_TALES FROM A FAMISHED LAND_
_TALES FROM A
FAMISHED LAND_
_INCLUDING_
_The White Island--A
Story of the Dardanelles_
_BY_
_EDWARD EYRE HUNT_
_Author of “War Bread,” Etc._
[Illustration]
_GARDEN CITY_ _NEW YORK_
_DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY_
_1918_
_Copyright, 1918, by_
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
_All rights reserved, including that of
translation into foreign languages,
including the Scandinavian_
COPYRIGHT, 1916, 1917, BY THE REPUBLIC PUBLISHING COMPANY, INC.
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY THE AMERICAN RED CROSS SOCIETY
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY THE OUTLOOK COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY P. F. COLLIER’S SONS
TO THE
MEMORY OF E. O.
_Collier’s Weekly_, _The Outlook_, _The New Republic_, _The
Atlantic Monthly_, and _The Red Cross Magazine_ have published
certain of these tales in serial form, and to them my thanks are
due for permission to republish in book form.
FOREWORD
Herbert Clark Hoover, chairman of the Commission for Relief in
Belgium, once called that amazing organization, “the door in the
wall of steel.” Between November, 1914, and March, 1917, when
America entered the world war, there had passed through that door
millions of dollars in money, thousands of tons of foodstuffs and
clothing, and four or five dozen young Americans, most of them
just out of their ’teens, who played a part in Belgian history
which they are still trying to explain in words of one syllable to
admiring relatives and friends!
Theirs is a story of sweet romance, gallant adventure, grotesque
comedy, and grim tragedy. The tales which are here set down are a
part of their story. These tales are not strictly truth, but they
are not fiction. They are both. They try to describe the state of
mind, the atmosphere in which History--both truth and fiction--is
made; the atmosphere behind long lines of barbed-wire and bayonets,
behind waves of poisoned gas, in a famished land where ten million
heroic people, both French and Belgians, have silently and steadily
fought to keep their self-respect, their sanity, and their courage.
These tales have been written in a spirit of gratitude and love;
with gratitude and love first of all to Herbert Clark Hoover, then
to the other officers and members of the Commission for Relief
in Belgium, and then, and perhaps most of all, to those unnamed
French, Walloon, and Flemish millions with whom we Americans stood
shoulder to shoulder on the inside of the “door in the wall of
steel.”
E. E. H.
_4 Place de la Concorde, Paris_
_New Year’s Day, 1918._
CONTENTS
PAGE
FOREWORD ix
I. SAINT DYMPNA’S MIRACLE 3
II. LOVE IN A BARGE 19
III. THE ODYSSEY OF MR. SOLSLOG 29
IV. FIGURES OF THE DANCE 46
V. THE SAVIOUR OF MONT CÉSAR 61
VI. GHOSTS 86
VII. THE DESERTER 96
VIII. THE GLORY OF TINARLOO 114
IX. A FLEMISH FANCY 122
X. THE SWALLOWS OF DIEST 135
XI. PENSIONERS 148
XII. DOÑA QUIXOTE 160
XIII. IN THE STREET OF THE SPY 167
XIV. THE WHITE ISLAND--A STORY
OF THE DARDANELLES 176
_TALES FROM A FAMISHED LAND_
_Tales From a Famished Land_
I
SAINT DYMPNA’S MIRACLE
Pierre, the chauffeur, launched a savage kick at the newly
punctured tire and swore into the night. “Three quarters of an
hour, monsieur, to repair it,” he said reluctantly, switching off
the motor. “Do you wish----”
Into the sudden silence stole the slow, incessant roar of the
Yser cannon. The level stretches of the Campine, alternating
black vistas of scrub evergreens with little fields, peat bogs,
and kitchen gardens, lay fragrant and silent in the moonlight.
Heather was in bloom, nightingales were nesting and so were no
longer singing, and the narrow Flemish road before and behind the
automobile lay like a placid silver river, inviting one to quiet
thoughts.
“Yes,” I answered Pierre’s unfinished query. “I’ll go for a stroll
toward the next farmhouse. Take your time, Pierre. There’s no hurry
to-night.”
We had just left the town of Gheel, one of the most remarkable
places in Belgium, a town where more than a thousand insane folk
live quiet and useful lives, parcelled out among the peasants, but
under the supervision of district doctors. The insane are treated
as if they were normal beings, are given work according to their
strength, mental and physical, and find companionship among a
peasantry noted for industry and stubborn independence. This is
originally due to certain miracles of Saint Dympna, one of the
guardian saints of the insane--an Irish princess, converted to
Christianity, and martyred at Gheel by her pagan father on the 30th
of May in the year of Our Lord 600.
Under the bright moon the land seemed singularly like Ireland,
and a little old man stepping toward me down the silvery road,
his pipe in his mouth, his eyes screwed up, his bent legs wrapped
in ill-fitting trousers, his feet in wooden shoes, might have
been the fabled leprechaun, or Wee Hughie Gallagher of Donegal.
He wore a _brassard_ on his right sleeve, for he was one of the
village watch, guarding the telephone and telegraph wires so that
no accident might happen to them to give the Germans an excuse for
crushing the commune with an exorbitant fine.
“_Goe’n avond, mynheer_,” I called cheerfully.
“_Avond, mynheer_,” he answered in a weak voice.
“I am the American delegate of the _Komiteit voor Hulp en
Voeding_,” I explained.
“Mynheer is American?” he asked doubtfully, taking his pipe from
his mouth and scratching his head as if to recall where or what
America could be.
“_Ja wel._ Have you a cup of milk at your house?”
He turned and faced back down the road, still scratching his head.
“_Als ’t U belieft, mynheer_,” I added ceremoniously.
My superlative courtesy seemed to decide him, and he gave a gesture
of assent. Side by side and in silence then we walked down the
silver road to the first farmhouse. A black mass of protecting
trees hung close over the chimney, and low thatch swept down like
the back of some prehistoric monster, gray green in the clear
moonlight. The walls were lath filled in with clay. Two little
rectangular windows glowed dully, and the edges of the thick,
ill-fitting door shone with faint light.
“You live here, mynheer?” I asked.
“_Ja_, mynheer.”
“You own it?”
“I rent it.”
“I may enter?”
“You may enter, mynheer.”
He thrust open the door without knocking. I stumbled into the dimly
lighted room, hardly knowing what I expected to find. Peasants’
cottages were invariably interesting to me, and invariably they
contained surprises. But this was older and more primitive than
any I had yet visited--a relic of long-gone days. It was like
opening an ancient tomb or a buried city. I entered expectantly,
and lo! the centuries rolled backward, and I stood with people of
Froissart’s day, with peasants who had scarcely altered since the
Middle Ages, whose feet were hardly on the threshold of modernity.
The room was square. At one end was a brick fireplace, rude as if
aborigines had built it, with an iron frame squatting in the ashes,
a thick pot suspended by a chain, a broiling rack, a heavy iron
fork, a charred stick for a poker, and a rude crane. In the smoke
of a tiny turf fire on the hearth hung rows of drying vegetables
and skins of meat. The floor was beaten earth, hard as brick. The
walls were whitewashed. The ceiling was low and strung with onions
and other roots and vegetables, and the only touch of modern
things was a hanging lamp in the centre. In a corner hung a man’s
suit of Sunday clothes, like a creature which has been hanged. A
ladder beside it went up to the blind loft overhead. A picture
of the Virgin hung on one wall, and a plaster statuette of Saint
Anthony and Saint Joseph gleamed from a shelf over the fireplace,
drawing one’s eye to a row of plates and dishes. An odour of smoke
and cooking and manure heaps and the foul smells of unwashed human
beings crowded the little room, and the air droned with the sleepy
buzzing of innumerable flies.
A barefooted, prematurely aged woman, bent with too much
child-bearing, gave me a chair, wiping it ceremoniously with her
apron. The man spat on the floor behind us and scraped the spittle
with his sabot. Three children were asleep in a recess on a pile of
litter curtained from sight in the day-time. But the most striking
person in the room was a young woman, sitting before the turf fire
with a fourth child--evidently the youngest--in her lap. She wore
stockings, leather shoes, and a simple, black bombazine dress. Her
face was turned from me, but I saw that her hair was neatly coiled
about her head and pinned with a shell comb.
The older woman sprang to the hanging lamp and turned it high until
it smoked. “Good evening, mynheer,” she called in a panic of fear
and pleasure. “Be seated, if it please your Excellency.”
She dragged the chair beside the lamp and the table in the centre
of the room. During the next five minutes she was feverishly busy
offering me beer, milk, and everything else that her mean little
house afforded.
I stared at the woman beside the fireplace, and my host--who
refused to seat himself in my presence--at last touched his head
significantly. “Ah, monsieur,” he sighed. (He had been one of the
_franksmannen_, migratory labourers who work for several months of
the year in France, and he spoke tolerable French. Indeed he was
much better informed and quicker of wit than his person or his
home would indicate.) “She is mad: like all the world, she is mad.
All the world is mad.”
“You mean the war?”
“Yes, monsieur. Saint Dympna has received thousands of mad ones,
and of those who are mad but whom she has not received, there are
millions. When the war broke out two men went mad in this village.
They were carried away to Gheel, raving. Their eyes stared, their
lips frothed, and they twitched all over. When the Germans came
here, certain ones went mad at sight of them. I have seen it with
my eyes, monsieur. They say that when the Germans came into France
they sent whole long trainloads of mad ones back into their own
land. When the big shells burst in the forts, all the garrison
goes mad. When the aviator flies over the trench, men go mad. You
have seen there are always two German sentries together? It is so
that if one goes mad the other will be at hand. For they go mad,
monsieur, by dozens, by hundreds, by thousands. Have you seen their
eyes? They are mad. And their lips? They work like the lips of men
always talking to themselves. When the war began, I, too, was mad.
I dreamed terrible dreams. For two months I was mad--like all the
world.”
“But the woman there?” I asked, pointing to the figure beside the
turf glow.
The man clattered over to her and laid his hand gently on her
shoulder. “Madame,” he said, “there is a gentleman here to speak
with you.”
“Nay, mynheer,” she answered quietly, “not until midnight.”
“He is not the doctor, madame.”
She turned and gave me a searching glance. The movement revealed
that her breast was uncovered, and that she held the sleeping child
against her heart. “Nay,” she said again, “not until midnight.”
He came slowly back. “When a child is sick, she knows it and she
comes,” he explained apologetically. “At midnight she goes back to
the doctor’s house.”
“Alone?”
“Alone, monsieur. God and the Devil alike love the mad. God and the
Devil alike watch over them. This one”--he pointed to the woman
with the child--“was a lady of Louvain, of the Krakenstraat; she
was rich; she had a husband and two children. They were killed by
the Germans and she was wounded in the shoulder. Her house was
burned; her money lost. She went mad. She was taken to Duffel, I
think; then to Antwerp, then to Hoogstraeten, then she was brought
to Gheel, screaming for her children and her husband--mad--mad and
soon to die. Then, monsieur, Saint Dympna wrought a miracle through
the love of a little child, a little sick boy in the doctor’s house
where madame was confined, and she became well after a fashion. And
now in whatever house a child is ill, madame by the grace of God
knows of it, and she comes and nurses it back to health. The first
madness is of the Devil, monsieur, violent and bloody; the second
is of God, and it is kind.”
In the midst of his prattle the woman rose slowly, holding the
sleeping child in the hollow of her right arm and buttoning the
bosom of her dress with her left hand. “Hush!” she admonished
softly. “Listen, mynheeren!” From some instinct of courtesy I rose
to my feet. She raised her hand warningly but did not turn her
head. “Listen,” she repeated, staring toward the fireplace.
It was an uncanny thing. We stood as if frozen. The heavy breathing
of the peasant woman pulsed through the quiet room; the old man
stared with all his eyes; a sleepy chicken chuckled from an
adjoining shed, but there was no other sound from outside. A minute
went by; another; a third, and still we stood stiffly in the centre
of the room. At last madame beckoned to the peasant-mother, who
stole across the floor toward her and paused at her side. Silently
she gave the mother her child, her finger on her lips, her eyes
still fixed on the spot near the fireplace.
Then she turned, and laying her hands on the head of the sleeping
boy, she began in a strange, low, hissing voice, “This one shall
be an avenger of Louvain, he shall be an avenger of Dinant, and
Termonde, and Aerschot, and Andenne, and Liége, and Tamines, and
Visé. He shall avenge our nation. He shall not forget. In the days
of his happiness he shall remember our sorrow; in the days of
his prosperity he shall remember our misery; in the days of his
strength he shall remember our weakness. Go! Be healed!” Then in
her quiet, natural voice, pointing to the spot on a level with her
eyes at which she had stared, she added, “A sick child is there,
mynheeren. Three, four kilometres away it is, and I must go to it.”
“God!” the old man breathed.
“I must go now. The child is very ill. I must go now, or I shall be
too late.”
The old man crossed himself again and again. “God! God!” he
repeated helplessly.
The young woman wheeled suddenly. “What is that noise?” she
exclaimed, pointing to the roadway.
The roar of an automobile resounded outside, and I knew Pierre was
coming.
“Is it the Germans?”
“No, madame, it is my automobile, at your service.”
She showed no astonishment or perplexity. Her mind seemed wholly
absorbed in the problem of the sick child. “Take me in your
automobile to the child, monsieur,” she replied rapidly, speaking
in French. “Let us hurry, hurry!”
“But where, madame?”
“I do not know, monsieur, but I will show you. There! There!” She
waved her hand in the direction of Gheel.
We hurried like fugitives from the house and into the tonneau,
leaving the awe-struck peasants standing with mouths agape. Pierre
stared in consternation at our coming, but said no word. I did not
try to explain. Our passenger sat tense, her head turned to one
side as if she were listening closely.
We came quickly to a fork of the road. “Which way, monsieur?”
Pierre asked.
“I do not know. It is for madame to say,” I answered.
She was quiet for an instant. “To the right hand,” she exclaimed
suddenly. “Make haste! There! In that house!”
The car jerked to a stop, and I leaped out to help madame to the
ground. Now that we had arrived, to my astonishment she made no
move to leave the car. Her head sank slowly forward to her breast,
and she sat huddled listlessly, paying no attention to Pierre or me.
“Is it this house, madame?” I asked, hoping to arouse her.
“This house,” she said, “but we are too late.”
“But no, madame!” I exclaimed. “Go quickly and help!” At the moment
I believed in her supernatural powers as firmly as any peasant of
the Campine.
She lifted her head. A sad light had come into her eyes. “It is too
late. The avenger of Belgium is not to come from this house,” she
muttered.
“But yes! Hurry!”
The madness of my words did not occur to me until days afterward:
the lunacy of thinking either that she could heal, or that the
child of these poor peasant-folk when healed would avenge his
nation on her enemies. God knows what wild thoughts were in my mind
that night! God knows, and Saint Dympna!
“I will go in then,” she said, rising, giving her hand with a
queenly gesture, and stepping from the car. “Thank you, monsieur.
You need not wait; indeed you must not wait. I am here with
friends. Adieu!”
She clutched my arm in a sudden spasm of fright.
“Listen!” she whispered.
A piercing wail rose from the quiet cottage; a dull lamp flared as
it was borne hastily past a window; a man’s deep voice groaned
horribly. Children in the loft, wakened by the outcry, began to
scream, and a startled dog far away howled in terror.
Madame released my arm and walked slowly toward the house of death.
At the door she turned and looked back at us as if she feared to
go in. Her left hand fumbled for the latch; her right waved our
dismissal. “Adieu, monsieur, adieu,” she called in a strained,
unhappy tone. And we drove quietly away and left her under the
placid moon.
II
LOVE IN A BARGE
A little Spitz ran back and forth on the deck of the lighter
_Cornelis de Vriendt_, barking defiance at all the world and
especially at me for my efforts to come aboard. Two fat Flemish
babies clad only in shirts and no underclothes sat in the bow
watching him.
“Hay, skipper,” I shouted, “where are you? Call off your dog!”
A gigantic shock of red hair appeared from the cabin, followed by
a long face, prodigiously wrinkled, and a thin body in blue shirt
and nondescript trousers, from which protruded broad red hands and
naked feet. Like the babies, the captain stared at me in silence
and made no move to come nearer.
“Are you the skipper?” I demanded, losing patience.
“_Ja_, mynheer.”
“Call off your dog. I’m the American delegate of the Relief
Committee.”
“What, mynheer?”
I aimed a kick at the dancing, barking bundle of fur and feet,
lost my balance on the edge of the wharf, and came down on the
sloping deck of the _Cornelis de Vriendt_ on all fours. The dog
went wild, and the frightened babies howled, but the skipper
watched motionless as before. “What did you say, mynheer?” he asked
imperturbably.
It seemed no time for the French or Flemish languages. In an
emotional crisis, such as a deathbed repentance or losing one’s
heart or one’s temper, the tongue turns to the speech of youth,
and I fell to cursing in most excellent and idiomatic English. The
shock-head stared. “For God’s sake, sir,” he exclaimed at last, in
English like my own, “are you a British spy?”
“A spy, you idiot? I’m the American delegate of the Commission for
Relief in Belgium. What do you mean by staring at me like that and
letting your crazy dog bark his head off at me? I’m the consignee
of this cargo, and I’ve come to inspect it.”
The bargeman leaped to the peak of the vessel and came forward,
his bare toes clutching the ridge of the deck, smacked the nearest
infant into silence, swore at the dog, and came down to me. He drew
an old cap from his pocket and began to clean my clothes, using the
cap as a dust cloth. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said meekly, “but you
see, sir, I has to be careful, wot with the Germans and all.”
“With that accent I should think you would have to be careful,” I
retorted grimly.
“Ow no, sir,” he returned, “I’m a Belgian all right-o, but I ’ave
served my time in the British navy.”
“And now you’re skipper of a barge!”
He smiled and scratched his head. “There was a woman, sir, as done
me into doing it--leaving the navy, I mean. O’ course she wasn’t
the first woman I ever see, but when I saw her I thort she was.”
“Well, you’re a funny one!” I exclaimed heartily, feeling a sudden
kinship with the lanky red-crowned scarecrow before me--a kinship
which would have been impossible without our common language. “Is
this Queen of Sheba still travelling with you?”
“Beg pardon, sir?”
“Is your wife on board?”
“Yes, indeed, sir, and here are two of my little shavers.” He
pointed with extraordinary pride at the half-naked youngsters
clinging to their precarious seats on the sloping deck. “Fine
little fellers, aren’t they, sir? I’ve got three children, and
there is going to be a fourth. These is twins--both boys,” he said.
“So I see,” I retorted. The jest was lost on him. “Well, open up
hatches and let’s look at your cargo.”
He bent to the fastenings and slipped off the round lead seals.
“Funny thing about these Germans, sir, ’ow careful they are. That
Johnny standing sentry-go over there”--he pointed to the lonely
watch in the distance--, “’e always comes up and asks me for
them little bits of lead. I gives ’em to ’im, sir. ’E gets paid
for ’em and they don’t do me no good, so I gives ’em to him.” He
lifted the first hatch, still chatting affably. “It’s a good lot
o’ flour, sir, as I sees it. Only up at Rotterdam sometimes they
has to unload too fast, and they piles it into the lighters in all
kinds o’ weather. I’ve got forty-eight bags of bad flour in ’ere
myself--spoilt by the rain in Rotterdam.”
“We can use it here for making dog bread.”
“They uses ’ooks on the bags, too, sir, and that ain’t right.
Ortn’t to use no ’ooks. They always break the bags. Still, they’re
a good sort up there, and they treat me right so far.... Now this
flour, sir, it’s first rate--better than the Belgians is used to,
if I do say it, and well stowed, ain’t it?” He dusted the white
meal from his hands and replaced the hatches. “It ain’t bad, is
it, sir?”
“Pretty good,” I answered.
“No, I don’t regret being skipper on a canal boat ’stead of
hordinary seaman banging ’round in a cruiser’s forecastle and
target-practising at the ’Uns. It’s an awful life, sea-faring is,
sir. A man wot is a man owes it to himself to marry and settle
down.”
“You certainly are a domestic animal, skipper.”
He grinned. “Yes, sir. Why, the first time I sawr ’er she was
a-standing behind the till in a sweets-shop, in Flushing, and
a-crying ’er pretty eyes out.”
“Who was?”
“Blimey! my wife! I thort I ’ad told you, sir.”
“You’ve told me nothing.”
“It’s an awful life, sea-faring is, sir----”
“You’ve told me that already, but what about your wife?”
“Ow, yes, sir. She was a-standing behind the counter in a
sweets-shop and a-crying ’er pretty eyes out, and I come in just
off the ship with a ’unger for sweets so strong my tongue was fair
’anging out of my mouth. (You gets that way banging round in a
cruiser’s forecastle, sir.)
“Sniff--sniff--sniff---- ‘What’ll ye ’ave, mynheer?’ she says to me.
“‘Good-day juffrouw, and what’s the matter with you, my pretty
dear?’ I says back at her. ‘I’ll ’ave a kiss,’ I says.
“‘You’ll ’ave nothing of the sort, you bad man,’ she says, wiping
her eyes and glaring at me.
“‘Juffrouw,’ I says, free and easy, ‘I’m just off ship and I’m
’ungry--so ’ungry I could fair eat you--and I never see a pretty
maid crying but I kiss ’er tears away. I ain’t been drinking
either. I ain’t a drinking man.’
“I was serious for all my glib talk, sir. I was that serious as I’d
never been in my life before; and, between ourselves, sir, though
I ’ate to admit it, I didn’t kiss no tears away that day. She
wouldn’t ’ave it.
“Wot was she weeping for? She’d just lorst ’er sweetheart, sir,
that was wot for! ’E was a sheep-faced Dutchman--I sawr ’im
afterward, I did, and he ’adn’t a merit to ’im. She didn’t really
love ’im, but she thort she did, and that’s where I come in
a-asking for a kiss!
“‘Oom Jan,’ she yells to the back of the shop. ‘Come ’ere and throw
out this drunken sailor-man.’
“Lucky for me ’er uncle didn’t ’ear ’er, so I leans across the
counter and I says very serious, ‘Juffrouw, I love you. Tell me,
wot’s the tears about?’”...
“I tell you, sir,” he interrupted his story to observe, “in dealing
with women tell ’em the truth first pop. If you love ’em, tell ’em
so. Lies is all right in dealing man to man, but with the wimmen,
tell ’em the truth.
“So it wasn’t long till we was fair intimate. I ’ung ’round ’er
shop for three days, I did, and then I thort as ’ow I might take a
few liberties with ’er.
“‘No,’ she says, ‘nothing of that, George. I want to make you a
good wife,’ she says.
“‘Wife,’ I says to myself. I was sitting in the potaties all
right-o, with a quid a month and no ‘ome ner nothing. Wife! Wot
’ave I let myself in for?’ But she was that simple ’earted I
couldn’t say no to ’er and I loved her fair to distraction.
“I went back to my ship, but I couldn’t stand it, so at last I gave
it up and went to her and we was married in a church and set up
’ousekeeping in a barge!”
A sharp voice from the cabin cut short our colloquy. The skipper
jumped as if shot. “Coming, coming,” he called in a very respectful
voice, “coming, my dear!”
“It’s----” I left the useless question unfinished. I knew it was
the Queen of Sheba, the heroine of the sweets-shop in Flushing, the
Mrs. Noah of the barge.
“Yes, it’s my wife. A strong bellus she has, sir: good lungs; and
the little shavers has ’em, too.” He pointed to the babies on the
deck. “Sea-faring men needs good lungs, you know, sir. But my lads
don’t seem to take much to salt water, sir. They prefers canals.
They gets sick on the Hollandsch Diep. Can’t make sailor-men o’
them, sir.”
“Sailor-men!” I retorted. “What about that cruiser’s forecastle
talk you were giving me, and marrying and settling down? Were you
joking with me, skipper? Isn’t love in a barge all it’s cracked up
to be?”
“No, sir; yes, sir,” he said, answering both my questions at once
but pulling a very sober face. “A man what is a man owes it to
hisself to marry and settle down. But a lad, now! that’s another
question, sir. I tell you, sir, confidential-like, I’m going to
name the next lad after Sir David Beatty!”
“Whew!” I whistled. “And if the lad is a girl?”
“I’ll name her ‘Rule Brittania,’ sir--if my wife agrees.... Coming,
coming, my dear; coming,” he called. “Good day, sir; thank you,
sir.”
III
THE ODYSSEY OF MR. SOLSLOG
“You-all are in charge of the Relief Commission, suh? I am Mistah
Solslog, of Alabama. I’m lookin’ for my sistah.”
The tense blue eyes of my fellow-countryman stared at me
searchingly, and I at him. He wore a rubber collar and a false
shirt front of a style which afforded popular subjects for
caricature twenty-five years ago. His salt-and-pepper suit was
cheap, horribly cheap, thin, cotton, summer weight, but immaculate.
His hat--an old, well-brushed Stetson--was in his hand. He had
no luggage. In the cold winter light of my office in Antwerp his
slight, lean features looked prematurely aged, but neither age nor
hardship had changed the characteristically even Southern drawl.
“Sit down, Mr. Solslog,” I said. “We’re feeding eleven hundred
thousand Belgians here, and clothing and giving work, too, but an
American citizen certainly has a claim.”
His face reddened. “Thank you, suh, but it ain’t that sort of help
I reequiah, Preehaps you did not understand me. I’m a-lookin’ for
my sistah.”
“Yes?”
“She was in Maubeuge when the war broke out.” He pronounced it
Maw-booge. “She was a governess, suh. I read in the _Atlanta
Constitution_ that war was declared. That was on a Sunday. I quit
my job in the lumberyard an’ come straight over here on the old
_Saint Paul_, and I ain’t found her--not yet.”
“But, Mr. Solslog, it’s February now. You left America in August?”
“Yes, suh,” he said gently. “I come in August.”
“Where have you been, then, in the meantime?” I demanded.
“Well, suh, first I went to Maw-booge.”
“The Germans captured Maubeuge on August 27th; they took the
fortress on September 6th.”
“Yes, suh. I know they did. I was there. You don’t quite understand
me. I was lookin’ for my sistah.”
The man amazed, angered, and puzzled me. Common-sense told me that
the Germans allowed no one--least of all a stray American--to
wander into Belgium, inside the German lines, on the flimsy excuse
of “looking for his sister,” but here was just such a man. Worst of
all, he really seemed simple and candid: the more dangerous as a
spy, probably, though what he was to spy upon I had not the ghost
of an idea.
“_Sprechen Sie Deutsch, Herr Solslog? Warum sind Sie hier in
Belgien? Sind Sie Spion? Vous parlez Français, n’est-ce pas? Vous
êtes espion, oui? ’ut U Veaamsch klappen?_” I shot at him rapidly.
He smiled a smile which disarmed my suspicions, a pathetic,
whimsical, puzzled smile. “People are always sayin’ things to me
I cain’t understand in these here foreign countries. No, suh, I
don’t understand any language but plain You-nited States. I can say
‘_uh franc, doo franc_’--that’s French, you know, suh--and I know
‘Muhsoor’, that’s French for ‘Mistah’ and ‘my sistah.’ I’ll never
forget that word.
“It’s like this, suh: I got up almost to Maw-booge--oh, yes, suh, I
had a pass. I got up there with the French. Just walked along with
’em; they couldn’t understand me; I couldn’t understand them, but
we walked along. Then we got ’most to Maw-booge where my sistah
was--red roofs, like all them pretty towns in France--I could see
the town, fightin’ everywhere. I was with a battery, what they call
_swasuntcans_. The officer could speak my language.
“‘Go back,’ he says. ‘Go with these refugee people.’ Everybody was
runnin’ away--the fields was full of ’em, dirty and tired, but
still runnin’. ‘Go to Paris,’ he says.
“‘But I’m lookin’ for my sistah,’ I says.
“‘She’ll most likely be in Paris. Go quick,’ he says.
“We was standin’ in a poppy field, his battery was firing in
fours--pop! pop! pop! pop!--like that. A German ae-reoplane come
over like a big bee and dropped a bomb. They screamed and run,
everybody did, but the bomb busted and nothin’ come out but
powdered lime. Then everybody laughed. But in three minutes more
the Germans was a-droppin’ shells all over us. That lime was just a
marker.
“They hit my officer friend. ‘Git out,’ he says again to me, ‘Git
out quick.’ His fingers dug into the poppies, he was hurt so bad;
hit in the stomach. Then he kind of smiled once and pulled off a
poppy flower and held it up to me. ‘Here’s a red poppy--the blood
of France,’ he says. ‘Take it as a souvenir, and git out.’
“They got me, though--the Germans did. I was in Mardeevay” (I have
no idea what the name of the town was) “when they come in. After
all the fightin’ I’d seen I went to sleep in a church, and along
come the Germans. They was massacreein’ the people. They wanted to
shoot me, too, but one of ’em understood my lingo and he took me to
the gen’ral. ‘So you’re an English spy,’ he says politely. ‘We’ll
examine you a little bit, and then we’ll have you shot. Good-day,’
he says. Then they drug me into a little room in the town hall
and kep’ me there. But next day come a man who spoke You-nited
States; he’d been in Birmingham, Alabama--funny, ain’t it, how they
travel?--and he found out I wasn’t no spy.
“Then I went to Paris----”
“You went to Paris from inside the German lines?”
Mr. Solslog smiled his slow, child-like smile. “Yes, suh. It wasn’t
hard a-tall. I was captured by the French. You see, suh, it ain’t
hard to travel about in the war so long as the fightin’ is goin’
on. Them French peesants was captured by the Germans, then captured
by the French, then captured by the Germans again, then captured
by their own people again. It’s when the armies sits down and quits
fightin’ on their feet that you cain’t git around. I could a-gone
from Berlin right to Paris through all the fightin’ durin’ the
first month of the war, before the battle of the Marne.
“Funny thing about that battle. I was all through it, and I never
knowed till afterward in Paris that it was the battle of the Marne.
“Then I got to Paris. Paris was awful, half dead, Zeppelins
comin’ over most every night, government in Bordoo. I got to the
Embassy----”
“Mr. Solslog,” I interrupted, “how on earth did you get about
knowing not a word of French?”
“Oh, I made mistakes, in course. But an American can do anything,
suh; can git anywhere he has a mind to, I mean. They was always
some one who could say a few words of my language--English Tommies,
American reporters--they was everywhere I went.”
“But money?”
“I had a hundred and forty francs when I got to Paris. I paid for
everything,” he said proudly, “and they never cheated me so’s
I could notice it. They’re great people, the Frenchies. Once I
worked for ’em two weeks in one of their field hospitals, just
because I liked ’em. ‘_Muhsoor luh_ American,’ they called me.
‘_Muhsoor_’--that’s French for ‘Mistah’ and my sis----But I told
you that beefore.
“I got a pass from the Embassy----”
“How did you do that?”
“I told ’em about my sistah. They hadn’t had word about her, so
I got the pass. Then I got a pass from General Caselnow and went
to the front.” His tired eyes gleamed restlessly as he went on.
“You-all here cain’t imagine it, I reckon, how dirty it is and how
it stinks. War is mostly bad smells. The men cain’t wash, they’re
covered with live things, flies is awful, rotten horses and rotten
men have to lie about, sometimes for weeks, till people can bury
’em. Soldiers marching through a town you can smell for blocks
sometimes.
“I got arrested, in course, but the Frenchies is always kind. It’s
the English is hard. They locked me up in Calais; wouldn’t listen
to me. I told ’em about my sistah, but they only laughed. They let
me write to the Embassy, though, and Mr. Herrick made ’em release
me. That was in November, I think, and I hadn’t had word of my
sistah.
“Then I went to London on an empty horse transport. They knew I
was stowed away on it, all right, and it was ’gainst orders, so
they chased me--tried to find me all night. The transport was awful
dirty after all them horses had been in it, but I had to git to
London to see if they had got word of my sistah. I slid down a
ventilator and lit in a horse stall. It half killed me: knocked me
plum out and sprained my back so’s I couldn’t run no more. They
come a-snoopin’ round with lanterns, right up into the stall, till
the light fell plum on my face. I didn’t hardly breathe, but my
hurt back seemed broken right through, so I says, ‘Here I am.’ An’
they found me.
“They talk a queer kind of language, the English do: it’s a little
like ours, and they’re more like us Americans than the Frenchies,
or the Dutchmen, or the Germans. They helped me up, cussed me out a
lot; but they got hot water and bathed my back, and one of ’em, a
dirty hostler from Chelsea, he bedded me down for the rest of the
night and give me tobacco. So I got along all right. They smuggled
me off.
“Mr. Page’s secretary in London told me they hadn’t heard of my
sistah, and he sent me to see Hoover’s committee--the committee to
send Americans home, preehaps you know. It was about closed up, but
I didn’t want to go home, not without my sistah, and they hadn’t
any word of her, so I went back to the Embassy. They was a man
there. I misrecollect his name now, he was very good to me. He told
me to go home. I says I wouldn’t--without my sistah I wouldn’t,
so he helped me to git over to Holland. Oh, I forgot to tell you,
suh, I was sick in London; had some kind of fever and stayed in
the hospital two months. It hurts me still here,” he pointed
solemnly at his forehead. “I had awful dreams: dreamed that the
Germans had caught my sistah--they had her in a little house, and
she was screamin’.” His eyes lighted dreadfully. “You-all cain’t
understand it, preehaps, but I hear her screamin’ ’most every night
and sometimes in the daytime if I ain’t feeling very well. Listen!
Listen, suh! I’m huntin’ for my sistah, and you-all must help me!
You-all’s got to help me, or I’ll--I’ll--I’ll go crazy--I’ll kill
somebody!”
The soft Southern drawl mounted to a shriek, and my visitor had
me by the throat. I fought him off desperately. His sickness had
weakened him, or else he would have throttled me. Suddenly his
hands relaxed, his eyes lost their light, and he spoke again in the
slow, gentle voice he had first used:
“You-all must pardon me, suh. I--I’m right ashamed of myself. I’ve
spoiled your tie.” He deftly rearranged the crumpled folds before
I could interfere. “I--I reckon I’m not quite reesponsible when I
think of--of things that might have happened. It’s seven months,
suh, and I ain’t had word of my sistah.” He drew out a tattered
paper, stamped with many stamps, sealed with many seals, and showed
me a line in German script.
“To look for his sister, reported to be in Maubeuge at the
beginning of the war.”
“I cain’t read what the German says,” he observed quietly.
“To go to Antwerp, Brussels, Mons, Charleroi, Maubeuge, Dinant,
Namur, Liége,” I translated aloud, “to look for his sister.”
* * * * *
Months later Mr. Solslog came again. “There is a gentleman in the
reception room waiting for monsieur: an American gentleman----”
Leon shrugged his shoulders expressively, spread out his palms,
and went on in a rapid whisper: “He asked for monsieur. Nothing
else could I understand. He has waited for monsieur four hours, and
he talks, talks to himself always!”
From the hall I heard a steady gentle voice talking, talking,
talking. “Mr. Solslog,” I hailed him. The voice stopped. He must
have stepped swiftly from the thick carpet to the tiled floor of
the hall, for he came like a man running.
“You-all here, suh,” he asked, without an interrogative lift to
the question. “Let me--let me hold on to your hand for a minute.
I--I’m right glad to see you. They’ve just--I’ve just got out.” He
gathered his voice and breath for a tremendous effort. His next
sentence came like a blast of prophecy. “Oh, may God damn the
Germans!” he screamed.
“Leon,” I shouted, “bring brandy, quick!”
“Oh, no, suh; not for me. I don’t use it.” Mr. Solslog gently
released my hands and walked beside me into the reception room.
His face was whiter than before, the lines in it deeper, and the
pathetic, patient eyes stranger than when I had seen him last; but
the fever fit of passion passed and left him calm as usual.
“I haven’t found my sistah--it isn’t that,” he explained in his
slow, drawling voice. “I’ve jist got out of prison here in Antwerp,
suh. I told the German officer if I ever see him again I’ll kill
him. I’m going to kill him if I ever see him again. I’m going
to----”
“Yes, yes,” I said soothingly. The monotonous recitative I had
heard on first entering the house had begun.
“I told him I’d kill him, I’d kill him, suh, kill him, I’d kill
him----”
“But your sister?”
“Oh, yes.” He gathered himself together. “I went to Brussels
and Charleyroy--I say I’ll kill him--and Maw-booge. She ain’t
there--at none of those places. I dream about her all the time, I
see her and hear her. Preehaps you don’t altogether understand me.
Suh--they’re chokin’ her--and--and mistreatin’ her, the Germans
are, suh; and she’s callin’ to me--screamin’ and callin’--I told
him I’d kill him! Then I come back to Malines. I got a paper from
the burgomaster to go out and see ’em diggin’ up the dead Belgian
soldiers and buryin’ ’em in new cemeteries.” Some wild, morbid
impulse must have led him to do this thing. “And the Germans
caught me, suh. They said my passport was expired. I cain’t read
German, suh, so how was I to know? They drug me up here to Antwerp,
and a German officer--I told him I’d kill him--and in the police
place, he said I was an English spy. They stripped me, suh. They
searched my skin. They took photygraphs of my clothes and looked
at my collar against a light. They even went over my money with a
microscope and looked under my hair to see if anything was tattooed
on to me. I told that officer I’d kill him!
“‘Where is your baggage?’ he says.
“‘I haven’t got any.’
“‘You damned spy’--I told him I’d kill him--‘you dirty spy,’ he
says.
“‘I’m just as clean as you are,’ I told him. ‘I buy a shirt when I
need it. I reckon I’m as clean as you, and I’ll kill you!’
“He jumped at me and beat me with his fists. ‘I’ll kill you! Some
day I’ll kill you,’ I says. They wouldn’t let me sleep; hectored me
for two nights, but ‘I’ll kill you,’ I says to him. ‘I’ll----’”
He rose to his feet and faced me, then his knees sagged, and
slowly, very slowly, he fell over in a dead faint.
* * * * *
There is little to add to this strange tale. The wilder wanderings
of a sick mind followed the wild wanderings of his broken body.
He was lodged in a private house where he had good care, but his
case was hopeless from the start. About a month before his death I
received a note written in his own hand. It read:
“They says I am vury sick but I doo not beleeve them in a few days
moor I am gooen back to Mawbooj. I beleeve my sister is there still
goodbie.
Yurs truly
MR. SOLSLOG.”
His sister was never found.
IV
FIGURES OF THE DANCE
The poet finished his recitation and resumed his cigarette, waiting
for our applause.
“It is a man absolutely extraordinary,” murmured the dancing-master
across the table at my left, under cover of the hand-clapping. “He
is the greatest poet of Belgium, monsieur. Verhaeren, Cammaerts,
Maeterlinck--they are nothing. If you bring him an album--presto!
he writes you an ode in it.”
In the tight little supper-room over the Café de la Toison d’Or
we were sweltering and dining at the expense of McTeague. It was
a night in August, and the heat of noon had not yet died out of
the boulevards and streets of Brussels, _ville basse_. The cheap
cotton curtains at the two windows fronting on the avenue waved
languidly to and fro, and the air of the room reeked with cigarette
smoke and the odours of Belgian cooking.
McTeague sat at the table’s head--a huge, lonely, unsophisticated
American, with a mop of gray hair topping a face like a child’s,
tired eyes, slightly Roman nose, and what once was a rose-bud
mouth. At his right was Yvette, the dancer of the Scala; pretty, of
course, the big, muscular, operatic-soprano type of beauty rather
than the petite beings we usually think of in the dance; sleek,
serpentine, appraising the world about her. Next her was I; then
Yvette’s husband, the poet; then Guilbert, her dancing-master.
“Thanks! thanks! I thank you infinitely, monsieur. Bravo! _Bis_,
_bis_!” said McTeague, in his heavy Scotian French.
“No, no, monsieur,” the poet answered gloomily, shaking his head.
“I demand pardon, but no.”
“Ah, it is the war, then! You feel such a sadness that you cannot
be gay, monsieur?”
“No, it is not the war. What is the war? It is of nations. For me
nations are nothing: men, men--Pushkin, Byron, Whitman, Schiller,
Napoleon, Goethe, Victor Hugo--those for me are worth while. The
rest? Pah!”
“Oh, la, la, la, la!”
“Do not mind, monsieur,” the dancing-master whispered ecstatically,
as if he feared such sentiments might offend me, “it is a poet,
_n’est-ce pas_? Art--art--that is a world of itself.” He mopped
his forehead, beaded with drops of perspiration, his little black
eyes rolled in his head, and he drummed on the tablecloth as if his
fingertips would do the office of his toes. The man was a genuine
enthusiast. To dance and to teach others to dance--that was life!
“Yvette, you have brought your ballet costume so you can dance for
messieurs the Americans?” he asked.
“Yes, my old Guilbert,” she answered languidly.
“Come, then.”
We drained our coffee cups reluctantly, rose from the table, and
stirred out into the hot passageway, Yvette and McTeague ahead,
old Guilbert following with me, the poet trailing behind. Through
little winding streets, dusky, sleepy, and sweltering we passed,
and at length out beside the Maison du Roi and the golden Flemish
splendours of the corporation halls and the Hôtel de Ville on the
Grand’ Place. We wound through the lines of German sentries and up
the steps of a new restaurant--the Café du Cid--up dirty, twisting
stairs behind the bar rail, to the dancing-hall where Guilbert
taught.
“Now,” he exclaimed in rapture, turning on his toes with a movement
of astonishing grace for one so old and fat. “Monsieur le poète to
the piano! Madame Yvette to the dressing-room, quick! _Messieurs
les Américains_, seat yourselves, if you please! Quick! Quick!
Quick! Everybody!
“Messieurs!” He flung up his fingers and addressed us as we sank
languidly into chairs before the open windows. “It is a dance
which I have myself composed--the dance of the ourang-outang. I am
he--the great man-ape. I dance so.... Music!” he called to the poet
at the piano. “Music! Moussorgsky--slow--terrible--so!”
The poet smote the ivory keys, keys yellow as the teeth of an old
horse, and the dance began _solo_. Old Guilbert swayed and leaped
over the dusty floor under the hanging lamps--swayed and leaped
heavily, horribly, bestially, while the wild music of the piano
panted and coughed through the room. The hot night air doubtless
added to the grim effect on McTeague and me. I seemed to breathe
the very exhalations of a jungle, and watched as if fascinated the
contortions of the dancing-master.
As he danced he roared explanations and orders. “It is a forest,
messieurs, and I, the ourang-outang, I dance in the moonlight under
the trees, so, and so, and so; and as I dance I long for something
to love, something to destroy. I am seeking here, there, as I
dance.... Ah! I have found her--there, there!”
He made an extraordinary succession of leaps toward Madame Yvette’s
dressing-room, and suddenly she floated out before us, her heavy
body spinning on her toes, light as a cloud and almost as swift;
her eyes half closed, her hands at her breast, a Liberty cap on her
head; and at the end of her turn she sank quietly into a heap in
the middle of the floor.
Guilbert’s horrid dance began again, and the rapid flow of his
explanation: “She is asleep, messieurs, this fay in the forest.”
He paused ecstatically before her. “I have found her, I love her,
I will have her, I shall win her by my dancing.” He touched her on
the breast. She leaped to her feet and spun across the floor like
a whirlwind, terror and amazement and grace and voluptuousness
all portrayed in her movements. The ape leaped after her, dancing
round and round her, enmeshing her like a firefly in a cage of
grass. Her eyes grew wider with terror, she danced this way and
that, trying to escape him; he seized her, and she flew to right
and left, still fast in his clutches; she leaped straight up, and
he caught her firmly in his arms and yelled, actually yelled, with
delight.
And then--it seems utterly impossible even as I tell it--into the
music came a wild, unholy burst of “The Watch on the Rhine.” The
two figures on the floor leaped and curveted. A hoarse cheer rose
to us from outside, and below the windows I saw three ecstatic
German soldiers swaying and bellowing applause.... The ape held the
forest-fay securely as they danced.... It must have been the music
which first warned me of change, for into the German hymn stole a
wilder motif--the great chords of an alien theme intruded, fought,
conquered, and swept over the fragments of the old, and like a wild
mob of music bursting from prisons of silence poured forth the
“Marseillaise.” The dance was symbolic, then: Germany and Europe!
The conquest of the world!... The knit figures still swayed and
leaped, but the ape was weakening. The taller figure of the woman
slowly dominated and then submerged the male. With a sudden thrust
she flung him prone, but the music went on. There came a howl at
our backs, and I saw the soldiers in the square below waving their
rifles and dancing with anger.
McTeague stared as if he were just recovering from a trance,
shook himself clumsily, and muttered through the “Marseillaise”:
“Strange, isn’t it, how artistic these Belgians are? Now if you and
I were arranging a dance----”
The loud howls of the Germans beneath us interrupted McTeague’s
moralizings. Swift feet were upon the stair, the proprietor of the
café and his wife burst in upon us, weeping, gesticulating, talking
all at once. Guilbert lay quietly in the middle of the floor, still
acting his part; the poet at the piano pounded lustily. Yvette,
more practical than they, ran to a window at the back of the hall
and looked out, then ran back to us and grasped us. “Come quickly,”
she exclaimed. “We can escape before the Germans come.”
“But your husband, and Guilbert?” I asked.
“Drag them behind us, then,” she replied, shrugging her naked
shoulders. “Come at once. The Germans are on the stair!”
Directly beneath our feet we heard a tumult of rough voices, a
clatter of dishes and pans, and then tramping boots coming up the
winding stair. Panic seized on McTeague and me simultaneously.
We leaped at the performers and hustled them across the floor
behind the twinkling feet of the dancing-girl. Before we reached
the window she had already scrambled through it and dropped to a
roof five or six feet below. We leaped after her and ran across
a space sloping like a deck. Guilbert and the poet had not yet
spoken a word. I had begun to laugh--a wild, hysterical laugh
which irritated McTeague, so that while we ran he remonstrated
with me: “Germans--’ll hear--come after us,” he panted. “What--’s
matter--now?”