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?_