interesting never to explain it," she essayed fearfully, feigning a
laugh of regained naturalness. "We shall never, never find out who he
was, by whom it was painted, or what made you break it, or why--"
"Ah," he shouted eagerly, defying, as the memories came crowding into
his brain, the doubts which had freshly assailed him. "I told you it
might be possible! And he did have, after all--for that man was the
father of her child!"
"Whose child?" Julia gasped.
But love and pity for her whom he could not name kept him from
answering. And in the drift of his silence the vision capriciously
failed him. He looked at Julia. He looked back at the wall. It was
nothing but a funny old picture which hung there confronting them.
The commonplaceness, beside it, of Julia's long-drawn expression made
him snicker, until, as a result of this accidental reaction, they were
both actually giggling aloud.
He turned away from her. She watched him cross to the bureau. He pulled
out each one of the drawers in turn. He peered blankly into them, where
there was only the smell of mold and whirring dust to greet his pains.
He persistently scanned the room again. What had become of the hat-tub?
Why had the Chinese water-jug gone from the squalid little wash-stand?
Baffled and solemn, he went back over to her.
"Haven't you taken some things away?"
"Nothing. Not even so much as a splinter. What are you trying to find?"
Timidly catching her hand he cried:
"Come with me, please." And he drew her to the closet door. But when he
opened it, he let go her hand in his amazement.
A slit of window at the far end let in a ray of sun. There were rows and
rows of wooden hooks, but there seemed nothing on them. Steeling himself
boldly to view it, he turned to where there might have dangled that
calico bag stuffed with pieces against which the stranger had leaned. He
went forward and felt over the empty spaces to satisfy himself.
"Yes, Julia," he slowly brought out, "you are right; it was a dream--a
mystery." And he nodded vacantly to her.
"If only, Jack, you could remember it all!"
She stretched out her arms to him. But just as she was coming nearer, he
caught sight of something lying between them on the floor. He darted for
it, picked it up, and ran with it out of the shadow. Then, in terror, he
saw that it was a piece of crumpled gray chiffon, and that there were
the stains of blood upon it.
VENGEANCE IS MINE[10]
BY VIRGIL JORDAN
From _Everybody's Magazine_
[10] Copyright, 1915, by The Ridgway Company. Copyright, 1916, by Virgil
Jordan.
A psychologist has said that most dreams indicate some deep fear or some
deep wish that lies dormant in the dreamer. One curious thing about this
is that the psychologist was a German. Another is that none of my
companions in the dugout at Le Prêtre seemed to find in my experience
anything entirely new to them. I leave you to judge which it was--fear
or desire--that came to light in me in the trenches of Pont-à-Mousson.
Foot by foot we had driven the Germans out of the forest of Le Prêtre;
and when the winter came down on us we had brought up behind the ridge
overlooking the Moselle, with the enemy on the other side, fifteen miles
away from Metz.
They managed to keep the river open, but otherwise let us alone. There
was nothing to do for weeks but to sit tight. With cement, moss, burlap,
and a few rugs and a boiler and some steam-pipe we stole at
Pont-à-Mousson, we made our dugouts pretty comfortable.
Excepting myself and the rest of the aëroplane corps, our work had been
each day to do so and so much digging, hauling, figuring, firing into
the air, mechanically protecting ourselves from shells that we took as
a matter of course, like wind and rain. We did not even know when we had
won a point against the unseen enemy. We did not feel their resistance
as one feels a push. Some one who had charge of those matters figured it
out on paper, and we moved forward or back as their calculations said.
Outside our company we knew nothing of the general state of affairs.
Once in a while, especially about Christmas, one of us would get
a bundle of books, papers and magazines from a friend. Then we
talked--talked; we discussed again and again the reasons for the war,
the object of it, what we were going to do to Germany when it was over.
Every evening we tried Germany over again, put her culture, commerce,
social system on the rack, found her guilty and had her hanged, drawn,
and quartered.
Christmas Eve, 1914, I had turned in warm and excited and confused
with the whirl of ideas we had been discussing, gathered around our
steam-pipe. I had a restless night in the stuffy dugout. About midnight
the German firing commenced in the direction of Metz. Toward morning,
Christmas Day, they stopped, and I fell into a long, dreamy sleep.
* * * * *
It was Christmas Eve, 1916. Two long, haggard years of the war had
dragged by, to a wailing crescendo of misery, famine, disease, and
madness. We had been hurled up and down an invisible line of death,
bending and pressing it back and forth like a horde of ants at a thread.
Every human thought and fact had by now changed in us. As we formerly
recognized our friends, we seemed to know each other now as the citizens
of a new state on earth, in which the people did not live by productive
labor, nor in houses, nor in families, but like strange bees in an
unknown place, sexless, unconscious of our activity, destroying instead
of building. It was as if we had been born that way. All memory of
another life was sunk deep into the subconscious. We had become highly
specialized things, yet knew not in what or for what. Birth and death
had lost their meaning.
Tens of thousands of us had disappeared. Thousands took their places
nonchalantly. As the opening of the third year approached, there was
in the air the wild and brooding sense of the millions of German and
Austrian lives and as many of the Allies that had gone out before their
time.
Earth seemed to stir into consciousness of it.
The carnival of Chaos had spread like a wanton dementia. Italy had
long since flung aside her sane reserve and plunged into the carnage
for the shreds of Austria she desired--Tyrol, Dalmatia, Istria, and
Albania. Rumania and Greece had joined with Servia and bound the Balkans
into a temporary brotherhood. Together with Russia and Italy at Haskoi
they had scattered the crazy Turkish army like chaff and swarmed on to
the Bosphorus. The allied fleet drove a withering wedge of steel and
fire through the Dardanelles. Constantinople fell.
As to a Bacchanal of Blood, the colonies tore out of the map every
shred of German colonial territory there was, and poured into Europe
their flood of black, white, and yellow men. Little Denmark, catching
the festive spirit, reached out for Schleswig-Holstein; and the rest,
coveting the Kiel Canal, lent a willing hand to the useful tool.
Holland, sore from being the frail buffer between the struggling
combatants, placed her interests in the British hands, and opened
another gate to the heart of Germany.
Russia debouched her million after million upon the East, and though
they died dumbly like flies before the German walls of steel at Thorn
and Bromberg, they swept the Germans back over the Vistula and out of
East Prussia down to the line of the Warthe and Oder. Austria, torn by
internal dissension, was ringed in the upper basin of the Danube, where
the Tyrol, the Carpathians, and the Germans protected the few shattered
loyal ones.
There was not a German vessel left on the Seven Seas. Her fleet had been
put to sleep in the Frisian marshes, outnumbered by the British on the
outside, and cut off from supplies by troops landed through Denmark and
Holland.
On the West they stood behind the Rhine. The drive had been rapid and
relentless from all sides. They left their villages empty except for the
dead as they went before the closing ring of steel. They took everything
with them that might be used as fuel, as material for ammunition, and
left their cities razed more completely than the invader could have done
it.
Christmas night found us where Ludwigshafen had been. For two months we
had stood, unable to move an inch farther. The thick deluge of fire the
Germans rolled upon us at every advance amazed us. There could not long
be a bit of iron or copper or saltpeter or food left inside the ring.
We had no knowledge of the source of this indomitable resistance. For
months not a living soul had been able to pass across the lines, nor
had a single message of any kind or a reply to any, by any means, come
out of Germany. For three to five miles about the lines there was a
devastated ring, bare of everything, swept by fire and death. Beyond
that was grim and gruesome silence. The airmen could see little. Houses
were apparently deserted and the people lived in the woods or in the
ground. Every particle of earth that could be spared was used to grow
something to eat. In the large cities buildings and bridges were torn
down. Their cut stone and iron went to the making of fort and cannon.
This Christmas Eve, as we sat in our cement dugout, the silence outside
was brooding and heavy. Snow had fallen for a week and there had been no
fighting. In the intervals of our talk there was only the sound of a
famished cat's wailing outside. We talked of the war, and of what we
were going to do with Germany when the end came.
The talk of the world had been done. The nations at home sat like the
knitting ring about the guillotine, waiting for the final scene to be
staged. Germany was no more in the world's mind. They had tried to
think about her. Their thought had been brought to folly and confusion.
Already she was forgotten. She had become a piece of territory that
shortly their armies would occupy. Condemnations of her culture, of her
aspirations, of her part in the greatest of the world's wars, had come
to nothing, and were abandoned. Pompous plans for her reorganization,
superior homilies to the German people on peace and freedom from their
wicked masters, good advice on the improvement of their culture--all
these had been written to a shred. To preserve its dignity the world
wished to forget them. Its dull, avid gaze saw not beyond the moment
toward which it had strained, leaving its mind and simple sincerity of
soul behind.
This was the night of the final assault. In a circle of three hundred
miles, the word was written, on land and sea, in seven tongues and among
a score of races--"AT MIDNIGHT." We were then to draw tight the halter
upon the throat of Germany. Der Tag had become The Hour--Ours. The
mailed fist was to have its gauntlet stripped from it and a naked hand
should pay us tribute.
Steadily we had battered down the stone and steel chain about her. We
stood before the Rhine in dead of winter. At one sweep we were to
stretch our arm across it and with the other crush the mighty militant
menace that lay at bay between.
The slopes that were old in story, that had sustained the surge of
unnumbered hordes from East and West and South and North; in whose
grapes were the bloods of Roman, Teuton, Slav, Mongol, and Frank; that
had been the source and shelter of a race's song, science, and
story--lay in silent slumber, muffled in midwinter's snows.
That race stood at bay before its fellow's vengeance. By this time
all those of alien blood had dropped away from its single body like
engrafted limbs. Its trunk stood bare and barkless before the blast,
we to wring from its bloody, unbowed head, obeisance to our will--a will
that had begun in covetousness of commerce, in rancor of humiliating
reminiscence, in rage of race rivalry, a will that had grown beyond our
grasp, beyond our consciousness. We lusted for the day that should press
from Germany's lips, "Your will be done."
Unthinking were we that then would come the days of dull and devious
diplomacy, of division of domain, of dragging indemnity from a people
dumb and disheartened by devastation and death. At all costs to beat the
breath from her body! The hour had come when this resistant something
should be ours, ours, the Briton's, the Frenchman's, the Russian's, the
Italian's, the Serb's, the Rumanian's, the Montenegrin's, the Dane's,
the Mongol's!
At midnight we moved, in silence. It seemed as if we heard from the
Carpathians to the Rhine, from the sea to the Alps, the anthem of arms,
the stir of destruction go up as we moved. We wrangled for the outpost
places, that when the closing of the steel ring was flashed across the
circle we might be first to see the white flag at our point.
I was fortunate--one of the three sent to see how clear the road from
Ludwigshafen to Mannheim, and to cover the river crossing.
I was off and my aëroplane rose quickly. There were no lights beyond the
Rhine. Where Mannheim used to be was darkness. The three miles between
us and the river lay motionless in the moonlight. The Rhine was tight in
ice. The batteries at the angle of the Neckar were invisible. In wonder
I came down to three hundred feet and circled, watching our men creep
tentatively up to the sharp-cut bank, hesitate, clamber down, and start
across the ice recklessly. They were not spiked, never dreaming of
getting to the ice at all.
The dark figures slipped and slid and fell. It was so still and
the moon so bright I could hear the cracks shoot across the untried
sheet and see the men's faces twisted in apprehension. They were the
only moving things. It was clear the Germans had fallen back. They
had abandoned Malstatt by night--but Mannheim--and the Rhine! It
was unbelievable. I rose and coasted down to above the Mannheim
parade-ground. There was nothing to be heard but the distant stir
of our line.
I touched. My machine ran along, bumping over hundreds of bodies
lightly covered by the new snow. I got out, stumbled over them at
my feet, felt them. They were not long dead. I looked about me at the
dark, silent city of Mannheim. A panic took me. I ran to my machine,
tried to get it off, but failed and sat numb and transfixed, vainly
groping in the darkness of my mind for the thought that would not
form, till my comrades came to me with blanched faces and bit by bit
in swift succession pieced for me the words that could not find
utterance, having never been uttered in the world's life before.
The rest--a flowing phantasmagoria that tore me too far out of human
experience, even of dream--to tell again. The thousands crumpled up
in full-dress uniform, stained and tattered, beneath the new snow of
the parade-ground, fallen at a moment, at a word, hands here and there
stiffened in salute to the flag slow moving in the graying winter's
dawn. Death we had seen,--but here in the streets and in the houses,
in all corners and in all byways, the vivid faces of those who had
sought death freely, each face telling with ghastly eloquence a tale
that had never been told in the life of man, of a race self-destroyed
at a moment, at a word, for a vision which it alone had understood,
leaving its epitaph in the words on the poison vials which a government
machine efficient to the last had supplied--"_Der Tag ist zu uns_"--"The
Day is Ours."
Then through the blenching words that flashed along the closed circle of
steel in all the tongues of Europe, the shrinking thought leaped to our
dumb, numb mind and throbbed upon them like the insistent resounding
clangor of a titanic brazen shield, as if beaten by a grimacing god:
Germany is yours, O sons of men! What now?
* * * * *
I woke at dawn to the boisterous, bold boom of the batteries of Metz.
They seemed to speak in glorious wide-mouthed joy of Til Eulenspiegel
and the young Siegfried.
I thanked God for the Germans.
THE WEAVER WHO CLAD THE SUMMER[11]
BY HARRIS MERTON LYON
From _The Illustrated Sunday Magazine_
[11] Copyright, 1915, by The Illustrated Sunday Magazine. Copyright,
1916, by Harris Merton Lyon.
I had always felt vaguely that there must be at times an intense pathos
which overcame the master-worker in perishable materials--the actor
in his supreme moment; the singer, the musician--I thought--must feel
a bitter regret that his glory cannot live but must die, _in articulo
gloriæ_, with the sound, the effect he has created. Bernhardt seemed
to me to have that in the back of her mind when she exulted over her
appearance in the moving pictures. "I am immortal," she cried,
dramatically--always dramatic, that old lady--"I am a film." So thin
a bridge to immortality!
The actor, the singer, the musician; struggling through years and over
obstacles to attain perfection--and then what? A brief triumph in a
perishable art; a transient, fugitive gracing of a day, an hour, a
moment ... and then another forgotten mortal artist. I remembered
Gautier's decision, "The coin outlasts Tiberius." Paint, chisel, then,
or write if you wish your work to endure.
No doubt here was wisdom in a little box; and I fell to wondering
stupidly what there could possibly be in being a worker at the other,
the evanescent thing. I remembered a certain kind of moth that dies soon
after it is born. Are these people moths?
And then one night a ragtag ghost came and answered me.
I
It was eleven o'clock. Outside it was snowing, and so I remained in
Pigalle's, loath to leave, and killing the time with a book. Pigalle's
was one of those basement eating places in New York's West Thirties, a
comfy, tight, cosy sort of a cellar. An Italian table d'hôte, of course,
though not like the usual; it had more character and less popularity.
You seldom saw a blond skin there, the place being unknown to the
night-tramping hordes of avid New Yorkers who crowd into all the
"foreign" places and devour all the foreign food they can find. Mostly
the _habitués_ were French and Italian, gentle, noisy people who did,
in their way, slight damage to the fine arts. By nine-thirty, they were
done eating and gone; almost all the lights were turned out and chairs
were piled up on the tables, out of the way of the early morning mop.
By ten Pigalle and his wife and several others, mostly sculptors, scene
painters and musicians, were gathered beneath the light at the main
table and had begun their nightly game of poker. From then on it was
slim gambling and loud, staccato chatter in French and Italian.
At eleven, then, this night, the cautious door-bell tinkled. Some kind
of a world knocking at mine and wanting to get in, I thought. Some kind
of an adventure out there, demanding to be encountered; some kind of a
soul pounding at the walls of my soul. Every time the doorbell tinkles,
whoever has this Show is setting a new scene. Or, no. The wall opens
and the genie slips through, spreads his rug on the ground and begins
to make new magic before your very eyes. Never a doorbell rang yet, I
thought, that didn't bring a bit of heaven or hell--or mere
purgatory--with it.
At eleven the doorbell tinkled and the fat little
waitress-maid-scrubwoman-second cook, a Lombard wench by the name, the
sweet ineffable name of Philomène, waddled over and opened the door a
tiny space. Pigalle occasionally sold liquor without a license; hence
his caution as to visitors. She let in an odd apparition; with doubts,
I thought; certainly with mutterings and rolling of her black eyes. At
any rate she knew him, whether for well or ill.
The man cast his eyes around, saw that the only open table save the
poker table was the one I held, and came and sat down opposite me. With
a slightly insolent motion he dragged his chair around sidewise, turned
his shoulder to me and stared across the room at a gaudy lithograph of
the good ship Isabella bound for Naples, eighty-five dollars first
class. Philomène, with a porky look, asked him what he wished.
He announced in French that he desired of all things to "strangle a
parrokeet." This was some absurd slang for saying he wanted an absinthe.
He was a gaunt, tall, round-shouldered, queer old fellow with a gray
beard and a matted moustache, colored with the brown stain of cigarette
smoke. As ugly, I thought, as ugly as--oh, Socrates. And yet with
something lovable about him. And his combination of dress was certainly
odd enough: a frayed, cutaway coat with extremely long tails, dripping
wet and dangling cylindrically like sections of melted stovepipe; mussy,
baggy old gray trousers; a blue plush waistcoat; a black, but clean
muffler pinned tight up under his chin with a safety pin of the
brassiest; and a broad-brimmed black slouch hat, so broad of brim that
he walked forever in its shadow. This hat he kept on all the time. His
hands were long and clean and white--the virile, sensitive hands of a
poet, I thought. The eyes were the fascinating feature of the man. I
said to myself right away, "This man is a mystic." Though they burned
brightly in their sockets, they had a trick of turning abruptly dim; a
sort of film or veil, closed over them. "Druid or old Celt," I murmured.
"Give him a bit of mistletoe and he'd call his gods right down into my
_demi-tasse_ and scare the poker game into fits."
He swallowed his whole glass of absinthe in five gulps--a performance
that it would make a cow shudder to watch--threw back his head, and,
with a hoarse burr, called for another. This time he spoke English; but
the burr was decidedly Scotch. Pigalle now looked around at him--gross,
pleasant, Provençal Pigalle--and nodded; then went on placidly shuffling
the tiny cards in his great fat hands.
When the second absinthe came the old man took it slowly; settled
himself back on his shoulder-blades and the tail of his spine, and
pulled his hat down level with his eyes, as if he intended to spend
a considerable time with us. He called for a package of French
cigarettes--_cigarettes jaunes_--and proceeded to color his moustache
a riper brown. "Now my adventure has knocked and come in," I thought.
"If he is my adventure, I cannot help him--nor can I keep him off. He
is the _primum mobile_. It is up to him."
Suddenly my ears were shocked with a sharp argument between two young
fellows at the poker table. No, it was not about the game. One said
something; the other shrieked his answer; the first shouted back; the
second in a violent burst that had a finality about it slammed down his
cards and said something curt, with a solemn rolling of his eyes.
To my amazement, the odd old fish across from me boomed out with equal
violence: "_Ben trovato_!" None of them paid any attention to him.
I may have shown some of my surprise at his action, for he turned
suddenly to me, and asked: "Did you understand what he said?"
I replied that I did not.
"He said, roughly translated: 'Sufficient unto eternity is the glory of
the hour.' Yes. And it is true. Sufficient unto eternity is the glory of
the hour, young man. There's many an artist who must--" he stopped short
and began biting his finger ends.
My mind reverted to Bernhardt's film and the question about the moth.
"Who must--what?" I prodded. "Content himself with this catch phrase?"
"Content himself? Damnation, no! Must feel the keener triumph in a piece
of work, young man, just because it _is_ perishable." He thumped the
table and breathed hard. I got the full paregoric reek of his drink.
"What is this stork-legged Verlaine going to say?" I thought to myself.
But he contented himself with breathing for a few moments and that odd
film dropped over his eyes. "Just because the thing is ended, and dies
out of men's minds almost as soon as it is ended"--he seemed to be
feeling slowly for the words--"_if_ the work was right, was masterly
done, there's a sort of higher joy in knowing that it triumphed--and was
suddenly gone--like a sunset, like a light on the water, like a summer."
He asked abruptly: "You think I have 'spiders on my ceiling'--you think
I am crazy?"
"On the contrary. Can you make this clearer to me, this--?"
"My agreement that sufficient unto eternity is the glory of the hour?"
He sipped his absinthe. "With your patience. Let me see. I can give you
a favorite example of mine, about a friend of mine named Andy
Gordon--something like a story?" Now in his eyes there was an eager
shine.
"Go on."