off her guard, astonished, wounded, a bit angry. But the one word
was all I wanted. It showed me I could bully her. That word had
been warm and human, utterly unlike the icy flood which normally
came from her lips. “Doña Quixote!” I repeated blandly.
“You shall do nothing of the sort. Don Quixote was a madman.”
“Yes, and you are a madwoman. You won’t listen to the people who
love you.”
“You are not to say that word to me again.”
“What word?”
“That word! You know--_that_ word.”
“Doña?”
“The other one: the one that begins with _l_ and has four letters!”
XIII
IN THE STREET OF THE SPY
The Commissaire of the Arrondissement of Metseys beat on the
glass front of the limousine and arrested the mad career
of the Government automobile in which we were riding. The
soldier-chauffeur (a Belgian in the near-British uniform which the
Belgian army now wears, with a small round button in his cap marked
with the Belgian colours in concentric circles--black, white, red)
turned and looked back into the car inquiringly. “We stop here,”
the Commissaire announced in pantomime.
Just five minutes before we had rushed directly under a battery
of heavy French guns blazing away like furnaces. I did not know
they were French guns--although the accent was marked!--until
the Commissaire told me; but then he knew every battery, every
cantonment, every airdrome, and every hospital in that little
bit of Belgium behind the Yser lines which is still free from
the invaders. As we passed the battery, a wave of sulphur had
engulfed us, the glass of the limousine rattled dangerously, and
that mad chauffeur, putting on all power, had rushed us down
the winding Flemish road, scattering stray groups of mild-eyed
Belgian infantrymen and cavalrymen and grazing the metallic flanks
of lumbering British motor lorries, their canvas sides splashed
with Flanders mud, on their way down to the lines. He had rushed
us over a little canal where two or three soldiers were fishing
sleepily, in spite of the noise of the bombardment. He had dashed
us alongside a field of over-ripe wheat, through a long avenue of
stunted willows, across an acre of barbed-wire entanglements, and
into the town of Zandt, its gray walls gleaming in the splashing
sunlight which had just followed the customary morning shower, its
claret-red roofs burnished like the morocco binding of old books.
We stepped stiffly from the car on to the slippery cobblestones and
stared about us.
“The Germans shell Zandt almost every day,” said the Commissaire
coolly. “That French battery we just passed will probably wake them
up. Put the car in the lee of that wall, Pierre,” he called to the
chauffeur. “We shall be back in ten minutes.”
“This, gentlemen,” he said, as we walked down the principal street
of Zandt, “is called the Street of the Spy, because, up to this
moment, no German shells have fallen in it. The population of Zandt
pretend that it is because the Germans have a spy living in this
street. Droll, isn’t it?”
We laughed with him. It is true that no shells had fallen in the
Street of the Spy, but they had missed it by inches, not yards or
rods. If I have ever said that the Germans do not use heavy calibre
shells on unfortified villages and towns, I apologize. They use
their very heaviest shells on these little defenceless villages of
west Flanders just behind the Yser lines; they throw almost daily
shells which are as destructive as cyclones into three or four room
dwelling-houses. A row of such houses falls like a sand castle when
such a shell arrives.
“But the people want to stay here, of course,” explained the
Commissaire. “Where can they go? The peasant and the man of the
small town has no capital except his farm or his house or his
_winkel_--his little shop. He has no bank account. He is primitive.
He is simple. All he has in the world is here in Zandt. And
so he stays. Yes, we give them gas-masks, for the Germans use
asphyxiating gas very often here. But it is hardest on the children
and the little babies.
“Those boys we are sending away to-morrow to a safe place in
France.” He pointed to two youngsters, nine and seven years old,
peering through the broken glass of a near-by window.
“Are you glad to go, _manneken_?” he asked the elder.
“Oh, yes, yes, mynheer.”
“But why?”
“Because one has fear of the bombardment, mynheer,” said the boy,
shivering.
* * * * *
“This you must see,” said the Commissaire, ducking his head and
leading us into a small passageway between two brick walls. “It is
the most interesting person in Zandt. She is eighty-three years
old. She lost her only grandson in the war. She has nothing to eat
except from her little garden. There, see!”
We had emerged on the edge of a tiny plot of land, perhaps
twenty-two feet square. A gray one-story cottage, covered with
mossy thatch, bounded it on one side; low walls and an outhouse
inclosed it on the others. The little plot was cultivated, densely,
compactly, expertly--a mosaic of fruits and green vegetables. Two
apricot trees trimmed in the French fashion were trained along the
wall, and a low vine, with some sort of pendent fruit, hung from
the outhouse.
But strangest of all there were three beds of ornamental flowers. I
stared hard at them, and suddenly I saw that they were graves!
“Good-day, madame,” the Commissaire called, touching his hat. “See,
these are American gentlemen come to look at your little garden.”
She came slowly from the cottage, a wisp of lace in her white hair,
wearing the ceremonial black frock which a peasant woman puts on
for such feast days as the Feast of the Assumption, a white apron,
and leather shoes. “You are welcome, gentlemen, you are welcome,”
she said, with the grace of a chatelaine.
“But aren’t those graves?” I asked, pointing to the beds of
nasturtiums, geraniums, and marigolds which covered three long
mounds at the end of the garden, taking up almost half of the room
available for vegetables and fruits. “Madame, aren’t those graves?”
“Oh, yes, mynheer,” she said.
“They have not been here long, madame?” I was looking at the
transplanted geraniums, well rooted in the mud, but not yet wholly
at home, and the raw, muddy rim about the edges of the three mounds.
“Since April, mynheer. I tend them myself,” she added proudly.
I turned to the Commissaire. “None of those is her grandson’s
grave?” I asked in a low voice.
“Oh, no,” he muttered. “Her grandson died in Germany. He was taken
prisoner at Liége in August, 1914. Madame,” he said to her, “the
gentleman asks if he may look at your graves.”
“Oh, yes, mynheeren.” She fluttered down before us, bent
rheumatically at the first mound, and pulled at a weed which the
rain had freshened.
“‘Pray for the soul of Franz Mueller,’” I read in breathless
amazement. “A Boche?”
“A Boche, of course!” said the Commissaire.
“And the other two--they are Boches also? ‘Pray for the soul of
Max Edelsheim’ and ‘Pray for the soul of Erich Schneider,’” I read
aloud. The neat wooden crosses bore also the regimental numbers of
the men and the date of their death.
“Boches, too. It happens that they were killed in this garden on a
reconnaissance.”
“But why don’t you remove them? You can put them somewhere else,
and then this poor old woman can use all her garden. I should think
she could hardly raise enough to eat from all this little plot, let
alone from half of it.”
We had spoken in French, and of course the old proprietress had
not understood. The Commissaire now turned to her, speaking the
rhythmic, metrical Flemish of west Flanders. “Madame, the mynheer
says that we should take up these bodies and place them in the
churchyard. Do you wish it done so?”
At first she did not seem to understand, and bent inquiringly
toward the Commissaire, her little gray eyes screwed up in
bewilderment at his words. “What is it, mynheer?” she asked.
“Mynheer says that we should remove the three Germans and let you
have your garden.”
“Oh, nay, nay,” she remonstrated, shaking her head emphatically.
“Nay, mynheeren. God gave me these three graves instead of the
grave of my boy. I could not tend them so well if they were in the
churchyard. It is too far from my house. Nay, nay, let the three
sleep here.”
“But you have not the room, madame.”
“There is room in my heart and in my garden, mynheer. I shall keep
these three graves, and maybe in Germany there is some one who will
keep the grave of my boy.”
* * * * *
“Messieurs, there is no use arguing with a Belgian peasant,” said
the Commissaire of Metseys, as we walked back through the Street
of the Spy to our waiting automobile. “But she has a fine spirit,
that old grandmother.”
XIV
THE WHITE ISLAND
A STORY OF THE GALLIPOLI ADVENTURE
The aviation launch rolled slowly in the grip of the grounds well
behind one of the desolate islands off Tenedos, southwest of the
entrance to the Dardanelles. The afternoon was windless and humid.
Warm, dripping fog covered the launch and hid from her the outlines
of the rocky, treeless island in the lee of which she lay. Fog
had sprinkled the deck as if with baptismal water, and the day
was noiseless except for the lazy slapping of waves against the
launch’s side.
A hydro-aeroplane alongside dipped and rose rhythmically with
the launch’s motion, and the aviator, Lieutenant Douka, of the
Royal Flying Corps, muffled in a British airman’s uniform, with
thick wadded helmet on his head, goggles, and rubber gauntlets,
bent over and tested the bomb-dropping mechanism. Those who had
known Douka as a student in America or as an unambitious idler in
Paris would hardly have recognized him in his new rôle. He had
always been romantic, but he explained this amiable weakness as an
inheritance from his Byzantine ancestors. “My grandparents were
Greek, you know,” was his offhand explanation to college friends of
his glowing fondness for the classics and things Hellenic. His two
or three trips to Greece had been marred by the unpleasant contrast
between the Greece he had imagined and the Greece of to-day.
He could scarcely make himself understood in the modern tongue
of Hellas; it irritated him, as modern English would doubtless
irritate Chaucer. “A degenerate language and a degenerate people,”
he told himself. Yet he had taken up aviation at Pau, not as a
sport--although that is what he told his friends--but as one of the
gifts he could offer modern Greece when the day of her final fight
with the Turk should dawn.
The war came. He went hopefully to Athens. There came a day
when King Constantine overrode his people, Venizelos retired,
constitutional government in Greece ceased to be, and Douka went to
London and volunteered in time for the Dardanelles expedition.
But he gave no sign of all this as he tested and retested the
bomb-dropping mechanism hanging between the pontoons which
supported the machine, and pushed and pulled the controls. He
thrust his feet against the pedals and examined the petrol and oil
throttles. “Right, lieutenant?” called the skipper of the launch.
“Right, sir,” he answered. “Belay there! Lively!” the skipper
shouted to two sailors who held the machine. A mechanician spun
the propeller and dropped from sight; the motor churned nervously;
Lieutenant Douka lifted his hand and signalled that all was
satisfactory. The launch shot sidewise, and the ’plane skated
swiftly forward, leaving a foaming wake. She tilted and shot
forward faster, then up from the water and heavily into the mist.
Douka swung her back and around the launch. Along the deck beneath
him the sailors stood at attention, but a gust of gray smoke showed
him that his escort was already in motion, off for the mother-ship
and the flock of aeroplanes at Imbros, and he was alone, sailing
away to bomb the _Sultan Omar_, the flagship of the Turkish fleet.
He looked at the clock--it read 3:17; then at the oil gauge--it
was working properly. He climbed to fifteen hundred feet. Under
him the mist lay like an Arctic snow-field, broken by pools of
rotten ice through which the gray sea stared. The sea abruptly
changed to gray land, and he mounted higher. He was flying at a
height of four thousand feet over Asia, the ancestral enemy of his
race and his continent. Somewhere down in the haze beneath lay
Troy. Douka smiled bitterly as he thought again of the ten years’
warfare, and of how the Greeks had blotted her from the earth.
The sullen roar of his motor seemed to stimulate his imagination.
The mist thinned slightly, and he saw far away the narrow blue
ribbon of the Dardanelles--the blood-thickened boundary between
free Europe and the despotic East. Haughty Xerxes once sat on those
cliffs and watched his Asiatic worms crossing to conquer the West.
Twenty-eight centuries had battled on that blue line. Always it had
been the same, age after age, century after century, always the
Greek against the Asiatic, the Greek against the barbarian, and for
five hundred years the disinherited Christian Greek against the
Moslem Turk. Muffled in his helmet as he was, he began to sing an
old Byzantine war song--a song his grandmother had taught him. His
hate rose like a bird in a gale; his clutched hands bit into the
rubber sheathing of the levers; he drove ahead at top speed, but
his wrath seemed to leap out before him like a racer distancing the
thing behind. To kill, to destroy, to blot out, utterly obsessed
him.
High over the Sea of Marmora he flew toward Constantinople.
Battles without end had been fought on the watery plains below.
There the vast Greek Empire had struggled to the death with the
hordes of Asia. The mist which had half hidden the land thinned
and disappeared. The choppy air became cleaner and easier to
fly through. He climbed to eight thousand feet. Far away he
caught sight of the Golden Horn, the royal city of Constantine
the Great, like a Grecian jewel set in Oriental gold, or like a
Grecian body pierced by the bright spears of Turkish minarets.
For five centuries she had been the spoil of the East. He cursed
her conquerors and laughed to himself. What if he should bomb the
mosque of Omar or the Sultan’s palace?... He shook his fist at
Scutari as if the city were a person. Little flowers of dirty-white
smoke bloomed in the air beside him and above him; once he seemed
to fly through a shower where before all had been clear, and he
felt small pieces of steel drumming like rain on the wings of his
’plane. It was a burst of shrapnel. He laughed and flew on.
Up the Bosphorus he drove, searching the sea with his eyes. The
British Secret Service had reported the _Sultan Omar_ at Bojukdere.
He strained for a sight of her.
Then suddenly, like a mirage, he saw the half-moon of a harbour
and black ships at anchorage. He drew rapidly near. A violent puff
of smoke rose from the funnels of the largest ship. She had seen
him, or she had been warned, and was endeavouring to escape. He
recognized her with a cry of delight. She was the _Sultan Omar_.
Hidden forts on the green hills about the harbour burst into life.
Smoke, flame, and the dull thud of cannon rose to him, for he was
flying lower and lower. A shrapnel shell flashed just in front
of him and showered steel splinters against his windshield. He
screamed with laughter. It seemed to him ridiculously funny that
they should think they could kill him or escape him.
He volplaned; from seven thousand feet he sank to one thousand,
then to eight hundred--to seven hundred--to six hundred--to five
hundred. A curving white wake showed him that his victim was
in motion. He was almost over her. Rifles cracked as the crew
endeavoured to reach him with their bullets. He did not hear them.
His right arm swung deliberately back to the bomb-thrower. He was
near. He was over. He jerked madly, and the pent volcano fell
straight on the warship.
The air rocked and heaved. His ’plane almost turned a somersault,
and he fought to restore its balance in an atmosphere reeling like
a typhoon. Solid waves of air beat and buffeted him. He jerked the
levers and fought furiously. Then, like a bronco, the machine found
her feet, prancing and shuddering in the choppy air, and up he
climbed. A glance over his shoulder was enough, even if the boiling
air had not told him of his success. The blue sea was black with
wreckage; men like insects floated in the water, but the _Sultan
Omar_ had disappeared.
The air still cracked and roared as the Turks shelled him. The
whole land seemed to wake, and the setting sun shone through a
curtain of dirty smoke. A Turkish aeroplane slid up in long spirals
behind him to cut off his retreat; petrol dripped slowly from a
leak in his reservoir caused by shrapnel or a rifle bullet. It was
the price of his success; a glance told him that he could not stop
the leak. He had often thought of that moment. Should he go back
and risk capture by the Turks? No; he would fly straight out into
the Black Sea and die alone in its waters. He would fly out into
the sea where his ancestors had sailed centuries before the Moslems
had taken Constantinople; the sea of the Golden Fleece, of Medea,
of Xenophon and the Ten Thousand, of the long campaigns against the
Persians. He would die there.
The sun set swiftly. In the twilight his mind seemed to slip its
leash and play high jinks with him. His palms grew into the handles
of the controls and became part of the mechanism; his fingers
lengthened into levers, his legs into rods upholding the aeroplane,
and he flew, screaming, laughing, and cursing, until night fell
like a plummet from the dusky sky.
* * * * *
Suddenly his machine struck the level surface of the sea and
buckled forward. Douka awoke, as if from sleep, tore the harness
from his aching head, and slumped forward against the straps,
waiting for the end. The wreckage of his machine still floated on
the long, slow waves, and rocked easily to and fro, but one of the
pontoons was crushed and another was leaking.
He felt no wind against his face, and the sea was calm. “Lucky,”
he thought listlessly, knowing that at a touch of wind or wave
the ’plane would go under. It might float for hours, or only for
minutes; he did not care. Death was certain.
But there seemed to be a sound of voices in the air, a distant
singing and a splash of oars. “Delirium,” he said calmly. “But
how beautifully they sing! What is it? It is Greek! Why, it is the
old Greek: ‘To thee, Zeus, blessings upon our timid flocks.’” His
wondering lips formed the words which he had learned in school.
Then out of the darkness swam a boat, and in the boat were a
steersman and four men at the oars, and the men were singing a hymn
to Zeus, the Father of all and the King of all. To Lieutenant Douka
nothing now seemed strange. To his shaken mind it seemed good to
hear them, good to see them, good to find them loosing the straps
which held him to the wrecked machine, and lifting him, in silence,
into their boat.
Half an hour they rowed, when Douka caught across the level sea
a hot breath of wind and the odour breathed from rye-fields in
midsummer. “Land! It is land!” he exclaimed. “It is land--the
White Island,” they answered gently. Both he and they had spoken
in the classic Greek, the Greek of the old heroic days--not the
bastard modern speech, larded with cruel words from the Turks and
the rough idioms of northern barbarians. His tired eyes strained
forward. Like night mist advancing upon them came the land, white
like foam and very fair; and he heard cicadas chanting in the olive
trees, and the warm breath of the night brought murmurs of song and
the sibilant lapping of waves along a sandy shore.
All the island was white. A crescent moon stole out of cloudbanks
and stared down on white sands, white balustrades, the white walls
of palaces, white hills swelling against the darkness, silvery
white olive groves, and slowly moving figures, clad all in white,
pacing along the stairs.
A white crane beside the landing-place awoke, flapped his wings,
and flew slowly off. Stately men and beautiful women thronged the
quay and looked down curiously as the boat grated against the
beach. “We have brought another from the wars,” the steersman
called to them. “Welcome, friend,” those on the quay called gently;
and “Thanks, friends,” Douka answered.
His tortured muscles knotted and failed as he tried to climb from
the boat, and he fell back helplessly. Two of the oarsmen bent to
him, lifted him like a child, and bore him between them up the long
flights of steps. He had fainted.
When he awoke, his nude body lay on a warm marble slab, and two
male attendants of the bath were kneading his aching flesh with
perfumed hands. Their touch was like ice and like fire, and life
seemed poured back into his body as into a wineskin as they
worked. The hands stole over him, gradually more and more softly,
exploring, soothing, stupefying. He slept.... He awoke once more,
to find that they had placed him in what seemed to be a bed of
live coals, in a white furnace which burned and leaped with light,
but the crackling heat did not harm him, and again he slept....
He awoke in a high-roofed hall, and all around him was light and
laughter, jets of fountains and music of slow streams; and the two
attendants plunged him again and again into pools which received
him as into a bed and covered him with warm floods.
Then he was rubbed with oils, and a garland was placed on his head.
Two girls came, bringing him clothing--a blue-bordered peplos, a
white mantle for his shoulders, and white sandals for his feet.
“Drink,” they said, and they gave him a cup of barley crushed in
water flavoured with mint.
“Now it is time for the feast,” they cried gayly. “Come to the
feast.” And they led him through alleys bordered with white
violets, hyacinths, roses, crocuses, and ghostly narcissi. In the
cleft hills the olive groves gleamed like pools of moonlight; a
waking dove gurgled drowsily, and the cicadas sang; and to left
and right he heard faint snatches of old Greek hymns and saw white
figures moving slowly along the sandy paths.
So they brought him to the banquet in a high-roofed hall of marble,
lit by flambeaux in sconces along the walls, garlanded with white
lilies, and spread with Oriental tables and low couches. And boys
and girls flew laughingly about serving the meats and drink.
He was led to his place, and reclined in the antique fashion on a
cushion beneath his elbow. Then guests began to appear through the
wide marble doors. To his delight and astonishment he knew them.
They were like old friends--friends of his youth, friends of the
youth of all the world; and they came into the hall with garlands
in their hair and bright robes upon them and gayety and peace in
their looks.
There came Achilles, his gigantic arm over the shoulders of Hector,
and a smile on his youthful face as he talked; and goat-bearded,
bandy-legged Thersites, limping and chattering endlessly; and
stately Nestor; broad-breasted, stout Agamemnon; Priam, leaning
on an ivory staff; wily Odysseus, walking alone in the throng;
huge, ungainly Ajax; gossipy Menelaus, Sarpedon, and Patroclus;
Neoptolemus leading by the hand the sweet boy Astyanax; Diomedes,
Æneas, smooth-shaven Troilus, black Memnon, laughing Paris. And
the women! white-armed Briseïs, motherly Hecuba, Andromache and
gentle Cressida, Chryseïs, grave Cassandra, Penelope, Polyxena,
Iphigenia, the lithe, dark-eyed beauty of Myrine the Amazon, and
the golden radiance of Helen, her face like noon sunlight--Helen of
Sparta, for whose sake the Greeks are forever named Hellenes, at
whose shrine all men worship, and shall worship so long as beauty
endures--these came into the high-roofed hall; these, and many more.
And after them came an old blind singer, a lyre in his hands, a
laurel crown on his head. “Homer, Homer!” they cried. “A welcome
to Homer!” All rose as he passed, and they led him to the highest
place in the hall, and took their pillows again, applauding him.
They poured libations and began the banquet, drinking from
four-handled cups studded with gold. They ate no flesh. There was
no mark of death in the hall, or violence, or cruelty. They talked
gayly, and all their talk was of peace; they told old stories, but
all their stories were of peace; and when they sang, their songs
were of peace. And always the boys and girls served them, laughing.