general perfect liberty of movement in the house where he was a guest.
He had even his own entrance through a small door in one corner of
the orangery. Thus he was not exposed that evening to the necessity
of dissembling his agitation before the calm ignorance of the other
inmates. He was glad of it. It seemed to him that if he had to open
his lips, he would break out into horrible imprecation, start breaking
furniture, smashing china and glasses. From the moment he opened the
private door, and while ascending the twenty-eight steps of winding
staircase, giving access to the corridor on which his room opened, he
went through a horrible and humiliating scene in which an infuriated
madman, with bloodshot eyes and a foaming mouth, played inconceivable
havoc with everything inanimate that may be found in a well-appointed
dining room. When he opened the door of his apartment the fit was over,
and his bodily fatigue was so great that he had to catch at the backs
of the chairs as he crossed the room to reach a low and broad divan
on which he let himself fall heavily. His moral prostration was still
greater. That brutality of feeling, which he had known only when
charging sabre in hand, amazed this man of forty, who did not recognise
in it the instinctive fury of his menaced passion. It was the revolt of
jeopardised desire. In his mental and bodily exhaustion it got cleared,
fined down, purified into a sentiment of melancholy despair at having,
perhaps, to die before he had taught this beautiful girl to love him.
On that night General D'Hubert, either stretched on his back with his
hands over his eyes or lying on his breast, with his face buried in a
cushion, made the full pilgrimage of emotions. Nauseating disgust at
the absurdity of the situation, dread of the fate that could play such
a vile trick on a man, awe at the remote consequences of an apparently
insignificant and ridiculous event in his past, doubt of his own fitness
to conduct his existence and mistrust of his best sentiments--for what
the devil did he want to go to Fouché for?--he knew them all in turn.
“I am an idiot, neither more nor less,” he thought. “A sensitive idiot.
Because I overheard two men talk in a café... I am an idiot afraid of
lies--whereas in life it is only truth that matters.”
Several times he got up, and walking about in his socks, so as not to
be heard by anybody downstairs, drank all the water he could find in
the dark. And he tasted the torments of jealousy, too. She would marry
somebody else. His very soul writhed. The tenacity of that Feraud, the
awful persistence of that imbecile brute came to him with the tremendous
force of a relentless fatality. General D'Hubert trembled as he put down
the empty water ewer. “He will have me,” he thought. General D'Hubert
was tasting every emotion that life has to give. He had in his dry mouth
the faint, sickly flavour of fear, not the honourable fear of a
young girl's candid and amused glance, but the fear of death and the
honourable man's fear of cowardice.
But if true courage consists in going out to meet an odious danger from
which our body, soul and heart recoil together General D'Hubert had
the opportunity to practise it for the first time in his life. He had
charged exultingly at batteries and infantry squares and ridden with
messages through a hail of bullets without thinking anything about
it. His business now was to sneak out unheard, at break of day, to
an obscure and revolting death. General D'Hubert never hesitated. He
carried two pistols in a leather bag which he slung over his shoulder.
Before he had crossed the garden his mouth was dry again. He picked two
oranges. It was only after shutting the gate after him that he felt a
slight faintness.
He stepped out disregarding it, and after going a few yards regained
the command of his legs. He sucked an orange as he walked. It was a
colourless and pellucid dawn. The wood of pines detached its columns of
brown trunks and its dark-green canopy very clearly against the rocks
of the gray hillside behind. He kept his eyes fixed on it steadily. That
temperamental, good-humoured coolness in the face of danger, which made
him an officer liked by his men and appreciated by his superiors, was
gradually asserting itself. It was like going into battle. Arriving at
the edge of the wood he sat down on a boulder, holding the other orange
in his hand, and thought that he had come ridiculously early on the
ground. Before very long, however, he heard the swishing of bushes,
footsteps on the hard ground, and the sounds of a disjointed loud
conversation. A voice somewhere behind him said boastfully, “He's game
for my bag.”
He thought to himself, “Here they are. What's this about game? Are they
talking of me?” And becoming aware of the orange in his hand he thought
further, “These are very good oranges. Leonie's own tree. I may just as
well eat this orange instead of flinging it away.”
Emerging from a tangle of rocks and bushes, General Feraud and his
seconds discovered General D'Hubert engaged in peeling the orange. They
stood still waiting till he looked up. Then the seconds raised their
hats, and General Feraud, putting his hands behind his back, walked
aside a little way.
“I am compelled to ask one of you, messieurs, to act for me. I have
brought no friends. Will you?”
The one-eyed cuirassier said judicially:
“That cannot be refused.”
The other veteran remarked:
“It's awkward all the same.”
“Owing to the state of the people's minds in this part of the country
there was no one I could trust with the object of your presence here,”
explained General D'Hubert urbanely. They saluted, looked round, and
remarked both together:
“Poor ground.”
“It's unfit.”
“Why bother about ground, measurements, and so on. Let us simplify
matters. Load the two pairs of pistols. I will take those of General
Feraud and let him take mine. Or, better still, let us take a mixed
pair. One of each pair. Then we will go into the wood while you remain
outside. We did not come here for ceremonies, but for war. War to the
death. Any ground is good enough for that. If I fall you must leave me
where I lie and clear out. It wouldn't be healthy for you to be found
hanging about here after that.”
It appeared after a short parley that General Feraud was willing to
accept these conditions. While the seconds were loading the pistols he
could be heard whistling, and was seen to rub his hands with an air of
perfect contentment. He flung off his coat briskly, and General D'Hubert
took off his own and folded it carefully on a stone.
“Suppose you take your principal to the other side of the wood and let
him enter exactly in ten minutes from now,” suggested General D'Hubert
calmly, but feeling as if he were giving directions for his own
execution. This, however, was his last moment of weakness.
“Wait! Let us compare watches first.”
He pulled out his own. The officer with the chipped nose went over to
borrow the watch of General Feraud. They bent their heads over them for
a time.
“That's it. At four minutes to five by yours. Seven to, by mine.”
It was the cuirassier who remained by the side of General D'Hubert,
keeping his one eye fixed immovably on the white face of the watch he
held in the palm of his hand. He opened his mouth wide, waiting for the
beat of the last second, long before he snapped out the word:
“_Avancez!_”
General D'Hubert moved on, passing from the glaring sunshine of the
Provençal morning into the cool and aromatic shade of the pines. The
ground was clear between the reddish trunks, whose multitude, leaning at
slightly different angles, confused his eye at first. It was like going
into battle. The commanding quality of confidence in himself woke up in
his breast. He was all to his affair. The problem was how to kill his
adversary. Nothing short of that would free him from this imbecile
nightmare. “It's no use wounding that brute,” he thought. He was known
as a resourceful officer. His comrades, years ago, used to call him “the
strategist.” And it was a fact that he could think in the presence of
the enemy, whereas Feraud had been always a mere fighter. But a dead
shot, unluckily.
“I must draw his fire at the greatest possible range,” said General
D'Hubert to himself.
At that moment he saw something white moving far off between the trees.
The shirt of his adversary. He stepped out at once between the trunks
exposing himself freely, then quick as lightning leaped back. It had
been a risky move, but it succeeded in its object. Almost simultaneously
with the pop of a shot a small piece of bark chipped off by the bullet
stung his ear painfully.
And now General Feraud, with one shot expended, was getting cautious.
Peeping round his sheltering tree, General D'Hubert could not see him
at all. This ignorance of his adversary's whereabouts carried with it a
sense of insecurity. General D'Hubert felt himself exposed on his flanks
and rear. Again something white fluttered in his sight. Ha! The enemy
was still on his front then. He had feared a turning movement. But,
apparently, General Feraud was not thinking of it. General D'Hubert saw
him pass without special haste from one tree to another in the straight
line of approach. With great firmness of mind General D'Hubert stayed
his hand. Too far yet. He knew he was no marksman. His must be a waiting
game--to kill.
He sank down to the ground wishing to take advantage of the greater
thickness of the trunk. Extended at full length, head on to his enemy,
he kept his person completely protected. Exposing himself would not
do now because the other was too near by this time. A conviction that
Feraud would presently do something rash was like balm to General
D'Hubert's soul. But to keep his chin raised off the ground was irksome,
and not much use either. He peeped round, exposing a fraction of his
head, with dread but really with little risk. His enemy, as a matter of
fact, did not expect to see anything of him so low down as that. General
D'Hubert caught a fleeting view of General Feraud shifting trees again
with deliberate caution. “He despises my shooting,” he thought, with
that insight into the mind of his antagonist which is of such great help
in winning battles. It confirmed him in his tactics of immobility. “Ah!
if I only could watch my rear as well as my front!” he thought, longing
for the impossible.
It required some fortitude to lay his pistols down. But on a sudden
impulse General D'Hubert did this very gently--one on each side. He had
been always looked upon as a bit of a dandy, because he used to shave
and put on a clean shirt on the days of battle. As a matter of fact he
had been always very careful of his personal appearance. In a man of
nearly forty, in love with a young and charming girl, this praiseworthy
self-respect may run to such little weaknesses as, for instance, being
provided with an elegant leather folding case containing a small ivory
comb and fitted with a piece of looking-glass on the outside. General
D'Hubert, his hands being free, felt in his breeches pockets for that
implement of innocent vanity, excusable in the possessor of long silky
moustaches. He drew it out, and then, with the utmost coolness and
promptitude, turned himself over on his back. In this new attitude, his
head raised a little, holding the looking-glass in one hand just clear
of his tree, he squinted into it with one eye while the other kept a
direct watch on the rear of his position. Thus was proved Napoleon's
saying, that for a French soldier the word impossible does not exist. He
had the right tree nearly filling the field of his little mirror.
“If he moves from there,” he said to himself exultingly, “I am bound to
see his legs. And in any case he can't come upon me unawares.”
And sure enough he saw the boots of General Feraud flash in and out,
eclipsing for an instant everything else reflected in the little mirror.
He shifted its position accordingly. But having to form his judgment of
the change from that indirect view, he did not realise that his own
feet and a portion of his legs were now in plain and startling view of
General Feraud.
General Feraud had been getting gradually impressed by the amazing
closeness with which his enemy had been keeping cover. He had spotted
the right tree with bloodthirsty precision. He was absolutely certain of
it. And yet he had not been able to sight as much as the tip of an ear.
As he had been looking for it at the level of about five feet ten inches
it was no great wonder--but it seemed very wonderful to General Feraud.
The first view of these feet and legs determined a rush of blood to his
head. He literally staggered behind his tree, and had to steady himself
with his hand. The other was lying on the ground--on the ground!
Perfectly still, too! Exposed! What did it mean?... The notion that he
had knocked his adversary over at the first shot then entered General
Feraud's head. Once there, it grew with every second of
attentive gazing, overshadowing every other
supposition--irresistible--triumphant--ferocious.
“What an ass I was to think I could have missed him!” he said to
himself. “He was exposed _en plein_--the fool--for quite a couple of
seconds.”
And the general gazed at the motionless limbs, the last vestiges of
surprise fading before an unbounded admiration of his skill.
“Turned up his toes! By the god of war that was a shot!” he continued
mentally. “Got it through the head just where I aimed, staggered behind
that tree, rolled over on his back and died.”
And he stared. He stared, forgetting to move, almost awed, almost sorry.
But for nothing in the world would he have had it undone. Such a shot!
Such a shot! Rolled over on his back, and died!
For it was this helpless position, lying on the back, that shouted its
sinister evidence at General Feraud. He could not possibly imagine
that it might have been deliberately assumed by a living man. It was
inconceivable. It was beyond the range of sane supposition. There was no
possibility to guess the reason for it. And it must be said that
General D'Hubert's turned-up feet looked thoroughly dead. General Feraud
expanded his lungs for a stentorian shout to his seconds, but from what
he felt to be an excessive scrupulousness, refrained for a while.
“I will just go and see first whether he breathes yet,” he mumbled
to himself, stepping out from behind his tree. This was immediately
perceived by the resourceful General D'Hubert. He concluded it to be
another shift. When he lost the boots out of the field of the mirror, he
became uneasy. General Feraud had only stepped a little out of the line,
but his adversary could not possibly have supposed him walking up with
perfect unconcern. General D'Hubert, beginning to wonder where the other
had dodged to, was come upon so suddenly that the first warning he had
of his danger consisted in the long, early-morning shadow of his
enemy falling aslant on his outstretched legs. He had not even heard a
footfall on the soft ground between the trees!
It was too much even for his coolness. He jumped up instinctively,
leaving the pistols on the ground. The irresistible instinct of most
people (unless totally paralysed by discomfiture) would have been
to stoop--exposing themselves to the risk of being shot down in
that position. Instinct, of course, is irreflective. It is its very
definition. But it may be an inquiry worth pursuing, whether in
reflective mankind the mechanical promptings of instinct are not
affected by the customary mode of thought. Years ago, in his young
days, Armand D'Hubert, the reflective promising officer, had emitted the
opinion that in warfare one should “never cast back on the lines of
a mistake.” This idea afterward restated, defended, developed in many
discussions, had settled into one of the stock notions of his brain,
became a part of his mental individuality. And whether it had gone so
inconceivably deep as to affect the dictates of his instinct, or simply
because, as he himself declared, he was “too scared to remember the
confounded pistols,” the fact is that General D'Hubert never attempted
to stoop for them. Instead of going back on his mistake, he seized
the rough trunk with both hands and swung himself behind it with such
impetuosity that going right round in the very flash and report of a
pistol shot, he reappeared on the other side of the tree face to face
with General Feraud, who, completely unstrung by such a show of agility
on the part of a dead man, was trembling yet. A very faint mist of smoke
hung before his face which had an extraordinary aspect as if the lower
jaw had come unhinged.
“Not missed!” he croaked hoarsely from the depths of a dry throat.
This sinister sound loosened the spell which had fallen on General
D'Hubert's senses.
“Yes, missed--a _bout portant_” he heard himself saying exultingly
almost before he had recovered the full command of his faculties.
The revulsion of feeling was accompanied by a gust of homicidal fury
resuming in its violence the accumulated resentment of a lifetime.
For years General D'Hubert had been exasperated and humiliated by an
atrocious absurdity imposed upon him by that man's savage caprice.
Besides, General D'Hubert had been in this last instance too unwilling
to confront death for the reaction of his anguish not to take the shape
of a desire to kill.
“And I have my two shots to fire yet,” he added pitilessly.
General Feraud snapped his teeth, and his face assumed an irate,
undaunted expression.
“Go on,” he growled.
These would have been his last words on earth if General D'Hubert had
been holding the pistols in his hand. But the pistols were lying on the
ground at the foot of a tall pine. General D'Hubert had the second's
leisure necessary to remember that he had dreaded death not as a man but
as a lover, not as a danger but as a rival--not as a foe to life but
as an obstacle to marriage. And, behold, there was the rival defeated!
Miserably defeated-crushed--done for!
He picked up the weapons mechanically, and instead of firing them into
General Feraud's breast, gave expression to the thought uppermost in his
mind.
“You will fight no more duels now.”
[Illustration: frontispiece166.jpg “You will fight no more duels now.”]
His tone of leisurely, ineffable satisfaction was too much for General
Feraud's stoicism.
“Don't dawdle then, damn you for a coldblooded staff-coxcomb!” he roared
out suddenly out of an impassive face held erect on a rigid body.
General D'Hubert uncocked the pistols carefully. This proceeding was
observed with a sort of gloomy astonishment by the other general.
“You missed me twice,” he began coolly, shifting both pistols to one
hand. “The last time within a foot or so. By every rule of single combat
your life belongs to me. That does not mean that I want to take it now.”
“I have no use for your forbearance,” muttered General Feraud savagely.
“Allow me to point out that this is no concern of mine,” said General
D'Hubert, whose every word was dictated by a consummate delicacy of
feeling. In anger, he could have killed that man, but in cold blood, he
recoiled from humiliating this unreasonable being--a fellow soldier
of the Grand Armée, his companion in the wonders and terrors of the
military epic. “You don't set up the pretension of dictating to me what
I am to do with what is my own.”
General Feraud looked startled. And the other continued:
“You've forced me on a point of honour to keep my life at your disposal,
as it were, for fifteen years. Very well. Now that the matter is decided
to my advantage, I am going to do what I like with your life on the same
principle. You shall keep it at my disposal as long as I choose. Neither
more nor less. You are on your honour.”
“I am! But _sacrebleu!_ This is an absurd position for a general of
the empire to be placed in,” cried General Feraud, in the accents of
profound and dismayed conviction. “It means for me to be sitting all the
rest of my life with a loaded pistol in a drawer waiting for your word.
It's... it's idiotic. I shall be an object of... of... derision.”
“Absurd?... Idiotic? Do you think so?” queried argumentatively General
D'Hubert with sly gravity. “Perhaps. But I don't see how that can be
helped. However, I am not likely to talk at large of this adventure.
Nobody need ever know anything about it. Just as no one to this day, I
believe, knows the origin of our quarrel.... Not a word more,” he added
hastily. “I can't really discuss this question with a man who, as far as
I am concerned, does not exist.”
When the duellists came out into the open, General Feraud walking a
little behind and rather with the air of walking in a trance, the two
seconds hurried towards them each from his station at the edge of the
wood. General D'Hubert addressed them, speaking loud and distinctly:
“Messieurs! I make it a point of declaring to you solemnly in the
presence of General Feraud that our difference is at last settled for
good. You may inform all the world of that fact.”
“A reconciliation after all!” they exclaimed together.
“Reconciliation? Not that exactly. It is something much more binding. Is
it not so, general?”
General Feraud only lowered his head in sign of assent. The two veterans
looked at each other. Later in the day when they found themselves alone,
out of their moody friend's earshot, the cuirassier remarked suddenly:
“Generally speaking, I can see with my one eye as far or even a little
farther than most people. But this beats me. He won't say anything.”
“In this affair of honour I understand there has been from first to last
always something that no one in the army could quite make out,” declared
the chasseur with the imperfect nose. “In mystery it began, in mystery
it went on, and in mystery it is to end apparently....”
General D'Hubert walked home with long, hasty strides, by no means
uplifted by a sense of triumph. He had conquered, but it did not seem
to him he had gained very much by his conquest. The night before he had
grudged the risk of his life which appeared to him magnificent, worthy
of preservation as an opportunity to win a girl's love. He had even
moments when by a marvellous illusion this love seemed to him already
his and his threatened life a still more magnificent opportunity of
devotion. Now that his life was safe it had suddenly lost it special
magnificence. It wore instead a specially alarming aspect as a snare for
the exposure of unworthiness. As to the marvellous illusion of conquered
love that had visited him for a moment in the agitated watches of the
night which might have been his last on earth, he comprehended now its
true nature. It had been merely a paroxysm of delirious conceit. Thus to
this man sobered by the victorious issue of a duel, life appeared robbed
of much of its charm simply because it was no longer menaced.
Approaching the house from the back through the orchard and the kitchen
gardens, he could not notice the agitation which reigned in front. He
never met a single soul. Only upstairs, while walking softly along the
corridor, he became aware that the house was awake and much more noisy
than usual. Names of servants were being called out down below in a
confused noise of coming and going. He noticed with some concern that
the door of his own room stood ajar, though the shutters had not been
opened yet. He had hoped that his early excursion would have passed
unperceived. He expected to find some servant just gone in; but the
sunshine filtering through the usual cracks enabled him to see lying
on the low divan something bulky which had the appearance of two women
clasped in each other's arms. Tearful and consolatory murmurs issued
mysteriously from that appearance. General D'Hubert pulled open the
nearest pair of shutters violently. One of the women then jumped up. It
was his sister. She stood for a moment with her hair hanging down and
her arms raised straight up above her head, and then flung herself with
a stifled cry into his arms. He returned her embrace, trying at the same
time to disengage himself from it. The other woman had not risen. She
seemed, on the contrary, to cling closer to the divan, hiding her face
in the cushions. Her hair was also loose; it was admirably fair. General
D'Hubert recognised it with staggering emotion. Mlle. de Valmassigue!
Adèle! In distress!
He became greatly alarmed and got rid of his sister's hug definitely.
Madame Léonie then extended her shapely bare arm out of her peignoir,
pointing dramatically at the divan:
“This poor terrified child has rushed here two miles from home on
foot--running all the way.”
“What on earth has happened?” asked General D'Hubert in a low, agitated
voice. But Madame Léonie was speaking loudly.
“She rang the great bell at the gate and roused all the household--we
were all asleep yet. You may imagine what a terrible shock.... Adèle, my
dear child, sit up.”