The Penal Department of the Royal School of Technical Military
Instruction, so soon to become an institution where the youth of the
nation were taught to fight for Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity under
the banner of the Second Republic of France,--the Penal Department was
a central passage in the basement of the Instructors’ Building, with an
iron-grated gate at either end, and a row of seven cool stone cells on
either side, apartments favorable to salutary reflection, containing
within a space of ten square feet a stool, and a window boarded to the
upper panes.
In one of these Pupil 130, guilty of an offense of homicidal violence
against the person of a schoolfellow, was subjected to cold storage,
pending the Military Court Martial of Inquiry which would follow the
sentence pronounced by the Civil Director-in-Chief of Studies. Pending
both, the offender, deprived of his brass-handled hanger and the esteem
of his instructors, nourished upon bread and water--Seine water in
those unenlightened days, and Seine water but grudgingly dashed with
the thin red vinegary ration-wine--had nothing to do but sit astraddle
on the three-legged stool, gripping the wooden edge between his thighs,
and remember--and remember....
And see, painted on the semi-obscurity of the dimly-lighted cell,
de Moulny’s plume of drab-colored fair hair crowning the high,
knobbed, reflective forehead; the stony-blue eyes looking watchfully,
intolerantly, from their narrow eye-orbits; the heavy blockish nose;
the pouting underlip; the long, obstinate, projecting chin; the ugly,
powerful, attractive young face moving watchfully from side to side on
the column of the muscular neck, in the hollow at the base of which
the first light curly hairs began to grow and mass together, spreading
downwards over the broad chest and fleshy pectorals in a luxuriance
envied by other boys, for to them hirsuteness meant strength, and to be
strong, for a man, meant everything....
He would hear de Moulny grunt as he lunged. He would straighten his
own arm for the riposte--tread on that thrice-accursed slug: feel the
thing squelch under his foot and slip: land in the ridiculous sitting
posture, bump! upon those inhospitable paving-stones, shaken, inclined
to laugh, but horribly conscious that the point of the foil he still
mechanically gripped had entered human flesh....
That bulge of the big sallow body over the edge of the tightly-tied
white silk handkerchief! Just there the steel had entered.... There was
a little trickle of the dark red blood....
“That spoils my breakfast,” he would hear de Moulny say.... He would
see him leaning forward with the forlorn schoolboy grin fixed upon
his scarlet face.... And then--there would be the facial change, from
painful red to ghastly bluish-yellow, and the limp heavy body would
descend upon him, a crushing, overwhelming weight. The foil had broken
under it.... Oh, God! And de Moulny would die.... And he, Hector
Dunoisse, his friend, who loved him, as Jonathan, David, would be his
murderer....
He leaped up in frenzy, oversetting the stool.... Came podgy
Pédelaborde in the twenty-ninth hour of a confinement that seemed to
the prisoner to have endured for weeks, in the character of one whose
feet are beautiful upon the mountains. Undeterred by the fact that he
possessed not the vestige of a voice, the dentist’s nephew had recourse
to the method of communicating intelligence to one in durance vile,
traditionally hit upon by the Sieur Blondel. A free translation of the
lay is appended:
“_You have not cooked his goose!
(Although at the first go-off it appeared uncommonly like it!)
They’ve plugged him up with tow--(I mean the surgeons)
If he does not inflame--(and the beggar is as cool as a cucumber
and as strong as a drayhorse!)
He may possibly get over it.
So keep up your pecker!_” sang Pédelaborde.
Upon the captive Cœur-de-Lion the song of the Troubadour could hardly
have had a more tonic effect. Hector sang out joyfully in answer:
“A thousand thanks, old boy!” and a savage access of appetite
following on the revulsion from black despair to immense relief, he
promptly plumped down on his stiff knees, and began to rummage in the
semi-obscurity for one of the stale bread-rations previously pitched
away in disgust. And had found the farinaceous brickbat, and got
his sharp young teeth in it even as Pédelaborde was collared by the
curly-whiskered, red-faced, purple-nosed ex-Sergeant of the Municipal
Guard in charge of the Penal Department, and handed over to the School
Police, as one arrested in the act of clandestinely communicating with
a prisoner in the cells.
The civil ordeal beneath the shining spectacles of the
Director-in-Chief, assisted by the six Professors, the School
Administrator, and the Treasurer, proved less awful than the culprit
had reason to expect.
An imposition; Plutarch’s “Life of Marcus Crassus” to be written out
fairly without blots or erasures, three times, was inflicted. The
address of the Director-in-Chief moved five out of the six Professors
to tears, so stately was it, so paternal, so moving in its expressions.
The sixth Professor would have wept also, had he not, with his chin
wedged in his stock and his hands folded upon his ample waistcoat, been
soundly, peacefully, sleeping in his chair.
Monseigneur le Duc had graciously entreated, said the
Director-in-Chief, clemency for one whose young, revengeful hand
had well-nigh deprived him of his second son, and plunged himself
and his exalted family in anxiety of the most cruel. The future of
the young sufferer, who, the Director-in-Chief was grateful to say,
was pronounced by the surgeons to be progressing favorably--(“Then
he was not inflamed!” ... thought Hector, with a rush of infinite
relief.)--the future of M. Alain de Moulny must inevitably be changed
by this deplorable occurrence--a profession less arduous than the
military must now inevitably be his. Let him who had reft the crown
of laurels from the temples of his comrade reflect upon the grave
consequences of his act. The Director-in-Chief ended, rapping the table
as a signal to the Professor who had not wept, to wake up, “Pupil 130,
you may now return to your studies, but, pending the decision of the
Military Tribunal, you are Still Provisionally Under Arrest.”
The verdict of the Military Tribunal was in favor of the prisoner.
It was decided that Pupil No. 130, roused to choler by an expression
injurious to his family honor, had challenged Pupil No. 127 with
justification. Having already undergone three days’ imprisonment, no
further punishment than a reprimand for leaving the dormitory before
beat of drum would be administered by the Court, which rose as M. the
General gave the signal. And Hector was free.
But for many days after the completion of those three unblotted copies
of “Marcus Crassus” he did not see de Moulny.... He hung about the
Infirmary, waiting for scraps of intelligence as a hungry cat was wont
to hang about the kitchen quarters, wistful-eyed, hollow-flanked,
waiting for eleemosynary scraps. One of the two Sisters of Charity in
charge took pity on him, perhaps both of them did.... A day came when
he was admitted into the long bare sunshiny ward.... At the end nearest
the high west window that commanded a view of the flowery garden-beds
and neat green grass-plats surrounding the house of Monsieur the
Director-in-Chief, upon a low iron bedstead from which the curtains had
been stripped away, lay stretched a long body, to which an unpleasant
effect of bloated corpulence was imparted by the wicker cage that held
the bedclothes up.... The long face that topped the body was very
white, a lock of ashen blonde hair drooped over the knobby forehead;
the pouting underlip hung lax; the blue eyes, less stony than of old,
looked out of hollowed orbits; a sparse and scattered growth of fluffy
reddish hairs had started on the lank jaws and long, powerful chin.
Hector, conscious of his own egg-smooth cheeks, knew a momentary pang
of envy of that incipient beard.... And then as de Moulny grinned in
the old cheerful boyish way, holding out a long attenuated arm and
bony hand in welcome, something strangling seemed to grip him by the
throat....
Only de Moulny saw his tears. The Sister, considerately busy at
the other end of a long avenue of tenantless beds with checked
side-curtains, assiduously folded bandages at a little table, as the
sobbing cry broke forth:
“Oh, Alain, I always loved you!--I would rather you had killed me than
have lived to see you lie here! Oh! Alain!--Alain!”
“It does not matter,” said de Moulny, but his long upper lip quivered
and the water stood in his own eyes. “They will make a priest of me
now, that is all. She”--he jerked his chin in the direction of the busy
Sister--“would say the foil-thrust was a special grace. Tell me how
Paris is looking? I have not seen the slut for--how long?” He began
a laugh, and broke off in the middle, and gave a grimace of pain.
“_Dame!_--but that hurts!” he said before he could stop, and saw his
smart reflected in the other’s shamed, wet face, and winced at it.
“Pupil 127 must not excite himself or elevate his voice above a whisper
in speaking. The orders of the Surgeon attending are stringent. It is
my duty to see that they are obeyed.”
Sister Edouard-Antoine had spoken. Hector rose up and saluted as the
nun came gliding down the avenue of beds towards them, her beads
clattering and swinging by her side, her black robes sweeping the
well-scrubbed boards, her finger raised in admonition, solicitude on
the mild face within the _coif_ of starched white linen....
“They shall be obeyed, my Sister,” said de Moulny in an elaborate
whisper. The Sister smiled and nodded, and went back to her work.
Hector, on a rush-bottomed chair by the low bed, holding the hot, thin,
bony hand, began to say:
“I went out yesterday--being Wednesday. Paris is looking as she always
looks--always will look, until England and Russia and Germany join
forces to invade France, and batter down her forts and spike her
batteries, and pound her churches and towers and palaces to powder with
newly-invented projectiles, bigger than any shell the world has ever
yet seen, filled with some fulminate of a thousand times the explosive
power of gunpowder....”
“Go it!” whispered de Moulny. Then a spark of fanatical enthusiasm
kindled in his pale blue eyes. “An explosive of a thousand times the
power of gunpowder, you say!” he repeated. “Remember that inspection,
and the grimy neck and black hands that cost me my Corporal’s _galon_!
I had been working in the Department of Chemistry that morning....
I had got all that black on me through a blow-up in the laboratory.
_Nom d’un petit bonhomme!_ I thought I had discovered it--then!--that
explosive that is to send gunpowder to the wall. Listen----”
“Do not excite yourself!” begged Hector, “or the Sister will turn me
out.”
De Moulny went on: “I shall pursue the thing no further, for how shall
one who is to be a Catholic priest spend his time inventing explosives
to destroy men? But--one day you may take up the thread of discovery
where I left off.”
“Or where the discovery went off!” suggested Hector.
De Moulny grinned, though his eyes were serious.
“Just so. But listen. I had been reading of the experiments made
in 1832 by Braconnot of Nancy, who converted woody fiber into a
highly-combustible body by treating it with nitric acid. And I dipped
a piece of carded cotton-wool in nitric, and washed it. Then I dipped
it in concentrated sulphuric. The sulphuric not only dehydrated the
nitric--_saisissez_?--but took up the water. Then it occurred to me to
test the expansive power of the substance in combustion by packing it
into a paper cone and lighting it. Well, I was packing the stuff with
the end of an aluminum spatula, into the little paper case, when--but
you must have heard?”
“Ps’st! Br’roum! Boum!” Hector nodded. “I heard, most certainly! But
let me now tell you of Wednesday.” He leaned forwards, gripping the
seat of the rush-bottomed chair between his knees with his strong
supple red hands as he had gripped the edge of the prison stool, and
his bright black eyes were eager on de Moulny’s.
“First I went and looked up at the outside of the great Carmelite
Convent in the Rue Vaugirard--the place where I was taken when I was
eight years old, to say good-by to my mother before she went away....
Where she was going they would not tell me--nor, though I have always
received a letter from her regularly twice a year, has there ever been
any address or postmark upon it by which I might be guided to find
out her whereabouts. But of course she is at Widinitz, in the Priory
Convent there. And it seems to me that she did right in returning. In
her place I should have done the same. _He_ says I say so because I
have Carmel in my blood!”
A faint pink flush forced its way to the surface of de Moulny’s thick
sallow skin. He whispered, averting his eyes:
“You have spoken to him about...?”
“When he heard of our--difference of opinion, he naturally inquired its
cause.”
Hector’s small square white teeth showed in a silent mocking laugh that
was not good to see. “He thought I fought in defense of my father’s
honor. He said so. He may say so again--but he will not think it now!”
The boyish face changed and hardened at the recollection of that
interview. Terrible words must have been exchanged between the father
and the son. De Moulny, cadet of a family whose strongest hereditary
principle, next to piety towards the Church, was respect towards
parents, shuddered under his wicker-basket and patchwork coverlet.
There was a cautious tap at the black swing-doors leading out upon the
tile-paved passage. They parted, Madame Gaubert appeared looking for
the Sister, caught her mild eye as she glanced round from her work,
beckoned with an urgent finger and the whole of her vivacious face....
The Sister rose, and the face vanished. As the doors closed behind the
nun’s noiseless black draperies, Hector took up his tale:
“I said to him that the terms upon which he had permitted my mother to
return to the bosom of the Church were infamous. He laughed at first at
what he called my pompous manner and fine choice of words. He was very
witty about the recovery of the dowry--called it ‘_squeezing the Pope’s
nose_,’ ‘_milking the black cow_,’ and other things. All the while he
pretended to laugh, but he gnashed his teeth through the laughter in
that ugly way he has.”
“I know!” de Moulny nodded.
“Then he reproached me for unfilial ingratitude. He said it was
to endow his only son with riches that he demanded return of the
dowry--the surrender of the three-hundred-thousand silver thalers....
‘You are a child now,’ he told me, ‘but when you are a man, when you
need money for play, dress, amusements, pleasure, women, you will come
to me hat in hand.’ I said: ‘Never in my life!...’ He told me: ‘Wait
until you are a man!’”
Hector pondered and rubbed his ear. De Moulny cackled faintly:
“He tweaked you well when he told you to wait, I see!”
Hector nodded, grimacing.
“To pull the hair, or tweak the ear, that was his Emperor’s habit, when
he was in a good temper.... My father copies the habit, just as he
carries Spanish snuff loose in the pockets of his buff nankeen vests
and wears his right hand in the bosom--so!” He imitated the historic
pose and went on: “He kept it there as he pinched and wrung with the
left finger and thumb”--the speaker gingerly touched the martyred
ear--“laughing all the time. I thought my ear would have come off,
but I set my teeth and held my tongue.... Then he let go, and chucked
me under the chin--another trick of the Emperor’s. ‘A sprig of the
blood-royal for Luitpold’s blood-pudding! That is not a bad return! We
shall have a fine Serene Highness presently for those good people of
Widinitz.’ And he went away laughing and scattering snuff all over his
vest and knee-breeches; he calls pantaloons ‘the pitiable refuge of
legs without calves.’ Now, what did he mean by a Serene Highness for
those good people of Widinitz?”
“I--am--not quite sure.” De Moulny pastured upon a well-gnawed
finger-nail, pulled at his jutting underlip, and looked wise. “What I
think he meant I shall not tell you now--! What I want you to do now
is to swear to me, solemnly, that you will never touch a franc of that
money.”
“I have promised.”
“A promise is good, but an oath is better.”
Hector began to laugh in a sheepish way, but de Moulny’s knobby
forehead was portentous. That mass of gold, reclaimed from the coffers
of the Convent of Widinitz seemed to him the untouchable thing; the
taking it unpardonable--an act of simony his orthodox Catholic gorge
rose at. So, as Hector looked at him, hesitating, he gnawed and
glowered and breathed until he lost patience and hit the basket that
held up the bedclothes with his fist, and whispered furiously:
“Swear, if you value my friendship! And I--I will swear, as you once
asked me--remember, Redskin!--as you once asked me!--to be your friend
through life--to the edge of Death--beyond Death if that be permitted!”
Ah me! It is never the lover who loves the more, never the friend
whose friendship is the most ardent, who seeks the testing-proof of
love or friendship, who demands the crowning sacrifice in return for
the promise of a love that is never to grow cool, a loyalty that shall
never fail or falter....
* * * * *
Perhaps if the boy who was now to repeat the vow that the other boy
dictated had known at this juncture all that its keeping was to
involve, he would have taken it all the same. Here before him lay his
chosen friend, brought to the verge of that grave of which he spoke,
laid low in the flower of his youth, in the pride of his strength,
by the hand of him who loved him; the bright wings of his ambition
clipped, the prosaic, sedentary life of a theological student unrolled
before him instead of the alluring, vari-colored career of soldierly
adventure, his well-loved researches in War-chemistry _tabu_ forever by
that pale, prohibitory reflection of the priestly tonsure.... Do you
wonder that his will was as wax in the molding hands?
De Moulny’s Rosary, disinterred at the commencement of his
wound-sickness from among the cake-crumbs and bits of flue at the
bottom of his dormitory kit-locker by Sister Edouard-Antoine when
searching for nightcaps, hung upon one of the iron knobs at the head
of his bed.... He reached up a long gaunt arm to get it; gave the
blue string of lapis-lazuli beads, with the silver _Paternosters_
and silver-scrolled and figured Crucifix, into Hector’s hands, ...
bade him, in a tone that already had something of the ecclesiastical
authority, kiss the sacred Symbol and repeat the vow.
“‘I, Hector-Marie-Aymont-von Widinitz Dunoisse, solemnly swear and
depose’--where did de Moulny get all the big words he knew? ...
‘swear and depose that I will never profit by one penny of the dowry
of three-hundred-thousand silver thalers paid to the Prioress of
the Convent of Widinitz as the dowry of my mother, the Princess
Marie-Bathilde von Widinitz, otherwise Dunoisse, in religion Sister
Térèse de Saint François. So help me, Almighty God, and our Blessed
Lady! Amen.’”
He kissed the Crucifix de Moulny put to his lips, and de Moulny took
the oath in his turn:
“And I, Alain-Joseph-Henri-Jules de Moulny, solemnly swear to be a
faithful, true, and sincere friend to Hector-Marie-Aymont-von Widinitz
Dunoisse, through Life to the edge of Death, and beyond Death--if that
be permitted? _In Nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti._ Amen.”