inadequately relieved by high barred windows. Straw littered the floor
and was collected into little heaps along the walls. Dimly discerned in
the shadows was a throng of people, men and women--some promenading up
and down in solitary dejection, some in groups seated upon the straw
at a game of cards, some leaning propped against the wall in listless
despair. He gazed into that Hades-like abode of misery with a curious
anxiety at his heart, an anxiety whose cause for the moment eluded
him. He watched, waiting in a vague expectation of some event that
approached and was yet unseen.
A door in the foreground opened and, with a little intimate shock, he
saw enter that mysterious duplication of his personality that was he
and yet was not he--the sternly ascetic young _répreséntant en mission_
whose plumed hat and sash of office proclaimed his authority in this
dreadful place. A subservient turnkey followed at his heels, called a
name.
A young girl--_she_--she of the bare room overlooking the square, she
of--of--he failed to identify another appearance he knew ought to be
familiar--started up from a bed of straw where she had been sitting in
company with an old man. She approached, in quiet command of herself,
neither hastily nor reluctantly. Obviously, she was indifferent to
whatever might be required of her. Only when she perceived the identity
of her visitor did she start back in a sudden little hesitation,
vanquished as soon as felt. She came coolly up to him, regarded him
with contemptuously hostile eyes, awaited his business with her.
He was trembling with emotions that almost overpowered him--the soul
that watched felt itself gripped in an agony of remorse, of fear,
of--something else that he would not acknowledge. He stammered
evidently as he spoke.
“_Citoyenne_, come with me--you are free!”
She looked at him in blank surprise.
“Free?”
The inaudible words were plain to those two watching souls who had long
ago forgotten the crystal that they held. Both thrilled with a sense of
crisis in which they were intimately involved.
The young man reiterated his assertion eagerly.
“And my father?” The girl turned her head toward the melancholy figure
bowed in dejection on its heap of straw.
He shrugged his shoulders.
“Your father is guilty of a crime against the Republic. I can do
nothing for him. But you have committed no crime, _citoyenne_”
Her eyes looked into his, probed him.
“Nor have many here. Why do you release me?”
He lost control of himself in his eagerness to withdraw her from the
danger into which he had himself wantonly plunged her.
“Because--because I love you! Because I cannot let you die!--Because--I
cannot help it--you are all of life to me, _citoyenne_!”
She looked at him, her face like a carven sphinx, her eyes inscrutable.
“I go--wherever my father goes!”
He stood, deathly pale, wrestling with a terrible temptation. She
watched his agony, without malice, without sympathy, cold like a slave
in the market who may be bought--for a price. All of him that was human
yearned for her, yearned for her unutterably in a surge of desire that
all but overcame him--and yet an austere inner self, that self which
had vowed itself to the idealized service of the Republic in youthful
fanaticism, stood firm although it agonized. He felt himself a worthy
spiritual successor of that Scaevola who stood with his hand in the
fire, as he answered, cold sweat upon his brow.
“_Citoyenne_, it is impossible. I cannot buy even your love with my
dishonour. Your father has committed a crime against the Republic--but
you have committed none.”
She shrugged her shoulders in calm indifference. An insulting smile
came into her face.
“Then I will do so!” She turned toward the prisonful of victims with
the exultant gesture of a martyr who demands the stake, and cried,
evidently with full lungs: “_Vive le Roi! À bas la République!_”
“_Vive le Roi!--À bas la République!_” came like a murmured echo from
somewhere beyond defined space, in defiant mockery of all that he
craved.
He watched her turn away from him, an immense despair submerging him,
and went slowly, head down, toward the door as though himself condemned.
She turned for one last look at him as he disappeared, a strange wild
ecstasy in her face--and then flung herself face downward upon the
straw in a paroxysm of hysteric sobs.
Whence came those murmured words, charged with unutterable passion,
with the intensity of a soul that gathers its essence for its leap into
the infinite dark?
“Now--now I can love him! Death, death! come quickly!--now I have the
right to love!”
There was a glimpse of a face suddenly radiant through its tears--and
then again blackness, a suspense of thought.
He stood with his back to the room, looking out upon the square filled
with a surging mob. In the middle, upon a raised scaffold, stood the
terrible red-painted uprights with the gleaming knife under the linking
beam, poised ready for the swift fall of its diagonal edge. The mob
swirled in a sudden turbulence under the windows. He knew what it meant.
There, forcing its slow passage through the maddened crowd, came the
fatal cart--a rough vehicle filled with hatless men and women whose
necks were bare and whose hands were bound, men and women who seemed
deaf to the vociferations of the bloodthirsty mob that raved about
them. He shuddered--slipped his right hand into his pocket, held it
there, his gaze fastened in horrible fascination upon that slowly
moving cartload of already almost lifeless human beings. He saw,
clearly, only one figure, a girl in white, and he waited--in an agony
which held him rigid.
The cart lurched its slow way to the scaffold, stopped. The victims
began to descend. He saw the figure in white mount the steps to
the machine, saw it turn its head at the last moment toward his
window--and, as though it were the signal expected, he whipped the
pistol from his pocket, glimpsed the dark hole of its barrel, and fired.
The man and woman in the chair stared into a crystal ball whose depths
were suffused with a milky cloud.
“Oh, Jim!” she murmured. “_The last time----!_”
“Shh!” he said, with a squeeze of her hand. “Look! It’s coming again!”
Once more the cloud parted--they peered, breath held for further
revelations, into a crude contrast of bright light and intense shadow,
upon a striped awning at an angle from a wall glaring in the sun, upon
a narrow street where dust rose yellow like an illumined cloud above a
dark throng of Asiatics, their white robes almost blue in the shadow,
who gesticulated and pushed each other as they packed themselves into a
semicircle of eager faces. Their vision adjusting itself to the violent
juxtaposition of high light and deep shadow, they stared into the
comparative sombreness under the awning, to the object which held the
interest of the crowd.
In a cleared space, in front of a trio of barbaric musicians who
squatted cross-legged upon the ground in serious management of pipe and
tom-toms, a dancing-girl postured in fluidic attitudes of her lithe,
slim body. Arms and legs covered with bracelets, she turned, stretched,
and twisted herself in accompaniment to a rhythm which escaped them.
Indefatigably she danced, heedless of the eager, appreciative eyes upon
her, her face expressionless in a rapt absorption where consciousness
of her environment seemed lost. The crowd shouted inaudible
encouragements in flashes of gleaming teeth, flung flowers and small
coins on to the mat whereon she danced, swayed with contagious waves
of enthusiasm. The girl danced on, indifferent to the applause,
ecstatically absorbed in the perfection of her art. Only one or other
of the serious musicians lifted an occasional bright, sharp glance to
the increasing spread of coins upon the mat.
Suddenly there was a commotion in the rear of the crowd, a jostling and
elbowing which propagated itself to the front rank. The throng parted,
with alarmed turns of the head to some disturbance behind them. A huge
elephant appeared, gliding forward with slow and stately motion to
the rhythmic wave of its sensitive trunk. Upon the gorgeous cloth of
its back was poised a richly carved and gilt _howdah_ surmounted by a
gigantic umbrella in scarlet and gold. Beneath that umbrella reposed a
languid young man, handsome with aquiline nose and splendid eyes under
the magnificent turban which crowned his dark head. He lifted his hand
in a gesture to the mahout perched on the neck of the elephant, and the
great animal stopped, left in a clear space by the crowd which fell
back reverently from its neighbourhood.
Still the girl danced on, heedless, unperceiving perhaps, of the
prince who watched her from his lofty seat. The musicians, after one
quick glance upward of apprehension, risked boldly and played on with
undisturbed solemnity. She danced with a sinuous grace that held the
eye in fascination, with an intensity of restrained movement, daringly
provocative though were her postures, which thrilled the watcher with
a sense of suppressed and concentrated passion whose potentialities
might not be measured. She danced, the incarnation of the fierce pulse
of life that beats beneath the fallacious languor of the East, her body
charged with vitality as it bent and straightened with lithe precision
to another curve, her face carven, expressionless, as though her soul
were withdrawn to its mysterious centre. The prince clapped his hands
in irrepressible enthusiasm. She stopped dead, stood rigidly upright
facing him, arms close to her sides, arabesqued breastlets thrust
forward, a slim statue that quivered with magically arrested life, in a
motionless effrontery that challenged his regard, his very power. Their
eyes met, looked into each other while the musicians ceased to play.
What was that of intense communion which sped between them? With a
sudden gesture the prince flung a handful of golden coins into the mat,
made a grave inclination of his head.
The elephant moved onward. With a smile of triumph, with a breath
long-drawn through her nostrils, and eyes that closed ecstatically for
a moment as in a dream realized, the girl followed in the train of his
gorgeously attired retinue....
_They knew_--those watchers who gazed as through the rent veils
of eternity, apprehending with minds that had ceased to be
corporeal--recognizing themselves once more, though in an incarnation
immeasurably remote, an incarnation whose transient language was long
ago forgotten.
The vision changed abruptly. They gazed into the hall of an Oriental
palace, arabesqued arches in a colonnade on either side, tessellated
marble in cool colours patterning the floor, ebony-black slaves waving
peacock fans above a cushioned divan on which the prince reclined. An
indulgent smile played over his handsome features as he toyed with the
unbraided hair of the beautiful girl who sat at his feet, in confident
lassitude against his knee, and turned her head back to gaze up into
his face with eyes voluptuously fond. She sighed with happiness--her
face no longer expressionless as in the public dance, but charged with
a yearning intensity of love. He, too, yearned over her with his grave
smile, bent his head down for the kiss her lips put up to him....
Again the scene changed. It was night in the colonnaded hall, moonbeams
patching the tessellated floor, flickering points of yellow flame
swinging slightly with the hanging lamps in the gloom under the
intricacy of the arches. A shadow moved out of the darkness, stood in
the moonlight, waited for a moment, then dropped a veil from its face.
It was the dancing-girl. She turned questing eyes about her as though,
at risk to herself, she was fulfilling an appointment that was not yet
met.
Another shadow slid out of the gloom under the arches, approached
her--another woman, young also and also beautiful, but with a
beauty--its character was startlingly vivid to those watchers--that
was insinuatingly treacherous, the beauty that smiles as it betrays.
She stood now with the erstwhile dancing-girl in the moonlight, spoke
to her with an assumption of gravely concerned and pitying friendship,
shook her head dolefully as though in distress at her own message.
The dancing-girl revolted with a vehement gesture of denial, of
impossibility--but her dark eyes flashed and her nostrils quivered. The
other persisted, in emphatic asseveration, her face a study in subtle
malice. She pointed to the heavy curtains which draped the just-seen
extremity of the hall, a fiercely assertive significance in her gesture.
The girl shrank back, shuddered. Then, with a slow turn of her body
from the tempter, she relapsed into herself, into a fierce meditation
where her eyes swept the shadows about her, where her lips uncovered
her teeth in a quick-caught breath and her clenched fist went slowly,
tensely, up to the side of her head in an agony that was beyond
words. The other woman contemplated her, just restraining a smile,
diabolically malicious--appealed once more to those hanging curtains
for proof of her sincerity. The girl, forlorn, gripped in some immense
unhappiness, nodded sombrely, with set teeth. With one last unobserved
smile of evil triumph, the other woman vanished.
For a long moment the girl hesitated. Then, with stealthy, feline
step, her shoulders crouched, she commenced to move along the hall.
Her gaze, a gaze of wide-open eyes set in the horror of some torture
of the soul, was fixed as though fascinated upon those heavy curtains
which she approached. She attained them, stopped, stood with one hand
in a final hesitation upon the folds, her bosom heaving with fiercely
primitive emotions. Then, in a violent determination, she flung them
aside.
Beyond, in a small torch-lit apartment, the prince reclined in company
with another woman. His head turned in sudden anger to the intruder.
Before he could make a movement of defence or escape, the dancing-girl
had sprung upon him, with a bound like a tigress, a long knife flashing
in her hand....
Even as they gasped their horror, they found themselves once more
staring at the milky cloud suffusing the depths of the crystal globe.
“Oh, Jim!” she breathed, in an awe-stricken recognition, “that was _my_
crime--the crime for which you punished me----”
“Look!” he murmured. “Look! It is not finished yet.”
In fact, the cloud was parting once more, parting this time over a
scene in ancient Egypt. Once more they recognized themselves, princess
and priest of a temple, in a drama that passed vaguely, too quickly in
its remoteness to be fully grasped, before their sight.
Scene after scene unfolded itself in the depths of the crystal, in a
succession of varying settings, in an ever-briefer duration, an ever
more vague drama of relationship, whose blurred outlines were perhaps
the effect of their fatigued attention, no longer able to follow in
their details visions possibly as minutely exhibited as the first.
Always their two personalities, in ever-changing incarnations, met
and reacted in wild passions that claimed them fully. In the eternal
history of their lives, all was possible, all had happened, every
variation of experience--save only indifference to each other. An
unseen link held them always, tightened into contact from the moment
of propinquity. On islands in a blue sea furrowed by long-oared and
primitive galleys; in cities of Cyclopean masonry that glittered,
as if vitrified, in a burning sun; in dark forests where skin-clad
savages went furtively with stone-barbed spears and knelt in worship
of the animal that they had just slain; by the side of reedy lakes
where hairy, scarce-human creatures crouched and gnawed the bones they
plucked from the embers--always they two met and always they were
lovers, fortunate sometimes, tragic sometimes, but always lovers.
Beyond humanity, far into the mists of time where strange shapes bodied
themselves, unrecognizable, and were dissipated into others yet more
strange, the visions continued in ever-increasing recession--leading
back into a distance where they lost all sense of personal
participation among vague and formless shadows.
They watched, in a breathless fascination.
Still farther back, beyond those shadows, something began to glow in
the depths of a night that cleared to transparent blackness, a ball
of fire, of living light that pulsed with intense incandescence in an
uttermost remoteness. And, as they watched, it divided itself, split
into two smaller spheres that circled about each other, throwing
out flames that reached like clutching arms in vain endeavour to
reëstablish unity. For an incomputable period--it seemed æons to those
souls who watched--they circled, held in mutual attraction and yet
still apart despite the reaching streamers. And then slowly, slowly,
they approached--their light heightening to a yet more vivid brightness
as they drew near....
The crystal globe slipped from numbed fingers into the fireplace. As
though roused from a dream by the crash of its contact with the brass
curb, the girl started and turned to her companion. He picked up the
crystal, starred and fissured with its fall--henceforth useless.
“Oh, Jim!” she cried in poignant regret. “We shall not see---- What is
going to happen _this_ time?”
She held his hand between her two, gazed up into his face in fond
anxiety, yearned out to him.
He put down the crystal, drew her close, enfolded her.
“Love!” he answered. “Love--once more and for always! And, to us, dear,
nothing else matters. It is the one reality.”
In each other’s eyes they saw, with a perception transcending physical
vision, the divine light of those sundered spheres that drew together.
HELD IN BONDAGE
Two French officers, wearing the red velvet bands of the medical
service upon their caps, followed an old woman down the staircase of a
pleasant villa-residence on the outskirts of Mainz.
“The bedrooms will suit perfectly,” said the elder of the two officers,
a major, in German. “And now a sitting-room?”
The old woman led them along a passage and, without a word, threw open
the door of a room lined with books. The two officers entered, looked
about them.
They were startled by a man’s voice behind them.
“Good day, messieurs!”
They turned to see a tall civilian, pince-nez gleaming over
exceptionally blue eyes, fair moustache, fair hair cut short and
brushed up straight from a square forehead, smiling at them from the
doorway.
“I am Doctor Breidenbach--at your service,” he said courteously in
accentless French.
The major stepped forward.
“I am Major Chassaigne, monsieur. I--and my assistant, Lieutenant
Vincent here--have been allotted quarters in your house. Here is the
_billet de logement_.” He held out a piece of paper. “It is issued
with the authority of the Army of Occupation and countersigned by your
municipality. I regret to put you to inconvenience----”
“Not at all! not at all!” interposed the German, affably, taking
the billeting order. As his face went serious in a scrutiny of the
document, the two officers had an impression of extreme intelligence
and ruthless will-power. He looked up again with a nod of assent,
his smile masking everything behind its gleam of blue eyes and white
teeth. “Perfectly correct, monsieur! Please consider my house at your
disposition. I am charmed to be of assistance to any of my confrères.”
He smiled recognition of their red cap-bands. “Although you wear
another uniform than that which I myself have but recently quitted, we
serve in a common cause--the cause of humanity, _n’est-ce pas_? which
knows no national animosities.”
“We desired a sitting-room,” said Major Chassaigne, ignoring this
somewhat unctuous profession of altruism.
The German waved his hand about the room.
“If this will suit you----?”
“Your library, monsieur?” queried the lieutenant.
“My work-room,” replied the doctor. “Before this deplorable war
interrupted my studies, I had some little reputation in my special
branch of mental therapeutics. If you are interested in psychology,
normal and abnormal, you will find here a very complete collection of
works upon the subject. Use them freely, by all means. Well, if you are
satisfied, gentlemen, I will leave you, for I am a busy man. I was just
about to visit some patients when you arrived. _Auf wiedersehen!_” He
smiled and left them.
Vincent turned to his senior, with a puzzled expression.
“What is it about that man I do not like?”
The older man shrugged his shoulders.
“Too friendly by far. They are all the same, these _boches_--they would
do anything to make us forget,” he said, divesting himself of his belt.
“I am going to have a rest and a cigarette before we walk back into the
town.”
The young man wandered around the room, scanning the titles of the
books on the shelves, picking up the various bibelots scattered about.
Suddenly he uttered a startled cry.
“_Mon Dieu!_ Look at this!”
The major turned to him. In his hand he held a small snapshot
photograph. He stared at it, trembling violently.
“What is the matter?”
“Look!--_It is she!_” The young man’s face was a study in horrified
astonishment.
Chassaigne looked over his comrade’s shoulder at the photograph. It
represented their host arm in arm with a good-looking young woman.
“_She?_” he queried, with a tolerant smile. “Be a little more explicit,
my dear Vincent.”
The young man turned on him.
“You remember the deportations from Lille? The women and girls the
_boche_ snatched from their homes?--My fiancée was among them.” His
voice checked at the painful memory. “Other women have been traced,
returned to their relatives. She has never been heard of again.”
“My poor friend!” murmured the major, sympathetically.
Vincent stared once more, as if fascinated, at the photograph in his
hand.
“It is she--in every detail! Yet----” his tone was puzzled. “No!
I cannot believe it! It is some chance resemblance. This woman is
obviously happy--content, at least.” He looked up, passed over the
photograph. “Chassaigne, you are an analyst of the human mind. What
relationship do you diagnose between those two people?”
The major took the print, scrutinized it critically.
“Friends, certainly--lovers, possibly,” was his sententious verdict.
“Then it cannot be!” cried the young man. “My fiancée was--is, I am
sure of it--incapable of a faithless acquiescence in the wrong done to
her.”
“Can one ever be sure about a woman?” said the major, with a gentle
cynicism. “However, I agree with you that it is improbable that the
person in the photograph is your lost friend. It is, as you say, a
chance resemblance.”
“If I could only be certain of it!” The young man was obviously
stirred to the depths. “I _must_ make sure, Chassaigne.--I must get to
know this woman--find out who she is!”
Both men turned at the sound of the door opening behind them. A
young woman, tall, dark, strikingly handsome, stood timidly upon the
threshold. It was the woman of the photograph.
“Doctor--Doctor Breidenbach?” she faltered, as though disconcerted by
an unexpected meeting with strangers.
Vincent stared at her, held in a suspense of the faculties where he
seemed not to breathe. At last he found his voice.
“_Hélène!_” he cried. “Hélène! It _is_ you!” He sprang to her, clutched
her arm. “What are you doing here?”
With a frightened gesture of repulsion, the young woman disengaged
herself from his grasp. She drew herself up, looked at him without the
faintest recognition in her eyes.
“_Ich spreche nicht französisch, mein Herr!_” she said in a tone of
cold rebuff.
“Hélène!”
She shrank back in obviously offended dignity, and, without another
word, haughtily left the room.
Vincent reeled away from the closed door, his hands to his head.
“My God!” he groaned. “Am I going mad?”
Then, ceding to a sudden impulse, he eluded his friend’s restraining
grasp, dashed to the door.
“Hélène!”
He found himself confronted by the smiling figure of Doctor Breidenbach.