. When Deschat mentioned the descending spirits I saw Gabrielle quail and draw Dora to her side in a trembling spasm of alarm.

Slowly we entered the house. I shuddered in a momentary realization that its master and mistress were no longer sanctioning its hospitality. But how peaceful and comforting it all was! I felt embraced by the manifold tendernesses of form and picture and color and furnishment. Around the table of the dining room that evening in the cheerful splendor of the old oil lamp, with the shadows, grotesquely friendly, moving over the walls, we sat together, while Hortense and Julie outdid themselves in overloading the table with les pièces precieuses de la cuisine. I hardly dared to taste these delicacies. It seemed a profanation. Those suffering patient men at the front, so often almost starving! It was an impiety against patriotism to feast so lavishly.

I touched almost nothing, buried in sombre memories. The regalement was darkened by my abrupt disillusionment, and I could not easily rehearse my experience. I begged them to excuse me—another time I would go through it all, but just then—Ah surely they understood. There were so many reasons for hesitation, for suspense, for silence. They were most sympathetic, and I, who was to have been the raconteur, sat now almost moodily amongst them, and listened to the news of the neighborhood, as one and the other kept up the trivial narration.

How the Uhlans had been seen by little Mimette Collot prancing along a highway toward Cabrelet, how the thunders from the constant attrition eastward, between the armies, had kept them all awake at night; how the English soldiers had visited them and they had turned their pantries inside out to welcome and refresh them; how a taube had wheeled and droned above them, like some colossal bumble bee, and how it dropped one bomb in a pasturage, and had killed a young mother cow and her calf; how good Mother Webbe—she at the crossroads where you go east toward Landrecies and Mons—had given a young English soldier on a motorcycle a full glass of vin de prunes, and he had fallen from his cycle along the roadside "dead-drunk"—un ivrogne jusque mort—; the dear soul had thought it was only vin ordinaire; how the men had deserted the country-side to enlist, and the old men and the women, the boys and girls, had taken their places; how the Diligence had a woman driver now, and how she dressed in man's clothes, and how bitter she was with the horses, just to seem more mannish—comme un homme.

They told how the troops had filled the roads moving eastward, and with them the long files of ambulances, of ammunition vans, of cannon carriages; how when the news came of our victory the church bells were rung, bonfires were made in the streets, and processions of boys and girls went up and down the roads singing the Marseillaise.

But somehow the spirit of our reunion dragged and drooped, and I suppose it was all my fault. The oppression of despair had seized me. I could not escape a sense of doom, not exactly my own, or the country's, but some vague awfulness of desolation, approaching with black pestilence—breathing power, to desecrate and ravage the earth. It kept me dumb. And all of this uneasy and ungracious apathy or morose grief, had developed since I entered the house—where at first the happiness of refuge seemed so inexpressible.

When I bade them "Good night," I said some stumbling words about my disappointment with myself, and promised to make amends. I needed rest. My body and soul, my mind were ill at ease. And so they left me, that clear star-lit night as the rising wind, threatening frosts or snow, rocketed upward with gusty roars from the house-tops, and rushed away with a wail that almost sounded to me as the incorporeal echo of those ravenous moans and cries, those palpitating shrieks, that I had heard sweep across the battlefield, and that, as the hours waned died away in death.

I recovered my strength but slowly, and there were recurrent lapses into periods of frightful depression, nervousness, and I fear irritability, that tried the devoted soul of Gabrielle, who remained unchanged in her devotion, and unceasing in her soothing ministrations. We often talked about the strange apparitions, and the voices, and the weaving and winnowed lights, but there was no return to Gabrielle of these visitations. She had gained in strength, her old time loveliness of face bloomed again, and, delighted with my companionship, she withheld—if indeed they assaulted her at all, or essayed to—the disembodied souls. Gabrielle was utterly transparent and confessed everything. I know that for at least seven months, there literally was no return of the manifestations. Because they seemed to have vanished entirely we permitted ourselves to talk them over freely, and it amused me. The terrifying thought though often arose, in the minds of both of us, that the discharged multitudes of spirits, shot almost into eternity, clung to the earth. Their gathering increasing shades haunted the loved earth, and their affections, somehow still retained for the living, nursed in them a rising anger at the continuance of the slaughters.

For the war went on; west and east the perpetual deluge of shells and shrapnel and bullets, the surges of poisonous gases, the savagery of assassination, and the cruelty of the bayonet, were emptying homes, thinning the ranks, and draining the country of its best, its strongest, men. And now came the trench lines; the insinuating deep gutters in the earth, worming themselves this way and that, here in unutterable perplexity of entrance and exit, there more simple, running on with occasional dug-outs and bomb-proof dungeons, cellar-like dismal caverns of darkness, humidity, and sickness. Stuck in them at various intervals were the platoons of shooting men, the hunters after other men's lives, quick, almost instinctive in their scent of opportunity, almost wolfish in their ample placidity of intention to take those other men's lives, if they could reach them. The long lines of subterranean fortification, stretching, with irregular intervals of defenselessness, like broad gaps in a strong fence, swept over fields, and up hills, and over rivers, and through villages, junketed ever and anon with ruins, shattered homes, or burrowing like the entrails of a corrupting cancer under churches, and massing hither and thither, in coils of black and muddy gashes, like the redoubled and tangled intestines of an animal.

Here went on the daily work of murder, helped by the batteries, and at propitious moments intensified into the uttermost diabolism by the whine, scream, and tear of shells, the detonations of shrapnel, and the thudding din of cannon, the whipping, ping-pong hiss of bullets. And following that splenetic outburst the sudden bolt forward of regiments of men might follow; headlong charges, frenzied rushes, dashes through a hail of shot, men tumbling this way and that, wounded, dying, dead, and then the ferocity of bodily collision with stabs from bayonets, and slashes from swords and all in a tense silence, save for the oppressed suspiration, the swish of brushing bodies pinned to each other, a momentary cry of pain, smothered objurgations.

Over the wavering line of lethal burrows, high in the air, swung or raced the bird-like combatants of the French and the Germans, their shadows sometimes thrown upon a cloud, sometimes drifting over the ground in a grotesque patch—a mere spot perhaps—of gray. Thus the mortal combat sullied the pure air with its disorder. Up to those armed fliers rose the stark stenches of the earth—the smell of unburied corpses—and their eagle eyes looked down upon long stretches of torn mud flats, ploughed by missiles, dreary plains of desolation, beaten into a black and brown hideousness of confused holes and gaping rents, gouged out hillsides, heaped mounds of fantastic earth, stippled everywhere with the half hidden bodies of the dead.

From Ostend to Arras, from Arras to Maubeuge, from Maubeuge to Vouzier, the indented, buried, smoking furrows of human explosives stretched its weary length, concealing armies; hiding, in its ambuscades and pits and mines, volcanoes of ammunition, a vast aneurism draining two nations of their life and substance. What was a half stifled combat here in the east in Galicia and in Poland was a fiercer conflict, and from there as from here—in the west—each hour sent to some home the stab of bereavement.

I could not return to my work. Recurrent chills and nervous breakdowns, constantly augmented by the horrible agony of this insufferable crime, kept my mind weakened, my body helpless.

It was a little more than seven months after the repulse of the invaders at the Battle of the Marne, that the strange symptoms of the spirit visitation that had troubled Gabrielle returned with appalling violence. The spring about St. Choiseul had filled the hills and the valleys with a wonderful beauty, more entrancing because the season had prevailed with rain, and this had imbued the skies with a fascinating vaporousness, which, suffused with sunlight, made the picture about us in the lowlands so lovely in its grace and clinging softness of light and shades. This sweet peacefulness made the horrid nightmare of the war, only a few miles away, more unbearable and hateful. How often that spring Gabrielle and I sat out on the porch late into the night, amid the renewed fragrance of the flowers, the rising chorus of the insect and tree life, murmuring in field and stream and wood and along the grassy edges of the highway, talking over the miseries of our dear land! Gabrielle had worn herself to skin and bone—as the English say—with her work in the hospital at Paris, and now together, both melancholy and disabled, we lingered long in thoughtful communion on what the meaning and upshot of this unwearied struggle might be.

Perhaps it was about the middle of April, 1915, that late at night—it might have been after midnight—as I read in my room some late reports and personal letters from the front, my door—the one leading from my room into Gabrielle's, opened, and my sister appeared at the entrance, in her night dress. In her face was a wild, startled look, as of one who had been surprised in her sleep by some awful dream, and yet trembled under the malign shock.

"Gabrielle," I cried, myself moved to the outcry by her famished, stricken, hunted look, "What is it? Are you ill?"

She did not answer at once, but stole towards me with a wavering stealthiness, as of one escaping from a pursuer. When she was at my side—I had leaped to my feet in consternation and alarm—she flung her arms around my neck, and in a choking whisper, that half audible mixture of breathing and utterance which betokens physical and nervous exhaustion, said:

"Alfred, the spirits are here again, and they crowd my room; they are filling this room now. Don't you feel them? Have you seen, felt, heard nothing? They are the ghosts of the slain—I know it, for they tell me so, and their faces are so imploring—They ask me to stop the war. They tell me—" her voice grew stronger, and in the rush of her emotion and excitement the words followed faster and faster, but still her voice was a whisper only—"They tell me I can help. And O! Alfred their cry for Mercy is piteous. They feel the pain of those who have lost them—whom they have lost too. A voice came to my ears, clear and calm: 'Help us! Help us! Our sadness is yours. We wished to live. Death for us is wrong—too soon—too soon—too soon;' and then it died away, like a fading bell-note, far, far away. And Alfred the voice sounded to me like Sebastien's. O! Alfred there are others too—and some—" she shuddered in my arms, and clasped me convulsively, as if the pain of the recollection were too great to bear.

"Gabrielle," I answered, now aroused and almost terrified, "stay here. Are you quite well? The morning must soon break. Rest on my bed. We will watch it out. And—and—perhaps Gabrielle it will be best for us to leave this strange, bewitched place." My voice was loud. Its very loudness seemed to reassure her.

She released my arms, and controlling herself sank into the armchair I had risen from. She pressed her hands to her brows and her eyes closed. A moment later she opened them, looked steadfastly at me, then turned, without rising, and looked about the room in a dazed scrutiny, as if searching for something. Her wandering eyes returned to my face. I bent suddenly in surprise towards her. She was smiling. The staggering fancy crossed my mind that Gabrielle might have lost her reason. Anguish and despair and sympathy had spread madness and dementia throughout France already, that I knew.

"Alfred they have gone; how wonderful! Your loud words cleared the room of the crowding host. Alfred it was a host. I felt their presence before I woke. But they come like air; they vanish as darkness vanishes at the touch of day."

"Gabrielle, no more of it now. No. Rest. Sleep. I will sit up and read. I have letters to write to men at the front, in the trenches whom I know, who know me, who expect to hear from me. I have packed a wagon-load of things for these brave boys, and it goes to the front tomorrow. I wish I could go with it. But—"

"No Alfred—O! No!—not now! Do not leave me. Some strange powers are working, and in the voices I have heard I feel the approach of a vast spiritual finale."

"Why, Gabrielle, what do you mean? Stay. No more of it tonight. My brusqueness has chased them away. If a little noise scares these mockers, I can always furnish that."

I laughed and chided my sister for her seriousness. But Gabrielle rebuked me. I rebuked myself. A strange oppressive and yet merciful theory was shaping itself in my mind. I apprehended that a mysterious supernatural power might be summoned to end the war. And—Yes, so I thought—Gabrielle might be its protagonist and avatar.

I helped my sister to my bed, and when she again had regained her cheerfulness, and welcome sleep—that chrism of the Almighty to vexed hearts and minds—closed her eyes, I resumed my work. The silence was the very enclosure of the grave. But then it was like the grave in nothing else. The spring air, dewy, warm, perfumed, entered the room, and once or twice when I looked out of the window the shimmering stars shone in a velvet night over a world buried in slumber. All of the gentle twitterings and murmurs of the night seemed stilled. I think I fell asleep myself, for I awoke with a strange, a most benumbing sense of confinement, of restraint that I could not define, but perhaps was most easily compared to an immersion in some high pressure atmosphere. I felt suffocated. I sprang to my feet. The lamp was flickering as if about to go out, but its light fell on my watch, which recorded the hour as 2:30 past midnight. Someone stood at my side. I felt the presence, as we instinctively do—a cognition like a telepathy. It was Gabrielle again. Her face was pale and her eyes gazed, as if in a spell, upon the space above my head; her hands gropingly rested now on my arm. I waited for her to speak, and almost immediately the flickering flame of the lamp expired. We were in darkness.

But we were not alone. Some kinesthetic sense made me aware of beings, entities, existencies, about me. I yielded to the impression that a peculiar nervous excitation, a thrilled expectancy, as though the next instant some miracle of strangeness would befall me, was due to this influence of an invisible flood of spirits, or souls, or what you will, that had invaded the room. It was Gabrielle's voice that spoke in my ears, it was her arms again that encircled my neck.

"Alfred, again! They are all about us; and Alfred," the voice sank to a whisper, "the spirit of Sebastien Quintado is here too."

I could not restrain the impetuous cry that broke from my lips. Perhaps, were it rightly interpreted, it was fear, the sudden effort to restore some balance of sanity in the madness of a nightmare, that forced this outburst. I only knew that I almost shouted:

"Gabrielle, Gabrielle! You have gone mad." I sprang to the lamp and relit it. The pale lights of morning were streaking the sky, and the vocal welcome of Nature was breaking out from myriad throats in the wide jubilation of the spring's resurrection.

Gabrielle was on her knees before me with her face bowed within her embracing hands. I raised her up, and we walked together to the window in silence. Upon us both fell the overwhelming consciousness that our home had become a rendez-vous for the spirits of the slain. It was haunted. But to what end?

CHAPTER IX

GOD'S HAND

Neither Gabrielle nor I spoke of these marvellous matters to anyone. It was of course connected with my sister's peculiar power of mediumistic control. The appearances were oddly varied, and we began to associate the return of the spirits with certain atmospheric conditions. Then there was a notable increase—if it could be so called—of these mysterious visitants after heavy engagements, when we might assume that the hosts of the disembodied had been greatly augmented. For weeks the conditions of the house were normal, and there would be no manifestations—manifestations which I myself began to appreciate and detect. The times most favorable for the discarnate effects were the still nights, and more generally after cold days than after hot ones. Dark nights were not necessarily preferred, as on a wonderfully splendid moonlight night, my sister saw the myriad shapes and lines of these, shall I call them GHOSTS? I remember feeling myself the thrill of some electric-like sensation penetrating my nerves, and half caught before my eyes the scintillations of tiny specks of light.

At first we were both not a little frightened. The tremendous impact of this mass of disembodied creatures broke down our mental equilibrium. We felt suddenly half immersed in the other world, and felt too the oncoming denouement which, apprehended but unforeseen, awaited this spectral deluge. How often we sat at nights, deep into the night, at the front door under the leaf-embowered porch, fearful of entrance into the house, which had become a sort of adytum, which we might not penetrate, evicted as we were, by the unbidden tenants, that swarmed from grave, and trench, and field, hilltop and valley, from the crevices of walls, and the streets of villages, the cellars of churches, and the torn up holes of tree-roots. We might indeed have instituted—as at times I suggested—a sort of analysis of the psychical constants of these disembodied beings whose actuality neither of us doubted for an instant. We might have noted the exact moments of their larger recurrence, the intervals of their absence, the occasions when they became vocal, the peculiarities of their incidence upon ourselves in our physical sensations, or mental susceptibilities, or emotional response, if such observations were possible—that is if we could discover that the presence of these souls (?) affected us in those three elements of our existence at all.

Nothing of a systematic record was kept, but certain very sharp and certain hopelessly hazy impressions are quite, by me, easily recalled. The sharp impressions were in the nature of shocks allied with what might be less flatteringly called frights, and the hazy ones were indubitably aural influences such as have been determined as electrical, or epileptic, or hysteric. Naturally the latter possess the greater interest and have more to do with the extra-natural mystical agencies of spirits. Perhaps it would not be amiss to describe these—not too tediously—before I rehearse the last convincing stages of the spiritualistic manifestations as they ushered in the final descent of the "Other World" for the shame of human strife, and the obliterating arrest of this infernal, this demoralizing, this vast national embroilment of bitterness and hatred, that has unloosed the satanic energies of HELL to the confusion of Faith and Hope and Charity.

An experience of the first sort, followed immediately by the aural influence, took place about the beginning of June in 1916. It was a beautiful day, the light gloriously brilliant, and the summer fragrance of St. Choiseul filling our little world with its inexhaustible presence of roses, when, as I stood at my open window, leaning outward to regale my senses with the precious offerings of the earth and sky, I felt a wind, perhaps without any precise quality of heat or coolness, blow over me, although not a breath of the moving atmosphere outside stirred leaf or blade or flower, and then supervened a loss of consciousness, a relaxation of my body in sleep, and I, overcome with this unnatural drowsiness against which I forlornly struggled, sank into a chair, and did not recover consciousness before the evening. Now on that day was fought the battle of the —— which killed 5000 men here in the west, while almost simultaneously the conflict in Poland added another 5000 to the number of the slain. There could be no doubt that my unconsciousness partook of the immediate character of syncope, or, to be even more scientific, that it was lethal, and might have terminated my life. That is my firm conviction. From a later experience I have become convinced that the ingestion so to speak into the air of the disembodied, actually devitalizes the atmosphere, and produces in those subjected to their multitudinous contact, asphyxiation. I awoke from my sleep wearied and apathetic.

The second occasion happened at night, and was not attributable to any sudden influx of the dead from contemporaneous battles. I have no theory to explain it. I was asleep in my bed. It was in the following August. I awoke with a start, almost as if I had been struck, and realized the most curious tingling inside my head, as if a thousand or more needles were therein busily engaged in employing their myriad points upon my sensitive tissues. It was an excruciating agony, not exactly acutely painful, but maddeningly intolerable and nerve racking and confusing. It was unendurable. Instinctively I clapped the bedclothes to my head and instantly there was complete relief. Exposing my head again to this outside atmospheric bombardment the agony recurred. I maintained my self-possession and actually tried the experiment over and over again of alternately putting my head outside of the bedclothes and then covering it with them. The effects were constant, and the inference unimpeachable that the air contained some agencies that exasperated my brain and pierced its envelope of skull, while the interposition of the loose textures of the bed-coverings stopped it. I can add authoritatively, that, as might have been expected, the thicker the covering of my head the more complete the relief, while upon no other part of my exposed body was any effect noticeable. The irritatable surfaces were confined to my head only. Not the spinal column nor the ganglionic centres along the thigh responded to this inexplicable force. There was no cessation of this attack throughout the night, but it slowly quieted down and disappeared as the day broke. The aural effects upon me were dual in character. They were physiological to the extent of producing a severe intermittent headache, and they were psychic or mental inasmuch as they provoked an irrepressible activity of thought, and, quite humiliatingly, with it, an extreme emotional irritability. So cross did I become that I left the house, and exhausted myself walking about the country to rid myself of this abominable disagreeableness.

Another experience distinctly connected with the frightful cost of the assaults upon the German trenches in September, 1915, took place in that month, a few days after the engagements—the suggestion might be hazarded that it requires some time for the "ghosts" to assemble themselves and repair to any agreed upon rendez-vous—when entering the house at evening, both my sister and myself became stifled with the strange suffocating effect of the air. It was irrespirable. I muttered "Again the spirits." The conclusion was ludicrous enough. We fell to our knees and crawled out of the room. In fact the circumstances resembled exactly the entrance of irrespirable gases into a room of pure air, and the consequent escape of the victims by creeping along the floor.

I must now state that these material effects were much more noticeable with me than with my sister. My sister, as the foregoing pages have reiterated was familiar with the spiritual world, and her powers of mediumistic control had been successfully evoked. She had indeed been visited apparently by numbers of the dead, and no unpleasant bodily sensations had been felt. The voices alone had become to her unendurable, but for many months now these voices had been stilled, as it were; in fact ever since that moment when she saw the wraith of Sebastien Quintado above us in my room their intelligible articulations had not been heard—hearing meaning a kind of inaudible utterance within the veil of the mind or soul. I do not think that I ever attained the sensitivity necessary to distinguish the voices, though, whether it was imagination or reality, my ears have possibly at moments rung with an indescribable confused murmur. And never, until the last materialization, did I discern faces. I except the special incarnation of Blanchette. These incidents, I have recalled, have only the slenderest value to establish any facts associated with the nature and functions of the disembodied, and they need not be further extended. Let me at once come to the ultimate act of this inexpressible drama.

My readers all know how, upon the approach of the spring of 1917, the Allies and their Teutonic adversaries prepared for the last desperate struggle, how it had become almost mutually understood that the fierce death-grapple should be undertaken outside of the trenches, and that the arbitrament of war, under skies darkened by all the most hideous emissions of shell, canister, powder, and infernal machines of poison, should be attempted in a colossal conflict, that strains the mind to conceive, and that might have approached in its horribleness of means and results, the very uttermost image of the End of All Things. The huge forces on both sides were assembled within the ten thousand miles of trenches, that had converted the northeastern edges of our country into a subterranean battlefield. From these trenches, almost so arranged by some supervising destiny, they were to arise, like implacable fiends or bloodless furies, and plunge their regiments, their brigades, their squadrons, their divisions, their armies against each other, in an unutterable tremendousness of slaughter, that might have rent the vault of Heaven, if any feeling, any sympathy, any recognition, any compassion, any power resided there! All of the resources were accumulated, and the last promised carnage proclaimed the extinction of civilized man in Europe.

Well that was the situation. On the eastern front the war had subsided. Russia was practically fought to a standstill, and though, with the customary Muscovite happiness of pretension, the Bear addressed his allies with pompous declarations, no one seriously thought of him. The Balkan turmoil had also simmered down to expectation simply. The invasion of Egypt and the upheaval of the Indian mutineers had not so very considerably materialized. Indeed everything now hung and was made to hang, upon this final, incalculable, terrible decision. Would either side survive its furious exterminating madness? Rumania was destroyed.

See what it meant. Two gigantic armies confronted each other over a line of two hundred and fifty miles, and the last resources of all the armaments of the magnified and reinforced invention of the great nations of Europe had been marshalled together to bring to some lasting decision the desecrating ravages of this racial duel. From the plain of Antwerp and the winding valleys of the Meuse, to the hilltops of the Marne, from Chalons to the slopes of the Vosges, the steel-bristling squadrons, carrying in their flanks volcanic fires, watched each other nervously, and yet, with a stolidity, born of custom and the grim confidence of an irreparable doom; with a detachment also from earthly ties, that made them seem like, almost like, discarnate beings. But to these men, brought there from the ends of Europe, to meet DEATH, as they might meet the morning or the evening of the common day, each country, throughout its fields and shires, its wards and towns, its bourgesses and departments and communes, its duchies, and electorates, would soon become an empty cenotaph.

Ah, but that was not all. There was a miracle in it. Yes, a miracle. God had moved the minds of the leaders towards this vast denouement. The huge military programme, replete with bristling glories of arms and men, the caparisoned squadrons of cavalry, the wide-mouthed, serried cannon, the lumpy groups of the squandering "Busy Berthas," and "Jack Johnsons," that wasted the ransom of kings in a few hours, the crowding millions of men covering square miles of desolated countrysides, the pitched tents, where the electric service, installed with thousands of wires, kept the tendrilous nets of communication quivering with orders, despatches, and rumors, the littered commissariats, filling screened refuges with barrels, wagons, soup-kitchens, and interminable bales of food, the long ranges of the hospital equipments, the stretchers, the Red-Cross orderlies, the waiting doctors in barracks and in tents, the auto-ambulances, the piled ramparts of bandages, and near at hand in loosely framed operating chambers the sweet sickly odors of ether and iodiform, and then back of all, along interminable alleys, the loaded ammunition vans, carrying the shells and canisters, the cartridges and gas engines and back again of these the grouped multitudes of spectators—all of this vast spectacle, repeated on the opposite line of the enemy—vis-a-vis—was thus concentrated, by a common impulse in both camps, for the irrevocable decision, because GOD willed it.

In such a grandiose style should the last act of HIS interposition be culminated, and the races of the earth should learn from the cavernous receptacles of spirit, from the shrined multitudes of the DEAD, enwrapped in the boundless fields of sky and star and cloud, issuing perchance from the wide-swung gates of Paradise, or Heaven, or of Hell itself—of the overwhelming pressure of the OTHER WORLD, learn thus too of the maintenance of sympathy between the affairs this side, and the affairs that side, of the narrow gap of DEATH! So it was.

But wonderful things had happened in the summer of 1916 and in its early autumn. There had been awful carnage at Verdun where the Teuton attempted to drive through to Paris and where the Gallic defiance rang out, Ils ne passeron pas. To and fro had the lines wavered, each interval strewn with innumerable corpses; the curtains of fire had swept to and fro and in their murderous folds life had expired as the flames destroy the swarming moths at harvest. Super-human deeds of valor had amazed the world that watched the struggle with terror-stricken eyes, and at last the Germans were pushed backward and the valleys of the Meuse, its hills and fields, its villages lay scorched, blackened, upheaved, overthrown, scarred from end to end, with most damnable desolation.

And northward the English had, along the Somme, struck at the Teuton with savage fury. The skies had been eclipsed with thunderous avalanches of fire, and for days the satanic deluge of shot and shell had stricken the German into helpless panic. Beyond Albert, with headlong rushes animated by God only knows what courage, the Briton had reached Thiepval Ginchy, Guillemont Clery and then shot forward with staggering, awful vehemence towards Bapaume and Peronne, and the defenses of the enemy, assailed on all sides, were melting away, and the invasion promised the greatest results. Except on the east the German forces seemed exhausted and the debacle had begun. The Allies were ready for the supreme effort.

Yes—there had been talk of PEACE—and, for one short moment, the world reeled almost in its dazed wonder-stricken joy. But the war-clouds closed again, and the steel-toothed, fire-shrouded fight stormed out again.

And then there had been another change. Their long line of armament had again been pushed further west by the Germans, who had forced our lines back, and again threatened the safety of Paris, had indeed so far trespassed over France, that their trenches and up-flung fortifications, their mounded parapets and encircling redoubts, broke in the line from Maubeuge, Rocroi, Dinant, Mézières, and Montmedy, eastward to Laon, again to Soissons, Compiègne, to Rheims, and now indeed, from the high ruined tower of the Chateau at La Ferté the trench line of the Teutons could be distinctly seen. The matter is important for there Gabrielle summoned—summoned I say—the disembodied to the great intervention. Ne riez pas; c'est vrai, le dernier mot de verité intime. Attendez! Vous savez bien la grande chose qui finit la guerre!

All of this happened in the winter of 1917. And about the first of April of that spring—let me see—that was on a Sunday morning, Gabrielle came into my room—before our breakfast—and sat down at the window, that one looking west. She had been to early mass, her face was drawn and inspired, her eyes were large and frightened, and she was trembling with excitement.

I had been reading and scarcely noticed her entrance. The instant my eyes met hers I started with alarm.

"Gabrielle qu'avez vous? What is it? The GHOSTS?"

She rose softly and came towards me. Then she knelt at my side, and looking rather down at her moving fingers than at me, told me this wonderful thing: One word—the spirits had not visited us for months, and we had, partly at least, forgotten them, in the busy work of the relief, and the frequent visits hither and thither, on errands of the Red-Cross mission. Gabrielle spoke rapidly in parts of her narrative, and then she hesitated, and seemed absent-minded, worn, and bewildered, but as she went on her words flowed abundantly and fastly,—so you remember it was before—and as she ended she had risen, and her expression assumed a peculiar vividness of—of—Ah how shall I say?—of seraphic beauty!

Yes, yes, it was just so. Vraiment!

"Alfred last night about two o'clock towards morning, I seemed to be awake, and I saw—Alfred I was not awake, it was a vision in my dreams—the figure of Sebastien Quintado like a blade of light standing at my bed-side, his eyes fixed into mine so that I was spell-bound—" Gabrielle here stopped, and her face blushed, I thought, with a kind of modest shame I could not comprehend—"Finally he spoke, and his voice sounded like an echo; I seemed just to hear it. Sometimes it grew louder, and then it faded and died away and I thought I leaned towards him to catch his words—so it seemed Alfred. He said this:

"'Gabrielle! Gabrielle! the spirits need you. The great war ends. The millions who have died, who now, as I do, repine in spirit-land, have gathered together, thousands upon thousands, upon thousands, and GOD sends them to stop the slaughter. God has dispensed council—the council of willfulness—to the nations and their generals, and in a little while they will assemble the vast armies on the west, and try out the conflict in one great battle. So it will be determined; So God wills it.

"'And then Gabrielle WE—the millions of the dead, those torn away from wives and children, from youth and love and joy, from friends and country, from all of the ambitions which animate our kind on earth; we will flock like clouds, when the north wind blows over St. Choiseul, and descend, visible, luminous, vocal, from the glowing skies, and from us, Gabrielle, will proceed a terrible Paralysis—Ay more—an undeniable dread and weakness.

"'It will, like a contagion, spread throughout the armies from rank to rank, from private to general, and back again; it will freeze the blood, it will dwindle the heart, it will thrill the brain. Before it bravery becomes a shrinking, ambition a regret, the thought of conflict a remorse. It will do more. It will slowly become a strange, unendurable, gnawing, piercing, scorching, internal pain, a pain so bitter and keen, that flesh will refuse its infliction, and so there will enter in that innumerable host just one thought—FLIGHT!

"'It will not be, though, the FLIGHT of cowards, but of Conscience-stricken men. And then a greater thing will come. There will be no Flight; the pain will manacle their feet, will stifle their voices, will wither their wills—one monstrous Stupor will overcome them, and for three days and a night, like the men overcome with sleep that watched the Apostle St. Peter in the prison, the armies of the Nations will sleep—Ay—and sleep in PAIN!

"'We shall abide above them. Our millions, by night and day, will perpetually afflict them. By day we will be unseen, by night we shall be seen. And from every particle of our incorporeal beings will flow the influence of our terror and our punishment. There will be no mitigation. GOD so wills it!

"'And when the three days are finished, then those men will awake—General and Prince and King and Private and Officer—and their strength will be as nothing, their vigor as a reed shaken by the wind, their wills as shaking vials of water, their threats like sheets whipped by the wind. So shall it be. Like men dazed in a flame, or smoke, or men caught half dead from the waters, will it be to them. It will be to them as the prophet Isaiah said:

"'"And they shall be brought down and shall speak out of the ground, and their speech shall be low out of the dust, and their voice shall be, as of one that hath a familiar spirit, out of the ground, and their speech shall whisper out of the dust."

"'But'—it was at this point that Gabrielle rose, and stood like some Sybil or Prophetess, replenished with a divine ardor—'Gabrielle, you have been chosen as the instrument of our incarnation. I chose you. See! It is God's way! Great issues HE brings about through the lowly and the humble, the contrite and the simple. God chooses you. There must be the human, living, breathing, earth-born medium. Go to the Chateau of La Ferté on —— and use your power. It will be added to. Let it be at night, the night before the great combat and the whole world will be advertised of it. That is the intention of God. So does He sway the feeble minds of men, turning their pride into humiliation, their certainties into failures, their promises into dreams. GO!

"'And Gabrielle, perchance it shall happen that then you also will be numbered with US—those of the Over-World.'"

Here Gabrielle stopped, a sudden flush mounted to her temples, and after came a deathly pallor, and then she fell upon my neck in an embrace utterly tearless, when I felt her body sway upon mine with deep pulsations, while her lips sought my own, and almost inaudibly she whispered in my ear—"Alfred, Sebastien kissed me as he vanished, and his lips were like fire, and the power he brought to me rested with me from his lips. I am ready to go. But you, Alfred, will go with me. It may be afterwards we shall be no more together."

Truly upon us unutterable things had fallen. We sat there together, almost unnoticing the passage of the day, immersed in a wonder that deepened into sadness as the anticipation of some wild unearthly ending of the great war steadily became more and more fixed in our minds, and with it—Ah there was the desperate cruelty and anguish of it—the possible separation of our lives. We hardly spoke, and only as the noon hour flooded the room with light and heat, did we arise, and, hand in hand, almost as if then we approached the tragic sacrifice of our happiness, went out, and down the stairway to our duties.

Perhaps dear old Emile Chouteau thinking of our propitiation would have said:

Sic, sic juvat ire sub umbras.

During the long weeks before that awfully auspicious moment came, Gabrielle and I kept working at our tasks; she at the villages about us, in the homes of sick returning soldiers, and also at Paris on errands of every sort, and I in work of distribution, supervision and occasionally administration. But it was mostly at the hospital of Saint Jean that I experienced the full measure of an unusual depression—the customary, and now grown habitual, grievous seriousness of a national crisis, deepened into a pathos, almost unassuaged with any hope of joy. Here I saw our soldiers in that delicately conceived and apportioned religious retreat, itself a poetic dream of gentle loveliness, with its walls of time-stained stone, its avenues of trees, the ranged gardens of its sunny domains, with the petunias, the geraniums, the sages, and the high-browed and over shadowing chestnuts, the outspread firm outlines of tower and hall, its innumerable vistas, at evenings breathing a strange and subtle melancholy—malheur à qui n'a pas senti ces mélancolies (Renan)—and the devoted community of priests and nurses. Here I saw the sons of my country dying, praying, chanting, smiling in their ferocious sufferings, slipping away into eternity with prayers for La patrie, or rising from the very border of the grave with mutilated bodies, and yet yearning for the last chance of fighting still again. Here I saw the deathless love of home, lingering in the sick bodies, whose lips moved in a delirium of dreams, that they were soon to revisit the old orchards, the vineyards, the chimney places, and their people—Ah c'était miserable—and I have seen the chapel filled with the mourners and the broken-limbed companions of the dead, lifting the coffin so gently, as if the lifeless figure in it might feel their friendliness and thank them for it. Yes more too—a spectacle that might have touched the heart of Heaven—the wounded in the wards singing, in murmurs, between their gasps of pain, or just slowly gesturing, as it were, with body and fingers and with their speaking eyes in unison, La Marseillaise. You know how M. —— has described it. Ecoutez.

"Nos blessés chantaient ainsi par la bouche de leur blessures et nous en écoutant les strophes sublimes, il nous semblait les comprendre pour la première fois!"

Our—Gabrielle's and mine—miraculous mission was never forgotten. We did not speak of it, but we watched the racing days, and as we watched the words of the VISION grew visibly true. The Great Effort was to be made; that we knew. In the face of all prudence, driven onward by the irresistible purpose of the Almighty, the generals of the armies announced the dread decision of "trying it out"—the English said—in one colossal combat. It was the edict of fate that rushed them on to this conclusion. And it was trumpeted to the whole world. And no one thought it strange. No one wondered. And yet in any finite human view what unutterable folly! Ah—it was God's way. HE had blinded the eyes of the wise. HE had perverted the judgment of the mighty. HE had turned the councils of the Great into childishness. His hand indeed again rested on the earth, and its peoples, and the vast END would be—so it became clear to my sister and to me—HIS Revelation of Himself, blasting clean into the hearts of men this truth, that HE LIVED.

So the armies of the Allies and of the Powers gathered together against each other, along the line of the eastern frontiers of France, as I have said. There the last gage of war was to be flung down, and the issue tested.

But no new command came to us from the spirit-world. It was now within two weeks of the hour set for the DESCENT, and Gabrielle and I wondered that we should not hear again of the mysterious matter. Need we doubt? See how the current of events foretold the END! That last night at the old home in St. Choiseul I shall never forget. We sat together in the big library throughout the night expecting some sudden GUIDANCE from the Unknown. We said very little. The weight of our purpose had withdrawn us from the companionship of our neighbors, and for weeks we had lived alone in a reserve of solitude, of wondering suspense, that also tied our tongues. We had become stupefied with the terror of this admission to the supernatural, as if we were holding the hands of the Creator! Did we believe? Gabrielle did, and—I will confess it—I linked it all with the phantasmagoria of events of the hideous war, as something possible—just possible.

That was the end of September. We must be at the Chateau of La Ferté the following night if punctuality counted in this tremendous eventuality. And of course it did count. How exactly GOD had given his commands to Moses and Joshua, to Barak and to Gideon, to Jephthah, to David, to Solomon, to Elijah! So instinctively we grouped ourselves with the designs of Providence as indeed commissioned agents of its ends.

It was almost morning; the eastern sky reddening with flakes of fire scattered over it, and the light entering the room from the south wall of the garden, where the clustering vines hung untouched and forgotten; when Gabrielle spoke to me.

"Alfred have you any doubts? The time is short for our preparation. Tonight we should be at La Ferté."

"I will go with you Gabrielle. Would you go alone?"

And my sister answered in the words of Barak to Deborah:

"'If thou will go with me then I will go; but if thou will not go with me, then I will not go.'"

"Gabrielle all issues are with God. I will go with you."

Later, when the day had fully broken, and the sunlight flooded everything without and within the house, and, from its singular clarity, the not usual picture of the Eiffel Tower, far off in Zeppelin-haunted Paris, was just descried as a hazy skein of lines in the sky—we were both looking at it—the front door was assailed with a furious knocking. I ran to it and opening it encountered Privat Deschat with a paper in his hands, his face convulsed with emotion, his mouth wide open, and crowded with insulting epithets, that he flung upon me with such emphasis that, for an instant, I thought I was the occasion of his rage. But it was not so. It was what he read that had startled him into this unaccustomed excitement and denunciation.

"Voila," he shouted, waving the sheet he held in my face. "Voila, une clique des fous. Les scelerats; les imbecilles abominables; traitres; Dogs of Perdition. See, they intend to risk all on a single cast of the die and then—C'est assez à faire un homme honnête—with his head on his shoulders—créver avec desespoir, with madness. Alfred Lupin, what do you suppose? The Allies and the Boches and their forces have agreed upon tomorrow as a day of final quittance. There is to be one huge battle, un conflit superbe and then—Quoi? Give up—la FIN. C'est a dire une massacre insupportable, unheard of, monstrous, irreparable, and then—Ah, le Diable pourquoi existe je?—la renvoi à jour fixe. Can you believe such a suicide of the nation, such a shameless cowardice, such insanity, such depravity of ideas? And they make of it a circus, une parade macaronique, and of the nation un jouet. Is it not most damnable? Eh?"

Stunned by this unexpected outburst I retreated a step, and following me with the offending paper he continued his onslaught.

"Have you not heard? The Generals, the Kings, the Princes, the Diplomats, the Soldiers, have all agreed upon one infernal exterminating duel, and with that over no matter who wins, they throw down their arms and make peace. And here—HERE—" he shouted, still pursuing me backward into the hall-way, while behind me gathered Hortense, Julie, and even Gabrielle in appalled curiosity—"here they proclaim it to their peoples, and bid them gather at the carnage, Une spectacle magnifique assurement—the death of the nations. What poison of insanity, of miserable, hopeless, brutal, depraved idiocy, possesses our men? Has the whole world become a drivelling fool, une bête écervelé?"

He was still holding out towards me the paper, and in despair over his exasperation, I seized it, and rushed with it to the light, while Privat Deschat rushed with me, and the little circle of auditors closed about us in amazement. I saw at once the cause of Deschat's disgust. The sheet he had brought to us was a broadside—une bordée—which evidently was intended for circulation throughout the country, and had been posted over the walls of the cities, where what I knew, was frankly announced—the umpirage, the arbitrament in one last conflict of the undecided war. It read.

PROCLAMATION

PEACE COMES WITH VICTORY. ONE BATTLE MORE. THEN IT IS ALL OVER. ON —— THE BATTLE BEGINS. THAT ENDS THE WAR. LET THE NATIONS GATHER. THE TOURNAMENT OF CIVILIZATION IS AT HAND. SUCH IS THE DECISION OF THE RULERS, AFTER THAT INDUSTRY, REST. PRAY FOR US, AND COME AND SEE.

L'ADMINISTRATION.

"Yes," mocked Deschat, "l'es boutiquiers are selling seats for it now in Paris, in Berlin, in London. Mon Dieu je vais à me mettre au cercueil." With that admonishment he vanished from the house.

I turned to Gabrielle.

"Gabrielle, it is enough. It is the writing on the wall. GOD COMES. He has truly turned the heads of the nations. It is again the words of the prophet Jeremiah:

"'Yes, the stork in the heavens knoweth her appointed times; and the turtle and the crane and the swallow, observe the time of their coming; but my people know not the judgment of the Lord.'

"We need no further assurance, Gabrielle. It will be as the spirit of Sebastien Quintado said. LET US GO AT ONCE."

CHAPTER X

THE END

The Chateau of La Ferté stands upon a low hill forty kilometres (about twenty-five miles) northeast of Briois. It is a wooded hill, because it has been a neglected one. The old trees of the ancient demesne have grown up in disorder, and have gathered to themselves a wild brood of other trees and bushes. The whole place is a wilderness, but threaded with paths of picnickers—parties du plaisir—and it is a place, too, full of game; here pasture deer, and the fox lurks in its coverts, and the grouse and the partridge, and on the shielded lake swim wild ducks. Its great towers are falling to ruin; the stone walls that bound them together are in decay, but buried in the thicketed vines that have sprung upon them in profusion like a horde of biting hounds. The strong trunks of the wistarias, like mighty thighs have crushed in their partitions, and the old courtyards are damp with rank weeds and spotted fungus-growths. The northeast tower still lifts up its gray masses of wall above the encroaching trees, but its feet are buried in the luxuriant verdure of the plants and trees. A strangely beautiful spot. Traces of the old gardens remain, and a few still decipherable paths wander up and down the northern slopes. Some of these lead to the lake, invaded on all sides by rushes and sedges, thickly wadding its sides, except at one rim where still a pebbly margin stretches its white ribbon against the vivid green of descending, creeping mosses.

A moat was once dug deeply about the fortress-villa, and the range of the portcullis can be irregularly interpreted in the crumbling walls, that faced the ditch. It is a wide domain, embracing hundreds of acres, and the tangled thickets are interrupted by open grassy plains, while towards the south an orchard partially redeemed by some neighboring farmers, mixes with the savage glories of the unmolested wilderness, the pastoral sweetness of cultivation. It is a rare bit of natural artistry, enriched by feudal history and weirdly darkened by ancient crime, and now in the country circuits ascribed a half sinister population of unfavorable natural tenants. Here the owl secretes his nest and bewitches the night with his melancholy screams, the mosaic-backed snakes glide within its shadows, or bask in its hot exposures, the claw legged bats drape its fastnesses in the daytime, and wheel in twitching gyrations about its grim sentinel towers in the moonlight. Toads and stealthy rats find in its uninvaded precincts safe hiding. Like some untamed forest land it invited the flight of the hated denizens of the countrysides, and freely offered its thickets, overgrown jungles, and sunless recesses for their concealment and protection.

But there were more terrible things said of La Ferté. The displeasure of Heaven had visited it. The blazing lightning had struck it again and again. Its ancient oaks had been blasted by the fires of the Almighty. When storms came from the north or east, their worst fury was spent on the wearied old walls of La Ferté; when the snow fell it fell deepest at La Ferté and the winds played there their most demoniacal tricks. Some wanderers who once had taken refuge in its deserted rooms, had been killed by the bolts of lightning, and others—a Gypsy band—in winter had been found huddled together dead in its woods, buried beneath enormous drifts, when the snowfall outside of the fated spot and over the general country-land had been light and even.

Ah yes, the old castle lay under a curse. In its old dungeons men and women, and children too had been done to death, and there was the well-known tale of the murdered duke and his beautiful wife and three fair children stabbed to death with the very dining forks at a banquet, when words ran high and the wine had turned the heads of the wicked guests who were the duke's own kindred; such current gossip as fascinates the contemplation of every deserted ruin.

In the spring St. Elmo fires burned on its turrets, and were one to enter its woods at night haunting lights shone from its empty windows, and, if the wind rose—it soon became a tempest at La Ferté—and on it rose a chorus of wailing, long sighing sobs, that you could hear as far as the post road. That was well known everywhere. And then a thunder bolt, a great iron rock, hurled from Heaven, had crushed in the roof of an old keep, outside of the moat, where once a pretty girl—so ran the legend—and boy who were in the way of a terrible baron, way back in the reign of Charles V, had been strangled, and their bodies sunk in a well, which sometimes filled even now with blood, and ran out, painting the ground in red streaks under the hawthorn bushes. You could see the stone now, though the way to it was through thick-set briars. No wild flowers ever grew there, though everywhere else at La Ferté they were plentiful enough, and the marguerites were famous. Hundreds came there to gather them for birthdays, at weddings, and for funerals. Yes, yes—but only in daylight was La Ferté visited. All good people gave it a wide berth at night. The post road passed near it, but those who chanced to travel on it by night hurried past the gloomy shadows of La Ferté—darkest too like ink or ebony, when the moon silvered its craggy walls.

To Gabrielle and to me, La Ferté was invested with no terrors. We loved it. From our earliest years of life we had every summer gone to it on pleasure parties, and later—so absorbing was it to my fancy—I had, when a very young man, made a complete survey of it, mapped its old walk-ways, gardens, and outbuildings, reconstructed in drawings, from ancient prints, its granaries and storerooms, the cellars, vaults, larders, arsenals, and the upper stories of its dwelling apartments. So the supernatural summons to repair to La Ferté brought with it, despite its ghostly origin, no fears. Indeed fear under the spell of this awful errand could not have been suspected. It all lay prone before the sublime magnitude of the event which we were to serve, whose heralds and appanage we were. The excitement, spiritual and mental, woven with the emancipated feelings of destiny, and also with the emotional elation over the issue of peace and restoration, lifted us completely above usual physical states, and half immersed us in that dreamless sleep which the Hindus call prajna, or something like it. Consciousness was there with us, of course, but a larger consciousness obliterated our own selves, and we had become mixed in with the currents of the intentions of the Supreme Spirit.

However I was all the time intensely practical and I had formed exactly my plans for our installation at the chateau. Almost immediately after the storming Privat Deschat had left us, we started. An automobile, already engaged from the hospital, carried us to Briois, and there, almost on the instant of our arrival, we took a train for the village of Peltry, which is not far from the chateau. From the village we made our way across the fields to the chateau. We were quite alone, but not knowing what circumstances might arise, and eagerly insistent upon the demands of nature, I provided us with a plentifully supplied basket of provisions, which momentarily may strike the reader as an anticlimax to our exalted states of mind. It was really nothing of the sort. Physical weakness could only have interfered with our mediation. It was not satiety or even satisfaction I was thinking of, but just physical endurance under some unforeseen and incomputable exigency.

All the way we had been made aware of the vast concentration of troops, and of the nation, towards the frontiers of the country, where the confronting armies were to try out the dread decision. Marching regiments, the vans, the clouds of aeroplanes, and the multitudes of people traveling in all manner of ways, and mostly afoot, landing from trains from Paris, from the west, from the south, and converging in one colossal mass upon the selected battlefield, convinced us that the utterly suicidal madness was to subserve the purposes of God. The spectacle was to be grandiose and universal. The testimony to its power should not be lacking in emphasis.

Streams of men and women, mostly old men now, and children, swept past us. The land was inundated with the migrating crowds. These spectators invaded the fields, waded the little streams, overran the farmyards, pressing on to that strange goal, the duel of the nations. Surely the poison of an insane prepossession had turned reason and wisdom and experience and prudence into foolishness. So we thought. Thus the mysterious messages revealed to us seemed to be visibly corroborated.

But the hilltop of La Ferté was not sought. The drifting crowds, pushing stubbornly on, almost without sound of voice, in a dreadful silence, like creatures driven to their doom, divided there their compact masses, and it remained like some obstacle in a river's rush and freshet, and only around it poured the human tides, animated by some fear perhaps—No, rather directed by the mystical forces of the intelligences that ruled the hour, and ruling the hour ruled also the inclinations of the hearts that, in their blind animal herding, obeyed them.

We had hurried along with the scattered throngs, veering constantly towards the untouched wilderness of bushes, swards, jungles, and woods, around the ancient ruin, until upon its verge we stepped out of the vast struggle, and moved upward on the slopes towards its towers. There were wondering comments, and a few for a moment were inclined to follow our example. But the murmur of disapproval rose like the breaking of waves upon a beach, half articulate, half inarticulate, but wholly in remonstrance. Some words were intelligible. They sufficed.

"Non, non—pas là. Retournez; c'est un pays maudit. Ne restons là. C'est une place méchante. Voila. Back, back; the devil owns it. Je vous le dit. Aucun qui reste là se flétrie."

We were watched a little while with consternation and astonishment, and then the bovine muteness returned, and the headlong plunge went on uninterrupted. We were left alone. The edge of the preserve which we crossed was a grassy slope, terminated at a little height by a thicket of hawthorns. Through this latter, along a devious pathway, we made our way, bending beneath the heavily draped branches. Then came an open space, and a large ragged chestnut of huge girth was encountered. Its wide flung branches struck against the very walls of the western tower, which here, crumbling and falling apart, had crushed the front wall of the enclosure, and left its inner courtyards exposed, seen over blackened masonry, and piles of bricks, and rudely cut limestone blocks. Scrambling over this obstacle we found ourselves at length in the chateau's courtyard, and in the darkest shadows, almost impenetrable in daylight. Beyond us rose the better preserved eastern tower, which it was my intention to ascend. Shy lizards shot hither and thither along the walls, and the air seemed almost irrespirable with the odors of decay, from rotting timbers, and the multitudinous growth of fungi, and ivy, and a red confervae coating the pavement in the little undried pools. I knew exactly where I was. I led the way further to a descent of a few steps, that brought us within the rounded walls of the tower, where a fairly well preserved winding stairway led upward to its very summit. I had often ascended it to its very summit. Now I told Gabrielle to wait below, and I would first essay the steps, and discover their condition. I felt confident of their strength. It had been spoliation, more than weathering, that had destroyed the western tower. There had been four towers once, but the two northern ones had been almost razed to the ground by the frequent plunderings of their stones for bridges, and stables, and culverts of the surrounding country. Their stumps and foundations were thickly encumbered with all kinds of wild growths, amongst which the stunted saplings of apple trees had inserted themselves, making the enclosure in the late spring a bower of fragrance with their abundant blossoms.

I found that the stairs were unchanged; their solidity could not be questioned. The better preservation of the eastern tower with the still unbroached and massive roof at its summit, had kept the stairway in an almost pristine condition of stability, though, here and there, the inroads of the elements, the disheartened growth of mosses and pallid fungi upon the thin accumulations of earth in the corners, and along the rises of the steps, imparted a sense rather than a look of decay. At the topmost winding of the circular stairs, everywhere supported by the central newel about which they wound, I discovered, to my interested surprise, that the lightning had played some of its mischievous tricks, which were popularly ascribed to the infamous history of the ancient keep and castle, as marking it for devastation and vengeance. A splitting of the parapet wall had occurred here, and the angular line of dislocation had separated the stones of the rather high wall, and, under the stress of subsequent rains and wind storms, they had fallen out for a space of two or three feet. The accident was not inopportune. It permitted a view of the land towards the east, towards the vast panorama of the assembled armies and the gathering multitudes, who thus now, under the sway of an over-ruling Providence, flocked to this utterly amazing exploit. No conceit of theatrical device could have been more spectacular; no imaginative invention of the epic poets more sublime.

I stood a moment at the opening of the wall and looked out over the fair landscape. The trance-like wonder of that moment I can never forget. Upon the brink of what tremendous phenomenon did I stand? Was the visible intervention of the Most High soon to be revealed, and we—my sister and myself—were we the chosen instrumentalities—trivial and feeble—for its transcendent beauty?

The westering sun threw the long shadows of the chateau, far flung over the trees and bushes, the slopes and even outward upon the throngs, at my distance hardly seen to move, a generally dark streaming mass, darkening at the horizon, which it seemed to overrun—the exodus of a nation! Beyond the farthest elevations northward, and again southward in the plain, extended—unseen but understood—the boyeaux, the labyrinths, the cave shelters, of Picardy and Champagne where the soldiers waited. Beyond that ravelled edge of desperation, of suffering, of confronted death, lay the bordering edges of the enemy. Beyond that again, another concourse, summoned from the towns, the villages, and the farm-lands of Germany, instinct with the same hallucination. And above us all—WHAT? The approaching descent of the shriven and unshriven hosts of the slain?

The day, fast closing, ushered in a night warm and clear. I assisted Gabrielle up the long ascent of stairs; I returned for the baskets and wraps and two small tent-stool chairs, our entire furnishment for that ordeal, doubtless, unattended, I divined, with either hunger or fatigue. Still the provision of these simple comforts seemed wise. Indeed as the day died away, we ate the bread and drank the wine, in silence, waiting. Below us came the murmurs, the catches of song, the wailing melodies of hymns, and over the illimitable concourse spread with flickering inconstancy, the spangles of lights, with here and there a spurt of flames from the bonfires of improvised camps.

Perhaps it was about midnight, or later—we knew nothing of time, the very breathing of our bodies, the beating of our hearts, hurried and rapid as they were, were not even felt, or were only noticed in the moments of self-realization. How could it have been otherwise? About midnight, I say, we both became conscious of an unwonted agitation in our minds or souls—who shall say which?—and we started up together, crouching down at the broken gap of the parapet. Surely the instinct of premonition was awakened in us. The sky was moonless. The stars shone distantly, their light softened into spotted glows only.

"Look," it was Gabrielle speaking, with uplifted hand pointing above us.

I raised my eyes.

A light—O so slowly developed—the faintest possible silvery radiance, emerged somewhere in the centre—or what seemed to us the centre—of the sky, and grew steadily broader and brighter. At first it was a curdling spot of light, from whose rapidly moving—we could now discern its motion—edges, like the margins of a thunder cloud which is torn or frayed into wisps of sullen vapor, thin wavering flames of a richer golden light shot softly, now piercing the darkness in arrowy lines, now withdrawn to descend again in broad blades of nebulous splendor. And from them an illumination, pale, like the first morning's glow, spread upon the earth beneath, and the dense distant masses of men, the springing features of the landscape, slowly developed spectrally. How marvellous it was. I was transfixed not with wonder so much as with admiration, an awful admiration—Ah yes a quickening sense of worship perhaps. Within me stirred those original promptings of a recognition of the OVER-RULE, somewhere in those depthless heavens above us, where the stars shine.

Gabrielle had risen to her feet, and with her hands clasped tightly across her eyes swayed with the moment's inspiration, with her own evoked transcendentally strengthened powers. I stood aside and watched, a human record simply of the immeasurable spectacle.

The light descended bodily; it almost seemed as a shimmering mist at first but taking on a skeiny texture, and streaked here and there with lines of brightness. If it was a vast cloud of the disembodied it was too far away from us to analyze it into forms or faces, or whatever the spectral apparitions were. There however incontestably before us, it grew and distended and softly sank, in an increasing radiance, upon the earth. This radiance was superbly delicate, and yet intense. It seemed almost colorless, though I thought, too, bluescent masses passed over it or through it, like floating shadows on a wall. The fight was comparable to the strong glow of an electric light, shaded within an opalescent glass. The whole descent of the cloud was in the nature of a progression or inundation. It appeared to touch the earth, and then to roll north and south, while an endless ocean of the same brightness poured downward from the remote zenith. It was ineffably amazing.

But quietly, like the rising winds in an approaching storm, motion developed. And it became quicker and quicker, until I could discern within the vast, white, shining envelope, currents of light passing this way and that in unbroken rushes, and then came a sound. I heard it distinctly and yet doubted my senses. I turned to Gabrielle. She was not there. Terrified with the sudden thought of some miraculous transfiguration I called aloud. My voice was a whisper. Turning abruptly to one side I stumbled upon her prostrate body. She lay almost face downward, on the damp paving, and as I seized her and raised her up, there could scarcely be perceived any token of life in her. Hastily chafing her hands, and clasping her to my breast for warmth, I felt the renewed pulsations, and a moment later she opened her eyes and gazed at me in a transfixed vacant way that again startled my fears as to some hideous issues to this night of wonder.

"Gabrielle," I could see her and the objects everywhere plainly, by the flooding light that momentarily grew more and more brilliant, "Gabrielle. What is it? Are you sick?"

There was no answer; her eyes were closed again, and her hands seemed stiffened together in the figure of prayer. I placed her on one of the stools, and without relinquishing my hold of her, opened the basket of food and wine, took out a flask and pressed it between her lips. She responded. The wine revived her, and like a dazed person, she stared about her as if lost.

"Gabrielle, here I am—Alfred, your brother. Speak, Gabrielle. O! speak."

Sentient life was returning, its force was reawakened, and she opened her arms, and embraced me, and—blessed sound—her words entered my ears, soft, low, almost gasping.

"Alfred. See. The Spirits are here. My summons has been heard. Quintado has kept his word. It is all as he said. Listen, Alfred. There are voices—a sort of music; singing or—is it sighing? Ah! This ends the war. And the cries, the shouts, Alfred. What are they?"

The light had become more and more strong—it rained now upon old La Ferté, and its solitary tower, and its ruins, the wandering ancient park with trees and bushes started outward, clothed in the strange splendor. The glory of it filled the skies, and it beat upon the motionless crowds revealing their compacted and scattered groups. And the people? Everywhere was confusion or consternation. A widespread agitation was expressed in uplifted hands, in bowed heads, in kneeling bodies. We could see that, indistinctly, on the country-side, beyond La Ferté. But it was the mammoth voice of that people that Gabrielle had heard, rising—rising—blotting out the ethereal music, until its indescribable weirdness, its inarticulate ululations were like some animal expiration of immeasurable magnitude. It shot a singular terror into my heart. Was this indeed the End of the Earth?

"Gabrielle," I whispered, "let us go. We cannot stay here. This light, this influence—these ghostly crowds. I cannot—you cannot stand it. Come—come."

I lifted her to her feet, forced her again to drink of the wine and drank myself. And then we turned to the steps to descend. Everything was in a bright light, and the light was accompanied now by gleaming shooting darts or rays, that split it in streaks of phosphorescent—nothing else quite describes it—cleavages.

I thought I saw faces—but they were like thoughts only. Gabrielle clung closely to me, and shielded her eyes from the marvellous picture, that increased its stupendous power every minute. I took one last look through the broad gap in the parapet. The clouds of glory were still descending, sometimes in rolling folds, and the billowy masses or reservoirs of light that had reached the earth were visibly hastening onward along the track of that distant endless marshalled host, like dust-storms of countless sparks. I thought too, different from the colossal moan of the multitude, I caught the sharp note of distant cries. Was that the beginning of that "terrible Paralysis" Quintado in his vision to Gabrielle had threatened? I thought so.

I almost carried Gabrielle down the winding stairs. Her interest increased, animation awakened, the vitality of her tired nerves was renewed; she seemed suddenly thrilled with an exorbitant curiosity. At the foot of the long descent, painfully traversed, as I could not bring with me my little lantern, though the exterior splendor sent innumerable dashes of light through chinks and narrow eyelets, that dimly lit our winding way—at the foot, Gabrielle seemed quickened into an almost delirious activity.

"Alfred. Let us go to the trenches. Are they far away? The soldiers, Alfred—Sebastien said they would be as dead men, that they would throw away their arms and flee, suddenly stricken with the crime of their murders. And then will come the STUPOR, that will hold them asleep, motionless, the many millions—and then Alfred—I almost can hear him now telling me—the three days of the Presence of the Dead over them, and the terror, the punishment, and then, Alfred—you remember?—their weakness and remorse—and then Alfred, Peace—and then—" her voice faltered a moment, but only for a moment—"then Alfred, comes—, Ah, Alfred, do not think me cruel—then perhaps I shall leave you, and Sebastien will take me to Heaven."

Her voice became almost inaudible. I struggled with an overwhelming agony of sorrow, because—never had the thought been altogether absent—Gabrielle too might leave me, and then Ah God,—then I would be just a drifting relic, on the ocean of chance, unnoticed, unloved—ALONE. It seemed too hard, too cruel. Yet even amid the distracting misery of this anticipation, a curious malignancy of suspicion—No, not that—a pained wonder surprised me. Did Gabrielle love Sebastien Quintado? Did she seek him in Heaven? And Dora? What about her?

I lifted my eyes above into the magnificence that now enveloped our earth—this unearthly vapor or emission of spirits—and there above me in the air I saw the figure of Sebastien. The face above it was grave and smiling, the lips seemed moving in salutation, although I heard nothing. A form leaped past me. It was Gabrielle. Her outstretched arms were raised to the pallid spectre. The tableau lasted for a few minutes, and then the spirit shape vanished into the effluence above and around us. Gabrielle returned to my side.

"Alfred; come. Sebastien says the Spell of Heaven is on the Earth. He says, 'Go and See.' God's manifestation confounds the purposes of men. 'Go and See.' Come Alfred, I have new strength, new power. Nothing now can tire me. COME."

So silently, hand in hand, we walked through the groves, the hawthorn trees, the old grass clothed mounds, past mimic lakes reflecting the supernal fires, as though the moon shone on them, but diversified with the play of incomputable radiances, past the last long slope of meadow and out into the horrified, worshipping multitudes, making our way on, and on, and on, over the five mile walk to the trenches of the soldiers. My inquisitive thoughts left nothing unessayed, untried, unseen. And this is what I saw.

Beyond La Ferté stretched a diversified country-side, roads and fields, sloping descents into meadow-like expanses, whose grass and sedges were interrupted by low wooded islets, taller hillsides crowned by farm houses, thin strips of forest land, and uneven half hummocky ranges of elevations, crowding down upon narrow and shallow streams, with broader sweeps of scarcely undulating land, spreading upward to chalk terraces on the horizon, where burrowed the hidden chained chambers of the army, the masked batteries, the mud pasted trenches.

Everywhere were the people. They were the most numerous on the roads, where the blockade of carriages, vehicles, automobiles extended for miles. The fences were lined with spectators and over the farm-lands, in groups, and families, or sometimes in packed crowds, the populace was encountered.

We passed amongst them almost unnoticed. Here was a group of peasant folk kneeling on the grass, and led in prayer by a parson or a priest. Here others stood in mute masses, gazing upward aghast, or thrilled, or motionless, and numbed as in a trance. But there were exciting contrasts to all this immobility. Men were shouting with delirium; women singing in strident unison, their harsh voices rising in vocal yelps of pious song; in places I saw colonies thrown down upon the ground, men and women and children, rolling over and back again, against each other, in a queer rhythmic way, like some bed of mechanical reciprocating cylinders. It was almost ludicrous. Young men had climbed the trees, and their bodies bored the white radiance that enveloped the earth, with black patches, like spots of gloom. The roofs of the farmhouses and those of a few little villages we passed through were sometimes thickly invested with people, and against the lambent horizon they made serrated hedges of heads, broken now and again with ejaculating hands and arms.

I stood a little while at the back of a dairy—laiterie—where a milkmaid on her knees, working the white rosary in her hands, was surrounded by a knot of small children. Their prattle was infinitely pleasing. For an instant it seemed to conciliate the monstrous prodigy about us with things human and ordinary.

"Comme, il est beau!" cried a small boy with his hands clapping in delight. "Je crois que les anges descendent sur la terre; n'est ce pas?" and he nudged the oblivious milkmaid who stuck persistently to her rosary.

"Ah, well," said a still smaller girl, "I think they are fairies—all those shining spots—and they come to live with us and help us. Voila."

"Ah then we shall have anything we wish—toys and good clothes I guess," muttered a rather larger girl.

"Yes, Bertha, but you must be very good and not kick Margarite. The fairies are—are—tres particulières. Ils n'aiment pas les filles méchantes."

"But where—where," asked another boy, pushing his way forward among the others, "where did the fairies get so many candles? Pas en Ciel?"

I looked up; there was now a startling glory in the spectacle. The white enveloping banks of ghostly things had become tremulous with countless flickering spires of light, so slightly different from the quality of the entire luminousness, that they appeared and disappeared, with an incessant discontinuity that produced the effect of an interior commotion most strangely beautiful.

We passed from the laiterie into an open pasture, where the cows, motionless and resting, continued to chew their cuds, apathetic and unmoved, while from point to point, marking the houses on our way, the dismayed dogs kept up their long prolonged baying, howls, and half suppressed growls. It was hard to believe that we were still in quite the usual world. Gabrielle retained her composure, and showed no symptoms of exhaustion. I feared her sudden collapse under the double strain of the mere muscular exertion, and that nervous preoccupation that drove her onward to the trenches. The rising ground to a higher hill indicated the approaching terminus of our fevered journey.

"Gabrielle, let us stay here a few minutes. Why kill yourself with this rapid gait? Besides, the morning comes, and then it will be time—quite time enough."

"Yes Alfred, I am quite willing. For a little time past I have noticed the fading of the light. Quintado said that in the daytime the host of the dead would be invisible though their influence would stay. Here—let us sit down and watch."

The place was propitious, a deserted shelter for cattle with a few benches in it, and facing the east.

For a while at least all our thoughts were absorbed in the marvelous atmospheric—if I might so term it—mutations taking place in the sky around us or above us. It almost seemed that we had left the earth, and had become part and participants in some vast celestial panorama; as if, under the magic of some incalculable influence and REVELATION, we were entering on the sublimities of Heaven.

The horizon lights as the sun toiled upward were clearly seen. There was first against the earth-rim a high wall of grey-blue clouds, their precipitous heights crowned with parapets, and these last glowing with gold. Later, and above the slowly dissolving cloud walls there developed reefs of separated islets, faintly roseate, moored off from a blue-grey shore, over which rose cloud dunes, themselves also acknowledging the coming of the day with faintest blushes, and then below the reefs taking the places of the parapeted walls, a pearly sky. And then, an almost instantaneous splendor of multiplied iridescences in the Ghost-Cloud before us, either a physical refraction or some supernatural addition, obliterated the sunrise, and flung far and wide its intolerable brilliancies. We sank to our knees in a trance of adoration. How long we remained kneeling I cannot say. From time to time I raised my eyes; Gabrielle never moved. The colored scintillations were inscrutably piercing and varied; the whole celestial radiance was shot through and through with the compounded glories of thousands and thousands of rainbows. And then it faded, faded, the lights dropping out in broken fashion, now here, now there, until all was gone, and the uncovered sun lifted its round orb above the hills, and spread its native light over the earth, and the familiarity of that same earth itself was all resumed. The MANIFESTATION had vanished.

When I looked around me, the country-side there was bare of people. Perhaps they had fled; perhaps that portion of the land had not been visited. We had walked now about four and a half miles, and, gazing ahead, I saw the hills littered with prostrate figures—the motionless thousands of soldiers along the lines of the trenches! We had reached the PARALYSIS, that now held the armies of a continent in its awful chancery. And—God be Praised—this was the END.

Some distance behind the shed where we had taken our rest was a farm house, and, though not a sign of life distinguished it, it offered the only visible opportunity for securing nourishment, and of that both Gabrielle and I felt the need. The walk had been long, and the excitement, the fierce turmoil and agitation of our thoughts and the dazed exhaustion of our senses demanded succor. We quickly walked back to it and entered the open door that led into its small chambers. It was deserted. I called aloud, but there was no answer, and opening door after door, mounted the steps to the attic, and studying from that elevation the neighborhood, I could see no one. We seemed to have reached a point which was far away from the crowds we had at first encountered. Had some resistless panic driven them back? OR—had the Paralysis seized them, and thrown them everywhere to the ground and, thus inert, they lay in the distances, undiscovered, undiscoverable? The wonder had been realized by myself over our apparent immunity from the dread coercion of this omnipresent stupor. How was that to be explained? Ah—how was anything to be explained? At least—if explanations must be sought—I thought it was the preserving graces of Gabrielle that lifted from us the covenanted affliction.

When I returned to the diminutive kitchen filled with the utensils of domestic use, with its unmade fire, where had been gathered the sticks and peat for its sustention, and with the pantries stocked with the humble provisions of the poor peasantry, I was overcome with a savage resentment. To what end, conceived of under the most accommodating suffrages of Faith and Religion, could all this wretchedness, the starved desolation of a country-side, serve? Nay, the utter subversion of a nation upon whose bent shoulders now would weigh the insufferable and unredeemable burden of an incalculable debt—a nation, too, groaning aloud with the wounds of bereavement, of sorrows, that a life-time would never heal. Oh! how desolating, how harsh and unrelenting it seemed—the blackness of a huge despair overtaxed me. I sank to the table with outspread arms, and burst into sobs of utter, direful misery. I felt the caress of Gabrielle, I heard her sweet comforting voice, I felt her tender lips press my cheeks—her very breath seemed the incense of an offering to God. And would my SISTER be added to the necessary sacrifices? The thought stung me into madness. My old revolt and rebellion, that which had momentarily defied the purposes of the Most High when Blanchette died, arose again, revengeful, blaspheming, sharply irreconcilable. And then, even then, an inexpressible mystery blessed me.

I lost consciousness—consciousness to earth—but I entered the gates of a dreamland, blessed with prophecy. I was in flight, rapid flight, and my way surmounted the mountain heights, and yet to my eyes nothing was hid upon the earth. It was too this same Europe. I swept over the cities of France, over the sunlit loveliness of its country, now far off into the bordering areas of Belgium, and again over the dike-seamed, flat-lands of Holland, and then with a monstrous swing that clove the air with the mighty speed of thought, I looked down upon the fair provinces of Germany, of Austria, of Italy—it even seemed that for an instant I stood upon the endless plains of Russia, and even surveyed the minarets of Constantinople, and everywhere in all of that measureless domain there was PEACE. Over the fresh verdure of England I returned, and ever and again renewed my flight, as if the gracious beauty of the smiling lands, creased with scouring trains, their rivers brimful of traffic, prosperous with teaming markets, and gay with merry life, was too sweet and bountiful a picture not to be rehearsed to satiety. I saw the flags of all the countries waving in their cities, but above them all too I thought I saw another flag that waved with them, and this second flag was everywhere the same—it was the Flag of BROTHERHOOD, and it meant the consolidation of the nations in a Brotherhood of States. I heard the music of the songs of the people, ascending from the homes of the whole continent, and the sound of bells ringing in the churches, and the hum of an incessant industry, and the murmur, like the unceasing murmur of the ocean, of the sons of men at their daily tasks, and the instantaneous realization came to me, that at length Europe had put aside its soldiery, its mighty guns, the hideous ingenuity of its death factories, the useless edifices of its Class Mummeries and Families, and all of the venomous pride of Title, and Europe had turned its beseeching eyes to the future, unlearning the barbarity of its past, and working and planning and divining the things that would bring upon the Earth Peace, Good-Will to Men. And then it seemed to me that as I wondered and laughed in the depthless joy of this realization, that a voice like the Voice of God, filled the empyrean wherein I sailed, and it said:

"FOR THIS END CAME I INTO THE WORLD."

We threaded our way through the thickly filled ranks of soldiers—we had passed by the wagons of ammunition, the ambulance corps, the vast enceinte of kitchen equipments—and everywhere was the stupefaction of utter apathy, here and there in individuals beginning to assume consciousness, with the twitching pains of increasing misery, that we had been told would be both physical and mental, the double excruciation of pain and remorse. But what a sight!

The inveterate poignancy of my wonder and my curious freedom from the omnipresent influence—derived somehow from Gabrielle's immunity—kept me vigilant and observing. Gabrielle was constantly at my side, but she seemed less intent upon seeing, as upon ceaselessly going on. We advanced carefully between files of men, from whose hands guns and swords had fallen, as their owners succumbed to the incredible stupor. The relaxed arms had dropped the guns, the nerveless fingers released the control, the stricken bodies had reeled to the ground. We stepped over the motionless heaps of men who had sunk together in twisted groups of overlaid bodies and sprawling limbs—as I had seen the dead at Landrecies and at Coulommiers—steeped in this etherial opiate. We came upon battalions of cavalry slowly dissolving in a confusion of riderless horses. The riders had fallen from their saddles, or lay forward upon the necks of their horses, as if drugged with sleep. The horses were moving this way and that, confused, startled, neighing in their bewilderment, or, with wild eyes, struggling in broken companies to escape the weird strangeness of being unbidden, missing the familiar voices, the guiding check. Numbers slowly ambled away, their masters falling to the ground, pulling the belly-bands of the saddles after them, while, most miraculously, their imprisoned feet freed themselves from the stirrups, and the disengaged animals moved continuously away.

In the trickery of this supernatural stagnation there was no real panic among the animals, and the horses watching the ground seemed instinct with intelligence. I felt DIRECTION over-ruling circumstance. Occasionally incongruous predicaments arose, as when a cavalry man had fallen backward over his horse's broad back, and his head rolled slowly over the horse's rump with the latter's oscillation. A few riders were dragged onward with the horses, but they seemed finally to become disentangled and slumped to the ground. It was a bizarre disorganization, wherein the rigorous modernity of detail and preparation, had been hopelessly dispelled under a divine disintegration.

Indeed a portentous trance had gripped the millions of men. In its ensnarement they lay like corpses, hither, thither, rolled into masses, carpeting the ground in phalanxes, drooping upon each other in mimic embraces, or leaning in thick palisades of bodies like clustered logs. It seemed a vast immeasurable inebriety.

And the shadowy host? Where was it? The daylight illumined the interminable vistas. The wind blew softly over a spring landscape. The white flecks of clouds drifted as usual across the feebly bluescent sky. Nothing on earth was different except this palsied host, before, behind, around us. The similitudes from legend and romance came to my mind; the bolstered court in the Sleeping Beauty, the stricken seneschals in Consuelo, the death masque in Vathek, the rigid warriors with Frederick Barbarossa in the subterranean halls of earth, waiting their summons to leap forth in battle, the lifeless bodies in the pit that Sinbad saw.

But the invisible PRESENCE that held this world of men stiffened into immobility. What was it? Where was it? We moved through it, Gabrielle and I, but felt nothing; nothing more than the faintly heated air of spring. Would it shine illimitably again at night? Well, we should see. And the Enemy—How was it with them? The thought made us hasten.

We had walked until noon, and had reached the trenches. There stretched the pitch-forked angular line, the shelters, the dug-outs, the wire embarbments, the peering snouts of cannon. Men had crawled out and lay recumbent in the full light unharmed. We stole furtively into one subterranean cave. Behind the front space against a wall of half dripping clay ran backward a narrow room. In its centre a table was spread with the rude service of dishes, and behind that again a ruder grotto held a fire-place where a blaze of wood was charring a forgotten leg of mutton. Around the table slept twenty men, and an officer at its head groaned uneasily. Boyau after boyau was entered, and always the arrested work, the drugged sleepers. From point to point, like rabbits hanging on the lips of their warrens, men were revealed, half exposed, half hidden. But no murderous fire despatched them. The enemy too slumbered. We looked that way. The ground over which our eyes searched eastward and northward, was ploughed with the horrid ruts of shells, beaten into mud slowly drying in barren cankerous tracts of dust, or gouged with holes, while mounds rose intermittently, whose washed sides disclosed the limbs of buried men. Perhaps half a kilometre away on hillsides, in valleys, through the frayed margins of woods, thrashed into splinters by the shells, ran a crease, like a smeared titanic pencil mark, where now we knew the Teuton, the unspeakable Boche, snored unresistingly and oblivious.

We essayed the experiment of seeing if it was indeed so. In the dying day we crossed that silent tract, and safely, in a zone which for months had trembled beneath the explosions of shells, where sudden sorties had filled it with the clash of arms, or sent along its pale yellow and black surfaces the groans, the prayers, the gasps of dying soldiers. Now it was a graveyard only, and as silent as the place of tombs. We entered the lines of the enemy—and there—stark in the embrace of the Paralysis the mighty German, officer and men, yes, generals and—at the very point of our first contact with them—a prince too, rolled ignominiously together, in the suffocation of this asphyxia. It was a humiliating discomfiture. It confounded appreciation for distinction. They were thrown down along the banks in droves, and backward in the avenues of approach the legions upon legions slept. It made me think of the rafts of logs upon Texan rivers caught in inextricable confusion, tilted, submerged, locked, and tumbling over each other in heaving booms, as the tides jammed them together in thicker and denser snags.

Strangely unbelievable it seemed, those stunned masses of men! The setting sun sent its rays upon them and, through an exact orientation in spots of the serried helmets, they were returned in a blaze of reflected light. We wandered on, along the edges of this sea of faces, dreading to penetrate their ranks. There was an unearthly horribleness in it all, as if an Universal Death had expelled Life from the earth, and in the continental solitude we alone lived. I shuddered, with a sickness of despair at my heart, wondering if indeed we should see the dawn of the Last Judgment.

And now a marvelous thing happened. Gabrielle and I had retreated from the German line, slowly, with bowed heads hurrying towards our countrymen, when, as the day darkened, the air above us, with an infinity of sparklings, like a scattered ignition in combustibles, resumed slowly its supernatural brilliancy. The great ghost bank enveloped us. We quailed beneath it. We clung together, thrilled and speechless, in the immersing splendors of the heavenly light; the radiance of unnumbered souls. We could not see within it as we had seen when without its limits. It dazzled our eyes, and for the first time I felt a singular numbness creeping upward in my limbs, an insuperable heaviness in my head, and dull reiterating beats in my ears. Gabrielle seemed almost lifeless.

The ghost mass was vital with movement, there was indeed a low decrepitation in the spaces above us, and an incessant arrowy flight of forms, or veils of forms, where, too, faces shone, half traceable in features, half blurred, as in a sheen that erased them, as soon as seen. And those faces! They were not the presentiments of color and shade and shadow, perhaps, as a pictorial fact. No, not that—they were evocative lights, that created in my mind's eye, an image as it were, of a living face, and they were most solemn, most sad; in them dwelt an irretrievable impress of desolation. A wave of gloom overwhelmed me. The ground beneath me seemed sinking, I caught Gabrielle to my breast, and, as if in an engulfing swarm of myriads and myriads of stars, I fell to the ground.

The day had again risen, and our neighborhoods still showed the recumbent acres of motionless figures—we had moved on far to the north and westward—the huge aggregations had here drawn together and the trench lines of the hostile armies were scarcely three hundred metres apart. In the French and in the German battalions that indescribable unrest of FEAR that Quintado had predicted was now easily detected. This opened up a more singular and a deeply interesting panorama. By ones and twos, by hundreds and by thousands, slowly, slowly, the immense leaven of repentance of the unsearchable agony of a mingled moral and physical pain, was lifting them from the first stupor, and we could see the figures struggling to their feet, we could see their dazed, horrified, and distorted features, their exchanges of questioning glances, almost as if in their friends, they saw their foes. Nothing more utterly diableresque could be imagined.

Over ourselves had now been developed a great change of feeling. It was the second day of the miraculous intervention, and we had become imbued with the meaning of the miracle. It meant the End of the War, and it meant too a startling Enlightenment. The nations should put an end to their insane rivalries. The era of a divine economy and brotherhood was about to dawn upon the puerile egotism of the world. A new insight deep and revolutionary would adapt the coming centuries to new ends. So an exultation born of this divination urged us to watch and record the accuracy of the prediction. We became neutralized in sympathy by reason of an exorbitant curiosity, and from camp to camp, turning now to the enemy and now to the friend, we pursued our way, that monstrous and wonderful day. The dramatic intensity of it—albeit not a word was spoken in those marshalled millions—surpasses relation. At one moment we watched a group of Germans starting to their feet with consternation in their faces, their arms waving in protest, their features wearing a hundred expressions, terror, maddened wonder, abject subjection, grimness, a mixed commotion of tempers that rolled their eyes, and jerked their lips, and contorted their limbs. And then these initial emotions succumbed to the overpowering sense of torment, and on that followed their convulsive efforts to rise and flee. And their flight was impossible; their feet stuck to the earth, where they stood, and their most violent efforts tumbled them headlong to the ground, and thus quivering into quietness, like the palpitations of a dying animal, they lay motionless.

At another moment we gazed upon the French, behind entanglements of wire, with fierce-looking and harsh iron-toothed fences, near a millsite where the shattering shells had ploughed their desolating way through solid masonry, while beneath it the tortuous crawling boyaux journeyed on for miles. Here was a company of the chasseurs-a-pieds, the bravest of the Frenchmen whose dauntless courage and resolution in the face of death, like some fatalistic spell, had made them motionless under fire, and furious, with a whirlwind of roused premonitions of success, in their lightning charges. I knew of them well. These stem gallants of the battle field, were crowding the apertures of their underground burrows, and many had pulled themselves into the remnants of grass and clover, even sprinkled, as with dashes of blood, with carmine blossoms, at the lips of their retreats. Their faces expressed, with a wide difference of interior consciousness, the same amazement that had clouded the German faces, but here, in the Frenchmen, the amazement participated with a half revealed penitence, the stricken sense of sorrow, and of an awakening realization of an oncoming transformation. Intelligence beautified its misery with the colors of a mild, yes, an expostulating contrition. I watched them with an understanding sympathy. The dismay, the terror even, was all there, and that distinguishable physical suffering that was the prologue to their mutual surrender to the mission of Peace that the Spirits brought. But what else was there? Was that invisible multitude of the dead individualized to each and every man of the vast armies? Did these men, thus quenched in the waters of a mental and bodily affliction, hear unspoken words, see the faces of their lost comrades, and did they feel the piercing ardor of their contact with the revealing dead? Who shall say? As with the Germans they too had essayed Flight, and their will was helpless in the strangling grip of the vast prostration. There stayed the tremendous equipment of the nation, helpless as a nursery of children.

I spoke to these men, bending over them with Gabrielle, but there was no recognition. They stared at me as if eyeless, or deprived of vision. If I shouted in their ears, there was no response. If I tugged at their limbs they acted as inert figures of clay. And yet there was expression in their faces. What could it mean? Was all their attention focussed upon an interior illumination while their outward senses remained calloused in some impossible apathy?

And then we approached the lines of the stalwart English fighters. At one point spread a cantonment of infantry, rayed with bands of artillery, and flanked by the surcharged battalions of horsemen. The field view was picturesque. It was east of Landrecies where early in the war the English had met the Germans in withering combat. It was a shallow sweeping basin-like valley, between two wooded hills, where the thick set trees, shielded by some whim of accident, yet preserved their branches and uncrippled growth, and wore the blazonry of spring. A narrow stream crossed by a hump-backed bridge traversed the foreground, and beyond the stream eastward rolled a meadowland. Beyond that somewhere lay the slumbering Germans. But their puissant foes were slumbering too. The valley stretch was filled, like an overflowing bowl, with the English troops, and in hedges, in human sheaves, in rows, as in wind-swept, rain-beaten fields of high grass, the soldiers tossed their pain-racked bodies. We had become accustomed to the grotesque predicament and entered the camps, where we were tempted by the rudeness or wonder of the spectacle, with a stolid confidence. Our own strength too seemed inexhaustible. We were immune from the wide gathering Paralysis. Indeed a sort of exultation now surged within us as we began to see that Quintado's prophecy approached its certain conclusion, the END of the WAR. It almost filled us with gayety. We could have shouted a Te Deum.

I pointed out to Gabrielle a low farm house upon the northern hillside, and we made our way there among the masses of men, actually stepping upon them, as though they clothed the ground with a human corduroy. We opened the swinging door and walked into a room fitted out as a headquarters. Its floor was dotted with the recumbent figures of officers. Those mighty men plotting their strategies had been overcome by a strategy more sublime, and overthrown, with the benumbing exhalations of the heavenly armies, sprawled upon the tables, over the chairs, and the General curled ludicrously upon the floor. I could have laughed at the humiliation of the scene, except that for an instant I doubted my senses. It had all the inane inconsequence of a dream.

Behind the front room of the little house was a messroom, and there the same talismanic somnolence had pitched its occupants on floor and table. I gathered some untouched food, and Gabrielle and I retreated. As we emerged and our eyes surveyed the prodigious debacle, there rose from the disordered companies a titanic sigh—like the possible suspiration of an agonized monster—and visibly those thousands, weltering together in panic, rose to their feet, and with uplifted arms, their fingers clutching convulsively at nothing, struggled mightily to move. It was as Quintado had spoken:

"There will be no Flight; the pain will manacle their feet, will stifle their voices, will wither their wills—one monstrous Stupor will overcome them, and for three days, like the men overcome with sleep that watched the Apostle Saint Peter in the prison the armies of the Nations will sleep—Ay, and sleep in PAIN."

We were in the environs of Arras, and it was the very evening of the third day. Our pilgrimage had passed along the zigzagging frontiers of the marshalled armies, and everywhere it had been the same—the coma, the recurrent efforts at escape, the nerveless surrender to imprisonment. And what was happening beyond those frontiers of the armies we knew nothing of. In the civilian populations of France and of Germany, and beyond them in the widened circles of national conflict, in England, in Russia, in Belgium, in Turkey, and the Balkans was this tremendous visitation recognized? Was the strange metempsychosis effecting there too its intangible reconciliations? Between the double cordon of the armies, moving along the broad and narrow corridor that separated their lines, we were excluded from the world. Around us lay the sleepers, shuddering in unutterable nightmares, and in our diversified roadway there was nothing but the ruins of villages, the shattered walls, the holed ground, the catacombs of trenches, deflowered woods, the sinuous storm-marked track of war's desolation. We, Gabrielle and I, alone lived in this camerated solitude. But it was the third day and then—what? Ah, what indeed?

We had made great strides toward the north, and our rapid march had been hastened by the use of the horses of the troopers. I was not unfamiliar—from my experiences in Texas—with the management of horses and in this living cenotaph wherein we moved the animals alone seemed living. Everywhere they were found strayed and masterless, and seemingly confused, foraging as best they might upon the scanty herbage, in the ruined fields, and probably escaping beyond the army confines into the surrounding country. I found two most serviceable mares, and, as Gabrielle was a good equestrienne, our journey was more rapid, while it too grew more and more fabulous, gathering to itself like a figment of fiction, the unreal, the incredible and in it rested the denouement of a great mystery. All through the night, the dazzling luminousness dwelt upon the earth, all the day it was unseen, though potent, and now the termination of its mission drew near. What then?

Near Vitry between Arras and Douay is a raised mound, a long softly swelling protuberance in the undulating landscape, uncrowned by any structure. The village lies somewhere west of it, and it commands, almost uninterruptedly, the view running north and south through the avenue of a slightly winding valley. You can see the village lights from its summit, and you can hear the church bells there too, when the wind is west. It was on this modest elevation that we pitched our camp, when the ghost fog "lifted." Almost, as if at the finale of a grand play, Gabrielle and I waited for that last night. The day died slowly and it grew colder. Thin clouds thickened into denser volumes and the sky became overcast. Starlets of snow dropped through the air. A timely shelter was provided for us in the barracks of an old sheepfold, and the thoughtful provision of some blankets, taken by me from one of the camps, kept us warm, and so we watched the fading day. Again, as always, that outpoured ocean of light, less shimmering than at first, less moving, less inconstant with variation, as if in the very thought of its countless denizens the premonition of retreat made a thoughtful stillness. We did not tremble as at first, at its envelopment, rather it seemed a benison of blessed promises. It lay over the armies, it penetrated them, soaking them with the flood of its spiritual waves, an effluence indescribably, insufferably desolating. To us it was simply an unnatural splendor.

As the night came on Gabrielle became distrait and restless. I feared again some nervous breakdown. There was a deeper fear. The fear of spoliation, her robbery from me by the mystic invaders, the evocation of her very soul into that retiring vortex of spiritual life. She should not go. I pressed her closely to me. I kissed her lips, and muttered, as if in desperation that she should promise me, not to follow that elusive host. My terror rose because she did not answer. It almost seemed that she did not hear me. What other voices stole, were stealing, away her allegiance?

At midnight the glory of the light was supreme. It became a homogeneous radiance, like the solid glow of the melted metals in the furnaces. An hour later great billows coursed through it, and the wavering crests smote each other, and when this collision occurred the light darkened with broad paths of extinction; an instant after the glooms vanished in the recurrent glory. It was then that I saw currents in flashing streams, push upward, and then more, and more, and more, as if, sucked up into some opening receptacle, the conflux had begun to separate itself from the earth. Its swift motion begot a sound like the trilling of innumerable violins, a keen and yet delicate staccato of quick notes, and suddenly looking over towards the horizon, I realized that indeed the whole composition, complex, and solution was sinking upward into the zenith. And Gabrielle?

I caught her in my arms more closely, and in the sepulchral light saw her face as if filmed already with the pallor of death. A smile gleamed there too, and a voice spoke in my ears. I looked above me. Again that haunting form and face of Sebastien Quintado, and with it—O my God—the entwined wraith of my sister. The dead body was in my arms, the creature was fleeing beyond my hold. I sprang to my feet, and yet clinging to the dead figure of Gabrielle, lying on my breast, I raised an imploring hand, and cried out in the oncoming darkness—fit symbol of my despair:

"Gabrielle, is this your love? You know that Life is now my prison. Return! Return!"

If human effort could have torn my own soul from my body, then, there, I would have wrecked my substance, and flown with her in the cosmic tide of the disembodied. But human effort waits only on the decrees of Fate. It was not to be. I still saw with enthralled eyes the rising figures of Quintado and of Gabrielle. The irretrievable misery of it half maddened me, and again I cried out, with might and main rending the silences around me with the fierce invocation: "God! God! Give me back my sister!"

And then, benumbed with wonder, I saw the shades part, and slowly descending upon me, the figure of Gabrielle, like some floating dream of shape, drew near. It stopped above my head, and the face bent forward, and the lips—those sweet lips of truth and innocence—opened, and to me came the REVELATION.

"Alfred! Alfred! There can be no separation between loving hearts. I shall always be with you. But it is appointed that there are times and seasons. I am called, you remain. Life and Death have no meaning to the immortal soul. It is in both the same. The vapor that melts in the air is still there; a moment's colder breath might bring it back again. Perhaps I shall return, perhaps not, perhaps you may come to me, but through the eternal series of designs that God weaves with Life and Death an immortal purpose runs. It is the Salvation of Mankind. Watch how even now it shall be upon the earth. These spirits, rent from all they loved, in this ministration of their return, have sanctified the hearts of men to a new consecration of endless PEACE upon the earth. The Death of thousands brings with it the irreversible decree of the Life of Reconciliation."

The voice was heard no more. With the rapture of my love I watched the last ghostly remnant of that beloved being fade upward, into the swiftly racing tides, forever out of my sight. On me the cruel burden of taking up life alone had been insupportably laid. I think that it was then that I ran forward and gazed around the hillside, looking towards Vitry, and searched the sky. There above me fled the last meteoric trails, like phosphorescent skeins. I could see the eclipsed stars reappear through them. It was—so I recall it—as if a cupola of shining walls opened in the very centre of the Firmament, and, rushing through it, a tiny spark. Was that the fleeting soul of Gabrielle? Strained beyond endurance, agonized by the vehement protest of my despairing heart, the hope of even then rejoining her roused me to a sudden murderous resolve. I had seen a shepherd's knife left in the sheepcote. That should cut the loosening knot of Life. I found it, and then—there arose somewhere from illimitable distances, and from the neighborhoods about me, an unearthly muffled groan, like a cry buried in the ground, and heard in stifled shouts. It froze the blood, for it half seemed as if the corpses of the slain everywhere about, were speaking from their graves, the raucous outcry of mutilated bodies. A moment later I forgot my suicidal intent. The sentence from Isaiah that Quintado had spoken to Gabrielle, rang in my ears; rang like a trumpet.

"And they shall be brought down, and shall speak out of the ground, and their speech shall be low out of the dust, and their voice shall be, as of one that hath a familiar spirit, out of the ground, and their speech shall whisper out of the dust."

The great groan was the utterance of the embattled millions, coming to consciousness.

CHAPTER XI

THE CONCLUSION

The Great War is over. There is peace in Europe. It is now five years since the armies of the nations succumbed in terror to the incursions of the Spirits. And there is peace in St. Choiseul. Our old home is unchanged except that some familiar faces and some familiar voices are not seen or heard within its walls now—not all. Privat Deschat lives and Père Grandin and Père Antoine, and Dora is here, and our little housekeeper Julie. But the Capitaine is dead, and old Hortense, and—Ah that you know—Gabrielle is gone.

Tonight the wide country-side is wonderful with its snow-blanket and, with the moon lighting it up, shadows lie on the smooth white banks like pencilled drawings, flat and black. I have regained composure—perhaps happiness. At any rate St. Choiseul retains all of its loveliness, and in the nursery of its beauty why should not the heart grow calm. Visitors come often to see our house, and to see me. Privat Deschat says I should lecture about the Visitation. That I would make a king's ransom.

But that I could not do. It would be just pure profanation. I do not like to have the visitors. I talk to them in general phrases. Some understand my reticence, and some are vexed. Mais pourquoi? How can I go over and over again that miracle I have seen—the great miracle of the war? See, I have written this little book, so that I may no longer endure this intrusion, and now I have only to ask "Have you read my book?"

Sometimes it is an Englishman who remonstrates, with:

"But my dear sir; it is the living voice I want, the voice of the man who witnessed the Descent of the Dead. And then there are impressions that no book fairly gives—your own exact feeling you know—that is what I am after. Don't you see? It was a very remarkable circumstance."

Sometimes it is an American:

"Well! Well! That gets ahead of anything I ever knew. Weren't you shaken up a bit? Strikes me that my life would have been scared out of my body. Now let us have the whole thing."

These pertinacities and irrelevant curiosities I could not endure, and Dora urged me to write the book, and so at last it is written, and the world may now know the very truth of the matter—the truth as well as I can give it, for even now I sometimes feel as if I had been the toy of an illusion. And yet see the proofs. Is there not peace? Did not Gabrielle leave me? Is it not well known that the very day after the visions disappeared, the stir in the camps began? Is it not a common attested fact that the droves of soldiers broke out from all command—indeed that there was no command, the officers with the men being seized with one irresistible impulse—and streamed in disordered legions, over the country, seeking, this way and that, their homes, and hurting no one; all reduced to a childlike weariness of limb and spirit? And have not the lengthy histories recorded the voluntary abandonment of the war by the soldiers and their officers, despite what the bigger men and the so-called rulers wished? And was there not wholesale rejoicing everywhere, and were not the churches crowded to the doors, and did not the flocking multitudes improvise services in the fields, and on the roadways? And then came the signed manifestoes of the troops, that nothing in heaven, or on the earth, would drive them back to the trenches—that it was God's will that the carnage and the wretchedness of the whole business—l'affaire entière—should be put an end to?

And how was it with the governments?

They "surrendered" as the Americans say. They put their wise heads together and did for the first time what the people said they should do. And—again the good American slang—"there was no back talk." They did it. And how is it now? Where are the huge military establishments—where the drill, drill, drill, of uniformed and gun-carrying men, where the war bureaus and the generals, where that "power of the sword" that the Teuton blindly worshipped, where the Gospel of Power? Blotted out, and in its place the sanctification of Peace. The vision I had on that battlefield, when Gabrielle and I walked in the midst of the unshriven dead has been realized. The flags of the nations wave still, but with them waves the flag of their common Brotherhood.

Well, I am no great writer. I must not attempt eloquence. Let the historians and the essayists do that. What I think I saw, I must have seen, for what I see about me, everyone else sees, and this latter thing is the child of the former thing.

Reader are you content? The wonderfulness of the repatriation of the soldiers, as they swept from the battlefields and got back to the natural tasks of life has been written about, in hundreds of letters and books. I have given you the entire history of the strange event, that brought all that about. Again I ask: "Are you content?"

In years I am yet young, but I am old in spirit. The sharp experiences I have passed through; the transcendent Miracle I have been a part of, have delivered me from the trivial considerations of life. But too I have my part in life, and the darling prettiness of St. Choiseul, the noble friendship of Père Grandin, and the holy consolations of Père Antoine, the honest service of Julie, are not unconsidered. And—there is Dora.

Sincèrement. Je vous dit—le monde m'apparaît tres bon.

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[Pg 245]
[Pg 246]
[Pg 247]
[Pg 248]
[Pg 249]
[Pg 250]
[Pg 252]
[Pg 253]
[Pg 254]
[Pg 255]
[Pg 256]
[Pg 257]
[Pg 258]
[Pg 259]
[Pg 260]
[Pg 261]
[Pg 262]
[Pg 263]
[Pg 264]
[Pg 265]
[Pg 266]
[Pg 267]
[Pg 268]
[Pg 269]
[Pg 270]
[Pg 271]
[Pg 272]
[Pg 273]
[Pg 274]
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE