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._