bent old innkeeper, coming up with a bowl of oil and shoving her
with his shoulder.
“_Goed, goed_,” she answered, and disappeared, still smiling.
Alexis sulked, but worked; the innkeeper watched admiringly; I
sat in a tiny chair propped against the inn door and talked with
madame, while the swallows circled and cheeped overhead. The motor
backfired when it was tested, and the swallows screamed in fright
and fled through a cloud of stifling smoke which rose into their
nests. But in a moment they were back again at work, filling the
world with swallows.
“Like the cannon, is it not?” said madame in sluggish, country-bred
Flemish, speaking of the motor’s tricks. “But the swallows return.”
She laid her hand on her breast with a curious, passionate gesture.
“He is your husband?” I pointed to the old innkeeper, bent almost
double over the motor as he watched Alexis.
“Yes, mynheer.”
“You have children?”
“I shall have one in three months--about All Saints’ Day, mynheer.”
She spoke with the simplicity of a peasant, to whom life and death
and birth and growth are the simplest things in a complex world.
“Are you glad, madame?”
“Glad? No,” she said after a pause, smiling still.
“Are you sorry?”
“No, mynheer.”
“He is an old man, your husband,” I remarked after a long silence.
“Yes, he is old, mynheer.”
“You love him?”
“Love him? No.”
“Do you hate him, then?”
“No, mynheer. Why should I hate him?”
“Alexis, there, is a jolly fellow. What do you think of him?”
“I do not think of him, mynheer.”
I changed the subject. She was only a peasant, yet she knew how to
rebuff my levity. “Why did you marry, madame?” I asked, and my tone
was serious, befitting the question.
“Why does any one marry, mynheer? I was of the age--sixteen.”
“But why did you choose him?” I gestured again toward the old man,
still bent over Alexis as he tugged at the cylinder core.
“I did not choose, mynheer. The swallows,” she pointed to the
earthen nests, “do they choose? Other people, do they choose?”
“No,” I admitted, astonished at her. “It is Nature. They do not
choose.” I felt a sudden respect for the dully smiling enigma
before me. Love? choice? romance? the adventure of living?--what
were they after all? The stress of towns has bred these fantastic
ideas in men’s brains. This country woman knew she was no different
from birds and beasts, and she knew that it did not really matter
to anybody--not even to herself. In a few slow words, still
smiling, she sketched the dull drama of her life: peasant-born,
unbeautiful, bought from her family by the old innkeeper as soon
as the Church permitted her to marry, twice a mother, but both her
children dead, pregnant again: that was the whole story. She did
not know that her recital was sad, or that it could inspire pity.
She did not even know that it was interesting. She seemed to tell
it instinctively, as a bird cries in the thicket or as a tired dog
whines at the door.
“Alexis, is the motor ready?” I called.
“Almost, monsieur,” he answered; then turning to the innkeeper he
bawled, “Get me a pan and matches!” He rested his hands on his hips
and stared insolently at the woman and me. “Monsieur has seen the
flag on the cathedral?” he asked. He continued in Flemish, “The
brave men of Diest ran up a white flag while the Germans were still
at Liége! Madame says they did well to surrender.”
“I said that to surrender is nothing, myne heeren,” she interrupted
slowly, looking at me but addressing us both. “Every thing
surrenders.”
“Ha, madame! Foolishness! Talk like a Belgian patriot if you
please. We never surrender, we Belgians: we fight, fight, fight!”
Alexis swung his arm and waited confidently for my applause.
“Madame,” I turned to her. “You think these things do not matter?”
“They do not matter, mynheer,” she said, smiling.
“The invasion of Belgium?--that does not matter?”
“It does not matter, mynheer.”
“Murder? arson? rape? pillage? millions dead and maimed? millions
enslaved? Madame!” I found myself addressing her as if she were a
logician instead of a peasant.
“It is nothing, nothing; I know it is nothing. I feel it here.”
Again she laid her hand on her breast with the singular passionate
gesture I had marked before. “It does not change anything; it does
not change the soil of the earth, it does not change the man, it
does not change the woman, it does not change the child. Then it
is nothing. We of Belgium are like rain falling on a field: they
[the Germans] are like rain falling. We do not choose: they do not
choose. It is all--nothing.”
Alexis leaped forward, his tricky eyes blazing, his moustaches
stiff with anger. These patriotic outbursts were no new thing to
me, yet I was astonished at him. He trembled with honest emotion.
“Madame! You are no Belgian, you are no Christian, you are no
woman!” he shouted. “You have no sense of honour, you have no
patriotism, you have no decency. Bah! you would have us handed over
to the Boches!” He stopped his tirade abruptly and addressed me in
French, “Monsieur, the car is ready in a moment, if you please.
This woman--this woman----” He raised his arm as if he would strike
her. All this time she had stood watching and listening, still
smiling heavily and making no move. “This woman is a peasant, she
is not human, she is a beast.... Here!” he called to the innkeeper,
who had reappeared, “give me the matches. Hold the basin there.”
He jumped back to his place and pressed the self-starter. The
motor hummed with curious coughs and gasps from the jury-rigged
cylinder. “It will march until we reach home,” called Alexis, his
voice still keyed high with anger. “Monsieur is ready?”
I paid the modest reckoning and climbed into the tonneau. The woman
stared past me at Alexis; even my “good day” was unheard or at any
rate unnoticed. The motor roared and the frightened swallows flew.
The innkeeper flung open the double gates, removing his cap and
bowing low, and we rolled slowly into the square.
There was a patter of slippers on the cobblestones behind us, a
gasp and a choking cry, and madame was hanging to the running-board
beside Alexis, pouring forth a torrent of passionate Flemish. The
German sentries before the Stadthuis across the square stared
anxiously, passersby stopped as if thunder-struck, I looked back
and saw the old innkeeper standing open-mouthed and motionless in
the doorway.
“Mon Dieu, monsieur, she wants to go with me!” muttered Alexis,
mechanically stopping the car. The woman flung her arms toward me
with a piteous gesture. Her heavy, ugly face streamed tears. All
her reserve, her self-control were gone. She had chosen at last,
and she had chosen this!
“Wants what, you fool?” I exclaimed, appalled. “Drive on, Alexis.
Make her go back. You know the Germans would arrest us at the first
sentry-post. Damn you, anyway!” I roared, my anger mounting to
outraged brutality to think that a chauffeur’s cheap amour might
land us both in a German jail. “What have you done to get us into
this mess?”
He thrust his fist into the pleading face. “Go back, go back,” he
grunted, apparently without a trace of feeling for her.
“You must go back, madame,” I exclaimed. “You must go back!”
She ignored me and again burst into a storm of entreaty, all aimed
at Alexis. “No, no, no, no,” he shouted in answer to her pleas. “Go
back to your husband! Go, you--animal!”
At that word she dropped from the car. “Go on, Alexis, quick!” I
exclaimed.
Her hand flew to her breast with the old gesture. As the automobile
leaped forward, she walked a few steps toward the inn. I turned and
watched her: Alexis stared straight in front of him. She wheeled
and looked after us, her hand still at her breast, her body swaying
from side to side. Then she looked at the inn, and again at the
fleeing car. Finally, as we dashed away from the square, I saw
her stumbling toward the wretched old man, who still stood in the
blazing sunlight which streamed through the open doorway, while the
swallows of Diest circled and cried over his hoary head.
XI
PENSIONERS
Wilson belonged emphatically to the genus _Homo sapiens_; species,
_Texicana_; habitat, southwestern parts of the United States and
Antwerp, Belgium. He was tall and lithe and handsome, and also
sentimental. He was the only member of the American Commission for
Relief in Belgium who flatly refused to fly the American flag from
his automobile; he was the only member who publicly declared that
he said his prayers every night, but, as he confided to me once
in a moment of great emotion, he had never in his life prayed for
the President of the United States. The reason for these startling
facts was that Wilson was an unreconstructed rebel and wore pinned
in his shirt, just over his heart, a little butternut badge which
his grandfather had worn in ’63--a symbol of the dead Confederacy
and the Lost Cause.
We used to sing him a gay song which ran:
An unreconstructed rebel, that is what I am.
For this fair land of freedom I do not give a damn!
I’m glad we fought against them: I’m sorry that they won,
And I do not ask your pardon for anything I’ve done.
I fit with Stonewall Jackson: of that there is no doubt;
Got wounded in three places a-storming Fort Lookout.
I coched the rheumatism campaigning in the snow,
But I killed a sight o’ Yankees, and I wisht it had been mo’.
I hates the Yankee nation and everything they do.
I hates the Declaration of Independence, too.
I hates the Yankee eagle with all his scream and fuss,
But a lying, thieving Yankee, I hates him wuss and wuss!
We called him “Johnny Reb,” “Tex,” or “Stonewall Jackson,” just as
it happened to strike us.
Wilson was disturbed about something. “The Socialists are right,”
he said, thoughtfully, drawing his six feet two from the chair
beside my office desk. “There’s only one way to prevent wars--kill
the spirit of patriotism. Look at that old fool out there!” he
continued, bitterly, pointing toward a gray-bearded Landsturm
soldier in shapeless flat service cap, faded gray-green uniform
and high hob-nailed boots, who, with gun on shoulder, strode along
the pavement of the Graanmarkt on his way to the _Kommandantur_:
“That old fellow is probably a toy-maker in Nuremberg or a barber
in Munich, and here he is wandering round Belgium ready to die for
Kaiser and Vaterland!”
“Mankind’s a failure,” I acknowledged cheerfully. “Go on, Wilson.”
I knew these moods.
“The trouble is this,” he drawled. “There are five old Belgians in
the outer office who have come to ask about their pension money.
It’s the first time I’ve had to do with Yankee pensioners. They
were here yesterday,” he went on, impressively, “and for a solid
hour I listened to one of ’em making patriotic speeches and telling
me how he fought and bled and died for my country--_my country!_--a
damned Yankee pensioner.”
I laughed gleefully, and Wilson turned on his heel. “Sit down,
you Johnny Reb,” I gasped. “What’s it all about? Are they Belgian
citizens who fought in our Civil War?”
“‘Civil War’!” he quoted. “There you go again! Haven’t I explained
to you that you mustn’t call it the ‘Civil War?’ It’s the ‘War
between the States.’”
A timid, eminently respectful knock interrupted us, and Peeters,
the clerk, thrust his head through the half-open door, bowing to
each of us in turn. “The men have come,” he announced.
“What men, Peeters?”
“The men who saw Mr. Wilson yesterday.” He coughed apologetically.
“The men for the pensions. They want to see you, sir.”
I looked at Wilson, who was still meditating flight and cursing
under his breath. “Send them right in, Peeters. Mr. Wilson and I
are delighted to see them.”
“Delighted, are we?” my victim snarled; then his voice changed to
honeyed sweetness--the sweetness underlying all Southern courtesy
and hospitality, which is the sweetest in the world. “_Aah, goeden
dag, myneheeren, quel plaisir de vous revoir! Mynheer van der
Aa, Mynheer de Vos, Mynheer Dekkers, Mynheer van Oolen, Mynheer
Anderson._” He introduced them with a flourish--a little file of
old men, dressed in dingy Sunday best, with heavy leather shoes in
place of the customary slippers or wooden _blokken_, each holding
his cap in his hand, each bearded and bewhiskered, each with thick
weather-worn skin and little eyes folded deep in wrinkled cheeks.
These were the pensioners.
The first of them was scarcely five feet high. Little black eyes
snapped out from beneath his bushy brows, and he wore a sweeping
white moustache and an imperial. The second was tall and had once
been blond; now he was bald as a prophet, and his great white
beard swung from his heavy head like a broad pendulum ticking
off the minutes. The third was blind; his graceful, narrow head
tilted forward, a flickering smile played about his mouth, and I
noticed that when his attention was strongly attracted his eyes
occasionally turned up with a strange abortive movement, as if he
might take the darkness by surprise and change it into light. The
fourth man stood straight and soldierly, his knees tight together,
his great feet splayed out from his ankles, and his arms hanging
perpendicularly. He had an ox-like head, and his wide shoulders
were heavy and stooped with age. The fifth man was an aged negro,
and feeble-minded.
Peeters handed me a little paper which I read aloud: “Jan van
der Aa, Pieter de Vos, Georges Dekkers, Willem van Oolen, David
Anderson. Is that right?”
“_Ja, ja, mynheer_”--“_Parfaitement, monsieur_”--“Yes, sair,” the
voices quavered.
“Don’t you all speak English?” I demanded. “You’re entitled to
American pension money, yet you don’t speak our language? _Vous ne
parlez pas_----”
The little man with the imperial burst into volcanic speech. “Sir,”
he ejaculated, “they have forgotten the Eengleesh, but I--I speak
it pairfectly.”
Wilson sighed. “Yes, hang it, he does!” he whispered to me. “He’s
the damnedest, convincingest, Fourth-of-July orator you ever
listened to. Now he’s off! You can’t stop him!”
“You are Jan van der Aa?” I interrupted, after the first sentence.
“Jan van der Aa, sir,” he acknowledged, bowing, and continued
impressively: “Sirs, you see beforre you five men who fought in
the Grrand Arrmy of the Rrepublic, in the grrandest arrmy of
the grreatest rrepublic of the earth.” He rolled the rr’s like
thunder down the valleys of his speech. “It was not for nothing
that we fought. Liberrty and Union are not little things. They
are eterrnal. They are the same in everry country and in everry
time. We five were at Gettysburrg and Cold Harrbourr, de Vos was
at Antietam, Dekkars was wounded at Atlanta, I was at Chickamauga
underr Thomas, Anderson was at Peterrsburrg”--the strange, foreign
accent turned the familiar battle names into mighty voices, voices
to conjure dead men from the grave and dead deeds from the old
books where they lie buried; the man before us was a born orator,
he was winsome, sweet, powerful, pathetic, by turns--“Forrt
Fisherr, Culpeperr Courrt-House, Vicksburrg, Shiloh, Champion’s
Hill, Cairro, Chattanooga.” The tremendous words rolled forth; the
file of old men stirred; they awoke and threw up their heads as he
trumpeted forth these names, and I seemed to see them young again
and soldiers of the Republic.
But Van der Aa stopped abruptly. He turned half apologetically to
the others, speaking a most vulgar and harsh Flemish: “’_k Heb
’t verget_--I’d forgotten what we came for--our moneys,” he said.
“Sirs”--he addressed Wilson and me once more--“our pension moneys
are overdue. We have received nothing since Antwerp was captured.
The American Consul-General writes, but we receive nothing. Will
you tell Washington of us? The Government have forgotten; we are
far away, and so they have forgotten us.”
I turned inquiringly to Wilson.
“Oh, tell them you’ll get their money for them. Tell them
anything,” he whispered, harshly, fumbling his handkerchief. “Stop
that devil of a Van der Aa! You don’t understand; that man can talk
you to tears!”
“Mr. Wilson knows all about the case,” I said. “He will cable
to Washington the first time he goes to Rotterdam. We shall do
everything in the world to get your money.”
Van der Aa thanked me with a gesture and a low bow, and repeated my
words in Flemish to the others. They thanked us slowly. “And now,
sirs----” he began again.
“Stop him, for God’s sake!” groaned Wilson.
“Mynheer van der Aa----”
“----the only things men gladly die for, freedom and union. Freedom
and union, one and inseparable, now and forever.”
The spell came over us like a ghost--the ghost of something high
and splendid--and the voice of America spoke in conquered Belgium.
Not through American lips, but through the lips of an alien; and
not the voice of America to-day, divided, disunited, enslaved
in a thousand ways to fear and base interests; not the America,
I suppose, of the sixties, blatantly provincial, cursed with
over-confidence, torn with civil war; but the voice of the ideal
America--that America of the spirit which Lincoln must have seen
as Moses saw the Holy Land from Mount Nebo, the America which may
be, which must be; the mighty nation like a city set upon a hill,
with the glory of heaven shining upon her, and young men and women
singing in her streets.
I mopped my eyes; Wilson coughed and blew his nose. The five old
men stood imperturbable, and Van der Aa spoke on and on. He was
pitiless and glorious. As he talked I saw a flag borne to the tops
of tall mountains, flung over precipices, whipped through morasses
and dismal swamps, flung up from the sea and set firm in rocky
earth; and that flag was the American flag--the flag of Wilson’s
country and my country. These men had followed that flag--these
five aliens. I saw freedom and union like simple things, things to
be held in the hand as well as in the heart; necessary, elemental,
homely things. And I saw the world-wide war which is waged in
every land against freedom and union--the fight of caste against
caste, of class against class, of masters with slaves, of the state
against its citizens, of the thousand and one Frankenstein monsters
of commerce and industry and politics and religion, fighting
against the human beings who have created them. Everywhere I gazed
there was war.
“Liberty and union, one and inseparable, now and forever,”
concluded Van der Aa, his right arm outstretched to emphasize his
last period, the eyes of the blind man straining up to catch the
vanished sun.
* * * * *
Next morning Wilson’s motor car arrived an hour late at the office,
and I noticed that from a staff wired to the wind-shield there
floated a little American flag.
“Yes,” he said, defiantly, “I say kill patriotism and you kill war.
I’m taking the first step. I used to be for the South against the
world, now I’m for America against the world, and maybe some day
I’ll be for all the world against the world.
“I’ll see you late to-night,” he added, very seriously. “I’ve got
to go to Rotterdam to cable Washington about those old pensioners.”
XII
DOÑA QUIXOTE
Her parents had always regarded her as a sort of stepchild. There
was Elaine, her elder sister, docile, petite, with fair looks and
a proper dot, married at eighteen and mother of two babies; but
Virginie was twenty and unwed. Although I did not know her until
1914, I can fancy the picture in the ancient moated castle of Drie
Toren two years before when Virginie faced the old Baron, her
father, and declared her independence of parental restraints of all
sorts. The old Baron, bearded like a Numidian lion, had a special
vocabulary for matters which concerned his unmarried daughter.
“_Incroyable! pénible! triste! terrible! effrayante! bête!_”--I
heard them dozens of times a day--and the shy, wilted floweret of
a Baroness, her mother, sat with hands placidly folded, waiting
for the final catastrophe which was sure to overwhelm her “_pauvre
Virginie_.”
La Baronne Virginie was delighted to tell me of the famous
interview with her father. She told it with shrieks and giggles,
between puffs from one of my strongest cigarettes, her cold,
gray-blue eyes--inherited from some merciless Viking ancestor who
had once harried the coasts of Flanders--dancing with delight, and
her bright golden hair waving as she tossed her head to give point
to the jest.
“_‘Mais, ma chérie,’ il m’a dit._
“‘_Mais, mon père,’ j’ai dit_.... The devil! I forget always and
speak French. That morning I was very angry, so I slid down the
banisters and shrieked with the top of my breath, and there was my
father at the foot of the stair, like this!” She made an adorable
caricature of the leonine astonishment of her father at sight of
the apparition of his daughter, her foot caught in her skirt,
kicking vigorously to free herself and spreading tatters of lace
petticoat over the Chinese carpet. “‘Come here,’ he roared, as if I
were a servant. ‘Come here, cher _Papatje, s’il te plaît_. I have
something to say,’ I answer very respectfully, as a Belgian girl
must always speak: ‘I will not marry. I will not worship some man
like Jules. (Jules is my brother-in-law. He has red hair and a wart
on his nose. Ugh!) I will not have babies. I will not be as Elaine.
No, no, no, no, no, I will not. I am going to England to be a
suf-fer-a-gette. I will burn churches and bite people. I hate men!’”
“But do you hate us, really?” I interrupted.
“Of course!” The light of her eyes was like the light on Swiss
glaciers. “I hate all men--you especially.”
I was hurt, and showed it.
“Ha! I do,” she repeated, following up her advantage. “And I hate
my father--enough, not much, just a little. ‘_Oufff!_’ he says to
me, ‘what for a person is this my daughter! Have I not give you
all in the world, miserable one?’ ‘No,’ I answer. ‘Freedom? No.’
‘Freedom!’ he says. ‘Yes, freedom,’ I answer again. ‘It is the
century of the woman. We must have freedom.’ (I got that from an
American book, but I did not tell him. He was so troubled already.)
“So next day I went to England, and in England I burned one church
and bit two people.”
* * * * *
It was I who named her Doña Quixote. For all her Viking eyes
she was a perfect Spanish type, such a type as one occasionally
finds nowadays in villages of the Dutch Province of Zeeland or
in the Belgian Provinces of East Flanders and Antwerp, almost
the sole reminders of the days when the Dons lorded it in the
Low Countries. She was not brunette, but a Spanish blonde, with
a magnificent complexion burnished on the cheeks, straight,
aristocratic nose, and jeweled mouth. The oval of her face was
positively Mediterranean, and seeing her glorious hair I knew what
the Elizabethan poets meant by singing of “golden wires.” She was
adorable, perfect, and cold as frost.
“But, mademoiselle,” I began.
“Madame!” she interrupted. “Always call me madame.”
“Pardon, but why?”
“Never ask me the why of anything. It is because I choose. Isn’t
that enough?”
“No,” I burst out angrily. “I’m a reasonable being, I’ll have you
to know, and I must be treated reasonably. What the dickens----?”
She laughed suddenly and delightedly. “Ice, ice, I thought you were
of ice. I thought all Americans were of ice, Monsieur. Good! You
thaw. I shall tell you, because you know how to get angry like a
Belgian.”
“Stop teasing me,” I muttered, ashamed, sorry, and indignant.
“At the convent school in Bruges where I went to school the nuns
call us ‘madame’. It is a school for the petty nobility, you
understand, so we are called ‘madame’ just as the little Princess
Marie-Jose is called ‘Madame’ and not ‘Mademoiselle la Princesse.’
I like it.”
“Well, I don’t.”
“That is all one to me,” she responded calmly. “You are to call me
‘madame’.”
“I won’t. Not until you are married, and maybe I won’t even then.
Maybe I’ll call you by your first name.”
She examined curiously my flushed face, stubborn, unhappy,
disgusted with my own boorishness, but seeing no way out. Her cold
gaze took in all that she wanted; noted that I was a fly in her
spider-net; and she dimpled and thawed graciously. “Please!” she
begged.
“Mademoiselle--er--er----” I stuttered, “do you know Spanish?”
“Not a word. But I have read ‘Don Quixote,’ of course.”
“Doña--that is Spanish for a noble lady. I shall call you
Doña--Doña Quixote.”
“Wha-at?”